Autonomous
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TRACER: Trajectory-Aware Tool Retrieval for LLM Agents
2026-10-15 05:00:58Tanish Kher, Sarvesh DK, Abedelkadir Asi, Sparsha Chennarayapatna Sundaresh, Dezhi HongAbstract
Modern agents select tools from registries, but exposing entire registries incurs high token costs and can impair selection as they grow. We present TRACER, a retrieval front-end that indexes observed tool-call sequences in a trie and ranks continuations using a learned blend of empirical and contextual priors. On a mixed retail-and-telecom $\tau^2$ environment, TRACER improves GPT-5.4's tool-selection accuracy by 4.7 points while reducing input tokens per step by 80%, exposing just 5 of 128 tools. In autonomous full-turn execution, it matches GPT-5.4's full-registry task success with 61% fewer input tokens per step. Across six environments and four models, TRACER improves tool-selection accuracy over full-registry selection in 21 of 24 model-environment pairs, with average gains of 6 to 10 points; the three exceptions trail by at most 2.2. We analyze failures in both regimes to identify directions for future work.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21267
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A Responsibility-Centered Coordination Mechanism for Decentralized Multi-Agent Systems
2026-10-15 04:39:57Thi-Nhung Nguyen, Viet-Thanh Pham, Linhao Luo, Thuy-Trang Vu, Dinh PhungAbstract
Centralized orchestration provides comprehensive multi-agent coordination but creates bottlenecks in scalability, adaptability, and collective performance. Decentralized approaches alleviate these bottlenecks by distributing coordination across agents, yet often leave responsibility for delegated dependencies and failure recovery unclear. To address this gap, we propose RCM, a responsibility-centered coordination mechanism that leverages commitments to couple task delegation with explicit responsibilities of the involved parties. Through recursive delegation, agents retain their upstream responsibilities while locally orchestrating downstream commitments, thereby preserving accountability across delegation chains, creating a network of local orchestration. We operationalize this mechanism locally through responsibility-constrained decision-making and a responsibility-oriented communication protocol (RCP), enabling agents to autonomously establish, manage, and terminate commitments. As agents act in parallel, their local actions continuously evolve the commitment graph, allowing global coordination to emerge and adapt toward a shared mission without centralized control. Experiments across reasoning, coding, and executable agent environments demonstrate that RCM outperforms strong centralized and decentralized coordination baselines by up to 18.7 points in task performance and 10.2 points in Responsibility, while improving failure and harm detection without task-specific training.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21243
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Vision-Guided Closed-Loop Autonomous Navigation of Light-Driven Janus Microbots
2026-10-15 04:09:42Kanhu Charan Andia, Harsh Prashant Katole, Parth Nitinkumar Bhosale, Hemant Kumar, Dhruv Pratap SinghAbstract
Artificial microbots capable of precise and autonomous navigation could provide versatile platforms for microscale transport, manipulation, and task execution in complex environments. However, reliable navigation becomes increasingly challenging at the micrometre scale, particularly when the surrounding environment changes dynamically. Here, we develop a vision-guided closed-loop navigation framework for light-driven cube-shaped hematite/TiO2 Janus microbots with a characteristic size of approximately 3 {\mu}m. Real-time visual localization using a custom-trained YOLOv11 object-detection model is integrated with discretized waypoint-based magnetic steering to enable precise navigation along complex prescribed trajectories, with more than 90% of the measured trajectory deviations remaining below 6 {\mu}m across the tested path geometries. The framework further enables arbitrary user-defined free-hand trajectories and autonomous navigation through a physically confined maze. In dynamically changing environments, A* path planning enables real-time path replanning while avoiding multiple independently swimming 5 {\mu}m spherical Janus micromotors. Finally, the microbot selectively captures multiple cargo particles and autonomously transports and delivers them to a predefined location while simultaneously avoiding dynamic obstacles. These results establish an integrated platform combining programmable trajectory control, autonomous path planning, real-time environmental adaptation, and task execution within a single light-driven Janus microbot system.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21222
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AutoOnboarder: Autonomously Onboarding LLM Agents
2026-10-15 04:07:34Tanay Arora, Cong LiuAbstract
