arXiv:2510.02453v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier language models are deployed as black-box services, where model weights cannot be modified and customization is limited to prompting. We introduce Advisor Models, a method to train small open-weight models to generate dynamic, per-instance natural language advice that improves the capabilities of black-box frontier models. Advisor Models improve GPT-5.2's performance on RuleArena (Taxes) by 27.4%, reduce Gemini 3 Pro's steps taken in SWE agent tasks by 24.6%, and outperform static prompt optimizers in personalizing GPT-5 to user preferences (85-100% vs. 40-60%). We also find that advisors are transferable: an advisor trained with a low-cost student model still transfers improvements to a frontier model. Moreover, Advisor Models are robust: we observe no degradation on other benchmarks than the pipeline is trained on. Our method shows how to perform parametric optimization for black-box frontier models in a practical and cost-effective way.
Science Journals
arXiv:2605.15329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Every BFT consensus protocol uses collision-resistant hashes to compare validator state. Collision resistance destroys distance: two validators agreeing on 19 of 20 transactions produce unrelated hashes, indistinguishable from validators sharing nothing. This forces three design constraints across the BFT literature: validators must synchronize state before voting, agreement quality cannot be measured until votes are counted, and hierarchical committees must be large enough for independent BFT, limiting tree depth. This paper introduces distance-preserving transaction digests, a primitive that replaces collision-resistant hashes with commutative vector sums in 8-dimensional space. The primitive has three properties hashes lack: distance is proportional to disagreement, weighted means are exact, and set differences are identifiable via bloom filter diff. We demonstrate three applications: a two-phase BFT protocol (Proxima) that achieves single-round finality when validators agree; tree-structured consensus with groups of 10 validators (vs 128 in Ethereum), enabled because distance filtering replaces per-group BFT; and cross-shard consistency verification at 128 bytes per shard pair, replacing the per-transaction coordination of two-phase commit. Safety is proved: fewer than N/3 Byzantine validators cannot cause conflicting finalization, independent of Phase 1 clustering or tree topology. At N =100,000, Proxima Tree uses 2.2x fewer messages than HotStuff (a structural property unaffected by parallelism). Single-core finality is 0.9s vs 18s for HotStuff; multi-core BLS narrows but does not eliminate this gap.
arXiv:2605.15467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conversational nurse-patient transcripts contain actionable observations, but converting these transcripts into structured representations at scale remains challenging. Documentation burden is substantial, with prior studies showing clinicians spend large portions of their workday on documentation and related desk work rather than direct patient care. MEDIQA-SYNUR focuses on observation extraction from conversational nurse-patient transcripts, requiring systems to normalize these narratives into a predefined schema with value-type constraints. We propose a modular retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline that uses the training set as an exemplar corpus, combines schema-constrained prompting (full schema vs. pruned candidate schema), deterministic schema-based postprocessing, and a second-pass audit, with two LLM backbones: Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct and GPT-5.2 with corresponding embedding models for RAG. Our best configuration uses GPT-5.2 with full schema, RAG, and a second-pass auditing, achieving 80.36% F1 score. Overall, our results show that RAG consistently improves performance, while the optimal degree of schema constraint depends on the model, and second-pass auditing yields modest additional gains by correcting residual schema-adherence errors.
arXiv:2605.16191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a case study for how AI coding systems can be used to generate novel scientific hypotheses. We combine a generic coding agent (Google's AntiGravity) with an LLM-driven tree search algorithm (Empirical Research Assistance / ERA) to autonomously generate high-efficiency three-dimensional photovoltaic (3DPV) structures that overcome losses limiting flat solar panels at mid-latitudes. These structures operate by presenting favorable angles to the sun throughout the day, and for illustrative purposes we focus on optimizing performance for a single solar day. Our workflow begins by using AntiGravity to reproduce calculations \cite{bernardi2012solar} showing that 3DPV can have energy densities much higher than stationary flat PV panels. We use these initial designs as the starting point for large scale tree search, where we seek improved solutions and score them for their diurnal yield. The initial tree search leads to nominally more efficient solutions, yet they are caused by algorithmic reward hacking, arising from non-physical design features such as structurally levitating disconnected tiers and exploitations of the discretizations in the optics solver. To counteract this, we develop a workflow where the coding agent iteratively patches the physics engine with constraints to eliminate reward hacking. With reward-hacking eliminated, ERA discovers a series of designs with various constraints and improved performance, including optimal designs with different fixed collector areas, optimizing zenith tracking and avoiding self shadowing. Combining coding agents with tree search (ERA) provides a powerful platform for scientific discovery, for problems whose solutions can be empirically evaluated with a score function.
