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World models aim to capture environmental dynamics and predict future trajectories, showing growing potential for embodied intelligence. Physics-informed 4D generation integrates physical simulation to predict 3D object interactions, offering a promising pathway toward world models. However, this paradigm relies on manually imposed dynamical assumptions rather than internalizing world dynamics, and thus still leaves a gap toward a true world model. To bridge this gap, we propose NeuIDO, a novel world dynamics modeling framework that learns a unified intrinsic dynamics representation from visual observations, advancing physics-informed 4D generation toward a world model. Specifically, we formulate world modeling as a neural operator learning problem and introduce a two-stage training strategy to learn a generalizable mapping from the visual observation distribution to the intrinsic dynamics distribution. Building on this observation-dynamics mapping, NeuIDO enables zero-shot dynamics inference directly from videos and can be further aligned with complex real-world dynamics via few-shot adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeuIDO effectively unifies the intrinsic dynamics underlying diverse visual observations into a shared representation and rapidly infers dynamics in novel scenes.

Generative AI enables scalable production of educational videos, but current systems largely focus on producing visually coherent content rather than supporting learning. As a result, generated videos often lack explicit pedagogical structure, reliable quality control, and mechanisms for assessing learner understanding or addressing misconceptions. In this work, we introduce PIVOT (Pedagogy-guided Instructional VideO Tutoring), a generative video tutoring framework for STEM learning via learning-centered instructional support.1 Inspired by conventional teaching workflows, our framework integrates pedagogy into the full generation pipeline: it first uses instructional principles to guide storyboard generation, then produces verified multimodal videos through code-centric generation and a pedagogical verification harness, and finally connects videos with assessment and misconception-aware remediation. Experiments and expert evaluations across four STEM domains show that our framework produces educational videos with pedagogically aligned content, clear and engaging presentation, coherent instructional flow, and perceived effectiveness for learning. These findings suggest a human-centered perspective on educational content generation: generative systems should be evaluated and designed not only by what they produce, but also by how they support teaching practices, learner understanding, and corrective feedback.

Text-to-image (T2I) models are typically evaluated for bias using slot-based templates such as ``a photo of a [profession]''. Such templates probe only explicit demographic attributes (e.g., gender, skin tone) in isolation. They overlook a broader implicit bias that arises in natural prompts: when stereotype-relevant attributes are left unspecified, models still default to stereotypical outputs. We introduce IMPLICIT-Bench, a benchmark for measuring implicit bias in T2I models under such prompts. The key design is a structured-knowledge-graph (KG) construction of controlled prompt triplets: neutral, stereotype, and anti-stereotype variants that differ only along a single bias dimension while preserving scene semantics. This enables precise attribution of bias effects that template benchmarks cannot achieve. IMPLICIT-Bench comprises 5,493 prompts across 11 bias categories, validated through multi-model agreement, CLIP-based verification, and human evaluation. Using this benchmark, we show that state-of-the-art T2I models exhibit systematic bias under neutral prompts, a failure mode largely invisible to existing evaluations. We then use IMPLICIT-Bench to evaluate debiasing methods, uncovering a fundamental trade-off between bias reduction and semantic fidelity.

% !TEX root = ../main.tex Real-time embodied companion interaction requires a robot to infer user intent from streaming speech, generate timely responses, and execute expressive, interruptible motions. Existing systems typically decouple dialogue orchestration from gesture synthesis, relying on offline motion generation from complete audio. This separation leaves open how a deployed robot can dynamically synchronize response content, prosodic timing, and physical safety under incremental inputs and uncertain turn boundaries. We present MIRA, a unified framework for real-time full-duplex embodied companion interaction. Given streaming user speech, dialogue history, and vocal affect, MIRA predicts both the response text and an explicit embodiment cue that routes the response to the appropriate physical behavior. Discrete social behaviors (\eg listening and greeting) are mapped to validated robot trajectories, while speaking responses are accompanied by streaming, generative co-speech motion. For co-speech motion generation, we propose ROSCO, a prefix-conditioned diffusion model for streaming audio-to-joint motion generation. We further design RHPC, an inference scheme that maintains a sufficiently long temporal context for motion prediction while bounding physical commitment to a short, interruptible prefix. At the interaction level, we design CORTEX, a dual-timescale interaction policy that combines low-latency barge-in preemption and streaming response generation with deliberative turn decisions, backed by a robot-side execution layer that enforces physical safety constraints during execution. MIRA is deployed on an Astribot S1 humanoid robot. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate competitive audio-motion alignment relative to state-of-the-art motion-generation baselines, while real-robot deployment measurements characterize streaming responsiveness and interruption handling.

