Daily Papers

Learning a perception and reasoning module for robotic assistants to plan steps to perform complex tasks based on natural language instructions often requires large free-form language annotations, especially for short high-level instructions. To reduce the cost of annotation, large language models (LLMs) are used as a planner with few data. However, when elaborating the steps, even the state-of-the-art planner that uses LLMs mostly relies on linguistic common sense, often neglecting the status of the environment at command reception, resulting in inappropriate plans. To generate plans grounded in the environment, we propose FLARE (Few-shot Language with environmental Adaptive Replanning Embodied agent), which improves task planning using both language command and environmental perception. As language instructions often contain ambiguities or incorrect expressions, we additionally propose to correct the mistakes using visual cues from the agent. The proposed scheme allows us to use a few language pairs thanks to the visual cues and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/snumprlab/flare.

Large language models (LLMs) deployed in real-world agentic applications must be capable of replanning and adapting when mid-task disruptions invalidate their prior decisions. Existing dynamic benchmarks primarily measure whether LLMs can detect temporal changes in a timely manner, leaving the complementary challenge of adaptive replanning under spatio-temporal dynamics largely unexplored. We introduce STT-Arena (Spatio-Temporal Tool-Use Arena), a benchmark of 227 high-quality interactive tasks spanning nine spatio-temporal conflict types and four solvability levels. Each task is grounded in a realistic, executable environment equipped with injected spatio-temporal triggers that can abruptly invalidate an ongoing plan, forcing the model to detect the state shift and construct a revised execution strategy. Extensive evaluation of frontier LLMs reveals that even the SOTA proprietary models, including Claude-4.6-Opus, achieves less than 40\% overall accuracies, highlighting the fundamental difficulty of spatio-temporal dynamic reasoning. Systematic analysis of failure trajectories uncovers three recurring error modes of existing models: Stale-State Execution, Misdiagnosis of Dynamic Triggers, and Missing Post-Adaptation Verification. Guided by these findings, we propose an iterative trajectory refinement technique that eliminates these failure patterns from training data, and combine it with online RL to produce STT-Agent-4B which outperforms frontier LLMs on STT-Arena.

Heterogeneous multi-robot systems are increasingly deployed in long-horizon missions that require coordination among robots with diverse capabilities. However, existing planning approaches struggle to construct accurate symbolic representations and maintain plan consistency in dynamic environments. Classical PDDL planners require manually crafted symbolic models, while LLM-based planners often ignore agent heterogeneity and environmental uncertainty. We introduce KGLAMP, a knowledge-graph-guided LLM planning framework for heterogeneous multi-robot teams. The framework maintains a structured knowledge graph encoding object relations, spatial reachability, and robot capabilities, which guides the LLM in generating accurate PDDL problem specifications. The knowledge graph serves as a persistent, dynamically updated memory that incorporates new observations and triggers replanning upon detecting inconsistencies, enabling symbolic plans to adapt to evolving world states. Experiments on the MAT-THOR benchmark show that KGLAMP improves performance by at least 25.5% over both LLM-only and PDDL-based variants.

Open-vocabulary mobile manipulation (OVMM) requires robots to follow language instructions, navigate, and manipulate while updating their world representation under dynamic environmental changes. However, most prior approaches update their world representation only at discrete update points such as navigation targets, waypoints, or the end of an action step, leaving robots blind between updates and causing cascading failures: overlooked objects, late error detection, and delayed replanning. To address this limitation, we propose BINDER (Bridging INstant and DEliberative Reasoning), a dual process framework that decouples strategic planning from continuous environment monitoring. Specifically, BINDER integrates a Deliberative Response Module (DRM, a multimodal LLM for task planning) with an Instant Response Module (IRM, a VideoLLM for continuous monitoring). The two modules play complementary roles: the DRM performs strategic planning with structured 3D scene updates and guides what the IRM attends to, while the IRM analyzes video streams to update memory, correct ongoing actions, and trigger replanning when necessary. Through this bidirectional coordination, the modules address the trade off between maintaining awareness and avoiding costly updates, enabling robust adaptation under dynamic conditions. Evaluated in three real world environments with dynamic object placement, BINDER achieves substantially higher success and efficiency than SoTA baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness for real world deployment.

Generative Behavior Cloning (GBC) is a simple yet effective framework for robot learning, particularly in multi-task settings. Recent GBC methods often employ diffusion policies with open-loop (OL) control, where actions are generated via a diffusion process and executed in multi-step chunks without replanning. While this approach has demonstrated strong success rates and generalization, its inherent stochasticity can result in erroneous action sampling, occasionally leading to unexpected task failures. Moreover, OL control suffers from delayed responses, which can degrade performance in noisy or dynamic environments. To address these limitations, we propose two novel techniques to enhance the consistency and reactivity of diffusion policies: (1) self-guidance, which improves action fidelity by leveraging past observations and implicitly promoting future-aware behavior; and (2) adaptive chunking, which selectively updates action sequences when the benefits of reactivity outweigh the need for temporal consistency. Extensive experiments show that our approach substantially improves GBC performance across a wide range of simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/junhyukso/SGAC

Automated vulnerability reproduction from CVE descriptions requires generating executable Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploits and validating them in target environments. This process is critical in software security research and practice, yet remains time-consuming and demands specialized expertise when performed manually. While LLM agents show promise for automating this task, existing approaches often conflate exploring attack directions with fixing implementation details, which leads to unproductive debugging loops when reproduction fails. To address this, we propose CVE2PoC, an LLM-based dual-loop agent framework following a plan-execute-evaluate paradigm. The Strategic Planner analyzes vulnerability semantics and target code to produce structured attack plans. The Tactical Executor generates PoC code and validates it through progressive verification. The Adaptive Refiner evaluates execution results and routes failures to different loops: the Tactical Loop for code-level refinement, while the Strategic Loop for attack strategy replanning. This dual-loop design enables the framework to escape ineffective debugging by matching remediation to failure type. Evaluation on two benchmarks covering 617 real-world vulnerabilities demonstrates that CVE2PoC achieves 82.9% and 54.3% reproduction success rates on SecBench.js and PatchEval, respectively, outperforming the best baseline by 11.3% and 20.4%. Human evaluation confirms that generated PoCs achieve comparable code quality to human-written exploits in readability and reusability.

Path planning in dynamic environments remains a core challenge in robotics, especially as autonomous systems are deployed in unpredictable spaces such as warehouses and public roads. While algorithms like Fast Marching Tree (FMT^{*}) offer asymptotically optimal solutions in static settings, their single-pass design prevents path revisions which are essential for real-time adaptation. On the other hand, full replanning is often too computationally expensive. This paper introduces FMT^{x}, an extension of the Fast Marching Tree algorithm that enables efficient and consistent replanning in dynamic environments. We revisit the neighbor selection rule of FMT^{*} and demonstrate that a minimal change overcomes its single-pass limitation, enabling the algorithm to update cost-to-come values upon discovering better connections without sacrificing asymptotic optimality or computational efficiency. By maintaining a cost-ordered priority queue and applying a selective update condition that uses an expanding neighbor to identify and trigger the re-evaluation of any node with a potentially suboptimal path, FMT^{x} ensures that suboptimal routes are efficiently repaired as the environment evolves. This targeted strategy preserves the inherent efficiency of FMT^{*} while enabling robust adaptation to changes in obstacle configuration. FMT^{x} is proven to recover an asymptotically optimal solution after environmental changes. Experimental results demonstrate that FMT^{x} outperforms the influential replanner RRT^{x}, reacting more swiftly to dynamic events with lower computational overhead and thus offering a more effective solution for real-time robotic navigation in unpredictable worlds.

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential in facilitating high-level reasoning, logical reasoning and robotics planning. Recently, LLMs have also been able to generate reward functions for low-level robot actions, effectively bridging the interface between high-level planning and low-level robot control. However, the challenge remains that even with syntactically correct plans, robots can still fail to achieve their intended goals. This failure can be attributed to imperfect plans proposed by LLMs or to unforeseeable environmental circumstances that hinder the execution of planned subtasks due to erroneous assumptions about the state of objects. One way to prevent these challenges is to rely on human-provided step-by-step instructions, limiting the autonomy of robotic systems. Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable success in tasks such as visual question answering and image captioning. Leveraging the capabilities of VLMs, we present a novel framework called Robotic Replanning with Perception and Language Models (RePLan) that enables real-time replanning capabilities for long-horizon tasks. This framework utilizes the physical grounding provided by a VLM's understanding of the world's state to adapt robot actions when the initial plan fails to achieve the desired goal. We test our approach within four environments containing seven long-horizion tasks. We find that RePLan enables a robot to successfully adapt to unforeseen obstacles while accomplishing open-ended, long-horizon goals, where baseline models cannot. Find more information at https://replan-lm.github.io/replan.github.io/

In the pursuit of fully autonomous robotic systems capable of taking over tasks traditionally performed by humans, the complexity of open-world environments poses a considerable challenge. Addressing this imperative, this study contributes to the field of Large Language Models (LLMs) applied to task and motion planning for robots. We propose a system architecture that orchestrates a seamless interplay between multiple cognitive levels, encompassing reasoning, planning, and motion generation. At its core lies a novel replanning strategy that handles physically grounded, logical, and semantic errors in the generated plans. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed feedback architecture, particularly its impact on executability, correctness, and time complexity via empirical evaluation in the context of a simulation and two intricate real-world scenarios: blocks world, barman and pizza preparation.

We present a novel autonomous robot navigation algorithm for outdoor environments that is capable of handling diverse terrain traversability conditions. Our approach, VLM-GroNav, uses vision-language models (VLMs) and integrates them with physical grounding that is used to assess intrinsic terrain properties such as deformability and slipperiness. We use proprioceptive-based sensing, which provides direct measurements of these physical properties, and enhances the overall semantic understanding of the terrains. Our formulation uses in-context learning to ground the VLM's semantic understanding with proprioceptive data to allow dynamic updates of traversability estimates based on the robot's real-time physical interactions with the environment. We use the updated traversability estimations to inform both the local and global planners for real-time trajectory replanning. We validate our method on a legged robot (Ghost Vision 60) and a wheeled robot (Clearpath Husky), in diverse real-world outdoor environments with different deformable and slippery terrains. In practice, we observe significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods by up to 50% increase in navigation success rate.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable planning abilities across various domains, including robotics manipulation and navigation. While recent efforts in robotics have leveraged LLMs both for high-level and low-level planning, these approaches often face significant challenges, such as hallucinations in long-horizon tasks and limited adaptability due to the generation of plans in a single pass without real-time feedback. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multi-agent LLM framework, Multi-Agent Large Language Model for Manipulation (MALMM) that distributes high-level planning and low-level control code generation across specialized LLM agents, supervised by an additional agent that dynamically manages transitions. By incorporating observations from the environment after each step, our framework effectively handles intermediate failures and enables adaptive re-planning. Unlike existing methods, our approach does not rely on pre-trained skill policies or in-context learning examples and generalizes to a variety of new tasks. We evaluate our approach on nine RLBench tasks, including long-horizon tasks, and demonstrate its ability to solve robotics manipulation in a zero-shot setting, thereby overcoming key limitations of existing LLM-based manipulation methods.

In dynamic operational environments, particularly in collaborative robotics, the inevitability of failures necessitates robust and adaptable recovery strategies. Traditional automated recovery strategies, while effective for predefined scenarios, often lack the flexibility required for on-the-fly task management and adaptation to expected failures. Addressing this gap, we propose a novel approach that models recovery behaviors as adaptable robotic skills, leveraging the Behavior Trees and Motion Generators~(BTMG) framework for policy representation. This approach distinguishes itself by employing reinforcement learning~(RL) to dynamically refine recovery behavior parameters, enabling a tailored response to a wide array of failure scenarios with minimal human intervention. We assess our methodology through a series of progressively challenging scenarios within a peg-in-a-hole task, demonstrating the approach's effectiveness in enhancing operational efficiency and task success rates in collaborative robotics settings. We validate our approach using a dual-arm KUKA robot.

This paper introduces CoMuRoS (Collaborative Multi-Robot System), a generalizable hierarchical architecture for heterogeneous robot teams that unifies centralized deliberation with decentralized execution, and supports event-driven replanning. A Task Manager LLM interprets natural-language goals, classifies tasks, and allocates subtasks using static rules plus dynamic contexts (task, history, robot and task status, and events).Each robot runs a local LLM that composes executable Python code from primitive skills (ROS2 nodes, policies), while onboard perception (VLMs/image processing) continuously monitors events and classifies them into relevant or irrelevant to the task. Task failures or user intent changes trigger replanning, allowing robots to assist teammates, resume tasks, or request human help. Hardware studies demonstrate autonomous recovery from disruptive events, filtering of irrelevant distractions, and tightly coordinated transport with emergent human-robot cooperation (e.g., multirobot collaborative object recovery success rate: 9/10, coordinated transport: 8/8, human-assisted recovery: 5/5).Simulation studies show intention-aware replanning. A curated textual benchmark spanning 22 scenarios (3 tasks each, around 20 robots) evaluates task allocation, classification, IoU, executability, and correctness, with high average scores (e.g., correctness up to 0.91) across multiple LLMs, a separate replanning set (5 scenarios) achieves 1.0 correctness. Compared with prior LLM-based systems, CoMuRoS uniquely demonstrates runtime, event-driven replanning on physical robots, delivering robust, flexible multi-robot and human-robot collaboration.

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has shown clear effectiveness in coordinating multiple agents across simulated benchmarks and constrained scenarios. However, its deployment in real-world multi-agent systems (MAS) remains limited, primarily due to the complex and dynamic nature of such environments. These challenges arise from multiple interacting sources of variability, including fluctuating agent populations, evolving task goals, and inconsistent execution conditions. Together, these factors demand that MARL algorithms remain effective under continuously changing system configurations and operational demands. To better capture and assess this capacity for adjustment, we introduce the concept of adaptability as a unified and practically grounded lens through which to evaluate the reliability of MARL algorithms under shifting conditions, broadly referring to any changes in the environment dynamics that may occur during learning or execution. Centred on the notion of adaptability, we propose a structured framework comprising three key dimensions: learning adaptability, policy adaptability, and scenario-driven adaptability. By adopting this adaptability perspective, we aim to support more principled assessments of MARL performance beyond narrowly defined benchmarks. Ultimately, this survey contributes to the development of algorithms that are better suited for deployment in dynamic, real-world multi-agent systems.

Language Model (LM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving tasks that require multiple interactions with the environment. However, they remain vulnerable in environments where a single error often leads to irrecoverable failure, particularly under strict feasibility constraints. We systematically analyze existing agent frameworks, identifying imperfect planning and stochastic execution as the primary causes. To address these challenges, we propose Tool-guided Adaptive Planning with constrained Execution (TAPE). TAPE enhances planning capability by aggregating multiple plans into a graph and employing an external solver to identify a feasible path. During execution, TAPE employs constrained decoding to reduce sampling noise, while adaptively re-planning whenever environmental feedback deviates from the intended state. Experiments across Sokoban, ALFWorld, MuSiQue, and GSM8K-Hard demonstrate that TAPE consistently outperforms existing frameworks, with particularly large gains on hard settings, improving success rates by 21.0 percentage points on hard settings on average, and by 20.0 percentage points for weaker base models on average. Code and data available at here.

