Daily Papers

The integration of experimental technologies with large language models (LLMs) is transforming scientific research. It positions AI as a versatile research assistant rather than a mere problem-solving tool. In the field of power systems, however, managing simulations -- one of the essential experimental technologies -- remains a challenge for LLMs due to their limited domain-specific knowledge, restricted reasoning capabilities, and imprecise handling of simulation parameters. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a feedback-driven, multi-agent framework. It incorporates three proposed modules: an enhanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) module, an improved reasoning module, and a dynamic environmental acting module with an error-feedback mechanism. Validated on 69 diverse tasks from Daline and MATPOWER, this framework achieves success rates of 93.13% and 96.85%, respectively. It significantly outperforms ChatGPT 4o, o1-preview, and the fine-tuned GPT-4o, which all achieved a success rate lower than 30% on complex tasks. Additionally, the proposed framework also supports rapid, cost-effective task execution, completing each simulation in approximately 30 seconds at an average cost of 0.014 USD for tokens. Overall, this adaptable framework lays a foundation for developing intelligent LLM-based assistants for human researchers, facilitating power system research and beyond.

Time-domain simulations are crucial for ensuring power system stability and avoiding critical scenarios that could lead to blackouts. The next-generation power systems require a significant increase in the computational cost and complexity of these simulations due to additional degrees of uncertainty, non-linearity and states. Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN) have been shown to accelerate single-component simulations by several orders of magnitude. However, their application to current time-domain simulation solvers has been particularly challenging since the system's dynamics depend on multiple components. Using a new training formulation, this paper introduces the first natural step to integrate PINNs into multi-component time-domain simulations. We propose PINNs as an alternative to other classical numerical methods for individual components. Once trained, these neural networks approximate component dynamics more accurately for longer time steps. Formulated as an implicit and consistent method with the transient simulation workflow, PINNs speed up simulation time by significantly increasing the time steps used. For explanation clarity, we demonstrate the training, integration, and simulation framework for several combinations of PINNs and numerical solution methods using the IEEE 9-bus system, although the method applies equally well to any power system size.

This paper describes the design and simulation of an 8-bit dedicated processor for calculating the Sine and Cosine of an Angle using CORDIC Algorithm (COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer), a simple and efficient algorithm to calculate hyperbolic and trigonometric functions. We have proposed a dedicated processor system, modeled by writing appropriate programs in VHDL, for calculating the Sine and Cosine of an angle. System simulation was carried out using ModelSim 6.3f and Xilinx ISE Design Suite 12.3. A maximum frequency of 81.353 MHz was reached with a minimum period of 12.292 ns. 126 (3%) slices were used. This paper attempts to survey the existing CORDIC algorithm with an eye towards implementation in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). A brief description of the theory behind the algorithm and the derivation of the Sine and Cosine of an angle using the CORDIC algorithm has been presented. The system can be implemented using Spartan3 XC3S400 with Xilinx ISE 12.3 and VHDL.

Time domain simulation, i.e., modeling the system's evolution over time, is a crucial tool for studying and enhancing power system stability and dynamic performance. However, these simulations become computationally intractable for renewable-penetrated grids, due to the small simulation time step required to capture renewable energy resources' ultra-fast dynamic phenomena in the range of 1-50 microseconds. This creates a critical need for solutions that are both fast and scalable, posing a major barrier for the stable integration of renewable energy resources and thus climate change mitigation. This paper explores operator learning, a family of machine learning methods that learn mappings between functions, as a surrogate model for these costly simulations. The paper investigates, for the first time, the fundamental concept of simulation time step-invariance, which enables models trained on coarse time steps to generalize to fine-resolution dynamics. Three operator learning methods are benchmarked on a simple test system that, while not incorporating practical complexities of renewable-penetrated grids, serves as a first proof-of-concept to demonstrate the viability of time step-invariance. Models are evaluated on (i) zero-shot super-resolution, where training is performed on a coarse simulation time step and inference is performed at super-resolution, and (ii) generalization between stable and unstable dynamic regimes. This work addresses a key challenge in the integration of renewable energy for the mitigation of climate change by benchmarking operator learning methods to model physical systems.

The use of mmWave frequencies is one of the key strategies to achieve the fascinating 1000x increase in the capacity of future 5G wireless systems. While for traditional sub-6 GHz cellular frequencies several well-developed statistical channel models are available for system simulation, similar tools are not available for mmWave frequencies, thus preventing a fair comparison of independently developed transmission and reception schemes. In this paper we provide a simple albeit accurate statistical procedure for the generation of a clustered MIMO channel model operating at mmWaves, for both the cases of slowly and rapidly time-varying channels. Matlab scripts for channel generation are also provided, along with an example of their use.

State-of-art NPUs are typically architected as a self-contained sub-system with multiple heterogeneous hardware computing modules, and a dataflow-driven programming model. There lacks well-established methodology and tools in the industry to evaluate and compare the performance of NPUs from different architectures. We present an event-based performance modeling framework, VPU-EM, targeting scalable performance evaluation of modern NPUs across diversified AI workloads. The framework adopts high-level event-based system-simulation methodology to abstract away design details for speed, while maintaining hardware pipelining, concurrency and interaction with software task scheduling. It is natively developed in Python and built to interface directly with AI frameworks such as Tensorflow, PyTorch, ONNX and OpenVINO, linking various in-house NPU graph compilers to achieve optimized full model performance. Furthermore, VPU-EM also provides the capability to model power characteristics of NPU in Power-EM mode to enable joint performance/power analysis. Using VPU-EM, we conduct performance/power analysis of models from representative neural network architecture. We demonstrate that even though this framework is developed for Intel VPU, an Intel in-house NPU IP technology, the methodology can be generalized for analysis of modern NPUs.

The evolution of cooperation has been extensively studied using abstract mathematical models and simulations. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and the rise of LLM agents have demonstrated their ability to perform social reasoning, thus providing an opportunity to test the emergence of norms in more realistic agent-based simulations with human-like reasoning using natural language. In this research, we investigate whether the cooperation dynamics presented in Boyd and Richerson's model persist in a more realistic simulation of the Diner's Dilemma using LLM agents compared to the abstract mathematical nature in the work of Boyd and Richerson. Our findings indicate that agents follow the strategies defined in the Boyd and Richerson model, and explicit punishment mechanisms drive norm emergence, reinforcing cooperative behaviour even when the agent strategy configuration varies. Our results suggest that LLM-based Multi-Agent System simulations, in fact, can replicate the evolution of cooperation predicted by the traditional mathematical models. Moreover, our simulations extend beyond the mathematical models by integrating natural language-driven reasoning and a pairwise imitation method for strategy adoption, making them a more realistic testbed for cooperative behaviour in MASs.

The surgence of Mixture of Experts (MoE) in Large Language Models promises a small price of execution cost for a much larger model parameter count and learning capacity, because only a small fraction of parameters are activated for each input token. However, it is commonly observed that some experts are activated far more often than others, leading to system inefficiency when running the experts on different devices in parallel. Therefore, we introduce Mixture of Grouped Experts (MoGE), which groups the experts during selection and balances the expert workload better than MoE in nature. It constrains tokens to activate an equal number of experts within each predefined expert group. When a model execution is distributed on multiple devices, this architectural design ensures a balanced computational load across devices, significantly enhancing throughput, particularly for the inference phase. Further, we build Pangu Pro MoE on Ascend NPUs, a sparse model based on MoGE with 72 billion total parameters, 16 billion of which are activated for each token. The configuration of Pangu Pro MoE is optimized for Ascend 300I Duo and 800I A2 through extensive system simulation studies. Our experiments indicate that MoGE indeed leads to better expert load balancing and more efficient execution for both model training and inference on Ascend NPUs. The inference performance of Pangu Pro MoE achieves 1148 tokens/s per card and can be further improved to 1528 tokens/s per card by speculative acceleration, outperforming comparable 32B and 72B Dense models. Furthermore, we achieve an excellent cost-to-performance ratio for model inference on Ascend 300I Duo. Our studies show that Ascend NPUs are capable of training Pangu Pro MoE with massive parallelization to make it a leading model within the sub-100B total parameter class, outperforming prominent open-source models like GLM-Z1-32B and Qwen3-32B.

Learning to simulate complex physical systems from data has emerged as a promising way to overcome the limitations of traditional numerical solvers, which often require prohibitive computational costs for high-fidelity solutions. Recent Graph Neural Simulators (GNSs) accelerate simulations by learning dynamics on graph-structured data, yet often struggle to capture long-range interactions and suffer from error accumulation under autoregressive rollouts. To address these challenges, we propose Information-preserving Graph Neural Simulators (IGNS), a graph-based neural simulator built on the principles of Hamiltonian dynamics. This structure guarantees preservation of information across the graph, while extending to port-Hamiltonian systems allows the model to capture a broader class of dynamics, including non-conservative effects. IGNS further incorporates a warmup phase to initialize global context, geometric encoding to handle irregular meshes, and a multi-step training objective that facilitates PDE matching, where the trajectory produced by integrating the port-Hamiltonian core aligns with the ground-truth trajectory, thereby reducing rollout error. To evaluate these properties systematically, we introduce new benchmarks that target long-range dependencies and challenging external forcing scenarios. Across all tasks, IGNS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GNSs, achieving higher accuracy and stability under challenging and complex dynamical systems. Our project page: https://thobotics.github.io/neural_pde_matching.

Generative models have the potential to transform the way we emulate Earth's changing climate. Previous generative approaches rely on weather-scale autoregression for climate emulation, but this is inherently slow for long climate horizons and has yet to demonstrate stable rollouts under nonstationary forcings. Here, we introduce Spatiotemporal Pyramid Flows (SPF), a new class of flow matching approaches that model data hierarchically across spatial and temporal scales. Inspired by cascaded video models, SPF partitions the generative trajectory into a spatiotemporal pyramid, progressively increasing spatial resolution to reduce computation and coupling each stage with an associated timescale to enable direct sampling at any temporal level in the pyramid. This design, together with conditioning each stage on prescribed physical forcings (e.g., greenhouse gases or aerosols), enables efficient, parallel climate emulation at multiple timescales. On ClimateBench, SPF outperforms strong flow matching baselines and pre-trained models at yearly and monthly timescales while offering fast sampling, especially at coarser temporal levels. To scale SPF, we curate ClimateSuite, the largest collection of Earth system simulations to date, comprising over 33,000 simulation-years across ten climate models and the first dataset to include simulations of climate interventions. We find that the scaled SPF model demonstrates good generalization to held-out scenarios across climate models. Together, SPF and ClimateSuite provide a foundation for accurate, efficient, probabilistic climate emulation across temporal scales and realistic future scenarios. Data and code is publicly available at https://github.com/stanfordmlgroup/spf .

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable tool-use capabilities, yet their application to power system operations remains largely unexplored. This paper presents Grid-Mind, a domain-specific LLM agent that interprets natural-language interconnection requests and autonomously orchestrates multi-fidelity power system simulations. The LLM-first architecture positions the language model as the central decision-making entity, employing an eleven-tool registry to execute Connection Impact Assessment (CIA) studies spanning steadystate power flow, N-1 contingency analysis, transient stability, and electromagnetic transient screening. A violation inspector grounds every decision in quantitative simulation outputs, while a three-layer anti-hallucination defence mitigates numerical fabrication risk through forced capacity-tool routing and post-response grounding validation. A prompt-level self-correction mechanism extracts distilled lessons from agent failures, yielding progressive accuracy improvements without model retraining. End-to-end evaluation on 50 IEEE 118-bus scenarios (DeepSeek-V3, 2026-02-23) achieved 84.0% tool-selection accuracy and 100% parsing accuracy. A separate 56-scenario self-correction suite passed 49 of 56 cases (87.5%) with a mean score of 89.3. These results establish a reproducible baseline for continued refinement while maintaining auditable, simulation-grounded decision support.

VR simulation in Health Professions (HP) education demonstrates huge potential, but fixed learning content with little customization limits its application beyond lab environments. To address these limitations in the context of VR for patient communication training, we conducted a user-centered study involving semi-structured interviews with advanced HP students to understand their challenges in clinical communication training and perceptions of VR-based solutions. From this, we derived design insights emphasizing the importance of realistic scenarios, simple interactions, and unpredictable dialogues. Building on these insights, we developed the Virtual AI Patient Simulator (VAPS), a novel VR system powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), supporting dynamic and customizable patient interactions for immersive learning. We also provided an example of how clinical professors could use user-friendly design forms to create personalized scenarios that align with course objectives in VAPS and discuss future implications of integrating AI-driven technologies into VR education.

Social network simulation plays a crucial role in addressing various challenges within social science. It offers extensive applications such as state prediction, phenomena explanation, and policy-making support, among others. In this work, we harness the formidable human-like capabilities exhibited by large language models (LLMs) in sensing, reasoning, and behaving, and utilize these qualities to construct the S^3 system (short for Social network Simulation System). Adhering to the widely employed agent-based simulation paradigm, we employ prompt engineering and prompt tuning techniques to ensure that the agent's behavior closely emulates that of a genuine human within the social network. Specifically, we simulate three pivotal aspects: emotion, attitude, and interaction behaviors. By endowing the agent in the system with the ability to perceive the informational environment and emulate human actions, we observe the emergence of population-level phenomena, including the propagation of information, attitudes, and emotions. We conduct an evaluation encompassing two levels of simulation, employing real-world social network data. Encouragingly, the results demonstrate promising accuracy. This work represents an initial step in the realm of social network simulation empowered by LLM-based agents. We anticipate that our endeavors will serve as a source of inspiration for the development of simulation systems within, but not limited to, social science.

Training embodied agents in the real world requires skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulation environments offer a compelling alternative by enabling large-scale, cost-effective data augmentation. Consequently, rapidly constructing high-fidelity simulation scenes with a minimal sim-to-real gap has become a critical objective in robot learning. While reconstruction-based methods provide superior visual quality, current workflows are hindered by inefficient data acquisition and subpar foreground object extraction. We thus propose GASE, a highly automated system for simulation scene construction. GASE leverages multi-view video streams from panoramic camera arrays to enable rapid environment scanning. To ensure high-quality asset generation, our pipeline introduces a camera-pose-based strategy that robustly extracts objects across frames in the 2D domain, followed by high-fidelity scene inpainting. Foreground objects and the static background are then reconstructed independently and seamlessly imported into physics simulators for policy training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GASE outperforms existing 3D Gaussian-based methods in segmentation accuracy by over 10\% while achieving state-of-the-art inpainting quality. Furthermore, real-robot deployments across manipulation and navigation tasks maintains a performance gap of less than 10\% compared to policies trained purely on real-world data. These results confirm that GASE provides an efficient and highly effective solution for bridging the sim-to-real gap. Code will be released.

Efficient downlink radio resource management in 5G requires jointly optimizing user scheduling and transmit-power allocation under time-varying wireless conditions. This is challenging in OFDMA systems because PRB assignment is combinatorial, power allocation is continuous, and performance depends on channel evolution, link adaptation, and long-term fairness. We propose a hierarchical cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning framework with staged curriculum training for joint downlink PRB and power allocation in a physically grounded 5G environment. System-level simulation is implemented in Sionna, while Sionna RT supports wireless scene construction and mobility-aware ray-traced channel generation. The control task is decomposed into two sequential stages: a PRB agent learns user-level resource shares, which are converted to exact PRB assignments by a deterministic channel-aware quota resolver, and a power agent distributes the base-station power budget across users and their assigned PRB-symbol resources. The framework operates in a cross-layer loop with adaptive modulation and coding, HARQ feedback, outer-loop link adaptation, and a fairness-aware reward based on smoothed throughput and Jain's fairness index. Training stability is improved through a three-phase curriculum for PRB allocation, power control, and joint fine-tuning. Under matched channel realizations, we compare against a PF scheduler with equal-power transmission and two ablations isolating the learned PRB and power-control components. Results show that both learned components improve throughput distribution relative to PF, while the full PRB and power controller achieves the largest cell-throughput gain with only a modest reduction in Jain's fairness index.

