Recent work shows that multimodal agents increasingly self-improve without recurring human annotation. However, each self-improvement mechanism is designed and evaluated within a single scenario, leaving its preconditions unverified under cross-scenario transfer. This survey investigates the structural source of asymmetric mechanism transfer across four scenarios: multimodal reasoning, multimodal generation, GUI and Web navigation, and embodied manipulation. We first formalize the self-evolving multimodal agent by four criteria and a differentia of self-reference, and adopt the three-stage self-evolving loop of experience generation, feedback acquisition, and update consolidation as our analytical framework to position the scenarios along ceilings on rollout count and feedback fidelity. Comparing self-evolving with fixed loops within each scenario separates the limitations that the scenario imposes from those inherent in the self-evolving design. We then recast each mechanism as a trade-off that raises a scarce factor by presupposing a task-structural resource, such as output equivalence or checkable outcomes, and judge it portable, conditional, blocked, or redundant across scenarios. We attribute the asymmetry to divergent combinations of scarce factors and resources across opposite transfer directions, and identify the matched-budget measurements that could overturn these still untested verdicts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14256
Text-to-image diffusion models can learn and reproduce an individual's identity from only a few reference photos, creating risks of unauthorized and misleading content generation. Proactive defenses address this risk by adding adversarial perturbations to facial images before release, thereby disrupting identity acquisition during downstream personalization. However, existing methods typically rely on dense $L_\infty$-bounded perturbations, whose accumulated distortions can become visible around facial structures. Recent methods improve protected-image quality, but often at the cost of reduced protection effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Sparse Encoder Attack on Latent Variance (SEAL), a sparse adversarial protection framework that modifies only 5% of the spatial locations in a facial image. SEAL combines a differentiable top-k masking scheme that jointly optimizes perturbation locations and values with a variance-oriented objective over the frozen VAE encoder's latent distribution to disrupt identity-consistent representations. A saliency-guided dispersion penalty further discourages perturbation concentration in perceptually salient facial regions. Experiments on CelebA-HQ and VGGFace2 show that SEAL achieves the best protected-image quality among the compared methods, exceeding 41 dB PSNR with 0.97 SSIM and at most 0.07 LPIPS, while reducing identity similarity to at most 0.15 after diffusion personalization. These results demonstrate that sparse location optimization enables strong identity protection while preserving high visual quality. Code and data are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14254
How can the facts that justify an answer be found from a question and presented as a sequence of connected statements? This paper models a context as a graph of logical facts and takes as given which expressions represent each fact. A parent fact can express a relation among its subfacts, and a preserving edge allows the content of a subfact to be recovered within a full representation of its parent. Suppose a root fact justifies the full answer and a path of preserving edges leads from that root to a fact that designates an object shared by the question and the answer. Under the conditions of the model, a search starting from the objects in the question reaches the root and covers every fact in the selected expansion. The root then admits a text that forms a single link connecting the question to the full answer and justifying it. For chains with several links, the paper gives a complete enumeration of candidate orders within the stated class and specifies when the link texts jointly preserve the justification and support every transition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14252
Estimating 3D head expression from a single image requires mapping visual appearance to underlying facial geometry. We propose ViGA-FLAME, a two-stage framework that aligns semantic visual features with a structured geometric latent space. First, a Parametric-Geometric Variational Autoencoder (PG-VAE) learns a unified representation of canonical head surfaces and FLAME parameters, supporting both detailed surface reconstruction and interpretable parameter recovery. Supervision on geometry and parameters, together with consistency between the two decoding branches, connects surface detail with parametric structure. Second, a trainable Visual-Geometric Adapter (ViGA) maps features from a pretrained semantic visual encoder into this latent space. Asymmetric attention enables ViGA to align semantic image features from the visual encoder with the structured geometric information represented in the PG-VAE latent space, without altering the original visual stream. By grounding image evidence in this latent prior, ViGA-FLAME enables robust 3D head expression estimation across severe facial deformations and large viewing angles, efficiently improving robustness over competing feed-forward methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14218
