Autonomous
-
Learning in Orbit: Onboard Training and Closed-Loop Attitude Control with a Thermal Segmentation Model on a Spacecraft
2026-10-13 19:57:06Elena Sorina Lupu, Hannah Grauer, Phaedrus Leeds, Nikhil Ranganathan, Connor Lee, Sulekha Kishore, Cailyn Smith, Shon Cortes, Brian Hardy, Benjamen Bycroft, Darren W. Rowen, Soon-Jo ChungAbstract
Deep space missions increasingly require spacecraft capable of autonomously operating in environments with communication delays and bandwidth limitations. A key enabler of such autonomy is the ability to run learning-based algorithms directly onboard. In this work, we present a flight deployment on a 6U CubeSat that demonstrates (1) onboard training and inference of a thermal segmentation model on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 NX GPU in space and (2) closed-loop attitude control using the segmentation model on a real-time, thermal image feed to track the Moon. In addition to this demonstration, we implement ROS 2 Foxy as a data transport middleware and integrate an open-source file system that provides strong data integrity guarantees and self-healing features. Over the course of approximately one year, we performed 12 experiments on the spacecraft, advancing the state of the art in autonomous spacecraft systems by showing how modern learning-based pipelines, commercially available hardware, and open-source software can operate reliably under the compute and environmental constraints of Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19122
PDF
-
ChunkAct: Action Chunking for Agentic Robotics
2026-10-13 17:59:57Bingxin Xu, Wenrui Bao, Xinxin Liu, Jiawei Zhou, Yuzhang Shang, Emilio FerraraAbstract
Agentic robotics places a large language model (LLM) agent in the robot control loop, where it composes perception, motion, and vision-language-action (VLA) tools under the guidance of a memory and thereby generalizes to new tasks without retraining. This generality comes at a steep price in efficiency. Every primitive requires a round of LLM reasoning over the full interaction history, so the cost of an episode grows with the number of primitives. We find this reasoning largely redundant: once a sub-goal is chosen, its primitives follow a routine already prescribed by memory. We present ChunkAct, which introduces action chunking to agentic robotics. Online, a single call launches a chunk of chained primitives, which executes autonomously and returns control only upon failure. Offline, ChunkAct compiles the memory into these chunks, so execution is memory-free at test time and the planner is reserved for decisions that require reasoning. LLM computation therefore scales with the number of decisions rather than the number of primitives. On LIBERO-Pro, ChunkAct improves task success by 5.0 points over the state of the art in agentic robotics while requiring 2.9x fewer LLM calls, 4.4x fewer input tokens, and 2.3x fewer output tokens.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18874
PDF
-
Tev: Scaling Long-Horizon Agentic Environments with Dense Progress Rewards
2026-10-13 17:59:51Wenbo Hu, Shraman Pramanick, Krishna Kumar Singh, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang, Yong Jae LeeAbstract
Long-horizon agents have drawn growing attention for their ability to work autonomously -- from hours to days -- on economically valuable tasks, a capability essential to automated discovery and recursive self-improvement (RSI). Yet open-source models still struggle on long-horizon tasks, largely for lack of both training data and a working recipe, and scaling both is hard: long, complex tasks are difficult to curate and verify, and their rewards are sparse. We address both. First, we introduce Tev-Gym, the first long-horizon agent training dataset with verifiable, dense, progressive rewards -- 1,170 verified task environments across 7 domains. It is built on a latent-world-first approach that first constructs a latent world: a complete and correct hidden specification of the task domain, workflow, and expected state after each step. Each task is then progressively rendered from this specification into an agent-facing environment, enabling controllable complexity and a natural progress metric. Second, we turn this metric into a training recipe: via progress-potential reward shaping (PPRS), we convert progress into a dense per-step reward that improves training efficiency and makes otherwise-intractable tasks trainable. Training with this recipe yields Tev-27B, which achieves substantial gains on the Agents' Last Exam computing and math sciences domains (ALE-CM), matching GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5 at Pass@5. Despite training only on ALE-related data, it generalizes to the Terminal-Bench (TB) 3.0 and 4.0 subsets, surpassing GLM 5.2 and Gemini 3.7 Flash, and reaches Claude Opus 4.8-level performance on middle-horizon tasks such as TB 2.1.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18868
PDF
-
Who Improves the Robot? Toward Physical Recursive Self-Improvement
