Think Inside the Chunk: RegulaRAG for Regulation-Compliant Scenario Generation using LLMs: A Case Study of UN Regulation No. 152

Generating regulation-compliant test scenarios is essential for validating safety-critical automotive systems, yet Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to ground outputs in long, hierarchical standards. We present RegulaRAG, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline that couples SmartChunking, reference-aware enrichment of paragraphs and tables via graph traversal, with Smart Retrieve & Rerank over these enriched units. To test our system, we evaluate on a manually curated dataset covering all scenarios in UN Regulation No. 152 (AEBS). Our study comprises: (i) a three-step progressive search that identifies near-optimal retrieval parameters without exhaustive grid search; (ii) head-to-head comparisons against five baseline RAG systems; and (iii) a robustness stress test that scales the source corpus with distractor content. Outputs are evaluated using a customized penalized scoring metric. Across all experiments, RegulaRAG achieves the highest average Meta-Score (82.99), outperforming the next-best system by 43% (NoRAG: 57.94), while operating at 14k-25k tokens per query versus up to 500k for graphcentric baselines. It maintains strong performance, remaining stable even as the number of regulatory sources grows, whereas competing RAG systems degrade sharply in both quality and robustness.

Dr. AGENTONOMICS: A Didactic Experiment of AGENTONOMICS

AGENTONOMICS is a framework that treats AI agents as economic entities that can be designed, managed, and governed through an integrated management architecture. Dr. AGENTONOMICS is its first application: a lecture agent developed in the context of the TUM course on AI agents in business administration. Conceived during the winter semester 2025/26 and first introduced to students in the summer semester 2026, it serves as a didactic experiment in which the agent is both the object that students study and the medium through which they learn and apply the framework. The current prototype is a web-based, retrieval-grounded tutor that explains AGENTONOMICS concepts and supports student questions. This report argues that the same system can grow beyond tutoring into three additional cumulative roles: an avatar lecturer that delivers multimodal instruction, a design consultant that guides students through the AGENTONOMICS Design & Management Reference Framework (ADMRF), and a meta-agent that helps construct the agents students have specified. These roles are cumulative because they share the same interface, intelligence layer, tools, knowledge base, and ecosystem connection, while an orchestrator selects the role-specific algorithm required for each task. We present the architecture of the prototype, outline its development roadmap, and discuss its implications for a polycentric AI economy. This report is intended to invite further discussion on how agents can teach, apply, and eventually reproduce the frameworks by which they are designed.

LLM-Driven Approach to Modeling Tool Interoperability in Automotive Domain

Interoperability between heterogeneous modeling tools remains a significant challenge in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), particularly in the automotive domain where multiple modeling languages, as well as defacto standard proprietary and open-source tools coexist. This paper presents an LLM-driven approach for automated model interoperability by considering two relevant aspects: 1) mapping model instances to a target metamodel 2) merging of metamodels. The proposed methodology is demonstrated through transformations involving Ecore and SysML v2 based metamodels and incorporates structural validation of generated model instances against user-defined target models. Automotive case studies illustrate the feasibility of the approach and show that large language models can significantly reduce manual transformation effort while generating structurally valid target models for cross-tool interoperability.

D-SafeMPC: Diffusion-Driven Safe Model Predictive Control with Discrete-Time Control Barrier Functions

A key limitation on the use of diffusion models in robotic planning is their inability to inherently enforce safety or dynamical constraints, which often results in physically infeasible or unsafe outputs. Hybrid approaches that employ model predictive control (MPC) to address this problem can be unstable, as poor trajectory initializations from the diffusion model prevent the MPC from converging to a safe and feasible solution. To overcome these challenges, we propose D-SafeMPC, which enhances the interaction between diffusion and control. Our method guides the reverse diffusion process with control barrier functions (CBFs) and control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) and employs an iterative-projection scheme where an MPC refines the trajectory at each denoising step. This steers sampling toward safe, goal-directed regions and provides reliable MPC warm starts. In simulations on a Franka manipulator across four scenarios (one static-obstacle and three dynamic-obstacle settings) and in a sim-to-real experiment on a physical Franka robot, D-SafeMPC improves safety, task success rates, and planning efficiency over state-of-the-art baselines. To facilitate reproducibility, our source code and experimental configurations are available in a repository at https://github.com/erdiphd/D-SafeMPC

