Safe social navigation requires a robot to anticipate not only the future consequences of its actions, but also whether a nominal action can actually be executed under surrounding physical and social constraints. We present Social-WM, an efficient latent world-model planning framework trained from egocentric RGB video sequences. Our key observation is that social-navigation experience contains a systematic discrepancy between the nominal action and the realizable action: a nominal forward action may be fully executed in free space, but needs to be constrained when heading towards a pedestrian or obstacle. Social-WM learns these safety-relevant consequences directly through action-conditioned future prediction, where the target is the actual observed future following each command. We further introduce a realizable inverse-dynamics objective that associates observed latent transitions with the action actually realized rather than the nominal one. At deployment, candidate actions are imagined through the latent world model, and the inverse dynamics model estimates their realizability; nominal--realizable discrepancy then provides a safety signal before execution. The learned dynamics and realizability model remain goal-independent and support both position- and image-goal navigation. On Social-HM3D, Social-WM achieves 63.77% success while reducing human collisions to 21.67%, and maintains strong performance under zero-shot transfer to Social-MP3D, without explicit pedestrian tracking, privileged human state, or online reinforcement learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40177
Modern transformers pair impressive capabilities with substantial memory and compute demands. Low-rank weight factorization reduces both while keeping the matrices dense, and thus efficient on standard hardware. Existing methods, however, choose the subspace to remove from each weight matrix with local closed-form criteria: activation energy, layer-wise reconstruction error, or a quadratic approximation of the loss. These criteria ignore how errors propagate through the network, so at high compression the errors compound with depth and performance collapses. We introduce Learnable Subspace Projections (LSP), which instead learns the subspaces to discard end-to-end. Each linear layer, or tied group of layers that read the same activations, is assigned an orthogonal projector. All projectors are optimized jointly against a global objective--the KL divergence to the dense model's output distribution or the model's original training loss--while the pretrained weights remain frozen. Projectors are initialized from a whitened SVD truncation, and ranks are allocated by the output KL each projector induces per parameter saved. After training, the projectors merge into standard low-rank factors, with each tied group sharing one factor. In attention, this also lets the model cache one narrow latent in place of full keys and values. Across LLMs (OPT-125M/1.3B, Qwen3-4B, Llama-2-7B) and ViT-B/16, LSP outperforms baselines, and its advantage widens as compression increases. At -70% compression, LSP brings Llama-2-7B to 10.9 WikiText-2 perplexity and 42.2% mean zero-shot accuracy, versus 13.3 and 36.0% for the strongest baseline. The factorized model decodes up to 1.6x faster than the dense model at small batch sizes, and aching the shared latent shrinks the combined memory of weights and KV cache by 13.5x at a 128k-token context, versus at most 6.5x for untied baseline factorizations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40127
Flow-matching approaches to voice conversion (VC) have gained attention owing to their high speech quality and strong speaker similarity. Among them, one-step models such as MeanVoiceFlow are particularly attractive because they enable efficient inference; however, their reliance on a computationally intensive content encoder remains a bottleneck. We therefore propose MeanVoiceFlow2, a framework that jointly optimizes a flow-based conversion module and a computationally efficient content encoder. The model is trained through conversion distillation using MeanVoiceFlow and the reconstruction of real data. We further incorporate diffusion-GAN training with sample mixing and teacher-guided conditioning augmentation to enhance realism and disentanglement. Experiments on zero-shot VC showed that MeanVoiceFlow2 achieved higher perceptual quality and approximately $9\times$ faster inference than MeanVoiceFlow while maintaining comparable speaker similarity. Audio samples are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40087
