Daily Papers Arch&EAI

Robotic manipulation policies have made rapid progress in recent years, yet most existing approaches give limited consideration to memory capabilities. Consequently, they struggle to solve tasks that require reasoning over historical observations and maintaining task-relevant information over time, which are common requirements in real-world manipulation scenarios. Although several memory-aware policies have been proposed, systematic evaluation of memory-dependent manipulation remains underexplored, and the relationship between architectural design choices and memory performance is still not well understood. To address this gap, we introduce RMBench, a simulation benchmark comprising 9 manipulation tasks that span multiple levels of memory complexity, enabling systematic evaluation of policy memory capabilities. We further propose Mem-0, a modular manipulation policy with explicit memory components designed to support controlled ablation studies. Through extensive simulation and real-world experiments, we identify memory-related limitations in existing policies and provide empirical insights into how architectural design choices influence memory performance. The website is available at https://rmbench.github.io/.

Robotic manipulation policies have made rapid progress in recent years, yet most existing approaches give limited consideration to memory capabilities.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as an effective solution for deploying Vision Transformers (ViTs) on resource-constrained devices. However, existing PTQ methods typically employ uniform bit-widths across transformer components, overlooking their heterogeneous sensitivity to quantization and leading to inefficient precision allocation. In this paper, we propose {MixFrag, a fragility-guided mixed-precision PTQ framework for Vision Transformers. MixFrag first estimates component-level quantization fragility by measuring the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence between full-precision and isolated quantized output distributions using a small calibration set. It then formulates bit allocation as a Multiple-Choice Knapsack Problem (MCKP), enabling adaptive layer-wise precision assignment under a target bit budget. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K across multiple Vision Transformer architectures demonstrate that MixFrag achieves competitive classification performance under practical mixed-precision settings. Furthermore, evaluations on COCO object detection and instance segmentation show that MixFrag achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing mixed-precision PTQ methods, improving the previous best method by up to 9.6 AP under the challenging MP3/MP3 setting. Additional analyses validate the proposed fragility metric and demonstrate its strong correlation with the learned bit allocation. These results establish MixFrag as an effective framework for mixed-precision post-training quantization of Vision Transformers.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as an effective solution for deploying Vision Transformers (ViTs) on resource-constrained devices.

Deploying autonomous computer-use agents (CUAs) locally is increasingly important for privacy, cost efficiency, and practical usability, yet improving their performance under strict hardware constraints remains challenging. While recent studies show that inference-time scaling can improve frontier computer-use agents through additional computation during execution, its effectiveness for resource-constrained local models remains poorly understood. We present a systematic empirical study of inference-time scaling in local CUAs across contextual, temporal, structural, and parallel dimensions. We evaluate Qwen3-VL-8B/30B-A3B, UI-TARS-1.5-7B, and OpenCUA-7B on the OSWorld benchmark. Our results show that additional computation often yields diminishing returns while changing failure modes. Contextual scaling provides historical grounding that improves trajectory stability and task accuracy, but its gains saturate as token cost increases and failures shift from repetitive or stalled trajectories toward premature false successes. Temporal scaling similarly reduces max-step stalls, yet does not substantially improve task success, indicating that longer horizons often extend erroneous trajectories rather than correct them. We further find that structural decomposition can introduce planning and formatting overhead in local two-stage agents, while parallel scaling partially mitigates these failures at a substantial computational cost. Overall, our findings suggest that efficient local CUAs require selective compute allocation, failure-aware control mechanisms, and agentic frameworks designed around the capabilities and limitations of local models.

Deploying autonomous computer-use agents (CUAs) locally is increasingly important for privacy, cost efficiency, and practical usability, yet improving their performance under strict hardware constraints remains challenging.

Motivated by the growing demand for reduced-precision arithmetic in computational science, we exploit lower-precision emulation in Python---widely regarded as the dominant programming language for numerical analysis and machine learning. Low-precision paradigms have revolutionized deep learning by enabling more efficient computation and reduced memory footprint while maintaining model fidelity. To better enable numerical experimentation with and exploration of reduced-precision computation, we developed the \texttt{pychop}, which supports customizable floating-point formats and a comprehensive set of rounding modes in Python, allowing users to benefit from fast, reduced-precision emulation in numerous applications. \texttt{pychop} also introduces interfaces for {array and tensor backends}, enabling efficient reduced-precision emulation on GPUs for neural network training and inference with unparalleled flexibility. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive exposition of the design and applications of \texttt{pychop}, establishing it as a foundational tool for advancing mixed-precision algorithms. Furthermore, we present empirical results on reduced-precision emulation for image classification and object detection using published datasets, illustrating the sensitivity of the use of low precision and offering valuable insights into its quantization-aware training and post-quantization impacts. \texttt{pychop} enables in-depth investigations into the effects of numerical precision, facilitates the development of novel hardware accelerators, and integrates seamlessly into existing deep learning workflows.