arXiv:2507.17572v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Global optimization has gained attraction over the past decades, thanks to the development of both theoretical foundations and efficient numerical routines. Among recent advances, Kernel Sum of Squares (KernelSOS) provides a powerful theoretical framework, combining the expressivity of kernel methods with the guarantees of SOS optimization. In this paper, we take KernelSOS from theory to practice and demonstrate its use on challenging control and robotics problems. We identify and address the practical considerations required to make the method work in applied settings: restarting strategies, systematic calibration of hyperparameters, methods for recovering minimizers, and the combination with fast local solvers. As a proof of concept, the application of KernelSOS to robot localization highlights its competitiveness with existing SOS approaches that rely on heuristics and handcrafted reformulations to render the problem polynomial. Even in the high-dimensional, non-parametric setting of trajectory optimization with simulators treated as black boxes, we demonstrate how KernelSOS can be combined with fast local solvers to uncover higher-quality solutions without compromising overall runtimes.
arXiv:2605.15388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stochastic estimators are fundamental to large-scale optimization, where population quantities must be inferred from noisy oracle observations. Although influential methods such as momentum, SPIDER, STORM, and PAGE have been highly successful, their analyses are largely estimator-specific and expectation-based, obscuring the structural tradeoffs that determine reliability. In this paper, we develop a unified framework for stochastic variance-reduced estimation based on a recursion with three components: memory retention, reset probability, and a correction term for iterate movement. This framework recovers several classical estimators, motivates new second-order variants, and yields a bias-variance decomposition of estimation error. Our main result is a unified high-probability bound proved using a new dimension-free vector-valued Freedman inequality, valid for smooth normed spaces involving random sums of vector martingales. The result applies in both Euclidean and non-Euclidean settings, including the analysis of mirror-descent-based methods in Banach spaces. As applications, we obtain high-probability oracle complexities for unconstrained optimization with mirror descent, establishing the logarithmic dependence on the confidence level. We also derive the first $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ oracle-complexity bounds for stochastic optimization with expectation constraints, improving upon the existing $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ complexity by leveraging variance-reduced estimation for the first time in this setting.
arXiv:2509.05030v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: To enable large-scale reuse of real-world 3D assets, where garments and characters rarely share skeletons, templates, or dense correspondences, we present a fully automated virtual try-on system that dresses complex, multi-layer garments onto diverse, arbitrarily posed humanoids. Our key idea is to use SMPL as an intermediate proxy and decompose clothing-to-body transfer into two correspondence tasks with distinct challenges: (1) clothing-to-SMPL (partial-to-complete alignment) and (2) body-to-SMPL (large pose/shape variation and stylization). We address clothing-to-SMPL using a geometry-driven correspondence model, and introduce a diffusion-based body-to-SMPL correspondence approach that leverages multi-view consistent appearance features together with a pretrained 2D foundation model. Using these correspondences, we register SMPL/SMPL+D (Displacement) to the garment and target body and then perform simulator-driven fitting by transferring the garment along a smooth SMPL-to-SMPL+D transition, producing physically plausible draping on the target. Our system handles complex garment topology (including non-manifold meshes) and generalizes to a wide range of humanoid characters (e.g., humans, robots, cartoons, and creatures) while remaining computationally practical. Upon draping, our system also supports fast customization of clothing size. We show that our system can produce high-quality 3D clothing fittings without any human labor, even when 2D clothing sewing patterns are not available. Our project page is: https://cao-cong0.github.io/LUIVITON-Learned-Universal-Interoperable-VIrtual-Try-ON/.
