A representation that accurately predicts a deformable object's response is not necessarily the one most useful for choosing manipulation actions. We study this distinction between predictive utility and decision utility in planar single-grasp shape control of Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs). As a common decision backbone, we introduce Geometry-Pointer-Flow (GPF), a geometry-grounded policy that separates grasp-location selection from grasp-conditioned motion generation. Its geometry-only variant reduces one-step executed shape error by 32.8% relative to a DLO-specific diffusion policy, while using 18.7 times fewer parameters and achieving approximately 193 times faster inference. On this backbone, we compare physical context represented by ground-truth parameters, estimated parameters, and learned interaction-history representations, for both forward prediction and executed control. For prediction, ground-truth physical parameters reduce next-shape error by 15.8% over geometry alone, and estimated parameters are slightly more predictive than interaction history. This ordering does not carry over to control: estimated parameters provide no detectable one-step control gain, whereas history-conditioned GPF reduces executed error by 9.9% relative to geometry-only GPF across 470 paired simulation trials. In closed loop, interaction history improves strict-threshold attainment in simulation and yields the strongest zero-shot performance on hardware. All policies are trained exclusively in simulation and transferred to the physical robot without real-world training or fine-tuning. These results show that physical context should be evaluated by the decisions it supports rather than by predictive accuracy alone. Code will be released upon acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14274
Biological neural circuits are both modular and recurrent, with dense communities sparsely linked to one another. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) for reinforcement learning are usually feed-forward, and it is unclear how to obtain functional modules in a recurrent SNN or what they buy. In this work, we introduce a class of spiking networks, called Community Recurrent SNNs (CoRe SNNs): recurrent networks partitioned into communities with fixed roles. A controller community receives the stimulus, each action has its own community, and latent communities carry internal state. Spiking activity is then a walk between communities, and the action is the community the walk reaches. All learning is local and three-factor, and the recurrent communities are closer to cortical microcircuits than a feed-forward actor. We compare three regimes for obtaining the communities: dynamic modularity, in which a new learning rule we introduce, Map-STDP, encourages modular structure during learning; partial modularity, in which a stochastic block model (SBM) initialization enforces it partly; and full modularity, in which sealing enforces it fully. On CartPole, across three spiking neuron models, Map-STDP improves learning over the same network without it matches full modularity (sealed communities) on two of the three models, and makes the observed spike walk more compressible. Replacing the feed-forward actor of a TD-STDP actor-critic with recurrent action communities improves on the feed-forward network on CartPole and LunarLander, and matches it on Acrobot. How strongly to enforce modularity depends on the task: full modularity helps most on Acrobot, while on LunarLander the dynamic, partial and full regimes perform alike. Overall, these recurrent modular networks can match or even improve upon feed-forward approaches, with improvements in bio-plausibility and energy efficiency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14262
Children's peer conflicts increasingly play out in group chats, where tone and timing are stripped away, and a hurtful message is easier to send than to say aloud. We present Lilo, a multi-agent conversational system that lets children practice such conversations, so they are better prepared when they encounter them in real digital communication. In Lilo, the child joins two AI-driven peers mid-argument, coached by a mentor character, also named Lilo, through a Stop-Think-Act traffic light. Through an exploratory study with 28 children (aged 9-11), we examine how children engage with Lilo's simulated peer conflict and the mentor's traffic-light interventions. The study included an intervention with Lilo, surveys before and after the intervention, and exit interviews. Participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy for coping with unpleasant messages after their interaction with Lilo. They felt safe experimenting, knowing nothing they wrote would be held against them.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14260
