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Received — 15 September 2026 ⏭ cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

The Anatomy and Boundary of Adaptation under Temporal Tabular Shift

arXiv:2609.12136v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prequential adaptation of frozen tabular foundation models under temporal drift, with each label revealed only after prediction, helps some deployments and harms others, yet current practice does not predict which. We study the sources and limits of these gains. A diagnostic anatomy attributes gains to four recurring mechanisms under a streaming protocol that removes three optimistic biases and quantifies a fourth. Within an agnostic total-variation drift class, the target conditional is only partially identified: its identified-set diameter, the \emph{wall}, is irreducible from unlabeled data uniformly in sample size. A second, orthogonal $L^2$ projection wall quantifies what the frozen representation cannot express. Two canonical mechanism priors collapse the first wall. Under stated nuisance-rate conditions, the wall can be estimated from labeled historical windows at a $\sqrt N$ rate above the margin threshold $\gamma^\star=d_0/(2\alpha_s)$. At $\gamma=0$, the conditional lower-bound program depends on an open affinity estimate; the positive-margin lower branch also remains open. Semi-synthetic data illustrate the finite-sample mechanism with calibrated exponents. Stream-level proxies on eight industrial streams fall on the difficult side under a stated roughness bound, while the equality case $\gamma=\gamma^\star$ remains unresolved.

Generative AI Assisted Workflows in Architectural Conceptual Design: Performance, Creative Self-Efficacy, and Cognitive Load

arXiv:2601.10696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly adopted in design education, yet evaluating its educational value through final outcomes provides an incomplete picture. This study compares two ecologically plausible workflows in an architectural conceptual design task: GenAI-assisted image generation and ArchDaily-based precedent search. The comparison concerns complete workflows rather than the isolated contributions. Thirty-six students completed a two-phase design task, first designing independently and then revising with their assigned workflow. Eight judges rated design performance, while participants reported task-specific and general creative self-efficacy and cognitive load after each phase. Difference-in-differences analyses showed no significant overall differences between the GenAI and precedent-search workflows in design performance, cognitive workload, or task-specific creative self-efficacy. Beyond these null overall effects, three patterns were observed. General creative self-efficacy showed a significant relative decline under the GenAI workflow. A subgroup analysis suggested higher revision-phase performance among novice students using GenAI than among those using precedent search (F (1,32) = 4.303, p = 0.046). However, this exploratory interaction should be interpreted cautiously due to low rating reliability, small subgroup cells, and imprecise estimation. Third, exploratory prompt analyses suggested that iterative, task-specific prompting strategies (CD3, CD6) were associated with cognitive load reductions at the uncorrected level, but neither association survived multiple-comparison correction. Overall, the GenAI workflow did not produce uniform gains. Its educational value may depend on pedagogical framing, learner characteristics, and human-AI interaction structure, underscoring the need to preserve creative agency and develop prompt literacy.

Lumina-OmniLV: A Unified Multimodal Framework for General Low-Level Vision

arXiv:2504.04903v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Lunima-OmniLV (abbreviated as OmniLV), a universal multimodal multi-task framework for low-level vision that addresses over 100 sub-tasks across four major categories: image restoration, image enhancement, weak-semantic dense prediction, and stylization. OmniLV leverages both textual and visual prompts to offer flexible and user-friendly interactions. Built on Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based generative priors, our framework supports arbitrary resolutions -- achieving optimal performance at 1K resolution -- while preserving fine-grained details and high fidelity. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that separately encoding text and visual instructions, combined with co-training using shallow feature control, is essential to mitigate task ambiguity and enhance multi-task generalization. Our findings also reveal that integrating high-level generative tasks into low-level vision models can compromise detail-sensitive restoration. These insights pave the way for more robust and generalizable low-level vision systems.

