Every robot already carries high-resolution contact sensors: its own joints. Legged robots and humanoids exploit them to walk, run, and track whole-body motions without vision, but there the contacts are large and forceful. Is joint sensing also enough for precise, contact-rich assembly, where the robot must find a millimeter-scale opening, mesh gear teeth, or catch a thread through light contact? We study this question by training blind assembly policies that observe only a short history of joint positions, velocities, and their own actions, without visual, force, torque, or tactile sensing. The poses of both the fixture and the part are unknown to the policy, and the grasp is randomized substantially. The policy must therefore assemble the parts through contact, sensed exclusively through its own proprioception. Trained with reinforcement learning entirely in simulation over randomized parts, grasps, and contacts, such policies learn peg insertion, gear meshing, and nut threading. The peg insertion policy transfers zero-shot to the real world and inserts pegs of different shapes and sizes in 73% of trials. Controlled comparisons with matched visual policies in simulation show that blind policies generalize far better to unseen part shapes and sizes, though they can be slower. Training such policies needs thousands of different assemblies, each simulated with its clearance intact, so we also release an open-source generator that builds them procedurally from exact convex pieces for MuJoCo; it is more accurate and faster than convex decomposition or MuJoCo's signed-distance collision. Videos and interactive simulations are at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23849
Qwen3-TTS reports state-of-the-art zero-shot voice cloning, but its technical report leaves open how the model should be conditioned, how it behaves outside read speech, and how it fails. We characterise its two cloning interfaces, in-context learning (ICL) and X-Vector, against Chatterbox, XTTS-v2 and F5-TTS on read, meeting, emotional and air-traffic-control (ATC) speech, using eighteen objective measures, an LLM judge, a spoofing countermeasure and a listening test. Neither interface dominates: ICL clones timbre more closely from correctly transcribed references, X-Vector clones timing, and ICL degrades sharply when a short reference transcript is wrong. Domain explains four times more variance than system choice. Qwen3-TTS leads on intelligibility and pitch register but trails on prosody, and the objective measures rank systems differently from listeners. An off-the-shelf countermeasure flags its clones no more often than genuine recordings, and on ATC radio it fails for every system. Code and audio are released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23678
Model-predictive control with Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) provides a strong zero-shot goal-reaching planner, but it is only effective over short planning horizons. Hierarchical extensions attempt to bridge this gap by learning a macro planner to predict intermediate latent sub-goals to guide the micro planner. In this work, we demonstrate that unconstrained latent sub-goal prediction is fundamentally flawed. A rigorous evaluation reveals that a leading state-of-the-art macro planner routinely emits physically unrealisable sub-goals. To resolve this, we introduce Metro-WM, a hierarchical framework that issues sub-goals by retrieving genuine states from prior experience rather than generating ungrounded latent vectors. Specifically, Metro-WM constructs a graph whose vertices are observed frames from offline expert demonstrations or random-action trajectories, allowing frames from different episodes to be connected and stitched into routes to the goal. Planning over the full graph also makes the system highly robust to execution errors: if the micro planner drifts off course, Metro-WM instantly finds a new optimal path from the current state. Our experiments show that Metro-WM achieves superior long-horizon success rates of up to 37.33 percentage points over the next best hierarchical approach while being up to 10.9 times faster, requiring both 13-56 times less offline compute and fewer tuned hyperparameters. Additional analysis reveals that Metro-WM finds shorter paths than the offline demonstrations, outperforms an oracle relying on the query's own demonstration, and maintains robust performance under extremely sparse dataset conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31868
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation is appealing for its potential to scale with unlabeled data, yet existing methods often degrade when trained on diverse scenes. This study finds that, under self-supervision, models tend to encode dataset-specific structural biases rather than transferable scene geometry, leading to cross-domain optimization conflicts. To address this issue, this study proposes the MaSS framework, aiming to make self-supervised depth learning scalable to diverse data. MaSS introduces a dedicated structural representation pathway explicitly decoupled from contextual features, which is guided by a novel scene-structure discrimination objective to learn generalized, layout-aware structural representations for depth decoding. Trained and evaluated on four diverse datasets, both individually and jointly, MaSS substantially outperforms prior self-supervised methods and is the first to consistently benefit from mixed-domain training. Zero-shot evaluation on eight additional datasets further demonstrates its remarkable generalizability, particularly on those entirely out-of-distribution scenes. The source code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23600
