Autonomous social navigation requires balancing efficiency, physical safety, and social compliance. Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods provide a viable and effective solution but often rely on unrealistic assumptions, such as the knowledge of humans' position and velocity. In this paper, we introduce JESSI (JAX-based E2E Safe Social Interpretable navigation), a lightweight end-to-end RL framework that maps raw LiDAR scans directly to kinematically feasible control commands. JESSI enhances safety via Dirichlet-parameterized continuous action spaces and deterministic bounding, while an integrated attention-based perception module extracts probabilistic human states for interpretable, socially aware decision-making. Through extensive simulations and real-world deployment on a differential-drive robot, we demonstrate that jointly optimizing the RL policy with a supervised perception signal in a multi-task paradigm enhances social behavior. Ultimately, JESSI is able to balance high navigation success rates and superior social behaviors compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05733
Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations have become a widely used interface between perception and planning in autonomous driving, but they encode what is in a scene, not what is behaviorally relevant to a human driver. Gaze offers a compelling behavioral signal for this gap, yet wearable eye trackers are routinely deployed as if their spatial output were ground truth, despite known sensitivity to head motion, illumination, and calibration drift. We present, to our knowledge, the first unified framework for quantifying wearable gaze accuracy under real driving conditions. Our on-road study contains 41 validated scenes in which one driver fixated a vehicle's license plate. Gaze error is measured as the angular difference between the plate center and the gaze direction estimated by the glasses. Separate indoor studies with the same driver and device systematically analyze how distance, illumination, head motion, target motion, and gaze eccentricity affect both systematic bias and gaze precision. The mean on-road error was 4.58 degrees. Applying an offset estimated from the indoor recordings reduced it to 1.10 degrees and improved all 41 scenes. Because this offset varied between sessions, reliable BEV supervision may require online recalibration and condition-dependent estimates of gaze uncertainty.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07783
User behavior simulation is the computational modeling of user interactions within information systems through the use of simulated agents in place of live users. It supports system testing and evaluation, decision-making and forecasting, and user experience design. Existing simulators rely on hand-crafted rules or domain expertise that transfers poorly across tasks. SWORD (Simulation-driven Workflow and Prompt Optimization with Role-based Design) is introduced as a framework that jointly optimizes multi-agent workflow topology and natural-language prompts. It is guided solely by a scalar task metric, without domain initialization or task-specific engineering. The experimental results demonstrate that SWORD achieves statistically significant gains over prompt-only, workflow-only, and staged-optimization baselines under a controlled, identical-backbone comparison. Against the strongest published domain-specific baseline, SWORD further improves accuracy while using a smaller backbone model, substantially less training data, and a very reasonable API cost (\$4--\$6 for each dataset). Beyond predictive performance, SWORD autonomously discovers domain-relevant signals, review-sentiment mapping rules and epidemiological decay priors, purely from scalar error feedback, establishing textual gradients as a mechanism for unsupervised feature-importance discovery in user behavior modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07663
Reusing a capability across heterogeneous robots still requires substantial human adaptation and verification: transferring a skill often means re-engineering interfaces, retuning parameters, and re-validating safety. We introduce Silicon Language, a robot-native knowledge exchange framework that treats the robot as the active subject of its own capability evolution. In this framework, a robot that wants a capability encodes its own experience into knowledge packets, publishes them, retrieves peer packets, translates them for its own sensors and actuators, and reviews them through independent local trial. A receiver-side usability evaluation procedure lets each robot decide for itself whether an external packet is useful, and progressive blending with automatic rollback is designed to reduce the risk of negative transfer when adopting it. The system combines three infrastructure layers (edge agent, Silicon Transfer Protocol (STP), and knowledge hub) with a capability stack inspired by the human scholarly system. We report a 30-day proof-of-concept deployment at an above-ground simulated-mine laboratory in Yulin, with following trials on an outdoor sand road and an indoor factory floor. Two heterogeneous robots encoded and translated three capabilities across embodiments through operator-assisted file copies mediated by the Silicon Language translation layer; source-side trials of the dust-locked following behavior were recorded on Taurus. Project records indicate that per-capability adaptation time dropped from days to hours; we present these figures as descriptive deployment records rather than controlled measurements. The deployment provides initial evidence for cross-embodiment knowledge exchange; fleet-level autonomous evolution and controlled with/without-packet comparisons remain future work.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07650
