Integrating autonomous mobile robots into human environments requires human-like decision-making and energy-efficient, event-based computation. Despite progress, neuromorphic methods are rarely applied to Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) navigation approaches due to unstable training. We address this gap with a hybrid socially integrated DRL actor-critic approach that combines Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) in the actor with Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in the critic and a neuromorphic feature extractor to capture temporal crowd dynamics and human-robot interactions. Our approach enhances social navigation performance and reduces estimated energy consumption by approximately 1.69 orders of magnitude.

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) plays a fundamental role in extended reality (XR) applications. As the standards for immersion in XR continue to increase, the demands for SLAM benchmarking have become more stringent. Trajectory accuracy is the key metric, and marker-based optical motion capture (MoCap) systems are widely used to generate ground truth (GT) because of their drift-free and relatively accurate measurements. However, the precision of MoCap-based GT is limited by two factors: the spatiotemporal calibration with the device under test (DUT) and the inherent jitter in the MoCap measurements. These limitations hinder accurate SLAM benchmarking, particularly for key metrics like rotation error and inter-frame jitter, which are critical for immersive XR experiences. This paper presents a novel continuous-time maximum likelihood estimator to address these challenges. The proposed method integrates auxiliary inertial measurement unit (IMU) data to compensate for MoCap jitter. Additionally, a variable time synchronization method and a pose residual based on screw congruence constraints are proposed, enabling precise spatiotemporal calibration across multiple sensors and the DUT. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods, achieving the precision necessary for comprehensive benchmarking of state-of-the-art SLAM algorithms in XR applications. Furthermore, we thoroughly validate the practicality of our method by benchmarking several leading XR devices and open-source SLAM algorithms. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ylab-xrpg/xr-hpgt.

Vehicle collisions remain a major challenge in large-scale mixed traffic systems, especially when human-driven vehicles (HVs) and robotic vehicles (RVs) interact under dynamic and uncertain conditions. Although Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) offers promising capabilities for traffic signal control, ensuring safety in such environments remains difficult. As a direct indicator of traffic risk, the collision rate must be well understood and incorporated into traffic control design. This study investigates the primary factors influencing collision rates in a MARL-governed Mixed Traffic Control (MTC) network. We examine three dimensions: total vehicle count, signalized versus unsignalized intersection configurations, and turning-movement strategies. Through controlled simulation experiments, we evaluate how each factor affects collision likelihood. The results show that collision rates are sensitive to traffic density, the level of signal coordination, and turning-control design. These findings provide practical insights for improving the safety and robustness of MARL-based mixed traffic control systems, supporting the development of intelligent transportation systems in which both efficiency and safety are jointly optimized.

Crowd navigation has garnered considerable research interest in recent years, especially with the proliferating application of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques. Many studies, however, do not sufficiently analyze the relative priorities among evaluation metrics, which compromises the fair assessment of methods with divergent objectives. Furthermore, trajectory-continuity metrics, specifically those requiring $C^2$ smoothness, are rarely incorporated. Current DRL approaches generally prioritize efficiency and proximal comfort, often neglecting trajectory optimization or addressing it only through simplistic, unvalidated smoothness reward. Nevertheless, effective trajectory optimization is essential to ensure naturalness, enhance comfort, and maximize the energy efficiency of any navigation system. To address these gaps, this paper proposes a unified framework that enables the fair and transparent assessment of navigation methods by examining the prioritization and joint evaluation of multiple optimization objectives. We further propose a novel reward-shaping strategy that explicitly emphasizes trajectory-curvature optimization. The resulting trajectory quality and adaptability are significantly enhanced across multi-scale scenarios. Through extensive 2D and 3D experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

The increasing complexity of cyber threats in distributed environments demands advanced frameworks for real-time detection and response across multimodal data streams. This paper introduces AgenticCyber, a generative AI powered multi-agent system that orchestrates specialized agents to monitor cloud logs, surveillance videos, and environmental audio concurrently. The solution achieves 96.2% F1-score in threat detection, reduces response latency to 420 ms, and enables adaptive security posture management using multimodal language models like Google's Gemini coupled with LangChain for agent orchestration. Benchmark datasets, such as AWS CloudTrail logs, UCF-Crime video frames, and UrbanSound8K audio clips, show greater performance over standard intrusion detection systems, reducing mean time to respond (MTTR) by 65% and improving situational awareness. This work introduces a scalable, modular proactive cybersecurity architecture for enterprise networks and IoT ecosystems that overcomes siloed security technologies with cross-modal reasoning and automated remediation.

Large language models (LLMs) offer strong high-level planning capabilities for reinforcement learning (RL) by decomposing tasks into subgoals. However, their practical utility is limited by poor planning-execution alignment, which reflects a critical gap between abstract plans and actionable, environment-compatible behaviors. This misalignment arises from two interrelated limitations: (1) LLMs often produce subgoals that are semantically plausible but infeasible or irrelevant in the target environment due to insufficient grounding in environment-specific knowledge, and (2) single-LLM planning conflates generation with self-verification, resulting in overconfident yet unreliable subgoals that frequently fail during execution. To address these challenges, we propose Subgoal Graph-Augmented Actor-Critic-Refiner (SGA-ACR), a framework that integrates an environment-specific subgoal graph and structured entity knowledge with a multi-LLM planning pipeline that explicitly separates generation, critique, and refinement to produce executable and verifiable subgoals. A subgoal tracker further monitors execution progress, provides auxiliary rewards, and adaptively updates the subgoal graph to maintain alignment between plans and actions. Experimental results on 22 diverse tasks in the open-world game "Crafter" demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