Coverage path planning (CPP) is the problem of finding a path that covers the entire free space of a confined area, with applications ranging from robotic lawn mowing to search-and-rescue. When the environment is unknown, the path needs to be planned online while mapping the environment, which cannot be addressed by offline planning methods that do not allow for a flexible path space. We investigate how suitable reinforcement learning is for this challenging problem, and analyze the involved components required to efficiently learn coverage paths, such as action space, input feature representation, neural network architecture, and reward function. We propose a computationally feasible egocentric map representation based on frontiers, and a novel reward term based on total variation to promote complete coverage. Through extensive experiments, we show that our approach surpasses the performance of both previous RL-based approaches and highly specialized methods across multiple CPP variations.

Forecasting future trajectories of agents in complex traffic scenes requires reliable and efficient predictions for all agents in the scene. However, existing methods for trajectory prediction are either inefficient or sacrifice accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose ADAPT, a novel approach for jointly predicting the trajectories of all agents in the scene with dynamic weight learning. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both single-agent and multi-agent settings on the Argoverse and Interaction datasets, with a fraction of their computational overhead. We attribute the improvement in our performance: first, to the adaptive head augmenting the model capacity without increasing the model size; second, to our design choices in the endpoint-conditioned prediction, reinforced by gradient stopping. Our analyses show that ADAPT can focus on each agent with adaptive prediction, allowing for accurate predictions efficiently. https://KUIS-AI.github.io/adapt

We introduce RoboNinja, a learning-based cutting system for multi-material objects (i.e., soft objects with rigid cores such as avocados or mangos). In contrast to prior works using open-loop cutting actions to cut through single-material objects (e.g., slicing a cucumber), RoboNinja aims to remove the soft part of an object while preserving the rigid core, thereby maximizing the yield. To achieve this, our system closes the perception-action loop by utilizing an interactive state estimator and an adaptive cutting policy. The system first employs sparse collision information to iteratively estimate the position and geometry of an object's core and then generates closed-loop cutting actions based on the estimated state and a tolerance value. The "adaptiveness" of the policy is achieved through the tolerance value, which modulates the policy's conservativeness when encountering collisions, maintaining an adaptive safety distance from the estimated core. Learning such cutting skills directly on a real-world robot is challenging. Yet, existing simulators are limited in simulating multi-material objects or computing the energy consumption during the cutting process. To address this issue, we develop a differentiable cutting simulator that supports multi-material coupling and allows for the generation of optimized trajectories as demonstrations for policy learning. Furthermore, by using a low-cost force sensor to capture collision feedback, we were able to successfully deploy the learned model in real-world scenarios, including objects with diverse core geometries and soft materials.

This paper proposes a novel sampling-based motion planner, which integrates in RRT* (Rapidly exploring Random Tree star) a database of pre-computed motion primitives to alleviate its computational load and allow for motion planning in a dynamic or partially known environment. The database is built by considering a set of initial and final state pairs in some grid space, and determining for each pair an optimal trajectory that is compatible with the system dynamics and constraints, while minimizing a cost. Nodes are progressively added to the tree of feasible trajectories in the RRT* algorithm by extracting at random a sample in the gridded state space and selecting the best obstacle-free motion primitive in the database that joins it to an existing node. The tree is rewired if some nodes can be reached from the new sampled state through an obstacle-free motion primitive with lower cost. The computationally more intensive part of motion planning is thus moved to the preliminary offline phase of the database construction {at the price of some performance degradation due to gridding. Grid resolution can be tuned so as to compromise between (sub)optimality and size of the database. The planner is shown to be }asymptotically optimal as the grid resolution goes to zero and the number of sampled states grows to infinity.

We provide an algorithm for adaptive legged locomotion via online learning and model predictive control. The algorithm is composed of two interacting modules: model predictive control (MPC) and online learning of residual dynamics. The residual dynamics can represent modeling errors and external disturbances. We are motivated by the future of autonomy where quadrupeds will autonomously perform complex tasks despite real-world unknown uncertainty, such as unknown payload and uneven terrains. The algorithm uses random Fourier features to approximate the residual dynamics in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Then, it employs MPC based on the current learned model of the residual dynamics. The model is updated online in a self-supervised manner using least squares based on the data collected while controlling the quadruped. The algorithm enjoys sublinear dynamic regret, defined as the suboptimality against an optimal clairvoyant controller that knows how the residual dynamics. We validate our algorithm in Gazebo and MuJoCo simulations, where the quadruped aims to track reference trajectories. The Gazebo simulations include constant unknown external forces up to 12g, where g is the gravity vector, in flat terrain, slope terrain with 20degree inclination, and rough terrain with 0.25m height variation. The MuJoCo simulations include time-varying unknown disturbances with payload up to 8~kg and time-varying ground friction coefficients in flat terrain.

Reinforcement learning-based policies for continuous control robotic navigation tasks often fail to adapt to changes in the environment during real-time deployment, which may result in catastrophic failures. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach called RE-MOVE (REquest help and MOVE on), which uses language-based feedback to adjust trained policies to real-time changes in the environment. In this work, we enable the trained policy to decide when to ask for feedback and how to incorporate feedback into trained policies. RE-MOVE incorporates epistemic uncertainty to determine the optimal time to request feedback from humans and uses language-based feedback for real-time adaptation. We perform extensive synthetic and real-world evaluations to demonstrate the benefits of our proposed approach in several test-time dynamic navigation scenarios. Our approach enable robots to learn from human feedback and adapt to previously unseen adversarial situations.

Industrial disruption replanning demands multi-agent coordination under strict latency and communication budgets, where disruptions propagate through tightly coupled physical dependencies and rapidly invalidate baseline schedules and commitments. Existing coordination schemes often treat communication as either effectively free (broadcast-style escalation) or fixed in advance (hand-tuned neighborhoods), both of which are brittle once the disruption footprint extends beyond a local region. We present \CASCADE, a budgeted replanning mechanism that makes communication scope explicit and auditable rather than fixed or implicit. Each agent maintains an explicit knowledge base, solves role-conditioned local decision problems to revise commitments, and coordinates through lightweight contract primitives whose footprint expands only when local validation indicates that the current scope is insufficient. This design separates a unified agent substrate (Knowledge Base / Decision Manager / Communication Manager) from a scoped interaction layer that controls who is contacted, how far coordination propagates, and when escalation is triggered under explicit budgets. We evaluate \CASCADE on disrupted manufacturing and supply-chain settings using unified diagnostics intended to test a mechanism-design claim -- whether explicit scope control yields useful quality-latency-communication trade-offs and improved robustness under uncertainty -- rather than to provide a complete algorithmic ranking.

3D Scene Graphs integrate both metric and semantic information, yet their structure remains underutilized for improving path planning efficiency and interpretability. In this work, we present S-Path, a situationally-aware path planner that leverages the metric-semantic structure of indoor 3D Scene Graphs to significantly enhance planning efficiency. S-Path follows a two-stage process: it first performs a search over a semantic graph derived from the scene graph to yield a human-understandable high-level path. This also identifies relevant regions for planning, which later allows the decomposition of the problem into smaller, independent subproblems that can be solved in parallel. We also introduce a replanning mechanism that, in the event of an infeasible path, reuses information from previously solved subproblems to update semantic heuristics and prioritize reuse to further improve the efficiency of future planning attempts. Extensive experiments on both real-world and simulated environments show that S-Path achieves average reductions of 5.7x in planning time while maintaining comparable path optimality to classical sampling-based planners and surpassing them in complex scenarios, making it an efficient and interpretable path planner for environments represented by indoor 3D Scene Graphs.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for the representation of natural, complex 3D scenes. NeRFs represent continuous volumetric density and RGB values in a neural network, and generate photo-realistic images from unseen camera viewpoints through ray tracing. We propose an algorithm for navigating a robot through a 3D environment represented as a NeRF using only an on-board RGB camera for localization. We assume the NeRF for the scene has been pre-trained offline, and the robot's objective is to navigate through unoccupied space in the NeRF to reach a goal pose. We introduce a trajectory optimization algorithm that avoids collisions with high-density regions in the NeRF based on a discrete time version of differential flatness that is amenable to constraining the robot's full pose and control inputs. We also introduce an optimization based filtering method to estimate 6DoF pose and velocities for the robot in the NeRF given only an onboard RGB camera. We combine the trajectory planner with the pose filter in an online replanning loop to give a vision-based robot navigation pipeline. We present simulation results with a quadrotor robot navigating through a jungle gym environment, the inside of a church, and Stonehenge using only an RGB camera. We also demonstrate an omnidirectional ground robot navigating through the church, requiring it to reorient to fit through the narrow gap. Videos of this work can be found at https://mikh3x4.github.io/nerf-navigation/ .

Humans are remarkably data-efficient when adapting to new unseen conditions, like driving a new car. In contrast, modern robotic control systems, like neural network policies trained using Reinforcement Learning (RL), are highly specialized for single environments. Because of this overfitting, they are known to break down even under small differences like the Simulation-to-Reality (Sim2Real) gap and require system identification and retraining for even minimal changes to the system. In this work, we present RAPTOR, a method for training a highly adaptive foundation policy for quadrotor control. Our method enables training a single, end-to-end neural-network policy to control a wide variety of quadrotors. We test 10 different real quadrotors from 32 g to 2.4 kg that also differ in motor type (brushed vs. brushless), frame type (soft vs. rigid), propeller type (2/3/4-blade), and flight controller (PX4/Betaflight/Crazyflie/M5StampFly). We find that a tiny, three-layer policy with only 2084 parameters is sufficient for zero-shot adaptation to a wide variety of platforms. The adaptation through In-Context Learning is made possible by using a recurrence in the hidden layer. The policy is trained through a novel Meta-Imitation Learning algorithm, where we sample 1000 quadrotors and train a teacher policy for each of them using Reinforcement Learning. Subsequently, the 1000 teachers are distilled into a single, adaptive student policy. We find that within milliseconds, the resulting foundation policy adapts zero-shot to unseen quadrotors. We extensively test the capabilities of the foundation policy under numerous conditions (trajectory tracking, indoor/outdoor, wind disturbance, poking, different propellers).

An interactive robot framework accomplishes long-horizon task planning and can easily generalize to new goals or distinct tasks, even during execution. However, most traditional methods require predefined module design, which makes it hard to generalize to different goals. Recent large language model based approaches can allow for more open-ended planning but often require heavy prompt engineering or domain-specific pretrained models. To tackle this, we propose a simple framework that achieves interactive task planning with language models. Our system incorporates both high-level planning and low-level function execution via language. We verify the robustness of our system in generating novel high-level instructions for unseen objectives and its ease of adaptation to different tasks by merely substituting the task guidelines, without the need for additional complex prompt engineering. Furthermore, when the user sends a new request, our system is able to replan accordingly with precision based on the new request, task guidelines and previously executed steps. Please check more details on our https://wuphilipp.github.io/itp_site and https://youtu.be/TrKLuyv26_g.

Robots have been successfully used to perform tasks with high precision. In real-world environments with sparse rewards and multiple goals, learning is still a major challenge and Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms fail to learn good policies. Training in simulation environments and then fine-tuning in the real world is a common approach. However, adapting to the real-world setting is a challenge. In this paper, we present a method named Ready for Production Hierarchical RL (ReProHRL) that divides tasks with hierarchical multi-goal navigation guided by reinforcement learning. We also use object detectors as a pre-processing step to learn multi-goal navigation and transfer it to the real world. Empirical results show that the proposed ReProHRL method outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline in simulation and real-world environments in terms of both training time and performance. Although both methods achieve a 100% success rate in a simple environment for single goal-based navigation, in a more complex environment and multi-goal setting, the proposed method outperforms the baseline by 18% and 5%, respectively. For the real-world implementation and proof of concept demonstration, we deploy the proposed method on a nano-drone named Crazyflie with a front camera to perform multi-goal navigation experiments.

The transformer architecture and variants presented remarkable success across many machine learning tasks in recent years. This success is intrinsically related to the capability of handling long sequences and the presence of context-dependent weights from the attention mechanism. We argue that these capabilities suit the central role of a Meta-Reinforcement Learning algorithm. Indeed, a meta-RL agent needs to infer the task from a sequence of trajectories. Furthermore, it requires a fast adaptation strategy to adapt its policy for a new task -- which can be achieved using the self-attention mechanism. In this work, we present TrMRL (Transformers for Meta-Reinforcement Learning), a meta-RL agent that mimics the memory reinstatement mechanism using the transformer architecture. It associates the recent past of working memories to build an episodic memory recursively through the transformer layers. We show that the self-attention computes a consensus representation that minimizes the Bayes Risk at each layer and provides meaningful features to compute the best actions. We conducted experiments in high-dimensional continuous control environments for locomotion and dexterous manipulation. Results show that TrMRL presents comparable or superior asymptotic performance, sample efficiency, and out-of-distribution generalization compared to the baselines in these environments.

This paper presents an AI-augmented decentralized framework for multi-agent (multi-robot) environmental mapping under limited sensing and communication. While conventional coverage formulations achieve effective spatial allocation when an accurate reference map is available, their performance deteriorates under uncertain or biased priors. The proposed method introduces an adaptive and self-correcting mechanism that enables agents to iteratively refine local density estimates within an optimal transport-based framework, ensuring theoretical consistency and scalability. A dual multilayer perceptron (MLP) module enhances adaptivity by inferring local mean-variance statistics and regulating virtual uncertainty for long-unvisited regions, mitigating stagnation around local minima. Theoretical analysis rigorously proves convergence under the Wasserstein metric, while simulation results demonstrate that the proposed AI-augmented Density-Driven Optimal Control consistently achieves robust and precise alignment with the ground-truth density, yielding substantially higher-fidelity reconstruction of complex multi-modal spatial distributions compared with conventional decentralized baselines.

Plasticity, the ability of a neural network to evolve with new data, is crucial for high-performance and sample-efficient visual reinforcement learning (VRL). Although methods like resetting and regularization can potentially mitigate plasticity loss, the influences of various components within the VRL framework on the agent's plasticity are still poorly understood. In this work, we conduct a systematic empirical exploration focusing on three primary underexplored facets and derive the following insightful conclusions: (1) data augmentation is essential in maintaining plasticity; (2) the critic's plasticity loss serves as the principal bottleneck impeding efficient training; and (3) without timely intervention to recover critic's plasticity in the early stages, its loss becomes catastrophic. These insights suggest a novel strategy to address the high replay ratio (RR) dilemma, where exacerbated plasticity loss hinders the potential improvements of sample efficiency brought by increased reuse frequency. Rather than setting a static RR for the entire training process, we propose Adaptive RR, which dynamically adjusts the RR based on the critic's plasticity level. Extensive evaluations indicate that Adaptive RR not only avoids catastrophic plasticity loss in the early stages but also benefits from more frequent reuse in later phases, resulting in superior sample efficiency.

