Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged, demonstrating strong generalization in robotic scene understanding and manipulation. However, when confronted with long-horizon tasks that require defined goal states, such as LEGO assembly or object rearrangement, existing VLA models still face challenges in coordinating high-level planning with precise manipulation. Therefore, we aim to endow a VLA model with the capability to infer the "how" process from the "what" outcomes, transforming goal states into executable procedures. In this paper, we introduce ManualVLA, a unified VLA framework built upon a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture, enabling coherent collaboration between multimodal manual generation and action execution. Unlike prior VLA models that directly map sensory inputs to actions, we first equip ManualVLA with a planning expert that generates intermediate manuals consisting of images, position prompts, and textual instructions. Building upon these multimodal manuals, we design a Manual Chain-of-Thought (ManualCoT) reasoning process that feeds them into the action expert, where each manual step provides explicit control conditions, while its latent representation offers implicit guidance for accurate manipulation. To alleviate the burden of data collection, we develop a high-fidelity digital-twin toolkit based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, which automatically generates manual data for planning expert training. ManualVLA demonstrates strong real-world performance, achieving an average success rate 32% higher than the previous hierarchical SOTA baseline on LEGO assembly and object rearrangement tasks.

We introduce LLM CHESS, an evaluation framework designed to probe the generalization of reasoning and instruction-following abilities in large language models (LLMs) through extended agentic interaction in the domain of chess. We rank over 50 open and closed source models by playing against a random opponent using a range of behavioral metrics, including win and loss rates, move quality, move legality, hallucinated actions, and game duration. For a subset of top reasoning models, we derive an Elo estimate by playing against a chess engine with variably configured skill, which allows for comparisons between models in an easily understandable way. Despite the simplicity of the instruction-following task and the weakness of the opponent, many state-of-the-art models struggle to complete games or achieve consistent wins. Similar to other benchmarks on complex reasoning tasks, our experiments reveal a clear separation between reasoning and non-reasoning models. However, unlike existing static benchmarks, the stochastic and dynamic nature of LLM CHESS uniquely reduces overfitting and memorization while preventing benchmark saturation, proving difficult even for top reasoning models. To support future work on evaluating reasoning and instruction-following in LLMs, we release our experimental framework, a public leaderboard, and a dataset of associated games.

Study Objectives: Wrist accelerometry is widely used for inferring sleep-wake state. Previous works demonstrated poor wake detection, without cross-device generalizability and validation in different age range and sleep disorders. We developed a robust deep learning model for to detect sleep-wakefulness from triaxial accelerometry and evaluated its validity across three devices and in a large adult population spanning a wide range of ages with and without sleep disorders. Methods: We collected wrist accelerometry simultaneous to polysomnography (PSG) in 453 adults undergoing clinical sleep testing at a tertiary care sleep laboratory, using three devices. We extracted features in 30-second epochs and trained a 3-class model to detect wake, sleep, and sleep with arousals, which was then collapsed into wake vs. sleep using a decision tree. To enhance wake detection, the model was specifically trained on randomly selected subjects with low sleep efficiency and/or high arousal index from one device recording and then tested on the remaining recordings. Results: The model showed high performance with F1 Score of 0.86, sensitivity (sleep) of 0.87, and specificity (wakefulness) of 0.78, and significant and moderate correlation to PSG in predicting total sleep time (R=0.69) and sleep efficiency (R=0.63). Model performance was robust to the presence of sleep disorders, including sleep apnea and periodic limb movements in sleep, and was consistent across all three models of accelerometer. Conclusions: We present a deep model to detect sleep-wakefulness from actigraphy in adults with relative robustness to the presence of sleep disorders and generalizability across diverse commonly used wrist accelerometers.

Chaos is a fundamental feature of many complex dynamical systems, including weather systems and fluid turbulence. These systems are inherently difficult to predict due to their extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Many chaotic systems are dissipative and ergodic, motivating data-driven models that aim to learn invariant statistical properties over long time horizons. While recent models have shown empirical success in preserving invariant statistics, they are prone to generating unbounded predictions, which prevent meaningful statistics evaluation. To overcome this, we introduce the Energy-Constrained Operator (ECO) that simultaneously learns the system dynamics while enforcing boundedness in predictions. We leverage concepts from control theory to develop algebraic conditions based on a learnable energy function, ensuring the learned dynamics is dissipative. ECO enforces these algebraic conditions through an efficient closed-form quadratic projection layer, which provides provable trajectory boundedness. To our knowledge, this is the first work establishing such formal guarantees for data-driven chaotic dynamics models. Additionally, the learned invariant level set provides an outer estimate for the strange attractor, a complex structure that is computationally intractable to characterize. We demonstrate empirical success in ECO's ability to generate stable long-horizon forecasts, capturing invariant statistics on systems governed by chaotic PDEs, including the Kuramoto--Sivashinsky and the Navier--Stokes equations.

