Accurate forecasting of transportation dynamics is essential for urban mobility and infrastructure planning. Although recent work has achieved strong performance with deep learning models, these methods typically require dataset-specific training, architecture design and hyper-parameter tuning. This paper evaluates whether general-purpose time-series foundation models can serve as forecasters for transportation tasks by benchmarking the zero-shot performance of the state-of-the-art model, Chronos-2, across ten real-world datasets covering highway traffic volume and flow, urban traffic speed, bike-sharing demand, and electric vehicle charging station data. Under a consistent evaluation protocol, we find that, even without any task-specific fine-tuning, Chronos-2 delivers state-of-the-art or competitive accuracy across most datasets, frequently outperforming classical statistical baselines and specialized deep learning architectures, particularly at longer horizons. Beyond point forecasting, we evaluate its native probabilistic outputs using prediction-interval coverage and sharpness, demonstrating that Chronos-2 also provides useful uncertainty quantification without dataset-specific training. In general, this study supports the adoption of time-series foundation models as a key baseline for transportation forecasting research.
We present a scalable methodology for evaluating language models in multi-turn interactions, using a suite of collaborative games that require effective communication about private information. This enables an interactive scaling analysis, in which a fixed token budget is divided over a variable number of turns. We find that in many cases, language models are unable to use interactive collaboration to improve over the non-interactive baseline scenario in which one agent attempts to summarize its information and the other agent immediately acts -- despite substantial headroom. This suggests that state-of-the-art models still suffer from significant weaknesses in planning and executing multi-turn collaborative conversations. We analyze the linguistic features of these dialogues, assessing the roles of sycophancy, information density, and discourse coherence. While there is no single linguistic explanation for the collaborative weaknesses of contemporary language models, we note that humans achieve comparable task success at superior token efficiency by producing dialogues that are more coherent than those produced by most language models. The proactive management of private information is a defining feature of real-world communication, and we hope that MT-PingEval will drive further work towards improving this capability.
Mobile Agents can autonomously execute user instructions, which requires hybrid-capabilities reasoning, including screen summary, subtask planning, action decision and action function. However, existing agents struggle to achieve both decoupled enhancement and balanced integration of these capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Channel-of-Mobile-Experts (CoME), a novel agent architecture consisting of four distinct experts, each aligned with a specific reasoning stage, CoME activates the corresponding expert to generate output tokens in each reasoning stage via output-oriented activation. To empower CoME with hybrid-capabilities reasoning, we introduce a progressive training strategy: Expert-FT enables decoupling and enhancement of different experts' capability; Router-FT aligns expert activation with the different reasoning stage; CoT-FT facilitates seamless collaboration and balanced optimization across multiple capabilities. To mitigate error propagation in hybrid-capabilities reasoning, we propose InfoGain-Driven DPO (Info-DPO), which uses information gain to evaluate the contribution of each intermediate step, thereby guiding CoME toward more informative reasoning. Comprehensive experiments show that CoME outperforms dense mobile agents and MoE methods on both AITZ and AMEX datasets.
Observational learning requires an agent to learn to perform a task by referencing only observations of the performed task. This work investigates the equivalent setting in real-world robot learning where access to hand-designed rewards and demonstrator actions are not assumed. To address this data-constrained setting, this work presents a planning-based Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) algorithm for world modeling from observation and interaction alone. Experiments conducted entirely in the real-world demonstrate that this paradigm is effective for learning image-based manipulation tasks from scratch in under an hour, without assuming prior knowledge, pre-training, or data of any kind beyond task observations. Moreover, this work demonstrates that the learned world model representation is capable of online transfer learning in the real-world from scratch. In comparison to existing approaches, including IRL, RL, and Behavior Cloning (BC), which have more restrictive assumptions, the proposed approach demonstrates significantly greater sample efficiency and success rates, enabling a practical path forward for online world modeling and planning from observation and interaction. Videos and more at: https://uwrobotlearning.github.io/mpail2/.