Multi-modal integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables environmental perception and reliable connectivity for intelligent wireless networks. Data-driven multi-modal ISAC models depend heavily on annotated real-world data to learn relationships across sensing and wireless observations, thereby constraining scalable deployment. Although synthetic data generation reduces the burden, adapting existing simulation pipelines to a target deployment requires consistent scene, sensing, wireless, and learning configurations, while mismatches among these coupled components impair sim-to-real transferability. To address the challenge, we propose an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) framework for sim-to-real multi-modal ISAC, named AIMS. Given a natural-language deployment request specifying the target task, deployment conditions, and real-data budget, AIMS derives a deployment-specific sim-to-real configuration and coordinates its execution to produce a deployment-specific task model. A two-agent architecture coordinates scene construction with task learning. A scene construction agent generates geographically grounded, synchronized sensing and wireless records from shared physical states, while a scene understanding agent configures task-relevant modalities and mixture-of-experts (MoE) learning for zero-shot inference or few-shot adaptation. Structured domain knowledge guides dependency-aware planning, while validation evidence supports feedback-driven revision of affected decisions. Experiments on the real-world DeepSense~6G dataset demonstrate improved vehicle detection and beam prediction over the considered simulation and fusion baselines. A separate orchestration benchmark evaluates task interpretation, dependency reasoning, and feedback-driven replanning across diverse deployment requests, showing improved plan correctness with structured domain knowledge and validation feedback.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39964
Reconstructing dynamic driving scenes from recorded sensor data supports closed-loop evaluation of autonomous driving systems by synthesizing observations beyond the original trajectory. Unlike cameras and LiDAR, radar measures radial velocity directly through Doppler. Yet existing radar novel-view synthesis fails to exploit this capability: methods addressing dynamic scenes reconstruct only range-azimuth tensors, while methods that render Doppler assume static scenes. Moreover, because radar processing spreads each reflection across multiple bins, existing representations absorb this spread into scene geometry, causing it to render incorrectly when the viewpoint moves. We present DyRAD, which models dynamic driving scenes using static background reflectors and motion-tracked dynamic point reflectors to render complete range-azimuth-Doppler (RAD) tensors. Reflector velocities are derived from object tracks and projected onto the line of sight, making Doppler both a rendered output and supervision for those tracks. Crucially, we render reflectors through a fixed analytic point-spread function (PSF) derived from the radar's signal-processing chain, preventing sensor-induced spread from being baked into the scene representation. Beyond improving scene reconstruction, this separation also enables zero-shot sensor-configuration transfer, allowing the same reconstructed scene to be rendered under different radar specifications without refitting. We evaluate DyRAD on RADIal, Boreas, and a synthetic benchmark across both on-path poses and displaced viewpoints untested by prior work. On RADIal, DyRAD recovers radar detections in 90.7% of reference-detected objects, compared with 26.9% for the strongest baseline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39841
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) relies heavily on massive manual annotations, creating a fundamental bottleneck for model scaling. While unsupervised methods attempt to learn object concepts from motion, they typically overfit to moving entities, lacking both multi-granularity understanding and the ability to generalize to static objects. To overcome this, we introduce Motion-Grounded Segment Anything (MoSA), a highly scalable unsupervised framework that learns a transferable objectness prior from unlabeled videos. MoSA operates in three progressive stages: (1) automatically generating multi-granularity motion pseudo-labels from large-scale video data; (2) training a Perceptual Grouping Model (PGM) via contrastive learning to internalize a generalized, appearance-driven concept of objects; and (3) transferring this learned prior into a prompt-guided architecture for segment-anything-style inference on images. Extensive zero-shot evaluations across seven challenging benchmarks (e.g., COCO and ADE20K) demonstrate that MoSA significantly outperforms existing unsupervised methods. Notably, despite using zero manual annotations, MoSA achieves segmentation performance comparable to the fully supervised SAM. Our findings reveal that harnessing large-scale unlabeled motion is a feasible and highly scalable alternative to annotation-driven segment-anything pipelines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39785
