ComBodied Agents: a New Paradigm of Human-Centric Agentic AI

After an older adult misses a medication dose, a software agent can send another reminder and an embodied agent can bring the medication. Yet neither explains whether the person forgot, is confused, has side effects, or deliberately refused, nor what support is appropriate. This reveals a structural gap in Agentic AI: Digital Agents primarily transform software states, while Embodied Agents transform physical states; neither makes a person's evolving state and agency the primary object of modeling, intervention, and evaluation. We introduce Combodied Agents, a human-centered paradigm that perceives, models, predicts, and supports individual human-state trajectories over time, using software tools, sensors, wearables, robots, and human services as action channels rather than end goals. We unify fragmented capabilities across personal assistants, health agents, AI companions, and adaptive human--AI systems into a closed loop: event-based multimodal perception reconstructs meaningful personal events; longitudinal, correctable memory provides temporal context; Personal World Models estimate future personal states and outcomes under alternative decisions and interventions; and an admissible intervention policy selects proportionate support under consent, uncertainty, safety, reversibility, and user control. Feedback from the person and environment updates the loop. Rather than requiring an exhaustive Human Digital Twin, the framework uses purpose-bounded, uncertainty-aware, user-correctable representations. We organize the design space by human-state targets, relational contexts, and agent roles, and propose scenario-centered evaluation, agency-preservation metrics, benchmark requirements, edge-native personal models, and governance directions. Combodied Agents shift Agentic AI from external task completion toward sustained human benefit.

Advantage-Guided Gate: Reshaping Open-Ended Reasoning for Vision-Based Spatial Intelligence

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in complex spatial scene understanding and reasoning tasks. However, their open-ended reasoning process is prone to decision errors and error accumulation, leading to instability in answer quality. To address this, we propose an advantage-guided gating framework that dynamically intervenes in and corrects deviations during the reasoning process. Specifically, we model step-by-step reasoning as a finite-horizon decision process and introduce Monte Carlo value evaluation on the reasoning tree to provide intermediate supervision signals. The framework includes Step-Advantage Gate and Trajectory-Advantage Gate, which dynamically select high-value reasoning steps and high-quality complete reasoning trajectories, respectively. During training, we perform supervised learning for the gates using reasoning trees generated via multi-branch sampling, and combine shared-parameter initialization with task-specific heads to achieve cross-task robustness and diversity. During inference, the model greedily selects high-value prefix reasoning steps while choosing the optimal reasoning head based on the problem type, thereby significantly improving the accuracy of the final answer. Furthermore, we constructed the Reasoning-Tree-160k dataset and performed two-stage learning on it. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this advantage-guided gating framework effectively enhances the performance of benchmark MLLMs in visual-based spatial understanding and reasoning tasks. The code is open to the public for research: https://github.com/LingLin-ll/Advantage-Guided-Gate.

Attention-Only White-Box Transformer via LeJEPA-Based Self-Supervised Pretraining

Existing studies on self-supervised learning for white-box networks typically decouple the derivation of white-box networks via optimization algorithms from self-supervised learning paradigms. In this work, we instead revisit the two components from a joint perspective. The LeJEPA-based self-supervised framework assumes an isotropic Gaussian distribution as the optimal embedding distribution for downstream tasks, which is conceptually equivalent to the expansion term $R(Z)$ in the sparse rate reduction objective guiding white-box Transformer optimization. Building on this observation, we use the LeJEPA self-supervised paradigm to optimize $R(Z)$, and derive the remaining terms $R^{c}(Z\mid U_{[K]})+λ\lVert Z\rVert_{0}$ via the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) into an attention-only Transformer that dispenses with the ISTA structure or MLP layers of the original design. Experimental results demonstrate that our attention-only white-box Transformer achieves classification accuracies of $88.88\%$ on CIFAR-10 and $63.54\%$ on CIFAR-100 at the Base scale under the LeJEPA self-supervised paradigm, while the original white-box Transformer CRATE achieves classification accuracies of $89.18\%$ on CIFAR-10 and $63.56\%$ on CIFAR-100. Our model achieves competitive performance while reducing the parameter count by roughly $31\%$. Beyond the white-box setting, we further investigate standard ViTs and find that replacing all MLP blocks with ReLU activations under knowledge distillation removes approximately 66\% of the parameters while preserving competitive accuracy, motivating further investigation into the potential redundancy of MLP modules in standard ViT architectures.

