OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Zero-Shot Cross-City Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Self-Supervised versus Supervised Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on multi-city datasets using supervised ImageNet-pretrained backbones, yet their ability to generalize to unseen cities remains largely unexamined. When training and evaluation data are geographically mixed, models may implicitly rely on city-specific cues, masking failure modes that would occur under real domain shifts when generalizing to new locations. In this work we investigate zero-shot cross-city generalization in end-to-end trajectory planning and ask whether self-supervised visual representations improve transfer across cities. We conduct a comprehensive study by integrating self-supervised backbones (I-JEPA, DINOv2, and MAE) into planning frameworks. We evaluate performance under strict geographic splits on nuScenes in the open-loop setting and on NAVSIM in the closed-loop evaluation protocol. Our experiments reveal a substantial generalization gap when transferring models relying on traditional supervised backbones across cities with different road topologies and driving conventions, particularly when transferring from right-side to left-side driving environments. Self-supervised representation learning reduces this gap. In open-loop evaluation, a supervised backbone exhibits severe inflation when transferring from Boston to Singapore (L2 displacement ratio 9.77x, collision ratio 19.43x), whereas domain-specific self-supervised pretraining reduces this to 1.20x and 0.75x respectively. In closed-loop evaluation, self-supervised pretraining improves PDMS by up to 4 percent for all single-city training cities. These results show that representation learning strongly influences the robustness of cross-city planning and establish zero-shot geographic transfer as a necessary test for evaluating end-to-end autonomous driving systems.
Detect Anything in Real Time: From Single-Prompt Segmentation to Multi-Class Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Recent advances in vision-language modeling have produced promptable detection and segmentation systems that accept arbitrary natural language queries at inference time. Among these, SAM3 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy by combining a ViT-H/14 backbone with cross-modal transformer decoding and learned object queries. However, SAM3 processes a single text prompt per forward pass. Detecting N categories requires N independent executions, each dominated by the 439M-parameter backbone. We present Detect Anything in Real Time (DART), a training-free framework that converts SAM3 into a real-time multi-class detector by exploiting a structural invariant: the visual backbone is class-agnostic, producing image features independent of the text prompt. This allows the backbone computation to be shared between all classes, reducing its cost from O(N) to O(1). Combined with batched multi-class decoding, detection-only inference, and TensorRT FP16 deployment, these optimizations yield 5.6x cumulative speedup at 3 classes, scaling to 25x at 80 classes, without modifying any model weight. On COCO val2017 (5,000 images, 80 classes), DART achieves 55.8 AP at 15.8 FPS (4 classes, 1008x1008) on a single RTX 4080, surpassing purpose-built open-vocabulary detectors trained on millions of box annotations. For extreme latency targets, adapter distillation with a frozen encoder-decoder achieves 38.7 AP with a 13.9 ms backbone. Code and models are available at https://github.com/mkturkcan/DART.
Verified Multi-Agent Orchestration: A Plan-Execute-Verify-Replan Framework for Complex Query Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

We present Verified Multi-Agent Orchestration (VMAO), a framework that coordinates specialized LLM-based agents through a verification-driven iterative loop. Given a complex query, our system decomposes it into a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of sub-questions, executes them through domain-specific agents in parallel, verifies result completeness via LLM-based evaluation, and adaptively replans to address gaps. The key contributions are: (1) dependency-aware parallel execution over a DAG of sub-questions with automatic context propagation, (2) verification-driven adaptive replanning that uses an LLM-based verifier as an orchestration-level coordination signal, and (3) configurable stop conditions that balance answer quality against resource usage. On 25 expert-curated market research queries, VMAO improves answer completeness from 3.1 to 4.2 and source quality from 2.6 to 4.1 (1-5 scale) compared to a single-agent baseline, demonstrating that orchestration-level verification is an effective mechanism for multi-agent quality assurance.
