arXiv subjects

Yi Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Yi Ma.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Executor-Side Progressive Risk-Gated Actuation for Agentic AI in Wireless Supervisory Control

Agentic artificial intelligence built on large language models shows promise for automating Open Radio Access Network supervisory control. However, action-level safeguards alone may be insufficient: evidence acquisition consumes time and shared resources, and network changes can invalidate approvals before release. We propose Progressive Risk-Gated Actuation (PRGA), an executor-side model and contract governing intents from assessment to release or termination. PRGA combines local checks with selective retrieval of coordination evidence to reduce acquisition costs while preserving mandatory evidence requirements. Version and lease rechecks prevent release under invalidated approvals, while reevaluation requires recorded progress within each transaction's retry budget. Building on this contract, we formulate evidence allocation to maximize the expected whole-period rate of timely valid releases under risk, quality-of-service, deadline, and shared byte-budget constraints. For energy-saving and slice-protection workloads with stable daily load cycles, thresholds are selected offline and interpolated using an online load-phase estimate. On average over modeled start phases and quota levels, the allocation policy improves timely valid release rates over arrival-order fetching and an offline-selected global threshold under identical quotas and release checks. In OpenAirInterface radio emulation, an immediate scripted resend after a version-mismatch refusal raises on-time receiver delivery from 77.3% to 89.9% at modest additional command cost.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Generalized Agent Iteration: One Formal Framework for Iterative Policy Improvement and Recursive Self-Improvement

When we speak of recursive self-improvement (RSI), are we speaking of a phenomenon, a mechanism, or a prospect? Towards autonomous and evolving intelligence, RSI is being claimed at many scales, while no single framework that formally describes these emerging instances exists. Its counterpart in the classical realm, iterative policy improvement, is characterized by generalized policy iteration (GPI), a framework of broad applicability with well-understood theoretical properties, but only where the update principle and the evaluation base lie outside the agent. In this paper, we propose Generalized Agent Iteration (GAI), a formal framework that describes iterative policy improvement and RSI as two cases of a single learning paradigm. GAI defines the agent as a configuration of modifiable components within a system and models the learning process as a cycle of agent evaluation and agent improvement. Two pivotal dials then distinguish the instances, in particular the systems that self-identify as RSI in recent work: whether the improving mechanism is part of the agent and whether the standard it is measured against is grounded outside it. The former dial delineates the boundary between GPI and RSI, and the latter determines a system's polarity as anchored, goal drift, or fully self-referential. Moreover, we use these coordinates to place existing systems on the same two axes and make the defects of recursive self-improvement statable one condition at a time. We see this paper as a first step toward exploring a formal characterization of RSI that rests on the classical account, makes existing systems comparable, and provides a principled basis for analyzing and designing new ones.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Generative Structure from Motion with Native 3D Diffusion

Recovering an object's 3D structure and camera motion from a few uncalibrated views is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Classical structure from motion methods recover 3D geometry consistent with the input images but cannot recover unseen regions; native generation methods produce plausible 3D objects which are related but not necessarily faithful to the input images. Methods simply concatenating reconstruction and generation allow error to cascade across the two stages, instead of producing a 3D object consistent with both the distribution and the input. We propose GenSfM, which integrates image-based 3D reconstruction with a native 3D diffusion model. In particular, we use a multi-modal diffusion transformer to jointly denoise the shape latent and per-view pose latents under shared self-attention, grounding generated geometry in the observed views while using object-level priors to infer unobserved regions. A compact 3D-native UV-volume tokenization keeps the joint sequence small as views are added, and a pose-aware stage refines geometry and texture by sampling per-voxel image features at the recovered camera poses. On Toys4k and GSO, for $4$ uncalibrated views, GenSfM improves novel-view PSNR by $3.2$-$4.5$ dB and reduces median Chamfer distance by $2.8$-$3.8\times$ over a strong native-3D generation baseline, while recovering input-view poses over $96\%$ Acc@$5^\circ$ without any external pose-estimation backbone, post-hoc optimization, or known intrinsics. Project page: https://dotb1ue.github.io/GenSfm/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Embodied Playground: A Long-Horizon Agentic Robotics Benchmark for Physical, Strategic, and Spatial Reasoning

