Moving from controllable videos to genuinely playable worlds requires persistent world state, executable game rules, and low-latency interaction. We outline a roadmap for the next generation of Matrix-Game that separates game execution from visual generation through an executable game harness, and introduce Matrix-Game 4.0 as the first system built on this design. A lightweight game engine maintains world state and executes interaction rules, a multimodal coding agent translates player ideas into game code and dynamic scene captions, and a renderer based on autoregressive video model transforms engine-rendered low-poly proxies into detailed visuals, conditioned on dynamic captions and memory references. This framework provides continuous guidance for visual generation and enables natural-language creation and modification of scenes and gameplay. Our renderer is trained on aligned low-poly and high-fidelity video pairs and distilled into a causal generator that generates in four-frame chunks with one or two denoising steps. Together with targeted inference optimizations, Matrix-Game 4.0 enables 480p, 60 FPS gameplay on a single NVIDIA RTX5090 with a key-press-to-display latency of 112ms. Single-step generation achieves 83FPS steady-state throughput with 18.2GiB of peak GPU memory usage. With fixed prompts, steady-state throughput also reaches 67FPS on an RTX5080 and 58FPS on an RTX5070Ti. We demonstrate customizable shooter and driving games with engine-enforced mechanics, and release code, model weights, and low-poly game assets to support research and creation of playable game worlds.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27999
Reasoning-enabled language model agents can incur substantial computation before acting, although the reasoning needed varies across decisions. Existing stopping signals, such as confidence and intermediate-answer stability, can vary in effectiveness across reasoning models; signals obtained from hidden states or token probabilities also require internal access that may be unavailable or impractical. We introduce StreamStop, which learns model-specific stopping policies offline from prefix-level action agreement. A frozen prefix reader encodes available reasoning text for a lightweight stop head, allowing stopping without access to the reasoning model's internal signals. We construct and publicly release a dataset of agent reasoning trajectories with prefix-level action annotations. These annotations compare each prefix action with the full-reasoning reference action, enabling offline comparison of stopping rules and exact expected-return optimization of a discounted action-agreement objective. Conditioning the head on the discount factor allows the agreement-token trade-off to be adjusted at inference without retraining. In closed-loop evaluations on WebShop and ScienceWorld, StreamStop achieves higher observed success than most validation-selected fixed-budget settings while using fewer reasoning tokens than Full thinking. On WebShop with Qwen3.8-27B, it uses 42% fewer reasoning tokens per episode with similar observed task success.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27981
Safe robot navigation in unknown, dynamic environments requires more than geometric collision checking: a robot still far from an obstacle may be unable to avoid it because of its speed, orientation, or the obstacle's motion. Hamilton--Jacobi (HJ) reachability analysis captures this in a value function whose sign separates states that admit a safe continuation from those where collision is unavoidable, but computing it online for every newly observed environment is too expensive. This dissertation trains neural implicit representations offline on reachability solutions to give optimization-based controllers this information in real time. Since the value function never exceeds the constraint, it equals a directly computed constraint, such as a signed distance, minus a nonnegative dynamics correction. Learning only this correction keeps represented obstacles outside the predicted safe set despite approximation errors. The first two of five methods use the learned function as a terminal constraint in model predictive control, for static local environments and predicted obstacle motion. The next two use it as a barrier candidate in control barrier function safety filters, for static environments and, through pairwise barriers in relative coordinates, for a varying number of moving obstacles. Simulations and hardware experiments on ground and aerial robots show better collision avoidance than geometric and hand-designed baselines, especially for short horizons and moving obstacles. The fifth method replaces the grid-based offline solver, which limits the first four to low-dimensional models. For control-affine dynamics with polytopic inputs, the HJ Hamiltonian is maximized at a vertex, so a parallelizable tree search over vertex inputs can generate training labels. With a loss from the HJ variational inequality, these labels yield barrier candidates for systems with up to 13 states.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16522
Approximate solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs) on unstructured grids can be represented on a graph. Numerical optimization involving stiff evolutionary and static PDEs often requires solving a large system of equations, which can be treated as a constraint. In this work, we present a fully differentiable graph-based implicit solver that incorporates this constraint. We evaluate its performance across four key tasks: a) linear and nonlinear forward modeling of evolutionary and static problems, b) solving inverse problems to estimate equation coefficients, c) solving inverse problems to estimate the right-hand side, and d) learnable graph coarsening to accelerate forward modeling. The stability and differentiability of our solver enable significant reductions in the complexity of forward modeling while efficiently addressing related inverse problems. These capabilities make it a powerful tool for different physics and engineering applications, in particular for geophysics, where inverse problems are commonly solved in order to reduce the model uncertainty.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27888
