S$^2$GS: Structured Sparse Gaussian Streaming for Efficient Free-Viewpoint Video Reconstruction on Edge-IoT Devices

Streaming reconstruction of Free-Viewpoint Videos (FVVs) supports immersive Internet of Things (IoT) services, such as telepresence and digital twin visualization. Existing methods suffer from high per-frame optimization time and large storage footprints, limiting deployment on resource-constrained Edge-IoT devices. To address these challenges, we propose Structured Sparse Gaussian Streaming (S$^2$GS), an FVV reconstruction framework that exploits structure-aware temporal sparsity to selectively update Gaussian residuals, enabling efficient streaming without compromising visual fidelity. In the spatial domain, a streaming octree hierarchically organizes Gaussian residuals, capturing spatial correlations that guide residual updates. In the temporal domain, a structured gating mechanism, comprising hierarchical feature propagation (HFP) and Gumbel-Sigmoid sampling, converts hierarchical dynamic cues into sparse residual update decisions under differentiable optimization. A multi-level discrete scheme is further adopted to provide fine-grained control over residual updates while preserving intricate dynamic details. Extensive experiments across consumer GPUs, industrial edge IoT devices, and a physical telepresence testbed demonstrate that S$^2$GS consistently reduces per-frame optimization time and storage footprint while maintaining competitive visual quality. Compared with QUEEN, S$^2$GS reduces per-frame optimization time by 59% and storage costs by 85% on an RTX 4090 GPU. On the Jetson AGX Orin, S$^2$GS delivers the highest rendering throughput (60+ FPS) and the lowest energy consumption among the evaluated methods, demonstrating its potential for deployment in resource-constrained systems.

Demystifying Agent Skills: Why They Work-Until They Don't

Skills have emerged as a practical and effective approach for enhancing LLM agents at inference time through structured packages of knowledge. However, existing evaluations largely measure whether skills improve aggregated task success, leaving a more fundamental question underexplored: \emph{\textbf{When do skills help, why do they work, and where do they fail?}} Through controlled experiments across various benchmarks, agent harnesses and LLMs, we isolate the effects of representation, outcome annotation, retrieval difficulty, and cross-framework robustness of skills. To further answer this question, we design a contrastive study that combines controlled quantitative experiments with paired trajectory analysis. We normalize 8,135 trial records from controlled experiments and retain 238 valid unique labels from 240 open-coded records. We consolidate these observations into a taxonomy of three high-level categories and twelve skill-use modes: skills work when noisy trajectories become procedural anchors that stabilize execution. Skills improve over Workflow Memory by 6.06 points in matched comparisons. Procedural anchoring accounts for 65.7\% of skill cases, versus 4.5\% for explicit knowledge injection, showing that skills stabilize action rather than inject missing facts. Retrieval is a separate bottleneck: as pools grow from 5 to 100, actual-use precision falls from 29.6\% to 3.3\%. Confusable distractors impair offline identification, yet downstream success remains stable; exact ground-truth invocation is neither sufficient nor necessary. Skills fail under brittle assumptions, incompatible contexts, or insufficient adaptation. These findings move evaluation beyond aggregate success rates and guide reliable self-evolving agents.

PAVXploreRL: Physical-Action-Visual World Model Reinforcement Learning with Action Exploration

Action-conditioned world models are a key component of embodied AI, serving as scalable policy evaluators that reduce reliance on expensive real-world rollouts. To accurately capture diverse action-induced dynamics, such models should satisfy three key objectives-Physical Plausibility (P), Action Adherence (A), and Visual Fidelity (V), collectively referred to as PAV-while remaining robust to both in-distribution (ID) expert demonstrations and out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. However, existing methods primarily rely on ID action-video pairs and pixel-level reconstruction losses, which do not explicitly optimize PAV objectives and generalize poorly beyond expert data. To address this, we propose PAVXploreRL, a reinforcement learning framework built on a pretrained latent world model that explicitly optimizes PAV objectives through reward-driven training. To improve action generalization, our method jointly leverages ID trajectories and noise-driven OOD action exploration, without paired video supervision. Experiments show that PAVXploreRL consistently outperforms pretrained baselines, achieving a 5.6% average gain across benchmarks and producing higher-quality PAV properties. As a policy evaluator, it also yields more reliable performance estimates and reduces the overestimation bias of prior expert-only world models such as Ctrl-World. Code: https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/PAVXploreRL