arXiv:2605.15391v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present PanoWorld, a panoramic video world model that generates geometry-consistent 360$\degree$ video from a single image and a caption. Existing panoramic video methods optimize primarily for visual realism and do not explicitly constrain the underlying 3D scene state, producing outputs that appear plausible yet exhibit inconsistent depth, broken correspondences, and implausible motion across the spherical surface. We address this gap by framing panoramic video generation as a geometry- and dynamics-consistent latent state modeling problem rather than pure visual synthesis. Building on a pre-trained perspective video world model, we introduce two lightweight regularizers: a depth consistency loss against pseudo ground-truth panoramic depth, and a trajectory consistency loss that supervises the 3D world-frame positions of tracked points across time. We further apply spherical-geometry-aware adaptation to the conditioning and positional encoding. We additionally introduce PanoGeo, a unified geometry-aware panoramic video dataset with consistent depth, trajectory, and prompt annotations across diverse real and synthetic sources, used for both training and stratified evaluation. Experiments show that PanoWorld improves geometric consistency over prior panoramic generation methods while maintaining competitive visual realism, establishing that panoramic video generation must be treated as a geometric modeling problem to support the holistic spatial understanding requirements of embodied AI applications. Code is available at https://github.com/ostadabbas/PanoWorld.
arXiv:2605.15535v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Underwater salient object detection (USOD) has attracted increasing attention for underwater visual scene understanding and vision-guided robotic applications. However, existing USOD methods still struggle with underwater image degradations, which often lead to inaccurate object localization, fragmented salient regions, and coarse boundary prediction. To address these challenges, this paper proposes DSS-USOD, a novel RGB-based USOD method built upon dynamic structural specialization. DSS-USOD extracts a shared base representation from a single underwater image, decomposes it into boundary-sensitive and region-coherent structural features, and dynamically coordinates their contributions according to local structural context. Specifically, the extracted shared base representation is decomposed into a boundary-sensitive branch for modeling fine-grained boundary details and a region-coherent branch for capturing region-level structural consistency. A spatial coordination module is then introduced to adaptively regulate the relative contributions of the two branches according to local structural context. Moreover, cooperative structural supervision is introduced to promote branch specialization and stabilize spatial coordination, enabling DSS-USOD to better balance boundary precision and region coherence under degraded underwater conditions. Extensive experiments show that DSS-USOD achieves superior performance on benchmark datasets. Finally, real-world deployment on an underwater robot validates the practical effectiveness of DSS-USOD for underwater object inspection.
arXiv:2605.15218v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models deployed for MAPDL finite-element simulation face practical reliability challenges: without structured execution control, tool encapsulation, and fault recovery, outputs may be inconsistent and task failures are common. The Agent Harness paradigm addresses this by inserting domain-specific orchestration middleware that manages tool lifecycles, workflow state, and recovery escalation. This paper presents the architecture of CAX-Agent, a lightweight agent harness purpose-built for MAPDL automation, and empirically evaluates one of its core components -- the recovery policy.CAX-Agent organizes execution into three layers -- LLM service, agent harness, and solver backend -- with a recovery ladder that escalates from deterministic rule patching through model-driven regeneration to context enrichment and human intervention. We evaluate three recovery strategies (no_recovery, rule_only, and model_only) on 50 standard structural benchmarks with three repeated runs per strategy (450 case-runs total). Two independent human raters score task completion under blind conditions; inter-rater agreement is strong (quadratic weighted Cohen's kappa = 0.84, 96 percent of score pairs within one point). Model_only achieves the best completion rate (0.9267), task score (3.59/4), total score (9.16/10), and zero-intervention rate (0.84), outperforming rule_only (0.7733, 3.17/4, 7.03/10, 0.00) and no_recovery (0.6933, 2.74/4, 5.60/10, 0.00) with large effect sizes (Cliff's delta = 0.81-0.87). The benchmark uses deliberately simple geometries to isolate recovery-policy effects; we discuss the scope of these findings and directions for broader validation.
arXiv:2507.20098v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper compares data-driven predictive control strategies by examining their theoretical foundations, assumptions, and applications. The three most widely recognized and consequential methods, Data Enabled Predictive Control, Willems-Koopman Predictive Control, Model-Free Adaptive Predictive Control are employed. Each of these strategies is systematically reviewed, and the primary theories supporting it are outlined. Following analysis, a discussion is provided regarding their fundamental assumptions, emphasizing their influence on control effectiveness. A numerical example is presented as a benchmark for comparison to enable a rigorous performance evaluation.
