仿真到真实

Computing worst-case robust strategies in pursuit-evasion games (PEGs) is time-consuming, especially when real-world factors like partial observability are considered. While important for general security purposes, real-time applicable pursuit strategies for graph-based PEGs are currently missing when the pursuers only have imperfect information about the evader's position. Although state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) methods like Equilibrium Policy Generalization (EPG) and Grasper provide guidelines for learning graph neural network (GNN) policies robust to different game dynamics, they are restricted to the scenario of perfect information and do not take into account the possible case where the evader can predict the pursuers' actions. This paper introduces the first approach to worst-case robust real-time pursuit strategies (R2PS) under partial observability. We first prove that a traditional dynamic programming (DP) algorithm for solving Markov PEGs maintains optimality under the asynchronous moves by the evader. Then, we propose a belief preservation mechanism about the evader's possible positions, extending the DP pursuit strategies to a partially observable setting. Finally, we embed the belief preservation into the state-of-the-art EPG framework to finish our R2PS learning scheme, which leads to a real-time pursuer policy through cross-graph reinforcement learning against the asynchronous-move DP evasion strategies. After reinforcement learning, our policy achieves robust zero-shot generalization to unseen real-world graph structures and consistently outperforms the policy directly trained on the test graphs by the existing game RL approach.

The sim-to-real problem remains a critical challenge in the real-world application of reinforcement learning (RL). The conventional sim-to-real methods heavily rely on resource-intensive re-training of the policy network to adapt to new domains, which limits the flexibility of the deployment of RL policies in ever-changing environments. Inspired by human locomotion, where individuals adjust their gait to new surface conditions without relearning the skill of walking, we introduce Latent Adaptation of Foundation Policies (Found-adapt), a framework that decouples this problem into skill acquisition and environment adaptation. Our method first pretrains a foundation policy on unlabeled offline trajectories from the source simulator, capturing diverse long-horizon behaviors as reusable skills. At deployment, instead of retraining the policy, we perform efficient latent space adaptation: a small amount of target-domain data is collected to refine a latent representation through an adapter network that incorporates parameter-efficient alignment, which produces a task-ready controller under various system dynamics. This adaptation occurs entirely in the latent space, avoiding costly policy optimization while enabling robust transfer. Empirical results across multiple locomotion tasks and dynamic variations demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the sim-to-real gap. Further sensitivity analysis provides interesting insights into the requirements for data quality and applicable situations. These findings highlight how foundation policies with latent adaptation could serve as a general and efficient paradigm for real-world RL deployment.

Predicting the evolution of complex physical systems remains a central problem in science and engineering. Despite rapid progress in scientific Machine Learning (ML) models, a critical bottleneck is the lack of expensive real-world data, resulting in most current models being trained and validated on simulated data. Beyond limiting the development and evaluation of scientific ML, this gap also hinders research into essential tasks such as sim-to-real transfer. We introduce RealPDEBench, the first benchmark for scientific ML that integrates real-world measurements with paired numerical simulations. RealPDEBench consists of five datasets, three tasks, nine metrics, and ten baselines. We first present five real-world measured datasets with paired simulated datasets across different complex physical systems. We further define three tasks, which allow comparisons between real-world and simulated data, and facilitate the development of methods to bridge the two. Moreover, we design nine evaluation metrics, spanning data-oriented and physics-oriented metrics, and finally benchmark ten representative baselines, including state-of-the-art models, pretrained PDE foundation models, and a traditional method. Experiments reveal significant discrepancies between simulated and real-world data, while showing that pretraining with simulated data consistently improves both accuracy and convergence. In this work, we hope to provide insights from real-world data, advancing scientific ML toward bridging the sim-to-real gap and real-world deployment. Our benchmark, datasets, and instructions are available at https://realpdebench.github.io/.

Current motion-conditioned video generation methods suffer from prohibitive latency (minutes per video) and non-causal processing that prevents real-time interaction. We present MotionStream, enabling sub-second latency with up to 29 FPS streaming generation on a single GPU. Our approach begins by augmenting a text-to-video model with motion control, which generates high-quality videos that adhere to the global text prompt and local motion guidance, but does not perform inference on the fly. As such, we distill this bidirectional teacher into a causal student through Self Forcing with Distribution Matching Distillation, enabling real-time streaming inference. Several key challenges arise when generating videos of long, potentially infinite time-horizons -- (1) bridging the domain gap from training on finite length and extrapolating to infinite horizons, (2) sustaining high quality by preventing error accumulation, and (3) maintaining fast inference, without incurring growth in computational cost due to increasing context windows. A key to our approach is introducing carefully designed sliding-window causal attention, combined with attention sinks. By incorporating self-rollout with attention sinks and KV cache rolling during training, we properly simulate inference-time extrapolations with a fixed context window, enabling constant-speed generation of arbitrarily long videos. Our models achieve state-of-the-art results in motion following and video quality while being two orders of magnitude faster, uniquely enabling infinite-length streaming. With MotionStream, users can paint trajectories, control cameras, or transfer motion, and see results unfold in real-time, delivering a truly interactive experience.

