Vision-Language-Action models such as OpenVLA show impressive zero-shot generalization across robotic manipulation tasks but often fail to adapt efficiently to new deployment environments. In many real-world applications, consistent high performance on a limited set of tasks is more important than broad generalization. We propose ExpReS-VLA, a method for specializing pre-trained VLA models through experience replay and retrieval while preventing catastrophic forgetting. ExpReS-VLA stores compact feature representations from the frozen vision backbone instead of raw image-action pairs, reducing memory usage by approximately 97 percent. During deployment, relevant past experiences are retrieved using cosine similarity and used to guide adaptation, while prioritized experience replay emphasizes successful trajectories. We also introduce Thresholded Hybrid Contrastive Loss, which enables learning from both successful and failed attempts. On the LIBERO simulation benchmark, ExpReS-VLA improves success rates from 82.6 to 93.1 percent on spatial reasoning tasks and from 61 to 72.3 percent on long-horizon tasks. On physical robot experiments with five manipulation tasks, it reaches 98 percent success on both seen and unseen settings, compared to 84.7 and 32 percent for naive fine-tuning. Adaptation takes 31 seconds using 12 demonstrations on a single RTX 5090 GPU, making the approach practical for real robot deployment.

Interfaces for contemporary large language, generative media, and perception AI models are often engineered for single user interaction. We investigate ritual as a design scaffold for developing collaborative, multi-user human-AI engagement. We consider the specific case of an immersive staging of the musical Xanadu performed at UCLA in Spring 2025. During a two-week run, over five hundred audience members contributed sketches and jazzercise moves that vision language models translated to virtual scenery elements and from choreographic prompts. This paper discusses four facets of interaction-as-ritual within the show: audience input as offerings that AI transforms into components of the ritual; performers as ritual guides, demonstrating how to interact with technology and sorting audience members into cohorts; AI systems as instruments "played" by the humans, in which sensing, generative components, and stagecraft create systems that can be mastered over time; and reciprocity of interaction, in which the show's AI machinery guides human behavior as well as being guided by humans, completing a human-AI feedback loop that visibly reshapes the virtual world. Ritual served as a frame for integrating linear narrative, character identity, music and interaction. The production explored how AI systems can support group creativity and play, addressing a critical gap in prevailing single user AI design paradigms.

B. Hierarchical Routing After data cleaning, to enable efficient and reliable decision-making, we adopt a hierarchical routing architecture, including task-level and action-level reasoning. At the task-level routing, a rule-based router quickly identifies the task type: classification, regression, or unsupervised learning, based on table schema metadata, such as, data types, label structures, and feature distribution. Such lightweight router relies on deterministic heuristics, instead of large language models, thus, enable fast and reliable responses across diverse datasets. At the action-level routing, a compact LLM-based planner refines the decision by selects and plans the most suitable feature-level actions such as, different ordered combinations of feature selection, transformation, or generation, under the identified task (e.g., a classification dataset). Since each router operates within a smaller, well-defined action space, this hierarchical routing approach not only accelerates processing but also avoid invalid or high-risk operations. C. Dual Feedback Loops We develop two collaborative feedback loops to transform the static workflow into an adaptive, self-correcting process, in order to achieve autonomy and continual refinement. 1) Action V alidation Loop for Safety: This feddback loop is to ground actions to ensure operational safety before execution. Each planned action is first grounded through schema alignment, type checking, and logical consistency tests, such as, detecting divisions by zero or invalid type conversions. Only actions that pass validation proceed to execution so as to prevent runtime errors and maintaining workflow integrity.

Aspect-based summarization aims to generate summaries that highlight specific aspects of a text, enabling more personalized and targeted summaries. However, its application to books remains unexplored due to the difficulty of constructing reference summaries for long text. To address this challenge, we propose BookAsSumQA, a QA-based evaluation framework for aspect-based book summarization. BookAsSumQA automatically generates aspect-specific QA pairs from a narrative knowledge graph to evaluate summary quality based on its question-answering performance. Our experiments using BookAsSumQA revealed that while LLM-based approaches showed higher accuracy on shorter texts, RAG-based methods become more effective as document length increases, making them more efficient and practical for aspect-based book summarization.

We introduce MemoriesDB, a unified data architecture designed to avoid decoherence across time, meaning, and relation in long-term computational memory. Each memory is a time-semantic-relational entity-a structure that simultaneously encodes when an event occurred, what it means, and how it connects to other events. Built initially atop PostgreSQL with pgvector extensions, MemoriesDB combines the properties of a time-series datastore, a vector database, and a graph system within a single append-only schema. Each memory is represented as a vertex uniquely labeled by its microsecond timestamp and accompanied by low- and high-dimensional normalized embeddings that capture semantic context. Directed edges between memories form labeled relations with per-edge metadata, enabling multiple contextual links between the same vertices. Together these constructs form a time-indexed stack of temporal-semantic surfaces, where edges project as directional arrows in a 1+1-dimensional similarity field, tracing the evolution of meaning through time while maintaining cross-temporal coherence. This formulation supports efficient time-bounded retrieval, hybrid semantic search, and lightweight structural reasoning in a single query path. A working prototype demonstrates scalable recall and contextual reinforcement using standard relational infrastructure, and we discuss extensions toward a columnar backend, distributed clustering, and emergent topic modeling.

