Quadruped robots can traverse low obstacles, but many 2D planning pipelines still model obstacles as binary occupied regions and rely on sampling-based search that can be inefficient under a limited budget. We propose a perception-assisted height-adaptive planning framework based on CMP-IRRT*, a Channel Mamba PointNet-guided Informed RRT* planner. Given a calibrated top-view RGB observation, the perception module estimates obstacle regions and converts depth predictions into a ground-relative height map. The planner then performs height-conditioned collision checking, treating high obstacles as blocked while allowing low obstacles to be traversed, and uses the CMP guide to bias sampling toward promising regions while retaining standard free-space and informed sampling fallbacks. Experiments on 2D planning benchmarks show that CMP-IRRT* reduces explored nodes and iterations compared with classical and neural-guided baselines, and a controlled ablation supports the contribution of the Mamba-based guide. In constructed traversability-aware scenarios, the proposed planner reduces path length by up to 16.3% when low obstacles are traversable, and a Unitree Go2 demonstration further shows executable bypassing and traversal behaviors. Our code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10470
Real-time whole-body controllers for legged robots typically plan through a fixed nominal model and degrade when the deployed dynamics change. Adaptive methods typically require a model structure that contact dynamics do not provide, or they need offline training for each anticipated condition. We present Look-back and Look-ahead Adaptive Model Predictive Path Integral control (LLA-MPPI). The method converts whole-body adaptation into selection over a bank of GPU-batched contact simulators with different physical or structural parameters. Windowed prediction errors select the simulator that best explains recent motion. A whole-body MPPI planner optimizes controls through the selected model. The framework requires no offline training, and its selected hypotheses are physically interpretable. Across four simulated tasks, it achieves 97.5% success while the strongest baseline reaches 74% and an oracle with the true model reaches 98.5%. Hardware validation on a Unitree Go2 shows the robot walking under a payload added mid-run, walking after one leg is disabled, and pushing a box to its goal while increasing its mass on the fly. Code, videos, and project details are available at: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10465
We present FoldBack, a self-correcting masked generative policy for long-horizon garment folding. Existing long-trajectory policies may continue after a missed or slipped grasp even when the garment has not reached the intended configuration. We structure FoldBack's recovery mechanisms around three inference-time decisions: when to refine and verify, how to roll back, and where and how to retry. FoldBack aligns refinement and grasp verification with pick-and-place events, returns the robot to a retryable pre-grasp configuration while preserving successful grasps, and selectively regenerates the failed segment and selected future actions while avoiding previous failed grasp locations. To our knowledge, FoldBack is the first editable full-trajectory policy to unify these decisions, enabling failed interactions to be detected, undone, and repaired before execution continues, without recovery demonstrations or base-policy retraining. Across 33 real garments from six categories, FoldBack achieves 75.2% final folding success and 0.837 final-mask IoU, versus 45.7% and 0.689 for the strongest prior baseline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10462
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) achieve remarkable performance in video synthesis, but their iterative denoising process suffers from high inference latency. To address this, caching has emerged as an effective acceleration strategy by capitalizing on inter-step redundancy during denoising. Existing dynamic caching methods typically estimate the error that cache reuse would introduce at each denoising step (step error) to guide cache decisions, whereas our concern is how much quality loss cache reuse would cause in the final generated video (terminal error). We show that step error does not directly correspond to terminal error and that latent information helps capture their relationship, thereby informing cache decisions. Moreover, existing threshold-based methods cannot provide precise speedup control, making it difficult to meet practical requirements for user-specified acceleration targets. To address these limitations, we introduce MORCA, a cache scheduling framework trained through offline-to-online reinforcement learning to make latent-aware reuse/recompute decisions under user-specified acceleration targets. Extensive experiments on different video generation models across multiple target acceleration ratios demonstrate that MORCA achieves better generation fidelity than state-of-the-art caching methods under comparable computational budgets. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10457
Hallucinated information can propagate through multi-stage LLM systems and become part of the context for subsequent reasoning. Existing studies of post-hallucination reasoning (PHR) mainly characterize changes in final outcomes and aggregate reasoning dynamics, leaving how models resolve hallucinated premises at the response level insufficiently understood. In this work, we introduce PHRBench, a controlled benchmark for behaviorally structured PHR across four domains and 18 large language models. PHRBench characterizes each reasoning trajectory independently of final-answer correctness through Hallucination Compliance, Hallucination Avoidance, and Heuristic Correction, and defines an insightful trajectory as successful correction that ultimately reaches the correct answer. Across 4820 controlled instances, we find that successful recovery remains relatively rare and is associated with more frequent belief updates along the reasoning trajectory. We further find that properties of the hallucinated prompt contain substantial predictive signal for successful recovery, with a lightweight predictor achieving an AUROC of 0.847. These findings provide a behavioral view of post-hallucination reasoning, characterizing how LLMs resolve erroneous context and when successful recovery is likely to occur.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10455
