Science Physics Particle Physics Scientists smash atoms together to create'little' big bangs Recreating the universe's earliest moments could help us learn more about the elusive quark-gluon plasma. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Oxygen and neon nuclei created different particle patterns after colliding with each other. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .

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The big cats can keep deer away from roads, according to new research. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . When it comes to living near large carnivores, the drawbacks for humans are pretty obvious.

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Appendix A describes the Unity-based interface implemented in EVAAA, including an environment setup, prefab structures, and object instantiation. Appendix B provides a comprehensive introduction to Essential Variables (EVs), including their design, dynamics, and role in internal state regulation. Appendix C explains the implementation of the reward system and its connection to the balance of internal states. Appendix E outlines the modular configuration to generate EVAAA environments, along with the instructions for environment customization. Appendix F presents the structure and progression of naturalistic training environments. Appendix G describes the design of unseen experimental testbeds for evaluation. Appendix I provides analyses of agent behavior across training and test environments, including emergent behavioral patterns. All code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/cocoanlab/evaaa A.1 Prefabs Environmental elements such as terrain, resources, obstacles, and predators are implemented as reusable and configurable Unity prefabs. Prefabs are grouped into Agents, Environment, and Materials. Each category includes reusable components for constructing and customizing interactive scenes: Agents (main agent and predators), Environment (terrain and containers), and Materials (varied textures and colors for visual distinction). This modular system enables rapid prototyping, task generation, condition randomization, and reproducible scene setup. Prefabs can be customized through the Unity Editor or programmatically at runtime, and reused across scenes without manual rebuilding.

Existing end-to-end autonomous driving (AD) algorithms typically follow the Imitation Learning (IL) paradigm, which faces challenges such as causal confusion and an open-loop gap. In this work, we propose RAD, a 3DGS-based closed-loop Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for end-to-end Autonomous Driving. By leveraging 3DGS techniques, we construct a photorealistic digital replica of the real physical world, enabling the AD policy to extensively explore the state space and learn to handle out-of-distribution scenarios through large-scale trial and error. To enhance safety, we design specialized rewards to guide the policy in effectively responding to safety-critical events and understanding realworld causal relationships. To better align with human driving behavior, we incorporate IL into RL training as a regularization term. We introduce a closed-loop evaluation benchmark consisting of diverse, previously unseen 3DGS environments. Compared to IL-based methods, RAD achieves stronger performance in most closed-loop metrics, particularly exhibiting a 3 lower collision rate. Abundant closed-loop results are presented in the supplementary material. Code is available at https://github.com/hustvl/RADfor

The advancement of Embodied AI heavily relies on large-scale, simulatable 3D scene datasets characterized by scene diversity and realistic layouts.However, existing datasets typically suffer from limitations in data scale or diversity, sanitized layouts lacking small items, and severe object collisions.To address these shortcomings, we introduce \textbf{InternScenes}, a novel large-scale simulatable indoor scene dataset comprising approximately 40,000 diverse scenes by integrating three disparate scene sources, \ie, real-world scans, procedurally generated scenes, and designer-created scenes, including 1.96M 3D objects and covering 15 common scene types and 288 object classes.We particularly preserve massive small items in the scenes, resulting in realistic and complex layouts with an average of 41.5 objects per region.Our comprehensive data processing pipeline ensures simulatability by creating real-to-sim replicas for real-world scans, enhances interactivity by incorporating interactive objects into these scenes, and resolves object collisions by physical simulations.We demonstrate the value of InternScenes with two benchmark applications: scene layout generation and point-goal navigation. Both show the new challenges posed by the complex and realistic layouts. More importantly, InternScenes paves the way for scaling up the model training for both tasks, making the generation and navigation in such complex scenes possible. We commit to open-sourcing the data and benchmarks to benefit the whole community.

Dexterous grasping in cluttered environments presents substantial challenges due to the high degrees of freedom of dexterous hands, occlusion, and potential collisions arising from diverse object geometries and complex layouts. To address these challenges, we propose CADGrasp, a two-stage algorithm for general dexterous grasping using single-view point cloud inputs. In the first stage, we predict a scene-decoupled, contact-and collision-aware representation--sparse IBS--as the optimization target. Sparse IBS compactly encodes the geometric and contact relationships between the dexterous hand and the scene, enabling stable and collision-free dexterous grasp pose optimization. To enhance the prediction of this high-dimensional representation, we introduce an occupancy-diffusion model with voxel-level conditional guidance and force closure score filtering. In the second stage, we develop several energy functions and ranking strategies for optimization based on sparse IBS to generate high-quality dexterous grasp poses. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world settings validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating its capability to mitigate collisions while maintaining a high grasp success rate across diverse objects and complex scenes.

Dirac-Frenkel instantaneous residual minimization evolves nonlinear parametrizations of PDE solutions in time, but ill-conditioning can render the parameter dynamics non-unique. We interpret this non-uniqueness as a gauge freedom: nullspace directions that leave the time derivative unchanged can be used to select better-conditioned parameter velocities. Building on Onsager's minimum-dissipation principle, we introduce a history variable -- interpretable as momentum -- and inject it only along the nullspace directions. The resulting Dirac-Frenkel-Onsager dynamics preserve instantaneous residual minimization, in contrast to standard regularization that can introduce bias, while promoting temporally smooth parameter evolutions. Examples demonstrate that the approach leads to increased robustness in singular and near-singular regimes.

In addition to the radar plot, we present the specific numerical values for the prediction and driving performance metrics to provide a more detailed and comprehensive analysis of the system's performance, as demonstrated in Table 1. The static evaluation metrics, ADE and FDE, are trained and validated on the Alignment dataset collected from the SUMMIT simulator. The task-driven evaluation metrics, including safety, efficiency, comfort, and driving performance, are derived from interactive closed-loop scenarios. The process for calculating these metrics is described in Appendix C. Results in Table 1 are used to plot the correlation map between ADE/FDE and driving performance, which surprisingly indicates no strong correlation between static evaluation metrics and real driving performance. Moreover, to ensure the comparability between prediction performance metrics and driving performance metrics in the radar plot, we normalize all metrics to the scale of [0, 1]. B.1 The RVOPlanner The Reciprocal Velocity Obstacle (RVO) planner is developed based on [8], which expands on the concept of velocity obstacles [4] to consider the reactive behaviors of exo-agents.