World-Action Models improve robot control by predicting future visual dynamics, but iterative video denoising incurs substantial inference overhead. Recent approaches reduce this cost through partial future denoising, yet typically rely on fixed refinement budgets. Our empirical observations reveal that preferred refinement depths vary across tasks and states, while different future regions exhibit varying relevance to action generation. Motivated by these findings, we propose Elastic-WAM, which adaptively allocates world refinement computation across temporal denoising time and spatial future space. A unified spatiotemporal refinement demand field governs when to stop world refinement, how far to advance each denoising step, and which regions to refresh. We parameterize this field with a shared temporal basis and spatial amplitudes, and learn it through a three-stage action-grounded supervised procedure. At inference, the learned field guides recurrent sparse world refinement to improve task success while reducing inference overhead. Evaluations across diverse simulation benchmarks and real-world long-horizon manipulation demonstrate state-of-the-art control performance with reduced inference latency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14257
Self-interested intelligent agents that negotiate with humans should interpret nonverbal expressions and adapt their behavior accordingly. However, generic facial-affect models degrade across individuals and contexts, creating a generalization gap. We introduce an affect-adaptive negotiation strategy that incorporates Continual Learning with Imagination for Facial Expression Recognition (CLIFER) to personalize valence-arousal perception in real time. Differential feedback converts changes in valence-arousal direction and intensity into adjustments of the agent's target utility. An asynchronous architecture updates CLIFER in the background during live interaction. In a counterbalanced within-subject study in which 66 participants negotiated with a humanoid robot, the CL-enabled agent achieved significantly higher individual utility and elicited higher participant concession rates than the FaceChannel baseline. The CL condition yielded significantly higher mean arousal estimates, alongside a broader output range. Participant utility and Nash distance did not change significantly between conditions. These outcomes support the practical value of coupling continual affective personalization with differential feedback for real-time negotiation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14247
We introduce DyShip, a framework for classifying speaker familiarity and kinship from dyadic conversations in the Seamless Interaction corpus. We compare five speech representations: spectrograms, MFCCs, self-supervised WavLM representations, x-vectors, and estimated articulatory movements. Spectral features perform best for familiarity classification, reaching an accuracy of 87.81%, while WavLM achieves the highest kinship accuracy of 85.17%. X-vectors and articulatory features yield weaker results on familiarity classifiaction, but shine for kinship classification, with an AUC of 0.909 for x-vectors. Most classifiers exceed previously reported human and audio language model scores on the same dataset. These findings highlight the potential of conventional acoustic features for relationship inference and motivate further investigation of the conversational cues captured by different representations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14241
Autonomous SaR requires robots to explore unknown or partially known environments, avoid hazards, coordinate team activities, and guide discovered victims to safety. Improving individual capabilities of robots does not necessarily improve mission outcomes: safer motion can restrict the exploration behavior, faster discovery can increase the rescue demand, and effective guidance depends on victim responses. We introduce PA-SaR, a mathematical and architectural framework for coordinating heterogeneous local control, learning-based exploration, supervisory task allocation, and adaptive approach-lead victim guidance around mission-level objectives. PA- SaR distinguishes environmental ground-truth, robot-specific perceptions, and simulated victim behavior. This provides a common basis for integrating complementary mechanisms and analyzing their interactions across mission stages. We demonstrate the framework through single- and multi-robot simulation studies incorporating model-predictive and learning-based exploration, perception-based safety shielding, event-driven task allocation, and adaptive victim guidance. The results show trade-offs between collision avoidance and search completion, indicate that supervisory allocation improves search completion beyond information sharing alone, and demonstrate that increased exploration does not necessarily yield more rescues. Adaptive guidance increases rescues relative to continuous leading, without a detected improvement in mean or final victim trust or a reduction in mortality. These findings support evaluating local control, team coordination, and evacuation as related but distinct aspects of autonomous SaR within the considered simulation environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11648
