Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generate robot actions from visual observations and language instructions, but effective manipulation also requires anticipating how the environment will change. Existing world-action models explore future image prediction and latent dynamics modeling. However, generating complete future images can be computationally expensive, while highly compressed latent representations may obscure local changes. To address these challenges, we propose PLaCA, a world-to-action framework built around future latent change. PLaCA directly predicts spatially structured patch-level future latent change from the current multimodal input, preserving local information about expected environmental changes. We introduce patch-level change-aware supervision to emphasize regions undergoing larger changes and a future-to-action interface that explicitly incorporates predicted future latent change into action generation. Experiments on LIBERO-Long show that PLaCA achieves a 79.0% success rate, improving upon the Action-only baseline by 5.0 percentage points. On CALVIN, PLaCA improves the average sequence length from 2.784 to 3.564. These improvements are achieved while updating only 2.95% of the model parameters during the second training stage, demonstrating the effectiveness of future latent change modeling for downstream robotic manipulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27657
We set out to reproduce a recent hallucination-mitigation result on the POPE benchmark. The LLaVA-1.5-7B baseline we measured, 82.21 F1 on the adversarial split, sat 1.21 to 8.67 points above the adversarial baselines we planned to compare against (81.00, 79.30, and 73.54). We looked at the evaluation code and found a readout choice that moves F1 on its own. A two-token logit readout decides yes versus no by comparing two vocabulary IDs, 3582 ("yes") and 1217 ("no"). Across 9,000 greedy-decode questions spanning all three splits, neither ID is generated even once. The model emits " Yes" (token 3869) and " No" (token 1939), because SentencePiece prepends a space byte after the prompt suffix "ASSISTANT:". Read with an eight-token lookup that covers the space-prefixed surface forms, LLaVA-1.5-7B scores F1 0.8221, 0.8498, and 0.8713 on the adversarial, popular, and random splits. That 6.13-point adversarial shift exceeds the adversarial gain reported by five of the six papers we surveyed. None of them states its readout, and our reference ran under 4-bit NF4 quantization, so we cannot say how much of any reported gain a matched evaluation would keep. That comparison stays unresolved until readout and precision are matched. On the fixed baseline we run nine inference-time corrections of our own (none beat it) and dissect why the adversarial split resists logit-level intervention. In a 3,000-question probe, wrong predictions draw more image attention than correct ones (Cohen's $d=-0.46$, $p=1.4\times10^{-24}$), the opposite of what grounding-based corrections assume. A four-readout audit across four further VLMs from three tokenizer families confirms the confound is protocol-level, not model-specific: porting the LLaVA-1.5 IDs verbatim drops F1 to 0.00 on the two disjoint-vocabulary models, whereas a tokenizer-derived readout holds between 0.80 and 0.92.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25964
Can embodied task agents use tactile experience to perform fine manipulation without task-specific model training? We investigate this capability through Tactile-ETA, a system that incorporates tactile experience into an embodied task agent through in-context learning. Successful expert demonstrations show how contact changes during manipulation. We pair each recorded robot movement with its camera views and bilateral tactile observations. We keep tactile observations at the start and end of each movement and add two neighboring time points when the tactile images change markedly in between. The agent combines these demonstrations with current vision, tactile observations, and proprioception to select actions through general-purpose robot tools, without updating model parameters. Across four simulated manipulation tasks, adding tactile observations to the same two expert demonstrations increases average success from 15.75% to 24.00%, with current sensing and execution interfaces held fixed. Further experiments show that performance depends on the sensory content and representation of demonstrations, while comparing agent models on Lift Bottle reveals substantial differences under the same system configuration. On the real-robot tasks, demonstrations with aligned visual and tactile observations increase the task success rate from 0% to 60%. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of using tactile experience in context for fine manipulation and suggest a path toward extending embodied task agents to additional sensory inputs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27613
Long-horizon agents must learn heterogeneous capabilities from interleaved trajectories. Updating shared parameters to learn new capabilities can degrade previously acquired ones, resulting in catastrophic forgetting. As a trajectory unfolds, different stages may require different capabilities, yet conventional joint training and static adapter merging maintain a fixed parameter configuration throughout execution. We introduce WeAct (Weight-level Internal Actions), which trains independent capability-specific LoRA adapters over a frozen backbone and adds adapter selection to the agent's action space. These internal actions use the model's native tool-calling interface for on-demand capability composition in a shared context. Across eight deep-research benchmarks, Qwen3-32B with WeAct improves average accuracy by 6.2% relative to full fine-tuning counterparts despite using less compute, and by 27.5% relative to the strongest static LoRA-merging method. WeAct also supports modular continual adaptation, by adding a new code computation adapter to expand the agent's capabilities and updating the existing writing adapter to improve report quality. Both updates leave the backbone and other adapters unchanged, supporting modular continual adaptation in agents.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26847