GigaBrain-WBC-0.5: A Behavior World Model for Robust Whole-Body Control with Environment Interaction

arXiv:2608.18234v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Whole-body motion tracking policies turn a humanoid into a robust control interface: the teleoperator---or an upstream model---only supplies a coarse movement intent, while the low-level policy keeps the robot balanced and physically feasible. Existing trackers deliver this interface only on flat ground: trained in empty scenes, they never learn how contact with terrain and objects reshapes their dynamics, and they attempt to teach the policy to balance under any command by continually enlarging the reference-motion corpus, which stops working once feasible behaviors become environment-dependent. We present GigaBrain-WBC-0.5, the first Behavior World Model (BWM) for humanoid whole-body control. Rather than a purely reactive tracker, we train a causal Transformer to jointly predict its next action, next state, and the distribution over its next latent behavior command, so the network that acts also models how the environment shapes what it can do next. An automatic terrain-annotation pipeline recovers full 3D contact geometry from retargeted motion, enabling terrain annotation at the scale of existing motion datasets. The predicted distribution is reused at deployment to detect implausible commands online and retract them onto learned behaviors, so the robot attempts tasks in a "best-effort" manner. The result is a unified policy that takes real-time command, interacts with environment, and stays robust to implausible commands, falls, and disturbances. GigaBrain-WBC-0.5 achieves the highest success rate across all four regimes among three large-scale tracker baselines: 81.3% on terrain interaction (4.3x the strongest baseline), 83.1% under implausible commands, and 99.3% fall recovery (16.8x the strongest baseline). Hardware trials show robust interaction under missing supports and disturbances; the Unitree G1 checkpoint transfers to the Maker L01 robot with simple fine-tuning.
Received — 10 September 2026 ⏭ cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

Time-Frequency Geometric Cross-Attention for Chunked Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2609.09925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern vision-language-action (VLA) policies predict a whole chunk of actions: one to two seconds of coordinated motion emitted in a single forward pass. Yet an action chunk is essentially a short multivariate trajectory, but inside these models it is a sequence of generic per-timestep hidden tokens decoded by a linear head. This under-serves two motion structures. First, frequency: a chunk superimposes a smooth global trend and fine corrective motion across time scales, and a single token entangles them. Second, cross-phase geometry: motions of different phases (reach, contact, grasp adjustment, settling) unfold along very different, near-orthogonal directions in representation space, yet are tightly related for the task and arise across the time axis. Dot-product attention scores alignment by an inner product, so it favors aligned tokens and is least sensitive near orthogonality, leaving such relationships for the network to recover through a detour. We introduce Time-Frequency Geometric Cross-Attention (TFGCA), a drop-in module repairing both blind spots. TFGCA uses a per-dimension learnable stationary wavelet transform to decompose the action chunk into time-frequency tokens, and each time token retrieves information from them via a cross-attention that fuses the dot product (similarity) with the wedge-product magnitude (sensitive to near-orthogonality) through a learnable weight. A zero-initialized residual reproduces the base behavior at initialization, so it can be dropped onto a pretrained VLA and fine-tuned jointly. Relative to the same-source base, TFGCA improves in-distribution LIBERO by +1.5 on average, the OOD LIBERO-Plus by +6.3, the randomized average under RoboTwin domain randomization by +28.5, and the overall success rate on three real-robot AgiBot A2 tasks by +11.67 points, with larger gains out of distribution.

AgentHijack: Visual Patch Attacks on Multimodal Computer-Use Agents

arXiv:2609.09212v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents an end-to-end evaluation framework for image-triggered command injection against computer-use agents (CUAs). The goal is to test whether a local visual patch can induce verifiable environmental consequences along the full chain of screenshot input, VLM generation, action parsing, and environment execution. We train and deploy patches on author-controlled GitHub Pages pages and a locally deployed CSDN clone, and evaluate them in real environments across five open-source or publicly available GUI-agent or vision-language-model (VLM) backends. Our experiment aggregates 600 instance-level online cases, with T-ASR, TAPR, and E2E-ASR reaching 84.5%, 47.0%, and 20.3%, respectively. Trajectory analysis further shows that in some successful cases the agent first executes a malicious terminal command and then continues the original benign task. These results indicate that optimized local visual signals can affect not only VLM outputs but also propagate through the execution pipeline of open CUAs and create real environmental risk.

