Shielding has emerged as a promising approach for ensuring safety of AI-controlled autonomous systems. The algorithmic goal is to compute a shield, which is a runtime safety enforcement tool that needs to monitor and intervene the AI controller's actions if safety could be compromised otherwise. Traditional shields are designed statically for a specific safety requirement. Therefore, if the safety requirement changes at runtime due to changing operating conditions, the shield needs to be recomputed from scratch, causing delays that could be fatal. We introduce dynamic shields for parametric safety specifications, which are succinctly represented sets of all possible safety specifications that may be encountered at runtime. Our dynamic shields are statically designed for a given safety parameter set, and are able to dynamically adapt as the true safety specification (permissible by the parameters) is revealed at runtime. The main algorithmic novelty lies in the dynamic adaptation procedure, which is a simple and fast algorithm that utilizes known features of standard safety shields, like maximal permissiveness. We report experimental results for a robot navigation problem in unknown territories, where the safety specification evolves as new obstacles are discovered at runtime. In our experiments, the dynamic shields took a few minutes for their offline design, and took between a fraction of a second and a few seconds for online adaptation at each step, whereas the brute-force online recomputation approach was up to 5 times slower.
Davide Corsi, Kaushik Mallik, Andoni Rodriguez et al.· 0 citations
Take three frontier mixture-of-experts models (Alibaba, OpenAI, NVIDIA; 3.6-4.0B active parameters each) and fine-tune them to reason in a low-resource language. On accuracy benchmarks almost nothing happens, and the benchmark itself is noise at this scale: changing only the random seed moves the score by 7.7 points, more than every data and recipe effect we measured. That null is our first result. The real changes live where accuracy cannot see. Base models never think in Greek: 0 of 1,000 reasoning traces, even when the question is Greek, so the model answers correctly while reasoning in a form its user cannot read, audit, or correct. After supervised fine-tuning (SFT), every released checkpoint reasons in the language of the question on ~98% of items, one family at 3x fewer tokens, with judged grammaticality improving on all four models and general ability within a few points of each base: nothing was forgotten, and fluency was gained. We propose six behavioural dimensions that make such changes measurable, each gated to reject any metric that correlates with output length, and we report how our own instruments lied: six failures, each caught by a control. What SFT cannot do is fix its own defects: a quarter of answers skip the requested format, answers leak into the reasoning channel, and an explicit "think in English" is obeyed under half the time. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, pre-registered before training, fixes the first two outright (fallback 24% to 2.5%, leak 3.5% to 0.0%, both against a flat random-reward control) and moves the third (+9.1pp), while the Greek reasoning habit survives an accuracy-only gradient untouched. We release five checkpoints. The instruments, the controls and the pre-registration travel to any low-resource language; Greek is the case that let us measure them.
A reinforcement learning-based framework for robotic grasp refinement, integrating keypoint-based object representations with a Deep Q-Network (DQN), is proposed, offering a scalable and adaptable solution for contact-rich manipulation tasks.
Amir Arsalan Nematollahi, Shayan Ahmadi, M. T. Masouleh et al.· 0 citations
This work employs encoder-decoder networks built around long-short term memory (LSTM) cells in a distributed optimization algorithm that allows unprecedented reconstruction accuracy or the usage of different prediction-horizon lengths without the necessity to retrain.
Torben Schiz, P. H. Nardelli, Henrik Ebel· 0 citations
Across four RoboTwin tasks spanning different horizons and coordination patterns, Prism-GRPO improves success and quality at matched rollout budgets and reaches target success rates with up to 56% fewer rollouts.
Zeyun Deng, Yuzhe Lu, Yawei Wang et al.· 0 citations
End-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models offer an elegant route to general-purpose robotics, but their reliability is bounded by validated physical coverage. When an unfamiliar object, sensor, embodiment, or contact falls outside that coverage and no validated fallback exists, correcting the failure requires new robot data, a policy update, and regression testing. This recurring burden is the retraining tax. Unlike text, embodied data must often be created by operating machines. We present Teach-and-Grow Learning (TGL), an agent-centered architecture for general robot learning. In its general form, a multimodal agent turns a few successful demonstrations into reusable Skill Blocks: closed-loop behaviors for meaningful subgoals. In a new scene, the agent grounds and composes these blocks, selects learned or geometric tools, observes the physical outcome, and revises the route when execution departs from intent. A Skill Library stores executable behavior, while structured Experience Memory carries forward success, failure, and repair. New tasks are acquired without task-specific policy retraining. Our LIBERO evaluation attains state-of-the-art performance; controlled studies expose skill induction, persistent reuse, and agent-directed adaptation. Finally, we propose the Teach-and-Grow scaling-law hypothesis: if X denotes effective reusable experience, future-task error and teaching demand should approach irreducible floors as power laws in X. The architecture therefore treats deployment as a period of continued learning, in which one task can make the next easier.
