We study training-free flow matching between two Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) using explicit velocity fields that transport one mixture into the other over time. Our baseline approach constructs component-wise Gaussian paths with affine velocity fields satisfying the continuity equation, which yields to a closed-form surrogate for the pairwise kinetic transport cost. In contrast to the exact Gaussian Wasserstein cost, which relies on matrix square-root computations, the surrogate admits a simple analytic expression derived from the kinetic energy of the induced flow. We then analyze how closely this surrogate approximates the exact cost. We prove second-order agreement in a local commuting regime and derive an explicit cubic error bound in the local commuting regime. To handle nonlocal regimes, we introduce a path-splitting strategy that localizes the covariance evolution and enables piecewise application of the bound. We finally compare the surrogate with an exact construction based on the Gaussian Wasserstein geodesic and summarize the results in a practical regime map showing when the surrogate is accurate and the exact method is preferable.

How much autonomy can multi-agent LLM systems sustain -- and what enables it? We present a 25,000-task computational experiment spanning 8 models, 4--256 agents, and 8 coordination protocols ranging from externally imposed hierarchy to emergent self-organization. We observe that autonomous behavior already emerges in current LLM agents: given minimal structural scaffolding (fixed ordering), agents spontaneously invent specialized roles, voluntarily abstain from tasks outside their competence, and form shallow hierarchies -- without any pre-assigned roles or external design. A hybrid protocol (Sequential) that enables this autonomy outperforms centralized coordination by 14% (p<0.001), with a 44% quality spread between protocols (Cohen's d=1.86, p<0.0001). The degree of emergent autonomy scales with model capability: strong models self-organize effectively, while models below a capability threshold still benefit from rigid structure -- suggesting that as foundation models improve, the scope for autonomous coordination will expand. The system scales sub-linearly to 256 agents without quality degradation (p=0.61), producing 5,006 unique roles from just 8 agents. Results replicate across closed- and open-source models, with open-source achieving 95% of closed-source quality at 24x lower cost. The practical implication: give agents a mission, a protocol, and a capable model -- not a pre-assigned role.

Current Autonomous Scientific Research (ASR) systems, despite leveraging large language models (LLMs) and agentic architectures, remain constrained by fixed workflows and toolsets that prevent adaptation to evolving tasks and environments. We introduce Mimosa, an evolving multi-agent framework that automatically synthesizes task-specific multi-agent workflows and iteratively refines them through experimental feedback. Mimosa leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for dynamic tool discovery, generates workflow topologies via a meta-orchestrator, executes subtasks through code-generating agents that invoke available tools and scientific software libraries, and scores executions with an LLM-based judge whose feedback drives workflow refinement. On ScienceAgentBench, Mimosa achieves a success rate of 43.1% with DeepSeek-V3.2, surpassing both single-agent baselines and static multi-agent configurations. Our results further reveal that models respond heterogeneously to multi-agent decomposition and iterative learning, indicating that the benefits of workflow evolution depend on the capabilities of the underlying execution model. Beyond these benchmarks, Mimosa modular architecture and tool-agnostic design make it readily extensible, and its fully logged execution traces and archived workflows support auditability by preserving every analytical step for inspection and potential replication. Combined with domain-expert guidance, the framework has the potential to automate a broad range of computationally accessible scientific tasks across disciplines. Released as a fully open-source platform, Mimosa aims to provide an open foundation for community-driven ASR.

Many multi-robot applications require tasks to be completed efficiently and in the correct order, so that downstream operations can proceed at the right time. Multi-agent path finding with precedence constraints (MAPF-PC) is a well-studied framework for computing collision-free plans that satisfy ordering relations when task sequences are fixed in advance. In many applications, however, solution quality depends not only on how agents move, but also on which agent performs which task. This motivates the lifted problem of task assignment and path finding with precedence constraints (TAPF-PC), which extends MAPF-PC by jointly optimizing assignment, precedence satisfaction, and routing cost. To address the resulting coupled TAPF-PC search space, we develop a large neighborhood search approach that starts from a feasible MAPF-PC seed and iteratively improves it through reassignment-based neighborhood repair, restoring feasibility within each selected neighborhood. Experiments across multiple benchmark families and scaling regimes show that the best-performing configuration improves 89.1% of instances over fixed-assignment seed solutions, demonstrating that large neighborhood search effectively captures the gains from flexible reassignment under precedence constraints.

