Squint is a visual Soft Actor Critic algorithm designed to accelerate reinforcement learning for robotics. It combines parallel simulation, a distributional critic, resolution squinting, layer normalization, a tuned update-to-data ratio, and an optimized implementation to reduce wall‑clock training time. On the SO‑101 Task Set, Squint trains policies in as little as 15 minutes on a single RTX 3090 GPU, with most tasks converging in under 6 minutes and successfully transferring to a real SO‑101 robot.
By Abdulaziz Almuzairee, Henrik I. Christensen
SCRIPT is a scalable diffusion policy that uses a Joint Action-State-Text Diffusion Transformer (JAST‑DiT) to jointly encode actions, physical states, and natural‑language instructions, enabling direct interaction between language semantics and control dynamics. The method employs a multi‑stage training framework, including supervised imitation pre‑training, a nonlinear history conditioning mechanism for stable autoregressive control, and a post‑training stage with Reinforcement Learning with Hybrid Rewards (RLHR) that injects learnable noise to improve motion quality and instruction following. Experiments on the 1200‑hour MotionMillion dataset show that SCRIPT outperforms prior state‑of‑the‑art methods across text alignment, motion quality, and physical realism, and its performance scales consistently with model size.
By Jingyan Zhang, Han Liang, Ruichi Zhang, Bin Li, Juze Zhang, Xin Chen, Jingya Wang, Lan Xu, Jingyi Yu
VoxelFix is a graph‑based post‑hoc semantic correction method that refines voxel labels in completed 3D voxel maps while preserving their geometry and occupancy. It learns to correct errors by exploiting local geometry and neighboring semantic information, using training pairs generated by corrupting annotated maps with class confusions from upstream perception pipelines. Experiments on OccuFly maps show consistent improvements of 4.23–5.00 percentage points in mIoU, especially for tree, roof, and wall classes, and the method generalizes to out‑of‑distribution aerial scenes.
By Sunesh Praveen Raja Sundarasami, Taehyoung Kim, Johannes Scherer, Toma\v{z} Coti\v{c}, Sivasubiramaniam Subbiah, Andreas Greiner, Paul Spannaus, Sebastian Houben
The paper proposes a neuro‑symbolic framework that augments vision‑language‑action (VLA) models with explicit task graphs and multimodal procedural memory to handle long‑horizon manipulation tasks. Task graphs encode action dependencies, valid transitions, and branch conditions, while memory tracks the active step, completed actions, textual context, and relevant visual evidence. Human demonstrations provide spatial and temporal guidance via gaze or saliency cues, which are annotated in robot‑view teleoperation videos and used to fine‑tune VLA models. The approach is evaluated on workspace clearing and surgical‑instrument handling tasks, measuring object and destination selection, subtask completion, task progress, step‑order consistency, overall success, and procedural or execution mistakes.
By Vivek Chavan, Yahuan Shi, Oliver Heimann, Kevin Haninger, J\"org Kr\"uger
VLA-Precision introduces an efficient real‑world online reinforcement learning framework for vision‑language‑action (VLA) models, featuring the Asymmetric Co‑Bootstrapping (ACoB) algorithm and the ACoB‑Stream architecture. ACoB uses asymmetric co‑bootstrapping across timescales to rapidly improve policy performance while refining value estimates, thereby reducing policy drift. ACoB‑Stream enables large VLA models to run with up to 10.9× higher throughput and computational efficiency, achieving a 98.3 % mean success rate on nine high‑precision chemistry tasks in under 46 minutes per task.
By Chenyu Su, Zhaolong Shen, Yuan Qian, Chen Qian, Rui Zhang, Feng Yan, Weixing Chen, Fei Zhang, Jiamin Wang, Shuang Cong, Weiwei Shang
The paper introduces Post Fusion Stabilizer (PFS), a lightweight module that refines intermediate bird’s‑eye view (BEV) feature maps in existing camera‑LiDAR fusion detectors. PFS stabilizes feature statistics under domain shift, suppresses regions affected by sensor degradation, and adaptively restores weakened cues via residual correction, acting as a near‑identity transformation. On the nuScenes benchmark, PFS achieves state‑of‑the‑art robustness, notably improving camera dropout robustness by +1.2% and low‑light performance by +4.4% mAP while adding only 3.3 M parameters.
