Zero-Shot
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Transferring the Intelligence of VLMs to Robotic Control
2026-09-19 11:34:13Meng-Hao Guo, Zhe-Han Mo, Jia-Jun Wang, Yi Zhang, Kejin Wang, Yi-Xuan Deng, Jia-Peng Zhang, Yongming Rao, Shi-Min HuAbstract
Humans can seamlessly adapt to both physical and digital worlds, suggesting that while a digital-to-real gap exists in embodiment, environment and task, human intelligence itself may transfer across this gap. This naturally raises a fundamental question: can the intelligence of vision-language models (VLMs) similarly generalize from the digital world to the physical world for robotic control? We investigate this question through RoboDawn, a human-intuitive interface that exposes robotic control to an agentic VLM through a compact set of discrete translation, rotation, and gripper commands. Using this interface, the VLM controls a robot in a closed loop: it observes the current visual state, reasons about the next action, executes it, and adapts subsequent decisions to the resulting state. Furthermore, we introduce an in-context learning (ICL) scheme that uses a few demonstrations to ground the VLM in both interface usage and task-solving strategies. Experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 C2R and RoboDojo demonstrate that RoboDawn achieves strong performance without task-specific robot training. In the zero-shot setting, RoboDawn outperforms several strong policies trained on benchmarkspecific robot data, while a single in-context demonstration further yields substantial performance gains and establishes state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. On RoboTwin 2.0 C2R, the success rate increases from 53.2% zero-shot to 73.6% one-shot, exceeding the solid baseline {\pi}0.5 (46.0%). Similar gains are observed on RoboDojo, where success rate improves from 35.67% zero-shot to 47.17% one-shot. The same framework also transfers to real-world robots, performing block-in-basket and block stacking on Franka.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22966
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From Lexical Baselines to Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Structured Skill and Responsibility-Level Extraction with the SFIA Framework
2026-09-19 07:58:51Ranuga Disansa, U. S. Samarasinghe, Lasith GunawardenaAbstract
Automated skill extraction underpins workforce planning, yet most systems represent skills as flat labels with no notion of the responsibility level at which a skill is practiced. The Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) captures exactly this dimension, defining 147 professional skills across seven responsibility levels, but no automated LLM-based extraction targeting SFIA has been reported. We formalize the task as structured prediction of (skill, level) pairs from free text and ask three questions: how accurately can text be mapped onto SFIA's closed vocabulary, which strategies reliably predict the level alongside the skill, and do agentic designs improve on simpler retrieval and prompting? We evaluate five strategies (a lexical baseline, dense retrieval with LLM reranking, a zero-shot schema-constrained LLM, single-agent agentic RAG, and a three-agent retriever--matcher--verifier crew) against expert-mapped European ICT role profiles, all drawing on an SFIA~9 corpus built by a fully automated agentic pipeline that we release. Retrieval-based matching identifies the most skills while generative strategies are markedly more precise; only strategies assigning the level as an explicit decision predict it reliably, with similarity-based selection more than twice as inaccurate; and the crew doubles latency without improving accuracy, so added agent roles do not automatically benefit closed-taxonomy matching. These results provide the first reproducible baseline for structured, level-aware skill extraction against SFIA.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35806
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ZIL: Zero-shot Image-to-LiDAR Registration
2026-09-19 03:04:51Zijun Li, Xiaotian Sun, Xuelun Shen, Yao Dai, Sheng Ao, Yangyang Shi, Jakob Engel, Zhipeng Cai, Cheng WangAbstract
Image-to-LiDAR registration estimates the camera pose of an image with respect to a LiDAR point cloud. It has diverse applications in autonomous driving, robot navigation etc. However, state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods still 1) mostly assume same-frame inputs, struggling with the image and point cloud from distant frames; 2) rely on domain-specific training, failing to generalize to unseen scenarios. We propose ZIL, the first foundation model for zero-shot non-synchronized image-to-LiDAR registration. ZIL encodes the input image and point cloud with the Vision and Point Transformers. In addition to regressing the relative pose, ZIL also learns to predict 3D coordinates, which substantially improves the pose accuracy without additional annotations. Interestingly, naive mix-data training cannot enable zero-shot generalization, which requires normalization on both camera intrinsics and the LiDAR vertical-axis origin. Trained on 7 public datasets with 1.4M LiDAR frames, ZIL consistently and significantly outperforms previous SOTA with a single model across 5 in-domain and zero-shot benchmarks, reducing the translation and rotation errors by up to 87% and 76% (shown in Fig. 1). Code and models are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22716
