Geometry-based pneumatic actuators for soft robotics

Soft pneumatic actuators enable safe human-machine interaction with lightweight and powerful applied parts. On the other side, they suffer design limitations as regards complex actuation patterns, including minimum bending radii, multi-states capabilities and structural stability. We present geometry-based pneumatic actuators (GPAs), a design and implementation approach that introduces constraint layers with configurable CNC heat-sealed chambers. The approach achieves predictable deformation, near-zero bending radii, multi-states actuation, and enables customizable and repeatable complex actuated geometries. Mathematical modeling reveals predictable linear angle transformations and validates nonlinear torque-angle relationships across diverse configurations. We demonstrate versatility of the GPAs approach through three applications: a 49 g wrist exoskeleton reducing muscle activity by up to 51%, a 30.8 g haptic interface delivering 8 N force feedback with fast response, and a 208 g bipedal robot achieving multi-gait locomotion. GPAs establish a configurable platform for next-generation wearable robotics, haptic systems, and soft locomotion devices.

Deep Learning-Based Meat Freshness Detection with Segmentation and OOD-Aware Classification

In this study, we present a meat freshness classification framework from Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images that supports both packaged and unpackaged meat datasets. The system classifies four in-distribution (ID) meat classes and uses an out-of-distribution (OOD)-aware abstention mechanism that flags low-confidence samples as No Result. The pipeline combines U-Net-based segmentation with deep feature classifiers. Segmentation is used as a preprocessing step to isolate the meat region and reduce background, producing more consistent inputs for classification. The segmentation module achieved an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 75% and a Dice coefficient of 82%, producing standardized inputs for the classification stage. For classification, we benchmark five backbones: Residual Network-50 (ResNet-50), Vision Transformer-Base/16 (ViT-B/16), Swin Transformer-Tiny (Swin-T), EfficientNet-B0, and MobileNetV3-Small. We use nested 5x3 cross-validation (CV) for model selection and hyperparameter tuning. On the held-out ID test set, EfficientNet-B0 achieves the highest accuracy (98.10%), followed by ResNet-50 and MobileNetV3-Small (both 97.63%) and Swin-T (97.51%), while ViT-B/16 is lower (94.42%). We additionally evaluate OOD scoring and thresholding using standard OOD metrics and sensitivity analysis over the abstention threshold. Finally, we report on-device latency using TensorFlow Lite (TFLite) on a smartphone, highlighting practical accuracy-latency trade-offs for future deployment.

Feasibility of simultaneous EEG-fMRI at 0.55 T: Recording, Denoising, and Functional Mapping

Simultaneous recording of electroencephalography (EEG) and functional MRI (fMRI) can provide a more complete view of brain function by merging high temporal and spatial resolutions. High-field ($\geq$3T) systems are standard, and require technical trade-offs, including artifacts in the EEG signal, reduced compatibility with metallic implants, high acoustic noise, and artifacts around high-susceptibility areas such as the optic nerve and nasal sinus. This proof-of-concept study demonstrates the feasibility of simultaneous EEG-fMRI at 0.55T in a visual task. We characterize the gradient and ballistocardiogram (BCG) artifacts inherent to this environment and observe reduced BCG magnitude consistent with the expected scaling of pulse-related artifacts with static magnetic field strength. This reduction shows promise for facilitating effective denoising while preserving the alpha rhythm and signal integrity. Furthermore, we tested a multimodal integration pipeline and demonstrated that the EEG power envelope corresponds with the hemodynamic BOLD response, supporting the potential to measure neurovascular coupling in this environment. We demonstrate that combined EEG-fMRI at 0.55T is feasible and represents a promising environment for multimodal neuroimaging.