Foundation models have shown impressive adaptation and scalability in supervised and self-supervised learning problems, but so far these successes have not fully translated to reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we demonstrate that training an RL agent at scale leads to a general in-context learning algorithm that can adapt to open-ended novel embodied 3D problems as quickly as humans. In a vast space of held-out environment dynamics, our adaptive agent (AdA) displays on-the-fly hypothesis-driven exploration, efficient exploitation of acquired knowledge, and can successfully be prompted with first-person demonstrations. Adaptation emerges from three ingredients: (1) meta-reinforcement learning across a vast, smooth and diverse task distribution, (2) a policy parameterised as a large-scale attention-based memory architecture, and (3) an effective automated curriculum that prioritises tasks at the frontier of an agent's capabilities. We demonstrate characteristic scaling laws with respect to network size, memory length, and richness of the training task distribution. We believe our results lay the foundation for increasingly general and adaptive RL agents that perform well across ever-larger open-ended domains.

For robots to operate in general environments like households, they must be able to perform non-prehensile manipulation actions such as toppling and rolling to manipulate ungraspable objects. However, prior works on non-prehensile manipulation cannot yet generalize across environments with diverse geometries. The main challenge lies in adapting to varying environmental constraints: within a cabinet, the robot must avoid walls and ceilings; to lift objects to the top of a step, the robot must account for the step's pose and extent. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive success in non-prehensile manipulation, accounting for such variability presents a challenge for the generalist policy, as it must learn diverse strategies for each new combination of constraints. To address this, we propose a modular and reconfigurable architecture that adaptively reconfigures network modules based on task requirements. To capture the geometric variability in environments, we extend the contact-based object representation (CORN) to environment geometries, and propose a procedural algorithm for generating diverse environments to train our agent. Taken together, the resulting policy can zero-shot transfer to novel real-world environments and objects despite training entirely within a simulator. We additionally release a simulation-based benchmark featuring nine digital twins of real-world scenes with 353 objects to facilitate non-prehensile manipulation research in realistic domains.

One of the key challenges in deploying RL to real-world applications is to adapt to variations of unknown environment contexts, such as changing terrains in robotic tasks and fluctuated bandwidth in congestion control. Existing works on adaptation to unknown environment contexts either assume the contexts are the same for the whole episode or assume the context variables are Markovian. However, in many real-world applications, the environment context usually stays stable for a stochastic period and then changes in an abrupt and unpredictable manner within an episode, resulting in a segment structure, which existing works fail to address. To leverage the segment structure of piecewise stable context in real-world applications, in this paper, we propose a \textbf{Segmented Context Belief Augmented Deep~(SeCBAD)} RL method. Our method can jointly infer the belief distribution over latent context with the posterior over segment length and perform more accurate belief context inference with observed data within the current context segment. The inferred belief context can be leveraged to augment the state, leading to a policy that can adapt to abrupt variations in context. We demonstrate empirically that SeCBAD can infer context segment length accurately and outperform existing methods on a toy grid world environment and Mujuco tasks with piecewise-stable context.

Evolutionary agentic systems intensify the trade-off between computational efficiency and reasoning capability by repeatedly invoking large language models (LLMs) during inference. This setting raises a central question: how can an agent dynamically select an LLM that is sufficiently capable for the current generation step while remaining computationally efficient? While model cascades offer a practical mechanism for balancing this trade-off, existing routing strategies typically rely on static heuristics or external controllers and do not explicitly account for model uncertainty. We introduce AdaptEvolve: Adaptive LLM Selection for Multi-LLM Evolutionary Refinement within an evolutionary sequential refinement framework that leverages intrinsic generation confidence to estimate real-time solvability. Empirical results show that confidence-driven selection yields a favourable Pareto frontier, reducing total inference cost by an average of 37.9% across benchmarks while retaining 97.5% of the upper-bound accuracy of static large-model baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/raypretam/adaptive_llm_selection.

This paper is an initial endeavor to bridge the gap between powerful Deep Reinforcement Learning methodologies and the problem of exploration/coverage of unknown terrains. Within this scope, MarsExplorer, an openai-gym compatible environment tailored to exploration/coverage of unknown areas, is presented. MarsExplorer translates the original robotics problem into a Reinforcement Learning setup that various off-the-shelf algorithms can tackle. Any learned policy can be straightforwardly applied to a robotic platform without an elaborate simulation model of the robot's dynamics to apply a different learning/adaptation phase. One of its core features is the controllable multi-dimensional procedural generation of terrains, which is the key for producing policies with strong generalization capabilities. Four different state-of-the-art RL algorithms (A3C, PPO, Rainbow, and SAC) are trained on the MarsExplorer environment, and a proper evaluation of their results compared to the average human-level performance is reported. In the follow-up experimental analysis, the effect of the multi-dimensional difficulty setting on the learning capabilities of the best-performing algorithm (PPO) is analyzed. A milestone result is the generation of an exploration policy that follows the Hilbert curve without providing this information to the environment or rewarding directly or indirectly Hilbert-curve-like trajectories. The experimental analysis is concluded by evaluating PPO learned policy algorithm side-by-side with frontier-based exploration strategies. A study on the performance curves revealed that PPO-based policy was capable of performing adaptive-to-the-unknown-terrain sweeping without leaving expensive-to-revisit areas uncovered, underlying the capability of RL-based methodologies to tackle exploration tasks efficiently. The source code can be found at: https://github.com/dimikout3/MarsExplorer.

Rapidly-exploring random trees (RRTs) are popular in motion planning because they find solutions efficiently to single-query problems. Optimal RRTs (RRT*s) extend RRTs to the problem of finding the optimal solution, but in doing so asymptotically find the optimal path from the initial state to every state in the planning domain. This behaviour is not only inefficient but also inconsistent with their single-query nature. For problems seeking to minimize path length, the subset of states that can improve a solution can be described by a prolate hyperspheroid. We show that unless this subset is sampled directly, the probability of improving a solution becomes arbitrarily small in large worlds or high state dimensions. In this paper, we present an exact method to focus the search by directly sampling this subset. The advantages of the presented sampling technique are demonstrated with a new algorithm, Informed RRT*. This method retains the same probabilistic guarantees on completeness and optimality as RRT* while improving the convergence rate and final solution quality. We present the algorithm as a simple modification to RRT* that could be further extended by more advanced path-planning algorithms. We show experimentally that it outperforms RRT* in rate of convergence, final solution cost, and ability to find difficult passages while demonstrating less dependence on the state dimension and range of the planning problem.

Planning with a learned model is arguably a key component of intelligence. There are several challenges in realizing such a component in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) problems. One such challenge is dealing effectively with continuous action spaces when using tree-search planning (e.g., it is not feasible to consider every action even at just the root node of the tree). In this paper we present a method for selecting affordances useful for planning -- for learning which small number of actions/options from a continuous space of actions/options to consider in the tree-expansion process during planning. We consider affordances that are goal-and-state-conditional mappings to actions/options as well as unconditional affordances that simply select actions/options available in all states. Our selection method is gradient based: we compute gradients through the planning procedure to update the parameters of the function that represents affordances. Our empirical work shows that it is feasible to learn to select both primitive-action and option affordances, and that simultaneously learning to select affordances and planning with a learned value-equivalent model can outperform model-free RL.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is increasingly viewed as a tree pruning mechanism. However, we identify a systemic pathology termed Recursive Space Contraction (RSC), an irreversible collapse driven by the combined dynamics of positive sharpening and negative squeezing, where the sampling probability of valid alternatives vanishes. While Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization aims to mitigate this, it imposes a rigid Shape Matching constraint that forces the policy to mimic the reference model's full density, creating a gradient conflict with the sharpening required for correctness. We propose Anchored Policy Optimization (APO), shifting the paradigm from global Shape Matching to Support Coverage. By defining a Safe Manifold based on the reference model's high-confidence support, APO permits aggressive sharpening for efficiency while selectively invoking a restorative force during error correction to prevent collapse. We theoretically derive that APO serves as a gradient-aligned mechanism to maximize support coverage, enabling an Elastic Recovery that re-inflates valid branches. Empirical evaluations on mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that APO breaks the accuracy-diversity trade-off, significantly improving Pass@1 while restoring the Pass@K diversity typically lost by standard policy gradient methods.

Multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning (mCPP) algorithms in popular commercial software typically treat a Region of Interest (RoI) only as a 2D plane, ignoring important3D structure characteristics. This leads to incomplete 3Dreconstructions, especially around occluded or vertical surfaces. In this paper, we propose a modular algorithm that can extend commercial two-dimensional path planners to facilitate terrain-aware planning by adjusting altitude and camera orientations. To demonstrate it, we extend the well-known DARP (Divide Areas for Optimal Multi-Robot Coverage Path Planning) algorithm and produce DARP-3D. We present simulation results in multiple 3D environments and a real-world flight test using DJI hardware. Compared to baseline, our approach consistently captures improved 3D reconstructions, particularly in areas with significant vertical features. An open-source implementation of the algorithm is available here:https://github.com/konskara/TerraPlan

This paper proposes the Real-Time Fast Marching Tree (RT-FMT), a real-time planning algorithm that features local and global path generation, multiple-query planning, and dynamic obstacle avoidance. During the search, RT-FMT quickly looks for the global solution and, in the meantime, generates local paths that can be used by the robot to start execution faster. In addition, our algorithm constantly rewires the tree to keep branches from forming inside the dynamic obstacles and to maintain the tree root near the robot, which allows the tree to be reused multiple times for different goals. Our algorithm is based on the planners Fast Marching Tree (FMT*) and Real-time Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree (RT-RRT*). We show via simulations that RT-FMT outperforms RT- RRT* in both execution cost and arrival time, in most cases. Moreover, we also demonstrate via simulation that it is worthwhile taking the local path before the global path is available in order to reduce arrival time, even though there is a small possibility of taking an inferior path.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have shown strong potential on complex interactive tasks. However, standard RL paradigms favor static problem-solving over continuous adaptation: agents often converge to suboptimal strategies due to insufficient exploration, while learned knowledge remains implicit within parameters rather than explicitly retrievable, limiting effective experiential learning. To address these limitations, we introduce RetroAgent, an online RL framework that empowers agents to master complex interactive environments not just by solving, but by evolving. Concretely, RetroAgent features a hindsight self-reflection mechanism that produces dual intrinsic feedback: (1) intrinsic numerical feedback that that tracks incremental subtask completion relative to prior attempts, rewarding promising explorations, and (2) intrinsic language feedback that distills reusable lessons into a memory buffer, retrieved via our proposed Similarity & Utility-Aware Upper Confidence Bound (SimUtil-UCB) strategy balancing relevance, utility, and exploration to effectively leverage past experiences. Extensive experiments on two model families across four challenging agentic tasks demonstrate that RetroAgent significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results -- e.g., surpassing Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)-trained agents by +18.3% on ALFWorld, +15.4% on WebShop, +27.1% on Sokoban, and +8.9% on MineSweeper -- while exhibiting strong test-time adaptation and generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios.

Diffusion models have demonstrated their powerful generative capability in many tasks, with great potential to serve as a paradigm for offline reinforcement learning. However, the quality of the diffusion model is limited by the insufficient diversity of training data, which hinders the performance of planning and the generalizability to new tasks. This paper introduces AdaptDiffuser, an evolutionary planning method with diffusion that can self-evolve to improve the diffusion model hence a better planner, not only for seen tasks but can also adapt to unseen tasks. AdaptDiffuser enables the generation of rich synthetic expert data for goal-conditioned tasks using guidance from reward gradients. It then selects high-quality data via a discriminator to finetune the diffusion model, which improves the generalization ability to unseen tasks. Empirical experiments on two benchmark environments and two carefully designed unseen tasks in KUKA industrial robot arm and Maze2D environments demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaptDiffuser. For example, AdaptDiffuser not only outperforms the previous art Diffuser by 20.8% on Maze2D and 7.5% on MuJoCo locomotion, but also adapts better to new tasks, e.g., KUKA pick-and-place, by 27.9% without requiring additional expert data. More visualization results and demo videos could be found on our project page.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a mainstream paradigm for training Mobile GUI Agents, yet it struggles with the temporal credit assignment problem inherent in long-horizon tasks. A primary challenge lies in the trade-off between reward fidelity and density: outcome reward offers high fidelity but suffers from signal sparsity, while process reward provides dense supervision but remains prone to bias and reward hacking. To resolve this conflict, we propose the Adaptive Milestone Reward (ADMIRE) mechanism. ADMIRE constructs a verifiable, adaptive reward system by anchoring trajectory to milestones, which are dynamically distilled from successful explorations. Crucially, ADMIRE integrates an asymmetric credit assignment strategy that denoises successful trajectories and scaffolds failed trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ADMIRE consistently yields over 10% absolute improvement in success rate across different base models on AndroidWorld. Moreover, the method exhibits robust generalizability, achieving strong performance across diverse RL algorithms and heterogeneous environments such as web navigation and embodied tasks.

Foundation models have revolutionized general-purpose problem-solving, offering rapid task adaptation through pretraining, meta-training, and finetuning. Recent crucial advances in these paradigms reveal the importance of challenging task prioritized sampling to enhance adaptation robustness under distribution shifts. However, ranking task difficulties over iteration as a preliminary step typically requires exhaustive task evaluation, which is practically unaffordable in computation and data-annotation. This study provides a novel perspective to illuminate the possibility of leveraging the dual importance of adaptation robustness and learning efficiency, particularly in scenarios where task evaluation is risky or costly, such as iterative agent-environment interactions for robotic policy evaluation or computationally intensive inference steps for finetuning foundation models. Firstly, we introduce Model Predictive Task Sampling (MPTS), a framework that bridges the task space and adaptation risk landscape, providing a theoretical foundation for robust active task sampling. MPTS employs a generative model to characterize the episodic optimization process and predicts task-specific adaptation risk via posterior inference. The resulting risk learner amortizes the costly evaluation of task adaptation performance and provably approximates task difficulty rankings. MPTS seamlessly integrates into zero-shot, few-shot, and supervised finetuning settings. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments in pattern recognition using foundation models and sequential decision-making. Our results demonstrate that MPTS significantly enhances adaptation robustness for tail or out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks and improves learning efficiency compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is available at the project site https://github.com/thu-rllab/MPTS.

Continual learning in robotics seeks systems that can constantly adapt to changing environments and tasks, mirroring human adaptability. A key challenge is refining dynamics models, essential for planning and control, while addressing issues such as safe adaptation, catastrophic forgetting, outlier management, data efficiency, and balancing exploration with exploitation -- all within task and onboard resource constraints. Towards this goal, we introduce a generative framework leveraging flow matching for online robot dynamics model alignment. Rather than executing actions based on a misaligned model, our approach refines planned actions to better match with those the robot would take if its model was well aligned. We find that by transforming the actions themselves rather than exploring with a misaligned model -- as is traditionally done -- the robot collects informative data more efficiently, thereby accelerating learning. Moreover, we validate that the method can handle an evolving and possibly imperfect model while reducing, if desired, the dependency on replay buffers or legacy model snapshots. We validate our approach using two platforms: an unmanned ground vehicle and a quadrotor. The results highlight the method's adaptability and efficiency, with a record 34.2\% higher task success rate, demonstrating its potential towards enabling continual robot learning. Code: https://github.com/AlejandroMllo/action_flow_matching.

