Autonomous
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F3-AGI v4.0: Bioenergetically-Gated Active Inference, Metaplastic Preconditioning, and Residual Program Synthesis for Sample-Efficient Abstract Reasoning
2026-11-09 22:47:43Henrique OliveiraAbstract
Few-shot abstract reasoning on ARC-AGI requires inducing algorithmic transformations from 2 to 5 demonstration pairs without task-specific pretraining. Because few-shot demonstrations under-constrain the hypothesis space, program synthesis suffers from the Rashomon effect (predictive multiplicity): heuristic search finds spurious programs with low training error that fail on test inputs, while unconstrained library growth degrades latency. We introduce F3-AGI v4.0, a CPU-native neuro-symbolic and active inference architecture comprising three mechanisms: (1) F3-Metabolic-Optim, combining mistake-gated plasticity, Fisher-EMA preconditioning, and virtual ATP gating; (2) Adaptive Complexity-Guided Program Synthesis (AACR) with a Cycle-3 ResidualPatchSynthesizer and smallest-pair early rejection; and (3) a 512D L2-normalized random projection driving Expected Free Energy (EFE) exploration with dead-signature pruning. Across three empirical studies: (i) on a synthetic 5-task class-incremental stream without replay, F3-Metabolic-Optim achieves 91.67% final accuracy with 9.17% forgetting, skipping 93.47% of updates, cutting L1 plasticity cost by 65.7%, and running 2.19x faster than EWC; (ii) on the 400-task ARC-AGI-1 public evaluation set (offline CPU, zero LLM calls), F3-AGI v4.0 solves 57/400 tasks (14.25% pass@2; 56/400 pass@1) with a mean latency of 1.62 s/task, decomposed into 19/50 (38.00%, 1.19 s/task, a 42.5x paired speedup over Horizon 2) on the 50-task calibration slice and 38/350 (10.86%) on the 350 strictly uninspected hold-out tasks (with 7 autonomous Cycle-3 patch solutions); and (iii) in a local 5-game (15-level) ARC-AGI-3-inspired interactive suite, our agent completes 15/15 levels with 89.44% level-weighted RHAE (90.72% unweighted).
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13325
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Decide, Ask, or Defer: Clinical LLMs under Incomplete Evidence
2026-11-09 21:39:31Mingzhan Yang, Weili WuAbstract
Clinical LLMs must decide not only what diagnosis to produce, but also whether the available evidence is sufficient for autonomous decision making. Binary DECIDE/ABSTAIN formulations merge distinct non decision states and do not explicitly evaluate information acquisition. We introduce a DECIDE/ASK/DEFER formulation together with a blinded protocol that prevents models from using evidence completeness metadata. We evaluate Qwen, Gemini, and GPT on 200 matched clinical evidence states constructed from DDXPlus. The models show substantial differences in action selection under identical evidence, with disagreement in 137 of 200 states. For Qwen, a matched targeted versus random analysis shows that selected information changes the likelihood of a subsequent autonomous decision more clearly than diagnostic correctness. Its matched DECIDE/ABSTAIN baseline further reveals a safety autonomy tradeoff: the three action policy rescues some erroneous autonomous decisions but also removes some correct autonomous deci sions. These results show that separating information acquisition from clinician deferral exposes behavior that binary abstention hides, without yielding a uniformly improved decision policy.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04542
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Curie's Jarvis: Autonomous Robotic Chemistry Experiments from Printed Protocols
2026-11-09 21:22:55Rumi Loghmani, Bozhang Song, Victor Alvarado, Aliyah Redding, Amir Barati FarimaniAbstract
A person running a bench experiment works from a printed instruction sheet, tells identical containers apart by the labels written on them, and looks at the bench again before each step. Lab automation usually works the other way around: the procedure is written as a script, and containers stand at fixed positions or carry fiducial markers. We present Curie's Jarvis, a system that lets a robot arm carry out a chemistry experiment on a bench set up for people. It reads the steps from a photo of the printed sheet, finds containers on an ordinary bench with no fixed positions or markers, tells identical-looking containers apart by reading their labels in four camera views, locates its target again before every step, and sets how each step is carried out, including its speed, from what is being handled. On a Franka Panda arm, Curie's Jarvis completed 5 of 5 runs of one protocol from a children's chemistry kit and 4 of 5 runs of another, with no human intervention, and in 160 locates on printed and handwritten labels it identified every container correctly. This brings robots a step closer to doing bench chemistry the way people do.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13251
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ExpertCrowd-SWE: Measuring Frontier Coding Agents on Expert-Authored Engineering Tasks in Unfamiliar Codebases
