A Visitation Grid for Complete Coverage Foraging in Robot Swarms

The complete collection of sparse resources in large, unknown environments remains a challenging problem for autonomous robot swarms. Previous studies have shown that a substantial portion of total mission time is consumed during the final stage of collection, where only a small fraction of randomly scattered resources remain. Consequently, many existing swarm foraging algorithms (search and collection) focus on collecting most resources within a limited time window, rather than improving end-stage efficiency for collecting all resources. We propose a grid-based stochastic foraging strategy that explicitly reduces redundant visits and accelerates late-stage collection. The unknown search area is partitioned into a grid map, which is maintained by a lightweight central server. To maintain scalability, both robots and the server operate within limited memory and computational constraints. The server updates the grid-level visitation counts based on robot-reported locations, producing a global estimate of the exploration density. For each new foraging trip, a robot selects its next search area from a local 3 X 3 neighborhood of grids probabilistically with the lowest visitation count, thus biasing exploration toward under-visited regions while maintaining stochasticity. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed strategy consistently outperforms the canonical centrally placed baseline foraging algorithm (CPFA). Compared to CPFA, the proposed method reduces the total collection time by up to 33% and improves collection efficiency by more than 48% during the final stage of the mission. These results indicate that the proposed strategy is robust, flexible, and scalable for near-complete and complete resource collection in robot swarms and can serve as a general enhancement for stochastic swarm foraging methods under limited onboard resources.

MCNav: Memory-Aware Dynamic Cognitive Map for Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation

Navigating to instance-level targets in complex environments is a challenging problem. Many existing zero-shot methods achieve strong performance by modeling the entire environment and leveraging large language models for scene understanding. However, such strategies primarily focus on exploring new regions while lacking a deeper exploitation of information from previously explored areas. Consequently, when targets are missed or misidentified within previously visited regions, navigation failures occur frequently. To address these limitations, we propose MCNav, a memory-aware navigation framework with a dynamic cognitive map. This map stores efficiently queryable information about relevant objects in explored areas. Building on this memory structure, MCNav introduces two memory-aware exploration strategies: goal re-validation, which re-assesses previously seen objects to correct matching failures, and missed goal re-exploration, which estimates the likelihood that a target is present in an explored region from contextual cues. These strategies are further stabilized by a blacklist mechanism to prevent repeated errors and a double-check mechanism for high-confidence confirmation. We evaluate MCNav on the HM3Dv1 and HM3Dv2 datasets across three different tasks, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly on the instance-level goal navigation task.

Linking Extreme Discourse to Structural Polarization in Signed Interaction Networks

Polarization in online communities is often studied through either language or interaction structure, but the two views are rarely connected in a unified measurement pipeline. Prior work links them by building interaction graphs from human judgments of agreement and disagreement, leaving a gap between language as observed text and structure as an engineered representation of that text. We address this gap with a language-grounded signed-network pipeline that derives continuous signed edge weights from LLM stance scores and quantifies structural polarization using two complementary measures: a spectral Eigen-Sign score and a partition-based frustration score. After normalization, the two measures show substantial agreement while retaining important differences in their sensitivity to edge magnitude. Applying the framework to Reddit Brexit discussions, we analyze how window-level discourse signals, including toxicity, extreme scalar claims, and perplexity, relate to temporal variation in structural polarization. Edge-level and ablation analyses show that continuous, confidence-weighted signed edges reveal intensity-sensitive patterns that are muted under sign-only representations. We further report an exploratory one-step-ahead forecasting analysis suggesting that lagged language signals may contain information about future polarization beyond structural persistence. Together, the results demonstrate how discourse and signed-network structure can be connected in a single framework for measuring and interpreting polarization dynamics over time.