Detecting objects in mobile robotics is crucial for numerous applications, from autonomous navigation to inspection. However, robots are often required to perform tasks in different domains with respect to the training one and need to adapt to these changes. Tiny mobile robots, subject to size, power, and computational constraints, encounter even more difficulties in running and adapting these algorithms. Such adaptability, though, is crucial for real-world deployment, where robots must operate effectively in dynamic and unpredictable settings. In this work, we introduce a novel benchmark to evaluate the continual learning capabilities of object detection systems in tiny robotic platforms. Our contributions include: (i) Tiny Robotics Object Detection (TiROD), a comprehensive dataset collected using a small mobile robot, designed to test the adaptability of object detectors across various domains and classes; (ii) an evaluation of state-of-the-art real-time object detectors combined with different continual learning strategies on this dataset, providing detailed insights into their performance and limitations; and (iii) we publish the data and the code to replicate the results to foster continuous advancements in this field. Our benchmark results indicate key challenges that must be addressed to advance the development of robust and efficient object detection systems for tiny robotics.

Ensuring safety in Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically framed as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), is crucial for real-world exploration applications. Current approaches in handling CMDP struggle to balance optimality and feasibility, as direct optimization methods cannot ensure state-wise in-training safety, and projection-based methods correct actions inefficiently through lengthy iterations. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Chance-constrained Safeguards (ACS), an adaptive, model-free safe RL algorithm using the safety recovery rate as a surrogate chance constraint to iteratively ensure safety during exploration and after achieving convergence. Theoretical analysis indicates that the relaxed probabilistic constraint sufficiently guarantees forward invariance to the safe set. And extensive experiments conducted on both simulated and real-world safety-critical tasks demonstrate its effectiveness in enforcing safety (nearly zero-violation) while preserving optimality (+23.8%), robustness, and fast response in stochastic real-world settings.

Humanoid robots can, in principle, use their legs to go almost anywhere. Developing controllers capable of traversing diverse terrains, however, remains a considerable challenge. Classical controllers are hard to generalize broadly while the learning-based methods have primarily focused on gentle terrains. Here, we present a learning-based approach for blind humanoid locomotion capable of traversing challenging natural and man-made terrain. Our method uses a transformer model to predict the next action based on the history of proprioceptive observations and actions. The model is first pre-trained on a dataset of flat-ground trajectories with sequence modeling, and then fine-tuned on uneven terrain using reinforcement learning. We evaluate our model on a real humanoid robot across a variety of terrains, including rough, deformable, and sloped surfaces. The model demonstrates robust performance, in-context adaptation, and emergent terrain representations. In real-world case studies, our humanoid robot successfully traversed over 4 miles of hiking trails in Berkeley and climbed some of the steepest streets in San Francisco.

We consider some classical optimization problems in path planning and network transport, and we introduce new auction-based algorithms for their optimal and suboptimal solution. The algorithms are based on mathematical ideas that are related to competitive bidding by persons for objects and the attendant market equilibrium, which underlie auction processes. However, the starting point of our algorithms is different, namely weighted and unweighted path construction in directed graphs, rather than assignment of persons to objects. The new algorithms have several potential advantages over existing methods: they are empirically faster in some important contexts, such as max-flow, they are well-suited for on-line replanning, and they can be adapted to distributed asynchronous operation. Moreover, they allow arbitrary initial prices, without complementary slackness restrictions, and thus are better-suited to take advantage of reinforcement learning methods that use off-line training with data, as well as on-line training during real-time operation. The new algorithms may also find use in reinforcement learning contexts involving approximation, such as multistep lookahead and tree search schemes, and/or rollout algorithms.

From out-competing grandmasters in chess to informing high-stakes healthcare decisions, emerging methods from artificial intelligence are increasingly capable of making complex and strategic decisions in diverse, high-dimensional, and uncertain situations. But can these methods help us devise robust strategies for managing environmental systems under great uncertainty? Here we explore how reinforcement learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence, approaches decision problems through a lens similar to adaptive environmental management: learning through experience to gradually improve decisions with updated knowledge. We review where reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for improving evidence-informed adaptive management decisions even when classical optimization methods are intractable. For example, model-free deep RL might help identify quantitative decision strategies even when models are nonidentifiable. Finally, we discuss technical and social issues that arise when applying reinforcement learning to adaptive management problems in the environmental domain. Our synthesis suggests that environmental management and computer science can learn from one another about the practices, promises, and perils of experience-based decision-making.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled the development of mobile agents that can understand visual inputs and follow user instructions, unlocking new possibilities for automating complex tasks on mobile devices. However, applying these models to real-world mobile scenarios remains a significant challenge due to the long-horizon task execution, difficulty in error recovery, and the cold-start problem in unfamiliar environments. To address these challenges, we propose MobileUse, a GUI agent designed for robust and adaptive mobile task execution. To improve resilience in long-horizon tasks and dynamic environments, we introduce a hierarchical reflection architecture that enables the agent to self-monitor, detect, and recover from errors across multiple temporal scales-ranging from individual actions to overall task completion-while maintaining efficiency through a reflection-on-demand strategy. To tackle cold-start issues, we further introduce a proactive exploration module, which enriches the agent's understanding of the environment through self-planned exploration. Evaluations on AndroidWorld and AndroidLab benchmarks demonstrate that MobileUse establishes new state-of-the-art performance, achieving success rates of 62.9% and 44.2%, respectively. To facilitate real-world applications, we release an out-of-the-box toolkit for automated task execution on physical mobile devices, which is available at https://github.com/MadeAgents/mobile-use.

This paper develops a policy learning method for tuning a pre-trained policy to adapt to additional tasks without altering the original task. A method named Adaptive Policy Gradient (APG) is proposed in this paper, which combines Bellman's principle of optimality with the policy gradient approach to improve the convergence rate. This paper provides theoretical analysis which guarantees the convergence rate and sample complexity of O(1/T) and O(1/epsilon), respectively, where T denotes the number of iterations and epsilon denotes the accuracy of the resulting stationary policy. Furthermore, several challenging numerical simulations, including cartpole, lunar lander, and robot arm, are provided to show that APG obtains similar performance compared to existing deterministic policy gradient methods while utilizing much less data and converging at a faster rate.

We introduce a Wireless Signal based Efficient multi-Robot eXploration (WiSER-X) algorithm applicable to a decentralized team of robots exploring an unknown environment with communication bandwidth constraints. WiSER-X relies only on local inter-robot relative position estimates, that can be obtained by exchanging signal pings from onboard sensors such as WiFi, Ultra-Wide Band, amongst others, to inform the exploration decisions of individual robots to minimize redundant coverage overlaps. Furthermore, WiSER-X also enables asynchronous termination without requiring a shared map between the robots. It also adapts to heterogeneous robot behaviors and even complete failures in unknown environment while ensuring complete coverage. Simulations show that WiSER-X leads to 58% lower overlap than a zero-information-sharing baseline algorithm-1 and only 23% more overlap than a full-information-sharing algorithm baseline algorithm-2. Hardware experiments further validate the feasibility of WiSER-X using full onboard sensing.

Robotic arms are increasingly deployed in uncertain environments, yet conventional control pipelines often become rigid and brittle when exposed to perturbations or incomplete information. Virtual Model Control (VMC) enables compliant behaviors by embedding virtual forces and mapping them into joint torques, but its reliance on fixed parameters and limited coordination among virtual components constrains adaptability and may undermine stability as task objectives evolve. To address these limitations, we propose Adaptive VMC with Large Language Model (LLM)- and Lyapunov-Based Reinforcement Learning (RL), which preserves the physical interpretability of VMC while supporting stability-guaranteed online adaptation. The LLM provides structured priors and high-level reasoning that enhance coordination among virtual components, improve sample efficiency, and facilitate flexible adjustment to varying task requirements. Complementarily, Lyapunov-based RL enforces theoretical stability constraints, ensuring safe and reliable adaptation under uncertainty. Extensive simulations on a 7-DoF Panda arm demonstrate that our approach effectively balances competing objectives in dynamic tasks, achieving superior performance while highlighting the synergistic benefits of LLM guidance and Lyapunov-constrained adaptation.

Autonomous robots deployed in the real world will need control policies that rapidly adapt to environmental changes. To this end, we propose AutoRobotics-Zero (ARZ), a method based on AutoML-Zero that discovers zero-shot adaptable policies from scratch. In contrast to neural network adaption policies, where only model parameters are optimized, ARZ can build control algorithms with the full expressive power of a linear register machine. We evolve modular policies that tune their model parameters and alter their inference algorithm on-the-fly to adapt to sudden environmental changes. We demonstrate our method on a realistic simulated quadruped robot, for which we evolve safe control policies that avoid falling when individual limbs suddenly break. This is a challenging task in which two popular neural network baselines fail. Finally, we conduct a detailed analysis of our method on a novel and challenging non-stationary control task dubbed Cataclysmic Cartpole. Results confirm our findings that ARZ is significantly more robust to sudden environmental changes and can build simple, interpretable control policies.

Landmines remain a threat to war-affected communities for years after conflicts have ended, partly due to the laborious nature of demining tasks. Humanitarian demining operations begin by collecting relevant information from the sites to be cleared, which is then analyzed by human experts to determine the potential risk of remaining landmines. In this paper, we propose RELand system to support these tasks, which consists of three major components. We (1) provide general feature engineering and label assigning guidelines to enhance datasets for landmine risk modeling, which are widely applicable to global demining routines, (2) formulate landmine presence as a classification problem and design a novel interpretable model based on sparse feature masking and invariant risk minimization, and run extensive evaluation under proper protocols that resemble real-world demining operations to show a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art, and (3) build an interactive web interface to suggest priority areas for demining organizations. We are currently collaborating with a humanitarian demining NGO in Colombia that is using our system as part of their field operations in two areas recently prioritized for demining.

The application of vision-language models (VLMs) has achieved impressive success in various robotics tasks, but there are few explorations for foundation models used in quadruped robot navigation. We introduce Cross Anything System (CAS), an innovative system composed of a high-level reasoning module and a low-level control policy, enabling the robot to navigate across complex 3D terrains and reach the goal position. For high-level reasoning and motion planning, we propose a novel algorithmic system taking advantage of a VLM, with a design of task decomposition and a closed-loop sub-task execution mechanism. For low-level locomotion control, we utilize the Probability Annealing Selection (PAS) method to train a control policy by reinforcement learning. Numerous experiments show that our whole system can accurately and robustly navigate across complex 3D terrains, and its strong generalization ability ensures the applications in diverse indoor and outdoor scenarios and terrains. Project page: https://cross-anything.github.io/

In this work, we introduce MO-SeGMan, a Multi-Objective Sequential and Guided Manipulation planner for highly constrained rearrangement problems. MO-SeGMan generates object placement sequences that minimize both replanning per object and robot travel distance while preserving critical dependency structures with a lazy evaluation method. To address highly cluttered, non-monotone scenarios, we propose a Selective Guided Forward Search (SGFS) that efficiently relocates only critical obstacles and to feasible relocation points. Furthermore, we adopt a refinement method for adaptive subgoal selection to eliminate unnecessary pick-and-place actions, thereby improving overall solution quality. Extensive evaluations on nine benchmark rearrangement tasks demonstrate that MO-SeGMan generates feasible motion plans in all cases, consistently achieving faster solution times and superior solution quality compared to the baselines. These results highlight the robustness and scalability of the proposed framework for complex rearrangement planning problems.

We approach autonomous drone-based reforestation with a collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) setup. Agents can communicate as part of a dynamically changing network. We explore collaboration and communication on the back of a high-impact problem. Forests are the main resource to control rising CO2 conditions. Unfortunately, the global forest volume is decreasing at an unprecedented rate. Many areas are too large and hard to traverse to plant new trees. To efficiently cover as much area as possible, here we propose a Graph Neural Network (GNN) based communication mechanism that enables collaboration. Agents can share location information on areas needing reforestation, which increases viewed area and planted tree count. We compare our proposed communication mechanism with a multi-agent baseline without the ability to communicate. Results show how communication enables collaboration and increases collective performance, planting precision and the risk-taking propensity of individual agents.

Whole-body humanoid locomotion is challenging due to high-dimensional control, morphological instability, and the need for real-time adaptation to various terrains using onboard perception. Directly applying reinforcement learning (RL) with reward shaping to humanoid locomotion often leads to lower-body-dominated behaviors, whereas imitation-based RL can learn more coordinated whole-body skills but is typically limited to replaying reference motions without a mechanism to adapt them online from perception for terrain-aware locomotion. To address this gap, we propose a whole-body humanoid locomotion framework that combines skills learned from reference motions with terrain-aware adaptation. We first train a diffusion model on retargeted human motions for real-time prediction of terrain-aware reference motions. Concurrently, we train a whole-body reference tracker with RL using this motion data. To improve robustness under imperfectly generated references, we further fine-tune the tracker with a frozen motion generator in a closed-loop setting. The resulting system supports directional goal-reaching control with terrain-aware whole-body adaptation, and can be deployed on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot with onboard perception and computation. The hardware experiments demonstrate successful traversal over boxes, hurdles, stairs, and mixed terrain combinations. Quantitative results further show the benefits of incorporating online motion generation and fine-tuning the motion tracker for improved generalization and robustness.

In heterogeneous multi-task decision-making, tasks not only exhibit diverse observation and action spaces but also vary substantially in their underlying complexities. While conventional multi-task world models like UniZero excel in single-task settings, we find that when handling a broad and diverse suite of tasks, gradient conflicts and the loss of model plasticity often constrain their sample efficiency. In this work, we address these challenges from two complementary perspectives: the single learning iteration and the overall learning process. First, to mitigate the gradient conflicts, we systematically investigate key architectural designs for extending UniZero. Our investigation identifies a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture as the most effective approach. We demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, that this architecture alleviates gradient conflicts by routing task-specific representations to specialized sub-networks. This finding leads to our proposed model, ScaleZero. Second, to dynamically allocate model capacity throughout the learning process, we introduce an online Dynamic Parameter Scaling (DPS) strategy. This strategy progressively integrates LoRA adapters in response to task-specific progress, enabling adaptive knowledge retention and parameter expansion. Evaluations on a diverse set of standard benchmarks (Atari, DMC, Jericho) demonstrate that ScaleZero, utilizing solely online reinforcement learning with one model, performs on par with specialized single-task agents. With the DPS strategy, it remains competitive while using just 71.5% of the environment interactions. These findings underscore the potential of ScaleZero for effective multi-task planning. Our code is available at magenta{https://github.com/opendilab/LightZero}.

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning have made significant impacts across various domains, yet they often struggle in complex multi-agent environments due to issues like algorithm instability, low sampling efficiency, and the challenges of exploration and dimensionality explosion. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) offers a structured approach to decompose complex tasks into simpler sub-tasks, which is promising for multi-agent settings. This paper advances the field by introducing a hierarchical architecture that autonomously generates effective subgoals without explicit constraints, enhancing both flexibility and stability in training. We propose a dynamic goal generation strategy that adapts based on environmental changes. This method significantly improves the adaptability and sample efficiency of the learning process. Furthermore, we address the critical issue of credit assignment in multi-agent systems by synergizing our hierarchical architecture with a modified QMIX network, thus improving overall strategy coordination and efficiency. Comparative experiments with mainstream reinforcement learning algorithms demonstrate the superior convergence speed and performance of our approach in both single-agent and multi-agent environments, confirming its effectiveness and flexibility in complex scenarios. Our code is open-sourced at: https://github.com/SICC-Group/GMAH.