Text-to-image diffusion models have advanced video editing. However, existing video editing methods are limited by their high computational overhead and memory consumption. Furthermore, these approaches often sacrifice visual fidelity, leading to temporal inconsistencies and artifacts such as blurring and mosaic-like patterns. To address these dual challenges and strike a balance between computational efficiency and visual fidelity, we propose Edit-Your-Interest, a lightweight, text-driven, zero-shot video editing method. Edit-Your-Interest introduces a Spatio-Temporal Feature Memory bank (SFM) to cache spatial-attention features from previous frames under a fixed memory budget. The SFM maintains a representative candidate pool, reducing the computational overhead of full-sequence spatio-temporal modeling. To query this memory, we propose Feature Most-Similar Propagation (FMP), a similarity-based retrieval rule that propagates relevant cached tokens to the current frame. Together, SFM and FMP form a bounded-memory retrieval-based propagation design that improves temporal consistency while reducing blurring and mosaic-like artifacts. Finally, we introduce a feature-diversity-based SFM update algorithm to keep the memory representative and non-redundant throughout the video sequence. Furthermore, to enable precise object editing, we leverage cross-attention maps to automatically extract masks for the instances of interest. These masks are seamlessly integrated into the diffusion denoising process, enabling fine-grained control over target objects and allowing Edit-Your-Interest to perform highly accurate edits while robustly preserving the background integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Edit-Your-Interest outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and visual fidelity. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13084
Humans manipulate objects within their hands through touch alone with remarkable ease, but for robots, achieving sustained real-world manipulation without vision remains an open challenge. Although reinforcement learning (RL) can generate sophisticated blind manipulation policies in simulation, transferring them to a real dexterous hand remains hindered by continuously changing contacts, motion-induced tactile information drift, and the gap between simulated and physical dynamics. We study this problem through Baoding ball rotation on the Shadow Dexterous Hand Lite, using only proprioception and binary tactile feedback as observations. We achieve successful zero-shot transfer through a combination of a sensor-aligned, coupling-aware embodiment in simulation, tactile calibration, and two novel episodic domain randomisations: slew-rate action limits and STuck-AT Taxels. On the physical hand, the policy achieves sustained blind Baoding rotation, completing 225 consecutive $\mathbf{180^\circ}$ rotations (112.5 full rotations) at $\sim0.36 \;\text{rot/s}$ in a single continuous trial without any vision or object-state information. Furthermore, we evaluate the contribution of tactile sensing relative to proprioception alone and identify the hand regions where tactile information is most important. This is the strongest reported hardware result for Baoding ball manipulation in both rotation count and speed, irrespective of the sensing modality used. By effectively bridging the sim-to-real gap, our framework sets a new benchmark for sustained tactile-driven dexterous manipulation on physical hardware.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23438
In-air handwriting recognition based on radio frequency (RF) signals offers a promising solution for human-computer interaction, yet existing methods are often limited by predefined writing planes, constrained writing styles, and small recognition vocabularies. To address these limitations, we propose m^2VLMs, a modality mapping architecture that bridges millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar sensing and large vision-language models (VLMs), and develop mmPencil, a 3D in-air handwriting word recognition system. mmPencil reconstructs 3D handwriting trajectories from mmWave signals using a multi-stage spatial trajectory reconstruction algorithm and maps them into visual representations through a spatial-to-visual mapping algorithm, enabling VLMs to recognize handwriting while reducing sensitivity to writing styles and environmental factors. We collect and release a 3D mmWave handwriting dataset containing 7,664 samples of 200 words from 12 users across 22 writing scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that mmPencil achieves robust word recognition under variations in writing position, range, angle, speed, size, direction, and user movement. It achieves 97.60% accuracy on 200 word classes for seen users and 92.50% zero-shot accuracy on 50 word classes for unseen users, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23419
Single-image refocusing changes the focal plane and depth of field of a photograph after capture. It is inherently interactive: users try many focal points and blur strengths on one image, so each edit should be fast and change only the blur. Recent generative methods, however, rerun large diffusion models for every edit. We observe that the two sub-problems differ in kind: recovering the all-in-focus image is ill-posed and needs a generative prior, whereas rendering blur is largely determined by depth and the focal plane. We therefore propose FlashReFocus, which runs diffusion once per photograph and renders every edit with a lightweight network. To address the ill-posed restoration, a one-step diffusion deblurrer with a decoder refiner recovers fine detail efficiently while balancing fidelity and perceptual quality. For precise control, the renderer is conditioned on an explicit defocus map and uses defocus-bias attention, which lets pixels at similar defocus share information without interference from pixels at other depths; in-focus content stays unchanged, and editing the map yields tilt-shift and two focal planes. To further test generalization to unseen cameras, we collect 3CReal, a three-camera benchmark of 89 pairs. FlashReFocus achieves the best perceptual fidelity for zero-shot bokeh rendering on EBB! and 3CReal, refocuses 148.3x faster than GenRefocus, and takes about half a second per further edit, 462x faster.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23297