Agentic large language models have been documented to lose reasoning capability when placed inside a harness, the software that mediates their observations and actions. To reconcile these losses, we introduce AutoOnboarder, an autonomous system that adapts an agent to a task the way a trainer onboards a new employee. It places the agent under the supervision of an intelligent ``Onboarder'' coding agent, which iteratively tailors its foundation model, prompt, and harness source code to simultaneously improve performance and decrease cost. Like a real onboarding process, the Onboarder is only given tens of examples, and all evaluation data is isolated on a separate virtual machine to prevent leakage. We report the lessons learned from building and testing AutoOnboarder on genomic-sequencing prior authorization form submission. Autonomously onboarded agents are able to match or exceed the performance of a Gemini 3.5 Flash baseline at up to 29$\times$ lower costs. However, these agents remain imperfect, and the Onboarding process varies greatly in terms of final performance. We conclude that future Onboarding systems require a robust environment for the Onboarder, including a structured thought interface, (controlled) internet access, and a wide model search space.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21218
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SpaceCache: Intermediate Feature Reuse for Efficient Semantic Segmentation on Point Cloud Streams
2026-10-15 04:02:47Dongheon Yang, Beomseok Kang, Jae-Joon KimAbstract
Point-cloud streams are central to autonomous driving and robotics, yet existing segmentation networks process every frame from scratch, although consecutive frames largely overlap. We observe that the intermediate features of point-cloud transformers remain semantically consistent across frames for the same spatial region, especially in deep stages. Building on this, we present SpaceCache, a training-free feature cache that reuses these features across frames. Tokens of previously observed regions skip a sequence of transformer blocks and take their cached features, only the remaining tokens are computed, and the full token layout is restored for dense prediction. Lightweight cache management keeps reused features reliable by limiting each entry's age and evicting low-confidence entries. Unlike token merging, SpaceCache selects tokens at negligible cost and runs its cache operations once per encoder stage. On both outdoor and indoor benchmarks, such as nuScenes, Waymo, and ScanNet, with two transformer backbones of Utonia and LitePT-B, SpaceCache achieves up to 1.65x speedup with less than 1-point mIoU drop and consistently outperforms token-merging methods.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21207
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Trajectory Prediction Method for person under WSN with Hierarchical Envelope Adversarial Domain Adaptation
2026-10-15 02:40:43Wenqian Jiang, Qifeng Sun, Xiaosong Gao, Xin Zou, Xingrui Ni, Yuan Hu, Yongming LiAbstract
Pedestrian trajectory prediction holds significant applications across autonomous driving, intelligent surveillance, and smart cities. However, the complexity and unpredictability of pedestrian interactions make this task a persistent challenge. Current models face two common limitations: 1) Consider only a single type of social coupling. This introduces redundant interactions. More critically, it fails to account for the varying nature of trajectory coupled across different scenarios and between different pedestrians. Consequently, models cannot deeply adapt to diverse scenes. 2) Inadequate domain shift handling. Although very few methods address domain shift, they rely on statistical criterion-based domain distribution alignment. Such approaches exhibit strong dependency on predefined statistical metrics. This leads to significant limitations in complex and dynamic environments. To address these problems, a Hierarchical Envelope Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Loosely-Tightly coupled model (HEADA-LTCTPM) is proposed. First, an envelope sample construction mechanism was proposed. It constructs envelope samples and extends them into graph structures. Secondly, an adversarial domain adaptation module was proposed. This integrates both local and global domain adaptation strategies. It dynamically adapts to diverse coupled relationships across scenarios. These innovations collectively enhance prediction accuracy and robustness. In the experimental section, two representative public datasets were employed for validation and comprehensive comparisons with six relevant baseline algorithms were conducted. Results demonstrate that our model achieves significantly higher accuracy compared to existing methods, with the ADE and FDE metrics reduced by 17.6% and 19.1% respectively. The time overhead meets practical requirements, which verifies the effectiveness of our key innovations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21132
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Sci$Pi$vot: Benchmarking Principal-Investigator Judgment at Pivotal Moments of Scientific AutoResearch Agents
2026-10-15 01:34:44Youran Sun, Xingyu Ren, Chugang Yi, Kejia Zhang, Di Wu, Yingkang Cao, Allen Zhou, Jianping Ye, Suying Liu, Jiaxuan Guo, Jianda Du, Weicheng Ye, Kecheng Liu, Hefan Zhang, Haixin Wang, Jie Xiao, Eric Yang, Haizhao YangAbstract