What if Agents Could Imagine? Reinforcing Open-Vocabulary HOI Comprehension through Generation

Multimodal Large Language Models have shown promising capabilities in bridging visual and textual reasoning, yet their reasoning capabilities in Open-Vocabulary Human-Object Interaction (OV-HOI) are limited by cross-modal hallucinations and occlusion-induced ambiguity. To address this, we propose \textbf{ImagineAgent}, an agentic framework that harmonizes cognitive reasoning with generative imagination for robust visual understanding. Specifically, our method innovatively constructs cognitive maps that explicitly model plausible relationships between detected entities and candidate actions. Subsequently, it dynamically invokes tools including retrieval augmentation, image cropping, and diffusion models to gather domain-specific knowledge and enriched visual evidence, thereby achieving cross-modal alignment in ambiguous scenarios. Moreover, we propose a composite reward that balances prediction accuracy and tool efficiency. Evaluations on SWIG-HOI and HICO-DET datasets demonstrate our SOTA performance, requiring approximately 20\% of training data compared to existing methods, validating our robustness and efficiency.

MTDrive: Multi-turn Interactive Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

Trajectory planning is a core task in autonomous driving, requiring the prediction of safe and comfortable paths across diverse scenarios. Integrating Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in addressing "long-tail" scenarios. However, existing methods are constrained to single-turn reasoning, limiting their ability to handle complex tasks requiring iterative refinement. To overcome this limitation, we present MTDrive, a multi-turn framework that enables MLLMs to iteratively refine trajectories based on environmental feedback. MTDrive introduces Multi-Turn Group Relative Policy Optimization (mtGRPO), which mitigates reward sparsity by computing relative advantages across turns. We further construct an interactive trajectory understanding dataset from closed-loop simulation to support multi-turn training. Experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark demonstrate superior performance compared to existing methods, validating the effectiveness of our multi-turn reasoning paradigm. Additionally, we implement system-level optimizations to reduce data transfer overhead caused by high-resolution images and multi-turn sequences, achieving 2.5x training throughput. Our data, models, and code will be made available soon.

A Two-Stage GPU Kernel Tuner Combining Semantic Refactoring and Search-Based Optimization

GPU code optimization is a key performance bottleneck for HPC workloads as well as large-model training and inference. Although compiler optimizations and hand-written kernels can partially alleviate this issue, achieving near-hardware-limit performance still relies heavily on manual code refactoring and parameter tuning. Recent progress in LLM-agent-based kernel generation and optimization has been reported, yet many approaches primarily focus on direct code rewriting, where parameter choices are often implicit and hard to control, or require human intervention, leading to unstable performance gains. This paper introduces a template-based rewriting layer on top of an agent-driven iterative loop: kernels are semantically refactored into explicitly parameterizable templates, and template parameters are then optimized via search-based autotuning, yielding more stable and higher-quality speedups. Experiments on a set of real-world kernels demonstrate speedups exceeding 3x in the best case. We extract representative CUDA kernels from SGLang as evaluation targets; the proposed agentic tuner iteratively performs templating, testing, analysis, and planning, and leverages profiling feedback to execute constrained parameter search under hardware resource limits. Compared to agent-only direct rewriting, the template-plus-search design significantly reduces the randomness of iterative optimization, making the process more interpretable and enabling a more systematic approach toward high-performance configurations. The proposed method can be further extended to OpenCL, HIP, and other backends to deliver automated performance optimization for real production workloads.

Hyperspherical Graph Representation Learning via Adaptive Neighbor-Mean Alignment and Uniformity

Graph representation learning (GRL) aims to encode structural and semantic dependencies of graph-structured data into low-dimensional embeddings. However, existing GRL methods often rely on surrogate contrastive objectives or mutual information maximization, which typically demand complex architectures, negative sampling strategies, and sensitive hyperparameter tuning. These design choices may induce over-smoothing, over-squashing, and training instability. In this work, we propose HyperGRL, a unified framework for hyperspherical graph representation learning via adaptive neighbor-mean alignment and sampling-free uniformity. HyperGRL embeds nodes on a unit hypersphere through two adversarially coupled objectives: neighbor-mean alignment and sampling-free uniformity. The alignment objective uses the mean representation of each node's local neighborhood to construct semantically grounded, stable targets that capture shared structural and feature patterns. The uniformity objective formulates dispersion via an L2-based hyperspherical regularization, encouraging globally uniform embedding distributions while preserving discriminative information. To further stabilize training, we introduce an entropy-guided adaptive balancing mechanism that dynamically regulates the interplay between alignment and uniformity without requiring manual tuning. Extensive experiments on node classification, node clustering, and link prediction demonstrate that HyperGRL delivers superior representation quality and generalization across diverse graph structures, achieving average improvements of 1.49%, 0.86%, and 0.74% over the strongest existing methods, respectively. These findings highlight the effectiveness of geometrically grounded, sampling-free contrastive objectives for graph representation learning.