Planning with learned world models combines online trajectory optimization with learned value and policy functions for high-dimensional control. Because the planner determines the experience used for learning, while the learned critic and actor in turn score and propose future plans, planning and learning form a closed feedback loop. TD-MPC is a prominent instance of this design. Recent policy-constrained variants strengthen one part of the loop by aligning the learned policy with planner behavior. We introduce PL-MPC (Planning-Learning MPC), which additionally modifies critic supervision and planner terminal-value estimation. Hybrid multi-step TD targets expose critic updates to more realized rewards before bootstrapping; disagreement-aware terminal estimates reduce the influence of uncertain critic values during MPPI planning; and return-weighted actor distillation emphasizes planner-executed actions from high-return episodes. The world-model architecture and MPPI optimizer are otherwise unchanged. On HumanoidBench, the largest gains occur on \texttt{balance-hard}, where Total Average Return (TAR) increases from $98\pm18$ to $387\pm255$, and \texttt{hurdle}, from $199\pm13$ to $466\pm200$; performance across the broader benchmark remains task dependent, and PL-MPC remains competitive on DMControl. Controlled ablations show different component interactions across the two tasks. We further demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on wrench-nut alignment with a 7-DoF KUKA IIWA14, obtaining higher observed success than TD-M(PC)^2 on the training object size and two unseen sizes. Code and data will be available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39751
Embodied agents must determine where to act, anticipate the resulting scene changes, and interpret observed outcomes to guide subsequent actions. This requires connecting 4D interaction understanding, which explains how past actions changed the scene, with spatially grounded planning, which determines how and where to act toward a goal and anticipates the resulting scene changes. We introduce ChronoGraph, a functional 4D scene graph that links actions on affordance parts to semantic and geometric state changes. By representing observed and anticipated transitions in the same form, it provides a shared basis for understanding and planning. We construct ChronoGraphBench through an automatic data engine that converts human-interaction videos and simulated robot trajectories into graph-annotated questions for training and evaluating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on both tasks. Using these annotations, we train ChronoGraphVLM by adapting pretrained VLMs in two stages. Graph-as-Chain-of-Thought supervised fine-tuning teaches the models to reconstruct observed transitions and predict future ones as graph traces before answering. Subsequent joint 4D graph reinforcement learning directly rewards graph properties and answer correctness. Experiments across model scales show improvements over the corresponding pretrained baselines and zero-shot transfer to VLM4D. Real-world demonstrations further show that graph-based planning and affordance grounding support mobile manipulation through existing robot skills without additional fine-tuning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39665
Generative models are transforming Bayesian computational imaging, yet the field still lacks physics-aware foundation models. Current practice falls into two camps. Large foundation image models are deployed as plug-and-play priors with zero-shot approximate likelihood guidance, which introduces significant bias and computational cost. Physics-aware generative models avoid this bias, but each is tied to a specific dataset, task and instrument. We introduce BAM (Bayesian Anything Model), a lightweight foundation model for few-step, physics-aware posterior sampling that generalises robustly to unseen data and tasks, zero-shot or with minimal finetuning. BAM upgrades the operator-conditioned Reconstruct Anything Model (RAM) backbone (Terris et al.) into a conditional flow map, so instrument physics is specified at inference time rather than fixed during training. BAM has just 36M parameters and is pre-trained jointly on large image corpora and libraries of forward operators. A single network then draws posterior samples in a few steps, with no likelihood approximation and no guidance weights to tune. Across linear inverse problems on FFHQ, AFHQ, LSUN, DIV2K and the Kohler camera-shake benchmark, BAM outperforms in just 3 steps both specialised models and leading zero-shot methods in sample quality, at a fraction of their computational cost. BAM gives the community an accessible entry point to generative computational imaging, lowers the economic and environmental cost of training imaging models, and opens a new path for research on physics-aware Bayesian computational imaging. Official page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39660
Tabular learning uses structured data to predict target outcomes. Traditionally, this process has relied on labeled data. However, large language models (LLMs) can be used to elicit domain priors based on the task description and feature semantics, thereby enabling predictions without labeled data. We propose Marginal Response Surface Elicitation (MARS), a method that transforms feature-level LLM priors into a reusable, zero-shot tabular classifier. To construct this classifier, MARS selects representative values for each feature from unlabeled data and prompts the LLM to provide corresponding class support scores and feature weights. It then aggregates multiple responses using the median to construct feature response functions, and makes predictions through their weighted sum without further LLM queries. Across eight tabular benchmark tasks, MARS achieves the highest average AUC and AP, outperforming direct prompting by 1.97 and 6.21 percentage points respectively, while substantially reducing end-to-end costs. Evaluations with LLMs of different sizes further demonstrate its predictive advantage over direct prompting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39639