Across the peak of cosmic star formation at $z\sim1-2$, inflow, processing, and feedback drive rapid changes in the spatial distribution and chemical composition of baryons in galaxies and surrounding reservoirs; this baryon cycle can be tomographically mapped by line intensity mapping (LIM) of atomic hydrogen, ionized carbon, and carbon monoxide. We present a simulation-based forecasting framework for detecting auto- and cross-power spectra between spectroscopic surveys of four such tracers at $z\sim0.5-1.7$ mapping the same deep field - TIM, EoRSpec/FYST, MeerKAT, & Euclid. We forward-model 3-D distributions for these tracers from magnetohydrodynamic simulations, directly capturing the two-halo, one-halo, and shot statistics without relying on analytical decompositions. We further detail a signal-to-noise formalism, tailored to LIM surveys with highly anisotropic geometries and Fourier-space coverage. We demonstrate that galaxy cross-correlations will be the dominant discovery channel for current-generation surveys. These instruments will detect the auto-spectra for CO and HI 21 cm and the CO $\times$ 21 cm cross-spectrum at modest S/N $\sim 1-10$, while placing upper limits on the [CII]-158$μ$m signals. [CII], CO, and HI LIM will be $\sim3-30\times$ ($0.5-1.5$ dex) more sensitive to cross-correlation with the Euclid survey, however, than their respective auto-correlations, constraining all three models of line emission at high significance (S/N $\sim 10-40$) within this decade. Finally, we formulate a staged instrumental trajectory with planned or reasonable improvements, including the as-proposed SKA-Mid. We forecast advancing the per-$k$-mode sensitivities of each auto-, galaxy-line, and line-line spectrum by several orders of magnitude, enabling new percent- and sub-percent level constraints on cosmology and the redshift evolution of star formation and the baryon cycle.
Open RAN (O-RAN) exposes rich control and telemetry interfaces across the Non-RT RIC, Near-RT RIC, and distributed units, but also makes it harder to operate multi-tenant, multi-objective RANs in a safe and auditable manner. In parallel, agentic AI systems with explicit planning, tool use, memory, and self-management offer a natural way to structure long-lived control loops. This article surveys how such agentic controllers can be brought into O-RAN: we review the O-RAN architecture, contrast agentic controllers with conventional ML/RL xApps, and organise the task landscape around three clusters: network slice life-cycle, radio resource management (RRM) closed loops, and cross-cutting security, privacy, and compliance. We then introduce a small set of agentic primitives (Plan-Act-Observe-Reflect, skills as tool use, memory and evidence, and self-management gates) and show, in a multi-cell O-RAN simulation, how they improve slice life-cycle and RRM performance compared to conventional baselines and ablations that remove individual primitives. Security, privacy, and compliance are discussed as architectural constraints and open challenges for standards-aligned deployments. This framework achieves an average 8.83\% reduction in resource usage across three classic network slices.
Winter road maintenance is critical for ensuring public safety and reducing environmental impacts, yet existing methods struggle to manage large-scale routing problems effectively and mostly reply on human decision. This study presents a novel, scalable bi-level optimization framework, validated on real operational data on UK strategic road networks (M25, M6, A1), including interconnected local road networks in surrounding areas for vehicle traversing, as part of the highway operator's efforts to solve existing planning challenges. At the upper level, a reinforcement learning (RL) agent strategically partitions the road network into manageable clusters and optimally allocates resources from multiple depots. At the lower level, a multi-objective vehicle routing problem (VRP) is solved within each cluster, minimizing the maximum vehicle travel time and total carbon emissions. Unlike existing approaches, our method handles large-scale, real-world networks efficiently, explicitly incorporating vehicle-specific constraints, depot capacities, and road segment requirements. Results demonstrate significant improvements, including balanced workloads, reduced maximum travel times below the targeted two-hour threshold, lower emissions, and substantial cost savings. This study illustrates how advanced AI-driven bi-level optimization can directly enhance operational decision-making in real-world transportation and logistics.
