AnySlot: Goal-Conditioned Vision-Language-Action Policies for Zero-Shot Slot-Level Placement

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies have emerged as a versatile paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation. However, precise object placement under compositional language instructions remains a major challenge for modern monolithic VLA policies. Slot-level tasks require both reliable slot grounding and sub-centimeter execution accuracy. To this end, we propose AnySlot, a framework that reduces compositional complexity by introducing an explicit spatial visual goal as an intermediate representation between language grounding and control. AnySlot turns language into an explicit visual goal by generating a scene marker, then executes this goal with a goal-conditioned VLA policy. This hierarchical design effectively decouples high-level slot selection from low-level execution, ensuring both semantic accuracy and spatial robustness. Furthermore, recognizing the lack of existing benchmarks for such precision-demanding tasks, we introduce SlotBench, a comprehensive simulation benchmark featuring nine task categories tailored to evaluate structured spatial reasoning in slot-level placement. Extensive experiments show that AnySlot significantly outperforms flat VLA baselines and previous modular grounding methods in zero-shot slot-level placement.

SPAN-Nav: Generalized Spatial Awareness for Versatile Vision-Language Navigation

Recent embodied navigation approaches leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong generalization in versatile Vision-Language Navigation (VLN). However, reliable path planning in complex environments remains challenging due to insufficient spatial awareness. In this work, we introduce SPAN-Nav, an end-to-end foundation model designed to infuse embodied navigation with universal 3D spatial awareness using RGB video streams. SPAN-Nav extracts spatial priors across diverse scenes through an occupancy prediction task on extensive indoor and outdoor environments. To mitigate the computational burden, we introduce a compact representation for spatial priors, finding that a single token is sufficient to encapsulate the coarse-grained cues essential for navigation tasks. Furthermore, inspired by the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mechanism, SPAN-Nav utilizes this single spatial token to explicitly inject spatial cues into action reasoning through an end-to end framework. Leveraging multi-task co-training, SPAN-Nav captures task-adaptive cues from generalized spatial priors, enabling robust spatial awareness to generalize even to the task lacking explicit spatial supervision. To support comprehensive spatial learning, we present a massive dataset of 4.2 million occupancy annotations that covers both indoor and outdoor scenes across multi-type navigation tasks. SPAN-Nav achieves state-of-the-art performance across three benchmarks spanning diverse scenarios and varied navigation tasks. Finally, real-world experiments validate the robust generalization and practical reliability of our approach across complex physical scenarios.

Mechanistic Knobs in LLMs: Retrieving and Steering High-Order Semantic Features via Sparse Autoencoders

Recent work in Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) has enabled the identification and intervention of internal features in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, a persistent challenge lies in linking such internal features to the reliable control of complex, behavior-level semantic attributes in language generation. In this paper, we propose a Sparse Autoencoder-based framework for retrieving and steering semantically interpretable internal features associated with high-level linguistic behaviors. Our method employs a contrastive feature retrieval pipeline based on controlled semantic oppositions, combing statistical activation analysis and generation-based validation to distill monosemantic functional features from sparse activation spaces. Using the Big Five personality traits as a case study, we demonstrate that our method enables precise, bidirectional steering of model behavior while maintaining superior stability and performance compared to existing activation steering methods like Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA). We further identify an empirical effect, which we term Functional Faithfulness, whereby intervening on a specific internal feature induces coherent and predictable shifts across multiple linguistic dimensions aligned with the target semantic attribute. Our findings suggest that LLMs internalize deeply integrated representations of high-order concepts, and provide a novel, robust mechanistic path for the regulation of complex AI behaviors.

Driving in Spikes: An Entropy-Guided Object Detector for Spike Cameras

Object detection in autonomous driving suffers from motion blur and saturation under fast motion and extreme lighting. Spike cameras, offer microsecond latency and ultra high dynamic range for object detection by using per pixel asynchronous integrate and fire. However, their sparse, discrete output cannot be processed by standard image-based detectors, posing a critical challenge for end to end spike stream detection. We propose EASD, an end to end spike camera detector with a dual branch design: a Temporal Based Texture plus Feature Fusion branch for global cross slice semantics, and an Entropy Selective Attention branch for object centric details. To close the data gap, we introduce DSEC Spike, the first driving oriented simulated spike detection benchmark.

Code-as-Monitor: Constraint-aware Visual Programming for Reactive and Proactive Robotic Failure Detection

Automatic detection and prevention of open-set failures are crucial in closed-loop robotic systems. Recent studies often struggle to simultaneously identify unexpected failures reactively after they occur and prevent foreseeable ones proactively. To this end, we propose Code-as-Monitor (CaM), a novel paradigm leveraging the vision-language model (VLM) for both open-set reactive and proactive failure detection. The core of our method is to formulate both tasks as a unified set of spatio-temporal constraint satisfaction problems and use VLM-generated code to evaluate them for real-time monitoring. To enhance the accuracy and efficiency of monitoring, we further introduce constraint elements that abstract constraint-related entities or their parts into compact geometric elements. This approach offers greater generality, simplifies tracking, and facilitates constraint-aware visual programming by leveraging these elements as visual prompts. Experiments show that CaM achieves a 28.7% higher success rate and reduces execution time by 31.8% under severe disturbances compared to baselines across three simulators and a real-world setting. Moreover, CaM can be integrated with open-loop control policies to form closed-loop systems, enabling long-horizon tasks in cluttered scenes with dynamic environments.