Social network simulation is developed to provide a comprehensive understanding of social networks in the real world, which can be leveraged for a wide range of applications such as group behavior emergence, policy optimization, and business strategy development. However, billions of individuals and their evolving interactions involved in social networks pose challenges in accurately reflecting real-world complexities. In this study, we propose a comprehensive Social Network Simulation System (GA-S3) that leverages newly designed Group Agents to make intelligent decisions regarding various online events. Unlike other intelligent agents that represent an individual entity, our group agents model a collection of individuals exhibiting similar behaviors, facilitating the simulation of large-scale network phenomena with complex interactions at a manageable computational cost. Additionally, we have constructed a social network benchmark from 2024 popular online events that contains fine-grained information on Internet traffic variations. The experiment demonstrates that our approach is capable of achieving accurate and highly realistic prediction results. Code is open at https://github.com/AI4SS/GAS-3.

Different outdoor illumination conditions drastically alter the appearance of urban scenes, and they can harm the performance of image-based robot perception systems if not seen during training. Camera simulation provides a cost-effective solution to create a large dataset of images captured under different lighting conditions. Towards this goal, we propose LightSim, a neural lighting camera simulation system that enables diverse, realistic, and controllable data generation. LightSim automatically builds lighting-aware digital twins at scale from collected raw sensor data and decomposes the scene into dynamic actors and static background with accurate geometry, appearance, and estimated scene lighting. These digital twins enable actor insertion, modification, removal, and rendering from a new viewpoint, all in a lighting-aware manner. LightSim then combines physically-based and learnable deferred rendering to perform realistic relighting of modified scenes, such as altering the sun location and modifying the shadows or changing the sun brightness, producing spatially- and temporally-consistent camera videos. Our experiments show that LightSim generates more realistic relighting results than prior work. Importantly, training perception models on data generated by LightSim can significantly improve their performance.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in Metaverse environments to generate dynamic and realistic content and to control the behavior of non-player characters (NPCs). However, the cybersecurity concerns associated with LLMs have become increasingly prominent. Previous research has primarily focused on patching system vulnerabilities to enhance cybersecurity, but these approaches are not well-suited to the Metaverse, where the virtual space is more complex, LLMs are vulnerable, and ethical user interaction is critical. Moreover, the scope of cybersecurity in the Metaverse is expected to expand significantly. This paper proposes a method for enhancing cybersecurity through the simulation of user interaction with LLMs. Our goal is to educate users and strengthen their defense capabilities through exposure to a comprehensive simulation system. This system includes extensive Metaverse cybersecurity Q&A and attack simulation scenarios. By engaging with these, users will improve their ability to recognize and withstand risks. Additionally, to address the ethical implications of user input, we propose using LLMs as evaluators to assess user content across five dimensions. We further adapt the models through vocabulary expansion training to better understand personalized inputs and emoticons. We conduct experiments on multiple LLMs and find that our approach is effective.

A ventilator simulation system can make mechanical ventilation easier and more effective. As a result, predicting a patient's ventilator pressure is essential when designing a simulation ventilator. We suggested a hybrid deep learning-based approach to forecast required ventilator pressure for patients. This system is made up of Bi-LSTM and Bi-GRU networks. The SELU activation function was used in our proposed model. MAE and MSE were used to examine the accuracy of the proposed model so that our proposed methodology can be applied to real-world problems. The model performed well against test data and created far too few losses. Major parts of our research were data collection, data analysis, data cleaning, building hybrid Bi-LSTM and Bi-GRU model, training the model, model evaluation, and result analysis. We compared the results of our research with some contemporary works, and our proposed model performed better than those models.

We present RoboAtlas, a contextual Active SLAM framework that adaptively balances geometric exploration and semantic reasoning using a scalable 3D semantic mapping system, OpenRoboVox. RoboAtlas integrates frontier exploration, global semantic-map reasoning, and egocentric VLM-based reasoning through a contextual multi-armed bandit that transitions from exploration to semantically guided navigation as scene understanding improves. We evaluate the system in simulation and on a Unitree Go2 robot in large-scale real-world environments exceeding 1800 m2 with approx. 30k mapped semantic instances, achieving a 100% task success rate. On the GOAT-Bench "Val Unseen" benchmark, RoboAtlas achieves state-of-the-art performance with highest reported success rate (SR) of 90.6%, using GPT-4o, improving over the strongest prior baseline by 17.8 percentage points in SR. Using the much smaller Qwen2.5-VL-7B model, it still achieves 88.8% SR, outperforming all baselines using GPT-4o in SR, and revealing the importance of the information gained by our semantic mapping framework over simply replacing the underlying foundation model. The results demonstrate that grounding foundation models with large-scale 3D semantic maps enables robust and efficient contextual Active SLAM.

With the rapid advancement of autonomous driving technology, a lack of data has become a major obstacle to enhancing perception model accuracy. Researchers are now exploring controllable data generation using world models to diversify datasets. However, previous work has been limited to studying image generation quality on specific public datasets. There is still relatively little research on how to build data generation engines for real-world application scenes to achieve large-scale data generation for challenging scenes. In this paper, a simulator-conditioned scene generation engine based on world model is proposed. By constructing a simulation system consistent with real-world scenes, simulation data and labels, which serve as the conditions for data generation in the world model, for any scenes can be collected. It is a novel data generation pipeline by combining the powerful scene simulation capabilities of the simulation engine with the robust data generation capabilities of the world model. In addition, a benchmark with proportionally constructed virtual and real data, is provided for exploring the capabilities of world models in real-world scenes. Quantitative results show that these generated images significantly improve downstream perception models performance. Finally, we explored the generative performance of the world model in urban autonomous driving scenarios. All the data and code will be available at https://github.com/Li-Zn-H/SimWorld.

Embedding polygonal mesh assets within photorealistic Neural Radience Fields (NeRF) volumes, such that they can be rendered and their dynamics simulated in a physically consistent manner with the NeRF, is under-explored from the system perspective of integrating NeRF into the traditional graphics pipeline. This paper designs a two-way coupling between mesh and NeRF during rendering and simulation. We first review the light transport equations for both mesh and NeRF, then distill them into an efficient algorithm for updating radiance and throughput along a cast ray with an arbitrary number of bounces. To resolve the discrepancy between the linear color space that the path tracer assumes and the sRGB color space that standard NeRF uses, we train NeRF with High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. We also present a strategy to estimate light sources and cast shadows on the NeRF. Finally, we consider how the hybrid surface-volumetric formulation can be efficiently integrated with a high-performance physics simulator that supports cloth, rigid and soft bodies. The full rendering and simulation system can be run on a GPU at interactive rates. We show that a hybrid system approach outperforms alternatives in visual realism for mesh insertion, because it allows realistic light transport from volumetric NeRF media onto surfaces, which affects the appearance of reflective/refractive surfaces and illumination of diffuse surfaces informed by the dynamic scene.

In recent years, there has been rapid development in 3D generation models, opening up new possibilities for applications such as simulating the dynamic movements of 3D objects and customizing their behaviors. However, current 3D generative models tend to focus only on surface features such as color and shape, neglecting the inherent physical properties that govern the behavior of objects in the real world. To accurately simulate physics-aligned dynamics, it is essential to predict the physical properties of materials and incorporate them into the behavior prediction process. Nonetheless, predicting the diverse materials of real-world objects is still challenging due to the complex nature of their physical attributes. In this paper, we propose Physics3D, a novel method for learning various physical properties of 3D objects through a video diffusion model. Our approach involves designing a highly generalizable physical simulation system based on a viscoelastic material model, which enables us to simulate a wide range of materials with high-fidelity capabilities. Moreover, we distill the physical priors from a video diffusion model that contains more understanding of realistic object materials. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with both elastic and plastic materials. Physics3D shows great potential for bridging the gap between the physical world and virtual neural space, providing a better integration and application of realistic physical principles in virtual environments. Project page: https://liuff19.github.io/Physics3D.

We introduce DIFFTACTILE, a physics-based differentiable tactile simulation system designed to enhance robotic manipulation with dense and physically accurate tactile feedback. In contrast to prior tactile simulators which primarily focus on manipulating rigid bodies and often rely on simplified approximations to model stress and deformations of materials in contact, DIFFTACTILE emphasizes physics-based contact modeling with high fidelity, supporting simulations of diverse contact modes and interactions with objects possessing a wide range of material properties. Our system incorporates several key components, including a Finite Element Method (FEM)-based soft body model for simulating the sensing elastomer, a multi-material simulator for modeling diverse object types (such as elastic, elastoplastic, cables) under manipulation, a penalty-based contact model for handling contact dynamics. The differentiable nature of our system facilitates gradient-based optimization for both 1) refining physical properties in simulation using real-world data, hence narrowing the sim-to-real gap and 2) efficient learning of tactile-assisted grasping and contact-rich manipulation skills. Additionally, we introduce a method to infer the optical response of our tactile sensor to contact using an efficient pixel-based neural module. We anticipate that DIFFTACTILE will serve as a useful platform for studying contact-rich manipulations, leveraging the benefits of dense tactile feedback and differentiable physics. Code and supplementary materials are available at the project website https://difftactile.github.io/.

In this paper, we present a simulation system called AgentCourt that simulates the entire courtroom process. The judge, plaintiff's lawyer, defense lawyer, and other participants are autonomous agents driven by large language models (LLMs). Our core goal is to enable lawyer agents to learn how to argue a case, as well as improving their overall legal skills, through courtroom process simulation. To achieve this goal, we propose an adversarial evolutionary approach for the lawyer-agent. Since AgentCourt can simulate the occurrence and development of court hearings based on a knowledge base and LLM, the lawyer agents can continuously learn and accumulate experience from real court cases. The simulation experiments show that after two lawyer-agents have engaged in a thousand adversarial legal cases in AgentCourt (which can take a decade for real-world lawyers), compared to their pre-evolutionary state, the evolved lawyer agents exhibit consistent improvement in their ability to handle legal tasks. To enhance the credibility of our experimental results, we enlisted a panel of professional lawyers to evaluate our simulations. The evaluation indicates that the evolved lawyer agents exhibit notable advancements in responsiveness, as well as expertise and logical rigor. This work paves the way for advancing LLM-driven agent technology in legal scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/relic-yuexi/AgentCourt.

As lunar exploration missions grow increasingly complex, ensuring safe and autonomous rover-based surface exploration has become one of the key challenges in lunar exploration tasks. In this work, we have developed a lunar surface simulation system called the Lunar Exploration Simulator System (LESS) and the LunarSeg dataset, which provides RGB-D data for lunar obstacle segmentation that includes both positive and negative obstacles. Additionally, we propose a novel two-stage segmentation network called LuSeg. Through contrastive learning, it enforces semantic consistency between the RGB encoder from Stage I and the depth encoder from Stage II. Experimental results on our proposed LunarSeg dataset and additional public real-world NPO road obstacle dataset demonstrate that LuSeg achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance for both positive and negative obstacles while maintaining a high inference speed of approximately 57\,Hz. We have released the implementation of our LESS system, LunarSeg dataset, and the code of LuSeg at:https://github.com/nubot-nudt/LuSeg.

Fringe projection profilometry (FPP) has been established as a high-accuracy 3D reconstruction method capable of achieving sub-pixel accuracy. However, this technique faces significant constraints due to complex calibration requirements, bulky system footprint, and sensitivity to environmental conditions. To address these limitations, we present VIRTUS-FPP, the first comprehensive physics-based virtual sensor modeling framework for FPP built in NVIDIA Isaac Sim. By leveraging the physics-based rendering and programmable sensing capabilities of simulation, our framework enables end-to-end modeling from calibration to reconstruction with full mathematical fidelity to the underlying principles of structured light. We conduct comprehensive virtual calibration and validate our system's reconstruction accuracy through quantitative comparison against ground truth geometry. Additionally, we demonstrate the ability to model the virtual system as a digital twin by replicating a physical FPP system in simulation and validating correspondence between virtual and real-world measurements. Experimental results demonstrate that VIRTUS-FPP accurately models optical phenomena critical to FPP and achieves results comparable to real-world systems while offering unprecedented flexibility for system configuration, sensor prototyping, and environmental control. This framework significantly accelerates the development of real-world FPP systems by enabling rapid virtual prototyping before physical implementation.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a core component of human--computer interaction and an increasingly important front-end for LLM-based assistants and agents. However, most current ASR systems still follow a single-pass paradigm, which is poorly aligned with human communication, where misunderstandings are resolved through iterative clarification and refinement. This mismatch makes it difficult to correct meaning-critical errors once they occur. Meanwhile, token-level metrics such as WER or CER cannot adequately reflect such a problem. To address these limitations, we formulate Interactive ASR as a multi-turn refinement task and propose Agentic ASR, a closed-loop framework that combines a single-pass ASR front-end with semantic correction, intent routing, and reasoning-based editing. We further introduce the Sentence-level Semantic Error Rate (S^2ER), an LLM-based semantic evaluation metric, together with an Interactive Simulation System for scalable and reproducible benchmarking. Experiments on multilingual, named-entity-intensive, and code-switching benchmarks show that iterative interaction consistently reduces semantic errors, with much larger gains in S^2ER than in conventional token-level metrics. Human--AI alignment and ablation studies further validate the reliability of the semantic judge and the robustness of the proposed framework. The code is available at: https://interactiveasr.github.io/ and the live demo is available at https://i-asr.sjtuxlance.com/

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) underlies in a simulated environment and optimizes objective goals. By extending the conventional interaction scheme, this paper proffers gym-ds3, a scalable and reproducible open environment tailored for a high-fidelity Domain-Specific System-on-Chip (DSSoC) application. The simulation corroborates to schedule hierarchical jobs onto heterogeneous System-on-Chip (SoC) processors and bridges the system to reinforcement learning research. We systematically analyze the representative SoC simulator and discuss the primary challenging aspects that the system (1) continuously generates indefinite jobs at a rapid injection rate, (2) optimizes complex objectives, and (3) operates in steady-state scheduling. We provide exemplary snippets and experimentally demonstrate the run-time performances on different schedulers that successfully mimic results achieved from the standard DS3 framework and real-world embedded systems.

We study the scaling properties of avalanche activity in the two-dimensional Abelian sandpile model. Instead of the conventional avalanche size distribution, we analyze the site activity distribution, which measures how often a site participates in avalanches when grains are added across the lattice. Using numerical simulations for system sizes up to \(L = 160\), averaged over \(10^4\) configurations, we determine the probability distribution \(P(A, L)\) of site activities. The results show that \(P(A, L)\) follows a finite-size scaling form \[ P(A, L) \sim L^{-2} F\Big(A{L^2}\Big). \] For small values \(A \ll L^2\) the scaling function behaves as \[ F(u) \sim u^{-1/2}, \quad corresponding to \quad P(A) \sim 1{L}, \] while for large activities \(A \sim O(L^2)\) the distribution decays as \[ F(u) \sim \exp\big(-c_3 u - c_4 u^2\big). \] The crossover between these two regimes occurs at \[ A^* \sim 0.1 \, L^2, \] marking the threshold between typical and highly excitable sites. This characterization of local avalanche activity provides complementary information to the usual avalanche size statistics, highlighting how local regions serve as frequent conduits for critical dynamics. These results may help connect sandpile models to real-world self-organized critical systems where only partial local activity can be observed.