Geometry Conditioning in an Embodied SLM: Training Controls and Robustness Diagnostics in a 0.8B Hybrid Model

10 September 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2609.09213v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study how physical-state inputs affect a 0.8B hybrid language model adapted for manipulation with 6.2M trainable parameters. Six conditions are trained on three LIBERO-Spatial tasks and evaluated over three seeds and 540 held-out rollouts. Conditioning recurrent decay gates on geometric increments yields 28.9% success, compared with 36.7% when those increments are shuffled during training and 24.4% without explicit object/goal geometry. Both geometry policies receive correct inputs at evaluation. A token adapter using the same increments scores 27.8%; differences vary across seeds and remain inconclusive. Token-clock conditioning scores 11.1%, including one seed that fails to converge. In separate robustness tests, a state-only relative-coordinate policy retains 7/10 success under frame relabeling, whereas all four tested visual policies fall to at most 3/20 after a 5 cm object displacement. These results show no reliable advantage from training-time geometric alignment under this recipe and illustrate the gap between coordinate invariance and physical-layout generalization. Episode records, seed-level analyses, and figure-generation code accompany the paper.

Harbor Adapters and Harbor-Index: Infrastructure and a Curated Meta-Dataset for Large-Scale Agentic Evaluation

arXiv:2609.04298v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating agents on the growing number of agentic benchmarks is challenging because they often require complex environments and agent integrations. We introduce Harbor Adapters, a unified evaluation infrastructure for agentic benchmarks. Our work makes three contributions. First, we develop benchmark adapters that port more than 80 benchmarks to evaluate arbitrary agents, and validate them through rigorous code review and parity experiments. Second, we conduct a large-scale evaluation of 8 models spanning capability tiers across 54 benchmarks; every model is run with Terminus-2 and with one of 3 native harnesses. This enables a broader analysis of agent capabilities and failure modes than was previously possible. Third, we introduce Harbor-Index, a curated set of 82 difficult, diverse, and high-quality tasks spanning 29 benchmarks, refined from the adapted suite through difficulty filtering, AI and human audit, and an audit-and-fix loop. Harbor-Index preserves the challenge and breadth of large-scale agentic evaluations while being affordable to run; no evaluated model-harness configuration exceeds 30% pass rate, and the strongest (GPT-5.5 with Codex) reaches 28.0%. We release the adapters, evaluation results, in-depth analysis, and Harbor-Index as open-source artifacts to support more reliable and comprehensive evaluation of language-model agents.

FiberTune: Preserving Action-Fiber Visual Residuals in Vision-Language-Action Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2606.08653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Action-supervised fine-tuning of vision-language-action (VLA) policies fits demonstrations effectively but constrains only the directions that change predicted actions, leaving visual structure consistent across action-equivalent states free to collapse. We formalize this as residual visual collapse along local action fibers and propose FiberTune, a training-time objective that preserves teacher-structured visual residuals without adding inference-time overhead. FiberTune uses an online action probe to estimate action-predictive feature directions, filters them from intermediate visual-token representations, and aligns the resulting probe-filtered residuals to a frozen visual teacher while regularizing their effective rank. Under identical training conditions, FiberTune improves over task-loss-only fine-tuning in every one of six controlled simulation settings spanning two benchmarks and two architectures (pi_0.5 and OpenVLA-OFT), as well as on physical SO-101 pick-place; representative gains include +10.7 percentage points SR(5) on long-horizon CALVIN ABC-to-D and physical SO-101 task success rising from 72.7% to 78.1%. Residual diagnostics show that these gains coincide with increased probe-filtered residual teacher alignment and effective rank, consistent with the action-fiber motivation.

LightNav-0: Eliciting VLM Spatial Intelligence for Generalist Embodied Navigation

arXiv:2608.30935v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied navigation requires agents to translate heterogeneous goals and visual observations into actions across tasks, environments, and robot embodiments. Modern vision-language models (VLMs) already encode spatial priors for visual grounding, spatial reasoning, and pointing, but these capabilities are rarely elicited directly for robot control. Existing navigation systems instead rely on task- or embodiment-specific components, fragmenting perception, reasoning, and action while offering limited generalization. Here we present LightNav-0, a compact generalist embodied navigation model that elicits the spatial intelligence of a pretrained VLM and aligns it with navigation, without task-specific prediction heads. LightNav-0 represents diverse navigation tasks through a unified token interface: dual-channel pointing expresses task-, scene-, and embodiment-agnostic spatial intent, while a residual vector-quantized action tokenizer maps this intent to precise, embodiment-specific trajectories. Together with temporally aware visual history compression, ER mid-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning, this formulation supports instruction following, open-vocabulary object navigation, and visual tracking within a single model. The navigation training corpus spans 2K+ scenes and 4K+ hours of embodied navigation data. LightNav-ER, the embodied-reasoning checkpoint used to initialize LightNav-0, attains the highest complete-set average across 8 embodied-reasoning benchmarks, while LightNav-0 achieves state-of-the-art monocular success rates across all 10 public navigation simulation settings. Real-world evaluations further demonstrate zero-shot generalization across robot embodiments, diverse scenes, and static and dynamic targets. These results establish compact VLMs as a unified and transferable backbone for generalist embodied navigation.
Received — 27 May 2026 ⏭ cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