AI video generators have not only become harder to detect but are used to generate a diverse set of scenarios from landscapes to street views to animal videos. This creates a problem where CNN-based detectors are effective but offer no insight into their inner workings, while forensics-based detectors are often pretrained for a set scenario or become too complex to derive meaningful insights. We present a novel approach to AI video detection using Sobel gradient values analysed with the first-digit law. Using linear discriminant analysis, we visualise the discriminatory signal, while a multi-layer perceptron is used for classification. The detection method has no generator- or scenespecific features, and the model has no knowledge of container formats, codec, bitrate, or compression artefacts. The model is trained and tested on GenBuster-200K, GenBusterBench, GenVA, FaceForensics++ C23, and CelebDF. We also show how zero-shot detection fails even though the feature set carries a discriminatory signal.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39585
Matching the same vehicle across front and rear cameras is difficult because the cameras do not share a view and the vehicle's appearance changes substantially. We introduce Front2Back-ReID, a benchmark of 500 manually verified vehicle handovers from 20 recording sequences in South Africa. Each example asks a model to match a vehicle highlighted in a front-camera image to the same vehicle among at least three candidates in a later rear-camera image. We evaluate seven zero-shot vision-language models, four image-retrieval baselines, and 25 human participants. Models are tested using full front RGB images, cropped target vehicles, and binary silhouettes. The strongest VLM achieved 76.6 percent Rank-1 accuracy on target crops, compared with 74.0 percent for the frozen SigLIP2 baseline; this difference was not statistically clear. Human participants achieved 94.0 percent accuracy with full images and 92.2 percent with target crops. Under our evaluation setup, enabling reasoning improved accuracy across all three input conditions for every model evaluated in both modes. We also found that VLMs generally performed worse on full scenes than on target crops. These results show that general-purpose VLMs do not yet consistently outperform strong visual retrieval for front-to-rear vehicle matching, while humans remain substantially more reliable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39492
Longitudinal clinical cohorts are multimodal, irregularly sampled and pervasively incomplete: in ADNI, positron emission tomography and cerebrospinal fluid assays are absent from roughly half of all visits. Linear state-space models handle irregular sampling gracefully but treat a missing modality by masking the input, leaving the transition operator untouched. We prove that this is a representational limitation: the latent state of any linear state-space layer whose transition operator does not depend on the availability pattern is an additive function of the availability indicators, so no such layer can represent an interaction between two modalities being jointly present or jointly absent. We propose CAMOS, which gives each modality a bank of second-order oscillators coupled through a matrix that sits inside the differential equation and is gated by availability, so the transition operator itself becomes a function of which measurements were taken. Coupling invalidates the analysis of uncoupled oscillatory models, and we restore it: a per-channel Gershgorin budget makes the effective stiffness positive definite uniformly over all $2^M$ availability patterns and all gaps, an energy argument charges amplification to availability transitions rather than sequence length, and a channel factorization preserves exact associative parallel scans. On ADNI, CAMOS outperforms uncoupled oscillatory state-space models and clinical fusion models on same-visit staging, landmark prediction and longitudinal forecasting, and under zero-shot transfer to OASIS-3 it is the only model that avoids collapse to the majority class.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39484
