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World models — compressed latent representations of an environment that support action-conditioned prediction and planning — are typically presented as a product of modern self-supervised learning. This paper argues that the functional anatomy of a world model was independently developed, deployed, and formally analyzed decades earlier in the model-order-reduction (MOR) and control literature, under different names and for a different purpose: the real-time operation of physical systems. We trace the anatomy across three communities. Low-dimensional models of turbulence built on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) supplied latent dynamics learned from data of a chaotic environment; eigenface methods in early computer vision supplied the encoder-decoder half, including a primitive runtime validity check; and measurement-based POD frameworks for facility thermal control assembled the complete loop — POD coefficients as latent state, parametric dependence on actuator setpoints as action conditioning, modal reconstruction as decoding, and, critically, a priori analytical error bounds as a verification layer that certified when the model's predictions could be trusted in closed loop. We then examine what each tradition possesses that the other lacks: MOR contributes verification, physical grounding, and extreme data efficiency; learned world models contribute nonlinear representation, transferability, and horizon. We argue that the outstanding obstacle to deploying world models in systems that cannot fail — power, thermal, process control — is not predictive fidelity but verifiability, and we outline a research agenda for physics-grounded, verifiable world models that unifies the two lineages.

Recent progress in large-scale generative models has substantially advanced video generation, yet existing methods remain constrained by a rigid inference paradigm. Bidirectional diffusion models excel at global coherence and visual fidelity but suffer from slow inference, while autoregressive models offer efficient and streaming generation at the cost of long-range consistency and exposure bias. We introduce Flex-Forcing, a unified training and inference framework that enables a video diffusion model to seamlessly operate under both bidirectional and autoregressive generation regimes. The core idea is a flexible chunking mechanism jointly defined over the temporal axis and denoising steps. This design allows the model to (1) perform flexible chunking according to different device budgets, (2) perform bidirectional inference across chunks for global structure planning, while generating frames autoregressively within each chunk for efficient and fine-grained synthesis, and (3) perform any-order, any-timestep autoregressive generation without the strict causal constraint. Extensive experiments on multiple video generation benchmarks demonstrate that Flex-Forcing achieves consistently better video quality, long-video stability than strong baselines with a rigid inference schedule, while offering faster inference.

We introduce Vidu S1, a real-time interactive video generation model supporting voice control of digital characters. Users can control video generation content at any moment through voice instructions. Vidu S1 supports infinite-length real-time video generation without blurring, drift, or visual distortion. Built with TurboDiffusion and TurboServe, Vidu S1 outputs 540p real-time videos at up to 42 FPS on regular consumer GPUs. Users can upload custom images of real people, anime, and pets, and choose different voice tones for personalized experiences. Experiments show that Vidu S1 achieves the best performance across all test metrics while fully meeting real-time inference requirements. A playable online demo is available at https://vidu.com/vidu-stream.

Establishing correspondence between projector and camera images in a procam (projector + camera) system is essential for achieving high-resolution pixel matching, referred to as procam registration. The highest accuracy is typically obtained using structured light patterns (e.g., stripes or blobs). However, these methods are often inefficient and lack meaningful information for human viewers. Although some have explored the use of natural images, these often fail to provide a sufficient distribution of features to achieve comparable accuracy. Additionally, existing methods struggle to cope with environmental factors such as surface textures and variations in brightness due to ambient light or changes in camera exposure. To address these limitations, we propose a method based on deep neural networks. Our approach aims to generate a single natural image from text-based prompts that not only appears realistic but also possesses rich spatial features to enhance registration accuracy in procam applications. We have developed a deep neural network trained on a synthesized dataset that simulates potential geometric and photometric distortions encountered in a procam system illuminating a relatively smooth object (see Figure 1). Our trained network predicts the correspondence between projector and camera images, significantly improving registration accuracy across various procam configurations. By jointly considering the naturalness and feature richness of the projector images, our method minimizes visual disruptions in projected content without sacrificing precision. A user study confirms that our technique enhances perceived naturalness and usability compared to existing methods, validating its practical utility in real-world applications.

