Decodable but Not Actionable: Auditing the Representation-Behavior Gap in Frozen LLMs for Geometric Constraints
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2608.17843v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) perform well on structured reasoning tasks, but what they encode and whether encoded information guides their behavior remain unclear. We introduce a controlled auditing framework that uses parametric CAD to distinguish failures of encoding, expression, and activation-level control. Applied to eight pretrained models and matched randomly initialized controls, our framework reveals that pretraining contributes substantially more to linear decoding of local relations than to global constraint status, which is already highly decodable from random representations. Yet strong local decodability does not translate into the models' zero-shot predictions, which remain far below supervised probe performance. Restoring clean internal activations can repair probe predictions, whereas simple activation steering does not provide reliable targeted control. With only 400 labeled relation pairs, low-rank fine-tuning substantially improves generation on three representative models, showing that the representation--behavior gap can be reduced through adaptation. Together, these findings show why decodability alone is insufficient evidence that encoded information will be expressed or controllable in model behavior.
Wiring Beats Blending: Structure-Aware Compensation for Transformer Downscaling
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2608.02829v5 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Model families are trained size by size. Can a pretrained large model instead be converted into a smaller sibling? We characterize the 1.4B->410M conversion in Pythia end to end. Representations align strongly across sizes (ridge R^2=0.84); parameters align weakly. Dense weight projection is destructive; a bit-exact control places the fault in basis mixing, which breaks rotary, per-head, GELU, and LayerNorm structure. Residuals after the best-fit linear operator carry no learnable or transferable signal under shuffle controls, so conversion value lives in initialization. Matched-budget continued pre-training separates two independent levers, least-squares compensation (function lever, best zero-shot) and variance-preserving rescale (dynamics lever, best endpoints), with a placement rule read off the architecture: compensation is well-posed exactly where no normalization sits between cut and read; norm-fronted paths take rescale. At 30M tokens compensation beats the best subcloning variant on a width-reduced pair (84.6+-2.1 vs. 90.7+-3.8, 6/6 seeds) and a held-out depth-reduced pair (109.3 vs. 117.9, 3/3 seeds); the two reach parity at 33x the budget, and at ~5x the donor scale the levers anti-synergize. A second family, Qwen3-1.7B->0.6B (RMSNorm, SwiGLU, grouped-query attention), takes the placement rule unchanged but reverses a 2x2 crossing the re-fit with the activation statistic it reads: on Pythia the re-fit carries the gain and the statistic adds 2.3 perplexity; on Qwen3, with far more heterogeneous MLP unit energies, the statistic carries 66 points and the re-fit is a null on top. Informed selection + compensation + rescale is the best arm in both families, 19x and 23x lower perplexity than from scratch at matched budget (2.94 and 3.13 nats), and beats structured pruning plus distillation. Code, checkpoints, and the frozen eval corpus are released.
Representation and Reference Selection in Training-Free Synthetic Image Attribution
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2607.12052v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Synthetic image attribution aims at identifying the generator responsible for a given AI-generated image. Training-free reference-based attribution methods are easily scalable, since newly emerging generators can be incorporated by adding source-specific references rather than retraining a task-specific classifier. Their performance depends on two coupled factors: the representation space used for comparison and the way source-specific references are constructed. However, the interaction between these two factors remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we provide a controlled analysis of this interaction using references and off-the-shelf pretrained representations. We study representations extracted from different layers of CLIP and DINOv2, along with three reference selection strategies with varying semantic constraints: arbitrary, semantically aligned, and resynthesis-based references. Our results show that attribution accuracy generally peaks at intermediate representation levels, indicating that source-discriminative cues are more accessible before strong semantic abstraction dominates. We further show that intermediate representations are not completely semantically neutral, making reference selection critical: semantically constrained references reduce query-reference mismatch and improve attribution, especially under limited reference budgets. Resynthesis is useful in low-reference regimes, while semantically aligned references provide a better accuracy-cost trade-off when a moderate-sized reference pool is available. Our findings show that training-free reference-based attribution should be understood as the interaction between where images are compared, how the reference set is constructed, and how many references are available. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/meiling-fdu/RefPrint.