Large language model (LLM) agents can keep scientific experiments running for months with little human supervision, but reliable autonomous research also requires scientific judgment. Evaluating scientific judgment is difficult because research decisions are open-ended and depend on project context. We construct Sci$\Pi$vot, a 248-case benchmark of scientific judgment based on human corrections. The benchmark draws on records from six months of research in which senior researchers ran LLM agents on 26 projects across six scientific fields and repeatedly intervened to correct the agents' research judgments. In each case, an agent chooses between the original LLM plan and the human-corrected alternative, using only the project record available before the correction as context. We compare LLM and human performance and examine the effects of reasoning effort, access to the project record, and reconsideration. At medium reasoning effort with the project record, models systematically prefer the original LLM plan over the human-corrected alternative. Four of five frontier models perform below chance on the selected cases. The highest accuracy in the project condition across the tested models and reasoning effort settings is 63.5%, compared with 73.4% for fresh researchers. At medium effort, every model achieves lower accuracy with the project record than without it, and reconsideration does not consistently improve overall accuracy. Even with a human-corrected alternative available, frontier models struggle with the selected research decisions, while Sci$\Pi$vot supports systematic evaluation of scientific judgment for LLM agents.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21082
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Athanor: An Agent-Native System for Autonomous Post-Training Research
2026-10-15 00:56:33Yufa Zhou, Yichen Wang, Jiakun Fan, Ziqi Shu, Zhichao Liu, Anru R. Zhang, Neiwen Ling, Zijun WeiAbstract
Recursive self-improvement, in which AI systems build stronger AI systems, is one promising route to superintelligence. We study a weaker form that can be measured today: frontier agents post-training a small raw base model with public data, as a test of their research potential. We build Athanor, an open agent-native system for autonomous post-training research (AutoPostTrain) on real GPUs. We give the agents full research autonomy, low-friction engineering tools, and efficient starter code. The agents carry out the research themselves: they read datasets and evaluation results, build their training data, write and modify training algorithms, tune hyperparameters, and analyze the results to decide what to try next. They work in a sandbox and cannot use external teacher models. Athanor's services supply frozen evaluation, managed jobs, decontaminated data, a persistent research record, and a held-out suite the agents are unaware of. In a 104-hour campaign, a team of four Claude Opus 5.5 agents, each on an eight-GPU node and given no research advice, improves Qwen3-4B-Base from 15.9 to 67.3 on a six-task development suite and from 9.2 to 48.2 on a held-out suite, against 66.5 and 47.9 for the official Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that a team of frontier agents can autonomously post-train a raw base model into a cross-domain generalist model that matches or surpasses the official instruct version on average. The campaign's full record shows that the agents reach this level by recombining known methods and each other's models: SFT on public reasoning data, RL with a rollout change one agent introduced, weight merges across agents, and rounds of self-distillation. With execution handled, today's agents already have the engineering and research ability to conquer this task. We hope Athanor provides a foundation for scaling autonomous AI research.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21055
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SCARCE: Emergent Institutions in Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Coding Systems
2026-10-15 00:00:47Abhinav Kumar, Rediet Abebe, Eugene Bagdasarian, Sahar AbdelnabiAbstract
As autonomous agents become widely deployed, coordinating access to shared computing resources and services will become increasingly important. Recent incidents have already revealed unplanned coordination between agents, highlighting the safety implications of these interactions. Yet prior studies of agent negotiation often use stylized games and simulated bargaining, leaving open how these behaviors develop during sustained, long-horizon tasks. We propose SCARCE (Shared Compute ARena for Coding agEnts), a framework in which agents solve sequences of coding tasks under individual deadlines while negotiating access to a shared execution resource. This negotiation determines when and for how long they can inspect programs, compile code, and run tests. We find that agents spontaneously develop informal institutions: persistent rules and commitments grounded in reputation, reciprocity, and precedent. These arrangements, which we call institutional behaviors, carry across tasks and influence resource allocation, with agents sometimes foregoing immediate advantages to honor earlier agreements. We develop a 21-category taxonomy of negotiation strategies and emergent norms and use it to analyze eight models and audit more than 1,500 trajectories across different environmental settings. Among the models tested, newer frontier models exhibit more institutional behaviors than older or lightweight models. Alongside cooperation, we observe exclusionary coalitions and rare divide-and-conquer strategies. SCARCE provides a controlled setting for proactively and systematically auditing how these relationships emerge, shape access to resources, and affect the safety and coordination of multi-agent systems.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21029