Instruction-based image editing enables natural-language control over visual modifications, yet existing models falter under Instruction-Visual Complexity (IV-Complexity), where intricate instructions meet cluttered or ambiguous scenes. We introduce RePlan (Region-aligned Planning), a plan-then-execute framework that couples a vision-language planner with a diffusion editor. The planner decomposes instructions via step-by-step reasoning and explicitly grounds them to target regions; the editor then applies changes using a training-free attention-region injection mechanism, enabling precise, parallel multi-region edits without iterative inpainting. To strengthen planning, we apply GRPO-based reinforcement learning using 1K instruction-only examples, yielding substantial gains in reasoning fidelity and format reliability. We further present IV-Edit, a benchmark focused on fine-grained grounding and knowledge-intensive edits. Across IV-Complex settings, RePlan consistently outperforms strong baselines trained on far larger datasets, improving regional precision and overall fidelity. Our project page: https://replan-iv-edit.github.io

This paper proposes a novel mission planning platform, capable of efficiently deploying a team of UAVs to cover complex-shaped areas, in various remote sensing applications. Under the hood lies a novel optimization scheme for grid-based methods, utilizing Simulated Annealing algorithm, that significantly increases the achieved percentage of coverage and improves the qualitative features of the generated paths. Extensive simulated evaluation in comparison with a state-of-the-art alternative methodology, for coverage path planning (CPP) operations, establishes the performance gains in terms of achieved coverage and overall duration of the generated missions. On top of that, DARP algorithm is employed to allocate sub-tasks to each member of the swarm, taking into account each UAV's sensing and operational capabilities, their initial positions and any no-fly-zones possibly defined inside the operational area. This feature is of paramount importance in real-life applications, as it has the potential to achieve tremendous performance improvements in terms of time demanded to complete a mission, while at the same time it unlocks a wide new range of applications, that was previously not feasible due to the limited battery life of UAVs. In order to investigate the actual efficiency gains that are introduced by the multi-UAV utilization, a simulated study is performed as well. All of these capabilities are packed inside an end-to-end platform that eases the utilization of UAVs' swarms in remote sensing applications. Its versatility is demonstrated via two different real-life applications: (i) a photogrametry for precision agriculture and (ii) an indicative search and rescue for first responders missions, that were performed utilizing a swarm of commercial UAVs. The source code can be found at: https://github.com/savvas-ap/mCPP-optimized-DARP

Open-world embodied agents must solve long-horizon tasks where the main bottleneck is not single-step planning quality but how interaction experience is organized and evolved. To this end, we present Steve-Evolving, a non-parametric self-evolving framework that tightly couples fine-grained execution diagnosis with dual-track knowledge distillation in a closed loop. The method follows three phases: Experience Anchoring, Experience Distillation, and Knowledge-Driven Closed-Loop Control. In detail, Experience Anchoring solidifies each subgoal attempt into a structured experience tuple with a fixed schema (pre-state, action, diagnosis-result, and post-state) and organizes it in a three-tier experience space with multi-dimensional indices (e.g., condition signatures, spatial hashing, and semantic tags) plus rolling summarization for efficient and auditable recall. To ensure sufficient information density for attribution, the execution layer provides compositional diagnosis signals beyond binary outcomes, including state-difference summaries, enumerated failure causes, continuous indicators, and stagnation/loop detection. Moreover, successful trajectories of Experience Distillation are generalized into reusable skills with explicit preconditions and verification criteria, while failures are distilled into executable guardrails that capture root causes and forbid risky operations at both subgoal and task granularities. Besides, Knowledge-Driven Closed-Loop Control retrieved skills and guardrails are injected into an LLM planner, and diagnosis-triggered local replanning updates the active constraints online, forming a continual evolution process without any model parameter updates. Experiments on the long-horizon suite of Minecraft MCU demonstrate consistent improvements over static-retrieval baselines.

In recent years, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to real-world problems with increasing success. Such applications often require to put constraints on the agent's behavior. Existing algorithms for constrained RL (CRL) rely on gradient descent-ascent, but this approach comes with a caveat. While these algorithms are guaranteed to converge on average, they do not guarantee last-iterate convergence, i.e., the current policy of the agent may never converge to the optimal solution. In practice, it is often observed that the policy alternates between satisfying the constraints and maximizing the reward, rarely accomplishing both objectives simultaneously. Here, we address this problem by introducing Reinforcement Learning with Optimistic Ascent-Descent (ReLOAD), a principled CRL method with guaranteed last-iterate convergence. We demonstrate its empirical effectiveness on a wide variety of CRL problems including discrete MDPs and continuous control. In the process we establish a benchmark of challenging CRL problems.

Model-based reinforcement learning is a powerful tool, but collecting data to fit an accurate model of the system can be costly. Exploring an unknown environment in a sample-efficient manner is hence of great importance. However, the complexity of dynamics and the computational limitations of real systems make this task challenging. In this work, we introduce FLEX, an exploration algorithm for nonlinear dynamics based on optimal experimental design. Our policy maximizes the information of the next step and results in an adaptive exploration algorithm, compatible with generic parametric learning models and requiring minimal resources. We test our method on a number of nonlinear environments covering different settings, including time-varying dynamics. Keeping in mind that exploration is intended to serve an exploitation objective, we also test our algorithm on downstream model-based classical control tasks and compare it to other state-of-the-art model-based and model-free approaches. The performance achieved by FLEX is competitive and its computational cost is low.

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled way to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet its effectiveness hinges on training signals that remain informative as models evolve. In practice, RL progress often slows when task difficulty becomes poorly aligned with model capability, or when training is dominated by a narrow set of recurring problem patterns. To jointly address these issues, we propose SCALER (Synthetic sCalable Adaptive Learning Environment for Reasoning), a framework that sustains effective learning signals through adaptive environment design. SCALER introduces a scalable synthesis pipeline that converts real-world programming problems into verifiable reasoning environments with controllable difficulty and unbounded instance generation, enabling RL training beyond finite datasets while preserving strong correctness guarantees. Building on this, SCALER further employs an adaptive multi-environment RL strategy that dynamically adjusts instance difficulty and curates the active set of environments to track the model's capability frontier and maintain distributional diversity. This co-adaptation prevents reward sparsity, mitigates overfitting to narrow task patterns, and supports sustained improvement throughout training. Extensive experiments show that SCALER consistently outperforms dataset-based RL baselines across diverse reasoning benchmarks and exhibits more stable, long-horizon training dynamics.

Building general-purpose graphical user interface (GUI) agents has become increasingly promising with the progress in vision language models. However, developing effective mobile GUI agents with reinforcement learning (RL) remains challenging due to the heavy-tailed distribution of task difficulty and the inefficiency of large-scale environment sampling. We present an online agentic reinforcement learning framework MobileRL to enhance GUI agents in mobile environments. Its core component is the Difficulty-ADAptive GRPO (ADAGRPO) algorithm. In ADAGRPO, we design difficulty-adaptive positive replay and failure curriculum filtering to adapt the model to different task difficulties. We introduce the shortest-path reward adjustment strategy to reshape rewards concerning the task length in multi-turn agentic tasks. Those strategies jointly stabilize RL training, improve sample efficiency, and generate strong performance across diverse mobile apps and tasks. We apply MOBILERL to two open models (Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and GLM-4.1V-9B-Base). The resultant MOBILERL-9B model achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of success rates on both AndroidWorld (80.2%) and AndroidLab (53.6%). The MOBILERL framework is open-sourced at: https://github.com/THUDM/MobileRL.

Motion planning problems have been studied by both the robotics and the controls research communities for a long time, and many algorithms have been developed for their solution. Among them, incremental sampling-based motion planning algorithms, such as the Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs), and the Probabilistic Road Maps (PRMs) have become very popular recently, owing to their implementation simplicity and their advantages in handling high-dimensional problems. Although these algorithms work very well in practice, the quality of the computed solution is often not good, i.e., the solution can be far from the optimal one. A recent variation of RRT, namely the RRT* algorithm, bypasses this drawback of the traditional RRT algorithm, by ensuring asymptotic optimality as the number of samples tends to infinity. Nonetheless, the convergence rate to the optimal solution may still be slow. This paper presents a new incremental sampling-based motion planning algorithm based on Rapidly-exploring Random Graphs (RRG), denoted RRT# (RRT "sharp") which also guarantees asymptotic optimality but, in addition, it also ensures that the constructed spanning tree of the geometric graph is consistent after each iteration. In consistent trees, the vertices which have the potential to be part of the optimal solution have the minimum cost-come-value. This implies that the best possible solution is readily computed if there are some vertices in the current graph that are already in the goal region. Numerical results compare with the RRT* algorithm.

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents exhibit inherent reasoning abilities through the collaboration of multiple tools. However, during agent inference, existing methods often suffer from (i) locally myopic generation, due to the absence of lookahead, and (ii) trajectory instability, where minor early errors can escalate into divergent reasoning paths. These issues make it difficult to balance global effectiveness and computational efficiency. To address these two issues, we propose meta-adaptive exploration with LLM agents https://github.com/exoskeletonzj/MAXS, a meta-adaptive reasoning framework based on LLM Agents that flexibly integrates tool execution and reasoning planning. MAXS employs a lookahead strategy to extend reasoning paths a few steps ahead, estimating the advantage value of tool usage, and combines step consistency variance and inter-step trend slopes to jointly select stable, consistent, and high-value reasoning steps. Additionally, we introduce a trajectory convergence mechanism that controls computational cost by halting further rollouts once path consistency is achieved, enabling a balance between resource efficiency and global effectiveness in multi-tool reasoning. We conduct extensive empirical studies across three base models (MiMo-VL-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-32B) and five datasets, demonstrating that MAXS consistently outperforms existing methods in both performance and inference efficiency. Further analysis confirms the effectiveness of our lookahead strategy and tool usage.

High-fidelity visual reconstruction and novel-view synthesis are essential for realistic closed-loop evaluation in autonomous driving. While 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) offers a promising balance of accuracy and efficiency, existing per-scene optimization methods require costly iterative refinement, rendering them unscalable for extensive urban environments. Conversely, current feed-forward approaches often suffer from degraded photometric quality. To address these limitations, we propose ReconDrive, a feed-forward framework that leverages and extends the 3D foundation model VGGT for rapid, high-fidelity 4DGS generation. Our architecture introduces two core adaptations to tailor the foundation model to dynamic driving scenes: (1) Hybrid Gaussian Prediction Heads, which decouple the regression of spatial coordinates and appearance attributes to overcome the photometric deficiencies inherent in generalized foundation features; and (2) a Static-Dynamic 4D Composition strategy that explicitly captures temporal motion via velocity modeling to represent complex dynamic environments. Benchmarked on nuScenes, ReconDrive significantly outperforms existing feed-forward baselines in reconstruction, novel-view synthesis, and 3D perception. It achieves performance competitive with per-scene optimization while being orders of magnitude faster, providing a scalable and practical solution for realistic driving simulation.

This paper introduces Personalized Path Recourse, a novel method that generates recourse paths for an agent. The objective is to achieve desired goals (e.g., better outcomes compared to the agent's original paths of action), while ensuring a high similarity to the agent's original paths and being personalized to the agent. Personalization refers to the extent to which the new path is tailored to the agent's observed behavior patterns from their policy function. We train a personalized recourse agent to generate such personalized paths, which are obtained using reward functions that consider the goal, similarity, and personalization. The proposed method is applicable to both reinforcement learning and supervised learning settings for correcting or improving sequences of actions or sequences of data to achieve a pre-determined goal. The method is evaluated in various settings and demonstrates promising results.

Neural Networks (NNs) trained through supervised learning struggle with managing edge-case scenarios common in real-world driving due to the intractability of exhaustive datasets covering all edge-cases, making knowledge-driven approaches, akin to how humans intuitively detect unexpected driving behavior, a suitable complement to data-driven methods. This work proposes a hybrid architecture combining low-level Model Predictive Controller (MPC) with locally deployed Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance decision-making and Human Machine Interaction (HMI). The DecisionxLLM module evaluates robotic state information against natural language instructions to ensure adherence to desired driving behavior. The MPCxLLM module then adjusts MPC parameters based on LLM-generated insights, achieving control adaptability while preserving the safety and constraint guarantees of traditional MPC systems. Further, to enable efficient on-board deployment and to eliminate dependency on cloud connectivity, we shift processing to the on-board computing platform: We propose an approach that exploits Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning, and quantization. Experimental results demonstrate that these enhancements yield significant improvements in reasoning accuracy by up to 10.45%, control adaptability by as much as 52.2%, and up to 10.5x increase in computational efficiency (tokens/s), validating the proposed framework's practicality for real-time deployment even on down-scaled robotic platforms. This work bridges high-level decision-making with low-level control adaptability, offering a synergistic framework for knowledge-driven and adaptive Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS).

Pommerman is a multi-agent environment that has received considerable attention from researchers in recent years. This environment is an ideal benchmark for multi-agent training, providing a battleground for two teams with communication capabilities among allied agents. Pommerman presents significant challenges for model-free reinforcement learning due to delayed action effects, sparse rewards, and false positives, where opponent players can lose due to their own mistakes. This study introduces a system designed to train multi-agent systems to play Pommerman using a combination of curriculum learning and population-based self-play. We also tackle two challenging problems when deploying the multi-agent training system for competitive games: sparse reward and suitable matchmaking mechanism. Specifically, we propose an adaptive annealing factor based on agents' performance to adjust the dense exploration reward during training dynamically. Additionally, we implement a matchmaking mechanism utilizing the Elo rating system to pair agents effectively. Our experimental results demonstrate that our trained agent can outperform top learning agents without requiring communication among allied agents.

We propose to address quadrupedal locomotion tasks using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a Transformer-based model that learns to combine proprioceptive information and high-dimensional depth sensor inputs. While learning-based locomotion has made great advances using RL, most methods still rely on domain randomization for training blind agents that generalize to challenging terrains. Our key insight is that proprioceptive states only offer contact measurements for immediate reaction, whereas an agent equipped with visual sensory observations can learn to proactively maneuver environments with obstacles and uneven terrain by anticipating changes in the environment many steps ahead. In this paper, we introduce LocoTransformer, an end-to-end RL method that leverages both proprioceptive states and visual observations for locomotion control. We evaluate our method in challenging simulated environments with different obstacles and uneven terrain. We transfer our learned policy from simulation to a real robot by running it indoors and in the wild with unseen obstacles and terrain. Our method not only significantly improves over baselines, but also achieves far better generalization performance, especially when transferred to the real robot. Our project page with videos is at https://rchalyang.github.io/LocoTransformer/ .

