Automating the Design of Embodied Agent Architectures

Embodied agents are typically built as hand-designed compositions of perception, memory, planning, and action modules. This modularity exposes a large architectural design space, but current systems still rely on researcher intuition to choose where information is stored, how observations are processed, and how model calls are connected. Agent Architecture Search (AAS) automates such design for text-domain agents, but has not been systematically evaluated on perceptual embodied agents through simulator rollouts. We study this transfer. We introduce AgentCanvas, a typed-graph runtime that hosts embodied executors as editable node-and-wire programs with simulator-aware execution and episode-level logs, and KDLoop, a coding-agent search procedure that cycles through proposal, critique, experiment, and distillation, with triggered reflection after stalls. We evaluate three AAS variants across four embodied executors spanning vision-language navigation, embodied question answering, and language-conditioned manipulation. The resulting 3x4 matrix shows that architecture-level search can produce deployable and directional success-rate gains on embodied tasks, while one apparent high-scoring candidate is rejected as leak-bearing. At the same time, the experiments expose constraints that are muted in text-domain AAS: optimization signals can be masked by rollout noise, search can become trapped in local edit basins, and episode-level credit assignment only partially emerges even when detailed logs are available. These results characterize both the promise and the current limits of automated architecture search for embodied agents.

Automating the Design of Embodied AgentArchitectures

Embodied agents are typically built as hand-designed compositions of perception, memory, planning, and action modules. This modularity exposes a large architectural design space, but current systems still rely on researcher intuition to choose where information is stored, how observations are processed, and how model calls are connected. Agent Architecture Search (AAS) automates such design for text-domain agents, but has not been systematically evaluated on perceptual embodied agents through simulator rollouts. We study this transfer. We introduce AgentCanvas, a typed-graph runtime that hosts embodied executors as editable node-and-wire programs with simulator-aware execution and episode-level logs, and KDLoop, a coding-agent search procedure that cycles through proposal, critique, experiment, and distillation, with triggered reflection after stalls. We evaluate three AAS variants across four embodied executors spanning vision-language navigation, embodied question answering, and language-conditioned manipulation. The resulting 3x4 matrix shows that architecture-level search can produce deployable and directional success-rate gains on embodied tasks, while one apparent high-scoring candidate is rejected as leak-bearing. At the same time, the experiments expose constraints that are muted in text-domain AAS: optimization signals can be masked by rollout noise, search can become trapped in local edit basins, and episode-level credit assignment only partially emerges even when detailed logs are available. These results characterize both the promise and the current limits of automated architecture search for embodied agents.

DBHN-Net: Dual-Branch Hybrid Neural Network For Low-Complexity Monaural Speech Enhancement

Although artificial neural network (ANN) based speech enhancement (SE) methods demonstrate excellent performance, the high computational complexity and high energy consumption hinder their deployment in practical front-end processing tasks.} Currently, the spiking neural networks (SNNs) have shown potential in reducing power consumption. However, the discrete binary activation and complex spatio-temporal dynamics of SNNs often result in information loss. The current challenge therefore focuses on how to maintain performance and reduce computational complexity. To address this issue, this work propose a Dual-Branch Hybrid Neural (DBHN) Network. 1) In terms of network architecture: A dual-branch network integrating ANN and SNN was designed, where the SNN branch reduces power consumption while the ANN branch addresses information loss; The BandSplit and Time-Frequency (TF) -Mamba modules were developed to simultaneously compress energy consumption and enhance model performance; Spiking Feature Extraction Group (SFEG) and Information Transformation Block (ITB) components were implemented with residual connections to mitigate information loss while further refining feature representations. 2) To facilitate inter-branch information fusion: An Interaction module was designed to promote information exchange at various stages of the dual-branch network; A TF-Cross Attention-Fusion module was designed to perform time-frequency domain fusion of dual-branch information while data-adaptively guiding the SNN branch to retain more critical information. Results show that the proposed model maintains superior performance across three public datasets while achieving an average 7.5 fold reduction in computational complexity compared to baseline models.