Foundation models offer a promising basis for robotic agents, but long-horizon tasks require them to sustain coherent reasoning and reliable physical execution across interdependent stages. We introduce Embodied Playground, a benchmark for evaluating how foundation-model agents coordinate physical, strategic, and spatial reasoning throughout such tasks. Agents must track task progress, satisfy intermediate constraints, and revise their plans using execution feedback as earlier actions shape subsequent decisions. The playground comprises 410 task environments spanning basic manipulation, sequential puzzles, and multi-stage household activities, with variations in planning depth, geometric constraints, and physical execution demands. We curate EP-100, a representative selection of 100 tasks across five suites and 16 task types, together with the EP-Easy and EP-Hard difficulty splits and the compact EP-20 selection. A shared protocol specifies observation and tool access, resource budgets, repeated trials, and independent checks of goal completion, task-rule compliance, and physical validity. Embodied Playground provides a unified framework for studying whether foundation-model agents can sustain effective reasoning and action over extended task horizons. https://winniechen2002.github.io/Agent-bench-website/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Information-Theoretic Scaling Laws for Generative Diffusion Training

Diffusion models trained on increasingly large datasets sampled from the same data distribution will converge to the same learned distribution. However, in practice, a model trained on finite data depends on the particular training dataset; this dependence is reflected in properties of the model's outputs, such as memorization and sample quality. To understand this dependence through an information-theoretic lens, we study \textit{model information}, a computationally tractable measure of how much samples from the trained model depend on the particular training dataset. We explore its scaling behavior as model size and training dataset size vary. Specifically, we uncover two qualitatively distinct scaling regimes: (1) a nonlinear model information regime marking the transition from pure memorization to imperfect generalization, and (2) a generalization regime characterized by linear scaling of the model information and progressively improved generalization and sample quality. We then posit an information-theoretically principled scaling law to quantify these two regimes, and show that this law yields induced scaling laws for memorization and sample quality. We finally demonstrate that these induced scaling laws extrapolate well outside the fit's domain. Our results demonstrate information-theoretic principles for memorization and sample quality scaling laws in diffusion models. Our code is publicly available on \href{https://github.com/DruvPai/diffusion_info_theory_scaling_law}{GitHub}.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Nested Sparsity for Scalable Pretraining and Continual Learning

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) transformers, the standard backbone for modern large-scale deep learning, employ conditional computation: only a sparse subset of model weights is used in each forward pass. In MoE transformers, this sparsity arises in the MoE operator, which generalizes the multi-layer perceptron in the classical transformer. In this work, we explore an alternative mechanism for conditional computation that analogously generalizes the attention operator. The sparsity induced by this mechanism naturally nests (i.e., hierarchically composes) with the sparsity induced by the MoE operator. We show that a transformer employing this nested sparsity mechanism, which we call Nestor, performs better than a conventional MoE transformer at equal compute and equal sparsity in language model pretraining. We also show that Nestor is well-suited for continual pretraining: it can be adapted to longer contexts more effectively than conventional MoEs, as well as adapt more efficiently to new domains while forgetting less on old domains. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these benefits persist as model size, dataset size, and context length grow. Our results demonstrate the potential of alternative conditional computation mechanisms for deep neural network architectures. Code and checkpoints are available on GitHub at https://github.com/Ma-Lab-Berkeley/Nestor .

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Balancing Image Compression and Generation with Bootstrapped Tokenization

Despite progress in image tokenization, standard methods encode redundant information by mixing all granularities within each token, thus redundancy persists between tokens. The mix of information of different granularity also complicates the training of generators. This paper introduces SelfBootTok, a method that resolves this by cleanly decomposing information into global and local token groups. Through self-bootstrapped learning, the model predicts local details exclusively from global tokens, shifting the burden of visual details from the generator to the tokenizer. Consequently, our generator is far more efficient, requiring only global tokens and reducing computation by approximately 40%, while delivering superior reconstruction and generation. Moreover, this paradigm scales elegantly: by leveraging more data or parameters to self-supervise local representation learning, SelfBootTok achieves a new state-of-the-art gFID score of 1.56 using only 64 tokens.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Rethinking Routing Exploration in Modern Mixture-of-Experts

