Expected Free Energy-based Informative Path Planning for Robotic Mars Exploration

An autonomous robot efficiently exploring an unknown environment, such as looking for water sources on Mars, faces two simultaneous demands: building an accurate information map while quickly finding the regions of greatest value, and paying for every meter of travel and the cost of every measurement it takes. Classical information-seeking and reward-seeking criteria address only one of these objectives at a time. Here, we propose Expected Free Energy (EFE), the principled action-selection objective from active inference, as a unifying criterion for budgeted robotic informative path planning. Maintaining a Gaussian-process belief over the information field, our agent plans continuous trajectories that minimize expected free energy under hard path-length constraints. The results from multiple realizations show that EFE-based planning yields accurate posterior maps and locates the highest-value regions simultaneously, outperforming information-theoretic baselines under the same settings. In robotic exploration, these unified, easy-to-tune principled information-gathering strategies facilitate autonomous deployment while enforcing efficiency and resource constraints.

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arXiv AI Papers·há 3 dias☆

Latent Reasoning in Continuous Space for Unified Multimodal Models↗

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) achieve remarkable success on diverse multimodal understanding and generation tasks, yet they still struggle to effectively leverage language-based chain-of-thought reasoning for image generation. As a result, existing reasoning-augmented UMMs often fail to inherit the test-time scaling and fine-grained controllability observed in large language models. We attribute this failure to a fundamental modality mismatch: reasoning is performed in a discrete token space, whereas image generation operates in a continuous space. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Latent Reasoning framework in Continuous space (LARC), which alleviates the token-level bottleneck by reasoning over continuous hidden states. Specifically, the training framework consists of two stages: (i) curriculum supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and (ii) information-gain reinforcement learning (RL). First, the curriculum SFT stage gradually converts token-level reasoning into latent reasoning. Subsequently, the information-gain RL stage self-evolves latent reasoning without ground truth supervision. Experiments across diverse text-to-image generation benchmarks show that LARC consistently improves generation quality, prompt following, and compositional fidelity. Notably, LARC achieves state-of-the-art performance on GenEval with a 7%p gain over BAGEL and demonstrates clear test-time scaling behavior, outperforming token-based generation under both parallel and sequential test-time scaling strategies.

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arXiv AI Papers·há 3 dias☆

Flide: Accelerating Decision Inference with Exact State Forking↗

Decision models such as Jev have emerged as a highly promising paradigm for LLM agent systems, providing lightweight and reliable categorical reasoning for rapid System One execution. However, existing generation-oriented inference engines fail to support these workloads effectively, suffering from severe prefix recomputation overheads or distorted output probabilities. To address this challenge, we propose Flide, an efficient and exact inference engine that decouples the logical tree structure of a decision request from its physical execution within a single flattened token stream. Through ForkAttention, Flide navigates request dependencies using GPU-resident indices across both standard attention and recurrent Gated DeltaNet layers, guaranteeing in exact arithmetic that every query branch evaluates identically to an isolated forward pass. By expressing branch topologies directly in GPU-resident metadata, Flide accommodates diverse request mixtures with a compact set of pre-recorded execution graphs while enabling expanding agent histories to resume from checkpoints saved in earlier passes. Extensive evaluations on public hybrid and decision models demonstrate that Flide answers queries up to 9.5 times faster than vLLM and SGLang while staying closest to a float32 reference in total variation distance. By unifying physical execution throughput with mathematical exactness, Flide establishes a principled foundation for scalable, latency-critical decision intelligence in agent systems.

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arXiv AI Papers·há 3 dias☆

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Agentic workflows are increasingly shifting towards long-horizon tasks, such as open-ended scientific work, where models benefit from long context windows. However, at ultra-long context (above 1M tokens), full attention is prohibitively expensive. A promising approach is sparse attention, in which a dedicated indexer selects a subset of keys for the attention. Yet current methods of indexing either still have quadratic cost in context size or lose accuracy at ultra-long context scale. We address this with Latent Sparse Attention (LSA), an efficient attention method that maintains accuracy at ultra-long context. In LSA, keys are hierarchically clustered in a learned latent space, and queries score the hierarchy of clusters instead of scoring every key, making prefill, decode and training faster at long context. We propose two variants, Distilled-LSA (D-LSA), which can be applied to pre-trained models via distillation, and Native-LSA (N-LSA), which is trained natively on the next-token loss alone. On GLM-5.3-FLASH (QWEN-3.8-27B) at 10M tokens, D-LSA speeds up one attention layer by 22.7x (72.4x) in prefill and 4.6x (42.5x) in decode over its original sparse attention (full attention), while keeping similar accuracy across a variety of tasks. N-LSA matches the accuracy of full attention with a training speedup of 1.6x per layer at 128k tokens. LSA offers practical and efficient attention for models to benefit from ultra-long context.

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arXiv AI Papers·há 3 dias☆

Hierarchical World Models with Implicit Dynamics↗

Planning with world models enables test-time adaptation for embodied agents, offering superior generalization over direct policy learning. However, long-horizon tasks remain hindered by cumulative errors and search complexity. Existing hierarchical methods often use rigid macro-actions or latent skills, leading to brittle representations and limited fine-grained control. We introduce ID-WM (Implicit Dynamics World Models), a hierarchical world model that decouples state-space reachability from local control. Our framework utilizes a high-level model to sample feasible transitions across the state manifold and a low-level world model as an inverse dynamics solver to ground these transitions into precise actions. This allows the planner to identify reachable subgoals without being constrained by low-level execution details. By prioritizing local physical feasibility over global behavioral patterns, ID-WM synthesizes novel long-horizon plans from short segments, transcending the specific behavioral modes seen during training. We demonstrate its effectiveness across three navigation and manipulation suites, achieving a 38.5% improvement over state-of-the-art policy and diffusion-based planners. Crucially, by leveraging this hierarchical structure to mitigate compounding errors, our approach yields a 135% performance gain over single-level world model MPC, particularly in complex, unseen configurations for long-horizon tasks. Videos can be viewed at https://id-wm.github.io

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