FLORO: A Multimodal Geospatial Foundation Model for Ecological Remote Sensing Across Sensors and Scales
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2605.28174v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Foundation models offer a promising route to transferable remote sensing representations, but many current approaches depend on very large pretraining datasets and fixed sensor configurations, limiting their suitability for ecological and environmental applications, where observations often vary across platforms, spatial and spectral resolutions, and available modalities. We introduce FLORO, a multimodal geospatial foundation model designed to learn transferable representations from a small but highly diverse remote sensing corpus. FLORO is pretrained using masked autoencoding on a heterogeneous combination of Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, SkySAT imagery, elevation, and UAV-derived data. To accommodate sensor variability, FLORO incorporates availability-aware inputs that indicate which spectral bands and auxiliary modalities are present in each sample, enabling a unified input space across heterogeneous sensor configurations. We evaluated FLORO on the PANGAEA benchmark under a frozen-encoder protocol across scene classification, segmentation, and regression tasks. Despite being pretrained on a smaller corpus than competing foundation models, FLORO achieved strong and stable transfer across optical, optical-SAR, and optical-elevation benchmarks spanning medium-resolution satellite, airborne, and ultra-high-resolution UAV imagery. FLORO obtained the second-best average segmentation performance across six PANGAEA benchmarks, the third-best average rank across three scene-classification benchmarks, and excelled in regression tasks, while qualitative results showed improved preservation of spatial structure in flood, urban, biomass, and canopy-height prediction settings. Overall, these results position FLORO as a practical framework for ecological and environmental monitoring under heterogeneous sensing conditions.
Always Learning, Always Mixing: Efficient and Simple Data Mixing All the Time
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2605.15220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Data mixing decides how to combine different sources or types of data and is a consequential problem throughout language model training. In pretraining, data composition is a key determinant of model quality; in continual learning and adaptation, it governs what is retained and acquired. Yet existing data mixing methods address only one phase of this lifecycle at a time: some require smaller proxy models tied to a single training phase, others assume a fixed domain set, and continual learning lacks principled guidance altogether. We argue that data mixing is fundamentally an online decision making problem---one that recurs throughout training and demands a single, unified solution. We introduce OP-Mix (On-Policy Mix), a data mixing algorithm that operates across pretraining, midtraining, and instruction tuning. Our main insight is that candidate data mixtures can be cheaply simulated by interpolating between low-rank adapters trained directly on the current model, eliminating separate proxy models and ensuring the search is always grounded in the model's actual learning dynamics. Across the language model training lifecycle, OP-Mix consistently finds near-optimal mixtures while using a fraction of the compute of the baselines. In pretraining, OP-Mix improves upon training without mixing by 6.3% in average perplexity. For continual learning, OP-Mix matches the performance of both retraining and on-policy distillation while using 66% and 95% less overall compute, respectively. OP-Mix suggests a different view of language model training: not a sequence of distinct phases, but a single continuous process of learning from data.
PepEVOLVE: Position-Aware Dynamic Peptide Optimization via Group-Relative Advantage
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2511.16912v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Macrocyclic peptides are an emerging modality that combines biologics-like affinity with small-molecule-like developability, yet their vast combinatorial space and multi-parameter objectives make lead optimization slow and challenging. Prior generative approaches for peptide lead optimization (e.g., PepINVENT) require chemists to pre-specify mutable positions for optimization, choices that are not always known a priori, and rely on static pretraining and optimization algorithms that limit the model's ability to generalize and effectively optimize peptide sequences. We introduce PepEVOLVE, a position-aware, dynamic framework that learns both where to edit and how to dynamically optimize peptides for multi-parameter improvement. PepEVOLVE (i) augments pretraining with dynamic masking and CHUCKLES shifting to improve generalization, (ii) uses a context-free multi-armed-bandit router that discovers high-reward residues, and (iii) couples a novel evolving optimization algorithm with group-relative advantage to stabilize reinforcement updates. During in silico evaluations, the router policy reliably learns and concentrates probability on chemically tractable sites that influence the desired peptide's properties. On a therapeutically motivated Rev-binding macrocycle benchmark, PepEVOLVE outperformed PepINVENT by reaching higher averaged permeability-weighted optimization scores of approximately 0.8 vs. 0.6, achieving best candidates with score of 0.97 (vs. 0.89), and converging in fewer steps under the task of optimizing permeability and lipophilicity with structure constraints. Overall, PepEVOLVE offers a practical, reproducible path to linear and macrocyclic peptide lead optimization when optimal edit sites are unknown, enabling more efficient chemical space exploration and improving design quality across multiple objectives to accelerate the design cycles.
