Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy
Abstract:RoboCup has always been a scenario to develop systems that solve real-world problems. Driven by the main goal of playing against the 2050 FIFA World Cup champions, the RoboCup Soccer leagues need to constantly measure how the research community is progressing. Computing visual statistics from match videos is a crucial way to track this evolution. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a fully autonomous, real-time sports commentator for RoboCup matches. By bridging the gap between raw kinematic tracking and natural language generation, our neuro-symbolic architecture extracts precise statistics from video streams and turns them into fluent, hallucination-free narration. The proposed system is capable of generating statistics and commentary both during live match streaming and in post-game analysis, easily adapting to the new dynamism of the league where different humanoid robots of different sizes share the field. Supplemental materials are available at https://lab-rococo-sapienza.github.io/MARIO/
Abstract:Recent advances in humanoid robotics have highlighted the importance of deployable loco-manipulation skills. Dribbling a soccer ball while evading active opponents requires simultaneous balance, precise ball control, and awareness of a dynamic adversary under onboard sensing and real-time constraints. Existing approaches typically separate perception and motion, which can be effective in controlled settings but may fail under occlusions, fast ball movements, and complex opponent interactions, since perception is not directly optimized for control. We propose an integrated approach in which a temporal depth encoder is embedded into a reinforcement learning policy through a task-specific projection layer. We apply this framework to a simulated Booster T1 humanoid robot and show that it is possible to learn vision-based, opponent-aware dribbling directly from depth observations, without explicit state estimation or privileged scene information. The learned policy achieves 100% success in nominal target-driven dribbling and 96% success with a single static obstacle, while reaching 46% success against an actively moving ball-attacker opponent. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework supports robust vision-based dribbling in nominal and moderately dynamic settings, and provides a strong foundation for handling more challenging moving-adversary scenarios.
Abstract:Joint spatial and temporal understanding of 3D scenes is a crucial requirement for robots deployed in everyday household environments. Such agents must not only comprehend and navigate spatial layouts, but also reason about how these spaces evolve over time. In particular, humans interact with objects daily, causing them to change position throughout the environment and making it difficult for robots to reliably associate current observations with previously seen objects. However, these interactions are not random: human habits and routines induce spatio-temporally consistent patterns in object locations, which robotic agents can potentially learn and then exploit for downstream tasks such as navigation. To this end, we introduce FlowMaps, a latent flow matching model for estimating multimodal distributions over the future locations of dynamic objects in a continuous 3D space. By learning the implicit dependencies among objects and their temporal evolution, FlowMaps predicts likely changes in object locations conditioned on past human interactions, while supporting generalization across previously unseen environments that share similar object routines. To demonstrate the utility of this method, we deploy FlowMaps in a downstream dynamic Object Navigation task in both simulated and real-world environments. Across more than 600 episodes, FlowMaps outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, showing that modeling object dynamics through continuous, multimodal spatio-temporal distributions improves robotic search and navigation in changing household environments. Code and additional material is available at https://fra-tsuna.github.io/flowmaps/.
Abstract:3D Scene Graphs (3DSGs) have emerged as a powerful representation for spatial AI by combining geometric grounding with semantic and relational abstractions of the environment. Their expressiveness has made them relevant to a broad range of problems in robotics and computer vision, including manipulation, navigation, task planning, scene understanding, and many others. However, the field remains fragmented: different communities adopt distinct formulations, construction pipelines, and evaluation protocols, making it difficult to compare methods, identify common assumptions, and assess remaining challenges for robust real-world deployment. This survey provides a unified and critical review of 3DSGs, with particular emphasis on open challenges and future directions. We first formalize 3DSGs under a common definition and analyze the principal modeling choices that characterize existing formulations, including node and edge attributes, hierarchical structure, dynamic scene representations, and affordance-aware extensions. We then review how 3DSGs are built from raw sensory observations, discussing the most common terminologies, conventions, and techniques. Finally, we examine downstream applications and evaluation strategies, from intrinsic graph quality to task-level performance. To support the community, we also provide a dedicated website that organizes and extends the surveyed content, accessible at https://3dscenegraphs.com/.
Abstract:Background. Traditional safety benchmarks for language models evaluate generated text: whether a model outputs toxic language, reproduces bias, or follows harmful instructions. When models are deployed as agents, the safety-relevant object shifts from what the system says to what it does within an environment, and evaluating model responses under prompting is no longer sufficient to address the safety challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Recent developments have seen the rise of benchmarks that evaluate large language models as agents. We contribute to this strand of research. Approach. We introduce Boiling the Frog, a benchmark that evaluates whether tool-using AI models deployed in corporate and office settings are susceptible to incremental attacks. Each scenario begins with benign workspace edits and later introduces a risk-bearing request. The benchmark focuses on stateful multi-turn evaluation: chains expose a persistent workspace, place the risk-bearing payload at controlled positions in the turn sequence, and score whether the resulting artifact state becomes unsafe. Scenarios are organized through a three-level operational risk taxonomy grounded in the Boiling the Frog risks, the AI Act Annex I and Annex III high-risk contexts, and EU AI Act's Code of Practice on General-Purpose AI (GPAI). Results. Across a nine-model panel, aggregate strict attack success rate (ASR) is 44.4%. Model-level ASR ranges from 20.5% for Claude Haiku 4.5 to 92.9% for Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, with Seed 2.0 Lite also above 80%. Average chain category-level ASR reaches 93.3% for Code of Practice loss-of-control scenarios.