2026-11-09 21:20:57Josip Vrdoljak, Akash Singh, Bas Steunebrink, Alex Yarotsky, John Lorenzo, Achille Nicoletti, Sam PigottAbstract
ExpertCrowd-SWE (EC-SWE) is a benchmark of 100 expert-authored, multi-file software engineering tasks for evaluating autonomous coding agents in large, unfamiliar codebases. Each task is a change request written by a practising engineer against a pinned commit of a real repository, paired with a sealed reference solution and a task-specific grader whose weighted, mostly executable criteria award partial credit; must-pass blockers and pass/fail gates encode what a maintainer would refuse to merge. The tasks span 87 open-source projects and 11 languages. The median ticket is 148 words, while the median reference solution changes 471 lines. Every task image is calibrated before release so that the reference solution scores 1.0 and both the untouched repository and an inert change score 0; nearly half of the tasks also ship alternative, lazy and adversarial control patches that the grader must classify correctly. The final 100 tasks were selected for difficulty against current frontier models. We evaluate seven frontier models, five runs each (3,495 scored runs), in a single platform harness that gives each model its provider-native tool interface. Claude Opus 5.5 (67.3%) and GPT-6 Astra (63.7%) lead without a statistically significant gap, followed by Claude Fable 5.1 (46.5%), Gemini 3.8 Flash (40.0%), and a statistically indistinguishable group of Qwen 3.8 Max, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Grok 4.6 (32-34%). No task is fully solved by every model, and on 80 tasks no model earns full credit on all five runs. Scores span 35 points. Depending on the model, agents take a median of 33 to 166 steps per run, with little relation to score. We release 24 tasks with their environments, graders and results, and hold out 76 to limit contamination.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13246
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An Integrated Open-Source Stack for Vision-Based Autonomous Navigation of Wheeled Rovers
2026-11-09 20:38:25Iaroslav Kolomiets, Iaroslav Sheipak, Mikhail Reppo, Vsevolod Egorov, Viktor Chertopolokhov, Isaac ChairezAbstract
Vision-based rover autonomy requires integrating perception, localization, planning and platform-specific control under limited sensing and computing resources. We present an open-source ROS 2 stack for following directional arrows, reaching a terminal cone and returning autonomously to the start. It connects YOLOv8n detection and geometric direction, range and bearing estimation with RGB-D SLAM, wheel-inertial state estimation, kinematics-aware planning, behavior-tree mission management and STM32 actuation. Standard interfaces separate reusable autonomy from the hardware layer; a proportional path-following plugin supports low-speed rover motion. Public resources include software, configuration, a labeled dataset, trained weights and evaluation logs. On 478 held-out images, the detector achieves mAP@0.5 of 0.720 under the Ultralytics evaluator and outperforms a classical OpenCV baseline under a shared evaluation protocol. The reported perception latency is 25 ms on a Jetson Orin NX. Three missions, one indoor and two outdoor, demonstrate marker-guided navigation and autonomous return without operator motion commands or reported collisions. Field results document integration failures and corrective choices; repeated instrumented trials remain necessary to quantify physical navigation errors and reliability.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08100
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From Process Models to Composable Agentic Workflows: Combining BPMN, Agents and Enterprise Knowledge
2026-11-09 20:18:32Christian Fillies, Jan Fillies, Frauke Weichhardt, Gay Anne Wood-AlbrechtAbstract
LLM-based agents can reason, use tools and collaborate. However, coordinating increasingly complex agentic applications becomes difficult to understand, monitor and improve. Decisions distributed across prompts, tool calls and application logic make workflows implicit. We introduce **Recursive Capability Composition**, enabling agents to execute business processes and expose them as reusable Agentic Tools. This paper presents a BPMN-based approach to Agentic Workflows, combining explicit orchestration with autonomous reasoning. SemTalk BPMN models are transformed into executable workflows using a LangGraph/Pregel runtime. Agentic Tasks introduce LLM reasoning at selected activities, while conventional BPMN controls process flows, deterministic decisions, system interactions and human approvals. Agentic Participants provide reusable interfaces for agent behavior or other executable processes. BPMN orchestration makes multi-agent systems more understandable and manageable. Explicit process models provide developers and operators with a shared view of workflow structures and execution progress, facilitating debugging, monitoring and optimization. Enterprise agents also need organization-specific context. Process Models and Knowledge Graphs describe activities, participants, information objects, decisions and relationships between processes. They provide structured knowledge of how an organization operates, supporting informed agent decisions and actions. Our contributions are threefold: 1. **Model-Driven Execution:** Transforming BPMN models into executable Agentic Workflows. 2. **Recursive Capability Composition:** Exposing agents and executable business processes as reusable tools for other agents. 3. **Enterprise Context:** Using Process Models and Ontologies to provide organization-specific knowledge for agent reasoning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13196
