We settle the exact complexity of the reachability problem in (stateless) vector addition systems (VAS) in fixed low dimension. In dimensions 2-4 it has only been known to be sandwiched between NP and PSPACE. We prove PSPACE-hardness of the reachability problem for symmetric vector addition systems in dimension 3 (3-VAS), a restricted fragment of general 3-VAS. Combined with previously established PSPACE upper bounds, our result settles the complexity of the problem to be PSPACE-complete in 3-VAS and 4-VAS, as well as in their symmetric fragments.
Benchmark gains are often treated as evidence of greater LLM capability. Yet the same gain can reflect different changes in model behavior. A model may reach new answers, or produce answers that were already within reach. Aggregate scores do not distinguish these changes question by question. We establish a question-level audit under fixed budgets, temperatures, and answer formats. A question is realized when the default deployment procedure produces the correct answer. A question is reachable when a specified probe finds that answer within a fixed budget. We first test whether inference-time layer routing can expand reachability. Under a matched budget, random routes match or exceed structured search in all 43 model and task settings. Answer-blind procedures retain almost none of this gain, which instead requires access to the correct answer. We then ask why reachable answers sometimes fail to appear. Across six cases spanning 0.5B to 31B, silencing one identified MLP block repairs 68 to 92 percent of a predefined failure set. We next test whether training closes the gap by expanding reachability. In five of six matched evaluations, deployed performance rises while the reachable ceiling remains flat or falls. For DAPO, the deployed score rises by 14.7 points while the reachable ceiling falls by 13.3 points. Across the settings we audit, realization and reachability therefore do not always change together. Claims of capability expansion should report both realized performance and reachability under matched evaluation conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/LiZaiyuan0619/reachability-not-realization
Ali Asadi, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Pavol Kebiscs.LG cs.GT
Reachability is the most fundamental logical objective, yet it is notoriously difficult to learn in reinforcement learning settings: even for Markov decision processes, PAC learning of reachability is impossible without additional assumptions. This difficulty also holds in turn-based stochastic games (TBSGs), where two adversarial players interact on a finite state space. In this work, we consider turn-based stochastic games with reachability objectives. For such settings, adversarial learning, in which players are adversarial even in the learning phase, is impossible. Therefore, the goal is to consider learning, in which both players learn the unknown model together. In this spirit, previous literature on PAC learning in TBSGs considers (a)~public information shared by both players; and (b)~centralized learning, which means that players share the same learning algorithm. In this work, our contribution is two-fold. First, we relax these strong assumptions and ensure learning: (i)~with private information not shared with the other player; and (ii)~decentralized learning where the players do not share the same learning algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first positive result for decentralized and private information learning of TBSGs with reachability objectives. Second, we introduce a game-theoretic generalization of the Expected Conditional Distance (ECD) parameter, which measures the expected length of reaching the target set. We establish a polynomial-sample complexity bound with respect to the number of states, actions, ECD parameter, and inverses of error tolerance and failure probability.
Finite-dimensional (FD) diffusion policies exhibit temporal drift owing to discretization artifacts that degrade long-horizon performance (when deployed on physical systems). We introduce a backward Kolmogorov equation that lifts diffusion policies to a Cameron-Martin space -- a subset of the Hilbert space. Essentially, replacing stochastic score matching with a deterministic boundary-value PDE problem. Our core innovation thrives on Gaussian measure theory whereupon the diffusion noise covariance operator is realized from a colored noise distribution which prescribes a notion of regularity on samples from the model at inference time. We train the diffusion model with a derived precision-weighted Cameron- Martin loss and a Kolmogorov residual is introduced as a PDE diagnostic during inference. These substitutions yield (i) convergence guarantees where the bound's constants depend on the effective rank of the kernel rather than action dimension, (ii) improved trajectory regularity via spectral weighting, and (iii) a deterministic failure detector without reward signals. Validation across two application domains demonstrates substantial improvements: on the PushT manipulation benchmark, the Cameron-Martin loss achieves a 17% improvement in maximum episode reward (0.95 vs. 0.78 for MSE) and 67.6% reduction in inter-step drifts during inference via the introduced residual magnitude. Similarly, on a 6-station manufacturing line with constant work-in-process (CONWIP) flow control, we achieve 28.4% lower RMSE than classical LSTM baselines; a high starvation-event recall (1.0 in test cycles), and effective bottleneck identification (Precision@1 = 1.0 in test set, 13x signal-to-noise ratio). We then certify the dispatch policies with Hamilton-Jacobi reachability theory which reduces deadlock events by 96% compared to uncontrolled dispatch over 100 simulated runs (351 events prevented).
Tim Walter, Xinyu Chen, Jonathan Külz +1cs.RO cs.LG
Many stages of the robotic lifecycle, from morphology synthesis to operation, rely fundamentally on the reachable workspace. However, current methods for approximating workspaces are slow, imprecise, or tied to a single morphology. We introduce Reachability Across Morphologies (RAM): a morphology-conditioned, implicit neural representation that acts as a fast, differentiable surrogate for pose reachability, generalising to unseen morphologies while inherently accounting for self-collisions. To train RAM, we publish a large-scale dataset of $3\cdot10^{10}$ samples generated solely from forward kinematics. Experiments show that our model achieves an $ F_1$-score of $86\%$ at nanosecond inference, outperforming the baseline by $14\%$ while reducing inference time by three orders of magnitude. We further demonstrate speed-ups of one and two orders of magnitude for gradient-based morphology and trajectory optimisation, respectively. Website: https://timwalter.github.io/ram.
Latent world models can contain the state needed for control, yet their terminal-cost interface can expose the planner to the wrong decision-relevant information. In common latent MPC, candidate sequences are ranked by Euclidean distance between predicted terminal and goal latent states; this assumes that raw latent distance weights reachability-relevant variables correctly. We propose trajectory reachability metrics (TRM), a post-hoc terminal-ranking method for fixed latent world models. TRM trains a small pairwise head from logged trajectory structure and uses it as a replacement or hybrid cost; the encoder, dynamics, sampler, optimizer, and evaluation manifests remain fixed. The key design choice is horizon-aware supervision: the metric is trained on broad, balanced temporal separations to match the long-horizon terminal candidate ranking problem. On a hard TwoRoom benchmark, raw latent planning with LeWorldModel (LeWM) reaches 7.0% success, while full-horizon TRM reaches 97.0%; shuffled temporal-label controls stay at 0.0%. The same recipe improves a PLDM baseline from 32.7% to 84.0% across three seeds, and a short-horizon TRM variant reaches only 35.0% with the 100,000 pair budget. In TwoRoom, we provide mechanistic evidence for why TRM works: XY position is linearly decodable (R^2=0.998), yet raw latent MSE misranks candidates; the XY-probe rowspace accounts for less than 1% of terminal-goal latent MSE but carries most candidate-quality signal; and SCSA audits show that TRM improves the ordering and selected endpoint seen by the planner. On PushT go50/go75, TRM-style task-state metrics improve SCSA ranking and selected final distance more cleanly than closed-loop success, motivating auxiliary hybrid costs in continuous manipulation. TRM is the planner-facing repair, and audits explain when terminal reachability metrics should replace or augment raw latent proximity.