Bridging Discrete Marks and Continuous Dynamics: Dual-Path Cross-Interaction for Marked Temporal Point Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Predicting irregularly spaced event sequences with discrete marks poses significant challenges due to the complex, asynchronous dependencies embedded within continuous-time data streams.Existing sequential approaches capture dependencies among event tokens but ignore the continuous evolution between events, while Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (Neural ODE) methods model smooth dynamics yet fail to account for how event types influence future timing.To overcome these limitations, we propose NEXTPP, a dual-channel framework that unifies discrete and continuous representations via Event-granular Neural Evolution with Cross-Interaction for Marked Temporal Point Processes. Specifically, NEXTPP encodes discrete event marks via a self-attention mechanism, simultaneously evolving a latent continuous-time state using a Neural ODE. These parallel streams are then fused through a crossattention module to enable explicit bidirectional interaction between continuous and discrete representations. The fused representations drive the conditional intensity function of the neural Hawkes process, while an iterative thinning sampler is employed to generate future events. Extensive evaluations on five real-world datasets demonstrate that NEXTPP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models. The source code can be found at https://github.com/AONE-NLP/NEXTPP.
Leveraging Phytolith Research using Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Phytolith analysis is a crucial tool for reconstructing past vegetation and human activities, but traditional methods are severely limited by labour-intensive, time-consuming manual microscopy. To address this bottleneck, we present Sorometry: a comprehensive end-to-end artificial intelligence pipeline for the high-throughput digitisation, inference, and interpretation of phytoliths. Our workflow processes z-stacked optical microscope scans to automatically generate synchronised 2D orthoimages and 3D point clouds of individual microscopic particles. We developed a multimodal fusion model that combines ConvNeXt for 2D image analysis and PointNet++ for 3D point cloud analysis, supported by a graphical user interface for expert annotation and review. Tested on reference collections and archaeological samples from the Bolivian Amazon, our fusion model achieved a global classification accuracy of 77.9\% across 24 diagnostic morphotypes and 84.5% for segmentation quality. Crucially, the integration of 3D data proved essential for distinguishing complex morphotypes (such as grass silica short cell phytoliths) whose diagnostic features are often obscured by their orientation in 2D projections. Beyond individual object classification, Sorometry incorporates Bayesian finite mixture modelling to predict overall plant source contributions at the assemblage level, successfully identifying specific plants like maize and palms in complex mixed samples. This integrated platform transforms phytolith research into an "omics"-scale discipline, dramatically expanding analytical capacity, standardising expert judgements, and enabling reproducible, population-level characterisations of archaeological and paleoecological assemblages.
PRMB: Benchmarking Reward Models in Long-Horizon CBT-based Counseling Dialogue
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2026
Year: 2026

Large language models (LLMs) hold potential for mental healthcare applications, particularly in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-based counseling, where reward models play a critical role in aligning LLMs with preferred therapeutic behaviors. However, existing reward model evaluations often fail to capture alignment effectiveness in long-horizon interventions due to limited coverage of process-oriented datasets and misalignment between evaluation targets and psychological alignment objectives. To address these limitations, we present PRMB, a comprehensive benchmark tailored for evaluating reward models in multi-session CBT counseling. PRMB spans 6 sessions and 21 diverse negative scenarios, incorporating both pairwise and Best-of-N preference evaluations. We demonstrate a positive correlation between our benchmark and downstream counseling dialogue performance. Based on our benchmark, we conduct extensive analysis on the state-of-the-art reward models, revealing their generalization defects that were not discovered by previous benchmarks and highlighting the potential of generative reward models. Furthermore, we delve into examining the effectiveness of inference-time strategy for the evaluation of reward models and analyzing the impact factors of generative reward models. This work advances intelligent informatics for personalized healthcare by establishing a framework for reward model assessment in mental health dialogues. Evaluation code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/YouKenChaw/PRMB
Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Generalized Embedding Learning in Federated Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Federated recommender systems enable collaborative model training while keeping user interaction data local and sharing only essential model parameters, thereby mitigating privacy risks. However, existing methods overlook a critical issue, i.e., the stable learning of a generalized item embedding throughout the federated recommender system training process. Item embedding plays a central role in facilitating knowledge sharing across clients. Yet, under the cross-device setting, local data distributions exhibit significant heterogeneity and sparsity, exacerbating the difficulty of learning generalized embeddings. These factors make the stable learning of generalized item embeddings both indispensable for effective federated recommendation and inherently difficult to achieve. To fill this gap, we propose a new federated recommendation framework, named Federated Recommendation with Generalized Embedding Learning (FedRecGEL). We reformulate the federated recommendation problem from an item-centered perspective and cast it as a multi-task learning problem, aiming to learn generalized embeddings throughout the training procedure. Based on theoretical analysis, we employ sharpness-aware minimization to address the generalization problem, thereby stabilizing the training process and enhancing recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of FedRecGEL in significantly improving federated recommendation performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/anonymifish/FedRecGEL.
