Abstract:The rapid growth of social media has greatly influenced political discourse, highlighting the need to understand individual political ideologies and their temporal dynamics. This task faces challenges such as data scarcity, abundant non-political content, costly and bias-prone manual annotation, and difficulty in modeling future ideological inclinations. To address these issues, we propose TSN4PI, a unified framework for tracking the evolution of political ideologies on social media. It includes two core modules. The PIDN uses large language models with style transfer and unsupervised domain adaptation to enable robust ideology detection and filter irrelevant content from noisy, cross-domain data. The PIPN employs temporal graph neural networks to predict future ideological shifts, enabling comprehensive analysis of ideology presence, intensity, and evolution. We release two large-scale datasets for noncommercial research use to facilitate further work. Extensive case studies on multiple platforms (X and Truth Social) validate the effectiveness of TSN4PI and provide empirical insights into political polarization and the evolution of online ideologies. Our findings offer a nuanced perspective, advancing both methodological development and empirical understanding in this field.
Abstract:Vision-language-action (VLA) models improve robotic manipulation but remain vulnerable to compounding errors, scene changes, and off-trajectory states. Reinforcement learning can refine pretrained VLA policies, yet sparse success signals hinder exploration, while engineered dense rewards are costly and task-specific. Existing learned visual reward models often rely on static before-after observations, causing temporal ambiguity and weak discrimination between robustness-preserving variations and task-invalid failures under out-of-distribution (OOD) execution. We introduce Robo-Dopamine 2.0, a history- and OOD-aware process reward model with a pairwise prediction interface. It combines (1) history-conditioned pairwise rewards that use source-aligned reference panels for synthetic OOD queries and observed rollout history for online queries, while preserving the queried endpoints, and (2) an OOD-aware signed progress space that represents valid progress, robustness, failure, and recovery. A Signed-Hop Curriculum with transition-aware replay learns coarse execution ordering before fine-grained progress calibration. We also construct an OOD trajectory dataset and a five-family benchmark. Reference panels improve mean visual order consistency (VOC) from 0.967 to 0.986 and OOD-robust VOC from 0.906 to 0.958. With the same 400K pairwise-reward budget, Signed-Hop training with 25% replay reaches 0.9872 mean VOC, compared with 0.9858 for a matched-pool shuffled control. In downstream reinforcement learning, the full model achieves 86.8% mean RoboTwin success and 71/80 successful real-world insertions.
Abstract:Action-conditioned world models (ACWMs) promise to provide embodied AI with scalable predictive simulators for planning, policy evaluation, and data generation. Realizing this promise requires precise action-conditioned transitions rather than merely plausible outputs. Yet their applicability remains difficult to establish because prevailing evaluations emphasize visual quality, task outcomes, or coarse rollout-level responsiveness without directly testing simulator fidelity. To address this gap, we evaluate ACWMs through the observable capabilities expected of physical simulators. Accordingly, we formalize Observable Simulator Contract, a minimal contract that any action-conditioned physical simulator should satisfy: supplied actions must induce corresponding agent motion, and environment responses must be grounded in that realized motion. To operationalize this contract, we introduce WorldSimProbe, comprising five controlled suites spanning local control sensitivity, global trajectory variation, source-diverse actions, interaction grounding, and dynamics. Suite-specific evaluators assess simulator-relative calibration, dense action-to-motion correspondence, false-interaction grounding, and primitive-level dynamics. We evaluate six open-source ACWMs on more than 18,000 instances across RoboTwin, ManiSkill, and LIBERO. World-SimProbe reveals systematic action-realization degradation across control variation, structured failures in interaction grounding and dynamics, and benchmark signals consistent with human judgments and downstream outcomes. Together, this capability-based framework provides a transparent, and standardized paradigm for diagnosing ACWM simulator fidelity beyond coarse, task-directed evaluation.
