Daily Papers Arch&EAI

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly promising for robotic manipulation, yet their real-world deployment remains bottlenecked by high inference latency and unstable asynchronous execution. This challenge is particularly pronounced in flow-matching-based VLA models, where action decoding requires multiple iterative steps conditioned on the VLM context. While efficient inference methods improve control frequency and asynchronous methods reduce execution idle time, existing approaches often fail to jointly achieve low-latency inference and accurate, temporally consistent asynchronous execution. We introduce \textbf{FlashVLA}, a streaming action decoding framework that addresses both challenges in a unified formulation. FlashVLA maintains a streaming action buffer with multiple chunks at different noise levels and decodes them using chunk-wise causal attention. This design allows FlashVLA to produce one executable action chunk per inference step. Moreover, its chunk-wise autoregressive formulation implicitly preserves action continuity, enabling smooth asynchronous execution without extra future-state conditioning. Across extensive simulated and real-world experiments, FlashVLA substantially improves inference speed while maintaining strong task performance. It can achieve $\geq$30\,Hz control frequency on a single GPU with smooth asynchronous inference in real-world deployment.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly promising for robotic manipulation, yet their real-world deployment remains bottlenecked by high inference latency and unstable asynchronous execution.

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) systems estimate individual appliance energy consumption from a single aggregate meter, without requiring separate sensors for each device. By installing a single meter that measures a building's total electricity consumption, NILM algorithms can determine the active status of each appliance. However, traditional NILM systems use computationally intensive optimization algorithms to process offline data, limiting their capability for on-device deployment, where sensitive household data must be processed locally. This paper proposes a Tsetlin Machine (TM)-based NILM framework, targeting real-time applications on resource-constrained microcontrollers (MCUs), enabling privacy-preserving edge deployment. The problem is reformulated as a classification task, and the proposed approach achieves an average precision of 90% and recall of 96% for two-appliance classification, and 77% precision and 80% recall for four appliances on the REDD dataset. The trained model occupies only 17 KB of flash memory and achieves an inference latency of 0.43 ms on an ESP32, demonstrating its suitability for NILM applications on MCUs.

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) systems estimate individual appliance energy consumption from a single aggregate meter, without requiring separate sensors for each device.

Zero-shot cross-task generalization, where a policy must execute manipulation tasks never seen during training, remains a central challenge in robot learning. In large language models, a novel task can be performed simply by specifying it in the context, without any parameter update. This form of in-context learning (ICL) turns generalization into a problem of task specification. To achieve cross-task generalization, we bring this paradigm to robotic manipulation, and argue that the natural task specification for manipulation is a human video: unlike language, it provides rich visual cues about the intended task evolution. We present Zero-WAM, a causal video-action model that executes unseen tasks by following in-context human video guidance. To address the scarcity of task-rich paired human-robot data, we propose an automatic pipeline that converts task-sampled robot trajectories into semantically matched human videos, yielding HumanGen, a dataset of 74.2K human-robot ICL pairs across 8.6K tasks. For model training, we further introduce an in-context future chunk prediction (IFP) objective that suppresses shortcuts learned from seen tasks and forces the policy to draw task information from the video prompt. On seven unseen tasks in RoboTwin 2.0 simulation, Zero-WAM achieves a 47.0% average success rate, an absolute improvement of 29.5 percentage points over the strongest video-action baseline. In real-world evaluations, it follows human video guidance to generalize to unseen task configurations involving multi-object scenes, long-horizon manipulation, and fine-grained insertion.

Zero-shot cross-task generalization, where a policy must execute manipulation tasks never seen during training, remains a central challenge in robot learning.

While most phenotyping platforms rely primarily on image-based measurements, advanced plant characterization requires the integration of active physiological sensing modali- ties such as chlorophyll fluorescence. We present an autonomous robotic platform designed to perform targeted fluorescence measurements on plant leaves. The system combines 3D plant reconstruction, geometric analysis, and motion planning to localize suitable measurement points and generate collision-free trajectories for a robotic manipulator. A dense 3D model of the plant is reconstructed from multi-view data and used to extract candidate leaf surfaces based on orientation, accessibility, and sensing constraints. These targets are then integrated into a task-level planning framework that guides the end-effector to precise contact or near-contact configurations required for point-based fluorescence acquisition. The platform enables automated, repeatable, and spatially resolved physiological measurements that go beyond passive imaging. By tightly coupling perception, geometric reasoning, and manipulation, the proposed system provides a robotics-driven approach to high-resolution plant phenotyping and opens new directions for autonomous agricultural inspection and plant-aware manipulation.

While most phenotyping platforms rely primarily on image-based measurements, advanced plant characterization requires the integration of active physiological sensing modali- ties such as chlorophyll fluorescence.

Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policies provide strong priors for robot manipulation, yet adapting them online to fine-grained biomedical tasks remains challenging. Task success often hinges on subtle, view-dependent visual cues, while task-level rewards provide little guidance about which regions matter, making it difficult to learn task-relevant visual grounding from limited real-robot interaction. Online adaptation is further constrained by the computational cost of VLA inference and replay-based updates. We introduce GRAFT (Grounded Reinforcement Adaptation for Fast Task Learning), a framework for efficient online VLA adaptation through grounded perception. GRAFT uses region-level supervision to learn view-specific visual anchors that focus perception on task-relevant local cues without requiring region proposals at deployment. It further combines single-step action generation with cached visual-language prefix reuse to accelerate online learning. Across four biomedical manipulation tasks, GRAFT improves success rates by 25 percentage points under matched adaptation budgets, while reducing the computational overhead of online policy updates.

Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policies provide strong priors for robot manipulation, yet adapting them online to fine-grained biomedical tasks remains challenging.

Accurate motion prediction of surrounding agents and safe motion planning are two closely coupled key tasks for social robot navigation in crowded environments. Deploying these systems on resource-constrained edge devices necessitates compact, unified models that can perform both tasks simultaneously. However, within these compact shared encoders, recent unified models often overlook severe representational conflicts that arise from the distinct objectives of predicting neighbor behaviors versus ego-centric safety planning. To address this issue, we first identify the Skill Conflict$\unicode{x2014}$a phenomenon where overlapping parameter assignments cause distinct tasks to compete for the same weights, preventing the model from fully specializing in individual skills. To resolve this, we propose a novel model-merging-based framework, Disjoint Parameter Training (DPT). DPT mitigates performance degradation caused by Skill Conflict through distributed parameter learning, which separates the key parameter regions of each task while preserving their core capabilities prior to merging. In addition, we observe that sparse merging, which selectively integrates only the most influential parameters for each task rather than combining all task-specific parameters, yields optimal performance by preventing interference among adjacent features and concentrating representational capacity. DPT can be applied in parallel with a variety of merging methods. Evaluated on standard crowd navigation benchmarks (JRDB and JTA), our framework demonstrates superior performance, validating its versatility and effectiveness for safe, resource-efficient robot navigation.

Accurate motion prediction of surrounding agents and safe motion planning are two closely coupled key tasks for social robot navigation in crowded environments.

Understanding why some sequential planning problems are harder than others requires models that go beyond average performance. They should capture the specific pattern of which problems are hard, and ideally fail in the same way people do when planning capacity is reduced. We apply AICON, a reactive gradient-descent framework developed for robotic manipulation, to the Tower of London test, a cognitive test used to assess planning in Parkinson's disease, mild cognitive impairment, and stroke. Without any lookahead planning or knowledge of human cognition, AICON reproduces the fine-grained human difficulty ordering across 24 problems better than structural task parameters and generalizes to held-out problems in a leave-two-out evaluation. Crucially, AICON outperforms a planning baseline for groups with reduced planning capacity while the planning baseline better captures healthy controls. This dissociation was predicted by the original AICON paper, which noted that the model's failure modes resemble those of Parkinson's patients who struggle with goal hierarchies but not move counts. This suggests that as planning capacity is reduced, human behavior shifts toward the reactive mode AICON models. The finding extends a broader pattern: AICON, originally built for robotics, now captures aspects of biological behavior across perception, eye movements, and sequential planning, suggesting its core abstraction reflects something real about how biological systems are organized.

Understanding why some sequential planning problems are harder than others requires models that go beyond average performance.

Generalist vision--language--action (VLA) policies learn long-horizon behavior mainly through short-horizon action prediction and reveal little beyond sampled commands. This creates two coupled bottlenecks: a single action target must implicitly absorb task progress, intermediate intent, and local reliability, while these control states remain hidden during execution. Inspired by functional principles of biological sensorimotor control, we introduce LM-X , which organizes prediction across task, event, and motor scales without claiming anatomical correspondence. Three explicitly supervised signals are emitted online and directly condition action generation: return-to-go (RTG) measures visible task progress, event-to-go (ETG) identifies the next semantic transition, and heteroscedastic action flow estimates local reliability through propagated variance. Explanation is therefore intrinsic to control rather than generated post hoc. Before a costly 20-day pretraining run on 64 NVIDIA B200 GPUs, a controlled five-task pretraining gate verifies the design: the complete model improves success by 16.0 points over the action-only backbone and by 10.8 points over the strongest single-head variant. We then train LM-X on more than 20,000 hours of real-robot trajectories, including over 1,000 hours of failed policy rollouts. LM-X achieves 74.1\% across 50 randomized-hard RoboTwin2.0 tasks versus 55.4\% for GR00T N1.7, and 68.6\% versus 50.7\% across seven real-robot tasks. RTG tracks semantic progress and visible regression, while variance rises during hesitation and oscillatory control. These results show that explicit multi-timescale predictive state can strengthen control while exposing interpretable internal estimates.