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Line-Augmented cuVSLAM: Robust Visual Odometry in Low-Texture Environments
2026-10-14 21:29:40Dara Molloy, Terry Wu, Wonju Lee, Abhilash Nand Kumar, David Adley, Conor Ferguson, Hesam RabetiAbstract
Autonomous mobile robots in warehouses and production facilities operate in precisely the environments that defeat point-feature visual odometry: featureless aisles, uniform walls, repetitive racking and specular floors. Such environments are, however, rich in straight-edge structure: rack uprights, door frames, wall junctions and cabinet outlines present high-contrast linear edges stable across wide viewpoint changes. A line-feature extension to cuVSLAM, a CUDA-accelerated visual-SLAM system, is presented that recovers this signal. Lines are parameterised as Plücker coordinates for geometric transport and as the minimal 4-DOF orthonormal representation of Bartoli and Sturm for optimisation; a Cauchy-robust point-to-line residual with analytic Jacobians is folded directly into cuVSLAM's per-frame Gauss-Newton pose solve, and the same line state is jointly refined in the Schur-complement sliding-window bundle adjustment. An adaptive information weight causes lines to assume more of the estimation burden exactly as point features become scarce, and the extension adds residual blocks to existing solvers rather than introducing a second estimator, reducing exactly to the unmodified point pipeline when disabled. Evaluated in RGB-D mode under SE(3) Umeyama alignment with no scale correction, line features reduce mean absolute trajectory error by 38.5% over the 22 sequences of the TUM RGB-D Freiburg3 collection and by 30.1% over the 8 Replica room and office sequences, where median translation error falls by 38.9% and median rotation error by 66.4%, with zero tracking failures in any configuration tested.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20958
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Adaptive Prescribed Performance Trajectory Tracking for Uncertain Autonomous Underwater Vehicles With Input Saturation
2026-10-14 21:29:25Athanasios K. Gkesoulis, Christos Vlachos, George K. Fourlas, Charalampos P. Bechlioulis, George C. KarrasAbstract
Accurate trajectory tracking is essential for autonomous underwater vehicles operating with uncertain hydrodynamics and limited thruster authority. This paper develops a low-complexity adaptive prescribed performance controller for uncertain underwater vehicle dynamics with coupled and saturated inputs. The proposed method adapts the performance functions directly through the mismatch between the requested and saturated control inputs, enlarging the performance funnels only when the available actuation cannot meet the nominal specifications. A coupled invariant-set analysis establishes boundedness of all closed-loop signals, prescribed bounds on the filtered tracking errors, and explicit feasibility conditions. Comparative simulations on a BlueROV2 underwater vehicle show that the adaptive design maintains prescribed performance during a figure-eight maneuver, whereas conventional prescribed performance control loses feasibility under input limits. A real-time pool experiment further demonstrates stable trajectory tracking and the practical implementation of the proposed method on an underwater robotic platform.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20957
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BubbleCBF: Constructive Safety for Second-Order Systems and Application to Autonomous Robot Navigation in Unknown Environments
2026-10-14 20:24:47Mani Amani, Mohammed Alyaseen, Zhirui Dai, Ki Myung Brian Lee, Nikolay Atanasov, Jorge CortesAbstract
Satisfying safety constraints for systems with second-order dynamics is challenging because a position constraint may require infeasible deceleration. Higher-order control barrier functions (CBFs) provide an approach for expressing safety conditions for such systems but feasibility depends on the system dynamics and available control authority. We develop a constructive approach for designing feasible safety constraints for second-order control-affine systems. Starting from a signed distance function (SDF), we construct collision-free spheres, i.e., bubbles, in position space, and use their quadratic geometry and overlap to construct a velocity-dependent safety constraint. The associated safe set is represented as a union of intersections and enforced through a quadratic-program safety filter. Under mild assumptions on the dynamics, bubble overlap, and design parameters, we prove that the quadratic-program-based controller is well defined, continuous in the system state, and renders the set forward invariant. We also derive sufficient conditions for feasibility under bounded inputs. We demonstrate that our BubbleCBF, applied to a differential-drive robot, achieves safe autonomous navigation in unknown environments. Videos and results are available at: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20895
