Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved their reasoning and decision-making abilities when deployed as agents. Richer reasoning, however, often comes at the cost of longer chain of thought (CoT), hampering interaction efficiency in real-world scenarios. Nevertheless, there still lacks systematic definition of LLM agent efficiency, hindering targeted improvements. To this end, we introduce dual-efficiency, comprising (i) step-level efficiency, which minimizes tokens per step, and (ii) trajectory-level efficiency, which minimizes the number of steps to complete a task. Building on this definition, we propose DEPO, a dual-efficiency preference optimization method that jointly rewards succinct responses and fewer action steps. Experiments on WebShop and BabyAI show that DEPO cuts token usage by up to 60.9% and steps by up to 26.9%, while achieving up to a 29.3% improvement in performance. DEPO also generalizes to three out-of-domain math benchmarks and retains its efficiency gains when trained on only 25% of the data. Our project page is at https://opencausalab.github.io/DEPO.

Autonomous exploration of obstacle-rich spaces requires strategies that ensure efficiency while guaranteeing safety against collisions with obstacles. This paper investigates a novel platform-agnostic reinforcement learning framework that integrates a graph neural network-based policy for next-waypoint selection, with a safety filter ensuring safe mobility. Specifically, the neural network is trained using reinforcement learning through the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm to maximize exploration efficiency while minimizing safety filter interventions. Henceforth, when the policy proposes an infeasible action, the safety filter overrides it with the closest feasible alternative, ensuring consistent system behavior. In addition, this paper introduces a reward function shaped by a potential field that accounts for both the agent's proximity to unexplored regions and the expected information gain from reaching them. The proposed framework combines the adaptability of reinforcement learning-based exploration policies with the reliability provided by explicit safety mechanisms. This feature plays a key role in enabling the deployment of learning-based policies on robotic platforms operating in real-world environments. Extensive evaluations in both simulations and experiments performed in a lab environment demonstrate that the approach achieves efficient and safe exploration in cluttered spaces.

Online social media platforms enable influencers to distribute content and quickly capture audience reactions, significantly shaping their promotional strategies and advertising agreements. Understanding how sentiment dynamics and emotional contagion unfold among followers is vital for influencers and marketers, as these processes shape engagement, brand perception, and purchasing behavior. While sentiment analysis tools effectively track sentiment fluctuations, dynamical models explaining their evolution remain limited, often neglecting network structures and interactions both among blogs and between their topic-focused follower groups. In this study, we tracked influential tech-focused Weibo bloggers over six months, quantifying follower sentiment from text-mined feedback. By treating each blogger's audience as a single "macro-agent", we find that sentiment trajectories follow the principle of iterative averaging -- a foundational mechanism in many dynamical models of opinion formation, a theoretical framework at the intersection of social network analysis and dynamical systems theory. The sentiment evolution aligns closely with opinion-dynamics models, particularly modified versions of the classical French-DeGroot model that incorporate delayed perception and distinguish between expressed and private opinions. The inferred influence structures reveal interdependencies among blogs that may arise from homophily, whereby emotionally similar users subscribe to the same blogs and collectively shape the shared sentiment expressed within these communities.

Abstract--Conventional radio frequency (RF) passive components modeling based on machine learning requires extensive electromagnetic (EM) simulations to cover geometric and frequency design spaces, creating computational bottlenecks. In this paper, we introduce an uncertainty-aware Bayesian online learning framework for efficient parametric modeling of RF passive components, which includes: 1) a Bayesian neural network with reconfigurable heads for joint geometric-frequency domain modeling while quantifying uncertainty; 2) an adaptive sampling strategy that simultaneously optimizes training data sampling across geometric parameters and frequency domain using uncertainty guidance. V alidated on three RF passive components, the framework achieves accurate modeling while using only 2.86% EM simulation time compared to traditional ML-based flow, achieving a 35 speedup. Radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) form the cornerstone of modern communication systems, enabling critical technologies from 5G/6G networks to Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices [1]. As operational frequencies increase into millimeter-wave and terahertz regimes, traditional lumped-element circuit models become inadequate in mm-wave circuits.

While intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) can use information from past students to personalize instruction, each new student is unique. Moreover, the education problem is inherently difficult because the learning process is only partially observable. We therefore develop a dynamic, time-series environment to simulate a classroom setting, with student-teacher interventions - including tutoring sessions, lectures, and exams. In particular, we design the simulated environment to allow for varying levels of probing interventions that can gather more information. Then, we develop reinforcement learning ITSs that combine learning the individual state of students while pulling from population information through the use of probing interventions. These interventions can reduce the difficulty of student estimation, but also introduce a cost-benefit decision to find a balance between probing enough to get accurate estimates and probing so often that it becomes disruptive to the student. We compare the efficacy of standard RL algorithms with several greedy rules-based heuristic approaches to find that they provide different solutions, but with similar results. We also highlight the difficulty of the problem with increasing levels of hidden information, and the boost that we get if we allow for probing interventions. We show the flexibility of both heuristic and RL policies with regards to changing student population distributions, finding that both are flexible, but RL policies struggle to help harder classes. Finally, we test different course structures with non-probing policies and we find that our policies are able to boost the performance of quiz and midterm structures more than we can in a finals-only structure, highlighting the benefit of having additional information.

