Learning Graphical Models
Graph Attention-Driven Bayesian Deep Unrolling for Dual-Peak Single-Photon Lidar Imaging
Choi, Kyungmin, Koo, JaKeoung, McLaughlin, Stephen, Halimi, Abderrahim
Single-photon Lidar imaging offers a significant advantage in 3D imaging due to its high resolution and long-range capabilities, however it is challenging to apply in noisy environments with multiple targets per pixel. To tackle these challenges, several methods have been proposed. Statistical methods demonstrate interpretability on the inferred parameters, but they are often limited in their ability to handle complex scenes. Deep learning-based methods have shown superior performance in terms of accuracy and robustness, but they lack interpretability or they are limited to a single-peak per pixel. In this paper, we propose a deep unrolling algorithm for dual-peak single-photon Lidar imaging. We introduce a hierarchical Bayesian model for multiple targets and propose a neural network that unrolls the underlying statistical method. To support multiple targets, we adopt a dual depth maps representation and exploit geometric deep learning to extract features from the point cloud. The proposed method takes advantages of statistical methods and learning-based methods in terms of accuracy and quantifying uncertainty. The experimental results on synthetic and real data demonstrate the competitive performance when compared to existing methods, while also providing uncertainty information.
Agent Lightning: Train ANY AI Agents with Reinforcement Learning
Luo, Xufang, Zhang, Yuge, He, Zhiyuan, Wang, Zilong, Zhao, Siyun, Li, Dongsheng, Qiu, Luna K., Yang, Yuqing
We present Agent Lightning, a flexible and extensible framework that enables Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based training of Large Language Models (LLMs) for any AI agent. Unlike existing methods that tightly couple RL training with agent or rely on sequence concatenation with masking, Agent Lightning achieves complete decoupling between agent execution and training, allowing seamless integration with existing agents developed via diverse ways (e.g., using frameworks like LangChain, OpenAI Agents SDK, AutoGen, and building from scratch) with almost ZERO code modifications. By formulating agent execution as Markov decision process, we define an unified data interface and propose a hierarchical RL algorithm, LightningRL, which contains a credit assignment module, allowing us to decompose trajectories generated by ANY agents into training transition. This enables RL to handle complex interaction logic, such as multi-agent scenarios and dynamic workflows. For the system design, we introduce a Training-Agent Disaggregation architecture, and brings agent observability frameworks into agent runtime, providing a standardized agent finetuning interface. Experiments across text-to-SQL, retrieval-augmented generation, and math tool-use tasks demonstrate stable, continuous improvements, showcasing the framework's potential for real-world agent training and deployment.
DiWA: Diffusion Policy Adaptation with World Models
Chandra, Akshay L, Nematollahi, Iman, Huang, Chenguang, Welschehold, Tim, Burgard, Wolfram, Valada, Abhinav
Fine-tuning diffusion policies with reinforcement learning (RL) presents significant challenges. The long denoising sequence for each action prediction impedes effective reward propagation. Moreover, standard RL methods require millions of real-world interactions, posing a major bottleneck for practical fine-tuning. Although prior work frames the denoising process in diffusion policies as a Markov Decision Process to enable RL-based updates, its strong dependence on environment interaction remains highly inefficient. To bridge this gap, we introduce DiWA, a novel framework that leverages a world model for fine-tuning diffusion-based robotic skills entirely offline with reinforcement learning. Unlike model-free approaches that require millions of environment interactions to fine-tune a repertoire of robot skills, DiWA achieves effective adaptation using a world model trained once on a few hundred thousand offline play interactions. This results in dramatically improved sample efficiency, making the approach significantly more practical and safer for real-world robot learning. On the challenging CALVIN benchmark, DiWA improves performance across eight tasks using only offline adaptation, while requiring orders of magnitude fewer physical interactions than model-free baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of fine-tuning diffusion policies for real-world robotic skills using an offline world model. We make the code publicly available at https://diwa.cs.uni-freiburg.de.