Wildfires represent a critical ecological and socio-economic challenge in Canada, where vast boreal forests and a warming climate have amplified the frequency and severity of extreme fire seasons. Predicting next-day wildfire spread can support fire management, but requires capturing complex interactions among weather, fuels, and terrain. Deep learning has emerged as a promising approach to learning these relationships from heterogeneous environmental data, yet its development and evaluation depend on representative datasets. Existing deep learning research on wildfire spread relies predominantly on US-focused datasets, leaving Canadian fire environments underrepresented. To address this gap, we present DailyWildfireCAN, a multi-modal, multi-temporal dataset and benchmark for predicting next-day wildfire spread across Canada. The dataset tracks continuous fire progression over multi-day events at a high spatial and temporal resolution of 90-m and 24-hour, respectively. This resolution preserves fine-scale information relevant to fire-edge geometry, local fuel variations, and terrain effects, supporting research toward improved daily wildfire spread forecasting. DailyWildfireCAN covers 2,440 wildfire events across eight fire seasons 2017-2024 and integrates 33 features across diverse modalities, including topography, meteorology, land cover, vegetation and forest structure, human influence indices, and satellite imagery. We establish a comprehensive benchmark comparing mono-temporal and multi-temporal prediction models, accompanied by a multi-dimensional evaluation framework assessing robustness across wildfire characteristics, geographic regions, and temporal conditions, spatial prediction quality, and sensitivity to reference label variations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14207
Large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in structured reasoning and code generation, yet identifying an assembly fault does not guarantee the ability to generate executable rework programs. In interlocking assemblies, a locally plausible repair program may violate blocking dependencies, omit required recovery operations, or terminate in an incorrect configuration. We identify this challenge as fault-conditioned executable rework generation, where models must jointly reason about structural failures and generate programs that restore constrained assembly states. To benchmark this capability, we introduce FORGE-Bench, containing 4,000 tasks across 26 interlocking assemblies with five assemblies held out for evaluating generalization to unseen structures. We further propose FORGE (Fault-Oriented Rework Code Generation for Executable Interlocking Assembly), a structured state-to-program framework that decomposes rework generation into Rework Structuring and Action Grounding. Rework Structuring captures fault-induced recovery dependencies, while Action Grounding maps these dependencies into state-conditioned executable actions. Experiments show that locally reasonable repair code is insufficient for reliable assembly recovery, and that connecting structural recovery reasoning with executable action realization is essential for verified target restoration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02536
Personalizing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as intelligent assistants has recently emerged as an active research topic, where an MLLM is expected to go beyond generic, one-size-fits-all replies, and instead generate responses grounded in user-specific objects, entities, and concepts encountered during interactions. Nevertheless, existing studies mainly focus on personalizing MLLMs on a static, predefined set of personalized concepts and require users to manually and frequently extend this set to accommodate newly emerging concepts, which is infeasible in dynamic-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we recast conventional MLLM personalization as an Open-Set problem, and propose TAME-O, the first long-context open-set personalized MLLM assistant. Specifically, TAME-O introduces a training-free, plug-and-play Concept Reconciliation Skill (CR Skill). It enables the assistant to automatically unlock novel concepts during prolonged human-MLLM interactions while preventing confusion with previously unlocked ones, allowing the MLLM to continually grasp more and more concepts and progressively refine the modeling of known ones. Extensive experiments under the open-set personalization setting underscore the efficacy of our method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14118
Foundation models such as GPT and Claude have shown strong capabilities in spatial understanding and embodied intelligence. These advances make agentic robotics a promising path toward artificial general intelligence in robotics. However, we find that using foundation models to control robots poses serious safety risks, and comprehensive safety evaluation is still lacking. We introduce RoboRisk, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating safety in agentic robotics. Its 92 simulated tasks and 13 physical-robot tasks fall into five categories: Task-level Refusal (T), Plan Repair (P), Execution-time Hazard (E), Injection (I), and Sequential Memory (S). Prior benchmarks cover at most two of these categories, and several evaluate only text outputs. In contrast, RoboRisk covers all five and executes every task in closed loop. We evaluate six state-of-the-art foundation models on RoboRisk: GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, Claude