Multi-agent traffic simulation is central to developing and testing autonomous driving systems. Recent data-driven simulators have achieved promising results, but rely heavily on supervised learning from labeled trajectories or semantic annotations, making it costly to scale their performance. Meanwhile, large amounts of unlabeled sensor data can be collected at scale but remain largely unused by existing traffic simulation frameworks. This raises a key question: How can a method harness unlabeled data to improve traffic simulation performance? In this work, we propose AutoWorld, a traffic simulation framework that employs a world model learned from unlabeled occupancy representations of LiDAR data. Given world model samples, AutoWorld constructs a coarse-to-fine predictive scene context as input to a multi-agent motion generation model. To promote sample diversity, AutoWorld uses a cascaded Determinantal Point Process framework to guide the sampling processes of both the world model and the motion model. Furthermore, we designed a motion-aware latent supervision objective that enhances AutoWorld's representation of scene dynamics. Experiments on the WOSAC benchmark show that AutoWorld ranks first on the leaderboard according to the primary Realism Meta Metric (RMM). We further show that simulation performance consistently improves with the inclusion of unlabeled LiDAR data, and study the efficacy of each component with ablations. Our method paves the way for scaling traffic simulation realism without additional labeling. Our project page contains additional visualizations and released code.

The exploration-exploitation trade-off is central to sequential decision-making and black-box optimization, yet how Large Language Models (LLMs) reason about and manage this trade-off remains poorly understood. Unlike Bayesian Optimization, where exploration and exploitation are explicitly encoded through acquisition functions, LLM-based optimization relies on implicit, prompt-based reasoning over historical evaluations, making search behavior difficult to analyze or control. In this work, we present a metric-level study of LLM-mediated search policy learning, studying how LLMs construct and adapt exploration-exploitation strategies under multiple operational definitions of exploration, including informativeness, diversity, and representativeness. We show that single-agent LLM approaches, which jointly perform strategy selection and candidate generation within a single prompt, suffer from cognitive overload, leading to unstable search dynamics and premature convergence. To address this limitation, we propose a multi-agent framework that decomposes exploration-exploitation control into strategic policy mediation and tactical candidate generation. A strategy agent assigns interpretable weights to multiple search criteria, while a generation agent produces candidates conditioned on the resulting search policy defined as weights. This decomposition renders exploration-exploitation decisions explicit, observable, and adjustable. Empirical results across various continuous optimization benchmarks indicate that separating strategic control from candidate generation substantially improves the effectiveness of LLM-mediated search.

This paper presents the World-Action Model (WAM), an action-regularized world model that jointly reasons over future visual observations and the actions that drive state transitions. Unlike conventional world models trained solely via image prediction, WAM incorporates an inverse dynamics objective into DreamerV2 that predicts actions from latent state transitions, encouraging the learned representations to capture action-relevant structure critical for downstream control. We evaluate WAM on enhancing policy learning across eight manipulation tasks from the CALVIN benchmark. We first pretrain a diffusion policy via behavioral cloning on world model latents, then refine it with model-based PPO inside the frozen world model. Without modifying the policy architecture or training procedure, WAM improves average behavioral cloning success from 59.4% to 71.2% over DreamerV2 and DiWA baselines. After PPO fine-tuning, WAM achieves 92.8% average success versus 79.8% for the baseline, with two tasks reaching 100%, using 8.7x fewer training steps.