Semantic-aware Graph-guided Behavior Sequences Generation with Large Language Models for Smart Homes
Xu, Zhiyao, Zhao, Dan, Zou, Qingsong, Li, Qing, Jiang, Yong, Wang, Yuhang, Xiao, Jingyu
As smart homes become increasingly prevalent, intelligent models are widely used for tasks such as anomaly detection and behavior prediction. These models are typically trained on static datasets, making them brittle to behavioral drift caused by seasonal changes, lifestyle shifts, or evolving routines. However, collecting new behavior data for retraining is often impractical due to its slow pace, high cost, and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose SmartGen, an LLM-based framework that synthesizes context-aware user behavior data to support continual adaptation of downstream smart home models. SmartGen consists of four key components. First, we design a Time and Semantic-aware Split module to divide long behavior sequences into manageable, semantically coherent subsequences under dual time-span constraints. Second, we propose Semantic-aware Sequence Compression to reduce input length while preserving representative semantics by clustering behavior mapping in latent space. Third, we introduce Graph-guided Sequence Synthesis, which constructs a behavior relationship graph and encodes frequent transitions into prompts, guiding the LLM to generate data aligned with contextual changes while retaining core behavior patterns. Finally, we design a Two-stage Outlier Filter to identify and remove implausible or semantically inconsistent outputs, aiming to improve the factual coherence and behavioral validity of the generated sequences. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that SmartGen significantly enhances model performance on anomaly detection and behavior prediction tasks under behavioral drift, with anomaly detection improving by 85.43% and behavior prediction by 70.51% on average. The code is available at https://github.com/horizonsinzqs/SmartGen.
Toward a Graph-Theoretic Model of Belief: Confidence, Credibility, and Structural Coherence
Belief systems are often treated as globally consistent sets of propositions or as scalar-valued probability distributions. Such representations tend to obscure the internal structure of belief, conflate external credibility with internal coherence, and preclude the modeling of fragmented or contradictory epistemic states. This paper introduces a minimal formalism for belief systems as directed, weighted graphs. In this framework, nodes represent individual beliefs, edges encode epistemic relationships (e.g., support or contradiction), and two distinct functions assign each belief a credibility (reflecting source trust) and a confidence (derived from internal structural support). Unlike classical probabilistic models, our approach does not assume prior coherence or require belief updating. Unlike logical and argumentation-based frameworks, it supports fine-grained structural representation without committing to binary justification status or deductive closure. The model is purely static and deliberately excludes inference or revision procedures. Its aim is to provide a foundational substrate for analyzing the internal organization of belief systems, including coherence conditions, epistemic tensions, and representational limits. By distinguishing belief structure from belief strength, this formalism enables a richer classification of epistemic states than existing probabilistic, logical, or argumentation-based approaches.
Pseudo-label Induced Subspace Representation Learning for Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection
Azad, Tarhib Al, Sayem, Faizul Rakib, Ibrahim, Shahana
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection lies at the heart of robust artificial intelligence (AI), aiming to identify samples from novel distributions beyond the training set. Recent approaches have exploited feature representations as distinguishing signatures for OOD detection. However, most existing methods rely on restrictive assumptions on the feature space that limit the separability between in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples. In this work, we propose a novel OOD detection framework based on a pseudo-label-induced subspace representation, that works under more relaxed and natural assumptions compared to existing feature-based techniques. In addition, we introduce a simple yet effective learning criterion that integrates a cross-entropy-based ID classification loss with a subspace distance-based regularization loss to enhance ID-OOD separability. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework.
CogniPlan: Uncertainty-Guided Path Planning with Conditional Generative Layout Prediction
Wang, Yizhuo, He, Haodong, Liang, Jingsong, Cao, Yuhong, Chakraborty, Ritabrata, Sartoretti, Guillaume
Path planning in unknown environments is a crucial yet inherently challenging capability for mobile robots, which primarily encompasses two coupled tasks: autonomous exploration and point-goal navigation. In both cases, the robot must perceive the environment, update its belief, and accurately estimate potential information gain on-the-fly to guide planning. In this work, we propose CogniPlan, a novel path planning framework that leverages multiple plausible layouts predicted by a COnditional GeNerative Inpainting model, mirroring how humans rely on cognitive maps during navigation. These predictions, based on the partially observed map and a set of layout conditioning vectors, enable our planner to reason effectively under uncertainty. We demonstrate strong synergy between generative image-based layout prediction and graph-attention-based path planning, allowing CogniPlan to combine the scalability of graph representations with the fidelity and predictiveness of occupancy maps, yielding notable performance gains in both exploration and navigation. We extensively evaluate CogniPlan on two datasets (hundreds of maps and realistic floor plans), consistently outperforming state-of-the-art planners. We further deploy it in a high-fidelity simulator and on hardware, showcasing its high-quality path planning and real-world applicability.