We study what actually works and what doesn't for training large language models as agents via multi-turn reinforcement learning. Despite rapid progress, existing frameworks and definitions are fragmented, and there is no systematic formulation or analysis of which design choices matter across tasks. We address this gap by first breaking down the design space into three inter-related pillars--environment, reward, and policy--and empirically derive a recipe for training LLM agents in situated textual domains. In particular, we test TextWorld and ALFWorld, popular domains for testing situated embodied reasoning, as well as SWE-Gym for more software engineering style tasks. Training LLMs as autonomous agents to navigate open-ended environments presents unique challenges: planning across extended horizons, making multi-turn sequential decisions, and optimizing for multi-turn rewards. The transition from static single-turn problem-solving to dynamic multi-step reasoning is essential for agentic benchmarks such as interactive text and embodied simulations (TextWorld (C ˆ ot e et al., 2018), ALFWorld (Shridhar et al., 2021), etc.), real-world software programming (OSWorld (Xie et al., 2024), SWE-gym (Pan et al., 2025), etc.), and abstract reasoning in novel situations (ARC-AGI (Chollet et al., 2025)). However, existing multi-turn RL implementations vary widely: some refer to tool-augmented single queries as multi-turn (Zeng et al., 2025), while many rely on model-based assumptions (Wang et al., 2025). This fragmentation has led to incomparable results across papers and confusion about what constitutes true multi-turn learning versus pseudo-multi-turn adaptations of single-turn methods. This paper aims to facilitate research efforts on the open research question: What factors are practically important in making multi-turn RL for LLM agent learning work. Motivated by the lack of standardization of multi-turn RL approaches, we systematically decompose the design space into three interdependent pillars--environment, reward, and policy--and empirically derive a recipe for training LLM agents in situated textual domains (Figure 1). We evaluate our approach on TextWorld and ALFWorld for embodied reasoning, and SWE-gym for real-world programming, revealing critical insights for each pillar.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents excel at multi-step, tool-augmented tasks. However, smart homes introduce distinct challenges, requiring agents to handle latent user intents, temporal dependencies, device constraints, scheduling, and more. The main bottlenecks for developing smart home agents with such capabilities include the lack of a realistic simulation environment where agents can interact with devices and observe the results, as well as a challenging benchmark to evaluate them. To address this, we introduce $\textbf{SimuHome}$, a time-accelerated home environment that simulates smart devices, supports API calls, and reflects changes in environmental variables. By building the simulator on the Matter protocol, the global industry standard for smart home communication, SimuHome provides a high-fidelity environment, and agents validated in SimuHome can be deployed on real Matter-compliant devices with minimal adaptation. We provide a challenging benchmark of 600 episodes across twelve user query types that require the aforementioned capabilities. Our evaluation of 16 agents under a unified ReAct framework reveals distinct capabilities and limitations across models. Models under 7B parameters exhibited negligible performance across all query types. Even GPT-4.1, the best-performing standard model, struggled with implicit intent inference, state verification, and particularly temporal scheduling. While reasoning models such as GPT-5.1 consistently outperformed standard models on every query type, they required over three times the average inference time, which can be prohibitive for real-time smart home applications. This highlights a critical trade-off between task performance and real-world practicality.

This paper applies the authors' recent results on asynchronous stochastic approximation (SA) in the Borkar-Meyn framework to reinforcement learning in average-reward semi-Markov decision processes (SMDPs). We establish the convergence of an asynchronous SA analogue of Schweitzer's classical relative value iteration algorithm, RVI Q-learning, for finite-space, weakly communicating SMDPs. In particular, we show that the algorithm converges almost surely to a compact, connected subset of solutions to the average-reward optimality equation, with convergence to a unique, sample path-dependent solution under additional stepsize and asynchrony conditions. Moreover, to make full use of the SA framework, we introduce new monotonicity conditions for estimating the optimal reward rate in RVI Q-learning. These conditions substantially expand the previously considered algorithmic framework and are addressed through novel arguments in the stability and convergence analysis of RVI Q-learning.

How much does a trained RL policy actually use its past observations? We propose \emph{Temporal Range}, a model-agnostic metric that treats first-order sensitivities of multiple vector outputs across a temporal window to the input sequence as a temporal influence profile and summarizes it by the magnitude-weighted average lag. Temporal Range is computed via reverse-mode automatic differentiation from the Jacobian blocks $\partial y_s/\partial x_t\in\mathbb{R}^{c\times d}$ averaged over final timesteps $s\in\{t+1,\dots,T\}$ and is well-characterized in the linear setting by a small set of natural axioms. Across diagnostic and control tasks (POPGym; flicker/occlusion; Copy-$k$) and architectures (MLPs, RNNs, SSMs), Temporal Range (i) remains small in fully observed control, (ii) scales with the task's ground-truth lag in Copy-$k$, and (iii) aligns with the minimum history window required for near-optimal return as confirmed by window ablations. We also report Temporal Range for a compact Long Expressive Memory (LEM) policy trained on the task, using it as a proxy readout of task-level memory. Our axiomatic treatment draws on recent work on range measures, specialized here to temporal lag and extended to vector-valued outputs in the RL setting. Temporal Range thus offers a practical per-sequence readout of memory dependence for comparing agents and environments and for selecting the shortest sufficient context.