Toward Visually Realistic Simulation: A Benchmark for Evaluating Robot Manipulation in Simulation

Reliable simulation evaluation of robot manipulation policies serves as a high-fidelity proxy for real-world performance. Although existing benchmarks cover a wide range of task categories, they lack visual realism, creating a large domain gap between simulation and reality. This undermines the reliability of simulation-based evaluation in predicting real-world performance. To mitigate the sim-to-real visual gap, we conduct a systematic analysis to isolate the effects of lighting and material. Our results show that these factors play a critical role in geometric reasoning and spatial grounding, yet are largely overlooked in existing benchmarks. Motivated by the analysis, we propose VISER, a visually realistic benchmark for evaluating robot manipulation in simulation. VISER features a high-fidelity dataset of over 1,000 3D assets with physically-based rendering (PBR) materials, along with 3D scenes created from these assets through curated layouts or generation. To this end, we propose an automated pipeline leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for material-aware part segmentation and material retrieval, enabling scalable generation of physically plausible assets. Building on the high-fidelity 3D asset dataset, we construct diverse evaluation tasks, such as grasping, placing, and long-horizon tasks, enabling scalable and reproducible assessment of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Our benchmark shows a strong correlation between simulation and real-world performance, achieving an average Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.92 across different policies.

Rational Communication Shapes Morphological Composition

Human languages expand vocabularies by combining existing morphemes rather than inventing arbitrary forms. Communicative efficiency shapes lexical systems at multiple levels (Gibson et al., 2019), yet morphological composition -- combining morphemes through compounding or affixation -- has rarely been modeled as a historically situated speaker choice among competing morpheme sequences, leaving unanswered why a language settles on one morpheme combination over other plausible alternatives. We ask whether a trade-off between listener recoverability and speaker production cost can predict attested compositions over contemporaneously available alternatives. Here we show, within the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework (Frank & Goodman, 2012; Goodman & Frank, 2016) using a time-indexed lexicon constructed from Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), that across 4323 naturally occurring English compounds and derivations spanning 1820--2019, attested compositions are systematically ranked above unattested alternatives generated from contemporaneously available morphemes. Models integrating semantic informativeness with production cost outperform semantic-only and cost-only baselines on Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and top-k accuracy (Acc@k), with the advantage of the Pragmatic Speaker model ($S_1$) over the semantic-only baseline growing as the candidate set expands, where meaning alone leaves morphological choice underdetermined. These findings suggest that lexicalization reflects a communicative trade-off between expressiveness and efficiency, extending rational accounts of communication from utterance-level choice to the internal structure of words.

AcademiClaw: When Students Set Challenges for AI Agents

Benchmarks within the OpenClaw ecosystem have thus far evaluated exclusively assistant-level tasks, leaving the academic-level capabilities of OpenClaw largely unexamined. We introduce AcademiClaw, a bilingual benchmark of 80 complex, long-horizon tasks sourced directly from university students' real academic workflows -- homework, research projects, competitions, and personal projects -- that they found current AI agents unable to solve effectively. Curated from 230 student-submitted candidates through rigorous expert review, the final task set spans 25+ professional domains, ranging from olympiad-level mathematics and linguistics problems to GPU-intensive reinforcement learning and full-stack system debugging, with 16 tasks requiring CUDA GPU execution. Each task executes in an isolated Docker sandbox and is scored on task completion by multi-dimensional rubrics combining six complementary techniques, with an independent five-category safety audit providing additional behavioral analysis. Experiments on six frontier models show that even the best achieves only a 55\% pass rate. Further analysis uncovers sharp capability boundaries across task domains, divergent behavioral strategies among models, and a disconnect between token consumption and output quality, providing fine-grained diagnostic signals beyond what aggregate metrics reveal. We hope that AcademiClaw and its open-sourced data and code can serve as a useful resource for the OpenClaw community, driving progress toward agents that are more capable and versatile across the full breadth of real-world academic demands. All data and code are available at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/AcademiClaw.