Robots that autonomously determine their actions from language instructions and sensory observations could perform new contact-rich manipulation tasks without task-specific training or hand-designed rules. To perform these tasks, robots must infer how objects contact one another and move as a result, then select actions. For contact inference and action selection, prior approaches involve designing estimation models and tactile feedback control laws, or learning models for object-motion estimation, action-outcome prediction, and action selection from tactile data. Instead, we propose TacZero, which uses a pretrained general-purpose vision-language model (VLM) to interpret visual and tactile observations and select robot actions without additional tactile or manipulation training or task-specific rules for contact interpretation or action selection. TacZero provides the VLM with camera images, robot state, and three-axis tactile responses represented as numerical values or vectors overlaid on the images. From these observations and interaction history, the VLM generates commands specifying target end-effector positions and gripper opening or closing, which a low-level controller executes. In real-world cylindrical-peg insertion experiments, TacZero succeeded in 15 of 20 trials with numerical tactile input, compared with 10 of 20 without tactile input. This study provides a concrete starting point for further research on contact-rich manipulation using general-purpose VLMs and highlights challenges in pursuing this direction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07621
LLM orchestration investigates how an orchestrator coordinates a group of autonomous agents to achieve common goals or maximize collective welfare. The agents are typically heterogeneous, each holding a private preference that it pursues but does not reveal. Inferring such hidden preferences from behavior has been a subject of long-standing research in game theory and multi-agent systems. The core challenge lies in maintaining a belief over every agent's preference and updating it from the agents' observed actions. Existing LLM orchestrators carry that belief as prompt text with no explicit update rule. This lets early errors persist and propagate rather than be corrected. We therefore propose \textbf{HARP} (Heterogeneous-preference Agent oRchestration via Preference inference), a novel framework that moves the belief out of the prompt. Specifically, HARP maintains one numeric posterior per agent over a finite set of candidate preferences and updates it in closed form by Bayes' rule. The language model supplies only actions and per-candidate likelihoods, so estimation is decoupled from its reasoning. We prove that HARP attains the same $\tilde O(\sqrt K)$ Bayesian regret as explicit joint inference when the factorization is exact. Furthermore, HARP\textsuperscript{+} augments planning with a bonus for actions that distinguish the candidates, so inference continues even when the optimal action is uninformative. Empirical results on three substrates, ranging from payoffs the preferences fully determine, through payoffs that depend on more than them, to scales where explicit joint inference is infeasible, demonstrate that HARP\textsuperscript{+} is the strongest non-oracle method across the class our theory identifies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07587
Driving models increasingly ground reasoning in causal relations, spatial structure, perceptual evidence, and predicted futures. These advances make reasoning more faithful to the driving scene, but leave a fundamental question unresolved: what should groundedness mean when the model ultimately outputs an action? Correctly grounded reasoning does not, by itself, ensure desirable driving outcomes. We introduce GroundAct, which starts from a simple premise: driving unfolds through physical entities and their interactions. Entities therefore become the unit of grounding; a lightweight reference token keeps each selected entity's continuous state addressable through symbolic reasoning; and only the referenced entities' interactions with the evolving proposal correct the plan. The result is an explicit path from what reasoning grounds to what the plan does, which we call grounded planning. To assess its practical value, we evaluate GroundAct in both open- and closed-loop settings. GroundAct shows strong open-loop planning across normal, out-of-distribution, and safety-critical scenarios, with closed-loop results extending this evidence to driving in simulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07521
Accurately modeling and tracking the deformation of soft tissue is critical for a wide range of interventional and surgical procedures. However, current methods struggle in scenarios involving topological changes, such as cutting and dissection, due to the inherent non-linearity and discontinuity introduced by explicit changes in connectivity. In this work, we present a novel, fully differentiable framework that enables robust estimation and modeling of topological changes during deformable tracking. Our method introduces a continuous, sigmoid-based formulation to smooth the otherwise discrete event of tissue cutting, making it amenable to gradient-based optimization within a differentiable Position-Based Dynamics (PBD) simulation. To account for uncertainty and improve robustness in the presence of noisy visual data, we incorporate Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) for particle-based probabilistic inference, generating multiple hypotheses for topological state estimation. Building on this foundation, we develop an autonomous dissection algorithm for thin-shell tissues that leverages topological updates to guide closed-loop cutting trajectory control. We evaluate our approach in both simulated and real-world electrosurgical environments, demonstrating significant improvements in topological estimation accuracy and dissection precision over existing methods. Our results highlight the potential of this framework to advance automation in soft-tissue surgical procedures by enabling reliable perception and control in the presence of complex structural changes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07515