Abstract:Construction-safety models must handle concrete deployment risks, such as a worker standing near a scaffold edge without guardrails, rather than only recognize common objects in curated images. Yet real inspection archives are redundant, long-tailed, and collected across changing sites and months. We introduce SafeBuild-Bench, a metadata-driven benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models on construction safety under realistic temporal and site variation. It is mined from 100K+ industrial image-text records and contains 3,314 task instances from over 3,000 expert-verified images, covering multiple-choice hazard identification and free-form hazard description. To make expert verification scalable, we develop GEMS, a graph-enhanced multimodal selection pipeline that combines a proxy-model confusion signal with graph-based diversity to identify informative candidates from redundant streams. On public instruction-tuning data, GEMS-selected subsets preserve robustness-oriented performance under small data budgets. On SafeBuild-Bench, current MLLMs remain far from reliable construction-safety understanding, with the best overall score near 60. We release the benchmark, evaluation scripts, and GEMS codebase at https://github.com/safebuild/gems.
Abstract:Current robotic evaluation is still largely dominated by binary success rates, which collapse rich execution processes into a single outcome and obscure critical qualities such as progress, efficiency, and stability. To address this limitation, we propose PRM-as-a-Judge, a dense evaluation paradigm that leverages Process Reward Models (PRMs) to audit policy execution directly from trajectory videos by estimating task progress from observation sequences. Central to this paradigm is the OPD (Outcome-Process-Diagnosis) metric system, which explicitly formalizes execution quality via a task-aligned progress potential. We characterize dense robotic evaluation through two axiomatic properties: macro-consistency, which requires additive and path-consistent aggregation, and micro-resolution, which requires sensitivity to fine-grained physical evolution. Under this formulation, potential-based PRM judges provide a natural instantiation of dense evaluation, with macro-consistency following directly from the induced scalar potential. We empirically validate the micro-resolution property using RoboPulse, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed for probing micro-scale progress discrimination, where several trajectory-trained PRM judges outperform discriminative similarity-based methods and general-purpose foundation-model judges. Finally, leveraging PRM-as-a-Judge and the OPD metric system, we conduct a structured audit of mainstream policy paradigms across long-horizon tasks, revealing behavioral signatures and failure modes that are invisible to outcome-only metrics.
Abstract:We introduce RoboBrain 2.5, a next-generation embodied AI foundation model that advances general perception, spatial reasoning, and temporal modeling through extensive training on high-quality spatiotemporal supervision. Building upon its predecessor, RoboBrain 2.5 introduces two major capability upgrades. Specifically, it unlocks Precise 3D Spatial Reasoning by shifting from 2D pixel-relative grounding to depth-aware coordinate prediction and absolute metric constraint comprehension, generating complete 3D manipulation traces as ordered keypoint sequences under physical constraints. Complementing this spatial precision, the model establishes Dense Temporal Value Estimation that provides dense, step-aware progress prediction and execution state understanding across varying viewpoints, producing stable feedback signals for downstream learning. Together, these upgrades extend the framework toward more physically grounded and execution-aware embodied intelligence for complex, fine-grained manipulation. The code and checkpoints are available at project website: https://superrobobrain.github.io
Abstract:Long-horizon robotic manipulation is increasingly important for real-world deployment, requiring spatial disambiguation in complex layouts and temporal resilience under dynamic interaction. However, existing end-to-end and hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often rely on text-only cues while keeping plan intent latent, which undermines referential grounding in cluttered or underspecified scenes, impedes effective task decomposition of long-horizon goals with close-loop interaction, and limits causal explanation by obscuring the rationale behind action choices. To address these issues, we first introduce Visual Sketch, an implausible visual intermediate that renders points, boxes, arrows, and typed relations in the robot's current views to externalize spatial intent, connect language to scene geometry. Building on Visual Sketch, we present Action-Sketcher, a VLA framework that operates in a cyclic See-Think-Sketch-Act workflow coordinated by adaptive token-gated strategy for reasoning triggers, sketch revision, and action issuance, thereby supporting reactive corrections and human interaction while preserving real-time action prediction. To enable scalable training and evaluation, we curate diverse corpus with interleaved images, text, Visual Sketch supervision, and action sequences, and train Action-Sketcher with a multi-stage curriculum recipe that combines interleaved sequence alignment for modality unification, language-to-sketch consistency for precise linguistic grounding, and imitation learning augmented with sketch-to-action reinforcement for robustness. Extensive experiments on cluttered scenes and multi-object tasks, in simulation and on real-world tasks, show improved long-horizon success, stronger robustness to dynamic scene changes, and enhanced interpretability via editable sketches and step-wise plans. Project website: https://action-sketcher.github.io
