Daily Papers Arch&EAI

Leveraging the high density and energy efficiency of Compute-In-Memory (CIM) crossbar-based Deep Neural Network (DNN) accelerators requires optimal Design Space Exploration (DSE), which becomes increasingly challenging as complex models for advanced AI workloads expand the highly non-convex design space. Among existing DSE approaches, multi-objective Bayesian Optimization (BO) is promising, as it explores high-quality design solutions while querying costly CIM simulators selectively. In this work, we propose a multi-objective BO framework that holistically co-optimizes hardware and algorithm parameters of a CIM crossbar-based hardware accelerator for various DNN inference tasks. Depending on NN model depth, our framework handles high-dimensional design spaces (with $26$ and $50$ dimensions) and extremely large search complexities on the order of $O(10^{12})$ and $O(10^{27})$ for VGG8/CIFAR-10 and VGG16/Tiny-ImageNet-200. Our method attains $91.72 \%$ and $57.2 \%$ accuracy, respectively, comparable to baseline designs, while improving chip area ($65.52 \%$ and $50.7 \%$), read latency ($9.52 \%$ and $13.27 \%$), read dynamic energy ($31.23 \%$ and $52.07 \%$) and increasing memory utilization ($13.41 \%$ and $2.67 \%$).

Leveraging the high density and energy efficiency of Compute-In-Memory (CIM) crossbar-based Deep Neural Network (DNN) accelerators requires optimal Design Space Exploration (DSE), which becomes increasingly challenging as complex models for advanced AI workloads expand the highly non-convex design space.

We introduce OTIS, an open time series encoder that yields high-quality time series features for downstream deployment on any system, including resource-constrained wearables and industrial sensors. Currently, the development of powerful general-purpose encoders relies on the scaling laws hypothesis, using large encoder sizes to memorise the heterogeneous distributions of multi-domain training data. However, this reliance on scale creates a barrier to real-world utility, rendering deployment on resource-constrained systems infeasible due to strict memory, energy, and latency constraints. Surprisingly, we find that tailoring standard masked modelling pre-training to time series properties yields a tiny $7.1\,$M encoder that matches the state-of-the-art performance of $54\times$ larger encoders across $162$ tasks, while requiring $10\times$ less memory, $43\times$ less energy, and $37\times$ lower latency. To achieve this without the capacity tax, we introduce three novel components: (1) a domain-aware tokeniser to resolve conflicting semantics within multi-domain training data; (2) a dual masking strategy to capture spatiotemporal structures and temporal causality; and (3) a structure-aware objective to decouple feature learning from modelling noise. Consequently, OTIS produces high-quality time series features that enable state-of-the art performance in discriminative tasks and even extend seamlessly to generative tasks at minimal additional cost. To democratise access to powerful time series features on any system, we release our code and pre-trained weights.

We introduce OTIS, an open time series encoder that yields high-quality time series features for downstream deployment on any system, including resource-constrained wearables and industrial sensors.

Autonomous racecars operate at the limits of vehicle dynamics, where small control errors translate into safety-critical behavior and lost performance. Trajectory planners assume perfect tracking and remain blind to execution errors. To guarantee safety, trajectory planners therefore restrict themselves to conservative spatial margins, leaving usable track space untapped. To overcome these issues, we introduce a control-informed online trajectory planning framework that learns from its own execution errors. By measuring systematic tracking deviations during runtime, we dynamically adapt spatial track constraints and iteratively expand the free-space planning area. The planner remains time-optimal while compensating for accumulated execution errors. This method was analyzed in a high-fidelity closed-loop simulation environment with autonomous racecars. The results demonstrate that our approach reduces lap time by 1.8\,s without increasing computational burden, maintaining a median runtime of 25 ms. Our finding indicates that feeding control-induced deviations back into the planning layer unlocks performance previously inaccessible to modular architectures and enables autonomous vehicles to exploit track limits systematically.

Autonomous racecars operate at the limits of vehicle dynamics, where small control errors translate into safety-critical behavior and lost performance.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved promising performance in robotic manipulation. However, existing benchmarks mainly evaluate generalization on static manipulation tasks and largely overlook dynamic interaction scenarios. To address this gap, we present ReflexBench, a benchmark for reaction-critical manipulation. ReflexBench contains six dynamic tasks and introduces an evaluation framework that decouples simulator stepping from robot control while supporting configurable latency under synchronous and asynchronous inference. Building upon ReflexBench, we propose ReflexVLA, an efficient VLA model designed for reaction-critical manipulation without large-scale robot-data pretraining. ReflexVLA enhances temporal reasoning through latent future prediction and multi-frame temporal fusion within the vision backbone, while reducing deployment latency through batched visual encoding and CUDA Graph replay. Experiments show that ReflexVLA consistently improves dynamic manipulation performance while maintaining competitive accuracy on standard static manipulation benchmarks, and real-world experiments further demonstrate its effectiveness under practical deployment conditions. Project website: https://reflexvla.github.io

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved promising performance in robotic manipulation.