From Imagined Futures to Executable Actions: Mixture of Latent Actions for Robot Manipulation

Video generation models offer a promising imagination mechanism for robot manipulation by predicting long-horizon future observations, but effectively exploiting these imagined futures for action execution remains challenging. Existing approaches either condition policies on predicted frames or directly decode generated videos into actions, both suffering from a mismatch between visual realism and control relevance. As a result, predicted observations emphasize perceptual fidelity rather than action-centric causes of state transitions, leading to indirect and unstable control. To address this gap, we propose MoLA (Mixture of Latent Actions), a control-oriented interface that transforms imagined future videos into executable representations. Instead of passing predicted frames directly to the policy, MoLA leverages a mixture of pretrained inverse dynamics models to infer a mixture of latent actions implied by generated visual transitions. These modality-aware inverse dynamics models capture complementary semantic, depth, and flow cues, providing a structured and physically grounded action representation that bridges video imagination and policy execution. We evaluate our approach on simulated benchmarks (LIBERO, CALVIN, and LIBERO-Plus) and real-world robot manipulation tasks, achieving consistent gains in task success, temporal consistency, and generalization.

NavOL: Navigation Policy with Online Imitation Learning

Learning robust navigation policies remains a core challenge in robotics. Offline imitation learning suffers from distribution shift and compounding errors at rollout, while reinforcement learning requires reward engineering and learns inefficiently. In this paper, we propose NavOL, an online imitation learning paradigm that interacts with a simulator and updates itself using expert demonstrations gathered online. Built upon a pretrained navigation diffusion policy that maps local observations to future waypoints, NavOL trains in a rollout update loop: during rollout, the policy acts in the simulator and queries a global planner which has privileged access to the global environment for the optimal path segment as ground truth trajectory labels; during update, the policy is trained on the online collected observation trajectory pairs. This online imitation loop removes the need for reward design, improves learning efficiency, and mitigates distribution shift by training on the policy own explored rollouts. Built on IsaacLab with fast, high-fidelity parallel rendering and domain randomization of camera pose and start-goal pairs, our system scales across 50 scenes on 8 RTX 4090 GPUs, collecting over 2,000 new trajectories per hour, each averaging more than 400 steps. We also introduce an indoor visual navigation benchmark with predefined start and goal positions for zero-shot generalization. Extensive evaluations on simulation benchmarks, including the NavDP benchmark and our proposed benchmark, as well as carefully designed real-world experiments, demonstrate the effectiveness of NavOL, showing consistent performance gains in online imitation learning.

The GaoYao Benchmark: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Multilingual and Multicultural Abilities of Large Language Models

Evaluating the multilingual and multicultural capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for their global utility. However, current benchmarks face three critical limitations: (1) fragmented evaluation dimensions that often neglect deep cultural nuances; (2) insufficient language coverage in subjective tasks relying on low-quality machine translation; and (3) shallow analysis that lacks diagnostic depth beyond simple rankings. To address these, we introduce GaoYao, a comprehensive benchmark with 182.3k samples, 26 languages and 51 nations/areas. First, GaoYao proposes a unified framework categorizing evaluation tasks into three cultural layers (General Multilingual, Cross-cultural, Monocultural) and nine cognitive sub-layers. Second, we achieve native-quality expansion by leveraging experts to rigorously localize subjective benchmarks into 19 languages and synthesizing cross-cultural test sets for 34 cultures, surpassing prior coverage by up to 111%. Third, we conduct an in-depth diagnostic analysis on 20+ flagship and compact LLMs. Our findings reveal significant geographical performance disparities and distinct gaps between tasks, offering a reliable map for future work. We release the benchmark (https://github.com/lunyiliu/GaoYao).

CT-VIR: Continuous-Time Visual-Inertial-Ranging Fusion for Indoor Localization with Sparse Anchors

Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is widely used for mobile robot localization, but its long-term accuracy degrades without global constraints. Incorporating ranging sensors such as ultra-wideband (UWB) can mitigate drift; however, high-accuracy ranging usually requires well-deployed anchors, which is difficult to ensure in narrow or low-power environments. Moreover, most existing visual-inertial-ranging (VIR) fusion methods rely on discrete time-based filtering or optimization, making it difficult to balance positioning accuracy, trajectory consistency, and fusion efficiency under asynchronous multi-sensor sampling. To address these issues, we propose a spline-based continuous-time state estimation method for VIR fusion localization. In the preprocessing stage, VIO motion priors and UWB ranging measurements are used to construct virtual anchors and reject outliers, thereby alleviating geometric degeneration and improving range reliability. In the estimation stage, the pose trajectory is parameterized in continuous time using a B-spline, while inertial, visual, and ranging constraints are formulated as factors in a sliding-window graph. The spline control points, together with a small set of auxiliary parameters, are then jointly optimized to obtain a continuous-time trajectory estimate. Evaluations on public datasets and real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and practical potential of the proposed approach.