Online Continual Learning (OCL) requires models to learn from non-stationary data streams under a strict single-pass constraint, making them highly susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. While existing studies have explored various strategies from data, architecture, and optimization perspectives, the optimizer often directly uses generic approaches such as SGD and AdamW. In this work, we reveal a new link between optimization dynamics and OCL needs by recasting Polyak-Ruppert averaging as the engine of "plasticity" and Primal averaging as the anchor of "stability". This inspires our novel optimizer, SPIN (Stability-Plasticity INterpolation), which explicitly decouples plasticity and stability by interpolating between a fast-moving "plasticity" sequence and an adaptive "stability" sequence. We theoretically demonstrate that SPIN implicitly employs an inverse Hessian approximation, providing crucial Tikhonov regularization to damp noisy, single-sample Hessian estimates and mitigate forgetting. More importantly, SPIN can be seamlessly integrated into existing OCL methods by taking resulted gradients as input and replacing standard optimizers. Extensive experiments show that using SPIN instead of standard optimizers yields consistent and significant performance gains across multiple OCL approaches, including the challenging rehearsal-free setting and under strict memory constraints.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27835
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieve high-quality novel-view synthesis by representing a scene as a continuous volumetric radiance field. However, the geometry encoded by the density field of vanilla NeRF can be noisy and inaccurate, since different combinations of shape and radiance may explain the same input images. To reduce this ambiguity, we augment vanilla NeRF with a geometry-optimization branch based on self-supervised cross-ray consistency. Specifically, this branch samples candidate surface points from the density field, generates virtual rays that intersect at each point from different directions, and renders their appearance using the NeRF network. Based on the visibility-weighted color consistency across these rays, we constrain the implicit geometry. We further regularize the implicit geometry by penalizing opacity at candidates with inconsistent appearance predictions and encouraging local normal smoothness. These geometric constraints are derived from the NeRF predictions and require no ground-truth depth or surface-normal supervision. Experiments on eight Replica scenes show that the proposed method reduces the mean Chamfer distance by 30.8% compared with vanilla NeRF.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27776
A global $\ell_1$ budget limits how much an adversary may change an image, not how that change is distributed. We ask how much of an $\ell_1$ attack's observed success remains when large coordinate changes are restricted. We add a per-coordinate cap to the budget, enforce the joint constraint by exact in-loop projection, and sweep the cap for APGD-$\ell_1$, SLIDE, and FMN-$\ell_1$ without altering their objectives. Across 18 standard-model settings, caps of at most $32/255$ retain a median $97\%$ of attack success relative to each method's native uncapped baseline, while median peak magnitude falls by $80\%$ and median effective support nearly triples. At matched realized $\ell_1$, capped perturbations remain structurally distinct; separate ImageNet comparisons also show lower LPIPS and DISTS at selected caps. Direct in-loop constrained optimization preserves up to $88$ percentage points more attack success than post-hoc clipping, highlighting the importance of constraint enforcement. Suitable caps nevertheless vary across attacks and models, and adversarially trained classifiers exhibit more heterogeneous concentration sensitivity. These results establish perturbation concentration as a complementary, model- and attack-dependent axis of $\ell_1$ attack evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27773
Latent diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable progress in Real-world Image Super-Resolution (Real-SR). However, existing methods consistently exhibit a persistent seesaw effect: enhancing perceptual realism compromises structural fidelity. This effect, we argue, is not intrinsic to diffusion models, but largely stems from the architectural constraints of prevailing two-stage frameworks. To address this challenge, we propose PixelSR, a novel single-stage Pixel Diffusion Transformer for Real-SR that operates directly in pixel space. Specifically, PixelSR consists of two core designs: Pixel-space Conditional Diffusion and Orthogonal Flow Decoupling. The former establishes an effective pixel-space restoration framework by integrating spatially aligned LR conditioning, visual semantic guidance, and lightweight texture refinement, thereby bypassing VAE compression and enabling end-to-end optimization directly in RGB space. Complementarily, the latter decomposes the asymmetric flow target into a low-rank semantic component and a noise-free orthogonal texture component. By routing these components to specialized branches, it achieves decoupled optimization with reduced mutual interference. Benefiting from these designs, our PixelSR restores perceptually realistic details while faithfully preserving structural content. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PixelSR not only achieves competitive performance, but also effectively mitigates the fidelity--realism seesaw effect.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27759