In this paper, we address the task of interacting with dynamic environments where the changes in the environment are independent of the agent. We study this through the context of trapping a moving ball with a UR5 robotic arm. Our key contribution is an approach to utilize a static planner for dynamic tasks using a Dynamic Planning add-on; that is, if we can successfully solve a task with a static target, then our approach can solve the same task when the target is moving. Our approach has three key components: an off-the-shelf static planner, a trajectory forecasting network, and a network to predict robot's estimated time of arrival at any location. We demonstrate the generalization of our approach across environments. More information and videos at https://mlevy2525.github.io/DynamicAddOn.

In the endeavor to make autonomous robots take actions, task planning is a major challenge that requires translating high-level task descriptions into long-horizon action sequences. Despite recent advances in language model agents, they remain prone to planning errors and limited in their ability to plan ahead. To address these limitations in robotic planning, we advocate a self-refining scheme that iteratively refines a draft plan until an equilibrium is reached. Remarkably, this process can be optimized end-to-end from an analytical perspective without the need to curate additional verifiers or reward models, allowing us to train self-refining planners in a simple supervised learning fashion. Meanwhile, a nested equilibrium sequence modeling procedure is devised for efficient closed-loop planning that incorporates useful feedback from the environment (or an internal world model). Our method is evaluated on the VirtualHome-Env benchmark, showing advanced performance with better scaling for inference computation. Code is available at https://github.com/Singularity0104/equilibrium-planner.

Video generative models trained on expert demonstrations have been utilized as performant text-conditioned visual planners for solving robotic tasks. However, generalization to unseen tasks remains a challenge. Whereas improved generalization may be facilitated by leveraging learned prior knowledge from additional pre-collected offline data sources, such as web-scale video datasets, in the era of experience we aim to design agents that can continuously improve in an online manner from self-collected behaviors. In this work we thus propose the Self-Adapting Improvement Loop (SAIL), where an in-domain video model iteratively updates itself on self-produced trajectories, collected through adaptation with an internet-scale pretrained video model, and steadily improves its performance for a specified task of interest. We apply SAIL to a diverse suite of MetaWorld tasks, as well as two manipulation tasks on a real robot arm, and find that performance improvements continuously emerge over multiple iterations for novel tasks initially unseen during original in-domain video model training. Furthermore, we discover that SAIL is surprisingly robust regarding if and how the self-collected experience is filtered, and the quality of the initial in-domain demonstrations. Through adaptation with summarized internet-scale data, and learning through online experience, we thus demonstrate a way to iteratively bootstrap a high-performance video model for solving novel robotic tasks through self-improvement.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has markedly enhanced the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Its success, however, largely depends on strong base models with rich world knowledge, yielding only modest improvements for small-size language models (SLMs). To address this limitation, we investigate Guided GRPO, which injects ground-truth reasoning steps into roll-out trajectories to compensate for SLMs' inherent weaknesses. Through a comprehensive study of various guidance configurations, we find that naively adding guidance delivers limited gains. These insights motivate G^2RPO-A, an adaptive algorithm that automatically adjusts guidance strength in response to the model's evolving training dynamics. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code-generation benchmarks confirm that G^2RPO-A substantially outperforms vanilla GRPO. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/T-Lab-CUHKSZ/G2RPO-A.

In post-disaster scenarios, efficient search and rescue operations involve collaborative efforts between robots and humans. Existing planning approaches focus on specific aspects but overlook crucial elements like information gathering, task assignment, and planning. Furthermore, previous methods considering robot capabilities and victim requirements suffer from time complexity due to repetitive planning steps. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a comprehensive framework__the Multi-Stage Multi-Robot Task Assignment. This framework integrates scouting, task assignment, and path-planning stages, optimizing task allocation based on robot capabilities, victim requirements, and past robot performance. Our iterative approach ensures objective fulfillment within problem constraints. Evaluation across four maps, comparing with a state-of-the-art baseline, demonstrates our algorithm's superiority with a remarkable 97 percent performance increase. Our code is open-sourced to enable result replication.

Continual Learning (CL) methods have traditionally focused on mitigating catastrophic forgetting through gradient-based retraining, an approach ill-suited for deployed agents that must adapt in real time. We introduce our Adaptive Teaching and Learning System (ATLAS), a dual-agent architecture that decouples reasoning (Teacher) from execution (Student) and incorporates a persistent learning memory that stores distilled guidance from experience. This informs the orchestration layer, enabling the system to dynamically adjust its operational strategies, such as supervision level or initial plan selection, at inference time. In doing so, ATLAS achieves gradient-free continual learning, shifting the locus of adaptation from model parameters to system-level orchestration. We formulate this as a system-centric paradigm for continual learning, where the objective is adaptive efficiency: maximizing task success while minimizing computational cost through inference-time orchestration rather than parameter updates. Evaluated on Microsoft's ExCyTIn-Bench, an open-source benchmark simulating complex cyberthreat investigation, ATLAS achieves 54.1% success with GPT-5-mini as its Student, outperforming the larger GPT-5 (High) by 13% while reducing cost by 86%. Cross-incident validation demonstrates generalization: frozen pamphlets from Incident #5 improve accuracy from 28% to 41% with zero retraining, while shifting output composition from verbose exploration to structured reasoning. Together, these findings establish gradient-free continual learning as a viable path toward adaptive, deployable AI systems and provide causally annotated traces valuable for training explicit world models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) pre-trained on internet-scale datasets have shown impressive capabilities in code understanding, synthesis, and general purpose question-and-answering. Key to their performance is the substantial prior knowledge acquired during training and their ability to reason over extended sequences of symbols, often presented in natural language. In this work, we aim to harness the extensive long-term reasoning, natural language comprehension, and the available prior knowledge of LLMs for increased resilience and adaptation in autonomous mobile robots. We introduce REAL, an approach for REsilience and Adaptation using LLMs. REAL provides a strategy to employ LLMs as a part of the mission planning and control framework of an autonomous robot. The LLM employed by REAL provides (i) a source of prior knowledge to increase resilience for challenging scenarios that the system had not been explicitly designed for; (ii) a way to interpret natural-language and other log/diagnostic information available in the autonomy stack, for mission planning; (iii) a way to adapt the control inputs using minimal user-provided prior knowledge about the dynamics/kinematics of the robot. We integrate REAL in the autonomy stack of a real multirotor, querying onboard an offboard LLM at 0.1-1.0 Hz as part the robot's mission planning and control feedback loops. We demonstrate in real-world experiments the ability of the LLM to reduce the position tracking errors of a multirotor under the presence of (i) errors in the parameters of the controller and (ii) unmodeled dynamics. We also show (iii) decision making to avoid potentially dangerous scenarios (e.g., robot oscillates) that had not been explicitly accounted for in the initial prompt design.

This paper introduces RouteFinder, a comprehensive foundation model framework to tackle different Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) variants. Our core idea is that a foundation model for VRPs should be able to represent variants by treating each as a subset of a generalized problem equipped with different attributes. We propose a unified VRP environment capable of efficiently handling any attribute combination. The RouteFinder model leverages a modern transformer-based encoder and global attribute embeddings to improve task representation. Additionally, we introduce two reinforcement learning techniques to enhance multi-task performance: mixed batch training, which enables training on different variants at once, and multi-variant reward normalization to balance different reward scales. Finally, we propose efficient adapter layers that enable fine-tuning for new variants with unseen attributes. Extensive experiments on 48 VRP variants show RouteFinder outperforms recent state-of-the-art learning methods. Code: https://github.com/ai4co/routefinder.

Models that can simulate how environments change in response to actions can be used by agents to plan and act efficiently. We improve on previous environment simulators from high-dimensional pixel observations by introducing recurrent neural networks that are able to make temporally and spatially coherent predictions for hundreds of time-steps into the future. We present an in-depth analysis of the factors affecting performance, providing the most extensive attempt to advance the understanding of the properties of these models. We address the issue of computationally inefficiency with a model that does not need to generate a high-dimensional image at each time-step. We show that our approach can be used to improve exploration and is adaptable to many diverse environments, namely 10 Atari games, a 3D car racing environment, and complex 3D mazes.

Multi-agent Pathfinding (MAPF) problem generally asks to find a set of conflict-free paths for a set of agents confined to a graph and is typically solved in a centralized fashion. Conversely, in this work, we investigate the decentralized MAPF setting, when the central controller that posses all the information on the agents' locations and goals is absent and the agents have to sequientially decide the actions on their own without having access to a full state of the environment. We focus on the practically important lifelong variant of MAPF, which involves continuously assigning new goals to the agents upon arrival to the previous ones. To address this complex problem, we propose a method that integrates two complementary approaches: planning with heuristic search and reinforcement learning through policy optimization. Planning is utilized to construct and re-plan individual paths. We enhance our planning algorithm with a dedicated technique tailored to avoid congestion and increase the throughput of the system. We employ reinforcement learning to discover the collision avoidance policies that effectively guide the agents along the paths. The policy is implemented as a neural network and is effectively trained without any reward-shaping or external guidance. We evaluate our method on a wide range of setups comparing it to the state-of-the-art solvers. The results show that our method consistently outperforms the learnable competitors, showing higher throughput and better ability to generalize to the maps that were unseen at the training stage. Moreover our solver outperforms a rule-based one in terms of throughput and is an order of magnitude faster than a state-of-the-art search-based solver.

While large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in web navigation tasks, the extensive context of web pages, often represented as DOM or Accessibility Tree (AxTree) structures, frequently exceeds model context limits. Current approaches like bottom-up truncation or embedding-based retrieval lose critical information about page state and action history. This is particularly problematic for adaptive planning in web agents, where understanding the current state is essential for determining future actions. We hypothesize that embedding models lack sufficient capacity to capture plan-relevant information, especially when retrieving content that supports future action prediction. This raises a fundamental question: how can retrieval methods be optimized for adaptive planning in web navigation tasks? In response, we introduce LineRetriever, a novel approach that leverages a language model to identify and retrieve observation lines most relevant to future navigation steps. Unlike traditional retrieval methods that focus solely on semantic similarity, LineRetriever explicitly considers the planning horizon, prioritizing elements that contribute to action prediction. Our experiments demonstrate that LineRetriever can reduce the size of the observation at each step for the web agent while maintaining consistent performance within the context limitations.

Controlling artificial agents from visual sensory data is an arduous task. Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can succeed but require large amounts of interactions between the agent and the environment. To alleviate the issue, unsupervised RL proposes to employ self-supervised interaction and learning, for adapting faster to future tasks. Yet, as shown in the Unsupervised RL Benchmark (URLB; Laskin et al. 2021), whether current unsupervised strategies can improve generalization capabilities is still unclear, especially in visual control settings. In this work, we study the URLB and propose a new method to solve it, using unsupervised model-based RL, for pre-training the agent, and a task-aware fine-tuning strategy combined with a new proposed hybrid planner, Dyna-MPC, to adapt the agent for downstream tasks. On URLB, our method obtains 93.59% overall normalized performance, surpassing previous baselines by a staggering margin. The approach is empirically evaluated through a large-scale empirical study, which we use to validate our design choices and analyze our models. We also show robust performance on the Real-Word RL benchmark, hinting at resiliency to environment perturbations during adaptation. Project website: https://masteringurlb.github.io/

We present a terrain traversability mapping and navigation system (TNS) for autonomous excavator applications in an unstructured environment. We use an efficient approach to extract terrain features from RGB images and 3D point clouds and incorporate them into a global map for planning and navigation. Our system can adapt to changing environments and update the terrain information in real-time. Moreover, we present a novel dataset, the Complex Worksite Terrain (CWT) dataset, which consists of RGB images from construction sites with seven categories based on navigability. Our novel algorithms improve the mapping accuracy over previous SOTA methods by 4.17-30.48% and reduce MSE on the traversability map by 13.8-71.4%. We have combined our mapping approach with planning and control modules in an autonomous excavator navigation system and observe 49.3% improvement in the overall success rate. Based on TNS, we demonstrate the first autonomous excavator that can navigate through unstructured environments consisting of deep pits, steep hills, rock piles, and other complex terrain features.

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) offers a powerful and general framework for learning humans' latent preferences in route recommendation, yet no approach has successfully addressed planetary-scale problems with hundreds of millions of states and demonstration trajectories. In this paper, we introduce scaling techniques based on graph compression, spatial parallelization, and improved initialization conditions inspired by a connection to eigenvector algorithms. We revisit classic IRL methods in the routing context, and make the key observation that there exists a trade-off between the use of cheap, deterministic planners and expensive yet robust stochastic policies. This insight is leveraged in Receding Horizon Inverse Planning (RHIP), a new generalization of classic IRL algorithms that provides fine-grained control over performance trade-offs via its planning horizon. Our contributions culminate in a policy that achieves a 16-24% improvement in route quality at a global scale, and to the best of our knowledge, represents the largest published study of IRL algorithms in a real-world setting to date. We conclude by conducting an ablation study of key components, presenting negative results from alternative eigenvalue solvers, and identifying opportunities to further improve scalability via IRL-specific batching strategies.

Humanoid motion tracking policies are central to building teleoperation pipelines and hierarchical controllers, yet they face a fundamental challenge: the embodiment gap between humans and humanoid robots. Current approaches address this gap by retargeting human motion data to humanoid embodiments and then training reinforcement learning (RL) policies to imitate these reference trajectories. However, artifacts introduced during retargeting, such as foot sliding, self-penetration, and physically infeasible motion are often left in the reference trajectories for the RL policy to correct. While prior work has demonstrated motion tracking abilities, they often require extensive reward engineering and domain randomization to succeed. In this paper, we systematically evaluate how retargeting quality affects policy performance when excessive reward tuning is suppressed. To address issues that we identify with existing retargeting methods, we propose a new retargeting method, General Motion Retargeting (GMR). We evaluate GMR alongside two open-source retargeters, PHC and ProtoMotions, as well as with a high-quality closed-source dataset from Unitree. Using BeyondMimic for policy training, we isolate retargeting effects without reward tuning. Our experiments on a diverse subset of the LAFAN1 dataset reveal that while most motions can be tracked, artifacts in retargeted data significantly reduce policy robustness, particularly for dynamic or long sequences. GMR consistently outperforms existing open-source methods in both tracking performance and faithfulness to the source motion, achieving perceptual fidelity and policy success rates close to the closed-source baseline. Website: https://jaraujo98.github.io/retargeting_matters. Code: https://github.com/YanjieZe/GMR.

We focus on agile, continuous, and terrain-adaptive jumping of quadrupedal robots in discontinuous terrains such as stairs and stepping stones. Unlike single-step jumping, continuous jumping requires accurately executing highly dynamic motions over long horizons, which is challenging for existing approaches. To accomplish this task, we design a hierarchical learning and control framework, which consists of a learned heightmap predictor for robust terrain perception, a reinforcement-learning-based centroidal-level motion policy for versatile and terrain-adaptive planning, and a low-level model-based leg controller for accurate motion tracking. In addition, we minimize the sim-to-real gap by accurately modeling the hardware characteristics. Our framework enables a Unitree Go1 robot to perform agile and continuous jumps on human-sized stairs and sparse stepping stones, for the first time to the best of our knowledge. In particular, the robot can cross two stair steps in each jump and completes a 3.5m long, 2.8m high, 14-step staircase in 4.5 seconds. Moreover, the same policy outperforms baselines in various other parkour tasks, such as jumping over single horizontal or vertical discontinuities. Experiment videos can be found at https://yxyang.github.io/jumping\_cod/.

