The Latest Papers about AI
-
OWLS: Open-world Language-conditioned Speed Fields for Zero-Shot Rover Navigation
Abstract
Semantics can provide a proxy for physical traversability. Terrain that looks like loose sand or a rock field is likely to have similar physical properties. Open-vocabulary vision-language models (VLMs) enable this physical reasoning over terrain outside any fixed label set. We present Open-world Language-conditioned Speed Fields (OWLS), which plans directly over the dense feature map of a VLM. Prompted with a description of traversable terrain, the VLM scores every pixel of a single camera image; OWLS projects these scores onto the ground, adapts them to the platform with two morphological operations, and uses the result as the speed field of a minimum-time planner, so terrain appearance and obstacle clearance shape one trajectory. OWLS needs no task-specific training, no terrain annotation, no persistent map, and no exteroceptive sensor beyond the camera. We evaluate it on a physical rover indoors and off-road, on simulated Mars and Moon rovers over 200 procedurally generated terrains, and on real planetary imagery.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32596
PDF
-
Localization and Neural Splatting on the Edge: An FPGA Scene Memory for Robots
Abstract
Resource-constrained robots and autonomous vehicles need scene memories that localize a camera and render nearby views without a desktop GPU. Scene-coordinate regression (SCR) and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) fit because they avoid an SfM stage, but ACEsplat-style pipelines are GPU-centered, and moving them to an edge FPGA is hard because SCR is pose-sensitive and 3DGS rendering is irregular and capacity-sensitive. We present LENS, an edge scene-memory acceleration system on the AMD KR260 that brings an ACEsplat-style workload to a low-power FPGA/ARM platform. Rather than proposing a new scene model, LENS co-designs the two dominant kernels with the board data path: an INT16 SCR accelerator that preserves pose accuracy, and a bit-exact fixed-point ordered 3DGS renderer that rewrites alpha transmittance as a log-sum-exp recurrence and removes provably useless streamed Gaussians. All LENS latency, power, and quality results are board-measured. The SCR engine preserves DSAC* localization accuracy at 25.42 ms, the on-board renderer reaches 34.11 dB on Cambridge against ACEsplat's 33.20, novel-view synthesis on RealEstate10K reaches 27.84 dB against 26.11, and all ten Wayspots scenes reach the ACEsplat rendering target. LENS wins performance per watt over a Jetson Orin NX on every deployment task, by 1.9x to 5.7x at about a quarter of the power, and is faster in absolute latency on localization and Wayspots rendering. On-device training reaches ACEsplat-level quality but not the GPU's time or energy, marking the remaining boundary for a future training accelerator.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25068
PDF
-
PHYRD: A Living Benchmark for Reproducing and Extending Theoretical Physics Research
Abstract
Large language models and agents have shown significant power in advanced physical research. In this paper, We introduce PHYRD, a living benchmark for theoretical-physics reasoning with 63 Reproduce and 43 Discover problems. Reproduce tests derivation of published results; Discover tests consequences of modified theoretical conditions. FormulaForest constructs the tasks with reference solutions and subquestion-level rubrics. Across five models, whole-problem accuracy ranges from 49.21% to 68.25% on Reproduce and from 18.60% to 74.42% on closed-book Discover. With tools, four models complete more Discover problems, but conceptual errors and missing arguments persist. Besides, our experimental results demonstrate the value of FormulaForest as synthetic data. On FrontierScience, a benchmark developed by OpenAI, it raises the accuracy of a Qwen-35B-A3B model from 61% to 72%.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32575
PDF
-
Standing on Open Shoulders: Regional Fine-Tuning of Open-Weight Camera-Trap Models for UK Wildlife with Modest Data and Compute
Abstract