ThorArena: Benchmarking Humanoid Physical Interaction with Human Motion-Force Demonstrations

Humanoid robots are increasingly expected to perform contact-rich tasks that require not only accurate whole-body motion but also robust physical interaction with surrounding objects and humans. Although recent advances in humanoid motion imitation and whole-body control have achieved remarkable tracking performance, existing datasets and benchmarks primarily focus on kinematic motion while largely overlooking synchronized interaction forces. As a result, current evaluations fail to capture how external interaction forces affect tracking accuracy, stability, and control robustness. In this paper, we present ThorArena, a benchmark for evaluating force-aware humanoid interaction based on human demonstrations with synchronized motion and force measurements. We collect a real-world interaction dataset that simultaneously captures whole-body human motion and forces exerted by both hands across six representative physical interaction tasks. Based on these demonstrations, we propose force-aware evaluation metrics that jointly assess whole-body tracking accuracy, robustness under different force levels, control effort, and episode survival through the Force-Aware Tracking Score (FATS) and complementary diagnostic metrics. We further establish a unified benchmark protocol that replays recorded interaction forces in simulation and provides a standardized evaluation interface for different humanoid control policies. Experiments on representative whole-body control policies demonstrate that force-aware evaluation reveals substantial performance differences that remain largely hidden under conventional no-force evaluation. ThorArena provides a practical and reproducible framework for studying force-aware humanoid interaction and offers a new benchmark for evaluating contact-rich humanoid behaviors.

CDCP: Conditional Diffusion Model with Contextual Prompts for Multi-task Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning

Multi-task offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) promises to learn a shared optimal safe policy from offline data across multiple tasks. This paradigm provides an effective means for the widespread application of RL in multi-task scenarios with high risk and interaction costs. However, the triple challenges of multi-tasking, safety constraints, and out-of-distribution (OOD) actions pose a significant hurdle for existing methods to ensure safety while maximizing reward returns. In this work, we propose a Conditional Diffusion model with Contextual Prompts (CDCP) to address these challenges. Concretely, we first rethink the requirements and challenges in current multi-task decision-making and control scenarios and establish the objectives of multi-task offline safe RL. Subsequently, we transform the multi-task constrained optimization problem into a conditional generation problem using the diffusion model. Based on this, we design a classifier-free guided cost-constraint strategy to provide flexible cost constraints and eliminate extrapolation errors from OOD actions via supervised learning. Additionally, we introduce a novel contextual prompting method to enhance multi-task representation accuracy and adaptability to unseen tasks. A gradient loss synchronization strategy is also introduced to eliminate gradient interference, improving training stability. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that the CDCP algorithm exhibits higher performance and safety in multi-task scenarios than the current state-of-the-art baseline methods. It meets different cost constraints without further training, providing a more flexible cost-constraint solution for the multi-task safe RL.

