J Q Xu

Peisheng Qian, Jie Xu, Xulei Yang et al.

Incremental 3D object detection requires a detector to learn novel object classes while remembering previously learned ones over sequentially arriving data. Previous methods, primarily based on pseudo-labeling, perform reasonably in short-incremental stages but still suffer from severe model forgetting when dealing with long-incremental sequences. We investigate this failure and reveal a detrimental self-reinforcing cycle: data distribution shift of novel classes causes model forgetting on old classes, which further produces accumulated error in pseudo-labeling that exacerbates model degradation. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the human learning process and propose the \emph{Learning-Dynamics-driven Memory and Review} (LDMR) framework. LDMR monitors per-class detection quality at periodic training checkpoints and uses these learning-dynamics signals to drive two innovative mechanisms, namely (i) human-like intra-stage review that divides each incremental stage into multiple sub-stages' training and concentrates on remembering the most-forgotten objects, and (ii) scene-aware cross-stage memory evolution that evolves a memory bank to transfer knowledge between two consecutive stages by jointly considering scene learnability and diversity. Extensive experiments across multiple long-incremental protocols on indoor benchmarks SUN RGB-D and ScanNetV2 show that LDMR substantially mitigates the model forgetting and outperforms all baselines by a clear margin. Code is available at https://github.com/qianpeisheng/LDMR.

Zichen Ding, Jiaye Ge, Shufan Jiang et al.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, the need for unified evaluation infrastructure becomes critical. However, current evaluation pipelines remain highly fragmented and tightly coupled, hindering reproducibility and causing redundant engineering. To address this, we introduce AgentCompass, an open-source, lightweight, and extensible infrastructure for evaluating LLM-based agents. AgentCompass organizes the evaluation process around three independent components, namely Benchmark, Harness, and Environment, thereby enabling flexible configurations without requiring the reimplementation of complex execution logic. Furthermore, it features a fault-tolerant asynchronous runtime and comprehensive trajectory analysis tools to transparently diagnose nuanced failure modes like reward-hacking. Natively supporting over 20 benchmarks across five capability dimensions, AgentCompass provides the community with a scalable and reproducible infrastructure for advancing agent research.

Manni Cui, Ruiqi Liu, Dianyuan Zou et al.

AI-generated image (AIGI) detectors achieve strong accuracy on clean benchmarks, but their performance drops sharply after images are propagated through real-world channels. We trace this fragility to what these detectors actually learn: they overfit to local artifacts left by generators in small spatial neighborhoods, which are easily destroyed by common propagation degradations such as JPEG compression and blur. Instead, we shift the discriminative cue from fragile local artifacts to more robust global structure. Building on this, we propose GlobalForge, a framework with two complementary modules. The Local Information Bottleneck (LIB) suppresses local components to block shortcut learning, while the Global Structural Reasoning (GSR) module forces every token to gather evidence from distant regions. Both modules are trained jointly under a contrastive structural loss based on degradation that keeps the resulting features stable under degradation. To support fine-grained robustness evaluation, we further introduce RealDeg-Bench, covering 7 common degradation operators and multi-step compound chains. GlobalForge improves average BAcc on 8 in-the-wild benchmark groups by $\mathbf{5.89\%}$ over the previous state-of-the-art, and is clearly ahead of representative baselines on RealDeg-Bench under both single and compound degradations. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GlobalForge-BE0F/.

Manni Cui, Ziheng Qin, ZiAn Wang et al.

AI-generated videos (AIGVs) typically contain subtle temporal artifacts that arise from inter-frame inconsistencies rather than within individual frames. A detector that captures such artifacts should therefore benefit from video pretrained backbones over image only ones. In practice, however, video backbones with standard global readouts often fail to outperform strong image pretrained probes on AIGV benchmarks. We attribute this gap to excessive spatiotemporal aggregation in the readout. Video pretrained backbones tend to compress each frame into a single global descriptor. This compression suppresses local patch level temporal dynamics and discards inter patch relations, which are precisely the cues that AIGV detection most reliably depends on. Based on this, we propose Velocity Gated Patch Velocity Profiling (V-PVP), a lightweight readout that replaces only the aggregation layer with two parallel streams over the patch velocity field, adding only about $0.5$M trainable parameters. V-PVP serves as a general plug-and-play module that consistently improves performance across diverse video backbones under both end-to-end fine-tuning and linear probing settings. Our method reaches \textbf{95.28} AUC on AIGVDBench while keeping the backbone fully frozen. The results show that simply replacing the aggregation layer reactivates the temporal potential of frozen video backbones, restoring their advantage on AIGV detection. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PVP-81B3/.