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models have become an important approach for scaling model parameters. Modern MoE architectures increasingly combine two design choices: fine-grained expert segmentation and shared experts. The former increases expressiveness by enabling more expert combinations at a fixed activation ratio, and the latter introduces experts that are active for every token. We identify an exploration dilemma between these designs: shared experts can make routing less exploratory by reducing the variability of token representations. This conflicts with the greater need for exploration induced by fine-grained expert segmentation due to the combinatorially enlarged routing space. Consequently, the additional expressiveness offered by fine-grained segmentation may not be fully realized in practice. MirrorMoE is proposed to reconcile this exploration dilemma by shrinking the exploration space through token-adaptive suppression of unnecessary experts. MirrorMoE consistently improves performance across model scales.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Flow Policy Gradients for Robot Control

Likelihood-based policy gradient methods are the dominant approach for training robot control policies from rewards. These methods rely on differentiable action likelihoods, which constrain policy outputs to simple distributions like Gaussians. In this work, we show how flow matching policy gradients, a recent framework that bypasses likelihood computation, can be made effective for training and finetuning more expressive policies in challenging robot control settings. We introduce an improved objective that enables success in legged locomotion, humanoid motion tracking, and manipulation tasks, as well as robust sim-to-real transfer on two humanoid robots. We then present ablations and analysis on training dynamics. Results show how policies can exploit the flow representation for exploration when training from scratch, as well as improved finetuning robustness over baselines.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Code Owns the Simulation, Jev Owns the Evaluation

Judgment models such as \jev{} return, in a single call and without reasoning text, a probability for each described option. This makes them attractive as an agent's action-selection layer, but it is unclear which decisions they can be trusted with. We test \jev{} on reflection tests, one-shot matrix games, the text game ALFWorld and robot control, and find a sharp boundary. \jev{} succeeds when the right option can be judged from what the input describes, which we call \emph{evaluation}. Specifically, it solves 99\% of the counterintuitive Cognitive Reflection Test questions. However, it fails when the right option depends on \emph{simulation} (i.e., predicting something not in the input), such as the opponent's action or the subgoal that must come first. In games, \jev{} plays suboptimally as if its rational opponent acted at random, because the opponent's action is not given. In ALFWorld, \jev{} favors commands that mention an object or place named in the task description. For example, given the task ``put a clean knife in the drawer'', \jev{} carries an unwashed knife straight to the drawer instead of first washing it at the sink. Surprisingly, many of these failures are not due to a lack of knowledge. Asked separately what the opponent will do, \jev{} usually answers correctly, and it responds well given the opponent's action. It fails when one call must both perform the simulation and evaluate based on it. This suggests letting code make the prediction or simulation. When code supplies it, such as a lookahead in ALFWorld and physics simulation in robot control, \jev{} becomes an expert controller through its general evaluation ability.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

YOCO: You Only Calibrate Once! Fast Mocap Calibration for Dexterous Teleoperation

Dexterous teleoperation requires reliable human-hand state estimations. However, common low-cost motion-capture gloves and markerless trackers often exhibit biases that vary across users, glove fit, and recording sessions, degrading retargeting and demonstration quality. We present YOCO, a fast few-shot, fine-tuning-free calibration framework that corrects biased hand-pose streams from a small set of paired raw and target poses. Instead of optimizing a separate model for every operator or session, YOCO conditions a calibration HyperNet on the paired examples and predicts LoRA-style updates for a frozen MANO hand-estimation module, turning per-user calibration into a lightweight feed-forward adaptation step while preserving the geometric prior of MANO and the efficiency of a compact estimator. We train YOCO with synthetic drift augmentations on InterHand2.6M and evaluate on augmented InterHand sequences, offline real glove data, and dexterous teleoperation tasks. Across these settings, YOCO improves calibration efficiency, hand-state estimation quality and teleoperation performance compared with uncalibrated input and standard calibration baselines.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Can Jev be Your Q or Policy in Reinforcement Learning?

