Low-Burden LLM-Based Preference Learning: Personalizing Assistive Robots from Natural Language Feedback for Users with Paralysis

Physically Assistive Robots (PARs) require personalized behaviors to ensure user safety and comfort. However, traditional preference learning methods, like exhaustive pairwise comparisons, cause severe physical and cognitive fatigue for users with profound motor impairments. To solve this, we propose a low-burden, offline framework that translates unstructured natural language feedback directly into deterministic robotic control policies. To safely bridge the gap between ambiguous human speech and robotic code, our pipeline uses Large Language Models (LLMs) grounded in the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework (OTPF). This clinical reasoning decodes subjective user reactions into explicit physical and psychological needs, which are then mapped into transparent decision trees. Before deployment, an automated "LLM-as-a-Judge" verifies the code's structural safety. We validated this system in a simulated meal preparation study with 10 adults with paralysis. Results show our natural language approach significantly reduces user workload compared to traditional baselines. Additionally, independent clinical experts confirmed the generated policies are safe and accurately reflect user preferences.

$AutoDrive\text{-}P^3$: Unified Chain of Perception-Prediction-Planning Thought via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly being adopted for end-to-end autonomous driving systems due to their exceptional performance in handling long-tail scenarios. However, current VLM-based approaches suffer from two major limitations: 1) Some VLMs directly output planning results without chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, bypassing crucial perception and prediction stages which creates a significant domain gap and compromises decision-making capability; 2) Other VLMs can generate outputs for perception, prediction, and planning tasks but employ a fragmented decision-making approach where these modules operate separately, leading to a significant lack of synergy that undermines true planning performance. To address these limitations, we propose ${AutoDrive\text{-}P^3}$, a novel framework that seamlessly integrates $\textbf{P}$erception, $\textbf{P}$rediction, and $\textbf{P}$lanning through structured reasoning. We introduce the ${P^3\text{-}CoT}$ dataset to facilitate coherent reasoning and propose ${P^3\text{-}GRPO}$, a hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm that provides progressive supervision across all three tasks. Specifically, ${AutoDrive\text{-}P^3}$ progressively generates CoT reasoning and answers for perception, prediction, and planning, where perception provides essential information for subsequent prediction and planning, while both perception and prediction collectively contribute to the final planning decisions, enabling safer and more interpretable autonomous driving. Additionally, to balance inference efficiency with performance, we introduce dual thinking modes: detailed thinking and fast thinking. Extensive experiments on both open-loop (nuScenes) and closed-loop (NAVSIMv1/v2) benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in planning tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/haha-yuki-haha/AutoDrive-P3.

Octree-based Learned Point Cloud Geometry Compression: A Lossy Perspective

Octree-based context learning has recently become a leading method in point cloud compression. However, its potential on lossy compression remains undiscovered. The traditional lossy compression paradigm using lossless octree representation with quantization step adjustment may result in severe distortions due to massive missing points in quantization. Therefore, we analyze data characteristics of different point clouds and propose lossy approaches specifically. For object point clouds that suffer from quantization step adjustment, we propose a new leaf nodes lossy compression method, which achieves lossy compression by performing bit-wise coding and binary prediction on leaf nodes. For LiDAR point clouds, we explore variable rate approaches and propose a simple but effective rate control method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed leaf nodes lossy compression method significantly outperforms the previous octree-based method on object point clouds, and the proposed rate control method achieves about 1% bit error without finetuning on LiDAR point clouds.

Probabilistic Concept Graph Reasoning for Multimodal Misinformation Detection

Multimodal misinformation poses an escalating challenge that often evades traditional detectors, which are opaque black boxes and fragile against new manipulation tactics. We present Probabilistic Concept Graph Reasoning (PCGR), an interpretable and evolvable framework that reframes multimodal misinformation detection (MMD) as structured and concept-based reasoning. PCGR follows a build-then-infer paradigm, which first constructs a graph of human-understandable concept nodes, including novel high-level concepts automatically discovered and validated by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), and then applies hierarchical attention over this concept graph to infer claim veracity. This design produces interpretable reasoning chains linking evidence to conclusions. Experiments demonstrate that PCGR achieves state-of-the-art MMD accuracy and robustness to emerging manipulation types, outperforming prior methods in both coarse detection and fine-grained manipulation recognition.

Complementary Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training LLM-based agents, yet remains limited by low sample efficiency, stemming not only from sparse outcome feedback but also from the agent's inability to leverage prior experience across episodes. While augmenting agents with historical experience offers a promising remedy, existing approaches suffer from a critical weakness: the experience distilled from history is either stored statically or fail to coevolve with the improving actor, causing a progressive misalignment between the experience and the actor's evolving capability that diminishes its utility over the course of training. Inspired by complementary learning systems in neuroscience, we present Complementary RL to achieve seamless co-evolution of an experience extractor and a policy actor within the RL optimization loop. Specifically, the actor is optimized via sparse outcome-based rewards, while the experience extractor is optimized according to whether its distilled experiences demonstrably contribute to the actor's success, thereby evolving its experience management strategy in lockstep with the actor's growing capabilities. Empirically, Complementary RL outperforms outcome-based agentic RL baselines that do not learn from experience, achieving 10% performance improvement in single-task scenarios and exhibits robust scalability in multi-task settings. These results establish Complementary RL as a paradigm for efficient experience-driven agent learning.