Camera-trap species classification is dominated by large models from well-resourced organisations, which often lack the species-level distinctions regional conservation needs, such as native red versus invasive grey squirrels in the UK. We ask whether open weights let a small team with a modest dataset and a single GPU take a real part in AI development. We fine-tuned the open DeepFaune classifier on 28 UK classes, paired it with the unmodified MegaDetector v6, and compared the resulting DeepFaune-UK v1.2 with DeepFaune v1.5.0 and SpeciesNet on 20,212 hand-verified MammalWeb citizen-science images, after removing sequences sharing any of 1,039 images with our training archive. DeepFaune-UK achieved a strict image-level accuracy of 88.8%, including empty frames, against 56.5% and 59.0% for the baselines, but at DeepFaune's coarser label resolution DeepFaune v1.5.0 was more accurate, though not significantly under contributor resampling (91.4% vs. 88.8%). As DeepFaune v1.5.0 uses a newer DINOv3-based classifier, we applied the identical recipe, without new data, to that classifier. The resulting DeepFaune-UK v1.3 reached 90.6% strict accuracy, narrowed the like-for-like gap to 0.8 points and reduced roe deer misclassified as fallow deer by 69%. On 1,850 images from the 26 contributors with no overlapping images, the three DeepFaune-based models did not differ significantly (90.5%, 90.6%, 89.9% like-for-like). Fine-tuning on 10% of the training crops (about 150 per class) gave out-of-distribution accuracy similar to using all of them, and a DINOv2 run on this subset took about 22 minutes with under 4 GB of GPU memory. Open weights thus make regional model development feasible for small teams, but the largest like-for-like gain came from a newer base model trained by others, so this democratisation depends on large actors continuing to release open weights, under licences that may change.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32573
PDF
-
Pseudo-Labels as Rewards, Not Targets: Group-Relative Policy Optimization for Semi-Supervised ASR
Abstract
Adapting ASR to a domain with only untranscribed audio typically relies on pseudo-labeling, a strong teacher transcribes the audio and a student is fine-tuned on it. Because supervised fine-tuning (SFT) treats every pseudo-label token as a target, the student inherits the teacher's errors. We show that using the same pseudo-labels as a reward reference for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is more robust to label noise. In the banking domain, GRPO yields 29.3% to 56.2% relative WER improvements over SFT on Whisper-generated labels, and the advantage holds across four Whisper sizes, four teacher families, three domains and four languages. While SFT reproduces almost 100% of teacher errors verbatim, GRPO passes through only 27%. Rollout statistics explain why, erroneous pseudo-label words rarely appear in on-policy rollouts, so group-relative advantages stay aligned with the clean transcript, whereas SFT forces them into the policy's support and collapses the reward variance GRPO relies on.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32572
PDF
-
Reuse, Don't Retrain: Efficient, Modality-Versatile Geospatial Foundation Models through Feature Distillation
Abstract
Geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) are costly to pretrain, yet model families often repeat this process across backbone scales and sensing modalities. We investigate feature distillation as a more efficient way to reuse existing representations. First, we distill frozen CROMA and TerraMind teachers into smaller Vision Transformers through patch-level feature matching. Across nine PANGAEA tasks, distilled TerraMind Tiny, Small, and Base outperform their scale-matched released counterparts by 2.76, 3.02, and 1.87 mean IoU points, respectively; each also matches or exceeds the next-larger released model. Distilled CROMA-Base gains 2.05 points. TerraMind-Base required only 43 A6000 GPU-hours, approximately 0.5\% of the reported cost of independent pretraining. Second, we introduce TEDI, an unpaired multi-expert approach combining TerraMind for multispectral imagery and DINOv3 for high-resolution RGB. Separate patch embeddings route unpaired inputs into a shared Transformer trunk, removing the need for co-registered data. TEDI-Large achieves the highest single-model mean in our PANGAEA-9 comparison (62.51 mIoU), outperforming both teachers overall while retaining their modality-specific strengths. TEDI-Base reaches 61.75 mIoU with 72\% fewer parameters. These results show that distillation improves the GeoFM accuracy-compute frontier while consolidating complementary experts into a single versatile backbone.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32566
PDF
-
Shared Is Not Enough: Predictor Width and Factor Readability Under Masked Latent Prediction
Abstract
Masked latent prediction methods such as I-JEPA aim to learn predictable features, but what determines which information they retain is less clear. We built a simulator in which every factor behind an image is known, so a probe can measure how readable each factor remains after training. We trained small encoders (0.7M parameters) with I-JEPA, SimCLR and BYOL on the same pairs of views and probed a factor that both views share. I-JEPA had a predictor with half the encoder's width and depth, the proportions it uses for ViT-B. Its median score was about 40% of SimCLR's. Widening the predictor to the encoder's width reversed this ordering at every training seed, against both other methods. We release the simulator and the trained models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32562
