arXiv preprints from January 1, 2026 through September 7, 2026 — 05:23:03 EST
Social robots are expected to operate across diverse environments, where similar arrangements can imply different socially appropriate actions, e.g., starting a conversation may be acceptable in a crowded home but disruptive in an office meeting. Because such norms and environments cannot all be anticipated in advance, robots require...
Academic leagues have become important mechanisms for promoting extracurricular education and strengthening the integration between universities and society. This paper presents the organizational framework adopted by the Academic League of Artificial Intelligence (LIA) at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), designed to...
Blue-noise sampling is widely used in computer graphics, but existing methods separate statistical modeling from scalable generation. Optimization and transport methods produce high-quality point sets by coupling all samples together. Procedural and tile-based samplers are local, but define their output only implicitly. We formulate...
Machine learning ethics researchers and critical HCI scholars have argued that algorithmically predicting gender is wrong. At the same time, other researchers rely on predicted gender labels to study gender disparities and develop algorithmic fairness techniques. How do we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory intuitions? We...
Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown substantial potential in visual understanding and graphic code generation, editing scientific figures through code presents a greater challenge: a model must jointly recover visual structure, ground the requested change, generate compilable code, and preserve all unrelated...
Contact-rich manipulation failures are often detected only after the robot has committed to contact. This is especially limiting in wrist-camera setups: close gripper--object views help observe contact, but a poor approach may already push, miss, slip, or disturb the object before conventional detectors react. We introduce...
Tendermint is among the most widely studied and deployed Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, owing in part to its native leader-rotation mechanism that subsumes complex view changes. Like most partially-synchronous BFT protocols, Tendermint tolerates $f < n/3$ Byzantine processes and decides in three communication...
Transformer-based language models are known to sometimes generalize to sequences longer than seen during training, but we lack a precise characterization of which tasks admit length generalization. It is not even known which regular languages transformers length-generalize on -- and this is a foundational class of languages. Our...
Instruction-tuned language models achieve strong performance across a range of generation tasks, but have also recently been shown to exhibit verbalized overconfidence. In question answering, verbalized model overconfidence may be associated with the consistency of the generated supporting rationales. In this paper, we study whether...
Assessing the maturity of artificial intelligence technologies is essential for investment decisions, project management, and policy monitoring, yet the available readiness frameworks are heterogeneous and difficult to apply automatically: the adaptation of Technology Readiness Levels to AI lacks AI-specific gating criteria, the...
Transformer-based language models achieve strong performance but incur substantial inference cost due to repeated high-dimensional matrix multiplications. We propose Reduced Matrix Multiplication (RMM), a training-free, input-adaptive inference method that reduces Transformer matrix products by selecting informative slices along their...
Self-supervised learning (SSL) speech representations achieve strong performance for Parkinson's disease (PD) detection within individual corpora. However, it remains unclear whether these models capture disease-related characteristics or exploit dataset-specific confounds, particularly since most SSL backbones are pretrained...
Visual bottlenecks that focus policy inputs on regions of interest (ROIs) can improve data-efficient visuomotor learning by separating where to look from how to act. Many ROI interfaces rely on external spatial labels, such as gaze, object classes, or affordance annotations. Label-free alternatives often derive crops from trajectories...
Embodied intelligent virtual agents are expected to operate as persistent, adaptive, and context-aware entities within complex virtual and Metaverse worlds. However, implementing cognitively capable agents in such environments is conceptually and technologically challenging. Among a range of blueprints and development approaches, the...
Autonomous agents are increasingly capable of improving models, systems, and other technical artifacts through long-horizon experimentation. To understand the current state of this capability, however, evaluation must go beyond final scores, which neither reveal where progress is gained or lost nor indicate whether accumulated...
Humans effortlessly perceive the present while remembering the past, yet streaming VLMs often trade off real-time perception against long-term memory. Prior work shows that shortening the context can sharpen current-scene perception at the expense of long-range recall. To reconcile these abilities, we introduce StreamTTT, which writes...
We consider the problem of autonomously learning robot skills under a limited practice budget for sequential tasks. We propose an active skill learning algorithm, \emph{Deliberate Practice (DP)}, that computes a provably \emph{budget-optimal} allocation---practicing skills that maximize expected cumulative reward while being learnable...
Closed-loop sensorimotor training systems can improve learning by sensing movement and delivering real-time feedback, yet most are built as fixed implementations tied to a single task, even though the core technology (inertial and tactile sensing, vibrotactile cueing, rule-based logic) remains the same. We present Sensorimotor...
Parliamentary proceedings are a primary record of democratic deliberation, yet their volume and fragmentation make multi-perspective access difficult for citizens, journalists, and researchers. Applying Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to parliamentary transcripts introduces three specific risks: dominance of the most frequent...
Existing predictive models in learning analytics often treat student academic history as a simple sequence, overlooking the concurrent nature of courses taken within a semester. This simplification can lead to inaccurate performance predictions, particularly for students with heavy or challenging course loads. This paper introduces a...
We consider systems of submatrix equations, that is, sets of equality constraints over square submatrices of the input. By generalising the recursive algorithm of Gawrychowski et al. [Universal reconstruction of a string, Theoretical Computer Science 2020] to two dimensions, we obtain a linear-time procedure that finds a solution for...
Background: Iterative feedback loops are the dominant paradigm for improving LLM-generated Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): validators such as Checkov and terraform validate feed error signals back for successive repair attempts. Prior work reports cumulative-best metrics, which are non-decreasing by construction, so the raw...
Shape and force sensing have long been critical bottlenecks in the development of compact capstan-driven continuum surgical robots, primarily due to the difficulty of obtaining cable tension information within the confined capstan assembly. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents an integrated design-modeling-sensing...
Reinforcement learning improves autonomous-driving vision-language-action (VLA) models by evaluating trajectories sampled from the current policy. Group relative policy optimization (GRPO) learns from reward differences within each rollout group. When all sampled trajectories are poor, this relative signal can rank failures without...
Interactive autoregressive video generation demands both low-latency rollouts and precise online control. Few-step distillation accelerates generation by reducing denoising steps, while online control imposes a causal constraint: frames and blocks should depend on history and controls available during generation. Existing video...