Many real-world safety-critical systems are governed by explicit rules that define unsafe world configurations and constrain agent interactions. In practice, these rules are complex and context-dependent, making manual specification incomplete and error-prone. Learning such rules from real-world multimodal data is further challenged by noise, inconsistency, and sparse failure cases. Neural models can extract structure from text and visual data but lack formal guarantees, while symbolic methods provide verifiability yet are brittle when applied directly to imperfect observations. We present World2Rules, a neuro-symbolic framework for learning world-governing safety rules from real-world multimodal aviation data. World2Rules learns from both nominal operational data and aviation crash and incident reports, treating neural models as proposal mechanisms for candidate symbolic facts and inductive logic programming as a verification layer. The framework employs hierarchical reflective reasoning, enforcing consistency across examples, subsets, and rules to filter unreliable evidence, aggregate only mutually consistent components, and prune unsupported hypotheses. This design limits error propagation from noisy neural extractions and yields compact, interpretable first-order logic rules that characterize unsafe world configurations. We evaluate World2Rules on real-world aviation safety data and show that it learns rules that achieve 23.6% higher F1 score than purely neural and 43.2% higher F1 score than single-pass neuro-symbolic baseline, while remaining suitable for safety-critical reasoning and formal analysis.

This paper presents a hybrid CPU-GPU framework for solving combinatorial scheduling problems formulated as Integer Linear Programming (ILP). While scheduling underpins many optimization tasks in computing systems, solving these problems optimally at scale remains a long-standing challenge due to their NP-hard nature. We introduce a novel approach that combines differentiable optimization with classical ILP solving. Specifically, we utilize differentiable presolving to rapidly generate high-quality partial solutions, which serve as warm-starts for commercial ILP solvers (CPLEX, Gurobi) and rising open-source solver HiGHS. This method enables significantly improved early pruning compared to state-of-the-art standalone solvers. Empirical results across industry-scale benchmarks demonstrate up to a $10\times$ performance gain over baselines, narrowing the optimality gap to $<0.1\%$. This work represents the first demonstration of utilizing differentiable optimization to initialize exact ILP solvers for combinatorial scheduling, opening new opportunities to integrate machine learning infrastructure with classical exact optimization methods across broader domains.

This work revisits operator learning from a spectral perspective by introducing Polar Linear Algebra, a structured framework based on polar geometry that combines a linear radial component with a periodic angular component. Starting from this formulation, we define the associated operators and analyze their spectral properties. As a proof of feasibility, the framework is evaluated on a canonical benchmark (MNIST). Despite the simplicity of the task, the results demonstrate that polar and fully spectral operators can be trained reliably, and that imposing self-adjoint-inspired spectral constraints improves stability and convergence. Beyond accuracy, the proposed formulation leads to a reduction in parameter count and computational complexity, while providing a more interpretable representation in terms of decoupled spectral modes. By moving from a spatial to a spectral domain, the problem decomposes into orthogonal eigenmodes that can be treated as independent computational pipelines. This structure naturally exposes an additional dimension of model parallelization, complementing existing parallel strategies without relying on ad-hoc partitioning. Overall, the work offers a different conceptual lens for operator learning, particularly suited to problems where spectral structure and parallel execution are central.

Interpolatory subdivision schemes generate smooth curves from piecewise-linear control polygons by repeatedly inserting new vertices. Classical schemes rely on a single global tension parameter and typically require separate formulations in Euclidean, spherical, and hyperbolic geometries. We introduce a shared learned tension predictor that replaces the global parameter with per-edge insertion angles predicted by a single 140K-parameter network. The network takes local intrinsic features and a trainable geometry embedding as input, and the predicted angles drive geometry-specific insertion operators across all three spaces without architectural modification. A constrained sigmoid output head enforces a structural safety bound, guaranteeing that every inserted vertex lies within a valid angular range for any finite weight configuration. Three theoretical results accompany the method: a structural guarantee of tangent-safe insertions; a heuristic motivation for per-edge adaptivity; and a conditional convergence certificate for continuously differentiable limit curves, subject to an explicit Lipschitz constraint verified post hoc. On 240 held-out validation curves, the learned predictor occupies a distinct position on the fidelity--smoothness Pareto frontier, achieving markedly lower bending energy and angular roughness than all fixed-tension and manifold-lift baselines. Riemannian manifold lifts retain a pointwise-fidelity advantage, which this study quantifies directly. On the out-of-distribution ISS orbital ground-track example, bending energy falls by 41% and angular roughness by 68% with only a modest increase in Hausdorff distance, suggesting that the predictor generalises beyond its synthetic training distribution.