PDF
-
HEALPix-Based Implicit Neural Compression of Omnidirectional Images
Abstract
Real-time decoding of omnidirectional images is essential for immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences. Compared with conventional transform-based learned image compression (LIC), overfitted codecs offer lower decoding complexity by representing each image with a lightweight implicit neural representation (INR). However, existing approaches typically operate on the equirectangular projection (ERP), which introduces nonuniform spherical sampling and spatial distortion, leading to redundant sampling near the poles and latitude-dependent receptive fields. To address these limitations, we propose a spherical overfitted codec based on a multi-scale Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization (HEALPix) representation, which enables equal-area sampling and efficient hierarchical modeling of spherical signals. Building on this representation, we develop a Spherical Inter-Scale Conditional entropy model that exploits spatial dependencies and cross-scale correlations among HEALPix latents to improve coding efficiency. We further introduce a Multi-Ring Spherical Convolution that aggregates neighboring pixels over a nearly uniform spherical receptive field across latitudes. Experiments on a public omnidirectional image dataset demonstrate BD-rate reductions of 16.3%, 26.5%, and 19.5% over VVC in terms of V-PSNR, V-MS-SSIM, and V-LPIPS, respectively. Our method also achieves a 13.1% BD-rate reduction over ERP-based Cool-Chic 5.0 in terms of V-PSNR, while providing 2.6-3.6x faster decoding than the evaluated learned autoencoder codecs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32561
PDF
-
UAV-SwarmAgent: Scalable Multi-UAV Reconnaissance and Task Allocation via Code Generation and Vision-Language Reasoning
Abstract
Supervising a multi-UAV reconnaissance mission usually means plotting waypoints and watching every drone. We present UAV SwarmAgent, a hierarchical multi-agent system in which an operator states the mission in one natural-language sentence and a ground-station agent writes and executes code that turns it into per-UAV routes. The agent grounds inspection targets in an aerial map with a vision-language model, splits them among N UAVs by balancing route length, and dispatches worker agents that verify incidents with a compact onboard decision model. In simulation over 4 incident types and 3 foundation models, the swarm located the incident in 244 of 255 missions (95.7%). A paired scaling study with one to 5 UAVs shows that flight time follows an Amdahl-type law. The second UAV delivers half of the attainable saving and the speedup is bounded at 1.52x. We discuss what this predictability, and the false alarms we observed, imply for an operator who supervises the swarm, and outline the user study needed to test it.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32559
PDF
-
Tool-Calling LLM Agents Under Realistic MCP Faults: Scale Does Not Purchase Fault Tolerance
Abstract
LLM agents increasingly rely on external tools exposed via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), yet current benchmarks assume tools respond correctly and on time, leaving agent resilience to realistic tool failures untested. We introduce MCP-Injector, a drop-in, protocol-aware fault-injection middleware that interposes on the MCP tool-call path with controlled persistence (permanent, transient, intermittent) and seedable schedules. Its fault model is calibrated to the observed incident distribution (failure mode x persistence) of the public MCP ecosystem, mined from 57,240 issue and pull-request threads across 1,774 open-source MCP repositories. In a 1,350-cell experiment crossing two backbone sizes (20B, 120B), three agent stacks (custom multi-round plan-and-execute, OpenAI Agents SDK, LangChain), and three fault injection conditions, we find that faults drawn from this permanent-heavy stress profile cause severe quality degradation (task-completion score falls by 60%, from 8.08 to 3.23 out of 10), and that scale does not purchase fault tolerance for the two gpt-oss backbones we test: the 120B retains no larger share of its fault-free score under faults (resilience-ratio model, $p = 0.96$), and its completion rate under faults is, if anything, lower (91.1% vs. 95.6%; difference 4.4 points, 95% CI $[-0.2, 9.3]$). Agent stacks differ in how well they absorb faults, which suggests that framework-level error handling matters more than model scale. These results demonstrate that capability benchmarks alone can mask operational brittleness, motivating protocol-aware fault injection as a complementary evaluation dimension for tool-calling agents.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32555
