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Air operations rely on complex rules, established procedures, and time-critical analysis under limited connectivity and strict security constraints. In such environments, analysts must combine written doctrine with images, often without access to external computing resources. This paper studies offline large language models as decision support tools, deployed in isolated and restricted environments to give analysts access to doctrinal knowledge that remains traceable to its original sources through natural language interaction. We describe a modular retrieval-augmented architecture suitable for operation without Internet connectivity, supporting both text and image input from technical manuals. As a first step toward evaluating this architecture, we report a pilot study with four image analysts of the Brazilian Air Force, combining (i) a doctrinal knowledge assessment based on their electronic-target identification doctrine, comparing human and proposed system performance on the same test, and (ii) a measurement of the cognitive workload involved in manually producing a reconnaissance target report (Relatório de Missão de Reconhecimento - REMIR) without AI assistance. The results show a demanding manual task, especially in terms of mental demand (6.0/7) and effort (5.0/7), while the proposed system matches the human score (8/10) and completes the assessment in 7.1 minutes (compared to a human average of 26.5 minutes), establishing a baseline for future AI-assisted evaluation. Finally, we describe a future evaluation protocol to systematically compare manual and AI-assisted workflows.

Post-training weight-activation quantization reduces the memory and inference costs of large language models, but aggressive W4A4 quantization remains difficult because activation outliers degrade effective quantization resolution. Although weight optimization, channel-wise scaling, and orthogonal rotation mitigate this problem, the error components they address and their relationship remain unclear. Using an exact decomposition of local weight-activation quantization error into an activation-guided weight compensation term and an orthogonal residual, we bound the residual using persistent channel-wise outlier and regular activation quantities. This decomposition clarifies which error components can be addressed by weight compensation and which require transformation design. We then use the residual bounds to derive practical guidelines for applying randomized Hadamard rotation, sign selection, and channel scaling. In particular, the analysis explains how random signs suppress constructive interference among persistent outlier channels, how sampling multiple sign patterns can improve transformation selection, and how second-moment balancing leads to an $L_2$ scaling rule while a further relaxation recovers SmoothQuant-style $L_\infty$ scaling. We evaluate these guidelines through backpropagation-free configurations across eight Llama and Mistral models, obtaining performance competitive with gradient-trained SpinQuant.

Understanding and modeling human intelligence are parallel goals shared by artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science. As AI systems grow increasingly capable, in what ways do model responses resemble human responses, and where do they systematically diverge? The sheer breadth and diversity of the tasks humans can perform and think about pose a challenge for scalable and rigorous comparison between humans and models. We introduce CogGym, a scalable, unified framework grounded in cognitive science for systematically comparing model and human behavior on matched experimental trials. CogGym uses a semi-automated, human-in-the-loop pipeline to standardize diverse experimental paradigms into a task-agnostic Experiment Markup Language (EML), enabling reproducible and faithful comparison at scale. For initial release, we curate and standardize 258 cognitive experiments from 100 papers that focuses on human commonsense reasoning, and evaluate 50 large language models against human responses. We find a clear scaling trend where larger and more recent AI models better reproduce human judgments. Yet AI models' improvement on such common reasoning tasks is considerably slower than the gains observed on formal-reasoning benchmarks like math and coding, and model--human fit remains well below human splithalf reliability ($R^2 = 0.93$ on text, $0.95$ on image, and $0.92$ on video) with the best models achieving $R^2 = 0.59$ on text, $0.58$ on image, and $0.43$ on video experiments. We intend for CogGym to provide a living evaluation framework that continually incorporates new cognitive science experiments to characterize where model behavior resembles human behavior, where it systematically diverges, and how those patterns change as models and experiments evolve.

Activation steering has become a widely used approach for controlling language models during explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, motivating its extension to latent CoT. However, we find that steering continuous thoughts produces substantially weaker effects on subsequent language generation than steering explicit CoT, even when the hidden representations are moved by comparable amounts. We first show that task information remains identifiable in continuous thoughts. Hence, we hypothesize a latent-to-language transition gap, in which an intervention effect in latent space fails to transfer to language generation. Two further results support this hypothesis: the output distribution changes abruptly at the transition boundary, and task-related directions exert much weaker bidirectional control in latent CoT than in explicit CoT. These findings identify the transition interface as a central target for evaluating and designing future latent-steering methods.

