Data scarcity remains a fundamental challenge in robot learning. While human demonstrations benefit from abundant motion capture data and vast internet resources, robotic manipulation suffers from limited training examples. To bridge this gap between human and robot manipulation capabilities, we propose UniPrototype, a novel framework that enables effective knowledge transfer from human to robot domains via shared motion primitives. ur approach makes three key contributions: (1) We introduce a compositional prototype discovery mechanism with soft assignments, enabling multiple primitives to co-activate and thus capture blended and hierarchical skills; (2) We propose an adaptive prototype selection strategy that automatically adjusts the number of prototypes to match task complexity, ensuring scalable and efficient representation; (3) We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments in both simulation environments and real-world robotic systems. Our results show that UniPrototype successfully transfers human manipulation knowledge to robots, significantly improving learning efficiency and task performance compared to existing approaches.The code and dataset will be released upon acceptance at an anonymous repository.

Sign language translation from text to video plays a crucial role in enabling effective communication for Deaf and hard--of--hearing individuals. A major challenge lies in generating accurate and natural body poses and movements that faithfully convey intended meanings. Prior methods often neglect the anatomical constraints and coordination patterns of human skeletal motion, resulting in rigid or biomechanically implausible outputs. To address this, we propose a novel approach that explicitly models the relationships among skeletal joints--including shoulders, arms, and hands--by incorporating geometric constraints on joint positions, bone lengths, and movement dynamics. During training, we introduce a parent-relative reweighting mechanism to enhance finger flexibility and reduce motion stiffness. Additionally, bone-pose losses and bone-length constraints enforce anatomically consistent structures. Our method narrows the performance gap between the previous best and the ground-truth oracle by 56.51%, and further reduces discrepancies in bone length and movement variance by 18.76% and 5.48%, respectively, demonstrating significant gains in anatomical realism and motion naturalness.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong persuasive capabilities comparable to those of humans, offering promising benefits while raising societal concerns about their deployment. However, systematically evaluating the persuasive capabilities of LLMs is inherently challenging, as the effectiveness of persuasion among humans varies significantly across different domains. In this paper, we take a theory-driven approach to provide a scalable and principled framework for measuring the persuasive capabilities of LLMs. Grounded in the Bayesian Persuasion (BP) framework, we repurpose existing human-human persuasion datasets to construct environments for evaluating and training LLMs in strategic persuasion. Our results reveal that frontier models can consistently achieve high persuasion gains and exhibit sophisticated persuasion strategies that align with theoretical predictions. Building on this, we use reinforcement learning to train LLMs for strategic persuasion in our environments. Our results also demonstrate that even small LLMs can obtain significantly higher persuasion gains through reinforcement learning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) vary widely in their capabilities, with larger models often having better performance but higher cost: choosing an LLM model often involves trading off performance and cost. The LLM Cascade is a paradigm that defers difficult queries from weak/cheap to strong/expensive models. This approach is nonadaptive: the deferral decision is trained offline. When confronted with similar or repeated queries, the LLM Cascade may then repeatedly consult the expensive model and incur higher cost. To improve the cascading efficiency, we propose Inter-Cascade, an online and interactive LLM Cascade that extends the role of strong model from a backup helper to a long-term teacher. In our system, when a strong model resolves a difficult query, it also distills its solution into a generalized, reusable problem-solving strategy that boosts the weak model on subsequent queries. Adding strategies to queries enables the weak model to dynamically improve its performance over time, avoiding computationally and time-intensive fine-tuning. Empirically, compared with standard LLM Cascade baselines across multiple benchmarks, the Inter-Cascade significantly improves the accuracy of the weak model (by up to 33.06 absolute percentage points) and the overall system (by up to 5.53 absolute percentage points), while reducing the calls to strong models (by up to 48.05% relative reduction) and saving the corresponding fees (by up to 49.63% relative reduction). Inter-Cascade demonstrates the effective in-context knowledge transfer between LLMs, and provides a general, scalable framework applicable to both open-source and API-based LLMs.

As Generative AI (GenAI) systems see growing adoption, a key concern involves the external validity of evaluations, or the extent to which they generalize from lab-based to real-world deployment conditions. Threats to the external validity of GenAI evaluations arise when the source sample of human raters and system outputs used to obtain a system quality estimate differs from the target distribution at deployment time. In this work, we propose a doubly-robust estimation framework designed to address this evaluation sampling bias. Key to our approach is the use of "persona" ratings produced by prompting an LLM evaluator (i.e., an LLM-as-a-judge) to behave as a human rater with specific sociodemographic characteristics. Our doubly-robust framework combines these informative yet imperfect persona ratings with human ratings obtained under evaluation sampling bias to produce statistically valid system quality estimates. In particular, we show that our approach yields valid system quality estimates when either (i) a model trained to predict human ratings using persona ratings and source data observed under sampling bias, or (ii) a reweighting model that corrects for sampling bias is of sufficient quality. We validate our framework theoretically and via a novel Persona Simulation Framework (PSF) designed to systematically manipulate persona quality and the degree of evaluation sampling bias present in source data. Our work provides a principled foundation for combining imperfect persona ratings with human ratings observed under sampling bias to obtain valid system quality estimates.