Generalist vision--language--action (VLA) policies learn long-horizon behavior mainly through short-horizon action prediction and reveal little beyond sampled commands.

We introduce Riemann-1.0, a fully causal autoregressive World Action Model for embodied intelligence. Riemann-1.0 jointly models multi-view visual observations, robot states, and embodiment-specific actions within a unified causal autoregressive sequence, representing robot actions and world evolution as causal state transitions. Unlike existing WAMs based on joint generation, video-first prediction, or decoupled modeling paradigms, Riemann-1.0 unifies online robot policy execution and action-conditioned world simulation within a single model, enabling it to function as both an executable robot policy and a multi-embodiment visual world simulator. To scale embodied experience across heterogeneous data sources, we further develop a progressive embodied pretraining framework that unifies learning from egocentric human videos, handheld-gripper demonstrations, and heterogeneous robot trajectories under a shared World Action Modeling objective. Built upon 200K+ hours of interaction data, Riemann-1.0 progressively transfers large-scale embodied experience into executable robot manipulation capabilities. Riemann-1.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance across both simulation benchmarks and real-world manipulation tasks. It achieves success rates of 94.3% on RoboTwin2.0, 99.0% on LIBERO, and 62.6% on the long-horizon compositional benchmark RoboCasa-365, outperforming the previous best method by 8.4% On long-horizon real-world manipulation tasks, Riemann-1.0 achieves a Success Rate (SR) of 85.0% and a Progress Success Rate (PSR) of 94.4%, exceeding the strongest open-source baseline by 15% in SR. These results demonstrate that unified World Action Modeling together with progressive embodied pretraining effectively transforms large-scale embodied experience into generalizable robot manipulation capabilities.

We introduce Riemann-1.0, a fully causal autoregressive World Action Model for embodied intelligence.

Recent works have demonstrated that attention-based transformer and large language model (LLM) architectures can achieve strong channel state prediction (CSP) performance by capturing long-range temporal dependencies across channel state information (CSI) sequences. However, these models suffer from quadratic scaling in sequence length, leading to substantial computational cost, memory consumption, and inference latency, which limits their applicability in real-time and resource-constrained wireless deployments. In this paper, we investigate whether selective state space models (SSMs) can serve as a hardware-efficient alternative for CSI prediction. We propose MambaCSP, a hybrid-attention SSM architecture that replaces LLM-based prediction backbones with a linear-time Mamba model. To overcome the local-only dependencies of pure SSMs, we introduce lightweight patch-mixer attention layers that periodically inject cross-token attentions, helping with long-context CSI prediction. Extensive MISO-OFDM simulations show that MambaCSP improves prediction accuracy over LLM-based approaches by 9-12%, while delivering up to 3.0x higher throughput, 2.6x lower VRAM usage, and 2.9x faster inference. Our results demonstrate that hybrid state space architectures provide a promising direction for scalable and hardware-efficient AI-native CSI prediction in future wireless networks.

Recent works have demonstrated that attention-based transformer and large language model (LLM) architectures can achieve strong channel state prediction (CSP) performance by capturing long-range temporal dependencies across channel state information (CSI) sequences.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models leverage pretrained vision-language representations for robot control, yet simply adding historical frames does not reliably capture recent physical change. This is especially problematic in multi-stage manipulation, where visually similar states may require different actions depending on prior execution. To address this challenge, we present TemporalFlow-VLA, which learns compact execution history through physically grounded temporal supervision. Using recorded robot states, robot geometry, and calibrated cameras, we construct robot-surface temporal flow as a training-only target and supervise two execution-aligned temporal queries that provide structured history to the action expert. The geometric supervision path is not evaluated at deployment. TemporalFlow-VLA achieves 97.63 +/- 0.26% average success on LIBERO, including 96.60 +/- 0.87% on LIBERO Long, and 85.5%/84.2% Clean/Randomized success across 12 RoboTwin tasks. It shows its clearest advantage over prior methods on longer-horizon, multi-stage manipulation. Controlled history interventions show that action prediction depends on both historical content and temporal order. With asynchronous feature caching, temporal conditioning maintains single-frame-level server-side sampling latency without additional historical-encoding overhead. Overall, TemporalFlow-VLA provides a compact, physically grounded interface for exploiting ordered execution history without explicit motion estimation or geometric processing at deployment.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models leverage pretrained vision-language representations for robot control, yet simply adding historical frames does not reliably capture recent physical change.

