Daily Papers

Learning long-horizon embodied behaviors from synthetic data remains challenging because generated scenes are often physically implausible, language-driven programs frequently "succeed" without satisfying task semantics, and high-level instructions require grounding into executable action sequences. To address these limitations, we introduce V-CAGE, a closed-loop framework for generating robust, semantically aligned manipulation datasets at scale. First, we propose a context-aware instantiation mechanism that enforces geometric consistency during scene synthesis. By dynamically maintaining a map of prohibited spatial areas as objects are placed, our system prevents interpenetration and ensures reachable, conflict-free configurations in cluttered environments. Second, to bridge the gap between abstract intent and low-level control, we employ a hierarchical instruction decomposition module. This decomposes high-level goals (e.g., "get ready for work") into compositional action primitives, facilitating coherent long-horizon planning. Crucially, we enforce semantic correctness through a VLM-based verification loop. Acting as a visual critic, the VLM performs rigorous rejection sampling after each subtask, filtering out "silent failures" where code executes but fails to achieve the visual goal. Experiments demonstrate that V-CAGE yields datasets with superior physical and semantic fidelity, significantly boosting the success rate and generalization of downstream policies compared to non-verified baselines.

An important feature of many real world facility location problems are capacity limits on the facilities. We show here how capacity constraints make it harder to design strategy proof mechanisms for facility location, but counter-intuitively can improve the guarantees on how well we can approximate the optimal solution.

Geometric methods for solving open-world off-road navigation tasks, by learning occupancy and metric maps, provide good generalization but can be brittle in outdoor environments that violate their assumptions (e.g., tall grass). Learning-based methods can directly learn collision-free behavior from raw observations, but are difficult to integrate with standard geometry-based pipelines. This creates an unfortunate conflict -- either use learning and lose out on well-understood geometric navigational components, or do not use it, in favor of extensively hand-tuned geometry-based cost maps. In this work, we reject this dichotomy by designing the learning and non-learning-based components in a way such that they can be effectively combined in a self-supervised manner. Both components contribute to a planning criterion: the learned component contributes predicted traversability as rewards, while the geometric component contributes obstacle cost information. We instantiate and comparatively evaluate our system in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution environments, showing that this approach inherits complementary gains from the learned and geometric components and significantly outperforms either of them. Videos of our results are hosted at https://sites.google.com/view/hybrid-imitative-planning

Spatial computing is a technological advancement that facilitates the seamless integration of devices into the physical environment, resulting in a more natural and intuitive digital world user experience. Spatial computing has the potential to become a significant advancement in the field of computing. From GPS and location-based services to healthcare, spatial computing technologies have influenced and improved our interactions with the digital world. The use of spatial computing in creating interactive digital environments has become increasingly popular and effective. This is explained by its increasing significance among researchers and industrial organisations, which motivated us to conduct this review. This review provides a detailed overview of spatial computing, including its enabling technologies and its impact on various applications. Projects related to spatial computing are also discussed. In this review, we also explored the potential challenges and limitations of spatial computing. Furthermore, we discuss potential solutions and future directions. Overall, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of spatial computing, its enabling technologies, their impact on various applications, emerging challenges, and potential solutions.

Treemaps are a popular technique to visualize hierarchical data. The input is a weighted tree tree where the weight of each node is the sum of the weights of its children. A treemap for tree is a hierarchical partition of a rectangle into simply connected regions, usually rectangles. Each region represents a node of tree and its area is proportional to the weight of the corresponding node. An important quality criterion for treemaps is the aspect ratio of its regions. One cannot bound the aspect ratio if the regions are restricted to be rectangles. In contrast, polygonal partitions, that use convex polygons, have bounded aspect ratio. We are the first to obtain convex partitions with optimal aspect ratio O(depth(tree)). However, depth(tree) still depends on the input tree. Hence we introduce a new type of treemaps, namely orthoconvex treemaps, where regions representing leaves are rectangles, L-, and S-shapes, and regions representing internal nodes are orthoconvex polygons. We prove that any input tree, irrespective of the weights of the nodes and the depth of the tree, admits an orthoconvex treemap of constant aspect ratio. We also obtain several specialized results for single-level treemaps, that is, treemaps where the input tree has depth~1.

Electoral boundaries in Malaysia are not publicly available in machine-readable form. This prevents rigorous analysis of geography-centric issues such as malapportionment and gerrymandering, and constrains spatial perspectives on electoral outcomes. We present the second component of the Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo), an open-access collection of digital electoral boundaries covering all 19 approved delimitation exercises in Malaysia's history, from the first set of Malayan boundaries in 1954 until the 2019 Sabah delimitation. We also auto-generate election-time maps for all federal and state elections up to 2025, and include equal-area and electorate-weighted cartograms to support deeper geospatial analysis. This is the first complete, publicly-available, and machine-readable record of Malaysia's electoral boundaries, and fills a critical gap in the country's electoral data infrastructure.