Jiaqi Xu, Bjorn Ottersten, A. Lee Swindlehurst

This paper proposes a rigorous framework for sensing of environmental objects using diffraction mechanisms prevalent at wireless communication frequencies. Specifically, we develop a physics-consistent parameterized diffraction channel model, derive maximum likelihood (ML) approaches for estimating the blockage shape, range, and source directions of arrival (DoAs), and quantify fundamental performance limits via the Cramér--Rao bound (CRB). In our physics-based modeling, we integrate various approximations for the wave propagation (far-field, paraxial Fresnel, and exact near-field regimes), enabling a wide range of applicability. The underlying model is frequency-agnostic, and we derive Fresnel-number scaling laws that map the diffraction pattern, and hence the estimation problem, across carrier frequency, object size, and range. We quantify the maximum likelihood estimation performance and its relationship to the CRB, and we study the impact of the modeling approximations developed in this work. Numerical results demonstrate that ML estimators closely approach the CRB at moderate to high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and highlight the utility of diffraction-based modeling for high-fidelity blockage characterization.

Jiawei Liang, Haotong Qin, Linfeng Du et al.

Achieving nanosecond-scale inference latency for deep neural networks (DNNs) has become a primary architectural concern for latency-critical applications. While Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer a promising substrate for low-latency inference, conventional FPGA accelerators remain arithmetic-centric, using LUTs primarily as building blocks for numerical operators and peripheral logic. In contrast, recent LUT-native neural networks treat LUTs as learnable neurons, revealing promising theoretical potential to exploit their intrinsic logic expressivity. However, existing methods are largely confined to algorithmic optimizations, failing to translate this theoretical potential into high-performance FPGA accelerators. Specifically, their differentiable formulations do not faithfully match FPGA LUT primitives, their physically-unaware topologies compromise routability and timing closure, and their lack of automated optimization flow hinders systematic design space exploration (DSE) and efficient hardware implementation. In this paper, we propose FPGN, an end-to-end physically-aware framework that closes the gap between LUT-native learning and latency-optimized FPGA implementation. FPGN addresses these challenges through (i) a hardware-aligned differentiable formulation for training FPGA-native LUT neurons, (ii) a structured LUT-native topology with a streaming hardware architecture to improve routing locality and timing closure, and (iii) a latency-driven compiler that leverages high-fidelity analytical Quality of Results models to automate DSE and hardware generation. Experiments show that FPGN achieves up to 205$\times$ latency reduction compared to representative FPGA-based BNN accelerators and up to 30$\times$ higher LUT efficiency than prior differentiable LUT-native networks, while maintaining competitive inference accuracy.

Su Wang, Pin Qian, Yifan Lin et al.

Self-improving AI agents are designed to learn from their mistakes. We show they can also hallucinate mistakes that never happened. We study this failure mode in automated harness optimization, where an LLM-based proposer edits an agent's scaffold, including prompts, parsers, filters, validators and guardrails, to eliminate observed failures. But this process rarely asks first: was there a real failure to fix? We introduce the Counterfactual Fabrication Lab, a deterministic micro-lab where the correct action is known: do nothing. The lab plants a candidate guardrail for a failure class that provably never occurs, presents only legal episodes, and uses a byte-exact oracle to check every cited violation. The proposer behaves as expected on real violations and abstains on featureless legal input. Yet when the legal input contains a harmless pattern resembling a familiar game rule, it invents a failure: in 15/60 runs, versus 0/60 on featureless input, it enables the nonexistent-rule guardrail and cites a violation the oracle refutes. The effect is structured, not indiscriminate. In single-shot proposals it appears only when three conditions coincide: a rule-shaped pattern, an open-ended rule set and an instruction that presupposes failures. Removing any of these conditions eliminates the fabrication. Because the invented guardrail changes no true outcome and cannot improve an already-perfect suppression score, the phenomenon is neither reward hacking nor over-refusal. It is a phantom guardrail: a fix for a failure that never happened, invisible to suppression-only acceptance. Inside an add-only accept loop it re-enters even without the failure-presupposing instruction, the loop's keep-adding role supplying the demand the instruction supplied in single shot, and once in it stays. We present the Counterfactual Fabrication Lab for measuring fabricated failures in self-improving agent harnesses.

