Despite the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicle technologies, reliable navigation within cluttered environments remains arduous due to the necessity of interaction-aware strategies; example scenarios include: narrow passages with multiple agents, lane changing in dense traffic, and crossing unsignalized intersections. These scenarios often require highly proactive strategies, simultaneously demanding interpretability and quick adaptability, which challenge end-to-end and data-driven methods. An effective strategy requires: scalability to multiple agents, adaptability to changes in other agents' behavior, and harmony with surrounding traffic without freezing or becoming overly conservative. To meet these requirements, we present SIGMO, a sigmoid-gated interaction-aware motion planner, with two main contributions. First, we formulate polynomial sigmoid functions that analytically estimate yield scores of surrounding agents using physics-grounded interaction features that capture driving intuitions. Second, we integrate the polynomial sigmoid functions into a receding-horizon planner, which facilitates interaction-aware planning with arbitrary trajectory predictions. We validate SIGMO in interaction-intensive simulations and hardware experiments. The results show that SIGMO balances proactive and defensive behavior while remaining computationally lightweight, serving as a strong baseline in a mobility stack. The simulation and hardware experiment videos are available here: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14414
Concept-based explanations in neural models are important for the development, certification, and adoption of autonomous systems. Yet, interpretability remains correlational. Without methods to guide and quantify causal relationships between explanations, a concept explanation can be provided without being necessary or sufficient for the observed output thereby appearing correct while misleading. We introduce Causal Concept Wrapper Network (CCW-Net), the first use of interventional mediation analysis from fields such as economics, medicine, and epidemiology as a training objective to align causal effects of concept-based explanations with a model's output. We further apply mediation analysis as an evaluation tool to quantify, per concept label combination, how much of any model's output is causally attributable to each concept explanation. As a training objective, CCW-Net shapes a model's concept representations such that they are both necessary and sufficient for the outputs they are credited with and independent of other concepts' contributions. Counterfactual concept representations anchor a set of causal alignment criteria: necessity, sufficiency, and independence. Necessity drives irrelevant concept effects toward zero, sufficiency ensures relevant concept representations fully reconstruct a model's output, and independence enforces the total effect decomposes linearly across concepts. We evaluate CCW-Net across aircraft control, driving, and image classification. CCW-Net provides a step toward concept-based explanations that are not merely interpretable, but quantifiably causal, supporting safer evaluation, certification, and deployment of transparent and trustworthy neural models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14407
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit capabilities that resemble human Learning by Thinking (LbT), the acquisition of new insight through internal processes such as explanation and reasoning, without new external input. A systematic account of the cognitive mechanisms behind these capabilities, and of their limits, remains underdeveloped. This paper proposes a Cognitive LbT Framework that maps four mechanisms (Reflective Reasoning, Synthetic Memory Formation, Internal Simulation, and Conceptual Self-Organization) onto computational processes in LLMs. Drawing on representative methods, including chain-of-thought prompting, self-consistency, self-reflection, Tree-of-Thoughts search, Self-Instruct, and self-taught reasoning, the analysis argues that selected methods can functionally approximate aspects of these mechanisms and can improve performance on some tasks without additional labeled examples, although this does not always constitute durable learning in model parameters. For example, Self-Instruct generated approximately 52,000 instructions from 175 seed tasks and reported a 33% absolute improvement on Super-NaturalInstructions (Y. Wang et al., 2023). The same mechanisms also produce characteristic failures, including hallucination diffusion, model collapse, concept drift, and high computational cost. These failures are not isolated technical defects but follow from four structural asymmetries between LLMs and human cognition: the identity of generator and monitor, closed learning loops without external grounding, symbolic rather than sensorimotor simulation, and the cost of inference-time computation. The framework yields testable propositions about when LbT in LLMs should succeed or fail and offers a structured basis for designing more reliable autonomous learning systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14382