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PanoSeg3R: Feed-Forward 3D Semantic Segmentation for Panoramic Images with an Automatic Data Curation Pipeline
2026-09-19 01:42:19Heechan Yoon, Dongki Jung, Phuc Nguyen, Ming Lin, Dinesh ManochaAbstract
We present PanoSeg3R, a feed-forward framework for 3D panoramic semantic segmentation. Unlike existing methods designed for perspective inputs, PanoSeg3R jointly predicts 3D geometry and multi-view semantic segmentation in one single forward pass. Built upon a pretrained reconstruction backbone that supports panoramic images, our approach extends feed-forward 3D reconstruction with a query-based mask decoder. Furthermore, we introduce an automatic panorama data curation pipeline that leverages the complementary strengths of off-the-shelf foundation models to generate reliable pseudo semantic annotations, substantially expanding the training data and improving zero-shot generalization. PanoSeg3R achieves state-of-the-art performance on panoramic 3D semantic segmentation, improving 3D mIoU by up to 16.02 on ScanNet++, while the curated training data further improves zero-shot performance by up to 4.26 and 43.28 mIoU on Stanford2D3D and ToF-360, respectively. Website: this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22687
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Splitting Documents at Lower Cost: Multi-Split Boundary Decisions for LLM-Based Page Stream Segmentation
2026-09-18 22:13:43Nikhil Reddy Pottanigari, Sepideh Kharaghani, Saverio Vadacchino, Alejandro Posada, Ying ZhangAbstract
Scanned mail, uploaded PDFs, and consolidated attachments often arrive as page streams that must be split into individual documents before downstream classification, extraction, or routing. Zero-shot large language models can detect document boundaries without task-specific training, but standard Page Classification (PC) and Boundary Decision (BD) formulations resolve only one boundary per model call. We introduce Multi-Split Boundary Decision (MSBD), which predicts multiple boundaries within a page window in a single call, reducing the number of inference requests. We evaluate MSBD across multiple language models, document collections, input modalities, and window sizes. The results reveal a model- and corpus-dependent operating range in which MSBD preserves strong segmentation accuracy while substantially improving inference efficiency, followed by a sharp decline at larger windows. MSBD provided the strongest overall accuracy--efficiency trade-off, while large windows expose distinct over- and under-segmentation behavior across models. These findings show that multi-boundary prediction can make zero-shot page stream segmentation more efficient when the window size is selected for the target corpus.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22620
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Correct Diagnosis, Better Feedback: A Symbolic-Verifier for Faithful LLM Tutoring Feedback in Logic Proofs
2026-09-18 20:09:49Tahreem Yasir, Arnav Mody, Xioayi Tian, Tiffany BarnesAbstract
Effective LLM tutoring depends on correctly identifying the specific error in a student's reasoning before generating feedback. We study this problem in propositional-logic proof tutoring, where student actions can be checked against formal inference rules. We introduce a verifier-grounded architecture that separates diagnosis from language generation. Using 600 balanced student actions, we compare a zero-shot LLM detector, a fine-tuned detector, and a symbolic verifier. Each diagnosis is processed by shared rationale and feedback agents, isolating the effect of the initial diagnosis. The zero-shot detector achieves a macro-F1 of 0.191; fine-tuning raises this to 0.709 but retains systematic errors between structurally related classes. Rationales generally preserve the diagnosis supplied to them, showing that an incorrect diagnosis can be faithfully propagated through the pipeline. Feedback can likewise remain faithful to its rationale, non-revealing, and pedagogically appropriate while addressing the wrong error. Verifier-grounded feedback achieves the highest diagnostic correctness, and expert ratings largely uneven with the automatic feedback evaluations. These findings show that apparent feedback quality can conceal upstream diagnostic errors and that faithfulness must be evaluated separately from correctness. Our code is publicly available