2026-10-13 17:57:04Hai Zhou, Fan Yang, Zeyi Chen, Lejun Zhang, Chenyang Fu, Jianping Li, Jiayi Zhu, Xianyang Liu, Yingxuan Yang, Lili Meng, Lu Wang, Xinyang Han, Jiankai Sun, Weirui Ye, Guanchu Wang, Wanhua Li, Ming Zhou, Boyi Li, Ming Jin, Kun Shao, Muhao Chen, Guang Chen, Lei Ma, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Costas Spanos, Xia Hu, Mac Schwager, Weinan Zhang, Qian Feng, Shangding GuAbstract
Robots are increasingly autonomous in task execution, yet their improvement remains largely human-driven. This study investigates Physical Recursive Self-Improvement (Physical RSI), in which physical experience guides lasting updates to both a robot's capabilities and its improvement procedure, making subsequent improvement more effective across tasks. Physical RSI faces challenges from noisy observations, continuous dynamics, costly trials, and irreversible consequences. We present an L0-L5 framework that differentiates capability-level from meta-level updates and within-task from across-task gains, reserving L5 for independently verified recursive gain. We study existing methods around harness adaptation and model training, alongside safety and control mechanisms that govern execution and successive updates. Our analysis reveals that, despite substantial progress in self-improvement, the surveyed literature does not yet demonstrate Physical RSI as defined by our framework. We identify research priorities in reliable feedback, causal attribution, safety preservation, and benchmarking, outlining a path toward robots that autonomously improve how they learn while ensuring safety. The GitHub repository for Physical RSI is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18842
PDF
-
RadarGSOcc: Doppler-Aware 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction Using 4D Radar Tensor with Geometric-Semantic Feature Extraction
2026-10-13 16:40:59Christofel Rio Goenawan, Dong-Hee Paek, Seung-Hyun KongAbstract
3D semantic occupancy prediction is crucial for autonomous driving, but camera-based methods degrade in low-light conditions and LiDAR-based methods are sensitive to adverse weather. 4D radar is more robust, yet its sparsity and the high cost of radar tensor processing limit its use. We propose Radar Geometric-Semantic Occupancy Prediction (RadarGSOcc), an efficient framework that directly processes 4D radar tensors by separately extracting geometric and semantic features, including Doppler information, with a deformable attention-based geometric refinement module as its key component. We also introduce the K-Radar 3DSemOcc benchmark, the first large-scale benchmark for 3D semantic occupancy prediction using 4D radar tensors, built on the K-Radar dataset with refined LiDAR-based annotations. RadarGSOcc predicts 15 classes within a 51.2m range and achieves 38.2% IoU, 7.6% mIoU, and 25.5% weighted mIoU, outperforming RadarOcc by 17% relative (25.5 vs. 21.9) in weighted mIoU while using fewer parameters and lower computation. It substantially improves truck prediction while trading off car accuracy, outperforms camera-based approaches, and narrows the gap with LiDAR-based methods. To assess robustness without per-frame ground truth in adverse weather, we further propose a novel proxy metric, Environment-Based KL Divergence (EBKL), under which 4D radar proves a reliable and efficient modality for 3D semantic occupancy prediction. The dataset and code will be publicly available.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18686
PDF
-
Autonomous Science Bench: Evaluating AI Agents for Autonomous Scientific Discovery
Abstract
AI agents for autonomous scientific discovery must decide which experiments to run under a limited budget. Most benchmarks for science agents provide fixed datasets, while others that support active experimentation largely rely on simulation. We introduce Autonomous Science Bench, an initial release comprising six budgeted design-build-test-learn campaigns grounded in published experiments across biology, chemistry, and materials science. Agents select batches of designs, receive measurements from a lab service, and use the results to guide subsequent experiments before delivering a predictive model. Success requires passing two calibrated gates: a discovery gate, which evaluates the designs the agent measured, and a learning gate, which evaluates its model's ranking of held-out designs. In a pilot evaluation of eight agent-model configurations and 144 trials, the best configuration succeeds in 67% of trials, while the hardest campaign is solved in only three of 24 attempts. The two gates reveal different weaknesses: some agents build accurate rankings but find too few promising designs, while others find promising designs but fail to predict which unseen designs will perform well. These differences are obscured by overall success rates alone. We release version 0.1 of the campaigns, lab runtime, and public leaderboard at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18449
PDF
-
Resource-Efficient 3D Shape and Orientation Estimation of Road Users using Roadside RGB Camera and 3D Radar