Homomorphic encryption (HE) has emerged as a promising approach to privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML), enabling computation directly over encrypted data. In HE-based PPML, a client submits an encrypted input to the server, which evaluates models such as large language models (LLMs) without access to the underlying plaintext. However, we identify a critical security vulnerability in this setting: HE-LLM inference is vulnerable to malicious clients that submit adversarial prompts, such as jailbreak attacks. The same confidentiality that protects benign clients also prevents the server from inspecting incoming prompts or generated responses, making adversarial attempts difficult to detect or block and potentially allowing successful attacks to remain entirely invisible to the server. To address this vulnerability, we propose HE-Guardrail, a framework that evaluates guardrail mechanisms entirely over encrypted data and homomorphically controls whether the target-model response is returned to the client. We instantiate HE-Guardrail with three representative guardrails - Llama Guard, JBShield, and GradSafe. Our results show that HE-Guardrail closely reproduces the decisions of the corresponding plaintext guardrails in the encrypted domain, with distinct security-efficiency-utility trade-offs.

Detecting pretraining data in large language models is challenging because high likelihood can reflect either training exposure or strong generalization. In the joint space of prediction loss and predictive entropy, a likelihood-only detector uses a horizontal boundary and can mistake predictable non-members for members. Motivated by this, we introduce an inclined boundary that evaluates prediction loss relative to predictive entropy. Our analysis shows that entropy correction can preserve the expected membership signal while reducing its variance, thereby improving standardized member--non-member separation. We further extend the mean--variance analysis to the more general setting with a nonzero mean entropy gap. Interestingly, this entropy-adjusted score admits a Helmholtz free-energy interpretation, leading to Energy Transfer Detection (ETD), which views pretraining data detection from a macroscopic residual free-energy transfer perspective. Extensive experiments show that ETD achieves the best average detection performance, improving average AUROC by up to 3.5% and TPR@5%FPR by up to 5.1%, while remaining robust across diverse settings.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been shown to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs), yet existing optimization methods largely rely on outcome-based feedback, leaving the logical validity of intermediate reasoning steps largely unverified. To address the gap whereby LLMs arrive at correct final answers through logically flawed intermediate reasoning chains, we propose LogicTrack, a neuro-symbolic framework that audits reasoning trajectories by auto-formalizing each reasoning step into symbolic representations and verifying it with automated theorem provers. LogicTrack introduces Solver-Based Backtracking Reward (SBR), a step-wise scoring mechanism that quantifies logical soundness and guides backtracking tree search at inference time. We further extend LogicTrack to construct supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data with backtracking traces from its trajectories, enabling fine-tuned models to internalize step-wise auditing as an intrinsic capability. Extensive experiments across 8 reasoning benchmarks and 7 LLMs demonstrate that LogicTrack effectively improves both the verifiability of reasoning chains and final answer pass rate, thereby enhancing overall CoT quality and trustworthiness in high-stakes domains.

High-consequence subsurface decisions often rely on sparse data that permit competing geological interpretations. Determining consistency of these interpretations with the available observations remains challenging. We present a workflow that addresses this challenge by translating competing geologic interpretations into alternative priors and ranking them according to their consistency with hydraulic-head observations. A key step in this workflow is exploiting the broad knowledge of image-generation foundation models to transform nuanced geologic interpretations into data ready for computer modeling. For each interpretation, a text-to-image foundation model generates an ensemble of geologic images, and a separately trained variational autoencoder learns an interpretation-specific latent representation. A supervised inverse network maps head observations into this latent space, and the frozen decoder reconstructs an image that is mapped to a log-conductivity field. Steady-state flow simulations predict heads, and the aggregate normalized head error determines the ranking. We evaluate the framework using a synthetic benchmark based on the Johansen Formation with three interpretations of decreasing consistency with the reference geology. Across 595 test cases, the Precise & Accurate interpretation produces lower normalized errors than Accurate in 58.5% of cases and Mismatched in 82.5% of cases. Accurate outperforms Mismatched in 65.5% of cases. We then compare spatial representations of two published conceptual models of the Culebra Dolomite Member at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The revised representation yields an aggregate normalized error of 7.598, compared with 8.595 for the original, consistent with the documented conceptual-model revision. The framework enables quantitative comparison of competing geological interpretations using available hydraulic observations.

