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
Understanding the progress of an activity requires tracking how the objects involved change over time. Object state readout provides this information by describing a target object's states and transitions across video frames. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) generate detailed visual descriptions, these descriptions may leave the attributes needed to distinguish successive states insufficiently specified. In this paper, we propose look-ahead state readout (LASER), an anticipation-guided agent for object state readout that uses possible next-step changes to determine which attributes to inspect in the present. Given temporally ordered frames and a target object, LASER converts anticipated changes into targeted visual questions and inspects the current frame to establish attribute values. It then checks state readouts and forecasts against independent observations of subsequent frames, refining a state record used to generate the final description. Reusable textual observation skills guide this process and are refined by tracing discrepancies with reference captions to the responsible instructions. Candidate revisions are selected on separate videos based on improved caption quality without increased contradictions with reference facts. Model parameters remain frozen throughout adaptation and inference, and the revised skills remain fixed during evaluation. Experiment results and further analysis on OSCaR and PLM RCap show consistent improvements of LASER over strong baselines and existing approaches, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14113
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
Biological intelligence emerges from neural activity that connects sensation, memory and action. Synaptic plasticity, neuronal assemblies and oscillations provide principles for biomimetic computing, but translating them into reusable operations requires a defined computational unit. We introduce Oscillatory Processing Units (OPUs), groups of synthetic neurons sharing a rhythm. Their directed interactions transform incoming activity and prior receiving state into an Oscillatory Occupancy Space (OOS), which becomes available to subsequent computation. We show that source--receiver conditions and oscillatory organization shape these transformations, including their geometry, persistence and historical accessibility. An Atlas of measured relationships supports prospective composition with predicted response classes. Configured circuits perform logical and numerical operations, express associative recall and generate closed-loop decisions with fixed synaptic weights. OPUs and OOS establish a computing substrate for biomimetic intelligence in which experience remains part of the state through which new input becomes action.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13840
Large language models can reason over scientific literature, but textual plans do not reliably produce biological sequences with the intended properties. Sequence generators capture sequence patterns, yet they do not interpret evidence, choose interventions, or reflect on outcomes. This separation creates an evidence-to-execution gap between scientific reasoning and sequence-level control. We introduce EASER, a reflective agent that connects the two through a learned property interface. The interface consists of property-specific low-rank directions trained offline and fixed during search; an LLM controller (the controller) composes them to steer a frozen diffusion generator. From retrieved evidence, sequence context, and prior outcomes, it proposes intervention hypotheses that specify anchors, editable positions, and coefficients. Probe-and-Steer tests these hypotheses and allocates further samples from their joint predicted responses; reflection updates the agent's memory. On computational antimicrobial peptide design, EASER balances activity, non-hemolysis, and non-toxicity. Explicit hypothesis formulation yields larger multi-objective gains than direct action generation, and ablations support evidence retrieval, episodic history, reflection, and Probe-and-Steer. EASER achieves the highest mean hypervolume and lowest mean IGD+ among the evaluated search policies and generators on screened candidates. These results show that a learned property interface can make literature-grounded reasoning executable at the sequence level.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06190
A humanoid that dances to streamed music must commit each motion chunk before it has heard the music that chunk accompanies, and must continue from motion it has already committed. We present AHEADance, a robot-native streaming dance generator executed on a humanoid robot by a whole-body tracker. ListenAhead conditions each chunk on heard music and a frozen music model's forecasts of the coming music, aligned to their target times and weighted by reliability. The forecasts carry the timing of upcoming beats almost as well as the actual future; with them, the generator is better synchronized with the music and concentrates more motion energy at its song's beat frequency. Commit Forcing trains continuation from the model's own committed chunks, updating both the latent history and the decoded boundary of the next chunk; it reduces low activity from 83.5% to 10.3%, the level of real dance. Three music evaluators, each validated on real G1 dance, test synchronization, song and style. On a physical Unitree G1, it dances while the music plays and comes to rest when it stops, without a fall. Project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13370