Current medical language model (LM) benchmarks often over-simplify the complexities of day-to-day clinical practice tasks and instead rely on evaluating LMs on multiple-choice board exam questions. In psychiatry especially, these challenges are worsened by fairness and bias issues, since models can be swayed by patient demographics even when those factors should not influence clinical decisions. Thus, we present an expert-created and annotated dataset spanning five critical domains of decision-making in mental healthcare: treatment, diagnosis, documentation, monitoring, and triage. This U.S. centric dataset — created without any LM assistance — is designed to capture the nuanced clinical reasoning and daily ambiguities mental health practitioners encounter, reflecting the inherent complexities of care delivery that are missing from existing datasets. Almost all base questions with five answer options each have had the decision-irrelevant demographic patient information removed and replaced with variables, e.g., for age or ethnicity, and are available for male, female, or non-binary-coded patients. This design enables systematic evaluations of model performance and bias by studying how demographic factors affect decision-making. For question categories dealing with ambiguity and multiple valid answer options, we create a preference dataset with uncertainties from the expert annotations. We outline a series of intended use cases and demonstrate the usability of our dataset by evaluating sixteen off-the-shelf and six (mental) health fine-tuned LMs on category-specific task accuracy, on the fairness impact of patient demographic information on decision-making, and how consistently free-form responses deviate from human-annotated samples.

Modern robotic manipulation primarily relies on visual observations in a 2D color space for skill learning but suffers from poor generalization. In contrast, humans, living in a 3D world, depend more on physical properties-such as distance, size, and shape-than on texture when interacting with objects. Since such 3D geometric information can be acquired from widely available depth cameras, it appears feasible to endow robots with similar perceptual capabilities. Our pilot study found that using depth cameras for manipulation is challenging, primarily due to their limited accuracy and susceptibility to various types of noise. In this work, we propose Camera Depth Models (CDMs) as a simple plugin on daily-use depth cameras, which take RGB images and raw depth signals as input and output denoised, accurate metric depth. To achieve this, we develop a neural data engine that generates high-quality paired data from simulation by modeling a depth camera's noise pattern. Our results show that CDMs achieve nearly simulation-level accuracy in depth prediction, effectively bridging the sim-to-real gap for manipulation tasks. Notably, our experiments demonstrate, for the first time, that a policy trained on raw simulated depth, without the need for adding noise or real-world fine-tuning, generalizes seamlessly to real-world robots on two challenging long-horizon tasks involving articulated, reflective, and slender objects, with little to no performance degradation. We hope our findings will inspire future research in utilizing simulation data and 3D information in general robot policies.

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on diverse tasks but often exhibit cognitive inertia, struggling to follow instructions that conflict with the standardized patterns learned during supervised fine-tuning (SFT). To evaluate this limitation, we propose Inverse IFEval, a benchmark that measures models’ Counter-intuitive Ability—their capacity to override training-induced biases and comply with adversarial instructions. Inverse IFEval introduces eight types of such challenges, including Question Correction, Intentional Textual Flaws, Code without Comments, and Counterfactual Answering. Using a human-in-the-loop pipeline, we construct a dataset of 1012 high-quality Chinese and English questions across 23 domains, evaluated under an optimized LLM-as-a-Judge framework. Experiments on existing leading LLMs demonstrate the necessity of our proposed Inverse IFEval benchmark. Our findings emphasize that future alignment efforts should not only pursue fluency and factual correctness but also account for adaptability under unconventional contexts. We hope that Inverse IFEval serves as both a diagnostic tool and a foundation for developing methods that mitigate cognitive inertia, reduce overfitting to narrow patterns, and ultimately enhance the instruction-following reliability of LLMs in diverse and unpredictable real-world scenarios.