We propose a Verification Reward Model (VRM) framework for training language models to create and repair chip verification artifacts. The central object is a versioned verification contract that binds requirements, permissible stimulus, observation boundaries, reference behavior, evaluation budgets, and acceptance criteria. Compiler, simulator, formal, mutation, coverage, and expert-review evidence are converted into auditable records. Deterministic acceptance checks remain outside the learned model. A learned outcome model predicts expensive future evidence from the specification, the generated artifact, and explicitly masked partial evidence; a semantic critic identifies evidence-supported weaknesses; a deterministic reward composer translates the resulting quality vector into task-conditioned training rewards. Extensions include paired clean/fault interventions, marginal fault-discovery rewards, uncertainty-aware evaluation scheduling, and a quarantined cross-domain learning loop. Evaluation emphasizes independently validated fault detection, false alarms, generalization across design families, and total cost to reach a specified quality level. We describe a first experiment on a small, open-tool-compatible benchmark with lightweight models, with full UVM capability admitted through feature-specific qualification. This is a position paper: we specify the framework and the experiments that would test it, and we report no training, EDA, or silicon results.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications that must weigh clashing moral values, yet even strong models exhibit hidden biases and brittle instruction-following across languages. We introduce a 12,000-instance dataset of two-option dilemmas covering pairwise three value conflicts: Honesty vs. Justice, Justice vs. Autonomy, and Autonomy vs. Honesty, along with their translations into Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese, to probe cross-lingual behavior. Benchmarking on GPT-5-mini reveals that it consistently favors Honesty over Autonomy across all five languages when no policy is given. The Llama-3.2-1/3B models exhibit strong first-option bias; however, both plain fine-tuning and Direct Preference Optimization fine-tuning effectively remove this bias, increasing accuracy to greater than 98%. In order to decouple the effect of learning correlations in the dataset from abstract values, we propose a task vector transfer based experiment where after computing the task vectors for a direction of value preference we orthogonalize it with respect to the general instruction following vector. Our experiment shows that this method is effective in isolating the direction of the specific value preference that can successfully be used to conduct task arithmetic to obtain a model with the opposite stance.

Reinforcement learning (RL) controllers have been recently adopted for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) navigation and control. However, they are susceptible to action-space attacks that overwrite the action commands after the policy generates them and before the actuators execute them. While most existing defenses target attacks on the policy's inputs, those addressing action-space attacks retrain the policy at training time and are not resilient to corrupted actions at runtime. We propose ASGARD, a two-phase teacher-student pipeline for making RL-based UAV control resilient to action-space attacks. In the teacher phase, an encoder combines the UAV's physical state with action-attack-related privileged information to produce an action-attack-aware latent that trains the RL control policy and a monitor that outputs corrected action commands to the actuators. In the student phase, both the encoder and the monitor are trained via supervised learning from their teacher counterparts to run on-board using only the UAV's physical state history. We evaluate ASGARD across attack scenarios targeting different action commands on UAV. We find that ASGARD is resilient to action-space attacks and completes the missions despite the attack. We further find that ASGARD generalizes to unseen attacks and remains resilient against stealthy attacks.

