Ego-trajectory prediction in urban roadway work zones remains an underexplored topic in autonomous-driving research, with limited dedicated data and systematic evaluation. Roadway work zones involve temporary changes in the lane layouts and connectivity of the roads, complicating interactions with surrounding vehicles and workers. These changes make future vehicle trajectories difficult to predict. To address these challenges, we collect WZDrive-Data, a multimodal dataset comprising 1,183 work-zone driving segments from 33 drivers, using a human-in-the-loop driving simulator with prerecorded worker animations and VR-controlled workers. Driver control and gaze signals are recorded from human participants, while vehicle trajectories and scene information are obtained from the simulator. Our proposed multimodal ego-trajectory predictor, WZDrive, achieves a mean minADE (K=6) of 1.09 m and minFDE (K=6) of 2.12 m. Compared with the best-performing state-of-the-art baseline for each metric in our benchmark, WZDrive reduces minADE (K=6) by 7.18% and minFDE (K=6) by 13.18%. This research addresses a gap in autonomous-driving research on urban work zones by combining human-in-the-loop data collection with multimodal learning from human driving signals and in the context of work zones.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12747
Stereo vision is increasingly used for robotic manipulation, with a growing body of work incorporating it into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, the scarcity of large-scale, real-world stereo datasets remains a fundamental bottleneck for scaling such policies. Recent generative monocular-to-stereo methods target settings such as VR content and autonomous driving. No prior work produces realistic synthetic stereo data for robotic manipulation, where stereo supervision has come predominantly from simulation. We propose StereoEngine, which introduces two complementary methods to synthesize stereo data for robotic manipulation. In the first, we warp a monocular (left) video into the right view using estimated depth and inpaint the disoccluded regions with a video diffusion model, lifting monocular demonstrations into stereo pairs without training on real stereo. In the second, we render a stereo pair in simulation and jointly generate both photorealistic views, producing consistent left-right data without any real video as input. StereoEngine outperforms existing baselines in generated stereo quality, and using its synthetic data for policy mid-training or task-specific fine-tuning substantially improves downstream bimanual manipulation. Project website: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12734
We introduce iRAG, a human-in-the-loop decision-support system combining Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with Hybrid Decision-Making. Unlike conventional RAG systems, relying on static Knowledge Bases (KBs), our proposal addresses settings where the KB is initially empty and is progressively populated through human decisions. The system stores previous decisions as retrievable precedents and moves from silent observation to evidence-grounded contestation and, finally, to autonomous handling with abstention. Against an independent baseline, iRAG matches final-decision error under 10% drift without retrieval decay and reduces it under 40% drift across all configurations. Retrieval decay improves performance on changed knowledge while increasing error on stable knowledge, evidencing a stability--plasticity trade-off rather than a general advantage. Human oversight is an architectural provision of the workflow; its usability with real human users remains to be evaluated.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12666
Globally consistent, real-time state estimation in large-scale, perceptually degraded environments is essential for autonomous vehicles and aerial robots, and requires fusing LiDAR, inertial, and GNSS measurements. Existing fusion methods, however, share a scan-to-map front-end with two failure modes. First, each scan is aligned to an incrementally built map that drifts under degeneracy, and once the estimate diverges the error is irrecoverable. Second, even without divergence, a registration biased by dynamic objects or wrong correspondences is propagated as a single pose constraint with an over-confident covariance, leaving its correspondences unavailable for GNSS to re-weight or relinearize. We propose GLIO2, a tightly-coupled LiDAR-Inertial-GNSS system whose GPU-parallel front-end jointly optimizes scan-to-multiscan LiDAR, IMU pre-integration, and raw GNSS measurements in a single sliding-window factor graph, sustaining real-time operation on edge hardware. A complementary offline back-end reuses the same cached factors to refine the entire trajectory in batch, completing the 30-min, 4.51-km UrbanNav Whampoa sequence in about 24 s. Across three public benchmarks (UrbanNav, MARS-LVIG, M3DGR) and self-collected UAV and vehicle data, GLIO2 attains the best overall accuracy among evaluated systems. On a 5.66-km bridge traversed at up to 96 km/h, where every competing baseline diverges under LiDAR degeneracy, it maintains 1.6 m horizontal accuracy. On an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX, the full pipeline runs at about 25 Hz (39.60 ms per scan). The source code and datasets will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12411