Although text-to-image models can accurately depict subjects and scenes, creators still struggle to specify the fine-grained emotions an image should convey without rewriting its content description. Natural language can suggest emotions, but it offers no control scale with stable meanings and ordered intensities. We propose EMOTRANS, which transforms psychologically grounded valence-arousal-dominance (VAD) coordinates into generation conditions that are independent of the content text and modulated across denoising stages, making emotional style a finely adjustable creative variable. To support this goal, we construct EMOVAD, an art-painting dataset that pairs objective content descriptions with separately collected emotional ratings from multiple annotators. We also coordinate emotional expression and content preservation through dual-branch training with a shared model. Objective and human evaluations show that the framework improves the accuracy of three-dimensional emotion control and produces perceptible, orderable continuous changes while maintaining competitive text alignment and image quality. This work provides a practical emotion-driven approach to image generation that extends objective content depiction to fine-grained emotional adjustment.

Image morphing aims to produce a smooth and semantically consistent transition between two input images. Existing diffusion-based morphing methods either require expensive per-pair optimization or rely on implicit spatial alignment, which easily fails under large layout discrepancies. To address these limitations, we propose AlignMorph, a novel tuning-free diffusion framework guided by the principle of transport-then-denoise. We explicitly decouple geometric alignment from generative denoising to avoid structural entanglement. Our framework consists of two core components. (1) Global Semantic Transport, which achieves diffusion-compatible semantic alignment via entropic optimal transport and reliability-aware latent warping; and (2) Coordinate-Aligned Generation, which uses a symmetric bi-phase attention handoff to maintain consistent spatial coordinates throughout denoising. Without any tuning, AlignMorph effectively eliminates ghosting and achieves superior structural coherence and temporal smoothness on morphing benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/51xOne/Alignmorph.

Linear models with an $L_1$-norm penalty remain state-of-the-art for high-dimensional ($d > 1,000,000$) tasks, offering a straightforward method for solving real-world industry problems. Despite their widespread use in industry and utility, many $L_1$ solvers are not effective for general use, are prohibitively slow, and are ineffective in parallelization. This makes them difficult to train in an MLOps pipeline on large industry-scale corpora. In this work, we test several proposed ``state-of-the-art'' solutions from the literature and find that older methods are currently far superior for general use. We also identify several recommendations for academics to perform research that avoids erroneously overconfident results, which can prevent the transition to production use. Equally surprising, we find that a new and simple baseline, using LBFGS on a sub-gradient, is highly effective with minor tweaks, despite being dismissed in the literature for theoretical non-convergence. In practice, we find it is an easier-to-support and easier-to-scale method for production use.

Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) has remarkably enhanced large language models on complex reasoning by leveraging structured entity topologies. However, existing frameworks heavily rely on standard autoregressive language models where the nature of inherent sequential generation severely hinders overall inference efficiency. Inspired by Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) that offer massive parallelism via continuous refine-in-parallel decoding, we aim to accelerate GraphRAG in the discrete space. However, it remains non-trivial for two challenges. First, partially denoised drafts are highly dynamic and uncertain, making dynamic graph grounding non-trivial. Second, raw denoising states are inherently noisy and unstable, making synchronous graph retrieval and multi-hop aggregation computationally prohibitive. To this end, we present LADDER, a novel framework that bridges diffusion language modeling with GraphRAG through graph-guided parallel decoding. Specifically, (i) we propose an event-driven self-clocking retrieval, inspired by our key insight that 88% of target entities emerge early in the partially denoised state, leading final commitment by an average of 5.7-9.6 steps. This mechanism dynamically triggers graph retrieval only when the set of graph-linkable entities expands, yielding an asynchronous self-clocking policy that bypasses learned gates or heuristic thresholds. (ii) An incomplete-query graph propagation module is designed to process the newly emerging entity queries using a specialized graph foundation model, continuously aggregating multi-hop evidence to sharpen parallel predictions and accelerate overall decoding convergence. Extensive experiments on three challenging multi-hop QA benchmarks show that LADDER raises average exact match from 39.6% to 45.2% while achieving a 4.1x latency reduction.