CHisIEC: An Information Extraction Corpus for Ancient Chinese History

Natural Language Processing (NLP) plays a pivotal role in the realm of Digital Humanities (DH) and serves as the cornerstone for advancing the structural analysis of historical and cultural heritage texts. This is particularly true for the domains of named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE). In our commitment to expediting ancient history and culture, we present the ``Chinese Historical Information Extraction Corpus''(CHisIEC). CHisIEC is a meticulously curated dataset designed to develop and evaluate NER and RE tasks, offering a resource to facilitate research in the field. Spanning a remarkable historical timeline encompassing data from 13 dynasties spanning over 1830 years, CHisIEC epitomizes the extensive temporal range and text heterogeneity inherent in Chinese historical documents. The dataset encompasses four distinct entity types and twelve relation types, resulting in a meticulously labeled dataset comprising 14,194 entities and 8,609 relations. To establish the robustness and versatility of our dataset, we have undertaken comprehensive experimentation involving models of various sizes and paradigms. Additionally, we have evaluated the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of tasks related to ancient Chinese history. The dataset and code are available at \url{https://github.com/tangxuemei1995/CHisIEC}.

Restoring Ancient Ideograph: A Multimodal Multitask Neural Network Approach

Cultural heritage serves as the enduring record of human thought and history. Despite significant efforts dedicated to the preservation of cultural relics, many ancient artefacts have been ravaged irreversibly by natural deterioration and human actions. Deep learning technology has emerged as a valuable tool for restoring various kinds of cultural heritages, including ancient text restoration. Previous research has approached ancient text restoration from either visual or textual perspectives, often overlooking the potential of synergizing multimodal information. This paper proposes a novel Multimodal Multitask Restoring Model (MMRM) to restore ancient texts, particularly emphasising the ideograph. This model combines context understanding with residual visual information from damaged ancient artefacts, enabling it to predict damaged characters and generate restored images simultaneously. We tested the MMRM model through experiments conducted on both simulated datasets and authentic ancient inscriptions. The results show that the proposed method gives insightful restoration suggestions in both simulation experiments and real-world scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the pioneering application of multimodal deep learning in ancient text restoration, which will contribute to the understanding of ancient society and culture in digital humanities fields.

Small Language Model Is a Good Guide for Large Language Model in Chinese Entity Relation Extraction

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been successful in relational extraction (RE) tasks, especially in the few-shot learning. An important problem in the field of RE is long-tailed data, while not much attention is currently paid to this problem using LLM approaches. Therefore, in this paper, we propose SLCoLM, a model collaboration framework, to mitigate the data long-tail problem. In our framework, We use the ``\textit{Training-Guide-Predict}'' strategy to combine the strengths of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and LLMs, where a task-specific PLM framework acts as a tutor, transfers task knowledge to the LLM, and guides the LLM in performing RE tasks. Our experiments on a RE dataset rich in relation types show that the approach in this paper facilitates RE of long-tail relation types.

An Effective Incorporating Heterogeneous Knowledge Curriculum Learning for Sequence Labeling

Sequence labeling models often benefit from incorporating external knowledge. However, this practice introduces data heterogeneity and complicates the model with additional modules, leading to increased expenses for training a high-performing model. To address this challenge, we propose a two-stage curriculum learning (TCL) framework specifically designed for sequence labeling tasks. The TCL framework enhances training by gradually introducing data instances from easy to hard, aiming to improve both performance and training speed. Furthermore, we explore different metrics for assessing the difficulty levels of sequence labeling tasks. Through extensive experimentation on six Chinese word segmentation (CWS) and Part-of-speech tagging (POS) datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in enhancing the performance of sequence labeling models. Additionally, our analysis indicates that TCL accelerates training and alleviates the slow training problem associated with complex models.

Knowledge-Aware Artifact Image Synthesis with LLM-Enhanced Prompting and Multi-Source Supervision

Ancient artifacts are an important medium for cultural preservation and restoration. However, many physical copies of artifacts are either damaged or lost, leaving a blank space in archaeological and historical studies that calls for artifact image generation techniques. Despite the significant advancements in open-domain text-to-image synthesis, existing approaches fail to capture the important domain knowledge presented in the textual description, resulting in errors in recreated images such as incorrect shapes and patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-aware artifact image synthesis approach that brings lost historical objects accurately into their visual forms. We use a pretrained diffusion model as backbone and introduce three key techniques to enhance the text-to-image generation framework: 1) we construct prompts with explicit archaeological knowledge elicited from large language models (LLMs); 2) we incorporate additional textual guidance to correlated historical expertise in a contrastive manner; 3) we introduce further visual-semantic constraints on edge and perceptual features that enable our model to learn more intricate visual details of the artifacts. Compared to existing approaches, our proposed model produces higher-quality artifact images that align better with the implicit details and historical knowledge contained within written documents, thus achieving significant improvements across automatic metrics and in human evaluation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/danielwusg/artifact_diffusion.