In Social Deduction Games (SDGs) such as Avalon, Mafia, and W erewolf, players conceal their identities and deliberately mislead others, making hidden-role inference a central and demanding task. Accurate role identification, which forms the basis of an agent's belief state, is therefore the keystone for both human and AI performance. We introduce CSP4SDG, a probabilistic, constraint-satisfaction framework that analyses gameplay objectively. Game events and dialogue are mapped to four linguistically-agnostic constraint classes--evidence, phenomena, assertions, and hypotheses. Hard constraints prune impossible role assignments, while weighted soft constraints score the remainder; information-gain weighting links each hypothesis to its expected value under entropy reduction, and a simple closed-form scoring rule guarantees that truthful assertions converge to classical hard logic with minimum error. The resulting posterior over roles is fully interpretable and updates in real time. Experiments on three public datasets show that CSP4SDG (i) outperforms LLM-based baselines in every inference scenario, and (ii) boosts LLMs when supplied as an auxiliary "reasoning tool." Our study validates that principled probabilistic reasoning with information theory is a scalable alternative--or complement--to heavy-weight neural models for SDGs.

The current body of research on Parkinson's disease (PD) screening, monitoring, and management has evolved along two largely independent trajectories. The first research community focuses on multimodal sensing of PD-related biomarkers using noninvasive technologies such as inertial measurement units (IMUs), force/pressure insoles, electromyography (EMG), electroencephalography (EEG), speech and acoustic analysis, and RGB/RGB-D motion capture systems. These studies emphasize data acquisition, feature extraction, and machine learning-based classification for PD screening, diagnosis, and disease progression modeling. In parallel, a second research community has concentrated on robotic intervention and rehabilitation, employing socially assistive robots (SARs), robot-assisted rehabilitation (RAR) systems, and virtual reality (VR)-integrated robotic platforms for improving motor and cognitive function, enhancing social engagement, and supporting caregivers. Despite the complementary goals of these two domains, their methodological and technological integration remains limited, with minimal data-level or decision-level coupling between the two. With the advent of advanced artificial intelligence (AI), including large language models (LLMs), agentic AI systems, a unique opportunity now exists to unify these research streams. We envision a closed-loop sensor-AI-robot framework in which multimodal sensing continuously guides the interaction between the patient, caregiver, humanoid robot (and physician) through AI agents that are powered by a multitude of AI models such as robotic and wearables foundation models, LLM-based reasoning, reinforcement learning, and continual learning. Such closed-loop system enables personalized, explainable, and context-aware intervention, forming the basis for digital twin of the PD patient that can adapt over time to deliver intelligent, patient-centered PD care.

Induction heads are attention heads that perform inductive copying by matching patterns from earlier context and copying their continuations verbatim. As models develop induction heads, they often experience a sharp drop in training loss, a phenomenon cited as evidence that induction heads may serve as a prerequisite for more complex in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. In this work, we ask whether transformers can still acquire ICL capabilities when inductive copying is suppressed. We propose Hapax, a setting where we omit the loss contribution of any token that can be correctly predicted by induction heads. Despite a significant reduction in inductive copying, performance on abstractive ICL tasks (i.e., tasks where the answer is not contained in the input context) remains comparable and surpasses the vanilla model on 13 of 21 tasks, even though 31.7\% of tokens are omitted from the loss. Furthermore, our model achieves lower loss values on token positions that cannot be predicted correctly by induction heads. Mechanistic analysis further shows that models trained with Hapax develop fewer and weaker induction heads but still preserve ICL capabilities. Taken together, our findings indicate that inductive copying is not essential for learning abstractive ICL mechanisms.

We study architectural and optimization techniques for sample-efficient language modeling under the constraints of the BabyLM 2025 shared task. Our model, BLaLM, replaces self-attention with a linear-time mLSTM token mixer and explores lightweight enhancements, including short convolutions, sliding window attention with dynamic modulation, and Hedgehog feature maps. To support training in low-resource settings, we curate a high-quality corpus emphasizing readability and pedagogical structure. Experiments across both STRICT and STRICT-SMALL tracks show that (1) linear attention combined with sliding window attention consistently improves zero-shot performance, and (2) the Muon optimizer stabilizes convergence and reduces perplexity over AdamW. These results highlight effective strategies for efficient language modeling without relying on scale.

Connectomics - the mapping of neural connections in an organism's brain - currently requires extraordinary human effort to proofread the data collected from imaging and machine-learning assisted segmentation. With the growing excitement around using AI agents to automate important scientific tasks, we explore whether current AI systems can perform multiple tasks necessary for data proofreading. We introduce ConnectomeBench, a multimodal benchmark evaluating large language model (LLM) capabilities in three critical proofreading tasks: segment type identification, split error correction, and merge error detection. Using expert annotated data from two large open-source datasets - a cubic millimeter of mouse visual cortex and the complete Drosophila brain - we evaluate proprietary multimodal LLMs including Claude 3.7/4 Sonnet, o4-mini, GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, as well as open source models like InternVL-3 and NVLM. Our results demonstrate that current models achieve surprisingly high performance in segment identification (52-82% balanced accuracy vs. 20-25% chance) and binary/multiple choice split error correction (75-85% accuracy vs. 50% chance) while generally struggling on merge error identification tasks. Overall, while the best models still lag behind expert performance, they demonstrate promising capabilities that could eventually enable them to augment and potentially replace human proofreading in connectomics. Project page: https://github.com/jffbrwn2/ConnectomeBench and Dataset https://huggingface.co/datasets/jeffbbrown2/ConnectomeBench/tree/main