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Cognitive Multi-Agent Search and Rescue: Language-Grounded Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Collaborative Robotics
2026-11-09 19:45:28Sepideh Ravanbakhsh, Hamidreza MoradiAbstract
Effective search and rescue (SAR) operations require autonomous systems capable of coordinating multiple heterogeneous agents, adapting to dynamic hazards, and aligning with human mission intent. Existing language-guided reinforcement learning (RL) methods primarily focus on single-agent instruction following and lack mechanisms for team-level coordination in complex, partially observable environments. This paper presents a Cognitive Multi-Agent Framework based on Language-Grounded Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (LG-HRL) that integrates natural-language understanding, hierarchical policy decomposition, and a shared cognitive workspace to achieve cohesive multi-agent behavior in SAR scenarios. Human instructions are interpreted by a large language model (LLM) and transformed into structured semantic cues that guide high-level strategy selection and role assignment across UAV and UGV agents. A formal Language-Grounded Multi-Agent Hierarchical Decision Process (LG-MAHDP) is introduced to model the interplay between semantic grounding, hierarchical control, and distributed coordination. Comprehensive experiments in a simulated disaster environment show that LG-HRL improves learning speed by 2.3 times, increases coordination coherence by 37%, and enhances subgoal accuracy and hazard avoidance by 46% and 31%, respectively. The system achieves 20-30% higher victim rescue rates, demonstrates emergent role specialization, and adapts immediately to human verbal updates. Ablation studies confirm that both the shared cognitive workspace and language grounding are critical to overall system performance. Overall, this work establishes a new paradigm for language-guided multi-agent SAR robotics, demonstrating that semantic grounding combined with hierarchical reasoning enables safer, more efficient, and more interpretable autonomous rescue operations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13161
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Autonomous Optimization of Numerical Algorithms by an AI Agent: Application to Atomistic Simulation
2026-11-09 19:23:39Jeheon WooAbstract
Coding agents built on large language models, run in automated improvement loops, can discover more efficient algorithms. We present AIOA, a framework that brings this approach to the numerical algorithms of atomistic simulation: an agent improves an algorithm against a pre-specified metric in a loop guarded by verifiers it cannot alter. Applied to ASE, a widely used atomistic simulation library, AIOA targets two facets of an algorithm: its implementation, rewritten to run faster with unchanged results, and the method itself, redesigned to converge with fewer force evaluations. Agents made six kernels 22-24 times faster on average in Python with NumPy and SciPy. On unseen problems, optimizers from the best configuration needed 3.1-3.4 times fewer force evaluations than L-BFGS for structure relaxation and 4.6-17 times fewer than standard climbing-image nudged elastic band calculations for reaction paths. The agents' optimizers also contain two algorithmic components we did not find in the literature.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13143
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ASPIRE: An Agentic System-Identification Platform for Iterative Reasoning and Exploration
2026-11-09 19:03:05Erik Derner, Ji\v{r}\'i Kubal\'ik, Robert Babu\v{s}kaAbstract