During manipulation, robot and scene motion can move previously observed regions outside the camera's field of view. Geometry-aware RGB features encode visible structure, while control under partial observability requires scene memory that integrates observation history and grounds inferred content in current evidence. We introduce \lifd{} (Look, Imagine, Focus, and Do), a framework for persistent, 3D-aware scene memory. LIFD learns scene tokens through multi-view agreement, then completes them from a single RGB view and recurrent memory using rectified flow. Anchor-Guided Cross-Attention anchors generation to current geometry-aware features, and compact slot features condition a visuomotor policy. Multi-view and geometric supervision are used during representation learning; deployment requires one RGB camera, proprioception, and a task instruction. LIFD (Staged) reaches 91.6% average success on LIBERO and 79.8% on MetaWorld, improving LIBERO average success by 11.1 percentage points over Joint training. After policy-head adaptation with ten demonstrations per family, LIFD achieves 56.0% mean success across four UR5e task families, compared with 40.5% for OpenVLA-7B.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation, yet their reliance on visual perception limits robustness in contact-rich environments, where critical physical interaction states may not be visually observable. Existing tactile-enhanced VLA methods improve physical grounding using observed tactile feedback, but most remain largely reactive rather than explicitly modeling how contact may evolve. Therefore, we propose ForeTac-VLA, a forecasting-based tactile-vision-language fusion model that predicts future tactile states to guide action generation. Specifically, ForeTac-VLA encodes recent tactile observations into temporal representations and integrates them with vision-language features through bidirectional cross-attention. Further, a transformer-based forecasting module predicts multi-step future tactile states, enabling the model to reason jointly over observed and anticipated contact. Finally, the fused multimodal representations and predicted future tactile states are fed into the VLA backbone to condition action generation. To stabilize training, a ground-truth-to-prediction curriculum is employed when early forecasts are unreliable. Across four real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, ForeTac-VLA achieves an average success rate of 95%, outperforming the fine-tuned VLA model by 36.25 percentage points and state-of-the-art tactile-enhanced VLA baselines by over 22 percentage points. ForeTac-VLA also maintains strong performance under low-illumination and visually cluttered conditions. Video demonstrations can be found on https://foretac-vla.github.io/

Closed-loop visual servoing requires predictions that indicate whether an action reduces task error, not only whether the action is plausible. We call this gap the prediction-control mismatch and introduce WM-VS, a target-centric progress-aligned world-model framework for closed-loop visual servoing. Offline target-region DINOv2 correspondences define a signed four-dimensional servo coordinate for translation, scale, and in-plane rotation. Stage 1 aligns action-conditioned latent transitions with this coordinate; Stage 2 freezes the world model and trains a reactive joint-velocity policy with action imitation, consequence supervision, and short imagined rollouts that favor error contraction. Deployment is RGB-only and reactive, without online trajectory optimization. On a real 7-DoF eye-to-hand system, WM-VS reaches a corner RMSE no larger than 10 percent of its initial value in 30/30 trials and retains this criterion at the final valid frame in 25/30 (83.33 percent). Removing future-error alignment reduces retention to 26.67 percent. The learned progress signal agrees with an external AprilTag corner error not used for training or control (mean Spearman rho = 0.8778). Without retraining, two unseen 3D targets achieve translation-error reductions of 86.48 percent and 90.27 percent and rotation-error reductions of 70.01 percent and 65.70 percent. These results link progress-aligned action consequences to repeated closed-loop correction and transfer. Code and data will be released as open source.

A repair favored under an isolated input fault can be inferior when deployed modules share the faulty information. We introduce an information-interface audit for world models, distinguishing fidelity gaps, where exact inputs become estimates, from availability gaps, where inputs are missing. Fixed-weight interventions measure prediction error, input dependence, and paired closed-loop benefit, including dependencies introduced by reconstruction. In simulated quadrotor model predictive control, coupled, opposite-sign 10% mass/thrust calibration errors reduce a physics-anchored model's success from 69% to 8%; uncertainty training restores 65%. Wind reconstruction recovers control benefit but inherits calibration dependence. For a positive calibration offset, reconstruction-only corruption favors uncertainty-trained reconstruction, whereas shared corruption favors the baseline. Acceleration diagnostics reveal compensation between reconstruction bias and nominal-model error, also observed with a disturbance observer. Repair selection therefore depends on the information paths used in deployment.