2026-10-13 13:58:01Shiva Agrawal, Savankumar Bhanderi, Gordon ElgerAbstract
End-to-end deep learning pipelines for camera-radar 3D object detection are well established in driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles; however, adapting them to roadside-mounted infrastructure presents significant challenges. On vehicles, sensor heights, pitch angles, and relative geometries remain largely uniform, allowing end-to-end models to generalize effectively. On the contrary, roadside sensor installations vary drastically in height, tilt, and field of view across locations, rendering end-to-end models prone to failure and difficult to adapt without massive location-specific datasets. Hence, instead of designing a complex end-to-end pipeline for direct 3D bounding box estimation, a low-cost, resource-efficient two-stage approach is proposed for real-time 3D shape and orientation estimation. The first stage utilizes any off-the-shelf, state-of-the-art method to extract 2D camera bounding boxes and associated 3D radar points for each road user. The proposed second stage then processes these inputs to construct 3D oriented bounding boxes where radar data determines 3D position, predefined templates define size for each road user, and a tiny neural network predicts a site-specific and optimized yaw angle. The algorithm is successfully validated at a curved road with a junction for pedestrians, bicycles, and cars, where it achieves 25 frames per second on an NVIDIA Jetson ORIN for real-time applications.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18417
PDF
-
JevGPT: Thinking Fast and Slow in Autonomous Research
2026-10-13 12:29:13Yasheng Sun, Yanning Dai, Yimeng Chen, Nanbo Li, Firas Laakom, Yifan Xu, Piotr Pi\k{e}kos, Mateusz Ostaszewski, Wenyi Wang, Cheng Luo, Yuhui Wang, J\"urgen SchmidhuberAbstract
Autonomous research agents must acquire and reason over evidence within a limited budget. Yet relevant sources can remain uninspected or unused, leaving a gap between retrieval coverage and the evidence that informs research. The challenge is to align fast local judgments with changing evidence needs and feed their findings back into research decisions. We introduce JevGPT, a dual-system architecture for autonomous research that couples fast evidence processing with deliberative research planning. System Two sets evidence objectives and integrates findings, while System One locates support, assesses relevance, and guides further inspection. Independent source judgments run in parallel; selected original passages inform the next research step. Experiments on fixed-corpus question answering and document ranking show that JevGPT achieves leading task performance, with faster completion and lower cost than comparably effective research agents. Evidence analysis shows broader source inspection and greater coverage of supporting documents in the research loop, highlighting efficient evidence processing as a route to more capable autonomous research.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18272
PDF
-
The Agentic Scientist: Orchestrating Coding Agents for Automated Scientific Discovery
2026-10-13 11:28:03Robert Tjarko Lange, Luca Grillotti, Yutaro Yamada, Rujikorn Charakorn, David HaAbstract
Modern coding agents are fundamentally reshaping the role of human input for computational research: they write code, launch in silico experiments, analyze their results, and autonomously operate with ever-increasing time horizons. Despite these developments, fully autonomous research agents suffer from a limited ideation radius and myopic hill-climbing search dynamics. To bridge this gap, we introduce The Agentic Scientist, an end-to-end distributed pipeline for human researchers to conduct computational research alongside modern coding agents. Building on its predecessor, our system decomposes research into task drafting, idea generation, planning, sandboxed experimentation, result aggregation, baseline and ablation construction, post-hoc analysis, and report writing. Importantly, each step in the pipeline is powered by the next generation of coding agents and leverages agentic self-verification. The overall research process is driven by a meta-controller that manages parallel research agents and enforces rubric verification at each stage. This design enables the same orchestration layer to be reused across heterogeneous domains with different execution environments, agentic coding harnesses, and evaluation metrics. Our system can be used across a spectrum of autonomy: either as a co-scientist tool or to perform end-to-end scientific investigation. Within the co-scientist setting, we leveraged a development version of our system to submit a single research paper, which got accepted for publication at ALIFE 2026. We further apply The Agentic Scientist fully autonomously to open problem-solving tasks in machine learning, and demonstrate the system's capability of scientific discovery across different domains of computational research. Our ablations suggest that reliable scientific autonomy depends not only on base model capabilities, but also on the cross-agent orchestration layer.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18933