Software agents built on large language models generate traffic unlike human web traffic, yet routers have no class for it and cannot verify a sender's claim to be an agent. This paper proposes the Verifiable Agentic Traffic Class (VATC), which combines a reserved Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) value declaring agent traffic, a router-side classifier that demotes flows contradicting the declaration to a class served after best-effort traffic, and a rate-limited priority queue. VATC was compared with static Differentiated Services (DiffServ), a dedicated class that trusts the marking, and fq_codel, a per-flow fair-queuing scheduler, in two simulators and on a real Linux kernel. VATC matched DiffServ under steady load. In a constructed burst it cut mean agent queuing delay by 98% relative to DiffServ in simulation (assuming an immediate verdict), at a 12% increase in human delay; most of the gain came from the separate class. Under a spoofed flood in the kernel, the rate limit held human latency 11 times below DiffServ's. Without verification, DiffServ and a tightly configured fq_codel gave legitimate agents lower latency than VATC; a live four-feature classifier then demoted all 20 bulk-shaped spoofers and gave agents 0.30 ms, but missed six spoofers that copied the agent pattern. With emulated network delay, a timing feature of the classifier stopped separating agent from human flows. In real agent harnesses on a congested link, router queueing took 13% to 63% of task time, depending on harness and assumed model latency. The traffic was synthetic or sandbox-scale.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14211
Deploying vision transformer models across connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) requires joint management of computation and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication. Static split-inference methods use fixed partition points and cannot adapt to time-varying link bandwidth, processing load, and concurrent multi-stream traffic. This paper proposes an edge orchestration framework that jointly selects model partition points, per-layer quantization bitwidths, and execution placement across heterogeneous vehicular compute nodes. The joint partitioning and mixed-precision allocation problem is formulated as a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) that minimizes compute and communication energy subject to end-to-end latency and task-quality constraints. The framework is evaluated on Jetson Orin Nano (8~GB), Jetson Orin NX (16~GB), and Jetson AGX Orin (32~GB) nodes using OPV2V-driven multi-stream workloads with $K \in \{2,4,6,8\}$. Across the evaluated configurations, the proposed formulation reduces V2V communication energy by $33.3$--$36.0\%$ relative to a Uniform INT8 split. At $K=8$, end-to-end task completion latency is reduced by $34.0\%$ on the Orin Nano and $33.1\%$ on the Orin NX relative to the same baseline, while limiting the reduction in 3D detection accuracy to $3.1$--$4.1$ percentage points in $\mathrm{mAP}_{50}$ relative to FP16 execution.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14196
We propose a Koopman model-based reinforcement learning (K-MBRL) algorithm for controlling nonlinear robotic systems with unknown dynamics. The K-MBRL learns a control policy by minimizing an approximate policy objective that combines the analytical immediate cost with an estimate of the future cost evaluated at the one-step predicted state. To this end, we develop a stochastic Koopman operator-based learning method to approximate the unknown nonlinear dynamics in a linear representation, while a critic function estimates the remaining future cost. This formulation offers two key advantages. First, the linear Koopman dynamics simplify the model-dependent policy gradient computation to a constant matrix product, enabling computationally efficient policy improvement. Second, one-step model propagation mitigates the accumulation of prediction errors associated with long-horizon rollouts while retaining long-term cost information through the critic. The learned policy enables real-time control through feedforward evaluation without online optimization. We establish policy learning convergence guarantees under standard stochastic approximation assumptions. Simulations on HalfCheetah and quadruped four-legged locomotion tasks demonstrate strong sample efficiency and improved performance compared with classical model-free and model-based reinforcement learning baselines. A pendulum swing-up task is used to assess policy gradient approximation accuracy and conduct ablation studies on the learning mechanism and key hyperparameters. The proposed K-MBRL is further validated on a physical quadruped robot performing a challenging sequence of maneuvers: rising to an upright posture supported by two rounded rear feet, maintaining balance during bipedal walking, and safely returning to the ground, as shown in Fig.1.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14186
Temporal-difference critics regress onto a bootstrapped target and usually need a target network. Lifted Bellman Linear Programming (LBLP) instead expresses the in-sample optimal values of offline RL as the solution to a linear program over the dataset. Its neural solver ALBUM relaxes the constraints into hinge penalties with fixed coefficients, and its guarantees are conditions on coefficients chosen in advance. We solve the same program with the method of multipliers: the coefficients become multipliers learned by dual ascent, with one penalty parameter $\rho$. In the convex case the fixed points are the KKT pairs of LBLP, and at every stationary point the applied constraint weights balance the objective exactly. The critic can serve a Gaussian actor, a flow actor, and best-of-N sampling, and for the Gaussian actor we propose an advantage-normalized DDPG+BC objective. With a single $Q$ and $V$ and no target network, our AL-LBLP with best-of-N reaches 60.1\% average success on the 50 state-based OGBench tasks. On long-horizon tasks, it reaches 81.5% on humanoidmaze-giant and 79.8% on antmaze-giant. It does not collapse up to batch size 8192.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14183
Repeated sampling with majority selection is an effective means of enforcing self-consistency in large language models. Recently, a variant has also been introduced that terminates early to save costs when the output distribution is favorable. But it still cannot yield a correct confidence estimate from the answer distribution. For this issue, we formalize this as majority identification under an unknown distribution with a budget and a target error rate, and propose BARS, a sequential rule certifying the top-two gap and returning an early stop, a budgeted majority vote, or a refusal when feasibility cannot be established. A refusal is a statement about the rule and its budget, not a claim that a question is unanswerable, and it tells practitioners when to widen the budget or switch models. A certified mode carries proven bounds on the joint answering error and on refusing an instance the budget could handle, while a practical mode, used in our experiments, replaces them with empirical calibration. On synthetic instances drawn from known distributions over thousands of seeds, the difficulty-driven behavior is recovered and the price of the certified mode is this http URL GSM8K the practical mode draws 22.3\% fewer samples than fixed-8 sampling over the same pool, refused questions included, at the cost of declining 18.8\% of the questions. On MATH, it greatly improves the accuracy of its output answers into 82.5\% at the cost of honestly refusing to answer half of the difficult questions that the model itself is unable to solve.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14171