Ontology Learning (OL) from text has advanced with the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it remains challenging due to the limited availability of annotated training data and the difficulty of adapting LLMs to perform OL effectively. We address this via APOLO - Automatic Prompt Optimization for Ontology Learning, by casting OL as an explicit prompt optimization problem over LLM modules. To obtain training data, we employ a multi-agent system that generates text-ontology pairs from existing expert-curated ontologies. We then propose two ontology learner architectures: a greedy and an autoregressive learner, and optimize both using GEPA, a greedy evolutionary prompt optimizer built on DSPy. Experiments on two ontologies - a biomedical (DOID) and a plant ontology (PO) show consistent improvements after optimization across nearly all model and mode combinations, with autoregressive learners achieving the largest gains. Our results demonstrate that prompt optimization is a viable and lightweight alternative to fine-tuning for OL, and that the autoregressive formulation better captures ontological structure than the greedy approach.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34540
Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) face significant challenges in roundabout navigation due to dense traffic interactions and unpredictable agent behaviors, necessitating high levels of adaptability and safety. While the combination of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Model Predictive Control (MPC) offers a promising approach, existing frameworks suffer from a structural mismatch where pointwise RL decisions fail to align with MPC's trajectory level optimization, and often lack rigorous safety guarantees. This work proposes RLTrajGen-PPMPC-CBF, a hierarchical framework for safe, smooth and comfort roundabout navigation, which regulates the coupling between RL-based planning and MPC-based control. We employ Prescribed Performance Constraints (PPC) to enforce a gradual, stable convergence between reference trajectories and control outputs, ensuring MPC tracking performance remains consistent with intended behavior from RL. Additionally, a Control Barrier Function (CBF) layer provides real-time safety corrections that are fed back into the RL process. Simulation results in the MetaDrive environment demonstrate that our method achieves a 6.25\% increase in average success rate and a 65.87\% reduction in Motion Sickness Dose Value (MSDV) compared to the optimal baseline, meanwhile accelerating training convergence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27732
Long-horizon human-object-scene interaction (HOSI) is central to embodied AI, animation, and game development. Existing human-object interaction (HOI) and human-scene interaction (HSI) models excel in their respective domains, but none alone covers tasks requiring multiple interaction skills. Training unified HOSI models is hindered by scarce and costly data. We introduce World2HOSI, a multi-expert orchestration harness that generates continuous HOSI data from 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scenes and natural language instructions. Our key insight is that long-horizon HOSI hinges not on a stronger single model but on orchestration. Given a shared, structured scene state and an orchestration harness grounded in it, existing experts can jointly accomplish tasks beyond the reach of any of them alone. World2HOSI realizes this insight as a closed loop around a persistent scene state built from decoupled background and object assets. A harness plans action stages over this state, invokes experts via their native conditioning interfaces, and writes each action's effects back, so that every invocation is grounded in the evolving world. To reduce physical artifacts, bounded residual optimization and contact-driven physics simulation further ensure the physical plausibility of human motion and object manipulation, respectively, while preserving interaction intent. Experiments and a perceptual user study show that World2HOSI achieves the best task completion and interaction quality on the evaluated HOSI tasks, while generating more diverse data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27725
Long-video understanding with multimodal LLMs is fundamentally constrained by the mismatch between video length and the model's limited visual context budget, making frame selection essential for practical reasoning. Existing query-aware methods typically rely on heuristic pipelines: they assign one-dimensional query-conditioned scores to frames and then apply sampling, ranking, or extraction rules to form the final subset. While effective in practice, such methods are generally not derived from an explicit optimization objective and struggle to capture the heterogeneous evidence required for complex reasoning. In this paper, we revisit long-video frame selection from a principled optimization perspective. We formulate it as a structured evidence-allocation problem and propose OTFS, an optimal transport framework that maps multiple evidence sources onto video frames. To reflect the asymmetry of this problem---important evidence should be preserved, whereas redundant frames need not absorb mass---we instantiate this view with a semi-unbalanced entropic optimal transport objective and an efficient solver, OTFS-Sinkhorn. Combined with an exact dynamic program for coverage-aware subset extraction, OTFS yields a practical two-stage training-free pipeline. We further show that, in the single-source case, our formulation induces a Gibbs-type distribution over frames, making Q-Frame's temperature-scaled distribution a special case of our framework while also providing a broader perspective for understanding related prior methods. Experiments on three long-video understanding benchmarks show that OTFS consistently outperforms strong training-free baselines. Codes are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27692