We present DecoupledGaussian, a novel system that decouples static objects from their contacted surfaces captured in-the-wild videos, a key prerequisite for realistic Newtonian-based physical simulations. Unlike prior methods focused on synthetic data or elastic jittering along the contact surface, which prevent objects from fully detaching or moving independently, DecoupledGaussian allows for significant positional changes without being constrained by the initial contacted surface. Recognizing the limitations of current 2D inpainting tools for restoring 3D locations, our approach proposes joint Poisson fields to repair and expand the Gaussians of both objects and contacted scenes after separation. This is complemented by a multi-carve strategy to refine the object's geometry. Our system enables realistic simulations of decoupling motions, collisions, and fractures driven by user-specified impulses, supporting complex interactions within and across multiple scenes. We validate DecoupledGaussian through a comprehensive user study and quantitative benchmarks. This system enhances digital interaction with objects and scenes in real-world environments, benefiting industries such as VR, robotics, and autonomous driving. Our project page is at: https://wangmiaowei.github.io/DecoupledGaussian.github.io/.

One major goal of the AI security community is to securely and reliably produce and deploy deep learning models for real-world applications. To this end, data poisoning based backdoor attacks on deep neural networks (DNNs) in the production stage (or training stage) and corresponding defenses are extensively explored in recent years. Ironically, backdoor attacks in the deployment stage, which can often happen in unprofessional users' devices and are thus arguably far more threatening in real-world scenarios, draw much less attention of the community. We attribute this imbalance of vigilance to the weak practicality of existing deployment-stage backdoor attack algorithms and the insufficiency of real-world attack demonstrations. To fill the blank, in this work, we study the realistic threat of deployment-stage backdoor attacks on DNNs. We base our study on a commonly used deployment-stage attack paradigm -- adversarial weight attack, where adversaries selectively modify model weights to embed backdoor into deployed DNNs. To approach realistic practicality, we propose the first gray-box and physically realizable weights attack algorithm for backdoor injection, namely subnet replacement attack (SRA), which only requires architecture information of the victim model and can support physical triggers in the real world. Extensive experimental simulations and system-level real-world attack demonstrations are conducted. Our results not only suggest the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed attack algorithm, but also reveal the practical risk of a novel type of computer virus that may widely spread and stealthily inject backdoor into DNN models in user devices. By our study, we call for more attention to the vulnerability of DNNs in the deployment stage.

Simulating object dynamics from real-world perception shows great promise for digital twins and robotic manipulation but often demands labor-intensive measurements and expertise. We present a fully automated Real2Sim pipeline that generates simulation-ready assets for real-world objects through robotic interaction. Using only a robot's joint torque sensors and an external camera, the pipeline identifies visual geometry, collision geometry, and physical properties such as inertial parameters. Our approach introduces a general method for extracting high-quality, object-centric meshes from photometric reconstruction techniques (e.g., NeRF, Gaussian Splatting) by employing alpha-transparent training while explicitly distinguishing foreground occlusions from background subtraction. We validate the full pipeline through extensive experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness across diverse objects. By eliminating the need for manual intervention or environment modifications, our pipeline can be integrated directly into existing pick-and-place setups, enabling scalable and efficient dataset creation. Project page (with code and data): https://scalable-real2sim.github.io/.

Underwater environments create a challenging channel for communications. In this paper, we design a novel receiver system by exploring the machine learning technique--Deep Belief Network (DBN)-- to combat the signal distortion caused by the Doppler effect and multi-path propagation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed receiver system in both simulation experiments and sea trials. Our proposed receiver system comprises of DBN based de-noising and classification of the received signal. First, the received signal is segmented into frames before the each of these frames is individually pre-processed using a novel pixelization algorithm. Then, using the DBN based de-noising algorithm, features are extracted from these frames and used to reconstruct the received signal. Finally, DBN based classification of the reconstructed signal occurs. Our proposed DBN based receiver system does show better performance in channels influenced by the Doppler effect and multi-path propagation with a performance improvement of 13.2dB at 10^{-3} Bit Error Rate (BER).

A key challenge for computationally intensive state-of-the-art Earth System models is to distinguish global warming signals from interannual variability. Here we introduce DLESyM, a parsimonious deep learning model that accurately simulates the Earth's current climate over 1000-year periods with no smoothing or drift. DLESyM simulations equal or exceed key metrics of seasonal and interannual variability--such as tropical cyclogenesis over the range of observed intensities, the cycle of the Indian Summer monsoon, and the climatology of mid-latitude blocking events--when compared to historical simulations from four leading models from the 6th Climate Model Intercomparison Project. DLESyM, trained on both historical reanalysis data and satellite observations, is an accurate, highly efficient model of the coupled Earth system, empowering long-range sub-seasonal and seasonal forecasts while using a fraction of the energy and computational time required by traditional models.

Vehicle-to-everything-aided autonomous driving (V2X-AD) has a huge potential to provide a safer driving solution. Despite extensive researches in transportation and communication to support V2X-AD, the actual utilization of these infrastructures and communication resources in enhancing driving performances remains largely unexplored. This highlights the necessity of collaborative autonomous driving: a machine learning approach that optimizes the information sharing strategy to improve the driving performance of each vehicle. This effort necessitates two key foundations: a platform capable of generating data to facilitate the training and testing of V2X-AD, and a comprehensive system that integrates full driving-related functionalities with mechanisms for information sharing. From the platform perspective, we present V2Xverse, a comprehensive simulation platform for collaborative autonomous driving. This platform provides a complete pipeline for collaborative driving. From the system perspective, we introduce CoDriving, a novel end-to-end collaborative driving system that properly integrates V2X communication over the entire autonomous pipeline, promoting driving with shared perceptual information. The core idea is a novel driving-oriented communication strategy. Leveraging this strategy, CoDriving improves driving performance while optimizing communication efficiency. We make comprehensive benchmarks with V2Xverse, analyzing both modular performance and closed-loop driving performance. Experimental results show that CoDriving: i) significantly improves the driving score by 62.49% and drastically reduces the pedestrian collision rate by 53.50% compared to the SOTA end-to-end driving method, and ii) achieves sustaining driving performance superiority over dynamic constraint communication conditions.

Constrained by the cost and ethical concerns of involving real seekers in AI-driven mental health, researchers develop LLM-based conversational agents (CAs) with tailored configurations, such as profiles, symptoms, and scenarios, to simulate seekers. While these efforts advance AI in mental health, achieving more realistic seeker simulation remains hindered by two key challenges: dynamic evolution and multi-session memory. Seekers' mental states often fluctuate during counseling, which typically spans multiple sessions. To address this, we propose AnnaAgent, an emotional and cognitive dynamic agent system equipped with tertiary memory. AnnaAgent incorporates an emotion modulator and a complaint elicitor trained on real counseling dialogues, enabling dynamic control of the simulator's configurations. Additionally, its tertiary memory mechanism effectively integrates short-term and long-term memory across sessions. Evaluation results, both automated and manual, demonstrate that AnnaAgent achieves more realistic seeker simulation in psychological counseling compared to existing baselines. The ethically reviewed and screened code can be found on https://github.com/sci-m-wang/AnnaAgent.

Recommender systems are central to online services, enabling users to navigate through massive amounts of content across various domains. However, their evaluation remains challenging due to the disconnect between offline metrics and online performance. The emergence of Large Language Model-powered agents offers a promising solution, yet existing studies model users in isolation, neglecting the contextual factors such as time, location, and needs, which fundamentally shape human decision-making. In this paper, we introduce ContextSim, an LLM agent framework that simulates believable user proxies by anchoring interactions in daily life activities. Namely, a life simulation module generates scenarios specifying when, where, and why users engage with recommendations. To align preferences with genuine humans, we model agents' internal thoughts and enforce consistency at both the action and trajectory levels. Experiments across domains show our method generates interactions more closely aligned with human behavior than prior work. We further validate our approach through offline A/B testing correlation and show that RS parameters optimized using ContextSim yield improved real-world engagement.

Deep learning (DL) based semantic communication methods have been explored for the efficient transmission of images, text, and speech in recent years. In contrast to traditional wireless communication methods that focus on the transmission of abstract symbols, semantic communication approaches attempt to achieve better transmission efficiency by only sending the semantic-related information of the source data. In this paper, we consider semantic-oriented speech transmission which transmits only the semantic-relevant information over the channel for the speech recognition task, and a compact additional set of semantic-irrelevant information for the speech reconstruction task. We propose a novel end-to-end DL-based transceiver which extracts and encodes the semantic information from the input speech spectrums at the transmitter and outputs the corresponding transcriptions from the decoded semantic information at the receiver. For the speech to speech transmission, we further include a CTC alignment module that extracts a small number of additional semantic-irrelevant but speech-related information for the better reconstruction of the original speech signals at the receiver. The simulation results confirm that our proposed method outperforms current methods in terms of the accuracy of the predicted text for the speech to text transmission and the quality of the recovered speech signals for the speech to speech transmission, and significantly improves transmission efficiency. More specifically, the proposed method only sends 16% of the amount of the transmitted symbols required by the existing methods while achieving about 10% reduction in WER for the speech to text transmission. For the speech to speech transmission, it results in an even more remarkable improvement in terms of transmission efficiency with only 0.2% of the amount of the transmitted symbols required by the existing method.

Online policy learning directly in the physical world is a promising yet challenging direction for embodied intelligence. Unlike simulation, real-world systems cannot be arbitrarily accelerated, cheaply reset, or massively replicated, which makes scalable data collection, heterogeneous deployment, and long-horizon effective training difficult. These challenges suggest that real-world policy learning is not only an algorithmic issue but fundamentally a systems problem. We present USER, a Unified and extensible SystEm for Real-world online policy learning. USER treats physical robots as first-class hardware resources alongside GPUs through a unified hardware abstraction layer, enabling automatic discovery, management, and scheduling of heterogeneous robots. To address cloud-edge communication, USER introduces an adaptive communication plane with tunneling-based networking, distributed data channels for traffic localization, and streaming-multiprocessor-aware weight synchronization to regulate GPU-side overhead. On top of this infrastructure, USER organizes learning as a fully asynchronous framework with a persistent, cache-aware buffer, enabling efficient long-horizon experiments with robust crash recovery and reuse of historical data. In addition, USER provides extensible abstractions for rewards, algorithms, and policies, supporting online imitation or reinforcement learning of CNN/MLP, generative policies, and large vision-language-action (VLA) models within a unified pipeline. Results in both simulation and the real world show that USER enables multi-robot coordination, heterogeneous manipulators, edge-cloud collaboration with large models, and long-running asynchronous training, offering a unified and extensible systems foundation for real-world online policy learning.

Quantum simulation of many-body systems in materials science and chemistry are promising application areas for quantum computers. However, the limited scale and coherence of near-term quantum processors pose a significant obstacle to realizing this potential. Here, we theoretically outline how a single-circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) device, consisting of a transmon qubit coupled to a long-lived cavity mode, can be used to simulate the ground state of a highly-entangled quantum many-body spin chain. We exploit recently developed methods for implementing quantum operations to sequentially build up a matrix product state (MPS) representation of a many-body state. This approach re-uses the transmon qubit to read out the state of each spin in the chain and exploits the large state space of the cavity as a quantum memory encoding inter-site correlations and entanglement. We show, through simulation, that analog (pulse-level) control schemes can accurately prepare a known MPS representation of a quantum critical spin chain in significantly less time than digital (gate-based) methods, thereby reducing the exposure to decoherence. We then explore this analog-control approach for the variational preparation of an unknown ground state. We demonstrate that the large state space of the cavity can be used to replace multiple qubits in a qubit-only architecture, and could therefore simplify the design of quantum processors for materials simulation. We explore the practical limitations of realistic noise and decoherence and discuss avenues for scaling this approach to more complex problems that challenge classical computational methods.

Recommender system has deeply revolutionized people's daily life and production, bringing a large amount of business value. In the recommendation domain, simulation and real data-based studies are two typical research paradigms, with each having different advantages. Previously, real data-based studies occupy more important positions, since accurately simulating the user preference is quite difficult. Recently, large language models (LLM) have shown great potential to achieve human-like intelligence, which provides new opportunities to overcome the shortcomings of simulation-based studies and thus highlight their advantages, such as much more application scenarios and cheaper data acquisition strategies. To shed lights on this direction, in this paper, we introduce an LLM-based recommender simulator called RecAgent. Our simulator is composed of two modules: (1) the user module and (2) the recommender module. The user module can browse the recommendation website, communicate with other users and broadcast messages on the social media. The recommender module is designed to provide search or recommendation lists to the users, and one can design different models to implement the recommender. All the users take actions based on LLMs, and can freely evolve like in the real world. We present several case studies to demonstrate that the users in our simulator can indeed behave in a reasonable manner as expected. Our project has been released at https://github.com/RUC-GSAI/YuLan-Rec.

Autonomous odor source localization remains a challenging problem for aerial robots due to turbulent airflow, sparse and delayed sensory signals, and strict payload and compute constraints. While prior unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based olfaction systems have demonstrated gas distribution mapping or reactive plume tracing, they rely on predefined coverage patterns, external infrastructure, or extensive sensing and coordination. In this work, we present a complete, open-source UAV system for online odor source localization using a minimal sensor suite. The system integrates custom olfaction hardware, onboard sensing, and a learning-based navigation policy trained in simulation and deployed on a real quadrotor. Through our minimal framework, the UAV is able to navigate directly toward an odor source without constructing an explicit gas distribution map or relying on external positioning systems. Vision is incorporated as an optional complementary modality to accelerate navigation under certain conditions. We validate the proposed system through real-world flight experiments in a large indoor environment using an ethanol source, demonstrating consistent source-finding behavior under realistic airflow conditions. The primary contribution of this work is a reproducible system and methodological framework for UAV-based olfactory navigation and source finding under minimal sensing assumptions. We elaborate on our hardware design and open source our UAV firmware, simulation code, olfaction-vision dataset, and circuit board to the community. Code, data, and designs will be made available at https://github.com/KordelFranceTech/ChasingGhosts.

Human writers often begin their stories with an overarching mental scene, where they envision the interactions between characters and their environment. Inspired by this creative process, we propose a novel approach to long-form story generation, termed hybrid bottom-up long-form story generation, using multi-agent simulations. In our method, agents interact within a dynamic sandbox environment, where their behaviors and interactions with one another and the environment generate emergent events. These events form the foundation for the story, enabling organic character development and plot progression. Unlike traditional top-down approaches that impose rigid structures, our hybrid bottom-up approach allows for the natural unfolding of events, fostering more spontaneous and engaging storytelling. The system is capable of generating stories exceeding 10,000 words while maintaining coherence and consistency, addressing some of the key challenges faced by current story generation models. We achieve state-of-the-art performance across several metrics. This approach offers a scalable and innovative solution for creating dynamic, immersive long-form stories that evolve organically from agent-driven interactions.

Front-end electronics equipped with high-speed digitizers are being used and proposed for future nuclear detectors. Recent literature reveals that deep learning models, especially one-dimensional convolutional neural networks, are promising when dealing with digital signals from nuclear detectors. Simulations and experiments demonstrate the satisfactory accuracy and additional benefits of neural networks in this area. However, specific hardware accelerating such models for online operations still needs to be studied. In this work, we introduce PulseDL-II, a system-on-chip (SoC) specially designed for applications of event feature (time, energy, etc.) extraction from pulses with deep learning. Based on the previous version, PulseDL-II incorporates a RISC CPU into the system structure for better functional flexibility and integrity. The neural network accelerator in the SoC adopts a three-level (arithmetic unit, processing element, neural network) hierarchical architecture and facilitates parameter optimization of the digital design. Furthermore, we devise a quantization scheme compatible with deep learning frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow) within a selected subset of layer types. We validate the correct operations of PulseDL-II on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) alone and with an experimental setup comprising a direct digital synthesis (DDS) and analog-to-digital converters (ADC). The proposed system achieved 60 ps time resolution and 0.40% energy resolution at signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 47.4 dB.