Large-kernel Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) deliver remarkable performance in vision tasks by significantly expanding receptive fields, yet their quadratic parameter growth critically impedes storage-efficient edge deployment. While existing efficient architectures adopt parameter-efficient depthwise separable convolution backbones that leverage techniques like low-rank approximation and weight sharing to compress depthwise convolutions, we identify a critical oversight: pointwise convolutions dominate parameter volume (>87% in models like RepLKNet-31B) and constitute the primary deployment bottleneck on resource-constrained edge devices. This results in prohibitive storage costs and severe memory-loading constraints on resource-limited devices (e.g., smartphones with 4-12 GB Random Access Memory (RAM)). To overcome this, we propose Channel Group-Shared (CGS) low-rank approximation, a novel Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based parameter-sharing strategy. CGS constructs a structured low-rank paradigm isomorphic to SVD decomposition, comprising shared (high-parameter-cost) down/up-projection matrices across channel groups within a layer and channel-group-specific (low-parameter-cost) scalable diagonal matrices. This group-sharing design achieves significant parameter reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that large-kernel CNNs (RepLKNet, ConvNeXt, SLaK) enhanced with CGS strike an empirically favorable balance between competitive performance and substantially reduced storage costs. Crucially, by alleviating storage constraints, reducing memory bandwidth pressure during loading, and minimizing model loading latency, CGS enables the feasible deployment of pre-trained large-kernel CNN models on edge devices, thereby bridging the gap between high-performance vision models and practical edge deployment.

Large-kernel Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) deliver remarkable performance in vision tasks by significantly expanding receptive fields, yet their quadratic parameter growth critically impedes storage-efficient edge deployment.

Despite the growing number of public datasets, annotated medical images remain scarce. Supervised learning methods achieve strong performance on many benchmarks, however require large amounts of labeled data, which are costly and time-consuming to obtain in the medical domain. To address this limitation, contrastive self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising alternative for learning useful representations from unlabeled data. In this work, we investigate two SSL frameworks, SimSiam and SimCLR, for retinal disease classification from fundus images. We focus on understanding how augmentation strategies and training parameters influence representation learning under resource-constrained settings. Given limited data and computational capacity, we explore the feasibility of training SSL models with small batch sizes incorporated with retinal-specific augmentation techniques. Through a series of experiments, we assess the quality of learned representations via linear evaluation and fine-tuning across downstream tasks, including multi-disease classification and diabetic retinopathy grading. Our results show that tailoring augmentation strategies to the characteristics of retinal images plays a critical role in improving performance. Even under constrained settings, lightweight SSL frameworks can learn transferable representations that reduce dependence on large annotated datasets and achieve competitive results.

Despite the growing number of public datasets, annotated medical images remain scarce.

Large pretrained vision-language-action models dominate modern robot-manipulation benchmarks, but it remains unclear how much model scale is necessary for strong language-conditioned control, or whether fundamentally different control architectures can remain competitive at much smaller parameter budgets. We present PredVLA, a language-conditioned predictive-coding policy with only 0.68 million trainable network parameters and no robot-data pretraining, whose hierarchical generative recurrent dynamics predict visual features and proprioception while observations influence latent state only through online inference from the resulting sensory prediction errors. On LIBERO, PredVLA achieves an 86.9% mean success rate across the three short-horizon suites and 75.4% when the long-horizon suite is included. Under a controlled comparison using the same frozen front end, demonstrations, action decoder, and evaluation protocol, PredVLA achieves 3.7x and 7.4x mean success rates of parameter-matched Transformer and LSTM policies, respectively. The predictive-coding formulation also makes the contribution of observation-driven correction directly measurable: because observations influence the recurrent state only through prediction-error-based latent inference, disabling this inference yields an exact open-loop control condition. Together, these results show that a sub-million-parameter recurrent generative policy can achieve strong performance on modern language-conditioned manipulation benchmarks while providing an explicit mechanism for prediction-error-driven online state correction.

Large pretrained vision-language-action models dominate modern robot-manipulation benchmarks, but it remains unclear how much model scale is necessary for strong language-conditioned control, or whether fundamentally different control architectures can remain competitive at much smaller parameter budgets.

Vision-Language-Action Models~(VLAs) have demonstrated significant promise in generalizing to complex, long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks. However, their performance remains brittle, as they are typically trained on trajectory-monotonic, failure-free demonstrations. This reliance on ``perfect" data leaves them unable to recover from common execution errors, such as a missed grasp, a dropped object, or an unexpected collision. In this paper, we propose FLARE, a novel framework that endows VLAs with robust error recovery capabilities through a ``Retry" and ``Reset" paradigm. First, we introduce a ``Retry" mechanism by injecting perturbation and bridging segments that decouple robot pose from environment state into demonstrations, enabling the policy to autonomously handle execution deviations. Second, to address critical, state-breaking (OOD) failures, we introduce a ``Reset" pipeline. We leverage an MLLM for offline failure analysis to automatically identify OOD states from execution videos. This analysis enables the efficient, targeted collection of a small library of object-centric ``Reset" skills, which are trained to restore the environment to a task-valid state. Our full framework integrates these learned policies. At inference, an online MLLM monitor arbitrates between task execution and ``Reset" skills. Experiments on challenging, contact-rich manipulation tasks show our approach significantly improves task success and robustness.