Foundation models supply reinforcement learning (RL) with priors that mitigate its longstanding weaknesses in sample efficiency and transfer, but their token-by-token generation makes queries sequential and costly. Jev, a recently released decision model, generates nothing and returns calibrated, typed answers in a single forward pass. Existing work studies foundation models in RL either as models to be trained or as generators to be prompted, and Jev belongs to neither category, having so far served only as a black box in single domains. How well such a model decides on its own in RL environments, and how it can improve RL as a component of training, therefore remain unaddressed. To this end, in this paper we first examine the requirements that the objects of an RL system place on the answers they consume, and establish that Jev can fulfill all of them except the cardinal use of a value function. The remaining objects form positions that admit several roles each. We then construct algorithms that employ Jev at three of these positions, as a reference policy, an exploration judge, and a replay rater, to improve sample efficiency, exploration, and learning performance. Across nine MiniGrid tasks and three Atari games, training with Jev outperforms a standard RL learner, including where the learner makes no progress alone, while the model itself remains untrained. To our knowledge, we present the first use of Jev within the RL learning process and establish a frozen decision model as a usable component of RL training, inviting further exploration of how Jev and other advanced decision models can improve RL.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Video-Conditioned Generative Joint 2D-3D Hand Motion Recovery

Recovering faithful 3D hand motion from video remains challenging due to frequent occlusions and incomplete visual observations, which make frame-wise pose estimates unreliable and temporally inconsistent. To address this problem, we propose JoHan, a unified generative framework that recovers hand motion directly from video sequences without relying on intermediate per-frame pose predictions. Trained from scratch, our model jointly generates aligned 2D and 3D local hand pose sequences by learning their temporal dynamics and cross-representation correspondence. The generated 2D trajectories exploit direct spatial and temporal cues from the 2D images to guide the following generative 3D motion reconstruction, while the learned motion prior promotes temporal consistency. Their learned 2D-3D correspondence further enables recovery of the hand's global position and orientation relative to the camera. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate significantly improved accuracy and speed in local hand-pose and camera-space reconstruction. Notably, our method captures much better hand-motion dynamics, producing significantly smoother motion than previous methods while maintaining high per-frame pose accuracy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

DexHoldem: An Agentic Robotics Benchmark for Dexterous Manipulation in Texas Hold'em

Evaluating embodied systems with real dexterous hardware requires more than isolated motor-skill tests: an agent must perceive a changing scene (e.g. a tabletop), choose a context-appropriate action, execute it with a dexterous hand, and leave the scene usable for later decisions. We introduce DexHoldem, a comprehensive real-world benchmark evaluating Texas Hold'em related dexterous manipulations with a ShadowHand. DexHoldem provides 1,470 teleoperated demonstrations across 14 Texas Hold'em manipulation primitives, a standardized physical policy benchmark, and an agentic perception benchmark that tests whether agents can recover the structured game state needed for embodied decision making. On primitive execution, $π_{0.5}$ obtains the highest task completion rate ($61.2\%$), while $π_{0.5}$ and $π_0$ tie on scene-preserving success rate ($47.5\%$). On agentic perception, Opus 5.5 narrowly leads on both strict problem-level accuracy ($49.1\%$) and average field-wise accuracy ($80.6\%$); the gap between the two exposes the distance between isolated visual sub-capabilities and complete routing-relevant state recovery. Finally, we instantiate the full embodied-agent loop with one agent--policy pairing over 33 closed-loop hand-level rollouts, in which only $12.1\%$ of hands complete; retries restore the failed primitive in 12 of 34 dispatches and resolve prolonged execution stalls in three of the four completed hands, which would otherwise have required manual termination. Only one hand completes with neither a retry nor a human-help request. DexHoldem therefore evaluates dexterous tabletop execution, agentic perception, and embodied decision routing in a shared physical setting. Project website: https://dexholdem.github.io/Dexholdem/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Scaling Versatile 3D Assets Editing with a Million-Scale Dataset

