Zero-Shot
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PointVGGT: Zero-Shot Multiview RGB-D Point Cloud Registration with Visual Geometry Foundation Priors
2026-10-08 09:54:56Haobo Jiang, Liang Yu, Jianmin ZhengAbstract
This paper addresses multiview RGB-D point cloud registration, aiming to estimate global rigid poses for unordered RGB-D scans and align them in a metrically consistent coordinate frame. The conventional pairwise-then-global paradigm suffers from locally optimized pairwise registration, severe error propagation and high computational burden. In particular, existing methods typically treat RGB data as a mere auxiliary matching cue and overlook the holistic geometric priors (e.g., camera poses and 3D models) encoded across image sequences. This paper introduces PointVGGT, a zero-shot framework built upon a novel \emph{foundation-then-refinement} paradigm that systematically leverages visual geometry foundation models (e.g., VGGT) as the computational backbone for robust, training-free multiview RGB-D registration. In the foundation stage, we directly recover metrically consistent global poses (without any pairwise estimation) by grounding the scale-ambiguous pose predictions of the foundation model against metric depth observations. In the refinement stage, we introduce an efficient voxelized spatial hashing mechanism that exploits the globally coherent 3D reconstruction (induced by the foundation model) as a shared spatial anchor, enabling dense multiview correspondences in near-linear time. On top of this, an IRLS-based robust motion-only bundle adjustment is performed using a conjugate gradient solver to jointly minimize the correspondence and reprojection residuals for multiview pose refinement. Extensive experiments on indoor/object-centric/outdoor datasets verify the outstanding zero-shot registration accuracy and computational efficiency of our proposed method.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11612
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Measuring Cultural Alignment Beyond the Average: A Framework for Evaluating Maternal-Health LLM Interactions in Indian Contexts
2026-10-08 09:35:15Umaira Izhar, Gunjan Arora, Pushpendra SinghAbstract
Existing evaluation methods for healthcare LLMs primarily assess factual correctness,safety, and fluency, while providing limited insight into whether generated interactions reflect culturally situated healthcare reasoning. This limitation is particularly important in maternal health, where care decisions are shaped by social and relational norms. We introduce MH-INDIC, a culturally grounded evaluation framework for maternal-health interactions in urban and semi-urban North Indian contexts that operationalises cultural behaviour through ten dimensions of maternal-health reasoning. Using a 26-item survey administered to 102 pregnant and postpartum women from urban and semi-urban North India, we evaluate ten LLMs. We distinguish population level cultural alignment from profile-level behavioural variation. Although several models approximate the human population-level distribution, all evaluated systems exhibit substantially lower variation across demographic and household profiles than the human cohort, revealing a gap between aggregate alignment and profile-conditioned sensitivity. As a downstream application of MH-INDIC, we use the strongest-aligned proprietary and open-source models to generate culturally conditioned maternal-health dialogues under zero-shot, self-conditioned, and human-grounded prompting. Human-grounded conditioning produces stronger profile alignment and dialogue quality ratings, suggesting that measured cultural profiles can improve the cultural grounding of generated interactions
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11586
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Stop My Dancing! Understanding, Detecting and Attributing Motion-Aware Deepfake Videos
2026-10-08 08:35:40Fazhong Liu, Yan Meng, Tian Dong, Guoxing Chen, Haojin ZhuAbstract
Pose-guided diffusion models can now synthesize entire human figures in motion, spawning a new class of deepfakes: Motion Aware Deepfake (MAD) that have already reached hundreds of millions of viewers. To better understand this emerging threat, we construct the first MAD-specific benchmark and measurement framework, containing over 1.5 million frames that mix 1,363 real and 30,122 synthetic videos from six controllable generators, with realistic perturbations and open-world evaluation splits. Then, we dissect MAD and discover that, despite their global coherence, these videos betray faint yet reliable cues: because the model relies on limited input frames for motion synthesis, it must predict and simulate coherent movement at motion boundaries, thereby producing high-frequency artifacts along with model-specific spectral fingerprints. Based on the observations obtained from analysis on dataset, we propose MoDA, the first defense framework tailored to detect and attribute MAD videos. MoDA couples spatial semantics with steganalysis-rich frequency features via cross-domain alignment and multi-scale aggregation, achieving 94.8% in-distribution and 89.1% cross-dataset detection accuracy gains of 10% to 25% over prior work and 91.5% model attribution accuracy. MoDA achieves 81.94% accuracy on 200 clips produced by two unseen commercial MAD platforms, indicating promising zero-shot transfer, and 78.13% detection accuracy on 1,200 unseen MAD video clips (55k frames in total) collected from the open Internet. Under white-box, gray-box, and black-box adaptive attacks, MoDA maintains relatively stable detection and attribution performance while the accuracies of the baselines drop rapidly.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11496