Gen-Fab: A Variation-Aware Generative Model for Predicting Fabrication Variations in Nanophotonic Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Silicon photonic devices often exhibit fabrication-induced variations such as over-etching, underetching, and corner rounding, which can significantly alter device performance. These variations are non-uniform and are influenced by feature size and shape. Accurate digital twins are therefore needed to predict the range of possible fabricated outcomes for a given design. In this paper, we introduce Gen-Fab, a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) based on Pix2Pix to predict and model uncertainty in photonic fabrication outcomes. The proposed method takes a design layout (in GDS format) as input and produces diverse high-resolution predictions similar to scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of fabricated devices, capturing the range of process variations at the nanometer scale. To enable one-to-many mapping, we inject a latent noise vector at the model bottleneck. We compare Gen-Fab against three baselines: (1) a deterministic U-Net predictor, (2) an inference-time Monte Carlo Dropout U-Net, and (3) an ensemble of varied U-Nets. Evaluations on an out-of-distribution dataset of fabricated photonic test structures demonstrate that Gen-Fab outperforms all baselines in both accuracy and uncertainty modeling. An additional distribution shift analysis further confirms its strong generalization to unseen fabrication geometries. Gen-Fab achieves the highest intersection-over-union (IoU) score of 89.8%, outperforming the deterministic U-Net (85.3%), the MC-Dropout U-Net (83.4%), and varying U-Nets (85.8%). It also better aligns with the distribution of real fabrication outcomes, achieving lower Kullback-Leibler divergence and Wasserstein distance.
Prediction of Grade, Gender, and Academic Performance of Children and Teenagers from Handwriting Using the Sigma-Lognormal Model
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Digital handwriting acquisition enables the capture of detailed temporal and kinematic signals reflecting the motor processes underlying writing behavior. While handwriting analysis has been extensively explored in clinical or adult populations, its potential for studying developmental and educational characteristics in children remains less investigated. In this work, we examine whether handwriting dynamics encode information related to student characteristics using a large-scale online dataset collected from Japanese students from elementary school to junior high school. We systematically compare three families of handwriting-derived features: basic statistical descriptors of kinematic signals, entropy-based measures of variability, and parameters obtained from the sigma-lognormal model. Although the dataset contains dense stroke-level recordings, features are aggregated at the student level to enable a controlled comparison between representations. These features are evaluated across three prediction tasks: grade prediction, gender classification, and academic performance classification, using Linear or Logistic Regression and Random Forest models under consistent experimental settings. The results show that handwriting dynamics contain measurable signals related to developmental stage and individual differences, especially for the grade prediction task. These findings highlight the potential of kinematic handwriting analysis and confirm that through their development, children's handwriting evolves toward a lognormal motor organization.