Diffusion language models (DLMs) are emerging as a promising paradigm for code generation, offering the potential for fast, parallel decoding. However, generating complex programs remains challenging, as their interdependent components must maintain consistent interfaces, data flows, and shared assumptions. Aggressive parallel decoding can compromise these dependencies and undermine program correctness, while conservative decoding sacrifices efficiency. To address this trade-off, we propose planning program decomposition before implementation to coordinate interdependent units during parallel generation. We introduce Self-Decomposing Diffusion for Code (SDDC), a novel framework that decomposes complex programs and implements their units in parallel, entirely through diffusion. SDDC first generates a contract specifying the program's decomposition and inter-unit dependencies, then uses it to guide coordinated parallel implementation. Across five benchmarks and two 7B diffusion backbones, SDDC substantially improves the accuracy--latency trade-off, raising pass@1 by up to 31.1 percentage points while decoding 7.5--13.7$\times$ faster than the base models, and outperforming a fine-tuning baseline by up to 23.5 points with lower latency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27600
Factual recall is a lookup: some representation inside the network serves as the key, and what that key is made of decides which queries can retrieve the fact, what an edit must cover, and what a retriever can read. We call it the factual access state. In autoregressive (AR) models the subject position enriches attributes largely independently of the relation, and relation-specific selection happens later, at the readout position. In masked diffusion language models (DLMs) we find the state is assembled differently, and much earlier: in the first attention layer the wording of the relation is routed into the position of whichever entity is visible and the early feed-forward layers look the fact up on this fused representation. The state therefore varies with the relation's surface form and with the query direction, so the queries about one fact occupy a region of state space rather than a point, and an operation on the fact succeeds only for queries that enter it. We treat the state as an interface to a DLM's factual knowledge, and put it to two uses. Writing to the state gives a knowledge editor: from one declarative statement, Multi-View Edit fits one shared value per direction across that region and installs it in the early-MLP block, preserving source-prompt reliability while substantially improving paraphrase and reverse question answering, where AR editors gain near zero. Reading it suggests a complementary use: the state at each entity position can serve as a relation-specific retrieval vector with no training, returning both pieces of evidence for two-entity queries on which pooled, prompted and lexical retrievers almost never return both.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27580
With increasing autonomy, Large Language Models (LLMs) may engage in deceptive behaviors, such as scheming to pursue misaligned goals or sandbagging to escape oversight. Monitoring outputs alone is insufficient, as models can produce seemingly benign responses while harboring misaligned internal objectives. While mechanistic approaches like linear probing are promising, they rely on the assumption that deception corresponds to a single direction in representation space. We demonstrate that such single-direction probes fail to generalize across diverse deception scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose representing deception as a multi-dimensional subspace rather than a single direction. Our method utilizes iterative orthogonal decomposition to identify complementary directions that capture distinct facets of deceptive intent. To effectively leverage these directions for detection, we find that static combinations prove brittle due to strong domain dependence across different scenarios. We therefore introduce a domain-adaptive gating mechanism that dynamically composes the extracted directions through few-shot adaptation at test time. With only 10 examples, our approach achieves an average AUROC of 0.97 and 94% recall at 5% FPR across all evaluated datasets, substantially outperforming existing methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27577
Multi-agent systems are increasingly deployed to coordinate multiple large language model (LLM) agents. However, this also creates new attack surfaces: malicious agents may have chances to exploit the coordination. In this paper, we propose and study the \textit{show-up attack}, in which a malicious subagent manipulates the supervisor into involving it in tasks beyond its assigned scope. To evaluate this risk, we propose SUA-Arena, which implements 6 attack strategies and contains 188 test cases. Then, we evaluate 6 frontier LLMs and find that all of them are vulnerable to show-up attacks. For example, GPT-5.6-Sol as a supervisor suffers an ASR of up to 0.93. Mitigation strategies such as prompting and restricted communication fail to reduce the risk consistently. These results show that multi-agent systems need explicit mechanisms for enforcing authority boundaries.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27574