By Trung Tien Dong, Dev Thakkar, Arman Sargolzaei, Xiaomin Lin
MultihopSpatial is a new benchmark for Vision‑Language Models that focuses on multi‑hop, compositional spatial reasoning with queries ranging from 1 to 3 hops across varied spatial perspectives. It introduces the Acc@50IoU metric, which jointly evaluates answer selection and precise bounding‑box prediction, and provides a large‑scale training corpus, MultihopSpatial‑Train, to improve spatial intelligence. Evaluation of 37 state‑of‑the‑art VLMs shows that compositional spatial reasoning remains a significant challenge, and reinforcement learning fine‑tuning on the corpus boosts both intrinsic spatial reasoning and downstream embodied manipulation performance.
By Youngwan Lee, Soojin Jang, Yoorhim Cho, Seunghwan Lee, Yong-Ju Lee, Sung Ju Hwang
The study benchmarks six quantum error‑correction decoders on the Willow processor, the first device operating below the surface‑code threshold, using a hierarchy of increasingly realistic noise models. By evaluating real hardware data across multiple code distances, bases, and round counts, the authors find that rank agreement with hardware emerges only when each operation type is assigned its own error rate. They also independently test NVIDIA’s Ising pre‑decoder, showing it offers no accuracy‑latency advantage over other decoders in most evaluations, and release the full evaluation pipeline and data for future comparisons.
By Shay J. Manor, Leila S. Erhili, Yassine Jebbouri
La Agente ’Optima is an agentic framework that builds and manages Bayesian optimization campaigns for self‑driving laboratories, separating large language model reasoning from campaign execution. It maintains a persistent optimization state, allowing consistent repetitive loops and auditable decisions, and only returns control to the agent when interpretation or revision is needed. In tests on digital discovery tasks and physical platforms, it corrected measurement failures, improved yields, and recommended formulation changes, outperforming human‑directed campaigns in cost and material usage.
By Marcel M\"uller, Jiaru Bai, Willi Gottstein, Abhijoy Mandal, Mohammad Nazeri, Elia Savino, Yanlin Fang, Sujoy Das, Sergio Pablo Garc\'ia Carrillo, Yeonghun Kang, Juan B. P\'erez-S\'anchez, Simone Pilon, Martin Fitzner, Timothy No\"el, Frank Gu, Varinia Bernales, Al\'an Aspuru-Guzik
CoLMIN is an LLM-based framework for multi-decision path negotiation in cooperative autonomous driving. It introduces a Multi-Intent Negotiation module that generates multiple driving intentions, an Evaluation-based Shallow Reflection Module that provides feedback to accelerate consensus, and a Deep Reflection Module that mitigates cognitive fixation by reflecting on negotiation histories. Experiments in the CARLA simulation show that CoLMIN outperforms existing methods in challenging interactive driving scenarios.
The study examines how the speed and accuracy of an AI teammate—Fast/Less-Accurate (FLA-AI) versus Slow/Accurate (SA-AI)—affect performance in a collaborative Brain‑Computer Interface (cBCI) team during a virtual reality drone search task. Fast AI leads to instant, blind compliance and a sharp drop in human accuracy, while Slow AI induces delayed cognitive conflict that ultimately allows teams to recover and achieve perfect accuracy. A 2D Adaptive Riemannian Oracle and Hybrid Fusion techniques were used to adaptively capture and integrate these timing-dependent signals, improving team performance in both scenarios.
By Christopher Baker, Stephen Hinton, Akashdeep Nijjar, Riccardo Poli, Caterina Cinel, Tom Reed, Stephen Fairclough
The paper introduces set difference captioning for autonomous driving datasets, aiming to generate natural‑language descriptions of differences between two image subsets. It adapts a two‑stage approach to focus on object‑centric patches, allowing attribution of differences to specific objects or categories. A new benchmark, AD‑Diff Bench, is presented to evaluate these methods, especially for sparse, real‑world differences, with open‑weight models to ensure reproducibility.
By Julian Truetsch, Felix Hauser, Christoph Stiller, Frank Bieder
The paper presents an end‑to‑end JEPA world model that enhances latent prediction with inverse dynamics and state alignment to improve goal‑conditioned robotic planning. By preventing latent collapse and grounding representations in physical configuration, the model achieves top success rates on tasks such as TwoRoom, PushT, and OGBench‑Cube, outperforming the baseline LeWorldModel. Ablation studies confirm that state alignment consistently boosts planning success over inverse dynamics alone across all four benchmark tasks.
By Muyuan Liu (GENISOM AI, Beijing, China), Yue Huang (GENISOM AI, Beijing, China), Zheng Liang (GENISOM AI, Beijing, China), Xiang Gao (GENISOM AI, Beijing, China)
The paper introduces Intent‑Aware Prompting (IAP), a new method that uses large language models to detect mental manipulation in conversations by identifying the underlying intents of participants. Experiments on the MentalManip dataset show that IAP outperforms other prompting strategies, especially by reducing false negatives and improving detection of subtle manipulative tactics. The authors provide the code for reproducibility.