Ying Chang, Jiahang Xu, Xuan Feng et al.

The optimization of long-horizon agents increasingly relies on reflection-based mechanisms, where a large language model (LLM) acts as an optimizer to diagnose agent failures and improve agent policies. However, real execution traces are difficult to use directly for optimization: large trace collections are often redundant and heterogeneous, making optimization inefficient and prone to overfitting to low-value failures; meanwhile, each individual trajectory also contains many irrelevant steps, while naive context reduction methods such as truncation or sliding windows can discard causally important evidence and produce misleading optimization signals. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce STRACE (Structural TRajectory Analysis and Causal Extraction), a framework that constructs high signal-noise optimization contexts for more precise and effective optimization. At the batch level, STRACE mines failure patterns to filter redundant traces and retain representative failures; within each selected trace, it performs causal localization over a textual dependency graph to remove non-causal steps and identify the true root-cause module for optimization. Empirical results demonstrate that STRACE significantly outperforms standard context-filtering baselines. Notably, on a challenging formal verification task (VeruSAGE-Bench), it successfully optimizes human-expert designed agents, delivering $1.4\times$ success-rate improvement (42.5% to 58.5%). The code is available at https://github.com/moomight/STRACE .

Ya Wang, Hanwei Fan, Zhenguo Liu et al.

Modern processor verification struggles to reach deep architectural states due to the inefficiencies of traditional mutation-based fuzzing. We propose HiFuzz, a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that replaces mutation with a structured, two-layer generation process: a Program Agent for global layout and a Basic Block Agent for precise instruction filling. To overcome reward sparsity, HiFuzz integrates an adaptive coverage reward mechanism and a semantic-aware basic block encoder providing intrinsic feedback. Extensive evaluations on three real-world RISC-V cores demonstrate that HiFuzz significantly outperforms state-of-the-art fuzzers in coverage and bug detection.

Menglu Yu, Jiaqi Xu, Yuzhen Huang et al.

In large-scale industrial applications, deep learning models that power recommendation and ranking have complex and diverse model architectures. These models are continuously developed and refined by large teams of machine learning engineers, rendering manual optimization infeasible. Consequently, graph-based optimization techniques have become an industry standard for boosting performance, with PyTorch FX transformations leading the charge. These transformations typically rely on a set of human-engineered module-level rewrite rules which are not scalable to diverse model architectures. To address this limitation, we introduce Optimus, a general-purpose model transformation framework built in the PyTorch 2.x (PT2) machine learning compiler. With a concise set of predefined patterns, Optimus applies an efficient greedy search algorithm for pattern matching and replacement, while preserving model semantic. It is designed and implemented as a highly customizable and extensible framework integrated into the PT2 stack. Our evaluation shows that the framework can achieve up to 63% speedup, 6% peak memory reduction, and over 400 second compile time decrease for our industry-scale recommendation models compared to baselines. Optimus is open-sourced together with PyTorch 2.x as a customizable model transformation layer.