Federated Learning (FL) on resource-constrained edge devices faces a critical challenge: The computational energy required for training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) often dominates communication costs. However, most existing Energy-Harvesting FL (EHFL) strategies fail to account for this reality, resulting in wasted energy due to redundant local computations. For efficient and proactive resource management, algorithms that predict local update contributions must be devised. We propose a lightweight client scheduling framework using the Version Age of Information (VAoI), a semantics-aware metric that quantifies update timeliness and significance. Crucially, we overcome VAoI's typical prohibitive computational cost, which requires statistical distance over the entire parameter space, by introducing a feature-based proxy. This proxy estimates model redundancy using intermediate-layer extraction from a single forward pass, dramatically reducing computational complexity. Experiments conducted under extreme non-IID data distributions and scarce energy availability demonstrate superior learning performance while achieving energy reduction compared to existing baseline selection policies. Our framework establishes semantics-aware scheduling as a practical and vital solution for EHFL in realistic scenarios where training costs dominate transmission costs.

GUI grounding aims to align natural-language instructions with precise regions in complex user interfaces (UIs). While advanced MLLMs have demonstrated strong capabilities in visual GUI grounding, they still struggle with small or visually similar targets, and ambiguity in real-world layouts. We argue that these limitations stem not only from the models' inherent grounding capacity, but also from an overlooked un-derutilization of their existing reasoning potential. To address this, we present Chain-of-Ground (CoG), a training-free multi-step grounding framework that leverages MLLMs for iterative visual reasoning and refinement. Instead of relying on direct prediction, Chain-of-Ground enables the model to progressively reflect and adjust its hypotheses, achieving more accurate and interpretable localization. Our approach establishes a new state of the art on the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark with 68.4% accuracy, surpassing the previous best by 4.8%. To evaluate real-world generalization, we introduce TPanel-UI, a dataset of 420 labeled industrial control panels featuring visual distortions such as blur and masking to test robustness. On TPanel-UI, Chain-of-Ground outperforms the SOTA MLLM Qwen3-VL-235B by 6.9%, demonstrating the effectiveness of multi-step, training-free grounding across real-world and digital interfaces. Together, these results point to a new direction for unlocking MLLMs' grounding potential, through structured, iterative refinement rather than additional training.

Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly used as evaluators for natural language generation (NLG) tasks, but their application to broader evaluation scenarios remains limited. In this work, we explore the potential of LLMs as general evaluators across diverse tasks. Although LLM-based evaluators have made progress in different areas, existing methods struggle to generalize due to their reliance on costly, human-designed evaluation principles, which are often misaligned with both annotated data and LLMs' understanding.To address these challenges, we propose a rule-augmented evaluation paradigm. First, we introduce a rule distillation method that automatically extracts scoring rules from data using an LLM-assisted Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), alleviating scalability issues and improving alignment with data. Second, to enable LLMs to effectively apply the learned rules, we propose two strategies: (1) Chain-of-Rule (CoR), which guides LLM to follow distilled rules, and (2) training a rule-augmented LLM evaluator (RuAE) via reinforcement learning, further bridging the gap between rules and LLMs' reasoning. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach across various evaluation scenarios.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has sparked a surge of interest in agents, leading to the rapid growth of agent frameworks. Agent frameworks are software toolkits and libraries that provide standardized components, abstractions, and orchestration mechanisms to simplify agent development. Despite widespread use of agent frameworks, their practical applications and how they influence the agent development process remain underexplored. Different agent frameworks encounter similar problems during use, indicating that these recurring issues deserve greater attention and call for further improvements in agent framework design. Meanwhile, as the number of agent frameworks continues to grow and evolve, more than 80% of developers report difficulties in identifying the frameworks that best meet their specific development requirements. In this paper, we conduct the first empirical study of LLM-based agent frameworks, exploring real-world experiences of developers in building AI agents. To compare how well the agent frameworks meet developer needs, we further collect developer discussions for the ten previously identified agent frameworks, resulting in a total of 11,910 discussions. Finally, by analyzing these discussions, we compare the frameworks across five dimensions: development efficiency, functional abstraction, learning cost, performance optimization, and maintainability, which refers to how easily developers can update and extend both the framework itself and the agents built upon it over time. Our comparative analysis reveals significant differences among frameworks in how they meet the needs of agent developers. Overall, we provide a set of findings and implications for the LLM-driven AI agent framework ecosystem and offer insights for the design of future LLM-based agent frameworks and agent developers.

Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (SVRG) and its variants aim to speed-up training by using gradient corrections, but have seen limited success in deep learning. Here, we show surprising new foundational connections of SVRG to a recently proposed Bayesian method called posterior correction. Specifically, we show that SVRG is recovered as a special case of posterior correction over the isotropic-Gaussian family, while novel extensions are automatically obtained by using more flexible exponential families. We derive two new SVRG variants by using Gaussian families: First, a Newton-like variant that employs novel Hessian corrections, and second, an Adam-like extension that improves pretraining and finetuning of Transformer language models. This is the first work to connect SVRG to Bayes and use it to boost variational training for deep networks.

Autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) must navigate safely in cluttered environments while accounting for complex dynamics and environmental uncertainty. Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability (HJR) offers formal safety guarantees through the computation of forward and backward reachable sets, but its application is hindered by poor scalability in environments with numerous obstacles. In this paper, we present a novel framework called NeuroHJR that leverages Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to approximate the HJR solution for real-time obstacle avoidance. By embedding system dynamics and safety constraints directly into the neural network loss function, our method bypasses the need for grid-based discretization and enables efficient estimation of reachable sets in continuous state spaces. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through simulation results in densely cluttered scenarios, showing that it achieves safety performance comparable to that of classical HJR solvers while significantly reducing the computational cost. This work provides a new step toward real-time, scalable deployment of reachability-based obstacle avoidance in robotics.