This workshop report from "Shaping the Digital Future of ErUM Research: Sustainability & Ethics" (Aachen, 2025) reviews progress on sustainability measures in data-intensive ErUM-Data research since the 2023 call-to-action on resource-aware research. It evaluates short-, medium-, and long-term actions around monitoring and reducing CO2 emissions, improving data and software FAIRness, optimizing workflows and computing infrastructures, and aligning operations with low-carbon energy availability, including concepts such as "breathing" computing centers, long-term data storage strategies, and software efficiency certification. The report stresses the need for systematic teaching, training, mentoring, and new support formats to establish sustainable coding and computing practices, particularly among students and early-career researchers, and highlights the importance of dedicated steering and funding instruments to embed sustainability in project planning. Ethical discussions focus on the transformative use of AI in ErUM-Data, addressing autonomy, bias, transparency, explainability, attribution of responsibility, and the risk of deskilling, while reaffirming that accountability for scientific outcomes remains with human researchers. Finally, the report emphasizes that sustainable transformation requires not only technical measures but also targeted awareness-building, communication strategies, incentives, and community-driven initiatives to move from awareness to action and to integrate sustainability and ethics into everyday scientific practice.
In the planned or considered upgrades of LHCb, ALICE and Belle II experiments, the Ring imaging Cherenkov (RICH) detectors will have to be improved in order to function at increased beam interaction density. The photodetectors used in future RICH detector will have to provide high granularity, single photon sensitivity and excellent timing, while being exposed to a couple of 10$^{13}$ 1-MeV neutron equivalent/cm$^2$ of background irradiation during total experiment run time. The spadRICH project is developing a CMOS single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) based photodetector specifically optimized for the application of the planned RICH detectors, which includes neutron radiation hardness and cryogenic operation. In this work we present recent experimental characterization studies of existing SPADs produced in 55 nm BCD and 110 nm CMOS image sensor technologies. Main results include dark count rate (DCR) measurements with SPADs irradiated up to 10$^{12}$ 1-MeV neutron equivalent/cm$^2$ and cooled down to liquid nitrogen temperature.
This paper presents a novel autonomous robotic assembly framework for constructing stable structures without relying on predefined architectural blueprints. Instead of following fixed plans, construction tasks are defined through targets and obstacles, allowing the system to adapt more flexibly to environmental uncertainty and variations during the building process. A reinforcement learning (RL) policy, trained using deep Q-learning with successor features, serves as the decision-making component. As a proof of concept, we evaluate the approach on a benchmark of 15 2D robotic assembly tasks of discrete block construction. Experiments using a real-world closed-loop robotic setup demonstrate the feasibility of the method and its ability to handle construction noise. The results suggest that our framework offers a promising direction for more adaptable and robust robotic construction in real-world environments.
Full-stack multimodal interaction in real-time is a central goal in building intelligent embodied agents capable of natural, dynamic communication. However, existing systems are either limited to unimodal generation or suffer from degraded reasoning and poor cross-modal alignment, preventing coherent and perceptually grounded interactions. In this work, we introduce U-Mind, the first unified system for high-intelligence multimodal dialogue that supports real-time generation and jointly models language, speech, motion, and video synthesis within a single interactive loop. At its core, U-Mind implements a Unified Alignment and Reasoning Framework that addresses two key challenges: enhancing cross-modal synchronization via a segment-wise alignment strategy, and preserving reasoning abilities through Rehearsal-Driven Learning. During inference, U-Mind adopts a text-first decoding pipeline that performs internal chain-of-thought planning followed by temporally synchronized generation across modalities. To close the loop, we implement a real-time video rendering framework conditioned on pose and speech, enabling expressive and synchronized visual feedback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U-Mind achieves state-of-the-art performance on a range of multimodal interaction tasks, including question answering, instruction following, and motion generation, paving the way toward intelligent, immersive conversational agents.
Cloud computing enables cost-effective on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. The purpose of this paper is to examine and identifying the use of Cloud computing in the critical infrastructure domain among small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The data for this study were gathered from a survey of different academic, industry, governmental and online literature related to the use of Cloud computing in SMEs. The result revealed that there are risks involved in the use of Cloud computing, SMEs are deploying Cloud computing using different deployment models and reaching a high level of deployment within the critical infrastructure. The research findings are useful for SMEs that are planning or are in the use of Cloud computing, as well as for SMEs policymakers and business support community that engaged with Cloud computing initiatives.