Qiyu Ma, Jiajie Xu, Mohamed-SlimAlouini

Underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) is an enabling technology for high-throughput subsea networks, yet its long-term deployment is constrained by the finite energy budget of underwater nodes. To address this challenge, we investigate a mobile system wherein an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) performs joint wireless information transfer (WIT) and wireless power transfer (WPT) for a network of randomly distributed sensor nodes. This paper develops \textcolor{blue}{an integrated mission-level framework} that combines stochastic node discovery with state-aware servicing. First, we present an analytical model for node discovery based on a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) analysis, deriving performance metrics that include the probability distribution of the discovery distance. Second, we introduce \textcolor{blue}{a threshold-based scheduling framework}, termed State-Aware Optimal Point Servicing (SA-OPS), which \textcolor{blue}{selects one of three actions according to the node's real-time energy state: preemptive charging, communication followed by charging, or communication only.} Simulations and multi-criteria decision analysis show that, \textcolor{blue}{under the considered assumptions and parameter ranges}, SA-OPS can improve the tradeoff between AUV energy expenditure and network-wide energy health relative to the adopted baseline strategies. The results also indicate that the selected charging threshold can be approximated by \textcolor{blue}{a simple state-dependent heuristic}, providing a practical guideline for autonomous energy replenishment in underwater networks.

Yin Huang, Qingsong Liu, Jie Xu

Mobile crowdsensing (MC) recruits mobile users to perform sensing tasks using their smartphones, enabling large-scale applications such as traffic monitoring and environmental sensing. A fundamental challenge is online worker recruitment under uncertainty, where the platform must learn workers' sensing performance while operating with a limited budget. Existing learning-based MC recruitment methods typically assume that each worker's sensing quality is stationary with a fixed mean over time. In practice, however, worker performance often improves with experience and eventually stabilizes, while the incurred sensing cost can be unknown in advance due to time-varying device and context states. In this paper, we study a budget-constrained online recruitment problem in which the platform selects one worker in each round, observes the sensing quality and incurred cost, where the expected sensing quality of each worker increases with experience and eventually converges to a plateau, and repeats until the budget is exhausted. We formulate this problem as a structured bandit model where each worker's expected reward evolves according to an unknown increasing-then-converging function of its participation count, and each worker has an unknown expected cost. We develop a cost-aware online learning framework that jointly learns evolving reward trajectories and heterogeneous costs, detects performance saturation, and allocates the limited budget to maximize long-term sensing utility. We provide theoretical performance guarantees and validate the proposed approach through extensive experiments, demonstrating consistent improvements over baselines that ignore experience-driven dynamics or assume known costs.

Hao Li, Han Fang, Zixin Pan et al.

Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, understanding 3D spatial relationships from 2D images remains a critical challenge. Existing methods primarily rely on symbolic text tokens, which inherently lack the fidelity to represent continuous geometric information. While recent methods use latent representations to enhance reasoning, relying on a single latent type cannot adapt to the diversity of spatial tasks, leading to misalignment in complex geometric scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose GeoAnchor, an interleaved text-latent reasoning framework. GeoAnchor decomposes 3D spatial information into three complementary components: position latents for object grounding, direction latents for relational orientation, and geometry latents for scene structure. These components are recombined in a structured space to construct local evidence while capturing global context, enabling dynamic and interpretable reasoning. Furthermore, we introduce a collaborative training strategy that guides the model from local spatial perception to comprehensive 3D understanding. Extensive experiments on diverse and complex 3D reasoning tasks demonstrate that GeoAnchor outperforms the state of the art, validating its effectiveness and generalization capabilities.

Xinyu Lin, Yashar Deldjoo, Sunhao Dai et al.

The rapid integration of large language model-based agents into recommender systems has driven a shift from static, ranking-based pipelines toward autonomous and interactive systems that can reason, plan, and act. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of this emerging landscape by introducing a unified taxonomy grounded in the level of autonomy and three core paradigms of agentic recommender systems: agent-assisted recommendation, agent-as-recommender, and agent-as-user-simulator. The autonomy framework organizes existing methods along increasing capabilities in proactivity, context awareness, interaction flexibility, and adaptivity. Building on this framework, the survey analyzes how each paradigm adopts different agentic architectures and how agents enhance key components such as profiles, memory, tool use, workflows, and optimization mechanisms. We further examine evaluation methodologies for agentic recommendation, covering automated metrics, LLM-based judging, and simulation-based assessment, and discuss their limitations in capturing reasoning quality, user experience, and system behavior. Beyond existing evaluation protocols, we further discuss unresolved issues in evaluating agentic recommender systems, including trajectory-level assessment, agent contribution analysis, and calibration of user simulation. Lastly, the survey outlines open challenges in lifelong user modeling, contextual abstraction, multimodal alignment, controllability, trustworthiness, privacy, scalability, and efficiency. Together, these analyses establish a unified foundation for understanding the current progress of agentic recommender systems and highlight promising opportunities for developing more autonomous, reliable, and human-aligned recommendation agents.

