arXiv:2609.12395v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three-dimensional Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) combines explicit primitives with efficient rasterization, yet recent systems increasingly use neural networks to generate or share Gaussian parameters. We characterize this trend along five axes: attribute decoding, spatial sharing, view-conditioned decoding, topology generation, and amortized inference. An analysis of 19 representative methods shows that these choices address different limitations and cannot be reduced to a binary neural label. We also isolate three forms of neural parameterization in a controlled mip-NeRF 360 study. Sharing appearance and opacity improves reconstruction quality, while decoding geometric structure offers no further gain. The evidence favors selective neuralization: shared functions help when they capture reusable correlations without sacrificing the local geometric freedom of explicit splats.

arXiv:2609.12036v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this technical report, we propose Pelican-Sim 1.0, a general world model simulator for embodied intelligence that predicts future observations from visual context and robot actions to support downstream learning and decision making. The model incorporates four key design features: (1) Unified action representation: a 28-dimensional action value space covering most mainstream embodiments, keeping one model valid across heterogeneous devices. (2) Action-visual injection: URDF- and camera-rendered action videos bridge actions and pixels, giving markedly better controllability across embodiments, scenes, and tasks (PSNR +0.904 over alternative fusion baselines). (3) Sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE): sparse MoE layers add capacity for heterogeneous dynamics and absorb the action modality while reducing inter-modality conflict (FVD -6.530 vs. the dense backbone). (4) Efficient rollout generation: causal adaptation and few-step distillation yield a four-step autoregressive simulator, achieving a 5.67-fold speedup over the 35-step model. Benefiting from these designs, we train on approximately one million real-world and simulated trajectories and obtain large gains in action controllability and video quality: PSNR improves over the strongest evaluated baselines by 4.636 on AgiBotWorld Beta, 2.080 on RoboMIND, and 10.343 on RoboTwin, with the adapted EWMBench DYN score up 0.426 on RoboTwin. Relying on this, four downstream applications on RoboTwin succeed: 500 generated trajectories added to 50 demonstrations per task raise policy success from 70% to 93%; policy evaluation reaches a Pearson correlation of 0.994 across five checkpoints; and relative success gains reach 47.7% for action selection and 20.3% for policy improvement. Qualitative generalization across trajectory, scene, object, embodiment, and viewpoint shifts highlights its potential as a general-purpose world model simulator.

Nature Biomedical Engineering, Published online: 11 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41551-026-01787-4

Applying extensive chemical modifications to RNA motifs substantially enhances prime editing efficiency in vivo and can be applied for improved efficiencies across RNA-based editing systems.