Proximal Mediation Analysis with Hidden Recanting Witnesses

Mediation analysis is essential for decomposing the causal effect of a treatment into direct and indirect pathways. However, many practical settings rely on the stringent assumption that recanting witnesses, defined as treatment-induced mediator-outcome confounders, are either absent or fully known a priori. Such a requirement is often untenable, especially when these variables remain unobservable due to measurement difficulties or privacy constraints. In this paper, we leverage proximal causal inference to develop three novel identification strategies to address the challenge of identifying path-specific effects in the presence of unknown recanting witnesses. Building on this, we develop a semiparametric inference framework that derives the efficient influence function and proposes a proximal multiply robust estimator, which remains consistent if at least one set of nuisance models is correctly specified. When all nuisance models are correctly specified and converge at appropriate rates, the estimator is asymptotically normal and achieves the semiparametric efficiency bound. We provide a minimax optimization-based debiased machine learning procedure for point estimation and constructing valid confidence intervals. The performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated by simulation studies and a real data application.

Prefix Teach, Suffix Fade: Local Teachability Collapse in Strong-to-Weak On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own rollouts using dense feedback from a stronger teacher. Prior literature suggests that, provided teacher feedback is available, supervising the full sequence of response tokens should monotonically improve performance. However, we demonstrate that this assumption sometimes fails to hold in strong-to-weak OPD settings. While later segments of a generated trajectory may still exhibit a non-zero teacher-student advantage, they frequently lack the local contrast that makes dense feedback effective for prioritizing student learning. We term this failure mode local teachability collapse. The resulting principle is straightforward: supervision should concentrate on trajectory regions where the teacher's feedback remains discriminative, rather than uniformly covering the entire response. We operationalize this principle through a trajectory-specific release rule. This rule measures the teacher's margin over the student's top-$K$ candidate set, aggregates this margin across NLTK-tokenized sentence segments, and truncates dense OPD supervision upon detecting a BIC-style downward change point. Experimental results across strong-to-weak distillation tasks using the Qwen3 model family indicate that this release rule consistently outperforms standard full-trajectory OPD across five in-domain benchmarks at various student scales. Furthermore, compared to baseline distillation methods, our approach better preserves model capabilities on out-of-domain task. These results suggest that effective strong-to-weak OPD requires evaluating not only the availability of teacher guidance but also its local utility, ensuring that the generated feedback remains teachable.

Multi-Objective and Mixed-Reward Reinforcement Learning via Reward-Decorrelated Policy Optimization

Complex reinforcement learning environments frequently employ multi-task and mixed-reward formulations. In these settings, heterogeneous reward distributions and correlated reward dimensions often destabilize the construction of scalar advantages. To address these challenges, we propose Reward-Decorrelated Policy Optimization (RDPO), a reward-processing method designed to explicitly target both failure modes. RDPO first utilizes Magnitude-Aware Quantile normalization to stabilize prompt-level advantage allocation across binary, fractional, and continuous rewards. It then applies Mahalanobis whitening within each active reward subspace to mitigate correlation redundancy prior to aggregation. When applied during the post-training of LongCat-Flash, RDPO enhances instruction following, writing quality, and robustness to hard prompts while remaining broadly competitive on reasoning and coding evaluations.