Versatile, autonomous robotic boats can offer excellent environmental inspection and monitoring solutions for remote, dangerous, hard to reach, or access protected water bodies. This paper introduces such a platform in the form of an autonomous, cost-effective, waterjet-powered robotic trimaran. Motivated by the need for an efficient aquatic monitoring, particularly in Aotearoa - New Zealand's diverse environments, the trimaran provides an efficient, low-cost, and easy to replicate alternative to resource-intensive research vessels. The proposed platform, costs $600-1,500 USD to develop (depending on the sensing system configuration), weighs under 5 kg, and excels in bathymetry and water quality testing. The trimaran can reach speeds of up to 2 m/s offering obstacle avoidance of natural features, such as rocks. Utilizing off-the-shelf components and 3D printing technology, the proposed platform offers excellent reproducibility and robustness while operating in shallow waters with its jet propulsion system. The paper presents in detail the design characteristics, the sensing system employed, testing results focusing on bathymetry, and highlights the ability of vessel and the potential for future research and data collection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07398
Monitoring of waterways such as remote and hazardous rivers and streams is important so as to assess the impact of external factors including construction runoff or climate change. Versatile, autonomous robotic boats can offer excellent environmental inspection and monitoring solutions for remote, dangerous, or access protected water bodies but they have several shortcomings in terms of maneuverability. This paper proposes an environmental inspection system consisting of an autonomous data collection buoy which is designed to be deployed to inaccessible river systems using a drone. The system can perform a drop off and pickup of the buoy depending on the requirements of a particular location and monitoring task. Utilising the natural flow of the river the buoy autonomously steers down, using GPS and magnetometers so as to maintain the desired trajectory. The buoy is capable of measuring water temperature but it can also be equipped with a range of sensors such as water oxygen meter, sonar for river bed inspection, or turbidity for water clarity. This paper describes the system design, presents an analysis of the self-righting capabilities of the buoy, and shows a full system demonstration at the Årewa River in Auckland, New Zealand.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07390
Modeling 3D scene geometry and its evolution over time is essential for autonomous driving and robotics. A common paradigm is to use world models to predict future images or latent representations of the environment and subsequently recover geometry from these predictions. However, this paradigm does not explicitly model geometric structure and typically relies on recursive rollouts to reach longer prediction horizons, leading to error accumulation and increasing computational cost. To address these limitations, we present GeoWM, a geometry world model that directly forecasts future scene geometry at specified future horizons without recursive rollout. The key idea is to leverage a geometry foundation model to transform observed RGB frames into a geometric history, which conditions a flow-matching transformer to predict the scene geometry at a specified future horizon. We further show that a lightweight camera-motion predictor can accurately estimate the future viewpoint, and that projecting the observed geometry into the predicted viewpoint provides an effective geometric prior for future geometry forecasting. Extensive experiments on four datasets spanning urban driving, aerial flight, and dynamic manipulation demonstrate that GeoWM outperforms the evaluated world models in forecasting depth, camera pose, and 3D scene geometry, while substantially reducing inference time at longer horizons.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07381
Time to Closest Point of Approach (TCPA), Distance to Closest Point of Approach (DCPA), and Velocity Obstacles (VOs), are widely used to assess and mitigate collision risk in autonomous navigation, yet their relationship and behavior under uncertainty remain largely unexplored. Assuming perfect state information, we establish a relationship between these representations over finite and infinite prediction horizons and derive conditions under which they provide equivalent characterizations of collision risk. Under bounded uncertainty, we extend the Closest Point of Approach (CPA) metrics and VO to convex relative-state sets. We show that in this setting, independently computed TCPA and DCPA bounds lose the joint relationship required for VO membership, while uncertainty-aware VOs preserve this relationship through a set-valued representation of collision-inducing velocities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07371
