arXiv:2607.01897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Rank-Then-Act (RTA), a framework for learning control policies from expert video demonstrations without environment rewards. RTA trains a Vision-Language Model (VLM) offline as a progress-based ordinal scorer, using a Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) objective over shuffled frame sequences, which forces the model to recover temporal ordering from visual semantics rather than trivial time cues. Importantly, instead of using the scorer directly as a scalar reward model, we propose a correlation-based reward function for reinforcement learning: at each interaction window, we compute the Spearman rank correlation between predicted progress rankings and true temporal indices, yielding a bounded, scale-invariant learning signal. This design decouples reward learning from absolute calibration and enables stable transfer across tasks and environments. We evaluate RTA on discrete control benchmarks (PyBoy: Catrap, Kirby) and continuous control tasks (PointMaze, MetaWorld). RTA consistently matches or outperforms prior video-based reward learning methods and rank-based baselines, while demonstrating strong cross-task reuse of a single pretrained progress scorer. Our results suggest that correlation-structured supervision over video-derived ordinal signals is sufficient for policy learning, offering a scalable alternative to explicit reward design.
Science Journals
arXiv:2607.01915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes a robust image processing framework for underwater robot-based construction environment monitoring, targeting complex degradations observed in real marine environments. Unlike conventional approaches that mainly consider absorption and backscattering, real underwater imagery is strongly affected by depth-dependent forward scattering blur and particle-induced degradations such as marine snow. To address this, we introduce a staged processing pipeline that sequentially models background degradation via depth-aware forward scattering and foreground degradation using realistic marine snow patterns extracted from real images. The resulting synthetic data are used to retrain an existing Joint-ID network without modifying its architecture, enabling an isolated evaluation of dataset realism. In addition, a lightweight post-processing scheme is applied to enhance contrast and structural clarity. Experiments on real underwater datasets collected in Korean coastal environments demonstrate consistent improvements in visual quality and UIQM scores. The results indicate that explicitly modeling forward scattering and realistic particle effects effectively reduces the synthetic-to-real gap and improves practical applicability in real-world underwater robotic operations.
arXiv:2603.21648v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate a single-arm optical platform for phase-retrieval-free, quantitative dynamic phase mapping of continuous transparent media via field-correlation ghost imaging. By modeling the medium as a dynamic pure-phase object, we spatially encode and compress its two-dimensional (2D) complex transmittance into a single bucket detector. Balanced heterodyne detection downconverts the optical frequencies for direct digitization. Crucially, by mapping spatial information into the temporal domain, this single-pixel architecture exploits high-speed digitization to continuously resolve 2D phase dynamics, effectively bypassing the frame-rate bottlenecks of traditional array sensors. Coupled with intermediate-frequency spectral analysis, this establishes a direct linear mapping from the recorded signal to the physical phase. The complex amplitude is thus deterministically extracted via field-correlation, enabling the spatial reconstruction of 2D acoustic pressure distributions using a pseudo-inverse algorithm. Experimental validations in an acoustic levitator confirm that the optically extracted acoustic wavelengths strictly match theoretical dispersion models, exhibiting a robust linear correlation between the retrieved phase shift and local sound pressure levels. This deterministic methodology provides a real-time-capable metrological tool for characterizing rapidly evolving phenomena, including transient aeroacoustic flows, shockwaves, and microfluidic biological dynamics.
arXiv:2603.23475v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) offers non-invasive deep-brain neuromodulation with high spatial precision, but reliably generating complex multi-target acoustic fields through the skull remains challenging. Here, we introduce a physics-aware hologram technique that directly generates fabrication-ready holographic implementations while preserving consistency between numerical field synthesis and physical acoustic realization. The method enables single-, dual-, and tri-focal transcranial stimulation patterns and was validated through in silico simulations, ex vivo skull measurements, and in vivo experiments. Compared with representative state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach improved focal reconstruction and energy confinement at intended targets while reducing off-target acoustic leakage. In a neuropathic-pain mouse model, simultaneous bilateral stimulation of thalamic nuclei reduced c-Fos expression and showed preliminary improvements in pain-related behavioral responses. These findings support the use of fabrication-consistent holographic design for spatially localized and reproducible multi-target transcranial neuromodulation.