We present a method for synthesizing reactive character behaviors for continuous games as compact, human-readable programs. Game AI practice still relies heavily on manually authored behavior trees, state machines, and scripts, while academic reinforcement learning typically produces opaque neural controllers that are expensive to train and difficult to edit. Our approach bridges this gap by searching directly over a domain-specific language for continuous-space game policies. The language is designed around reactive geometric decisions and includes higher-order constructs such as direction maximization. These constructs help discretize a continuous behavior space into enumerable program structures. To make program search practical, we introduce a large set of synthesis antipatterns that remove redundant program forms while preserving behavioral coverage. We further combine bottom-up symbolic enumeration with top-down guidance from a coding agent. Our resulting method, agentic sketching, has the agent propose high-level policy structure and call an enumerator to complete local program slots. We evaluate the method on a benchmark of 14 continuous games, ranging from classic control tasks to multi-agent football. We find that pure enumeration is often more efficient than using a coding agent alone, while the combined method substantially outperforms both. Our results suggest that programmatic policy search can be a practical authoring tool for game AI: designers specify reward functions, and the system discovers editable behaviors that are effective, portable, and often surprising.

Traditional data systems face profound limitations in the AI era, relying on human-crafted pipelines, lacking semantic understanding of heterogeneous data, and operating through rigid, reactive processing. To address these challenges, we propose a new paradigm called the Data Agent, designed to manage, process, and analyze data with minimal human intervention. Data agents autonomously execute a wide range of data-related tasks, transforming traditional data systems by shifting from manual design to autonomous orchestration, from literal manipulation to semantic interpretation, and from reactive to proactive processing. Our Data Agent system includes six components: semantic data organization, semantic operators, agentic pipeline orchestration and optimization, feedback-driven refinement, memory management, and proactive adaptation. Building on this foundation, we also develop two specialized agents: the data analytics agent and the data science agent. Experiments on real benchmarks demonstrate significant performance gains of our data agent over state-of-the-art methods. We identify open challenges to guide future research in building fully autonomous data systems.

Large language models (LLMs), when acting as agents, are expected to take observed data in context, infer the latent state space underlying the world, and leverage it for downstream prediction. However, prior work demonstrated that LLMs struggle to use representations learned in context on a graph tracking task, where the model needs to construct a representation of the graph governing data generation process and use it for subsequent predictions. In this paper, we show that extending this to few-shot settings, where each demonstration is generated from a different world with either the same or different graph topologies, enhances its prediction on 6 models from 4 model families. To understand this improvement, we linearly probe a low-dimensional world representation that encodes graph information in the hidden states. Notably, we find that few-shot demonstrations relocate the world representation and increase its predictive use. Specifically, for each model, these world representations shift in directions nearly orthogonal to their original subspace, and interventions on these representations selectively impair performance more than interventions on other subspaces. Consistent with this insight, we show that few-shot demonstrations with observations from different worlds improve performance on ARC-AGI-1&2, web agent tasks, and Othello. Our findings elucidate the role and internal mechanisms of few-shot demonstrations in in-context world modeling. More broadly, our work advances our understanding of how LLM agents learn from in-context observations and provides implications for their further improvement.

Foundation models are endowing autonomous systems with greater intelligence, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of the environment through visual perception. A representative example is Human Mesh Recovery (HMR), which provides useful estimates of a target's 3D pose and shape that can benefit tactical missions. However, the size and power demands of such models make them difficult to run on edge platforms and limit their real-time performance, undermining the requirements of tactical edge deployment - especially for active perception, where a mobile robot must plan its next-best view on-board and cannot offload computation under contested communications. We present LEAP-NBV, a lightweight active-perception framework that runs foundation-model-driven Next-Best-View (NBV) planning on-board an edge device. To this end, we distill a family of large HMR teachers, each into a compact 32M student, with an offline mesh objective, then quantize the vision encoder to FP16 and characterize its on-device accuracy and latency. Within an occlusion-aware active perception loop, we evaluate all configurations on the same held-out benchmark and deploy the end-to-end pipeline on an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX, reporting measured on-device latency and energy. Distillation recovers 6-7 mm of Procrustes-aligned mean per-vertex position error (PA-MPVPE) over the undistilled student on the test set. Selecting the edge-optimal compression model brings the HMR engine to ~12 ms at a small accuracy cost and runs the full closed loop at 3.6 FPS and 2.6 J per frame, achieving a 2.0x speedup and 3.0x lower energy than the uncompressed model while nearly matching downstream task quality.