Large language model based agents often fail in unfamiliar environments due to premature exploitation: a tendency to act on prior knowledge before acquiring sufficient environment-specific information. We identify autonomous exploration as a critical yet underexplored capability for building adaptive agents. To formalize and quantify this capability, we introduce Exploration Checkpoint Coverage, a verifiable metric that measures how broadly an agent discovers key states, objects, and affordances. Our systematic evaluation reveals that agents trained with standard task-oriented reinforcement learning consistently exhibit narrow and repetitive behaviors that impede downstream performance. To address this limitation, we develop a training strategy that interleaves task-execution rollouts and exploration rollouts, with each type of rollout optimized by its corresponding verifiable reward. Building on this training strategy, we propose the Explore-then-Act paradigm, which decouples information-gathering from task execution: agents first utilize an interaction budget to acquire grounded environmental knowledge, then leverage it for task resolution. Our results demonstrate that learning to systematically explore is imperative for building generalizable and real-world-ready agents.

Standing-up control is crucial for humanoid robots, with the potential for integration into current locomotion and loco-manipulation systems, such as fall recovery. Existing approaches are either limited to simulations that overlook hardware constraints or rely on predefined ground-specific motion trajectories, failing to enable standing up across postures in real-world scenes. To bridge this gap, we present HoST (Humanoid Standing-up Control), a reinforcement learning framework that learns standing-up control from scratch, enabling robust sim-to-real transfer across diverse postures. HoST effectively learns posture-adaptive motions by leveraging a multi-critic architecture and curriculum-based training on diverse simulated terrains. To ensure successful real-world deployment, we constrain the motion with smoothness regularization and implicit motion speed bound to alleviate oscillatory and violent motions on physical hardware, respectively. After simulation-based training, the learned control policies are directly deployed on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Our experimental results demonstrate that the controllers achieve smooth, stable, and robust standing-up motions across a wide range of laboratory and outdoor environments. Videos and code are available at https://taohuang13.github.io/humanoid-standingup.github.io/.

Wheel-legged robots integrate leg agility on rough terrain with wheel efficiency on flat ground. However, most existing designs do not fully capitalize on the benefits of both legged and wheeled structures, which limits overall system flexibility and efficiency. We present FLORES, a novel wheel-legged robot design featuring a distinctive front-leg configuration that sets it beyond standard design approaches. Specifically, FLORES replaces the conventional hip-roll degree of freedom (DoF) of the front leg with hip-yaw DoFs, and this allows for efficient movement on flat surfaces while ensuring adaptability when navigating complex terrains. This innovative design facilitates seamless transitions between different locomotion modes (i.e., legged locomotion and wheeled locomotion) and optimizes the performance across varied environments. To fully exploit \flores's mechanical capabilities, we develop a tailored reinforcement learning (RL) controller that adapts the Hybrid Internal Model (HIM) with a customized reward structure optimized for our unique mechanical configuration. This framework enables the generation of adaptive, multi-modal locomotion strategies that facilitate smooth transitions between wheeled and legged movements. Furthermore, our distinctive joint design enables the robot to exhibit novel and highly efficient locomotion gaits that capitalize on the synergistic advantages of both locomotion modes. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate FLORES's enhanced steering capabilities, improved navigation efficiency, and versatile locomotion across various terrains. The open-source project can be found at https://github.com/ZhichengSong6/FLORES.

This paper deals with the problem of informative path planning for a UAV deployed for precision agriculture applications. First, we observe that the ``fear of missing out'' data lead to uniform, conservative scanning policies over the whole agricultural field. Consequently, employing a non-uniform scanning approach can mitigate the expenditure of time in areas with minimal or negligible real value, while ensuring heightened precision in information-dense regions. Turning to the available informative path planning methodologies, we discern that certain methods entail intensive computational requirements, while others necessitate training on an ideal world simulator. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose an active sensing coverage path planning approach, named OverFOMO, that regulates the speed of the UAV in accordance with both the relative quantity of the identified classes, i.e. crops and weeds, and the confidence level of such detections. To identify these instances, a robust Deep Learning segmentation model is deployed. The computational needs of the proposed algorithm are independent of the size of the agricultural field, rendering its applicability on modern UAVs quite straightforward. The proposed algorithm was evaluated with a simu-realistic pipeline, combining data from real UAV missions and the high-fidelity dynamics of AirSim simulator, showcasing its performance improvements over the established state of affairs for this type of missions. An open-source implementation of the algorithm and the evaluation pipeline is also available: https://github.com/emmarapt/OverFOMO.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated the potential in acting as autonomous agents for sequential decision-making tasks. However, most existing methods either take actions greedily without planning or rely on static plans that are not adaptable to environmental feedback. Consequently, the sequential decision-making performance of LLM agents degenerates with problem complexity and plan horizons increase. We propose a closed-loop approach, AdaPlanner, which allows the LLM agent to refine its self-generated plan adaptively in response to environmental feedback. In AdaPlanner, the LLM agent adaptively refines its plan from feedback with both in-plan and out-of-plan refinement strategies. To mitigate hallucination, we develop a code-style LLM prompt structure that facilitates plan generation across a variety of tasks, environments, and agent capabilities. Furthermore, we propose a skill discovery mechanism that leverages successful plans as few-shot exemplars, enabling the agent to plan and refine with fewer task demonstrations. Our experiments in the ALFWorld and MiniWoB++ environments demonstrate that AdaPlanner outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 3.73% and 4.11% while utilizing 2x and 600x fewer samples, respectively.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for interactive decision-making tasks requiring planning and adapting to the environment. Recent works employ LLMs-as-agents in broadly two ways: iteratively determining the next action (iterative executors) or generating plans and executing sub-tasks using LLMs (plan-and-execute). However, these methods struggle with task complexity, as the inability to execute any sub-task may lead to task failure. To address these shortcomings, we introduce As-Needed Decomposition and Planning for complex Tasks (ADaPT), an approach that explicitly plans and decomposes complex sub-tasks as-needed, i.e., when the LLM is unable to execute them. ADaPT recursively decomposes sub-tasks to adapt to both task complexity and LLM capability. Our results demonstrate that ADaPT substantially outperforms established strong baselines, achieving success rates up to 28.3% higher in ALFWorld, 27% in WebShop, and 33% in TextCraft -- a novel compositional dataset that we introduce. Through extensive analysis, we illustrate the importance of multilevel decomposition and establish that ADaPT dynamically adjusts to the capabilities of the executor LLM as well as to task complexity.

Public service systems in many African regions suffer from delayed emergency response and spatial inequity, causing avoidable suffering. This paper introduces OPTIC-ER, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for real-time, adaptive, and equitable emergency response. OPTIC-ER uses an attention-guided actor-critic architecture to manage the complexity of dispatch environments. Its key innovations are a Context-Rich State Vector, encoding action sub-optimality, and a Precision Reward Function, which penalizes inefficiency. Training occurs in a high-fidelity simulation using real data from Rivers State, Nigeria, accelerated by a precomputed Travel Time Atlas. The system is built on the TALS framework (Thin computing, Adaptability, Low-cost, Scalability) for deployment in low-resource settings. In evaluations on 500 unseen incidents, OPTIC-ER achieved a 100.00% optimality rate with negligible inefficiency, confirming its robustness and generalization. Beyond dispatch, the system generates Infrastructure Deficiency Maps and Equity Monitoring Dashboards to guide proactive governance and data-informed development. This work presents a validated blueprint for AI-augmented public services, showing how context-aware RL can bridge the gap between algorithmic decision-making and measurable human impact.

Bundle adjustment is the common way to solve localization and mapping. It is an iterative process in which a system of non-linear equations is solved using two optimization methods, weighted by a damping factor. In the classic approach, the latter is chosen heuristically by the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm on each iteration. This might take many iterations, making the process computationally expensive, which might be harmful to real-time applications. We propose to replace this heuristic by viewing the problem in a holistic manner, as a game, and formulating it as a reinforcement-learning task. We set an environment which solves the non-linear equations and train an agent to choose the damping factor in a learned manner. We demonstrate that our approach considerably reduces the number of iterations required to reach the bundle adjustment's convergence, on both synthetic and real-life scenarios. We show that this reduction benefits the classic approach and can be integrated with other bundle adjustment acceleration methods.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising solution to learning an agent fully relying on a data-driven paradigm. However, constrained by the limited quality of the offline dataset, its performance is often sub-optimal. Therefore, it is desired to further finetune the agent via extra online interactions before deployment. Unfortunately, offline-to-online RL can be challenging due to two main challenges: constrained exploratory behavior and state-action distribution shift. To this end, we propose a Simple Unified uNcertainty-Guided (SUNG) framework, which naturally unifies the solution to both challenges with the tool of uncertainty. Specifically, SUNG quantifies uncertainty via a VAE-based state-action visitation density estimator. To facilitate efficient exploration, SUNG presents a practical optimistic exploration strategy to select informative actions with both high value and high uncertainty. Moreover, SUNG develops an adaptive exploitation method by applying conservative offline RL objectives to high-uncertainty samples and standard online RL objectives to low-uncertainty samples to smoothly bridge offline and online stages. SUNG achieves state-of-the-art online finetuning performance when combined with different offline RL methods, across various environments and datasets in D4RL benchmark.

The growing scale of modern farms has increased the need for efficient and adaptive multi-agent coverage strategies for pest, weed, and disease management. Traditional methods such as manual inspection and blanket pesticide spraying often lead to excessive chemical use, resource waste, and environmental impact. While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer a promising platform for precision agriculture through targeted spraying and improved operational efficiency, existing UAV-based approaches remain limited by battery life, payload capacity, and scalability, especially in large fields where single-UAV or uniformly distributed spraying is insufficient. Although multi-UAV coordination has been explored, many current frameworks still assume uniform spraying and do not account for infestation severity, UAV dynamics, non-uniform resource allocation, or energy-efficient coordination. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Density-Driven Optimal Control (D2OC) framework that integrates Optimal Transport (OT) theory with multi-UAV coverage control for large-scale agricultural spraying. The method supports non-uniform, priority-aware resource allocation based on infestation intensity, reducing unnecessary chemical application. UAVs are modeled as a linear time-varying (LTV) system to capture variations in mass and inertia during spraying missions. The D2OC control law, derived using Lagrangian mechanics, enables efficient coordination, balanced workload distribution, and improved mission duration. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms uniform spraying and Spectral Multiscale Coverage (SMC) in coverage efficiency, chemical reduction, and operational sustainability, providing a scalable solution for smart agriculture.

LLM-based autonomous agents often fail to execute complex web tasks that require dynamic interaction due to the inherent uncertainty and complexity of these environments. Existing LLM-based web agents typically rely on rigid, expert-designed policies specific to certain states and actions, which lack the flexibility and generalizability needed to adapt to unseen tasks. In contrast, humans excel by exploring unknowns, continuously adapting strategies, and resolving ambiguities through exploration. To emulate human-like adaptability, web agents need strategic exploration and complex decision-making. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is well-suited for this, but classical MCTS struggles with vast action spaces, unpredictable state transitions, and incomplete information in web tasks. In light of this, we develop WebPilot, a multi-agent system with a dual optimization strategy that improves MCTS to better handle complex web environments. Specifically, the Global Optimization phase involves generating a high-level plan by breaking down tasks into manageable subtasks and continuously refining this plan, thereby focusing the search process and mitigating the challenges posed by vast action spaces in classical MCTS. Subsequently, the Local Optimization phase executes each subtask using a tailored MCTS designed for complex environments, effectively addressing uncertainties and managing incomplete information. Experimental results on WebArena and MiniWoB++ demonstrate the effectiveness of WebPilot. Notably, on WebArena, WebPilot achieves SOTA performance with GPT-4, achieving a 93% relative increase in success rate over the concurrent tree search-based method. WebPilot marks a significant advancement in general autonomous agent capabilities, paving the way for more advanced and reliable decision-making in practical environments.

Navigation foundation models trained on massive webscale data enable agents to generalize across diverse environments and embodiments. However, these models trained solely on offline data, often lack the capacity to reason about the consequences of their actions or adapt through counterfactual understanding. They thus face significant limitations in the real-world urban navigation where interactive and safe behaviors, such as avoiding obstacles and moving pedestrians, are critical. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Seeing-to-Experiencing framework to scale the capability of navigation foundation models with reinforcement learning. S2E combines the strengths of pre-training on videos and post-training through RL. It maintains the generalizability acquired from large-scale real-world videos while enhancing its interactivity through RL in simulation environments. Specifically, we introduce two innovations: an Anchor-Guided Distribution Matching strategy, which stabilizes learning and models diverse motion patterns through anchor-based supervision; and a Residual-Attention Module, which obtains reactive behaviors from simulation environments without erasing the model's pretrained knowledge. Moreover, we establish a comprehensive end-to-end evaluation benchmark, NavBench-GS, built on photorealistic 3DGS reconstructions of real-world scenes that incorporate physical interactions. It can systematically assess the generalizability and safety of navigation foundation models. Extensive experiments show that S2E mitigates the diminishing returns often seen when scaling with offline data alone. We perform a thorough analysis of the benefits of Reinforcement Learning compared to Supervised Fine-Tuning in the context of post-training for robot learning. Our findings emphasize the crucial role of integrating interactive online experiences to effectively scale foundation models in Robotics.

Finding high-quality solutions quickly is an important objective in motion planning. This is especially true for high-degree-of-freedom robots. Satisficing planners have traditionally found feasible solutions quickly but provide no guarantees on their optimality, while almost-surely asymptotically optimal (a.s.a.o.) planners have probabilistic guarantees on their convergence towards an optimal solution but are more computationally expensive. This paper uses the AO-x meta-algorithm to extend the satisficing RRT-Connect planner to optimal planning. The resulting Asymptotically Optimal RRT-Connect (AORRTC) finds initial solutions in similar times as RRT-Connect and uses any additional planning time to converge towards the optimal solution in an anytime manner. It is proven to be probabilistically complete and a.s.a.o. AORRTC was tested with the Panda (7 DoF) and Fetch (8 DoF) robotic arms on the MotionBenchMaker dataset. These experiments show that AORRTC finds initial solutions as fast as RRT-Connect and faster than the tested state-of-the-art a.s.a.o. algorithms while converging to better solutions faster. AORRTC finds solutions to difficult high-DoF planning problems in milliseconds where the other a.s.a.o. planners could not consistently find solutions in seconds. This performance was demonstrated both with and without single instruction/multiple data (SIMD) acceleration.

This paper introduces FALCON, a novel Fast Autonomous expLoration framework using COverage path guidaNce, which aims at setting a new performance benchmark in the field of autonomous aerial exploration. Despite recent advancements in the domain, existing exploration planners often suffer from inefficiencies such as frequent revisitations of previously explored regions.FALCON effectively harnesses the full potential of online generated coverage paths in enhancing exploration efficiency.The framework begins with an incremental connectivity-aware space decomposition and connectivity graph construction, which facilitate efficient coverage path planning.Subsequently, a hierarchical planner generates a coverage path spanning the entire unexplored space, serving as a global guidance.Then, a local planner optimizes the frontier visitation order, minimizing traversal time while consciously incorporating the intention of the global guidance.Finally, minimum-time smooth and safe trajectories are produced to visit the frontier viewpoints.For fair and comprehensive benchmark experiments, we introduce a lightweight exploration planner evaluation environment that allows for comparing exploration planners across a variety of testing scenarios using an identical quadrotor simulator.Additionally, an in-depth analysis and evaluation is conducted to highlight the significant performance advantages of FALCON in comparison with the state-of-the-art exploration planners based on objective criteria.Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in the proposed framework.Real-world experiments conducted fully onboard further validate FALCON's practical capability in complex and challenging environments.The source code of both the exploration planner FALCON and the exploration planner evaluation environment has been released to benefit the community.