Beyond Policy Optimization: A Data Curation Flywheel for Sparse-Reward Long-Horizon Planning
Wang, Yutong, Ji, Pengliang, Li, Kaixin, Bi, Baolong, Feng, Tao, Sartoretti, Guillaume
Large Language Reasoning Models have demonstrated remarkable success on static tasks, yet their application to multi-round agentic planning in interactive environments faces two fundamental challenges. First, the intractable credit assignment problem renders conventional reinforcement learning ineffective in sparse-reward settings. Second, the computational overhead of verbose, step-by-step reasoning histories is prohibitive. To address these challenges, we propose BPO, a three-stage framework (bootstrapping, extrapolation, and refinement) that establishes a self-improving data flywheel to develop robust reasoning models for long-horizon, sparse-reward environments. Our framework first bootstraps efficient reasoning using the proposed planning quaternions with long-short chain-of-thought fusion. It then extrapolates to out-of-distribution tasks through complexity-stratified curriculum learning. Finally, the model iteratively refines itself by learning exclusively on experiences selected via reward-gated rejection sampling. Experiments on ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art with significant token efficiency, providing a new recipe for reasoning models in agentic planning.
GACL: Grounded Adaptive Curriculum Learning with Active Task and Performance Monitoring
Wang, Linji, Xu, Zifan, Stone, Peter, Xiao, Xuesu
-- Curriculum learning has emerged as a promising approach for training complex robotics tasks, yet current applications predominantly rely on manually designed curricula, which demand significant engineering effort and can suffer from subjective and suboptimal human design choices. While automated curriculum learning has shown success in simple domains like grid worlds and games where task distributions can be easily specified, robotics tasks present unique challenges: they require handling complex task spaces while maintaining relevance to target domain distributions that are only partially known through limited samples. We validate GACL on wheeled navigation in constrained environments and quadruped locomotion in challenging 3D confined spaces, achieving 6.8% and 6.1% higher success rates, respectively, than state-of-the-art methods in each domain. Curriculum learning has shown promises in training robots for complex tasks such as navigating through highly constrained environments or maintaining quadruped locomotion across challenging terrain [1], [2]. However, current applications of curriculum learning in robotics face a fundamental challenge: they predominantly rely on manually designed curricula, which demand significant engineering effort and can suffer from subjective, suboptimal design choices. For example, in quadruped locomotion tasks [2], roboticists must carefully design progressive stages from basic jumping skills to complex obstacle traversal and manually define success metrics and progression conditions at each stage.
A Bayesian Hybrid Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Method for Large Language Models
Chai, Yidong, Liu, Yang, Zhou, Yonghang, Xie, Jiaheng, Zeng, Daniel Dajun
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated transformative potential in reshaping the world. As these models are pretrained on general corpora, they often require domain-specific fine-tuning to optimize performance in specialized business applications. Due to their massive scale, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are widely used to reduce training costs. Among them, hybrid PEFT methods that combine multiple PEFT techniques have achieved the best performance. However, existing hybrid PEFT methods face two main challenges when fine-tuning LLMs for specialized applications: (1) relying on point estimates, lacking the ability to quantify uncertainty for reliable decision-making, and (2) struggling to dynamically adapt to emerging data, lacking the ability to suit real-world situations. We propose Bayesian Hybrid Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (BH-PEFT), a novel method that integrates Bayesian learning into hybrid PEFT. BH-PEFT combines Adapter, LoRA, and prefix-tuning to fine-tune feedforward and attention layers of the Transformer. By modeling learnable parameters as distributions, BH-PEFT enables uncertainty quantification. We further propose a Bayesian dynamic fine-tuning approach where the last posterior serves as the prior for the next round, enabling effective adaptation to new data. We evaluated BH-PEFT on business tasks such as sentiment analysis, news categorization, and commonsense reasoning. Results show that our method outperforms existing PEFT baselines, enables uncertainty quantification for more reliable decisions, and improves adaptability in dynamic scenarios. This work contributes to business analytics and data science by proposing a novel BH-PEFT method and dynamic fine-tuning approach that support uncertainty-aware and adaptive decision-making in real-world situations.