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22553
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IntLawNER: A Named Entity Recognition Dataset and Benchmark in International Law
2026-09-18 19:36:30Genis Skura, Roland Bouffanais, Didier WernliAbstract
International law provides the normative framework through which states coordinate action, regulate armed conflict, and protect human rights, yet its texts remain without token-level named entity recognition (NER) resources. We introduce IntLawNER, a NER dataset and benchmark for codified sources of international law, covering 2,987 gold-annotated sentences and 8,094 entity spans from International Court of Justice (ICJ) decisions, UN Security Council resolutions, and European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments, annotated with seven institution-specific entity types. We construct IntLawNER with a cost-effective hybrid algorithmic-agentic pipeline that reduces 468k source sentences to a compact annotation set through candidate retrieval, LLM-based vetting, and human review, with 89.6% of gold spans accepted unchanged from the silver layer. However, the silver-to-gold analysis reveals that human-machine aggregate agreement metrics can be misleading in domain-specific NER: Cohen's kappa=0.964 on boundary-matched spans masks a macro-F1 of 0.753 when missing entities, boundary errors, and label corrections are included. The benchmark shows that zero-shot span-based GLiNER collapses on entity types dependent on institutional function rather than surface form (0.243 micro-F1), while fine-tuned transformers struggle on rare labels. Carefully selected few-shot examples that demonstrate label contrasts improve every LLM over zero-shot prompting, with Claude Opus 4.6 reaching the best score of 0.873 micro-F1. We release IntLawNER as a benchmark and reusable resource for extracting references in international legal texts.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22529
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On the Limitations of Large Language Models for Conceptual Database Modeling
2026-09-18 17:59:25Arthur F. Siqueira, Carlos D. S. Nogueira, Eduarda Farias, Claudio E. C. Campelo, J\'ulia MenezesAbstract
This article analyzes the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as support for the conceptual modeling of relational databases through the automatic generation of Entity-Relationship (ER) diagrams from natural language requirements. The approach combines different language models with prompt engineering techniques to evaluate their ability to identify entities, relationships, and attributes in a conceptually consistent manner. The experimental evaluation involved three LLMs, each subjected to three prompting techniques (Zero-Shot, Chain of Thought, and Chain of Thought + Verifier), applied to the same requirements scenario with progressively increasing complexity. The generated diagrams were qualitatively analyzed through direct comparison with the textual requirements, considering the structural and semantic adherence of the modeled elements. The results indicate that, although LLMs show reasonable performance in less complex scenarios, their reliability decreases as the complexity of the requirements increases, with a rise in inconsistencies, ambiguities, and failures in representing constraints. These findings reinforce that, in their current state, LLMs are not sufficiently mature for reliable use in complex scenarios, and the cost of validation may offset the apparent productivity gains.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11986
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SkelWAM: A Skeleton-Guided World-Action Model for Zero-Shot Cross-Embodiment Manipulation
2026-09-18 16:44:42Pengjun Niu, Yujia Xie, Rui Peng, Hang Zhao, Ke LiuAbstract
Reusing manipulation experience across robot embodiments is important for scaling robot learning and reducing repeated task-specific data collection. However, changes in embodiment alter visual appearance, action dimensionality and semantics, and the whole-body configurations that can realize the same tool pose. We present SkelWAM, a skeleton-guided world-action model that couples perception and control through one explicit geometric representation for single-source cross-embodiment manipulation. Arm centerline geometry, tool-center-point (TCP) pose, and parallel-jaw commands form a shared 25-D state. The same definition underlies canonical third-person and wrist observations and future whole-body action targets. Trained with predictive visual supervision, a video-action mixture of transformers predicts canonical skeleton action chunks, which embodiment-specific constrained decoders convert into joint or continuum-robot controls. This formulation requires no one-to-one joint correspondence and uses no target-task demonstrations or target policy updates. We introduce LIBERO-Cross10, a source-only cross-embodiment transfer benchmark covering ten tasks and ten target embodiments across four morphological groups. On this benchmark, Franka-trained SkelWAM achieves 43.3% success over 1,000 episodes, exceeding the best-performing evaluated baseline by 36.2 percentage points. We further deploy a JAKA mini2-trained policy on the Feagine A03 continuum robot for three tabletop manipulation tasks, illustrating the approach's potential for real-world cross-embodiment manipulation. Project page: this http URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21983