FactCheck: Feasibility-aware Long-term Action Anticipation with Multi-agent Collaboration

Long-term action anticipation (LTA) aims to predict an ordered sequence of future verb-noun actions from a partially observed video. While this task serves as the foundation for embodied intelligence, anticipating physically feasible long-term actions remains a critical challenge. Existing methods, which operate in an open-loop manner, often hallucinate non-existent objects, violate object affordances, or disregard object states, as they lack explicit mechanisms to verify action feasibility against the physical environment. To address this, we propose FactCheck, a novel multi-agent collaboration framework that improves feasibility through a closed-loop "Observe-Plan-Verify" mechanism. FactCheck decomposes the complex LTA task into specialized roles: an Observer that recognizes historical actions from video observations and constructs a dual-form structured memory, comprising a History Action Abstract that captures high-level human intentions and environmental status, and a History Action Graph that encodes object states and temporal dependencies; a Planner that generates draft future actions conditioned on both low-level historical actions and high-level History Action Abstract; and a Verifier that rigorously validates the draft against the History Action Graph and refines infeasible actions. Extensive experiments on the EPIC-Kitchens-55 and EGTEA Gaze+ benchmarks demonstrate that FactCheck consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our work establishes a new paradigm for feasibility-aware long-term action anticipation, effectively closing the loop of action recognition, action prediction and action verification.

I Know What You Meme, Even If it Emerged Today: Understanding Evolving Memes through Open-World Knowledge Acquisition

Multimodal memes are dynamic and often require up to date background knowledge for interpretation. Existing methods often overlook such knowledge or rely on fixed parametric knowledge of pretrained models that may be incomplete, outdated, or unavailable for emerging memes. We introduce Query Retrieve Conclude, a zero shot framework that identifies missing knowledge, retrieves open web evidence, and synthesizes evidence grounded background knowledge for meme understanding and detection. We also introduce a curated meme understanding benchmark of recent memes from 2024 to 2026 with external background knowledge annotations. Experiments on three meme understanding datasets and five meme detection tasks show that our framework improves knowledge recovery, meme understanding and downstream detection over zero shot baselines.

Vision-Based Localization in Dense Urban Environments: A Case Study of an Urban Village in China

Urban villages, the widespread informal settlements which have emerged as a result of rapid urbanization, are now major residential hubs for migrant workers in large cities in China. The dense arrangement of buildings in these areas often leads to unreliable GPS signals, while incomplete mapping data further impairs accurate route planning and navigation. These issues not only hinder everyday mobility but also pose significant challenges for emergency response, as confusing road layouts and GPS inaccuracies can complicate evacuation efforts. To address these challenges, we propose a practical vision-based geo-localization solution tailored for dense urban environments. Our approach features a low-cost data collection pipeline utilizing a dual-camera system, comprising a panoramic camera and a smartphone camera, to capture synchronized 360-degree panoramas and query images. Using Shipai Village, a well-known densely populated urban village in Guangzhou, as a case study, we develop a specialized image geo-localization dataset. We then assess and compare the performance of existing models across various scene types to identify their strengths and weaknesses. The findings demonstrate both the potential and limitations of visual-based localization in dense urban-village environments. Our framework aims to enhance pedestrian navigation, last-mile delivery, and emergency management in areas with poor GPS coverage, ultimately supporting the vulnerable populations living within these informal settlements.