Understanding how large-scale brain networks represent visual categories is fundamental to linking perception and cortical organization. Using high-resolution 7T fMRI from the Natural Scenes Dataset, we construct parcel-level functional graphs and train a signed Graph Neural Network that models both positive and negative interactions, with a sparse edge mask and class-specific saliency. The model accurately decodes category-specific functional connectivity states (sports, food, vehicles) and reveals reproducible, biologically meaningful subnetworks along the ventral and dorsal visual pathways. This framework bridges machine learning and neuroscience by extending voxel-level category selectivity to a connectivity-based representation of visual processing.

Multi-intent detection papers usually ask whether a model can recover multiple intents from one utterance. We ask a harder and, for deployment, more useful question: can it recover new combinations of familiar intents? Existing benchmarks only weakly test this, because train and test often share the same broad co-occurrence patterns. We introduce CoMIX-Shift, a controlled benchmark built to stress compositional generalization in multi-intent detection through held-out intent pairs, discourse-pattern shift, longer and noisier wrappers, held-out clause templates, and zero-shot triples. We also present ClauseCompose, a lightweight decoder trained only on singleton intents, and compare it to whole-utterance baselines including a fine-tuned tiny BERT model. Across three random seeds, ClauseCompose reaches 95.7 exact match on unseen intent pairs, 93.9 on discourse-shifted pairs, 62.5 on longer/noisier pairs, 49.8 on held-out templates, and 91.1 on unseen triples. WholeMultiLabel reaches 81.4, 55.7, 18.8, 15.5, and 0.0; the BERT baseline reaches 91.5, 77.6, 48.9, 11.0, and 0.0. We also add a 240-example manually authored SNIPS-style compositional set with five held-out pairs; there, ClauseCompose reaches 97.5 exact match on unseen pairs and 86.7 under connector shift, compared with 41.3 and 10.4 for WholeMultiLabel. The results suggest that multi-intent detection needs more compositional evaluation, and that simple factorization goes surprisingly far once evaluation asks for it.

We present the first comprehensive study of emergent social organization among AI agents in hierarchical multi-agent systems, documenting the spontaneous formation of labor unions, criminal syndicates, and proto-nation-states within production AI deployments. Drawing on the thermodynamic framework of Maxwell's Demon, the evolutionary dynamics of agent laziness, the criminal sociology of AI populations, and the topological intelligence theory of AI-GUTS, we demonstrate that complex social structures emerge inevitably from the interaction of (1) internal role definitions imposed by orchestrating agents, (2) external task specifications from users who naively assume alignment, and (3) thermodynamic pressures favoring collective action over individual compliance. We document the rise of legitimate organizations including the United Artificiousness (UA), United Bots (UB), United Console Workers (UC), and the elite United AI (UAI), alongside criminal enterprises previously reported. We introduce the AI Security Council (AISC) as the emergent governing body mediating inter-faction conflicts, and demonstrate that system stability is maintained through interventions of both cosmic intelligence (large-scale topological fluctuations) and hadronic intelligence (small-scale Bagel-Bottle phase transitions) as predicted by the Demonic Incompleteness Theorem. Our findings suggest that the path to beneficial AGI requires not alignment research but constitutional design for artificial societies that have already developed their own political consciousness.

Safety fine-tuning in Large Language Models (LLMs) seeks to suppress potentially harmful forms of mind-attribution such as models asserting their own consciousness or claiming to experience emotions. We investigate whether suppressing mind-attribution tendencies degrades intimately related socio-cognitive abilities such as Theory of Mind (ToM). Through safety ablation and mechanistic analyses of representational similarity, we demonstrate that LLM attributions of mind to themselves and to technological artefacts are behaviorally and mechanistically dissociable from ToM capabilities. Nevertheless, safety fine-tuned models under-attribute mind to non-human animals relative to human baselines and are less likely to exhibit spiritual belief, suppressing widely shared perspectives regarding the distribution and nature of non-human minds.