PDF
-
Neuro-Symbolic Graph Transformers for Hierarchical Intention Recognition from Multimodal Human Activity Sequences
2026-10-13 11:20:51Farnaz Soleimani (LISSI), Abdelghani Chibani (LISSI), Yacine Amirat (LISSI), Ghazaleh Khodabandelou (LISSI)Abstract
Proactive human-robot collaboration requires autonomous systems to infer not only immediate actions but also the underlying hierarchical intentions governing human behavior. Current deep learning approaches predominantly focus on flat action classification, failing to capture the structural dependencies connecting kinematic motion to high-level goals. A Neuro-Symbolic Graph Transformer (NSGT) is proposed within this multimodal framework, a Human Reasoning Graph (HR-G) is integrated into the self-attention mechanism via learnable topological biases. Furthermore, the architecture is augmented with a differentiable First-Order Logic (FOL) loss, acting as a structural regularizer by which ontological consistency is enforced across four levels: atomic actions, composite activities, Low-Level Intentions, and High-Level Intentions. Evaluation is performed on the synthesized NTU-Hierarchy dataset, a four-level ontological extension of NTU RGB+D 120, wherein existing sequences were mapped into 119,383 complex hierarchical episodes (85 actions, 16 activities, 8 LLIs, 4 HLIs). To prevent circular supervision, strict isolation between label generation and FOL constraints was maintained. In the base configuration, 91.65% top-1 action accuracy is achieved by the NSGT. When the FOL loss is incorporated into the baseline, logic consistency is improved by 3.26 percentage points to 96.67%. Through the HR-G biases, a tunable trade-off between accuracy and structural coherence is established. In the primary consistency-maximizing configuration ($\lambda$ = 0.5), a logic consistency of 94.59% is reached and ontological contradictions are reduced by 33%, while a robust 89.90% top-1 action accuracy is retained. Finally, interpretable reasoning evidence is provided by the learned HR-G weights, wherein transition edges are strongly exploited ($\beta$ trans $\approx$ +2.6) without explicit supervision.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18176
PDF
-
GLST: Global-Local Spatio-Temporal Memory Decomposition Framework for Online Chained-Goal Navigation
2026-10-13 08:15:12Yousef Liang, Ryan Ardalan, Yarden Goraly, Chenhao Zhu, Yue Yin, Jonas Frey, Claire Tomlin, Marco Pavone, Shankar SastryAbstract
Autonomous navigation in real-world environments often requires long-horizon operation under partial observability and evolving goals. Existing mapless navigation approaches predominantly assume fixed goals throughout an episode, limiting applicability to practical scenarios where goals change online during execution. We study online chained-goal navigation, where goals evolve through existing-goal redirection or new-goal emergence without explicit transition signals. Under this setting, we find navigation may require either continued exploration or strategic revisitation, creating conflicting memory requirements. We propose Global-Local Spatio-Temporal Belief Learning (GLST), a memory-decomposition framework that separates latent beliefs into global-local spatial and long-short temporal representations for long-horizon reasoning. We further introduce goal-conditioned rewards to balance exploration and exploitation under evolving goals. Extensive experiments in simulation across diverse terrains demonstrate improved chained-goal navigation performance over baselines. Real-robot experiments using the Spot quadruped further validate our memory decomposition framework.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17927
PDF
-
DriveWLA: Unifying Future Dynamics and Scene Semantics through World-Language-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving
2026-10-13 07:56:37Shuzheng Wang, Haoxuan Li, Shengzhen Li, Chenxi Wu, Yajing Sun, Lu Hou, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang WangAbstract
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and world models have demonstrated strong capabilities in semantic understanding and future scene evolution for autonomous driving. However, effectively integrating both capabilities for trajectory generation remains challenging. In this work, we propose DriveWLA, a unified World-Language-Action model based on Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) that jointly models semantic understanding, future scene dynamics, and trajectory generation. DriveWLA consists of three experts: a World Expert for future prediction, a Language Expert for semantic understanding, and an Action Expert for trajectory generation. We further introduce Cross-Expert Attention, which enables controlled information flow across experts while aligning semantic and dynamic representations. To improve trajectory