Neural Dynamic GI: Random-Access Neural Compression for Temporal Lightmaps in Dynamic Lighting Environments

High-quality global illumination (GI) in real-time rendering is commonly achieved using precomputed lighting techniques, with lightmap as the standard choice. To support GI for static objects in dynamic lighting environments, multiple lightmaps at different lighting conditions need to be precomputed, which incurs substantial storage and memory overhead. To overcome this limitation, we propose Neural Dynamic GI (NDGI), a novel compression technique specifically designed for temporal lightmap sets. Our method utilizes multi-dimensional feature maps and lightweight neural networks to integrate the temporal information instead of storing multiple sets explicitly, which significantly reduces the storage size of lightmaps. Additionally, we introduce a block compression (BC) simulation strategy during the training process, which enables BC compression on the final generated feature maps and further improves the compression ratio. To enable efficient real-time decompression, we also integrate a virtual texturing (VT) system with our neural representation. Compared with prior methods, our approach achieves high-quality dynamic GI while maintaining remarkably low storage and memory requirements, with only modest real-time decompression overhead. To facilitate further research in this direction, we will release our temporal lightmap dataset precomputed in multiple scenes featuring diverse temporal variations.

One Agent to Guide Them All: Empowering MLLMs for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Explicit World Representation

A navigable agent needs to understand both high-level semantic instructions and precise spatial perceptions. Building navigation agents centered on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrates a promising solution due to their powerful generalization ability. However, the current tightly coupled design dramatically limits system performance. In this work, we propose a decoupled design that separates low-level spatial state estimation from high-level semantic planning. Unlike previous methods that rely on predefined, oversimplified textual maps, we introduce an interactive metric world representation that maintains rich and consistent information, allowing MLLMs to interact with and reason on it for decision-making. Furthermore, counterfactual reasoning is introduced to further elicit MLLMs' capacity, while the metric world representation ensures the physical validity of the produced actions. We conduct comprehensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments. Our method establishes a new zero-shot state-of-the-art, achieving 48.8\% Success Rate (SR) in R2R-CE and 42.2\% in RxR-CE benchmarks. Furthermore, to validate the versatility of our metric representation, we demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer across diverse embodiments, including a wheeled TurtleBot 4 and a custom-built aerial drone. These real-world deployments verify that our decoupled framework serves as a robust, domain-invariant interface for embodied Vision-and-Language navigation.

Step 3.5 Flash: Open Frontier-Level Intelligence with 11B Active Parameters

We introduce Step 3.5 Flash, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that bridges frontier-level agentic intelligence and computational efficiency. We focus on what matters most when building agents: sharp reasoning and fast, reliable execution. Step 3.5 Flash pairs a 196B-parameter foundation with 11B active parameters for efficient inference. It is optimized with interleaved 3:1 sliding-window/full attention and Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) to reduce the latency and cost of multi-round agentic interactions. To reach frontier-level intelligence, we design a scalable reinforcement learning framework that combines verifiable signals with preference feedback, while remaining stable under large-scale off-policy training, enabling consistent self-improvement across mathematics, code, and tool use. Step 3.5 Flash demonstrates strong performance across agent, coding, and math tasks, achieving 85.4% on IMO-AnswerBench, 86.4% on LiveCodeBench-v6 (2024.08-2025.05), 88.2% on tau2-Bench, 69.0% on BrowseComp (with context management), and 51.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparable to frontier models such as GPT-5.2 xHigh and Gemini 3.0 Pro. By redefining the efficiency frontier, Step 3.5 Flash provides a high-density foundation for deploying sophisticated agents in real-world industrial environments.

