Yuyang Li

Puhao Li, Tengyu Liu, Yuyang Li et al. · pku

Generating dexterous grasping has been a long-standing and challenging robotic task. Despite recent progress, existing methods primarily suffer from two issues. First, most prior arts focus on a specific type of robot hand, lacking the generalizable capability of handling unseen ones. Second, prior arts oftentimes fail to rapidly generate diverse grasps with a high success rate. To jointly tackle these challenges with a unified solution, we propose GenDexGrasp, a novel hand-agnostic grasping algorithm for generalizable grasping. GenDexGrasp is trained on our proposed large-scale multi-hand grasping dataset MultiDex synthesized with force closure optimization. By leveraging the contact map as a hand-agnostic intermediate representation, GenDexGrasp efficiently generates diverse and plausible grasping poses with a high success rate and can transfer among diverse multi-fingered robotic hands. Compared with previous methods, GenDexGrasp achieves a three-way trade-off among success rate, inference speed, and diversity. Code is available at https://github.com/tengyu-liu/GenDexGrasp.

Lu Yi, Runlin Lei, Liuyi Yao et al.

LLM agents increasingly face long-horizon tasks such as web search and deep research in real-world applications, where accumulated context can cause long-context degradation and reasoning failures. Prior work mitigates this through context management with agent-side context control or fixed strategies such as summarization, which require training the agent itself for adaptation - making it impractical for closed-source agents and ignoring that different agents may require different strategies. We introduce Adaptive Context Management (AdaCoM), which trains an external LLM to manage the context of a frozen agent through flexible modification actions and end-to-end reinforcement learning. Across diverse agents on web search and deep research benchmarks, AdaCoM substantially improves performance by preserving task constraints and progress while pruning stale content. The learned strategies reveal a Fidelity-Reliability Trade-off: agents with higher vanilla ReAct performance benefit from higher-fidelity context preservation, whereas lower-performing agents require more aggressive compression to stay within a reliable reasoning regime. Transfer experiments show that AdaCoM generalizes most effectively across agents with similar capability (measured by vanilla ReAct performance), suggesting a practical path toward reusable context managers for agent systems.

Yuyang Li, Bo Liu, Yiran Geng et al. · pku

The intricate kinematics of the human hand enable simultaneous grasping and manipulation of multiple objects, essential for tasks such as object transfer and in-hand manipulation. Despite its significance, the domain of robotic multi-object grasping is relatively unexplored and presents notable challenges in kinematics, dynamics, and object configurations. This paper introduces MultiGrasp, a novel two-stage approach for multi-object grasping using a dexterous multi-fingered robotic hand on a tabletop. The process consists of (i) generating pre-grasp proposals and (ii) executing the grasp and lifting the objects. Our experimental focus is primarily on dual-object grasping, achieving a success rate of 44.13%, highlighting adaptability to new object configurations and tolerance for imprecise grasps. Additionally, the framework demonstrates the potential for grasping more than two objects at the cost of inference speed.

Yuyang Li, Zihe Yan, Tobias Käfer

Multi-hop question-answering systems often use expensive retrieval on every question. They may decompose the question, run several retrieval rounds, or search through bridge entities before answering. All of these strategies rely on repeated LLM calls to rewrite or decompose the question, which increases extra token cost, and it is not fitting when the LLM budget is tight. However, our analysis shows that lots of multi-hop questions are already answered correctly by a single one-shot RAG, so running an extra retrieval on every question wastes the budget. We introduce RASER (Recoverability-Aware Selective Escalation Router), a family of cheap routers built on one-shot RAG and six features from it. RASER-2 decides whether to stop or escalate to the extra-retrieval action PRUNE. RASER-3 chooses among one-shot RAG, PRUNE, and iterative retrieval IRCoT, using the same features but adding an explicit cost-accuracy trade-off. Neither router makes an extra LLM call to decide. Across six LLMs and three multi-hop QA benchmarks, both routers stay competitive with the other state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines in F1 while spending only 41-49% of always-prune's tokens and also less than the iterative and decomposition retrieval baselines.