A Technical Taxonomy of LLM Agent Communication Protocols

As large language models (LLMs) advance and multi-agent systems aim to overcome the limits of standalone agents, robust communication protocols are becoming essential infrastructure for distributed agent networks. Nonetheless, the fragmented protocol landscape presents a significant interoperability challenge. This study develops a technical taxonomy to classify and analyze LLM agent communication protocols. Following an established iterative method, we defined the taxonomy's purpose, meta-characteristic, and ending conditions, then performed five iterations, three empirical-to-conceptual and two conceptual-to-empirical, on nine actively maintained open-source protocols with demonstrable adoption. The taxonomy comprises five dimensions: counterparty, payload, interaction state, discovery mechanism, and schema flexibility. Classification reveals recurring architectural patterns: all sampled agent-to-agent protocols combine hybrid payloads with session-state persistence; most protocols support multiple predefined schemas, and two negotiate schemas at runtime, indicating a trend toward schema flexibility; decentralized discovery remains rare. Analysis suggests short-term convergence pressure toward protocols unifying agent-to-agent and agent-to-context (tool and data) communication. Long-term, however, no single protocol is likely to maximize versatility, efficiency, and portability simultaneously. The field will more likely evolve toward a federated, layered protocol stack. The framework guides protocol selection and highlights open research gaps such as privacy and policy enforcement.}

Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Meta-reinforcement learning enables fast adaptation by extracting shared structure from related tasks, but existing end-to-end methods often couple task inference with embodiment-specific control. This coupling can obscure non-parametric task semantics, reduce sample efficiency, and limit cross-agent reuse. We propose a meta-knowledge reutilization framework that learns task-level knowledge on a dynamics-simplified agent and transfers it to heterogeneous agents. The framework uses a Bayesian non-parametric prior to organize latent task modes and a high-level policy to generate task-level magnitude guidance. To bridge reusable task knowledge with different embodiments, we introduce a semantic-magnitude interface and a lightweight temporal adaptor, which convert frozen meta-knowledge into temporally aligned subgoals for embodiment-specific low-level controllers. Experiments on multiple locomotion agents show that our framework reduces final-step tracking error by 94.75% -- 99.79% compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines and achieves comparable deployment performance with about 23.8% of their interaction data.

SpikeDecoder: Realizing the GPT Architecture with Spiking Neural Networks

The Transformer architecture is widely regarded as the most powerful tool for natural language processing, but due to a high number of complex operations, it inherently faces the issue of high energy consumption. To address this issue, we consider Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which are an energy-efficient alternative to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their naturally event-driven approach to processing information. However, this inherently makes them difficult to train. Often, many SNN-based models circumvent this issue by converting pre-trained ANNs. More recently, attempts have been made to design directly trainable SNN-based adaptations of the Transformer model structure. Although the results showed great promise, the application field was computer vision. Moreover, the proposed model incorporates only encoder blocks. In this paper, we propose SpikeDecoder, a fully SNN-based implementation of the Transformer decoder block, for applications in natural language processing. In a series of experiments, we analyze the impact of exchanging different blocks of the ANN model with spike-based alternatives to identify trade-offs and significant sources of performance loss. We further investigate the role of residual connections and the selection of SNN-compatible normalization techniques. Besides the work on the model architecture, we formulate and compare different embedding methods to project text data into spikes. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed SNN-based decoder block reduces the theoretical energy consumption by 87% to 93% compared to the ANN baseline.

$ω$-EVA: Envision, Verify, and Act with Latent Interactive World Models

Embodied policies typically map current observations directly to actions, leaving candidate-action consequences implicit. World models provide predictive supervision, representations, or external simulation, but rarely let a policy inspect the imagined consequence of its own proposal before acting. We introduce $ω$-EVA, a latent interactive world model that realizes an Envision--Verify--Act loop for embodied action generation. Its three-stage framework learns action-conditioned latent dynamics, trains a language-conditioned flow policy on dynamics-aware visual representations, and feeds the policy's proposal back through the world model. A tri-branch refiner jointly reasons over the current state, proposal-conditioned future, and proposed action to produce the final action chunk. Because consequence reasoning remains in latent feature space, $ω$-EVA avoids generating future videos at inference. Evaluations across diverse single-arm, bimanual, long-horizon, and perturbed simulation settings show that the complete interaction pipeline consistently improves the proposal policy, while latent diagnostics indicate meaningful action-conditioned future structure. With approximately 1.2B parameters and no additional robot-data pretraining, $ω$-EVA demonstrates a compact and competitive performance--scale--data trade-off, making the world model an active action-feedback module rather than a passive predictor.