Speech emotion recognition (SER) is the task of assigning emotion labels to utterances. Early systems relied on acoustic features, whereas recent approaches combine multiple modalities, most commonly speech and text. Still, performance remains poor on many datasets. Large language models (LLMs) have therefore attracted interest for SER, as they can process diverse inputs jointly with instructions. However, direct audio input raises questions of explainability. To address similar questions in image classification, concept bottleneck models were introduced. This work adapts concept bottlenecks to SER to examine how individual predictions depend on transcripts, acoustic descriptions and speaker attributes. Experiments test three LLMs on CREMA-D, IEMOCAP and MELD, with concepts extracted by separate tools. On scripted corpora, LLMs are strongly biased towards the transcript in the zero-shot setting, which lowers Macro-F1 from 27.8 to 5.8 on CREMA-D. Fine-tuning removes this bias, and the transcript raises Macro-F1 from 41.8 to 45.1. Removing speech rate changes 48% of Neutral predictions to Disgust on CREMA-D; removing intensity level on MELD changes predictions despite little change in Macro-F1. These findings show that aggregate performance changes alone do not capture the effects of concept removal on individual predictions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39453
Replay selectors often rank cached trajectories by format feedback, confidence, freshness, or response length, although cache-level correctness and downstream learner utility are distinct objectives. We formalize this selection-to-learning gap and introduce FAER as an auditable full-trajectory replay framework. Its training-free fixed selector is a protocol baseline; FAER-UTILITY is the learner-aware selector fitted on disjoint calibration blocks. The normalized gradient alignment is reported as a baseline, while a disposable optimizer-aware virtual update supplies a magnitude-aware utility surface. The audit contract freezes observed fields and replay traces before evaluation labels are joined. On GSM8K with Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct, the matched learner study reports quality 0.6329 for the fixed selector, compared with 0.5482 for uniform and 0.6037 for format-feedback under 128 updates. Metadata-only cross-fitted calibration reaches $0.6476\!\pm\!0.0139$ over eight seeds (median 0.6481; paired 95% interval $[+0.079,+0.122]$) at 63,276 target-run tokens; its recorded full cost is 189,642 tokens and 3.48 GPU-hours including calibration. The completed FAER-UTILITY row reaches 0.6624 at 62,844 target-run tokens and 4.26 GPU-hours. Format-feedback selects records with correctness 0.6953, compared with 0.3594 for the fixed selector, despite the different downstream ranking. The completed comparison surfaces report the learner-aware ablation, same-seed gap, policy-optimization rows, and strict zero-shot transfer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00385
A robot that observes people interacting with objects should be able to carry out later requests that refer back to those interactions. Such requests may specify a grasp target by the role it played in a past event rather than by its name or appearance. Moreover, the target may no longer be visible when the robot is asked to act. We present BeyondSCe, a zero-shot robotic grasping system for this event-referential setting. Given the event history and the current scene, the system identifies the requested object or part and localizes it for grasping. If the target is occluded, it combines an event prior recovered from the history with current scene geometry to select camera viewpoints likely to reveal the target. The system uses pretrained models without additional task-specific training. In real-robot experiments with a single wrist-mounted RGB-D camera, it achieves grasp success rates of 76% and 77% for initially visible and occluded targets, respectively, compared with 40% and 55% for the strongest baseline in each condition. On four additional scenes with heavy occlusion, it increases grasp success rates from 75% to 95% while reducing the mean number of views from 3.35 to 2.20, compared with an active-perception baseline given the target's ground-truth 3D bounding box.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39375
Self-supervised pre-training of time series models is currently dominated by next-token prediction and reconstruction objectives. In continuous-valued domains, these paradigms often waste model capacity on high-frequency, point-wise noise at the expense of learning invariant structure. While invariance-based self-distillation has proven highly effective in computer vision, its application to temporal data remains largely underexplored. Effectively adapting such methods to time series requires carefully designed augmentations: spatial operations like cropping can shift the timing of repeating cycles or distort the signal, while basic jittering may provide limited variation. We introduce Wavelet-based self-distillation for time series (WinoTS), an invariance-based pre-training paradigm designed specifically for temporal signals. At its core, WinoTS leverages time-frequency augmentations to construct multi-scale structural views without distorting underlying signal dynamics. Across extensive evaluations, WinoTS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in long-term forecasting, cross-domain zero-shot transfer, and unsupervised anomaly detection. Notably, linear probing on frozen WinoTS representations frequently surpasses fully supervised models trained from scratch. Systematic ablations demonstrate that WinoTS is a flexible, architecture-agnostic framework yielding gains across time series backbones, and establish that time-frequency transformations provide a principled alternative to vision-style spatial augmentations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39337