Zihang Zhao, Zhenghao Qi, Yuyang Li et al. · pku

Adept manipulation of articulated objects is essential for robots to operate successfully in human environments. Such manipulation requires both effectiveness--reliable operation despite uncertain object structures--and efficiency--swift execution with minimal redundant steps and smooth actions. Existing approaches struggle to achieve both objectives simultaneously: methods relying on predefined kinematic models lack effectiveness when encountering structural variations, while tactile-informed approaches achieve robust manipulation without kinematic priors but compromise efficiency through reactive, step-by-step exploration-compensation cycles. This paper introduces TacMan-Turbo, a novel proactive tactile control framework for articulated object manipulation that mitigates this fundamental trade-off. Unlike previous approaches that treat tactile contact deviations merely as error signals requiring compensation, our method interprets these deviations as rich sources of local kinematic information. This new perspective enables our controller to predict optimal future interactions and make proactive adjustments, significantly enhancing manipulation efficiency. In comprehensive evaluations across 200 diverse simulated articulated objects and real-world experiments, our approach maintains a 100% success rate while significantly outperforming the previous tactile-informed method in time efficiency, action efficiency, and trajectory smoothness (all p-values < 0.0001). These results demonstrate that the long-standing trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency in articulated object manipulation can be successfully resolved without relying on prior kinematic knowledge.

Yuyang Li, Yinghan Chen, Zihang Zhao et al.

Robotic manipulation requires both rich multimodal perception and effective learning frameworks to handle complex real-world tasks. See-through-skin (STS) sensors, which combine tactile and visual perception, offer promising sensing capabilities, while modern imitation learning provides powerful tools for policy acquisition. However, existing STS designs lack simultaneous multimodal perception and suffer from unreliable tactile tracking. Furthermore, integrating these rich multimodal signals into learning-based manipulation pipelines remains an open challenge. We introduce TacThru, an STS sensor enabling simultaneous visual perception and robust tactile signal extraction, and TacThru-UMI, an imitation learning framework that leverages these multimodal signals for manipulation. Our sensor features a fully transparent elastomer, persistent illumination, novel keyline markers, and efficient tracking, while our learning system integrates these signals through a Transformer-based Diffusion Policy. Experiments on five challenging real-world tasks show that TacThru-UMI achieves an average success rate of 85.5%, significantly outperforming the baselines of alternating tactile-visual (66.3%) and vision-only (55.4%). The system excels in critical scenarios, including contact detection with thin and soft objects and precision manipulation requiring multimodal coordination. This work demonstrates that combining simultaneous multimodal perception with modern learning frameworks enables more precise, adaptable robotic manipulation.

Mehmet Kerem Turkcan, Yuyang Li, Chengbo Zang et al.

We introduce Boundless, a photo-realistic synthetic data generation system for enabling highly accurate object detection in dense urban streetscapes. Boundless can replace massive real-world data collection and manual ground-truth object annotation (labeling) with an automated and configurable process. Boundless is based on the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) City Sample project with improvements enabling accurate collection of 3D bounding boxes across different lighting and scene variability conditions. We evaluate the performance of object detection models trained on the dataset generated by Boundless when used for inference on a real-world dataset acquired from medium-altitude cameras. We compare the performance of the Boundless-trained model against the CARLA-trained model and observe an improvement of 7.8 mAP. The results we achieved support the premise that synthetic data generation is a credible methodology for training/fine-tuning scalable object detection models for urban scenes.

Yuyang Li, Yime He, Zeyu Zhang et al.

Long-term conversational memory requires retrieving evidence scattered across multiple sessions, yet single-pass retrieval fails on temporal and multi-hop questions. Existing iterative methods refine queries via generated content or document-level signals, but none explicitly diagnoses the evidence gap, namely what is missing from the accumulated retrieval set, leaving query refinement untargeted. We present EviMem, combining IRIS (Iterative Retrieval via Insufficiency Signals), a closed-loop framework that detects evidence gaps through sufficiency evaluation, diagnoses what is missing, and drives targeted query refinement, with LaceMem (Layered Architecture for Conversational Evidence Memory), a coarse-to-fine memory hierarchy supporting fine-grained gap diagnosis. On LoCoMo, EviMem improves Judge Accuracy over MIRIX on temporal (73.3% to 81.6%) and multi-hop (65.9% to 85.2%) questions at 4.5x lower latency. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/EviMem.