We introduce a novel approach to large language model (LLM) distillation by formulating it as a constrained reinforcement learning problem. While recent work has begun exploring the integration of task-specific rewards into distillation processes, existing methods typically rely on ad-hoc reward weighting. We propose a principled optimization framework that maximizes task-specific rewards while constraining the divergence from the teacher model to remain below a specified threshold. Our approach adapts constrained state augmented reinforcement learning to the distillation setting, introducing a modified reward function that maintains theoretical guarantees of constraint satisfaction without requiring state augmentation or teacher model access during deployment and without the computational overhead of the dual Lagrangian methods. Through extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that our method achieves better constraint satisfaction rates and better reasoning compared to the soft Lagrangian relaxation baselines while maintaining competitive task performance. Our framework provides a theoretically grounded and practically efficient solution for reward-aware distillation in resource-constrained settings. Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of natural language processing tasks (V aswani et al., 2017; Trinh et al., 2024; Chervonyi et al., 2025; Guo et al., 2025; Christianos et al., 2023), but their size and complexity make them impractical for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Distillation (Hinton et al., 2015; Czarnecki et al., 2019), a technique where a smaller student model learns from a larger teacher model, has been widely used to transfer knowledge while reducing computational costs. Conventional distillation methods (Sanh et al., 2020; Gu et al., 2024; Ko et al., 2024) typically focus on minimizing the divergence between the student and teacher models, often using metrics such as Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. However, these methods do not fully leverage additional reward signals that can provide valuable guidance, particularly in tasks requiring complex reasoning.

Imitation learning is a powerful paradigm for robot skill acquisition, yet conventional demonstration methods--such as kinesthetic teaching and teleoperation--are cumbersome, hardware-heavy, and disruptive to workflows. Recently, passive observation using extended reality (XR) headsets has shown promise for egocentric demonstration collection, yet current approaches require additional hardware, complex calibration, or constrained recording conditions that limit scalability and usability. We present ARMimic, a novel framework that overcomes these limitations with a lightweight and hardware-minimal setup for scalable, robot-free data collection using only a consumer XR headset and a stationary workplace camera. ARMimic integrates egocentric hand tracking, augmented reality (AR) robot overlays, and real-time depth sensing to ensure collision-aware, kinematically feasible demonstrations. A unified imitation learning pipeline is at the core of our method, treating both human and virtual robot trajectories as interchangeable, which enables policies that generalize across different embodiments and environments. We validate ARMimic on two manipulation tasks, including challenging long-horizon bowl stacking. In our experiments, ARMimic reduces demonstration time by 50% compared to teleoperation and improves task success by 11% over ACT, a state-of-the-art baseline trained on teleoperated data. Our results demonstrate that ARMimic enables safe, seamless, and in-the-wild data collection, offering great potential for scalable robot learning in diverse real-world settings.

As increasingly capable large language model (LLM)-based agents are developed, the potential harms caused by misalignment and loss of control grow correspondingly severe. To address these risks, we propose an approach that directly measures and controls the agency of these AI systems. We conceptualize the agency of LLM-based agents as a property independent of intelligence-related measures and consistent with the interdisciplinary literature on the concept of agency. We offer (1) agency as a system property operationalized along the dimensions of preference rigidity, independent operation, and goal persistence, (2) a representation engineering approach to the measurement and control of the agency of an LLM-based agent, and (3) regulatory tools enabled by this approach: mandated testing protocols, domain-specific agency limits, insurance frameworks that price risk based on agency, and agency ceilings to prevent societal-scale risks. We view our approach as a step toward reducing the risks that motivate the ``Scientist AI'' paradigm, while still capturing some of the benefits from limited agentic behavior.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse domains but often exhibit disparities in how they handle real-life queries. To systematically investigate these effects within various disability contexts, we introduce \textbf{AccessEval (Accessibility Evaluation)}, a benchmark evaluating 21 closed- and open-source LLMs across 6 real-world domains and 9 disability types using paired Neutral and Disability-Aware Queries. We evaluated model outputs with metrics for sentiment, social perception, and factual accuracy. Our analysis reveals that responses to disability-aware queries tend to have a more negative tone, increased stereotyping, and higher factual error compared to neutral queries. These effects show notable variation by domain and disability type, with disabilities affecting hearing, speech, and mobility disproportionately impacted. These disparities reflect persistent forms of ableism embedded in model behavior. By examining model performance in real-world decision-making contexts, we better illuminate how such biases can translate into tangible harms for disabled users. This framing helps bridges the gap between technical evaluation and user impact, reinforcing importance of bias mitigation in day-to-day applications. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Srikant86/AccessEval

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) controllers for quadrupedal locomotion have demonstrated impressive performance on challenging terrains, allowing robots to execute complex skills such as climbing, running, and jumping. However, existing blind locomotion controllers often struggle to ensure safety and efficient traversal through risky gap terrains, which are typically highly complex, requiring robots to perceive terrain information and select appropriate footholds during locomotion accurately. Meanwhile, existing perception-based controllers still present several practical limitations, including a complex multi-sensor deployment system and expensive computing resource requirements. This paper proposes a DRL controller named MAstering Risky Gap Terrains (MARG), which integrates terrain maps and proprioception to dynamically adjust the action and enhance the robot's stability in these tasks. During the training phase, our controller accelerates policy optimization by selectively incorporating privileged information (e.g., center of mass, friction coefficients) that are available in simulation but unmeasurable directly in real-world deployments due to sensor limitations. We also designed three foot-related rewards to encourage the robot to explore safe footholds. More importantly, a terrain map generation (TMG) model is proposed to reduce the drift existing in mapping and provide accurate terrain maps using only one LiDAR, providing a foundation for zero-shot transfer of the learned policy. The experimental results indicate that MARG maintains stability in various risky terrain tasks.