Physics-Informed Reinforcement Learning of Spatial Density Velocity Potentials for Map-Free Racing

Autonomous racing without prebuilt maps is a grand challenge for embedded robotics that requires kinodynamic planning from instantaneous sensor data at the acceleration and tire friction limits. Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalization to various racetrack configurations utilizes Machine Learning (ML) to encode the mathematical relation between sensor data and vehicle actuation for end-to-end control, with implicit localization. These comprise Behavioral Cloning (BC) that is capped to human reaction times and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) which requires large-scale collisions for comprehensive training that can be infeasible without simulation but is arduous to transfer to reality, thus exhibiting greater performance than BC in simulation, but actuation instability on hardware. This paper presents a DRL method that parameterizes nonlinear vehicle dynamics from the spectral distribution of depth measurements with a non-geometric, physics-informed reward, to infer vehicle time-optimal and overtaking racing controls with an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) that utilizes less than 1% of the computation of BC and model-based DRL. Slaloming from simulation to reality transfer and variance-induced conservatism are eliminated with the combination of a physics engine exploit-aware reward and the replacement of an explicit collision penalty with an implicit truncation of the value horizon. The policy outperforms human demonstrations by 12% in OOD tracks on proportionally scaled hardware, by maximizing the friction circle with tire dynamics that resemble an empirical Pacejka tire model. System identification illuminates a functional bifurcation where the first layer compresses spatial observations to extract digitized track features with higher resolution in corner apexes, and the second encodes nonlinear dynamics.

WeatherRemover: All-in-one Adverse Weather Removal with Multi-scale Feature Map Compression

Photographs taken in adverse weather conditions often suffer from blurriness, occlusion, and low brightness due to interference from rain, snow, and fog. These issues can significantly hinder the performance of subsequent computer vision tasks, making the removal of weather effects a crucial step in image enhancement. Existing methods primarily target specific weather conditions, with only a few capable of handling multiple weather scenarios. However, mainstream approaches often overlook performance considerations, resulting in large parameter sizes, long inference times, and high memory costs. In this study, we introduce the WeatherRemover model, designed to enhance the restoration of images affected by various weather conditions while balancing performance. Our model adopts a UNet-like structure with a gating mechanism and a multi-scale pyramid vision Transformer. It employs channel-wise attention derived from convolutional neural networks to optimize feature extraction, while linear spatial reduction helps curtail the computational demands of attention. The gating mechanisms, strategically placed within the feed-forward and downsampling phases, refine the processing of information by selectively addressing redundancy and mitigating its influence on learning. This approach facilitates the adaptive selection of essential data, ensuring superior restoration and maximizing efficiency. Additionally, our lightweight model achieves an optimal balance between restoration quality, parameter efficiency, computational overhead, and memory usage, distinguishing it from other multi-weather models, thereby meeting practical application demands effectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/RICKand-MORTY/WeatherRemover.

Channel Knowledge Map-Enabled NLoS ISAC Localization

Accurate localization in non-line-of-sight (NLoS) environments remains challenging even with both angle-of-arrival (AoA) and time-of-arrival (ToA) measurements. In complex urban scenarios, the absence of line-of-sight (LoS) paths and the lack of environment prior knowledge make geometric based localization methods inapplicable, while prior-based approach such as fingerprinting is sensitive to environmental perturbations. This paper proposes a novel environment-aware localization framework enabled by the emerging concept called channel knowledge map (CKM). In the offline stage, AoA-ToA path signatures are learned by the CKM, with each path mapped to one candidate scatterer, thereby forming geometric priors within the environment. In the online stage, observed paths are matched to the CKM to extract high-confidence scatterers. Nonlinear least squares (NLS) method is then applied to jointly estimate the user and dominant scatterer locations. Even with imperfect CSI matching, geometric feasibility consistent with CKM scatterer priors provides corrective information and suppresses ambiguity. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms fingerprinting and offers a robust and scalable solution to address the challenging NLoS localization for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems.