Kaipeng Fang, Weiqing Liang, Yuyang Li et al.

Synthetic simulation data and real-world human data provide scalable alternatives to circumvent the prohibitive costs of robot data collection. However, these sources suffer from the sim-to-real visual gap and the human-to-robot embodiment gap, respectively, which limits the policy's generalization to real-world scenarios. In this work, we identify a natural yet underexplored complementarity between these sources: simulation offers the robot action that human data lacks, while human data provides the real-world observation that simulation struggles to render. Motivated by this insight, we present SimHum, a co-training framework to simultaneously extract kinematic prior from simulated robot actions and visual prior from real-world human observations. Based on the two complementary priors, we achieve data-efficient and generalizable robotic manipulation in real-world tasks. Empirically, SimHum outperforms the baseline by up to $\mathbf{40\%}$ under the same data collection budget, and achieves a $\mathbf{62.5\%}$ OOD success with only 80 real data, outperforming the real only baseline by $7.1\times$. Videos and additional information can be found at \href{https://kaipengfang.github.io/sim-and-human}{project website}.

Kaixun Yang, Mladen Raković, Yuyang Li et al.

Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) is a well-established educational pursuit that employs machine learning to evaluate student-authored essays. While much effort has been made in this area, current research primarily focuses on either (i) boosting the predictive accuracy of an AES model for a specific prompt (i.e., developing prompt-specific models), which often heavily relies on the use of the labeled data from the same target prompt; or (ii) assessing the applicability of AES models developed on non-target prompts to the intended target prompt (i.e., developing the AES models in a cross-prompt setting). Given the inherent bias in machine learning and its potential impact on marginalized groups, it is imperative to investigate whether such bias exists in current AES methods and, if identified, how it intervenes with an AES model's accuracy and generalizability. Thus, our study aimed to uncover the intricate relationship between an AES model's accuracy, fairness, and generalizability, contributing practical insights for developing effective AES models in real-world education. To this end, we meticulously selected nine prominent AES methods and evaluated their performance using seven metrics on an open-sourced dataset, which contains over 25,000 essays and various demographic information about students such as gender, English language learner status, and economic status. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrated that: (1) prompt-specific models tend to outperform their cross-prompt counterparts in terms of predictive accuracy; (2) prompt-specific models frequently exhibit a greater bias towards students of different economic statuses compared to cross-prompt models; (3) in the pursuit of generalizability, traditional machine learning models coupled with carefully engineered features hold greater potential for achieving both high accuracy and fairness than complex neural network models.

Kaile Du, Yifan Zhou, Fan Lyu et al.

Multi-label class-incremental learning (MLCIL) is essential for real-world multi-label applications, allowing models to learn new labels while retaining previously learned knowledge continuously. However, recent MLCIL approaches can only achieve suboptimal performance due to the oversight of the positive-negative imbalance problem, which manifests at both the label and loss levels because of the task-level partial label issue. The imbalance at the label level arises from the substantial absence of negative labels, while the imbalance at the loss level stems from the asymmetric contributions of the positive and negative loss parts to the optimization. To address the issue above, we propose a Rebalance framework for both the Loss and Label levels (RebLL), which integrates two key modules: asymmetric knowledge distillation (AKD) and online relabeling (OR). AKD is proposed to rebalance at the loss level by emphasizing the negative label learning in classification loss and down-weighting the contribution of overconfident predictions in distillation loss. OR is designed for label rebalance, which restores the original class distribution in memory by online relabeling the missing classes. Our comprehensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate that this rebalancing strategy significantly improves performance, achieving new state-of-the-art results even with a vanilla CNN backbone.

Wei Li, Yuyang Li, Kaile Du et al.

The recently established Convolution Nuclear Norm Minimization (CNNM) addresses the problem of \textit{tensor completion with arbitrary sampling} (TCAS), which involves restoring a tensor from a subset of its entries sampled in an arbitrary manner. Despite its promising performance, the optimization procedure of CNNM needs performing Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) multiple times, which is computationally expensive and hard to parallelize. To address the issue, we reformulate the optimization objective of CNNM from the perspective of convolution eigenvectors. By introducing pre-learned convolution eigenvectors which are shared among different tensors, we propose a novel method called Inductive Convolution Nuclear Norm Minimization (ICNNM), which bypasses the SVD step so as to decrease significantly the computational time. In addition, due to the extra prior knowledge encoded in the pre-learned convolution eigenvectors, ICNNM also outperforms CNNM in terms of recovery performance. Extensive experiments on video completion, prediction and frame interpolation verify the superiority of ICNNM over CNNM and several other competing methods.