NeuroBridge: Bio-Inspired Self-Supervised EEG-to-Image Decoding via Cognitive Priors and Bidirectional Semantic Alignment
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2511.06836v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Visual neural decoding seeks to reconstruct or infer perceived visual stimuli from brain activity patterns, providing critical insights into human cognition and enabling transformative applications in brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence. Current approaches, however, remain constrained by the scarcity of high-quality stimulus-brain response pairs and the inherent semantic mismatch between neural representations and visual content. Inspired by perceptual variability and co-adaptive strategy of the biological systems, we propose a novel self-supervised architecture, named NeuroBridge, which integrates Cognitive Prior Augmentation (CPA) with Shared Semantic Projector (SSP) to promote effective cross-modality alignment. Specifically, CPA simulates perceptual variability by applying asymmetric, modality-specific transformations to both EEG signals and images, enhancing semantic diversity. Unlike previous approaches, SSP establishes a bidirectional alignment process through a co-adaptive strategy, which mutually aligns features from two modalities into a shared semantic space for effective cross-modal learning. NeuroBridge surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods under both intra-subject and inter-subject settings. In the intra-subject scenario, it achieves the improvements of 12.3% in top-1 accuracy and 10.2% in top-5 accuracy, reaching 63.2% and 89.9% respectively on a 200-way zero-shot retrieval task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and scalability of the proposed framework for neural visual decoding.
SemantiScene-Edit: Expert-Synthesized Supervision and Dual-Path Source Conditioning for Instruction-Based Video Editing
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2609.26015v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Instruction-guided video editing requires executing a requested change while preserving the source video's appearance and temporal structure. We present SemantiScene-Edit, a video editor that couples a multimodal encoder with a pretrained video diffusion transformer. The encoder jointly processes source frames and the editing instruction, and learnable queries convey their semantic context to the generator through a trainable connector and cross-attention. A complementary visual pathway concatenates source-video latents with noisy target latents before patch embedding, supplying dense spatial and temporal information for content preservation. We train the model with flow matching and a three-stage image--video curriculum comprising semantic alignment, joint adaptation, and high-resolution refinement. To support training, we construct over 1.2 million instruction-conditioned video-editing records covering object addition, removal, replacement, and attribute modification. We also construct a 100-case benchmark for evaluating instruction execution, source preservation, temporal consistency, and visual quality. Comparative experiments show that SemantiScene-Edit effectively follows editing instructions while retaining source content. At inference, the model requires only a source video and a natural-language instruction.
WNM-3D: A World Navigation Model with 3D Scene Conditioning for Closed-Loop VLN
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2608.07267v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recent vision-language navigation (VLN) systems increasingly adapt pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) into vision-language-action (VLA) policies that map egocentric observations and language instructions directly to navigation actions. Although semantically capable, such action-centric training does not explicitly model how the agent's visual observations evolve under its predicted motion. Generative world-action models (WAMs) jointly predict future observations and actions, yet existing WAMs for continuous VLN do not condition joint future-view and action generation on geometry-aware representations inferred from the observation history. We present WNM-3D, a generative World Navigation Model with 3D scene conditioning for continuous VLN. A frozen feed-forward geometry encoder extracts cross-view representations from monocular RGB history, and a trainable 3D Scene-to-Token Adapter converts them into a fixed-length scene prefix for the world-action Diffusion Transformer. Through block-causal attention, this prefix remains visible to every future video-action block throughout joint denoising, providing persistent geometric context. We train WNM-3D with supervised world-action learning, DAgger-style adaptation on policy-visited states, and Counterfactual DanceGRPO refinement. Across GN-Bench and VLN-CE, WNM-3D consistently outperforms the backbone-matched WNM-2D counterpart, demonstrating gains from 3D scene conditioning across distinct visual domains. WNM-3D further outperforms strong VLN baselines on GN-Bench and demonstrates closed-loop deployment on a physical robot. Component and stage-wise ablations support the Adapter design and the complementary roles of DAgger-SFT and subsequent reward-guided refinement.