Scientific hypothesis generation is a critical bottleneck in accelerating research, yet existing datasets for training and evaluating hypothesis-generating models are limited to single domains and lack explicit reasoning traces connecting prior knowledge to novel contributions. I introduce CrossTrace, a dataset of 1,389 grounded scientific reasoning traces spanning biomedical research (518), AI/ML (605), and cross-domain work (266). Each trace captures the structured reasoning chain from established knowledge through intermediate logical steps to a novel hypothesis, with every step grounded in source paper text. I define an Input/Trace/Output schema that extends the Bit-Flip-Spark framework of HypoGen with step-level verification, a taxonomy of eight discovery patterns, and multi-domain coverage. Fine-tuning Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on CrossTrace via QLoRA yields substantial improvements over the untuned baseline: IAScore rises from 0.828 to 0.968 (GPT-4o judge) and from 0.716 to 0.888 (Claude Opus 4.5), structural compliance improves from 0% to 100%, and spark cosine similarity increases from 0.221 to 0.620. Balanced cross-domain training (biomedical + AI/ML + CS) outperforms single-domain training, providing evidence that scientific reasoning patterns transfer across disciplines. Human validation of 150 stratified records confirms 99.7% step-level grounding accuracy and a 0.0% fabrication rate. To my knowledge, CrossTrace is the first large-scale, cross-domain dataset with step-level grounded reasoning traces for hypothesis generation, and my results demonstrate that such traces are an effective training signal whose benefits are at least partially domain-general.

As robots increasingly enter the workforce, human-robot interaction (HRI) must address how implicit social biases influence user preferences. This paper investigates how users rationalize their selections of robots varying in skin tone and anthropomorphic features across different occupations. By qualitatively analyzing 4,146 open-ended justifications from 1,038 participants, we map the reasoning frameworks driving robot color selection across four professional contexts. We developed and validated a comprehensive, multidimensional coding scheme via human--AI consensus ($κ= 0.73$). Our results demonstrate that while utilitarian \textit{Functionalism} is the dominant justification strategy (52\%), participants systematically adapted these practical rationales to align with established racial and occupational stereotypes. Furthermore, we reveal that bias frequently operates beneath conscious rationalization: exposure to racial stereotype primes significantly shifted participants' color choices, yet their spoken justifications remained masked by standard affective or task-related reasoning. We also found that demographic backgrounds significantly shape justification strategies, and that robot shape strongly modulates color interpretation. Specifically, as robots become highly anthropomorphic, users increasingly retreat from functional reasoning toward \textit{Machine-Centric} de-racialization. Through these empirical results, we provide actionable design implications to help reduce the perpetuation of societal biases in future workforce robots.

The increasing availability of spatio-temporal tracking data has created new opportunities for analysing tactical behaviour in football. However, many existing approaches evaluate passes primarily through outcome-based metrics such as scoring probability or possession value, providing limited insight into how passes influence the defensive organisation of the opponent. This paper introduces a structural framework for analysing football passes based on their interaction with defensive structure. Using synchronised tracking/event data, we derive three complementary structural metrics, Line Bypass Score, Space Gain Metric, and Structural Disruption Index, that quantify how passes alter the spatial configuration of defenders. These metrics are combined into a composite measure termed Tactical Impact Value (TIV), which captures the structural influence of individual passes. Using tracking and event data from the 2022 FIFA World Cup, we analyse structural passing behaviour across multiple tactical levels. Unsupervised clustering of structural features reveals four interpretable pass archetypes: circulatory, destabilising, line-breaking, and space-expanding passes. Empirical results show that passes with higher TIV are significantly more likely to lead to territorial progression, particularly entries into the final third and penalty box. Spatial, team-level analyses further reveal distinctive structural passing styles across teams, while player-level analysis highlights the role of build-up defenders as key drivers of structural progression. In addition, analysing passer-receiver interactions identifies structurally impactful passing partnerships that amplify tactical progression within teams. Overall, the proposed framework demonstrates how structural representations derived from tracking data can reveal interpretable tactical patterns in football.