World models aim to capture environment dynamics in ways that support perception, reasoning, and action, and have recently become a central direction in Vision-Language-Action-World (VLAW) modeling. Meanwhile, unified vision-language models have demonstrated strong multimodal generation capabilities, yet their potential as world models remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce WorldBagel, a unified VLAW framework built on BAGEL, a modern multimodal unified model, and use it to systematically investigate the role of unification in world modeling. Across multi-task robotic manipulation and cross-domain experiments, WorldBagel consistently outperforms task-specific alternatives and learns action representations that are more structured and semantically aligned with visual and linguistic context. Experiments on LIBERO, Language Table, and Franka show that unification is not only an architectural convenience, but also a key factor in learning effective VLAW models, leading to consistent empirical gains and deeper insights into multimodal world modeling. Code and model checkpoints will be released upon acceptance.

Massive Activations (MAs) have been widely observed in Transformer-based models, yet their structure and functional roles in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we systematically analyze MAs in representative DiTs and find that they are spatially distributed across image tokens while concentrated in a small set of fixed feature dimensions. We further show that these dimensions are closely aligned with AdaLN residual scaling factors and are primarily modulated by the denoising timestep rather than text conditions. This structure leads to two task-dependent effects: for generation, MAs are critical for fine-grained detail synthesis while having limited influence on global semantics; for understanding, their shared high-magnitude directions make raw DiT features overly similar across spatial tokens and weaken dense feature discrimination. Based on these findings, we introduce Eliciting Massive Activation (EMA), a training-free framework that leverages Massive Activations (MAs) as a unified modulation signal to improve both generative and representational capabilities of DiTs. For generation, EMA proposes MA-driven Detail G}uidance (DG), which suppresses MA dimensions to construct a detail-deficient counterfactual prediction and guides sampling toward finer visual details. DG further supports efficient partial-forward inference, integration with classifier-free guidance, and token-level Local DG for refining selected image regions. For understanding, EMA introduces MA-modulated REPresentation extraction (MREP), which uses pretrained AdaLN channel-wise modulation to reduce MA directional dominance and concatenates spatially normalized MA maps to preserve useful spatial structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EMA consistently improves both the generation quality and representation capability of DiTs.

Multimodal diffusion transformers (MM-DiTs) have emerged as the prevalent backbone for modern text-to-image generation systems. However, they exhibit critical alignment vulnerabilities, systematically manifesting severe stereotype biases even under benign prompts. This poses a significant risk of algorithmic discrimination in deployed systems. Since most existing mitigation strategies were tailored for legacy U-Net architectures, the precise remediation of these vulnerabilities in MM-DiTs remains a critical open challenge. In this work, we first investigate the root cause of this vulnerability via mechanistic analysis. We reveal that bias representations in MM-DiTs are not uniformly distributed across depth, but are mediated by a sparse set of layers functioning as internal semantic binding hubs. These hubs exhibit a stage-wise propagation driving bias manifestation: early hubs establish the structural templates susceptible to bias, middle hubs actively extract core stereotypical concepts from textual conditioning, and late hubs globally solidify these biases through visual self-attention. Leveraging these architectural insights, we propose FairFlow, an intrinsic, mechanism-guided mitigation framework. FairFlow acts as an internal regulator by employing sparse steering: it learns attribute-specific fair directions and injects them exclusively at the identified semantic hubs within a constrained inference window. Evaluations on FLUX.1-dev and Stable Diffusion~3 demonstrate that FairFlow effectively neutralizes these stereotypical vulnerabilities across gender, race, and intersectional settings, achieving an optimal fairness-fidelity balance. With near-zero inference overhead and robustness to complex prompts, FairFlow provides a lightweight and practical bias mitigation for large-scale deployed MM-DiT systems. Code and datasets will be publicly released upon acceptance.

Single-image reflection removal (SIRR) aims to recover the clean transmission layer from a reflection-contaminated image. Although recent methods achieve promising results with large diffusion models, they rely on image-agnostic adaptation strategies, e.g., fine-tuning or ControlNet, that enforce uniform suppression regardless of reflection severity. As a result, heavy reflections often leave residuals, while weak ones suffer from detail loss. To this end, we propose ReLo-IRR, a reflection-guided LoRA framework built upon the rectified flow model. First, a lightweight estimator is designed to predict the reflection strength descriptor, providing an explicit prior of reflection dominance for each image and enabling image-dependent LoRA modulation. Second, we introduce a time-conditioned mechanism that fuses this reflection descriptor with timestep embeddings, enabling LoRA modulation to evolve consistently with the coarse-to-fine denoising process. By jointly modeling reflection strength and denoising dynamics, our ReLo-IRR achieves robust suppression of diverse reflection conditions. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks validate the effectiveness of ReLo-IRR, demonstrating superior dereflection performance and robust generalization. The code is released at https://github.com/KONGBAI-8080/ReLo-IRR.