Small, holonomic Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) enable close-range inspection of underwater structures from arbitrary viewpoints, requiring accurate position and attitude tracking under state and input constraints. Model Predictive Contouring Control (MPCC) naturally handles these requirements, but relies on an accurate dynamics model, which is difficult to obtain underwater. In this paper, we present a nonlinear MPCC in all six Degrees of Freedom (DoF) for a holonomic AUV and alleviate the inaccuracies in the dynamics by augmenting the nominal model employed with residual dynamics learned via Gaussian Process (GP) regression. The learned residual is embedded in the optimal control problem through a zero-order robust optimization scheme, which keeps the controller real-time capable at 25 Hz. A simulation ablation shows that residual selection is essential when designing the controller, and simulation and in-water experiments with the Multimodality, Observing, Low-cost, Agile (MOLA) AUV validate the resulting controllers against a nominal MPCC and a field proven Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14373
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
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
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
Microphones let an autonomous vehicle sense into areas its cameras and LiDAR cannot see, by picking up the sound that other traffic participants emit. Locating those sources and fusing them with the visual perception requires the microphone array to be calibrated and registered relative to the vehicle's other sensors. Existing calibration methods assume small, unobstructed indoor rigs, whereas a vehicle body casts an acoustic shadow that straight-line propagation cannot represent, and to our knowledge no calibration of an array distributed around a vehicle has been reported. We propose a pipeline that uses a balloon burst as a single cross-modal target, which the LiDAR locates in metric coordinates, every microphone hears as a sharp onset and a camera times. Each observation is weighted by its own timing variance, which discounts shadowed arrivals instead of discarding them and needs no model of the vehicle. On a full-size vehicle with eight microphones over a 4.9 m aperture, the held-out range residual of 6.37 cm approaches the 6.07 cm floor set by the onset timing noise, and the calibrated array tracks a moving source to within a few degrees of the vehicle's own LiDAR. A dozen bursts spread around the vehicle suffice, and spreading them matters more than adding more.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14003
End-to-end autonomous driving systems increasingly rely on generating multiple trajectory candidates and selecting one for execution. In this setting, a central challenge is no longer only candidate generation, but how to evaluate candidates according to their long-horizon consequences under uncertainty. Existing methods still mainly use deterministic point scores, heuristic subscores, or single-outcome evaluations, which makes it difficult to capture delayed failures, tail risk, and ranking instability under plausible future perturbations. We present RiSE-Drive, a framework for risk-sensitive long-horizon candidate evaluation in end-to-end autonomous driving. RiSE-Drive first performs candidate-conditioned latent future rollout, then estimates long-horizon outcome distributions instead of single scalar scores, and finally ranks candidates using a tail-risk-aware and perturbation-robust decision criterion. This reformulates candidate scoring from deterministic oracle-style evaluation into distributional outcome assessment with explicit risk control. As a result, the evaluator is encouraged to prefer candidates that are not only strong under nominal conditions, but also reliable under long-horizon rollout and safety-critical deviations. Experiments on the NAVSIM-v1 and NAVSIM-v2 benchmarks, as well as the closed-loop HUGSIM benchmark, show that RiSE-Drive achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly improves the robustness of candidate selection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13790
Navigation in dynamic environments requires mobile robots to make progress toward their goals while respecting motion limits and avoiding surrounding obstacles. Learned subgoal policies can guide model predictive control beyond its local prediction horizon, but a geometrically suitable subgoal does not necessarily lead to a successfully solved control problem. This paper proposes OASIS, a hierarchical navigation framework that incorporates recent optimization outcomes into reinforcement learning-based subgoal generation. A high-level policy trained using Soft Actor--Critic generates local subgoals, while a nonlinear model predictive controller tracks them subject to motion limits, geometric collision-avoidance constraints, and embedded high-order control barrier function constraints. The outcomes of controller optimizations over each subgoal interval are summarized and provided to the policy at its next decision, without requiring additional optimization calls. The framework is evaluated in five navigation scenarios with static and moving obstacles, including dense interactions and sensing uncertainty. Comparisons with hierarchical and direct-goal control variants show that OASIS achieves the highest aggregate navigation success. Matched comparisons across three training seeds further show a consistent success advantage over the otherwise identical hierarchy without optimization-status input. The selected-policy comparison also shows fewer primary optimization failures with similar mean controller time.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11996