Recent advances in humanoid robotics and embodied intelligence have enabled robots to perform increasingly complex manipulation tasks. However, musical instrument performance remains a formidable benchmark, demanding not only collision-free trajectory execution but also precise contact timing, asymmetric bimanual coordination, and target acoustic outcomes on physical instruments. The guqin, a seven-string fretless zither, presents unique manipulation challenges due to its millimetric string spacing, transient right-hand plucking, and sustained left-hand harmonic contacts. In this work, we present a physical heterogeneous dual-arm robotic system for phrase-level autonomous guqin performance. We formulate guqin playing as a hybrid discrete--continuous execution problem and develop a hierarchical planning framework that coordinates working finger assignment, configuration continuity, obstacle avoidance, and tight bimanual contact schedules across consecutive musical events. The system integrates vision-guided instrument localization, tactile-based harmonic contact monitoring, and auditory feedback-informed plucking parameter calibration. Real-world experiments on a 25-event phrase demonstrate that the system reliably executes coordinated open-string and seventh-hui harmonic sequences on a physical guqin, achieving 93.6% and 96.8% event correctness across repeated trials.

LLM agents can change their own future behavior, raising a basic control question of which self-generated changes should be allowed to persist. We formulate this as admission control for self-modification. The agent may propose changes to its operating instructions, while an external runtime gate controls persistence. We implement this principle as a model-agnostic self-healing harness that runs a Detect, Notice, Heal, Validate loop around an otherwise unmodified agent. The agent authors candidate behavioral rules in an external workspace, where they receive provisional execution authority during evaluation and acquire persistent cross-episode authority only after measured improvement on the triggering failure without regression beyond a fixed margin on protected cases. Replay provides matched evidence when available, forward trials provide a weaker fallback, and a corpus-level guard re-tests the accumulated active rule set. Across 16 matched Baseline and Harness runs spanning AppWorld, Terminal-Bench, and $τ^2$-Bench, the gate rejected 383 replay-decided proposals. Of these, 211 (55%) improved their triggering failure while degrading a case that previously worked. This shows that locally beneficial self-modifications can introduce collateral regressions often enough to materially affect gate decisions, providing direct empirical motivation for external admission control. Task-completion score is higher under the Harness in all 16 pairs, with two paired bootstrap intervals excluding zero, while repeated-trial reliability is higher in 12 pairs, tied in 4, and lower in none. Because adaptation modifies the policy-inducing context while leaving model weights fixed, admitted changes remain inspectable, reversible, and compatible with closed-weight models.

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents are applied in continuously interactive environments, driving the evolution of their own capabilities becomes a core problem for achieving long-term autonomy. Currently, environmental knowledge is typically treated as an external fixed input rather than as part of the agent's ongoing evolution. Reinforcement learning methods usually optimize policies through environmental interaction but tend to adapt only to fixed task distributions or single environments. This paper proposes TTSE (Two-Track Self-Evolution), a dual-track online self-evolution framework that separates evolving knowledge into FACT (environmental facts, whose reliability is continuously verified through interaction evidence) and TIP (task-conditioned implementation procedures). From a decision-theoretic perspective, we decompose the agent's excess risk into environment-representation regret and conditional-execution regret, characterize the conditions under which environment-conditioned policies strictly outperform condition-agnostic policies, and bound the downstream risk in terms of FACT identification error and cross-condition mismatch cost. In practice, TTSE's ablation experiments on GDPevo validate the advantage of dual-track evolution. On the classic agent task benchmarks ALFWorld and ScienceWorld, TTSE further demonstrates superior task adaptation. Moreover, TTSE is broadly compatible with existing skill self-evolution methods; combined with the Bayesian-Agent algorithm, a single-track ablation validates the dual-track advantage, substantially improving the aggregate score across the five major domains of SOPBench over three independent repetitions. Finally, on the real end-to-end task benchmark PinchBench, TTSE is integrated into a general agent framework via retrieval-based injection and stably outperforms the baseline across three independent runs.