The Beta Pictoris system is characterized by a dusty debris disk, in addition to the presence of two already known planets. This makes it a particularly interesting case for studying the formation and evolution of planetary systems at a stage where giant planets have already formed, most of the protoplanetary gas has dissipated, and terrestrial planets could emerge. Our goal here is to explore the possibility of additional planets orbiting beyond the outermost known one, beta Pic b. More specifically, we aim to assess whether additional planets in the system could explain the discrepancy between the predicted cutoff of the disk inner cavity at sim28 au with only two planets, and the observed one at sim50 au. We perform an exhaustive dynamical modeling of the debris disk and the carving of its inner edge, by introducing one or two additional planets beyond beta Pic b, coplanar with the disk. Guided by theoretical predictions for the parameter space - mass, semi-major axis, eccentricity - allowed for additional planets, we further carry out a set of N-body simulations, using the symplectic integrator RMVS3. Our simulations indicate that an additional planet with a low eccentricity of 0.05, a mass between 0.15 and 1 M_{Jup}, and a semi-major axis between 30 and 36 au, would be consistent with the observations of an inner debris disk edge at 50 au. We have also explored the hypotheses of a higher eccentricity and the presence of two additional lower mass planets instead of one, which could also account for these observations. While we have found that one or even two additional planets could explain the observed location of the disk inner edge, these hypothetical planets remain in most cases below the current observational limits of high contrast imaging. Future observational campaigns with improved sensitivity will help lowering these limits and perhaps detect that planet.

Ensuring the long-term sustainability of recommender systems (RS) emerges as a crucial issue. Traditional offline evaluation methods for RS typically focus on immediate user feedback, such as clicks, but they often neglect the long-term impact of content creators. On real-world content platforms, creators can strategically produce and upload new items based on user feedback and preference trends. While previous studies have attempted to model creator behavior, they often overlook the role of information asymmetry. This asymmetry arises because creators primarily have access to feedback on the items they produce, while platforms possess data on the entire spectrum of user feedback. Current RS simulators, however, fail to account for this asymmetry, leading to inaccurate long-term evaluations. To address this gap, we propose CreAgent, a Large Language Model (LLM)-empowered creator simulation agent. By incorporating game theory's belief mechanism and the fast-and-slow thinking framework, CreAgent effectively simulates creator behavior under conditions of information asymmetry. Additionally, we enhance CreAgent's simulation ability by fine-tuning it using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Our credibility validation experiments show that CreAgent aligns well with the behaviors between real-world platform and creator, thus improving the reliability of long-term RS evaluations. Moreover, through the simulation of RS involving CreAgents, we can explore how fairness- and diversity-aware RS algorithms contribute to better long-term performance for various stakeholders. CreAgent and the simulation platform are publicly available at https://github.com/shawnye2000/CreAgent.

Recent years have seen the advent of molecular simulation datasets that are orders of magnitude larger and more diverse. These new datasets differ substantially in four aspects of complexity: 1. Chemical diversity (number of different elements), 2. system size (number of atoms per sample), 3. dataset size (number of data samples), and 4. domain shift (similarity of the training and test set). Despite these large differences, benchmarks on small and narrow datasets remain the predominant method of demonstrating progress in graph neural networks (GNNs) for molecular simulation, likely due to cheaper training compute requirements. This raises the question -- does GNN progress on small and narrow datasets translate to these more complex datasets? This work investigates this question by first developing the GemNet-OC model based on the large Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) dataset. GemNet-OC outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on OC20 by 16% while reducing training time by a factor of 10. We then compare the impact of 18 model components and hyperparameter choices on performance in multiple datasets. We find that the resulting model would be drastically different depending on the dataset used for making model choices. To isolate the source of this discrepancy we study six subsets of the OC20 dataset that individually test each of the above-mentioned four dataset aspects. We find that results on the OC-2M subset correlate well with the full OC20 dataset while being substantially cheaper to train on. Our findings challenge the common practice of developing GNNs solely on small datasets, but highlight ways of achieving fast development cycles and generalizable results via moderately-sized, representative datasets such as OC-2M and efficient models such as GemNet-OC. Our code and pretrained model weights are open-sourced.

Model-free control strategies such as reinforcement learning have shown the ability to learn control strategies without requiring an accurate model or simulator of the world. While this is appealing due to the lack of modeling requirements, such methods can be sample inefficient, making them impractical in many real-world domains. On the other hand, model-based control techniques leveraging accurate simulators can circumvent these challenges and use a large amount of cheap simulation data to learn controllers that can effectively transfer to the real world. The challenge with such model-based techniques is the requirement for an extremely accurate simulation, requiring both the specification of appropriate simulation assets and physical parameters. This requires considerable human effort to design for every environment being considered. In this work, we propose a learning system that can leverage a small amount of real-world data to autonomously refine a simulation model and then plan an accurate control strategy that can be deployed in the real world. Our approach critically relies on utilizing an initial (possibly inaccurate) simulator to design effective exploration policies that, when deployed in the real world, collect high-quality data. We demonstrate the efficacy of this paradigm in identifying articulation, mass, and other physical parameters in several challenging robotic manipulation tasks, and illustrate that only a small amount of real-world data can allow for effective sim-to-real transfer. Project website at https://weirdlabuw.github.io/asid

Simulation is widely used in robotics for system verification and large-scale data collection. However, simulating sensors, including tactile sensors, has been a long-standing challenge. In this paper, we propose Taxim, a realistic and high-speed simulation model for a vision-based tactile sensor, GelSight. A GelSight sensor uses a piece of soft elastomer as the medium of contact and embeds optical structures to capture the deformation of the elastomer, which infers the geometry and forces applied at the contact surface. We propose an example-based method for simulating GelSight: we simulate the optical response to the deformation with a polynomial look-up table. This table maps the deformed geometries to pixel intensity sampled by the embedded camera. In order to simulate the surface markers' motion that is caused by the surface stretch of the elastomer, we apply the linear elastic deformation theory and the superposition principle. The simulation model is calibrated with less than 100 data points from a real sensor. The example-based approach enables the model to easily migrate to other GelSight sensors or its variations. To the best of our knowledge, our simulation framework is the first to incorporate marker motion field simulation that derives from elastomer deformation together with the optical simulation, creating a comprehensive and computationally efficient tactile simulation framework. Experiments reveal that our optical simulation has the lowest pixel-wise intensity errors compared to prior work and can run online with CPU computing. Our code and supplementary materials are open-sourced at https://github.com/CMURoboTouch/Taxim.

We propose a neural physics system for real-time, interactive fluid simulations. Traditional physics-based methods, while accurate, are computationally intensive and suffer from latency issues. Recent machine-learning methods reduce computational costs while preserving fidelity; yet most still fail to satisfy the latency constraints for real-time use and lack support for interactive applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel hybrid method that integrates numerical simulation, neural physics, and generative control. Our neural physics jointly pursues low-latency simulation and high physical fidelity by employing a fallback safeguard to classical numerical solvers. Furthermore, we develop a diffusion-based controller that is trained using a reverse modeling strategy to generate external dynamic force fields for fluid manipulation. Our system demonstrates robust performance across diverse 2D/3D scenarios, material types, and obstacle interactions, achieving real-time simulations at high frame rates (11~29% latency) while enabling fluid control guided by user-friendly freehand sketches. We present a significant step towards practical, controllable, and physically plausible fluid simulations for real-time interactive applications. We promise to release both models and data upon acceptance.

Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has been widely studied for Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) control in buildings. One of the critical challenges is the large amount of data required to effectively train neural networks for modeling building dynamics. This paper presents CLUE, an MBRL system for HVAC control in buildings. CLUE optimizes HVAC operations by integrating a Gaussian Process (GP) model to model building dynamics with uncertainty awareness. CLUE utilizes GP to predict state transitions as Gaussian distributions, effectively capturing prediction uncertainty and enhancing decision-making under sparse data conditions. Our approach employs a meta-kernel learning technique to efficiently set GP kernel hyperparameters using domain knowledge from diverse buildings. This drastically reduces the data requirements typically associated with GP models in HVAC applications. Additionally, CLUE incorporates these uncertainty estimates into a Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) algorithm, enabling the selection of safe, energy-efficient control actions. This uncertainty-aware control strategy evaluates and selects action trajectories based on their predicted impact on energy consumption and human comfort, optimizing operations even under uncertain conditions. Extensive simulations in a five-zone office building demonstrate that CLUE reduces the required training data from hundreds of days to just seven while maintaining robust control performance. It reduces comfort violations by an average of 12.07% compared to existing MBRL methods, without compromising on energy efficiency.

In this paper, we study state estimation of multi-visual-inertial systems (MVIS) and develop sensor fusion algorithms to optimally fuse an arbitrary number of asynchronous inertial measurement units (IMUs) or gyroscopes and global and(or) rolling shutter cameras. We are especially interested in the full calibration of the associated visual-inertial sensors, including the IMU or camera intrinsics and the IMU-IMU(or camera) spatiotemporal extrinsics as well as the image readout time of rolling-shutter cameras (if used). To this end, we develop a new analytic combined IMU integration with intrinsics-termed ACI3-to preintegrate IMU measurements, which is leveraged to fuse auxiliary IMUs and(or) gyroscopes alongside a base IMU. We model the multi-inertial measurements to include all the necessary inertial intrinsic and IMU-IMU spatiotemporal extrinsic parameters, while leveraging IMU-IMU rigid-body constraints to eliminate the necessity of auxiliary inertial poses and thus reducing computational complexity. By performing observability analysis of MVIS, we prove that the standard four unobservable directions remain - no matter how many inertial sensors are used, and also identify, for the first time, degenerate motions for IMU-IMU spatiotemporal extrinsics and auxiliary inertial intrinsics. In addition to the extensive simulations that validate our analysis and algorithms, we have built our own MVIS sensor rig and collected over 25 real-world datasets to experimentally verify the proposed calibration against the state-of-the-art calibration method such as Kalibr. We show that the proposed MVIS calibration is able to achieve competing accuracy with improved convergence and repeatability, which is open sourced to better benefit the community.

We introduce the concept of a generative infinite game, a video game that transcends the traditional boundaries of finite, hard-coded systems by using generative models. Inspired by James P. Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games, we leverage recent advances in generative AI to create Unbounded: a game of character life simulation that is fully encapsulated in generative models. Specifically, Unbounded draws inspiration from sandbox life simulations and allows you to interact with your autonomous virtual character in a virtual world by feeding, playing with and guiding it - with open-ended mechanics generated by an LLM, some of which can be emergent. In order to develop Unbounded, we propose technical innovations in both the LLM and visual generation domains. Specifically, we present: (1) a specialized, distilled large language model (LLM) that dynamically generates game mechanics, narratives, and character interactions in real-time, and (2) a new dynamic regional image prompt Adapter (IP-Adapter) for vision models that ensures consistent yet flexible visual generation of a character across multiple environments. We evaluate our system through both qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing significant improvements in character life simulation, user instruction following, narrative coherence, and visual consistency for both characters and the environments compared to traditional related approaches.

Extended reality (XR) demands generative models that respond to users' tracked real-world motion, yet current video world models accept only coarse control signals such as text or keyboard input, limiting their utility for embodied interaction. We introduce a human-centric video world model that is conditioned on both tracked head pose and joint-level hand poses. For this purpose, we evaluate existing diffusion transformer conditioning strategies and propose an effective mechanism for 3D head and hand control, enabling dexterous hand--object interactions. We train a bidirectional video diffusion model teacher using this strategy and distill it into a causal, interactive system that generates egocentric virtual environments. We evaluate this generated reality system with human subjects and demonstrate improved task performance as well as a significantly higher level of perceived amount of control over the performed actions compared with relevant baselines.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly expected to negotiate, coordinate, and transact autonomously, yet existing benchmarks lack principled settings for evaluating language-mediated economic interaction among multiple agents. We introduce AgenticPay, a benchmark and simulation framework for multi-agent buyer-seller negotiation driven by natural language. AgenticPay models markets in which buyers and sellers possess private constraints and product-dependent valuations, and must reach agreements through multi-round linguistic negotiation rather than numeric bidding alone. The framework supports a diverse suite of over 110 tasks ranging from bilateral bargaining to many-to-many markets, with structured action extraction and metrics for feasibility, efficiency, and welfare. Benchmarking state-of-the-art proprietary and open-weight LLMs reveals substantial gaps in negotiation performance and highlights challenges in long-horizon strategic reasoning, establishing AgenticPay as a foundation for studying agentic commerce and language-based market interaction. Code and dataset are available at the link: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/AgenticPay.

System identification from videos aims to recover object geometry and governing physical laws. Existing methods integrate differentiable rendering with simulation but rely on predefined material priors, limiting their ability to handle unknown ones. We introduce MASIV, the first vision-based framework for material-agnostic system identification. Unlike existing approaches that depend on hand-crafted constitutive laws, MASIV employs learnable neural constitutive models, inferring object dynamics without assuming a scene-specific material prior. However, the absence of full particle state information imposes unique challenges, leading to unstable optimization and physically implausible behaviors. To address this, we introduce dense geometric guidance by reconstructing continuum particle trajectories, providing temporally rich motion constraints beyond sparse visual cues. Comprehensive experiments show that MASIV achieves state-of-the-art performance in geometric accuracy, rendering quality, and generalization ability.

In this paper, we~present a novel scheduling solution for a class of System-on-Chip (SoC) systems where heterogeneous chip resources (DSP, FPGA, GPU, etc.) must be efficiently scheduled for continuously arriving hierarchical jobs with their tasks represented by a directed acyclic graph. Traditionally, heuristic algorithms have been widely used for many resource scheduling domains, and Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time (HEFT) has been a dominating state-of-the-art technique across a broad range of heterogeneous resource scheduling domains over many years. Despite their long-standing popularity, HEFT-like algorithms are known to be vulnerable to a small amount of noise added to the environment. Our Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based SoC Scheduler (DeepSoCS), capable of learning the "best" task ordering under dynamic environment changes, overcomes the brittleness of rule-based schedulers such as HEFT with significantly higher performance across different types of jobs. We~describe a DeepSoCS design process using a real-time heterogeneous SoC scheduling emulator, discuss major challenges, and present two novel neural network design features that lead to outperforming HEFT: (i) hierarchical job- and task-graph embedding; and (ii) efficient use of real-time task information in the state space. Furthermore, we~introduce effective techniques to address two fundamental challenges present in our environment: delayed consequences and joint actions. Through an extensive simulation study, we~show that our DeepSoCS exhibits the significantly higher performance of job execution time than that of HEFT with a higher level of robustness under realistic noise conditions. We~conclude with a discussion of the potential improvements for our DeepSoCS neural scheduler.

Generating robot simulation environments remains a major bottleneck in simulation-based robot learning. Constructing a training-ready MuJoCo scene typically requires expertise in 3D asset modeling, MJCF specification, spatial layout, collision avoidance, and robot-model integration. We present SR-Platform, a production-deployed agentic system that converts free-form natural language descriptions into executable, physically valid MuJoCo environments. SR-Platform decomposes scene synthesis into four stages: an LLM-based orchestrator that converts user intent into a structured scene plan; an asset forge that retrieves cached assets or generates new 3D geometry through LLM-to-CadQuery synthesis; a layout architect that assigns object poses and verifies industrial constraints; and a bridge layer that assembles the final MJCF scene and merges the selected robot model. The system is deployed as a nine-service Docker stack with WebSocket progress streaming, MinIO-backed mesh storage, Qdrant-based semantic asset retrieval, Redis job state, and InfluxDB telemetry. Using 30 days of production telemetry covering 611 successful LLM calls, SR-Platform generates five-object scenes with a median end-to-end latency of approximately 50 s, while cache-accelerated scenes complete in approximately 30-40 s. The asset forge shows an 11.3% first-attempt retry rate with automatic recovery, and cached asset retrieval removes per-object LLM calls for previously generated object types. These results show that agentic scene synthesis can reduce the manual effort required to create diverse robot training environments, enabling users to produce executable MuJoCo scenes from plain English prompts in under one minute.