Grounding Before Generalizing: How AI Differs from Humans in Causal Transfer

Extracting abstract causal structures and applying them to novel situations is a hallmark of human intelligence. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance on a wide range of reasoning tasks, their capacity for interactive causal learning -- inducing latent structures through sequential exploration and transferring them across contexts -- remains uncharacterized. Human learners accomplish such transfer after minimal exposure, whereas classical Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents fail catastrophically. Whether state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) models possess human-like mechanisms for abstract causal structure transfer is an open question. Using the OpenLock paradigm requiring sequential discovery of Common Cause (CC) and Common Effect (CE) structures, here we show that models exhibit fundamentally delayed or absent transfer: even successful models require initial environmental-specific mapping -- what we term environmental grounding -- before efficiency gains emerge, whereas humans leverage prior structural knowledge from the very first solution attempt. In the text-only condition, models matched or exceeded human discovery efficiency. In contrast, visual information -- in both the image-only and text-and-image conditions -- overall degraded rather than enhanced performance, revealing a broad reliance on symbolic processing rather than integrated multimodal reasoning. Models further exhibited systematic CC/CE asymmetries absent in humans, suggesting heuristic biases rather than direction-neutral causal abstraction. These findings reveal that large-scale statistical learning does not produce the decontextualized causal schemas underpinning human analogical reasoning, establishing grounding-dependent transfer as a fundamental limitation of current LLMs and VLMs.

PBE-UNet: A light weight Progressive Boundary-Enhanced U-Net with Scale-Aware Aggregation for Ultrasound Image Segmentation

Accurate lesion segmentation in ultrasound images is essential for preventive screening and clinical diagnosis, yet remains challenging due to low contrast, blurry boundaries, and significant scale variations. Although existing deep learning-based methods have achieved remarkable performance, these methods still struggle with scale variations and indistinct tumor boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose a progressive boundary enhanced U-Net (PBE-UNet). Specially, we first introduce a scale-aware aggregation module (SAAM) that dynamically adjusts its receptive field to capture robust multi-scale contextual information. Then, we propose a boundary-guided feature enhancement (BGFE) module to enhance the feature representations. We find that there are large gaps between the narrow boundary and the wide segmentation error areas. Unlike existing methods that treat boundaries as static masks, the BGFE module progressively expands the narrow boundary prediction into broader spatial attention maps. Thus, broader spatial attention maps could effectively cover the wider segmentation error regions and enhance the model's focus on these challenging areas. We conduct expensive experiments on four benchmark ultrasound datasets, BUSI, Dataset B, TN3K, and BP. The experimental results how that our proposed PBE-UNet outperforms state-of-the-art ultrasound image segmentation methods. The code is at https://github.com/cruelMouth/PBE-UNet.

Scalable Trajectory Generation for Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation

Robots deployed in unstructured environments must coordinate whole-body motion -- simultaneously moving a mobile base and arm -- to interact with the physical world. This coupled mobility and dexterity yields a state space that grows combinatorially with scene and object diversity, demanding datasets far larger than those sufficient for fixed-base manipulation. Yet existing acquisition methods, including teleoperation and planning, are either labor-intensive or computationally prohibitive at scale. The core bottleneck is the lack of a scalable pipeline for generating large-scale, physically valid, coordinated trajectory data across diverse embodiments and environments. Here we introduce AutoMoMa, a GPU-accelerated framework that unifies AKR modeling, which consolidates base, arm, and object kinematics into a single chain, with parallelized trajectory optimization. AutoMoMa achieves 5,000 episodes per GPU-hour (over $80\times$ faster than CPU-based baselines), producing a dataset of over 500k physically valid trajectories spanning 330 scenes, diverse articulated objects, and multiple robot embodiments. Prior datasets were forced to compromise on scale, diversity, or kinematic fidelity; AutoMoMa addresses all three simultaneously. Training downstream IL policies further reveals that even a single articulated-object task requires tens of thousands of demonstrations for SOTA methods to reach $\approx 80\%$ success, confirming that data scarcity -- not algorithmic limitations -- has been the binding constraint. AutoMoMa thus bridges high-performance planning and reliable IL-based control, providing the infrastructure previously missing for coordinated mobile manipulation research. By making large-scale, kinematically valid training data practical, AutoMoMa showcases generalizable whole-body robot policies capable of operating in the diverse, unstructured settings of the real world.