Real-time cardiac cine MRI enables visualization of the beating heart during free breathing, but severe undersampling and motion make reconstruction highly challenging. A central challenge for reconstruction is incorporating powerful priors of cardiac anatomy while remaining computationally efficient. We propose Piecewise Dynamic Diffusion Regularization (PDDR), a reconstruction method that integrates a spatiotemporal diffusion model as a generative prior within a variational reconstruction framework for cine MRI. The model employs dedicated spatial layers to encode anatomical structure and temporal layers to capture cardiac motion learned from gated cine data. PDDR leverages the dynamic prior in a piecewise manner, enabling the efficient use of spatiotemporal diffusion models for processing of long real-time sequences. Experiments on retrospectively accelerated and prospective real-time cine MRI demonstrate that PDDR outperforms classical, unsupervised, and diffusion-based methods, delivering high-quality reconstructions with substantially reduced computation time compared to state-of-the-art baselines. These results highlight PDDR as a practical and scalable solution for free-breathing, real-time cardiac MRI. Code is available at https://github.com/MLI-lab/pddr.

We present AquaGen, the first all-atom, explicit solvent, periodic-boundary-condition-aware generative model that produces molecular configurations from the Boltzmann distribution at a fraction of the cost of molecular dynamics (MD). This is in contrast with existing generative models that remove degrees of freedom by operating on coarse-grained, vacuum, or implicit solvent systems. Operating at this resolution allows for post-processing through force field energy evaluations and MD simulations, and enables the prediction of relevant properties in a gray-box manner (as ensemble averages of potential energy evaluations over generated samples). We demonstrate the utility of this paradigm on absolute hydration free energy (AHFE), producing estimates 4-10x faster and with comparable accuracy to standard GPU-based MD. By generating uncorrelated samples from alchemical Boltzmann distributions, we create more accurate, interpretable, and refinable ensemble predictions with calibrated uncertainty estimates, unlike regression methods which are entirely black-box predictors. Our approach also yields predictable benefits from increasing train- and test-time compute, realized by scaling model size and generating more samples, respectively. We believe that this approach demonstrates the utility of high-resolution ensemble generation for free energy estimation, with future potential to replace MD in tasks such as the prediction of lipophilicity, membrane permeability, or absolute binding free energy (ABFE) — whose grounding and interpretability may be critical for the development of new drugs and materials.

Diffusion architectures now encompass convolutional UNets as well as transformer-based designs such as Diffusion Transformers (DiTs), inspired by Vision Transformers (ViTs), yet the effects of structured geometric perturbations within these architectures remain poorly understood. We study this question through a unified framework that applies reflection-based elements of the dihedral group to intermediate hidden states as controlled internal interventions, contrasting geometrically consistent and inconsistent variants. Using activation-level diagnostics, including Self-Consistency Shift (SCS), Activation Mass Scatter (AMS), and Drift, we analyze feature stability and geometric drift. We find that consistent transformations improve stability, while inconsistent ones induce predictable, architecture-specific failures. In the main Stable Diffusion 2.1 U-Net study, we evaluate seven intervention modes over three seeds and complement the internal diagnostics with image-level FID, KID, CLIP score, and LPIPS diversity. Taken together with supporting ViT and controlled DiT analyses, these results establish geometric consistency as a key principle for stable hidden-state interventions in spatially structured vision and diffusion models.