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NeuRIO: A Streaming Neural Estimator for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Multi-Robot Relative Inertial Odometry
2026-09-18 12:44:23Zhehan Li, Jiadong Lu, Shengwei Ren, Chao Xu, Yanjun CaoAbstract
We present NeuRIO, a streaming neural estimator for anchor-free 6-DoF relative inertial odometry using only identified inter-robot bearings, ranges, and IMU measurements. NeuRIO canonicalizes measurements into gravity-aligned coordinates, represents robots as nodes and mutual observations as factors, and uses attention for spatial reasoning and GRUs for temporal modeling. As a graph network, NeuRIO applies shared node-wise and factor-wise operators throughout the network, enabling it to handle different team sizes and time-varying observation graphs. NeuRIO is trained on a simulator that couples various motion patterns, device-level sensor characteristics, and diverse, realistic modeled, and temporally persistent sensor corruptions. In this way, NeuRIO achieves zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Across $24$ real-world sequences, NeuRIO achieves $14.1\,\mathrm{cm}$ position RMSE and $3.9^\circ$ rotation RMSE. More importantly, NeuRIO demonstrates strong computational scalability, maintaining an update cost below $20\,\mathrm{ms}$ with up to $400$ robots in simulation, while optimization-based methods exceed $20\,\mathrm{ms}$ at only $24$ robots. Moreover, even trained on limited team sizes, NeuRIO transfers directly to unseen larger teams without architectural or parameter changes.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21707
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RAYA: Learning Where and When to Intervene for Robot Recovery
2026-09-18 12:25:08Ishaan Mahajan, Charles Chen, Frederike D\"umbgen, Brian PlancherAbstract
A robot can predict failure and still be unable to prevent it. By the time a safety mechanism reacts, the nominal plan may already have spent the control authority that recovery requires, and fixed task priorities may block whatever response remains. Our key insight is that both aspects are decided inside the controller. Recoverability must inform actions while they are chosen rather than veto them afterward, and task objectives must be adapted as recoverability shrinks. Building on this, we present RAYA, a hybrid learned-analytic framework that places a learned finite-horizon recoverability margin inside an optimal controller with hard constraints and pairs it with a bounded learned scheduler that shifts task weights to facilitate recovery. Across 7,200 simulation episodes per controller spanning quadrotor and autonomous-vehicle benchmarks, RAYA not only improves survival rates, but also transfers the learned components zero-shot to unseen trajectories, disturbances, plant shifts, and friction layouts. We developed an embedded realization of RAYA and deployed it on-board a 35g Crazyflie quadrotor. Across 40 combined hardware flights under wind with either aerodynamic mismatch or an unmodeled 40% motor-command loss, each of three baselines fails in all trials, while RAYA completes 10/10 six-cycle missions. Project Website: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21690
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The Spoken Wikipedia Presentation Corpus
2026-09-18 12:13:06Thomas Ranzenberger, Steffen Freisinger, Tobias Bocklet, Korbinian RiedhammerAbstract
We present the Spoken Wikipedia Presentation Corpus, an extension of the Spoken Wikipedia Corpora featuring LLM-generated slide decks for multimodal ASR. Slides are created from LLM-segmented sections using a hybrid pipeline that combines LLM-based content planning with rule-based design decisions. For each section, an LLM generates a slide title, bullet points, a takeaway message, and a visual description that is used to create an illustration. Rule-based matching then selects layouts, themes, and styles to produce the final slides. A vision LLM extracts slide text as Markdown. We evaluate multiple ASR and spoken language models (SLMs). The best model achieves an average micro-WER of 10.23% and an average micro-CER of 6.48% on audio-only inputs. English yields the lowest error rates, followed by German and Dutch, while performance declines across lower-resource languages. Although audio-only baselines are strong, multimodal zero-shot prompting of omni models remains challenging. The aligned slide, text, and audio data show a strong potential to improve recognition through cross-modal context.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21676