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) aims to detect anomalies in previously unseen classes using auxiliary images, with applications such as industrial visual inspection and medical imaging. Recent vision-language-model-based approaches improve ZSAD by aligning textual and visual representations, while distributional prompting further models prompt variability for unseen categories. However, existing methods do not explicitly combine normality-referenced distributional modeling with hierarchy-specific prompt specialization, limiting their ability to model anomalous semantics relative to normality while addressing both image-level detection and fine-grained localization. We propose Hierarchical Knowledge-Guided Distributional Prompt Learning (HiDist), a normality-referenced hierarchical distributional prompt framework for ZSAD. HiDist models each prompt token with a diagonal Gaussian distribution and generates stochastic prompt variations through Monte Carlo sampling. Rather than learning normal and anomalous distributions independently, anomalous prompt distributions are parameterized as deviations from learned normal references, explicitly encoding their dependency. The resulting distributions are specialized into global and local representations for image-level detection and pixel-level localization, respectively, while an adapted global visual representation guides hierarchical alignment. Experiments on seven industrial and medical datasets demonstrate strong cross-dataset performance across anomaly detection and localization tasks. Extensive ablation and representation analyses further support the effectiveness of the proposed distributional modeling and hierarchy-specific representation learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23172
Achieving precise terminal position and heading alignment remains a significant challenge for learning-based mobile robot control. Recent vision-based learning methods have shown promise for precise target-relative control and generalization to unseen environments with pretrained visual encoders, but general-purpose visual representations are not specifically designed to capture the fine-grained spatial differences between current and goal views required for precise control, and real-world demonstrations combining millimeter-scale terminal accuracy with zero-shot transfer across environments remain limited. To address these challenges, we propose Geometric Representation Conditioning for Precise Visuomotor Policy (GR-VIP), a goal-conditioned visuomotor policy that leverages a visual encoder pretrained for relative camera pose estimation. Rather than using the final relative-pose estimate, GR-VIP conditions action prediction on the dense relational features produced before pose regression, preserving fine-grained cross-view information for learning corrective actions from demonstrations. We evaluate GR-VIP on a real-world docking task and demonstrate high docking success rates and millimeter-scale terminal accuracy in both the training and unseen environments, without additional training for transfer. Furthermore, supplementary experiments illustrate the policy's ability to align with non-docking targets and complete docking under a tested low-light condition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22997
Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP retain zero-shot recognition ability, but their open-world use often requires task-agnostic continual learning: tasks arrive sequentially, past data are unavailable, task identity is unknown, and the backbone cannot be retrained. We argue that this setting fails VLMs through three coupled pressures beyond the stability-plasticity tradeoff: (1) modal-consistency drift, (2) representation-space interference, and (3) per-task capacity shortfall. We propose COMET (Collaborative Mixture-of-Expert Transfer) to resolve these three issues respectively as follows. A frozen teacher provides only a feature reference on a shared image-text pool; Tri-Affinity Distillation preserves image-image, text-text, and image-text geometry; and Student-Aware Cross-Expert Distillation aligns new experts with compatible prior experts so routing errors degrade gracefully. We design COMET to keep capacity and inference separate: a contextual bandit keeps or merges full per-task experts using post-training signals, while a reconstruction router selects sparse experts at test time without teacher semantics. On the X-TAIL benchmark, we show that each proposed component improves continual learning performance. COMET shows that continual vision-language adaptation can preserve multimodal geometry, coordinate accumulated experts, and allocate capacity jointly when feature reference, expert shaping, routing, and capacity control are separated by construction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22907
Blindness and low vision limit many people's ability to complete daily tasks, motivating AI assistants that provide useful guidance. Yet, existing benchmarks do not adequately test whether vision models can provide effective everyday assistance. In particular, i) existing benchmarks primarily rely on visual and textual inputs, with limited support for other modalities that are increasingly available in egocentric wearable devices such as gaze, inertial measurements, spatial trajectories, and others; and ii) existing evaluations emphasize scene understanding and question answering, with limited coverage of goal-conditioned guidance for blind and low-vision users across everyday tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce VISTA (Visually Impaired Scene and Task Annotations), a multimodal egocentric benchmark for goal-oriented assistance for blind and low-vision users. VISTA contains $\sim$1,000 egocentric recordings captured with Project Aria glasses; each recording provides synchronized sensor streams, six of which serve as model inputs, and three different types of annotation, covering ten task categories (TC), from object localization to hazard detection. We evaluate 14 representative vision-language models zero-shot on VISTA and design a lightweight multimodal model baseline that integrates all six modalities. Experimental results show that, although existing models can often describe egocentric scenes, they remain limited in generating goal-directed assistive guidance. VISTA thus provides a benchmark for evaluating multimodal models that could improve everyday accessibility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22822