Proximal Path-Specific Inference

Causal mediation analysis has been extended to estimate path-specific effects with multiple intermediate variables, isolating treatment effects through a mediator of interest while excluding pathways through its ancestors. Such analyses address bias from recanting witnesses, i.e., treatment-induced mediator-outcome confounders. However, existing methods typically rely on stringent assumptions precluding general unmeasured confounding, which are often violated in practice. In this paper, we relax these restrictions by leveraging observed covariates as proxy variables to accommodate unmeasured confounding among the treatment, recanting witness, mediator, and outcome. Using proximal confounding bridge functions, we develop four nonparametric identification strategies for the path-specific effect. We further derive the efficient influence function and propose a quadruply robust, locally efficient estimator. To handle high-dimensional nuisance parameters, we propose a proximal debiased machine learning approach. We theoretically guarantee that our estimator achieves $\sqrt{n}$-consistency and asymptotic normality even when machine learning estimators for nuisance functions converge at slower rates. Our approaches are validated via semiparametric and nonparametric simulations and an application to the CDC WONDER Natality study, estimating the path-specific effect of prenatal care on preterm birth through preeclampsia, independent of maternal smoking during pregnancy.

VideoWeaver: Multimodal Multi-View Video-to-Video Transfer for Embodied Agents

Recent progress in video-to-video (V2V) translation has enabled realistic resimulation of embodied AI demonstrations, a capability that allows pretrained robot policies to be transferable to new environments without additional data collection. However, prior works can only operate on a single view at a time, while embodied AI tasks are commonly captured from multiple synchronized cameras to support policy learning. Naively applying single-view models independently to each camera leads to inconsistent appearance across views, and standard transformer architectures do not scale to multi-view settings due to the quadratic cost of cross-view attention. We present VideoWeaver, the first multimodal multi-view V2V translation framework. VideoWeaver is initially trained as a single-view flow-based V2V model. To achieve an extension to the multi-view regime, we propose to ground all views in a shared 4D latent space derived from a feed-forward spatial foundation model, namely, Pi3. This encourages view-consistent appearance even under wide baselines and dynamic camera motion. To scale beyond a fixed number of cameras, we train views at distinct diffusion timesteps, enabling the model to learn both joint and conditional view distributions. This in turn allows autoregressive synthesis of new viewpoints conditioned on existing ones. Experiments show superior or similar performance to the state-of-the-art on the single-view translation benchmarks and, for the first time, physically and stylistically consistent multi-view translations, including challenging egocentric and heterogeneous-camera setups central to world randomization for robot learning.

Aligning Paralinguistic Understanding and Generation in Speech LLMs via Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

Speech large language models (LLMs) observe paralinguistic cues such as prosody, emotion, and non-verbal sounds--crucial for intent understanding. However, leveraging these cues faces challenges: limited training data, annotation difficulty, and models exploiting lexical shortcuts over paralinguistic signals. We propose multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) with chain-of-thought prompting that elicits explicit affective reasoning. To address data scarcity, we introduce a paralinguistics-aware speech LLM (PALLM) that jointly optimizes sentiment classification from audio and paralinguistics-aware response generation via a two-stage pipeline. Experiments demonstrate that our approach improves paralinguistics understanding over both supervised baselines and strong proprietary models (Gemini-2.5-Pro, GPT-4o-audio) by 8-12% on Expresso, IEMOCAP, and RAVDESS. The results show that modeling paralinguistic reasoning with multi-task RL is crucial for building emotionally intelligent speech LLMs.

ConfCtrl: Enabling Precise Camera Control in Video Diffusion via Confidence-Aware Interpolation

We address the challenge of novel view synthesis from only two input images under large viewpoint changes. Existing regression-based methods lack the capacity to reconstruct unseen regions, while camera-guided diffusion models often deviate from intended trajectories due to noisy point cloud projections or insufficient conditioning from camera poses. To address these issues, we propose ConfCtrl, a confidence-aware video interpolation framework that enables diffusion models to follow prescribed camera poses while completing unseen regions. ConfCtrl initializes the diffusion process by combining a confidence-weighted projected point cloud latent with noise as the conditioning input. It then applies a Kalman-inspired predict-update mechanism, treating the projected point cloud as a noisy measurement and using learned residual corrections to balance pose-driven predictions with noisy geometric observations. This allows the model to rely on reliable projections while down-weighting uncertain regions, yielding stable, geometry-aware generation. Experiments on multiple datasets show that ConfCtrl produces geometrically consistent and visually plausible novel views, effectively reconstructing occluded regions under large viewpoint changes.