Flow-based policies provide an expressive framework for continuous robot control, but their iterative ODE integration incurs substantial inference cost. Naively reducing the integration budget can severely degrade control, since policies optimized under full-step execution are not explicitly constrained to remain reliable under coarse numerical integration. We refer to this mismatch as the few-step discretization gap. To address this problem, we introduce RFPO, a flow-policy optimization framework for reliable few-step execution. Reward-aware online Reflow rectifies student-induced transport paths during on-policy learning, making the resulting policy more robust to coarse integration. A frozen Gaussian PPO controller supplies complementary action-space supervision at full and intermediate integration budgets, while the deployed policy remains a single flow student executed with one Euler step. Across Unitree Go2, Boston Dynamics Spot, Unitree H1, and Unitree G1, RFPO consistently preserves full-step control performance under one-step execution, with one-step returns remaining within 2.4% of their corresponding 64-step values across both zero and random initialization. On Unitree Go2, one-step execution retains 98.5% of the 64-step reward while reducing onboard mean inference latency from 4.39 ms to 0.08 ms, yielding a 54.9x speedup. Real-robot experiments further validate stable one-step locomotion. Code: this https URL. Website: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10453
MemoCare is an interactive mobile system for automated multimodal cognitive screening. A React Native application combines spoken responses, temporal and spatial orientation, touchscreen actions, and visuoconstruction in complete English and Vietnamese workflows. Speech is transcribed by Google Speech-to-Text and scored locally with deterministic task-specific natural language processing rules; GPS coordinates are resolved by the MemoCare spatial module before answer matching; touch tasks are scored from interaction events; and the drawing task uses a three-model convolutional neural network consensus with separate visual interpretation. Software tests pass 151/151 predefined cases across speech/language, spatial-answer, and touch-interaction scoring, while spatial regression passes 48/48 four-country coordinate-resolution cases. For the drawing module, validation-selected ShuffleNetV2 x1.5 achieved 91.33% mean balanced accuracy and 78.87% exact three-criterion accuracy on a locked 71-image test set. Four clinician co-authors additionally inspected the end-to-end workflow, yielding a pooled median rating of 4/5 across eight criteria, with item-level medians ranging from 3 to 4.5. At MMM, attendees can directly try a shortened multimodal screening workflow and inspect automatic item-level and total scoring.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10448
Much knowledge work produces new deliverables from files a workspace already holds, and LLM agents are beginning to take such work over. Through direct corpus interaction, an agent can search and read any of those files from a terminal with no indexing, and producing a deliverable from many of them in this way is what we call direct workspace interaction (DWI). Reaching the files, however, is only half the task: nothing keeps track of what the task asks for, what has been read, and what was listed but never opened, all of which slip through the context window without leaving a trace, so an agent may extract a figure and still deliver a report without it. To address this, we present RunningTab, a framework that equips direct workspace interaction with an environment-side tab: a per-task record of what the task still owes, kept by the environment alongside the agent. Specifically, the agent adds its requirements, while the environment records every file read as an excerpt with its provenance and every listed but unopened file as a candidate; the agent can then see each requirement beside its best-matching excerpts and top unopened candidates, resolve it against matching content or set it aside with a reason, and, should it try to finish with requirements still open, receive them in a finish check. We validate RunningTab on three benchmarks with three LLMs, where it consistently outperforms plain DWI and baselines that keep the record in the model, while its tab usually holds the values a deliverable needs once seen.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10444
Embodied and assistive agents must do more than recognize objects: they must reason about where an object belongs given the layout of an environment and the habits of the people who live in it. Progress on this problem has been limited, in part because no dedicated benchmark or dataset exists to define and evaluate it. Existing RGB-D scan datasets reconstruct static rooms without human activity, while human-object-interaction datasets capture motion without a navigable, fully reconstructed scene or a ground-truth notion of an object's natural destination. We introduce contextual object placement as a benchmark task: predicting an object's destination during an observed object-carrying episode. To support this task, we present Embodied Camera observations of Human Object carrying (ECHO), a large-scale synthetic dataset that pairs dense RGB-D scans of indoor scenes with recordings of an embodied human carrying everyday objects to context-appropriate