arXiv:2601.10710v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) create a severe visual feature bottleneck by using a crude, asymmetric connection that links only the output of the vision encoder to the input of the large language model (LLM). This static architecture fundamentally limits the ability of LLMs to achieve comprehensive alignment with hierarchical visual knowledge, compromising their capacity to accurately integrate local details with global semantics into coherent reasoning. To resolve this, we introduce Cross-Layer Injection (CLI), a novel and lightweight framework that forges a dynamic many-to-many bridge between the two modalities. CLI consists of two synergistic, parameter-efficient components: an Adaptive Multi-Projection (AMP) module that harmonizes features from diverse vision layers, and an Adaptive Gating Fusion (AGF) mechanism that empowers the LLM to selectively inject the most relevant visual information based on its real-time decoding context. We validate the effectiveness and versatility of CLI by integrating it into LLaVA-OneVision and LLaVA-1.5. Extensive experiments on 18 diverse benchmarks demonstrate significant performance improvements, establishing CLI as a scalable paradigm that unlocks deeper multimodal understanding by granting LLMs on-demand access to the full visual hierarchy.
arXiv:2605.23965v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on logical reasoning benchmarks, yet their reliability remains uncertain. Existing evaluations rely on static benchmarks, which fail to assess robustness under logically equivalent transformations and often overestimate reasoning capability. We propose LGMT (Logic-Grounded Metamorphic Testing), an oracle-free framework that leverages first-order logic (FOL) to evaluate LLM reasoning. By deriving metamorphic relations from formal logical equivalences, LGMT constructs semantically invariant test cases and detects reasoning defects through cross-case consistency checking. Experiments on six state-of-the-art LLMs show that LGMT exposes substantial hidden defects missed by traditional reference-based evaluations. We further find that models are particularly sensitive to symbol-level and conclusion-level variations, and that advanced prompting such as Few-shot CoT only partially mitigates these issues. These results suggest that LLM evaluation should move beyond isolated correctness toward robustness under logical invariance. LGMT provides a principled and scalable approach for diagnosing reasoning failures.
arXiv:2603.24747v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of large language model agents capable of invoking external tools has created urgent need for formal verification of agent protocols. Two paradigms dominate this space: Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD), a research framework for zero-shot API generalization, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an industry standard for agent-tool integration. While both enable dynamic service discovery through schema descriptions, their formal relationship remains unexplored. We present the first process calculus formalization of SGD and MCP, proving they are structurally bisimilar under a well-defined mapping Phi. We demonstrate that the reverse mapping Phi-1 is partial and lossy, revealing critical gaps in MCP's expressivity. Through bidirectional analysis, we identify four principles - semantic completeness, explicit action boundaries, failure mode documentation, and inter-tool relationship declaration -- as necessary and sufficient conditions for full behavioral equivalence. We formalize these principles as type-system extensions MCP+, proving MCP+ is fully equivalent to SGD. Our work provides the first formal foundation for verified agent systems and establishes schema quality as a provable safety property. Practically, this means that the current MCP specification has expressiveness gaps compared to SGD and would benefit from the proposed extensions.
arXiv:2607.01892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Metainterfaces can realize specified evolutions of their friction force as a function of the confining normal force (friction law), thanks to the design of the individual radii and heights of a population of independent hertzian asperities. However, not all friction laws are achievable. Here I show that, contrary to a suggestion from the literature, the slope of the friction law has a finite positive lower bound. This result is useful to identify friction laws that are not accessible to metainterfaces.
arXiv:2603.27130v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming software engineering by enabling developers to generate code ranging from small snippets to entire projects. As AI-assisted code becomes increasingly integrated into real-world systems, understanding its characteristics and impact is critical. Existing study on AI-generated code is usually limited in the lab setting with synthetic benchmarks and small-scale coding tasks and covers limited metrics. AI-assisted code's manifestation in real-world codebases and its differences between human-written one remain unclear. To close this gap, we perform a first large-scale measurement study of AI-assisted code, in comparison with the human-written, in real-world repositories. We study a comprehensive set of metrics including both code-level aspects (e.g., structural and graph-level complexity, coding style, security quality, etc.) and commit-level characteristics (e.g., commit size, frequency, post-commit stability, etc.). Our results provide new findings and insights: some contrast previous observations in the lab setting (e.g., we conclude that real-world AI-Human differences on code-level metrics are rather small instead of more pronounced), some extend prior results with finer-grained observations (e.g., the variance of security quality across different programming languages), yet more are presented for the first time on aspects not covered before (e.g., code duplication rate, commit size and stability, etc.). Based on these comprehensive real-world results, we also discuss the practical implications of AI-assisted programming.