Harness development plays a crucial role in building capable AI agents. Recent approaches improve harnesses through recursive self-improvement (RSI), but their performance gains often come with higher execution costs. We introduce HarnessPro, a label-free method for evolving harnesses to improve task performance while reducing execution cost. In this setting, candidate harnesses are evaluated using LLM-generated tests without access to ground-truth solutions or official tests. Specialized agents diagnose execution trajectories, plan updates with different performance-cost priorities, and implement them as candidate harnesses. Rather than returning a single harness, HarnessPro uses normalized weighted squared-distance selection to provide cost-focused (lite), balanced (medium), and performance-focused (heavy) harnesses for different deployment budgets. Selected harnesses enter the next iteration, where execution feedback guides further updates. Our experiments cover Terminal-Bench 2, SWE-Bench Pro, and ProgramBench, using GPT-5.5 with Codex and GLM-5.2 with Claude Code. Across these benchmarks using GPT-5.5 with Codex, the heavy mode of HarnessPro achieves an average pass-rate gain of 2.0 percentage points and an average per-task cost reduction of 26.1% relative to RHO. This advantage also holds when using GLM-5.2 with Claude Code. Code is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26770
Medical visual grounding requires models to align clinical descriptions with spatial evidence across heterogeneous imaging domains. However, existing multi-domain post-training strategies typically rely on fixed domain sampling and shared parameter updates, overlooking the need to adapt both which domains receive training and where their updates are applied. To address this issue, we propose PACE-MoE, a policy-guided framework that jointly performs adaptive domain sampling and domain-specific adaptation for medical visual grounding. PACE dynamically assesses the training value of each imaging domain from current-policy feedback and progressively adjusts domain coverage through domain admission, replay, and final all-domain balancing. Meanwhile, domain-specific LoRA adapters route updates to the corresponding imaging domains while preserving the pretrained backbone and visual encoder. This coordinated design aligns training-data allocation with parameter adaptation without modifying the original reward formulation or Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) objective. Experiments across seven medical imaging domains show that PACE-MoE consistently improves grounding performance over fixed-domain training, achieving a 3.64% relative improvement in mean box IoU over the Vanilla baseline. Under matched domain-specific adapter architectures, adaptive sampling alone further improves mean box IoU by 2.07%, demonstrating the benefit of policy-guided domain allocation. These results establish coordinated data-parameter routing as an effective strategy for multi-domain medical visual grounding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27656
Hierarchical world models plan over long horizons by passing predicted states from a coarse model to a lower-level controller. Choosing these states can be expensive: the upper-level planner repeatedly differentiates through candidate macro-action trajectories. We replace this search with a lightweight goal-conditioned network trained through the frozen high-level predictor. The network supplies a conditioning vector, while the predictor generates the next latent waypoint. Training uses hindsight goals and state-prediction losses on offline trajectories, without search-solution targets or macro-action labels. Inference retains an autoregressive high-level rollout, but requires no high-level candidate optimization. We evaluate this approach on the shared-latent HWM checkpoints distributed with H-JEPA, using three backbone seeds and three head initializations per backbone. With a common evaluation protocol, mean success is 70.4% on Cube, 48.7% on Push-T, 100.0% on FourRoom, and 71.1% on Visual AntMaze. The method improves over the corresponding HWM search baseline on three environments and has the same mean on Push-T. Dedicated measurements on an NVIDIA L40S give 1.28-4.39x end-to-end speedups for batched evaluation. Ablations identify state-adaptive conditioning as a consistent contributor, while predictor-mediated subgoals and unrestricted conditions have environment-dependent benefits.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26179
LLM agents have become capable kernel engineers on mainstream GPU stacks, but they struggle on emerging accelerators such as Ascend NPUs, whose programming model is barely represented in pretraining data. Recent NPU agents address this gap largely through experience: they accumulate memory from their own generation and optimization trials and reuse it on later tasks. We argue that experience alone is not enough for kernel generation. An agent can only remember what it has tried, and it rarely tries a mechanism it does not know. As a result, such memory offers little help when a new operator calls for a different mechanism, and even familiar operators raise unseen situations as optimization proceeds. We present ASCENDEVOLVE, which grounds every step of an evolutionary kernel search in a large external knowledge base built from platform documentation, toolkit headers, and operator repositories. Because this corpus far exceeds any context window, ASCENDEVOLVE indexes it and routes each agent to a small, task-specific slice of evidence instead of the corpus itself. The retrieved knowledge seeds diverse implementation strategies, guides repair when a candidate fails, and constrains how strong candidates are recombined. On 53 Ascend C operators from CANN-Bench spanning four difficulty levels, ASCENDEVOLVE achieves an overall score of 71.39, improving over Reflexion and OpenEvolve by 11.6% and 17.2%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27588