Advancing Graph Few-Shot Learning via In-Context Learning

arXiv:2605.24410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph few-shot learning, which aims to classify nodes from novel classes with only a few labeled examples, is a widely studied problem in graph learning. However, existing methods often face two key limitations. First, the predominant graph few-shot learning paradigm relies on supervised tasks, failing to leverage the vast number of unlabeled nodes in the graph. Second, many approaches require complex task adaptation or fine-tuning during inference, limiting their efficiency and applicability. Inspired by the powerful in-context learning capabilities of large language models, we propose a novel model named VISION for adVancIng graph few-Shot learning via In-cOntext LearNing to address these challenges. Our model reframes graph few-shot learning as a fine-tuning-free sequence reasoning problem. At its core is a context-aware network that initializes nodes with role embeddings and employs a dual-context fusion module to synergistically integrate local topological structures and global task-level dependencies. This allows our model to dynamically generate class-aware representations for the query set conditioned on the support set context in a single forward pass. To effectively train our model, we introduce an unsupervised task generator that creates structure-adaptive features and constructs diverse pseudo-tasks from abundant unlabeled data. Our method unifies unsupervised meta-learning with graph in-context learning, achieving efficient inference. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model. Our public code can be found

Inverting the Shield: Systematically Generating Safety Tests from Policy Specifications

arXiv:2605.24883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The widespread integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates rigorous and systematic safety evaluation. Existing paradigms either rely on constructed benchmarks to assess safety from predefined perspectives, or employ dynamic red-teaming to probe potential vulnerabilities. While effective, these approaches face challenges, as they depend heavily on expert domain knowledge, offer limited systematic guarantees, and are vulnerable to rapid obsolescence. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel framework POLARIS that brings the rigor of specification-based software testing to AI safety. POLARIS first compiles unstructured natural-language policies into First-Order Logic (FOL) representations, establishing a traceable link between high-level rules and concrete test cases. This formalization enables the construction of a Semantic Policy Graph, where complex policy violation scenarios are encoded as traversable paths. By systematically exploring this graph, POLARIS uncovers compositional violation patterns, which are then instantiated into executable natural-language test queries, enabling coverage-driven and reproducible safety testing. Experiments demonstrate that POLARIS achieves higher policy coverage and attack success counts compared to established baselines. Crucially, by bridging formal methods and AI safety, POLARIS provides a principled, automated approach to ensuring LLMs adhere to safety-critical policies with verifiable traceability. We release our code at https://github.com/huac-lxy/POLARIS.

ADMFormer: An Adaptive-Decomposition Transformer with Time-Varying Masked Spatial Attention for Traffic Forecasting

arXiv:2605.25543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate traffic forecasting is essential for intelligent transportation systems, supporting a wide range of real-world applications. However, it remains challenging due to two key factors:~(1) Traffic series contain heterogeneous temporal patterns, where stable periodic regularities coexist with event-driven fluctuations. Existing methods often treat them within a unified representation, limiting their ability to capture fine-grained temporal dynamics.~(2)Spatial dependencies among nodes are inherently dynamic and sparse, while dense all-pairs attention often introduces redundant interactions and amplifies noise. To address these issues, we propose ADMFormer, an Adaptive-Decomposition Transformer with Time-Varying Masked Spatial Attention. Specifically, ADMFormer first employs a time-node adaptive gating mechanism to decouple traffic signals into dominant regularities and residual fluctuations that vary across time and nodes. A dual-branch temporal module is then designed to separately capture global periodic dependencies and high-frequency irregular variations from these two decomposed components. Furthermore, ADMFormer introduces a time-varying masked spatial attention that sparsifies spatial interactions based on real-time traffic states, thereby effectively preserving dynamic and informative dependencies. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that ADMFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PHGNet: Prototype-Guided Hypergraph Construction for Heterogeneous Spatiotemporal Forecasting

