We present RACER, a hierarchical control framework for wheel-based quadruped racing that combines an MPPI planner with a learned residual dynamics model and a low-level RL velocity tracker. The planner augments a nominal unicycle kinematic model with a neural residual term to capture the closed-loop tracking behavior o …
Large language models are increasingly used to simulate how individuals respond to new situations, yet the behavioral reasoning behind these responses is either inherited from pretraining or learned from individual-level annotations, which offer limited behavioral diversity and little supervision of the reasoning itsel …
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies connect a pretrained vision-language backbone to an action head through a latent interface, but which backbone layers this interface should expose remains unclear. We study single-layer selection and multi-layer fusion for frozen backbones across three pretrained models and two man …
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly in static visual understanding, yet remain unreliable when judging how an egocentric task is progressing. Given a task instruction and two visual observations, a model should determine which state is closer to the goal by analyzing task-relevant object configurations …
Large Reasoning Models increasingly use intermediate traces for machine translation, but it remains unclear when such reasoning helps or hurts. We analyze reasoning traces across models, languages, domains, and datasets, focusing on reasoning language, length, and structure. We find that the best reasoning language is …