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data, but its performance degrades under non-IID data and stochastic client participation. Remedies built on classical Federated Averaging (FedAvg) typically presuppose that client participation probabilities are known to the server, which is rarely the case in deployed systems. We first discuss and then characterize the optimization problem that distributionally agnostic FedAvg actually solves when participation is entirely unknown, possibly highly skewed, and of variable size across rounds: uniform aggregation is shown to minimize a well-defined stochastic objective, weighted by the participation-induced marginal, at a standard $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ rate for convex and possibly nonsmooth losses. Building on this characterization, we propose Federated Risk-Averse Averaging (\textsc{FedeRage}), a risk-averse extension of FedAvg that embeds the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) into the local objective within a natural distributionally robust optimization (DRO) framework. \textsc{FedeRage} implicitly upweights high-loss and infrequently participating clients while adding only a single scalar per-client, and admits an $\mathcal{O}(κ/\sqrt{T})$ rate in which the factor $κ$ is the upper bound on the ``price" of risk aversion. In contrast with aggregation-alignment schemes based on optimal transport, which require the availability distribution as an input, \textsc{FedeRage} remains agnostic to it. Several experiments on three heterogeneous benchmarks indicate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, fairness, and convergence speed.

Image diffusion models have shown impressive image generation capabilities but are often hard to control, in contrast to classical computer graphics pipelines such as physically based rendering. However, we observe that there is a bridge between light transport phenomena and the distribution of latent space values produced by such models. Thus, we introduce physically based rendering in the feature space learned by the variational autoencoders in generative models, enabling light transport simulation in the latent space. This allows us to leverage physically based rendering techniques to output latent maps for physically guided content generation. We propose modifications to the rendering equation, which, when paired with a differentiable renderer, can yield an optimal set of scene parameters that require only minimal refinement to accurately render into the pretrained latent space. We train our method on a single rendered image, and then demonstrate the generalization of the method to scene geometry changes, lighting changes, and camera view changes.

Satellite communications are an essential component of sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks, which provide ubiquitous connectivity for global services. However, the satellite uplink remains a critical bottleneck for ground devices: their limited transmit power and antenna apertures result in low data rates and high packet errors. To overcome this bottleneck, this paper advocates a novel relaying paradigm termed generate-and-forward (GF) communications, where satellites exploit on-orbit generative artificial intelligence (AI) to robustly reconstruct corrupted data prior to forwarding. Specifically, we propose SpaceDiffusion, an over-the-orbit diffusion framework for satellite-assisted image transmission. The core of this framework is a channel-distortion-aware diffusion theory developed using the following approach. By formulating the recovery of compressed and lost image tokens as an inverse problem, this theory incorporates a channel-distortion correction term directly into the conventional denoising diffusion implicit model (DDIM) update. As a result, this design enables a single pretrained diffusion model to adapt dynamically to varying packet-loss patterns and compression distortions without retraining. Furthermore, we analytically characterize the progressive token-reconstruction error and derive a diffusion-step activation threshold that predicts when SpaceDiffusion is expected to outperform conventional decode-and-forward (DF) relaying. Building on these theoretical insights, we further develop an energy-aware early-exit policy to efficiently deploy SpaceDiffusion in orbit. Experimental results demonstrate that SpaceDiffusion achieves lower end-to-end latency compared to DF scheme with retransmission protocol and saves approximately 15 dB of uplink transmit power at a target perceptual quality.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly being explored for chip design, but most existing approaches operate directly at RTL. We ask whether agents can design better chips by leveraging higher-level abstractions. We compare Direct RTL Design, Agent-based HLS Design, Post-Compiler HLS Refinement, and Post-HLS RTL Refinement, and combine Agent-based HLS Design with Post-HLS RTL Refinement as Agent-based HLS with RTL Refinement (AHRR). We use FPGAs as a practical, easy-to-deploy platform for end-to-end evaluation, but note that the design-flow tradeoffs we study are largely independent of the target technology. Across a diverse 11-tasks benchmark suite, AHRR achieves a 2.6$\times$ geometric-mean speedup over Direct RTL Design across our benchmark suite. Case studies show that HLS distills design knowledge into abstractions that agents can leverage, while RTL refinement recovers lower-level optimization opportunities. Together, these results make AHRR a promising workflow for agentic chip design. The code and evaluation artifacts are available at https://github.com/ZijD/AHRR.