Building and Road Recognition in Dense Urban Informal Settlements: A Dataset and Benchmark

As a widespread form of informal settlements, urban villages present significant challenges for sustainable urban development and governance. Precise mapping of their infrastructure is essential, however, existing remote sensing datasets primarily focus on formal urban environments, lacking fine-grained annotated data for the high-density building patterns and narrow road networks typical of urban villages. To address this gap, we introduce the \textit{DenseUIS} dataset, the first high-resolution remote sensing dataset specifically designed for building and road extraction in extremely dense urban informal settlements, covering 126 urban villages across Shenzhen and Guangzhou in China. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art deep learning models on this dataset. Experimental results reveal the limitations of existing methods in handling the unique morphological patterns of dense informal settlements, underscoring the need for specialized approaches. \textit{DenseUIS} therefore provides a robust benchmark for advancing fine-grained urban mapping in complex and high-density informal environments. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/rui-research/DenseUIS.

SciPaths: Forecasting Pathways to Scientific Discovery

Scientific progress depends on sequences of enabling contributions, yet existing AI4Science benchmarks largely focus on citation prediction, literature retrieval, or idea generation rather than the dependencies that make progress possible. In this paper, we introduce discovery pathway forecasting: given a target scientific contribution and the prior literature available at a specified time, the task is to (1) identify the enabling contributions required to realize it and (2) ground each in prior work when such prior work exists. We present SciPaths, a benchmark of 262 expert-annotated gold pathways and 2,444 silver pathways constructed from machine learning and natural language processing papers, where each pathway records enabling contributions, roles, rationales, and prior-work groundings or unmapped decisions. Evaluating frontier and open-weight language models, we find that the best model reaches only 0.189 F1 under strict semantic matching, with core methodological dependencies hardest to recover. Prior-work grounding improves substantially when gold enabling contributions are provided, showing that decomposition quality is a major bottleneck for end-to-end pathway recovery. SciPaths therefore shifts evaluation toward a missing capability in scientific forecasting: reasoning backward from a target contribution to the enabling scientific building blocks and prior-work dependencies that make it feasible.

Learning Memory-Enhanced Improvement Heuristics for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling

The rise of smart manufacturing under Industry 4.0 introduces mass customization and dynamic production, demanding more advanced and flexible scheduling techniques. The flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP) has attracted significant attention due to its complex constraints and strong alignment with real-world production scenarios. Current deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approaches to FJSP predominantly employ constructive methods. While effective, they often fall short of reaching (near-)optimal solutions. In contrast, improvement-based methods iteratively explore the neighborhood of initial solutions and are more effective in approaching optimality. However, the flexible machine allocation in FJSP poses significant challenges to the application of this framework, including accurate state representation, effective policy learning, and efficient search strategies. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Memory-enhanced Improvement Search framework with heterogeneous graph representation--MIStar. It employs a novel heterogeneous disjunctive graph that explicitly models the operation sequences on machines to accurately represent scheduling solutions. Moreover, a memoryenhanced heterogeneous graph neural network (MHGNN) is designed for feature extraction, leveraging historical trajectories to enhance the decision-making capability of the policy network. Finally, a parallel greedy search strategy is adopted to explore the solution space, enabling superior solutions with fewer iterations. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and public benchmarks demonstrate that MIStar significantly outperforms both traditional handcrafted improvement heuristics and state-of-the-art DRL-based constructive methods.

The Automatic Verification of Image-Text Claims (AVerImaTeC) Shared Task

The Automatic Verification of Image-Text Claims (AVerImaTeC) shared task aims to advance system development for retrieving evidence and verifying real-world image-text claims. Participants were allowed to either employ external knowledge sources, such as web search engines, or leverage the curated knowledge store provided by the organizers. System performance was evaluated using the AVerImaTeC score, defined as a conditional verdict accuracy in which a verdict is considered correct only when the associated evidence score exceeds a predefined threshold. The shared task attracted 14 submissions during the development phase and 6 submissions during the testing phase. All participating systems in the testing phase outperformed the baseline provided. The winning team, HUMANE, achieved an AVerImaTeC score of 0.5455. This paper provides a detailed description of the shared task, presents the complete evaluation results, and discusses key insights and lessons learned.