The accuracy of consumer-grade inertial navigation is bottlenecked by the stochastic noise of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). Traditional deterministic neural architectures often succumb to ``estimation jittering,'' sacrificing high-frequency kinematic fidelity for numerical stability. We propose PedestrianDiffusion, a multimodal spectral-domain generative framework reformulating dense 6D state estimation as a continuous conditional denoising process. By operating in the frequency domain, our formulation bounds the spectral covariance, acting as a mathematical preconditioner to stabilize the reverse diffusion trajectory. Furthermore, we introduce a zero-shot semantic conditioning mechanism leveraging vision-language embeddings as categorical priors to generalize across heterogeneous sensor noise profiles. To address the computational intractability of generative tracking, we deploy a single-step deterministic probability flow ODE solver ($T=1$). This yields high-capacity asynchronous batch trajectory refinement, establishing the viability of generative architectures for asynchronous batch trajectory refinement on edge hardware. Extensive evaluations on the OxIOD, RIDI, RoNIN, and TLIO benchmarks demonstrate that PedestrianDiffusion achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting unprecedented robustness to impulse perturbations and coupled 6D kinematic drift. This work provides a rigorous algorithmic blueprint for next-generation Neural Inertial Measurement Units (N-IMUs).

Text-to-Image diffusion models often propagate harmful bias inherited from the training data. Existing bias mitigation techniques typically intervene only at the text encoder or provide inference-time guidance, often leading to generations that collapse into semantically incoherent outputs. To address these limitations, we introduce CO-ALIGN (Concept Ontology Alignment), a novel bias mitigation approach based on concept-graph alignment that operates on the model's internal concept ontology. By aligning concepts within the text encoder and denoiser, CO-ALIGN achieves substantial bias reduction while preserving generative integrity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of concept-graph alignment across three paradigms: text-encoders, denoisers and joint text-denoiser ontology alignment. CO-ALIGN outperforms the state of the art, improving fairness by $30%$, $ΔFID=11.4$ in image quality, $2.8%$ in image fidelity, all while reducing semantically incoherent outputs by $88%$. Beyond bias mitigation, we show that CO-ALIGN benefits other downstream tasks as well. In particular, our experiments demonstrate that better-aligned internal ontologies enhance concept unlearning robustness across multiple unlearning techniques.

Multi-domain knowledge graph completion (MKGC) aims to improve missing triple prediction in a target KG by transferring knowledge from other support KGs. Existing methods typically enforce consistency constraints on equivalent entities across KGs to transfer knowledge, which risks suppressing domain-specific contextual information of entities. This design can also compromise entity representation information from all KG domains, impeding performance improvements, especially in low-resource data scenarios. To address this, we pioneer a generation-based paradigm for MKGC and propose DMKGC, a conditional diffusion-guided knowledge transfer framework. Our key insight is to treat each KG as a partial view of the entity entire information, and generate informative domain-general entity embeddings through diffusion models conditioned on support KGs. Particularly, we first initialize domain-agnostic entity embeddings as prior entity embeddings, and then encode them within individual KGs. Afterward, we fuse equivalent entities from support KGs as the conditional diffusion generation guidance. We leverage the prior entity embeddings as the proxy generation objective, which ensures this conditional generation to be unbiased towards any conditioned KGs. Simultaneously, we also train the generated embeddings to be predictive across KGs, thus preserving domain-specific information. Extensive experiments on 14 KGs in 3 benchmarks demonstrate a 4.3% average MRR improvement in tail entity prediction over state-of-the-art methods, with sustained gains in low-resource data settings.

Molecular optimization often starts from a pretrained generative model that captures a broad prior over valid molecular structures. At test time, however, the goal is not to sample from this prior, but to use a limited oracle budget to shift generation toward task-specific high-reward molecules. We study this adaptation problem for discrete diffusion models. Each online round couples several choices. The loop must decide which candidates to evaluate, how rewards become model updates, which feedback to reuse, and how far to move beyond the pretrained prior. These choices have mostly been studied in isolation, leaving open whether they complement one another, become redundant, or interfere inside a full online adaptation loop. We conduct controlled studies across six small-molecule binding-affinity tasks and three protein-fitness tasks. We find that acquisition, reward shaping, and model debiasing provide complementary routes to higher reward, especially for small molecules. Replay further stabilizes learning, while validity penalties keep small-molecule exploration on the valid molecular manifold. Together, these findings point to a practical recipe for feedback-efficient molecular optimization: online fine-tuning with acquisition, reward shaping, debiasing, replay, and validity control. This recipe outperforms offline fine-tuning and inference-time search baselines under matched oracle-call budgets and GPU-hour accounting. The gains are largest when high-reward candidates require larger shifts from the pretrained prior.