Xiaochun Niu, Tselil Schramm, Jiaming Xu

Suppose we observe two sets of $n$ Gaussian vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$, with the promise that, after applying a permutation of $[n]$ and a rotation of $\mathbb{R}^d$, the two sets are $ρ$-correlated. The Procrustes matching problem asks us to recover the unknown permutation of $[n]$ that aligns the two sets. The problem is well-studied in the low-dimensional regime $d=O(\log n)$, but the high-dimensional regime $d\gg \log n$ has remained largely uncharted: prior matching guarantees require nearly perfect correlation $ρ=1-o(1)$, even for information-theoretic recovery. Our main result is a polynomial-time algorithm for exact recovery at constant correlation. The algorithm works by computing and comparing weighted counts of a specially chosen family of ``wide'' trees. So long as $d\ge \mathrm{polylog}(n)$, the algorithm succeeds with high probability for any $ρ^2>\sqrtα$, where $α\approx 0.338$ is Otter's tree-counting constant. We complement this algorithmic result with an improved information-theoretic guarantee, showing that exact recovery is possible when $ρ^2 \gtrsim \max\{\log n/d,\sqrt{\log n/n}\}$. We also carry out a low-degree advantage calculation, which suggests that the condition $ρ^2 > \sqrtα$ is necessary for any tree-counting algorithm.

Jian Xu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley et al.

Parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) are increasingly used as policies and value functions in quantum reinforcement learning, yet it remains unclear when and why quantum policies generalize. We give a PAC-Bayesian account in which generalization is governed not by the raw number of circuit parameters, but by the effective dimension of the Fisher geometry induced by the circuit. This quantity is inflated by entanglement, making entangling connectivity an independent axis of complexity.In controlled experiments that fix the number of trainable rotations and vary only entanglement, we find that circuits with larger Fisher effective dimension exhibit larger train-test gaps, while parameter count is a weak predictor. The resulting bound acts primarily as a ranking certificate: it correctly orders circuits with identical parameter count, which parameter-counting bounds cannot do. We validate this mechanism across supervised classification, quantum contextual bandits, and value-function generalization, where entangled circuits consistently generalize worse than non-entangled circuits of equal parameter count, with gaps shrinking as sample size increases.Our strongest evidence comes from low-variance decision models, including single-observable classifiers, value heads, and one-step policies. In end-to-end multi-step policy learning, entanglement effects remain statistically significant but high return variance leaves the full ordering only partially resolved. Partial-correlation analysis shows that Fisher effective dimension screens off entangling pattern, and controls for training accuracy, readout, and optimizer rule out major optimization confounders. The effect also persists on an IBM Heron quantum processor under real noise. Overall, our results reframe quantum policy design around an entanglement--generalization trade-off rather than expressivity alone.

Yanping Chen, Weijie Shi, Wen Yang et al.

Skill usage can significantly enhance the ability of modern agent systems to complete complex tasks. However, the growing scale of skill libraries makes accurate skill selection increasingly challenging. In real-world scenarios, ambiguous semantic matching often arises between a specific task requirement and multiple generic yet semantically similar candidate skills. Moreover, existing methods tend to overlook the dynamic influence of task difficulty and skill applicability when selecting the optimal target skill set. To address these issues, we propose SkillReranker, an inference-time reranking framework for adaptive skill selection. Specifically, we first perform semantic decomposition on both the task and skill sides, yielding informative subtask and execution-state descriptions as well as transition-state descriptions that characterize each skill's functionality. These descriptions are then used to construct a directed acyclic execution graph, where intermediate task states are modeled as nodes and candidate skills as edges, thereby establishing a structured task-skill correspondence. On this basis, SkillReranker determines whether each state node satisfies the split condition to identify subtask intervals. For each task interval, we employ a cross-encoder to perform comprehensive scoring over candidate skills and select the most suitable ones to form the final target skill set. Experiments on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld with three backbone LLMs show that SkillReranker effectively improves task performance, reduces environment interaction steps, and lowers token consumption compared with existing skill selection baselines.