Li Yuepan, Fan Lyu, Yuyang Li et al.

Parallel Continual Learning (PCL) tasks investigate the training methods for continual learning with multi-source input, where data from different tasks are learned as they arrive. PCL offers high training efficiency and is well-suited for complex multi-source data systems, such as autonomous vehicles equipped with multiple sensors. However, at any time, multiple tasks need to be trained simultaneously, leading to severe training instability in PCL. This instability manifests during both forward and backward propagation, where features are entangled and gradients are conflict. This paper introduces Stable Parallel Continual Learning (SPCL), a novel approach that enhances the training stability of PCL for both forward and backward propagation. For the forward propagation, we apply Doubly-block Toeplit (DBT) Matrix based orthogonality constraints to network parameters to ensure stable and consistent propagation. For the backward propagation, we employ orthogonal decomposition for gradient management stabilizes backpropagation and mitigates gradient conflicts across tasks. By optimizing gradients by ensuring orthogonality and minimizing the condition number, SPCL effectively stabilizing the gradient descent in complex optimization tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that SPCL outperforms state-of-the-art methjods and achieve better training stability.

Jinghang Shi, Xiaoyu Tang, Yang Huang et al. · microsoft-research

Astronomical image interpretation presents a significant challenge for applying multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to specialized scientific tasks. Existing benchmarks focus on general multimodal capabilities but fail to capture the complexity of astronomical data. To bridge this gap, we introduce AstroMMBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs in astronomical image understanding. AstroMMBench comprises 621 multiple-choice questions across six astrophysical subfields, curated and reviewed by 15 domain experts for quality and relevance. We conducted an extensive evaluation of 25 diverse MLLMs, including 22 open-source and 3 closed-source models, using AstroMMBench. The results show that Ovis2-34B achieved the highest overall accuracy (70.5%), demonstrating leading capabilities even compared to strong closed-source models. Performance showed variations across the six astrophysical subfields, proving particularly challenging in domains like cosmology and high-energy astrophysics, while models performed relatively better in others, such as instrumentation and solar astrophysics. These findings underscore the vital role of domain-specific benchmarks like AstroMMBench in critically evaluating MLLM performance and guiding their targeted development for scientific applications. AstroMMBench provides a foundational resource and a dynamic tool to catalyze advancements at the intersection of AI and astronomy.

Yuyang Li, Jiashu Han, Yinyi Lai et al.

Marine debris detection for ocean robot is crucial for ecological protection, yet performance is often degraded by low-quality images with blur, complex backgrounds, and small targets. To address these challenges, we propose YOLO-MD, an enhanced YOLO-based detection framework. A Dual-Branch Convolutional Enhanced Self-Attention (DB-CASA) module is designed to strengthen spatial-channel interactions, improving feature representation in degraded images. Additionally, a lightweight shift-based operation is introduced to enhance fine-grained feature extraction for objects of varying scales while maintaining parameter efficiency. We further propose SFG-Loss to mitigate class imbalance and optimization instability via dynamic sample reweighting. Experiments on the UODM dataset demonstrate that YOLO-MD achieves 0.875 precision, 0.822 F1-score, and 0.849 mAP50, outperforming the latest state-of-the-art methods. The effectiveness of this method has also been verified through real-world robotic edge deployment experiments.