Robot demonstration generation requires a system to identify where an interaction should occur, plan a feasible motion, and execute the required contact. HiWE connects these decisions through a point-based interface between visual grounding and language-based planning. PointVLM is instruction-tuned to associate task-relevant objects with image coordinates using a mixture of point annotations, segmentation-derived samples, robot observations, and visual question answering data. Depth measurements lift these predictions into a semantic 3D representation. A language planner, 3DLLM, uses this representation to specify end-effector waypoints and gripper commands, while a hybrid grasping module resolves local grasp poses. The evaluation covers 14 simulated manipulation tasks and four physical-robot tasks, together with ablations of the visual training data, spatial inputs, and grasp selection. Here, zero-shot execution refers to deployment without task-specific demonstration training; the visual model uses existing robot data during fine-tuning. This paper describes the original point-based formulation of the framework; its relationship to the subsequent GeneralVLA extension is detailed in the introduction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39323
Fine-grained vision-language alignment in chest radiography enables zero-shot classification, grounding, and segmentation without task-specific annotations. However, this alignment is fundamentally hindered by two intertwined sources of ambiguity: projection-induced visual mismatch and patient-agnostic semantic overlap. First, at the local feature level, frontal and lateral radiographs exhibit distinct appearances for the same clinical finding, rendering a shared patch-text similarity geometry inherently suboptimal. Compounding this visual ambiguity is a semantic mismatch during global contrastive optimization, where instance-level objectives penalize cross-patient pairs as strict negatives even when they share identical positive clinical concepts. To address this dual ambiguity, we propose PLRS-IC, a unified dual-calibration framework for chest X-ray representation learning. At the local alignment stage, Projection-Conditioned Low-Rank Residual Similarity (PLRS) dynamically adapts patch-text matching to projection-specific manifolds using a bounded, parameter-efficient low-rank residual. At the global optimization stage, Information-Content-Calibrated Soft False-Negative Suppression (IC-SFNS) leverages a corpus-derived information-theoretic prior to soften the penalty of semantically overlapping negatives without altering original contrastive assignments. Extensive experiments across nine public zero-shot benchmark settings demonstrate that our framework yields consistent improvements in classification, grounding, and segmentation, validating the necessity of dual-calibration in medical vision-language pre-training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39266
Persistent spatial memory enables embodied agents to navigate familiar environments across repeated visits. However, targets may move while unobserved, including during navigation, making remembered locations unreliable by the time an agent arrives. Despite advances in memory retrieval and state prediction, accounting for continued hidden world evolution and revising beliefs under limited visibility remain challenging. We study Evolving-World Navigation, where agents infer target locations from intermittent observations, predict their states at inspection time, and revise beliefs using visual evidence. We propose EvolvingNav, which constructs a time-indexed belief from timestamped 3D object histories through a structured persistence-relocation model. The belief distinguishes persistence at the last observed location from relocation to alternative locations and retains probability mass outside the known candidate set. An event-driven filter propagates the current belief as time elapses, forecasts target occupancy at candidate inspection times, and incorporates new RGB-D evidence. Negative observations downweight location hypotheses according to calibrated, visibility-conditioned detection probabilities, while evidence tracking prevents repeated use of the same observations. A frozen, zero-shot vision-language controller uses the updated belief to choose actions and replan. We further introduce EvoWorld-Bench, a benchmark grounded in human activity traces, comprising 54 scenes and 803,680 tasks with controlled changes before and during navigation. In simulation and real-robot experiments, EvolvingNav improves navigation success and search efficiency over the evaluated baselines. Paired experiments show the clearest gains under learnable temporal patterns, while ablations demonstrate the value of preserving uncertainty and incorporating visibility-aware evidence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39166