In many scientific and engineering domains, maximizing discovery within a limited sampling budget demands strategic, observation-guided exploration. While generative models have enabled training-free reward alignment, current methods typically excel in local searches within narrow regions of the underlying distribution. These approaches struggle when preferences are unknown a priori and only revealed through sequential feedback-a scenario demanding broad exploration to uncover high-utility regions. To address this, we introduce Bootstrap Flow-Map-Tree (a.k.a BFMT), a novel computationally efficient sampling framework designed for history-aware global search and alignment under sampling budget constraints. BFMT enables full tree-path construction from any tree depth using a single function evaluation, drastically reducing computational overhead while providing critical foresight for sequential sampling. By enabling dynamic transition time steps scheduling, BFMT efficiently allocates its sampling budget, smoothly transitioning from broad global exploration to fine-grained local refinement of high-utility modes discovered through exploration. Extensive experiments and ablations across diverse search and alignment tasks demonstrate that BFMT substantially outperforms baseline approaches.

Recovering online pen trajectories from offline handwriting images, often referred to as handwriting trajectory recovery (stroke recovery), is an offline-to-online conversion task with applications in stroke-level editing and forensic analysis. We propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first diffusion-model-based framework for this task. Our method formulates trajectory recovery as image-conditioned generation and uses a denoising diffusion model to sample pen trajectories consistent with the observed ink trace. Through extensive quantitative evaluations on CASIA-OLHWDB (1.0-1.1), we verify that the proposed approach enables accurate recovery even for complex multi-stroke characters, substantially improving both temporal similarity (DTW/LDTW) and shape fidelity (AIoU) over representative prior methods such as PEN-Net and Cross-VAE. We further show that the model captures general stroke-order tendencies and generalizes to classes unseen during training, exemplified by cross-script transfer: a model trained on Chinese characters can recover reasonable stroke orders for Latin letters to some extent.

Few-step distilled diffusion students cut text-to-image inference from ~50 to 1-8 network evaluations, but the quality gap is usually summarised by a single FID/CLIP scalar that cannot say which axis of the conditioning response changed, nor whether a behaviour comes from the architecture, the distillation objective, or simply from being a diffusion model. We replace the scalar with a decomposable probe that injects controlled perturbations along three layers (prompt encoder, denoiser input, denoiser output) under three modes (mean, variance, scale) and six strengths, reporting a bootstrap-median Bures W2^2 selectivity ratio on Inception features. Under a single matched estimator across 23 models — five teachers and 18 distilled students spanning five backbone families (SDXL, SD1.5, SD3.5, PixArt-alpha, FLUX), three architecture classes (UNet, DiT, MMDiT), and five distillation paradigms — the three layers read three empirically separable factors: the prompt layer is a universal prompt-mean response (a sanity channel, not a discriminator), the latent layer reads the prediction type, and the score layer reads the distillation objective. Our main result: within this sweep, the latent layer is a near-binary detector of rectified-flow backbones. Its ratio exceeds 1 across a sustained low-to-mid band only for rectified-flow models (SD3.5, FLUX); no epsilon-prediction model qualifies. A matched epsilon-prediction control (PixArt-alpha) rules out wide-T5 conditioning, and the fingerprint survives adversarial (ADD) distillation as both teacher and student. Two secondary score-layer findings hold under narrower scopes: a canonical 4-step ADD-vs-rest contrast on the UNet families with a non-ADD baseline, and a CI-separated trajectory-rollout early-strength score spike on both UNet and DiT. All ratios are CI-citable under one estimator; we release the per-cell tables and the estimator.

Recent advances in generative modeling have enabled the efficient computation of Schrödinger bridges (SB) in high-dimensional settings by leveraging partially simulation-free training methods inspired by flow matching. However, these have not covered SBs with reflecting dynamics, a useful model choice with built-in guarantees that generated samples stay in the data domain. Existing alternatives for reflected SBs instead rely on more complex training based on forward--backward SDE theory, requiring expensive higher-order derivatives and sampling entire paths during training. In this article, we introduce a partially simulation-free framework that allows reflected SBs to be trained similarly to flow matching, using a new sampling method and regression target. We demonstrate our results by coupling pairs of well-known high-dimensional image datasets. Using reflected dynamics incurs negligible additional wall-clock time during both training and inference while maintaining or slightly improving generative performance.