arXiv:2603.27190v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given a set of $k$-sparse linear equations over a ring $R$, we give algorithms to determine whether the right-hand sides are random or have a secret assignment planted with noise. For a parameter $k/2\leq l\leq n$, we give a spectral method to solve this problem in $\widetilde{O}\left(\binom{n}{l}\lvert{R}\rvert^l\right)$ time except with probability at most $n^{-\Omega(l)}$, provided the number of samples is roughly at least $\left(\frac{\lvert{R}\rvert n}{l}\right)^{k/2}$. This attack generalizes the Kikuchi method described by Wein et. al. (Journal of the ACM 2019) for $\mathbb{Z}_2$ to (commutative) rings of any finite size. We also give a simpler algorithm with better runtime than the spectral method and better sample complexity when $\lvert{R}\rvert=\omega(n/l)$. As a consequence, we obtain new sample-time tradeoffs for the decision problem of sparse LWE, sparse LPN over higher modulus $q$, and in general the distinguishing random vs planted $\mathbb{Z}_q$-linear equations for a large class of noise distributions. Our results imply a tightness of the hardness claims of Jain, Lin, Saha (Annual International Cryptology Conference, 2024) for sparse LWE.
arXiv:2603.27313v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Disturbance observer-based control has shown promise in robustifying robotic systems against uncertainties. However, tuning such systems remains challenging due to the strong coupling between controller gains and observer parameters. In this work, we propose MetaTune, a unified framework for joint auto-tuning of feedback controllers and disturbance observers through differentiable closed-loop meta-learning. MetaTune integrates a portable neural policy with physics-informed gradients derived from differentiable system dynamics, enabling adaptive gains across tasks and operating conditions. We develop an adjoint method that efficiently computes the meta-gradients with respect to adaptive gains backward in time to directly minimize the cost-to-go. Compared to existing forward methods, our approach reduces the computational complexity to be linear in the data horizon. On quadrotor control tasks, MetaTune achieves competitive or improved tracking performance while reducing gradient computation time by more than 50\%. In PX4-Gazebo hardware-in-the-loop simulation, the learned policy transfers zero-shot and reduces tracking RMSE by about 15--20\% in aggressive flight and up to 40\% under strong disturbances.
arXiv:2603.28906v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AGI has become the Holly Grail of AI with the promise of level intelligence and the major Tech companies around the world are investing unprecedented amounts of resources in its pursuit. Yet, there does not exist a single formal definition and only some empirical AGI benchmarking frameworks currently exist. The main purpose of this paper is to develop a general, algebraic and category theoretic framework for describing, comparing and analysing different possible AGI architectures. Thus, this Category theoretic formalization would also allow to compare different possible candidate AGI architectures, such as, RL, Universal AI, Active Inference, CRL, Schema based Learning, etc. It will allow to unambiguously expose their commonalities and differences, and what is even more important, expose areas for future research. From the applied Category theoretic point of view, we take as inspiration Machines in a Category to provide a modern view of AGI Architectures in a Category. More specifically, this first position paper provides, on one hand, a first exercise on RL, Causal RL and SBL Architectures in a Category, and on the other hand, it is a first step on a broader research program that seeks to provide a unified formal foundation for AGI systems, integrating architectural structure, informational organization, agent realization, agent and environment interaction, behavioural development over time, and the empirical evaluation of properties. This framework is also intended to support the definition of architectural properties, both syntactic and informational, as well as semantic properties of agents and their assessment in environments with explicitly characterized features. We claim that Category Theory and AGI will have a very symbiotic relation.