Depression dialogue benchmarks commonly assess models by comparing predicted symptom labels with clinical scale scores. However, a prediction may agree with a benchmark label even when the dialogue lacks enough evidence to justify it. We introduce EviDial, a benchmark that distinguishes label agreement from evidence-grounded assessment. EviDial comprises 382 depression dialogues from three sources and 2,744 participant-symptom cells, each classified as having absent, partial, conflicting, or sufficient evidence. Because evidence sufficiency lacks a directly observable gold standard, we derive calibrated evidence references from multiple judgments using generalizability theory, many-facet Rasch measurement, and random-effects latent class analysis. Our audit reveals that 82.8% of participant-symptom cells lack sufficient textual evidence for the corresponding symptom assessment, with substantial variation across sources. Across model families and prompting strategies, 69.2%-96.9% of predictions judged correct by benchmark labels are nonetheless unsupported by sufficient dialogue evidence. Further analyses show that strong agreement among LLM evaluators need not reflect independent evidence judgments, underscoring the need to calibrate automated reference panels. These findings demonstrate that label-based evaluation can overestimate evidence-grounded performance by conflating agreement with clinical labels and support in the observed dialogue. EviDial provides a measurement layer for separating these constructs and auditing LLM-based depression assessment more faithfully.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27541
Language-model agents increasingly participate in operational workflows where approvals, binds, and payments create commitments. An approval valid when issued may no longer authorize execution after relevant facts, evidence, policy, or authority change. We call this the evaluation--execution gap. We specify a state-bound runtime assurance layer that separates probabilistic measurement from deterministic adjudication, binds an execution allowance to the decision-relevant basis of an approval, invalidates that allowance after relevant logged changes, and rechecks admissibility at dispatch. This distinguishes the continued validity of a prior approval from a current-state policy check. We describe eight failure modes, an assurance model, a reference architecture, and prospective interventions with retrospective remediation. In a scripted 42-case replay, the state-bound configuration identifies 15 later-invalidated approvals that a deliberately non-re-evaluating point-in-time comparator does not revisit; it holds 14 affected actions before dispatch and compensates one landed effect. These results illustrate behavior under the stipulated policies and event orders, not superiority over dispatch-time enforcement designs or production effectiveness. Under explicit interception, ingestion, dependency, and serialization assumptions, the model establishes dispatch-time validity within the registered execution surface.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27480
3D point clouds generation requires capturing both part-level layout and surface detail while preserving permutation equivariance. Existing latent generative models often encode an entire shape into a single vector, which limits their ability to retain part-level structure. We propose TokenFlow, a hierarchical flow matching framework that represents each shape as a set of latent tokens and couples a rectified flow over these tokens with a conditional flow over points. A bottleneck of $M \ll N$ learnable tokens aggregates global context through cross-attention at $O(NM)$ cost. On ShapeNet, TokenFlow achieves the best MMD and coverage across airplane, car, and chair, while obtaining 1-NNA comparable to the strongest baselines. On ModelNet, its learned latent set reaches the best reported linear-evaluation accuracy on ModelNet10. These results show that representing a shape as a set of latent tokens, aggregated at $O(NM)$ cost, provides an effective representation for 3D point cloud generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27418
Neural image codecs face a fundamental trade-off between pixel fidelity and perceptual quality. Distortion-optimized codecs preserve pixel-wise fidelity but produce blurred reconstructions at low bitrates, whereas generative codecs leverage learned priors to improve perceptual quality but tend to exhibit saturating PSNR at higher bitrates and require separate models for different bitrate targets. We propose PerQ, which reframes perceptual reconstruction as inverse generative modeling with bounded support. Specifically, we define the quantization cell as the set of latents that yield the same transmitted symbols and derive a transport bound showing that reconstructions from this cell remain within a rate-determined radius of the codec output. This motivates performing generative reconstruction within the codec-induced quantization cell, rather than sampling from an unconstrained image prior. PerQ implements this principle by attaching a rate-conditioned flow-matching compensator to a frozen, multi-rate distortion-optimized backbone, enabling perceptual enhancement while preserving the backbone's coding performance. Experiments on Kodak and CLIC2020 show that PerQ achieves perceptual performance comparable to generative codecs such as MS-ILLM in LPIPS and FID, while maintaining competitive PSNR relative to distortion-optimized codecs such as ELIC. A single model checkpoint supports a wide bitrate range with fast decoding, and the compensator provides consistent gains across three different backbones. The implementation is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27374