Vision-Language-Action Models~(VLAs) have demonstrated significant promise in generalizing to complex, long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks.

We study dynamic pricing over a finite selling horizon when limited resource capacity determines revenue and the observations available for inference at a prespecified price. Resource depletion can remove the target neighborhood from the feasible price set, changing the experiment generated by the pricing policy. We develop inference-aware re-solving controllers that check target-band feasibility before current covariates arrive and log the pricing mixture. Target-reserved and smooth controllers take population mean-pair geometry as a predeployment input; learned barycentric re-solving instead estimates stationary mean-consumption vectors of predeclared component kernels. On an affine binding-capacity family, an exact-input target-reserved controller assigning mass $t^{-γ}$ obtains an information clock of order $T^{1-γ}$ in probability, radius $O_p\{T^{-(1-γ)/2}\}$, and, under an exposed-face reward identity, a signed fluid-benchmark gap bounded above by $O(\log T+T^{1-γ})$. Under the exogenous affine-face condition, predeclared target support, and polynomial error spending with exponent greater than one, learned barycentric re-solving has a linear information clock in probability and an $O(\log T)$ signed-gap upper bound; centered local pricing has the same orders under slack capacity and global target optimality. An exact-input, target-compatible smooth alternative without reservation gives a linear clock in probability, an $O_p(T^{-1/2})$ deterministic-envelope radius with unconditional coverage and reporting probability tending to one, and an $O(\log^2 T)$ signed-gap upper bound. Boundary results show when physical support is lost and why a $1/t$ target branch yields only $O_p(1)$ information if it is the sole target-local source. The policy reports an interval when its prespecified support and information conditions hold and otherwise abstains.

We study dynamic pricing over a finite selling horizon when limited resource capacity determines revenue and the observations available for inference at a prespecified price.

How should we analyze memory in deep RL? We introduce tools for analyzing policies under partial observability and revealing how agents use memory to make decisions. To utilize these tools, we present POPGym Arcade, a collection of Atari-inspired, hardware-accelerated environments sharing a single observation and action space. Each environment provides fully and partially observable variants, enabling counterfactual studies on observability. We find that controlled studies are necessary for fair comparisons and identify a pathology where value functions smear credit over irrelevant history. Using this pathology, we demonstrate how out-of-distribution scenarios can contaminate memory, perturbing the policy far into the future. Our code is available at https://github.com/bolt-research/popgym-arcade.

How should we analyze memory in deep RL?

Robot manipulation requires policies that are both accurate and efficient, as robot control must respond to changing observations under tight latency constraints. Recent diffusion and flow policies are promising, but they often treat conditions as auxiliary signals rather than jointly evolving them with action trajectories. We find that this limitation can be effectively mitigated by a \textbf{simple yet effective unified condition-action modeling design} that represents conditions and actions in a shared token space, allowing a compact model to achieve high performance while improving both inference speed and accuracy. Therefore, we propose UCA-Flow, a unified condition-action modeling framework for accurate one-step action generation. Our method unifies observation conditions, timestep conditions, interval conditions, and action tokens into a single sequence, and processes them with a Unified Condition-Action Transformer for joint condition-action representation learning. As a result, condition representations are dynamically reconstructed according to the current generation stage, highlighting information most relevant for action refinement. Furthermore, we introduce an improved dual-pass supervision scheme over $u$ and $v$ for stronger optimization of unified condition-action modeling. UCA-Flow improves the average success rate by 9.3 percentage points over the strongest baseline, while achieving $45.6\times$ and $33.4\times$ speedups over DP3 and Simple DP3, and remaining $4.3\times$ and $2.3\times$ faster than one-step FlowPolicy and MP1, respectively.Project page: https://uca-policy.github.io/UCA.github.io/.

Robot manipulation requires policies that are both accurate and efficient, as robot control must respond to changing observations under tight latency constraints.

This work introduces Configured Failure Trapping, a novel backdoor attack task against Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which aims to activate attacks through stealthy textual triggers and induce configured failure modes. Unlike prior backdoor attacks that treat any task failure as a successful attack, Configured Failure Trapping requires the attacker to control how the robot fails (e.g., causing the robot to grasp with a specified positional offset), making it substantially more challenging and hard to detect. To support the new task, we propose an effective data engine for synthesizing high-quality target trajectories and an automated suite for measuring configured-failure fidelity. Then, based on this foundation, we construct two new benchmarks, namely Trap-LIBERO and Trap-RoboTwin, that instantiate Configured Failure Trapping across four representative failure modes. To address this task, we identify sparse action deviation as a critical challenge and accordingly propose a novel method named TrapVLA, which explicitly learns trigger-induced action residuals to steer the policy toward the configured failure behavior. Extensive experiments across simulation benchmarks and real-world robotic settings show that TrapVLA effectively injects configured failure modes into VLA models while largely preserving performance on clean data. Project page: https://john-liua.github.io/TrapVLA/

This work introduces Configured Failure Trapping, a novel backdoor attack task against Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which aims to activate attacks through stealthy textual triggers and induce configured failure modes.