Motivated by the growing demand for reduced-precision arithmetic in computational science, we exploit lower-precision emulation in Python---widely regarded as the dominant programming language for numerical analysis and machine learning.

Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires an agent to follow a natural language instruction, predicting a sequence of low-level actions to navigate a robot from a starting point to a target location. The A2A benchmark and the AgriVLN method pioneeringly extended VLN-CE from indoor scenes to agricultural scenes, while we observed a challenging distinction: In indoor scenes, whether a zone is traversable tends to be clear to classify, such as wood floors are traversable but concrete walls are not. In agricultural scenes, however, this issue tends to be ambiguous, such as an unripe cornfield might be traversable for a robotic dog but might be non-traversable for a human. To address this issue, we propose the TEA module, which estimates the traversability of the camera image, then alarm the decision-maker for rethinking when the predicted action does not align with the traversability map. We integrate it into the AgriVLN backbone to build our TEA-AgriVLN method. When evaluated on A2A, it improves Success Rate (SR) from 0.47 to 0.54 and Navigation Error (NE) from 2.91 m to 2.70 m, showing the state-of-the-art performance in the agricultural VLN-CE domain. We further implement the ablation studies and the case study, discussing the effectiveness and limitations of TEA on different ground categories and scene classes. Code: https://github.com/AlexTraveling/TEA-AgriVLN.

Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires an agent to follow a natural language instruction, predicting a sequence of low-level actions to navigate a robot from a starting point to a target location.

Curved tactile fingertips for dexterous manipulation must resolve fine contact geometry, distinguish normal and tangential loads, and capture transient signals. Existing curved vision-based tactile sensors struggle to combine accurate 3D reconstruction, three-axis force estimation, and high-speed processing in a compact form. This article presents FasTac, a curved vision-based tactile sensor integrating multispectral photometric stereo, dynamic-convolution force estimation, and hardware acceleration on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Single-image-sensor simultaneous multispectral imaging provides spatially aligned observations for robust surface normal estimation, followed by boundary-prior fast Poisson depth reconstruction. HyperForce uses position-aware dynamic convolution to model the spatially nonuniform mechanical response of curved elastomers and estimate three-axis forces. The complete image-to-normal-force pipeline is deployed on an FPGA. Experiments show that near-infrared (NIR) illumination and the boundary prior decrease depth mean absolute error (MAE) from 0.2730 mm to 0.0415 mm; HyperForce achieves normalized mean absolute error (NMAE) values of 2.74% and 2.39% for normal and shear forces, respectively; and FPGA deployment shortens processing latency from 3.26 ms on the GPU to 1.09 ms. Multi-object reconstruction, feedback grasping, and vibration measurement validate fine geometric perception, stable force feedback, and dynamic contact sensing.

Curved tactile fingertips for dexterous manipulation must resolve fine contact geometry, distinguish normal and tangential loads, and capture transient signals.

World Action Models (WAMs) jointly predict future observations and actions, but their iterative denoising and closed-loop execution make efficient deployment costly. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods are poorly suited to WAMs because they rely on open-loop objectives, homogeneous model assumptions, and calibration distributions that do not reflect deployment. We present QuantWAMs, a PTQ framework that aligns quantization decisions with the calibration context defined by model structure, rollout distribution, and task objective. QuantWAMs introduces three strategies: shared-basis outlier calibration, which pools activation evidence only across coordinate-compatible modules; co-training-objective saliency, which computes empirical-Fisher scores from the joint video--action gradient and assigns weight precision at a calibration-stable layer granularity; and fixed-intervention rollout auditing, which revises denoising-step protection schedules using reachable closed-loop states without changing the precision budget. We evaluate QuantWAMs on Fast-WAM and LingBot-VA across RoboTwin 2.0, LIBERO, and real-robot manipulation with an AgiBot G2. Under a W4A4-dominant setting, the reported simulation means differ from FP16 by 0.2--0.7 percentage points. Real-robot trials further establish deployment feasibility on three manipulation tasks. For the targeted video and action blocks, QuantWAMs reduces peak weight-and-activation memory to about 29\% of FP16 and provides 1.4--1.6$\times$ block-level speedups.

World Action Models (WAMs) jointly predict future observations and actions, but their iterative denoising and closed-loop execution make efficient deployment costly.