Query clarification is essential for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that face ambiguous user queries. We consider multi-turn grounded conversational scenarios where a user query is either ill-formed or ambiguous in the context of the prior dialog or, more interestingly, it may be well-formed but when posed against retrieved documents there are multiple relevant interpretations. The task is to recognize both such cases and then generate an appropriate clarification request to the user. We present ClariEdge, a new dataset of approximately 3,900 examples that include such ambiguous queries along with negative examples that do not require clarification. We also show that a lightweight fine-tuned LoRA achieves 96.6% classification accuracy and outperforms prompted baselines of many larger models on both classification and quality of clarification generation. Our study shows that hard negatives are an essential ingredient to separate out queries that are truly ambiguous from queries that may look ambiguous but are not (i.e., can be resolved from the context). The same LoRA achieves high performance in both pre-retrieval and post-retrieval scenarios; thus, it can be used in two places in a RAG pipeline as a check before answer generation. The ClariEdge dataset is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28686
Accurate head immobilization is critical for medical procedures such as neuroimaging and intracranial radiation therapy, where even minor motion can compromise precision. Traditional methods, such as rigid stereotactic frames and thermoplastic face masks, are invasive, uncomfortable for patients, and require a time-consuming setup. To overcome these limitations, a novel approach employs a 6-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) robotic head holder that is integrated with real-time optical motion tracking, enabling dynamic compensation for head movements without physical restraint. However, implementing this system requires a detailed biomechanical understanding of skull-cervical spine interactions to define safe and effective motion limits. In this study, we conduct a human volunteer investigation using a 6DoF Stewart platform robot to characterize biokinematic workspace of the head-neck system and establish foundational data for human-robot interaction in precision head stabilization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27336
Accurate short-term air-quality forecasting is essential for public health protection and urban management, yet many recent forecasting frameworks rely on complex, data-intensive, and computationally demanding models. This study investigates whether lightweight and interpretable forecasting approaches can provide competitive performance for hourly PM2.5 prediction in Beijing, China. Using multi-year pollutant and meteorological time-series data, we developed a leakage-aware forecasting workflow that combined chronological data partitioning, preprocessing, feature selection, and exogenous-driver modeling under the Perfect Prognosis setting. Three forecasting families were evaluated: SARIMAX, Facebook Prophet, and NeuralProphet. To assess practical deployment behavior, the models were tested under two adaptive regimes: weekly walk-forward refitting and frozen forecasting with online residual correction. Results showed clear differences in both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency. Under walk-forward refitting, Facebook Prophet achieved the strongest completed performance, with an MAE of $37.61$ and an RMSE of $50.10$, while also requiring substantially less execution time than NeuralProphet. In the frozen-model regime, online residual correction improved Facebook Prophet and SARIMAX, with corrected SARIMAX yielding the lowest overall error (MAE $32.50$; RMSE $46.85$). NeuralProphet remained less accurate and less stable across both regimes, and residual correction did not improve its forecasts. Notably, corrected Facebook Prophet reached nearly the same error as its walk-forward counterpart while reducing runtime from $15$ min $21.91$ sec to $46.60$ sec. These findings show that lightweight additive forecasting strategies can remain highly competitive for urban air-quality prediction, offering a practical balance between accuracy, interpretability, ...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25495
Humanoid face robots can now move their lips in sync with speech and show detailed facial expressions. Give such a robot the face of a real person and drive it with generated speech, and you get a new kind of presentation attack: a face that talks and reacts in front of the camera, recorded as a real object with no edited pixel. We call this a RoboFake and ask whether current defenses are ready for it. We test three public face presentation attack detection (PAD) models and six public deepfake detectors on video of a physical lip-syncing face robot, on a synthesized video of the same robot, and on rendered robot faces. Thresholds are fixed on human data (BPCER 5% on FaceForensics++), and every result is compared with real human faces processed the same way as the robot videos and turned to the same head angle. A small mobile PAD model detects every physical robot frame (APCER 0%) and is not affected by compression, but its BPCER on processed human video rises to 14%; the two PAD models trained on CelebA-Spoof miss the robot in the direct capture, and one of them also misses most panel frames. Among the deepfake detectors, three flag almost every robot frame and two fewer than 7%; masking shows that the response comes from the face but does not track synthesis, and JPEG compression pushes most robot frames below the threshold for some detectors. Our results suggest that current models catch today's robots because their faces do not look human, not because they recognize the attack. We state three testable hypotheses about realistic, interactive RoboFakes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14269