arXiv:2604.01148v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most defects in mobile applications are visually observable on the device screen. Since automated mechanisms for detecting and reporting such defects are often unavailable, users, testers, and developers must manually submit bug reports. However, these reports are frequently incomplete, ambiguous, or inaccurate, often lacking the information needed to understand, reproduce, and diagnose defects. This challenge is particularly prominent for UI-centric defects, where the relevant application behavior is difficult for end users to describe precisely. We formulate automatic bug report enhancement as the problem of connecting user-written bug reports with application execution. We present BugScribe, an LLM-powered approach that links bug report information with app-specific UI execution information to infer and generate accurate, complete, and correct Observed Behavior (OB), Expected Behavior (EB), and Steps to Reproduce (S2Rs). BugScribe employs a component-specific grounding strategy that provides the most relevant context to an LLM for generating each bug report component. To support BugScribe's design and evaluation, we develop a bug report quality model and use it to identify the most effective context for each component. We evaluate BugScribe on 48 bug reports from 26 Android applications with manually constructed ground truth. Our results show that BugScribe generates higher-quality bug report components than the original reports and three LLM-based baselines, improving S2R quality by 44.1%--82.3% and OB/EB quality by 3.8%--35.2%.
arXiv:2605.17360v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-time duplex interaction is essential for multimodal AI systems operating in real-world scenarios, where models must continuously process streaming inputs and respond at appropriate moments. However, most existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are evaluated in offline settings, where the entire video input is processed before any response is generated. While recent work has started to explore real-time duplex MLLMs, there is still no comprehensive benchmark or automatic evaluation method for this setting. To address this gap, we propose Omni-DuplexEval, a benchmark for systematically evaluating real-time duplex interaction. The benchmark consists of two complementary scenarios: (1) Real-Time Description, which evaluates the ability to generate continuous, time-aligned responses that track evolving multimodal inputs, and (2) Proactive Reminder, which evaluates the ability to identify salient events and respond at appropriate moments. Omni-DuplexEval contains 660 videos with fine-grained, human-annotated labels and precise temporal metadata, spanning 9 tasks grounded in real-world scenarios, where all questions are formulated as open-ended queries. We further introduce an automatic evaluation framework based on LLM-as-a-Judge, which enables systematic assessment by jointly evaluating response-content alignment and response timing through timestamp-aware and sequential reasoning, achieving strong alignment with human judgments. Experiments on state-of-the-art duplex MLLMs reveal substantial limitations. The best-performing model achieves only 39.6% overall, while scoring only 20.0% on Proactive Reminder. Our analysis identifies two key challenges: models struggle to balance timely responses with coherent, holistic content generation, and they often fail to determine both when to respond and what to produce. We hope our work facilitates further progress in MLLMs.
arXiv:2604.10005v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prediction markets are starting to look less like crowd polls and more like electronic markets. The central question is therefore no longer only whether these markets forecast well, but what happens when institutional liquidity enters: do spreads tighten, does price discovery improve, and do those gains actually reach the traders who are slowest to react when information arrives? This paper offers a research design for answering that question. It defines a broad market-quality lens, separates the main channels through which institutional liquidity enters, and maps the identification problems that arise in live venue data. It also uses a synthetic microstructure laboratory as a proof of concept for the measurement pipeline. The main lesson of the synthetic exercise is deliberately narrow. Market-maker coverage, liquidity incentives, and automation do not have to work through the same channel; average liquidity gains do not have to translate into equal gains for all traders; and the sharpest welfare losses are most likely to appear in shock states, when slower takers receive the least pass-through of tighter quoted markets. The synthetic results are useful because they stress-test the design, not because they settle the live empirical question.
arXiv:2607.02330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the one-facility location game on a real line with a new objective called envy ratio. The envy ratio, which is adopted from fair division and represents the egalitarianism, is defined as the maximum over the ratios between any two agents' utilities. We are interested in strategyproof or group strategyproof mechanisms that can minimize the envy ratio objective. We consider the model in two settings that can capture natural scenarios: the facility location and all the agents' locations are restricted on a fixed interval; every agent's location can be any point on the real line but the facility location is restricted on a relative interval. In both settings, we obtain the optimal solution and the best deterministic strategyproof mechanism which is also group strategyproof. In the first setting, we provide a lower bound for randomized strategyproof mechanisms. In the second setting, we give a lower bound and two upper bounds for randomized strategyproof mechanisms.