AEM: Adaptive Entropy Modulation for Multi-Turn Agentic Reinforcement Learning
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2605.00425v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the ability of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with environments and solve multi-turn tasks. However, effective agentic RL remains challenging: sparse outcome-only rewards provide limited guidance for assigning credit to individual steps within long interaction trajectories. Existing approaches often introduce dense intermediate supervision, such as process reward models or auxiliary self-supervised signals, which increases supervision and tuning complexity and may limit generalization across tasks and domains. We present AEM, a supervision-free credit assignment method that adaptively modulates entropy dynamics during RL training to improve the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Since in agentic RL the environment is typically affected by a complete response, rather than an individual token, our analysis lifts entropy dynamics from the token level to the response level, aligning uncertainty estimation with the effective action granularity of LLM agents and reducing sensitivity to token-level sampling noise. We further show that entropy drift under natural-gradient updates is governed by the interaction between the sampled-response advantage and its relative surprisal. Motivated by this result, AEM derives a practical response-level uncertainty proxy and uses it to rescale advantages, leveraging the evolving balance between positive and negative samples to naturally transition from exploration to exploitation. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SWE-bench-Verified with models ranging from 1.5B to 32B demonstrate that AEM consistently improves strong RL baselines, including a +1.4\% gain when integrated into a state-of-the-art software-engineering RL training framework.
Rethinking Neural Thickets Without Weight Perturbations
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2610.40649v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The Neural Thickets hypothesis posits that pretrained language models lie in dense neighborhoods of task-specific experts in weight space, which random Gaussian perturbations can uncover. We reproduce the reported gains, but show that they do not require this geometric explanation. Perturbing a single decoder block already recovers much of the improvement, while keeping the model entirely frozen and adding a random bias to its output logits matches or exceeds full-weight perturbations on most reasoning tasks. This suggests an alternative explanation based on output diversity, validation-based selection, and voting. We formalize this view as Perturb-Select-Vote (PSV), a general procedure that generates perturbed predictors, selects high-performing members on a small validation set, and aggregates their predictions.
This interpretation connects Neural Thickets to established inference-time methods, including sampling, self-consistency, and verifier-guided selection. A first-order analysis further shows that small weight perturbations act primarily through their induced logit shifts. We extend this analysis to vision, where logit PSV substantially improves performance under domain shift, including on Earth observation, while full-weight perturbations provide little additional benefit. Together, these results suggest that the gains attributed to nearby weight-space experts can instead be obtained through output diversity, selection, and voting. Logit PSV realizes these benefits with a fully frozen model, providing a simple, training-free alternative to full-weight perturbation ensembles across language and vision.
Latent Prediction Yields Cross-Subject Alignable Representations in Sensory-Evoked fMRI
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2610.40280v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Decoding sensory-evoked functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is a central analytical tool in cognitive neuroscience. Here we ask whether self-supervised learning (SSL), which has been scarcely explored in this domain, can yield representations that support strong downstream performance. To do so, we adapt a joint embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) to train participant-specific encoders on brain data alone. The encoders never see the stimulus images or any representation derived from them. Applied to the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD), we evaluate our learned brain embeddings on the downstream tasks of brain captioning and image reconstruction, as well as cross-participant generalization. Our self-supervised approach achieves competitive performance with parameter-rich supervised pipelines that are trained end-to-end with access to image and language data. We further find that encoders trained independently for different participants can be aligned fully unsupervised, using neither images nor stimuli shared between them. After alignment, a neural decoding head trained on one participant can be applied to another without fine-tuning and retains most of its within-subject performance on image reconstruction and brain captioning. By removing the need for images and shared stimuli, our approach is a step towards pooling fMRI data across participants and, eventually, across datasets.
TaskFrame: Connecting Task-Level Planning with Frame-Level Control for Game Agents
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2610.40276v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Building general game agents requires both high-level task reasoning and low-latency action control in rapidly changing visual environments. These capabilities favor models with substantially different computational profiles, making them difficult to realize within a single model. In this work, we present TaskFrame, a hierarchical planner-controller framework that connects task-level planning with frame-level keyboard-and-mouse control. A vision-language task planner decomposes a high-level goal into an ordered sequence of atomic instructions and is optimized through supervised learning and dependency-aware GRPO. The hidden states of special goal tokens that terminate each atomic instruction provide continuous goal embeddings that are cached and reused across control steps. A causal Transformer controller combines the embedding of the active goal with recent observations to predict discrete keyboard and mouse-button actions and continuous camera motion at every game step. We train the system in three stages: planner training, controller pretraining, and joint alignment. Experiments in Minecraft show that TaskFrame is competitive with general-purpose vision-language models on instruction decomposition, and that in closed-loop evaluation the agent achieves a higher combat success rate than the evaluated baselines.