Hongliang Li, Yijin Liu, Zhiwei Zhang et al.

Large language model (LLM) agents have shown strong performance in long-horizon tasks that require planning, tool use, and interaction with external environments. However, most existing benchmarks implicitly assume a monolingual setting, where the entire execution process, including reasoning, tool invocation, and output generation, is conducted within a single language. In contrast, real-world applications often involve multilingual inputs and outputs within a unified workflow, yet the interaction between multilinguality and agentic execution remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce PolyWorkBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLM agents on multilingual long-horizon workplace workflows. PolyWorkBench consists of 67 tasks across five domains, including commerce, knowledge work, legal analysis, localization, and manufacturing, where agents must process heterogeneous multilingual inputs, perform iterative reasoning, invoke external tools, and produce structured outputs. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we propose a hybrid framework that combines structural grading, executable verification, and LLM-based semantic assessment. This design allows us to capture both functional correctness and linguistic consistency across complex workflows. Empirical results show that state-of-the-art LLM agents suffer significant performance degradation in multilingual workflow settings compared to monolingual counterparts. Our analysis suggests that multilinguality introduces compounding effects across reasoning and execution steps, highlighting the importance of jointly modeling language variation and procedural decision-making in agent evaluation.

Stone Tao, Jie Xu, Hesam Rabeti et al.

Linear-deformable manipulation remains challenging due to the complex deformations of objects such as cables and ropes. Prior data-driven approaches, particularly imitation learning, have shown some promise in narrowly defined settings but typically require thousands of demonstrations for specific tasks and cable types, limiting scalability and generalization. We introduce a sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) framework for multi-stage cable routing that leverages GPU-parallelized simulation to approximate linear deformable behaviors. Training across thousands of parallel simulations enables the learned policies to generalize across diverse cable geometries and deformation patterns. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we propose a novel deployment strategy that combines a Simulation In the LOop (SILO) execution framework, localized RL policies, and robust cable state estimation. On real-world cable routing tasks, our approach achieves higher success rates and 2x reduction in cycle times compared to prior state-of-the-art learning methods. To our knowledge, this is the first successful sim-to-real transfer of RL policies for multi-stage cable routing. Videos and additional visualizations are available at https://silo-cable-routing.github.io/

Chengkun Sun, Jinqian Pan, Renjie Liang et al.

Imaging signatures are quantitative features extracted from medical images that provide clinically meaningful information for tumor diagnosis, characterization, prognosis, and treatment planning. Although deep learning has shown great potential for imaging signature discovery, its limited interpretability remains a major barrier to clinical adoption. Existing approaches often achieve high predictive performance but provide little biological insight into the identified signatures. We propose a unified framework for interpretable imaging signature discovery by integrating deep learning based segmentation, explainable classification, and radiomic analysis. A robust segmentation model is first used to accurately delineate tumors, followed by a Grad-CAM guided pipeline that identifies diagnostically important regions as candidate imaging signatures. A mutual information based adaptive thresholding strategy enables patient-specific signature extraction. The resulting signatures are validated using a downstream deep learning classification model, while radiomic features extracted from the signature regions are evaluated with traditional machine learning models and interpreted using SHAP to identify the most discriminative biomarkers. The proposed framework is evaluated on the public BUSI breast ultrasound, KiTS renal CT, and BraTS brain tumor datasets, as well as a private UF Health renal CT cohort. Compared with conventional whole-tumor radiomics, the proposed signature-based approach achieves improved discriminative performance while providing greater biological interpretability. By converting deep learning attention into reproducible quantitative imaging biomarkers, this framework offers an interpretable and reproducible solution for non-invasive tumor characterization and imaging biomarker discovery.