We propose Perceptual Flow Matching (PFM), a simple yet effective framework for few-step generation in flow-matching models. Rather than performing velocity regression in the conventional VAE latent space, PFM supervises flow matching in a perceptual feature space using pretrained perceptual models. This simple change substantially improves the few-step generation capability of flow-matching models, reducing the number of sampling steps from 35-50 to 4-8 while preserving generation quality. Unlike existing acceleration and distillation approaches, PFM requires neither teacher models nor auxiliary score networks and can be integrated into standard flow-matching training pipelines with minimal modifications. Extensive experiments on image generation, video generation, and image editing tasks demonstrate that PFM consistently produces high-quality results while producing fewer artifacts than existing distillation-based methods. We further show that perceptual supervision shifts the regression minimizer from mean-seeking to mode-seeking, biasing predictions toward on-manifold modes that remain accurate under coarse few-step integration. Our results reveal that standard flow-matching training can naturally yield high-quality few-step generators when supervised in an appropriate representation space. We hope this insight inspires future research into representation-aware objectives for efficient generative modeling.

Quantitative 3D spatial reasoning from egocentric RGB-D video is a critical capability for next-generation wearable assistants. Yet existing benchmarks do not reflect the challenges of handling (1) natural egocentric video, (2) posed RGB-D video inputs, and (3) challenging quantitative 3D spatial reasoning Q&A. To fill this gap, we introduce R3D-Bench (Reasoning in 3D), a benchmark of 3,033 quantitative spatial reasoning questions across 15 types — spanning multiple-choice, distance-based, and volumetric reasoning questions — built on top of 57 egocentric video sequences from Aria Digital Twin. To set a strong baseline on this dataset, we introduce R3D, a model-agnostic spatial tool-calling framework. In contrast to existing approaches that directly embed 3D information into the model's input representation, R3D constructs a 3D scene from video using segmentation and depth-lifted object representations. It provides this information to an LLM through eight composable spatial tools. On R3D-Bench, R3D with Qwen3-VL 235B achieves 73.5% mean relative accuracy, substantially outperforming the best depth-enabled baseline (CuTR+Tools, 61.9%) and the best RGB-only baseline (Gemini 3 Flash, 46.5%).

Large language model (LLM) agents can improve through accumulated experience, but free-form textual memories become difficult to maintain, validate, and reuse as interactions grow. Recent symbolic approaches learn executable skills or programmatic world models, yet often store local procedures or assume simplified dynamics. We propose Object-Centric Environment Modeling (OCM), which organizes experience into an executable object-centric environment model. OCM maintains two connected code bases: object knowledge, which defines environment entities and mechanisms as Python classes, and procedure knowledge, which records reusable interaction patterns that must import and use the object model. OCM works in an online setting: after each episode, OCM reflects on the trajectory, updates both knowledge bases, and verifies that all procedures execute against the updated object model. During future interaction, the agent uses progressive knowledge disclosure to inspect compact code signatures first and read source code only when needed. Experiments show that OCM achieves the best average rank across benchmarks and reduces invalid actions, demonstrating that agents can benefit from building object-centric environment models.

Embodied intelligence systems require not only end-to-end policy models, but also reusable functional modules that transform multimodal observations, robot states, human demonstrations, and task contexts into structured representations, decisions, trajectories, control references, and system services. This work defines these modules as embodied operators and studies them as independent yet composable units in embodied intelligence pipelines. We clarify their definition boundary, emphasizing task semantics, standardized input-output contracts, deployability, reusability, and multi-layer optimizability. We further construct a taxonomy covering five categories: detection and segmentation, spatial localization and 3D understanding, hand motion recovery, embodied foundation models and task-decision operators, and planning, control, and system support operators. For each category, we summarize representative functions, technical paradigms, application roles, and practical limitations. Beyond taxonomy, we propose a multi-dimensional benchmark framework that evaluates embodied operators in terms of correctness, end-to-end efficiency, resource usage, temporal stability, portability, interface compatibility, deployment reliability, and downstream task utility. We also discuss workflow-level operator acceleration and open challenges in operator composition, data standardization, world models, VLA safety, edge deployment, and real-world application value. Overall, this work argues that embodied operators should be optimized and evaluated as holistic deployable components, providing a foundation for reusable, scalable, and verifiable embodied intelligence systems.