Overhang Tower: Resource-Rational Adaptation in Sequential Physical Planning

Humans effortlessly navigate the physical world by predicting how objects behave under gravity and contact forces, yet how such judgments support sequential physical planning under resource constraints remains poorly understood. Research on intuitive physics debates whether prediction relies on the Intuitive Physics Engine (IPE) or fast, cue-based heuristics; separately, decision-making research debates deliberative lookahead versus myopic strategies. These debates have proceeded in isolation, leaving the cognitive architecture of sequential physical planning underspecified. How physical prediction mechanisms and planning strategies jointly adapt under limited cognitive resources remains an open question. Here we show that humans exhibit a dual transition under resource pressure, simultaneously shifting both physical prediction mechanism and planning strategy to match cognitive budget. Using Overhang Tower, a construction task requiring participants to maximize horizontal overhang while maintaining stability, we find that IPE-based simulation dominates early stages while CNN-based visual heuristics prevail as complexity grows; concurrently, time pressure truncates deliberative lookahead, shifting planning toward shallower horizons: a dual transition unpredicted by prior single-mechanism accounts. These findings reveal a hierarchical, resource-rational architecture that flexibly trades computational cost against predictive fidelity. Our results unify two long-standing debates (simulation vs. heuristics and myopic vs. deliberative planning) as a dynamic repertoire reconfigured by cognitive budget.

T-800: An 800 Hz Data Glove for Precise Hand Gesture Tracking

Human dexterity relies on rapid, sub-second motor adjustments, yet capturing these high-frequency dynamics remains an enduring challenge in biomechanics and robotics. Existing motion capture paradigms are compromised by a trade-off between temporal resolution and visual occlusion, failing to record the fine-grained hand motion of fast, contact-rich manipulation. Here we introduce T-800, a high-bandwidth data glove system that achieves synchronized, full-hand motion tracking at 800 Hz. By integrating a novel broadcast-based synchronization mechanism with a mechanical stress isolation architecture, our system maintains sub-frame temporal alignment across 18 distributed inertial measurement units (IMUs) during extended, vigorous movements. We demonstrate that T-800 recovers fine-grained manipulation details previously lost to temporal undersampling. Our analysis reveals that human dexterity exhibits significantly high-frequency motion energy (>100 Hz) that was fundamentally inaccessible due to the Nyquist sampling limit imposed by previous hardware constraints. To validate the system's utility for robotic manipulation, we implement a kinematic retargeting algorithm that maps T-800's high-fidelity human gestures onto dexterous robotic hand models. This demonstrates that the high-frequency motion data can be accurately translated while respecting the kinematic constraints of robotic hands, providing the rich behavioral data necessary for training robust control policies in the future.

Visual Distraction Undermines Moral Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Moral reasoning is fundamental to safe Artificial Intelligence (AI), yet ensuring its consistency across modalities becomes critical as AI systems evolve from text-based assistants to embodied agents. Current safety techniques demonstrate success in textual contexts, but concerns remain about generalization to visual inputs. Existing moral evaluation benchmarks rely on textonly formats and lack systematic control over variables that influence moral decision-making. Here we show that visual inputs fundamentally alter moral decision-making in state-of-the-art (SOTA) Vision-Language Models (VLMs), bypassing text-based safety mechanisms. We introduce Moral Dilemma Simulation (MDS), a multimodal benchmark grounded in Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) that enables mechanistic analysis through orthogonal manipulation of visual and contextual variables. The evaluation reveals that the vision modality activates intuition-like pathways that override the more deliberate and safer reasoning patterns observed in text-only contexts. These findings expose critical fragilities where language-tuned safety filters fail to constrain visual processing, demonstrating the urgent need for multimodal safety alignment.

OmniClone: Engineering a Robust, All-Rounder Whole-Body Humanoid Teleoperation System

Whole-body humanoid teleoperation enables humans to remotely control humanoid robots, serving as both a real-time operational tool and a scalable engine for collecting demonstrations for autonomous learning. Despite recent advances, existing systems are validated using aggregate metrics that conflate distinct motion regimes, masking critical failure modes. This lack of diagnostic granularity, compounded by tightly coupled and labor-intensive system configurations, hinders robust real-world deployment. A key open challenge is building a teleoperation system that is simultaneously robust, versatile, and affordable for practical use. Here we present OmniClone, a whole-body humanoid teleoperation system that achieves high-fidelity, multi-skill control on a single consumer GPU with modest data requirements. Central to our approach is OmniBench, a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates policies across stratified motion categories and difficulty levels on unseen motions, exposing the narrow specialization of prior systems. Guided by these diagnostics, we identify an optimized training data recipe and integrate system-level improvements: subject-agnostic retargeting and robust communication, that collectively reduce Mean Per-Joint Position Error (MPJPE) by over 66% while requiring orders-of-magnitude fewer computational resources than comparable methods. Crucially, OmniClone is control-source-agnostic: a single unified policy supports real-time teleoperation, generated motion playback, and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while generalizing across operators of vastly different body proportions. By uniting diagnostic evaluation with practical engineering, OmniClone provides an accessible foundation for scalable humanoid teleoperation and autonomous learning.