Large language models exhibit misbehaviors that hinder deployment in high-stakes settings. One approach to monitor such failures is to use an external LLM as a monitor, but this is prohibitively expensive. A well-known and efficient class of monitors can detect such failures from internal representations (such as activation probes), but are tied to the model they were trained on, requiring costly re-annotation as new LLMs appear. A natural way to avoid this repeated annotation cost is to develop internal-representation based monitors that transfer zero-shot across LLMs. However, such transfer is challenging because internal representations are not naturally aligned across models; in particular, attention maps, known to contain signals of misbehavior, may differ in head function, ordering, and model depth. In this work, we characterize those cross-model attention mismatches as algebraic symmetries and use geometric deep learning principles to build LEMON (Language-model Equivariant MOnitoring Network) an online graph neural network-based monitor, whose predictions are invariant under these symmetries. LEMON processes attention maps token-by-token, as they are produced and outputs a score after every token (or every window of $W$ tokens) at negligible cost. Across 16 LLMs and six datasets, in the zero-shot cross-model setting, LEMON outperforms all baselines on both hallucination and jailbreak monitoring tasks, improving over the strongest by up to 14 ROC-AUC points.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22723
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as formalizers: given a reasoning problem expressed in natural language, they produce a formal specification that a symbolic solver can then solve, with guarantees relative to that specification. Many specifications are runnable yet semantically wrong, encoding incorrect constraints, domains, objectives, predicates, or goals, and solver-error feedback dries up once execution succeeds. Purely LLM-based diagnosis, lacking a formal ground truth, often fails to spot these errors, and its ungrounded critiques cause regressions in 11.8% of initially correct specifications in our experiments. We propose DRAGO, a repair framework that replaces this ungrounded critique with deterministic, formalism-specific diagnosis, and retains a rewrite only when the diagnosed error weight strictly decreases under a reference-free acceptance predicate. Across five benchmarks spanning logical reasoning (SMT-LIB2), constraint programming (MiniZinc), and planning (PDDL), DRAGO cuts regressions by nearly an order of magnitude, to 1.3%, while improving answer accuracy by 12.9 percentage points over zero-shot formalization and 8.7 percentage points over LLM-diagnostic repair, averaged across benchmarks. We also uncover two rendering defects in Planetarium that cause 50% (3,086 instances) of its floor-tile split to be inconsistent with the reference formalizations, and release a corrected split.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22568
We describe our submission to Subtask~1b of ImageEval 2026. The task consists of selecting the single visually valid statement from three candidates paired with an image, and is in both English and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Our system uses a pre-trained 7B vision--language model in a zero-shot setting, without task-specific training or fine-tuning. We formulate the task as a constrained selection problem and choose the answer using next-token log-probabilities. To reduce answer-position bias, we apply a Latin-square rotation to the candidate statements. Our system achieves CI scores of 0.0510 on the English test set and 0.0960 on the MSA test set, reducing CI relative to the official 3B baselines reported on devtest by 83.7\% and 80.4\%, respectively.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22515
Personalization is essential for general-purpose robots to transition into household environments and achieve true practicality. While general robotic manipulation has been extensively studied, personalized robotic manipulation (PeRM) lacks a controlled benchmark for separating task completion from preference satisfaction. We introduce LIBERO-PeRM, a benchmark for preference learning in embodied agents. LIBERO-PeRM studies five questions: 1) how policies follow preferences in zero-shot settings; 2) how they learn single preferences from demonstrations; 3) how efficiently they acquire preferences as demonstrations increase; 4) how learned preferences generalize across layouts and tasks; and 5) how policies compose preferences and behave under conflicts. We propose a controlled formulation and taxonomy of observable preferences in simulation, covering motion, skill, and user-profile choices. This formulation is restricted to language-expressible preferences that can be instantiated in LIBERO without changing the task goal, evaluated automatically, and reused across tasks. Building on LIBERO, our procedural pipeline generates paired demonstrations with and without preferences. We create five task suites (312 tasks) with high-quality demonstrations, rich metadata, and preference-satisfaction metrics. Experiments show that current VLA policies struggle with zero-shot personalization, while SFT makes preferences learnable. Mixed training achieves better no-preference retention than sequential adaptation and improves performance with contextual prompts compared with preference-only training, but can weaken motion-preference learning; preference generalization, decomposition, and conflict handling remain difficult. The code, datasets, and demos can be found on the project website: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22372