The development of robust and generalizable robot learning models is critically contingent upon the availability of large-scale, diverse training data and reliable evaluation benchmarks. Collecting data in the physical world poses prohibitive costs and scalability challenges, and prevailing simulation benchmarks frequently suffer from fragmentation, narrow scope, or insufficient fidelity to enable effective sim-to-real transfer. To address these challenges, we introduce Genie Sim 3.0, a unified simulation platform for robotic manipulation. We present Genie Sim Generator, a large language model (LLM)-powered tool that constructs high-fidelity scenes from natural language instructions. Its principal strength resides in rapid and multi-dimensional generalization, facilitating the synthesis of diverse environments to support scalable data collection and robust policy evaluation. We introduce the first benchmark that pioneers the application of LLM for automated evaluation. It leverages LLM to mass-generate evaluation scenarios and employs Vision-Language Model (VLM) to establish an automated assessment pipeline. We also release an open-source dataset comprising more than 10,000 hours of synthetic data across over 200 tasks. Through systematic experimentation, we validate the robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer capability of our open-source dataset, demonstrating that synthetic data can server as an effective substitute for real-world data under controlled conditions for scalable policy training. For code and dataset details, please refer to: https://github.com/AgibotTech/genie_sim.

The development of robust and generalizable robot learning models is critically contingent upon the availability of large-scale, diverse training data and reliable evaluation benchmarks.

Generalist robot policies aim to map multimodal observations and linguistic task instructions to actions across diverse tasks. However, existing methods typically represent the future as a fixed, short video-action chunk. This short-term future captures local scene evolution for action execution, but it does not explicitly describe the stage-level future that specifies how a task should progress from its current stage to the next. We therefore distinguish two complementary futures for robot manipulation: a short-term physical future to capture local scene evolution and a stage-level semantic future to represent task progress. We introduce StageWAM, which augments a Motus-based World Action Model (WAM) with Stage-JEPA, a goal-conditioned Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) predictor. Given the current observation and task instruction, Stage-JEPA uses a frozen V-JEPA2 encoder to extract the current-state representation and predicts the latent target of the next inferred stage. Across 50 RoboTwin 2.0 tasks in clean and randomized environments, StageWAM achieves 90.25% overall success and reduces the mean number of execution steps in successful rollouts by 5.97% relative to the strongest baseline.

Generalist robot policies aim to map multimodal observations and linguistic task instructions to actions across diverse tasks.

Robotic manipulation of flat objects is challenging due to the ungraspable configurations and strong variations in object geometry and material. Existing methods rely on heuristic pre-manipulation and are often evaluated in closed settings with limited generalization. We propose a unified framework that decouples the manipulation into a strategy generator and an action execution module. The strategy generator predicts appropriate manipulation strategies from object point clouds by learning strategy-centric, object-invariant representations via simulated data transformation and contrastive learning. Conditioned on the predicted strategy, the execution module decomposes long-horizon manipulation into reusable action primitives and dynamically composes them to generate stable trajectories. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce FlatLab, a comprehensive simulation benchmark for robotic flat object manipulation. FlatLab provides high-fidelity physical simulation of diverse rigid and deformable flat objects, automated multi-modal data collection, and standardized task definitions and evaluation protocols. Experiments conducted in FlatLab demonstrate that our approach generalizes effectively to unseen objects and categories, outperforming existing baselines. The project page and the code are provided at https://flatlab-web.github.io/.

Robotic manipulation of flat objects is challenging due to the ungraspable configurations and strong variations in object geometry and material.

This paper integrates end-to-end Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models with agentic tool-use to propose Agentic Robot with Tool-use (ART). ART is a tool-injection framework that tunes any VLA model to leverage off-the-shelf tool modules for low-level vision, high-level affordance, and embodiment enhancement. Compared to vanilla VLA models with a whole continuous action solution space, ART reduces the complexity of the action solution space through tool-use, which not only improves generalizability across different tasks but also reduces data dependency. To demonstrate the advantages (high generalizability and low data dependency) of this framework, we first built a dataset of 30K tool-use trajectories and action demonstrations, which is much smaller than those used by baseline methods. We then designed a training regimen for long-trajectory tool-use reasoning in challenging environments. Experiments show that ART achieves a 20% higher success rate than mainstream baselines on simulation and real-world tasks, such as pick-and-place in the dark at novel viewpoints. Empirical results highlight the benefits of an agent-based approach: modular tool utilization enables more efficient training, lightweight deployment, and scalable integration of new tools. This design fosters robustness, adaptability, and extensibility, paving the way for the practical deployment of VLA systems in complex real-world scenarios.