STEP3-VL-10B Technical Report

We present STEP3-VL-10B, a lightweight open-source foundation model designed to redefine the trade-off between compact efficiency and frontier-level multimodal intelligence. STEP3-VL-10B is realized through two strategic shifts: first, a unified, fully unfrozen pre-training strategy on 1.2T multimodal tokens that integrates a language-aligned Perception Encoder with a Qwen3-8B decoder to establish intrinsic vision-language synergy; and second, a scaled post-training pipeline featuring over 1k iterations of reinforcement learning. Crucially, we implement Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe) to scale test-time compute, allocating resources to scalable perceptual reasoning that explores and synthesizes diverse visual hypotheses. Consequently, despite its compact 10B footprint, STEP3-VL-10B rivals or surpasses models 10$\times$-20$\times$ larger (e.g., GLM-4.6V-106B, Qwen3-VL-235B) and top-tier proprietary flagships like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Seed-1.5-VL. Delivering best-in-class performance, it records 92.2% on MMBench and 80.11% on MMMU, while excelling in complex reasoning with 94.43% on AIME2025 and 75.95% on MathVision. We release the full model suite to provide the community with a powerful, efficient, and reproducible baseline.

Decoupled Action Head: Confining Task Knowledge to Conditioning Layers

Behavior Cloning (BC) is a data-driven supervised learning approach that has gained increasing attention with the success of scaling laws in language and vision domains. Among its implementations in robotic manipulation, Diffusion Policy (DP), with its two variants DP-CNN (DP-C) and DP-Transformer (DP-T), is one of the most effective and widely adopted models, demonstrating the advantages of predicting continuous action sequences. However, both DP and other BC methods remain constrained by the scarcity of paired training data, and the internal mechanisms underlying DP's effectiveness remain insufficiently understood, leading to limited generalization and a lack of principled design in model development. In this work, we propose a decoupled training recipe that leverages nearly cost-free kinematics-generated trajectories as observation-free data to pretrain a general action head (action generator). The pretrained action head is then frozen and adapted to novel tasks through feature modulation. Our experiments demonstrate the feasibility of this approach in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. As an additional benefit, decoupling improves training efficiency; for instance, DP-C achieves up to a 41% speedup. Furthermore, the confinement of task-specific knowledge to the conditioning components under decoupling, combined with the near-identical performance of DP-C in both normal and decoupled training, indicates that the action generation backbone plays a limited role in robotic manipulation. Motivated by this observation, we introduce DP-MLP, which replaces the 244M-parameter U-Net backbone of DP-C with only 4M parameters of simple MLP blocks, achieving a 83.9% faster training speed under normal training and 89.1% under decoupling.

Behavior-Aware Online Prediction of Obstacle Occupancy using Zonotopes

Predicting the motion of surrounding vehicles is key to safe autonomous driving, especially in unstructured environments without prior information. This paper proposes a novel online method to accurately predict the occupancy sets of surrounding vehicles based solely on motion observations. The approach is divided into two stages: first, an Extended Kalman Filter and a Linear Programming (LP) problem are used to estimate a compact zonotopic set of control actions; then, a reachability analysis propagates this set to predict future occupancy. The effectiveness of the method has been validated through simulations in an urban environment, showing accurate and compact predictions without relying on prior assumptions or prior training data.

Linguistic Neuron Overlap Patterns to Facilitate Cross-lingual Transfer on Low-resource Languages

The current Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges in improving performance on low-resource languages and urgently need data-efficient methods without costly fine-tuning. From the perspective of language-bridge, we propose BridgeX-ICL, a simple yet effective method to improve zero-shot Cross-lingual In-Context Learning (X-ICL) for low-resource languages. Unlike existing works focusing on language-specific neurons, BridgeX-ICL explores whether sharing neurons can improve cross-lingual performance in LLMs or not. We construct neuron probe data from the ground-truth MUSE bilingual dictionaries, and define a subset of language overlap neurons accordingly, to ensure full activation of these anchored neurons. Subsequently, we propose an HSIC-based metric to quantify LLMs' internal linguistic spectrum based on overlap neurons, which guides optimal bridge selection. The experiments conducted on 2 cross-lingual tasks and 15 language pairs from 7 diverse families (covering both high-low and moderate-low pairs) validate the effectiveness of BridgeX-ICL and offer empirical insights into the underlying multilingual mechanisms of LLMs.