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SpikeSSL: A Universal Spike Inference Framework with Dynamics-Informed State-Space Layers
2026-10-08 08:09:47Chenghao Yue, Siming Xing, Shuran Liu, Angran Li, Yuanlong ZhangAbstract
Two-photon calcium imaging is a standard tool for recording large neural populations in vivo, yet inferring spikes accurately across the growing diversity of calcium indicators remains an open problem. Existing supervised methods achieve reasonable in-domain accuracy but generalize poorly to unseen indicators, because different indicators induce distinct fluorescence kinetics and signal statistics while existing architectures remain relatively simple generic temporal regressors without dynamics-matched inductive bias. We propose SpikeSSL, a universal spike inference framework whose temporal backbone is a bank of bidirectional IIR state-space layers broadly motivated by calcium dynamics. A multi-modal conditioning encoder maps indicator identity, sampling rate, and trace-level signal statistics into a global conditioning vector that modulates the backbone via Adaptive Layer Normalization, while a heteroscedastic variance head provides calibrated per-frame uncertainty. On a benchmark with five fixed evaluation splits built from 33 public ground-truth datasets, SpikeSSL achieves state-of-the-art performance in both in-domain and zero-shot leave-one-indicator-out settings. We also develop a biophysical simulation pipeline capable of generating paired fluorescence-spike traces with systematically varied kinetic parameters, spike statistics, response nonlinearities, baseline drift, and noise. Using this pipeline, we synthesize approximately 11,000 simulated traces. Augmenting training with these data effectively closes the cross-indicator domain gap and improves zero-shot generalization. Code is publicly available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11456
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GroundSight at GroundLM 2026 Shared Tasks: GoldenViewVQA
2026-10-08 07:34:26Kun Wang, Yupeng Hu, Ruping Cao, Hao Liu, Zhiran Li, Qianlong Xiang, Harry ChengAbstract
GoldenViewVQA requires models to jointly answer driving-scene questions and identify the camera view containing the supporting visual evidence, making precise evidence localization as important as answer correctness. We present \textbf{CoVeR-VQA}, a training-free multi-stage verification and correction framework for grounded multi-view VQA. Starting from GPT-5.6 zero-shot predictions, CoVeR-VQA progressively applies view-specific verification with Gemini-3.6-Flash, prior-guided joint verification with Claude-Opus-5, and cross-split group-level verification that exploits semantically filtered question groups from shared multi-view scenes and validation-derived prior knowledge. On the official GoldenViewVQA test set, the four-stage CoVeR-VQA pipeline achieves 84.75\% Joint Accuracy, improving the GPT-5.6 zero-shot baseline by 13.56 percentage points, while reaching 94.92\% Answer Accuracy and 86.44\% View Accuracy. The final submitted run achieves 88.14\% Joint Accuracy after two additional evaluator-informed post-hoc corrections. Our analysis shows that supporting-view localization remains the primary source of residual errors, highlighting the importance of explicit evidence verification for reliable multi-view multimodal reasoning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11402
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PlanWAM: Planning-Shaped Future Representations for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
2026-10-08 07:13:10Jinchang Xu, Hongda Yu, Fengwei Dong, Wenhui Huang, Xi Wei, Yongzhi Liu, Sunan Zhang, Jirao Wang, Chen Lv, Bingbing Li, Guodong Yin, Weichao ZhuangAbstract