PDF
-
HGWM: Hierarchical Graph-Guided World Model for Zero-Shot Object Navigation via Graph Matching
2026-10-23 12:35:26Abstract
Zero-shot object navigation requires an embodied agent to choose where to search while retaining evidence from previous observations. HGWM couples an LLM-generated room-anchor prior with persistent spatial-semantic memory. A coarse stage assigns visual-semantic scores to candidate headings on a 0-10 scale; a fine stage measures symbolic compatibility between observed objects, room context, and the goal prior. Phase-dependent fusion combines these scores with an LLM direction recommendation before local action selection. On HM3D v0.1, the reported HGWM configuration achieves 62.6% success rate (SR) and 31.5% success weighted by path length (SPL), compared with 58.1% and 31.2% for WMNav. On MP3D, the corresponding values are 46.8% and 17.9%, compared with 45.4% and 17.2%. The results indicate higher success point estimates and modest path-efficiency gains. On HM3D v0.2, the full model obtains 74.4% SR and 31.9% SPL. Additional component ablations reduce SR by 0.9-2.3 percentage points and SPL by 0.6-1.5 points. These are author-reported aggregate measurements. The accompanying implementation repairs pass offline tests; episode-level rerun records are not available. Evaluation is confined to simulation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32554
PDF
-
Beyond Channel Data: Configuration-Enriched Radio Foundation Models
Abstract
This paper proposes incorporating channel configuration (CFG) information into Radio Foundation Model (RFM) pre-training and demonstrates that the resulting CFG-enriched embeddings serve as effective inductive priors for downstream tasks under label scarcity. We compare the proposed embeddings with raw channel tokens and multiple baseline models, under three different data regimes, for multiple downstream tasks --- Line-of-Sight/Non-Line-of-Sight (LoS/NLoS) classification, timing advance (TA) estimation, and beam selection. Evaluation is done in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution configuration settings. Experimental outcomes show that the proposed embeddings consistently outperform and/or are competitive to the baselines, across experiments in both seen and unseen configuration scenarios.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32542
PDF
-
StarRTT: An End-to-End Real-Time Framework for Blind Zone-Free RTT Prediction in Starlink LEO Satellite Networks
Abstract
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite mega-constellations such as Starlink require frequent handovers due to high orbital velocities, resulting in substantial Round-Trip Time (RTT) fluctuations. Accurate RTT prediction can mitigate these fluctuations, yet it fundamentally relies on continuously updated serving- satellite information. Existing serving-satellite identification methods typically complete identification only at the end of each scheduling cycle, creating an identification blind zone that limits real-time prediction. To overcome this limitation, we develop StarRTT, an end-to-end real-time framework that eliminates the blind zone by integrating per-second serving-satellite identification with RTT prediction. Within this framework, we propose Real-Time Long Short-Term Memory (RT-LSTM), an LSTM-based RTT prediction model designed to capture both non-stationary RTT evolution and time-varying geometric relationships among the serving satellite, user terminal, and gateways. Specifically, a historical LSTM encodes historical RTT observations and real-time serving-satellite and gateway-relative features, while a future LSTM processes Two-Line Element (TLE)-propagated future features of the identified serving satellite up to the next scheduling instant. Under strict real-time back-testing, RT-LSTM achieves a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 1.405 ms averaged over all 15 prediction horizons and 15 reference time-slot indices, reducing the error by 4.3 %, 11.6 %, and 22.1 % compared with the existing baseline models, LSTM, StarNet, and Attention-based Spatiotemporal Model (ASTM), respectively. Notably, the reduction over LSTM reaches 12.5 % at the scheduling instant, highlighting the benefit of real-time serving-satellite information when recent RTT observations are limited.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32540
PDF
-
Optimization, Optimal Control, and Reinforcement Learning for Robotics
Abstract