System identification requires expert decisions on the identification method, incorporation of prior physical knowledge, and model validation. We propose ASPIRE, a framework for nonlinear system identification in which a large language model agent selects and executes the identification method. ASPIRE constructs closed-form, nonlinear static or dynamic models from measured data, optionally supplemented by a system description, the intended use of the model, and physical requirements expressed formally or in natural language. Each model includes its parameters, an estimation record, an interpretation of its terms, and an error evaluated on test data inaccessible to the agent. Formal physical requirements are verified independently. ASPIRE operates autonomously or interactively, allowing the agent to ask questions and the user to request further analyses and identification rounds. We evaluate ASPIRE on three measured systems: a mobile robot, a rotational system with dry friction, and a laboratory fermenter. Each system is tested with and without a description, in five runs per task. All 30 runs delivered valid models, at a cost of 0.96 to 3.38 US dollars per run. An assessment by the authors found that, for the 30 models recommended by the agent, one per run, the interpretation of the model and the documentation of its structure selection and parameter estimation fully satisfied 132 of 150 assessed items and partly satisfied 18. The most frequent discrepancy, found in nine models, concerned inaccurate or unsupported claims about model structure selection.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13114
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Building World Models from Intrinsic Motivation
2026-11-09 19:02:32Reece Keller, Declan Kutscher, Xaq Pitkow, Aran NayebiAbstract
In the absence of extrinsic rewards or task supervision, human behavior is guided by intrinsic motivation---neural signals that drive curiosity, creativity, play, and other essential facets of intelligence. Intrinsic motivation plays an important developmental role in building robust world models that enable generalization and adaptation. Yet existing studies leave open how a broad range of intrinsic motivations interacts with world-model representation learning to support downstream control. This limits our understanding of which intrinsically collected experiences build reusable models. To address these gaps, we integrate 24 intrinsic objectives, including established methods and explicit variants spanning curiosity, entropy, and competency, into a common model-based reinforcement learning framework. We evaluate the world models they build through zero-shot, few-shot, and multi-task control in locomotion, manipulation, and open-ended gaming environments, using three representation-learning strategies: observation reconstruction, latent prediction, and redundancy reduction. Curiosity-driven exploration with observation reconstruction yields the strongest aggregate family profile, although the best individual pairing depends on the experiment. In compositional vision-based tasks, intrinsic motivation derived from both episodic and lifelong novelty---providing a complementary memory to the world model's generic recurrent state---achieves the best zero-shot transfer and few-shot adaptation. These findings motivate designing intrinsic motivation and representation learning jointly. Our results demonstrate world models as a powerful tool for measuring the quality of intrinsically motivated experience, and positions intrinsic motivation as a key ingredient for building world models autonomously.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13113
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ChipOmni: A General-Purpose AI Agent for Electronic Design Automation
2026-11-09 06:28:34Pengkun Wang, Rui Mao, Zhe Zhao, Dongting Xie, Haibin Wen, Song Xu, Di Wu, Xu Wang, Zhengyang Zhou, Binwu Wang, Xiaofeng Cao, Yang WangAbstract
Electronic design automation (EDA) workflows remain highly fragmented, requiring engineers to coordinate heterogeneous representations, specialised software tools, and iterative verification across multiple design stages. Although large language models have brought more general reasoning and code-generation capabilities to EDA, many existing approaches remain focused on isolated tasks and struggle to plan, verify, and repair designs autonomously within executable engineering environments. Here we introduce ChipOmni, a knowledge-enhanced, context-evolving AI agent framework for EDA. ChipOmni integrates multimodal understanding, dynamic planning, multi-agent collaboration, and verification-driven tool interaction into a unified autonomous system. By continually incorporating feedback from external engineering tools, the framework maintains an evolving task context, integrates domain knowledge, and iteratively refines intermediate designs. Across benchmarks for analog circuit, RTL, testbench, and formal-assertion generation, ChipOmni improves multiple task-specific measures over the evaluated baselines and solves all 30 AnalogCoder-Pro tasks. In a long-horizon case study, ChipOmni advances a natural-language RISC-V specification through three design levels to a micro-SoC GDSII layout that passes physical sign-off, without human intervention after initialization. Together, these results show that ChipOmni can coordinate verification-driven design across heterogeneous tasks and sustain long-horizon engineering workflows, advancing a shift from fragmented, tool-centred processes towards agent-centred, closed-loop systems.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13020
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CAFE: Closed-Loop Autonomous Task Formulation and Execution without Instance-Specific Instructions