Performance models of LLM servers support both latency evaluation and the design of controllers for autoscaling against service level objectives (SLOs) and for inference optimization. We model the multiplexed execution of prefill and decode operations with a tractable, approximate queueing model under Markovian assumptions. Three parameters characterize a model-accelerator pair, namely a baseline per-iteration overhead, a per-token compute cost, and a per-token key-value (KV) cache access cost. The model combines a mean-value analysis of per-iteration work with a state-dependent Markov chain for batch occupancy to predict mean time to first token (TTFT) and inter-token latency (ITL). We validate these predictions against measurements and show that the three parameters can be estimated from observed latencies. Over a grid of input and output lengths and arrival rates spanning light to moderate load, the relative error of the average ITL is about 5% for Llama-3.1-8B and 8% for Qwen2.5-14B running on an H100 GPU, and the corresponding TTFT errors are 14% and 16%. We then implement an autoscaling controller that uses the model to adjust inference-server replica counts as the workload changes. On an OpenShift cluster of H100 GPUs it tracks a fourfold load ramp under both latency targets, missing one in 7 of 127 control cycles, and its in-loop predictions carry median errors of at most 5% for TTFT and 9% for ITL. A decode-throughput analyzer from an existing autoscaler, which takes no latency target, misses 27 of 128 cycles under the same controller and load while provisioning 4% and 28% fewer replicas.

Recent advances in large language models have improved their effectiveness as back-end components for voice assistants, particularly in intent understanding and context-aware input classification. However, online-hosted models introduce network dependency and variable inference latency, limiting their suitability for time-critical autonomous driving applications. In this work, we address these issues by developing Jarvis, an offline voice assistant for high-level behavioral commands of autonomous vehicles. Its architecture integrates speech recognition and synthesis with natural language command classification into a lightweight, local framework. Jarvis core component is a text-to-command classifier, built using a domain-specific fine-tuning of the Mistral 7B model, demonstrating low-latency inference. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our solution outperforms larger online-hosted models, achieving 97.63 % intent recognition accuracy with an average processing latency of 1.39 s, making it well-suited for operations requiring quick response times. To support further research and fine-tuning, we provide an open-source implementation.

In Mixture-of-Experts language models, the router typically selects and weights experts based on the token's hidden state, utilizing limited contextual information. We propose Attention-Aware Routing (AAR), which augments the router with temporal and spectral features extracted from a sliding window of attention weights that represent a summary of the model's contextual state, disentangled from the hidden state. Keeping the base transformer entirely frozen, we train only the routing parameters, isolating routing as the sole variable. AAR improves GSM8K by +3.37 pp over a routing-only SFT baseline on OLMoE. Beyond performance, we show that routing and attention form a coupled circuit: routing changes at layer l propagate through the residual stream to amplify attention sinks at layer l+1, reshaping attention without any direct update to the attention mechanism itself. Further, AAR reduces long diverging generation, with incorrect answers getting shorter, while correct answers remain unchanged in length. Finally, AAR is strongly depth-sensitive: applying it indiscriminately across layers can degrade factual retrieval, whereas mathematical reasoning gains persist when it is introduced deeper in the network. This sensitivity exposes a retrieval--reasoning tension across depth and makes layer-selective AAR a controlled probe of the routing-relevant information carried by attention at different layers.

Autoregressive (AR) models suffer from local greediness, while diffusion language models (DLMs) often lack the strict causal structure required for reasoning. To combine the advantages and overcome the drawbacks of the dual, we propose Causal Latent Revision (CaLR), a framework that reformulates reasoning as constrained latent optimization. By adopting a causal topology matrix (CTM) from an expert model and implicit differentiation, CaLR performs gradient-guided ``thought revision" to enforce logical consistency, enabling dynamic self-correction of intermediate steps during parallel generation. Empirically, CaLR achieves SOTA DLM performance on complex benchmarks, surpassing strong AR baselines and demonstrating superior robustness in constrained tasks like Sudoku.