Puhao Li, Tengyu Liu, Yuyang Li et al. · berkeley

Autonomous robotic systems capable of learning novel manipulation tasks are poised to transform industries from manufacturing to service automation. However, modern methods (e.g., VIP and R3M) still face significant hurdles, notably the domain gap among robotic embodiments and the sparsity of successful task executions within specific action spaces, resulting in misaligned and ambiguous task representations. We introduce Ag2Manip (Agent-Agnostic representations for Manipulation), a framework aimed at surmounting these challenges through two key innovations: a novel agent-agnostic visual representation derived from human manipulation videos, with the specifics of embodiments obscured to enhance generalizability; and an agent-agnostic action representation abstracting a robot's kinematics to a universal agent proxy, emphasizing crucial interactions between end-effector and object. Ag2Manip's empirical validation across simulated benchmarks like FrankaKitchen, ManiSkill, and PartManip shows a 325% increase in performance, achieved without domain-specific demonstrations. Ablation studies underline the essential contributions of the visual and action representations to this success. Extending our evaluations to the real world, Ag2Manip significantly improves imitation learning success rates from 50% to 77.5%, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalizability across both simulated and physical environments.

Miaoxuan Zhu, Yi Yu, Yuyang Li et al.

The quantification of uncertainty in prediction models is crucial for reliable decision-making, yet remains a significant challenge. Interval time series forecasting offers a principled solution to this problem by providing prediction intervals (PIs), which indicates the probability that the true value falls within the predicted range. We consider a recently established point forecasts (PFs) method termed Learning-Based Convolution Nuclear Norm Minimization (LbCNNM), which directly generates multi-step ahead forecasts by leveraging the convolutional low-rankness property derived from training data. While theoretically complete and empirically effective, LbCNNM lacks inherent uncertainty estimation capabilities, a limitation shared by many advanced forecasting methods. To resolve the issue, we modify the well-known Quantile Regression (QR) and integrate it into LbCNNM, resulting in a novel interval forecasting method termed LbCNNM with Modified Quantile Regression (LbCNNM-MQR). In addition, we devise interval calibration techniques to further improve the accuracy of PIs. Extensive experiments on over 100,000 real-world time series demonstrate the superior performance of LbCNNM-MQR.

Kailin Li, Puhao Li, Tengyu Liu et al.

Human hands play a central role in interacting, motivating increasing research in dexterous robotic manipulation. Data-driven embodied AI algorithms demand precise, large-scale, human-like manipulation sequences, which are challenging to obtain with conventional reinforcement learning or real-world teleoperation. To address this, we introduce ManipTrans, a novel two-stage method for efficiently transferring human bimanual skills to dexterous robotic hands in simulation. ManipTrans first pre-trains a generalist trajectory imitator to mimic hand motion, then fine-tunes a specific residual module under interaction constraints, enabling efficient learning and accurate execution of complex bimanual tasks. Experiments show that ManipTrans surpasses state-of-the-art methods in success rate, fidelity, and efficiency. Leveraging ManipTrans, we transfer multiple hand-object datasets to robotic hands, creating DexManipNet, a large-scale dataset featuring previously unexplored tasks like pen capping and bottle unscrewing. DexManipNet comprises 3.3K episodes of robotic manipulation and is easily extensible, facilitating further policy training for dexterous hands and enabling real-world deployments.

Kairui Ding, Boyuan Chen, Ruihai Wu et al. · tsinghua

Robotic manipulation with two-finger grippers is challenged by objects lacking distinct graspable features. Traditional pre-grasping methods, which typically involve repositioning objects or utilizing external aids like table edges, are limited in their adaptability across different object categories and environments. To overcome these limitations, we introduce PreAfford, a novel pre-grasping planning framework incorporating a point-level affordance representation and a relay training approach. Our method significantly improves adaptability, allowing effective manipulation across a wide range of environments and object types. When evaluated on the ShapeNet-v2 dataset, PreAfford not only enhances grasping success rates by 69% but also demonstrates its practicality through successful real-world experiments. These improvements highlight PreAfford's potential to redefine standards for robotic handling of complex manipulation tasks in diverse settings.

Fan Lyu, Kaile Du, Yuyang Li et al.

The prior drift is crucial in Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) methods that only use unlabeled test data, as it can cause significant error propagation. In this paper, we introduce VCoTTA, a variational Bayesian approach to measure uncertainties in CTTA. At the source stage, we transform a pre-trained deterministic model into a Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) via a variational warm-up strategy, injecting uncertainties into the model. During the testing time, we employ a mean-teacher update strategy using variational inference for the student model and exponential moving average for the teacher model. Our novel approach updates the student model by combining priors from both the source and teacher models. The evidence lower bound is formulated as the cross-entropy between the student and teacher models, along with the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence of the prior mixture. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate the method's effectiveness in mitigating prior drift within the CTTA framework.