Protein engineering requires navigating rugged fitness landscapes, where small sequence changes can produce large functional differences, but experimental screening can only sample a small fraction of sequence space. Thus, a central challenge is to efficiently traverse the large combinatorial space of mutations in silico. We introduce ProTEUS, a mutation-resolved world model for closed-loop protein evolution. Pretrained on deep mutational scanning assays, ProTEUS learns a joint representation of sequence, evolutionary, and structural information using MutationFormer, a mutation-biased attention architecture. Variants are represented as states in this joint latent space, and mutations define actions whose functional consequences are predicted. To support exploration of many mutants, we developed a fast, physics-constrained all-atom predictor that utilizes explicit geometric constraint enforcement to achieve >10 fold increase in speed than AlphaFold3 with guaranteed physical validity. Lastly, ProTEUS refines its prediction and understanding of protein activity through closed loop experimental feedback to guide evolution toward a desired phenotype. ProTEUS surpasses established models in both zero-shot and supervised fine-tuning mutation prediction tasks. We experimentally demonstrate its utility in two closed-loop multi-objective engineering campaigns on aldehyde dehydrogenase and levansucrase, yielding variants with >10 fold higher activity than wild type. ProTEUS provides a world-model framework that connects virtual evaluation of mutational outcomes with experimental learning for efficient protein evolution.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13348
Temporal Sentence Grounding (TSG) aims to localize temporal segments in untrimmed videos that correspond to natural language queries, a critical task for video understanding with applications in video retrieval, summarization, and human-computer interaction. Despite significant progress driven by transformer-based models, existing TSG methods suffer from two key limitations: quantization errors due to temporal downsampling, which misalign segment boundaries, and suboptimal ranking of predictions based on semantic matching rather than localization precision. To address these challenges, we propose the Adaptive Boundary Refinement and Ranking (ABRR) framework, a novel, model-agnostic post-processing approach that enhances the performance of any TSG model without retraining. ABRR integrates three innovative components: (1) Temporal Distribution Smoothing, which mitigates noise in predicted score distributions using Gaussian kernel convolution; (2) Boundary Refinement via Optimal Transport, which leverages the 2-Wasserstein distance and Sinkhorn iterations to align coarse segment boundaries with true temporal moments, grounded in Monge-Kantorovich optimal transport theory; and (3) Quality-Driven Re-Ranking, which reorders predictions using a composite score balancing localization precision and semantic relevance. By correcting quantization errors and prioritizing accurately localized segments, ABRR achieves substantial improvements over state-of-the-art TSG models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including Charades-STA, ActivityNet Captions, and QVHighlights, demonstrate consistent gains at stringent IoU thresholds (e.g., IoU=0.7), alongside enhanced ranking performance. The framework's computational efficiency and compatibility with existing models make it a versatile and impactful solution for real-world TSG applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13310
Event cameras offer high temporal resolution and dynamic range for uncooperative spacecraft pose estimation, but models trained on synthetic event streams must generalize to the noise, background activity, and contrast variation of physical sensors. We present a comparative systems study of two independently developed approaches to synthetic-to-real, event-based 6-DoF spacecraft pose estimation. The first is a modular pipeline that combines learned keypoint detection and unlabeled target-domain adaptation with geometry-based pose recovery and temporal smoothing. The second directly regresses translation and rotation from global and cropped event representations using an apparent-scale cue, physics-motivated synthetic corruptions, and feature-consistency regularization. We evaluate both systems under the same SPARK 2026 hidden-test protocol on the real-event split of SPADES, with predictions for all test frames. The results reveal a component-wise reversal concealed by the aggregate challenge score: direct regression reduces orientation error by 22.7% (1.1767 to 0.9101 rad) and obtains a 13.4% lower composite score, whereas the modular pipeline reduces relative translation error by 78.7% (0.1335 to 0.0285). Archived configurations and a qualitative failure case identify plausible explanations for these complementary error profiles, without isolating their causes. These findings motivate a testable hybrid design that combines direct orientation estimation with geometry-constrained translation recovery.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09717