World models in end-to-end autonomous driving predict future scene evolution to provide foresight for trajectory planning. Existing methods mainly study how to predict the future and how to use it, but less often ask which future representation is actually most useful for planning. To this end, we propose PlanWAM, a Planning-Shaped World Action Model. The key idea is to let the planning task shape the future-state representation, so that it retains the information most useful for planning. A latent world model then predicts this planning-shaped future latent representation from historical observations and uses it for planning, enabling foresighted planning. Specifically, we first use a Temporal Register Pyramid to compress multi-frame historical information in a recency-aware manner, learning a compact history representation oriented toward future reasoning and planning. We then introduce a privileged future posterior branch that observes ground-truth future frames, and shape its future latent representation with trajectory-planning objectives to obtain a planning-shaped future latent representation. Hindsight-to-Foresight Distillation trains a prior branch that depends only on history to predict this future latent representation. The predicted future latent representation serves as planning context and guides trajectory generation and selection. PlanWAM achieves 93.8 PDMS / 90.9 EPDMS on NAVSIM-v1/v2 navtest and reaches 38.7 HD-Score on closed-loop HUGSIM in a zero-shot setting, demonstrating leading planning performance across both open-loop and closed-loop evaluations. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that planning-shaped future representations provide an effective and deployable form of foresight for world-action models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11382
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CRISP: Fixing Flying Pixels in Latent LiDAR Generation via Diffusion Decoding
2026-10-08 07:07:55Andrea Ceron, Michael Schmidt, Alvaro Marcos-Ramiro, Sebastian Schmidt, Benjamin BusamAbstract
Latent LiDAR pipelines suffer from flying pixels: convolutional VAEs blur sharp radial depth discontinuities, yielding edge depths that back-project to points floating between surfaces. We identify this as a major, directly correctable decoder bottleneck and introduce CRISP: a pixel-space diffusion decoder with a backbone-agnostic latent adapter, DiT-based denoiser, and support mask predictor. CRISP replaces video-VAE and LiDAR-native decoders alike while keeping the encoder and latent generator fixed. Across KITTI-360, SemanticKITTI, and nuScenes, replacing only the decoder reduces FSVD/FPVD by 50.5% on average across frozen backbones; for generic video VAEs, the reductions reach 71%/74%. On the LiDAR-native LiDM backbone, FRID drops by 71%, with the largest gains at depth discontinuities. In a pretrained LiDM world model, the same zero-shot replacement improves FSVD by 15.5%, narrowing the sim-to-real gap.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11376
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Rethinking Contrastive Loss in CLIP Post-training: A Complementary Framework with Frozen Text Encoder
2026-10-08 07:06:58Zidan Wang, Yaqian Li, Xiaokai Zhang, Kaiwen Long, Kun He, Hanpeng LiuAbstract
CLIP serves as a foundational vision-language model and the de facto vision encoder for downstream VLMs such as LLaVA. Post-training offers a lightweight route to refine CLIP, but recent work argues that the standard contrastive loss is unsuitable for post-training due to catastrophic forgetting under small batches, motivating designs that abandon the contrastive objective in favor of distillation. We revisit this premise and find that, for the InfoNCE objective, the reported forgetting is driven primarily not by insufficient negatives but by an inappropriate magnitude of the contrastive temperature $\tau$: with $\tau$ set sufficiently small, contrastive post-training improves rather than degrades the pretrained CLIP, which we explain through the temperature dependence of the InfoNCE gradient. Building on this finding, we propose \textbf{ComCLIP}, a lightweight single-epoch post-training recipe that freezes CLIP's text encoder---so the refined vision encoder is a drop-in replacement with unchanged architecture and inference cost---and trains the vision encoder with a properly-tempered contrastive loss, an MSE anchoring loss against the original CLIP, and a relational distillation loss from DINOv2. Over multiple seeds, ComCLIP matches the self-distillation baseline CLIP-Refine on zero-shot classification while significantly improving the transferability of visual features, measured by linear probing ($48.99$ vs.\ $42.28$ on ViT-B/16), and on ViT-L/14 it also improves MMVP over CLIP-Refine ($24.20$ vs.\ $19.01$); CLIP-Refine remains stronger on image-text retrieval. Used as a drop-in vision encoder for LLaVA-1.5-7B without re-aligning the projector or LLM, ComCLIP yields no net change across $8$ VLM benchmarks, i.e., the refinement does not break downstream compatibility. Code and models are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11374
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PathLang: A Language-Centered Benchmark for Vision-Language Models in Computational Pathology
2026-10-08 06:27:42Fanqi Cheng, Kuo Gong, Shangke Liu, Beidi Zhao, Junchao Zhu, Zheyu Zhu, Leiyue Zhao, Fengbei Liu, John Cannon, Gang Wang, Zu-hua Gao, Kenji Ikemura, Yihe Yang, Yaohong Wang, Yuankai Huo, Xiaoxiao Li, Mert R. Sabuncu, Ruining DengAbstract