Despite recent advances in multimodal content generation enabled by vision-language models (VLMs), their ability to reason about and generate structured 3D scenes remains largely underexplored. This limitation constrains their utility in spatially grounded tasks such as embodied AI, immersive simulations, and interactive 3D applications. We introduce a new paradigm that enables VLMs to generate, understand, and edit complex 3D environments by injecting a continually evolving spatial context. Constructed from multimodal input, this context consists of three components: a scene portrait that provides a high-level semantic blueprint, a semantically labeled point cloud capturing object-level geometry, and a scene hypergraph that encodes rich spatial relationships, including unary, binary, and higher-order constraints. Together, these components provide the VLM with a structured, geometry-aware working memory that integrates its inherent multimodal reasoning capabilities with structured 3D understanding for effective spatial reasoning. Building on this foundation, we develop an agentic 3D scene generation pipeline in which the VLM iteratively reads from and updates the spatial context. The pipeline features high-quality asset generation with geometric restoration, environment setup with automatic verification, and ergonomic adjustment guided by the scene hypergraph. Experiments show that our framework can handle diverse and challenging inputs, achieving a level of generalization not observed in prior work. Further results demonstrate that injecting spatial context enables VLMs to perform downstream tasks such as interactive scene editing and path planning, suggesting strong potential for spatially intelligent systems in computer graphics, 3D vision, and embodied applications.

We study the impact on mechanisms for facility location of moving from one dimension to two (or more) dimensions and Euclidean or Manhattan distances. We consider three fundamental axiomatic properties: anonymity which is a basic fairness property, Pareto optimality which is one of the most important efficiency properties, and strategy proofness which ensures agents do not have an incentive to mis-report. We also consider how well such mechanisms can approximate the optimal welfare. Our results are somewhat negative. Moving from one dimension to two (or more) dimensions often makes these axiomatic properties more difficult to achieve. For example, with two facilities in Euclidean space or with just a single facility in Manhattan space, no mechanism is anonymous, Pareto optimal and strategy proof. By contrast, mechanisms on the line exist with all three properties.We also show that approximation ratios may increase when moving to two (or more) dimensions. All our impossibility results are minimal. If we drop one of the three axioms (anonymity, Pareto optimality or strategy proofness) multiple mechanisms satisfy the other two axioms.

Many AI companies are training their large language models (LLMs) on data without the permission of the copyright owners. The permissibility of doing so varies by jurisdiction: in countries like the EU and Japan, this is allowed under certain restrictions, while in the United States, the legal landscape is more ambiguous. Regardless of the legal status, concerns from creative producers have led to several high-profile copyright lawsuits, and the threat of litigation is commonly cited as a reason for the recent trend towards minimizing the information shared about training datasets by both corporate and public interest actors. This trend in limiting data information causes harm by hindering transparency, accountability, and innovation in the broader ecosystem by denying researchers, auditors, and impacted individuals access to the information needed to understand AI models. While this could be mitigated by training language models on open access and public domain data, at the time of writing, there are no such models (trained at a meaningful scale) due to the substantial technical and sociological challenges in assembling the necessary corpus. These challenges include incomplete and unreliable metadata, the cost and complexity of digitizing physical records, and the diverse set of legal and technical skills required to ensure relevance and responsibility in a quickly changing landscape. Building towards a future where AI systems can be trained on openly licensed data that is responsibly curated and governed requires collaboration across legal, technical, and policy domains, along with investments in metadata standards, digitization, and fostering a culture of openness.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems will increasingly be used to cause harm as they grow more capable. In fact, AI systems are already starting to be used to automate fraudulent activities, violate human rights, create harmful fake images, and identify dangerous toxins. To prevent some misuses of AI, we argue that targeted interventions on certain capabilities will be warranted. These restrictions may include controlling who can access certain types of AI models, what they can be used for, whether outputs are filtered or can be traced back to their user, and the resources needed to develop them. We also contend that some restrictions on non-AI capabilities needed to cause harm will be required. Though capability restrictions risk reducing use more than misuse (facing an unfavorable Misuse-Use Tradeoff), we argue that interventions on capabilities are warranted when other interventions are insufficient, the potential harm from misuse is high, and there are targeted ways to intervene on capabilities. We provide a taxonomy of interventions that can reduce AI misuse, focusing on the specific steps required for a misuse to cause harm (the Misuse Chain), and a framework to determine if an intervention is warranted. We apply this reasoning to three examples: predicting novel toxins, creating harmful images, and automating spear phishing campaigns.