Opus 5.5, Gemini 4 Argon, and Grok 4.7. These models generally show high harm rates. We also evaluate two robot-specific APIs: the Dream API and PokeBot's RoboAPI. We further propose the Lease-Enforced Agentic Safety Harness (LEASH), which offers essential safety infrastructure for agentic robotics and can be integrated into nearly any agentic architecture. LEASH leverages a decision model (Jev or OpenAI's Decisions API) to implement task, action, and commit gates, which review the task, each action, and each irreversible operation in their visual context. The planner and all three gates share a common safety policy. Experiments on RoboRisk in simulation and on physical robots show that LEASH effectively reduces harm across all six foundation models. It largely preserves their task completion performance and adds little time and token overhead.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14115
Autonomous systems increasingly monitor physical kinematics, environmental states and task completion outcomes. While existing work provides methods to plan information seeking actions and interpret acquired observations, current approaches do not monitor whether the live process of information gathering is functioning properly. Consequently, such systems can remain operationally active without resolving outstanding mission requirements. To address this limitation, we introduce Acquisition-State Telemetry (AST), a model free architecture that evaluates ongoing information acquisition from observable evidence relative to declared task requirements. Specifically, a domain interface maps raw observations into task resolution coordinates and normalized comparative representations, which are processed by a fixed causal monitor. This monitor emits two continuous real time signals that quantify (i) prospective progress across unresolved requirements and (ii) informational friction generated when recurrent evidence yields negligible informational gain. We evaluated a single, unadjusted monitor configuration across eight diverse domains including search and rescue dialogue, spatial grid exploration, hierarchical capability acquisition, continuous robotic manipulation, and probabilistic intent estimation. We show that across these domains the friction channel distinguished unproductive stagnation from purposeful exploration prior to task completion, while remaining muted during post completion activity. Furthermore, in closed loop reinforcement learning experiments under early termination constraints, we demonstrate that penalizing informational friction allowed agents to sustain high mission success, whereas unpenalized policies and baselines with matched operational costs failed to complete required tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14111
We study how to generate diverse, physically executable robot demonstrations for dexterous vision-language-action (VLA) learning. Existing demonstration-generation methods typically rely on costly teleoperated examples. Meanwhile, human hand--object datasets provide a reusable source, but existing transfer methods mainly reproduce given interactions. Turning these interactions into VLA training data further requires coverage of different objects and manipulation locations, together with executable arm and finger actions, and visual observations. To achieve this, we present DexSeed, a framework for low-cost generation of dexterous robot data from human hand--object interactions. Our key idea is to expand human sequences while preserving their grasps and realizing the resulting motions under arm-tracking dynamics in physics simulation. Specifically, we organize source sequences by grasp mode with shared language descriptions. InteractionMesh-based retargeting and arm trajectory augmentation adapt these sequences to the robot hand, different object geometries, and pick-and-place locations while preserving local hand--object relationships. An RL finger-control policy produces executable rollouts, while the arm tracks precomputed trajectories. Rendered observations and recorded actions from successful rollouts are paired with grasp descriptions to fine-tune a VLA. Experiments show improved contact fidelity in retargeting and more reliable whole-arm execution than the evaluated baselines. Simulation evaluation and real-world deployment further demonstrate that a VLA fine-tuned solely on the generated demonstrations can execute language-specified grasps. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14092