destinations. ECHO is the first publicly available dataset to combine reconstructed scenes, human activity, natural language, and contextual-placement annotations. It comprises 3,805 human-annotated episodes across 159 floors of 115 HM3D scenes, involving 198 distinct objects. Each floor includes a complete RGB-D scan with human-annotated room labels and a surface list. Each episode provides synchronized RGB-D encounter clips; 6-DoF camera, human, and object trajectories; start and destination surfaces; an action caption; and a human-written context: a single sentence describing the inhabitant's routine that implies the destination without naming it. We evaluate contextual object placement using input-masked probes and an end-to-end baseline. Results show that no single input modality is sufficient, highlighting the need to jointly reason over scene structure, human activity, and contextual knowledge.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10438
Flow policies capture rich and diverse action distributions, and fine-tuning them with off-policy RL to improve beyond the demonstrations has drawn growing interest. However, fine-tuning a flow policy against a learned value function is not trivial, because the policy generates its action over many flow steps. Adjoint matching offers a principled way to update the flow model itself by propagating value information from the final action back to each flow step, but it requires a vector--Jacobian product through the policy at every step, a cost that grows with the number of flow steps and the policy size. We observe that the batch-averaged velocity Jacobian of pretrained flow policies concentrates on its diagonal. Motivated by this finding, we derive a closed-form scalar adjoint that scales the value gradient at the final action by the flow time, eliminating the per-step vector--Jacobian products. We further find that controlling the critic's value at policy-generated actions is particularly important under the scalar adjoint. Based on these findings, we propose Q-learning with Scalar Adjoint Matching (SQAM), which combines the scalar adjoint with a value penalty at those actions. SQAM's gains concentrate on the four hardest OGBench domains, where its success rate exceeds that of the strongest baseline in each domain by 18 to 35 percentage points. To test whether SQAM extends to large pretrained policies, we also fine-tune a vision-language-action policy on a real bimanual robot. SQAM improves over supervised fine-tuning on all three tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10437
Adversarial perturbations can alter the predictions of frozen vision-language models (VLMs) while leaving their confidence and image--text similarity patterns seemingly plausible. We investigate whether we can identify adversarial inputs based on the broader way an image interacts with a collection of general semantic prompts. Our detector summarizes these responses using category-level statistics, relationships among prompts, deviations from clean reference distributions, and stability under weak image transformations, producing a compact response profile that is classified by a lightweight model while the VLM remains fixed. We evaluate the approach on multiple public image datasets, several CLIP-style visual backbones, and a range of gradient-based, optimization-based, automated, and spatial attacks. The detector achieves strong discrimination in attack-specific settings and retains substantial performance when evaluated on attacks not seen during training. Under a controlled detector-specific protocol, the response-profile representation outperforms the evaluated embedding-geometry baselines. Additional analyses show that the feature groups provide complementary information and that the method remains effective under variations in the prompt configuration. We also examine inference cost and performance against detector-aware adaptive attacks. Overall, the results indicate that response patterns across semantic prompts provide a useful complementary signal for adversarial image detection in frozen VLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10436
Autoregressive video generation requires denoising the current frames while writing their key-value representations as context for future predictions. However, these two roles typically share parameters, and we find that their gradients exhibit distinct patterns and systematic negative alignment, hindering the joint optimization of visual quality and temporal consistency. We introduce Self Gradient Forcing Plus (SGF+), which assigns separate parameters to context writing and denoising while preserving their interaction through causal attention. Both roles are jointly optimized using the original generation objective without auxiliary losses, with context writing supervised through its contribution to future predictions. This simple change improves visual quality and long-horizon consistency over the evaluated baselines in both framewise and chunkwise generation, without additional video training data or a longer training horizon. Trained on only 5s rollouts, SGF+ supports continuous generation for up to 24 hours without long-video fine-tuning. These results highlight role-specific parameterization as an effective design principle for high-quality autoregressive video generation and native long-horizon extrapolation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10429