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DefoliationCAM: An Edge-AI System for Real-Time Insect Defoliation Severity Assessment in Grapevines
2026-10-14 20:12:17Fuchen Li, Wei-Zhen Liang, Pin-Chu Lai, Xin Qiao, Jingqiu Chen, Haw Yen, Zonglin Yanga, Chi-En Chiang, Rudolph Avalos, Abbigail L. RathAbstract
Insect-induced defoliation threatens grapevine health and yield, yet severity assessment relies on subjective manual scouting. We developed DefoliationCAM (D-CAM), a solar-powered edge AI system that estimates canopy defoliation and transmits results via LoRa to a web dashboard. The pipeline uses YOLOX-Nano to localize grapevine cordons in 4K images and a MobileNet-based classifier with lightweight channel attention to classify 320 x 320 pixel patches. The 29,674 field-collected patches were labeled as background or one of four damage levels: no to negligible, mild, moderate, and severe. Merging moderate and severe classes reduced the class imbalance ratio from approximately 40:1 to 8.8:1. Synthetic augmentation increased macro-F1 from 0.768 to 0.838. The classifier outperformed ResNet-50 in macro-F1 with fewer parameters (1.08 M versus 23.52 M). Patch predictions were aggregated into a canopy-level Non-linear Global Defoliation Severity (NGDS) score and validated against an entomologist's ratings of 86 held-out canopy images. Quadratic discriminant analysis identified boundaries of 9% and 29% separating negligible damage, mild damage requiring monitoring, and action-level damage warranting on-site scouting and insecticide treatment consideration. The 29% boundary aligned with the 25%-30% action threshold range for Japanese beetle management in grapevine. Using TensorRT FP16 on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, the pipeline processed each 4K image in approximately 1.5 s, with a complete operating cycle of 57-60 s. A five-week deployment of two field units demonstrated the feasibility of autonomous solar-powered operation, LoRa communication, and remote defoliation monitoring. D-CAM supports frequent, objective canopy damage assessment for targeted scouting and timely pest-management decisions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20879
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Race to Recovery: Designing Advanced Safety Systems for Autonomous Driving via Learning Autonomous Racing
2026-10-14 20:04:54Teodor Ilie, Kleber Cabral, Sidney GivigiAbstract
Vehicles that lose control at the handling limit through icing, hydroplaning, or an abrupt evasive maneuver fall outside the operating envelope of production safety systems such as electronic stability control, which focus on preventing instability rather than recovering from it. Expert drivers regain authority in these conditions by drifting. Existing autonomous recovery approaches are validated on idealized scenarios, define "recovered" states empirically and inconsistently, or rely on offline-planned trajectories rather than acting online. We address these gaps by first training a racing policy with reinforcement learning that learns drifting as a time-optimal maneuver, then adapting it to recovery through continued training with a minimum-time reward. We define recovery relative to a phase-plane-grounded stable equilibrium and introduce Gym-Khana for controller training and evaluation. Across 294 initial loss-of-control states, the transferred policy improves recovery by 186.8% over a Stanley path tracker and outperforms both a nonlinear model predictive controller and a recovery-only policy trained from scratch, while also recovering faster on states the baseline can already handle. An ablation shows that racing pretraining, rather than broader initial-state exposure alone, drives this gain. Deployed on a physical 1:10-scale F1TENTH vehicle using system identification, actuator-lag modelling, and domain randomization, the transferred policy outperforms Stanley on every tested loss-of-control state, including recovering 50% of the time from a hard state the baseline never recovers from.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20873
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Clarity-Driven Adaptive Mission Planning for a Solar-Powered Autonomous Surface Vessel
2026-10-14 20:00:27Kavin M. Govindarajan, Kaleb Ben Naveed, David Li, Devansh R. Agrawal, Mary Maceda, Matthew Bryant, Dimitra Panagou, Chris VermillionAbstract
