A Survey on Soft Robot Adaptability: Implementations, Applications, and Prospects

Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing application across various fields. Among these benefits, adaptability is particularly noteworthy. In this paper, adaptability in soft robots is categorized into external and internal adaptability. External adaptability refers to the robot's ability to adjust, either passively or actively, to variations in environments, object properties, geometries, and task dynamics. Internal adaptability refers to the robot's ability to cope with internal variations, such as manufacturing tolerances or material aging, and to generalize control strategies across different robots. As the field of soft robotics continues to evolve, the significance of adaptability has become increasingly pronounced. In this review, we summarize various approaches to enhancing the adaptability of soft robots, including design, sensing, and control strategies. Additionally, we assess the impact of adaptability on applications such as surgery, wearable devices, locomotion, and manipulation. We also discuss the limitations of soft robotics adaptability and prospective directions for future research. By analyzing adaptability through the lenses of implementation, application, and challenges, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of this essential characteristic in soft robotics and its implications for diverse applications.

FedMLAC: Mutual Learning Driven Heterogeneous Federated Audio Classification

Federated Learning (FL) provides a privacy-preserving paradigm for training audio classification (AC) models across distributed clients without sharing raw data. However, Federated Audio Classification (FedAC) faces three critical challenges that substantially hinder performance: data heterogeneity, model heterogeneity, and data poisoning. While prior works have attempted to address these issues, they are typically treated independently, lacking a unified and robust solution suited to real-world federated audio scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose FedMLAC, a unified mutual learning framework designed to simultaneously tackle these challenges in FedAC. Specifically, FedMLAC introduces a dual-model architecture on each client, comprising a personalized local AC model and a lightweight, globally shared Plug-in model. Through bidirectional knowledge distillation, the Plug-in model enables global knowledge transfer while adapting to client-specific data distributions, thus supporting both generalization and personalization. To further enhance robustness against corrupted audio data, we develop a Layer-wise Pruning Aggregation (LPA) strategy that filters unreliable Plug-in model updates based on parameter deviations during server-side aggregation. Extensive experiments on four diverse audio classification benchmarks, spanning both speech and non-speech tasks, demonstrate that FedMLAC consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification accuracy and robustness to noisy data.

Know-MRI: A Knowledge Mechanisms Revealer&Interpreter for Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, there is a growing urgency to enhance the interpretability of their internal knowledge mechanisms. Consequently, many interpretation methods have emerged, aiming to unravel the knowledge mechanisms of LLMs from various perspectives. However, current interpretation methods differ in input data formats and interpreting outputs. The tools integrating these methods are only capable of supporting tasks with specific inputs, significantly constraining their practical applications. To address these challenges, we present an open-source Knowledge Mechanisms Revealer&Interpreter (Know-MRI) designed to analyze the knowledge mechanisms within LLMs systematically. Specifically, we have developed an extensible core module that can automatically match different input data with interpretation methods and consolidate the interpreting outputs. It enables users to freely choose appropriate interpretation methods based on the inputs, making it easier to comprehensively diagnose the model's internal knowledge mechanisms from multiple perspectives. Our code is available at https://github.com/nlpkeg/Know-MRI. We also provide a demonstration video on https://youtu.be/NVWZABJ43Bs.

Prompting Wireless Networks: Reinforced In-Context Learning for Power Control

To manage and optimize constantly evolving wireless networks, existing machine learning (ML)- based studies operate as black-box models, leading to increased computational costs during training and a lack of transparency in decision-making, which limits their practical applicability in wireless networks. Motivated by recent advancements in large language model (LLM)-enabled wireless networks, this paper proposes ProWin, a novel framework that leverages reinforced in-context learning to design task-specific demonstration Prompts for Wireless Network optimization, relying on the inference capabilities of LLMs without the need for dedicated model training or finetuning. The task-specific prompts are designed to incorporate natural language descriptions of the task description and formulation, enhancing interpretability and eliminating the need for specialized expertise in network optimization. We further propose a reinforced in-context learning scheme that incorporates a set of advisable examples into task-specific prompts, wherein informative examples capturing historical environment states and decisions are adaptively selected to guide current decision-making. Evaluations on a case study of base station power control showcases that the proposed ProWin outperforms reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods, highlighting the potential for next-generation future wireless network optimization.

Please Translate Again: Two Simple Experiments on Whether Human-Like Reasoning Helps Translation

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities for many tasks, often by explicitly decomposing the task via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Recent work on LLM-based translation designs hand-crafted prompts to decompose translation, or trains models to incorporate intermediate steps.~\textit{Translating Step-by-step}~\citep{briakou2024translating}, for instance, introduces a multi-step prompt with decomposition and refinement of translation with LLMs, which achieved state-of-the-art results on WMT24. In this work, we scrutinise this strategy's effectiveness. Empirically, we find no clear evidence that performance gains stem from explicitly decomposing the translation process, at least for the models on test; and we show that simply prompting LLMs to ``translate again'' yields even better results than human-like step-by-step prompting. Our analysis does not rule out the role of reasoning, but instead invites future work exploring the factors for CoT's effectiveness in the context of translation.