arXiv:2604.10998v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large, spatially flexible electricity consumers such as data centers can reallocate demand across locations, influencing dispatch and prices in wholesale electricity markets. While flexible load is often assumed to improve system efficiency, this intuition typically relies on price-taking behavior. We study price-anticipatory spatial load shifting by modeling a large flexible consumer as a Stackelberg leader interacting with DC optimal power flow (DC-OPF) based market clearing. We show that decentralized, cost-minimizing load shifting need not align with system operating cost minimization, and that misalignment arises at boundaries between DC-OPF operating regimes, where small changes in load can induce discrete changes in marginal generators or congestion patterns. We evaluate strategic load shifting on the 73-bus RTS-GMLC test system, where findings indicate reductions in system operating cost in most hours, but misalignment in a subset of cases that are driven by redispatch at merit-order discontinuities. We find that these outcomes are primarily redistributive relative to a price-taking benchmark, reducing generator profits while lowering electricity procurement costs for both flexible and inflexible consumers, even in cases where total system operating costs increase.
arXiv:2604.12198v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous LLM agents now produce complete research artifacts in machine-learning sandboxes, but real computational physics is harder: experiments are first-principles calculations against re-runnable physical ground truth, and meaningful new work almost always builds on a key existing paper. We ask whether such an agent can perform grounded scrutiny of published computational physics - reading a paper, reproducing it from scratch, and surfacing methodological concerns from execution. We deploy a single Claude Opus 4.6 configuration at two complementary scopes. At scale, across 111 open-access Quantum ESPRESSO papers, an autonomous agent runs the read-plan-compute-compare loop and, although never asked to critique, raises substantive methodological concerns on ~42% of papers; 85 of 88 of these critiques (96.6%) surface only after the agent has actually run a calculation, with a reading-only ceiling of 1.8%. Critique emerges from reproduction, not from reading. In depth, on one Nature Communications paper on multiscale device simulation of a 2D-material MOSFET, a fresh agent inheriting a verified reproduction pipeline autonomously produces a 14-concern physics inventory and a complete, submission-form six-page Comment that revises the paper's L_G = 5 nm headline. Two of its L_G = 5 nm headline-challenging attacks - a source-degeneration contact-resistance bound and a Sb-doping degradation ratio - are absent from the published 21-reviewer peer review.
arXiv:2607.01403v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We give an operator-theoretic interpretation of unsteady Kutta selection in trailing-edge acoustic receptivity. The inviscid acoustic--wake problem leaves one outgoing wake amplitude undetermined. We show that, under explicit structural hypotheses, this amplitude is the same scalar obtained from three representations: cancellation of the inverse-square-root edge singularity, Fredholm compatibility of the viscous lower-deck problem, and the residue of the Kutta-normalized transform solution at the downstream wake pole: $\displaystyle A = -\frac{C_-^{(0)}}{C_-^{(KH)}} = -\frac{\langle \mathbf F_{\rm inc},\Psi^\ast\rangle}{\langle \mathbf F_{KH},\Psi^\ast\rangle} = i\operatorname*{Res}_{\alpha=\alpha_{KH}}\mathcal M(\alpha)$. The inner Fredholm--edge mechanism is verified exactly in a linear-shear lower-deck model, where the primal shear and adjoint velocity are Airy fields and the edge concomitant is nonzero outside a discrete resonance set.
arXiv:2607.01406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a laser system referenced to a room-temperature ultrastable cavity employing crystalline AlGaAs coatings. We demonstrate a fractional frequency instability of $4.2 \times 10^{-17}$, which is one of the lowest for room temperature systems and surpasses the limit imposed by Brownian noise if dielectric coatings were employed. For the first time in a room temperature system we identified the spontaneous fluctuations of the coating birefringence as a leading contribution to frequency instability. At optimized conditions we achieve an ultrastable cavity with an eigenfrequency that is highly immune to power fluctuations. As acceleration noise is the main noise contribution, we demonstrated that a feed-forward method can reduce the influence of accelerations on the cavity-stabilized laser frequency by a factor of four.