High-precision, tight-clearance assembly demonstrations are indispensable for training tactile-aware robotic foundation models, yet their acquisition is heavily bottlenecked by the high operational barriers of conventional teleoperation. To bridge this gap, we propose SharedAssembly, a novel shared-autonomy bilateral teleoperation framework that embeds assembly-specific intelligence across both leader and follower sides to facilitate scalable data collection. Rigorous real-world user studies on challenging sub-millimeter tasks show that SharedAssembly achieves an exceptional 97% assembly success rate while significantly boosting completion efficiency. Notably, these performance gains become even more pronounced as the assembly clearance shrinks. Furthermore, our framework effectively eliminates the expertise gap, enabling novice operators to match or even outperform expert operators using conventional systems. By minimizing the skill barrier, SharedAssembly provides an efficient, robust, and accessible solution for large-scale data harvesting in contact-rich manipulation.

High-precision, tight-clearance assembly demonstrations are indispensable for training tactile-aware robotic foundation models, yet their acquisition is heavily bottlenecked by the high operational barriers of conventional teleoperation.

While depth sensors have the potential to complement RGB data for affordance segmentation in wearable robots, their usage seems to remain underexplored. The paper proposes two approaches: a reformulated version of hardware-aware neural architecture search, endowed with a newly designed search space to integrate depth (D) information into small-sized deep networks, and a dedicated fine-tuning approach, including a preprocessing layer to merge depth information with RGB data and make it compatible with conventional architectures. In both cases, those methods aim to generate solutions that benefit from modern (portable) hardware accelerators and overcome existing tiny-like approaches, which often fail to tackle critical scenarios due to the severe constraints set by the supporting hardware. Extensive experiments on a pair of real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method as compared with existing solutions. The approach presented in the paper generates, in most cases, solutions that identify the Pareto optimal front to balance generalization performance and hardware requirements. The paper also describes the supporting prototype, including a Jetson Nano board and a RealSense RGB-D camera. When considering the energy profile of the device, the overall system can attain real-time performances within an energy budget that is compatible with standard batteries, such as those used in smartphones.

While depth sensors have the potential to complement RGB data for affordance segmentation in wearable robots, their usage seems to remain underexplored.

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in dynamic financial environments face a critical challenge: maintaining factual accuracy as market conditions, regulations, and corporate facts change continuously. While 4-bit quantization enables efficient deployment, it severely limits the viability of sequential memory editing: existing methods undergo catastrophic performance degradation under this "quantization stability crisis." We introduce CACHE-UK (Contextual Adaptive Continual Hybrid Editor for UK Finance), a stability-aware memory editing framework specifically designed for domain-specific, quantized LLMs. CACHE-UK integrates three components: a rank-1 LoRA perturbation mechanism that confines edits to the low-rank adapter subspace, a financial domain prioritization module for content-adaptive edit strength, and a closed-loop Stability Controller that tracks "degradation debt" to prevent catastrophic forgetting across sequential updates. Evaluated on a 4-bit quantized OpenLLaMA-3B model with a curated UK financial corpus of 88,021 documents, CACHE-UK reduces knowledge degradation by 11-17% relative to adapted baselines under identical 4-bit constraints -- its most robust effect -- while attaining the highest test success (generalization) rate observed in our setting (28%, a 6 percentage point improvement over the strongest adapted baseline). These results indicate that stability-aware editing can improve factual maintenance in resource-constrained financial LLM deployments, though absolute generalization rates remain low.

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in dynamic financial environments face a critical challenge: maintaining factual accuracy as market conditions, regulations, and corporate facts change continuously.

Collaborative robotics is a representative task-oriented 6G use-case, where communication quality should be reflected in mission execution, environment understanding, and closed-loop operation rather than packet delivery alone. This demo paper presents a robot-edge semantic communication (SemCom) testbed integrating robot-side visual compression, edge-side semantic mapping, and dashboard-based mission interaction. A mobile robot equipped with RGB-D sensing and LiDAR runs ROS 2, while a Jetson Orin edge node performs reconstruction, RTAB-Map mapping, semantic object handling, and browserbased visualization. As an initial proof of concept, RGB frames are encoded on the robot into VQ-VAE tokens using an ONNX Runtime encoder and reconstructed on the edge using a PyTorch decoder. A 320 X 240 image is represented by an 80 X 60 token grid with a packed payload of 5400 bytes, corresponding to a 42.67X reduction relative to model-input RGB bytes. The reconstructed visual stream is further associated with depth, pose, and 3D mapping information to generate a semantic map for downstream robotic applications. The demo exposes the full path from semantic visual transport to object-level map interaction, and provides a practical platform for future task-aware 6G networking studies at the intersection of SemCom, embodied AI, and physical AI-enabled robotics. A video of the demo is available at https://tinyurl.com/Tos09

Collaborative robotics is a representative task-oriented 6G use-case, where communication quality should be reflected in mission execution, environment understanding, and closed-loop operation rather than packet delivery alone.