Although recent 3D generative models produce increasingly realistic assets, controllable 3D asset editing remains challenging. Existing methods are limited by scarce training data, insufficient source-aware modeling, and a lack of practical evaluation protocols. To address these limitations, we present Alchemy3D, a unified framework for training and evaluating versatile 3D asset editors that covers data construction, model architecture, and benchmark evaluation. Specifically, we curate Alchemy3D-1M, a large-scale 3D editing dataset containing 1.25M assets and 1.38M editing pairs across seven editing types. On this data, we train a family of generative flow models for general-purpose 3D asset editing. The model family supports image- and text-conditioned editing, few-step inference, and transfer to multi-view 3D part segmentation. We further introduce GEdit3D-Bench, a large-scale, open-world benchmark with a multi-dimensional evaluation protocol. Across existing and newly introduced benchmarks, our method outperforms prior methods on most metrics of editing fidelity, source preservation, and visual quality.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

From Pixel to Poses: Object-centric Tool Manipulation Learning from Human Demonstrations

Scaling up robotic manipulation is primarily bottlenecked by the scarcity of real-world robot data. While recent approaches leverage human video demonstrations to mitigate this shortage, they remain computationally expensive and still rely on paired human-robot data for domain alignment. Although current state-of-the-arts excel at long-horizon tasks, they struggle with the delicate and precise control required for complex tool manipulation. To overcome these limitations, we introduce P2P-T, from Pixel to Poses for Tool Manipulation, a data-efficient, object-centric framework that learns tool use directly from human demonstrations. P2P-T bridges the cognitive and physical execution gap through a two-stage approach. First, pretraining an object-centric world model to extract stable pose priors; second, integrating these priors into an efficient, pose-aware low-level policy. By utilizing a robust automated data processing pipeline powered by modern foundation models, P2P-T completely bypasses the need for human-robot aligned data. This reduces overall training overhead drastically. With minimal per-task fine-tuning, our framework achieves a 73% improvement over the previous state of the art in execution performance on complex, real-world tool manipulation tasks that currently remain out of reach for standard large-scale pretrained models.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Grounding Generated Video Plans in Simulation Towards Versatile Dexterous Controllers

Generated hand-object interaction (HOI) videos provide a controllable way to propose manipulation motions. Simulation-based HOI tracking can translate such kinematic references into feasible low-level control, but its scalability is limited by the lack of reliable reference motions. We therefore combine generated videos with simulation-based HOI grounding: during training, generated videos provide diverse motion references for learning a multi-object, multi-trajectory HOI tracker, and at deployment, the video model produces motion plans that are executed by the learned tracker. In particular, we propose a method that enables scalable reference generation by HOI reconstruction with minimal manual intervention and successfully grounds more than 1,500 generated videos in simulation, achieving success rates over 25 percentage points higher than those of baselines during simulation-based training. In real-world closed-loop experiments, it achieves diverse grasps, including functional grasps, non-prehensile manipulation, and post-grasp object-pose tracking. Videos and code are available at https://boyuan-an.github.io/GALATEA/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

WarpSAC: Towards the Pinnacle of Scalable Off-policy RL by Rethinking Exploration and Exploitation

Massively parallel simulation changes the data regime in which off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) is trained, challenging stabilizers designed for data-limited replay. Through controlled experiments across eight benchmark families, we show that these stabilizers are data-regime-dependent: parameter normalization helps with narrow replay coverage but restricts value fitting when data are abundant, while clipped double-Q can be relaxed in high-throughput manipulation. Age-biased replay weighting improves learning efficiency across regimes, especially with limited network capacity. Based on these findings, we propose WarpSAC, a regime-aware family of off-policy RL algorithms. WarpSAC uses Sample Weight Decay for efficient exploitation and provides two variants: WarpSAC-L (Norm ON, clipped double-Q) for data-limited CPU-scale training, and WarpSAC-A (Norm OFF, single-Q) for data-abundant GPU-parallel training. WarpSAC improves normalized score--step AUC over FlashSAC by 4.5% across nine CPU-scale environments and 23.1% across fourteen GPU-parallel environments. It increases UnitreeG1TransportBox-v1 success rate from 19.8% to 96.4%, improves mean normalized wall-time AUC on MuJoCo Playground by 19.1%, and achieves 36.4% faster sim-to-real deployment on Unitree G1 than FlashSAC. These results show that scalable off-policy RL should adapt its stabilizers to the available data regime.

cs.LG↗