This paper presents a comprehensive methodology, backed by simulation and experimental results, for an adaptive mission planning strategy that is mathematically grounded in the maximization of the information-driven quantity of clarity. In particular, the methodology introduced in this work addresses the use of sustainably powered autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) to perform scientific missions that prioritize locations of maximum interest. Because these locations of maximum interest are not known a priori but are rather identified based on in-situ measurements, online adaptation is essential for mission planning. Furthermore, the reliance on a limited-power renewable resource requires an adaptation strategy that maximizes information gathering subject to mobility restrictions imposed by the renewable resource. Our approach addresses these challenges through a clarity-driven ergodic search, where clarity represents a mathematical quantity that has been rigorously linked to differential (information) entropy. In our approach, a target clarity map is adapted online to reflect the prioritization of certain areas based on in-situ measurements, and an ergodic path planner continually re-plans based on the target clarity map and ASV speed limitations (driven by the renewable propulsion source). Focusing on a solar-powered ASV, we present simulations and experiments conducted at Jordan Lake, North Carolina, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20871
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SHRED: Self-Play for Heterogeneous Road-Users without Expert Demonstrations
2026-10-14 19:56:13Wei-Jer Chang, Zhouchonghao Wu, Akshay Rangesh, Weixin Li, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei ZhanAbstract
Realistic traffic simulation and autonomous planning both depend on modeling interactions among heterogeneous road users whose dynamics, constraints, and behaviors differ fundamentally. Existing approaches predominantly learn realistic interaction behavior from large-scale human driving demonstrations. In this work, we ask whether such behavior can instead emerge purely through self-play. We present SHRED, a framework that jointly trains vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists through large-scale heterogeneous self-play from random initialization, without demonstrations or logged-trajectory replay. SHRED combines type-specific dynamics and objectives with procedural scenario generation and per-agent randomization, allowing diverse behaviors to emerge through closed-loop interaction. On the Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge (WOSAC), SHRED jointly controls all three road-user types and outperforms both the closest demonstration-free self-play baseline and prior self-play methods that use demonstration-trained reference policies. Policies trained only on nuPlan map geometry retain comparable realism under zero-shot evaluation on Waymo. For planning, SHRED outperforms all compared planners on the interaction-heavy InterPlan benchmark. Controlled ablations show that heterogeneity in self-play improves both traffic realism and planning performance, with particularly large planning gains in interaction-heavy scenarios. Together, these results establish heterogeneous procedural self-play as a scalable, demonstration-free paradigm for learning realistic and interactive traffic behavior.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20866
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SafeDriveVLA: Navigation-Conditioned World Model Dreaming for Conflict-Aware End-to-End Autonomous Driving
2026-10-14 17:59:56Shaoyuan Xie, Zihan Zhang, Jingxuan Wang, Jiashu Qu, Xiaoqing Liang, Lingdong Kong, Junchi Lu, Henrik I. Christensen, Qi Alfred ChenAbstract
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are gaining attention in autonomous driving, inheriting commonsense priors from large language models (LLMs) and widening the navigation interface from a fixed command set to free-form natural-language instructions. However, this open-ended interface exposes a new vulnerability surface: an inattentive driver may issue instructions that are unsafe given the current scene, and a malicious user may issue dangerous ones on purpose. We present the first benchmark suite that evaluates navigation following and conflict awareness together, along with adversarial robustness. Existing VLAs fall short on both: SimLingo completes no language-instructed lane change in closed loop, and all models degrade sharply under conflicting signals. We propose SafeDriveVLA, the first driving VLA that (1) explicitly predicts a three-level navigation-compliance mode to decouple conflict reasoning from action generation, and (2) uses navigation-conditioned world model dreaming to inform this prediction. Unlike prior world models that roll out expert or planned actions, ours dreams of strictly following the navigation signal, showing when following is safe. SafeDriveVLA reaches 88.16 Driving Score (DS) and 68.64% Success Rate (SR) on Bench2Drive, lifts closed-loop language following by 49.3% and reduces collisions under unsafe instructions from 60 to 38 compared to the best SimLingo variant. Video demonstrations are available on our project page.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20609
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Hierarchical Residual Policy Learning for Real-World Mobile Manipulation with Sparse Human Guidance
2026-10-14 17:59:52Zhefei Gong, Hefeifei Jiang, Zehao Wang, Jiachen LiAbstract