The practical deployment of Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) for Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) is hindered by a critical sim-to-real gap. This gap stems not only from training on oversimplified Euclidean data but also from node-based architectures incapable of handling the node-and-edge-based features with correlated asymmetric cost matrices, such as those for real-world distance and duration. We introduce RRNCO, a novel architecture specifically designed to address these complexities. RRNCO's novelty lies in two key innovations. First, its Adaptive Node Embedding (ANE) efficiently fuses spatial coordinates with real-world distance features using a learned contextual gating mechanism. Second, its Neural Adaptive Bias (NAB) is the first mechanism to jointly model asymmetric distance, duration, and directional angles, enabling it to capture complex, realistic routing constraints. Moreover, we introduce a new VRP benchmark grounded in real-world data crucial for bridging this sim-to-real gap, featuring asymmetric distance and duration matrices from 100 diverse cities, enabling the training and validation of NCO solvers on tasks that are more representative of practical settings. Experiments demonstrate that RRNCO achieves state-of-the-art performance on this benchmark, significantly advancing the practical applicability of neural solvers for real-world logistics.

Real-world time series data are inherently multivariate, often exhibiting complex inter-channel dependencies. Each channel is typically sampled at its own period and is prone to missing values due to various practical and operational constraints. These characteristics pose three fundamental challenges involving channel dependency, sampling asynchrony, and missingness, all of which must be addressed simultaneously to enable robust and reliable forecasting in practical settings. However, existing architectures typically address only parts of these challenges in isolation and still rely on simplifying assumptions, leaving unresolved the combined challenges of asynchronous channel sampling, test-time missing blocks, and intricate inter-channel dependencies. To bridge this gap, we propose ChannelTokenFormer, a Transformer-based forecasting framework with a flexible architecture designed to explicitly capture cross-channel interactions, accommodate channel-wise asynchronous sampling, and effectively handle missing values. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets reflecting practical settings, along with one private real-world industrial dataset, demonstrate the superior robustness and accuracy of ChannelTokenFormer under challenging real-world conditions.

Real-time execution is essential for cyber-physical systems such as robots. These systems operate in dynamic real-world environments where even small delays can undermine responsiveness and compromise performance. Asynchronous inference has recently emerged as a system-level paradigm for real-time robot manipulation, enabling the next action chunk to be predicted while the current one is being executed. While this approach achieves real-time responsiveness, naive integration often results in execution failure. Previous methods attributed this failure to inter-chunk discontinuity and developed test-time algorithms to smooth chunk boundaries. In contrast, we identify another critical yet overlooked factor: intra-chunk inconsistency, where the robot’s executed action chunk partially misaligns with its current perception. To address this, we propose REMAC, which learns corrective adjustments on the pretrained policy through masked action chunking, enabling the policy to remain resilient under mismatches between intended actions and actual execution during asynchronous inference. In addition, we introduce a prefix-preserved sampling procedure to reinforce inter-chunk continuity. Overall, our method delivers more reliable policies without incurring additional latency. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our method enables faster task execution, maintains robustness across varying delays, and consistently achieves higher completion rates.

Reinforcement learning in GPU-enabled physics simulation has been the driving force behind many of the breakthroughs in sim-to-real robot learning. However, current approaches for data generation in simulation are unwieldy and task-specific, requiring extensive human effort to engineer training curricula and rewards. Even with this engineering, these approaches still struggle to reliably solve long-horizon, dexterous manipulation tasks. To provide a seamless tool for robotic data generation in simulation, we introduce a simple framework that enables on-policy reinforcement learning to reliably solve an array of such tasks with a single reward function, set of algorithm hyper-parameters, no auto-curricula, and no human demonstrations. Our key insight is careful usage of diverse simulator resets for simplifying long-horizon exploration challenges. Our proposed system, OmniReset, automatically generates these resets with minimal human input and gracefully scales with compute to solve dexterous, contact-rich long-horizon tasks. OmniReset outperforms baselines on easier versions of our tasks, and scales to tasks with complexities beyond the reach of existing techniques. Finally, we use this data-generation methodology to create a large dataset of trajectories in simulation, and show that augmenting it with a small amount of real-world data enables successful real-world transfer for complex manipulation tasks.

Domain generalization methods can effectively enhance network performance on test samples with unknown distributions by isolating gradients between unstable and stable parameters. However, existing methods employ relatively coarse-grained partitioning of stable versus unstable parameters, leading to misclassified unstable parameters that degrade network feature processing capabilities. We first provide a theoretical analysis of gradient perturbations caused by unstable parameters. Based on this foundation, we propose Layer-Decomposition Training (LDT), which conducts fine-grained layer-wise partitioning guided by parameter instability levels, substantially improving parameter update stability. Furthermore, to address gradient amplitude disparities within stable layers and unstable layers respectively, we introduce a Dynamic Parameter Update (DPU) strategy that adaptively determines layer-specific update coefficients according to gradient variations, optimizing feature learning efficiency. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks (super-resolution, classification, semantic segmentation) and architectures (Transformer, Mamba, CNN) demonstrate LDT's superior generalization capability. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZaizuoTang/LDT.