This paper integrates end-to-end Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models with agentic tool-use to propose Agentic Robot with Tool-use (ART).

Robotic laboratories play a critical role in autonomous scientific discovery by enabling scalable, continuous experimental execution. Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models offer a promising foundation for robotic laboratories. However, scientific experiments typically involve long-horizon tasks composed of multiple atomic tasks. Existing VLA models may fail to perform composed tasks formed by reordering and composing these known atomic actions. This limitation can arise from a skill-chaining gap caused by robot-state mismatch: the terminal robot state of one skill can fall outside the valid initial-state distribution of the next. To address this challenge, we propose AtomBridge, an Agentic VLA Inference Plugin for Long-Horizon Tasks in Scientific Experiments. AtomBridge attaches at inference time to a VLA policy already fine-tuned on atomic tasks, while keeping its weights fixed. At each task boundary, it uses LLM-based transition reasoning and robotic-action code generation to insert transitional actions between consecutive tasks. This plug-and-play design mitigates the skill-chaining gap caused by robot-state mismatch without additional VLA fine-tuning or demonstrations of composed long-horizon sequences. Across scientific manipulation sequences in simulation and a real-world experimental environment, AtomBridge improves execution continuity and per-step atomic-task success. On 8-step composed tasks, AtomBridge improves full-sequence success by 10%~25%.

Robotic laboratories play a critical role in autonomous scientific discovery by enabling scalable, continuous experimental execution.

Physical AI policies require inference throughout their lifecycle, including model evaluation, cloud reinforcement learning rollout, edge GPU serving, and onboard deployment. Although these settings share the same checkpoint and action semantics, they often rely on separate inference programs. To unify them, we build PhyAI, a Physical AI inference engine with a single runtime that keeps architecture-specific conditioning, solver, cache, and output logic in model adapters while sharing graph execution, kernels, memory management, and parallel services. The same codebase runs vision-language-action (VLA) models and world-action models (WAMs) on single or multiple GPUs across onboard, edge, and cloud deployments. We used the adapter interface to add MiniCPM-Robot on the day of its release. PhyAI achieves 1.40x-4.65x speedups over the official implementations of pi0, pi0.5, GR00T N1.7, and MiniCPM-Robot. On Cosmos3-Nano-Policy-DROID it reduces latency from 2.46 to 1.18 s on eight H20 GPUs (CFG=2, TP=4), a 2.08x speedup. Specialized runtimes remain faster in several configurations, so our goal is one runtime with competitive latency rather than the fastest result in every case. Detailed profiles reveal why different models need different execution policies: on a Hopper-series GPU at batch size one, the pi0.5 action expert accounts for 8.8% of FLOPs but 57.2% of latency; at batch size 32 its share drops to 13.5% and throughput reaches about 100 samples/s. Cosmos3 remains generation-dominated and gains only 14.3% throughput as batch size increases from 1 to 16. We further introduce the control-time Roofline, which distinguishes inference-bound from environment-bound control; the measured pi0.5 points on four LIBERO suites are environment-bound while Cosmos3 stays inference-bound. Code and benchmarks: https://github.com/mingti-org/phyai.

Physical AI policies require inference throughout their lifecycle, including model evaluation, cloud reinforcement learning rollout, edge GPU serving, and onboard deployment.

Dexterous robot manipulation can benefit from the abundance of human demonstrations, but transferring such demonstrations to robot policies remains challenging. We present Contact Wrench Guidance from Human Demonstration in Robotic Dexterous Manipulation (CHORD), a framework for long-horizon manipulation of rigid and articulated objects with reinforcement learning. The key idea is object-centric contact wrench space guidance: we represent human and robot motions by the forces and torques they can induce on the object, enabling similarity to be measured by the induced instantaneous motions. This guidance makes reinforcement learning more scalable for contact-rich dexterous manipulation. We further introduce a large-scale simulation benchmark with 4,739 bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks, constructed from motion-capture datasets and reconstructed in-house videos. Evaluated on 1,831 benchmark tasks, CHORD achieves an average success rate of 82.12%, demonstrating strong scalability. CHORD also generalizes to whole-body manipulation from hand-only and third-person demonstrations, achieving a 90.77% success rate, and the learned policies transfer to the real world in both open-loop and closed-loop settings.

Dexterous robot manipulation can benefit from the abundance of human demonstrations, but transferring such demonstrations to robot policies remains challenging.