Force/torque feedback can substantially improve Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models on contact-rich manipulation, but most existing approaches fuse all modalities at a single operating frequency. This design ignores the mismatched sampling rates of real robot sensors, forcing downsampling of the high-frequency contact cues needed for reactive correction. Combined with common VLM-action-expert (AE) pipelines that execute action chunks largely open loop between expensive VLM updates, unified-frequency fusion often yields delayed responses to impacts, stick-slip, and force spikes. We propose FAVLA, a force-adaptive fast-slow VLA that decouples slow perception planning from fast contact-aware control. FAVLA runs a slow VLM at a fixed low frequency to encode modalities to produce latent representations and to predict near-future force variation. A fast AE then executes at a variable high frequency, conditioning on the latest force sequence data to generate reactive actions. We further introduce a force adapter that injects high-frequency force features into multiple AE layers, and adaptively schedules the AE's execution frequency based on the VLM's predicted force variation. Extensive experiments on contact-rich tasks demonstrate that FAVLA significantly outperforms baselines, achieving superior reactivity and success rates, especially with a smaller contact force during manipulation.
Magnetic rolling microrobots enable gentle manipulation in confined microfluidic environments, yet autonomy for contact-rich behaviors such as cell pushing and multi-target assembly remains difficult to develop and evaluate reproducibly. We present MicroPush, an open-source simulator and benchmark suite for magnetic rolling microrobots in cluttered 2D scenes. MicroPush combines an overdamped interaction model with contact-aware stick--slip effects, lightweight near-field damping, optional Poiseuille background flow, and a calibrated mapping from actuation frequency to free-space rolling speed. On top of the simulator core, we provide a modular planning--control stack with a two-phase strategy for contact establishment and goal-directed pushing, together with a deterministic benchmark protocol with fixed tasks, staged execution, and unified CSV logging for single-object transport and hexagonal assembly. We report success, time, and tracking metrics, and an actuation-variation measure $E_{Δω}$. Results show that controller stability dominates performance under flow disturbances, while planner choice can influence command smoothness over long-horizon sequences via waypoint progression. MicroPush enables reproducible comparison and ablation of planning, control, and learning methods for microscale contact-rich micromanipulation.
In the real world, planning is often challenged by distribution shifts. As such, a model of the environment obtained under one set of conditions may no longer remain valid as the distribution of states or the environment dynamics change, which in turn causes previously learned strategies to fail. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for planning under partial observability using Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) formulated using causal knowledge. By representing shifts in the environment as interventions on this causal POMDP, the framework enables evaluating plans under hypothesized changes and actively identifying which components of the environment have been altered. We show how to maintain and update a belief over both the latent state and the underlying domain, and we prove that the value function remains piecewise linear and convex (PWLC) in this augmented belief space. Preservation of PWLC under distribution shifts has the advantage of maintaining the tractability of planning via $α$-vector-based POMDP methods.
Curation is a significant barrier to using 'big data' radiotherapy planning databases of 100,000+ patients. Anatomic site stratification is essential for downstream analyses, but current methods rely on inconsistent plan labels or target nomenclature, which is unreliable for multi-institutional data. We developed software to automate labeling by inferring anatomic regions directly from dose-volume overlap with deep-learning segmentations, eliminating metadata reliance. The software processes DICOM files in bulk, utilizing deep learning to segment 118 structures (organs, glands, and bones) categorized into six regions: Cranial, Head and Neck, Pelvis, Abdomen, Thorax, Extremity. The 85% and 50% isodose lines are converted to structures to compute organ-specific dose-overlap metrics. Plans are assigned ranked regional labels based on these intersections. The algorithm was refined using 109 expert-labeled cases and validated on 100 consecutive clinical plans. On the 100-plan test dataset, the algorithm achieved 91% Exact Accuracy (matching all expert labels and order), 94% Top-2 Accuracy (matching the top two expert regions regardless of order), and 95% Top-1 Accuracy (matching the primary expert label). The automated workflow demonstrated high accuracy and robustness. The 95% Top-1 Accuracy is particularly significant, as it enables reliable querying of plans based on the primary treatment site. Detailed analysis of the few mismatched cases showed most were treated areas at the border between anatomic regions and were ambiguous between these two regions in a common-sense interpretation. This algorithm provides a scalable, standardized solution for curating the large, multi-institutional datasets required for 'big data' in radiotherapy and provides an important complement to text-based approaches.