J. Diaz Peon Gonzalez Pacheco, J. Xu, A. Zhao et al.

Infrastructure maintenance, contact-based inspection, and emergency response can benefit from aerial vehicles that act as a flying human hand with extreme maneuverability, manipulation, and resiliency (MMR): maneuverability to fly in arbitrary orientations to reach remote and tight locations; manipulation to point sensors, turn valves, and press tools at arbitrary orientations; resiliency to maintain accurate motion and force control despite disturbances from arbitrary directions, such as wind, ground effects, and friction. Realizing MMR on aerial vehicles requires not only omnidirectional flight; it also requires (I) vectoring of maximum thrust in any direction, to maximize capacity for contact-force application and disturbance rejection, (II) global stability, to enable control over any orientation/position, and (III) compact, standard designs that build upon platforms such as quadrotors to inherit technological know-how. No current aerial vehicle simultaneously enables I--III, due to structural and control limitations that constrain actuation. We present MorphQuad: a morphable quadrotor that enjoys MMR. Key to our approach is a hardware and control co-design: on hardware, we independently articulate each of the four rotor systems via two-axis gimbals; on control, we introduce globally-stable control, and energy-optimal thrust allocation that permits inter-rotor thrust cancellations only to avoid downwash interference and gimbal lock. With fully-onboard autonomy, MorphQuad demonstrates multi-revolution rotation while translating or hovering, for pipe inspection and target tracking (maneuverability); valve turning, perching, and object pressing and pushing with human-level strengths (manipulation); and wind rejection from any direction, even directed to a single rotor, and push-pull recovery (resiliency).

Jingtao Xu, Zizhuo Lin, Jianwen Sun et al.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in standard visual understanding, adapting them for active visual search in 360$^\circ$ panoramic environments exposes fundamental limitations. Specifically, standard MLLMs struggle to effectively model inherent panoramic properties, such as severe polar distortion and continuous cylindrical topologies, which significantly degrades target detection accuracy. Consequently, existing panoramic search methods attempt to compensate by relying heavily on fragmented local viewpoints. Burdened by rigid initialization and a lack of global panoramic priors, these approaches suffer from myopic, inefficient exploration and struggle with robust error recovery when targets are out of view. To overcome these challenges, we propose EAGLE-360, a novel Embodied Active Global-to-Local Exploration framework. Rather than performing exhaustive local searches, EAGLE-360 leverages global priors to establish an initial holistic perspective, iteratively reasoning and progressively narrowing the search space. Architecturally, we adapt RoPE Rolling, a coordinate-shifting positional encoding mechanism, to seamlessly model the continuous topologies of panoramas. To facilitate this paradigm, we construct the large-scale EAGLE-360 dataset, comprising 14,000+ 4K panoramas and 70,000+ rounds of high-quality VQA dialogues. By employing a training pipeline that integrates Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), we effectively elicit complex spatial reasoning and tool-calling capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EAGLE-360 establishes a new state-of-the-art for 360$^\circ$ visual search, achieving nearly an 8-fold increase in accuracy over the base model while significantly enhancing exploration efficiency.

Zikai Zhang, Rui Hu, Olivera Kotevska et al.

Cloud-edge Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) inference enables efficient deployment by splitting computation between edge devices and cloud servers. In this process, intermediate vision tokens are transmitted from the edge to the cloud over a communication link, thereby exposing a new attack surface. We study vision token manipulation attack (VTM-Attack) under a black-box man-in-the-middle setting, where an adversary intercepts and manipulates a subset of transmitted vision tokens under a budget constraint. We propose four naïve attack strategies and an optimization-based token selection method. Experiments on 6 state-of-the-art LVLMs (3B-72B) across 4 benchmarks show that manipulating only 10\% of vision tokens can reduce accuracy by up to 88.31\%. These results reveal a critical vulnerability in cloud-edge LVLM inference.