Real-time Voice AI agents must separate the active user from intelligible background speech that survives conventional noise suppression. Background sources include television audio, family members, and colleagues. Production denoisers remove non-stationary environmental noise effectively. Background speech shares the spectral characteristics of the target and passes through, causing false acceptances in downstream speaker verification (SV) and automatic speech recognition (ASR). We benchmark open-source speaker embedders TitaNet-Large, TitaNet-Small, ECAPA-TDNN, CAM++, and SpeakerNet under a strict sub-second latency budget. Evaluation combines a controlled benchmark with a weighted human-annotated production set. Our controlled benchmark is built from real calls in which a second real speaker is injected into silence intervals at modulated amplitude. We report three findings. First, denoising before embedding is generally harmful and raises equal error rate (EER) across architectures. Second, truncating audio below the full voice-activity segment degrades every model. Third, roughly half of the TitaNet embedding is redundant for this task. Trailing dimensions encode population attributes such as language and gender. Such attributes carry little discriminative value in a demographically homogeneous user base. We distill these results into deployment guidance. Verification should run on raw audio with full voice-activity chunks. Thresholds should favor precision over F1. Truncated embeddings reduce the cost of similarity search.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09516
A neural account of lexical access requires an explicit distinction between the structure of lexical representations, the associations linking representational levels, and the activity generated during retrieval. This paper specifies a spiking neural implementation of the mental lexicon within the Neural Engineering Framework and Semantic Pointer Architecture. Conceptual and phonological form representations are constructed recursively from relational graphs, whereas lemma representations provide independent lexical identities. The implementation contains 613 lexical entries and supports two directed processing pathways: perception maps a phonological form to its associated concept via a lemma, whereas production maps a concept to its associated phonological form via a lemma. Each pathway combines two associative-memory variants, winner-take-all (WTA) selection (competition) and thresholded transfer, and uses 199,400 leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. We formalize within-level similarity, cross-level associative retrieval, and the interpretation of decoded activity. Simulations show successful retrieval of eight selected words from the lexicon in both processing directions, with retrieval evaluated against all 613 lexical entries. These simulations use complete phonological forms as input for perception and complete concepts as input for production, illustrating lexical retrieval through the corresponding processing pathways. This paper provides a transparent description of lexical representations and neural retrieval mechanisms, supported by accessible code, lexical data, and online simulation documentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09402
Coding agents combine visual understanding with program execution, offering a new route to automated 3D creation. By translating images and instructions into editable programs, they bring reconstruction, generation, and editing into a shared workflow. Yet existing benchmarks fragment evaluation across task scopes and protocols, leaving their capabilities across construction levels unclear. We propose Frontier3DBench, a unified benchmark of 145 tasks across 9 categories spanning object, scene, and interactive open-world creation, with joint evaluation of appearance, structure, and behavior. Experiments with 11 model-harness configurations reveal strengths that vary by level: GPT-6.1-sol leads the object and scene levels and achieves the highest overall score of 66.02/100, whereas GPT-6-astra leads interactive world construction. However, all configurations score lower on reference reconstruction than on text-driven generation in object and scene tasks. Producing plausible content thus remains easier than reproducing specified geometry, layouts, and visual details. Moreover, generated worlds average 83.08/100 on local mechanisms but only 20.82 on motion clearance and 30.26 on stateful workflows: individual mechanisms often function, whereas complete activities that require coordinated actions and persistent state remain difficult. These results identify reference fidelity and coordinated activity completion as central bottlenecks for coding agents in 3D creation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09017
Reconstructing natural visual experience from cortical population activity is a central challenge in neural decoding, particularly for calcium imaging, where signals are noisy, temporally filtered, and paired neural-video data are limited. Here we present Ca2REAL (Calcium Activity to Reconstruct Events, Appearance, and Layout), a neural-to-video framework that conditions a pretrained video diffusion model through separate layout and semantic controls derived from calcium activity. Using measured responses from 7,863 V1 neurons in one mouse, Ca2REAL reconstructed held-out natural-movie clips with 81.4% all-pairs stimulus-identification accuracy, with its clearest gains over deterministic baselines in perceptual and semantic measures. We further evaluated the framework in a stimulus-aligned virtual population of 116,705 neurons assembled from encoding-model-predicted responses across 11 independently recorded datasets. Perturbation and ablation analyses showed that reconstruction depends on distributed, stimulus-specific population structure, with layout and semantic pathways providing complementary spatial and identity information. Temporal analyses further showed improved preservation of semantic dynamics across reconstructed clips. These results show that large-scale cortical population activity constrains the spatial, semantic, and temporal structure of natural visual experience, providing a generative framework for high-fidelity neural reconstruction of dynamic visual scenes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08887