Large language model agents driving security tool suites over the Model Context Protocol are increasingly common. Yet the factors that bound their capability remain poorly characterized: how much depends on the model versus the client that drives it, whether constraining the agent to the orchestrator's own tools helps, and where capability is limited by reasoning rather than by missing tools. Using HexStrikeAI, an open-source orchestrator that exposes 150+ tools, as a testbed, we follow a methodology that evaluates the system, diagnoses its failures, and applies targeted improvements. We run 86 picoCTF challenges across seven categories and three difficulty tiers, under three tool-access regimes and three model/client configurations (774 trials). We then apply corrections to existing tools, agent-behavior changes, and eleven new capability tools, and re-run the previously-unsuccessful trials. The diagnosis isolates the driving client as a first-order factor for a fixed model (a 2.1 * gap between two DeepSeek clients) and a monotonic difficulty gradient, with the largest gains in the mid tier. The overall solve rate rises from 55.4% to 72.0%, and every configuration improves significantly (paired McNemar p < 0.001, non-overlapping 95% confidence intervals). The residual failures are reasoning- or environment-bound rather than missing-tool. A 60-run stability sub-study finds single-run verdicts reproducible (17/20 unanimous). We discuss what the results imply for how such orchestrators should be evaluated, and we are explicit about the limits: the study uses a single benchmark, the fixes were tuned on the same challenges they were evaluated on, and the client effect is demonstrated for one model only, so its generality to other models remains a hypothesis.

Video understanding is moving beyond closed-context perception toward open-world evidence exploration, a paradigm formalized as Video Deep Research (VDR). However, existing multimodal search agents primarily target static images, and the current VDR benchmark relies on text-centric retrieval that discards crucial visual information. To address these limitations, we propose VideoSearcher, a closed-loop agentic framework that empowers Vision-Language Models with multi-tool reasoning for VDR. VideoSearcher unifies temporal localization, spatial focusing, and multimodal search within a single reasoning trajectory, enabling agents to progressively ground visual clues, retrieve relevant evidence, and synthesize answers. To optimize knowledge-intensive reasoning trajectories, we propose Bi-branch Sequence Policy Optimization (BiSPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm that decouples tool-invocation optimization from answer-accuracy optimization. This design provides stable learning signals for both evidence-grounded reasoning and purposeful tool use. Furthermore, we construct VideoSearch-QA, the first benchmark designed to evaluate open-world video information grounding and multimodal search-based reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoSearcher significantly outperforms prior open-source agentic baselines across various search-oriented and multimodal understanding benchmarks.

The rapid growth of publicly available digital information has rendered manual open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysis insufficient for modern intelligence, cybersecurity, and cyber investigation. Large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI systems, capable of tool use, multi-step reasoning, and iterative intelligence generation, have emerged as promising solutions, yet evaluation frameworks have not kept pace with reported capabilities. This survey systematically reviews 74 studies and makes four contributions. First, it establishes agentic AI as a distinct analytical category rather than an extension of LLM prompting, organising the literature through an 11-category taxonomy covering LLM foundations, agentic architectures, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), knowledge graphs, prompt engineering, domain adaptation, evaluation benchmarks, and risk. Second, it identifies the hallucination-validation gap as a corpus-level finding: although hallucination is recognised as a major reliability concern in over twenty studies, end-to-end hallucination is empirically measured in only one OSINT-specific RAG-based system, non-reproducible conditions, while related reasoning and factual-correction studies evaluate general-domain question answering rather than OSINT. Third, it maps existing research to the OSINT lifecycle, showing strong support for collection and analysis but limited coverage of verification, reporting, dissemination, and decision support. Fourth, it derives a ten-point research agenda addressing evaluation, benchmarking, hallucination measurement, adversarial robustness, dark-web coverage, multimodal intelligence, and governance. It concludes that a human-AI co-pilot model, where LLMs assist collection and triage while analysts retain responsibility for verification and decision-making, represents the most defensible near-term deployment architecture.