Understanding the internal representations of neural networks and characterizing their relationship with human conceptual structure are two critical questions for elucidating model mechanisms. The former reveals how learned knowledge is organized in internal representations, whereas the latter provides a basis for interpreting these representations through human conceptual structure. Here, we formally define fundamental representational units (FRUs) and establish two evaluation criteria: fidelity and stability. We further prove that threshold-activated sparse autoencoders (TSAEs) can identify FRUs with high fidelity and stability under appropriate conditions, and validate this result through large-scale experiments. Further analyses reveal that FRUs with higher stability exhibit greater monosemanticity and can be composed across layers to recover semantic organization corresponding to human conceptual structure. These results provide a unified framework for defining, evaluating and identifying FRUs in neural networks, and establish a foundation for characterizing the relationship between neural network representations and human conceptual structure.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14168
Multimodal contrastive learning models such as CLIP are vulnerable to backdoor attacks with diverse trigger structures, ranging from localized patches to globally distributed perturbations, with recent attacks increasingly optimizing these triggers in the representation space. Existing post-hoc defenses based on clean fine-tuning may leave backdoors active, while trigger-inversion methods depend on accurately estimating the attack target and trigger. We observe that backdoored encoders exhibit structure-dependent representation sensitivity: global perturbations preferentially expose distributed backdoors, whereas local patch perturbations are more effective for localized backdoors. Based on this observation, we propose Gradient-Guided Adversarial Representation Defense (GARD), a target- and trigger-agnostic post-hoc defense. GARD optimizes complementary global and local adversarial probes to maximally displace clean-image representations, and then realigns the perturbed representations with detached clean anchors while preserving image-text alignment. The resulting model requires no additional computation at inference time. Across six visual backdoor attacks and two CLIP visual backbones, GARD reduces the attack success rate below 1% in all 12 evaluated attack-backbone combinations while maintaining competitive clean accuracy. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of adversarial representation probing for repairing backdoored multimodal contrastive encoders.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14143
Three-dimensional spatial transcriptomics (3D ST) enables the analysis of gene-expression patterns across tissue depths. However, 3D ST measurements are acquired from discrete 2D tissue sections, which are often sparsely sampled due to high acquisition costs. To address this limitation, we propose a histology-informed multi-task implicit neural representation (HIM-INR) for continuous 3D gene-expression reconstruction from sparse ST observations. HIM-INR jointly reconstructs gene-expression profiles and histological representations using an INR with a shared backbone, leveraging densely sampled histological images as auxiliary spatial supervision. Once trained, HIM-INR predicts gene expression at arbitrary 3D coordinates without requiring histological images. Experiments on two 3D ST datasets demonstrate improved reconstruction over existing methods, particularly as the number of missing ST sections increases.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14129
Large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in structured reasoning and code generation, yet identifying an assembly fault does not guarantee the ability to generate executable rework programs. In interlocking assemblies, a locally plausible repair program may violate blocking dependencies, omit required recovery operations, or terminate in an incorrect configuration. We identify this challenge as fault-conditioned executable rework generation, where models must jointly reason about structural failures and generate programs that restore constrained assembly states. To benchmark this capability, we introduce FORGE-Bench, containing 4,000 tasks across 26 interlocking assemblies with five assemblies held out for evaluating generalization to unseen structures. We further propose FORGE (Fault-Oriented Rework Code Generation for Executable Interlocking Assembly), a structured state-to-program framework that decomposes rework generation into Rework Structuring and Action Grounding. Rework Structuring captures fault-induced recovery dependencies, while Action Grounding maps these dependencies into state-conditioned executable actions. Experiments show that locally reasonable repair code is insufficient for reliable assembly recovery, and that connecting structural recovery reasoning with executable action realization is essential for verified target restoration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02536