Shuo Feng, Runlin Zhou, Yuyang Li et al.

Industrial surface defect detection often suffers from limited defect samples, severe long-tailed distributions, and difficulties in accurately localizing subtle defects under complex backgrounds. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an unsupervised defect detection method that integrates a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) with an asymmetric teacher-student architecture. First, at the data level, the DDPM is trained solely on normal samples. By introducing constant-variance Gaussian perturbations and Perlin noise-based masks, high-fidelity and physically consistent defect samples along with pixel-level annotations are generated, effectively alleviating the data scarcity problem. Second, at the model level, an asymmetric dual-stream network is constructed. The teacher network provides stable representations of normal features, while the student network reconstructs normal patterns and amplifies discrepancies between normal and anomalous regions. Finally, a joint optimization strategy combining cosine similarity loss and pixel-wise segmentation supervision is adopted to achieve precise localization of subtle defects. Experimental results on the MVTecAD dataset show that the proposed method achieves 98.4\% image-level AUROC and 98.3\% pixel-level AUROC, significantly outperforming existing unsupervised and mainstream deep learning methods. The proposed approach does not require large amounts of real defect samples and enables accurate and robust industrial defect detection and localization. \keywords{Industrial defect detection \and diffusion models \and data generation \and teacher-student architecture \and pixel-level localization}

Yuyang Li, Wenxin Du, Chang Yu et al.

Tactile sensing is crucial for achieving human-level robotic capabilities in manipulation tasks. As a promising solution, Vision-Based Tactile Sensors (VBTSs) offer high spatial resolution and cost-effectiveness, but present unique challenges in robotics for their complex physical characteristics and visual signal processing requirements. The lack of efficient and accurate simulation tools for VBTSs has significantly limited the scale and scope of tactile robotics research. We present Taccel, a high-performance simulation platform that integrates IPC and ABD to model robots, tactile sensors, and objects with both accuracy and unprecedented speed, achieving an 18-fold acceleration over real-time across thousands of parallel environments. Unlike previous simulators that operate at sub-real-time speeds with limited parallelization, Taccel provides precise physics simulation and realistic tactile signals while supporting flexible robot-sensor configurations through user-friendly APIs. Through extensive validation in object recognition, robotic grasping, and articulated object manipulation, we demonstrate precise simulation and successful sim-to-real transfer. These capabilities position Taccel as a powerful tool for scaling up tactile robotics research and development, potentially transforming how robots interact with and understand their physical environment.

Xiaomeng Zhu, Yuyang Li, Leiyao Cui et al.

Object affordance reasoning, the ability to infer object functionalities based on physical properties, is fundamental for task-oriented planning and activities in both humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This capability, required for planning and executing daily activities in a task-oriented manner, relies on commonsense knowledge of object physics and functionalities, extending beyond simple object recognition. Current computational models for affordance reasoning from perception lack generalizability, limiting their applicability in novel scenarios. Meanwhile, comprehensive Large Language Models (LLMs) with emerging reasoning capabilities are challenging to deploy on local devices for task-oriented manipulations. Here, we introduce LVIS-Aff, a large-scale dataset comprising 1,496 tasks and 119k images, designed to enhance the generalizability of affordance reasoning from perception. Utilizing this dataset, we develop Afford-X, an end-to-end trainable affordance reasoning model that incorporates Verb Attention and Bi-Fusion modules to improve multi-modal understanding. This model achieves up to a 12.1% performance improvement over the best-reported results from non-LLM methods, while also demonstrating a 1.2% enhancement compared to our previous conference paper. Additionally, it maintains a compact 187M parameter size and infers nearly 50 times faster than the GPT-4V API. Our work demonstrates the potential for efficient, generalizable affordance reasoning models that can be deployed on local devices for task-oriented manipulations. We showcase Afford-X's effectiveness in enabling task-oriented manipulations for robots across various tasks and environments, underscoring its efficiency and broad implications for advancing robotics and AI systems in real-world applications.

Cuihui Xia, Lei Yue, Deliang Chen et al.