Egocentric video offers rich manipulation experience for embodied AI, yet collecting diverse egocentric data across scenes, objects, motions, and embodiments remains costly. We present \method, an egocentric world-action simulator that synthesizes controllable, high-quality manipulation videos to expand scarce real-world training data. \method{} builds on a pretrained video generation prior and introduces two geometry-aware conditioning mechanisms. Online Anchored Projective Memory (OAPM) preserves a first-frame 3D scene anchor while periodically refreshing a recent state during autoregressive generation. Action-3D Rotary Position Embedding (A3D-RoPE) encodes end-effector motion with camera-aware 3D rotary coordinates, injecting action geometry into skeleton-to-video cross-attention for precise control. Together, these components improve visual fidelity, geometric stability, and action alignment in long egocentric rollouts. Moreover, augmenting 400 real trajectories with 400 \method-generated trajectories improves out-of-distribution real-robot success from 77\% to 84\% on single-arm tasks and from 53\% to 70\% on dual-arm tasks, demonstrating that the synthesized data substantially improve downstream WAM generalization.

Egocentric video offers rich manipulation experience for embodied AI, yet collecting diverse egocentric data across scenes, objects, motions, and embodiments remains costly.

World models give embodied AI a predictive core: they compress observations into states, simulate action-conditioned futures, and enable planning beyond reactive control. This predictive layer, however, opens a new security boundary-compromise can propagate from data, sensors, prompts, or feedback into physical action. Rather than treating world models as an isolated component, this survey traces threats across their entire lifecycle-from data construction and representation learning, through state grounding and imagination, to trajectory evaluation, execution, and long-term adaptation via memory and tools. We show that familiar attack families: poisoning, backdoors, adversarial examples, sensor spoofing, prompt injection, trajectory manipulation, and supply-chain attacks take on distinct meanings when they corrupt world states, learned dynamics, affordance estimates, or safety costs. We also highlight a duality: world models can serve as runtime safety shields, yet when compromised or over-trusted they generate predictive safety illusions. The survey offers a lifecycle taxonomy, maps existing attacks to world-model security properties, outlines evaluation protocols for safety failures, and structures defenses across provenance, robust grounding, uncertainty-aware prediction, trajectory gating, feedback auditing, and deployment assurance.

World models give embodied AI a predictive core: they compress observations into states, simulate action-conditioned futures, and enable planning beyond reactive control.

Credit assignment is a fundamental challenge in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, particularly in embodied AI settings characterized by limited and delayed feedback as well as dynamically changing numbers of active agents. We propose MARS-RA, a framework that reformulates credit assignment as a rank aggregation problem using contribution-based pairwise comparisons among agents generated by large multimodal models. This shift from absolute to relative estimation ensures robustness against noise and dynamic agent participation, converting comparison results into contribution scores for potential-based reward shaping. We provide theoretical justification for the convergence and robustness of the proposed framework, and show that Shapley values can be used as an interpretive reference. Experimental results on challenging tasks of different types indicate that MARS-RA can guide agents toward effective cooperation.

Credit assignment is a fundamental challenge in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, particularly in embodied AI settings characterized by limited and delayed feedback as well as dynamically changing numbers of active agents.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have attracted growing interest as a scalable approach to robotic manipulation. While these models are effective action predictors, deploying them as robotic agents exposes critical gaps: no mechanism for failure recovery, inconsistent execution over long horizons, and limited robustness to shifts in observations, tasks, or embodiments. Existing solutions address these limitations individually through model retraining or environment-specific modules, yet what is needed is a general framework that systematically transforms a pretrained VLA into a robotic agent. We present RoboBRIDGE, a modular framework that provides an orchestration layer over five coordinated modules, namely Monitor, Perceptor, Planner, Controller, and Robot Interface, to compose robust robotic agents from off-the-shelf components, including pretrained VLAs. The Monitor pairs rapid failure detection with hierarchical recovery to correct errors before they cascade. When the environment diverges from the current plan, the Planner triggers replanning while the Perceptor updates scene understanding asynchronously, avoiding execution stalls. Within the Controller, primitive skill fine-tuning factors manipulation into domain-invariant primitives with dedicated LoRA adapters, reducing sensitivity to domain shifts when a VLA is used. Across LIBERO, RoboCasa, and real-world case studies spanning multiple robot platforms and VLA backbones, RoboBRIDGE consistently outperforms both standalone policies and prior augmented VLA deployments. These results suggest that reliable robotic agency does not arise from scaling action predictors alone, but from structured orchestration around them.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have attracted growing interest as a scalable approach to robotic manipulation.

