Fudan university
Abstract:End-to-end autonomous driving planners are commonly trained by imitating a single logged trajectory, yet evaluated by rule-based planning metrics that measure safety, feasibility, progress, and comfort. This creates a training--evaluation mismatch: trajectories close to the logged path may violate planning rules, while alternatives farther from the demonstration can remain valid and high-scoring. The mismatch is especially limiting for proposal-selection planners, whose performance depends on candidate-set coverage and scorer ranking quality. We propose CLOVER, a Closed-LOop Value Estimation and Ranking framework for end-to-end autonomous driving planning. CLOVER follows a lightweight generator--scorer formulation: a generator produces diverse candidate trajectories, and a scorer predicts planning-metric sub-scores to rank them at inference time. To expand proposal support beyond single-trajectory imitation, CLOVER constructs evaluator-filtered pseudo-expert trajectories and trains the generator with set-level coverage supervision. It then performs conservative closed-loop self-distillation: the scorer is fitted to true evaluator sub-scores on generated proposals, while the generator is refined toward teacher-selected top-$k$ and vector-Pareto targets with stability regularization. We analyze when an imperfect scorer can improve the generator, showing that scorer-mediated refinement is reliable when scorer-selected targets are enriched under the true evaluator and updates remain conservative. On NAVSIM, CLOVER achieves 94.5 PDMS and 90.4 EPDMS, establishing a new state of the art. On the more challenging NavHard split, it obtains 48.3 EPDMS, matching the strongest reported result. On supplementary nuScenes open-loop evaluation, CLOVER achieves the lowest L2 error and collision rate among compared methods. Code data will be released at https://github.com/WilliamXuanYu/CLOVER.
Abstract:As AI agents improve, the central question is no longer whether they can solve isolated well-defined financial tasks, but whether they can reliably carry out financial professional work. Existing financial benchmarks offer only a partial view of this ability, as they primarily evaluate static competencies such as question answering, retrieval, summarization, and classification. We introduce Herculean, the first skilled benchmark for agentic financial intelligence spanning four representative workflows, including Trading, Hedging, Market Insights, and Auditing. Each workflow is instantiated as a standardized MCP-based skill environment with its own tools, interaction dynamics, constraints, and success criteria, enabling consistent end-to-end assessment of heterogeneous agent systems. Across frontier agents, we find agents perform relatively well on Trading and Market Insights, but struggle substantially on Hedging and Auditing, where long-horizon coordination, state consistency, and structured verification are critical. Overall, our results point to a key gap in current agents in turning financial reasoning into dependable workflow execution in high-stakes financial workflows.
Abstract:This paper addresses the motion control problem for mobile robots in obstacle-cluttered environments. The mobile robot has partial environment information only, and aims to move from an initial position to a target position without collisions. For this purpose, a reactive planning based control strategy (RPCS) is proposed. First, the initial and target positions are connected as a reference trajectory. Then, a reactive planning strategy (RPS) is developed to ensure the collision avoidance by modifying the reference trajectory locally based on the partial environment information. Next, an adaptive tracking control strategy (ATCS) is proposed to track the reference trajectory with potentially local modifications via the discretization techniques. Finally, the RPS and ATCS are combined to establish the RPCS, whose efficacy and advantages are illustrated by numerical examples.
Abstract:Memory is a critical component of robotic intelligence, as robots must rely on past observations and actions to accomplish long-horizon tasks in partially observable environments. However, existing robotic memory benchmarks still lack multimodal annotations for memory formation, provide limited task coverage and structural complexity, and remain restricted to simulation without real-world evaluation. We address this gap with RoboMemArena, a large-scale benchmark of 26 tasks, with average trajectory lengths exceeding 1,000 steps per task and 68.9% of subtasks being memory-dependent. The generation pipeline leverages a vision-language model (VLM) to design and compose subtasks, generates full trajectories through atomic functions, and provides memory-related annotations, including subtask instructions and native keyframe annotations, while paired real-world memory tasks support physical evaluation. We further design PrediMem, a dual-system VLA in which a high-level VLM planner manages a memory bank with recent and keyframe buffers and uses a predictive coding head to improve sensitivity to task dynamics. Extensive experiments on RoboMemArena show that PrediMem outperforms all baselines and provides insights into memory management, model architecture, and scaling laws for complex memory systems.
Abstract:This paper proposes a novel approach to address the challenge that pretrained VLA models often fail to effectively improve performance and reduce adaptation costs during standard supervised finetuning (SFT). Some advanced finetuning methods with auxiliary training objectives can improve performance and reduce the number of convergence steps. However, they typically incur significant computational overhead due to the additional losses from auxiliary objectives. To simultaneously achieve the enhanced capabilities of auxiliary training with the simplicity of standard SFT, we decouple the two objectives of auxiliary-objective SFT within the parameter space, namely, enhancing general capabilities and fitting task-specific action distributions. To deliver the goal, we only need to train the model to converge on a small-scale task set using two distinct training strategies, resulting in two finetuned models. The parameters' difference between the two models can then be interpreted as capability vectors provided by auxiliary objectives. These vectors are then merged with pretrained parameters to form a capability-enhanced meta model. Moreover, when standard SFT is augmented with a lightweight orthogonal regularization loss, the merged model attains performance comparable to auxiliary finetuned baselines with reduced computational overhead. Internal and external experiments demonstrate that our capability vectors (1) are effective and versatile across diverse models, (2) can generalize to novel environments and embodiments out of the box.