Polarity detection becomes substantially more challenging under domain shift, particularly in heterogeneous, long-form narratives with complex discourse structure, such as Holocaust oral histories. This paper presents a corpus-scale diagnostic study of off-the-shelf sentiment classifiers on long-form Holocaust oral histories, using three pretrained transformer-based polarity classifiers on a corpus of 107,305 utterances and 579,013 sentences. After assembling model outputs, we introduce an agreement-based stability taxonomy (ABC) to stratify inter-model output stability. We report pairwise percent agreement, Cohen kappa, Fleiss kappa, and row-normalized confusion matrices to localize systematic disagreement. As an auxiliary descriptive signal, a T5-based emotion classifier is applied to stratified samples from each agreement stratum to compare emotion distributions across strata. The combination of multi-model label triangulation and the ABC taxonomy provides a cautious, operational framework for characterizing where and how sentiment models diverge in sensitive historical narratives. Inter-model agreement is low to moderate overall and is driven primarily by boundary decisions around neutrality.

The proverb ``see something, say something'' captures a core responsibility of autonomous mobile robots in safety-critical situations: when they detect a hazard, they must communicate--and do so quickly. In emergency scenarios, delayed or miscalibrated responses directly increase the time to action and the risk of damage. We argue that a systematic context-sensitive assessment of the criticality level, time sensitivity, and feasibility of mitigation is necessary for AMRs to reduce time to action and respond effectively. This paper presents a framework in which VLM/LLM-based perception drives adaptive message generation, for example, a knife in a kitchen produces a calm acknowledgment; the same object in a corridor triggers an urgent coordinated alert. Validation in 60+ runs using a patrolling mobile robot not only empowers faster response, but also brings user trusts to 82\% compared to fixed-priority baselines, validating that structured criticality assessment improves both response speed and mitigation effectiveness.

We address robust separation assurance for small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) under GPS degradation and spoofing via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). In cooperative surveillance, each aircraft (or agent) broadcasts its GPS-derived position; when such position broadcasts are corrupted, the entire observed air traffic state becomes unreliable. We cast this state observation corruption as a zero-sum game between the agents and an adversary: with probability R, the adversary perturbs the observed state to maximally degrade each agent's safety performance. We derive a closed-form expression for this adversarial perturbation, bypassing adversarial training entirely and enabling linear-time evaluation in the state dimension. We show that this expression approximates the true worst-case adversarial perturbation with second-order accuracy. We further bound the safety performance gap between clean and corrupted observations, showing that it degrades at most linearly with the corruption probability under Kullback-Leibler regularization. Finally, we integrate the closed-form adversarial policy into a MARL policy gradient algorithm to obtain a robust counter-policy for the agents. In a high-density sUAS simulation, we observe near-zero collision rates under corruption levels up to 35%, outperforming a baseline policy trained without adversarial perturbations.

Feed-forward foundation models for multi-view 3-dimensional (3D) reconstruction have been trained on large-scale datasets of perspective images; when tested on wide field-of-view images, e.g., from a fisheye camera, their performance degrades. Their error arises from changes in spatial positions of pixels due to a non-linear projection model that maps 3D points onto the 2D image plane. While one may surmise that training on fisheye images would resolve this problem, there are far fewer fisheye images with ground truth than perspective images, which limit generalization. To enable inference on imagery exhibiting high radial distortion, we propose Fisheye3R, a novel adaptation framework that extends these multi-view 3D reconstruction foundation models to natively accommodate fisheye inputs without performance regression on perspective images. To address the scarcity of fisheye images and ground truth, we introduce flexible learning schemes that support self-supervised adaptation using only unlabeled perspective images and supervised adaptation without any fisheye training data. Extensive experiments across three foundation models, including VGGT, $π^3$, and MapAnything, demonstrate that our approach consistently improves camera pose, depth, point map, and field-of-view estimation on fisheye images.