Flow-matching Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for robotic manipulation but often suffer from compounding errors caused by distribution shifts during deployment. While offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a practical way to improve deployed policies using rollout data, existing methods either ignore failure data or exploit it only at the trajectory level, resulting in low learning efficiency and persistent errors. We propose **RedFlow**, a fine-grained offline RL framework that redirects failure experiences into action-level corrective supervision for flow-matching VLA policies. RedFlow consists of two key components: (1) a **Context-Aware Corrective Matching** mechanism that identifies failure-inducing actions and retrieves successful alternatives from similar contexts as corrective targets, and (2) an **Adaptive Redirection Objective** that jointly reinforces successful actions, suppresses undesirable ones, and redirects recoverable failures toward corrective targets. By converting both successful and failed experiences into dense supervision, RedFlow enables robust recovery learning from mixed-quality data. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and three real-world manipulation tasks show that RedFlow consistently outperforms state-of-the-art offline RL baselines, improving the real-world success rate from 56.7% to 74.7%. It also matches strong on-policy methods (PPO, GRPO, and DDPO) while requiring roughly an order of magnitude fewer training samples.

Flow-matching Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for robotic manipulation but often suffer from compounding errors caused by distribution shifts during deployment.

Imitation Learning (IL) enables robots to acquire manipulation skills from expert demonstrations. Diffusion Policy (DP) models multi-modal expert behaviors but degrades when naively increasing stacked observation horizons, limiting long-horizon manipulation. We propose Self-Evolving Gated Attention (SEGA), a temporal module that maintains a time-evolving latent state via gated attention, enabling efficient recurrent updates that accumulate long-term context into a compact latent representation while filtering irrelevant temporal information. Integrating SEGA into DP yields Self-Evolving Diffusion Policy (SeedPolicy), which resolves the temporal modeling bottleneck and extends the effective temporal horizon with moderate overhead. On the RoboTwin 2.0 benchmark with 50 manipulation tasks, SeedPolicy outperforms DP and other IL baselines. Averaged across both CNN and Transformer backbones, SeedPolicy achieves 36.8% relative improvement in clean settings and 169% relative improvement in randomized challenging settings over the DP. Compared to vision-language-action models such as RDT with 1.2B parameters, SeedPolicy achieves stronger performance in the clean setting with one to two orders of magnitude fewer parameters, demonstrating strong efficiency. These results establish SeedPolicy as a state-of-the-art imitation learning method for long-horizon robotic manipulation. Code is available at: https://github.com/Youqiang-Gui/SeedPolicy.

Imitation Learning (IL) enables robots to acquire manipulation skills from expert demonstrations.

Vision-language models (VLMs), spanning predictive architectures to generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), have revolutionized artificial intelligence through powerful cross-modal alignment and zero-shot generalization. However, enabling them to learn continually from non-stationary data remains a major challenge, as their cross-modal alignment and generalization capabilities are particularly vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting. Unlike traditional unimodal continual learning (CL), VLMs face unique challenges such as cross-modal feature drift, parameter interference due to shared architectures, and zero-shot capability erosion. Furthermore, generative MLLMs exhibit a unique "alignment tax," where catastrophic forgetting manifests not merely as factual amnesia, but as a systemic collapse of deep Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. This survey presents the first comprehensive diagnostic review bridging continual learning across predictive VLMs and generative MLLMs. We systematically deconstruct the aforementioned failure modes and propose a challenge-driven taxonomy comprising four core paradigms: (1) Multi-Modal Replay Strategies addressing explicit and implicit memory drift; (2) Cross-Modal Regularization enforcing topological and geometric alignment; (3) Parameter-Efficient Adaptation utilizing dynamic routing and subspace projections; and the emerging (4) Model Fusion and Decoupling paradigms. We critically analyze the evolution of evaluation protocols, highlighting the essential shift toward dual-track benchmarks (Domain vs. Ability CL). Finally, we chart a roadmap for future research, emphasizing compositional zero-shot learning, embodied AI with sensor fusion, and autonomous agentic ecosystems. All resources are available at: https://github.com/YuyangSunshine/Awesome-Continual-learning-of-Vision-Language-Models

Vision-language models (VLMs), spanning predictive architectures to generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), have revolutionized artificial intelligence through powerful cross-modal alignment and zero-shot generalization.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to demonstrate exceptional capabilities across various domains, the challenge of achieving energy-efficient and accurate inference becomes increasingly critical. This work presents LightRot, a lightweight rotation scheme and dedicated hardware accelerator designed for low-bit LLM inference. The proposed architecture integrates Grouped Local Rotation (GLR) and Outlier Direction Aligning (ODA) algorithms with a hierarchical Fast Hadamard Transform (FHT)-based rotation unit to address key challenges in low-bit quantization, including the energy overhead of rotation operations. The proposed accelerator, implemented in a 28nm CMOS process, achieves a peak energy efficiency of 27.4 TOPS/W for 4-bit inference, surpassing prior state-of-the-art designs. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on higher-precision inference or evaluate on basic language modeling tasks like GPT-2, LightRot is optimized for advanced models such as LLaMA2-13B and LLaMA3-8B. Its performance is further validated on MT-Bench, demonstrating robust applicability to real-world conversational scenarios and redefining benchmarks for chat-based AI systems. By synergizing algorithmic innovations and hardware efficiency, this work sets a new paradigm for scalable, low-bit LLM inference, paving the way for sustainable AI advancements.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to demonstrate exceptional capabilities across various domains, the challenge of achieving energy-efficient and accurate inference becomes increasingly critical.