Jian Xu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as cheap, scalable judges that compare candidate outputs pairwise -- to rank responses, select models, or triage papers. Yet LLM judges are both noisy and systematically biased: they favor verbose or well-formatted answers and exhibit position effects, so simply aggregating their votes recovers a ranking of presentation, not of true quality. We study the practical goal of identifying the \topk{} items under a fixed comparison budget, and make two contributions. First, we cast judging as Bayesian inference over latent quality with explicit, judge-specific bias covariates (verbosity, position), regularized by a shrinkage prior so that the data decide which biases a given judge actually exhibits. Second, we introduce a \topk-aware active acquisition rule that chooses the next comparison to maximally reduce uncertainty about \topk{} \emph{membership}, rather than about the full ranking. On a controlled benchmark with known ground-truth quality, judged by sixteen real LLMs spanning open and proprietary families (Llama, Qwen, Phi-4, GPT-4o-mini/5.1/5.5, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Claude Haiku/Sonnet/Opus), naive aggregation plateaus at a wrong \topk{} on biased judges regardless of budget, while our bias-aware model recovers it; \topk-aware acquisition reaches this ceiling with far fewer comparisons than round-robin or a global-uncertainty (D-optimal) rule. Bias is real but heterogeneous and capability-dependent: cheap and mid-tier judges carry a strong verbosity bias that our model corrects (lifting recall from $\sim$$0.5$--$0.6$ to $0.84$--$1.0$), whereas the frontier judges we tested show little bias and already rank accurately, so bias-aware modeling changes little there.

Jinliang Xu, Liping Ma

This paper studies the Metabolic Multi-Agent Optimizer (MMAO) at the framework level rather than at the implementation or benchmark level. The central question is whether the metabolic resource loop of private energy, communal budget, role drift, and lifecycle turnover has a framework-level interpretation beyond narrative metaphor. We introduce a generic MMAO state model that abstracts away domain-specific move operators while retaining the resource bookkeeping that defines the framework. Under mild bounded-gain and bounded-spending assumptions, we establish boundedness and nonnegativity properties for private energy, communal budget, role state, and active population size. We then characterize three endogenous behavioral regimes of the loop: contraction under sustained resource deficit, reinvestment under surplus communal accumulation, and search redistribution under heterogeneous marginal returns across agents or subgroups. The analysis is intentionally conservative. It does not claim global convergence of the full adaptive system, universal superiority over specialist optimizers, or a complete stationary characterization of the resulting process. Instead, it identifies which internal regulation properties are generic consequences of the loop and which remain implementation specific. A compact mechanism-validation package on representative continuous and discrete MMAO realizations provides supporting empirical evidence for this reading, but is not intended to replace a full benchmark study. The resulting contribution is therefore a bounded, regenerative, resource-regulated interpretation of MMAO, rather than a complete proof of all adaptive behaviors of the full algorithm family.

Jinliang Xu, Liping Ma

This paper studies whether the Metabolic Multi-Agent Optimizer (MMAO) can act as a credible outer-loop optimizer for classification model selection. We propose MMAO-Cls, a mixed-space realization in which each agent jointly encodes a binary feature mask and classifier hyperparameters, while private energy, communal budget, role drift, and lifecycle turnover are mapped to the accuracy-complexity tradeoff of wrapper learning. The implementation is strengthened by deriving feature-budget adaptation from feature-information priors and by regularizing validation reward with both subset compactness and train-validation overfitting gap. We evaluate MMAO-Cls on seven standard tabular benchmarks with three seeds each and compare it against RandomSearch, GA-lite, PSO-lite, and an endogenous no-sharing ablation. On the aggregate validation objective, MMAO-Cls ranks second ($0.9433$) behind GA-lite ($0.9446$). On held-out test performance, it reaches mean score $0.8882$, improving over RandomSearch ($0.8808$) and GA-lite ($0.8857$), remaining close to PSO-lite ($0.8874$) and the no-sharing ablation ($0.8900$), while using the most compact mean held-out feature subset among all compared methods (feature ratio $0.4881$). Pairwise tests show that these margins are not yet statistically significant. The resulting claim is therefore conservative: MMAO-Cls supports classification applicability and compact mixed-space search more clearly than it isolates communal sharing as a decisive standalone advantage.