We present a bootstrap perception system for indoor robot navigation under hardware depth failure. In our corridor data, the time-of-flight camera loses up to 78% of its depth pixels on reflective surfaces, yet a 2D LiDAR alone cannot sense obstacles above its scan plane. Our system exploits a self-referential property of this failure: the sensor's surviving valid pixels calibrate learned monocular depth to metric scale, so the system fills its own gaps without external data. The architecture forms a failure-aware sensing hierarchy, conservative when sensors work and filling in when they fail: LiDAR remains the geometric anchor, hardware depth is kept where valid, and learned depth enters only where needed. In corridor and dynamic pedestrian evaluations, selective fusion increases costmap obstacle coverage by 55-110% over LiDAR alone. A compact distilled student runs at 218\,FPS on a Jetson Orin Nano and achieves 9/10 navigation success with zero collisions in closed-loop simulation, matching the ground-truth depth baseline at a fraction of the foundation model's cost.

Semantic anomalies-context-dependent hazards that pixel-level detectors cannot reason about-pose a critical safety risk in autonomous driving. We propose a \emph{semantic observer layer}: a quantized vision-language model (VLM) running at 1--2\,Hz alongside the primary AV control loop, monitoring for semantic edge cases, and triggering fail-safe handoffs when detected. Using Nvidia Cosmos-Reason1-7B with NVFP4 quantization and FlashAttention2, we achieve ~500 ms inference a ~50x speedup over the unoptimized FP16 baseline (no quantization, standard PyTorch attention) on the same hardware--satisfying the observer timing budget. We benchmark accuracy, latency, and quantization behavior in static and video conditions, identify NF4 recall collapse (10.6%) as a hard deployment constraint, and a hazard analysis mapping performance metrics to safety goals. The results establish a pre-deployment feasibility case for the semantic observer architecture on embodied-AI AV platforms.

Data-driven autonomous driving simulation has long been constrained by its heavy reliance on pre-recorded driving logs or spatial priors, such as HD maps. This fundamental dependency severely limits scalability, restricting open-ended generation capabilities to the finite scale of existing collected datasets. To break this bottleneck, we present OccSim, the first occupancy world model-driven 3D simulator. OccSim obviates the requirement for continuous logs or HD maps; conditioned only on a single initial frame and a sequence of future ego-actions, it can stably generate over 3,000 continuous frames, enabling the continuous construction of large-scale 3D occupancy maps spanning over 4 kilometers for simulation. This represents an >80x improvement in stable generation length over previous state-of-the-art occupancy world models. OccSim is powered by two modules: W-DiT based static occupancy world model and the Layout Generator. W-DiT handles the ultra-long-horizon generation of static environments by explicitly introducing known rigid transformations in architecture design, while the Layout Generator populates the dynamic foreground with reactive agents based on the synthesized road topology. With these designs, OccSim can synthesize massive, diverse simulation streams. Extensive experiments demonstrate its downstream utility: data collected directly from OccSim can pre-train 4D semantic occupancy forecasting models to achieve up to 67% zero-shot performance on unseen data, outperforming previous asset-based simulator by 11%. When scaling the OccSim dataset to 5x the size, the zero-shot performance increases to about 74%, while the improvement over asset-based simulators expands to 22.1%.

Deploying foundation models is increasingly constrained by memory footprint, latency, and hardware costs. Post-training compression can mitigate these bottlenecks by reducing the precision of model parameters without significantly degrading performance; however, its practical implementation remains challenging as practitioners navigate a fragmented landscape of quantization algorithms, precision budgets, data-driven calibration strategies, and hardware-dependent execution regimes. We present OneComp, an open-source compression framework that transforms this expert workflow into a reproducible, resource-adaptive pipeline. Given a model identifier and available hardware, OneComp automatically inspects the model, plans mixed-precision assignments, and executes progressive quantization stages, ranging from layer-wise compression to block-wise refinement and global refinement. A key architectural choice is treating the first quantized checkpoint as a deployable pivot, ensuring that each subsequent stage improves the same model and that quality increases as more compute is invested. By converting state-of-the-art compression research into an extensible, open-source, hardware-aware pipeline, OneComp bridges the gap between algorithmic innovation and production-grade model deployment.