Agents are deployed in applications from trip planners and stock trading to IT incident triage. In most cases, LLM agents work autonomously with minimal rule-based safeguarding, leading to cost and safety issues from irreversible actions. Recent works resolve this either by using a safeguard agent to monitor behavior or evaluating logs post-hoc. The first adds cost and latency to every step; the second delivers its verdict after the run, when tokens are burned and damage is done. To overcome this, we propose OnTrack, a streaming monitoring mechanism that compares an agent's steps and dependencies against recorded successful runs to alert users or block the agent in about a millisecond per step. We study this problem in three regimes of decreasing access: full reference access (historical runs and tool schemas), intermediate access (only tool schemas), and no prior knowledge (only step logs as generated). Expectation of OnTrack's monitoring capabilities reduces as data access drops, ranging from plan violation detection to identifying loops, stalls, and repeated tool calls. Finally, we evaluate OnTrack using SWE-bench trajectories. Based on the first 8 steps, our method ranks failing trajectories below succeeding ones better than content similarity approaches (+0.057 AUROC). With an abort policy, we save about 18% of compute that would be burned on failing runs, where 83% of interrupted runs were actually heading to failure (5 out of 6 aborts were correct).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12375
Multimodal large language models have made remarkable progress in bridging vision and language, facilitating various perception tasks essential for human-machine interaction, robotics, and autonomous driving. However, existing MLLM-based perception methods predominantly rely on text-based coordinate representation, which suffers from excessive token overhead, or fixed-range quantization, which suffers from range and precision constraints, especially for 3D domains with unbounded spatial range and high localization accuracy requirements. To address these challenges, we propose a dynamic vector decoding method named DVD, which unifies the representation of 2D and 3D perception tasks. Specifically, we first transform diverse perceptual representation (i.e., 2D bounding boxes, 2D masks, and 3D bounding boxes) into 1D vector sequences, which are then mapped to compact discrete tokens in the high-dimensional space. Then, a lightweight de-tokenizer enables seamless integration with MLLMs by decoding output tokens back to original 2D and 3D perceptual representations. Extensive experiments on 2D and 3D perception benchmarks including RefCOCO series, SUN-RGBD, KITTI, Hypersim, nuScenes demonstrate that DVD achieves superior performance in 2D and 3D tasks and reduces significantly the token overhead and inference latency. DVD provides an efficient and general framework for integrating perception capabilities into MLLMs, overcoming the inherent limitations of existing methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12266
Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) operating in dynamic marine environments require robust control policies for tasks such as path following and station keeping, making reinforcement learning (RL) a promising alternative to classical controllers. However, existing ASV simulators rarely support parallel environments for RL training. Such existing simulators require accurate hydrodynamic modeling from computational fluid dynamics solvers or towing tank tests for setting hydrodynamic parameters to address the sim-to-real gap. To address these challenges, we present an ASV simulator and accompanying pipeline that enables training policies starting from unknown vehicle dynamics. Our framework uses only a CAD model and brief set of open-water field trajectories for approximating and refining both hydrodynamic and thruster parameters. Real-world deployments on a BlueBoat ASV demonstrate successful zero-shot sim-to-real transfer in path following and station-keeping tasks without prior hydrodynamic and propeller information.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12202
Autonomous racing requires accurate trajectory tracking near the handling limits of a vehicle while maintaining low computational latency. Geometric controllers are computationally efficient, but the Ackermann steering geometry becomes invalid under limit-handling conditions. Model- and Acceleration-based Pursuit (MAP) preserves the simplicity of geometric approaches while leveraging tire dynamics. Yet MAP remains fundamentally a geometric controller that relies on Ackermann steering geometry, and its tire model may not fully capture the vehicle's actual dynamic response. This paper presents MAP2, a model-based pursuit controller that combines a curvature-based kinematic MPC and a Sparse Gaussian Process (SGP) residual correction. The proposed algorithm uses MPC to optimize kinematic control inputs over a prediction horizon and maps them to steering commands through a tire dynamics model augmented with SGP residual correction. Real-world vehicle experiments demonstrate substantial reductions in lateral tracking error and lap time. Compared with MAP and Pure Pursuit (PP), MAP2 reduces the average lateral tracking error by 37.99% and 44.65%, respectively, while reducing average lap time by at least 1.5%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12196
Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) progression prediction can support patient monitoring, requiring the integration of multimodal data and multidomain expertise. Moreover, isolated risk estimates provide limited insight underlying a prediction. To automate the progression assessment workflow and reduce manual effort while providing interpretable findings and supporting evidence, we present OA-MAP, an autonomous multi-agent framework for evidence-grounded assessment of structural and pain progression in KOA. The system incorporates modality-specific agents including MRI, X-ray, and clinical agents, together with a coordinator agent. This framework can autonomously recruit specialist agents, select tools for prediction and analysis, and retrieve literature as external evidence based on user request and available patient information. An uncertainty-informed human-in-the-loop mechanism enables clinicians to review and correct intermediate findings, triggering recomputation of affected results. We evaluate the prediction models using 600 participants from the FNIH Osteoarthritis Biomarkers Consortium cohort. On the test set of 100 participants, the fusion models achieve AUROCs of 0.80 for structural progression and 0.68 for pain progression. A case study illustrates how OA-MAP combines risk estimates with intermediate findings, cross-modal conflicts, literature support, and uncertainty indicators to support interactive review.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12134
The evolution of Large Language Model agents from single-task execution to long-term autonomous operation highlights the critical challenge of transforming continuous experiences into reusable knowledge. To address this, we propose Hippocam, a hierarchical memory and continual learning architecture. Hippocam draws inspiration from two characteristics of human memory: cognitive processes selectively maintain information relevant to current goals, while long-term memories form gradually through repeated consolidation. Accordingly, Hippocam structures an agent's ongoing work as nested intents. The active context remains centered on the current intent, while completed intents are consolidated into the task-relevant outcomes and state needed for subsequent work, rather than carrying forward their full working details. Concurrently, a recursive prefix consolidation mechanism repeatedly consolidates earlier history, causing long-unused experiences to become increasingly abstract. Original interactions are preserved, allowing the agent to progressively recover finer-grained details through the hierarchy and stop once sufficient information is available. Crucially, when past experiences are recalled and reintegrated into active work, they undergo subsequent consolidation alongside new experiences, thereby being reinforced, supplemented, and updated. Through this memory dynamic of use and disuse, Hippocam connects working context, long-term memory, knowledge accumulation, and skill learning within a single continuously evolving experiential process. This enables agents to learn and evolve capabilities through their own experiences without parameter updates.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12124
Test-time training (TTT) adapts an LLM's parameters using signals derived from test inputs, and can make striking improvements in pre-specified settings such as IMO competitions or designated open problems. By turning deployment experience into parameter updates, TTT provides a direct mechanism for model-level self-improvement. Yet TTT is not universally beneficial: each TTT algorithm works in different settings, and applying an ill-suited method could waste test-time compute or even damage model performance. Therefore, such parameter-level self-improvement requires agency: the model must decide when TTT is warranted, which algorithm to invoke, and whether an existing skill can be reused. To fill this gap, we introduce Agentic-TTT, which learns a test-time policy to govern those decisions. Agentic-TTT turns TTT procedures into callable tools, treats accumulated skills as an evolving deployment environment, and trains its policy using the observed utility gains from its decisions. On our benchmark, Agentic-TTT nearly doubles the utility over the backbone model, learns to trade off utility against compute, and generalizes to domains unseen during training. Together, these results point toward autonomous self-improvement: models that can decide how to learn from their own deployment experience.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12002
Autonomous rovers navigating large unstructured environments need efficient global planning that accounts for terrain traversability. However, searching dense grid-based costmaps becomes computationally expensive as the mapped area grows. We introduce STAG, a Sparse Traversability-Aware Graph that converts costmaps into compact graphs. STAG combines a medial-axis topological backbone, representative nodes for homogeneous traversability regions, and transition nodes near strong traversability gradients. Edges encode geometry and traversability to account for path length and terrain difficulty. We compare A* on STAG and dense grids using synthetic cave maps, mine maps and the DARPA CERBERUS dataset. Across five benchmark categories comprising 203 map instances and 101,200 queries, STAG reduces median planning time by 3.4x to 9.9x and peak query memory by 2.1x to 15.4x, with median relative path-length differences of -2.9% and +7.6%. STAG offers a compact representation for global planning, trading dense-grid traversability optimality for faster, less memory-intensive search.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11943