Developing coordination policies for complex multi-agent systems relies on either labor-intensive algorithm design or opaque task-specific reinforcement learning. With recent advances in autonomous coding agents, we show that policy search directly in code space offers a compelling third path that combines automated optimization with explicit interpretability. We investigate a human-directed workflow in which coding agents iteratively propose, implement, evaluate, diagnose, and eventually refine algorithms guided by simulation feedback and explicit correctness verification. We conducted two case studies and found that this workflow robustly outperformed any manually engineered solutions. On a challenging map in the 2024 League of Robot Runners competition, a two-day search discovered a policy that exceeds the stronger locally reproduced competition entry by 35.0% on the densest instance and generalizes to unseen map instances. In simulated real-world warehouses with irregular lanes, continuous robot geometry, and asynchronous motion, a week-long search discovered an entirely new class of multi-agent pathfinding algorithm that outperforms a calibrated proprietary solution in throughput by 58.9%. Under stated assumptions, we further prove that the new algorithm is collision-free and completes, in finite time, every accepted goal that is not withdrawn or replaced. Together, the studies show that policy search in code space powered by state-of-the-art coding agents offers a highly competitive path to building real engineering solutions that are both effective and analytically tractable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25946
Neural combinatorial optimization has enabled fast constructive solvers for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), yet most autoregressive models still construct solutions through sequential node selection and represent route organization only implicitly. We investigate whether route-level customer co-assignment can be modeled explicitly and used to guide this node-level decision process. To this end, we propose TopologyAware RouteConsistency Modeling (TRCM), which reuses node representations from a standard autoregressive construction pipeline to predict pairwise same-route probabilities and injects them into customer selection as a route-consistency signal. Because sameroute supervision is both class-imbalanced and structurally uneven, TRCM combines structure-preserving augmentation with Topological Entropy (TE)- based reweighting to emphasize locally ambiguous customer pairs. Under matched decoding budgets, TRCM reduces the optimality gap from 3.67% to 3.28% on CVRP50 and from 2.11% to 1.99% on CVRP100; under 8-fold augmented inference, it reduces the CVRP100 gap from 1.61% to 1.49%. On XML100, TRCM*8Aug improves the average objective by 0.24%, with larger gains on several structurally informative factors. A controlled demand-reassignment test over 500 variants further shows more concentrated objective fluctuations. These results support explicit route-consistency modeling as an effective structural principle for autoregressive neural routing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27568
Objective: To demonstrate and evaluate THERMO, a thermal-velocity optimization algorithm for autonomous electrosurgery, in ex vivo porcine tissue using the UR10e-based ASTR system. Methods: Thermography for Electrosurgical Rate Modulation via Optimization (ThERMO), a closed-loop algorithm that uses real-time thermal imaging data to minimize thermal injury while ensuring accurate cut margins, was tested on ex vivo porcine tissue. Histological analysis was performed to detect thermal injury extent at a cellular level, and 3D photogrammetric measurement was used to verify margin accuracy. ThERMO's performance was compared against two previously used fixed velocity methods. Results: ThERMO outperformed both fixed velocity comparison methods without requiring data-driven training or iterative tuning, reducing thermal injury by up to 52%, improving cut accuracy by up to 59%, and maintaining task completion speed. Conclusions: Closed-loop thermal feedback via ThERMO improves autonomous robotic electrosurgery by simultaneously reducing thermal injury and improving margin accuracy, reinforcing its value over fixed velocity approaches for tumor resection applications. Significance: This work advances autonomous robotic tumor resection by demonstrating that real-time closed-loop thermal feedback control can substantially reduce collateral tissue damage and improve surgical margin accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27562
As coding models and agent harnesses become more capable, reliable security verification is becoming a central bottleneck. Improving secure code generation requires a signal whose reported progress remains aligned with actual program behavior under optimization; otherwise, an optimizer can improve the signal's verdict without removing the underlying vulnerability. Existing model-based approaches require models to either infer program behavior from source code or specify correct outcomes for adversarial tests, placing substantial reasoning demands on the security signal. We introduce \falcon{}, a counterexample-grounded verification framework that separates attack exploration from behavioral verification and connects them through execution traces of the program under test. In test-time repair, \falcon{} yields substantially stronger held-out functional-security gains than alternative security signals across secure code generation benchmarks, while preserving or improving functionality. As an RL reward, \falcon{} also outperforms static-analysis and learned rewards on held-out functional-security, even when all policies successfully optimize their respective training rewards. Combining \falcon{} with either proxy reward further improves held-out performance, suggesting that execution-grounded feedback can mitigate reward overoptimization while preserving useful guidance from existing security signals.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25916