Active perception and manipulation are crucial for robots to interact with complex scenes. Existing benchmarks struggle to evaluate how robots effectively acquire and maintain information in memory in an active manner. To this end, we introduce ActiveArena-Sim, an active-perception simulator with controllable viewpoints and large-scale workspaces as the foundation. Built on this, we propose ActiveArena-Bench, which comprises 35 tasks across 5 fine-grained categories, covering visual exploration and interactive information acquisition. Each task is difficult to solve from passive observations alone, requiring multi-round evidence acquisition and memory-based reasoning. The benchmark provides rich memory annotations, standardized training data, and ID/OOD protocols featuring disjoint scenes, unseen distractor configurations, and novel backgrounds. Moreover, we present ActiveArena-VLA, a modular suite of 13 vision-language-action configurations for controlled studies of memory writing, memory capacity, proprioceptive state, subtask supervision, and high-level planning in active perception. Benchmark results reveal a substantial ID-OOD gap: uniform memory sampling, increased memory capacity under reliable write policies, proprioceptive inputs, and subtask supervision improve OOD generalization, while planner-guided memory management and decision-making achieve performance close to the best-performing configuration using only sparse memory. ActiveArena thus provides a unified testbed to develop and diagnose models for active perception and manipulation.

GUI agents predict click coordinates as digit-token sequences, but standard text-LLM confidence estimation methods rank correct clicks from wrong ones only weakly. GUI-specific alternatives use K samples or new supervision, but still leave room for improvement. We trace part of this to place-value asymmetry: bounding-box correctness often makes higher-place digits more important than lower-place digits, so uniform aggregation weakens the signal that determines correctness. The fix is to weight each digit's Shannon entropy by its place value. We call this Place-Aware Coordinate Entropy (PACE). Across fixed-scale agents on ScreenSpot-Pro and ScreenSpot-v2, PACE wins both AUROC and selective accuracy on all primary comparisons in a single forward pass, matching or outperforming K-sample baselines at a fraction of the cost. PACE provides a per-click confidence estimate that turns coordinate-token internals into a practical confidence signal for GUI agent deployment.

Deception plays a central role in Intelligence operations, yet it remains difficult to analyse systematically without expert knowledge of reasoning patterns and cognitive manipulation. In computational argumentation, for instance, no scheme-level ground-truth corpora currently exist to support statistical validation. In this paper, we address this by introducing a set of ten argument schemes designed to model distinct forms of deception, each accompanied by structured premises and critical questions. In doing so, we introduce the first dedicated library of argumentation schemes specifically designed for deception analysis, providing a structured foundation for systematically modelling and analysing deception in narrative text. We then present DeceptionAnalyser, a browser-based tool that implements these schemes through a two-stage methodology combining LLM-based premise extraction with critical-question-driven evaluation. Our aim is to provide a conceptual and methodological foundation for analysing deceptive reasoning in narrative text. This is precisely what we address in this paper by demonstrating how structured argumentation theory and AI-assisted analysis can support transparent, explainable assessments of potential deception. Because the schemes are designed to flag claims for scrutiny rather than to output a deception verdict, we do not benchmark classification accuracy; instead, we assess the reliability of the methodology by measuring the consistency of the tool's premise and conclusion assessments across ten contemporary large language models and repeated runs. We find that scheme detection is highly stable for clear-cut deception and degrades gracefully, in interpretable ways, on more ambiguous intelligence-style narratives.

AI agents are being deployed rapidly, accompanied by a growing number of AI-specific attacks and corresponding incidents. As incident reporting becomes increasingly important for legal compliance, governance, accountability, and security; current frameworks must be adapted to the unique characteristics of AI agents. In this paper, two editorial authors compare AI systems and AI agents and, drawing on input from 23 experts in academia and industry, identify the information required for reporting incidents where the security of AI agents is harmed. %involving AI agents. Potential reporting elements include, for example, agent memory and memory accesses, actual and potential levels of autonomy, and tool usage. Based on these findings, we identify several open research questions, including how to efficiently record incidents and how to determine whether vulnerabilities and incidents generalize. Expert feedback also highlighted potential reporting weaknesses, such as risks of data leakage and attacks targeting the reporting infrastructure itself, creating additional research needs. Lastly, we summarize privacy requirements and outline research directions for the secure and trustworthy deployment of AI agents.