In dynamic multi-mode project scheduling, activities have alternative execution modes and uncertain durations, while precedence relations and limited resources constrain their execution. Heuristic priority rules support fast online decisions, but their design requires substantial domain expertise. Genetic programming (GP) hyper-heuristics can automatically evolve such rules. Large language models (LLMs), meanwhile, provide a flexible interface for interpreting scheduling information and explaining decisions. However, zero-shot LLM decisions may lack domain knowledge, consume many tokens, and vary across repeated queries. GP-evolved rules therefore provide a potential source of scheduling knowledge for guiding LLM decisions. Unlike existing LLM--GP hybrids that use LLMs to support heuristic evolution, we transfer knowledge in the reverse direction, using knowledge extracted from high-quality GP rules to guide an online LLM decision maker. We extract knowledge from high-quality GP rules and inject it through Feature Selection, Feature Hint, Rule Reference, and Rule Follow. These mechanisms are evaluated in terms of scheduling performance, token consumption, decision stability, and the feature focus expressed in generated rationales. GP-derived guidance generally improves the unguided LLM, but its representation matters. Simplifying the decision context or supplying explicit decision logic is more effective than highlighting important features. Feature Selection offers the best token efficiency, whereas Rule Follow achieves strong performance at greater token cost. Guidance also improves decision stability and changes the features expressed in generated rationales.

In dynamic multi-mode project scheduling, activities have alternative execution modes and uncertain durations, while precedence relations and limited resources constrain their execution.

Low-bit quantization is essential for efficient LLM inference, and both rotation and fine-grained group quantization have shown individual promise. However, their combination often leads to accuracy degradation or hardware overhead due to a mismatch between the global nature of rotation and the localized behavior of group scaling. We propose GyRot, a quantization framework and hardware accelerator that bridges this gap through algorithm-hardware co-design. GyRot introduces Coarse Rotation, Fine Grouping (CoRFiG) and Harmonic-Aligned Permutation (HAP) to enable cooperative integration of rotation and group quantization, enhancing quantizability while relaxing scaling factor precision. To further reduce hardware cost, we reformulate asymmetric quantization and introduce a zero-point rounding strategy that enables fully integer dequantization. Implemented on an INT4-based tensor PE architecture, GyRot achieves state-of-the-art 4-bit accuracy across LLaMA-family models, while delivering up to 3.4x speedup and 3.6x energy efficiency over baseline LLM accelerators. These results validate GyRot's practical effectiveness for scalable and energy-efficient LLM deployment.

Low-bit quantization is essential for efficient LLM inference, and both rotation and fine-grained group quantization have shown individual promise.

Personalized image enhancement should reflect individual aesthetic taste, yet learning such preferences commonly depends on private photos and ratings that are unsuitable for centralized collection. The task must infer preference from sparse, heterogeneous feedback and translate it into natural-looking color transformations on resource-constrained user devices. We introduce FedPAIE, a federated personalized aesthetic image enhancement framework for user-adaptive color grading without centralizing raw photos or ratings. FedPAIE trains a lightweight dual-cue aesthetic scorer, calibrates it into a personalized scorer on a small local support set, and freezes it to guide regularized adaptation of a lightweight CLUT enhancer from unpaired local photographs. Fidelity constraints and an excess-gap penalty regularize scorer-guided adaptation to limit proxy-score over-optimization while preserving content and natural appearance. Training remains lightweight throughout the pipeline: scorer learning updates at most 0.787M parameters, enhancer adaptation updates 0.265M, and inference retains only a 0.293M-parameter personalized enhancer. Experiments on MIT-Adobe FiveK and Flickr-AES demonstrate effective open-world personalization and a favorable balance between user preference and image fidelity. FedPAIE thus connects decentralized preference learning with efficient personalized image transformation without requiring paired user retouches.

Personalized image enhancement should reflect individual aesthetic taste, yet learning such preferences commonly depends on private photos and ratings that are unsuitable for centralized collection.