2026-11-08 08:08:15Mingjia Chen, Xuewen Zhao, Philip Dames, Qi Mao, Fei Xie, Jun ChenAbstract
Scene-driven robot autonomy requires selecting tasks from observations as well as executing them. We study scene-driven task formulation and execution under predefined cleaning, safety, and storage/organization categories, without instance-specific goals or action sequences. CAFE maintains online memory of objects, functional zones, and execution states. A rule-guided Trigger-LLM admits formulation from accumulated evidence; Draft, Complete, and Audit propose goals, resolve execution details, and check dependencies. Outcomes update memory for correction and subsequent discovery. Evaluation in 12 AI2-THOR scenes compares three backbones and task-complexity tiers using coverage, constraint, and execution metrics. Tri-LLM records higher GCR scores than the evaluated baselines across three backbones and task-complexity tiers. Controls examine completion, auditing, zones, feedback, triggering, and prompt examples. LimoCobot traces illustrate storage, cleanup, and recovery from a failed grasp. The study examines how shared scene state connects task discovery to execution and outcome-driven revision.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12983
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Embodied Science Agents: Making Embodied Experimental Design Learnable
2026-11-07 07:52:16Yihang Che, Zhongwei Yu, Yang Li, Xingyu Lu, Hongxia Yu, Jun WangAbstract
Recent advances in large models have accelerated AI for Science toward agentic science, where AI agents autonomously conduct scientific discovery. Realising this vision requires closing the loop between computational reasoning and physical experimentation, positioning self-driving laboratories (SDLs) as critical enablers. However, existing SDLs exhibit a fundamental paradox: foundation model integration has increased linguistic sophistication while severing physical grounding. By treating models as disembodied planners that output symbolic workflows for separate robotic systems, current architectures inherently block the development of embodied experimental intuition. We argue that overcoming this paradox requires embedding \emph{learnability} along three interdependent axes: cognitive learnability (learning what to investigate), experimental learnability (learning where to search), and embodied learnability (learning how to act). Building on this view, we introduce the Embodied Science Agent (ESA), which unifies digital intelligence with physical embodiment through three synergistic components: a Digital Agent that provides cognitive and experimental learnability via memory-based reasoning and Bayesian optimisation, an Embodied Agent that provides embodied learnability via generalisable instrument control, and an Embodied Unified Interface for seamless coordination. We validated ESA in autonomous wastewater treatment experiments, navigating over 200 million possible conditions. Through 15 continuous rounds, ESA raised the final solution transmittance from 82\% to 99.7\%, corresponding to a 98.5\% reduction in residual dye concentration and near-complete decolourisation, while its learned visuomotor policies generalised across varying instrument placements, a promising step toward next-generation SDLs for autonomous scientific discovery.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12958
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Maze Runner: Autonomous Maze Navigation with Line-Based Localization and Control Barrier Functions
2026-11-06 22:32:59Alvaro J. Gaona, Lucas G\'omez-Velayos, Peter Pasuy-QuevedoAbstract
Maze navigation requires localization from sparse, repetitive geometry, planning through narrow corridors, and control that stays safe when the estimate or the map is wrong. We present Maze Runner, an open autonomy stack in C++ and ROS 2 that addresses these needs end to end on a simulated Husarion ROSbot XL with a 2D LiDAR in Gazebo. Perception extracts wall lines from each scan with RANSAC and total least squares, with per-line uncertainty. The same line front end feeds two estimators: an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) that localizes against a line map built from the maze mesh, and an EKF SLAM variant that builds the line map online. Planning runs online on an inflated occupancy grid with A* plus line-of-sight shortcutting, or with a forward-only Hybrid A*. A nonlinear Model Predictive Controller (NMPC) tracks the plan while discrete-time Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) on world-frame LiDAR points keep the robot clear of walls and unmapped obstacles. The algorithms live in a ROS-free, unit-tested core library, and the whole stack builds and runs from a single reproducible environment. In simulation, the robot drives a 135 m route through the maze with 1.0 cm localization RMSE against the known map and 24 cm in SLAM mode, the planner returns a path in 6 ms, and the NMPC solves in 11.7 ms on average, never exceeding its 80 ms budget.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12949