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DualCast: A Dual-Path Language Model for Bimodal Financial Time-Series Forecasting
2026-09-18 11:33:05Wentao Zhao, Hongqiang Wu, Shanghang Liu, Zhaochen Zan, Yu Zhang, Biqing HuangAbstract
Financial time-series forecasting must capture price dynamics across heterogeneous assets while incorporating news available at prediction time. We introduce DualCast, a dual-path framework that extends a frozen language model with a discrete financial vocabulary. Each log-return patch is represented by a learned summary token and three residual shape tokens, preserving local drift and volatility while allowing shape patterns to be shared across assets. To improve codebook utilization, we develop adaptive frequency-equalizing residual vector quantization, which rebalances overloaded codewords without compromising reconstruction accuracy. The fast path trains only the new financial-token embeddings and output heads on a frozen Qwen3-8B backbone. A toggleable LoRA adapter enables a slow path that conditions on the fast forecast and news available at the forecast origin to produce a revised prediction. The reviser is initialized by supervised fine-tuning and further optimized with a return-space group relative policy optimization objective that rewards improvements over the fast forecast. In zero-shot evaluations covering equities and energy prices at five-minute, daily, and weekly resolutions, the slow path achieves the lowest mean absolute percentage error among the compared methods in 8 of 12 dataset-horizon settings, including every longest-horizon setting. News ablations indicate additional gains in most tested settings, although their magnitude varies across markets. DualCast thus combines a fast numerical forecaster with an optional text-conditioned revision mechanism.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38197
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Chinese Competitive Debating Dataset and Benchmark
2026-09-18 11:27:47Zongrui Yang, Haoyuan Li, Zhongsheng Wang, Zhirui Zeng, Pengqian Han, Yi Zhou, Yuting Wang, Jiamou LiuAbstract
Debate adjudication requires tracking how arguments develop through interaction, yet existing datasets rarely combine fine-grained debate transcripts with professional judgments collected during real competitions under a shared rubric. We introduce a dataset and benchmark for evaluating large language models' understanding of competitive Chinese-language debate at the match, stage, and speaker levels. We organized 182 matches and recruited 120 professional judges, with each match independently adjudicated by three judges using a predefined rubric. After excluding matches with incomplete records, the dataset contains 148 matches, 2,698 stages, and 20,542 exchange units, with manually verified transcripts and segmentation. It preserves original stage scores, match votes, best-debater ballots, and adjudication rationales. We define three tasks: winner-tendency prediction, stage-score prediction, and best-debater prediction. Zero-shot evaluation of multiple large language models yields a highest winner-prediction accuracy of 66.2%, a highest Pearson correlation of 0.250 between model stage scores and mean human ratings, and a highest best-debater prediction accuracy of 56.8%. The dataset and benchmark provide a testbed for studying large language models' understanding of interactive argumentation and their agreement with professional judges.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21637
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Detection is solved, delineation is not: what governs tooth segmentation on panoramic radiographs
2026-09-18 11:08:02Muhammad Rehan, Moaz Amjad, Syed Danial Ahmed, Mariam Adnan, Haider AliAbstract
Automatic tooth segmentation and FDI numbering on panoramic radiographs underpins computer-assisted dental diagnosis, yet which factors govern performance remains unclear. We assemble a corpus of 1,422 panoramic radiographs containing 42,142 expert-delineated tooth polygons across the 32-class FDI taxonomy, annotated by 30 dental practitioners and independently reviewed by two others, and use it to isolate input resolution, architecture and anatomical priors under a single evaluation protocol. First, resolution dominates: across a controlled 640/1024/1280 ablation, mask mAP50-95 rises 0.656 -> 0.710 -> 0.717 while mAP50 stays flat at ~0.982. Both gains are significant under a paired bootstrap over images (p < 0.001, p = 0.024); neither mAP50 change is distinguishable from zero. Added resolution buys boundary precision, not detection. Second, architecture