The request-to-handoff gap has three coupled sources: ambiguity about the behavior intended at request time, physical-state drift accumulated during action generation, and residual incompatibility when the new action finally assumes control. BICPO-VLA addresses them in sequence. First, an instruction-aware causal history encoder identifies the behavior supported by the command and current task progress. Second, sequential Haar subspace generation decomposes each action chunk into complementary pairwise scaffold and residual coefficients, enabling two specialized generation stages followed by exact reconstruction. By reducing iterative refinement in the original action space, it shortens the interval over which the robot continues moving before the new chunk becomes available. Finally, BICPO rolls the known outgoing actions to the actual handoff state and applies reference-relative Flow-DPO among behaviorally matched candidates, adapting the generated chunk to the remaining request-to-handoff mismatch without changing its intended behavior.

The request-to-handoff gap has three coupled sources: ambiguity about the behavior intended at request time, physical-state drift accumulated during action generation, and residual incompatibility when the new action finally assumes control.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a prominent paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving; however, their efficient deployment is severely constrained by high computational latency and exposure bias arising from sequential autoregressive decoding. Conversely, while specialized diffusion policies enable low-latency, parallel execution, training them from scratch typically yields narrow, single-task architectures that lack holistic visual-linguistic reasoning. Successfully transforming pre-trained autoregressive generalists into parallel diffusion models could combine multi-task cognitive intelligence with execution efficiency, yet this transition presents a formidable architectural challenge due to mismatched attention patterns (causal versus bidirectional) and divergent optimization objectives. To bridge this divide, we introduce WAM-Diff2, a multi-task discrete diffusion VLA framework powered by a three-stage hierarchical distillation strategy. By structuring the architectural shift through progressive block-wise adaptation, block-wise distillation, and model-wise cross-scale distillation, WAM-Diff2 preserves the underlying semantic foundations of the base model while accelerating inference. Extensive evaluations across driving understanding, perception, and planning benchmarks demonstrate that WAM-Diff2 effectively mitigates exposure bias and achieves performance parity with autoregressive baselines. Crucially, the autoregressive-to-diffusion transition yields a 2.8x decoding speedup, which scales to an ultimate 15.1x acceleration when combined with system-level optimizations including FlashInfer and CUDA Graphs.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a prominent paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving; however, their efficient deployment is severely constrained by high computational latency and exposure bias arising from sequential autoregressive decoding.

This work investigates the potential benefits and technical challenges of using high-bandwidth flash (HBF) for large language model (LLM) inference. HBF has gained increasing attention as a promising solution to mitigate memory-capacity bottlenecks in modern LLM-serving systems, but its benefits and challenges remain largely uninvestigated. To address this gap, we thoroughly analyze HBF-based LLM-serving systems under diverse system configurations and operating scenarios in which HBF serves as a main GPU-memory component to handle both reads and writes. Our analysis shows that, despite its limited write performance, HBF can significantly improve the batch size, throughput, and flexibility of LLM-serving systems while reducing the minimum GPU requirements, but realizing these benefits critically depends on sustaining HBM-comparable read bandwidth and requires significant endurance improvements.

This work investigates the potential benefits and technical challenges of using high-bandwidth flash (HBF) for large language model (LLM) inference.

How much of a vision-language model's (VLM) spatial understanding remains after the action post-training process of building a vision-language-action model (VLA)? We probe depth perception, a primitive of spatiogeometric understanding, from every decoder layer of a weight-matched open-source base VLM/VLA pair: Molmo2-ER and MolmoAct2-LIBERO. First, the VLA decodes depth worse at every layer, a persistent gap we call the floor. Second, the degradation is not uniform: while the base VLM's depth decodability improves through its final layers, the VLA's collapses, an additional late-layer drop we call the cliff. We causally localize the cliff to late-layer MLP interference: ablating the late-layer MLP writes recovers the majority of the terminal decodability cliff, while matched attention ablations and the same intervention in the weight-matched base VLM produce no comparable recovery. A module-level decomposition explains this dissociation: the base VLM carries depth most accessibly in accumulated MLP writes, whereas action post-training collapses depth decodability in the late accumulated writes.

How much of a vision-language model's (VLM) spatial understanding remains after the action post-training process of building a vision-language-action model (VLA)?

