These are composed into a single vector representing position by a similarity-preserving, conjunctive vector-binding operation.

We study planning in a fragment of PDDL with qualitative state-trajectory constraints, capturing safety requirements, task ordering conditions, and intermediate sub-goals commonly found in real-world problems. A prominent approach to tackle such problems is to compile their constraints away, leading to a problem that is supported by state-of-the-art planners. Unfortunately, existing compilers do not scale on problems with a large number of objects and high-arity actions, as they necessitate grounding the problem before compilation. To address this issue, we propose two methods for compiling away constraints without grounding, making them suitable for large-scale planning problems. We prove the correctness of our compilers and outline their worst-case time complexity. Moreover, we present a reproducible empirical evaluation on the domains used in the latest International Planning Competition. Our results demonstrate that our methods are efficient and produce planning specifications that are orders of magnitude more succinct than the ones produced by compilers that ground the domain, while remaining competitive when used for planning with a state-of-the-art planner.

Abstract--The modular composite representation (MCR) is a computing model that represents information with high-dimensional integer vectors using modular arithmetic. Ori gi-nally proposed as a generalization of the binary spatter cod e model, it aims to provide higher representational power whi le remaining a lighter alternative to models requiring high-p recision components. However, despite this potential, MCR has recei ved limited attention in the literature. Systematic analyses o f its trade-offs and comparisons with other models, such as binar y spatter codes, multiply-add-permute, and Fourier hologra phic reduced representation, are lacking, sustaining the perce ption that its added complexity outweighs the improved expressiv ity over simpler models. In this work, we revisit MCR by presenti ng its first extensive evaluation, demonstrating that it achie ves a unique balance of information capacity, classification acc uracy, and hardware efficiency. Experiments measuring informatio n capacity demonstrate that MCR outperforms binary and integ er vectors while approaching complex-valued representation s at a fraction of their memory footprint. Evaluation on a collect ion of 123 classification datasets confirms consistent accuracy gains and shows that MCR can match the performance of binary spatter codes using up to 4.0 less memory. We investigate the hardware realization of MCR by showing that it maps naturally to digital logic and by designing the first dedicat ed accelerator for it. Evaluations on basic operations and sev en selected datasets demonstrate a speedup of up to three order s-of-magnitude and significant energy reductions compared to a software implementation. Furthermore, when matched for accuracy against binary spatter codes, MCR achieves on aver age 3.08 faster execution and 2.68 lower energy consumption. The work of CJK was supported by the Center for the Co-Design o f Cognitive Systems (CoCoSys), one of seven centers in JUMP 2.0, a Se miconductor Research Corporation (SRC) program sponsored by DARP A, in a ddition to the NDSEG Fellowship, Fernström Fellowship, Swartz Founda tion, and NSF Grants 2147640 and 2313149. The work of AL and DK was supporte d by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation under the Wallenber g Scholars program (Grant No. KA W2023.0327).

Motion prediction, recently popularized under the term world models, refers to anticipating the future states of agents or the future evolution of a scene, which is rooted in human cognition to bridge perception and decision-making, enabling us to anticipate, adapt, and act within an ever-changing world. It lies at the core of intelligent autonomous systems, such as robotics and self-driving cars, to safely operate in dynamic and human-robot-mixed environments, and also informs broader time-series challenges. With advances in methods, representations, and datasets, the field has seen rapid progress, reflected in rapidly updated benchmark performance. However, when state-of-the-art methods are deployed in the real world, they are often found to struggle to generalize to open-world settings and fall short of deployment standards. This reveals a gap between reality and benchmarks, which are often idealized or ill-posed, and fail to capture real-world complexity. To address the pressing need for problem settings that better reflect real-world challenges and guide future research, this paper focuses on revisiting the generalization and applicability of motion prediction models, with an emphasis on robotics, autonomous driving, and human motion applications. We first provide a comprehensive taxonomy of motion prediction methods, covering representations, modelling methods, application domains, and evaluation protocols. We then revisit two fundamental problems: 1) how to push motion prediction models to be deployable to realistic deployment standards, where motion prediction does not act in a vacuum, but functions as one module of closed-loop autonomy stacks - it takes input from the localization and perception, and informs downstream planning and control.

Sim-to-real transfer remains a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for robotics, as policies trained in simulation often fail to generalize to the real world due to discrepancies in environment dynamics. While standard approaches typically train policies agnostic to these variations, we investigate whether sim-to-real transfer can be improved by conditioning the policy on an estimate of the dynamics parameters -- referred to as context. To this end, we integrate a context estimation module into a DR-based RL framework and systematically compare SOTA supervision strategies. We evaluate the resulting context-aware policies in both a canonical control benchmark and a real-world pushing task using a Franka Emika Panda robot. Results show that context-aware policies outperform the context-agnostic baseline across all settings, although the best supervision strategy depends on the task. Introduction Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved significant success in developing robot controllers capable of solving complex tasks [1]. To address these limitations, physics simulation engines are widely used as a safer and more efficient alternative for policy training. Once a policy has been trained in simulation, it is transferred to the physical robot--a process known as sim-to-real transfer [2, 1, 3]. Although promising, this paradigm is hindered by the reality or sim-to-real gap, which refers to the discrepancy between the simulated and real-world environments [4, 5].

AI research agents are demonstrating great potential to accelerate scientific progress by automating the design, implementation, and training of machine learning models. We focus on methods for improving agents' performance on MLE-bench, a challenging benchmark where agents compete in Kaggle competitions to solve real-world machine learning problems. We formalize AI research agents as search policies that navigate a space of candidate solutions, iteratively modifying them using operators. By designing and systematically varying different operator sets and search policies (Greedy, MCTS, Evolutionary), we show that their interplay is critical for achieving high performance. Our best pairing of search strategy and operator set achieves a state-of-the-art result on MLE-bench lite, increasing the success rate of achieving a Kaggle medal from 39.6% to 47.7%. Our investigation underscores the importance of jointly considering the search strategy, operator design, and evaluation methodology in advancing automated machine learning.

As human machine teaming becomes central to paradigms like Industry 5.0, a critical need arises for machines to safely and effectively interpret complex human behaviors. A research gap currently exists between techno centric robotic frameworks, which often lack nuanced models of human behavior, and descriptive behavioral ontologies, which are not designed for real time, collaborative interpretation. This paper addresses this gap by presenting OntoPret, an ontology for the interpretation of human behavior. Grounded in cognitive science and a modular engineering methodology, OntoPret provides a formal, machine processable framework for classifying behaviors, including task deviations and deceptive actions. We demonstrate its adaptability across two distinct use cases manufacturing and gameplay and establish the semantic foundations necessary for advanced reasoning about human intentions.