Collecting a high-quality dataset is a critical task that demands meticulous attention to detail, as overlooking certain aspects can render the entire dataset unusable. Autonomous driving challenges remain a prominent area of research, requiring further exploration to enhance the perception and planning performance of vehicles. However, existing datasets are often incomplete. For instance, datasets that include perception information generally lack planning data, while planning datasets typically consist of extensive driving sequences where the ego vehicle predominantly drives forward, offering limited behavioral diversity. In addition, many real datasets struggle to evaluate their models, especially for planning tasks, since they lack a proper closed-loop evaluation setup. The CARLA Leaderboard 2.0 challenge, which provides a diverse set of scenarios to address the long-tail problem in autonomous driving, has emerged as a valuable alternative platform for developing perception and planning models in both open-loop and closed-loop evaluation setups. Nevertheless, existing datasets collected on this platform present certain limitations. Some datasets appear to be tailored primarily for limited sensor configuration, with particular sensor configurations. To support end-to-end autonomous driving research, we have collected a new dataset comprising over 2.85 million frames using the CARLA simulation environment for the diverse Leaderboard 2.0 challenge scenarios. Our dataset is designed not only for planning tasks but also supports dynamic object detection, lane divider detection, centerline detection, traffic light recognition, prediction tasks and visual language action models . Furthermore, we demonstrate its versatility by training various models using our dataset. Moreover, we also provide numerical rarity scores to understand how rarely the current state occurs in the dataset.
We propose a signal temporal logic (STL)-based framework that rigorously verifies the feasibility of a mission described in STL and synthesizes control to safely execute it. The proposed framework ensures safe and reliable operation through two phases. First, the proposed framework assesses the feasibility of STL by computing a backward reachable tube (BRT), which captures all states that can satisfy the given STL, regardless of the initial state. The proposed framework accommodates the multiple reach-avoid (MRA) problem to address more general STL specifications and leverages a deep neural network to alleviate the computation burden for reachability analysis, reducing the computation time by about 1000 times compared to a baseline method. We further propose a layered planning and control architecture that combines mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) for global planning with model predictive control (MPC) as a local controller for the verified STL. Consequently, the proposed framework can robustly handle unexpected behavior of obstacles that are not described in the environment information or STL, thereby providing reliable mission performance. Our numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed framework can successfully compute BRT for a given STL and perform the mission.
The accurate and automatic extraction of roads from satellite imagery is critical for applications in navigation and urban planning, significantly reducing the need for manual annotation. Many existing methods decompose this task into keypoint extraction and connectedness prediction, but often struggle to capture long-range dependencies and complex topologies. Here, we propose LineGraph2Road, a framework that improves connectedness prediction by formulating it as binary classification over edges in a constructed global but sparse Euclidean graph, where nodes are keypoints extracted from segmentation masks and edges connect node pairs within a predefined distance threshold, representing potential road segments. To better learn structural link representation, we transform the original graph into its corresponding line graph and apply a Graph Transformer on it for connectedness prediction. This formulation overcomes the limitations of endpoint-embedding fusion on set-isomorphic links, enabling rich link representations and effective relational reasoning over the global structure. Additionally, we introduce an overpass/underpass head to resolve multi-level crossings and a coupled NMS strategy to preserve critical connections. We evaluate LineGraph2Road on three benchmarks: City-scale, SpaceNet, and Global-scale, and show that it achieves state-of-the-art results on two key metrics, TOPO-F1 and APLS. It also captures fine visual details critical for real-world deployment. We will make our code publicly available.