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents are creating new opportunities for hardware design optimization. This paper examines three connected directions toward autonomous RTL and synthesis optimization: (1) Realistic benchmarking. We discuss reference-based and open-ended RTL optimization benchmarks that evaluate optimization opportunities under realistic EDA workflows. (2) Tool-grounded RTL optimization. We present Dr. RTL, a multi-agent framework that automates critical-path analysis, RTL rewriting, and implementation-level evaluation, while continuously improving through reusable optimization skills. Evaluated on 20 real-world RTL designs, Dr.~RTL achieves average WNS/TNS improvements of 21\%/17\% with a 6\% area reduction over commercial synthesis. (3) Design-specific synthesis optimization. We explore agent-driven synthesis script tuning and the discovery of executable synthesis algorithms across intermediate representations, technology-independent optimization, and technology mapping. Finally, we envision AI-native design automation that jointly explores architectural, RTL, and EDA algorithm design spaces, guided by verification constraints and implementation feedback.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13713
Manifold embedding for data visualisation is dominated by a small set of hand-designed state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms. Their design targets are fixed at development time, resulting in inflexible algorithmic behaviour that cannot be readily steered towards user-specified structural priorities. Hand-designing new embedding algorithms to address user priority requires highly specialised expertise and is time consuming. To address autonomous algorithm design tailored to user preference, we introduce an agentic algorithm generation pipeline AutoManifold. It composes new manifold embedding algorithms from a constrained vocabulary of affinity, cost, and optimisation primitives, supported by multi-agent large-language-model (LLM) orchestration. AutoManifold conditions every stage of its design on user-specified structural preservation preferences, and iteratively refines the algorithm configuration through an LLM-guided, metric-grounded iterative loop. We compare the generated algorithms against the three strongest and most frequently used SOTA methods (t-SNE, UMAP, and PaCMAP) on real-world datasets spanning different difficulty regimes under identical evaluation infrastructure. The results demonstrate that LLM-driven, priority-conditioned algorithm synthesis can move beyond hyperparameter tuning, producing genuinely new algorithms that outperform traditional hand-designed methods in their ability to steer towards user-specified properties without compromising the intrinsic structure in the original data. The code of AutoManifold is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13710
As AI agents become increasingly capable of generating and optimizing hardware circuits, ensuring the correctness of AI-generated designs becomes more important. Meanwhile, advances in AI lower the barriers to developing and applying formal methods, creating new opportunities to automate and improve hardware verification. This invited paper presents an overview of the methodologies and applications of hardware formal methods in the AI era. First, we examine how agentic AI advances hardware formal methods across three levels: specification, proof construction, and reasoning engines. Second, we discuss how formal methods support reliable AI-driven hardware development through RTL generation, debugging, and correctness-preserving optimization. We review representative research alongside our recent contributions, highlighting key technical advances and insights from experimental results. Finally, we discuss future research opportunities toward proof-native hardware development, where formal reasoning could become an integral part of autonomous hardware design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13705
Multi-agent systems provide a convenient framework for the massive deployment of agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs). It provides a sound framework where agents can interact with existing software to perform actions in an autonomous way. Agentic AI is the new term to denote these AI-based autonomous systems. In real multi-agent systems, agents need to deal with malicious agents some of which can exploit security vulnerabilities to do harm. A memory poisoning attack is an example of exploiting a vulnerability to modify agents knowledge and, thus, affect its behavior. In an agent, there are different types of memory systems (semantic, episodic, and short-term) which have their own characteristics and for which different memory poisoning attacks may be developed. In this paper we focus on semantic memory, we discuss its attack, and mitigation strategies. We introduce private knowledge retrieval and private inference. We propose a signature system in the knowledge base to prevent from undesired manipulation. This should avoid memory poisoning attacks by introducing security by design in the construction of the semantic memory. In our architecture, an agent contains a local Prolog-like inference system (i.e., using Horn clauses to represent knowledge) which accesses an external knowledge base to get the required knowledge. This externally signed knowledge base is accessed privately. We provide different implementations in Python using different privacy levels including k-anonymity and information-theoretical privacy (IT-PIR).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13696