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 \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 provides flexible interfaces for array and tensor backends, enabling efficient reduced-precision emulation on both CPUs and GPUs for neural network deployment. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive exposition of the design and applications of \texttt{pychop}. Furthermore, we present empirical results on reduced-precision emulation for image classification and object detection using published datasets, illustrating the sensitivity to low precision and delivering valuable insights into its quantization-aware training and post-quantization impacts. Establishing itself as a foundational tool for advancing mixed-precision algorithms, \texttt{pychop} enables in-depth investigations into the effects of numerical precision in scientific computing and deep learning deployment, facilitating the development of novel hardware accelerators.

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.

Aligning deployed language models requires knowing when their outputs can be trusted, yet on-device models now ship to hundreds of millions of devices with no server-side moderation, and the configuration developers can actually deploy is rarely audited independently. We present a reproducible reliability audit of the developer-accessible on-device foundation model, framed as an oversight question: can a user or a resource-constrained developer tell when the model is wrong? Red-teaming it on calibration, confident confabulation on false-premise questions, and over-refusal of benign prompts, we find a \emph{task-asymmetric miscalibration}: its guardrails fail in opposite directions across tasks (confabulating on 69\% of false premises while refusing 18\% of entirely benign inputs), atop a self-reported confidence that is saturated and non-discriminative (AUROC 0.47; ECE 70, worst among comparable small models). Crucially, confident-correct and confident-wrong outputs are \emph{surface-indistinguishable}: a classifier over 15 user-visible features separates them at AUROC only 0.55 (equivalence-confirmed), leaving no signal for oversight at inference time. No cheap single-generation signal flags these failures ($\le$0.68 AUROC), whereas a black-box consistency wrapper requiring no model access recovers reliability (confident confabulation 75\%$\to$3\%; selective accuracy 43\%$\to$83\%) at a tunable cost. We contribute a model-agnostic audit protocol, a surface-indistinguishability test, and released code and frozen evaluation items as reusable infrastructure for auditing deployed models.

Aligning deployed language models requires knowing when their outputs can be trusted, yet on-device models now ship to hundreds of millions of devices with no server-side moderation, and the configuration developers can actually deploy is rarely audited independently.

Grasp synthesis is a core task in robotic manipulation, for which the solution typically forms a multimodal distribution rather than a point estimate. Generative robotic grasping aims to learn this distribution with deep generative models such as diffusion and flow-based approaches. The iterative nature of such generative models makes them flexible and generalizable; however, multi-step sampling impedes the time-critical operation required in robotics. We devise an approach to fast generative grasping based on MeanFlow on the product Lie group $\mathcal{G} = \mathrm{SO}(3) \times \mathbb{R}^3$. The training objective couples a purely algebraic semigroup consistency condition with Riemannian Conditional Flow Matching on $\mathcal{G}$ that anchors the average velocity to the data distribution. The resulting Lie Group-constrained MeanFlow formulation samples reliable grasps in $\leq 5$ network evaluations, matching the grasp generation performance of state-of-the-art diffusion and flow-based models on the ACRONYM dataset at millisecond-scale inference latency (up to $39\times$ speed-up). We further demonstrate that the approach directly translates to real-world robotic grasping without additional training or domain adaptation, exhibiting robust grasp synthesis under observation noise.

Grasp synthesis is a core task in robotic manipulation, for which the solution typically forms a multimodal distribution rather than a point estimate.

Scaling generalist vision-language-action (VLA) policies is severely bottlenecked by the inherent heterogeneity of embodied data, which spans diverse robot morphologies, camera configurations, and low-level action spaces. Existing paradigms typically address this mismatch through explicit action retargeting, human-to-robot video synthesis, or dataset-specific adaptation branches, fundamentally hindering the joint learning of a unified policy. We introduce UCAG-P, a camera-centric unified action formulation that structurally aligns heterogeneous embodied datasets into a shared geometric action space. Rather than treating robot-specific commands as the shared policy target, UCAG-P represents manipulation through camera-observable anchor motion in image and camera-frame coordinates, treating robot arms, humanoids, and human hands as different embodiments of a common action schema. A geometry-conditioned action translator combines predicted motion with target-embodiment kinematics to produce executable controls. The resulting decoupled architecture allows a shared VLA policy to learn transferable manipulation geometry while retaining embodiment-specific controllability. UCAG-P is trained on 4.03K hours of robot and simulation data and 2.34K hours of human demonstrations. A single checkpoint reaches 98.3% on LIBERO, 88.7% and 89.2% on RoboTwin Easy and Hard, 82.0% zero-shot on LIBERO-Plus, and 62.0% on RoboCasa GR-1, without benchmark-specific fine-tuning.

