Sometimes You Gotta Run Before You Can Walk: Run-then-Walk Scheduling Strategy for VLM Autonomous Driving

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Recent VLM-based autonomous driving planners adopt GRPO-style reinforcement learning to optimize driving performance. However, existing GRPO recipes either optimize driving efficiency, risking progress-seeking but unsafe behavior, or enforce early safety constraints, leading to overly conservative behavior; both require lengthy training. To solve these problems, we first reveal two distinct RL regimes: […]


Continue.. Sometimes You Gotta Run Before You Can Walk: Run-then-Walk Scheduling Strategy for VLM Autonomous Driving

Sometimes You Gotta Run Before You Can Walk: Run-then-Walk Scheduling Strategy for VLM Autonomous Driving

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Recent VLM-based autonomous driving planners adopt GRPO-style reinforcement learning to optimize driving performance. However, existing GRPO recipes either optimize driving efficiency, risking progress-seeking but unsafe behavior, or enforce early safety constraints, leading to overly conservative behavior; both require lengthy training. To solve these problems, we first reveal two distinct RL regimes: […]


Continue.. Sometimes You Gotta Run Before You Can Walk: Run-then-Walk Scheduling Strategy for VLM Autonomous Driving

Growth and Interface Engineering of Superconducting TiN on Sapphire by Thermal-Laser Epitaxy

Kavli Affiliate: Grace Xing | Summary:Thermal-laser epitaxy (TLE) extends the accessible pressure, temperature, and growth-rate regimes of conventional molecular-beam epitaxy, enabling in situ laser annealing, high-purity buffer-layer growth, and efficient evaporation of refractory elements. These capabilities make TLE a promising platform for engineering low-loss superconducting resonators and Josephson-junction heterostructures. Here, we study the TLE growth […]


Continue.. Growth and Interface Engineering of Superconducting TiN on Sapphire by Thermal-Laser Epitaxy

TaskAnchor: Grounding Task State in Reactive VLAs for Long-Horizon Manipulation

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Reactive vision–language–action (VLA) models struggle with long-horizon manipulation when visually similar observations can correspond to different actions depending on the task stage or interaction history. We refer to this ambiguity as task-state aliasing and introduce TaskAnchor, a lightweight adapter that grounds pretrained VLAs in execution history. TaskAnchor combines history-conditioned visual refinement […]


Continue.. TaskAnchor: Grounding Task State in Reactive VLAs for Long-Horizon Manipulation

TaskAnchor: Grounding Task State in Reactive VLAs for Long-Horizon Manipulation

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Reactive vision-language-action (VLA) policies suffer from task-state aliasing in long-horizon manipulation, where identical multimodal inputs call for distinct, context-dependent actions. Given that pretrained VLAs already possess rich control primitives to express diverse behaviors, we hypothesize that the execution bottleneck lies not in policy capacity, but in input ambiguity. In this paper, […]


Continue.. TaskAnchor: Grounding Task State in Reactive VLAs for Long-Horizon Manipulation

TaskAnchor: Grounding Task State in Reactive VLAs for Long-Horizon Manipulation

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Reactive vision-language-action (VLA) policies suffer from task-state aliasing in long-horizon manipulation, where identical multimodal inputs call for distinct, context-dependent actions. Given that pretrained VLAs already possess rich control primitives to express diverse behaviors, we hypothesize that the execution bottleneck lies not in policy capacity, but in input ambiguity. In this paper, […]


Continue.. TaskAnchor: Grounding Task State in Reactive VLAs for Long-Horizon Manipulation

TaskAnchor: Grounding Task State in Reactive VLAs for Long-Horizon Manipulation

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Reactive vision-language-action (VLA) policies suffer from task-state aliasing in long-horizon manipulation, where identical multimodal inputs call for distinct, context-dependent actions. Given that pretrained VLAs already possess rich control primitives to express diverse behaviors, we hypothesize that the execution bottleneck lies not in policy capacity, but in input ambiguity. In this paper, […]


Continue.. TaskAnchor: Grounding Task State in Reactive VLAs for Long-Horizon Manipulation

Searching for Embedded Protoplanets with the Keck/NIRC2 Vortex Coronagraph: Confirmation of a Core-accretion Planet in the Narrow Gap of the Elias 2-24 Disk

Kavli Affiliate: Dimitri Mawet| Summary:We present high-contrast imaging observations of seven stars obtained with the Keck/NIRC2 vortex coronagraph between 2018 May and June in the $L’$ and $M_s$ bands. All targets host protoplanetary disks with substructures such as gaps and cavities, potentially tracing ongoing planet formation. Our aim is to assess whether these embedded planets […]


Continue.. Searching for Embedded Protoplanets with the Keck/NIRC2 Vortex Coronagraph: Confirmation of a Core-accretion Planet in the Narrow Gap of the Elias 2-24 Disk

Bootstrap certification of string order in quantum spin chains

Kavli Affiliate: Debanjan Chowdhury | Summary:The many-body bootstrap certifies ground-state properties by minimizing energy over correlators constrained only by positivity, without any variational wavefunction. Its cost, however, grows exponentially with the size of the operators involved, placing the long-range string correlators that diagnose topological phases out of reach. We overcome this by treating string operators […]


Continue.. Bootstrap certification of string order in quantum spin chains

Strain-Induced Relaxor Multiferroicity at Room Temperature in Hexaferrite BaFe12O19 Thin Films

Kavli Affiliate: David Muller | Summary:Multiferroic materials that combine magnetic and electric order at room temperature are rare. Here, we demonstrate strain-induced room-temperature polar order in the ferrimagnetic hexaferrite BaFe12O19. First-principles calculations reveal a strain-tunable energy landscape with multiple competing dipolar configurations and predict that compressive strain favors polar distortions. Using an isostructural Sr1.03Ga10.81Mg0.58Zr0.58O19 substrate, […]


Continue.. Strain-Induced Relaxor Multiferroicity at Room Temperature in Hexaferrite BaFe12O19 Thin Films