Traditional equation-driven hydrological models often struggle to accurately predict streamflow in challenging regional Earth systems like the Tibetan Plateau, while hybrid and existing algorithm-driven models face difficulties in interpreting hydrological behaviors. This work introduces HydroTrace, an algorithm-driven, data-agnostic model that substantially outperforms these approaches, achieving a Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency of 98% and demonstrating strong generalization on unseen data. Moreover, HydroTrace leverages advanced attention mechanisms to capture spatial-temporal variations and feature-specific impacts, enabling the quantification and spatial resolution of streamflow partitioning as well as the interpretation of hydrological behaviors such as glacier-snow-streamflow interactions and monsoon dynamics. Additionally, a large language model (LLM)-based application allows users to easily understand and apply HydroTrace's insights for practical purposes. These advancements position HydroTrace as a transformative tool in hydrological and broader Earth system modeling, offering enhanced prediction accuracy and interpretability.

Yinyi Lai, Jiaqi Shang, Zenghui Liu et al.

As terrestrial resources become increasingly depleted, the demand for deep-sea resource exploration has intensified. However, the extreme conditions in the deep-sea environment pose significant challenges for underwater operations, necessitating the development of robust detection robots. In this paper, we propose an advanced path planning methodology that integrates an improved A* algorithm with the Dynamic Window Approach (DWA). By optimizing the search direction of the traditional A* algorithm and introducing an enhanced evaluation function, our improved A* algorithm accelerates path searching and reduces computational load. Additionally, the path-smoothing process has been refined to improve continuity and smoothness, minimizing sharp turns. This method also integrates global path planning with local dynamic obstacle avoidance via DWA, improving the real-time response of underwater robots in dynamic environments. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses the traditional A* algorithm in terms of path smoothness, obstacle avoidance, and real-time performance. The robustness of this approach in complex environments with both static and dynamic obstacles highlights its potential in autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) navigation and obstacle avoidance.

Yuyang Li, Swasthik Muloor, Jack Laudati et al.

Miniature imaging systems are essential for space-constrained applications but are limited by memory and power constraints. While machine learning can reduce data size by extracting key features, its high energy demands often exceed the capacity of small batteries. This paper presents a CNN hardware accelerator optimized for object classification in miniature imaging systems. It processes data from a spatial Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS), reconfigurable to a temporal DVS via pixel sharing, minimizing sensor area. By using ternary DVS outputs and a ternary-input, binary-weight neural network, the design reduces computation and memory needs. Fabricated in 28 nm CMOS, the accelerator cuts data size by 81% and MAC operations by 27%. It achieves 440 ms inference time at just 1.6 mW power consumption, improving the Figure-of-Merit (FoM) by 7.3x over prior CNN accelerators for miniature systems.

Kaile Du, Zihan Ye, Junzhou Xie et al.

Prompt-based methods have shown strong effectiveness in single-label class-incremental learning, but their direct extension to multi-label class-incremental learning (MLCIL) performs poorly due to two intrinsic challenges: semantic confusion from co-occurring categories and true-negative-false-positive confusion caused by partial labeling. We propose Dual-Decoupled Prompting (DDP), a replay-free and parameter-efficient framework that explicitly addresses both issues. DDP assigns class-specific positive-negative prompts to disentangle semantics and introduces Progressive Confidence Decoupling (PCD), a curriculum-inspired decoupling strategy that suppresses false positives. Past prompts are frozen as knowledge anchors, and interlayer prompting enhances efficiency. On MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC, DDP consistently outperforms prior methods and is the first replay-free MLCIL approach to exceed 80% mAP and 70% F1 under the standard MS-COCO B40-C10 benchmark.

Mengxue Yang, Chun Yang, Jiaqi Zhu et al.