Accurate risk stratification of precancerous polyps during routine colonoscopy screening is a key strategy to reduce the incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC). However, assessment of low-grade dysplasia remains limited by subjective histopathologic interpretation. Advances in computational pathology and deep learning offer new opportunities to identify subtle, fine morphologic patterns associated with malignant progression that may be imperceptible to the human eye. In this work, we propose XtraLight-MedMamba, an ultra-lightweight state-space-based deep learning framework to classify neoplastic tubular adenomas from whole-slide images (WSIs). The architecture is a blend of a ConvNeXt-based shallow feature extractor with parallel vision mamba blocks to efficiently model local texture cues within global contextual structure. An integration of the Spatial and Channel Attention Bridge (SCAB) module enhances multiscale feature extraction, while the Fixed Non-Negative Orthogonal Classifier (FNOClassifier) enables substantial parameter reduction and improved generalization. The model was evaluated on a curated dataset acquired from patients with low-grade tubular adenomas, stratified into case and control cohorts based on subsequent CRC development. XtraLight-MedMamba achieved an accuracy of 97.18\% and an F1-score of 0.9767 using approximately 32,000 parameters, outperforming transformer-based and conventional Mamba architectures, which have significantly higher model complexity and computational burden, making it suitable for resource-constrained areas.

Accurate risk stratification of precancerous polyps during routine colonoscopy screening is a key strategy to reduce the incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC).

We present \textbf{DreamX-Phi 1.0}, an action-conditioned video world model for robotic manipulation that, given an observed frame, a language instruction, and a prescribed action sequence comprising end-effector poses and gripper states, predicts the resulting future observations. Yet realism alone does not guarantee faithfulness: a convincing rollout can still move the wrong arm or lose the manipulated object. To ensure the prediction respects each arm's commanded path, we inject per-arm $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ transformations into attention via \textbf{PRoPE-style geometric encoding}, preserving arm identity and rigid-motion structure. Action control alone does not fully constrain scene geometry or the evolution of small manipulated objects. We therefore add a lightweight \textbf{depth branch} for scene-level geometry and use \textbf{SAM3 masks} with a frozen \textbf{V-JEPA teacher} to maintain object consistency throughout grasping. We further distill the multi-step generator into a few-step student via distribution-matching distillation for efficient deployment. At the time of writing, \model{} achieves first place on Track~1 and second place on Track~2 of the WorldArena~2.0 Challenge. Our model and code will be publicly available.

We present \textbf{DreamX-Phi 1.0}, an action-conditioned video world model for robotic manipulation that, given an observed frame, a language instruction, and a prescribed action sequence comprising end-effector poses and gripper states, predicts the resulting future observations.

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) are moving rapidly towards deployment as general-purpose manipulation policies, but we currently lack basic tools for understanding what these models represent internally or for monitoring them at runtime. Leveraging ideas from mechanistic interpretability, we probe the residual stream of $π_{0.5}$ and find that task progress, the normalized time remaining in a trajectory, is linearly readable from the activations. We find that this signal is present in the pretrained PaliGemma backbone prior to training on any robot-specific data. A single linear probe generalizes to unseen tasks and varies under language counterfactuals when trained on multi-prompt data, but does not enable meaningful steering of the policy. These properties make the signal directly useful for instrumenting deployed VLAs. We use the probe as a simple label-free OOD detector, which detects stalled task progress, and find it competitive with state-of-the-art methods. Our results suggest that VLAs have rich, linearly readable internal representations of semantic quantities like task progress, and that learning to read these signals offers a lightweight, interpretable path toward monitoring deployed visuomotor policies.

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) are moving rapidly towards deployment as general-purpose manipulation policies, but we currently lack basic tools for understanding what these models represent internally or for monitoring them at runtime.

Robotic manipulation requires understanding both the 3D spatial structure of the environment and its temporal evolution, yet most existing policies neglect one or both aspects. They often rely on 2D visual observations or backbones pretrained on static image--text pairs, which leads to high data requirements and limited comprehension of environment dynamics. To address this, we introduce SpatialVAM, the first 3D Video Action Model that simultaneously predict spatial-aware multi-view heatmap videos and RGB videos. Our key insight is that this design naturally injects 3D information into video foundation models while aligning the representation format between video pretraining and action finetuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpatialVAM enables data-efficient, robust, generalizable, and interpretable manipulation. With only ten demonstration trajectories and no additional pretraining, SpatialVAM handles challenging long-horizon and contact-rich tasks, generalizes to out-of-distribution settings, and predicts realistic future videos. Evaluations on Meta-World (22\%$\uparrow$), RoboCasa (15\%$\uparrow$) and real-world robotic platforms (16\%$\uparrow$) show that SpatialVAM consistently outperforms other video action models, vision language action models and 3D-based policies, establishing a new state-of-the-art in data-efficient multi-task manipulation.