Rethinking Pre-pretraining
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2610.40051v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We report that allocating compute to synthetic pre-pretraining (PPT) never outperforms pure natural-language training in our compute-matched experiments. This holds across four PPT curricula (k-Dyck, neural cellular automata (NCA), declarative reference corpora, and code) and three training regimes: data-constrained, data-unconstrained, and a high token-to-parameter-ratio regime (881M parameters trained on 50B tokens). When natural language is scarce, repeated epochs over a 100M-token corpus beat every synthetic curriculum on natural-language validation loss, with no consistent downstream accuracy advantage from PPT. We find that PPT gains reported in prior work are sensitive to the weight initialization scheme. In an NCA reproduction, we recover a 5.4% perplexity improvement from PPT under the original initialization scheme. An alternative scheme improves both methods, but the no-PPT baseline more, closing the gap between them. However, when PPT receives additional compute rather than a share of the natural-language budget, gains persist at small natural-language budgets even with improved initialization, but disappear by 1B tokens. Finally, models forget what they learn during PPT in subsequent natural-language training; interleaving the same data throughout training prevents forgetting, but does not significantly improve natural-language performance. Our results suggest limited benefits of synthetic pre-pretraining as a distinct training stage and motivate rethinking how such data are used in language model training.
Event-SAMA: Language-Grounded Video Object Segmentation on Neuromorphic Event Streams
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2610.39676v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Event cameras offer microsecond temporal resolution, high dynamic range and no motion blur, but referring video object segmentation (RVOS) lacks event-stream datasets and models. We introduce Event-SAMA-239K, a synthetic-event conversion of the SAMA-239K grounded video-chat corpus and all additional SAMA training data: 30,650 video clips and 392,162 images. Optical-flow, FILM or saccade upsampling followed by a linear event generator preserves all mask, referring-expression and dialogue annotations. We also introduce Event-SAMA, adapting SAMA-4B with a two-channel polarity patch embedding initialised from pretrained RGB weights and a zero-initialised event adapter. End-to-end training yields 24.37 $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$ on MeViS valid_u and 22.33 $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$ on the converted ReVOS valid subset, establishing the first event-native RVOS baseline (RGB SAMA-4B: 55.4 on MeViS). Frozen RGB SAMA-4B with pseudo-RGB renderings or E2VID reconstructions of the same events scores 13.23 and 15.94 $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$. Without retraining, Event-SAMA works on real event-camera recordings when the accumulation window matches their event density. A seed-controlled ablation with a measured noise floor of 0.47 $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$ finds gains from diverse training sources over MeViS alone (+4.99), RGB-mean event-stem initialisation (+4.33), and a trainable SAM2 mask decoder (+2.76); the event adapter, partial ViT unfreezing and event polarity are within noise at this budget. An earlier, partially converted corpus snapshot trained with the identical recipe scores 1.38 $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$ higher on MeViS and 1.12 higher on ReVOS. Both are single runs that also differ in schedule length, so we draw no conclusion about corpus scale.
WorldFlow: Joint Video and 3D Motion Prediction via Large-Scale Pretraining
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2610.39278v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Predicting future physical states stands as a central challenge in embodied intelligence. Existing video world models leave 3D dynamics implicit, action-based formulations remain tied to specific robot configurations, and 3D motion prediction models use flow-only supervision, providing a limited learning signal for physical dynamics. To circumvent these limitations, we introduce \method{}, a generative world model that jointly predicts future video and query-based 3D trajectories. By parameterizing 3D motion as continuous displacement tokens aligned with the video grid, a unified Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) backbone jointly denoises both modalities under a rectified-flow objective. This formulation couples explicit geometric dynamics with visual evolution, effectively unlocking the physical commonsense embedded within pretrained video models. To empirically scale and validate this unified architecture, we train \method{} on a heterogeneous mixture of 1.44 million object-level samples spanning simulated and real-world domains. We further introduce WorldFlowBench, comprising 1,678 evaluation samples from 11 data sources across simulated and real-world interactions, including spatial reasoning tasks. Across all three evaluation sets, WorldFlow achieves the lowest average displacement error (ADE) and final displacement error (FDE) among the evaluated learning-based methods. Notably, on the challenging SpatialCog set, WorldFlow achieves an ADE of 0.060 m, a 54.2\% reduction compared with the strongest external baseline. It also reduces ADE and FDE by 55.9\% and 68.5\%, respectively, compared with its flow-only variant. Project page: https://worldflow-rbs.github.io/.
