Towards Long-Horizon Interpretability: Efficient and Faithful Multi-Token Attribution for Reasoning LLMs

Token attribution methods provide intuitive explanations for language model outputs by identifying causally important input tokens. However, as modern LLMs increasingly rely on extended reasoning chains, existing schemes face two critical challenges: (1) efficiency bottleneck, where attributing a target span of M tokens within a context of length N requires O(M*N) operations, making long-context attribution prohibitively slow; and (2) faithfulness drop, where intermediate reasoning tokens absorb attribution mass, preventing importance from propagating back to the original input. To address these, we introduce FlashTrace, an efficient multi-token attribution method that employs span-wise aggregation to compute attribution over multi-token targets in a single pass, while maintaining faithfulness. Moreover, we design a recursive attribution mechanism that traces importance through intermediate reasoning chains back to source inputs. Extensive experiments on long-context retrieval (RULER) and multi-step reasoning (MATH, MorehopQA) tasks demonstrate that FlashTrace achieves over 130x speedup over existing baselines while maintaining superior faithfulness. We further analyze the dynamics of recursive attribution, showing that even a single recursive hop improves faithfulness by tracing importance through the reasoning chain.

First Frame Is the Place to Go for Video Content Customization

What role does the first frame play in video generation models? Traditionally, it's viewed as the spatial-temporal starting point of a video, merely a seed for subsequent animation. In this work, we reveal a fundamentally different perspective: video models implicitly treat the first frame as a conceptual memory buffer that stores visual entities for later reuse during generation. Leveraging this insight, we show that it's possible to achieve robust and generalized video content customization in diverse scenarios, using only 20-50 training examples without architectural changes or large-scale finetuning. This unveils a powerful, overlooked capability of video generation models for reference-based video customization.

Humanoid Occupancy: Enabling A Generalized Multimodal Occupancy Perception System on Humanoid Robots

Humanoid robot technology is advancing rapidly, with manufacturers introducing diverse heterogeneous visual perception modules tailored to specific scenarios. Among various perception paradigms, occupancy-based representation has become widely recognized as particularly suitable for humanoid robots, as it provides both rich semantic and 3D geometric information essential for comprehensive environmental understanding. In this work, we present Humanoid Occupancy, a generalized multimodal occupancy perception system that integrates hardware and software components, data acquisition devices, and a dedicated annotation pipeline. Our framework employs advanced multi-modal fusion techniques to generate grid-based occupancy outputs encoding both occupancy status and semantic labels, thereby enabling holistic environmental understanding for downstream tasks such as task planning and navigation. To address the unique challenges of humanoid robots, we overcome issues such as kinematic interference and occlusion, and establish an effective sensor layout strategy. Furthermore, we have developed the first panoramic occupancy dataset specifically for humanoid robots, offering a valuable benchmark and resource for future research and development in this domain. The network architecture incorporates multi-modal feature fusion and temporal information integration to ensure robust perception. Overall, Humanoid Occupancy delivers effective environmental perception for humanoid robots and establishes a technical foundation for standardizing universal visual modules, paving the way for the widespread deployment of humanoid robots in complex real-world scenarios.

Confidence Adjusted Surprise Measure for Active Resourceful Trials (CA-SMART): A Data-driven Active Learning Framework for Accelerating Material Discovery under Resource Constraints

Accelerating the discovery and manufacturing of advanced materials with specific properties is a critical yet formidable challenge due to vast search space, high costs of experiments, and time-intensive nature of material characterization. In recent years, active learning, where a surrogate machine learning (ML) model mimics the scientific discovery process of a human scientist, has emerged as a promising approach to address these challenges by guiding experimentation toward high-value outcomes with a limited budget. Among the diverse active learning philosophies, the concept of surprise (capturing the divergence between expected and observed outcomes) has demonstrated significant potential to drive experimental trials and refine predictive models. Scientific discovery often stems from surprise thereby making it a natural driver to guide the search process. Despite its promise, prior studies leveraging surprise metrics such as Shannon and Bayesian surprise lack mechanisms to account for prior confidence, leading to excessive exploration of uncertain regions that may not yield useful information. To address this, we propose the Confidence-Adjusted Surprise Measure for Active Resourceful Trials (CA-SMART), a novel Bayesian active learning framework tailored for optimizing data-driven experimentation. On a high level, CA-SMART incorporates Confidence-Adjusted Surprise (CAS) to dynamically balance exploration and exploitation by amplifying surprises in regions where the model is more certain while discounting them in highly uncertain areas. We evaluated CA-SMART on two benchmark functions (Six-Hump Camelback and Griewank) and in predicting the fatigue strength of steel. The results demonstrate superior accuracy and efficiency compared to traditional surprise metrics, standard Bayesian Optimization (BO) acquisition functions and conventional ML methods.

In-Situ Melt Pool Characterization via Thermal Imaging for Defect Detection in Directed Energy Deposition Using Vision Transformers

Directed Energy Deposition (DED) offers significant potential for manufacturing complex and multi-material parts. However, internal defects such as porosity and cracks can compromise mechanical properties and overall performance. This study focuses on in-situ monitoring and characterization of melt pools associated with porosity, aiming to improve defect detection and quality control in DED-printed parts. Traditional machine learning approaches for defect identification rely on extensive labeled datasets, often scarce and expensive to generate in real-world manufacturing. To address this, our framework employs self-supervised learning on unlabeled melt pool data using a Vision Transformer-based Masked Autoencoder (MAE) to produce highly representative embeddings. These fine-tuned embeddings are leveraged via transfer learning to train classifiers on a limited labeled dataset, enabling the effective identification of melt pool anomalies. We evaluate two classifiers: (1) a Vision Transformer (ViT) classifier utilizing the fine-tuned MAE Encoder's parameters and (2) the fine-tuned MAE Encoder combined with an MLP classifier head. Our framework achieves overall accuracy ranging from 95.44% to 99.17% and an average F1 score exceeding 80%, with the ViT Classifier slightly outperforming the MAE Encoder Classifier. This demonstrates the scalability and cost-effectiveness of our approach for automated quality control in DED, effectively detecting defects with minimal labeled data.