Agentic memory is becoming essential for long-horizon AI agents, yet many existing systems rely on autoregressive LLMs to control how memories are organized, retrieved, and used, placing expensive generation on the critical path of memory operations. We introduce \method, a new agentic memory architecture inspired by System-One/System-Two cognition. System One captures fast, lightweight decision-making, whereas System Two performs slower, deliberative reasoning. Jev-Mem brings this division of labor to agentic memory through a dedicated System-One control plane, a structured multi-relational memory plane, and a System-Two reasoning plane. The System-One controller governs memory typing and relational organization during construction, and dynamically performs query routing, retrieval-budget allocation, graph traversal, candidate scoring, and adaptive stopping during retrieval. System Two is invoked only for complex reasoning and answer synthesis. This design improves both memory effectiveness and system efficiency: on LoCoMo Jev-Mem achieves an overall LLM-as-a-Judge score of 0.777, an 11.0% relative improvement over the strongest baseline, while reducing memory construction time to 158\,s, a 6.6$\times$ speedup over the fastest competing memory system, and lowering average query latency to 0.93\,s, a 36.7% reduction.

Group-relative reinforcement learning compares rollouts of the same prompt, but independent environment noise can obscure these comparisons. We study paired rollouts, which share an event-keyed noise schedule within each group while preserving each rollout's marginal distribution. Pairing removes the between-schedule component of reward-contrast variance, but need not reduce gradient variance. For one-sided grader noise, we derive an exact condition for reduction and give a counterexample in which reward contrasts improve while gradient variance increases. A controlled study trains a 2B tool-use agent under tool faults and grader flips, with three seeds per design. The protocol was registered with a disclosed, previously completed pilot. Under tool faults, pairing improves final noisy-test success by +5.1 percentage points on average, with all three seed differences positive, but misses the registered learning-curve criterion. The criterion is also missed under grader flips: the validation-AUC difference is +0.003 (95% interval [-0.029, +0.033]). A gradient probe on eight distinct checkpoints from two fault-trained trajectories finds lower mean-centered covariance traces under both noise types: 21 to 30% for grader flips and 40 to 63% for tool faults. These finite-sample measurements support the variance mechanism without establishing a general learning-speed benefit. The results distinguish improving reward comparisons, reducing estimator variance, and improving learning.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly execute long-horizon workflows through external tools, allowing untrusted outputs to influence subsequent actions and exceed user authorization. Existing defenses isolate injected content or constrain execution with predefined plans and static policies, but these approaches are brittle under dynamic workflows and scale poorly across extensible tool ecosystems. In this work, we present ActGov, a runtime enforcement framework that validates each LLM-proposed tool action before it causes external effects. Built on a unified semantic model of authorization, actions, runtime context, and security constraints, the ActGov-Policy component iteratively constructs a policy set from tool specifications, benign tasks, and observed failure traces, with each update verified through SMT-based counterexample checking. At runtime, ActGov-Runtime abstracts each tool call into finite policy records and permits it only if it remains within the task-scoped authorization boundary and satisfies all applicable policies. This per-action enforcement preserves authorization throughout long-horizon, dynamically branching workflows. We evaluate ActGov on the AgentDojo and AgentDyn benchmarks across multiple models and attack configurations. It shows that ActGov consistently reduces the success rate of indirect prompt-injection attacks while preserving task utility, significantly outperforming existing defenses. These results demonstrate that ActGov can enforce fine-grained authorization over dynamic agent executions without relying on the underlying LLM to correctly identify malicious instructions.

We propose a safety-critical framework for the cooperative transportation of passive targets in microgravity, where a team of chaser robots acts through unilateral pushing contacts to track a human-provided desired twist while ensuring safe target motion. The pushing-only nature of the interaction introduces sparse, configuration-dependent actuation constraints requiring chasers to physically relocate on the target body when the desired pushing allocation changes. To address these challenges, we formulate a delay-aware feedback control architecture leveraging Control Lyapunov Function (CLF) and Control Barrier Function (CBF) constraints within a mixed-integer thrust allocation program to enforce stability and safety of the target, respectively. The proposed framework enables reference tracking while guaranteeing obstacle avoidance with a circular obstacle despite intermittent control authority, providing a foundation for human-supervised cooperative transportation of free-flyers in space environments. The proposed framework is validated through Gazebo simulations.