Despite the impressive visuomotor capabilities enabled by Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, their performance often degrades on challenging and out-of-domain tasks. Recent test-time steering and scaling methods improve performance without extensive data collection and retraining, but action samples often remain concentrated around similar behaviors and therefore inherit correlated failure modes. Moreover, existing methods apply the same intervention strategy at every timestep, regardless of whether the base policy is already likely to succeed. To address these limitations, we introduce $RL^2$, an adaptive inference-time steering framework that leverages Reinforcement Learning on VLA Latents. First, we train a lightweight offline RL policy conditioned on expressive latents extracted from the VLA action expert and compose its flow velocity with that of the frozen VLA during inference. This compositional steering strategy combines the behavioral priors of large-scale imitation learning with the action diversity induced by offline RL beyond dominant demonstration modes. We further discover that inference-time steering follows fundamentally different scaling laws under success and failure states, revealing that action diversity is most beneficial when the base VLA is likely to fail, but can unnecessarily perturb already-accurate actions when success is likely. Building on this insight, $RL^2$ activates compositional steering only when failure is predicted. Across the SIMPLER and PolaRiS benchmarks, $RL^2$ improves success rates by up to +17.3% in out-of-domain settings, while ablations and scaling studies demonstrate the importance of latent representations and RL training. Finally, real-world experiments demonstrate that these gains transfer beyond simulation, establishing $RL^2$ as a practical and modular steering framework for VLA deployment.

Despite the impressive visuomotor capabilities enabled by Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, their performance often degrades on challenging and out-of-domain tasks.

Incorporating tactile sensing into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models holds promise for contact-rich manipulation, where visual observations alone often fail to capture critical cues about physical interactions. However, learning informative tactile representation while effectively adapting it to pretrained VLA models remains challenging under limited task-specific data. Existing methods either focus on instantaneous contact states or model temporal interaction dynamics using 6D wrench sequences, leaving high-dimensional tactile signals underexplored. To address these challenges, we present τ, a touch-augmented VLA framework that learns an action-conditioned spatiotemporal tactile representation from future visual supervision inspired by the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), and fuses it with vision-language features for action generation. This supervision operates in latent space and is used only during training, adding no deployment overhead. We also introduce TacAura, a dataset of synchronized vision, proprioception, and vision-based tactile signals across four representative contact-rich manipulation tasks. Experiments show that τ outperforms existing models and generalizes to unseen objects and scenes, delivering improved manipulation performance and robustness.

Incorporating tactile sensing into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models holds promise for contact-rich manipulation, where visual observations alone often fail to capture critical cues about physical interactions.

Building generalizable agents for diverse applications remains a fundamental challenge. While imitation learning-based policies succeed in specific training environments, they often fail to generalize to novel scenes and tasks. In this work, we propose World Action Planner, a robot planning system that leverages the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the physical grounding of a multi-task pose-image conditioned world model. Our system enables an agent to propose initial action plans and iteratively refine them via optimization and search, reasoning over imagined world model rollouts. We demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance across compositional tasks, new layouts, and zero-shot generalization scenarios, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art end-to-end policy models such as VLAs and WAMs. Project website at worldactionplanner.github.io

Building generalizable agents for diverse applications remains a fundamental challenge.

Robot action planning in the real world is challenging as it requires not only understanding the current state of the environment but also predicting how it will evolve in response to actions. Vision-language-action (VLA), which repurpose large-scale vision-language models for robot action generation using action experts, have achieved notable success across a variety of robotic tasks. Nevertheless, their performance remains constrained by the scope of their training data, exhibiting limited generalization to unseen scenarios and vulnerability to diverse contextual perturbations. More recently, world models have been revisited as an alternative to VLAs. These models, referred to as world action models (WAMs), are built upon world models that are trained on large corpora of video data to predict future states. With minor adaptations, their latent representation can be decoded into robot actions. It has been suggested that their explicit dynamic prediction capacity, combined with spatiotemporal priors acquired from web-scale video pretraining, enables WAMs to generalize more effectively than VLAs. In this paper, we conduct a comparative study of prominent state-of-the-art VLA policies and recently released WAMs. We evaluate their performance on the LIBERO-Plus and RoboTwin 2.0-Plus benchmarks under various visual and language perturbations. Our results show that WAMs achieve strong robustness, with LingBot-VA reaching 74.2% success rate on RoboTwin 2.0-Plus and Cosmos-Policy achieving 82.2% on LIBERO-Plus. While VLAs such as $π_{0.5}$ can achieve comparable robustness on certain tasks, they typically require extensive training with diverse robotic datasets and varied learning objectives. The evaluation code for the RoboTwin2.0-Plus benchmark is available at: https://robot-robustness.github.io/RoboTwin2.0-Plus/.

Robot action planning in the real world is challenging as it requires not only understanding the current state of the environment but also predicting how it will evolve in response to actions.