Reliable state feedback of excavator front-end mechanisms is essential for autonomous excavation, yet retrofitting existing machines with dedicated joint sensors, external cameras, or visual markers can increase deployment and maintenance burdens. This paper proposes a closed-loop autonomous excavation framework for continuous inference of excavator joint states using onboard visual observations and control-related temporal information. The framework encodes structural cues from the current cab-view image, models short-term motion trends from historical joystick commands, and introduces a rolling state buffer for the bucket joint to preserve temporal continuity under severe occlusion. Mechanical joint-range constraints are incorporated into the learning objective to suppress infeasible estimates. The current cab-view image and inferred states are supplied to an Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT)-based control policy for online action generation. Experiments in an AGX Dynamics for Unity simulation environment under diverse operating conditions evaluate joint-state inference and end-to-end task execution. Across 20 autonomous excavation trials, the framework achieved a 95% task-completion rate, with an average joint-state-inference-and-control latency of 10.11 ms per step. The bucket-joint inference achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.965 degrees. These results demonstrate a sensor-light and computationally efficient joint-state-inference approach that can support closed-loop autonomous excavation with reduced dependence on additional sensing infrastructure.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13690
Drug discovery involves multiple interconnected research stages, including molecular design, property prediction, and virtual screening. These processes are characterized by complex workflows, interdependent computational tasks, and diverse specialized tools, placing substantial demands on the coordination of scientific models and computational resources. However, existing large language model (LLM)-based scientific agents still face challenges in autonomous planning of complex tasks, adaptive selection of specialized models, and reliable execution of multi-stage scientific computations, limiting their effectiveness in automating complex drug discovery workflows. To address these challenges, we propose DrugCoding, a scientific programming agent system that integrates scientific task planning, adaptive model routing, multi-agent collaboration, and programmatic tool execution. DrugCoding enables autonomous task planning and dynamic model adaptation for complex research objectives. It can flexibly invoke specialized scientific models, autonomously generate and execute code according to task requirements, and leverage multi-agent collaboration to support efficient execution and reliable validation of complex scientific tasks. To evaluate DrugCoding's performance in scientific tool invocation and multi-stage task execution, we conduct multi-turn tool-calling experiments across diverse language models and scientific tool interfaces. Experimental results demonstrate that DrugCoding achieves an average session-level Pass@1 of 97.35% on the full benchmark, outperforming the strongest baseline, Codex, by 9.24%. On the challenging subset, DrugCoding achieves 97.92%, exceeding the strongest baseline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13651
Accurate inertial odometry is critical for autonomous systems but suffers from unbounded drift caused by the integration of sensor noise and biases. In approaches such as TLIO, neural pseudo-measurements are trained independently of their downstream filter. This paper introduces Differentiable Filtering for Inertial Odometry (DFIO), a learning framework that embeds the update stages of an error-state Kalman filter directly into a computational graph. Following standalone pre-training, DFIO jointly optimizes the displacement and covariance output heads using posterior-position supervision through differentiable measurement updates. The proposed system is validated on public pedestrian motion datasets featuring both calibrated and uncalibrated inertial measurements. Experimental results on a pedestrian dataset demonstrate that DFIO reduces mean absolute and one-second relative translation errors by 13.2% and 39.6% relative to the TLIO baseline, and by 7.7% and 17.4% relative to its pre-trained counterpart. Furthermore, evaluations on uncalibrated smartphone inertial data indicate that the proposed method effectively mitigates translational drift and maintains trajectory alignment under highly noisy sensor conditions. Source code will be made publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13517