Reinforcement-learning agents often struggle when deployed from simulation to the real-world. A dominant strategy for reducing the sim-to-real gap is domain randomization (DR) which trains the policy across many simulators produced by sampling dynamics parameters, but standard DR ignores offline data already available from the real system. We study offline domain randomization (ODR), which first fits a distribution over simulator parameters to an offline dataset. While a growing body of empirical work reports substantial gains with algorithms such as DROPO, the theoretical foundations of ODR remain largely unexplored. In this work, we cast ODR as a maximum-likelihood estimation over a parametric simulator family and provide statistical guarantees: under mild regularity and identifiability conditions, the estimator is weakly consistent (it converges in probability to the true dynamics as data grows), and it becomes strongly consistent (i.e., it converges almost surely to the true dynamics) when an additional uniform Lipschitz continuity assumption holds. We examine the practicality of these assumptions and outline relaxations that justify ODR’s applicability across a broader range of settings. Taken together, our results place ODR on a principled footing and clarify when offline data can soundly guide the choice of a randomization distribution for downstream offline RL.

This paper explores the geometric characteristics of loss landscapes to enhance domain generalization (DG) in deep neural networks. Existing methods mainly leverage the local flatness around minima for improved generalization. However, recent theoretical studies indicate that flatness does not universally guarantee better generalization. Instead, this paper investigates a global geometrical property for domain generalization, i.e., mode connectivity, the phenomenon where distinct local minima are connected by continuous low-loss pathways. Different from flatness, mode connectivity enables transitions from poor to superior generalization models without leaving low-loss regions. To navigate these connected pathways effectively, this paper proposes a novel Billiard Optimization Algorithm (BOA), which discovers superior models by mimicking billiard dynamics. During this process, BOA operates within a low-dimensional Krylov subspace, aiming to alleviate the curse of dimensionality caused by the high-dimensional parameter space of deep models. Furthermore, this paper reveals that oracle test gradients strongly align with the Krylov subspace constructed from training gradients across diverse datasets and architectures. This alignment offers a powerful tool to bridge training and test domains, enabling the efficient discovery of superior models with limited training domains. Experiments on DomainBed demonstrate that BOA consistently outperforms existing sharpness-aware and DG methods across diverse datasets and architectures. Impressively, BOA even surpasses the sharpness-aware minimization by 3.6\% on VLCS when using a ViT-B/16 backbone.

Recent advancements in LLM-based information-seeking agents have achieved record-breaking performance on established benchmarks. However, these agents remain heavily reliant on search-engine-indexed knowledge, leaving a critical blind spot: Unindexed Information Seeking (UIS). This paper identifies and explores the UIS problem, where vital information is not captured by search engine crawlers, such as overlooked content, dynamic webpages, and embedded files. Despite its significance, UIS remains an underexplored challenge. To address this gap, we introduce UIS-QA, the first dedicated UIS benchmark, comprising 110 expert-annotated QA pairs. Notably, even state-of-the-art agents experience a drastic performance drop on UIS-QA (e.g., from 70.90 on GAIA and 46.70 on BrowseComp-zh to 24.55 on UIS-QA), underscoring the severity of the problem. To mitigate this, we propose UIS-Digger, a novel multi-agent framework that incorporates dual-mode browsing and enables simultaneous webpage searching and file parsing. With a relatively small $\sim$30B-parameter backbone LLM optimized using SFT and RFT training strategies, UIS-Digger sets a strong baseline at 26.36\%, outperforming systems integrating sophisticated LLMs such as O3 and GPT-4.1. This demonstrates the importance of proactive interaction with unindexed sources for effective and comprehensive information-seeking. Our work not only uncovers a fundamental limitation in current agent evaluation paradigms but also provides the first toolkit for advancing UIS research, defining a new and promising direction for robust information-seeking systems.

Image restoration in real-world conditions is highly challenging due to heterogeneous degradations such as haze, noise, shadows, and blur. Existing diffusion-based methods remain limited: conditional generation struggles to balance fidelity and realism, inversion-based approaches accumulate errors, and posterior sampling requires a known forward operator that is rarely available. We introduce **LearnIR**, a learnable diffusion posterior sampling framework that eliminates this dependency by training a lightweight model to directly predict gradient correction distributions, enabling *Diffusion Posterior Sampling Correction (DPSC)* that maintains consistency with the true image distribution during sampling. In addition, a *Dynamic Resolution Module (DRM)* dynamically adjusts resolution to preserve global structures in early stages and refine fine textures later, while avoiding the need for a pretrained VAE. Experiments on ISTD, O-HAZE, HazyDet, REVIDE, and our newly constructed FaceShadow dataset show that LearnIR achieves state-of-the-art performance in PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS.