Humanoid robots hold the potential for unparalleled versatility in performing human-like, whole-body skills. However, achieving agile and coordinated whole-body motions remains a significant challenge due to the dynamics mismatch between simulation and the real world. Existing approaches, such as system identification (SysID) and domain randomization (DR) methods, often rely on labor-intensive parameter tuning or result in overly conservative policies that sacrifice agility. In this paper, we present ASAP (Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics), a two-stage framework designed to tackle the dynamics mismatch and enable agile humanoid whole-body skills. In the first stage, we pre-train motion tracking policies in simulation using retargeted human motion data. In the second stage, we deploy the policies in the real world and collect real-world data to train a delta (residual) action model that compensates for the dynamics mismatch. Then, ASAP fine-tunes pre-trained policies with the delta action model integrated into the simulator to align effectively with real-world dynamics. We evaluate ASAP across three transfer scenarios: IsaacGym to IsaacSim, IsaacGym to Genesis, and IsaacGym to the real-world Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Our approach significantly improves agility and whole-body coordination across various dynamic motions, reducing tracking error compared to SysID, DR, and delta dynamics learning baselines. ASAP enables highly agile motions that were previously difficult to achieve, demonstrating the potential of delta action learning in bridging simulation and real-world dynamics. These results suggest a promising sim-to-real direction for developing more expressive and agile humanoids.

Imitation learning from a large set of human demonstrations has proved to be an effective paradigm for building capable robot agents. However, the demonstrations can be extremely costly and time-consuming to collect. We introduce MimicGen, a system for automatically synthesizing large-scale, rich datasets from only a small number of human demonstrations by adapting them to new contexts. We use MimicGen to generate over 50K demonstrations across 18 tasks with diverse scene configurations, object instances, and robot arms from just ~200 human demonstrations. We show that robot agents can be effectively trained on this generated dataset by imitation learning to achieve strong performance in long-horizon and high-precision tasks, such as multi-part assembly and coffee preparation, across broad initial state distributions. We further demonstrate that the effectiveness and utility of MimicGen data compare favorably to collecting additional human demonstrations, making it a powerful and economical approach towards scaling up robot learning. Datasets, simulation environments, videos, and more at https://mimicgen.github.io .

The accuracy of classical force fields (FFs) has been shown to be limited for the simulation of cation-protein systems despite their importance in understanding the processes of life. Improvements can result from optimizing the parameters of classical FFs or by extending the FF formulation by terms describing charge transfer and polarization effects. In this work, we introduce our implementation of the CTPOL model in OpenMM, which extends the classical additive FF formula by adding charge transfer (CT) and polarization (POL). Furthermore, we present an open-source parameterization tool, called FFAFFURR that enables the (system specific) parameterization of OPLS-AA and CTPOL models. The performance of our workflow was evaluated by its ability to reproduce quantum chemistry energies and by molecular dynamics simulations of a Zinc finger protein.

robosuite is a simulation framework for robot learning powered by the MuJoCo physics engine. It offers a modular design for creating robotic tasks as well as a suite of benchmark environments for reproducible research. This paper discusses the key system modules and the benchmark environments of our new release robosuite v1.5.

We present PyCARL, a PyNN-based common Python programming interface for hardware-software co-simulation of spiking neural network (SNN). Through PyCARL, we make the following two key contributions. First, we provide an interface of PyNN to CARLsim, a computationally-efficient, GPU-accelerated and biophysically-detailed SNN simulator. PyCARL facilitates joint development of machine learning models and code sharing between CARLsim and PyNN users, promoting an integrated and larger neuromorphic community. Second, we integrate cycle-accurate models of state-of-the-art neuromorphic hardware such as TrueNorth, Loihi, and DynapSE in PyCARL, to accurately model hardware latencies that delay spikes between communicating neurons and degrade performance. PyCARL allows users to analyze and optimize the performance difference between software-only simulation and hardware-software co-simulation of their machine learning models. We show that system designers can also use PyCARL to perform design-space exploration early in the product development stage, facilitating faster time-to-deployment of neuromorphic products. We evaluate the memory usage and simulation time of PyCARL using functionality tests, synthetic SNNs, and realistic applications. Our results demonstrate that for large SNNs, PyCARL does not lead to any significant overhead compared to CARLsim. We also use PyCARL to analyze these SNNs for a state-of-the-art neuromorphic hardware and demonstrate a significant performance deviation from software-only simulations. PyCARL allows to evaluate and minimize such differences early during model development.

We introduce Augmented Physics, a machine learning-integrated authoring tool designed for creating embedded interactive physics simulations from static textbook diagrams. Leveraging recent advancements in computer vision, such as Segment Anything and Multi-modal LLMs, our web-based system enables users to semi-automatically extract diagrams from physics textbooks and generate interactive simulations based on the extracted content. These interactive diagrams are seamlessly integrated into scanned textbook pages, facilitating interactive and personalized learning experiences across various physics concepts, such as optics, circuits, and kinematics. Drawing from an elicitation study with seven physics instructors, we explore four key augmentation strategies: 1) augmented experiments, 2) animated diagrams, 3) bi-directional binding, and 4) parameter visualization. We evaluate our system through technical evaluation, a usability study (N=12), and expert interviews (N=12). Study findings suggest that our system can facilitate more engaging and personalized learning experiences in physics education.

Large language models (LLMs) has been widely used for automated negotiation, but their high computational cost and privacy risks limit deployment in privacy-sensitive, on-device settings such as mobile assistants or rescue robots. Small language models (SLMs) offer a viable alternative, yet struggle with the complex emotional dynamics of high-stakes negotiation. We introduces EmoMAS, a Bayesian multi-agent framework that transforms emotional decision-making from reactive to strategic. EmoMAS leverages a Bayesian orchestrator to coordinate three specialized agents: game-theoretic, reinforcement learning, and psychological coherence models. The system fuses their real-time insights to optimize emotional state transitions while continuously updating agent reliability based on negotiation feedback. This mixture-of-agents architecture enables online strategy learning without pre-training. We further introduce four high-stakes, edge-deployable negotiation benchmarks across debt, healthcare, emergency response, and educational domains. Through extensive agent-to-agent simulations across all benchmarks, both SLMs and LLMs equipped with EmoMAS consistently surpass all baseline models in negotiation performance while balancing ethical behavior. These results show that strategic emotional intelligence is also the key driver of negotiation success. By treating emotional expression as a strategic variable within a Bayesian multi-agent optimization framework, EmoMAS establishes a new paradigm for effective, private, and adaptive negotiation AI suitable for high-stakes edge deployment.

Backtests of cryptocurrency perpetual futures are fragile when they ignore microstructure frictions and reuse evaluation windows during parameter search. We study four liquid perpetuals (BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, SOL/USDT, AVAX/USDT) and quantify how execution delay, funding, fees, and slippage can inflate reported performance. We introduce AutoQuant, an execution-centric, alpha-agnostic framework for auditable strategy configuration selection. AutoQuant encodes strict T+1 execution semantics and no-look-ahead funding alignment, runs Bayesian optimization under realistic costs, and applies a two-stage double-screening protocol across held-out rolling windows and a cost-sensitivity grid. We show that fee-only and zero-cost backtests can materially overestimate annualized returns relative to a fully costed configuration, and that double screening tends to reduce drawdowns under the same strict semantics even when returns are not higher. A CSCV/PBO diagnostic indicates substantial residual overfitting risk, motivating AutoQuant as validation and governance infrastructure rather than a claim of persistent alpha. Returns are reported for small-account simulations with linear trading costs and without market impact or capacity modeling.

This paper presents the Adaptive Personalized Control System (APECS) architecture, a novel framework for human-in-the-loop control. An architecture is developed which defines appropriate constraints for the system objectives. A method for enacting Lipschitz and sector bounds on the resulting controller is derived to ensure desirable control properties. An analysis of worst-case loss functions and the optimal loss function weighting is made to implement an effective training scheme. Finally, simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture. This architecture resulted in a 4.5% performance increase compared to the human operator and 9% to an unconstrained feedforward neural network trained in the same way.

While end-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, fine-tuning them on narrow control data often compromises the profound reasoning capabilities inherited from their base Vision-Language Models (VLMs). To resolve this fundamental trade-off, we propose HiVLA, a visual-grounded-centric hierarchical framework that explicitly decouples high-level semantic planning from low-level motor control. In high-level part, a VLM planner first performs task decomposition and visual grounding to generate structured plans, comprising a subtask instruction and a precise target bounding box. Then, to translate this plan into physical actions, we introduce a flow-matching Diffusion Transformer (DiT) action expert in low-level part equipped with a novel cascaded cross-attention mechanism. This design sequentially fuses global context, high-resolution object-centric crops and skill semantics, enabling the DiT to focus purely on robust execution. Our decoupled architecture preserves the VLM's zero-shot reasoning while allowing independent improvement of both components. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate that HiVLA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art end-to-end baselines, particularly excelling in long-horizon skill composition and the fine-grained manipulation of small objects in cluttered scenes.

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) and diverse specialized benchmarks necessitates a shift from fragmented, task-specific metrics to a holistic, competitive ranking system that effectively aggregates performance across multiple ability dimensions. Primarily using static scoring, current evaluation methods are fundamentally limited. They struggle to determine the proper mix ratio across diverse benchmarks, and critically, they fail to capture a model's dynamic competitive fitness or its vulnerability when confronted with sequential, high-stakes tasks. To address this, we introduce the novel Competitive Swiss-System Dynamics (CSD) framework. CSD simulates a multi-round, sequential contest where models are dynamically paired across a curated sequence of benchmarks based on their accumulated win-loss record. And Monte Carlo Simulation (N=100,000 iterations) is used to approximate the statistically robust Expected Win Score (E[S_m]), which eliminates the noise of random pairing and early-round luck. Furthermore, we implement a Failure Sensitivity Analysis by parameterizing the per-round elimination quantity (T_k), which allows us to profile models based on their risk appetite--distinguishing between robust generalists and aggressive specialists. We demonstrate that CSD provides a more nuanced and context-aware ranking than traditional aggregate scoring and static pairwise models, representing a vital step towards risk-informed, next-generation LLM evaluation.

Roadside Collaborative Perception refers to a system where multiple roadside units collaborate to pool their perceptual data, assisting vehicles in enhancing their environmental awareness. Existing roadside perception methods concentrate on model design but overlook data issues like calibration errors, sparse information, and multi-view consistency, leading to poor performance on recent published datasets. To significantly enhance roadside collaborative perception and address critical data issues, we present the first simulation framework RoCo-Sim for road-side collaborative perception. RoCo-Sim is capable of generating diverse, multi-view consistent simulated roadside data through dynamic foreground editing and full-scene style transfer of a single image. RoCo-Sim consists of four components: (1) Camera Extrinsic Optimization ensures accurate 3D to 2D projection for roadside cameras; (2) A novel Multi-View Occlusion-Aware Sampler (MOAS) determines the placement of diverse digital assets within 3D space; (3) DepthSAM innovatively models foreground-background relationships from single-frame fixed-view images, ensuring multi-view consistency of foreground; and (4) Scalable Post-Processing Toolkit generates more realistic and enriched scenes through style transfer and other enhancements. RoCo-Sim significantly improves roadside 3D object detection, outperforming SOTA methods by 83.74 on Rcooper-Intersection and 83.12 on TUMTraf-V2X for AP70. RoCo-Sim fills a critical gap in roadside perception simulation. Code and pre-trained models will be released soon: https://github.com/duyuwen-duen/RoCo-Sim

Vision-based teleoperation offers the possibility to endow robots with human-level intelligence to physically interact with the environment, while only requiring low-cost camera sensors. However, current vision-based teleoperation systems are designed and engineered towards a particular robot model and deploy environment, which scales poorly as the pool of the robot models expands and the variety of the operating environment increases. In this paper, we propose AnyTeleop, a unified and general teleoperation system to support multiple different arms, hands, realities, and camera configurations within a single system. Although being designed to provide great flexibility to the choice of simulators and real hardware, our system can still achieve great performance. For real-world experiments, AnyTeleop can outperform a previous system that was designed for a specific robot hardware with a higher success rate, using the same robot. For teleoperation in simulation, AnyTeleop leads to better imitation learning performance, compared with a previous system that is particularly designed for that simulator. Project page: http://anyteleop.com/.

Instrumenting and collecting annotated visual grasping datasets to train modern machine learning algorithms can be extremely time-consuming and expensive. An appealing alternative is to use off-the-shelf simulators to render synthetic data for which ground-truth annotations are generated automatically. Unfortunately, models trained purely on simulated data often fail to generalize to the real world. We study how randomized simulated environments and domain adaptation methods can be extended to train a grasping system to grasp novel objects from raw monocular RGB images. We extensively evaluate our approaches with a total of more than 25,000 physical test grasps, studying a range of simulation conditions and domain adaptation methods, including a novel extension of pixel-level domain adaptation that we term the GraspGAN. We show that, by using synthetic data and domain adaptation, we are able to reduce the number of real-world samples needed to achieve a given level of performance by up to 50 times, using only randomly generated simulated objects. We also show that by using only unlabeled real-world data and our GraspGAN methodology, we obtain real-world grasping performance without any real-world labels that is similar to that achieved with 939,777 labeled real-world samples.

A flow control system is a critical concept for increasing the production capacity of manufacturing systems. To solve the scheduling optimization problem related to the flow control with the aim of improving productivity, existing methods depend on a heuristic design by domain human experts. Therefore, the methods require correction, monitoring, and verification by using real equipment. As system designs increase in complexity, the monitoring time increases, which decreases the probability of arriving at the optimal design. As an alternative approach to the heuristic design of flow control systems, the use of deep reinforcement learning to solve the scheduling optimization problem has been considered. Although the existing research on reinforcement learning has yielded excellent performance in some areas, the applicability of the results to actual FAB such as display and semiconductor manufacturing processes is not evident so far. To this end, we propose a method to implement a physical simulation environment and devise a feasible flow control system design using a transfer robot in display manufacturing through reinforcement learning. We present a model and parameter setting to build a virtual environment for different display transfer robots, and training methods of reinforcement learning on the environment to obtain an optimal scheduling of glass flow control systems. Its feasibility was verified by using different types of robots used in the actual process.

Closed-loop simulation is a core component of autonomous vehicle (AV) development, enabling scalable testing, training, and safety validation before real-world deployment. Neural scene reconstruction converts driving logs into interactive 3D environments for simulation, but it does not produce complete 3D object assets required for agent manipulation and large-viewpoint novel-view synthesis. To address this challenge, we present Asset Harvester, an image-to-3D model and end-to-end pipeline that converts sparse, in-the-wild object observations from real driving logs into complete, simulation-ready assets. Rather than relying on a single model component, we developed a system-level design for real-world AV data that combines large-scale curation of object-centric training tuples, geometry-aware preprocessing across heterogeneous sensors, and a robust training recipe that couples sparse-view-conditioned multiview generation with 3D Gaussian lifting. Within this system, SparseViewDiT is explicitly designed to address limited-angle views and other real-world data challenges. Together with hybrid data curation, augmentation, and self-distillation, this system enables scalable conversion of sparse AV object observations into reusable 3D assets.