Accurate prediction of project duration and cost remains one of the most challenging aspects of project management, particularly in resource-constrained and interdependent task networks. Traditional analytical techniques such as the Critical Path Method (CPM) and Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) rely on simplified and often static assumptions regarding task interdependencies and resource performance. This study proposes a novel resource-based predictive framework that integrates network representations of project activities with graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture structural and contextual relationships among tasks, resources, and time-cost dynamics. The model represents the project as a heterogeneous activity-resource graph in which nodes denote activities and resources, and edges encode temporal and resource dependencies. We evaluate multiple learning paradigms, including GraphSAGE and Temporal Graph Networks, on both synthetic and benchmark project datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed GNN framework achieves an average 23 to 31 percent reduction in mean absolute error compared to traditional regression and tree-based methods, while improving the coefficient of determination R2 from approximately 0.78 to 0.91 for large and complex project networks. Furthermore, the learned embeddings provide interpretable insights into resource bottlenecks and critical dependencies, enabling more explainable and adaptive scheduling decisions.

Personal use of this material is permitted. Abstract--Learning from Demonstration (LfD) has shown to provide robots with fundamental motion skills for a variety of domains. V arious branches of LfD research (e.g., learned dynamical systems and movement primitives) can generally be classified into "time-dependent" or "time-independent" systems. Each provides fundamental benefits and drawbacks - time-independent methods cannot learn overlapping trajectories, while time-dependence can result in undesirable behavior under perturbation. This paper introduces Cluster Alignment for Learned Motions (CALM), an LfD framework dependent upon an alignment with a representative "mean" trajectory of demonstrated motions rather than pure time-or state-dependence. We discuss the convergence properties of CALM, introduce an alignment technique able to handle the shifts in alignment possible under perturbation, and utilize demonstration clustering to generate multi-modal behavior . We show how CALM mitigates the drawbacks of time-dependent and time-independent techniques on 2D datasets and implement our system on a 7-DoF robot learning tasks in three domains. S robots are introduced in industry and domestic settings, there is increasing need for robots to learn fundamental motions for given tasks.

Ramp merging is a critical and challenging task for autonomous vehicles (A Vs), particularly in mixed traffic environments with human-driven vehicles (HVs). Existing approaches typically rely on either lane-changing or inter-vehicle gap creation strategies based solely on local or neighboring information, often leading to sub-optimal performance in terms of safety and traffic efficiency. In this paper, we present a V2X (vehicle-to-everything communication)-assisted Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework for on-ramp merging that effectively coordinates the complex interplay between lane-changing and inter-vehicle gap adaptation strategies by utilizing zone-specific global information available from a roadside unit (RSU). The merging control problem is formulated as a Multiagent Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (MA-POMDP), where agents leverage both local and global observations through V2X communication. To support both discrete and continuous control decisions, we design a hybrid action space and adopt a parameterized deep Q-learning approach. Extensive simulations, integrating the SUMO traffic simulator and the MOSAIC V2X simulator, demonstrate that our framework significantly improves merging success rate, traffic efficiency, and road safety across diverse traffic scenarios.

Assuring the trustworthiness and safety of AI systems, e.g., autonomous vehicles (AV), depends critically on the data-related safety properties, e.g., representativeness, completeness, etc., of the datasets used for their training and testing. Among these properties, this paper focuses on representativeness-the extent to which the scenario-based data used for training and testing, reflect the operational conditions that the system is designed to operate safely in, i.e., Operational Design Domain (ODD) or expected to encounter, i.e., Target Operational Domain (TOD). We propose a probabilistic method that quantifies representativeness by comparing the statistical distribution of features encoded by the scenario suites with the corresponding distribution of features representing the TOD, acknowledging that the true TOD distribution is unknown, as it can only be inferred from limited data. We apply an imprecise Bayesian method to handle limited data and uncertain priors. The imprecise Bayesian formulation produces interval-valued, uncertainty-aware estimates of representativeness, rather than a single value. We present a numerical example comparing the distributions of the scenario suite and the inferred TOD across operational categories-weather, road type, time of day, etc., under dependencies and prior uncertainty. We estimate representativeness locally (between categories) and globally as an interval.

Diffusion and flow matching models have recently emerged as promising approaches for peptide binder design. Despite their progress, these models still face two major challenges. First, categorical sampling of discrete residue types collapses their continuous parameters into onehot assignments, while continuous variables (e.g., atom positions) evolve smoothly throughout the generation process. This mismatch disrupts the update dynamics and results in suboptimal performance. Second, current models assume unimodal distributions for side-chain torsion angles, which conflicts with the inherently multimodal nature of side chain rotameric states and limits prediction accuracy. To address these limitations, we introduce PepBFN, the first Bayesian flow network for full atom peptide design that directly models parameter distributions in fully continuous space. Specifically, PepBFN models discrete residue types by learning their continuous parameter distributions, enabling joint and smooth Bayesian updates with other continuous structural parameters. It further employs a novel Gaussian mixture based Bayesian flow to capture the multimodal side chain rotameric states and a Matrix Fisher based Riemannian flow to directly model residue orientations on the $\mathrm{SO}(3)$ manifold. Together, these parameter distributions are progressively refined via Bayesian updates, yielding smooth and coherent peptide generation. Experiments on side chain packing, reverse folding, and binder design tasks demonstrate the strong potential of PepBFN in computational peptide design.