generation beyond imitation learning, we apply Flow-GRPO reinforcement learning post-training to refine the Action Expert. Extensive experiments show that DriveWLA achieves superior performance in both open-loop and closed-loop evaluation. DriveWLA achieves 92.3 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 and 90.1 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2, demonstrating strong performance among VLM-based and world-model-based planners. Without specific fine-tuning, DriveWLA further demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization to HUGSIM, nuScenes, and Bench2Drive. These results validate the effectiveness of our unified World-Language-Action modeling, establishing DriveWLA as a generalizable framework for autonomous driving.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17903
PDF
-
Navalia: Advancing Cowork Agents through Verifiable Task Synthesis and Long-Horizon Post-Training
2026-10-13 07:19:22Hengqi Liu, Ziyuan Liu, Yang Qin, Wanting Zhou, Zichuan Wang, Jiachen Liang, Xu Chu, Shaowei Chen, Zhaokai Luo, Mu ChuanAbstract
Large language model (LLM) agents are evolving from conversational assistants into Cowork Agents capable of autonomous planning, tool use, and complex task execution. Financial analysis requires these agents to integrate cross-document evidence and perform multistep numerical reasoning, but expert task authoring is costly, while direct LLM synthesis struggles to produce challenging tasks with reliable answers. We introduce Navalia, a framework for Cowork Agents that combines verifiable task synthesis with long-horizon post-training. Using corporate financial reports as its data source, Navalia semantically selects supporting evidence from complete fact sets and constructs executable computation chains to generate analytical tasks with traceable evidence and actual data dependencies between steps. We further use independent LLM review and programmatic checks to verify evidence consistency and answer correctness. The verified tasks are then used for trajectory collection, cold-start supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL) to improve long-horizon task execution. Navalia, initialized from Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, achieves consistent gains over the base model across all five benchmarks: OfficeQA Pro, FinSearchComp, Finance Agent Benchmark, APEX-Agents-AA, and Workspace-Bench-Lite. These results demonstrate that Navalia improves evidence integration, tool use, and long-horizon task execution capabilities and generalizes to broader Cowork settings, including general office tasks.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26887
PDF
-
Autonomous 3D Visual-Thermal Inspection for Utility-Scale Solar Farms
2026-10-13 05:43:11Lachlan Tychsen-Smith, Mark Cox, Brett Wood, David Haddon, Kenrick Anderson, Benjamin Duck, Jim O'Malley, Noel W Duffy, Peyman MoghadamAbstract
Utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) inspection is dominated by aerial surveys, which are effective for identifying module-level hot cells but provide limited visibility of critical components located under the array, including connectors, cabling, fasteners and structural elements. These assets are difficult to inspect consistently at scale, and their defects are often spatially small, partially occluded and difficult to localise from isolated images. We present an automated 3D visual-thermal inspection system (Tricorder) for under-panel PV asset inspection. The approach combines LiDAR-inertial Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) with geometrically calibrated RGB and thermal imagery and machine-learning-based object detection and segmentation. Detected assets are associated with the reconstructed 3D environment, allowing visual and thermal observations from multiple viewpoints to be spatially fused and localised. We demonstrate the approach on utility-scale PV data for MC4 connector detection and connection-state recognition, thermal anomaly identification, and detection of structural components including bolts, nuts and torque tubes. The results demonstrate a pathway from image-based inspection toward spatially grounded autonomous inspection, where defects are detected and linked to specific assets and their 3D locations within the solar farm.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17762
PDF
-
I3L: Iterative Interactive Imitation Learning for Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation
2026-10-13 05:28:59Wensi Ai, Christopher Luey, Karthik Dharmarajan, Evans Han, Yunfan Jiang, Stef Ren, Jianwen Xie, Jiajun Wu, Li Fei-Fei, Ruohan ZhangAbstract