Accurately modelling human attention is essential for numerous computer vision applications, particularly in the domain of automotive safety. Existing methods typically collapse gaze into saliency maps or scanpaths, treating gaze dynamics only implicitly. We instead formulate gaze modelling as an autoregressive dynamical system and explicitly unroll raw gaze trajectories over time, conditioned on both gaze history and the evolving environment. Driving scenes are represented as gaze-centric graphs processed by the Affinity Relation Transformer (ART), a heterogeneous graph transformer that models interactions between driver gaze, traffic objects, and road structure. We further introduce the Object Density Network (ODN) to predict next-step gaze distributions, capturing the stochastic and object-centric nature of attentional shifts in complex environments. We also release Focus100, a new dataset of raw gaze data from 30 participants viewing egocentric driving footage. Trained directly on raw gaze, without fixation filtering, our unified approach produces more natural gaze trajectories, scanpath dynamics, and saliency maps than existing attention models, offering valuable insights for the temporal modelling of human attention in dynamic environments.

Simulation is essential to the development and evaluation of autonomous robots such as self-driving vehicles. Neural reconstruction is emerging as a promising solution as it enables simulating a wide variety of scenarios from real-world data alone in an automated and scalable way. However, while methods such as NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting can produce visually compelling results, they often exhibit artifacts particularly when rendering novel views, and fail to realistically integrate inserted dynamic objects, especially when they were captured from different scenes. To overcome these limitations, we introduce DiffusionHarmonizer, an online generative enhancement framework that transforms renderings from such imperfect scenes into temporally consistent outputs while improving their realism. At its core is a single-step temporally-conditioned enhancer that is converted from a pretrained multi-step image diffusion model, capable of running in online simulators on a single GPU. The key to training it effectively is a custom data curation pipeline that constructs synthetic-real pairs emphasizing appearance harmonization, artifact correction, and lighting realism. The result is a scalable system that significantly elevates simulation fidelity in both research and production environments.

Simulating high-fidelity patients offers a powerful avenue for studying complex diseases while addressing the challenges of fragmented, biased, and privacy-restricted real-world data. In this study, we introduce SynthAgent, a novel Multi-Agent System (MAS) framework designed to model obesity patients with comorbid mental disorders, including depression, anxiety, social phobia, and binge eating disorder. SynthAgent integrates clinical and medical evidence from claims data, population surveys, and patient-centered literature to construct personalized virtual patients enriched with personality traits that influence adherence, emotion regulation, and lifestyle behaviors. Through autonomous agent interactions, the system simulates disease progression, treatment response, and life management across diverse psychosocial contexts. Evaluation of more than 100 generated patients demonstrated that GPT-5 and Claude 4.5 Sonnet achieved the highest fidelity as the core engine in the proposed MAS framework, outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro and DeepSeek-R1. SynthAgent thus provides a scalable and privacy-preserving framework for exploring patient journeys, behavioral dynamics, and decision-making processes in both medical and psychological domains.

Large foundation models are integrated into Computer Use Agents (CUAs), enabling autonomous interaction with operating systems through graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to perform complex tasks. This autonomy introduces serious security risks: malicious instructions or visual prompt injections can trigger unsafe reasoning and cause harmful system-level actions. Existing defenses, such as detection-based blocking, prevent damage but often abort tasks prematurely, reducing agent utility. In this paper, we present MirrorGuard, a plug-and-play defense framework that uses simulation-based training to improve CUA security in the real world. To reduce the cost of large-scale training in operating systems, we propose a novel neural-symbolic simulation pipeline, which generates realistic, high-risk GUI interaction trajectories entirely in a text-based simulated environment, which captures unsafe reasoning patterns and potential system hazards without executing real operations. In the simulation environment, MirrorGuard learns to intercept and rectify insecure reasoning chains of CUAs before they produce and execute unsafe actions. In real-world testing, extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks and CUA architectures show that MirrorGuard significantly mitigates security risks. For instance, on the ByteDance UI-TARS system, it reduces the unsafe rate from 66.5% to 13.0% while maintaining a marginal false refusal rate (FRR). In contrast, the state-of-the-art GuardAgent only achieves a reduction to 53.9% and suffers from a 15.4% higher FRR. Our work proves that simulation-derived defenses can provide robust, real-world protection while maintaining the fundamental utility of the agent. Our code and model are publicly available at https://bmz-q-q.github.io/MirrorGuard/.

This study focuses on operational control strategies for a multi-energy District Heating Network (DHN). Two control strategies are investigated and compared: (i) a reactive rule-based control (RBC) and (ii) a model predictive control (MPC). For the purpose of the study a small scale district heating network is modelled using Modelica. The production plant combines a heat pump, a gas boiler and a thermal solar field on the production side with a storage tank for flexibility purposes. On the consumption side, the virtual buildings are aggregated into a single consumer. We use our co-simulation and control platform, called Pegase, to implement the studied strategies. For both strategies the goal is to meet the consumers' demand while satisfying technical constraints. In addition MPC has the objective to minimize the operational costs, taking into account variable electricity prices and availability of solar thermal resource. Different scenarios are also defined and compared to study the effect of the heat plant sizing and forecasting error. The operational cost is reduced when switching from RBC to a MPC. As can be expected, MPC is more efficient when dealing with variable energy costs, intermittent solar energy and storage capabilities. This study also demonstrates how our tools enable an easy coupling of Modelica-based simulation with various control strategies. It especially supports the implementation and validation of complex MPC strategies in an efficient way, and yearly simulations are performed within 20 minutes.

Navigating certain communication situations can be challenging due to individuals' lack of skills and the interference of strong emotions. However, effective learning opportunities are rarely accessible. In this work, we conduct a human-centered study that uses language models to simulate bespoke communication training and provide just-in-time feedback to support the practice and learning of interpersonal effectiveness skills. We apply the interpersonal effectiveness framework from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), DEAR MAN, which focuses on both conversational and emotional skills. We present IMBUE, an interactive training system that provides feedback 25% more similar to experts' feedback, compared to that generated by GPT-4. IMBUE is the first to focus on communication skills and emotion management simultaneously, incorporate experts' domain knowledge in providing feedback, and be grounded in psychology theory. Through a randomized trial of 86 participants, we find that IMBUE's simulation-only variant significantly improves participants' self-efficacy (up to 17%) and reduces negative emotions (up to 25%). With IMBUE's additional just-in-time feedback, participants demonstrate 17% improvement in skill mastery, along with greater enhancements in self-efficacy (27% more) and reduction of negative emotions (16% more) compared to simulation-only. The improvement in skill mastery is the only measure that is transferred to new and more difficult situations; situation specific training is necessary for improving self-efficacy and emotion reduction.

The damage and the impact of natural disasters are becoming more destructive with the increase of urbanization. Today's metropolitan cities are not sufficiently prepared for the pre and post-disaster situations. Digital Twin technology can provide a solution. A virtual copy of the physical city could be created by collecting data from sensors of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and stored on the cloud infrastructure. This virtual copy is kept current and up to date with the continuous flow of the data coming from the sensors. We propose a disaster management system utilizing machine learning called DT-DMS is used to support decision-making mechanisms. This study aims to show how to educate and prepare emergency center staff by simulating potential disaster situations on the virtual copy. The event of a disaster will be simulated allowing emergency center staff to make decisions and depicting the potential outcomes of these decisions. A rescue operation after an earthquake is simulated. Test results are promising and the simulation scope is planned to be extended.

The vulnerability of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) against adversarial disturbances and attacks significantly restricts their applicability in safety-critical systems including cyber-physical systems (CPS) equipped with neural network components at various stages of sensing and control. This paper addresses the reachable set estimation and safety verification problems for dynamical systems embedded with neural network components serving as feedback controllers. The closed-loop system can be abstracted in the form of a continuous-time sampled-data system under the control of a neural network controller. First, a novel reachable set computation method in adaptation to simulations generated out of neural networks is developed. The reachability analysis of a class of feedforward neural networks called multilayer perceptrons (MLP) with general activation functions is performed in the framework of interval arithmetic. Then, in combination with reachability methods developed for various dynamical system classes modeled by ordinary differential equations, a recursive algorithm is developed for over-approximating the reachable set of the closed-loop system. The safety verification for neural network control systems can be performed by examining the emptiness of the intersection between the over-approximation of reachable sets and unsafe sets. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been validated with evaluations on a robotic arm model and an adaptive cruise control system.

Machine Unlearning (MU) aims to remove target training data from a trained model so that the removed data no longer influences the model's behavior, fulfilling "right to be forgotten" obligations under data privacy laws. Yet, we observe that researchers in this rapidly emerging field face challenges in analyzing and understanding the behavior of different MU methods, especially in terms of three fundamental principles in MU: accuracy, efficiency, and privacy. Consequently, they often rely on aggregate metrics and ad-hoc evaluations, making it difficult to accurately assess the trade-offs between methods. To fill this gap, we introduce a visual analytics system, Unlearning Comparator, designed to facilitate the systematic evaluation of MU methods. Our system supports two important tasks in the evaluation process: model comparison and attack simulation. First, it allows the user to compare the behaviors of two models, such as a model generated by a certain method and a retrained baseline, at class-, instance-, and layer-levels to better understand the changes made after unlearning. Second, our system simulates membership inference attacks (MIAs) to evaluate the privacy of a method, where an attacker attempts to determine whether specific data samples were part of the original training set. We evaluate our system through a case study visually analyzing prominent MU methods and demonstrate that it helps the user not only understand model behaviors but also gain insights that can inform the improvement of MU methods.

We present PDE-Agents, a multi-agent ecosystem that automates the full lifecycle of partial differential equation (PDE) / finite element method (FEM) simulations through natural-language interaction. Three specialist large language model (LLM) agents (Simulation, Analytics, Database) are orchestrated via a LangGraph supervisor, with a local open-source LLM stack (Qwen3-Coder-Next, Llama 4 Scout) on dual NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPUs. The architecture is model-agnostic, validated across two LLM generations. A GraphRAG knowledge base (Neo4j, 768-d vector embeddings) encodes curated material properties, known failure patterns, and prior run lineage. We report seven contributions: (i) a verification and validation (V&V) study confirming second-order spatial convergence (O(h^2)) on the heat-equation solver; (ii) a three-way ablation over 50 tasks with a frozen KG (KG On, KG Off, KG Smart), where KG Smart reaches 100% success and the highest output quality (physics 0.933 vs. 0.853 for KG Off; MPF 0.926 vs. 0.796); (iii) a novel-material experiment with three fictional materials known only to the KG, where KG Smart attains near-perfect material property fidelity (MPF = 1.00) versus 0.34 for the KG-free baseline; (iv) a failure analysis tracing KG On's three failures to budget exhaustion and timeout, establishing warm-start injection as the dominant reliability factor; (v) an adaptive framework selecting the optimal retrieval mode per task; (vi) production metrics from 1,369 runs (97.8% success, 57.6% first-try); and (vii) a 100-task KG growth experiment showing a difficulty-dependent gain, with hard-task MPF improving 8.8% while easy/novel tasks stay at ceiling. All code, models, and evaluation artifacts are released openly. Our findings show that integration pattern, not knowledge content, determines whether GraphRAG augmentation helps or hinders LLM agents.

Solving a linear system Ax=b is a fundamental scientific computing primitive for which numerous solvers and preconditioners have been developed. These come with parameters whose optimal values depend on the system being solved and are often impossible or too expensive to identify; thus in practice sub-optimal heuristics are used. We consider the common setting in which many related linear systems need to be solved, e.g. during a single numerical simulation. In this scenario, can we sequentially choose parameters that attain a near-optimal overall number of iterations, without extra matrix computations? We answer in the affirmative for Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR), a standard solver whose parameter omega has a strong impact on its runtime. For this method, we prove that a bandit online learning algorithm--using only the number of iterations as feedback--can select parameters for a sequence of instances such that the overall cost approaches that of the best fixed omega as the sequence length increases. Furthermore, when given additional structural information, we show that a contextual bandit method asymptotically achieves the performance of the instance-optimal policy, which selects the best omega for each instance. Our work provides the first learning-theoretic treatment of high-precision linear system solvers and the first end-to-end guarantees for data-driven scientific computing, demonstrating theoretically the potential to speed up numerical methods using well-understood learning algorithms.

We present a system that enables an autonomous small-scale RC car to drive aggressively from visual observations using reinforcement learning (RL). Our system, FastRLAP (faster lap), trains autonomously in the real world, without human interventions, and without requiring any simulation or expert demonstrations. Our system integrates a number of important components to make this possible: we initialize the representations for the RL policy and value function from a large prior dataset of other robots navigating in other environments (at low speed), which provides a navigation-relevant representation. From here, a sample-efficient online RL method uses a single low-speed user-provided demonstration to determine the desired driving course, extracts a set of navigational checkpoints, and autonomously practices driving through these checkpoints, resetting automatically on collision or failure. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that with appropriate initialization and choice of algorithm, our system can learn to drive over a variety of racing courses with less than 20 minutes of online training. The resulting policies exhibit emergent aggressive driving skills, such as timing braking and acceleration around turns and avoiding areas which impede the robot's motion, approaching the performance of a human driver using a similar first-person interface over the course of training.

Nitrogen (N) management is critical to sustain soil fertility and crop production while minimizing the negative environmental impact, but is challenging to optimize. This paper proposes an intelligent N management system using deep reinforcement learning (RL) and crop simulations with Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT). We first formulate the N management problem as an RL problem. We then train management policies with deep Q-network and soft actor-critic algorithms, and the Gym-DSSAT interface that allows for daily interactions between the simulated crop environment and RL agents. According to the experiments on the maize crop in both Iowa and Florida in the US, our RL-trained policies outperform previous empirical methods by achieving higher or similar yield while using less fertilizers

Despite being a pivotal frontier, interactive world modeling remains underexplored in terms of the versatile controllability required by practical scenarios. To bridge this gap, we present AnchorWorld, a framework that advances egocentric simulation through enhanced interaction integrity and a flexible mechanism for world customization. First, we utilize 3D human motion as the primary interaction modality. To complement the out-of-view or truncated body parts in egocentric views, we introduce an auxiliary training supervision that incorporates exogenous viewpoints decoupled from the agent's first-person sensorium. It allows the model to observe the agent's full-body positioning relative to the environment, facilitating a more robust spatial grounding of human-world interactions. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective mechanism for customizing self-evolving worlds. This is achieved by defining anchor views within a unified world coordinate system, coupled with textual descriptions dictating the dynamic evolution of local scenes. Experimental results show that AnchorWorld significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, while ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our key designs. Notably, our customization scheme exhibits promising spatio-temporal geometric consistency and adheres strictly to the prescribed evolutionary dynamics.

As autonomous vehicle capabilities advance, the safe evaluation of driving policies in long-tail scenarios remains a critical bottleneck. In closed-loop simulation, the driving policy model actively interacts with the environment, where its actions dynamically update the simulator state and directly influence the next set of generated sensor observations. While recent reconstruction-based neural simulators offer photorealism, they are fundamentally constrained by their initial captured data and struggle to generalize to highly dynamic or novel scenes. To overcome these limitations, we introduce OmniDreams, a foundation generative world model mid- and post-trained from the Cosmos diffusion model to autoregressively generate action-conditioned videos in real time. By leveraging the rich visual priors of Cosmos and mid- and post-training on 21k hours of driving scenarios, OmniDreams synthesizes complex, unobserved phenomena that are hard for traditional simulators to capture, such as extreme weather and unpredictable dynamic agent behaviors. Crucially, it autoregressively conditions its photorealistic sensor generation on past frames, the current simulator state, and immediate driving actions. Deployed in a closed-loop system with the Alpamayo 1 policy model and AlpaSim orchestrator, OmniDreams acts as a highly responsive, reactive environment, providing a scalable and comprehensive solution for training and evaluating next-generation autonomous driving policies. We additionally show preliminary results indicating that a world-action model (WAM) post-trained from OmniDreams achieves strong performance on the Physical AI Autonomous Vehicles NuRec dataset, surpassing the VLA-based Alpamayo 1.5 research policy model while using only 1/5 the total parameters. These results highlight the potential for a real-time world model like OmniDreams to also serve as a backbone for policy architectures.