Solar-VLM: Multimodal Vision-Language Models for Augmented Solar Power Forecasting

Photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting plays a critical role in power system dispatch and market participation. Because PV generation is highly sensitive to weather conditions and cloud motion, accurate forecasting requires effective modeling of complex spatiotemporal dependencies across multiple information sources. Although recent studies have advanced AI-based forecasting methods, most fail to fuse temporal observations, satellite imagery, and textual weather information in a unified framework. This paper proposes Solar-VLM, a large-language-model-driven framework for multimodal PV power forecasting. First, modality-specific encoders are developed to extract complementary features from heterogeneous inputs. The time-series encoder adopts a patch-based design to capture temporal patterns from multivariate observations at each site. The visual encoder, built upon a Qwen-based vision backbone, extracts cloud-cover information from satellite images. The text encoder distills historical weather characteristics from textual descriptions. Second, to capture spatial dependencies across geographically distributed PV stations, a cross-site feature fusion mechanism is introduced. Specifically, a Graph Learner models inter-station correlations through a graph attention network constructed over a K-nearest-neighbor (KNN) graph, while a cross-site attention module further facilitates adaptive information exchange among sites. Finally, experiments conducted on data from eight PV stations in a northern province of China demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Our proposed model is publicly available at https://github.com/rhp413/Solar-VLM.

Decocted Experience Improves Test-Time Inference in LLM Agents

There is growing interest in improving LLMs without updating model parameters. One well-established direction is test-time scaling, where increased inference-time computation (e.g., longer reasoning, sampling, or search) is used to improve performance. However, for complex reasoning and agentic tasks, naively scaling test-time compute can substantially increase cost and still lead to wasted budget on suboptimal exploration. In this paper, we explore \emph{context} as a complementary scaling axis for improving LLM performance, and systematically study how to construct better inputs that guide reasoning through \emph{experience}. We show that effective context construction critically depends on \emph{decocted experience}. We present a detailed analysis of experience-augmented agents, studying how to derive context from experience, how performance scales with accumulated experience, what characterizes good context, and which data structures best support context construction. We identify \emph{decocted experience} as a key mechanism for effective context construction: extracting essence from experience, organizing it coherently, and retrieving salient information to build effective context. We validate our findings across reasoning and agentic tasks, including math reasoning, web browsing, and software engineering.

MedConceal: A Benchmark for Clinical Hidden-Concern Reasoning Under Partial Observability

Patient-clinician communication is an asymmetric-information problem: patients often do not disclose fears, misconceptions, or practical barriers unless clinicians elicit them skillfully. Effective medical dialogue therefore requires reasoning under partial observability: clinicians must elicit latent concerns, confirm them through interaction, and respond in ways that guide patients toward appropriate care. However, existing medical dialogue benchmarks largely sidestep this challenge by exposing hidden patient state, collapsing elicitation into extraction, or evaluating responses without modeling what remains hidden. We present MedConceal, a benchmark with an interactive patient simulator for evaluating hidden-concern reasoning in medical dialogue, comprising 300 curated cases and 600 clinician-LLM interactions. Built from clinician-answered online health discussions, each case pairing clinician-visible context with simulator-internal hidden concerns derived from prior literature and structured using an expert-developed taxonomy. The simulator withholds these concerns from the dialogue agent, tracks whether they have been revealed and addressed via theory-grounded turn-level communication signals, and is clinician-reviewed for clinical plausibility. This enables process-aware evaluation of both task success and the interaction process that leads to it. We study two abilities: confirmation, surfacing hidden concerns through multi-turn dialogue, and intervention, addressing the primary concern and guiding the patient toward a target plan. Results show that no single system dominates: frontier models lead on different confirmation metrics, while human clinicians (N=159) remain strongest on intervention success. Together, these results identify hidden-concern reasoning under partial observability as a key unresolved challenge for medical dialogue systems.