arXiv:2510.02307v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models often degrade when sampled at resolutions outside the final training resolution set. Prior work has largely emphasized higher resolution generation, enabling pretrained diffusion models to extrapolate beyond the resolutions seen during training. In this work, we instead target lower-resolution generation, performing inference at reduced resolution to significantly cut computational cost. We show that network conditioning of the noise level induces a train-test mismatch that directly degrades low-resolution generation: the same scheduled noise level can correspond to a different perceptual corruption level at lower resolutions, mis-calibrating the denoiser timestep and noise embedding. To this end, we propose NoiseShift, a training-free recalibration method that keeps the original noise sampling schedule unchanged and instead re-indexes the noise conditioning of the denoiser to restore local forward-reverse consistency. Using a lightweight coarse-to-fine calibration on a small set of image-text pairs, NoiseShift learns a resolution-specific mapping from scheduler noise to conditioning noise, reducing train-test mismatch and improving lower-resolution generation quality. When NoiseShift is applied to Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3), Stable Diffusion 3.5 (SD3.5), and Flux-Dev, generation quality at low resolutions improves consistently. Particularly, SD3 generation at 128x128 resolution gets an improved FID score from 203 to 171, and SD3.5 gets an improved FID score from 310 to 277 on LAION-COCO. Even Flux-Dev which already implements a complementary time-shifting strategy gets a modest boost from NoiseShift with an improved FID score from 120 to 113 at 64x64 resolution. More importantly, NoiseShift achieves such improvements with minimal implementation changes and no additional inference overhead.
arXiv:2603.20030v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A triangulation of a surface is k-irreducible if every non-contractible curve has length at least k and any edge contraction breaks this property. Equivalently, every edge belongs to a non-contractible curve of length k and there are no shorter non-contractible curves. We prove that a k-irreducible triangulation of an orientable surface of genus g has $O(k^2g)$ triangles, which is optimal. This is an improvement over the previous best bound $k^{O(k)} g^2$ of Gao, Richter and Seymour [Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 1996].
arXiv:2605.15379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The log-homotopy particle flow filter resolves the Bayesian update by transporting particles along a continuous trajectory in pseudo-time. However, the governing partial differential equation for the flow velocity is fundamentally underdetermined, admitting an infinite family of valid solutions. In this work, we regard the particle flow as the motion of a pressureless inviscid fluid. We define a Lagrangian action based on the kinetic energy of the system, subject to the constraints imposed by the continuity equation and the log-homotopy evolution. By applying the principle of least action, we obtain the Euler--Lagrange equations for the optimal flow, which yields an irrotational potential flow structure. We show that this variational framework yields a coupled Hamilton--Jacobi equation structurally isomorphic to Madelung's hydrodynamic formulation of quantum mechanics. In this analogy, the log-homotopy constraint acts as a generalized quantum potential that generates the force required to guide the probability fluid along the exact Bayesian update path. Finally, we derive the material acceleration of the flow, shifting the formulation from a kinematic to a dynamical description. This perspective could enable the application of higher-order symplectic integrators for improved numerical stability and provide a physics-based metric for adaptive stiffness detection in high-dimensional filtering.
arXiv:2603.13608v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The concept of matrix D-stability plays an important role in applications, ranging from economic and biological system models to decentralized control. Here we provide necessary and sufficient Lyapunov-type conditions for the robust (block) D-stability property. We leverage this characterization as part of a novel Lyapunov analysis of decentralized integral control for MIMO LTI systems, providing sufficient conditions guaranteeing stability under low-gain and under arbitrary connection and disconnection of individual control loops.
arXiv:2605.15384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory plays a central role in enabling large language models (LLMs) to operate over sequential tasks by accumulating and reusing experience over time. However, existing evaluations of LLM memory mostly rely on aggregate metrics such as final hold-out accuracy or cumulative online performance, which can obscure critical failure modes such as forgetting and negative transfer. In this paper, we introduce SeqMem-Eval, a diagnostic evaluation framework for sequentially evolving LLM memory. Drawing inspiration from continual learning, it targets a test-time setting in which memory is external, prompt-mediated, and updated without modifying model parameters. Rather than focusing only on final performance, SeqMem-Eval evaluates how memory states evolve, generalize, consolidate experience, and retain useful information during sequential inference. Specifically, it measures online utility, hold-out generalization, backward transfer, and forgetting, providing a finer-grained view of memory quality. Through extensive experiments across diverse tasks and memory methods, we show that higher final or cumulative accuracy does not necessarily imply better memory quality: many methods exhibit strong performance gains while suffering from substantial forgetting or negative transfer. Moreover, different memory designs exhibit distinct trade-offs between adaptability and stability that remain invisible under standard evaluation metrics.