Indicator-based approaches to machine consciousness recommend mechanism-linked evidence triangulated across tasks, supported by architectural inspection and causal intervention. Inspired by Humphrey's ipsundrum hypothesis, we implement ReCoN-Ipsundrum, an inspectable agent that extends a ReCoN state machine with a recurrent persistence loop over sensory salience Ns and an optional affect proxy reporting valence/arousal. Across fixed-parameter ablations (ReCoN, Ipsundrum, Ipsundrum+affect), we operationalize Humphrey's qualiaphilia (preference for sensory experience for its own sake) as a familiarity-controlled scenic-over-dull route choice. We find a novelty dissociation: non-affect variants are novelty-sensitive (Delta scenic-entry = 0.07). Affect coupling is stable (Delta scenic-entry = 0.01) even when scenic is less novel (median Delta novelty ~ -0.43). In reward-free exploratory play, the affect variant shows structured local investigation (scan events 31.4 vs. 0.9; cycle score 7.6). In a pain-tail probe, only the affect variant sustains prolonged planned caution (tail duration 90 vs. 5). Lesioning feedback+integration selectively reduces post-stimulus persistence in ipsundrum variants (AUC drop 27.62, 27.9%) while leaving ReCoN unchanged. These dissociations link recurrence -> persistence and affect-coupled control -> preference stability, scanning, and lingering caution, illustrating how indicator-like signatures can be engineered and why mechanistic and causal evidence should accompany behavioral markers.
Real-world multimodal agents solve multi-step workflows grounded in visual evidence. For example, an agent can troubleshoot a device by linking a wiring photo to a schematic and validating the fix with online documentation, or plan a trip by interpreting a transit map and checking schedules under routing constraints. However, existing multimodal benchmarks mainly evaluate single-turn visual reasoning or specific tool skills, and they do not fully capture the realism, visual subtlety, and long-horizon tool use that practical agents require. We introduce AgentVista, a benchmark for generalist multimodal agents that spans 25 sub-domains across 7 categories, pairing realistic and detail-rich visual scenarios with natural hybrid tool use. Tasks require long-horizon tool interactions across modalities, including web search, image search, page navigation, and code-based operations for both image processing and general programming. Comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models exposes significant gaps in their ability to carry out long-horizon multimodal tool use. Even the best model in our evaluation, Gemini-3-Pro with tools, achieves only 27.3% overall accuracy, and hard instances can require more than 25 tool-calling turns. We expect AgentVista to accelerate the development of more capable and reliable multimodal agents for realistic and ultra-challenging problem solving.
Generalized planning studies the construction of solution strategies that generalize across families of planning problems sharing a common domain model, formally defined by a transition function $γ: S \times A \rightarrow S$. Classical approaches achieve such generalization through symbolic abstractions and explicit reasoning over $γ$. In contrast, recent Transformer-based planners, such as PlanGPT and Plansformer, largely cast generalized planning as direct action-sequence prediction, bypassing explicit transition modeling. While effective on in-distribution instances, these approaches typically require large datasets and model sizes, and often suffer from state drift in long-horizon settings due to the absence of explicit world-state evolution. In this work, we formulate generalized planning as a transition-model learning problem, in which a neural model explicitly approximates the successor-state function $\hatγ \approx γ$ and generates plans by rolling out symbolic state trajectories. Instead of predicting actions directly, the model autoregressively predicts intermediate world states, thereby learning the domain dynamics as an implicit world model. To study size-invariant generalization and sample efficiency, we systematically evaluate multiple state representations and neural architectures, including relational graph encodings. Our results show that learning explicit transition models yields higher out-of-distribution satisficing-plan success than direct action-sequence prediction in multiple domains, while achieving these gains with significantly fewer training instances and smaller models. This is an extended version of a short paper accepted at ICAPS 2026 under the same title.