Improving the reliability of large language model (LLM) agents in long-horizon decision-making remains a key challenge. When deployed as autonomous agents interacting with complex environments, early mistakes can propagate through trajectories and cause cascading failures. Recent approaches improve reliability by incorporating external critique or deliberation, but invoking these mechanisms at every step substantially increases token consumption and latency, limiting practical deployment. We propose SAG (Self-improving Agent with Gated critique), a cost-aware framework that formulates critique invocation as a step-wise decision problem during long-horizon interaction. SAG introduces a lightweight, training-free gating mechanism that estimates the utility of critique using action-level ambiguity signals--global entropy and local top-2 margin--computed over admissible actions. From a decision-theoretic perspective, this mechanism approximates the Value of Information (VoI) of critique, enabling the agent to selectively allocate expensive feedback only when its expected benefit justifies the cost. SAG further incorporates online bootstrapped self-improvement, allowing the actor to internalize critic-assisted behaviors and progressively reduce reliance on critique. Across three long-horizon interactive benchmarks and multiple backbone models, SAG substantially improves the performance-cost trade-off compared with both no-critique and always-on critique agents. On ALFWorld, SAG increases task success from 24.6% to 78.4% while maintaining a token budget comparable to ReAct, yielding a $3.1\times$ improvement in normalized token efficiency. Moreover, a 7B actor with a lightweight 3B critic achieves performance comparable to a 14B actor without critique, showing that selective critique can recover most of the reliability benefits of deliberation while dramatically reducing inference cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07335
Multi-robot missions in infrastructure-denied environments frequently rely on reliable communication links between spatially separated locations. We propose a fully decentralized framework for constructing and dynamically maintaining communication networks without centralized topology planning or global positioning infrastructure. Driven strictly by local interactions, robots reconfigure local network topologies and adjust their physical positions to minimize overall network length while adhering to communication constraints. Formal analysis shows that our local reconfiguration operations guarantee continuous network connectivity, strictly decrease network length with every branch transfer, and bound worst-case performance to the shortest starlike tree. Embodied simulations and physical multi-robot experiments confirm that our approach forms networks near the length of centrally computed Euclidean Steiner trees. Additionally, the system dynamically adapts to moving targets and optimizes deployment by utilizing only necessary connectors, preserving excess robots for auxiliary tasks. This work enables autonomous swarms to self-organize adaptive ad hoc communication infrastructure in communication-denied environments, which could support applications varying from subterranean exploration to planetary missions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07320
Manual repair of program failures is time-consuming and disruptive for software developers, particularly during the pre-submit phase where test failures occur within continuous integration systems. While Automated Program Repair has seen significant advancement through Large Language Models, existing state-of-the-art techniques primarily focus on post-submit workflows, operating offline without the low-latency requirements necessary to assist developers in real-time within their flow before they switch context. In this paper, we introduce FlowAgent, an AI agent deployed at Google to automatically repair test failures in the pre-submit outer-loop workflow inside continuous integration systems. Integrated into Google's internal developer tools, Critique and Cider,FlowAgent utilizes a ReAct-style generate-and-validate loop, as well as rigorous pre-execution and post-execution abstention filters to ensure high-quality suggestions under strict latency constraints. Based on our case studies, FlowAgent is highly effective. First, a manual evaluation conducted on 195 real-world test failures demonstrated 67.18% accuracy in suggesting correct fixes. Following its Google-wide deployment, FlowAgent suggested fixes on 295,508changes, of which developers previewed 65,069 and applied 28,554. Developer feedback from interviews indicate that the agent is useful in suggesting correct fixes, integration of autonomous repair agents into industrial software engineering workflows is received well, while interesting challenges and opportunities still remain.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07289
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables robots to navigate through environments using natural language instructions, making human-robot interaction intuitive. Traditional VLN models often rely on navigation graphs, 360-degree views, and perfect localization which pose significant challenges when adapting these models to real-world settings. This work addresses these limitations by performing a simulation-to-real domain shift of a VLN approach that operates in continuous environments without requiring navigation graphs or panoramic views. The proposed system integrates vision-language models that align visual inputs and linguistic instructions within a shared embedding space, facilitating natural language-driven navigation. We employ a Cross-Modal Attention (CMA) based architecture trained on an existing dataset in a simulated environment and fine-tune it using real-world data collected from a custom-built Ackermann-steered robot equipped with a camera and a LiDAR sensor. By utilising linear photometric adjustments and fine-tuning on a limited number of episodes, our model successfully adapts to real-world environments, achieving effective navigation while running offline on dedicated hardware. Experimental results, evaluated using Success weighted by Path Length (SPL) and Normalized Dynamic Time Warping (nDTW) metrics, demonstrate the robustness and adaptability of our approach. Keywords: Vision-Language Navigation, Cross-Modal Attention, Natural Language Instructions, Sim-to-Real Transfer, Autonomous Navigation, Ackermann-steering.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07192