Developing embodied AI agents requires scalable training environments that balance content diversity with physics accuracy. World simulators provide such environments but face distinct limitations: video-based methods generate diverse content but lack real-time physics feedback for interactive learning, while physics-based engines provide accurate dynamics but face scalability limitations from costly manual asset creation. We present Seed3D 1.0, a foundation model that generates simulation-ready 3D assets from single images, addressing the scalability challenge while maintaining physics rigor. Unlike existing 3D generation models, our system produces assets with accurate geometry, well-aligned textures, and realistic physically-based materials. These assets can be directly integrated into physics engines with minimal configuration, enabling deployment in robotic manipulation and simulation training. Beyond individual objects, the system scales to complete scene generation through assembling objects into coherent environments. By enabling scalable simulation-ready content creation, Seed3D 1.0 provides a foundation for advancing physics-based world simulators. Seed3D 1.0 is now available on https://console.volcengine.com/ark/region:ark+cn-beijing/experience/vision?modelId=doubao-seed3d-1-0-250928&tab=Gen3D

While self-supervised pretraining has reduced vision systems' reliance on synthetic data, simulation remains an indispensable tool for closed-loop optimization and rigorous out-of-distribution (OOD) evaluation. However, modern simulation platforms often present steep technical barriers, requiring extensive expertise in computer graphics and game development. In this work, we present LychSim, a highly controllable and interactive simulation framework built upon Unreal Engine 5 to bridge this gap. LychSim is built around three key designs: (1) a streamlined Python API that abstracts away underlying engine complexities; (2) a procedural data pipeline capable of generating diverse, high-fidelity environments with varying out-of-distribution (OOD) visual challenges, paired with rich 2D and 3D ground truths; and (3) a native integration of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that transforms the simulator into a dynamic, closed-loop playground for reasoning agentic LLMs. We further annotate scene-level procedural rules and object-level pose alignments to enable semantically aligned 3D ground truths and automated scene modification. We demonstrate LychSim's capability across multiple downstream applications, including serving as a synthetic data engine, powering reinforcement learning-based adversarial examiners, and facilitating interactive, language-driven scene layout generation. To benefit the broader vision community, LychSim will be made publicly available, including full source code and various data annotations.

Generative models aim to simulate realistic effects of various actions across different contexts, from text generation to visual effects. Despite significant efforts to build real-world simulators, the application of generative models to virtual worlds, like financial markets, remains under-explored. In financial markets, generative models can simulate complex market effects of participants with various behaviors, enabling interaction under different market conditions, and training strategies without financial risk. This simulation relies on the finest structured data in financial market like orders thus building the finest realistic simulation. We propose Large Market Model (LMM), an order-level generative foundation model, for financial market simulation, akin to language modeling in the digital world. Our financial Market Simulation engine (MarS), powered by LMM, addresses the domain-specific need for realistic, interactive and controllable order generation. Key observations include LMM's strong scalability across data size and model complexity, and MarS's robust and practicable realism in controlled generation with market impact. We showcase MarS as a forecast tool, detection system, analysis platform, and agent training environment, thus demonstrating MarS's "paradigm shift" potential for a variety of financial applications. We release the code of MarS at https://github.com/microsoft/MarS/.

This paper tackles the challenge of autonomous target search using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in complex unknown environments. To fill the gap in systematic approaches for this task, we introduce Star-Searcher, an aerial system featuring specialized sensor suites, mapping, and planning modules to optimize searching. Path planning challenges due to increased inspection requirements are addressed through a hierarchical planner with a visibility-based viewpoint clustering method. This simplifies planning by breaking it into global and local sub-problems, ensuring efficient global and local path coverage in real-time. Furthermore, our global path planning employs a history-aware mechanism to reduce motion inconsistency from frequent map changes, significantly enhancing search efficiency. We conduct comparisons with state-of-the-art methods in both simulation and the real world, demonstrating shorter flight paths, reduced time, and higher target search completeness. Our approach will be open-sourced for community benefit at https://github.com/SYSU-STAR/STAR-Searcher.

The redshifted 21-cm signal is a unique probe of the early universe, particularly the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). While the 21-cm power spectrum has been the primary statistic for parameter inference, it fails to capture the non-Gaussian information in the signal, motivating the use of higher-order statistics such as the bispectrum. We perform a rigorous cross-simulation validation to infer the mean neutral hydrogen fraction (x_{HI}) by training a Bayesian neural network on 21cmFAST simulations and applying it to mock observations generated by ReionYuga code. Our analysis spans six redshifts and includes realistic SKA system noise and cosmic variance, calculated from 50 statistically independent realizations. We find that the bispectrum adds useful information, but the improvement is moderate, with constraints tightened by sim 1.4times the power-spectrum only case. The cross-simulation analysis also identifies a persistent systematic discrepancy between inferred and true values that often exceeds the statistical uncertainties, implying that modeling uncertainty remains the dominant limitation. Our results, therefore, indicate that the highly stringent constraints obtained in same-code validation studies may be overly optimistic, and mitigating cross-model systematics is crucial for robust parameter inference in the SKA era.

We introduce AgenticSimLaw, a role-structured, multi-agent debate framework that provides transparent and controllable test-time reasoning for high-stakes tabular decision-making tasks. Unlike black-box approaches, our courtroom-style orchestration explicitly defines agent roles (prosecutor, defense, judge), interaction protocols (7-turn structured debate), and private reasoning strategies, creating a fully auditable decision-making process. We benchmark this framework on young adult recidivism prediction using the NLSY97 dataset, comparing it against traditional chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting across almost 90 unique combinations of models and strategies. Our results demonstrate that structured multi-agent debate provides more stable and generalizable performance compared to single-agent reasoning, with stronger correlation between accuracy and F1-score metrics. Beyond performance improvements, AgenticSimLaw offers fine-grained control over reasoning steps, generates complete interaction transcripts for explainability, and enables systematic profiling of agent behaviors. While we instantiate this framework in the criminal justice domain to stress-test reasoning under ethical complexity, the approach generalizes to any deliberative, high-stakes decision task requiring transparency and human oversight. This work addresses key LLM-based multi-agent system challenges: organization through structured roles, observability through logged interactions, and responsibility through explicit non-deployment constraints for sensitive domains. Data, results, and code will be available on github.com under the MIT license.

We introduce NeoWorld, a deep learning framework for generating interactive 3D virtual worlds from a single input image. Inspired by the on-demand worldbuilding concept in the science fiction novel Simulacron-3 (1964), our system constructs expansive environments where only the regions actively explored by the user are rendered with high visual realism through object-centric 3D representations. Unlike previous approaches that rely on global world generation or 2D hallucination, NeoWorld models key foreground objects in full 3D, while synthesizing backgrounds and non-interacted regions in 2D to ensure efficiency. This hybrid scene structure, implemented with cutting-edge representation learning and object-to-3D techniques, enables flexible viewpoint manipulation and physically plausible scene animation, allowing users to control object appearance and dynamics using natural language commands. As users interact with the environment, the virtual world progressively unfolds with increasing 3D detail, delivering a dynamic, immersive, and visually coherent exploration experience. NeoWorld significantly outperforms existing 2D and depth-layered 2.5D methods on the WorldScore benchmark.

In online learning environments, students often lack personalized peer interactions, which are crucial for cognitive development and learning engagement. Although previous studies have employed large language models (LLMs) to simulate interactive learning environments, these interactions are limited to conversational exchanges, failing to adapt to learners' individualized cognitive and psychological states. As a result, students' engagement is low and they struggle to gain inspiration. To address this challenge, we propose OnlineMate, a multi-agent learning companion system driven by LLMs integrated with Theory of Mind (ToM). OnlineMate simulates peer-like roles, infers learners' psychological states such as misunderstandings and confusion during collaborative discussions, and dynamically adjusts interaction strategies to support higher-order thinking. Comprehensive evaluations, including simulation-based experiments, human assessments, and real classroom trials, demonstrate that OnlineMate significantly promotes deep learning and cognitive engagement by elevating students' average cognitive level while substantially improving emotional engagement scores.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is an essential simulation tool in engineering, yet its steep learning curve and complex manual setup create significant barriers. To address these challenges, we introduce Foam-Agent, a multi-agent framework that automates the entire end-to-end OpenFOAM workflow from a single natural language prompt. Our key innovations address critical gaps in existing systems: 1. An Comprehensive End-to-End Simulation Automation: Foam-Agent is the first system to manage the full simulation pipeline, including advanced pre-processing with a versatile Meshing Agent capable of handling external mesh files and generating new geometries via Gmsh, automatic generation of HPC submission scripts, and post-simulation visualization via ParaView. 2. Composable Service Architecture: Going beyond a monolithic agent, the framework uses Model Context Protocol (MCP) to expose its core functions as discrete, callable tools. This allows for flexible integration and use by other agentic systems, such as Claude-code, for more exploratory workflows. 3. High-Fidelity Configuration Generation: We achieve superior accuracy through a Hierarchical Multi-Index RAG for precise context retrieval and a dependency-aware generation process that ensures configuration consistency. Evaluated on a benchmark of 110 simulation tasks, Foam-Agent achieves an 88.2% success rate with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, significantly outperforming existing frameworks (55.5% for MetaOpenFOAM). Foam-Agent dramatically lowers the expertise barrier for CFD, demonstrating how specialized multi-agent systems can democratize complex scientific computing. The code is public at https://github.com/csml-rpi/Foam-Agent.

Sea ice is governed by highly complex, scale-invariant, and anisotropic processes that are challenging to represent in Earth system models. While advanced numerical models have improved our understanding of the sea-ice dynamics, their computational costs often limit their application in ensemble forecasting and climate simulations. Here, we introduce GenSIM, the first generative AI-based pan-Arctic model that predicts the evolution of all relevant key properties, including concentration, thickness, and drift, in a 12-hour window with improved accuracy over deterministic predictions and high computational efficiency, while remaining physically consistent. Trained on a long simulation from a state-of-the-art sea-ice--ocean system, GenSIM robustly reproduces statistics as observed in numerical models and observations, exhibiting brittle-like short-term dynamics while also depicting the long-term sea-ice decline. Driven solely by atmospheric forcings, we attribute GenSIM's emergent extrapolation capabilities to patterns that reflect the long-term impact of the ocean: it seemingly has learned an internal ocean emulator. This ability to infer slowly evolving climate-relevant dynamics from short-term predictions underlines the large potential of generative models to generalise for unseen climates and to encode hidden physics.

Objectives: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used to assist clinicians and support patients, no existing work has explored dialogue systems for standard diagnostic interviews and assessments. This study aims to bridge the gap in mental healthcare accessibility by developing an LLM-powered dialogue system that replicates clinician behavior. Materials and Methods: We introduce TRUST, a framework of cooperative LLM modules capable of conducting formal diagnostic interviews and assessments for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). To guide the generation of appropriate clinical responses, we propose a Dialogue Acts schema specifically designed for clinical interviews. Additionally, we develop a patient simulation approach based on real-life interview transcripts to replace time-consuming and costly manual testing by clinicians. Results: A comprehensive set of evaluation metrics is designed to assess the dialogue system from both the agent and patient simulation perspectives. Expert evaluations by conversation and clinical specialists show that TRUST performs comparably to real-life clinical interviews. Discussion: Our system performs at the level of average clinicians, with room for future enhancements in communication styles and response appropriateness. Conclusions: Our TRUST framework shows its potential to facilitate mental healthcare availability.

Real-world data collection for robotics is costly and resource-intensive, requiring skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulations offer a scalable alternative but often fail to achieve sim-to-real generalization due to geometric and visual gaps. To address these challenges, we propose a 3D-photorealistic real-to-sim system, namely, RE^3SIM, addressing geometric and visual sim-to-real gaps. RE^3SIM employs advanced 3D reconstruction and neural rendering techniques to faithfully recreate real-world scenarios, enabling real-time rendering of simulated cross-view cameras within a physics-based simulator. By utilizing privileged information to collect expert demonstrations efficiently in simulation, and train robot policies with imitation learning, we validate the effectiveness of the real-to-sim-to-real pipeline across various manipulation task scenarios. Notably, with only simulated data, we can achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with an average success rate exceeding 58%. To push the limit of real-to-sim, we further generate a large-scale simulation dataset, demonstrating how a robust policy can be built from simulation data that generalizes across various objects. Codes and demos are available at: http://xshenhan.github.io/Re3Sim/.

The increasing deployment of autonomous systems in complex environments necessitates efficient communication and task completion among multiple agents. This paper presents SERN (Simulation-Enhanced Realistic Navigation), a novel framework integrating virtual and physical environments for real-time collaborative decision-making in multi-robot systems. SERN addresses key challenges in asset deployment and coordination through our bi-directional SERN ROS Bridge communication framework. Our approach advances the SOTA through: accurate real-world representation in virtual environments using Unity high-fidelity simulator; synchronization of physical and virtual robot movements; efficient ROS data distribution between remote locations; and integration of SOTA semantic segmentation for enhanced environmental perception. Additionally, we introduce a Multi-Metric Cost Function (MMCF) that dynamically balances latency, reliability, computational overhead, and bandwidth consumption to optimize system performance in contested environments. We further provide theoretical justification for synchronization accuracy by proving that the positional error between physical and virtual robots remains bounded under varying network conditions. Our evaluations show a 15% to 24% improvement in latency and up to a 15% increase in processing efficiency compared to traditional ROS setups. Real-world and virtual simulation experiments with multiple robots (Clearpath Jackal and Husky) demonstrate synchronization accuracy, achieving less than 5 cm positional error and under 2^circ rotational error. These results highlight SERN's potential to enhance situational awareness and multi-agent coordination in diverse, contested environments.

Cyber-physical systems like autonomous vehicles are tested in simulation before deployment, using domain-specific programs for scenario specification. To aid the testing of autonomous vehicles in simulation, we design a natural language interface, using an instruction-following large language model, to assist a non-coding domain expert in synthesising the desired scenarios and vehicle behaviours. We show that using it to convert utterances to the symbolic program is feasible, despite the very small training dataset. Human experiments show that dialogue is critical to successful simulation generation, leading to a 4.5 times higher success rate than a generation without engaging in extended conversation.

Human communication is a complex and diverse process that not only involves multiple factors such as language, commonsense, and cultural backgrounds but also requires the participation of multimodal information, such as speech. Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have demonstrated promising performance in simulating human society. Can we leverage LLM-based multi-agent systems to simulate human communication? However, current LLM-based multi-agent systems mainly rely on text as the primary medium. In this paper, we propose SpeechAgents, a multi-modal LLM based multi-agent system designed for simulating human communication. SpeechAgents utilizes multi-modal LLM as the control center for individual agent and employes multi-modal signals as the medium for exchanged messages among agents. Additionally, we propose Multi-Agent Tuning to enhance the multi-agent capabilities of LLM without compromising general abilities. To strengthen and evaluate the effectiveness of human communication simulation, we build the Human-Communication Simulation Benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that SpeechAgents can simulate human communication dialogues with consistent content, authentic rhythm, and rich emotions and demonstrate excellent scalability even with up to 25 agents, which can apply to tasks such as drama creation and audio novels generation. Code and models will be open-sourced at https://github. com/0nutation/SpeechAgents

Robotic assembly is a longstanding challenge, requiring contact-rich interaction and high precision and accuracy. Many applications also require adaptivity to diverse parts, poses, and environments, as well as low cycle times. In other areas of robotics, simulation is a powerful tool to develop algorithms, generate datasets, and train agents. However, simulation has had a more limited impact on assembly. We present IndustReal, a set of algorithms, systems, and tools that solve assembly tasks in simulation with reinforcement learning (RL) and successfully achieve policy transfer to the real world. Specifically, we propose 1) simulation-aware policy updates, 2) signed-distance-field rewards, and 3) sampling-based curricula for robotic RL agents. We use these algorithms to enable robots to solve contact-rich pick, place, and insertion tasks in simulation. We then propose 4) a policy-level action integrator to minimize error at policy deployment time. We build and demonstrate a real-world robotic assembly system that uses the trained policies and action integrator to achieve repeatable performance in the real world. Finally, we present hardware and software tools that allow other researchers to reproduce our system and results. For videos and additional details, please see http://sites.google.com/nvidia.com/industreal .