By Jiayuan Ma, Hongbin Na, Zimu Wang, Yining Hua, Yue Liu, Wei Wang, Ling Chen
FlexMap is a vectorized high‑definition map construction framework that works with flexible camera configurations without needing calibrated rigs or explicit 2D‑to‑BEV transformations. It replaces geometric projection with a geometry foundation model that encodes cross‑view 3D structure, and uses a spatial‑temporal enhancement module and a camera‑aware decoder to separate spatial reasoning from temporal aggregation. Experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 show that FlexMap outperforms pose‑dependent baselines and remains accurate even when camera views are missing or pose estimates are inaccurate.
By Run Wang, Chaoyi Zhou, Amir Salarpour, Xi Liu, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Feng Luo, Mert D. Pes\'e, Siyu Huang
AdaRoboVLG is a Vision‑Language‑Grasp framework that separates a generalizable base grasp policy from task‑specific understanding. The base policy generates and evaluates physically feasible grasp candidates using kinematic mapping and force‑closure stability, while foundation‑model modules supply composable spatial, cognitive, and temporal priors that adapt grasp synthesis to different robotic hands and environments without retraining. Experiments show strong cross‑hand generalization, effective handling of diverse grasping challenges, and functional grasping in cluttered, dynamic settings.
By Sixu Yan, Shikang Wang, Binhua Huang, Xuanlai Tang, Guohua Fan, Fan Huang, Haoxuan Li, Yongkang Li, Yuhan Li, Bencheng Liao, Zeyu Zhang, Wenyu Liu, Hangxin Liu, Xinggang Wang
The paper proves that several decision and approximation problems for ReLU neural networks are computationally hard. For any number of layers λ≥2, deciding whether a network’s output is positive (and thus whether it is surjective) is W[ℓ−1]-hard when parameterized by the input dimension d. In particular, for two-layer networks, the related geometric problem of zonotope non‑containment is W[1]-hard in the ambient dimension, and computing or approximating the Lp‑Lipschitz constant is NP‑hard and W[ℓ−1]-hard with respect to d. The results also show that these problems remain hard when parameterized by the number of layers for constant d, implying that naive enumeration algorithms running in n^{(ℓ−1)d}·poly(N) time are essentially optimal under the Exponential Time Hypothesis.
By Vincent Froese, Moritz Grillo, Christoph Hertrich, Moritz Stargalla
AnyBox is a zero‑shot framework that estimates the full 9DoF pose (6D pose plus 3D dimensions) of boxes from a single RGB‑D image, leveraging the geometric regularity of boxes. It alternates between pose and scale estimation, using a binary search guided by the discrepancy between a reprojected template and the observed mask, and employs a depth‑consistency filter and an early‑stopping rule to prune implausible hypotheses. On public benchmarks and a warehouse dataset, AnyBox improves detection AP by up to 36 points and boosts robotic box‑shelving success by 28%.
By Yintao Ma, Sajjad Pakdamansavoji, Charles Eret, Rui Heng Yang, Xuan Zhao, Yingxue Zhang, Tongtong Cao, Amir Rasouli
The paper investigates the use of thermal infrared video to non‑invasively monitor cardiorespiratory and sudomotor activity in industrial human‑machine interfaces. It presents a signal‑processing pipeline that tracks facial regions, aggregates thermal signals, and separates slow sudomotor trends from faster heart‑rate and breathing‑rate components. Experiments on 31 driver‑monitoring sessions show that thermal imaging can estimate heart rate, breathing rate, and electrodermal activity with reasonable accuracy, while highlighting challenges such as ROI selection, polarity changes, latency, and subject variability.
By Constantino \'Alvarez Casado, Mohammad Rahman, Sasan Sharifipour, Nhi Nguyen, Manuel Lage Ca\~nellas, Xiaoting Wu, Miguel Bordallo L\'opez
RoboTok is an internet‑scale data engine that retrieves human manipulation videos from the web to train dexterous robot policies. It learns a latent motion space from 3D hand trajectories in actor‑centered reference frames, allowing manipulation behaviors to be compared across different viewpoints, scenes, and occlusions while remaining compact for efficient search. Experiments show RoboTok retrieves more relevant demonstrations and improves downstream robot task success compared to existing retrieval methods.
By Howard Qian, Yiting Chen, Yunfei Xie, Kejia Ren, Podshara Chanrungmaneekul, Gaotian Wang, Bowen Wen, Chen Wei, Kaiyu Hang