Language-guided Robust Navigation for Mobile Robots in Dynamically-changing Environments

In this paper, we develop an embodied AI system for human-in-the-loop navigation with a wheeled mobile robot. We propose a direct yet effective method of monitoring the robot's current plan to detect changes in the environment that impact the intended trajectory of the robot significantly and then query a human for feedback. We also develop a means to parse human feedback expressed in natural language into local navigation waypoints and integrate it into a global planning system, by leveraging a map of semantic features and an aligned obstacle map. Extensive testing in simulation and physical hardware experiments with a resource-constrained wheeled robot tasked to navigate in a real-world environment validate the efficacy and robustness of our method. This work can support applications like precision agriculture and construction, where persistent monitoring of the environment provides a human with information about the environment state.

Hierarchical Tri-manual Planning for Vision-assisted Fruit Harvesting with Quadrupedal Robots

This paper addresses the challenge of developing a multi-arm quadrupedal robot capable of efficiently harvesting fruit in complex, natural environments. To overcome the inherent limitations of traditional bimanual manipulation, we introduce the first three-arm quadrupedal robot LocoHarv-3 and propose a novel hierarchical tri-manual planning approach, enabling automated fruit harvesting with collision-free trajectories. Our comprehensive semi-autonomous framework integrates teleoperation, supported by LiDAR-based odometry and mapping, with learning-based visual perception for accurate fruit detection and pose estimation. Validation is conducted through a series of controlled indoor experiments using motion capture and extensive field tests in natural settings. Results demonstrate a 90\% success rate in in-lab settings with a single attempt, and field trials further verify the system's robustness and efficiency in more challenging real-world environments.

Vision-assisted Avocado Harvesting with Aerial Bimanual Manipulation

Robotic fruit harvesting holds potential in precision agriculture to improve harvesting efficiency. While ground mobile robots are mostly employed in fruit harvesting, certain crops, like avocado trees, cannot be harvested efficiently from the ground alone. This is because of unstructured ground and planting arrangement and high-to-reach fruits. In such cases, aerial robots integrated with manipulation capabilities can pave new ways in robotic harvesting. This paper outlines the design and implementation of a bimanual UAV that employs visual perception and learning to autonomously detect avocados, reach, and harvest them. The dual-arm system comprises a gripper and a fixer arm, to address a key challenge when harvesting avocados: once grasped, a rotational motion is the most efficient way to detach the avocado from the peduncle; however, the peduncle may store elastic energy preventing the avocado from being harvested. The fixer arm aims to stabilize the peduncle, allowing the gripper arm to harvest. The integrated visual perception process enables the detection of avocados and the determination of their pose; the latter is then used to determine target points for a bimanual manipulation planner. Several experiments are conducted to assess the efficacy of each component, and integrated experiments assess the effectiveness of the system.

ChipExpert: The Open-Source Integrated-Circuit-Design-Specific Large Language Model

The field of integrated circuit (IC) design is highly specialized, presenting significant barriers to entry and research and development challenges. Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various domains, existing LLMs often fail to meet the specific needs of students, engineers, and researchers. Consequently, the potential of LLMs in the IC design domain remains largely unexplored. To address these issues, we introduce ChipExpert, the first open-source, instructional LLM specifically tailored for the IC design field. ChipExpert is trained on one of the current best open-source base model (Llama-3 8B). The entire training process encompasses several key stages, including data preparation, continue pre-training, instruction-guided supervised fine-tuning, preference alignment, and evaluation. In the data preparation stage, we construct multiple high-quality custom datasets through manual selection and data synthesis techniques. In the subsequent two stages, ChipExpert acquires a vast amount of IC design knowledge and learns how to respond to user queries professionally. ChipExpert also undergoes an alignment phase, using Direct Preference Optimization, to achieve a high standard of ethical performance. Finally, to mitigate the hallucinations of ChipExpert, we have developed a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, based on the IC design knowledge base. We also released the first IC design benchmark ChipICD-Bench, to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs across multiple IC design sub-domains. Through comprehensive experiments conducted on this benchmark, ChipExpert demonstrated a high level of expertise in IC design knowledge Question-and-Answer tasks.

An unsupervised approach towards promptable defect segmentation in laser-based additive manufacturing by Segment Anything

Foundation models are currently driving a paradigm shift in computer vision tasks for various fields including biology, astronomy, and robotics among others, leveraging user-generated prompts to enhance their performance. In the manufacturing domain, accurate image-based defect segmentation is imperative to ensure product quality and facilitate real-time process control. However, such tasks are often characterized by multiple challenges including the absence of labels and the requirement for low latency inference among others. To address these issues, we construct a framework for image segmentation using a state-of-the-art Vision Transformer (ViT) based Foundation model (Segment Anything Model) with a novel multi-point prompt generation scheme using unsupervised clustering. We apply our framework to perform real-time porosity segmentation in a case study of laser base powder bed fusion (L-PBF) and obtain high Dice Similarity Coefficients (DSC) without the necessity for any supervised fine-tuning in the model. Using such lightweight foundation model inference in conjunction with unsupervised prompt generation, we envision the construction of a real-time anomaly detection pipeline that has the potential to revolutionize the current laser-based additive manufacturing processes, thereby facilitating the shift towards Industry 4.0 and promoting defect-free production along with operational efficiency.