AI Driven Soccer Analysis Using Computer Vision

Sport analysis is crucial for team performance since it provides actionable data that can inform coaching decisions, improve player performance, and enhance team strategies. To analyze more complex features from game footage, a computer vision model can be used to identify and track key entities from the field. We propose the use of an object detection and tracking system to predict player positioning throughout the game. To translate this to positioning in relation to the field dimensions, we use a point prediction model to identify key points on the field and combine these with known field dimensions to extract actual distances. For the player-identification model, object detection models like YOLO and Faster R-CNN are evaluated on the accuracy of our custom video footage using multiple different evaluation metrics. The goal is to identify the best model for object identification to obtain the most accurate results when paired with SAM2 (Segment Anything Model 2) for segmentation and tracking. For the key point detection model, we use a CNN model to find consistent locations in the soccer field. Through homography, the positions of points and objects in the camera perspective will be transformed to a real-ground perspective. The segmented player masks from SAM2 are transformed from camera perspective to real-world field coordinates through homography, regardless of camera angle or movement. The transformed real-world coordinates can be used to calculate valuable tactical insights including player speed, distance covered, positioning heatmaps, and more complex team statistics, providing coaches and players with actionable performance data previously unavailable from standard video analysis.

NED-Tree: Bridging the Semantic Gap with Nonlinear Element Decomposition Tree for LLM Nonlinear Optimization Modeling

Automating the translation of Operations Research (OR) problems from natural language to executable models is a critical challenge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in linear tasks, they suffer from severe performance degradation in real-world nonlinear scenarios due to semantic misalignment between mathematical formulations and solver codes, as well as unstable information extraction. In this study, we introduce NED-Tree, a systematic framework designed to bridge the semantic gap. NED-Tree employs (a) a sentence-by-sentence extraction strategy to ensure robust parameter mapping and traceability; and (b) a recursive tree-based structure that adaptively decomposes complex nonlinear terms into solver-compatible sub-elements. Additionally, we present NEXTOR, a novel benchmark specifically designed for complex nonlinear, extensive-constraint OR problems. Experiments across 10 benchmarks demonstrate that NED-Tree establishes a new state-of-the-art with 72.51% average accuracy, NED-Tree is the first framework that drives LLMs to resolve nonlinear modeling difficulties through element decomposition, achieving alignment between modeling semantics and code semantics. The NED-Tree framework and benchmark are accessible in the anonymous repository https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NORA-NEXTOR.

Brain3D: EEG-to-3D Decoding of Visual Representations via Multimodal Reasoning

Decoding visual information from electroencephalography (EEG) has recently achieved promising results, primarily focusing on reconstructing two-dimensional (2D) images from brain activity. However, the reconstruction of three-dimensional (3D) representations remains largely unexplored. This limits the geometric understanding and reduces the applicability of neural decoding in different contexts. To address this gap, we propose Brain3D, a multimodal architecture for EEG-to-3D reconstruction based on EEG-to-image decoding. It progressively transforms neural representations into the 3D domain using geometry-aware generative reasoning. Our pipeline first produces visually grounded images from EEG signals, then employs a multimodal large language model to extract structured 3D-aware descriptions, which guide a diffusion-based generation stage whose outputs are finally converted into coherent 3D meshes via a single-image-to-3D model. By decomposing the problem into structured stages, the proposed approach avoids direct EEG-to-3D mappings and enables scalable brain-driven 3D generation. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation comparing the reconstructed 3D outputs against the original visual stimuli, assessing both semantic alignment and geometric fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate strong performance of the proposed architecture, achieving up to 85.4% 10-way Top-1 EEG decoding accuracy and 0.648 CLIPScore, supporting the feasibility of multimodal EEG-driven 3D reconstruction.

LLM-based Atomic Propositions help weak extractors: Evaluation of a Propositioner for triplet extraction

Knowledge Graph construction from natural language requires extracting structured triplets from complex, information-dense sentences. In this paper, we investigate if the decomposition of text into atomic propositions (minimal, semantically autonomous units of information) can improve the triplet extraction. We introduce MPropositionneur-V2, a small multilingual model covering six European languages trained by knowledge distillation from Qwen3-32B into a Qwen3-0.6B architecture, and we evaluate its integration into two extraction paradigms: entity-centric (GLiREL) and generative (Qwen3). Experiments on SMiLER, FewRel, DocRED and CaRB show that atomic propositions benefit weaker extractors (GLiREL, CoreNLP, 0.6B models), improving relation recall and, in the multilingual setting, overall accuracy. For stronger LLMs, a fallback combination strategy recovers entity recall losses while preserving the gains in relation extraction. These results show that atomic propositions are an interpretable intermediate data structure that complements extractors without replacing them.