Pathology vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong visual perception ability, but their robustness in the language domain remains poorly characterized. Existing pathology VLM benchmarks largely rely on canonical closed-set prompts or perturb only generic templates, treating language as a fixed evaluation component rather than a variable axis of model behavior. In clinical practice, however, diagnostic language varies across reports, institutions, and candidate diagnoses. We introduce PathLang, a language-centered and clinically grounded zero-shot benchmark. PathLang holds the underlying slides, ground-truth labels, and image-text evaluation direction fixed while systematically varying only the diagnostic language, so that performance differences reflect how a diagnosis is phrased rather than what is imaged. The language variation follows how pathologists actually rephrase diagnoses (terminology, specificity, and reporting style), and all prompts and candidate pools are validated by six board-certified pathologists. PathLang covers four task families: (1) zero-shot classification with image-text alignment analysis, (2) cross-modal retrieval, (3) paraphrase robustness, including semantic-equivalence paraphrases, length and reporting-style variation, and prompt ensembling, and (4) open-vocabulary diagnosis retrieval over four candidate pools with distinct forms of semantic competition. Across nine VLMs and five public datasets spanning four organs, we find that performance is highly sensitive to clinically equivalent paraphrases, varies substantially across forms of semantic competition, and that image-text alignment quality does not necessarily translate into inter-class separability. We release the prompt corpus, candidate pools, pre-computed text embeddings, and evaluation code at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11329
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ORDO: Operation-level Round-aware Dynamic Ordering for MIP Presolve
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Presolve strongly affects mixed-integer programming (MIP) performance, yet learning-based methods only optimize parameter configurations and cannot express the non-commutative temporal dependencies among actions, whose default order is nearly unique on most domains, yet functionally necessary: artificially shuffling the order of the same sequence inflates the tail of the solve-time distribution by up to several-fold. We recast presolve planning as autoregressive sequence generation over a unified atomic action space, moving the decision object to action sequences; we call this framework ORDO---Operation-level Round-aware Dynamic Ordering for MIP Presolve. Its payoff is cross-domain generalization: on multiple unseen domains it attains end-to-end zero-shot speedup---to our knowledge the first for presolve action sequences---varying by domain and not explained by corpus richness, the strongest domain reaching the largest speedup once racing is added. Deployment uses sequence racing, in which candidate sequences run concurrently and the winner is kept, enabled by an execution-and-observation facility, added by modifying the SCIP source, that injects sequences along the native path and records which actions actually execute and in which round.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11294
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SimVLA: Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real VLA Learning for Mobile Manipulation
2026-10-08 04:52:35Kyoungin Baik, Youngwoon LeeAbstract
Large-scale, diverse datasets have driven the success of LLMs and VLMs. But VLAs for robotics remain limited by the cost and complexity of real-world data collection. While simulation offers a scalable alternative, its potential for sim-to-real VLA learning in mobile manipulation remains largely underexplored. We introduce SimVLA, an end-to-end framework that trains VLAs entirely on synthetic simulation data without teleoperation for mobile manipulation. SimVLA is first pre-trained on two complementary simulation-derived datasets: SimAction, a large-scale robot action dataset spanning 35 diverse mobile manipulation tasks, generated by composing atomic skills, and SimVQA, which leverages privileged simulator state to provide spatial, geometric, and subtask-level visual-language supervision. We further post-train SimVLA on a mixture of SimAction and SimDeploy, a dataset collected from policy rollouts across diverse simulated environments. We evaluate SimVLA on tasks including restocking, pouring, and cleaning, and show zero-shot transfer to real-world mobile manipulation, including real home environments. SimVLA outperforms policies trained on 50 in-domain real-world demonstrations, suggesting that simulation can enable scalable sim-to-real mobile manipulation. We further demonstrate the value of multiple complementary forms of supervision for effectively leveraging simulation in VLA training.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11248