Where Position Matters: Profiling-Guided Layer-Wise RoPE Allocation in Transformers
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2610.39223v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) typically uses uniform coverage across Transformer layers despite heterogeneous positional requirements. Phase-off interventions reveal non-uniform, model-specific rotary-phase dependence, while coverage interventions relate it to coverage-upgrade benefits. We propose profiling-guided layer-wise RoPE allocation, assigning high/low coverage under a fixed budget using early coverage-benefit profiles. The framework supports fixed-width query/key representations and physical rotary-dimension allocation in Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA). Normalized-depth mapping transfers profiles within model families, enabling small-model measurements to guide larger-model allocations before pretraining. A brief analysis relates selection and transfer to score calibration and inter-layer interactions. From-scratch experiments demonstrate validation-loss improvements over available budget-matched baselines, while analytical resource accounting identifies favorable quality--storage--compute trade-offs for physical MLA. These results connect positional demand to transferable, efficient architecture design.
inkGround: Benchmarking Fine-grained Visual Grounding Capabilities of Vision-Language Models for Cursive Handwriting in the Wild
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2610.38720v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Human handwriting is produced as an ordered sequence of pen movements, but an offline image keeps only the final ink. Handwriting trajectory recovery aims to restore the ordered stroke points and their pen-up/pen-down transitions. Existing image-trajectory pair datasets are recorded with digitizing tablets under controlled conditions, which limits writer coverage and stylistic diversity. Moreover, there is no benchmark that measures the visual grounding capabilities of general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for the stroke trajectory recovery task. In this work, we introduce inkGround, a benchmark for stroke trajectory recovery from full-page, camera-captured handwriting. inkGround pairs 537 page images (~18.7k words, ~163k strokes) with reference trajectories produced by a pretrained offline-to-online model, filtered by OCR agreement, and verified by human raters. Because these references are pseudo-labels that represent one plausible pen trajectory, we also evaluate VLMs on the IAM-OnDB dataset, which provides recorded pen trajectories. We cast the task as text-conditioned point grounding: given a page image and a target word, the model must locate the word and output its ordered stroke points. Outputs are scored by trajectory fidelity (DTW, Chamfer distance), readability of the rendered strokes (Accurate Rate, Correct Rate), and style similarity. We benchmark four open-source and three frontier closed-source VLMs with a shared in-context prompt. Closed-source models, notably Gemini-3.1-Pro, produce legible trajectories close to the reference, and this ranking also holds on IAM-OnDB.
Explore Where It Matters: Targeted Exploration for Efficient Rover Adaptation
arXiv cs.AIarXiv:2610.38657v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Future planetary rovers will traverse steep, deformable terrain where slip, sinkage, and terrain deformation can threaten mobility. Although simulation can capture some wheel-soil effects, unmodeled deformable-terrain phenomena create sim-to-real gaps requiring deployment-time adaptation. Yet, rover operations leave little room for extensive trial-and-error. We introduce TERRA (Targeted Exploration for Reward-Relevant Adaptation), an online adaptation framework that efficiently seeks deployment data exposing task-relevant model errors and corrects them. TERRA adapts a simulation-trained world model with a reward-weighted prediction loss and trains a loss predictor to estimate where future performance-relevant errors are likely to occur, using this signal to guide exploration during MPC. In simulation, TERRA reaches approximately 90% slope-climbing success within five trials under severe out-of-distribution pretraining conditions, outperforming exploration baselines in reward, completion time, and energy to first success. On the ERNEST rover, TERRA recovers coordinated active-suspension locomotion on a deformable Mars-simulant slope within three to five real-world trials. Project website: https://terra-explore.github.io
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