The effectiveness of agent memory ultimately depends on whether the underlying LLM gives each memory in context an appropriate degree of influence over its response. Yet this capability has remained largely overlooked. To assess this capability, we introduce MemCalib, a benchmark grounded in realistic memory-system scenarios for evaluating memory use and advancing optimization algorithms. Results on the MemCalib test set reveal that frontier open- and closed-source models struggle to use memory appropriately. They frequently over-use or under-use memory rather than matching each proposition's actual use to its target level, leading to biased, low-quality responses. Experiments with common post-training algorithms, including group relative policy optimization and on-policy self-distillation, further reveal a clear directional skew: trained models improve in one direction while deteriorating in the other. We therefore propose MemCalib-RL, an ordered bidirectional counterfactual credit-assignment algorithm that separates over- and under-use signals and localizes their credit to response tokens through exact atom ablation. Results across model families and scales (Qwen3-8B, Ministral-3-8B-Instruct, and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B) show that MemCalib-RL achieves the best overall performance while better balancing over-use and under-use, with gains generalizing beyond MemCalib in external benchmark evaluation. Further experiments support its design choices and robustness and provide insight into its training dynamics.

As LLM agents increasingly interact with external tools through standardized protocols such as MCP, tool-interface design becomes a critical yet underexplored factor. How funψtionality is decomposed into tools affects whether an agent can select the right tool and construct valid arguments. This choice is especially consequential at the edge, where resource constraints limit which models can run locally and scaling up is often not an option. We present MCP-GRANITE, an open-source extensible benchmark framework that treats tool-interface granularity as a controlled variable for MCP-based agents, evaluated under edge and IoT scenarios. It comprises 81 multi-step scenarios across 9 domains, instantiated at 4 granularity levels from fine-grained primitive tools to a single tool. We evaluate 9 locally deployed models (268M-20.9B parameters) across 8,748 trials using task completion, tool selection F1, argument accuracy, latency, and resource-usage metrics. Results show that a 4-tool interface offers the best trade-off, improving task completion by 16.4% over fine-grained primitives and 33.6% over a single monolithic tool, while nearly doubling argument accuracy. Model size is only weakly correlated with task completion and strongly with latency, while its association with argument accuracy is less robust, and a 3.2B model at the optimal granularity outperforms a 20.9B model at a mismatched one. These findings identify tool-interface granularity as a key design parameter for MCP-based agents.

Tool-calling LLM agents are increasingly deployed in enterprise applications. However, effective evaluation and optimization require high-quality, diverse task datasets that are often difficult to obtain due to privacy and other constraints. Existing synthetic task generation methods often produce generic tasks that ignore an agent's underlying state or database and fail to reflect real-world usage diversity. We propose EdgeGen, a synthetic task generation framework that extracts compliance rules from an agent's specification and uses them to generate database-grounded edge-case tasks designed to violate these rules. When combined with existing synthetic data generation techniques, EdgeGen enables agent improvement through finetuning and harness optimization. The resulting pipeline forms a fully automated closed-loop system that requires no human annotation. Finetuning on data generated by EdgeGen yields a consistent mean progress improvement of 2 percent to 42 percent on tau2bench airline domain, while other baseline methods show degradation for some models. On the other hand, for harness optimization, our method shows a mean progress improvement of 10 percent and 30 percent over the human-curated and base harnesses, respectively, for the Gemma-4-e4b model.