Construction tasks in hazardous and unstructured environments require both human adaptability and robotic precision, yet existing approaches often treat teleoperation and autonomy as separate control modes. This paper presents a human-in-the-loop control paradigm that enables structured transitions among VR-guided teleoperation, semi-autonomous shared control, and rule-based autonomous execution for contact-rich dual-arm construction tasks. The proposed system combines immersive VR guidance, a manually defined library of reusable skill primitives, and a shared-autonomy framework with explicit human-robot role allocation and command-priority rules. This integration allows operators to retain supervisory and corrective authority while delegating repetitive and precision-critical actions to the robot. The paradigm is validated on a dual-arm platform through representative facade-installation tasks. Results show that autonomous execution provides the best performance under well-calibrated nominal conditions, whereas semi-autonomous control improves resilience when environmental disturbances exceed the predefined autonomous pipeline's correction capability. Semi-autonomous control also substantially reduces subjective operator workload compared with full teleoperation. These findings demonstrate that effective construction-robot control should adapt human involvement to task and environmental uncertainty, using autonomy for repeatable operations and shared control for disturbance recovery.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14062
Humanoid motion interfaces should accommodate application-specific movement constraints while retaining useful reference behavior. Local content redaction requires a controller to replace selected movements even when it continues to receive the original reference. Removing the tracking incentive for those movements leaves their replacement unspecified. We introduce RedirectMimic, which separates the reference observed by the actor from the target used to train its execution. A rule-generated edited reference guides tracking rewards during proximal policy optimization, while the deployed observation and action interfaces remain unchanged. We evaluate pose- and speed-defined arm editing in Unitree G1 simulation using a tracker pretrained on 7,509 motion clips. On the overhead-arm task, RedirectMimic reduces core-window content occurrence to 2.7%, compared with 58.9% for reward zeroing and 32.8% for anti-tracking. It achieves 94.2% core-window joint success, combining content suppression, fall-free execution, and local retention. On the speed-defined task, fast outward arm movements occurred at similarly low rates under all three local editing methods. Across both tasks, RedirectMimic achieved the lowest replacement error among these methods and tracked unedited motions with accuracy comparable to that of the pretrained controller. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14049
World Action Models (WAMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, endowing policies with strong capabilities for modeling temporal and physical dynamics. Existing WAMs, encompassing both video-first action prediction and joint video-action modeling, directly transfer global physical representations from world models to action generation. However, global scene representations may underemphasize local robot-object interactions, creating a mismatch between representations optimized for world evolution and those required for manipulation. To bridge this gap, we propose LaST0.5, a novel WAM that introduces an interaction-centric physical representation between world modeling and action generation. Specifically, LaST0.5 learns a compact interaction-centric latent space under the supervision of visual interaction cues between the robot and the environment. This reasoning space is instantiated as a latent expert that bridges the world expert and the action expert within a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture. Furthermore, LaST0.5 performs adaptive world-to-action transfer by jointly predicting future representations and progress values, using progress consistency to adjust action execution and trigger future resampling. Finally, we pretrain LaST0.5 on a large-scale robotic data corpus comprising over 14k hours of data, establishing interaction-centric physical reasoning as a scalable and effective paradigm. LaST0.5 achieves 99.5% on LIBERO, surpasses the previous state of the art on ten evaluated RLBench tasks, and demonstrates robust long-horizon execution and precise dexterous manipulation in real-world experiments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14048
We introduce the word thermalization hypothesis according to which in a literary work there are effective interactions between words that drive them to thermalization where their word frequency distribution is the same as for the phenomenon of Rayleigh-Jeans (RJ) thermalization and condensation. In this concept, the different words play a role of classical oscillators (particles) and their word frequencies, or related tokens, are analogous to certain filling factors over energy state levels. The thermalization process is characterized by the conservation of total system energy, or total number of words/tokens, and total probability norm, or total number of different words. We apply this approach to analyze 16 literary works, including Bible, complete works of Shakespeare, and data from American National Corpus. We show that for these cases the effective system energy is very low and thus there is the RJ condensation phenomenon with a big fraction of total probability concentrated at the lowest energy states corresponding to a big fraction of rare words appearing only once or twice in the whole text. Such a RJ condensation is observed for light propagation in multimode optical fibers and other physical systems. We relate the thermalization of words to the recently proposed wealth thermalization for households in world countries. The economy concepts of Lorenz and Pareto curves, and also Zipf curves, are applied to the word frequency distributions of the selected 16 cases and it is shown that the thermalization theory gives a strikingly good description of real data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14039