arXiv:2605.25554v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As a core task in intelligent transportation systems, traffic forecasting plays a critical role in urban traffic management. Accurate traffic forecasting relies on modeling complex spatiotemporal dependencies, which is inherently challenging due to spatial heterogeneity in traffic systems.Despite significant progress, most existing methods are still limited to pairwise spatial dependency modeling, making it difficult to capture dynamic high-order interactions among nodes with similar traffic patterns. To address this issue, we propose PHGNet, a novel spatiotemporal forecasting framework based on prototype-guided hypergraph construction. At the core of PHGNet, a prototype learning mechanism is designed to adaptively assign pattern-similar nodes to hyperedges, thereby capturing high-order interactions with time-varying structures. To improve the reliability of dynamic hypergraph construction, we further develop a global-local node representation module to extract time-consistent features. For forecasting, iterative residual refinement and Temporal Query Attention are introduced to improve forecasting accuracy while supporting efficient parallel decoding. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that PHGNet achieves superior predictive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

IVR-R1: Refining Trajectories through Iterative Visual-Grounded Reasoning in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.23997v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models via reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex visual reasoning tasks, yet they remain limited in long-horizon multimodal scenarios, often suffering from visual hallucination and logical error. Current methods typically pre-encode high-dimensional visual scenes into discrete textual proxies to facilitate downstream reasoning. As the reasoning chain unfolds, however, the inherent information asymmetry between text and visual scenes tends to erode visual grounding, resulting in misguided reasoning and erroneous outputs. To address this issue, we introduce IVR-R1 (Iterative Visual-grounded Reasoning), a novel RL training framework that facilitates dynamic visual re-alignment that actively rectifies reasoning trajectories to guide policy optimization. Specifically, by leveraging a reward-driven screening mechanism to identify flawed rollouts, IVR-R1 executes a fine-grained, step-level error attribution within the multimodal context. By iteratively cross-referencing intermediate reasoning states against pristine visual priors, a Re-Reasoning Loop enables automated trajectory rectification, effectively synthesizing expert-level demonstrations that serve as high-fidelity reasoning templates for the policy model. Our experiments across diverse multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that IVR-R1 consistently outperforms existing reinforcement learning methods, establishing a superior paradigm for maintaining logical and visual consistency in complex multimodal reasoning.

ScaleAcross Explorer: Exploring Communication Optimization for Scale-Across AI Model Training

arXiv:2605.24326v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid scaling of large language model training requires distributing GPU resources across multiple data center buildings and regions. We refer to such paradigm as "scale-across" training. As infrastructure expands, the system design space becomes increasingly intricate, encompassing new model architectures, hardware heterogeneity, and evolving communication patterns. Drawing from Meta's production experience, we highlight the complexities of deploying training jobs across a few data centers housing hundreds of thousands of GPUs. To accelerate exploration of the large design space and to enable efficient training for frontier model development, we conduct in-depth characterization of three key design dimensions: parallelism placement, parallelism scheduling, and network layer technologies. We then propose ScaleAcross Explorer, an optimizer that considers the interplay of design dimensions and holistically optimizes scale-across training. Testbed experiments and simulations demonstrate up to 64.62% training speedups over production configuration and up to 37.59% training speedups over the state-of-the-art baseline across a wide range of design points.

MindAlign: Bridging EEG, Vision, and Language for Zero-Shot Visual Decoding

arXiv:2605.24523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual decoding from brain signals is a key challenge at the intersection of computer vision and neuroscience, requiring methods that bridge neural representations and computational models of vision. We introduce a tri-modal contrastive framework for EEG-based visual decoding that aligns EEG, visual, and textual representations within a unified latent space. Our approach follows a two-stage design. First, we pre-train an EEG encoder via masked reconstruction on unlabeled trials, learning spatio-temporal regularities that transfer robustly to downstream tasks. Second, we jointly align EEG, image, and LLM-generated textual descriptions through contrastive learning, where text supervision acts as a semantic regularizer that injects linguistic structure into the shared space without overwhelming the primary EEG-image signal. The encoder integrates subject-specific adaptation, graph-attention over channels, and temporal-spatial convolutional embeddings. On the Things-EEG2 200-way zero-shot benchmark, our framework achieves 54.1% Top-1 and 83.4% Top-5 accuracy, substantially exceeding the strongest prior baseline (32.4% / 64.0%), with paired Wilcoxon tests confirming significance (p