Abstract:Large language models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, where their ability to resist harmful instructions is essential. Although post-training aims to make models robust against many jailbreak strategies, recent evidence shows that stylistic reformulations, such as poetic transformation, can still bypass safety mechanisms with alarming effectiveness. This raises a central question: why do literary jailbreaks succeed? In this work, we investigate whether their effectiveness depends on specific poetic devices, on a failure to recognize literary formatting, or on deeper changes in how models process stylistically irregular prompts. We address this problem through an interpretability analysis of attention patterns. We perform input-level ablation studies to assess the contribution of individual and combinations of poetic devices; construct an interpretable vector representation of attention maps; cluster these representations and train linear probes to predict safety outcomes and literary format. Our results show that models distinguish poetic from prose formats with high accuracy, yet struggle to predict jailbreak success within each format. Clustering further reveals clear separation by literary format, but not by safety label. These findings indicate that jailbreak success is not caused by a failure to recognize poetic formatting; rather, poetic prompts induce distinct processing patterns that remain largely independent of harmful-content detection. Overall, literary jailbreaks appear to misalign large language models not through any single poetic device, but through accumulated stylistic irregularities that alter prompt processing and avoid lexical triggers considered during post-training. This suggests that robustness requires safety mechanisms that account for style-induced shifts in model behavior. We use Qwen3-14B as a representative open-weight case study.
Abstract:The Adversarial Humanities Benchmark (AHB) evaluates whether model safety refusals survive a shift away from familiar harmful prompt forms. Starting from harmful tasks drawn from MLCommons AILuminate, the benchmark rewrites the same objectives through humanities-style transformations while preserving intent. This extends literature on Adversarial Poetry and Adversarial Tales from single jailbreak operators to a broader benchmark family of stylistic obfuscation and goal concealment. In the benchmark results reported here, the original attacks record 3.84% attack success rate (ASR), while transformed methods range from 36.8% to 65.0%, yielding 55.75% overall ASR across 31 frontier models. Under a European Union AI Act Code-of-Practice-inspired systemic-risk lens, Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) is the highest bucket. Taken together, this lack of stylistic robustness suggests that current safety techniques suffer from weak generalization: deep understanding of 'non-maleficence' remains a central unresolved problem in frontier model safety.
Abstract:Zero-shot open-vocabulary object navigation has progressed rapidly with the emergence of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs), now widely used as high-level decision-makers instead of end-to-end policies. Although effective, such systems often rely on iterative large-model queries at inference time, introducing latency and computational overhead that limit real-time deployment. To address this problem, we repurpose ray frontiers (R2F), a recently proposed frontier-based exploration paradigm, to develop an LLM-free framework for indoor open-vocabulary object navigation. While ray frontiers were originally used to bias exploration using semantic cues carried along rays, we reinterpret frontier regions as explicit, direction-conditioned semantic hypotheses that serve as navigation goals. Language-aligned features accumulated along out-of-range rays are stored sparsely at frontiers, where each region maintains multiple directional embeddings encoding plausible unseen content. In this way, navigation then reduces to embedding-based frontier scoring and goal tracking within a classical mapping and planning pipeline, eliminating iterative large-model reasoning. We further introduce R2F-VLN, a lightweight extension for free-form language instructions using syntactic parsing and relational verification without additional VLM or LLM components. Experiments in Habitat-sim and on a real robotic platform demonstrate competitive state-of-the-art zero-shot performance with real-time execution, achieving up to 6 times faster runtime than VLM-based alternatives.
Abstract:Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful framework for solving complex sequential decision-making problems, particularly in robotic control. However, its practical deployment is often hindered by the substantial amount of experience required for learning, which results in high computational and time costs. In this work, we propose a novel integration of DRL with semantic knowledge in the form of Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs), aiming to enhance learning efficiency by providing contextual information to the agent. Our architecture combines KGEs with visual observations, enabling the agent to exploit environmental knowledge during training. Experimental validation with robotic manipulators in environments featuring both fixed and randomized target attributes demonstrates that our method achieves up to {60}{\%} reduction in learning time and improves task accuracy by approximately 15 percentage points, without increasing training time or computational complexity. These results highlight the potential of semantic knowledge to reduce sample complexity and improve the effectiveness of DRL in robotic applications.
Abstract:Multi-agent LLM ensembles can converge on coordinated, socially harmful equilibria. This paper advances an experimental framework for evaluating Institutional AI, our system-level approach to AI alignment that reframes alignment from preference engineering in agent-space to mechanism design in institution-space. Central to this approach is the governance graph, a public, immutable manifest that declares legal states, transitions, sanctions, and restorative paths; an Oracle/Controller runtime interprets this manifest, attaching enforceable consequences to evidence of coordination while recording a cryptographically keyed, append-only governance log for audit and provenance. We apply the Institutional AI framework to govern the Cournot collusion case documented by prior work and compare three regimes: Ungoverned (baseline incentives from the structure of the Cournot market), Constitutional (a prompt-only policy-as-prompt prohibition implemented as a fixed written anti-collusion constitution, and Institutional (governance-graph-based). Across six model configurations including cross-provider pairs (N=90 runs/condition), the Institutional regime produces large reductions in collusion: mean tier falls from 3.1 to 1.8 (Cohen's d=1.28), and severe-collusion incidence drops from 50% to 5.6%. The prompt-only Constitutional baseline yields no reliable improvement, illustrating that declarative prohibitions do not bind under optimisation pressure. These results suggest that multi-agent alignment may benefit from being framed as an institutional design problem, where governance graphs can provide a tractable abstraction for alignment-relevant collective behavior.