Link prediction in knowledge graphs requires integrating structural information and semantic context to infer missing entities. While large language models offer strong generative reasoning capabilities, their limited exploitation of structural signals often results in structural sparsity and semantic ambiguity, especially under incomplete or zero-shot settings. To address these challenges, we propose SLiNT (Structure-aware Language model with Injection and coNtrastive Training), a modular framework that injects knowledge-graph-derived structural context into a frozen LLM backbone with lightweight LoRA-based adaptation for robust link prediction. Specifically, Structure-Guided Neighborhood Enhancement (SGNE) retrieves pseudo-neighbors to enrich sparse entities and mitigate missing context; Dynamic Hard Contrastive Learning (DHCL) introduces fine-grained supervision by interpolating hard positives and negatives to resolve entity-level ambiguity; and Gradient-Decoupled Dual Injection (GDDI) performs token-level structure-aware intervention while preserving the core LLM parameters. Experiments on WN18RR and FB15k-237 show that SLiNT achieves superior or competitive performance compared with both embedding-based and generation-based baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of structure-aware representation learning for scalable knowledge graph completion.

Boyuan Zheng, Zerui Fang, Zhe Xu et al.

While AI for Science (AI4S) serves as an analytical tool in the current research paradigm, it doesn't solve its core inefficiency. We propose "Agent for Science" (Agent4S)-the use of LLM-driven agents to automate the entire research workflow-as the true Fifth Scientific Paradigm. This paper introduces a five-level classification for Agent4S, outlining a clear roadmap from simple task automation to fully autonomous, collaborative "AI Scientists." This framework defines the next revolutionary step in scientific discovery.

Yuyang Li, Philip J. M. Kerbusch, Raimon H. R. Pruim et al.

Airports from the top 20 in terms of annual passengers are highly dynamic environments with thousands of flights daily, and they aim to increase the degree of automation. To contribute to this, we implemented a Conversational AI system that enables staff in an airport to communicate with flight information systems. This system not only answers standard airport queries but also resolves airport terminology, jargon, abbreviations, and dynamic questions involving reasoning. In this paper, we built three different Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods, including traditional RAG, SQL RAG, and Knowledge Graph-based RAG (Graph RAG). Experiments showed that traditional RAG achieved 84.84% accuracy using BM25 + GPT-4 but occasionally produced hallucinations, which is risky to airport safety. In contrast, SQL RAG and Graph RAG achieved 80.85% and 91.49% accuracy respectively, with significantly fewer hallucinations. Moreover, Graph RAG was especially effective for questions that involved reasoning. Based on our observations, we thus recommend SQL RAG and Graph RAG are better for airport environments, due to fewer hallucinations and the ability to handle dynamic questions.

Cunshi Wang, Yu Zhang, Yuyang Li et al.

The exponential growth of large-scale telescope arrays has boosted time-domain astronomy development but introduced operational bottlenecks, including labor-intensive observation planning, data processing, and real-time decision-making. Here we present the StarWhisper Telescope system, an AI agent framework automating end-to-end astronomical observations for surveys like the Nearby Galaxy Supernovae Survey. By integrating large language models with specialized function calls and modular workflows, StarWhisper Telescope autonomously generates site-specific observation lists, executes real-time image analysis via pipelines, and dynamically triggers follow-up proposals upon transient detection. The system reduces human intervention through automated observation planning, telescope controlling and data processing, while enabling seamless collaboration between amateur and professional astronomers. Deployed across Nearby Galaxy Supernovae Survey's network of 10 amateur telescopes, the StarWhisper Telescope has detected transients with promising response times relative to existing surveys. Furthermore, StarWhisper Telescope's scalable agent architecture provides a blueprint for future facilities like the Global Open Transient Telescope Array, where AI-driven autonomy will be critical for managing 60 telescopes.

Kaile Du, Yifan Zhou, Fan Lyu et al.

The partial label challenge in Multi-Label Class-Incremental Learning (MLCIL) arises when only the new classes are labeled during training, while past and future labels remain unavailable. This issue leads to a proliferation of false-positive errors due to erroneously high confidence multi-label predictions, exacerbating catastrophic forgetting within the disjoint label space. In this paper, we aim to refine multi-label confidence calibration in MLCIL and propose a Confidence Self-Calibration (CSC) approach. Firstly, for label relationship calibration, we introduce a class-incremental graph convolutional network that bridges the isolated label spaces by constructing learnable, dynamically extended label relationship graph. Then, for confidence calibration, we present a max-entropy regularization for each multi-label increment, facilitating confidence self-calibration through the penalization of over-confident output distributions. Our approach attains new state-of-the-art results in MLCIL tasks on both MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC datasets, with the calibration of label confidences confirmed through our methodology.