The sudden appearance of occluded pedestrians presents a critical safety challenge in autonomous driving. Conventional rule-based or purely data-driven approaches struggle with the inherent high uncertainty of these long-tail scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel framework grounded in Active Inference, which endows the agent with a human-like, belief-driven mechanism. Our framework leverages a Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter (RBPF) to efficiently estimate the pedestrian's hybrid state. To emulate human-like cognitive processes under uncertainty, we introduce a Conditional Belief Reset mechanism and a Hypothesis Injection technique to explicitly model beliefs about the pedestrian's multiple latent intentions. Planning is achieved via a Cross-Entropy Method (CEM) enhanced Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controller, which synergizes the efficient, iterative search of CEM with the inherent robustness of MPPI. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the collision rate compared to reactive, rule-based, and reinforcement learning (RL) baselines, while also exhibiting explainable and human-like driving behavior that reflects the agent's internal belief state.
Energy-based predictive world models provide a powerful approach for multi-step visual planning by reasoning over latent energy landscapes rather than generating pixels. However, existing approaches face two major challenges: (i) their latent representations are typically learned in Euclidean space, neglecting the underlying geometric and hierarchical structure among states, and (ii) they struggle with long-horizon prediction, which leads to rapid degradation across extended rollouts. To address these challenges, we introduce GeoWorld, a geometric world model that preserves geometric structure and hierarchical relations through a Hyperbolic JEPA, which maps latent representations from Euclidean space onto hyperbolic manifolds. We further introduce Geometric Reinforcement Learning for energy-based optimization, enabling stable multi-step planning in hyperbolic latent space. Extensive experiments on CrossTask and COIN demonstrate around 3% SR improvement in 3-step planning and 2% SR improvement in 4-step planning compared to the state-of-the-art V-JEPA 2. Project website: https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/GeoWorld.
Recent automated vehicle (AV) motion planning strategies evolve around minimizing risk in road traffic. However, they exclusively consider risk from the AV's perspective and, as such, do not address the ethicality of its decisions for other road users. We argue that this does not reduce the risk of each road user, as risk may be different from the perspective of each road user. Indeed, minimizing the risk from the AV's perspective may not imply that the risk from the perspective of other road users is also being minimized; in fact, it may even increase. To test this hypothesis, we propose an AV motion planning strategy that supports switching risk minimization strategies between all road user perspectives. We find that the risk from the perspective of other road users can generally be considered different to the risk from the AV's perspective. Taking a collective risk perspective, i.e., balancing the risks of all road users, we observe an AV that minimizes overall traffic risk the best, while putting itself at slightly higher risk for the benefit of others, which is consistent with human driving behavior. In addition, adopting a collective risk minimization strategy can also be beneficial to the AV's travel efficiency by acting assertively when other road users maintain a low risk estimate of the AV. Yet, the AV drives conservatively when its planned actions are less predictable to other road users, i.e., associated with high risk. We argue that such behavior is a form of self-reflection and a natural prerequisite for socially acceptable AV behavior. We conclude that to facilitate ethicality in road traffic that includes AVs, the risk-perspective of each road user must be considered in the decision-making of AVs.
Presentation generation requires deep content research, coherent visual design, and iterative refinement based on observation. However, existing presentation agents often rely on predefined workflows and fixed templates. To address this, we present DeepPresenter, an agentic framework that adapts to diverse user intents, enables effective feedback-driven refinement, and generalizes beyond a scripted pipeline. Specifically, DeepPresenter autonomously plans, renders, and revises intermediate slide artifacts to support long-horizon refinement with environmental observations. Furthermore, rather than relying on self-reflection over internal signals (e.g., reasoning traces), our environment-grounded reflection conditions the generation process on perceptual artifact states (e.g., rendered slides), enabling the system to identify and correct presentation-specific issues during execution. Results on the evaluation set covering diverse presentation-generation scenarios show that DeepPresenter achieves state-of-the-art performance, and the fine-tuned 9B model remains highly competitive at substantially lower cost. Our project is available at: https://github.com/icip-cas/PPTAgent
With the recent fast development of generative models, instruction-based image editing has shown great potential in generating high-quality images. However, the quality of editing highly depends on carefully designed instructions, placing the burden of task decomposition and sequencing entirely on the user. To achieve autonomous image editing, we present PhotoAgent, a system that advances image editing through explicit aesthetic planning. Specifically, PhotoAgent formulates autonomous image editing as a long-horizon decision-making problem. It reasons over user aesthetic intent, plans multi-step editing actions via tree search, and iteratively refines results through closed-loop execution with memory and visual feedback, without requiring step-by-step user prompts. To support reliable evaluation in real-world scenarios, we introduce UGC-Edit, an aesthetic evaluation benchmark consisting of 7,000 photos and a learned aesthetic reward model. We also construct a test set containing 1,017 photos to systematically assess autonomous photo editing performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhotoAgent consistently improves both instruction adherence and visual quality compared with baseline methods. The project page is https://github.com/mdyao/PhotoAgent.