ADAPT: Adaptive Dual-projection Architecture for Perceptive Traversal

Agile humanoid locomotion in complex 3D en- vironments requires balancing perceptual fidelity with com- putational efficiency, yet existing methods typically rely on rigid sensing configurations. We propose ADAPT (Adaptive dual-projection architecture for perceptive traversal), which represents the environment using a horizontal elevation map for terrain geometry and a vertical distance map for traversable- space constraints. ADAPT further treats its spatial sensing range as a learnable action, enabling the policy to expand its perceptual horizon during fast motion and contract it in cluttered scenes for finer local resolution. Compared with voxel-based baselines, ADAPT drastically reduces observation dimensionality and computational overhead while substantially accelerating training. Experimentally, it achieves successful zero-shot transfer to a Unitree G1 Humanoid and signifi- cantly outperforms fixed-range baselines, yielding highly robust traversal across diverse 3D environtmental challenges.

Overview and Comparison of AVS Point Cloud Compression Standard

Point cloud is a prevalent 3D data representation format with significant application values in immersive media, autonomous driving, digital heritage protection, etc. However, the large data size of point clouds poses challenges to transmission and storage, which influences the wide deployments. Therefore, point cloud compression plays a crucial role in practical applications for both human and machine perception optimization. To this end, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) has established two standards for point cloud compression, including Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) and Video-based Point Cloud Compression (V-PCC). In the meantime, the Audio Video coding Standard (AVS) Workgroup of China also have launched and completed the development for its first generation point cloud compression standard, namely AVS PCC. This new standardization effort has adopted many new coding tools and techniques, which are different from the other counterpart standards. This paper reviews the AVS PCC standard from two perspectives, i.e., the related technologies and performance comparisons.

MosaicThinker: On-Device Visual Spatial Reasoning for Embodied AI via Iterative Construction of Space Representation

When embodied AI is expanding from traditional object detection and recognition to more advanced tasks of robot manipulation and actuation planning, visual spatial reasoning from the video inputs is necessary to perceive the spatial relationships of objects and guide device actions. However, existing visual language models (VLMs) have very weak capabilities in spatial reasoning due to the lack of knowledge about 3D spatial information, especially when the reasoning task involve complex spatial relations across multiple video frames. In this paper, we present a new inference-time computing technique for on-device embodied AI, namely \emph{MosaicThinker}, which enhances the on-device small VLM's spatial reasoning capabilities on difficult cross-frame reasoning tasks. Our basic idea is to integrate fragmented spatial information from multiple frames into a unified space representation of global semantic map, and further guide the VLM's spatial reasoning over the semantic map via a visual prompt. Experiment results show that our technique can greatly enhance the accuracy of cross-frame spatial reasoning on resource-constrained embodied AI devices, over reasoning tasks with diverse types and complexities.

Depth estimation of a monoharmonic source using a vertical linear array at fixed distance

Estimating the depth of a monoharmonic sound source at a fixed range using a vertical linear array (VLA) is challenging in the absence of seabed environmental parameters, and relevant research remains scarce. The orthogonality constrained modal search based depth estimation (OCMS-D) method is proposed in this paper, which enables the estimation of the depth of a monoharmonic source at a fixed range using a VLA under unknown seabed parameters. Using the sparsity of propagating normal modes and the orthogonality of mode depth functions, OCMS-D estimates the normal mode parameters under a fixed source-array distance at first. The estimated normal mode parameters are then used to estimate the source depth. To ensure the precision of the source depth estimation, the method utilizes information on both the amplitude distribution and the sign (positive/negative) patterns of the estimated mode depth functions at the inferred source depth. Numerical simulations evaluate the performance of OCMS-D under different conditions. The effectiveness of OCMS-D is also verified by the Yellow Sea experiment and the SWellEx-96 experiment. In the Yellow Sea experiment, the depth estimation absolute errors by OCMS-D with a 4-second time window are less than 2.4 m. And the depth estimation absolute errors in the SWellEx-96 experiment with a 10-second time window are less than 5.4 m for the shallow source and less than 10.8 m for the deep source.

DALD-PCAC: Density-Adaptive Learning Descriptor for Point Cloud Lossless Attribute Compression

Recently, deep learning has significantly advanced the performance of point cloud geometry compression. However, the learning-based lossless attribute compression of point clouds with varying densities is under-explored. In this paper, we develop a learning-based framework, namely DALD-PCAC that leverages Levels of Detail (LoD) to tailor for point cloud lossless attribute compression. We develop a point-wise attention model using a permutation-invariant Transformer to tackle the challenges of sparsity and irregularity of point clouds during context modeling. We also propose a Density-Adaptive Learning Descriptor (DALD) capable of capturing structure and correlations among points across a large range of neighbors. In addition, we develop a prior-guided block partitioning to reduce the attribute variance within blocks and enhance the performance. Experiments on LiDAR and object point clouds show that DALD-PCAC achieves the state-of-the-art performance on most data. Our method boosts the compression performance and is robust to the varying densities of point clouds. Moreover, it guarantees a good trade-off between performance and complexity, exhibiting great potential in real-world applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/zb12138/DALD_PCAC.