Imitation learning for end-to-end driving trains policies only on expert demonstrations. Once deployed in a closed loop, such policies lack recovery data: small mistakes cannot be corrected and quickly compound into failures. A promising direction is to generate alternative viewpoints and trajectories beyond the logged path. Prior work explores photorealistic digital twins via neural rendering or game engines, but these methods are prohibitively slow and costly, and thus mainly used for evaluation. In this work, we argue that photorealism is unnecessary for training end-to-end planners. What matters is semantic fidelity and scalability: driving depends on geometry and dynamics, not textures or lighting. Motivated by this, we propose 3D Rasterization, which replaces costly rendering with lightweight rasterization of annotated primitives, enabling augmentations such as counterfactual recovery maneuvers and cross-agent view synthesis. To transfer these synthetic views effectively to real-world deployment, we introduce a Raster-to-Real (R2R) feature-space alignment that bridges the sim-to-real gap at the representation level. Together, these components form the Rasterization Augmented Planning (RAP) pipeline, a scalable data augmentation framework for planning. RAP achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop robustness and long-tail generalization, ranking 1st on four major benchmarks: NAVSIM v1/v2, Waymo Open Dataset Vision-based E2E Driving, and Bench2Drive. Our results demonstrate that lightweight rasterization with feature alignment suffices to scale end-to-end training, offering a practical alternative to photorealistic rendering. Project page: https://alan-lanfeng.github.io/RAP/.

Deploying semantic segmentation in driving and robotics requires both real-time inference and robustness to domain shifts, formalized as Real-Time Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation (RT-DGSS), which has not been fully addressed. Existing methods often treat real-time(RT) inference and domain generalization (DG) separately, with DG improving robustness but lacking real-time performance, and real-time models being brittle under distribution shifts. To address the RT-DGSS problem, we propose QPrompt-R1, a real-time Query-Prompt architecture built on a ViT backbone. QPrompt-R1 injects a small set of learnable queries only at the final transformer block, performing a single query–image alignment step and eliminating decoder overhead. To further enhance alignment without test-time cost, we introduce a Group Relative Query Alignment (GRQA) objective, which uses group-relative supervision within each group to align queries with features, improving domain generalization through group-relative rewards. QPrompt-R1 achieves 54 FPS, delivering strong performance in synthetic-to-real transfer, real-to-real generalization, and robustness under adverse conditions. Additionally, GRQA is plug-and-play, improving state-of-the-art DGSS methods like REIN (+1.2) and SoMA (+0.5) without inference-time overhead.

We present the first comprehensive evaluation of AI agents against human cybersecurity professionals in a live enterprise environment. We evaluate ten cybersecurity professionals alongside six existing AI agents and ARTEMIS, our new agent scaffold, on a large university network consisting of $\sim$8,000 hosts across 12 subnets. ARTEMIS is a multi-agent framework featuring dynamic prompt generation, arbitrary sub-agents, and automatic vulnerability triaging. In our comparative study, ARTEMIS placed second overall, discovering 9 valid vulnerabilities with an 82\% valid submission rate and outperforming 9 of 10 human participants. While existing scaffolds such as Codex and CyAgent underperformed relative to most human participants, ARTEMIS demonstrated technical sophistication and submission quality comparable to the strongest participants. AI agents offer advantages in systematic enumeration, parallel exploitation, and cost---certain ARTEMIS variants cost $18/hour versus $60/hour for professional penetration testers. We also identify key capability gaps: AI agents exhibit higher false-positive rates and struggle with GUI-based tasks.

Exoskeletons show great promise for enhancing mobility, but providing appropriate assistance remains challenging due to the complexity of human adaptation to external forces. Current state-of-the-art approaches for optimizing exoskeleton controllers require extensive human experiments in which participants must walk for hours, creating a paradox: those who could benefit most from exoskeleton assistance, such as individuals with mobility impairments, are rarely able to participate in such demanding procedures. We present Exo-plore, a simulation framework that combines neuromechanical simulation with deep reinforcement learning to optimize hip exoskeleton assistance without requiring real human experiments. Exo-plore can (1) generate realistic gait data that captures human adaptation to assistive forces, (2) produce reliable optimization results despite the stochastic nature of human gait, and (3) generalize to pathological gaits, showing strong linear relationships between pathology severity and optimal assistance.