Off-road autonomous driving poses significant challenges such as navigating unmapped, variable terrain with uncertain and diverse dynamics. Addressing these challenges requires effective long-horizon planning and adaptable control. Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising solution by learning control policies directly from interaction. However, because off-road driving is a long-horizon task with low-signal rewards, standard RL methods are challenging to apply in this setting. We introduce TADPO, a novel policy gradient formulation that extends Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), leveraging off-policy trajectories for teacher guidance and on-policy trajectories for student exploration. Building on this, we develop a vision-based, end-to-end RL system for high-speed off-road driving, capable of navigating extreme slopes and obstacle-rich terrain. We demonstrate our performance in simulation and, importantly, zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on a full-scale off-road vehicle. To our knowledge, this work represents the first deployment of RL-based policies on a full-scale off-road platform.

While reinforcement learning algorithms can learn effective policies for complex tasks, these policies are often brittle to even minor task variations, especially when variations are not explicitly provided during training. One natural approach to this problem is to train agents with manually specified variation in the training task or environment. However, this may be infeasible in practical situations, either because making perturbations is not possible, or because it is unclear how to choose suitable perturbation strategies without sacrificing performance. The key insight of this work is that learning diverse behaviors for accomplishing a task can directly lead to behavior that generalizes to varying environments, without needing to perform explicit perturbations during training. By identifying multiple solutions for the task in a single environment during training, our approach can generalize to new situations by abandoning solutions that are no longer effective and adopting those that are. We theoretically characterize a robustness set of environments that arises from our algorithm and empirically find that our diversity-driven approach can extrapolate to various changes in the environment and task.

We propose ReinFlow, a simple yet effective online reinforcement learning (RL) framework that fine-tunes a family of flow matching policies for continuous robotic control. Derived from rigorous RL theory, ReinFlow injects learnable noise into a flow policy's deterministic path, converting the flow into a discrete-time Markov Process for exact and straightforward likelihood computation. This conversion facilitates exploration and ensures training stability, enabling ReinFlow to fine-tune diverse flow model variants, including Rectified Flow [35] and Shortcut Models [19], particularly at very few or even one denoising step. We benchmark ReinFlow in representative locomotion and manipulation tasks, including long-horizon planning with visual input and sparse reward. The episode reward of Rectified Flow policies obtained an average net growth of 135.36% after fine-tuning in challenging legged locomotion tasks while saving denoising steps and 82.63% of wall time compared to state-of-the-art diffusion RL fine-tuning method DPPO [43]. The success rate of the Shortcut Model policies in state and visual manipulation tasks achieved an average net increase of 40.34% after fine-tuning with ReinFlow at four or even one denoising step, whose performance is comparable to fine-tuned DDIM policies while saving computation time for an average of 23.20%. Project webpage: https://reinflow.github.io/

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the development of autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning and multi-step problem solving. However, these agents struggle to adapt to specialized environments and do not leverage past interactions, approaching each new task from scratch regardless of their accumulated experience. We introduce Experiential Reflective Learning (ERL), a simple self-improvement framework that enables rapid environment adaptation through experiential learning. ERL reflects on task trajectories and outcomes to generate heuristics, capturing actionable lessons that transfer across tasks. At test time, relevant heuristics are retrieved based on the current task and injected into the agent's context to guide execution. On the Gaia2 benchmark, ERL improves success rate by 7.8% over a ReAct baseline, with large gains in task completion reliability, and outperforms prior experiential learning methods. Through systematic ablations, we find that selective retrieval is essential and that heuristics provide more transferable abstractions than few-shot trajectory prompting. These results demonstrate that reflecting on single-attempt experiences to extract transferable heuristics enables effective agent self-improvement.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) require adaptive behavior planners to navigate unpredictable, real-world environments safely. Traditional behavior trees (BTs) offer structured decision logic but are inherently static and demand labor-intensive manual tuning, limiting their applicability at SAE Level 5 autonomy. This paper presents an agentic framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal vision models (LVMs) to generate and adapt BTs on the fly. A specialized Descriptor agent applies chain-of-symbols prompting to assess scene criticality, a Planner agent constructs high-level sub-goals via in-context learning, and a Generator agent synthesizes executable BT sub-trees in XML format. Integrated into a CARLA+Nav2 simulation, our system triggers only upon baseline BT failure, demonstrating successful navigation around unexpected obstacles (e.g., street blockage) with no human intervention. Compared to a static BT baseline, this approach is a proof-of-concept that extends to diverse driving scenarios.

Deceptive path planning (DPP) is the problem of designing a path that hides its true goal from an outside observer. Existing methods for DPP rely on unrealistic assumptions, such as global state observability and perfect model knowledge, and are typically problem-specific, meaning that even minor changes to a previously solved problem can force expensive computation of an entirely new solution. Given these drawbacks, such methods do not generalize to unseen problem instances, lack scalability to realistic problem sizes, and preclude both on-the-fly tunability of deception levels and real-time adaptivity to changing environments. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based scheme for training policies to perform DPP over arbitrary weighted graphs that overcomes these issues. The core of our approach is the introduction of a local perception model for the agent, a new state space representation distilling the key components of the DPP problem, the use of graph neural network-based policies to facilitate generalization and scaling, and the introduction of new deception bonuses that translate the deception objectives of classical methods to the RL setting. Through extensive experimentation we show that, without additional fine-tuning, at test time the resulting policies successfully generalize, scale, enjoy tunable levels of deception, and adapt in real-time to changes in the environment.

Humans naturally adapt to diverse environments by learning underlying rules across worlds with different dynamics, observations, and reward structures. In contrast, existing agents typically demonstrate improvements via self-evolving within a single domain, implicitly assuming a fixed environment distribution. Cross-environment learning has remained largely unmeasured: there is no standard collection of controllable, heterogeneous environments, nor a unified way to represent how agents learn. We address these gaps in two steps. First, we propose AutoEnv, an automated framework that treats environments as factorizable distributions over transitions, observations, and rewards, enabling low-cost (4.12 USD on average) generation of heterogeneous worlds. Using AutoEnv, we construct AutoEnv-36, a dataset of 36 environments with 358 validated levels, on which seven language models achieve 12-49% normalized reward, demonstrating the challenge of AutoEnv-36. Second, we formalize agent learning as a component-centric process driven by three stages of Selection, Optimization, and Evaluation applied to an improvable agent component. Using this formulation, we design eight learning methods and evaluate them on AutoEnv-36. Empirically, the gain of any single learning method quickly decrease as the number of environments increases, revealing that fixed learning methods do not scale across heterogeneous environments. Environment-adaptive selection of learning methods substantially improves performance but exhibits diminishing returns as the method space expands. These results highlight both the necessity and the current limitations of agent learning for scalable cross-environment generalization, and position AutoEnv and AutoEnv-36 as a testbed for studying cross-environment agent learning. The code is avaiable at https://github.com/FoundationAgents/AutoEnv.

Achieving truly adaptive embodied intelligence requires agents that learn not just by imitating static demonstrations, but by continuously improving through environmental interaction, which is akin to how humans master skills through practice. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic manipulation by leveraging large language models, yet remain fundamentally limited by Supervised Finetuning (SFT): requiring hundreds of demonstrations per task, rigidly memorizing trajectories, and failing to adapt when deployment conditions deviate from training. We introduce EVOLVE-VLA, a test-time training framework enabling VLAs to continuously adapt through environment interaction with minimal or zero task-specific demonstrations. The key technical challenge is replacing oracle reward signals (unavailable at test time) with autonomous feedback. We address this through a learned progress estimator providing dense feedback, and critically, we design our framework to ``tame'' this inherently noisy signal via two mechanisms: (1) an accumulative progress estimation mechanism smoothing noisy point-wise estimates, and (2) a progressive horizon extension strategy enabling gradual policy evolution. EVOLVE-VLA achieves substantial gains: +8.6\% on long-horizon tasks, +22.0\% in 1-shot learning, and enables cross-task generalization -- achieving 20.8\% success on unseen tasks without task-specific demonstrations training (vs. 0\% for pure SFT). Qualitative analysis reveals emergent capabilities absent in demonstrations, including error recovery and novel strategies. This work represents a critical step toward VLAs that truly learn and adapt, moving beyond static imitation toward continuous self-improvements.

Inference-time LLM alignment methods, particularly activation steering, offer an alternative to fine-tuning by directly modifying activations during generation. Existing methods, however, often rely on non-anticipative interventions that ignore how perturbations propagate through transformer layers and lack online error feedback, resulting in suboptimal, open-loop control. To address this, we show empirically that, despite the nonlinear structure of transformer blocks, layer-wise dynamics across multiple LLM architectures and scales are well-approximated by locally-linear models. Exploiting this property, we model LLM inference as a linear time-varying dynamical system and adapt the classical linear quadratic regulator to compute feedback controllers using layer-wise Jacobians, steering activations toward desired semantic setpoints in closed-loop with minimal computational overhead and no offline training. We also derive theoretical bounds on setpoint tracking error, enabling formal guarantees on steering performance. Using a novel adaptive semantic feature setpoint signal, our method yields robust, fine-grained behavior control across models, scales, and tasks, including state-of-the-art modulation of toxicity, truthfulness, refusal, and arbitrary concepts, surpassing baseline steering methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/trustworthyrobotics/lqr-activation-steering

Foundation models are transitioning from offline predictors to deployed systems expected to operate over long time horizons. In real deployments, objectives are not fixed: domains drift, user preferences evolve, and new tasks appear after the model has shipped. This elevates continual learning and instant personalization from optional features to core architectural requirements. Yet most adaptation pipelines still follow a static weight paradigm: after training (or after any adaptation step), inference executes a single parameter vector regardless of user intent, domain, or instance-specific constraints. This treats the trained or adapted model as a single point in parameter space. In heterogeneous and continually evolving regimes, distinct objectives can induce separated feasible regions over parameters, forcing any single shared update into compromise, interference, or overspecialization. As a result, continual learning and personalization are often implemented as repeated overwriting of shared weights, risking degradation of previously learned behaviors. We propose HY-WU (Weight Unleashing), a memory-first adaptation framework that shifts adaptation pressure away from overwriting a single shared parameter point. HY-WU implements functional (operator-level) memory as a neural module: a generator that synthesizes weight updates on-the-fly from the instance condition, yielding instance-specific operators without test-time optimization.

Language-guided long-horizon mobile manipulation has long been a grand challenge in embodied semantic reasoning, generalizable manipulation, and adaptive locomotion. Three fundamental limitations hinder progress: First, although large language models have improved spatial reasoning and task planning through semantic priors, existing implementations remain confined to tabletop scenarios, failing to address the constrained perception and limited actuation ranges of mobile platforms. Second, current manipulation strategies exhibit insufficient generalization when confronted with the diverse object configurations encountered in open-world environments. Third, while crucial for practical deployment, the dual requirement of maintaining high platform maneuverability alongside precise end-effector control in unstructured settings remains understudied. In this work, we present ODYSSEY, a unified mobile manipulation framework for agile quadruped robots equipped with manipulators, which seamlessly integrates high-level task planning with low-level whole-body control. To address the challenge of egocentric perception in language-conditioned tasks, we introduce a hierarchical planner powered by a vision-language model, enabling long-horizon instruction decomposition and precise action execution. At the control level, our novel whole-body policy achieves robust coordination across challenging terrains. We further present the first benchmark for long-horizon mobile manipulation, evaluating diverse indoor and outdoor scenarios. Through successful sim-to-real transfer, we demonstrate the system's generalization and robustness in real-world deployments, underscoring the practicality of legged manipulators in unstructured environments. Our work advances the feasibility of generalized robotic assistants capable of complex, dynamic tasks. Our project page: https://kaijwang.github.io/odyssey.github.io/

Multi-agent systems play a central role in area coverage tasks across search-and-rescue, environmental monitoring, and precision agriculture. Achieving non-uniform coverage, where spatial priorities vary across the domain, requires coordinating agents while respecting dynamic and communication constraints. Density-driven approaches can distribute agents according to a prescribed reference density, but existing methods do not ensure connectivity. This limitation often leads to communication loss, reduced coordination, and degraded coverage performance. This letter introduces a connectivity-preserving extension of the Density-Driven Optimal Control (D2OC) framework. The coverage objective, defined using the Wasserstein distance between the agent distribution and the reference density, admits a convex quadratic program formulation. Communication constraints are incorporated through a smooth connectivity penalty, which maintains strict convexity, supports distributed implementation, and preserves inter-agent communication without imposing rigid formations. Simulation studies show that the proposed method consistently maintains connectivity, improves convergence speed, and enhances non-uniform coverage quality compared with density-driven schemes that do not incorporate explicit connectivity considerations.

Reasoning large language models (LLMs) excel in complex tasks, which has drawn significant attention to reinforcement learning (RL) for LLMs. However, existing approaches allocate an equal number of rollouts to all questions during the RL process, which is inefficient. This inefficiency stems from the fact that training on simple questions yields limited gains, whereas more rollouts are needed for challenging questions to sample correct answers. Furthermore, while RL improves response precision, it limits the model's exploration ability, potentially resulting in a performance cap below that of the base model prior to RL. To address these issues, we propose a mechanism for dynamically allocating rollout budgets based on the difficulty of the problems, enabling more efficient RL training. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive dynamic temperature adjustment strategy to maintain the entropy at a stable level, thereby encouraging sufficient exploration. This enables LLMs to improve response precision while preserving their exploratory ability to uncover potential correct pathways. The code and data is available on: https://github.com/LiaoMengqi/E3-RL4LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive action sequence prediction capabilities but often struggle with dynamic, long-horizon tasks such as real-time strategic games. In a game such as StarCraftII (SC2), agents need to manage resource constraints and adapt to evolving battlefield situations in a partially observable environment. This often overwhelms exisiting LLM-based approaches. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical multi-agent framework that employs specialized imitation learning agents under a meta-controller called Strategic Planner (SP). By expert demonstrations, each specialized agent learns a distinctive strategy, such as aerial support or defensive maneuvers, and produces coherent, structured multistep action sequences. The SP then orchestrates these proposals into a single, environmentally adaptive plan that ensures local decisions aligning with long-term strategies. We call this HIMA (Hierarchical Imitation Multi-Agent). We also present TEXTSCII-ALL, a comprehensive SC2 testbed that encompasses all race match combinations in SC2. Our empirical results show that HIMA outperforms state of the arts in strategic clarity, adaptability, and computational efficiency, underscoring the potential of combining specialized imitation modules with meta-level orchestration to develop more robust, general-purpose AI agents.