Alchemist: Unlocking Efficiency in Text-to-Image Model Training via Meta-Gradient Data Selection

Recent advances in Text-to-Image (T2I) generative models, such as Imagen, Stable Diffusion, and FLUX, have led to remarkable improvements in visual quality. However, their performance is fundamentally limited by the quality of training data. Web-crawled and synthetic image datasets often contain low-quality or redundant samples, which lead to degraded visual fidelity, unstable training, and inefficient computation. Hence, effective data selection is crucial for improving data efficiency. Existing approaches rely on costly manual curation or heuristic scoring based on single-dimensional features in Text-to-Image data filtering. Although meta-learning based method has been explored in LLM, there is no adaptation for image modalities. To this end, we propose **Alchemist**, a meta-gradient-based framework to select a suitable subset from large-scale text-image data pairs. Our approach automatically learns to assess the influence of each sample by iteratively optimizing the model from a data-centric perspective. Alchemist consists of two key stages: data rating and data pruning. We train a lightweight rater to estimate each sample's influence based on gradient information, enhanced with multi-granularity perception. We then use the Shift-Gsampling strategy to select informative subsets for efficient model training. Alchemist is the first automatic, scalable, meta-gradient-based data selection framework for Text-to-Image model training. Experiments on both synthetic and web-crawled datasets demonstrate that Alchemist consistently improves visual quality and downstream performance. Training on an Alchemist-selected 50% of the data can outperform training on the full dataset.

Embodied Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Manipulation Planning with Embodied World Model

World models have emerged as a pivotal component in robot manipulation planning, enabling agents to predict future environmental states and reason about the consequences of actions before execution. While video-generation models are increasingly adopted, they often lack rigorous physical grounding, leading to hallucinations and a failure to maintain consistency in long-horizon physical constraints. To address these limitations, we propose Embodied Tree of Thoughts (EToT), a novel Real2Sim2Real planning framework that leverages a physics-based interactive digital twin as an embodied world model. EToT formulates manipulation planning as a tree search expanded through two synergistic mechanisms: (1) Priori Branching, which generates diverse candidate execution paths based on semantic and spatial analysis; and (2) Reflective Branching, which utilizes VLMs to diagnose execution failures within the simulator and iteratively refine the planning tree with corrective actions. By grounding high-level reasoning in a physics simulator, our framework ensures that generated plans adhere to rigid-body dynamics and collision constraints. We validate EToT on a suite of short- and long-horizon manipulation tasks, where it consistently outperforms baselines by effectively predicting physical dynamics and adapting to potential failures. Website at https://embodied-tree-of-thoughts.github.io .

FusionFM: All-in-One Multi-Modal Image Fusion with Flow Matching

Current multi-modal image fusion methods typically rely on task-specific models, leading to high training costs and limited scalability. While generative methods provide a unified modeling perspective, they often suffer from slow inference due to the complex sampling trajectories from noise to image. To address this, we formulate image fusion as a direct probabilistic transport from source modalities to the fused image distribution, leveraging the flow matching paradigm to improve sampling efficiency and structural consistency. To mitigate the lack of high-quality fused images for supervision, we collect fusion results from multiple state-of-the-art models as priors, and employ a task-aware selection function to select the most reliable pseudo-labels for each task. We further introduce a Fusion Refiner module that employs a divide-and-conquer strategy to systematically identify, decompose, and enhance degraded components in selected pseudo-labels. For multi-task scenarios, we integrate elastic weight consolidation and experience replay mechanisms to preserve cross-task performance and enhance continual learning ability from both parameter stability and memory retention perspectives. Our approach achieves competitive performance across diverse fusion tasks, while significantly improving sampling efficiency and maintaining a lightweight model design. The code will be available at: https://github.com/Ist-Zhy/FusionFM.