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Video-Coder: Reinforcing Agentic Coding for Video Generation
2026-11-06 18:59:57Chaoyang Wang, Sicheng Gao, Junan Hu, Kunyang Li, Dongyang Chen, Yiyang Zhou, Huaxiu Yao, Yong Jae Lee, Radu Timofte, Yuzhang ShangAbstract
Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in video generation in terms of visual quality and temporal consistency. However, generating videos with precise spatial structure, coherent motion dynamics, and controllable scene composition remains challenging. In this paper, we introduce Video-Coder, the first attempt to train a code-driven video generation agent, which autonomously writes and executes code to construct a dynamic 3D scene (Draft Video) that provides structure and motion signals to downstream video generators. To support this paradigm, we design a dedicated data pipeline and curate two high-quality datasets, Video-Coder-SFT-6k and Video-Coder-RL-2k, which contain diverse prompts and ground-truth reference videos. We further develop the Video- Coder Harness, a unified interactive environment integrating code execution, 3D scene rendering, and execution feedback for agent training and inference. We then train Video-Coder with SFT fol- lowed by harness-native agentic reinforcement learning with dual reward feedback, which combines execution-based and video-based rewards. Additionally, we design an annealing training strategy that gradually reduces the execution reward over time, allowing the model to rely more on the video reward in the later training stages. Experiments show that Video-Coder achieves significant gains, improving Minimax-H3 by approximately 7 points on PhyGenBench and 24 points on VBench-2.0. We hope this work can serve as an open foundation for coding agents in video generation, and we fully open-source our data, models, and code
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09894
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Scenario Orchestration for Closed-loop Policy Evaluation of Autonomous Driving
2026-11-06 18:58:27Frieda Rong, Zhaoyue Wang, Veer Kapadia, Vishaka Rajani, Aren A. Babikian, Xujie Si, Mahsa Golchoubian, Raquel Urtasun, Igor GilitschenskiAbstract
Scenario-based simulation is central to evaluating autonomous-driving policies, but a scenario scripted before execution (i.e., with predetermined, fixed actor routes and speeds) may not preserve its intended interaction once the tested ego policy responds in closed loop. Scripted scenarios cannot adapt to unanticipated ego behavior, while learned traffic actors may remain reactive without reliably realizing a particular scenario intent. We introduce a scenario orchestrator that continuously monitors the joint traffic state and adapts non-ego actors through re-timing, re-routing, and role reassignment for creating a specific scenario intent. At each step, the orchestrator solves a constrained optimization problem that preserves the intended interaction while limiting interventions and maintaining traffic feasibility. We further distinguish scenario realization from policy failure, allowing a test to first be judged based on whether the intended interaction occurred and then by how the ego policy responded. Experiments in the CARLA simulator across multiple scenario families and driving policies show that orchestration realizes targeted interactions more reliably than scripted and learned actor-level baselines, particularly under variations in initial conditions and ego behavior. These results support closed-loop scenario orchestration as a tool for controlled and reproducible policy evaluation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09888
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Autonomous Whole-body Loco-manipulation Using a Snake Robot
2026-11-06 17:38:50Adarsh Salagame, Henry Noyes, Haroon Hublikar, Alireza RamezaniAbstract
Snake robots can leverage their hyper-redundant morphology for both locomotion and manipulation through distributed body contact but whole-body loco-manipulation is particularly challenging since the entire body serves simultaneously as propulsive mechanism and manipulation tool Prior work on wheeled legged and snake robot platforms has decoupled these functions through dedicated appendages body segmentation or grippers We present closed-loop loco-manipulation with our snake robot COBRA without this distinction such that any part of the body may make contact We develop a contact-implicit dynamic model unifying robot-ground robot-object and object-ground interactions within a Moreau-Jean time-stepping framework and formulate a trajectory optimization over the full-order dynamics guided by a geometric planner and nominal proportional controller to autonomously push an object to a goal location during sidewinding We validate the planner and controller on hardware across varied configurations and present simulation results for a simplified trajectory optimization that resolves robot-object and object-ground contacts
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09777