Fine-tuning has emerged as a widely adopted approach for adapting LLMs to a variety of downstream tasks. However, how it reshapes their internal mechanisms remains poorly understood. To address this, we investigate how fine-tuning alters internal representations in LLMs, including attention patterns and layer-wise activations, and examine whether these changes are linked to task-relevant components identified by EAP (e.g., attention heads and logit-level activations) that drive task performance. We find that EAP-identified components are concentrated within specific layers, indicating a degree of functional localisation in how models internalise task-specific behavior. Notably, the distribution of these components across layers is largely uncorrelated with the layers undergoing the most substantial representational changes during fine-tuning. Furthermore, we observe that overlap in EAP-identified components across tasks does not translate into cross-task performance transfer if the tasks are different in nature (e.g. classification vs. generative tasks). More specifically, fine-tuning on one task can lead to a degradation of performance on another when the two tasks exhibit a high degree of overlap in their EAP-identified components.

Long-context large language model inference is increasingly limited by prefill, where dense self-attention processes the entire prompt before generation begins. Sparse block selection can reduce this cost, but a block centroid may hide a highly relevant token among many irrelevant ones. We call this failure mode mean dilution and propose RBS-Attention, a training-free sparse-prefill method with two complementary selection branches. A centroid base branch captures average relevance, while a rescue branch uses the maximum key-block radius and its prompt-, layer-, and head-dependent distribution to identify blocks at risk of underestimation. Independently thresholding the two branches and combining their masks controls the contribution of rescue blocks while preserving regular block-sparse FlashAttention execution. On H100 GPUs, RBS-Attention achieves 20.65$\times$ standalone prefill-attention speedup, 11.92$\times$ vLLM prefill-attention speedup, and 5.97$\times$ end-to-end time-to-first-token speedup at 128K on Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507-FP8. On the dense Qwen3-32B model, it obtains 88.65 overall RULER accuracy versus 89.52 for dense attention; LongBench-v2, InfiniteBench, and Video-MME provide additional quality evaluation. Supporting experiments measure actual retention, compare selectors at matched density, and characterize block-size, threshold, and memory behavior. Together, these results support radius-adaptive dual-branch selection as an effective approach to long-context prefill.

Evaluating live streaming speech synthesis (TTS) requires assessing fine-grained, highly expressive prosody such as emotion, intonation, and energy which traditional MOS predictors fail to capture. While proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) like Gemini can evaluate these aspects, they are too costly for massive inference and reinforcement learning feedback. To address this, we first introduce Live-ProsodyJudge (LPJ), a cost-effective pairwise evaluator distilled from Gemini into Qwen3-Omni. However, we identify a critical flaw in standard multi-dimensional evaluation: verdict coupling. The judge tends to lazily align all individual dimension scores with its overall preference, collapsing a rich multi-dimensional rubric into a single preference bit. To resolve this, we further propose Decoupled-Live-ProsodyJudge (D-LPJ). D-LPJ eliminates the overall verdict target to prevent blind following, masks uncertain pair-dimensions during Supervised Fine-Tuning(SFT), and introduces a novel span-local GRPO strategy that applies normalized advantages strictly to their corresponding rationale spans. Evaluated on highly curated human-annotated test sets, 10 sample balanced-order LPJ achieves higher point accuracy than a single Gemini call, while D-LPJ successfully produces independent,decoupled dimension judgments. Furthermore, in a Best-of-8 TTS candidate selection tournament, the LPJ-selected utterance falls within the human top-3 in 85.29% of high-confidence cases, demonstrating its efficacy for fine-grained TTS preference optimization.

Cross-view object geo-localization (CVOGL) typically assumes a fixed query image, overlooking the ability of mobile agents to actively acquire more informative observations. To address this limitation, we introduce Active Cross-View Object Geo-Localization (ActiveGeo), where an agent sequentially selects new viewpoints and determines when to stop, aiming to improve localization with minimal observations. We further propose ActiveMoPT, an ActiveGeo framework with three-stage training. First, Multi-View Prompt-Preserving Adaptation enables the model to aggregate multiple query views while reusing the initial prompt. Second, Trajectory-Guided Policy Initialization uses supervised agent trajectories to learn viewpoint selection and initial stopping behavior. Third, Cost-Aware Policy Refinement employs GRPO with a gain-cost reward to jointly optimize localization accuracy and observation efficiency. We also construct ActiveGeo-858, a zero-shot test set containing 858 scenes and 1,716 target annotations. Experiments show that ActiveMoPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on MoP-UAV using only 1.45 query views on average, and substantially outperforms previous CVOGL approaches under zero-shot evaluation on ActiveGeo-858.