Think in Latent Thoughts: A New Paradigm for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation

Many SLT systems quietly assume that brief chunks of signing map directly to spoken-language words. That assumption breaks down because signers often create meaning on the fly using context, space, and movement. We revisit SLT and argue that it is mainly a cross-modal reasoning task, not just a straightforward video-to-text conversion. We thus introduce a reasoning-driven SLT framework that uses an ordered sequence of latent thoughts as an explicit middle layer between the video and the generated text. These latent thoughts gradually extract and organize meaning over time. On top of this, we use a plan-then-ground decoding method: the model first decides what it wants to say, and then looks back at the video to find the evidence. This separation improves coherence and faithfulness. We also built and released a new large-scale gloss-free SLT dataset with stronger context dependencies and more realistic meanings. Experiments across several benchmarks show consistent gains over existing gloss-free methods. Code and data will be released upon acceptance at https://github.com/fletcherjiang/SignThought.

AIBuildAI: An AI Agent for Automatically Building AI Models

AI models underpin modern intelligent systems, driving advances across science, medicine, finance, and technology. Yet developing high-performing AI models remains a labor-intensive process that requires expert practitioners to iteratively design architectures, engineer representations, implement training pipelines and refine approaches through empirical evaluation. Existing AutoML methods partially alleviate this burden but remain limited to narrow aspects such as hyperparameter optimization and model selection within predefined search spaces, leaving the full development lifecycle largely dependent on human expertise. To address this gap, we introduce AIBuildAI, an AI agent that automatically builds AI models from a task description and training data. AIBuildAI adopts a hierarchical agent architecture in which a manager agent coordinates three specialized sub-agents: a designer for modeling strategy, a coder for implementation and debugging, and a tuner for training and performance optimization. Each sub-agent is itself a large language model (LLM) based agent capable of multi-step reasoning and tool use, enabling end-to-end automation of the AI model development process that goes beyond the scope of existing AutoML approaches. We evaluate AIBuildAI on MLE-Bench, a benchmark of realistic Kaggle-style AI development tasks spanning visual, textual, time-series and tabular modalities. AIBuildAI ranks first on MLE-Bench with a medal rate of 63.1%, outperforming all existing baseline methods and matching the capability of highly experienced AI engineers. These results demonstrate that hierarchical agent systems can automate the full AI model development process from task specification to deployable model, suggesting a pathway toward broadly accessible AI development with minimal human intervention.

HYVE: Hybrid Views for LLM Context Engineering over Machine Data

Machine data is central to observability and diagnosis in modern computing systems, appearing in logs, metrics, telemetry traces, and configuration snapshots. When provided to large language models (LLMs), this data typically arrives as a mixture of natural language and structured payloads such as JSON or Python/AST literals. Yet LLMs remain brittle on such inputs, particularly when they are long, deeply nested, and dominated by repetitive structure. We present HYVE (HYbrid ViEw), a framework for LLM context engineering for inputs containing large machine-data payloads, inspired by database management principles. HYVE surrounds model invocation with coordinated preprocessing and postprocessing, centered on a request-scoped datastore augmented with schema information. During preprocessing, HYVE detects repetitive structure in raw inputs, materializes it in the datastore, transforms it into hybrid columnar and row-oriented views, and selectively exposes only the most relevant representation to the LLM. During postprocessing, HYVE either returns the model output directly, queries the datastore to recover omitted information, or performs a bounded additional LLM call for SQL-augmented semantic synthesis. We evaluate HYVE on diverse real-world workloads spanning knowledge QA, chart generation, anomaly detection, and multi-step network troubleshooting. Across these benchmarks, HYVE reduces token usage by 50-90% while maintaining or improving output quality. On structured generation tasks, it improves chart-generation accuracy by up to 132% and reduces latency by up to 83%. Overall, HYVE offers a practical approximation to an effectively unbounded context window for prompts dominated by large machine-data payloads.