These lecture notes provide an introduction to optimization, optimal control, and reinforcement learning for robotics, emphasizing their mathematical connections and practical relevance. They present established material compiled and edited by Yonghyeon Lee, rather than new research results. The notes were developed through a human and AI collaborative writing process, with AI assistance in drafting, organizing, and refining the exposition. This first version is a preliminary collection of notes, not yet a fully developed textbook, and currently contains no figures or graphs. The notes may be revised, corrected, and expanded in future versions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32538
PDF
-
IGG: A Benchmark for Interactive GUI Grounding under Visibility Constraints
Abstract
GUI grounding benchmarks ask whether an agent can localize a target that is already visible in a static screenshot. Real interfaces often violate this assumption: a target may be off-screen, appear only after a state change or hover, remain occluded, or become actionable after a delay. This leaves the ability to recover target visibility unevaluated. To measure this reveal step, we introduce Interactive GUI Grounding (IGG), a benchmark in which an agent must first make the target visible through interaction and then click it. IGG contains 601 tasks across 16 controllable GUI environments and seven visibility-constraint sub-types, with a compact action space of scrolling, moving, dragging, waiting, and clicking. In our human study, participants achieve 94.6% accuracy, while GPT-5.5 reaches 79.4% and the strongest evaluated open-source VLM reaches only 31.6%. To identify the source of this gap, we conduct two controlled interventions. Telling Qwen3-VL which interaction to perform raises its accuracy only from 30.8% to 33.9%, whereas performing the interaction for the model raises it to 81.9%. The bottleneck is executing the reveal interaction, not recognizing the target once it is exposed. We further show that this capability is learnable, demonstrating that visibility recovery can be strengthened consistently across model families.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32536
PDF
-
Facultative Swarming: A Capability, Not a Category, for Multi-Robot Systems
Abstract
Collective robotics is split by a long-standing but increasingly artificial boundary between centralised multi-robot systems that prioritise optimality and decentralised swarms that prioritise robustness and adaptivity. We propose a unified control framework, shifting from `obligate' swarms---systems constrained to pure self-organisation---to facultatively swarming systems: hybrid architectures that operate as centrally planned systems under permissive conditions yet degrade gracefully into decentralised swarming under environmental stress. By reframing swarming as a dynamic capability, rather than a rigid system category, we outline a pathway towards collective robotic systems that benefit from centralised optimality when conditions permit and from the flexibility of self-organisation when they do not.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32526
PDF
-
From Freehand Demonstrations to Autonomous Robotic Ultrasound: An Anatomy-Anchored Learning Framework
Abstract
Ultrasound imaging is highly operator-dependent, motivating robotic systems that reproduce expert scanning skills consistently. These skills involve coordinated interpretation of anatomical landmarks, ultrasound images, and probe-tissue interactions that are difficult to encode in hand-designed control strategies. Imitation learning offers an alternative, but its observation and action representations should reflect the anatomically structured nature of scanning. We propose an anatomy-anchored imitation-learning framework that combines anatomy-guided probe placement with learned ultrasound navigation. The placement module identifies a task-specific anatomical starting point from external visual observations and establishes the initial probe pose as the reference frame for scanning. A flow-based policy then generates scanning motions from anchor-relative probe poses, ultrasound images, probe-mounted camera views, and contact forces, while a termination head predicts task completion. This avoids continuous reliance on third-person vision and reduces dependence on the robot-patient configuration. A handheld acquisition platform enables multimodal demonstrations to be collected during natural freehand scanning without a robot. On 16 unseen participants, task success reaches 96%, 94%, 88%, and 94% for kidney, gallbladder, and liver standard-plane acquisition and radial artery sweeping, respectively. Compared with a fine-tuned pi_0 model, success on the abdominal tasks improves by 10-42 percentage points, with lower time-to-target, peak contact force, and trajectory jerk. Ablations support the complementary roles of anatomical anchoring, egocentric vision, and force feedback. End-to-end trials with automatic placement achieve 90-100% success, and the policies transfer without retraining to a second robot with 83-100% success.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32525