Millimeter-wave radar resolves the micrometer displacements of a moving body as micro-Doppler, enabling gait, gesture, activity, pose and vital-sign sensing. Each task relies on a downstream model trained on real data, yet radar datasets lag orders of magnitude behind vision and language. Brute-force collection will not close that gap, and existing synthesis methods (forward-only simulators, learned generators and static-scene inverse renderers) cannot fit a real capture of a moving body, leaving a sim2real gap. We present 4D Point Splatting (4DPS), a physics-based differentiable renderer that fits an explicit moving scene to a real capture. Using the synchronized camera to initialize the room and body, we represent the scene as oriented points carrying material, normal and velocity, and splat each point into range and Doppler bins. Our output is the raw complex return a real radar records, so we apply the same signal processing on the rendered data to obtain any representation for training any SOTA downstream model. We fit 235 sequences on HuPR and 100 on RT-Pose, two datasets with different radars. Our reconstructions set the state of the art, with median correlations of 0.940 and 0.830 on range-azimuth, 0.829 and 0.695 on range-Doppler, and 0.988 and 0.966 on micro-Doppler. Our renders also set the state of the art in downstream sim2real gap. On RT-Pose, a pose model trained on them reaches 21.9 cm MPJPE on real data, against 16.7 cm for real training and 127.6 cm for the RF-Genesis baseline, where both the rendered- and real-trained models learn nearly the same features. Our custom CUDA kernels fit a sequence in 5.7 minutes on HuPR and 12.9 on RT-Pose on one H100, making dataset-scale inverse rendering of mmWave radar possible for the first time. This work can enable synthetic data generation for any human-centered downstream task and model, and scene editing for data augmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08342
Recent neural decoding approaches achieve strong performance by training on large collections of paired neural-behavioral recordings, but such datasets are expensive, invasive, and difficult to scale. In contrast, behavioral data is abundant and easy to collect, raising the question of whether neural decoding can benefit from decoupling behavioral and neural representation learning. We introduce BEEMO, a flexible multi-session framework that enables training with arbitrary mixtures of paired neural-behavioral recordings and unpaired behavioral data. A behavior decoder learns movement dynamics directly from behavioral trajectories, while neural activity is incorporated through cross-attention layers when available, allowing behavioral and neural supervision to scale independently. Across multiple intracortical motor datasets and tasks in nonhuman primates, we show that incorporating unpaired behavioral data improves decoding performance, particularly when transferring to new tasks, and that adding even a small amount of behavioral data from the target task further improves transfer. By decoupling neural and behavioral data, we unlock a new dimension for scaling: unpaired behavioral data, which is substantially cheaper and easier to collect than paired neural recordings, can be used directly to improve decoding performance. We further show that behavior-only pretraining, without any neural pretraining, achieves performance comparable to models pretrained on substantially larger neural datasets. Together, our results suggest that scaling behavioral data offers a practical and cost-effective path toward neural decoding models that generalize across subjects and tasks. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08263
Person identification from millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar point clouds has primarily focused on gait. However, since indoor walking is typically brief and fragmented, gait-based identification is largely constrained to designated passages that support continuous walking. Meanwhile, non-gait activities of daily living (ADLs) are pervasive and also encode discriminative personal signatures. In this study, we evaluate the feasibility of ADL-based identification from sparse mmWave point clouds using mm-ADL, a dataset comprising seven core ADLs collected from 11 subjects under controlled protocols. Moving beyond uniform gait introduces significant activity-dependent variations that confound identity representations. To address this challenge, we systematically benchmark three activity-identity learning paradigms: monolithic learning, joint multi-task learning, and two-stage activity-conditioned routing, under both closed-set identification (ID) and subject-disjoint re-identification (ReID) biometric settings. In parallel, we propose Dual-Stream Static-Dynamic PointNet (DS-SDPNet), an architecture tailored to radar point clouds that captures complementary spatial morphology and motion dynamics. Across seven ADLs, DS-SDPNet achieves 70.2% mean closed-set identification accuracy and outperforms existing baselines on both mm-ADL and mmGait. Moreover, benchmarking the three paradigms without ground-truth activity labels during inference yields up to 68.0% closed-set accuracy and 75.4% ReID mAP, providing a systematic baseline and confirming the feasibility of point-cloud-based biometric identification across diverse daily activities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08818