Tool-use agent traces identify messages and API calls, but procedural analyses also need explicit units of action and inspectable links to their evidence. We present Canonical Procedural Actions (CPAs), an annotation protocol that records a procedural function, its first agent-event anchor, the agent events that realize it, and separate contextual evidence. Multiple actions may share a message anchor without an inferred within-message order. A retail case study produces a versioned 24-entry codebook through open induction, recorded consolidation, and successive application audits. Two isolated LLM contexts annotate 32 trajectories disjoint from development at the trajectory level, producing 499 and 491 occurrences with anchor-label overlap A=0.982. Requiring identical context-event references reduces overlap to 0.798. These are structural repeatability measures, not semantic accuracy: 16 of 26 task IDs also occur in development, and historical tool payloads were truncated to 110 characters. Retrospective controls show that collapsing all labels raises overlap to 0.986, while simple endpoint rules reproduce the tool-anchored portion with 0.997 overlap. Assistant-message actions have 0.971 overlap, with a per-label minimum of 0.816. Applying the frozen codebook to 244 further trajectories yields 4,058 records, including eight diagnostic outcomes. The contribution is an explicit, auditable annotation instrument and a case study of its construction and measurement limits; human-reference validity and downstream utility remain to be established.

LLM agents can make expert scientific workflows accessible through natural language, but a plausible response does not establish that the requested computation ran. This matters at synchrotron facilities, where calibration and integration are multi-step operations over terabyte-scale datasets. We present APEXA, a deployed framework coordinating 61 tools for synchrotron data reduction. A deterministic execution-integrity guard prevents it from returning results for tool calls that did not execute, and the same tool layer enforces motor safety: across 50 adversarial scenarios and four models, it produced 0/200 violations against a simulated EPICS controller, versus 15/200 for a prompt-only baseline. We also introduce APEXA-Bench, 58 facility tasks organized by scientific correctness and physical consequence. On real APS beamline data, one prompt recovered detector geometry and integrated a full attenuation and exposure sweep. Trustworthy scientific agents need deterministic validation of execution, not model-side assurances. We release the framework, benchmark, and traces.

Deploying language-conditioned manipulation without a dedicated GPU requires efficient inference and action chunks that cover the delay between policy queries. We present vla.simd, a CPU inference engine that combines shared SIMD micro-kernels, reusable computation, and target-specific optimization. We relate query latency and execution horizon to action availability under lagged and time-aligned execution, distinguishing action supply from feedback frequency. Across six policies and four CPUs, vla.simd achieves approximately $1.4\times$ median speedup over compiled PyTorch references while preserving fp32 numerical fidelity. We also introduce IMPACT, an ACT-based policy with cached text representations and language-modulated visual features. IMPACT is the only language-conditioned policy in our evaluated set that supplies at least 30 actions/s on the Raspberry Pi 5: after a 90 s thermal soak, it supplies 33.5 actions/s in fp32 and 81.2 with int8. Separate GPU evaluations yield $76.4%$ mean success across four LIBERO suites without robot pretraining; instruction-shuffling tests demonstrate selection among familiar goals. Trials with IMPACT on an SO-101 arm and SmolVLA on a UR10e with a Robotiq gripper demonstrate CPU deployment on two robot embodiments.

Voice-controlled interaction in industrial settings is hampered by acoustic noise, which severely degrades audio-only speech recognition. Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) addresses this by fusing lip-motion cues with the audio stream, but state-of-the-art pipelines rely on three-dimensional convolutions, recurrent units, and attention modules that exceed the budget of typical edge devices. We present NAVIR, an end-to-end AVSR system targeting the BrainChip Akida neuromorphic processor, which natively supports only sequential two-dimensional convolutional inference. The pipeline factorises spatial and temporal encoding into separate AkidaNet-based modules: a per-frame visual encoder, a temporal video encoder, and a spectrogram audio encoder, fused by a lightweight predictor head and decoded by constrained beam search. Models are trained with connectionist temporal classification on noise-augmented audio and then fine-tuned with quantization-aware training. On the GRID benchmark, the quantized audio-visual model reaches 14.0% word error rate (WER) under noise on the unseen-speaker split and 3.3% WER on the overlapped-speaker split, against 22.5% and 11.8% for audio-only baselines, and it attains 98.6% command accuracy at 1.5% WER on a task-specific industrial-command corpus. Operation-count analysis indicates a 13-fold energy advantage of the spiking formulation over its artificial neural network counterpart at 27.6% mean firing rate. On-board measurements show roughly 5-fold lower energy per inference than a Raspberry Pi central processing unit on the lip-reading model, and over 100-fold lower than a laptop graphics processing unit, while sustaining 14.5 inferences per second. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first complete multimodal AVSR pipeline running on neuromorphic hardware of this class.