Terminal-agent capability depends jointly on model weights and the runtime harness that formats prompts, binds tools, and handles error recovery. Existing harness-model co-evolution approaches improve both components, yet often treat trajectories produced during harness search as an undifferentiated replay buffer. This practice overlooks that a trajectory's value for model training depends on the harness under which it was generated. To systematically analyze this interface, we establish an alternating co-evolution framework that decouples harness search and policy training through component-wise promotion decisions. Within this framework, we introduce CoTrace, a harness-aware data recipe that explicitly governs trajectory routing, provenance matching, and curriculum refresh. Under CoTrace, recurring execution failures guide harness synthesis, while policy training is strictly conditioned on verified rollouts matched to the adopted runtime for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or fresh online interactions for reinforcement learning (RL). On the Tmax promotion split, CoTrace advances Qwen3.5-9B from 78 to 88 solved tasks under supervised fine-tuning while an online reinforcement variant reaches 90. Specifically, a compact harness-matched corpus produces steady model gains at substantially lower compute than much larger corpora pooled across sibling harnesses. Furthermore, evaluations on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and SWE-bench Lite show that out-of-distribution transfer depends fundamentally on harness compatibility, where maintaining consistency between training and evaluation runtimes prevents procedural execution breakdowns observed under foreign scaffolds.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10426
Adversarial example detectors are often tied to the classifier backbone they were trained on, limiting reuse when the protected model is replaced or upgraded. Directly transferring such detectors across backbones is challenging because different networks generally produce incompatible internal representations. We propose GraphRectify, a graph-based framework for transferring adversarial image detectors across classifier backbones. GraphRectify learns a structured representation of intermediate classifier features and adapts representations from a new backbone to the detector learned on the original model, enabling detector reuse. We evaluate GraphRectify across multiple datasets, backbone architectures, and adversarial attacks, including detector-aware adaptive attacks that jointly target the classifier and detector. Across the complete evaluation matrix, GraphRectify achieves higher aggregate ROC-AUC than training a detector from scratch on the new backbone and the evaluated transfer ablations. The gains are particularly strong for transfers between different backbone families and when sufficient data are available. In contrast, training from scratch remains competitive in the most data-limited settings. These results show that adversarial detection knowledge can transfer effectively across heterogeneous classifier architectures rather than being relearned whenever the protected backbone changes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10423
When reinforcement learning teaches a language model a new behavior, can we find the training rollouts that taught it? And when an attribution method says it can, how do we know the answer is real? We study both questions on online RL fine-tuning with GRPO, using a planted behavior with a known cause. We release BehaviorTrace, an open evaluation harness that combines full-gradient sketching, the planted-behavior setup, and controls for gradient magnitude, fluency, headroom, and variation across seeds and generation draws. Across three seeds on Qwen2.5-1.5B, much of the apparent attribution signal comes from confounds. A control that ranks training steps by gradient size alone, with no behavior target, reaches 4.2 to 4.5 times chance and matches or beats the best targeted estimator on two of three seeds. At saturated checkpoints, model fluency predicts the behavior label at least as well as every gradient method we compared it with. Once fluency is controlled, the per-rollout results change from seed to seed and from one generation draw to the next, so a single run cannot settle the question. One signal does hold on all three seeds. The gradient of the trigger tokens aligns with a target built where the behavior actually occurs. We turn these findings into a checklist for evaluating attribution in RL. We test existing estimators, including GAS (renormalized TracInCP) and a TRAK-style estimator, and do not propose a new one.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10422
Goal-oriented Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to locate and reach targets described in natural language without prescribed routes. Air--ground collaboration is valuable for tasks requiring both wide-area search and fine-grained localization. However, systematic study of goal-oriented air--ground collaborative VLN remains limited by the lack of large-scale, diverse benchmarks and two core challenges: 1) substantial differences between aerial and ground views, together with useful observations becoming unavailable as navigation proceeds, make it difficult to maintain spatially consistent context across platforms and over time; and 2) asymmetric spatial observability makes ground perception locally detailed but spatially limited and aerial perception broad but locally coarse, limiting the reliability of single-platform planning. To address these limitations, we introduce AirGroundVLN, a benchmark containing 10,281 navigation episodes and 955 target instances across 19 Unreal Engine environments, with seen/unseen splits and an aerial-visibility protocol for systematic evaluation. Alongside the benchmark, we propose AG-CoNAV, a trainable reference framework comprising two key components: Spatiotemporally Anchored Collaborative Memory (SACM) and Aerial-Guided Regional-to-Local Planning (AGRLP). SACM maintains and retrieves spatially consistent historical context across aerial and ground observations. Meanwhile, AGRLP combines regional aerial guidance with fine-grained ground navigation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AG-CoNAV and establish AirGroundVLN as a comprehensive benchmark for future exploration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10421