3D digital anthropometry is the study of estimating human body measurements from 3D scans. Precise body measurements are important health indicators in the medical industry, and guiding factors in the fashion, ergonomic and entertainment industries. The measuring protocol consists of scanning the whole subject in the static A-pose, which is maintained without breathing or movement during the scanning process. However, the A-pose is not easy to maintain during the whole scanning process, which can last even up to a couple of minutes. This constraint affects the final quality of the scan, which in turn affects the accuracy of the estimated body measurements obtained from methods that rely on dense geometric data. Additionally, this constraint makes it impossible to develop a digital anthropometry method for subjects unable to assume the A-pose, such as those with injuries or disabilities. We propose a method that can obtain body measurements from sparse landmarks acquired in any pose. We make use of the sparse landmarks of the posed subject to create pose-independent features, and train a network to predict the body measurements as taken from the standard A-pose. We show that our method achieves comparable results to competing methods that use dense geometry in the standard A-pose, but has the capability of estimating the body measurements from any pose using sparse landmarks only. Finally, we address the lack of open-source 3D anthropometry methods by making our method available to the research community at https://github.com/DavidBoja/pose-independent-anthropometry.

This paper presents a novel virus propagation model using NetLogo. The model allows agents to move across multiple sites using different routes. Routes can be configured, enabled for mobility and (un)locked down independently. Similarly, locations can also be (un)locked down independently. Agents can get infected, propagate their infections to others, can take precautions against infection and also subsequently recover from infection. This model contains certain features that are not present in existing models. The model may be used for educational and research purposes, and the code is made available as open source. This model may also provide a broader framework for more detailed simulations. The results presented are only to demonstrate the model functionalities and do not serve any other purpose.

Regulating AI is a key societal challenge, but which regulation methods are effective is unclear. This study measures the effectiveness of restricting AI services geographically, focusing on ChatGPT. OpenAI restricts ChatGPT access in several countries, including China and Russia. If restrictions are effective, ChatGPT use should be minimal in these countries. We measured use with a classifier based on distinctive word usage found in early versions of ChatGPT, e.g. "delve." We trained the classifier on pre- and post-ChatGPT "polished" abstracts and found it outperformed GPTZero and ZeroGPT on validation sets, including papers with self-reported AI use. Applying the classifier to preprints from Arxiv, BioRxiv, and MedRxiv showed ChatGPT was used in about 12.6% of preprints by August 2023, with 7.7% higher usage in restricted countries. The gap appeared before China's first major legal LLM became widely available. To test the possibility that, due to high demand, use in restricted countries would have been even higher without restrictions, we compared Asian countries with high expected demand (where English is not an official language) and found that use was higher in those with restrictions. ChatGPT use was correlated with higher views and downloads, but not citations or journal placement. Overall, restricting ChatGPT geographically has proven ineffective in science and possibly other domains, likely due to widespread workarounds.

This document presents the Center for Robot Assisted Search And Rescue - Uncrewed Aerial Systems - Disaster Response Overhead Inspection Dataset (CRASAR-U-DROIDs) for building damage assessment and spatial alignment collected from small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) geospatial imagery. This dataset is motivated by the increasing use of sUAS in disaster response and the lack of previous work in utilizing high-resolution geospatial sUAS imagery for machine learning and computer vision models, the lack of alignment with operational use cases, and with hopes of enabling further investigations between sUAS and satellite imagery. The CRASAR-U-DRIODs dataset consists of fifty-two (52) orthomosaics from ten (10) federally declared disasters (Hurricane Ian, Hurricane Ida, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Idalia, Hurricane Laura, Hurricane Michael, Musset Bayou Fire, Mayfield Tornado, Kilauea Eruption, and Champlain Towers Collapse) spanning 67.98 square kilometers (26.245 square miles), containing 21,716 building polygons and damage labels, and 7,880 adjustment annotations. The imagery was tiled and presented in conjunction with overlaid building polygons to a pool of 130 annotators who provided human judgments of damage according to the Joint Damage Scale. These annotations were then reviewed via a two-stage review process in which building polygon damage labels were first reviewed individually and then again by committee. Additionally, the building polygons have been aligned spatially to precisely overlap with the imagery to enable more performant machine learning models to be trained. It appears that CRASAR-U-DRIODs is the largest labeled dataset of sUAS orthomosaic imagery.