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The '10th Juror': Open-Set Standpoint Screening for Bureaucratic Bias Detection
2026-10-08 03:05:08Yuchen Miao, Zijun Wang, Chang Han, Yurui Shi, Mingtai Zhang, Siyang XuAbstract
Presupposing the boundaries of bias is itself a form of bias. We study closed-loop bias governance for Dutch government documents, where a system must detect biased language, ground decisions in legal and contextual evidence, rewrite problematic sentences when intervention is warranted, and verify that the rewrite mitigates harm without distorting meaning. Existing methods face three challenges: (i) discriminative classifiers capture surface regularities but lack normative grounding; (ii) zero-shot LLMs often adopt generic viewpoints and over-flag ambiguous administrative language; and (iii) fixed taxonomies inherit the Closed-World Assumption, missing emerging local targets. We propose MARS-Gov, a standpoint-aware multi-agent framework that combines legal retrieval, open-set target screening, specialized jurors, conservative routing, and rewrite verification. When screening finds an uncovered group, MARS-Gov instantiates a dynamic "10th juror" to deliberate outside the fixed panel. On DGDB, MARS-Gov sets a new SOTA with 0.880 F1, outperforming the strongest zero-shot LLM detector by 20.2 points (29.8% relative) and the best supervised Dutch encoder by 6.8 points, while reducing unnecessary interventions to 2.5%. Leave-One-Category-Out (LOCO) evaluation recovers held-out categories with 85.1% Correct@1 and 93.8% Correct@3.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11136
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When Citations Mislead? A Claim-Level Benchmark for Legal Hallucination Detection
2026-10-07 22:43:56M. Mikail Demir, M. Abdullah CanbazAbstract
Large language models are increasingly used in legal research and drafting, but they can still produce claims that sound convincing without being supported by the cited source. We introduce PARCEL, a benchmark for checking whether a legal claim is supported by the underlying authority. Using recent New York State Court of Appeals decisions, we build a dataset of 3,396 parenthetical-style claims labeled as Supported, Refuted, or Not Found. We cast this task as a three-way natural language inference problem and evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs in a zero-shot setting. Although the strongest models reach up to 0.97 accuracy, the results also show an important weakness: models still incorrectly mark unsupported claims as supported, even when the full opinion text is provided. Across models, missing support is harder to detect than direct contradiction, and fabricated but plausible citations cause the largest drop in performance. Overall, PARCEL provides a practical benchmark for testing claim-level groundedness in legal RAG systems.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10971
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AI4Fire: Evaluating Large Language Models on Wildfire Tasks
2026-10-07 21:52:18Yue Zhao, Xiyang Hu, Zuobin Xiong, Zhangyu Wang, Ruolin LiAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) are entering wildfire management, where overstated evaluations can cost property and lives. How do they perform on wildfire tasks, with and without grounding? Bare means a model receives the task input alone. Grounded means it also receives one task-specific addition: for smoke detection, a smoke-free reference frame from the same camera. AI4Fire runs six core models bare and grounded on five wildfire tasks, zero-shot; a sweep adds 29 more. Our literature search on fire tasks found 138 works; none combines this roster, task coverage, and paired bare and grounded runs. We report three findings. (1) Grounding helped most where the addition carried the answer: a read-only SQL tool lifted every core model's database accuracy from at most 16 to at least 88 percent. (2) Simple rules were hard to beat: no core model outperformed repeating today's staffing count, and two open-weight models mostly copied the median of similar earlier fire-days, a worse forecast. (3) Public releases carry hazards: a fire-danger column separates the holdout perfectly, and 67 aerial fire frames carry smoldering or fire-free labels read from a clipped thermal maximum. We release prompts, responses, scores, code, and the survey record.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10946
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RoboPrompt: Intuitive Robot Policy Steering with Sparse Human Input
2026-10-07 17:58:53Yanwen Zou, Chenyang Shi, Guoxuan Xu, Wenye Yu, Wendi Chen, Ye Pan, Cewu Lu, Chuan WenAbstract