Scaling generalist vision-language-action (VLA) policies is severely bottlenecked by the inherent heterogeneity of embodied data, which spans diverse robot morphologies, camera configurations, and low-level action spaces.

Reasoning in language allows foundation models to spend more test-time compute on hard problems, such as those requiring decomposition, constraint tracking, and prediction of future consequences. Whether this mechanism can improve robotic manipulation remains unclear, where long-horizon tasks require tracking partial progress, reasoning about object relations, recovering from mistakes, and steering noisy low-level policies. In this paper, we study whether VLMs can be trained to reason directly in natural language to guide low-level manipulation policies. We introduce $R^3$, a simple post-training recipe that turns off-the-shelf VLMs into robotic reasoners: it first mid-trains a VLM on expert-generated reasoning traces to initialize the desired reasoning style, then improves the reasoner with single-step rubric-based RL from offline action data. Unlike prior robotic reasoning methods that mostly use structured traces as auxiliary supervision, $R^3$ trains free-form language reasoning to produce test-time guidance for action. We instantiate $R^3$ on Language Table and simulated bimanual grocery packing, two controlled testbeds for studying robotic reasoning and long-horizon manipulation. $R^3$ improves exploration and generalization across unseen tasks and significantly outperforms instruction-only imitation learning baselines on both benchmarks. Our analyses suggest that free-form language reasoning can function as a test-time compute mechanism for steering low-level policies. Our project page is available at https://robotic-reasoner.github.io/.

Reasoning in language allows foundation models to spend more test-time compute on hard problems, such as those requiring decomposition, constraint tracking, and prediction of future consequences.

Multi-arm collaboration is becoming a core capability in embodied manipulation. Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models integrate perception, language, and control, but most represent language as a single global instruction and do not provide an explicit mechanism for assigning and composing arm-specific behaviors. This design limits transfer to collaboration patterns that differ from those observed during training. We present MA-VLA, a unified framework for multi-arm collaboration via atomic action assignment. MA-VLA decomposes cooperative behavior into mid-level atomic prompts and allocates them to individual arms, enabling explicit subgoal specification and compositional reuse across tasks. To reduce reliance on fixed execution roles, we introduce Arm Shuffle, a training-time permutation of the observation, state, and assigned atomic prompts for each arm. This permutation enforces role-agnostic instruction following and supports recomposition into unseen coordination patterns, which we term multi-arm compositional generalization. We also construct a benchmark in which test-time collaboration patterns are absent in training set. Across simulation and real-world evaluations, prior state-of-the-art VLAs largely fail under these unseen collaborations, while MA-VLA consistently succeeds. These results indicate that structured, per-arm atomic action assignment offers a practical route to scalable generalization in multi-arm embodied systems. Code, models, and data are available at https://github.com/zhangzaibin/future-robots

Multi-arm collaboration is becoming a core capability in embodied manipulation.

While reinforcement learning (RL) allows generalist robot policies to continually improve during deployment, the large model size of modern generalist policies, such as VLAs, poses a fundamental obstacle to effective RL improvement. In particular, their severe inference latency---which can lead to pauses or jerky movements---can alter the effective environment dynamics and, if not correctly accounted for, break the Markov assumption that RL relies on, causing standard RL algorithms to fail completely. In this work, we introduce a latency-aware framework, Asynchronous RL with Intermediate Information (ARLI), that enables RL-based improvement of generalist policies under inference delays. Our framework builds on asynchronous inference approaches, which interleave action generation with execution to hide latency, and addresses its incompatibility with RL by providing a low-latency RL policy design that maximizes reactivity within the inference window through two contributions: state augmentations that restore near-Markovian structure by incorporating committed actions and a mid-inference observation. We evaluate our approach across simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, and find that it enables effective finetuning under inference delays where standard RL fails entirely, even matching or exceeding the performance of standard RL in idealized no-latency settings.

While reinforcement learning (RL) allows generalist robot policies to continually improve during deployment, the large model size of modern generalist policies, such as VLAs, poses a fundamental obstacle to effective RL improvement.