Pretrained text-to-speech (TTS) models can generate expressive speech, but reliable inference-time emotion control remains challenging: prompts and reference audio offer coarse, inconsistent control, whereas specialized conditioning and model adaptation require costly training. We present SteerSpeech, a lightweight activation-steering framework that controls emotion by injecting steering vectors into hidden activations. For each target emotion we train a lightweight low-rank transform, using a multi-expert objective that encourages monotonic emotion control while preserving speaker identity and linguistic content, constraining steering drift, and keeping the TTS backbone frozen. To optimize through discrete speech tokens, we introduce a two-pass generation-and-replay pipeline using a straight-through estimator to backpropagate expert supervision through sampled tokens. At inference, a target-emotion steering direction is optimized with its respective transform and injected into the base TTS model. Objective and subjective evaluations with Qwen3-TTS across seen, unseen, and accented speakers show stronger continuous emotion control with limited speaker and content degradation. SteerSpeech achieves 1.08x-7.12x baseline target-emotion scores and for a representative emotion subjectively, it receives 78.1%-96.8% intensity preference and 1.43x-1.46x speaker-identity preservation at high steering strengths.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10415
Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by using a low-cost draft model to propose tokens that the full-size target model verifies in parallel. Parallel and semi-autoregressive (semi- AR) drafters improve drafting efficiency by proposing an entire block in a single forward pass, but training them raises a new difficulty: the draft distribution for a given position depends on where the decoding round starts, and where rounds start depends on how many tokens earlier rounds accepted. Existing training objectives typically rely on block-local surrogates that ignore this cross-round coupling, and therefore do not directly optimize the global decoding efficiency. In this work, we develop a theoretical framework for training and evaluating these drafters by representing speculative decoding as a Markov reward process. This formulation yields the Expected Decoding Rounds (EDR) objective, which weights local rejection costs by state occupancies and exactly equals the expected number of decoding rounds. Unlike prior surrogate objectives, EDR introduces no auxiliary hyperparameters. We then derive an exact temporal-difference gradient that supports unbiased stochastic optimization from target-model rollouts. The same framework also yields an exact offline evaluator for round counts, enabling paired drafter comparisons on shared target rollouts without running speculative decoding. Finetuning two state-of-the- art drafters, DSpark and DFly, with EDR consistently improves mean accepted length and outperforms existing training objectives across nine benchmarks spanning math reasoning, code generation, and chat.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10411
General-purpose agents increasingly write code, use tools, and complete complex digital tasks, raising the question of how far these capabilities carry into the physical world. To investigate this, we introduce RobotWorld, a challenging simulation testbed for robot use: turning instructions and observations into physical task execution through robot interfaces. Its 84 tasks span manipulation, mobile manipulation, locomotion, driving, and aerial control, with explicit interaction budgets and executable success checks. By analysing task outcomes alongside execution traces, we identify both the capabilities that transfer and the gaps that prevent reliable completion. Furthermore, we find that current agents can construct sophisticated perception and control workflows, including image segmentation, camera calibration, spatial estimation, and dynamics-based computation. These capabilities, however, do not consistently compose into successful behaviour: agents lose task-relevant object states despite reaching commanded poses, fail to correct ineffective actions, recover too late, or mistake unfinished tasks for completion. This uneven transfer also differs across models: Astra succeeds more often on spatial and constrained-contact goals, whereas Opus 5.5 succeeds more often on continuous-balance and timed-interaction goals. By linking these outcomes to execution behaviour, RobotWorld provides both a rigorous proving ground and an empirical account of the remaining capability gaps, thereby establishing concrete targets for training and designing more reliable physical-world agents.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10409
Procrustes-Wasserstein alignment jointly estimates a matching and rotation without supplied correspondences, but alternating minimization can stop at suboptimal solutions. Rubix solves the equally weighted planar problem globally under squared Euclidean loss. Each matching $\sigma$ of two centered $n$-point sets defines a complex correlation $z_\sigma=\sum_i\bar x_i y_{\sigma(i)}$. Their convex hull is the permutation polygon: supporting vertices give optimal matchings at fixed rotations, and the farthest vertex gives the global alignment. We prove the sharp bound of $n(n-1)$ vertices for $n\ge2$, answering Rote's rotation-assignment open problem. In exact arithmetic, assignment queries recover the polygon in $\mathcal O(n^5)$ operations. Assignment-based bounds extend the approach to three-dimensional rotations and partial matching at a supplied translation through branch-and-bound. On timed MPEG-7 shape pairs, Rubix attains every numerical reference value in 12 ms on average, 50 times faster than a rotation grid at the same accuracy. Its distances improve gravity-aligned matching of real 3D scans, shape retrieval and noisy crystal classification over alternating minimization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10408