Diffusion models have become a popular choice for decision-making tasks in robotics, and more recently, are also being considered for solving autonomous driving tasks. However, their applications and evaluations in autonomous driving remain limited to simulation-based or laboratory settings. The full strength of diffusion models for large-scale, complex real-world settings, such as End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E AD), remains underexplored. In this study, we conducted a systematic and large-scale investigation to unleash the potential of the diffusion models as planners for E2E AD, based on a tremendous amount of real-vehicle data and road testing. Through comprehensive and carefully controlled studies, we identify key insights into the diffusion loss space, trajectory representation, and data scaling that significantly impact E2E planning performance. Moreover, we also provide an effective reinforcement learning post-training strategy to further enhance the safety of the learned planner. The resulting diffusion-based learning framework, Hyper Diffusion Planner} (HDP), is deployed on a real-vehicle platform and evaluated across 6 urban driving scenarios and 200 km of real-world testing, achieving a notable 10x performance improvement over the base model. Our work demonstrates that diffusion models, when properly designed and trained, can serve as effective and scalable E2E AD planners for complex, real-world autonomous driving tasks.
Value decomposition (VD) methods have achieved remarkable success in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, their reliance on the max operator for temporal-difference (TD) target calculation leads to systematic Q-value overestimation. This issue is particularly severe in MARL due to the combinatorial explosion of the joint action space, which often results in unstable learning and suboptimal policies. To address this problem, we propose QSIM, a similarity weighted Q-learning framework that reconstructs the TD target using action similarity. Instead of using the greedy joint action directly, QSIM forms a similarity weighted expectation over a structured near-greedy joint action space. This formulation allows the target to integrate Q-values from diverse yet behaviorally related actions while assigning greater influence to those that are more similar to the greedy choice. By smoothing the target with structurally relevant alternatives, QSIM effectively mitigates overestimation and improves learning stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QSIM can be seamlessly integrated with various VD methods, consistently yielding superior performance and stability compared to the original algorithms. Furthermore, empirical analysis confirms that QSIM significantly mitigates the systematic value overestimation in MARL. Code is available at https://github.com/MaoMaoLYJ/pymarl-qsim.
We introduce SceneTransporter, an end-to-end framework for structured 3D scene generation from a single image. While existing methods generate part-level 3D objects, they often fail to organize these parts into distinct instances in open-world scenes. Through a debiased clustering probe, we reveal a critical insight: this failure stems from the lack of structural constraints within the model's internal assignment mechanism. Based on this finding, we reframe the task of structured 3D scene generation as a global correlation assignment problem. To solve this, SceneTransporter formulates and solves an entropic Optimal Transport (OT) objective within the denoising loop of the compositional DiT model. This formulation imposes two powerful structural constraints. First, the resulting transport plan gates cross-attention to enforce an exclusive, one-to-one routing of image patches to part-level 3D latents, preventing entanglement. Second, the competitive nature of the transport encourages the grouping of similar patches, a process that is further regularized by an edge-based cost, to form coherent objects and prevent fragmentation. Extensive experiments show that SceneTransporter outperforms existing methods on open-world scene generation, significantly improving instance-level coherence and geometric fidelity. Code and models will be publicly available at https://2019epwl.github.io/SceneTransporter/.