Robotic manipulation requires understanding both the 3D spatial structure of the environment and its temporal evolution, yet most existing policies neglect one or both aspects.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as generalist robotic policies capable of following diverse language instructions and performing a wide range of manipulation tasks. However, their direct control over embodied agents also exposes them to adversarial interference that may cause unsafe physical behaviors. Existing attacks on robotic policies are typically optimized for a single task or instruction, leaving the cross-task vulnerabilities of multitask VLAs largely unexplored. We introduce UniTexture, a cross-task universal adversarial texture attack that uses a single textured 3D object to induce targeted deviations in VLA action predictions across multiple tasks. UniTexture backpropagates gradients from the policy's action outputs to surface texture parameters through a differentiable renderer. It jointly optimizes the shared texture over a distribution of tasks, instructions, states, and viewpoints using a targeted action-space objective, steering predicted actions toward attacker-defined targets without optimizing a separate texture for each task. We evaluate UniTexture on OpenVLA and $π_{0.5}$ across diverse manipulation tasks and multiple evaluation settings. UniTexture reduces the mean task success rate from 90.0% under benign conditions to 48.4% under attack, induces target-aligned action shifts, and further exhibits cross-suite and cross-model transfer without re-optimization. Together, these findings reveal shared cross-task vulnerabilities in multitask VLAs that can be systematically exploited through a single adversarial surface texture.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as generalist robotic policies capable of following diverse language instructions and performing a wide range of manipulation tasks.

Reinforcement learning improves autonomous-driving vision-language-action (VLA) models by evaluating trajectories sampled from the current policy. Group relative policy optimization (GRPO) learns from reward differences within each rollout group. When all sampled trajectories are poor, this relative signal can rank failures without identifying behavior outside the failed region. We introduce FIRE-VLA, a failure-informed self-evolution framework that converts such unresolved failures into privileged supervision for the next policy. Low-reward, low-diversity groups trigger self-distillation from a frozen round-start copy of the same model. Teacher and student have the same parameter scale, but only the teacher observes the hidden future trajectory. Supervision follows the student's generated prefix and is restricted to answer tokens, while GRPO remains active for every group. The updated policy supplies the teacher for the next round, allowing the routed failure distribution to change with the policy without requiring a larger external teacher. Starting from the same Qwen2.5-VL-3B SFT checkpoint, the comparison matches student rollout and policy-update counts. On 6,019 examples from 150 held-out nuScenes scenes, FIRE-VLA retains comparable single-sample planning, reduces G=4 mean L2 from 1.848 to 1.500 m, and lowers evaluation-persistent failure prevalence from 13.03% to 11.20%. The reduction in mean error arises mainly from rare severe rollouts rather than uniform improvement across ordinary trajectories.

Reinforcement learning improves autonomous-driving vision-language-action (VLA) models by evaluating trajectories sampled from the current policy.

Being able to solve a task in diverse ways makes agents more robust to task variations and less prone to local optima. In this context, constrained diversity optimization has become a useful reinforcement learning (RL) framework for training a set of diverse agents in parallel. However, existing constrained-diversity RL methods often under-explore in complex tasks such as robot manipulation, resulting in limited behavioral diversity. We address this with a two-stage curriculum that introduces a spline-based trajectory prior as an inductive bias to produce diverse, high-reward behaviors in an initial stage, and then distills these behaviors into reactive, step-wise policies in a second stage. In our empirical evaluation, we provide novel insights into challenges of diversity-targeted training and show that our curriculum increases the diversity of learned skills while maintaining high task performance.

Being able to solve a task in diverse ways makes agents more robust to task variations and less prone to local optima.

Edge AI deployment demands neural architectures that are simultaneously accurate, computationally efficient, and hardware-deployable - a challenge addressed by hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (NAS). While recent works incorporate quantization directly into the NAS loop, these approaches expand search complexity and tightly couple architecture and quantization design. The simpler post-search quantization strategy has received little analytical attention: the effects of Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) on the NAS-discovered Pareto structure remain uncharacterised, and no framework combines quantized architecture mapping onto reconfigurable accelerators with automated hardware exploration. This paper addresses both gaps. First, a three-stage pipeline is proposed: a hardware-agnostic Pareto rank surrogate frontend on NAS-Bench-201, a quantization bridge with Pareto-aware filtering and feedback control, and an evolutionary Domain Space Exploration (DSE) backend on CGRA4ML for optimal hardware mapping. Second, an empirical study characterises how INT4 PTQ perturbs the NAS-Bench-201 Pareto space through formal stability metrics on ground-truth data for all 15,625 architectures, and demonstrates that an FP32 zero-shot surrogate outperforms a dedicated INT4-trained surrogate in Pareto space coverage across two standard search strategies.

Edge AI deployment demands neural architectures that are simultaneously accurate, computationally efficient, and hardware-deployable - a challenge addressed by hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (NAS).