Remote sensing increasingly captures the Earth's surface through complementary sensors such as SAR and optical, yet ground-truth annotations remain scarce, limiting supervised approaches. Self-supervised learning (SSL) addresses the label scarcity, and cross-modal SSL further exploits the complementarity between co-located sensors, but existing cross-modal frameworks align modalities mostly through global image-level representations or treat them as largely redundant, leaving their fine-grained complementary structure underexploited. We propose CroCoMAE, a cross-modal SSL framework for SAR-optical remote sensing that unifies contrastive learning and masked image modeling within a ViT-based architecture, operating at two complementary levels. At the image level, an intra-modality contrastive loss on the class token yields globally discriminative, augmentation-invariant representations. At the patch level, masked image modeling drives fine-grained per-modality representations, while a cross-modal contrastive objective aligns a shared subspace across SAR and optical patch tokens, leaving the complementary subspace unconstrained to retain modality-specific information. On two SAR-optical benchmarks covering scene classification and semantic segmentation, CroCoMAE improves over uni-modal SSL baselines and outperforms state-of-the-art cross-modal frameworks in most configurations, with gains in both single-modality and multi-modal evaluation across varying label regimes and the largest improvements on semantic segmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14124
Personalizing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as intelligent assistants has recently emerged as an active research topic, where an MLLM is expected to go beyond generic, one-size-fits-all replies, and instead generate responses grounded in user-specific objects, entities, and concepts encountered during interactions. Nevertheless, existing studies mainly focus on personalizing MLLMs on a static, predefined set of personalized concepts and require users to manually and frequently extend this set to accommodate newly emerging concepts, which is infeasible in dynamic-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we recast conventional MLLM personalization as an Open-Set problem, and propose TAME-O, the first long-context open-set personalized MLLM assistant. Specifically, TAME-O introduces a training-free, plug-and-play Concept Reconciliation Skill (CR Skill). It enables the assistant to automatically unlock novel concepts during prolonged human-MLLM interactions while preventing confusion with previously unlocked ones, allowing the MLLM to continually grasp more and more concepts and progressively refine the modeling of known ones. Extensive experiments under the open-set personalization setting underscore the efficacy of our method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14118
Foundation models such as GPT and Claude have shown strong capabilities in spatial understanding and embodied intelligence. These advances make agentic robotics a promising path toward artificial general intelligence in robotics. However, we find that using foundation models to control robots poses serious safety risks, and comprehensive safety evaluation is still lacking. We introduce RoboRisk, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating safety in agentic robotics. Its 92 simulated tasks and 13 physical-robot tasks fall into five categories: Task-level Refusal (T), Plan Repair (P), Execution-time Hazard (E), Injection (I), and Sequential Memory (S). Prior benchmarks cover at most two of these categories, and several evaluate only text outputs. In contrast, RoboRisk covers all five and executes every task in closed loop. We evaluate six state-of-the-art foundation models on RoboRisk: GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, Claude Opus 5.5, Gemini 4 Argon, and Grok 4.7. These models generally show high harm rates. We also evaluate two robot-specific APIs: the Dream API and PokeBot's RoboAPI. We further propose the Lease-Enforced Agentic Safety Harness (LEASH), which offers essential safety infrastructure for agentic robotics and can be integrated into nearly any agentic architecture. LEASH leverages a decision model (Jev or OpenAI's Decisions API) to implement task, action, and commit gates, which review the task, each action, and each irreversible operation in their visual context. The planner and all three gates share a common safety policy. Experiments on RoboRisk in simulation and on physical robots show that LEASH effectively reduces harm across all six foundation models. It largely preserves their task completion performance and adds little time and token overhead.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14115
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
In this paper, we propose a new paradigm in wildfire management for detecting both visible and obscured fire using Deep Learning (DL). The essence of our method is the joint spatial and temporal analysis of RGB videos, embracing the fact that temporal patterns of smoke motions in consecutive video frames can indicate obscured fire flames. This perspective contrasts the traditional approach of independently analyzing images and individual video frames. To this end, we propose a frame-wise transformer architecture that applies an attention mechanism between the consecutive frames while preserving spatial information within frames as opposed to regular attention mechanisms like the non-local block, which combines spatial and temporal information into a single vector. We also optimize the temporal pattern lengths under different spatial resolutions to achieve the highest performance while reducing the computational cost. To investigate the applicability of our method in aerial image processing, we applied it to a curated version of the FLAME2 dataset that includes dual-mode RGB/IR videos. The IR video feed is used to extract ground truth, while the model is trained only on RGB videos to maintain applicability to lowcost commercial drones (which are equipped only with regular cameras) and facilitate processing existing RGB-only datasets. Our proposed method achieves a Segmentation Foreground Dice score of 92.61%, an Object Detection Precision and Recall rate of 93.21% and 91.73%, and clip-level classification accuracy of 98.02%, respectively. We also investigated the efficacy and generalizability of our method through ablation study
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14074
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