Preprint Open access
Skillful prediction of biomass-burning activity several days in advance is important for air-quality forecasting and aerosol prediction. Two operational constraints motivate this work. First, the GBBEPx satellite fire radiative power (FRP) product used to initialize NOAA's GEFS-Aerosols is available with about a 1.5-da …
Preprint Open access
Learning to act in unfamiliar environments requires agents to infer how the world works and revise that understanding as new evidence arrives. Yet limited observations can support multiple world models that explain past interactions but predict different outcomes in unseen states. We introduce Memento 3, building on th …
Preprint Open access
A central challenge for scientific agents is to turn analytical experience into reusable expertise grounded in physical evidence. Here we introduce Gan Jiang, a self-learning agent for powder X-ray diffraction built on a diffraction-analysis ecosystem we developed: XMatcher, XQueryer, XDecomposer and WPEM. Together, th …
Preprint Open access
Language models draft engineering calculations, but answer accuracy does not show whether they reject an impossible problem. We tested 14 models on 30 pairs of mechanics problems, each with a valid version and one made impossible by changing a given value or assumption. Two independent solvers verified every answer key …
Preprint Open access
Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful listwise rerankers for multimodal retrieval, but high inference costs restrict them to evaluating small local candidate views. Existing multi-call strategies rely on fixed schedules, wasting expensive VLM calls on uninformative candidate pairs and easy queries. To address this …
Preprint Open access
Incorporating rich task-relevant context, such as domain knowledge and external observations, is a key capability yet remains challenging for Bayesian optimisation (BO). Recently, practitioners have started to use large language models (LLMs) to generate and execute BO programs through coding harnesses. In such emergin …
Preprint Open access
Many-shot in-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to complex tasks by conditioning on thousands of demonstration examples, but this paradigm shifts the inference efficiency bottleneck to the key-value (KV) cache memory. Due to the linear scaling behavior of the KV cache, storing these in …
Preprint Open access
Many physical properties relevant to robotic manipulation are hidden from vision. A sealed object, for example, may reveal little about its center of mass (COM) or internal contents until it is lifted, shaken, or otherwise dynamically perturbed. This study shows that such interactions can enable a new modality of robot …
Preprint Open access
Biological swimmers and flyers exploit unsteady vortices for propulsion, whereas engineered vehicles usually suppress them as disturbances. Learning such flow exploitation in machines is difficult because real-fluid interaction data are scarce and unstructured exploration is unstable in high-dimensional, history-depend …
Preprint Open access
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models combine a pretrained vision encoder, a language backbone, and an action head, but their relative contribution has not been established under controlled, latency-paired conditions. We fix the backbone families (SigLIP2 and Qwen2.5) and the training pipeline, sweep action-head design a …