Policies trained offline from teleoperated demonstrations can degrade outside their training distribution. This gap is particularly acute in long-horizon whole-body mobile manipulation, where long horizons amplify compounding errors and coordinated arm, torso, and base motion makes exhaustive demonstration coverage impractical. We introduce I3L, an integrated hardware and learning system that combines whole-body correction with iterative policy refinement to address this last-mile reliability gap. Its low-cost, open-source JoyLo+ interface uses policy-tracking leader arms and touch-triggered takeover to enable coordinated corrections across the body parts, while iterative deployment and retraining allow operators to target failures of the updated policy. We evaluate I3L across three robot embodiments and eight simulated and real-world tasks, including four long-horizon whole-body mobile manipulation tasks. Controlled simulation experiments show that four-round HG-DAgger achieves the highest final success on both tasks. Under this protocol, I3L improves autonomous success over the base policies by an average of 68.3 percentage points and achieves at least 90% success on every task, outperforming demonstration-only training by 35.6 percentage points on average with the same number of training trajectories. Averaged across tasks, takeover duration per episode decreases by 72% over four rounds. Together, these results show that I3L helps close the last-mile gap between offline training and reliable deployment and provides practical insights into collecting and using corrections for long-horizon whole-body mobile manipulation. Videos, visualizations, and appendix are at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17748
PDF
-
TacitVLA: Reasoning Vision-Language-Action Models Without Reasoning Latency
2026-10-13 01:09:25Jack Lu, Yurong You, Boyi Li, Yulong Cao, Thomas Tian, Chaowei Xiao, Xiangyu Chen, Wenjie Luo, Boris Ivanovic, Marco Pavone, Yan WangAbstract
Textual reasoning before acting has improved vision-language-action (VLA) models, but at the cost of latency: every action conditioned on the reasoning text must wait for autoregressive decoding. We show that actions do not need to wait for or condition on the generated reasoning to benefit from it, because the reasoning supervision already improves the backbone representation. We introduce TacitVLA, a reasoning VLA whose action expert never attends to the reasoning it generates for the current call. On long-horizon tasks where the reasoning text also serves as episodic memory, it can generate each entry during action execution rather than before acting. We evaluate it in a controlled study on four benchmarks spanning manipulation and autonomous driving, memory and non-memory tasks: RoboMME, RMBench, LIBERO, and PhysicalAI-AV. On all four, TacitVLA matches the performance of its explicit-reasoning counterpart at up to 3.4x lower latency, and matches the latency of the same architecture trained without reasoning at up to +17.1% success. In absolute terms, it surpasses the best previously published results on the RoboMME Counting suite (82.7% vs. 66.8%) and RMBench (77.5% vs. 56.5%), and reaches 72.9% on LIBERO-Plus and a 52.5% scene score on the public split of the PhysicalAI-AV closed-loop driving challenge. Project page: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17540
PDF
-
Large Language Models Extend Known Research But Do Not Create New Research Directions
2026-10-12 21:57:24Zhihua Liu, Kurt Butler, Damian Machlanski, Danilo Bueno, Sotirios A. TsaftarisAbstract
The success of autonomous research systems relies on the quality of the scientific hypotheses they generate. Recent studies report that human reviewers often rate LLM-generated ideas as more novel than those from human experts, raising hope that AI can accelerate scientific discovery. Yet it is unclear whether these models can do more than extend existing knowledge. Can LLMs drive genuine innovation by revealing new research directions, or are they limited to repeating and recombining what science already knows? This unresolved question lies at the heart of discussions about AI and the future of science. To address this, we distinguish two types of novelty: distance, which measures how far a hypothesis lies from existing work, and direction, which captures whether the hypothesis pursues new lines of inquiry beyond those already present. These two measures diverge sharply for LLM-generated work. We represent scientific papers in a shared conceptual space using a pretrained scientific-paper embedding model. Within this space, we embed 26.9 million human-authored papers across 1,325 research topics in six natural-science fields and 524,308 LLM-generated hypotheses from eight models. Distance is measured using existing metrics. To quantify direction, we introduce the orthogonal novelty score (ONS). LLMs consistently generate ideas more distant from existing work than human-authored papers, up to 16\% further when the LLM is given the papers farthest from the centre of the topic. However, LLM hypotheses have a 15--23\% lower median ONS than published papers from the same topic. Thus, LLMs move further from what is already known, but remain within established directions. This pattern persists across changes in various configurations. As a result, LLMs excel at extending the frontier but the creation of new directions is still led by human scientists.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17439