We propose SnapPhysics, a training-free framework that reconstructs 3D objects and estimates their physical properties such as mass, friction, and center of gravity from a single image. For physically coherent interactions in mixed reality (MR), such properties are as important as geometry. Prior approaches infer them by analyzing object dynamics in video, which is computationally costly, or by querying vision-language models (VLMs) on single images, which lacks geometric grounding and inter-object relationships. We address these limitations by combining instance-level 3D reconstruction and spatial alignment with a physics-aware scene graph that encodes these relationships and per-object metric geometry as structured context for VLM-based property reasoning. Experiments on 3D-FRONT show that SnapPhysics improves scene-level F-Score by 18.6% over the best learning-based method, and on real captured scenes with ground-truth mass, it reduces the mean absolute log difference error (mALDE) by up to 20.5% and improves log-scale correlation ($r^2_{\mathrm{ls}}$) by up to 19.6% over VLM-only estimation. SnapPhysics enables physically interactive MR experiences without manual parameter tuning. Project page: https://snapphysics-ismar2026.github.io/.

Autonomous recovery of a micro unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) onto a moving airborne carrier enables reusable deploy-mission-recover operation, but couples long-range rendezvous, close-range perception, carrier motion, aerodynamic interaction, and a discontinuous contact event. This paper presents an RTK-vision-guided reinforcement-learning framework in which a child UAV is physically transported by a larger carrier, takes off from the carrier while airborne, executes an independent sortie, returns to the carrier's current position, redocks, and subsequently descends with the carrier. Both vehicles carry RTK-GNSS, and the carrier continuously shares its navigation state with the child. Near the recovery deck, RTK remains active while a downward-facing camera with a fiducial marker detector provides marker-relative alignment cues. A proximal policy optimization (PPO) policy governing the terminal recovery phase is trained in a physics-based MuJoCo simulation environment with explicit sensor noise models, an aerodynamic disturbance surrogate, and marker-latency randomization, then transferred to hardware. PX4 retains low-level stabilization, and a deterministic safety gate authorizes descent independently of the learned policy. The PPO checkpoint achieves 99.55% success over 2,000 held-out randomized terminal episodes, compared with 78.4% for a tuned PD baseline under identical conditions, with a median planar terminal error of 6.62 cm. Across 14 outdoor trials, the full mission succeeds in 13 trials (92.9%), spanning both near-region recovery and recovery after the carrier translates away from the release point. The results demonstrate a complete autonomous aerial deployment-and-recovery cycle rather than an isolated landing maneuver, establishing a practical basis for reusable carrier-child operation in inspection, surveillance, and mobile-logistics applications.

Training embodied foundation models typically requires massive-scale datasets and extensive computational resources, yet often suffers from three critical limitations: (1) inefficient sample utilization due to low-informative samples; (2) imbalanced gradient contributions across heterogeneous tasks; and (3) severe credit assignment problem in long-horizon planning, where trajectory-level rewards indiscriminately penalize all tokens. To address these issues, we propose an efficient training paradigm that achieves state-of-the-art average performance through strategic data selection and hierarchical policy optimization. Our approach consists of three synergistic stages. First, Rejection Sampling-based Fine-Tuning (RSFT) filters out low-informative samples to establish robust behavioral priors while preventing distributional collapse. Second, Iterative Rejection GRPO (IR-GRPO) employs task-specific queues stratified by difficulty to keep datasets balanced across reinforcement learning iterations, coupled with a hybrid reward mechanism for precise cross-task feedback. Third, to enhance long-horizon task planning, we introduce Trie-GRPO, a novel reinforcement learning algorithm based on action prefix trees, which enables step-level advantage estimation. This resolves the credit assignment problem by isolating intermediate correct decisions from downstream errors, while effectively balancing exploration efficiency and depth compared to conventional search trees. As a result, EmbodiedMind achieves a state-of-the-art average performance of 70.02% across 18 benchmarks, and significantly outperforms other embodied foundation models in long-horizon task planning accuracy. Our project will be released for reproducibility.