PDF
-
VERA-Hand: A Verified Multidimensional Benchmark for 2D Hand Pose Estimation in Third-Person Dynamic Gesture Videos
2026-10-23 11:44:54Abstract
Hand landmarks serve as input for gesture recognition, sign language understanding, and touchless human-computer interaction. Yet hand pose estimators are typically evaluated with frame-wise localization metrics such as PCK or MPJPE, which are computed over matched predictions and overlook missed or spurious hands, handedness errors, and temporal instability. To address these limitations, we present VERA-Hand, a benchmark that evaluates estimators using manually verified, frame-level 2D annotations for 10,690 hands across four complementary dimensions (detection, localization, identification, and temporal stability), as well as a joint Pose-F1 metric that requires both correct detection and accurate localization. Evaluating six estimators spanning hand-specific, whole-body, reconstruction-based, and foundation-model paradigms, we find that no estimator dominates: rankings reorder sharply across dimensions. VERA-Hand also exposes failures that localization-only and downstream evaluations may not reveal, including cross-hand overlap in over 85% of frames for a recent foundation model. A post-hoc cleanup case study demonstrates how the benchmark can validate corrective interventions, while stratified analyses show that robustness varies across motion-blur classes and hand regions. We release the verified annotations, protocol, and code at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32517
PDF
-
Principled Nonlinear Concept Erasure and Steering
Abstract
Learned representations often encode sensitive attributes, such as gender or race, that may be undesirable or unsafe to retain. Concept erasure aims to remove this information while preserving task-relevant content. Existing methods remain incomplete: linear methods provide guarantees only against linear probes, while nonlinear methods achieve stronger empirical erasure but lack formal guarantees and often sacrifice utility. In this work, we introduce a principled conditional autoencoder framework for nonlinear concept erasure. We follow the principle that erasure should remove only the sensitive attribute and nothing else, and we show that, under the stated assumptions, perfect reconstruction together with population-level independence is sufficient for perfect nonlinear guardedness, with preservation guarantees in the imperfect-reconstruction regime. Empirically, we attain a superior utility-erasure trade-off across multiple datasets, sensitive attributes, and language models, surpassing even the supervised variants of competing methods despite using no target-task labels, while being simpler to optimize and converging substantially faster. Beyond erasure, our framework yields concept conversion (representation steering) as a by-product: by changing only the target concept at inference time, it produces representations corresponding to different concept values - at no additional training cost - a capability no prior erasure method provides, and on which we likewise demonstrate strong empirical performance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32516
PDF
-
Analysing Austrian Parliamentary Speeches by Predicting Party Affiliations
Abstract
This paper examines speech characteristics of the Austrian National Council members (CMs). We introduce analysis methodology based on a fine-tuned BERT-Model which assigns to every speech a probability distribution over Austrian parties. These are then aggregated at the speaker and party level. We perform an extensive evaluation to ensure the quality of the generated distributions prior to further analysis. Instead of considering mis-assignments of predicted parties as a performance issue, we leverage them to derive insights about the CMs and political developments. Our findings show that parties that govern together become more similar in their speech characteristics, while, analogously, parties that are in opposition move further away from governing parties. Moreover, CMs who switch party usually adapt their speech characteristics only after the switch occurs. Finally, we publicly release a data set containing party affiliation predictions for the speeches of the Austrian National Council from 1996 to 2018.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32515
PDF