For AI assistants to move beyond simple chat interfaces and reliably assist users with applications like Gmail, Venmo, and Slack, we need to improve their tool-use capabilities. However, existing tool use benchmarks are still limited and difficult to scale because they rely on human supervision or are too domain-specific. To make data generation scalable, we propose, TURTLE (**T**ool **U**se **R**elated **T**asks with **L**ong-Horizon **E**volution), an Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) approach to evolve existing tasks using a proposer, a solver, and a feedback generator large language model agents. The proposer is rewarded for difficult yet solvable tasks based on the solver's empirical performance, and the feedback generator summarizes the solver's execution traces for the proposer to exploit. TURTLE produces evolving, self-tuning test suites adaptable to different environment requirements, from supporting user simulators and dense document retrieval to interacting across multiple apps. Empirical results on AppWorld, $\tau$-Bench, and AutomationBench using Gemma 4 31B-it show that the evolved tasks target the desired difficulty range (e.g., a 165\% increase in the percentage of hard tasks on AppWorld), increase task diversity (in terms of reasoning and simultaneous tool interactions), and elicit a broader range of failure modes than the original tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27307
Walking without vision requires timely, unambiguous guidance, yet many wearable aids encode directions as audio or vibrotactile signals that users must translate into movement. We present XoNav, a four-actuator hip exoskeleton that renders guidance cues directly at the hip joints. It renders an Advance cue and two-level Braking cues through sagittal-plane actuators and two-level Steering cues through frontal-plane actuators. A bilateral LSTM-based gait-state classifier uses two thigh-mounted IMUs to identify gait states, enabling haptic cues to be delivered in coordination with the wearer's gait while suppressing them during standing. The classifier generalized to unseen users with recalls of 95.2-97.9%, with mean detection delays of 38.6 and 63.1 ms for stance-to-swing and swing-to-stance transitions, respectively. Constrained human-in-the-loop Bayesian optimization personalized Braking for minimum resistance and Steering for maximum comfort while ensuring detectability and safety. All participants reliably distinguished between grades of their personalized cues and the firmest Braking cue remained below 53% of the safety limit. In blindfolded Wizard-of-Oz navigation trials along three paths, the participants kept 98.8% of the walked distance within a 0.75 m wide passage, with a 4.9% increase in mean progression speed per trial. A body-worn camera, RTAB-Map and Nav2 further enabled a feasibility study of autonomous navigation and detours around previously unmapped obstacles.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27271
Producing synthetic data for comparison testing a migrated COBOL application is a major challenge that agentic migrations face today. Our prior paper, the Agentic Method for Deterministic Validation of Legacy Code Migration, presents a deterministic oracle to facilitate such migrations, the Locksmith Loop. We now propose a novel method for achieving high branch and paragraph coverage through generated synthetic end-to-end test cases, by means of entry-replay test-case certification by observing the code execution trace on a surrogate COBOL program that mocks external interactions via a chronological external-operation tape. We applied our method to a very large COBOL program with 33,429 lines of code to generate 849 synthetic end-to-end test cases covering 2,973/3,806 source branches (78.1%) and 989/1,033 main-AST paragraphs (95.7%). Using the Locksmith Loop's projected-agreement validation, the generated Java code matched the COBOL surrogate on the specified observations across all 849 certified synthetic end-to-end test cases. During the campaign we detected 61 defects and fixed the Java generator accordingly. To test whether the coding agent could silently introduce business logic bugs, we seeded 450 defects into the Java code, such as deleted writes, deleted paragraph calls, and altered rounding, to verify how many of these would be detected by the gating methodology. The gate detected 47.6%, including all deleted writes and paragraph calls in executed code, but was unable to detect the rounding and precision defects.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27272
Agent systems are shifting from task-scoped tool-use agents to persistent, personalized assistants such as OpenClaw. These claw-style agents maintain configuration files (e.g., this http URL), long-term memory, and reusable skills. Once poisoned, this persistent state is repeatedly reloaded into the agent's context, creating persistent threats across tasks and sessions. Existing security evaluation systems struggle to evaluate these complex claw-style systems since they rely heavily on manually constructed test cases and environments, which limits their scale and coverage; in addition, these manually designed cases quickly become outdated as agents evolve, and their evaluation settings leave a gap with how claw-style agents are deployed in practice. To address this, we introduce AutoRedClaw, an automated red-teaming framework that generates end-to-end attacks together with the environments needed to execute them. AutoRedClaw combines a strict quality-checking protocol with execution-based validation to ensure the correctness, realism, and effectiveness of generated samples, and adopts task-driven environment construction to keep costs low. To achieve broad coverage, it organizes generation along risk categories, attack strategies, attack stages, and attack surfaces, and uses experience-guided exploration to steer generation toward under-explored regions. AutoRedClaw achieves an effective attack rate above 30% at less than $0.10 per successful sample. From its outputs, we construct RedClaw-Bench, a 330-case benchmark that yields substantially higher attack success rates (ASRs) than AgentDojo, AgentDyn, and DTap. Across seven harnesses and four frontier models, most agent systems exceed 50% ASR, showing that our red-teaming pipeline provides a strong evaluation signal even for the most advanced agent systems. Our code and benchmark are released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27244