End-to-end robot policies trained through imitation learning remain constrained by limited data diversity, making reliable zero-shot deployment in real-world settings challenging. Shared-autonomy methods enable human correction through teleoperation, but specialized hardware and operator training hinder deployment at scale. Other approaches incorporate human guidance as additional policy inputs, often requiring architectural changes and dedicated training for steerability, which limits their applicability across policies. We present RoboPrompt, a general-purpose, lightweight robot policy steering system that enables users to guide policy behavior through intuitive, sparse inputs, including drawn traces, target points, and coarse directional instructions. RoboPrompt decouples human-intention translation from the underlying policy: a reusable module converts human guidance into action drafts, which are refined through the diffusion or flow-matching dynamics of the base policy. By controlling action generation in noise space, RoboPrompt balances human intent with the policy prior without modifying the base policy architecture or fine-tuning it for steerability. Experiments demonstrate effective steering across Diffusion Policy, $\pi_{0.5}$, and FastWAM. We further use steered rollouts for online policy improvement through DAgger. After 2-3 rounds of iteration, average success rates increase by 15.5\% for $\pi_{0.5}$ across three tasks and by 21.3\% across three policies(Diffusion Policy, $\pi_{0.5}$, FastWAM) on the Insert Bread task, while average human intervention counts decrease by 44.0\% (2.86 to 1.60) and 81.9\% (2.60 to 0.47), respectively.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10534
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Rephrase Before You Act: Characterizing and Mitigating Language Sensitivity in Vision-Language-Action Models
2026-10-07 17:57:38Mikey Watts (Independent Researcher), Yuchen Cui (University of California, Los Angeles)Abstract
Vision-language-action models (VLAs) are strikingly sensitive to instruction phrasing and do not inherit the language robustness of the vision-language models they are built on. A one-word edit can move success by tens of points: $\pi_{0.5}$ turns on a LIBERO stove 100% of the time for "switch on the stove" and 2% for "switch on the hot plate", and a $\pi_0$ checkpoint finetuned with rephrase augmentation still shows swings of up to 61 points. We characterize this sensitivity with statistically tested single-edit swings and an oracle phrase search, which shows that phrasing alone nearly closes the 21-point gap between in-distribution and out-of-distribution tasks. We then reduce it without modifying the policy. Because the sensitivity is systematic, it can be expressed as explicit rules: we score many phrasings of a few training tasks, have a large language model distill the evidence into ten to twenty rephrasing rules, and at deployment rewrite each incoming instruction once under these rules. The rules improve the frozen $\pi_0$ by 16 to 27% relative on twelve held-out tasks across adversarial, VLM-generated, and human-generated phrasings, with gains concentrated on out-of-distribution tasks. The pipeline replicates on $\pi_{0.5}$ and LIBERO, lifting in-finetune success from 93.6% to 97.8%. The method requires no retraining and no per-step verification, and applies zero-shot to unseen tasks and instructions. Project website: this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10526
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RoboJEPA: Scaling Robotic Latent World Models
2026-10-07 17:54:42Artem Zholus, Nicolas Beltran-Velez, Jianhao Yuan, Sarath Chandar, Tushar Nagarajan, Daniel Severo, Koustuv Sinha, Michal Drozdzal, Adriana Romero Soriano, Jeannette Bohg, Nicolas Ballas, Mahmoud AssranAbstract
Latent world models have shown a remarkable ability to predict future states and to plan in the real world. In practice, however, we lack a principled way to estimate how their capabilities scale with model size, data, and compute, an open problem that slows progress in the field. In this work we present RoboJEPA, a world model based on the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and trained on a large-scale dataset spanning 12 robotic embodiments. We show that RoboJEPA's imagination error, the error of its latent rollouts, follows a second-order power law in compute, allowing us to predict model quality well beyond the scale at which the law is fit. We further show that downstream robotic planning performance improves predictably with compute, and that imagination error is strongly correlated with it, making it a reliable proxy for real-robot evaluation. Finally, we demonstrate that latent world models can be deployed zero-shot as robotic agents, planning toward a single goal image to solve tasks requiring long-horizon planning on real hardware. We release all model checkpoints together with our training and robot deployment code. To our knowledge, this is the first work to establish scaling laws for multi-embodiment robotic world models trained on real robot data, and RoboJEPA, at 8B parameters, is the largest JEPA predictor model trained to date.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10515
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QuadTok: Quadtree Visual Tokenizer for Autoregressive Image Generation
2026-10-07 17:47:42Yucheng Mao, Zeyuan Chen, Xiaojun Shan, Xiang Zhang, Divyansh Srivastava, Bingnan Li, Zhuowen TuAbstract