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AI Governance Should Prioritize Control and Knowledge Boundaries Over Limiting Intelligence
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The rapid proliferation of autonomously acting AI agents makes the governance of agentic systems urgent. We propose the competence circuit, summarized as IKC + KC + C, that decomposes an agent's real-world impact into three pathways: intelligence-mediated discovery, procedural know-how, and direct control. Using the canonical fast-takeoff debate as a stress test, we formalize the conditions for intelligence-mediated fast takeoff as a conjunction jointly sufficient for fast catastrophic supremacy, showing that most rely on rapid knowledge acquisition or control attainment rather than intelligence alone. We operationalize epistemic intelligence as hypothesis-selection efficiency and validate this framework via stochastic simulation on NK fitness landscapes across six scenarios spanning the conjunctive chain. An analytic bound supported by the simulations shows that intelligence-driven speedup is capped by the ratio of competing intelligence levels regardless of task difficulty. The simulations also expose a fast-takeoff dilemma: a large intelligence-driven speedup multiplier materializes only when the hypothesis space is noisy, but the absolute timescale remains constrained by the time required for capability-critical tests, so a large multiplier need not imply rapid progress. Simulations also indicate that institutional chokepoints disproportionately slow down superintelligent agents when mandatory authorization delays are large relative to the negligible time these agents spend on unproductive search. We argue that the dominant safety levers are restricting control and enforcing knowledge boundaries rather than limiting intelligence alone, and this applies to agentic systems at any capability level. Purely digital domains weaken these bottlenecks, strengthening the case for architectures that intentionally "put physics in the loop."
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12941
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Autonomous Particle Image Velocimetry Using Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning
2026-11-06 16:27:25Chang Rajani, Luke Sebastien Marsden, Stephan Kunz, Claudio Mucignat, Ivan LunatiAbstract
Particle image velocimetry (PIV) reconstructs a flow field from the motion of tracer particles but the reconstruction quality is bounded by how well the flow structure of interest is resolved in the images. The acquisition position is typically fixed by the operator before the measurement. We cast camera placement as a sequential decision-making problem and train a reinforcement learning agent to control a 6-DoF manipulator equipped with a camera, enabling it to locate, frame and resolve a hydrofoil wake in a water tunnel. The agent commands the camera pose and observes the scene only through the velocity field and uncertainty estimated from time-separated image pairs. It is trained entirely in a photorealistic simulation of our water tunnel, with wakes generated by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of hydrofoils with varying profiles, positions and angles of attack. After zero-shot transfer to the real water tunnel, the policy reliably locates and frames the wakes of randomly placed hydrofoils. It resolves the wake at a higher resolution than a fixed camera view and with lower error in the measured flow statistics, in roughly half the time of a full scan and with far fewer image pairs.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09679
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LACART: Lookahead-Augmented Collision Avoidance and Reference Tracking Strategies for Safety-Critical Robots
2026-11-06 15:52:50Pedro Lopes, Amit Shivam, Luis Tiago PaivaAbstract
Autonomous racing provides a demanding testbed for collision avoidance under tight geometric and computational constraints. Building on a recent conference contribution and a master's dissertation, LACART combines lookahead-based control barrier functions (CBFs), a relaxed control Lyapunov function (CLF), and quadratic programming (QP) to modify nominal vehicle commands for obstacle avoidance and reference tracking. The method handles circular obstacles and track boundaries in a common optimisation layer. Comparative simulation results against Huang \emph{et al.} \cite{r9} show similar full-track paths and lower median computation times: 0.31 versus 0.33 ms per step and 0.023 versus 0.025 ms per QP solve. The dissertation further demonstrates a 1:43-scale vehicle with camera-based estimation and wireless actuation at a reported 25 Hz control rate. We identify the conditions linking lookahead-point clearance to body clearance, illustrate hardware limitations, and propose a recorded demonstration of safety intervention and recovery. The contribution targets ground-robot collision avoidance and real-time safety monitoring.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09640
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