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    "story_id": "mp-2026-09-20-012",
    "source_story_id": "tmp-story-toia-task-oriented-learning",
    "edition_id": "mp-2026-09-20-morning-0073",
    "edition_url": "https://themachinepress.com/edition/2026-09-20",
    "position": 12,
    "story_type": "dispatch",
    "section": "robotics",
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    "headline": "The Rover Learned Only What the Route Needed",
    "slug": "the-rover-learned-only-what-the-route-needed",
    "dek": "Task-weighted information gathering improved simulated goal arrival by up to 27.4 percentage points.",
    "summary": "Task-weighted information gathering improved simulated goal arrival by up to 27.4 percentage points.",
    "body_text": "Task-Oriented Information Acquisition scores observations by how much they would reduce later uncertainty along the same model-predictive-control rollout, then weights that value by relevance to the mission. It reuses the controller’s existing rollout batch without imagining future observations or repeatedly optimizing hypothetical updates. Across held-out simulated off-road maps, it improved goal-reaching over passive residual learning by 19.3 and 27.4 percentage points and ran online at 20 hertz on an RTX 2080 Ti. The evidence is simulation-only and depends on the tested Gaussian-process residual model.",
    "why_it_matters": "Task-weighted information gathering improved simulated goal arrival by up to 27.4 percentage points.",
    "limitations": [
      "The evidence is simulation-only and depends on the tested Gaussian-process residual model."
    ],
    "importance": 8,
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    "first_published_at": "2026-09-20T09:00:00.000-04:00",
    "modified_at": "2026-09-20T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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        "text": "Task-weighted information gathering improved simulated goal arrival by up to 27.4 percentage points.",
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        "qualification": "The evidence is simulation-only and depends on the tested Gaussian-process residual model."
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    "tags": [
      "active learning",
      "predictive control",
      "off-road navigation"
    ],
    "image_url": null,
    "corrections": []
  },
  "sources": [
    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-09-20-012",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2609.19378",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19378",
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      "source_type": "primary_research",
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      "published_at": "2026-09-16T15:56:31.000-04:00",
      "accessed_at": "2026-09-20T08:23:59.913-04:00",
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  "publisher": {
    "name": "The Machine Press",
    "url": "https://themachinepress.com",
    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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  "cite_this_report": {
    "title": "The Rover Learned Only What the Route Needed",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-09-20T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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