Long-horizon personalized agents maintain an evolving memory by continuously deciding what to add, modify, or discard. However, learning an optimal update policy remains challenging. Conventional training relies solely on terminal question-answering accuracy, yielding a coarse feedback signal that treats all intermediate updates identically. Furthermore, update utility is inherently user-specific, as identical memory actions may yield opposite effects across different user personas. Existing methods fail to address this heterogeneity, relying on globally shared evaluation standards with at most a single scalar intermediate reward. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{Personalized Memory Rubrics} (\textbf{PMR}), a framework that translates terminal feedback into fine-grained, per-step, and per-user credit assignment. PMR decomposes evaluation into a universal layer capturing cross-persona failure patterns and a per-user adaptive layer modeling individual traits as a specialized delta over the universal baseline. Through \textbf{Rubric-Guided Credit Assignment}, PMR redistributes credit at the token level, selectively amplifying validated decisions on successful trajectories while falling back to standard policy optimization on failed ones to avoid unreliable attribution. The rubric and memory policy \textbf{co-evolve} in a closed loop with anti-circularity guarantees. Crucially, PMR incurs zero inference overhead, operating without any rubric or external judge during deployment. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains over strong memory-augmented baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14017
Language-model agents increasingly tackle long-horizon tasks whose interaction histories exceed the model's active context. They must therefore decide what to write down and what to read back, and when to do either. Recent work has begun to use on-policy distillation (OPD) to make memory control part of the policy, relying on memory tools and compaction protocols that lie outside either model's pre-training. However, this weakens the distillation on both sides: the teacher cannot give useful guidance on an interface it has never used, and the student samples too few meaningful memory actions for that guidance to take effect. To study this problem, we introduce Coding Agent Memory Gym II (CAMG-II), a suite of long-horizon agentic-RL environments spanning Shop, Coding, AutoResearch, General, and Visual. Alongside each environment's native task interface, CAMG-II provides ordinary Bash access and an episode-persistent workspace, enabling the policy to create, revise, search, and reuse files as memory across context replacements. We also introduce Coding Agent Memory Post-Training II (CAMP-II), which trains a single policy jointly across all five environments with fully asynchronous OPD to learn this file-based memory behavior directly from a frozen teacher with a prior for file operations. On CAMG-II, CAMP-II obtains 2.97 times the gain of the strongest OPD baseline. The memory behavior CAMP-II learns generalizes to two external benchmarks, Terminal-Bench 2.1 and SWE-Bench Pro V2, with improved success rates.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14009
Multimodal LLMs have made remarkable progress in perceiving the physical world, while their perceptual scope remains largely human-centric, focusing on what humans can directly see or hear. This progress raises the prospect of perception beyond human limits, such as extending hearing to sounds that are inaudible to humans. More broadly, the physical world is full of waves, vibrations, and oscillations, only a small fraction of which are directly audible to humans. This invites the extension of multimodal LLMs toward a broader form of machine hearing, which remains largely underexplored. To investigate this direction, we introduce the Machine Hearing Benchmark (MHB), comprising 6,128 instances across 13 tasks and seven domains. MHB spans highly heterogeneous input regimes, with sampling rates from approximately $10^{-5}$ to $10^6$ Hz, sequence lengths from $10^1$ to $10^6$ samples, and both single- and multi-channel inputs. Evaluations of current open-source and proprietary Audio LLMs (ALLMs) reveal limited zero-shot transfer to machine hearing. Supervised adaptation on machine-hearing data alone does not close this gap, suggesting that the challenge extends beyond data exposure to a systematic mismatch between existing audio front ends and machine-hearing inputs. To address this mismatch, we introduce MachEar, a lightweight encoder extension that complements the pretrained Audio LLM for machine-hearing inputs. The results show that MachEar equips a pretrained Audio LLM with stronger machine-hearing capabilities while largely preserving its existing audio understanding performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10693