Recent progress in large-scale imitation learning for robot manipulation has been driven by leveraging datasets across a wide range of robot embodiments. However, achieving significant cross-embodiment transfer is often still challenging. In this work, we study the role of using behavior-aligned representations (e.g., object bounding boxes, language motions, end-effector traces of robot motion) in vision-language-action (VLA) models to promote cross-embodiment transfer. We hypothesize that by possessing invariances across embodiments while being predictive of robot actions, these representations can help unify large-scale cross-embodiment data to enhance transfer. To assess our hypothesis, we develop a simulation-based benchmark designed to assess transfer with diverse cross-embodiment data to new embodiments. Using this benchmark, we compare different representations and ways of incorporating them. We identify that end-effector traces can be particularly beneficial for transfer, representations are generally more useful with larger prior datasets, and can be used to benefit from action-free data. We also demonstrate that they can enhance sim-to-real cross-embodiment transfer, improving task completion progress of real robot policies pre-trained on simulation data by 28%. We provide videos of our evaluations at our website: https://ajaysridhar.com/barx/.

Recent progress in large-scale imitation learning for robot manipulation has been driven by leveraging datasets across a wide range of robot embodiments.

Deep learning drives a new wave in computing systems and triggers the automation of increasingly complex problems. In particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced cognitive tasks, often matching or even surpassing human-level performance. However, their extensive parameters result in high computational costs and slow inference, posing challenges for deployment in resource-limited settings. Among the strategies to overcome the aforementioned challenges, pruning emerges as a successful mechanism since it reduces model size while maintaining predictive ability. In this paper, we introduce AMP: Attention Heads and MLP Pruning, a novel structured pruning method that efficiently compresses LLMs by removing less critical structures within Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP). By projecting the input data onto weights, AMP assesses structural importance and overcomes the limitations of existing techniques, which often fall short in flexibility or efficiency. In particular, AMP surpasses the current state-of-the-art on commonsense reasoning tasks by up to 1.49 percentage points, achieving a 30% pruning ratio with minimal impact on zero-shot task performance. Moreover, AMP also improves inference speeds, making it well-suited for deployment in resource-constrained environments. We confirm the flexibility of AMP on different families of LLMs, including LLaMA and Phi.

Deep learning drives a new wave in computing systems and triggers the automation of increasingly complex problems.

Large Language Model~(LLM)-based agents have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide range of complex interactive tasks. However, they often struggle with long-horizon interactive tasks common in domains, such as embodied AI. The complexity and vast action spaces in these settings lead to compounding errors, where a single suboptimal action can derail an entire trajectory, causing the agent to exhaust its limited step budget on inefficient or unrecoverable paths. To overcome this without costly fine-tuning, we draw inspiration from software debugging, where execution logs are analyzed to preemptively catch errors. We propose \textit{Trajectory Graph Copilot}, a novel framework that acts as a ``copilot'' for LLM agents by diagnosing potential action errors before they are executed. At its core,\textit{Graph Debugger} models historical trajectories as a probabilistic graph and uses a Graph Neural Network to identify sequential action patterns that frequently lead to failure. Functioning as a proactive diagnostic sandbox, our method provides early warnings on potentially flawed actions, prompting the agent to self-correct. This pre-action error diagnosis prevents costly mistakes, significantly enhancing the agent's ability to complete long-horizon tasks successfully. The extensive experiments on four benchmarks with three LLM agents demonstrate a $14.69\%$ pass ratio improvement on average.

Large Language Model~(LLM)-based agents have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide range of complex interactive tasks.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models commonly adopt an LLM-centric $V \to L \to A$ pathway, where visual observations are projected into the representation space of a large language model before being decoded into robot actions. Although effective, this design incurs substantial computation and memory overhead at every policy invocation. In this work, we introduce TurboVLA, a new VLA paradigm that reformulates the conventional $V \to L \to A$ pathway as a direct $V + L \to A$ mapping. Instead of using a large language model as the central interface between perception and action, TurboVLA independently encodes visual observations and language instructions, directly exchanges information between them through lightweight bidirectional vision-language interaction, and predicts continuous action chunks with a compact decoder. This simple design constructs task-conditioned representations directly from visual and linguistic features, significantly reducing the computational and memory costs of VLA inference. On LIBERO, TurboVLA achieves 97.7% average success with only 0.2B parameters, 31.2 ms inference latency, and 0.9 GB inference VRAM on a consumer-grade RTX 4090, matching or outperforming substantially larger VLA policies. These results establish TurboVLA as a simple and effective alternative to the prevailing LLM-centric VLA paradigm, offering a new perspective on how vision, language, and action can be connected for efficient robotic manipulation. Code is available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/TurboVLA.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models commonly adopt an LLM-centric $V \to L \to A$ pathway, where visual observations are projected into the representation space of a large language model before being decoded into robot actions.