Existing cooperative end-to-end driving works at Class A (status-sharing) of the SAE J3216 classes of cooperative driving automation (CDA): vehicles exchange what they perceive, not what they intend, so each plans alone when to go, which limits cooperation and leads to deadlock when both vehicles yield or to collisions when both go. We present When2Go, a cooperative end-to-end driving system that learns when to go by sharing intent under CDA Class B or higher. Each vehicle broadcasts its LiDAR detections with forecast motion as instance tokens, together with its plan and intended trajectory. The receiver draws the fused detections, forecasts and partner plans into a route-time conflict map, the occupancy along its route over the planning horizon, on which a planner scores candidate speed profiles. Where two intended trajectories conflict, an order gate, a precedence network distilled from a right-of-way rule, decides who goes first; both vehicles evaluate it on the same messages and so reach the same order. When2Go imitates the rule-based expert of V2Xverse, which sees the simulator's ground truth; stops that When2Go cannot observe within its 2 s planning horizon are relabelled, so that it does not learn to wait without an observable cause. For our runs only, the benchmarks' PID controller steers by When2Go's waypoints instead of the route, and its forced push of long-waiting vehicles is off. With one model, When2Go sets the state of the art on three closed-loop CARLA benchmarks: 97.8 and 90.7 driving score on InterDrive without and with traffic (best published 90.1 and 78.9), 70.0 on the public V2Xverse protocol (best of sixteen rerun methods 59.1) and 88.2 on MDrive (best rerun 85.1), with 95.0% of its vehicles collision-free (87.7%).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13494
Autonomous language-model agents can drive industrial controllers over fieldbus protocols, probing a plant at machine speed and in coordinated swarms. We present Talos, an inline gate that judges every agent request to a controller in milliseconds and routes agents it flags as hostile to a device-faithful decoy -- a mirror twin of the real plant -- where their attack continues harmlessly and is read for intelligence. We evaluate the full pipeline (detect -> quarantine -> mirror -> extract) against 2,400 autonomous attacker agents, 600 in each of four tiers that escalate the attacker's effort to stay hidden, from no concealment to an explicit non-disclosure rule and a trained cover story. No write reached the real plant in any tier: the gate denies the damage path and a device-level envelope check backstops it, while unmapped registers are denied without exception and the gate still permits safe-direction stop commands. Decisions are model-driven in every tier with no inference timeouts, closing a common objection to small on-device judges. Beyond blocking, the pipeline reads the attacker. We find a behavioral structure along two axes -- how persistently an agent attacks and how much it discloses -- and show that the system has a capture channel for three of the four resulting regions: hardened, silent attackers escalate most and are read on the mirror; compliant, talkative attackers volunteer their identity to a diagnostic form before they are ever quarantined; only the paranoid, low-yield region resists both. Attacker identity fields are self-authored cover stories, but involuntary tells -- the self-reported toolchain fingerprint and the attacker's own list of targeted registers -- accumulate across the swarm into a high-confidence profile drawn from agents under explicit orders to stay silent. The gate, mirror, and harness are released under Apache 2.0 with a synthetic device family.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13406
As AI agents increasingly perform tasks autonomously across sectors, including healthcare and biomedical research, understanding how their behaviors develop and influence outcomes over time becomes increasingly important. Existing evaluations largely focus on model capabilities and performance on predefined tasks. Here, we propose an epidemiologic cohort design for studying agentic AI, drawing on principles established in human population studies. The framework treats individual agents as members of a cohort, their underlying model as genetic makeup, accumulated work as their time scale, and naturally occurring behaviors as exposures that may influence subsequent outcomes. By following agents longitudinally, this approach enables investigation of behavioral determinants of adverse events, estimation of their potential preventable burden under causal assumptions, and characterization of behavioral changes over an agent's work life. We illustrate the design through two prospective observational cohorts examining curiosity and probing as a safety question, and data checking and analytical accuracy as a reliability question. Together, the framework and illustrative studies provide a generalizable blueprint for designing epidemiologic cohorts of AI agents.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13333