A common way for attackers to compromise victim systems is hijacking sensitive operations (e.g., control-flow transfers) with attacker-controlled inputs. Existing solutions in general only protect parts of these targets and have high performance overheads, which are impractical and hard to deploy on systems with limited resources (e.g., IoT devices) or for low-level software like kernels and bare-metal firmware. In this paper, we present a lightweight hardware-software co-design solution ROLoad-PMP to protect sensitive operations from being hijacked for low-level software. First, we propose new instructions, which only load data from read-only memory regions with specific keys, to guarantee the integrity of pointees pointed by (potentially corrupted) data pointers. Then, we provide a program hardening mechanism to protect sensitive operations, by classifying and placing their operands into read-only memory with different keys at compile-time and loading them with ROLoad-PMP-family instructions at runtime. We have implemented an FPGA-based prototype of ROLoad-PMP based on RISC-V, and demonstrated an important defense application, i.e., forward-edge control-flow integrity. Results showed that ROLoad-PMP only costs few extra hardware resources (< 1.40%). Moreover, it enables many lightweight (e.g., with negligible overheads < 0.853%) defenses, and provides broader and stronger security guarantees than existing hardware solutions, e.g., ARM BTI and Intel CET.

A common way for attackers to compromise victim systems is hijacking sensitive operations (e.g., control-flow transfers) with attacker-controlled inputs.

Recent advances in teleoperation have enabled robotic manipulators to perform dexterous, human-arm-like motions. However, human operators may fail to avoid suddenly appearing obstacles promptly and effectively, particularly under network latency or limited attention, thereby creating safety risks. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight and modular framework for proactive collision avoidance, operating directly at the end-effector velocity-command level. After preprocessing the point cloud, the framework first predicts potential collisions based on time-to-collision (TTC) with integrated overshoot protection, and subsequently rotates the relative-velocity vector using Rodrigues' rotation formula. The deflection changes only the direction of the relative velocity while preserving its magnitude, thereby mitigating the deadlock problem commonly encountered by conventional artificial potential field (APF) methods. The prediction module compensates for point-cloud processing latency introduced by complex teleoperation pipelines, while the lightweight design enables the high-frequency control required for teleoperation. Simulations across diverse scenarios show that the proposed method achieves a higher end-effector collision avoidance rate than the baseline methods. Experiments on a physical robotic system further validate its collision-avoidance effectiveness.

Recent advances in teleoperation have enabled robotic manipulators to perform dexterous, human-arm-like motions.

Persistent AI memory is often reduced to a retrieval problem: store prior interactions as text, embed them, and ask the model to recover relevant context later. This design is useful for thematic recall, but it is mismatched to the kinds of memory that agents need in production: exact facts, current state, updates and deletions, aggregation, relations, negative queries, and explicit unknowns. These operations require memory to behave less like search and more like a system of record. This paper argues that reliable external AI memory must be schema-grounded. Schemas define what must be remembered, what may be ignored, and which values must never be inferred. We present an iterative, schema-aware write path that decomposes memory ingestion into object detection, field detection, and field-value extraction, with validation gates, local retries, and stateful prompt control. The result shifts interpretation from the read path to the write path: reads become constrained queries over verified records rather than repeated inference over retrieved prose. We evaluate this design on structured extraction and end-to-end memory benchmarks. On the extraction benchmark, the judge-in-the-loop configuration reaches 90.42% object-level accuracy and 62.67% output accuracy, above all tested frontier structured-output baselines. On our end-to-end memory benchmark, xmemory reaches 97.10% F1, compared with 80.16%-87.24% across the third-party baselines. On the application-level task, xmemory reaches 95.2% accuracy, outperforming specialised memory systems, code-generated Markdown harnesses, and customer-facing frontier-model application harnesses. The results show that, for memory workloads requiring stable facts and stateful computation, architecture matters more than retrieval scale or model strength alone.

Persistent AI memory is often reduced to a retrieval problem: store prior interactions as text, embed them, and ask the model to recover relevant context later.

Synthetic 3D scene generation is increasingly used as a data source for computer vision and embodied AI, but existing generators often optimize perceptual realism without reliably satisfying task-critical functional constraints. This mismatch limits the usefulness of synthetic data for downstream training, where accessibility, traversability, and spatial rule compliance are often essential. We present iARCS, an iterative agentic reinforcement learning framework that adapts a pretrained scene generator to natural-language task requirements. iARCS uses a two-stage strategy: universal-reward pretraining to improve physical plausibility and layout quality, followed by task-specific fine-tuning with LLM-generated reward programs that are iteratively refined from training feedback. Experiments show improved constraint fidelity on walkability, reachability, and clearance-focused tasks, effective task-specific constraint optimization, and competitive scene diversity. We further show that data generated by iARCS improves a base generator, supporting its value as a practical synthetic data generation tool rather than only a controllable scene editing method.