Abstract:Language-model agents are increasingly used as persistent coworkers that assist users across multiple working days. During such workflows, the surrounding environment may change independently of the agent: new emails arrive, calendar entries shift, knowledge-base records are updated, and evidence appears across images, scanned PDFs, audio, video, and spreadsheets. Existing benchmarks do not adequately evaluate this setting because they typically run within a single static episode and remain largely text-centric. We introduce \bench{}, a benchmark for coworker agents built around multi-turn multi-day tasks, a stateful sandboxed service environment whose state evolves between turns, and rule-based verification. The current release contains 100 tasks across 13 professional scenarios, executed against five stateful sandboxed services (filesystem, email, calendar, knowledge base, spreadsheet) and scored by 1537 deterministic Python checkers over post-execution service state; no LLM-as-judge is invoked during scoring. We benchmark seven frontier agent systems. The strongest model reaches 75.8 weighted score, but the best strict Task Success is only 20.0\%, indicating that partial progress is common while complete end-to-end workflow completion remains rare. Turn-level analysis shows that performance drops after the first exogenous environment update, highlighting adaptation to changing state as a key open challenge. We release the benchmark, evaluation harness, and construction pipeline to support reproducible coworker-agent evaluation.
Abstract:Most agents today ``self-evolve'' by following rewards and rules defined by humans. However, this process remains fundamentally dependent on external supervision; without human guidance, the evolution stops. In this work, we train agents to possess an intrinsic meta-evolution capability to spontaneously learn about unseen environments prior to task execution. To instill this ability, we design an outcome-based reward mechanism that measures how much an agent's self-generated world knowledge improves its success rate on downstream tasks. This reward signal is used exclusively during the training phase to teach the model how to explore and summarize effectively. At inference time, the agent requires no external rewards or human instructions. It spontaneously performs native self-evolution to adapt to unknown environments using its internal parameters. When applied to Qwen3-30B and Seed-OSS-36B, this shift to native evolution yields a 20% performance increase on WebVoyager and WebWalker. Most strikingly, the generated world knowledge even enables a compact 14B Qwen3 model to outperform the unassisted Gemini-2.5-Flash, establishing a new paradigm for truly evolving agents.
Abstract:Dynamic facial expression recognition in the wild remains challenging due to data scarcity and long-tail distributions, which hinder models from effectively learning the temporal dynamics of scarce emotions. To address these limitations, we propose ARGen, an Affect-Reinforced Generative Augmentation Framework that enables data-adaptive dynamic expression generation for robust emotion perception. ARGen operates in two stages: Affective Semantic Injection (ASI) and Adaptive Reinforcement Diffusion (ARD). The ASI stage establishes affective knowledge alignment through facial Action Units and employs a retrieval-augmented prompt generation strategy to synthesize consistent and fine-grained affective descriptions via large-scale visual-language models, thereby injecting interpretable emotional priors into the generation process. The ARD stage integrates text-conditioned image-to-video diffusion with reinforcement learning, introducing inter-frame conditional guidance and a multi-objective reward function to jointly optimize expression naturalness, facial integrity, and generative efficiency. Extensive experiments on both generation and recognition tasks verify that ARGen substantially enhances synthesis fidelity and improves recognition performance, establishing an interpretable and generalizable generative augmentation paradigm for vision-based affective computing.
Abstract:The human brain constructs emotional percepts not by processing facial expressions in isolation, but through a dynamic, hierarchical integration of sensory input with semantic and contextual knowledge. However, existing vision-based dynamic emotion modeling approaches often neglect emotion perception and cognitive theories. To bridge this gap between machine and human emotion perception, we propose cognition-inspired Dual-stream Semantic Enhancement (DuSE). Our model instantiates a dual-stream cognitive architecture. The first stream, a Hierarchical Temporal Prompt Cluster (HTPC), operationalizes the cognitive priming effect. It simulates how linguistic cues pre-sensitize neural pathways, modulating the processing of incoming visual stimuli by aligning textual semantics with fine-grained temporal features of facial dynamics. The second stream, a Latent Semantic Emotion Aggregator (LSEA), computationally models the knowledge integration process, akin to the mechanism described by the Conceptual Act Theory. It aggregates sensory inputs and synthesizes them with learned conceptual knowledge, reflecting the role of the hippocampus and default mode network in constructing a coherent emotional experience. By explicitly modeling these neuro-cognitive mechanisms, DuSE provides a more neurally plausible and robust framework for dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER). Extensive experiments on challenging in-the-wild benchmarks validate our cognition-centric approach, demonstrating that emulating the brain's strategies for emotion processing yields state-of-the-art performance and enhances model interpretability.
Abstract:Reward Models (RMs) are critical components in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) pipeline, directly determining the alignment quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recently, Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have emerged as a superior paradigm, offering higher interpretability and stronger generalization than traditional scalar RMs. However, existing methods for GRMs focus primarily on outcome-level supervision, neglecting analytical process quality, which constrains their potential. To address this, we propose ReflectRM, a novel GRM that leverages self-reflection to assess analytical quality and enhance preference modeling. ReflectRM is trained under a unified generative framework for joint modeling of response preference and analysis preference. During inference, we use its self-reflection capability to identify the most reliable analysis, from which the final preference prediction is derived. Experiments across four benchmarks show that ReflectRM consistently improves performance, achieving an average accuracy gain of +3.7 on Qwen3-4B. Further experiments confirm that response preference and analysis preference are mutually reinforcing. Notably, ReflectRM substantially mitigates positional bias, yielding +10.2 improvement compared with leading GRMs and establishing itself as a more stable evaluator.