Abstract-- Path planning algorithms, such as the search-based A*, are a critical component of autonomous mobile robotics, enabling robots to navigate from a starting point to a destination efficiently and safely. We investigated the resilience of the A* algorithm in the face of potential adversarial interventions known as obstacle attacks. The adversary's goal is to delay the robot's timely arrival at its destination by introducing obstacles along its original path. We developed malicious software to execute the attacks and conducted experiments to assess their impact, both in simulation using T urtleBot in Gazebo and in real-world deployment with the Unitree Go1 robot. In simulation, the attacks resulted in an average delay of 36%, with the most significant delays occurring in scenarios where the robot was forced to take substantially longer alternative paths. In real-world experiments, the delays were even more pronounced, with all attacks successfully rerouting the robot and causing measurable disruptions. These results highlight that the algorithm's robustness is not solely an attribute of its design but is significantly influenced by the operational environment. For example, in constrained environments like tunnels, the delays were maximized due to the limited availability of alternative routes.

Large-scale egocentric video datasets capture diverse human activities across a wide range of scenarios, offering rich and detailed insights into how humans interact with objects, especially those that require fine-grained dexterous control. Such complex, dexterous skills with precise controls are crucial for many robotic manipulation tasks, yet are often insufficiently addressed by traditional data-driven approaches to robotic manipulation. To address this gap, we leverage manipulation priors learned from large-scale egocentric video datasets to improve policy learning for dexterous robotic manipulation tasks. We present MAPLE, a novel method for dexterous robotic manipulation that learns features to predict object contact points and detailed hand poses at the moment of contact from egocentric images. We then use the learned features to train policies for downstream manipulation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MAPLE across 4 existing simulation benchmarks, as well as a newly designed set of 4 challenging simulation tasks requiring fine-grained object control and complex dexterous skills. The benefits of MAPLE are further highlighted in real-world experiments using a 17 DoF dexterous robotic hand, whereas the simultaneous evaluation across both simulation and real-world experiments has remained underexplored in prior work. We additionally showcase the efficacy of our model on an egocentric contact point prediction task, validating its usefulness beyond dexterous manipulation policy learning.

Deep neural networks such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformers have achieved many successes in image classification in recent years. It has been consistently demonstrated that best practice for image classification is when large deep models can be trained on abundant labelled data. However there are many real world scenarios where the requirement for large amounts of training data to get the best performance cannot be met. In these scenarios transfer learning can help improve performance. To date there have been no surveys that comprehensively review deep transfer learning as it relates to image classification overall. However, several recent general surveys of deep transfer learning and ones that relate to particular specialised target image classification tasks have been published. We believe it is important for the future progress in the field that all current knowledge is collated and the overarching patterns analysed and discussed. In this survey we formally define deep transfer learning and the problem it attempts to solve in relation to image classification. We survey the current state of the field and identify where recent progress has been made. We show where the gaps in current knowledge are and make suggestions for how to progress the field to fill in these knowledge gaps. We present a new taxonomy of the applications of transfer learning for image classification. This taxonomy makes it easier to see overarching patterns of where transfer learning has been effective and, where it has failed to fulfill its potential. This also allows us to suggest where the problems lie and how it could be used more effectively. We show that under this new taxonomy, many of the applications where transfer learning has been shown to be ineffective or even hinder performance are to be expected when taking into account the source and target datasets and the techniques used.

Air pollution is one of the most concerns for urban areas. Many countries have constructed monitoring stations to hourly collect pollution values. Recently, there is a research in Daegu city, Korea for real-time air quality monitoring via sensors installed on taxis running across the whole city. The collected data is huge (1-second interval) and in both Spatial and Temporal format. In this paper, based on this spatiotemporal Big data, we propose a real-time air pollution prediction model based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) algorithm for image-like Spatial distribution of air pollution. Regarding to Temporal information in the data, we introduce a combination of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) unit for time series data and a Neural Network model for other air pollution impact factors such as weather conditions to build a hybrid prediction model. This model is simple in architecture but still brings good prediction ability.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in multimodal tasks. Despite their impressive performance, MLLMs suffer from the modality imbalance issue, where visual information is often underutilized compared to textual representations in deeper layers, leading to degraded visual performance or hallucinations. This issue stems from the predominant reliance on next-text-token-prediction during training, which fails to provide direct visual supervisory signals, resulting in progressive homogenization of visual representations throughout the layers. To this end, we propose Latent Visual Reconstruction (LaVer), a novel training framework that facilitates MLLMs in learning more discriminative visual representations via masked image modeling in the joint latent semantic space of LLM. Our method offers direct visual activation to MLLMs, which exhibit increased visual attention allocation, indicating enhanced utilization of visual information. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks prove the superiority of our approach in various scenarios, especially those requiring dense visual capabilities. Code of LaVer is available at https://github.com/Fir-lat/LaVer.

Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMABs) are a powerful framework for sequential decision-making, widely applied in resource allocation and intervention optimization challenges in public health. However, traditional RMABs assume independence among arms, limiting their ability to account for interactions between individuals that can be common and significant in a real-world environment. This paper introduces Networked RMAB, a novel framework that integrates the RMAB model with the independent cascade model to capture interactions between arms in networked environments. We define the Bellman equation for networked RMAB and present its computational challenge due to exponentially large action and state spaces. To resolve the computational challenge, we establish the submodularity of Bellman equation and apply the hill-climbing algorithm to achieve a $1-\frac{1}{e}$ approximation guarantee in Bellman updates. Lastly, we prove that the approximate Bellman updates are guaranteed to converge by a modified contraction analysis. We experimentally verify these results by developing an efficient Q-learning algorithm tailored to the networked setting. Experimental results on real-world graph data demonstrate that our Q-learning approach outperforms both $k$-step look-ahead and network-blind approaches, highlighting the importance of capturing and leveraging network effects where they exist.

Abstract--Unlike traditional multi-agent coordination frameworks, which assume a fixed number of agents, UAS traffic management (UTM) requires a platform that enables Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) to freely enter or exit constrained low-altitude airspace. Consequently, the number of UAS operating in a given region is time-varying, with vehicles dynamically joining or leaving even in dense, obstacle-laden environments. The primary goal of this paper is to develop a computationally efficient management system that maximizes airspace usability while ensuring safety and efficiency. T o achieve this, we first introduce physics-informed methods to structure fixed skyroads across multiple altitude layers of urban airspace, with the directionality of each skyroad designed to guarantee full reachability. We then present a novel Continuous UTM (C-UTM) framework that optimally allocates skyroads to UAS requests while accounting for the time-varying capacity of the airspace. Collectively, the proposed model addresses the key challenges of low-altitude UTM by providing a scalable, safe, and efficient solution for urban airspace usability.

Abstract-- Generating safe, kinodynamically feasible, and optimal trajectories for complex robotic systems is a central challenge in robotics. This paper presents Safe Model Predictive Diffusion (Safe MPD), a training-free diffusion planner that unifies a model-based diffusion framework with a safety shield to generate trajectories that are both kinodynamically feasible and safe by construction. By enforcing feasibility and safety on all samples during the denoising process, our method avoids the common pitfalls of post-processing corrections, such as computational intractability and loss of feasibility. The results show that it substantially outperforms existing safety strategies in success rate and safety, while achieving sub-second computation times. I. INTRODUCTION Trajectory optimization is a cornerstone of robotics, enabling autonomous systems to generate goal-oriented motions consistent with their dynamics.

Predicting a song's commercial success prior to its release remains an open and critical research challenge for the music industry. Early prediction of music popularity informs strategic decisions, creative planning, and marketing. Existing methods suffer from four limitations:(i) temporal dynamics in audio and lyrics are averaged away; (ii) lyrics are represented as a bag of words, disregarding compositional structure and affective semantics; (iii) artist- and song-level historical performance is ignored; and (iv) multimodal fusion approaches rely on simple feature concatenation, resulting in poorly aligned shared representations. To address these limitations, we introduce GAMENet, an end-to-end multimodal deep learning architecture for music popularity prediction. GAMENet integrates modality-specific experts for audio, lyrics, and social metadata through an adaptive gating mechanism. We use audio features from Music4AllOnion processed via OnionEnsembleAENet, a network of autoencoders designed for robust feature extraction; lyric embeddings derived through a large language model pipeline; and newly introduced Career Trajectory Dynamics (CTD) features that capture multi-year artist career momentum and song-level trajectory statistics. Using the Music4All dataset (113k tracks), previously explored in MIR tasks but not popularity prediction, GAMENet achieves a 12% improvement in R^2 over direct multimodal feature concatenation. Spotify audio descriptors alone yield an R^2 of 0.13. Integrating aggregate CTD features increases this to 0.69, with an additional 7% gain from temporal CTD features. We further validate robustness using the SpotGenTrack Popularity Dataset (100k tracks), achieving a 16% improvement over the previous baseline. Extensive ablations confirm the model's effectiveness and the distinct contribution of each modality.

In this work, we report what happens when two large language models respond to each other for many turns without any outside input in a multi-agent setup. The setup begins with a short seed sentence. After that, each model reads the other's output and generates a response. This continues for a fixed number of steps. We used Mistral Nemo Base 2407 and Llama 2 13B hf. We observed that most conversations start coherently but later fall into repetition. In many runs, a short phrase appears and repeats across turns. Once repetition begins, both models tend to produce similar output rather than introducing a new direction in the conversation. This leads to a loop where the same or similar text is produced repeatedly. We describe this behavior as a form of convergence. It occurs even though the models are large, trained separately, and not given any prompt instructions. To study this behavior, we apply lexical and embedding-based metrics to measure how far the conversation drifts from the initial seed and how similar the outputs of the two models becomes as the conversation progresses.