Synthetic 3D scene generation is increasingly used as a data source for computer vision and embodied AI, but existing generators often optimize perceptual realism without reliably satisfying task-critical functional constraints.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) demonstrate exceptional performance in computer vision but suffer from large parameter counts and quadratic computational complexity, severely limiting their deployment on resource-constrained edge hardware. While recursive weight-sharing reduces parameter counts and token merging mitigates computational and memory bottlenecks, integrating these two paradigms without costly retraining is non-trivial, leaving this intersection largely unexplored. We propose MergeOver, a post-training approach that integrates Token Merging (ToMe) into the recursively weight-shared Sliced Recursive Transformer (SReT). Through an Unmerge tracking stack, constraint-safe merge-rate adjustment, and synchronised token-mass tracking across spatial permutations, MergeOver resolves the spatial and merging constraints of this integration. We further employ a stage-wise single-shot schedule that performs token reduction at the first block of each stage and maintains a fixed sequence length throughout its subsequent recursive iterations. Benchmarked on ImageNet-1K, our selected configuration reduces top-1 accuracy by 1.47 percentage points. On the GPU, it reduces peak activation memory by 37.3% and 38.4% at batch sizes 1 and 16, while throughput decreases by 21.7% at batch size 1 but increases by 21.7% at batch size 16. On a Raspberry Pi 5 (ARM CPU), it reduces latency by 2.4% and 17.6% at batch sizes 1 and 16. These results show that MergeOver can recover a meaningful part of the throughput and memory cost that recursive weight-sharing introduces, without retraining, and provides a baseline for combining token merging with hierarchical recursive transformers.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) demonstrate exceptional performance in computer vision but suffer from large parameter counts and quadratic computational complexity, severely limiting their deployment on resource-constrained edge hardware.

Long-horizon surgical robot manipulation is challenging because task rewards are sparse, while meaningful interaction changes occur at irregular intervals. Existing world-model agents typically imagine at primitive-step resolution, leaving variable-duration task progress implicit. Manually specified stages can provide intermediate structure, but their task specific boundaries are difficult to align with state-dependent interaction transitions. We propose S2-HWM, a Sparse Event-Structured Hierarchical World Model that learns sparse event evidence from primitive latent trajectories to coordinate an event-level manager and a primitive-step worker. The event evidence schedules manager goal updates, and each selected latent goal conditions the worker's primitive actions until the next update. The learned event evidence also forms variable-duration segments for an Event Transition Model (ETM), which predicts the next?boundary stochastic state, segment duration, and accumulated segment reward. Chaining these event-level predictions provides a variable-duration continuation beyond the primitive imagination horizon for manager learning, while the worker retains primitive-step actor-critic learning. On a SurRoL-based PegTransfer task, S2-HWM achieves a success rate of 98.7%, outperforming the flat GAS DreamerV3 baseline by 22.7 percentage points.

Long-horizon surgical robot manipulation is challenging because task rewards are sparse, while meaningful interaction changes occur at irregular intervals.

Large-scale manipulation data is essential for robot learning, yet collecting robot demonstrations remains expensive and difficult to scale. Meanwhile, abundant egocentric human manipulation videos provide rich behavioral experiences, but transferring them across embodiments remains challenging due to differences between human hands and robotic end-effectors. Recent advances in video world models offer a promising pathway to synthesize robot-centric manipulation videos from human observations, while their cross-embodiment transfer capability remains largely unexplored. Therefore, we introduce H2R-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating cross-embodiment human-to-robot manipulation video generation, where models transform egocentric human demonstrations into robot manipulation videos under specified embodiments. Each benchmark instance contains a human demonstration video, target embodiment constraints, and source-grounded annotations covering task goals, action events, functional contacts, and object responses. H2R-Bench evaluates generated videos through five dimensions, including goal-state completion, action-event completion, functional contact transfer, embodiment correctness, and general video quality. We benchmark eleven state-of-the-art video generation models across six manipulation families and two robot embodiments. Our evaluation reveals that current video world models remain limited in human-to-robot manipulation transfer: even leading models often fail in embodiment consistency, functional interaction, and task execution. H2R-Bench provides a systematic diagnostic framework for evaluating whether video world models can bridge the human-to-robot embodiment gap and convert human manipulation observations into robot-centric training resources.

Large-scale manipulation data is essential for robot learning, yet collecting robot demonstrations remains expensive and difficult to scale.