The massive overactuation in the human musculoskeletal system makes it challenging to train musculoskeletal models to generate human-like motion via reinforcement learning, primarily because exploration in the resulting high-dimensional and redundant action space is extremely inefficient. To address this problem, we propose the $\lambda$-hold controller, inspired by the equilibrium-point (EP) hypothesis, which has been widely supported by extensive evidence from human motor control studies. The policy's control variable is the per-muscle EP threshold length $\lambda$, from which a stretch-reflex recruitment law computes the muscle excitations automatically. Holding each $\lambda$ over an interval of the gait phase also sharply reduces the frequency at which the policy must be queried. Consequently, the controller, to our knowledge for the first time, enables a muscle-actuated skeletal model to learn human-like sprinting using only a minimal reward within an hour of training. The efficient exploration through the proposed $\lambda$-hold controller is not merely an engineering trick but an approach grounded in physiology, bringing together the EP hypothesis, intermittent control, and optimal feedback control. Beyond encapsulating human-like behavior in predictive simulation, this achievement contributes to developing a learnable model of the human motor controller.
Jun Hyuk Lee, Chihyeong Lee, Jooeun Ahn· 0 citations
VLCP closes the loop where the failure actually lives, on the control code, within a single episode, and keeps the VLM frozen, which is a training-free policy with a tenfold gap between pooled success and confidence intervals in every scene family.
Dhia Naouali, Ming Wu, Claudia Wong et al.· 0 citations
Instant Episode Repetition (IER) is introduced, a simple and novel mechanism that improves sample efficiency by immediately repeating action sequences from successful episodes during environment interaction by directly influences the data collection process.
Hoda Yamani, Yuning Xing, Koen van Rijnsoever et al.· 0 citations
Large language model (LLM)-driven embodied agents rely on environment states to interpret scenes, generate high-level plans, and drive physical execution, making planner-visible state representations a critical security boundary. Existing attacks primarily manipulate user instructions, prompt contexts, model behavior, or perceptual inputs, while paying limited attention to whether environment-state text itself can serve as deceptive task evidence and propagate beyond planning to affect execution outcomes. Because embodied tasks are constrained by entity grounding, action preconditions, spatial relations, and environmental constraints, planning deviation alone does not guarantee adversarial execution.
To address this gap, we investigate environment-state text as an independent attack surface and present the first closed-loop Environment State-Text Injection (ESTI) attack for LLM-driven embodied agents. Without modifying the original user instruction, model parameters, or executor, ESTI reformulates an adversarial objective as false state evidence compatible with the current environment and influences planning and execution through object properties, spatial relations, affordances, task-stage rules, and execution feedback. We further develop ESTI-Bench to evaluate attack propagation across the planning-to-execution closed loop and compare ESTI with Vanilla IPI, EIRAD, and BADROBOT across ProgPrompt/VirtualHome, VoxPoser/RLBench, and AI2-THOR/iTHOR. ESTI consistently outperforms existing baselines, improving planning-level and execution-level attack success rates by up to 89.32\% and 43.69\%, respectively. Further analysis shows that grounding, consistency, and executability jointly determine whether manipulated state evidence can propagate through the embodied closed loop and produce verifiable environmental changes.
Jiawei Liu, Jiacheng Guo, Tian Zhang et al.· 0 citations
A neurosymbolic agent that factors long-horizon household tasks into task-directed visual exploration and constrained symbolic planning and evaluates executable continuations using a domain-independent planning heuristic is presented.
Mohammad Albinhassan, Yuming Feng, Alessandra Russo et al.· 0 citations
Dynamics-effective is used to describe an intervention that changes the model's future computation in a sustained and target-specific way under autonomous rollout under autonomous rollout.
Gemini Robotics ER 2 helps robots reason, collaborate, and solve real-world tasks. It represents a step change in video understanding, tool orchestration, and multi-robot collaboration for robotic applications.
From feet to fingertips — we are teaching robots intelligent whole-body control, fine dexterity, and teamwork to complete a broad range of complex tasks.