Industrial environments are increasingly characterized by the tight interaction among physical processes, communication infrastructures, and intelligent applications. In this context, Digital Twins (DTs) have emerged as a key technology for system analysis and optimization. However, existing DT solutions typically focus either on industrial processes or communication networks, while lacking an integrated and application-aware perspective. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a modular DT framework for industrial environments that jointly models physical processes, wireless communications, and application logic within a unified architecture. The feasibility of the proposed framework is experimentally validated through a real-world Proof-of-Concept (PoC) implemented in the BI-REX pilot line, involving a 5G-connected Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) transporting hazardous liquids and remotely controlled by an AI-driven application. The proposed DT is used to reproduce the behaviour of the real deployment and to investigate the impact of different placements of the AI application, including on-premise, edge, and remote cloud execution scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate a close agreement between DT predictions and PoC measurements in terms of both network-level metrics, such as Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) and latency, and end- to-end application metrics, including application-level Round- Trip-Time (RTT). Moreover, the analysis shows how inaccuracies of network modeling can critically affect the feasibility of latency-sensitive industrial control loops, highlighting the potential of integrated DTs as tools for the pre-deployment design and validation of next-generation industrial systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11934
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded as components in software systems, marketed under labels such as chatbot, copilot, retrieval-augmented generation, workflow, coding agent and AI agent. Whether these labels denote genuine architectural forms or serve as branding has not been assessed systematically. In the sources surveyed, labels do carry architectural content, most clearly in vendor usage: copilot denotes a router-worker architecture operating a host application under step-by-step user confirmation, while the more recent shift to the label agent coincides with AI-planned multi-step execution of which the user sees only the outcome. The coding agents of four major providers share one architecture, a reason-and-act loop delegating to subagents. This survey describes seven recurring forms---LLM chats, custom agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI-enhanced workflows, copilots, coding agents, and, in part, agentic RAG---in a common vocabulary of agents and tools. Each is characterized along four structural dimensions (agentic RAG only partially): the architectural pattern, the control of execution and the point of user intervention, the number of agent calls per task, and tool use. An illustrative corpus of 22 systems from research publications and vendor documentation grounds the descriptions and shows where they reach their limit.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11899
Learning to act in unfamiliar environments requires agents to infer how the world works and revise that understanding as new evidence arrives. Yet limited observations can support multiple world models that explain past interactions but predict different outcomes in unseen states. We introduce Memento 3, building on the Memento series to enable frozen LLM agents to continually learn explicit world models through external memory. The agent maintains a natural-language rulebook as persistent semantic memory, recording revisable hypotheses about environment dynamics while leaving unknown aspects underspecified. It compiles this rulebook into executable code for prediction and planning. Through a continual loop of observation, reflection, rule revision, compilation, and verification, the agent uses prediction errors to refine both the rulebook and its code. Updated code is accepted only when the LLM judges it faithful to the rulebook and cell-exact replay reproduces the observed transitions. We investigate this process as a model-based route to recursive self-improvement (RSI): the agent autonomously explores the environment, revises its world model, and uses verified updates to guide subsequent interaction and learning, while the underlying LLM remains fixed. A population extension maintains multiple world models in parallel, sharing interaction evidence and using their predictions to guide exploration. On ARC-AGI-3, the single-model agent clears every level of all 25 public games, achieves a mean Relative Human Action Efficiency (RHAE) of 100.0, and uses 44% of the human action count. In an Atari Pong case study, a learned feedback controller wins 21:0 in each of three evaluated episodes with different openings, without further LLM calls.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11794
Reliable crop-row perception is essential for autonomous agricultural robots, but low-cost deployment is constrained by computation, memory, power, and inference time. This paper addresses crop-row detection and navigation-line extraction using UltraLight Luma, a compact encoder-decoder segmentation network with a progressive learning strategy and only 13.1k trainable parameters. The predicted crop-row masks are processed using a post-processing algorithm to estimate row alignment for downstream visual servoing. UltraLight Luma improves parameter efficiency over U-Net, YOLOv8, and YOLOv26 while maintaining reliable crop-row detection performance. The model required only 25.23 mJ per inference, demonstrating its suitability for resource-constrained agricultural robots.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11764