Recent work on LeWorldModel (LeWM) has shown that the Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularizer (SIGReg) enables stable end-to-end world model learning from pixels by regularizing the latent representation toward an isotropic Gaussian. While effective for latent-space planning, the representations learned by Raw LeWM are poorly suited for downstream robot policy learning. In this paper, through Monte Carlo analysis, we show that the Raw LeWM objective biases variance allocation toward the temporally persistent component, thereby suppressing the variance of the temporally centered residual. Consistent with this analysis, trained Raw LeWM representations exhibit suppressed residual variation and reduced decodability of robot state and dynamics, particularly gripper dynamics, which are crucial for robotic manipulation. To address this issue, we apply SIGReg to temporally centered residuals rather than to the whole latent representation. This simple change decouples persistent and residual variance allocation while retaining an effective anti-collapse property. On the LIBERO benchmark, our method improves downstream policy success on the Goal suite by 1.66x and raises the average success rate across all suites from 63.6% to 83.8%. Without external pretraining, it also outperforms both Diffusion Policy trained from scratch and the pretrained OpenVLA baseline. These results associate the variance-allocation bias of Raw LeWM with the downstream policy gap, and show that decoupling persistent and residual variation yields representations better suited for downstream robot policy learning.

Recent work on LeWorldModel (LeWM) has shown that the Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularizer (SIGReg) enables stable end-to-end world model learning from pixels by regularizing the latent representation toward an isotropic Gaussian.

Emerging computation-intensive applications impose stringent latency requirements on resource-constrained mobile devices. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) addresses this challenge through task offloading. However, designing effective policies remains difficult due to dynamic task arrivals, time-varying channels, and the spatio-temporal coupling of server queues. Conventional heuristics lack adaptability, while Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) suffers from limited generalization and architectural rigidity, requiring retraining when network topology changes. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) offer semantic reasoning capabilities, standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) yields myopic policies that greedily minimize immediate latency without accounting for long-term system evolution. To address these limitations, we propose COMLLM, a generative framework that enables foresighted decision-making in MEC systems. COMLLM integrates Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a Look-Ahead Collaborative Simulation (LACS) mechanism, which performs multi-step Monte Carlo rollouts while jointly modeling server queue dynamics. By incorporating these rollouts into the reward design, the framework captures the long-term impact of current decisions on future system states. Experimental results demonstrate that COMLLM achieves near-optimal latency and improved load-balancing fairness. Notably, it exhibits zero-shot topological scalability, allowing a model trained on small-scale networks to generalize to larger, unseen topologies without retraining, outperforming SFT, DRL, and heuristic baselines.

Emerging computation-intensive applications impose stringent latency requirements on resource-constrained mobile devices.

The inappropriate disposal of solid waste remains a significant public health and environmental concern worldwide, including in Ghana. Poor sanitation and improper waste management practices contribute to substantial economic costs and avoidable deaths annually. In 2022, a field study in Atonsu, Kumasi, Ghana, reported a community-perceived relationship between household waste disposal and illness patterns, but only through descriptive analysis without quantitative validation. This study extends that investigation using two data-driven approaches. First, a Random Forest classifier was developed to predict illness categories using waste disposal practices and demographic survey data. On a held-out group of respondents who reported illness (N=69), the model obtained a macro F1 score of 0.63, with disposal method emerging as the most important substantive predictor of illness type. Second, a MobileNetV2 image classification model enabled automated waste sorting via visual recognition, achieving 88.2% accuracy and a macro F1 score of 0.87 on the test set (N=415). The vision-based approach offers an affordable, camera-driven alternative to complex multi-sensor systems, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained settings. Taken together, the findings provide quantitative evidence for a community health relationship previously documented only qualitatively. They demonstrate the potential for automated waste-sorting in low-resource environments. Importantly, the results illustrate that technological performance alone does not guarantee public health improvements; effective institutional support and implementation are equally necessary.

The inappropriate disposal of solid waste remains a significant public health and environmental concern worldwide, including in Ghana.

World-Action Models (WAMs) build robot control on video-generation backbones, which jointly predict dense future visual trajectories and robot actions. We argue that video generation is an unnecessary intermediate objective for world-action modeling. For robotic manipulation, the goal of a world model is not to reproduce how the world looks at every intermediate moment, but to predict the state that the world will reach after an action is executed. The intermediate frames only describe the visual transition between physical states, which consumes substantial model capacity and computation, but do not directly specify the physical outcome that the robot action is intended to produce. In this paper, we propose DELE-w0.5, which infers robot actions from predicted future states without relying on video generation. Concretely, DELE-w0.5 infers the action sequence from its corresponding compact future latent state. The future latent state captures the action-relevant physical outcome of robot interaction and serves as an explicit bridge between world modeling and action generation. The core design principle of DELE-w0.5 is to model how the physical world changes under robot actions, rather than how its visual appearance evolves frame by frame. This formulation removes the high-dimensional visual redundancy introduced by dense video representations, and it therefore enables cheaper training and low-latency inference. Across 480 real-robot trials on four long-horizon manipulation tasks, our DELE-w0.5 achieves the best performance among all compared policies, attaining 62.5 overall full-task success and 81.3 macro ordered-stage progress, outperforming the strongest baseline by 47.5 and 30.7 percentage points, respectively.

World-Action Models (WAMs) build robot control on video-generation backbones, which jointly predict dense future visual trajectories and robot actions.