Large Language Models (LLM) are increasingly being explored for problem-solving tasks. However, their strategic planning capability is often viewed with skepticism. Recent studies have incorporated the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to augment the planning capacity of LLM. Despite its potential, MCTS relies on extensive sampling simulations to approximate the true reward distribution, which leads to two primary issues. Firstly, MCTS is effective for tasks like the Game of Go, where simulation results can yield objective rewards (e.g., 1 for a win and 0 for a loss). However, for tasks such as question answering, the result of a simulation is the answer to the question, which cannot yield an objective reward without the ground truth. Secondly, obtaining statistically significant reward estimations typically requires a sample size exceeding 30 simulations, resulting in excessive token usage and time consumption. To address these challenges, we present the Multi-Agent System with Tactical Execution and Reasoning using LLM Specialized MCTS (MASTER), a novel framework that coordinates agent recruitment and communication through LLM specialized MCTS. This system autonomously adjusts the number of agents based on task complexity and ensures focused communication among them. Comprehensive experiments across various tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. It achieves 76% accuracy on HotpotQA and 80% on WebShop, setting new state-of-the-art performance on these datasets.

Simulating rare events, such as the transformation of a reactant into a product in a chemical reaction typically requires enhanced sampling techniques that rely on heuristically chosen collective variables (CVs). We propose using differentiable simulations (DiffSim) for the discovery and enhanced sampling of chemical transformations without a need to resort to preselected CVs, using only a distance metric. Reaction path discovery and estimation of the biasing potential that enhances the sampling are merged into a single end-to-end problem that is solved by path-integral optimization. This is achieved by introducing multiple improvements over standard DiffSim such as partial backpropagation and graph mini-batching making DiffSim training stable and efficient. The potential of DiffSim is demonstrated in the successful discovery of transition paths for the Muller-Brown model potential as well as a benchmark chemical system - alanine dipeptide.

Achieving fully autonomous driving systems requires learning rational decisions in a wide span of scenarios, including safety-critical and out-of-distribution ones. However, such cases are underrepresented in real-world corpus collected by human experts. To complement for the lack of data diversity, we introduce a novel and scalable simulation framework capable of synthesizing massive unseen states upon existing driving logs. Our pipeline utilizes advanced neural rendering with a reactive environment to generate high-fidelity multi-view observations controlled by the perturbed ego trajectory. Furthermore, we develop a pseudo-expert trajectory generation mechanism for these newly simulated states to provide action supervision. Upon the synthesized data, we find that a simple co-training strategy on both real-world and simulated samples can lead to significant improvements in both robustness and generalization for various planning methods on challenging real-world benchmarks, up to +6.8 EPDMS on navhard and +2.9 on navtest. More importantly, such policy improvement scales smoothly by increasing simulation data only, even without extra real-world data streaming in. We further reveal several crucial findings of such a sim-real learning system, which we term SimScale, including the design of pseudo-experts and the scaling properties for different policy architectures. Our simulation data and code would be released.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) with advanced video analysis capabilities have recently garnered significant attention. However, most evaluations rely on traditional methods like multiple-choice questions in benchmarks such as VideoMME and LongVideoBench, which are prone to lack the depth needed to capture the complex demands of real-world users. To address this limitation-and due to the prohibitive cost and slow pace of human annotation for video tasks-we introduce VideoAutoArena, an arena-style benchmark inspired by LMSYS Chatbot Arena's framework, designed to automatically assess LMMs' video analysis abilities. VideoAutoArena utilizes user simulation to generate open-ended, adaptive questions that rigorously assess model performance in video understanding. The benchmark features an automated, scalable evaluation framework, incorporating a modified ELO Rating System for fair and continuous comparisons across multiple LMMs. To validate our automated judging system, we construct a 'gold standard' using a carefully curated subset of human annotations, demonstrating that our arena strongly aligns with human judgment while maintaining scalability. Additionally, we introduce a fault-driven evolution strategy, progressively increasing question complexity to push models toward handling more challenging video analysis scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that VideoAutoArena effectively differentiates among state-of-the-art LMMs, providing insights into model strengths and areas for improvement. To further streamline our evaluation, we introduce VideoAutoBench as an auxiliary benchmark, where human annotators label winners in a subset of VideoAutoArena battles. We use GPT-4o as a judge to compare responses against these human-validated answers. Together, VideoAutoArena and VideoAutoBench offer a cost-effective, and scalable framework for evaluating LMMs in user-centric video analysis.

We present a deep-dive into a real-world robotic learning system that, in previous work, was shown to be capable of hundreds of table tennis rallies with a human and has the ability to precisely return the ball to desired targets. This system puts together a highly optimized perception subsystem, a high-speed low-latency robot controller, a simulation paradigm that can prevent damage in the real world and also train policies for zero-shot transfer, and automated real world environment resets that enable autonomous training and evaluation on physical robots. We complement a complete system description, including numerous design decisions that are typically not widely disseminated, with a collection of studies that clarify the importance of mitigating various sources of latency, accounting for training and deployment distribution shifts, robustness of the perception system, sensitivity to policy hyper-parameters, and choice of action space. A video demonstrating the components of the system and details of experimental results can be found at https://youtu.be/uFcnWjB42I0.

An ideal traffic simulator replicates the realistic long-term point-to-point trip that a self-driving system experiences during deployment. Prior models and benchmarks focus on closed-loop motion simulation for initial agents in a scene. This is problematic for long-term simulation. Agents enter and exit the scene as the ego vehicle enters new regions. We propose InfGen, a unified next-token prediction model that performs interleaved closed-loop motion simulation and scene generation. InfGen automatically switches between closed-loop motion simulation and scene generation mode. It enables stable long-term rollout simulation. InfGen performs at the state-of-the-art in short-term (9s) traffic simulation, and significantly outperforms all other methods in long-term (30s) simulation. The code and model of InfGen will be released at https://orangesodahub.github.io/InfGen

Humans practice slow thinking before performing actual actions when handling complex tasks in the physical world. This thinking paradigm, recently, has achieved remarkable advancement in boosting Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks in digital domains. However, the potential of slow thinking remains largely unexplored for robotic foundation models interacting with the physical world. In this work, we propose Hume: a dual-system Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with value-guided System-2 thinking and cascaded action denoising, exploring human-like thinking capabilities of Vision-Language-Action models for dexterous robot control. System 2 of Hume implements value-Guided thinking by extending a Vision-Language-Action Model backbone with a novel value-query head to estimate the state-action value of predicted actions. The value-guided thinking is conducted by repeat sampling multiple action candidates and selecting one according to state-action value. System 1 of Hume is a lightweight reactive visuomotor policy that takes System 2 selected action and performs cascaded action denoising for dexterous robot control. At deployment time, System 2 performs value-guided thinking at a low frequency while System 1 asynchronously receives the System 2 selected action candidate and predicts fluid actions in real time. We show that Hume outperforms the existing state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action models across multiple simulation benchmark and real-robot deployments.

Urban embodied AI agents, ranging from delivery robots to quadrupeds, are increasingly populating our cities, navigating chaotic streets to provide last-mile connectivity. Training such agents requires diverse, high-fidelity urban environments to scale, yet existing human-crafted or procedurally generated simulation scenes either lack scalability or fail to capture real-world complexity. We introduce UrbanVerse, a data-driven real-to-sim system that converts crowd-sourced city-tour videos into physics-aware, interactive simulation scenes. UrbanVerse consists of: (i) UrbanVerse-100K, a repository of 100k+ annotated urban 3D assets with semantic and physical attributes, and (ii) UrbanVerse-Gen, an automatic pipeline that extracts scene layouts from video and instantiates metric-scale 3D simulations using retrieved assets. Running in IsaacSim, UrbanVerse offers 160 high-quality constructed scenes from 24 countries, along with a curated benchmark of 10 artist-designed test scenes. Experiments show that UrbanVerse scenes preserve real-world semantics and layouts, achieving human-evaluated realism comparable to manually crafted scenes. In urban navigation, policies trained in UrbanVerse exhibit scaling power laws and strong generalization, improving success by +6.3% in simulation and +30.1% in zero-shot sim-to-real transfer comparing to prior methods, accomplishing a 300 m real-world mission with only two interventions.

Recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) for common-sense reasoning have led to the development of vision-language-action (VLA) models, enabling robots to perform generalized manipulation. Although existing autoregressive VLA methods design a specific architecture like dual-system to leverage large-scale pretrained knowledge, they tend to capture static information, often neglecting the dynamic aspects vital for embodied tasks. To this end, we propose TriVLA, a unified Vision-Language-Action model with a triple-system architecture for general robot control. The vision-language module (System 2) interprets the environment through vision and language instructions. The dynamics perception module (System 3) inherently produces visual representations that encompass both current static information and predicted future dynamics, thereby providing valuable guidance for policy learning. TriVLA utilizes pre-trained VLM model and fine-tunes pre-trained video foundation model on robot datasets along with internet human manipulation data. The subsequent policy learning module (System 1) generates fluid motor actions in real time. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that TriVLA operates at approximately 36 Hz and surpasses state-of-the-art imitation learning baselines on standard simulation benchmarks as well as challenging real-world manipulation tasks.

As large language models (LLMs) become widespread in various application domains, a critical challenge the AI community is facing is how to train these large AI models in a cost-effective manner. Existing LLM training plans typically employ a heuristic based parallel training strategy which is based on empirical observations rather than grounded upon a thorough examination of the search space of LLM parallelization. Such limitation renders existing systems to leave significant performance left on the table, wasting millions of dollars worth of training cost. This paper presents our profiling-driven simulator called vTrain, providing AI practitioners a fast yet accurate software framework to determine an efficient and cost-effective LLM training system configuration. We demonstrate vTrain's practicality through several case studies, e.g., effectively evaluating optimal training parallelization strategies that balances training time and its associated training cost, efficient multi-tenant GPU cluster schedulers targeting multiple LLM training jobs, and determining a compute-optimal LLM model architecture given a fixed compute budget.

Robust perception and dynamics modeling are fundamental to real-world robotic policy learning. Recent methods employ video diffusion models (VDMs) to enhance robotic policies, improving their understanding and modeling of the physical world. However, existing approaches overlook the coherent and physically consistent motion representations inherently encoded across frames in VDMs. To this end, we propose Video2Act, a framework that efficiently guides robotic action learning by explicitly integrating spatial and motion-aware representations. Building on the inherent representations of VDMs, we extract foreground boundaries and inter-frame motion variations while filtering out background noise and task-irrelevant biases. These refined representations are then used as additional conditioning inputs to a diffusion transformer (DiT) action head, enabling it to reason about what to manipulate and how to move. To mitigate inference inefficiency, we propose an asynchronous dual-system design, where the VDM functions as the slow System 2 and the DiT head as the fast System 1, working collaboratively to generate adaptive actions. By providing motion-aware conditions to System 1, Video2Act maintains stable manipulation even with low-frequency updates from the VDM. For evaluation, Video2Act surpasses previous state-of-the-art VLA methods by 7.7% in simulation and 21.7% in real-world tasks in terms of average success rate, further exhibiting strong generalization capabilities.

TOI-396 is an F6V star (Vapprox6.4) orbited by three transiting planets. The orbital periods of the two innermost planets are close to the 5:3 commensurability (P_b sim3.6 d and P_c sim6.0 d). To measure the masses of the three planets, refine their radii, and investigate whether planets b and c are in MMR, we carried out HARPS RV observations and retrieved photometric data from TESS. We extracted the RVs via a skew-normal fit onto the HARPS CCFs and performed an MCMC joint analysis of the Doppler measurements and transit photometry, while employing the breakpoint method to remove stellar activity from the RV time series. We also performed a thorough TTV dynamical analysis of the system. Our analysis confirms that the three planets have similar sizes: R_b=2.004_{-0.047}^{+0.045}R_{oplus}; R_c=1.979_{-0.051}^{+0.054}R_{oplus}; R_d=2.001_{-0.064}^{+0.063}R_{oplus}. For the first time, we have determined the RV masses for TOI-396b and d: M_b=3.55_{-0.96}^{+0.94}M_{oplus} (rho_b=2.44_{-0.68}^{+0.69} g cm^{-3}) and M_d=7.1pm1.6M_{oplus} (rho_d=4.9_{-1.1}^{+1.2} g cm^{-3}). Our results suggest a quite unusual system architecture, with the outermost planet being the densest. The Doppler reflex motion induced by TOI-396c remains undetected in our RV time series, likely due to the proximity of P_c to the star's rotation period (P_{rot}=6.7pm1.3 d). We also discovered that TOI-396b and c display significant TTVs. While the TTV dynamical analysis returns a formally precise mass for TOI-396c (M_{c,dyn}=2.24^{+0.13}_{-0.67}M_{oplus}), the result might not be accurate owing to the poor sampling of the TTV phase. We also conclude that TOI-396b and c are close to but out of the 5:3 MMR. Our numerical simulation suggests TTV semi-amplitudes of up to 5 hours over a temporal baseline of sim5.2 years.

Sim-to-real transfer remains a significant challenge in robotics due to the discrepancies between simulated and real-world dynamics. Traditional methods like Domain Randomization often fail to capture fine-grained dynamics, limiting their effectiveness for precise control tasks. In this work, we propose a novel approach that dynamically adjusts simulation environment parameters online using in-context learning. By leveraging past interaction histories as context, our method adapts the simulation environment dynamics to real-world dynamics without requiring gradient updates, resulting in faster and more accurate alignment between simulated and real-world performance. We validate our approach across two tasks: object scooping and table air hockey. In the sim-to-sim evaluations, our method significantly outperforms the baselines on environment parameter estimation by 80% and 42% in the object scooping and table air hockey setups, respectively. Furthermore, our method achieves at least 70% success rate in sim-to-real transfer on object scooping across three different objects. By incorporating historical interaction data, our approach delivers efficient and smooth system identification, advancing the deployment of robots in dynamic real-world scenarios. Demos are available on our project page: https://sim2real-capture.github.io/

Scene simulation in autonomous driving has gained significant attention because of its huge potential for generating customized data. However, existing editable scene simulation approaches face limitations in terms of user interaction efficiency, multi-camera photo-realistic rendering and external digital assets integration. To address these challenges, this paper introduces ChatSim, the first system that enables editable photo-realistic 3D driving scene simulations via natural language commands with external digital assets. To enable editing with high command flexibility,~ChatSim leverages a large language model (LLM) agent collaboration framework. To generate photo-realistic outcomes, ChatSim employs a novel multi-camera neural radiance field method. Furthermore, to unleash the potential of extensive high-quality digital assets, ChatSim employs a novel multi-camera lighting estimation method to achieve scene-consistent assets' rendering. Our experiments on Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that ChatSim can handle complex language commands and generate corresponding photo-realistic scene videos.