TextAtari: 100K Frames Game Playing with Language Agents

We present TextAtari, a benchmark for evaluating language agents on very long-horizon decision-making tasks spanning up to 100,000 steps. By translating the visual state representations of classic Atari games into rich textual descriptions, TextAtari creates a challenging test bed that bridges sequential decision-making with natural language processing. The benchmark includes nearly 100 distinct tasks with varying complexity, action spaces, and planning horizons, all rendered as text through an unsupervised representation learning framework (AtariARI). We evaluate three open-source large language models (Qwen2.5-7B, Gemma-7B, and Llama3.1-8B) across three agent frameworks (zero-shot, few-shot chain-of-thought, and reflection reasoning) to assess how different forms of prior knowledge affect performance on these long-horizon challenges. Four scenarios-Basic, Obscured, Manual Augmentation, and Reference-based-investigate the impact of semantic understanding, instruction comprehension, and expert demonstrations on agent decision-making. Our results reveal significant performance gaps between language agents and human players in extensive planning tasks, highlighting challenges in sequential reasoning, state tracking, and strategic planning across tens of thousands of steps. TextAtari provides standardized evaluation protocols, baseline implementations, and a framework for advancing research at the intersection of language models and planning.

SentinelAgent: Graph-based Anomaly Detection in Multi-Agent Systems

The rise of large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) introduces new security and reliability challenges. While these systems show great promise in decomposing and coordinating complex tasks, they also face multi-faceted risks across prompt manipulation, unsafe tool usage, and emergent agent miscoordination. Existing guardrail mechanisms offer only partial protection, primarily at the input-output level, and fall short in addressing systemic or multi-point failures in MAS. In this work, we present a system-level anomaly detection framework tailored for MAS, integrating structural modeling with runtime behavioral oversight. Our approach consists of two components. First, we propose a graph-based framework that models agent interactions as dynamic execution graphs, enabling semantic anomaly detection at node, edge, and path levels. Second, we introduce a pluggable SentinelAgent, an LLM-powered oversight agent that observes, analyzes, and intervenes in MAS execution based on security policies and contextual reasoning. By bridging abstract detection logic with actionable enforcement, our method detects not only single-point faults and prompt injections but also multi-agent collusion and latent exploit paths. We validate our framework through two case studies, including an email assistant and Microsoft's Magentic-One system, demonstrating its ability to detect covert risks and provide explainable root-cause attribution. Our work lays the foundation for more trustworthy, monitorable, and secure agent-based AI ecosystems.

Reinforced Reasoning for Embodied Planning

Embodied planning requires agents to make coherent multi-step decisions based on dynamic visual observations and natural language goals. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) excel at static perception tasks, they struggle with the temporal reasoning, spatial understanding, and commonsense grounding needed for planning in interactive environments. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement fine-tuning framework that brings R1-style reasoning enhancement into embodied planning. We first distill a high-quality dataset from a powerful closed-source model and perform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to equip the model with structured decision-making priors. We then design a rule-based reward function tailored to multi-step action quality and optimize the policy via Generalized Reinforced Preference Optimization (GRPO). Our approach is evaluated on Embench, a recent benchmark for interactive embodied tasks, covering both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms models of similar or larger scale, including GPT-4o-mini and 70B+ open-source baselines, and exhibits strong generalization to unseen environments. This work highlights the potential of reinforcement-driven reasoning to advance long-horizon planning in embodied AI.

Visualized Text-to-Image Retrieval

We propose Visualize-then-Retrieve (VisRet), a new paradigm for Text-to-Image (T2I) retrieval that mitigates the limitations of cross-modal similarity alignment of existing multi-modal embeddings. VisRet first projects textual queries into the image modality via T2I generation. Then, it performs retrieval within the image modality to bypass the weaknesses of cross-modal retrievers in recognizing subtle visual-spatial features. Experiments on three knowledge-intensive T2I retrieval benchmarks, including a newly introduced multi-entity benchmark, demonstrate that VisRet consistently improves T2I retrieval by 24.5% to 32.7% NDCG@10 across different embedding models. VisRet also significantly benefits downstream visual question answering accuracy when used in retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. The method is plug-and-play and compatible with off-the-shelf retrievers, making it an effective module for knowledge-intensive multi-modal systems. Our code and the new benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/xiaowu0162/Visualize-then-Retrieve.

Leveraging Multivariate Long-Term History Representation for Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting has a wide range of applications in both industry and academia. Recent advances in Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network (STGNN) have achieved great progress in modelling spatial-temporal correlations. Limited by computational complexity, most STGNNs for MTS forecasting focus primarily on short-term and local spatial-temporal dependencies. Although some recent methods attempt to incorporate univariate history into modeling, they still overlook crucial long-term spatial-temporal similarities and correlations across MTS, which are essential for accurate forecasting. To fill this gap, we propose a framework called the Long-term Multivariate History Representation (LMHR) Enhanced STGNN for MTS forecasting. Specifically, a Long-term History Encoder (LHEncoder) is adopted to effectively encode the long-term history into segment-level contextual representations and reduce point-level noise. A non-parametric Hierarchical Representation Retriever (HRetriever) is designed to include the spatial information in the long-term spatial-temporal dependency modelling and pick out the most valuable representations with no additional training. A Transformer-based Aggregator (TAggregator) selectively fuses the sparsely retrieved contextual representations based on the ranking positional embedding efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate that LMHR outperforms typical STGNNs by 10.72% on the average prediction horizons and state-of-the-art methods by 4.12% on several real-world datasets. Additionally, it consistently improves prediction accuracy by 9.8% on the top 10% of rapidly changing patterns across the datasets.