is nearly irrelevant in-domain: a query-based transformer with 2.1x the parameters is statistically equivalent to a one-stage detector (95% CI [-0.0064, +0.0064]), only marginally better under domain shift, 5.5x slower on CPU and not executable under standard ONNX runtimes. Third, three targeted interventions fail: a LoRA-adapted self-supervised encoder underperforms, a promptable foundation segmenter degrades masks by 39%, and globally optimal anatomical label assignment yields +0.0007 despite correcting a constraint violated in 40% of out-of-domain predictions. Zero-shot transfer to an independent multi-centre cohort, verified overlap-free, costs 62% of mask mAP50-95 but only 18% of mAP50, reproducing the dissociation. Decomposing masks along the tooth axis localises the residual error to the apical third. Boundary precision is therefore the binding constraint, and effort is better directed at resolution and acquisition diversity than at architectural novelty.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21628
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DPed-VLN: A Benchmark for Socially Compliant Vision-and-Language Navigation in Dynamic Pedestrian Environments
2026-09-18 08:55:29Haojie Dai, Xiangyi Wang, Liuyi Wang, Kai Sheng, Zongtao He, Chengju Liu, Wei Ye, Qijun ChenAbstract
Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) has advanced rapidly in static indoor environments, but robots operating in human-populated spaces must ground language while responding to moving pedestrians and social-safety constraints. We present DPed-VLN, a Habitat 3.0 benchmark for dynamic-pedestrian VLN that couples 33,093 navigation episodes with paired global and prior-augmented instructions, ORCA-controlled humanoid pedestrians, socially constrained expert paths, and metrics that jointly assess navigation efficiency and social safety. DPed-VLN separates ordinary goal-oriented route guidance from prior-augmented instructions that expose dynamic-pedestrian cues for controlled analysis. To instantiate the benchmark, we introduce DPet (Dynamic Pedestrian-aware Network), a pedestrian-aware policy network trained with reinforcement learning and imitation learning. We further adapt representative state-of-the-art VLM-based navigation models, including NaVILA and StreamVLN, to DPed-VLN through LoRA fine-tuning. Experiments show that LoRA adaptation improves zero-shot VLM baselines in several success and safety metrics, especially reducing StreamVLN's collision rate. Among the evaluated methods, DPet-RL achieves the highest SR, SPL, and STL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21504
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Stability-aware Residual Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robotic Manipulator Disturbance Compensation
2026-09-18 04:35:01Jihong Kim, Joonhyuk Kwon, Hwa Soo Kim, TaeWon Seo, Hyung-Tae SeoAbstract
Although conventional controllers and disturbance observers (DOBs) are the standard for precision tracking in manipulators, they suffer from parameter uncertainty, nonlinear friction, and compound disturbances. This study proposes a residual reinforcement learning DOB framework that pairs an analytical observer with an RL policy. The deterministic baseline operates within a reliable region, whereas the RL policy explicitly targets the residuals that the model cannot capture. To make this compensation disturbance-aware, an estimator network aligns the observation history with a privileged disturbance context, organizing the latent space by disturbance regime and enabling rapid adaptation across disturbance transitions. To guarantee stability, we derived and enforced a state-dependent action bound on the RL policy from an input-to-state stability (ISS) analysis such that the closed loop provably confines the tracking error to a certified envelope for arbitrary policy outputs. Experiments on a 6-DOF manipulator demonstrated consistent improvements in disturbance estimation and tracking, including a 27.8% tracking-error reduction on real hardware under zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and a 38.0% reduction under a base-vibration disturbance that was not observed during training.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21307
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Aligning with Lived Experience: Heterogeneous Benefits of Fine Tuning in Mental Health Support Generation
2026-09-17 20:55:02Mohit Chandra, Nabin Kim, Eli Min, Aamogh Sawant, Tanmay Sutar, Munmun De ChoudhuryAbstract