arXiv:2605.15404v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model personalization typically adapts outputs to user preferences and style but does not account for differences in user evaluation capacity across domains of expertise. This limitation can encourage Professional Domain Drift, where users rely on AI generated reasoning in domains they cannot reliably evaluate. We introduce Capability Conditioned Scaffolding, a typed framework that partitions expertise into strong, mixed, and weak domains and conditions intervention behavior on structured capability profiles. A pilot evaluation across multiple MMLU subsets and four LLM substrates shows consistent profile conditioned intervention behavior, including categorical inversion under profile swapping and selective activation in mixed domain risk zones. These findings suggest that capability aware scaffolding can support more reliable professional human AI collaboration beyond stylistic personalization.
arXiv:2605.15406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work presents a new approach for implementing polymorphism for bottom-up relational languages, without monomorphization. We begin by introducing semiringKanren, a bottom-up weighted relational programming language. We extend this base language to support polymorphism. We describe a new method to compile polymorphic semiringKanren programs into non-polymorphic ones, based on equality patterns and large-enough instances of polymorphic relations. We prove the correctness of this method. Finally, we consider existing work and suggest directions for future research.
arXiv:2605.15398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in 3D generative editing, particularly pipelines based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have achieved high-fidelity, multi-view-consistent scene manipulation from text prompts. However, we find that these pipelines also introduce new safety risks when unsafe prompts produce edits that are propagated and optimized across views. In this work, we study unsafe generation in 3D editing pipelines and show that such behavior can lead to coherent, undesirable Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content in the final 3D representation. To address this, we propose 3DEditSafe, a safety-regularized 3D editing framework that constrains unsafe semantic propagation during optimization. 3DEditSafe combines generation-stage safety guidance with rendered-view 3D safety regularization, safe semantic projection, residue suppression, and mask-aware preservation to steer optimization away from unsafe editing directions. We evaluate our approach on EditSplat scenes using an object-compatible unsafe prompt benchmark and show that 2D safety guidance alone is not consistently sufficient to prevent unsafe 3D edits. 3DEditSafe reduces unsafe semantic alignment and view-level attack success rates, while revealing a safety-quality tradeoff in which stronger unsafe suppression can introduce artifacts or reduce unsafe-prompt fidelity. To our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to study and defend against unsafe generation in text-driven 3D editing pipelines, highlighting the need for safety mechanisms that operate directly on optimized 3D representations.
arXiv:2602.16363v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study reward-free and reward-agnostic exploration in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs), where an agent explores an unknown environment without observing external rewards. Reward-free exploration aims to enable $\epsilon$-optimal policies for any reward revealed after exploration, while reward-agnostic exploration targets $\epsilon$-optimality for rewards drawn from a small finite class. In the reward-agnostic setting, Li, Yan, Chen, and Fan achieve minimax sample complexity, but only for restrictively small accuracy parameter $\epsilon$. We propose a new algorithm that significantly relaxes the requirement on $\epsilon$. Our approach is novel and of technical interest by itself. Our algorithm employs an online learning procedure with carefully designed rewards to construct an exploration policy, which is used to gather data sufficient for accurate dynamics estimation and subsequent computation of an $\epsilon$-optimal policy once the reward is revealed. Finally, we establish a tight lower bound for reward-free exploration, closing the gap between known upper and lower bounds.