Event cameras enable tracking under fast motion and challenging illumination. However, stable long-term point tracking remains challenging: event activity is sparse and varies with scene content and motion, complicating correspondence, while trajectory estimates can drift over long sequences. Together, these challenges motivate a tracker that selectively uses informative event evidence and retains trajectory constraints across temporal windows. We propose Selective Event Evidence and Persistent Temporal Priors (SEPT), an event-only framework for tracking any point (TAP) over long sequences. SEPT introduces two complementary modules: Task-Adaptive Event Evidence Modulation (TEEM) and Persistent Trajectory Prior (PTP). Using only tracking supervision, TEEM learns a bounded reliability field that weights the event tensor across space, time, and channels before feature extraction. PTP carries geometric information across overlapping windows by marginalizing a fixed local quadratic trajectory model with a Schur complement. Its visibility-aware correction refines overlap coordinates, while a clipped terminal velocity initializes coordinates at newly exposed timestamps. SEPT builds on the ETAP architecture. SEPT is trained exclusively on synthetic EventKubric data and evaluated on five datasets across TAP and feature tracking. Results show that SEPT outperforms the retrained ETAP baseline in average Jaccard for TAP and in feature age and expected feature age for feature tracking; it also surpasses several methods combining event and frame inputs on EC and EDS. The source code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07713
Drug discovery requires continuous scientific decision-making across a vast research space. We introduce PharmAgents2, an autonomous system for end-to-end drug discovery that combines knowledge-enhanced decision-making with organized large-scale exploration. Paper2Skill extracts transferable scientific decision knowledge from public sources and, together with expert-developed skills, supports research decisions. Self-Scaling Discovery expands exploration through parallel agents inheriting research context and decision-making capabilities across targets, scientific hypotheses, and discovery strategies. We introduce PharmAgents-Bench v0.1, comprising 121 questions across nine decision scenarios and three end-to-end tasks assessed with expert-defined process rubrics. PharmAgents2 outperforms evaluated baselines in most decision categories and achieves the highest process scores on all three end-to-end tasks. In three real-world studies, autonomous investigations generated findings subsequently supported by human-executed experiments. For LpxH, PharmAgents2 hypothesized a previously unreported allosteric site and screened compounds against it, identifying a novel inhibitor scaffold with experimentally confirmed inhibitory activity and binding. For JAK1, it prioritized a covalent inhibition strategy and nominated compounds with experimentally demonstrated activity. Starting from a known bioactive molecule, Self-Scaling Discovery explored candidate targets across the proteome and identified a new binding target, with the interaction subsequently confirmed experimentally. PharmAgents2 represents a prototype of a virtual pharmaceutical company, marking a step toward autonomous end-to-end drug discovery.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07653
We present IMUDINO, the first foundation model (FM) for inertial sensing to achieve competitive performance across diverse sensing tasks including human activity recognition (HAR), health, motion capture, and odometry. Prior inertial FMs often focus on one subfield of inertial sensing and sometimes underperform state-of-the-art supervised methods (e.g., in HAR), making their scope considerably narrower than FMs for vision and natural language. Moreover, they often require fixed input length and sampling rate, and generalize poorly to unseen sensor locations. To build a general-purpose foundation model for inertial sensing, we adapt the DINO self-supervised learning (SSL) paradigm to inertial data through a set of semantics-preserving motion transformations that simulate variations in motion pattern and sensor setup. For model architecture, we use a plain transformer encoder with frequency-aware positional encoding that natively supports varying input length and sampling rate. This simple setup proved remarkably effective for learning global and dense features generalizable across users, sensor setups, tasks, and, in the case of robot odometry, embodiments. We hope IMUDINO can serve as a backbone for inertial sensing and kickstart the development of general-purpose inertial FMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07437
We introduce LifeVal, a benchmark evaluating AI model performance on personalized agentic consumer tasks. LifeVal covers the most valuable life tasks that a personalized digital superassistant could automate, representing over 1.7 trillion US dollars in annual willingness-to-pay across 148 consumer task categories (e.g., managing finances, moving apartments, searching for a job, finding childcare). To construct our activity distribution, we conducted a new survey of willingness-to-pay for a digital superassistant across a demographically representative sample of over 3,800 consumers, cross-referencing our results against the American Time Use Survey (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025) and the Multinational Time Use Study (Fisher et al., 2025). For the most valuable consumer activities, we recruited task creators to create AI evaluation tasks personalized using real ChatGPT conversations and memories, reference files, and personal context. Task creators had to pass our expertise threshold (including personally completing the task multiple times and seeing the results through in their real lives for over a year) and also write a rubric, ensuring that our evaluation measured the best personalized completion for that task. All tasks had to pass at least three rounds of human quality-control before acceptance into our final evaluation sets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06687