Abstract:The primary obstacle for applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world robotics is the design of effective reward functions. While recently learning-based Process Reward Models (PRMs) are a promising direction, they are often hindered by two fundamental limitations: their reward models lack step-aware understanding and rely on single-view perception, leading to unreliable assessments of fine-grained manipulation progress; and their reward shaping procedures are theoretically unsound, often inducing a semantic trap that misguides policy optimization. To address these, we introduce Dopamine-Reward, a novel reward modeling method for learning a general-purpose, step-aware process reward model from multi-view inputs. At its core is our General Reward Model (GRM), trained on a vast 3,400+ hour dataset, which leverages Step-wise Reward Discretization for structural understanding and Multi-Perspective Reward Fusion to overcome perceptual limitations. Building upon Dopamine-Reward, we propose Dopamine-RL, a robust policy learning framework that employs a theoretically-sound Policy-Invariant Reward Shaping method, which enables the agent to leverage dense rewards for efficient self-improvement without altering the optimal policy, thereby fundamentally avoiding the semantic trap. Extensive experiments across diverse simulated and real-world tasks validate our approach. GRM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in reward assessment, and Dopamine-RL built on GRM significantly improves policy learning efficiency. For instance, after GRM is adapted to a new task in a one-shot manner from a single expert trajectory, the resulting reward model enables Dopamine-RL to improve the policy from near-zero to 95% success with only 150 online rollouts (approximately 1 hour of real robot interaction), while retaining strong generalization across tasks. Project website: https://robo-dopamine.github.io
Abstract:Source-Free Object Detection (SFOD) aims to adapt a source-pretrained object detector to a target domain without access to source data. However, existing SFOD methods predominantly rely on internal knowledge from the source model, which limits their capacity to generalize across domains and often results in biased pseudo-labels, thereby hindering both transferability and discriminability. In contrast, Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), pretrained on massive and diverse data, exhibit strong perception capabilities and broad generalization, yet their potential remains largely untapped in the SFOD setting. In this paper, we propose a novel SFOD framework that leverages VFMs as external knowledge sources to jointly enhance feature alignment and label quality. Specifically, we design three VFM-based modules: (1) Patch-weighted Global Feature Alignment (PGFA) distills global features from VFMs using patch-similarity-based weighting to enhance global feature transferability; (2) Prototype-based Instance Feature Alignment (PIFA) performs instance-level contrastive learning guided by momentum-updated VFM prototypes; and (3) Dual-source Enhanced Pseudo-label Fusion (DEPF) fuses predictions from detection VFMs and teacher models via an entropy-aware strategy to yield more reliable supervision. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art SFOD performance, validating the effectiveness of integrating VFMs to simultaneously improve transferability and discriminability.
Abstract:We introduce \textsc{MathSticks}, a benchmark for Visual Symbolic Compositional Reasoning (VSCR), which unifies visual perception, symbolic manipulation, and arithmetic consistency. Each task presents an incorrect matchstick equation that must be corrected by moving one or two sticks under strict conservation rules. The benchmark includes both text-guided and purely visual settings, systematically covering digit scale, move complexity, solution multiplicity, and operator variation, with 1.4M generated instances and a curated test set. Evaluations of 14 vision--language models reveal substantial limitations: closed-source models succeed only on simple cases, open-source models fail in the visual regime, while humans exceed 90\% accuracy. These findings establish \textsc{MathSticks} as a rigorous testbed for advancing compositional reasoning across vision and symbols. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Yuheng2000/MathSticks.