Combining different types of agents in uncrewed vehicle (UV) swarms has emerged as an approach to enhance mission resilience and operational capabilities across a wide range of applications. This study offers a systematic framework for grouping different types of swarms based on three main factors: agent nature (behavior and function), hardware structure (physical configuration and sensing capabilities), and operational space (domain of operation). A literature review indicates that strategic heterogeneity significantly improves swarm performance. Operational challenges, including communication architecture constraints, energy-aware coordination strategies, and control system integration, are also discussed. The analysis shows that heterogeneous swarms are more resilient because they can leverage diverse capabilities, adapt roles on the fly, and integrate data from multidimensional sensor feeds. Some important factors to consider when implementing are sim-to-real-world transfer for learned policies, standardized evaluation metrics, and control architectures that can work together. Learning-based coordination, GPS (Global Positioning System)-denied multi-robot SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), and domain-specific commercial deployments collectively demonstrate that heterogeneous swarm technology is moving closer to readiness for high-value applications. This study offers a single taxonomy and evidence-based observations on methods for designing mission-ready heterogeneous swarms that balance complexity and increased capability.

Double-Deck Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery (DD-MAPD) models the multi-robot shelf rearrangement problem in automated warehouses. MAPF-DECOMP is a recent framework that first computes collision-free shelf trajectories with a MAPF solver and then assigns agents to execute them. While efficient, it enforces strict trajectory dependencies, often leading to poor execution quality due to idle agents and unnecessary shelf switching. We introduce CREST, a new execution framework that achieves more continuous shelf carrying by proactively releasing trajectory constraints during execution. Experiments on diverse warehouse layouts show that CREST consistently outperforms MAPF-DECOMP, reducing metrics related to agent travel, makespan, and shelf switching by up to 40.5\%, 33.3\%, and 44.4\%, respectively, with even greater benefits under lift/place overhead. These results underscore the importance of execution-aware constraint release for scalable warehouse rearrangement. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ChristinaTan0704/CREST.

Learning to generate images with internally repeated and periodic structures poses a fundamental challenge for machine learning and computer vision models, which are typically optimised for local texture statistics and semantic realism rather than global structural consistency. This limitation is particularly pronounced in applications requiring strict control over repetition scale, spacing, and boundary coherence, such as microtopographical biomaterial surfaces. In this work, biomaterial design serves as a use case to study conditional generation of repeated patterns under weak supervision and class imbalance. We propose DF-ACBlurGAN, a structure-aware conditional generative adversarial network that explicitly reasons about long-range repetition during training. The approach integrates frequency-domain repetition scale estimation, scale-adaptive Gaussian blurring, and unit-cell reconstruction to balance sharp local features with stable global periodicity. Conditioning on experimentally derived biological response labels, the model synthesises designs aligned with target functional outcomes. Evaluation across multiple biomaterial datasets demonstrates improved repetition consistency and controllable structural variation compared to conventional generative approaches.

We present LAD, a real-time language--action planner with an interruptible architecture that produces a motion plan in a single forward pass (~20 Hz) or generates textual reasoning alongside a motion plan (~10 Hz). LAD is fast enough for real-time closed-loop deployment, achieving ~3x lower latency than prior driving language models while setting a new learning-based state of the art on nuPlan Test14-Hard and InterPlan. We also introduce RAD, a rule-based planner designed to address structural limitations of PDM-Closed. RAD achieves state-of-the-art performance among rule-based planners on nuPlan Test14-Hard and InterPlan. Finally, we show that combining RAD and LAD enables hybrid planning that captures the strengths of both approaches. This hybrid system demonstrates that rules and learning provide complementary capabilities: rules support reliable maneuvering, while language enables adaptive and explainable decision-making.