arXiv:2607.01440v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Faithful reasoning is essential in medicine, where clinical decisions require transparent justification grounded in reliable evidence. Current medical LLMs either lack active access to evidence or use retrieved evidence without supervising how it should be appraised and applied during reasoning. To address this, we formalize evidence-based medicine principles as process-level criteria and introduce FaithMed, a framework that combines clinician-designed, automatically refined rubrics with reinforcement learning using step-level process reward assignment and advantage grouping. Across seven medical benchmarks, FaithMed improves over agentic-search baselines (+9% on average) and outcome-only RL (+5.8%), while raising average evidence-based medicine rubric scores over agentic-search Qwen3 baselines (+15.5%). This work demonstrates that explicit step-level supervision can improve both task success and the faithfulness of the reasoning process. Code is available at https://github.com/cxcscmu/FaithMed.
arXiv:2607.02369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs stage a new form of cultural encounter that is massive, automated, and monolingual. Literary disciplines have always negotiated cultural struggles with comparative reading of literature, narratological and poetic analysis, critical theory, world literature, and translation. These tools have now become indispensable for building culturally literate AI. The essay develops a layered framework toward more nuanced textual models and pluralistic interpretations of AI, emphasizing the natural intersections of literature and AI development, connecting current debates in critical theory with structural monolingualism, and suggesting a new application of world literature approaches to address global AI textuality through macrostructure, circulation, and untranslatability.
arXiv:2607.02167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents an intelligent control framework for trajectory tracking of robotic manipulators using radial basis function (RBF) neural networks for online disturbance estimation. The proposed control structure combines model-based nonlinear control with an adaptive neural approximator that compensates for parametric uncertainties, friction, and unmodeled dynamics. A Lyapunov-based adaptation law with projection guarantees boundedness of the closed-loop signals and convergence of the tracking error to a compact region. The primary objective of this work is to investigate how the choice of activation function within the RBF network influences transient behavior, steady-state accuracy, and control smoothness. The controller is implemented on a robotic manipulator. Experimental results demonstrate that although stability is preserved for all kernels, activation function selection significantly affects adaptation dynamics and practical tracking performance. These findings demonstrate that activation function selection acts as a structural design parameter in intelligent control, directly shaping adaptation dynamics and practical closed-loop performance.
arXiv:2607.02129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating a speaker's head orientation from audio can provide valuable information in smart environments, meetings, and driver monitoring. We propose a novel approach that leverages the phase component of the short-time Fourier transform from a single microphone array as input to a deep neural network combining convolutional, recurrent, and self-attention layers. Unlike prior methods that use physics-informed handcrafted features or raw waveform inputs, our approach enables robust learning from simulated and real data. Trained on a large-scale dataset generated with voice directivity patterns and fine-tuned on real recordings, our model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, outperforming baselines under both clean and noisy conditions. Personalization experiments further demonstrate significant gains, reaching a mean angular error of 11.3 degrees when adapting to individual users and environments.
arXiv:2507.11212v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the problem of aggregating a set of polygons by covering them with disjoint representative regions, thereby inducing a clustering of the polygons. Equivalently, this can be seen as a fence enclosure problem, where the goal is to surround the polygons with a set of closed curves. Our objective is to minimize a weighted sum of the total area and the total perimeter of the regions, which naturally extends other fencing problems and has applications in geographical information systems. Previously, this objective was only studied in a restricted variant, in which the boundary curves of the regions must be selected from a fixed subdivision of the plane. It is natural to ask whether the problem is still tractable if this restriction is removed, allowing output regions to be bounded by arbitrary curves. We provide a positive answer in the form of an algorithm with runtime $\mathcal{\tilde{O}}(n^4)$, where $n$ is the number of input vertices. To achieve this, we fully characterize the optimal solutions by showing that their boundaries are composed of input edges and circular arcs of constant radius. Additionally, we consider the parametric problem, where for every weighting factor we seek a solution that is optimal for that trade-off of area and perimeter. We show that $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ combinatorial solutions suffice to describe all optimal solutions across all weighting factors, and provide both an exact algorithm and an approximation scheme. To make the algorithms scalable in practice, we develop engineering techniques that exploit structural properties of the solutions. Our experimental evaluation on real-world data shows linear runtime in practice, even for the parametric variant.