As access to professional mental healthcare remains limited, many individuals turn to online platforms such as Reddit to seek peer support situated within human lived experience. However, a significant portion of such queries go unanswered, presenting an opportunity for using Large Language Models (LLMs) to fill this gap. While LLMs have demonstrated strong performance on clinical benchmarks, their ability to generate lived-experience informed and community-aligned peer support is underexplored. Addressing this gap, we introduce the COmmunity-centered Peer Engaged Support (COPES) dataset and a three-axis evaluation framework to assess LLM alignment with community perspectives to mental health support seeking queries. Evaluating zero-shot and post-trained (SFT and DPO) models, we show that post-training on COPES significantly improves Strategy Alignment (>50% for general-purpose models) and alignment in Emotion & Tone. However, we also observe that such improvements are heterogeneous and alignment improvements vary significantly across subreddits and requested coping strategies. Furthermore, post-training induces distributional shifts, heavily favoring problem-focused recommendations while suppressing emotion-focused strategies. Together, this work shows that while curating community-driven data improves the alignment of LLM responses, model performance remains disparate across distinct sub-communities and specific mental health needs.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21075
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DEXTERA: From a Single Image to Deployable Dexterous Manipulation via Real-to-Sim-to-Real
2026-09-17 20:05:16Jin Wu, Lianjie Yuan, Zeyan Sun, Yuanyuan Lei, Disi A, Bicheng Han, Fangzhou XiaAbstract
Collecting real-world robot data for dexterous manipulation is costly and time-consuming. While high-fidelity physics simulators enable scalable data synthesis and policy learning, constructing deployment-ready digital twins manually remains labor-intensive, and residual visual, geometric, and dynamics gaps hinder reliable sim-to-real transfer. We present DEXTERA, an automated real-to-sim-to-real framework that transforms a single RGB image into deployable policies for dexterous manipulation across four unified stages: (1) single-image scene factorization into a static Gaussian background and interactive rigid or articulated assets with VLM-inferred physical parameters; (2) metric scene global alignment, object canonicalization, and morphology-balanced robot calibration; (3) scalable simulator task primitive construction, VR teleoperation, and object-centric trajectory synthesis; and (4) a shared multimodal policy interface supporting both imitation learning and reinforcement learning. We evaluate DEXTERA across 13 task-embodiment pairs, 2 dexterous robot platforms, and 6 policy architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that DEXTERA achieves superior visual fidelity and 3D geometric reconstruction compared to generative baselines, while cross-domain trajectory replays validate strong physical interaction consistency. Furthermore, simulation-only trained policies enable viable zero-shot real-robot deployment, while simulation-real co-training substantially improves mean physical policy success from 29.2% to 61.9% across diverse policy architectures.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21045
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MILER: Semantic Mid-Level Representation for Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning in Unstructured Autonomous Driving
2026-09-17 17:35:22Thomas Steinecker, Denis Trescher, Alexander Bienemann, Thorsten Luettel, Mirko MaehlischAbstract
Reinforcement learning constitutes a promising approach owing to its potential for superhuman performance and self-learned policies. However, its application to real-world autonomous driving remains scarce, particularly in unstructured environments, because of the challenges associated with sim-to-real transfer for unstructured environments. In this work, we present MILER, an end-to-end policy framework with zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. During offline training, we employ a custom semantic mid-level representation (MLR) simulator and train the policy network using reinforcement learning, with its control outputs applied directly to a bicycle model. During deployment on the real vehicle, camera and LiDAR data are processed by BEVFusion to generate a semantic bird's-eye-view representation consistent with that of the MLR simulator. The actions generated by the policy network are not applied directly to the real vehicle. Instead, we employ a trajectory-alignment strategy that enables zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of both perception and control. We extensively evaluate the proposed framework on a diverse test track comprising numerous challenges, including various obstacles, hairpin curves, velocities of up to 33.6 km/h, and off-road sections. In total, we drove 17.3 km with two different vehicles on a 3.0 km test track without human intervention, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, the entire software stack runs on a Jetson AGX Orin.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20747
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