arXiv:2603.03243v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation Interface (HoMMI), a data collection and policy learning framework that learns whole-body mobile manipulation directly from robot-free human demonstrations. We augment UMI interfaces with egocentric sensing to capture the global context required for mobile manipulation, enabling portable, robot-free, and scalable data collection. However, naively incorporating egocentric sensing introduces a larger human-to-robot embodiment gap in both observation and action spaces, making policy transfer difficult. We explicitly bridge this gap with a cross-embodiment hand-eye policy design, including an embodiment agnostic visual representation; a relaxed head action representation; and a whole-body controller that realizes hand-eye trajectories through coordinated whole-body motion under robot-specific physical constraints. Together, these enable long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks requiring bimanual and whole-body coordination, navigation, and active perception. Results are best viewed on: https://hommi-robot.github.io
arXiv:2508.17218v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reliable path planning in stochastic transportation networks requires decisions that account for uncertain and correlated travel times on irregular road graphs, rather than only minimizing expected delay. Such networks exhibit strong spatial-temporal coupling, where link travel times evolve as stochastic processes over graph edges, making the problem inherently sequential under uncertainty. Existing stochastic on-time arrival (SOTA) methods primarily depend on the current node and remaining budget, which limits their ability to exploit trajectory-level temporal structure and history-dependent correlations. This work proposes GPG-HT, a history-aware graph-signal policy framework that integrates a Decision Transformer with generalized policy gradient optimization for reliable routing. By attending to historical node-edge-time observations, GPG-HT captures non-Markovian spatial-temporal dependencies and enables context-aware decision making under uncertainty. Experiments on the Sioux Falls and Anaheim networks demonstrate consistent gains in on-time arrival probability over representative optimization and reinforcement learning baselines.
arXiv:2601.19562v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quality diversity (QD) is a branch of evolutionary computation that seeks high-quality and behaviorally diverse solutions to a problem. While adversarial problems are common, classical QD cannot be easily applied to them, as both the fitness and the behavior depend on the opposing solutions. Recently, Generational Adversarial MAP-Elites (GAME) has been proposed to coevolve both sides of an adversarial problem by alternating the execution of a multi-task QD algorithm against previous elites, called tasks. The original algorithm selects new tasks based on a behavioral criterion, which may lead to undesired dynamics due to inter-side dependencies. In addition, comparing sets of solutions cannot be done directly using classical QD measures due to side dependencies. In this paper, we (1) use an inter-variants tournament to compare the sets of solutions, ensuring a fair comparison, with 6 measures of quality and diversity, and (2) propose two tournament-informed task selection methods to promote higher quality and diversity at each generation. We evaluate the variants across three adversarial problems: Pong, a Cat-and-mouse game, and a Pursuers-and-evaders game. We show that the tournament-informed task selection method leads to higher adversarial quality and diversity. We hope that this work will help further advance adversarial quality diversity. Code, videos, and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/Timothee-ANNE/GAME_tournament_informed.
arXiv:2509.10825v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Explaining a trained model requires a clear account of how explanatory evidence is generated. We propose CUBE, a post-hoc explanation framework that brings factorial experimental design to black-box model analysis. CUBE evaluates a trained predictor on balanced low--high probe combinations and summarizes the responses as factorial effects. Main effects and pairwise interactions are interpreted as controlled contrasts on a specified explanation region. Complete factorial probes identify these effects exactly on the selected design space, while fractional probes reduce query cost and expose aliasing and resolution constraints. Experiments on synthetic and real tabular tasks show that CUBE recovers dominant learned effect structure and clarifies the identifiability limits of query-efficient explanations.
arXiv:2508.01014v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Advances in 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis have enabled efficient and photorealistic rendering. However, images for reconstruction are still either largely manual or constrained by simple preplanned trajectories. To address this issue, recent works propose generalizable next-best-view planners that do not require online learning. Nevertheless, robustness and performance remain limited across various shapes. Hence, this study introduces Voxel-Face-Aware Hierarchical Next-Best-View Acquisition for Efficient 3D Reconstruction (Hestia), which addresses the shortcomings of the reinforcement learning-based generalizable approaches for five-degree-of-freedom viewpoint prediction. Hestia systematically improves the planners through four components: a more diverse dataset to promote robustness, a hierarchical structure to manage the high-dimensional continuous action search space, a close-greedy strategy to mitigate spurious correlations, and a face-aware design to avoid overlooking geometry. Experimental results show that Hestia achieves non-marginal improvements, with at least a 4% gain in coverage ratio, while reducing Chamfer Distance by 50% and maintaining real-time inference. In addition, Hestia outperforms prior methods by at least 12% in coverage ratio with a 5-image budget and remains robust to object placement variations. Finally, we demonstrate that Hestia, as a next-best-view planner, is feasible for the real-world application. Our project page is https://johnnylu305.github.io/hestia web.