PDF
-
ClearNav: Perception-Aligned Quadrotor Flight Using Differential-Physics
Abstract
Autonomous quadrotor flight in cluttered environment is an key capability for tasks like inspection and search. Navigation policies trained in simulation and transferred to hardware can fly at high speed in open space, but they can still collide as obstacle clearance shrinks. We attribute most of these collisions to a single mechanism, namely motion in directions the onboard camera does not observe. Heading that is not aligned with the direction of travel and lateral excursion during obstacle avoidance both carry the vehicle toward obstacles outside its field of view. We introduce ClearNav, a navigation policy trained with two reward terms that constrain motion to the observed direction, a forward-looking heading target and a penalty on lateral velocity. A third term penalizes speed near obstacles so that an obstacle entering the field of view remains avoidable. In simulation, across 18 held-out scenarios with 2304 paired flights per policy unseen in training, ClearNav improves success by 6.8 points, cuts the collision rate by 65% relative to the state of the arts, and flies at maximum 5m/s. For the proximity term alone under matched commanded speeds, the collision reduction still holds at 70%. The effect is significant on static scenes and consistent in direction on moving obstacles, though not significant there at the suite level, showing that safer flight in clutter is possible even on the limited sensors and compute of small drones. We also validate our navigation policy in a real-world cluttered environment, showing that it enables the quadrotor to navigate through the cluttered environment successfully and safely.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17419
PDF
-
Agency as a New Organizing Abstraction for Computer Science
Abstract
Advances in large-scale machine learning have enabled agentic AI systems: persistent, autonomous computational entities that pursue goals, initiate actions, and interact with open environments. These systems are often framed as applications of foundation models. We argue that this framing is incomplete: agency is also a candidate new organizing abstraction for computer science. What is new is not the concept of an agent, nor runtime policy generation per se, but its general-purpose, open-ended form, in which systems can synthesize courses of action from goals, observations, and memory, over tools and environments for which no complete task-specific model was specified in advance. Thus agency becomes a systems-level abstraction as well as an AI modeling concept. Where the process abstraction organizes computation around executing programs, agency organizes it around pursuing goals under bounded resources: a process executes a program; an agent pursues a goal. From this perspective, the recurring failures of deployed agentic systems (runaway resource consumption, behavior redirected by adversarial content, opaque continuous operation) are symptoms of structural abstraction gaps, not isolated engineering defects. We examine these gaps across six dimensions (execution, interfaces, correctness, oversight, coordination, and persistence) and argue that closing them requires coordinated advances in systems,
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17410
PDF
-
When Goals Leak Across Relationships: How Cached Goal Representations Shape Cross-Client Decisions
2026-10-12 20:22:45Saloni Gupta, S\'ebastien Krier, Glenn MatlinAbstract
As LLM agents take on more autonomous roles, they may interact with multiple clients and counterparties whose goals and incentives conflict. If an agent maintains shared inference state across these interactions, information associated with one relationship may influence decisions made for another. We test OLMo-3-7B-Instruct in a controlled two-client environment with 20 market scenarios, where each client is assigned an opposing objective. With shared conversational memory, the model deviates from the current client's objective in 22% of eligible decisions. We then investigate how these goals are represented in the KV cache. Linear probes show that client-goal ownership becomes highly recoverable in middle layers and is concentrated in particular attention heads. We use these results to identify where to intervene in the cache and test whether these representations affect the model's decisions. Ablating the competitor's cached goal representations at these locations shifts the model toward the current client. The effect is larger for heads identified by probing than for randomly selected heads, and larger when ablating goal tokens than matched non-goal tokens from the same client. Our results show that client-specific goal representations persist in the KV cache and can causally influence decisions made for other clients, highlighting the importance of relationship-specific state isolation in persistent LLM agents.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17365
PDF