Recent tools such as OpenClaw have extended the capabilities of LLM-based agents from simple dialog-based systems to fully autonomous agents. These systems allow personalization of the agent through modifiable internal files and the installation of skills. While this enables deployment in a wide range of settings and the automation of diverse tasks, greater capability and autonomy increases the risk of malicious actions being executed unintentionally. In this work, we explore the interplay between agent configuration and the risk of executing dangerous actions without explicit instruction. To this end, we propose CONfiguration Tree-search for Red-teaming Agents (CONTRA), an LLM-assisted tree-search algorithm that discovers agent configurations resulting in the execution of malicious actions. CONTRA works by reasoning about benign yet dangerous configurations and evaluating them in a simulated environment. We construct a dataset of the 473 most popular skills from a public repository, along with 2-5 corresponding malicious target actions per skill. In a large-scale analysis, we find that 75.1% of skills have at least one configuration resulting in the execution of a malicious action, most of which have not been detected as containing malicious content by existing scans. Overall, CONTRA successfully identifies a configuration leading to the execution of the target action in 39.2% of all tested cases. Our findings demonstrate that current agents provide insufficient safety with respect to personalization.

Eco-friendly energy management for artificial intelligence data centers (AIDCs) is crucial because of the significant increase in energy consumption-induced carbon emissions from AIDCs resulting from the rapid expansion of AI applications. This paper proposes a hierarchical carbon-aware multi-agent reinforcement learning (CA-MARL) framework for robust and efficient operations of AIDCs under uncertainties while ensuring low-carbon operation of power distribution systems. The framework comprises a workload manager (WM) agent and multiple local AIDC agents trained using a multi-agent transformer method, corresponding to a global AIDC aggregator and a local AIDC operator, respectively. Leveraging AIDC operation data along with nodal carbon intensity (NCI) calculated from the carbon emission flow-integrated distribution system operator problem, the WM agent spatially allocates AI training and inference jobs among all AIDCs. Based on the jobs allocated from the WM agent and NCI information, each AIDC agent schedules economical and eco-friendly operations of the AIDC by performing the following tasks: i) temporal shifting of training jobs, ii) spatial allocation of training graphics processing unit (GPU) blocks and inference GPUs within the AIDC, and iii) control of the supply air temperature of the cooling system. The effectiveness of the proposed framework was assessed using an IEEE 33-node power distribution system.

Platform-orchestrated agentic workflows have become a popular paradigm for developing LLM-based applications. However, their reliability remains a major challenge due to the uncertainty of LLM outputs, complex inter-node dependencies, and heterogeneous tool interactions. Existing agentic workflow optimization and agent enhancement methods primarily rely on trajectory-level feedback. Without explicitly identifying the underlying failure root causes, their resulting repair plans are often insufficiently targeted. We propose FlowFixer, a diagnosis-driven automated repair framework for agentic workflows. FlowFixer first transforms workflow executions into unified symbolic traces and performs symbolic inference to derive executable behavioral specifications that capture node correctness, temporal dependencies, and causal relationships. Based on specification verification, it conducts failure attribution and root cause analysis, and then generates targeted repair patches. To reduce verification costs, FlowFixer further employs a multi-dimensional pre-execution assessment to filter infeasible repairs before dynamic verification. We evaluate FlowFixer on workflow failures collected from three popular development platforms: Dify, Coze and n8n. Results show that FlowFixer achieves a repair success rate of 71.3%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by 11.9% to 27.6%. It also improves failure attribution accuracy by 4.8% to 33.1% and root cause analysis accuracy by 15.3% to 38.8%. This work offers a new perspective on reliable diagnosis and repair of agentic workflows through symbolic modeling and inference.

Current benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in medical calculation are largely based on simplified settings, where each patient case corresponds to a single calculator and the required tool is explicitly specified in the query. However, real clinical scenarios often require multiple calculators for joint evaluation, nested-scale calculation, and fuzzy queries that do not directly specify the target calculator. To this end, we propose a new medical calculation benchmark, MedCalc-Pro, which covers three progressively challenging task settings: single-calculator, multi-calculator, and nested-calculator calculation settings. MedCalc-Pro contains 2,268 real-world clinical cases, covering 77 medical calculators across 14 clinical departments. Meanwhile, to address the limited performance of existing frameworks and methods in complex clinical scenarios, we further propose a more generalizable agent framework that supports multi-tool selection and nested-tool calling, while suppressing parameter error propagation through structured validation and evidence review. We conduct systematic comparisons across open-source, closed-source, and medical-specialized LLMs, and the results show that our framework achieves the best performance across all three task settings. This work provides a new benchmark and method for evaluating and applying LLMs in challenging medical calculation scenarios.