Thermodynamic cycles are the foundation of energy conversion across natural and engineered systems, transforming heat into useful work. However, these cycles traditionally operate between fixed thermal reservoirs, restricting them to specific locations and temperature differences. Here, we introduce autonomous thermodynamic cycles enabled by robotic mobility and sensing, allowing robots to perform thermodynamic cycles by accessing spatially varying temperature fields. We experimentally realize this concept using multistable gas-filled capsules that circulate within the system across a thermal gradient. Our model reveals that rapid transitions in the capsules' energy states allow the system to operate as a mobile heat engine that harvests and stores energy. By linking the capsule-scale internal energy dynamics to the robot's large-scale navigation strategy, we optimize locomotion paths that balance motion cost and energy harvesting. These findings demonstrate that thermodynamic cycles can emerge when autonomous systems navigate their environments, offering an artificial analog of organisms that forage for energy across spatial resources.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11667
Autonomous driving capabilities depend strongly on the distribution of scenarios encountered during training. Existing methods commonly construct or dynamically adapt training scenario distributions using surrogate criteria such as realism, difficulty, or risk. However, these predefined surrogates may misrepresent training value, leading to inefficient use of training resources. To address this limitation, we propose a Lamarckian evolutionary framework that replaces surrogate-based guidance with competition among candidate distributions. We formulate training strategy discovery as a multi-stage bilevel optimization problem and use Lamarckian evolution algorithm to approximate its solution. At the outer level, Darwinian crossover, mutation, and selection explore the scenario distribution space; at the inner level, policy learning acquires new capabilities, and Lamarckian inheritance transfers them to subsequent stages, allowing scenario distributions and policy capabilities to co-evolve. The resulting evolutionary trajectories reveal recurring stage-wise regularities among high-value distributions, characterized by capability accumulation through stage-wise challenge rotation. We further distill these regularities into a lightweight, reusable Lamarckian Training Strategy. Experiments show that, compared with the baseline, the complete framework reduces performance loss by up to 25.07%, while the lightweight strategy still achieves a 19.13% reduction. These results demonstrate that evolutionary competition can both discover effective training strategies and reveal reusable stage-wise patterns in how the value of training distributions changes with policy capability. Code is available on GitHub.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11662
End-to-end autonomous driving demands trajectory planners that are both highly accurate and cheap enough for edge deployment. State-of-the-art artificial neural network (ANN) planners meet the accuracy requirement at the cost of heavy dense computation, while spiking neural networks (SNNs)---though promising orders-of-magnitude energy savings through sparse, event-driven arithmetic---still lag far behind in planning accuracy. We present \textbf{SDPAD}, a fully spike-driven end-to-end planning pipeline that closes this gap. SDPAD converts a pre-trained ANN perception stack into integer-spike form via quantized ANN2SNN conversion, lifts multi-view images into the bird's-eye-view (BEV) space with a spike-driven-max (SDM) depth distribution (Spike-3D-Lift), and plans through the Spike-QFormer, a spiking query transformer in which ego, agent, and map queries distilled from the BEV scene are fused by learnable waypoint queries via cross-attention, followed by deformable spike-cross-attention refinement. Every operation is gated by integer spikes and inference is a single feed-forward pass without temporal simulation loops. On the nuScenes open-loop benchmark, SDPAD achieves an average $L_2$ error of 0.40\,m and a collision rate of 0.12\%, on par with strong ANN planners while consuming 69.9\,mJ---less than 2\% of recent ANN baselines. In closed-loop evaluation on the NAVSIM navtest split, SDPAD reaches 86.3 PDMS, surpassing the previous SNN planner SAD by 4.3 points and matching mainstream ANN planners at a fraction of their energy. To our knowledge, SDPAD is the first fully spike-driven planner evaluated in end-to-end autonomous driving, demonstrating that SNNs can rival dense ANNs in complex driving tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11583
Autonomous vehicles often suffer from limited perception due to occlusions, blind spots, limited sensor range, and the complex nature of surrounding environments. Multi-agent collaborative perception (CP) addresses these challenges by allowing vehicles to share sensory information and reconstruct the scene cooperatively. However, camera-only perception remains fundamentally limited by the uncertainty of distance-dependent monocular depth estimation. We propose CoCam4D, a Bayesian framework for collaborative perception that explicitly models geometric uncertainty. It uses a VGGT-based feedforward network to generate 3D Gaussian scene representations with associated uncertainty estimates, enabling multiple vehicles or agents to efficiently combine their observations. By sharing compact Gaussian primitives, reliable observations from one agent can reduce the depth uncertainty of another without requiring LiDAR sensors. To support real-world deployment, we introduce Dynamic Object Primitives (DOPs), a compact 35-byte representation designed for efficient C-V2X communication. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method consistently outperforms recent vision-only methods, achieving improvements of 11.48% on OPV2V+ and 10.62% on DAIR-V2X-C, demonstrating the potential of geometrically grounded collaborative perception for LiDAR-free autonomous driving.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11577