Understanding and modeling interactions between autonomous agents is a fundamental challenge in robotics, with broad implications for collaborative systems, social robotics, and human-robot coexistence. Although the study of robot interactions has emerged as a compelling research direction, progress has been severely hampered by the absence of large-scale benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce Robot-to-Robot Interaction (R2RI), the first dataset specifically designed to address the Robot-Robot Interaction (RRI) task. R2RI consists of different humanoid robots and realistic interactions modeled on real human social behaviors. Complementary viewpoints are available, \textit{i.e.}, an egocentric perspective from each robot's onboard sensors, and an exocentric perspective from external fixed cameras, thus enabling rich spatial and contextual understanding of the interaction dynamics. The dataset comprises more than $6.5$M frames and $\approx5000$ videos at $120$ fps, including Event and RGB domains. We investigate pros and cons of each domain, comparing state-of-the-art approaches for a number of key sensing and interaction based tasks. We publicly release the dataset and its annotations for all tasks and modalities at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07117
High-quality 3D reconstruction of lunar terrain from sparse rover images is indispensable for autonomous lunar exploration, but remains challenging because viewpoint overlap is insufficient, surface textures are weak, and data volume is limited. We propose MoonGS, the first feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting framework tailored to lunar scenes. Given only two input images, MoonGS predicts pixel-aligned Gaussian primitives in a single forward pass and renders photorealistic novel views without any per-scene optimization. MoonGS (i) adopts an adaptable backbone design that seamlessly integrates advanced vision foundation models to extract robust depth features; (ii) integrates semantic priors in two manners: merging semantic cues with visual features to refine Gaussian parameter estimation, and adopting a semantic ranking loss that regularizes background depth; and (iii) employs an entropy-guided heuristic resampling strategy to augment sparse observations by selecting the most informative distant viewpoints with negligible overhead. Experiments on the LuSNAR benchmark and our synthetic weak-texture MoonBlender dataset show that MoonGS surpasses state-of-the-art feed-forward NeRF/3DGS baselines by +4.9 dB PSNR, +0.29 SSIM, and 40\% lower LPIPS while maintaining sub-second inference. Furthermore, we validate the broad applicability of our framework by demonstrating that it effectively leverages state-of-the-art backbones, including VGGT, to significantly boost performance. Qualitative evaluations on Chang'e mission imagery also show the best visual quality among compared methods, indicating robustness on real lunar data. The source code and dataset are publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07110
Autonomous aerial parcel collection remains constrained by package-transfer operations that require manual loading, landing, or dedicated ground infrastructure. This letter presents HexaGripper, a single-actuator, winch-deployed six-plate gripper for autonomous collection of cuboid parcels. The proposed mechanism provides synchronized grasping with a wide capture region and tolerance to positional misalignment during pickup. The system integrates vision-based alignment, range sensing, winch deployment, and state-based control to enable autonomous collection while maintaining UAV separation from the pickup surface. Experimental evaluation covered static grasping, capture-workspace assessment, and end-to-end outdoor aerial collection. Static experiments achieved 100% pickup success (15/15 trials) across three parcel geometries, while workspace experiments achieved successful pickup at all 28 tested positions up to a 150 mm radial offset. End-to-end outdoor aerial collection achieved an 80% success rate (4/5 trials). These results demonstrate the feasibility of mechanically synchronized, winch-deployed grasping for landing-free autonomous aerial parcel collection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08259
Traditional data pipelines are notoriously brittle, often failing due to upstream schema drift, API contract changes, or website DOM modifications. Present observability tools only raise alerts but for human engineers, resulting in a high Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and operational fatigue. In this paper we propose AegisFlow (Agentic Engine for Intelligent Self-healing and Graph-driven Operations for Workload remediation), a novel agentic framework that closes the loop between detection and resolution. AegisFlow uses a Watchdog agent to collect runtime telemetry and has a Repair agent to automatically create, test and deploy code patches based on Large Language Models (LLMs). The framework presents the non-intrusive execution model called Parallel Shadow Patching, a non-intrusive execution model based on the Monitor, Analyze, Plan, Execute, Knowledge (MAPE-K) loop to generate and verify patches in digital twin environments. Through experimental testing, we have evaluated AegisFlow across five common failure scenarios, and see 98.1 percent improvement in MTTR (from an average of 170 minutes per patch to 3.2 minutes) and a patch success rate of 92 percent . In particular, the system is successful in dealing with changes in the JSON schema (96 percent ) and punctuation drift (98 percent ), and is least successful in Shadow DOM cases (85 percent ). AegisFlow frees up about 98 percent of data engineering on-call time from firefighting and reallocates it towards innovation. The framework is deployment agnostic consisting of a system that can be deployed in a plugin fashion into an existing pipeline orchestration system with minimal uplift to the existing system.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06971