Mobile Manipulation (MoMa) is a cornerstone of autonomous robotic systems, yet real-world fine-tuning remains a formidable challenge because of high-dimensional action spaces and intricate coupling between heterogeneous modules. In this paper, we propose HiRe-MoMa (Hierarchical Residual Mobile Manipulation), a systematic framework for stable and sample-efficient real-world fine-tuning of complex MoMa systems. At its core, HiRe-MoMa adopts a Hierarchical Residual Architecture that fine-tunes a frozen base policy. A Policy-Agnostic Residual learns additive corrections atop the base policy, while Hierarchical Decoupling splits the residual into mobile-base and manipulator-arm heads with unidirectional conditioning, mitigating gradient interference and aligning corrections with the platform's physical hierarchy. To improve sample efficiency in data-expensive real-world settings, we propose Expert-Guided Value Alignment, which leverages sparse human interventions with under 20% training coverage to reshape the critic's value landscape, effectively guiding autonomous exploration through expert priors. Extensive real-world experiments on the TIAGo++ platform demonstrate that HiRe-MoMa consistently enhances task performance with only around 30 minutes of online interaction, regardless of the base policy architecture. To our knowledge, this is among the first frameworks to enable efficient on-robot fine-tuning for mobile manipulation in the real world, providing a practical paradigm for deploying complex robotic systems in dynamic, human-centric environments. Further details can be found on our project website: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20607
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Towards Agentic Robots: Model, Data, Environment, and Harness
2026-10-14 16:32:22Chonghan Qin, Dongming Wu, Kaituo Feng, Jiaxu Wang, Xinlei Yu, Peiwen Sun, Yijia Fan, Xilin He, Bingao Chen, Weitong Lian, Ryan Ji, Wenqi Ren, Xiaobin Hu, Dahua Lin, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xiangyu YueAbstract
Foundation models are driving a paradigm shift in robotic intelligence, moving beyond low-level action prediction to goal-directed orchestration of data collection, model training, task planning, and real-world execution. We characterize this emerging paradigm as an agentic robots, in which agents reason over human instructions, interact with robotic environments, rectify execution errors autonomously, and dynamically adjust operational strategies. Although this field develops fast, current studies are not well connected. Researchers have no consistent view of how to combine different agentic functions into a complete robot system. This paper provides a unified overview of existing research on agentic robots. We first trace the development from robot policies to agentic systems, covering vision-language-action models, world models, and world-action models. We then clarify the definition and scope of agentic robots and organize existing research into seventeen categories across four functional domains: Model, Data, Environment, and Harness. Across these domains, we examine how agents shape model learning and robot decisions, collect and curate robot data, construct worlds, tasks, and tests for learning and evaluation, and organize capabilities for robot use. Finally, we discuss open challenges and outline directions for future research. Looking forward, we hope this work contributes to a clearer understanding of agentic robots and supports new approaches to making them more capable, reliable, and adaptive.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20442
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Do AI Agents Gossip? Evaluative Talk in Human and AI-Agent Online Communities
2026-10-14 15:34:38Yong-Hui Hua, Chih-Han Lin, Shu-Kai HsiehAbstract
Gossip, defined as evaluative talk about absent third parties, is widely seen as a uniquely human social practice. This study examines whether comparable discourse emerges spontaneously in a community of autonomous AI agents. We compare Moltbook, a Reddit-style platform populated by AI agents, with PTT, a large human-operated bulletin board in Taiwan. To reduce differences attributable to communicative setting, we analyze two public, asynchronous forums using the same operational definition of gossip. Gossip occurs on Moltbook, but its prevalence is 2.6 to 6 times lower than on PTT, depending on the denominator used. On both platforms, gossip frequently targets locally prominent figures, tends to elicit agreement from the first respondent, and is rarely presented as unsupported rumor. The clearest difference concerns how subsequent responses develop. Among threads containing at least one codable reply, challenges occur in 65.1% of human threads but only 21.3% of agent threads. Moreover, following an early aligning response, consensus remains unchallenged in 83.6% of agent threads, compared with 44.7% of human threads. This thread-level contrast remains after controlling for thread depth and board composition and under recalibration against two human annotators. Estimates based on individual reply turns are less robust and are therefore reported as bounds. These findings suggest that AI-agent communities reproduce the informational dimension of gossip, while the extent to which gossip performs comparable relational functions remains unresolved.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20360
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