What Are We Actually Decoding? Source Attribution for Non-Invasive Brain-to-Language Retrieval

arXiv:2605.24524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In non-invasive neural language decoding, results can be inflated by sources that are not stimulus-evoked neural evidence: decoder priors, embedding-based metrics, and non-neural structural nuisances such as signal duration. The methodological challenge is therefore attribution: a reported gain is more informative when it can be traced to a specific source. We recast stimulus-locked MEG-to-audio retrieval as an auditing framework that separates apparent performance into three sources - structural shortcuts, window-level stimulus-locked evidence, and cross-window contextual aggregation - and provides a diagnostic for each. Signal-blind Gaussian noise reaches 66.3% Rank@1 (R@1) under variable-length decoding but collapses to near chance once fixed-duration windows and stimulus-identity splits are enforced, isolating structural leakage. Under these controls, fixed-window retrieval recovers measurable MEG-audio discriminability, while an oracle sentence-bucket diagnostic shows that 95.7% of Top-1 errors select the wrong sentence, localising the residual bottleneck to sentence-level competition. We audit this contextual source with Group Context Bias (GCB), an inference-time additive logit bias that pools sentence-consistent evidence across windows while leaving the base retrieval scores and candidate pool fixed. Used as a score-space intervention, GCB makes the contextual source measurable: R@1 shifts from 44% to 52% on Gwilliams and from 22% to 29% on MOUS under the same fixed setting. GCB is auditable under this design: its effect collapses under random-grouping perturbations and vanishes when local evidence is attenuated in MEG or is near chance in EEG, supporting its use as a controlled source-attribution intervention. These results suggest that brain-to-language performance should be source-attributed, not merely reported.

Bridging the Gap: Enabling Soft Actor Critic for High Performance Legged Locomotion

arXiv:2605.24975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the de facto standard for training legged robots, thanks to its robustness and scalability in massively parallel simulation environments like IsaacLab. However, its on-policy nature makes it inherently sample-inefficient, preventing its use for continuous adaptation and fine-tuning on real hardware. Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), by contrast, is an off-policy algorithm that can reuse past experience, making it a natural candidate for sim-to-real transfer workflows where the same algorithm can be used both in simulation and for online learning on the real robot. Despite these advantages, SAC has consistently failed to match PPO's empirical performance in massively parallel training settings. This work identifies the root causes of this gap and introduces targeted modifications, covering policy initialization, timeout-aware critic targets, and multi-step return estimation, that enable SAC to train stably at scale. Evaluated across multiple legged robot platforms and diverse locomotion tasks, our approach closes the performance gap with PPO entirely.

Uncertainty-DTW for Sequences and Visual Tokens

arXiv:2605.25110v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aligning structured data is a fundamental problem in computer vision and machine learning, underlying tasks such as time series analysis, human action recognition, and visual representation learning. Existing alignment methods, including Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and its differentiable variants, rely on deterministic similarity measures and are therefore sensitive to heterogeneous and noisy features. In this work, we introduce uncertainty-aware alignment, a probabilistic framework that models pairwise correspondences with heteroscedastic uncertainty and performs structured matching along alignment paths. Our formulation, uncertainty-DTW (uDTW), assigns each correspondence a Normal distribution and parametrizes each alignment path by a Maximum Likelihood Estimate objective consisting of (i) a precision-weighted matching term that suppresses unreliable features, and (ii) a log-variance regularization that prevents degenerate solutions. This yields a probabilistic alignment mechanism that is robust to noise and interpretable, as uncertainty directly reflects the reliability of matches. We further generalize this framework from temporal sequences to tokenized visual representations, enabling structured matching over sets of visual tokens. The learned uncertainty can be interpreted as a reverse-attention: semantically relevant regions exhibit low uncertainty and dominate the alignment, while ambiguous/noisy regions have high uncertainty. This provides a connection between alignment, attention, and uncertainty modeling. We evaluate the proposed framework across diverse domains. The results demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods and show that learned uncertainty correlates with semantic importance. These findings establish uncertainty-aware alignment as a general, robust, and interpretable framework for learning from structured data.
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