Recent 3D world models increasingly use features from geometry foundation models (GFMs) as predictive world states, benefiting from their rich geometric priors. However, the view dependence of these features entangles scene dynamics with camera-induced variation, making the resulting state evolution harder to predict. We propose GeoState, a view-decoupled geometry representation for predictive 3D world modeling that separates scene-state evolution from camera-dependent observation. Specifically, a scene tokenizer aggregates multi-view GFM features into a view-decoupled scene state, which a geometry decoder queries using camera rays. An autoregressive world model then predicts future scene states, while camera motion is modeled separately. The predicted states can therefore be decoded under either predicted or externally specified cameras, while retaining a single context-derived scale throughout the rollout without per-frame scale alignment. Experiments show that GeoState outperforms prior 3D world models on Waymo, supports geometrically consistent cross-view querying, and generalizes zero-shot to KITTI and nuScenes. Project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22343
Reasoning over long document contexts remains a challenge for large language models (LLMs). Standard retrieval methods are inherently reactive, bottlenecking agents with complex, cross-document reasoning at inference time, while precomputed structures like knowledge graphs often fall short because they rely on rigid heuristics. Instead, can we allow agents to perform anticipatory directed curation: learning to proactively reorganize unstructured corpora prior to inference to efficiently serve diverse future queries. We build on a key asymmetry in modern agentic harnesses (e.g., Claude Code): while LLM agents are adept at navigating existing filesystems to solve an immediate task, they are rarely trained to construct reusable workspaces for future use. To instantiate this capability, we introduce Librarian Agents, a framework in which a builder agent transforms raw documents into a hierarchical filesystem of synthetic files and reference links, which forms a workspace tailored for a downstream answering agent. We formulate workspace construction as a Markov decision process and optimize the builder policy via reinforcement learning to directly maximize downstream answering accuracy. Empirically, Librarian Agents outperforms the strongest retrieval and precomputation baselines by 33 percentage points on BrowseComp-Plus, amortizes upfront construction costs across repeated queries, and generalizes zero-shot to unseen domains on BRIGHT with a 31-point average accuracy improvement.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22273
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in computational social science to assign scalar scores to social and psychological constructs. However, studies use different rating scales, and whether their scores remain comparable across scale designs is understudied. To address this gap, we define and systematically investigate scale sensitivity, the variation in LLM-generated scores caused by rating scale design. We distinguish numerical sensitivity, changes in normalized scores, from semantic sensitivity, changes in score interpretation. To assess both, our experimental design crosses 2 formats (continuous vs. ordinal), 4 ranges (3, 5, 11, and 21 points), and 2 signs (signed vs. unsigned) across 3 tasks (political leaning, sentiment, and toxicity), 2 prompting strategies (zero-shot and rubric-based), and 5 LLMs. We find that changing one design element shifts normalized scores by about 0.10 on average and changes the category of roughly 20% of texts. Sensitivity is greatest for toxicity, the only unipolar construct examined. Also, rubric-based prompting does not reduce sensitivity compared with zero-shot prompting. We provide practical guidance for designing more reliable LLM-based text scoring and highlight the need for robustness checks across alternative scales.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22187
Current humanoid dexterous manipulation remains largely confined to end-effectors and simple grasps, falling short of humans' ability to engage the entire body by bracing and sliding bulky objects against the arms and torso. We introduce Whole-Body Dexterity (WBD), a general framework that uses the robot's body and appendages as contact surfaces to grasp and manipulate objects. Our sim-to-real pipeline first generates a dataset of feasible whole-body grasps, then trains reinforcement-learning experts on a general any-to-any repositioning objective by sampling initial and goal grasps from the dataset, and distills these experts into a single policy that uses proprioception and object geometry. We show that the distilled policy transfers zero-shot to a real Unitree G1, where it repositions a basketball and a cardboard box to regions around the torso and completes a long-horizon task that stows a box under one arm, carries it from a shelf to a table, and places it. The controller operates interactively, steered by coarse motion references from a human teleoperator. Across real-world whole-body manipulation tasks, the distilled controller completes 90% of trials, compared with 18% for direct retargeting and 4% for a generalist whole-body controller.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22184