We introduce QuadTok, a novel framework for visual tokenization and autoregressive image generation. Compared to traditional approaches using 2D grids or 1D token sequences, we propose a hierarchical quadtree structure, bridging the gap between 2D spatial binding and 1D sequence-level flexibility. The QuadTok tokenizer dynamically allocates representational capacity to visually intricate areas while leaving homogeneous regions at a coarse resolution. Compared with a fixed 256-token grid, our ImageNet-trained tokenizer saves approximately 10% of tokens on ImageNet and 9% when transferred zero-shot to the COCO dataset, while maintaining comparable reconstruction fidelity. Furthermore, the natural causality introduced by the tree structure seamlessly enables autoregressive image generation. Conditioned on a quadtree topology supplied before generation, our 947M GPT-style generative model achieves a 2.08 gFID on the ImageNet $256 \times 256$ benchmark. Additionally, leveraging the strong spatial correlation preserved by the quadtree structure, the QuadTok generator enables zero-shot spatially controlled image generation capabilities. Code: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10497
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Performance at What Cost? A Sustainability-Aware Performance Index for Cell and Nucleus Instance Segmentation
2026-10-07 16:12:53Eiram Mahera Sheikh, Alaa Tharwat, Wolfram SchenckAbstract
Pretrained models for cell and nuclear instance segmentation differ substantially in architecture, pretraining data and objectives, parameter count, inference strategy, adaptation requirements, postprocessing pipeline, and computational demand. Large pretrained and foundation models are increasingly adopted because of their strong zero-shot capabilities, but their use also imposes greater energy consumption, memory requirements, computational demands, adaptation costs, and operational carbon emissions. Whether these additional demands are justified by meaningful gains in segmentation performance remains unclear. We address this question by introducing the Sustainability-Aware Performance Index (SAPI), a configurable metric that combines segmentation performance, energy consumption, and model size. We benchmark 19 pretrained and foundation models across six CellBinDB datasets under zero-shot inference and evaluate 16 fine-tunable models using few-shot adaptation with both frozen encoder and full-model fine-tuning. We estimate energy consumption for GPU, CPU, and RAM using software-based monitoring tools. Our results show that larger and more computationally demanding models do not consistently achieve proportionate improvements in segmentation quality. While few-shot adaptation benefits several models, the gains and resource costs vary considerably across architectures, datasets, and adaptation strategies, causing SAPI-based rankings to differ from rankings based on performance alone. This study provides a practical framework for comparing segmentation models more comprehensively and supports more computationally accessible and environmentally responsible model selection in biomedical image analysis.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10324
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Energy-Efficient Gait Adaptation via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Quadrupedal Locomotion Across Diverse Terrains
2026-10-07 15:53:35Ammar Issa, Anubhav Singh, Anton Tsaritsin, Sergey KolyubinAbstract
While energy efficiency is a critical objective for legged-robot locomotion control, achieving low energy consumption while maintaining robust performance across different velocity ranges and terrain conditions remains a key challenge. This is particularly true for end-to-end RL policies, where gait generation, motion execution, and energy optimization are tightly coupled, leading to high sensitivity to reward design. In this work, we propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework that separates a high-frequency policy for stable and robust joint-level motion execution from low-frequency gait adaptation that explicitly minimizes the cost of transport (CoT). The three-stage Isaac-based training procedure enables zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with improved tracking accuracy, robustness, and energy efficiency. The learned hierarchy exhibits automatic speed-dependent gait adaptation, transitioning from pacing at low speeds to trotting at higher speeds. We validate the proposed approach in simulation against representative single-policy and hierarchical locomotion baselines, demonstrating reduced CoT over a broad range of commanded velocities, while maintaining robust locomotion across flat, uneven rough, and inclined terrains. We further demonstrate its practical feasibility through zero-shot deployment on a physical Unitree AlienGo quadruped.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10297
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