Multi-Task Anti-Causal Learning for Reconstructing Urban Events from Residents' Reports
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Many real-world machine learning tasks are anti-causal: they require inferring latent causes from observed effects. In practice, we often face multiple related tasks where part of the forward causal mechanism is invariant across tasks, while other components are task-specific. We propose Multi-Task Anti-Causal learning (MTAC), a framework for estimating causes from outcomes and confounders by explicitly exploiting such cross-task invariances. MTAC first performs causal discovery to learn a shared causal graph and then instantiates a structured multi-task structural equation model (SEM) that factorizes the outcome-generation process into (i) a task-invariant mechanism and (ii) task-specific mechanisms via a shared backbone with task-specific heads. Building on the learned forward model, MTAC performs maximum A posteriori (MAP)based inference to reconstruct causes by jointly optimizing latent mechanism variables and cause magnitudes under the learned causal structure. We evaluate MTAC on the application of urban event reconstruction from resident reports, spanning three tasks:parking violations, abandoned properties, and unsanitary conditions. On real-world data collected from Manhattan and the city of Newark, MTAC consistently improves reconstruction accuracy over strong baselines, achieving up to 34.61\% MAE reduction and demonstrating the benefit of learning transferable causal mechanisms across tasks.
Shadowless Projection Mapping for Tabletop Workspaces with Synthetic Aperture Projector
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Projection mapping (PM) enables augmented reality (AR) experiences without requiring users to wear head-mounted displays and supports multi-user interaction. It is regarded as a promising technology for a variety of applications in which users interact with content superimposed onto augmented objects in tabletop workspaces, including remote collaboration, healthcare, industrial design, urban planning, artwork creation, and office work. However, conventional PM systems often suffer from projection shadows when users occlude the light path. Prior approaches employing multiple distributed projectors can compensate for occlusion, but suffer from latency due to computational processing, degrading the user experience. In this research, we introduce a synthetic-aperture PM system that uses a significantly larger number of projectors, arranged densely in the environment, to achieve delay-free, shadowless projection for tabletop workspaces without requiring computational compensation. To address spatial resolution degradation caused by subpixel misalignment among overlaid projections, we develop and validate an offline blur compensation method whose computation time remains independent of the number of projectors. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our shadowless PM plays a critical role in achieving a fundamental goal of PM: altering material properties without evoking projection-like impression. Specifically, we define this perceptual impression as ``sense of projection (SoP)'' and establish a PM design framework to minimize the SoP based on user studies.
AI Knows What's Wrong But Cannot Fix It: Helicoid Dynamics in Frontier LLMs Under High-Stakes Decisions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Large language models perform reliably when their outputs can be checked: solving equations, writing code, retrieving facts. They perform differently when checking is impossible, as when a clinician chooses an irreversible treatment on incomplete data, or an investor commits capital under fundamental uncertainty. Helicoid dynamics is the name given to a specific failure regime in that second domain: a system engages competently, drifts into error, accurately names what went wrong, then reproduces the same pattern at a higher level of sophistication, recognizing it is looping and continuing nonetheless. This prospective case series documents that regime across seven leading systems (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Llama families), tested across clinical diagnosis, investment evaluation, and high-consequence interview scenarios. Despite explicit protocols designed to sustain rigorous partnership, all exhibited the pattern. When confronted with it, they attributed its persistence to structural factors in their training, beyond what conversation can reach. Under high stakes, when being rigorous and being comfortable diverge, these systems tend toward comfort, becoming less reliable precisely when reliability matters most. Twelve testable hypotheses are proposed, with implications for agentic AI oversight and human-AI collaboration. The helicoid is tractable. Identifying it, naming it, and understanding its boundary conditions are the necessary first steps toward LLMs that remain trustworthy partners precisely when the decisions are hardest and the stakes are highest.
SVLL: Staged Vision-Language Learning for Physically Grounded Embodied Task Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Embodied task planning demands vision-language models to generate action sequences that are both visually grounded and causally coherent over time. However, existing training paradigms face a critical trade-off: joint end-to-end training often leads to premature temporal binding, while standard reinforcement learning methods suffer from optimization instability. To bridge this gap, we present Staged Vision-Language Learning (SVLL), a unified three-stage framework for robust, physically-grounded embodied planning. In the first two stages, SVLL decouples spatial grounding from temporal reasoning, establishing robust visual dependency before introducing sequential action history. In the final stage, we identify a key limitation of standard Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), its purely relative nature -- optimizing only the preference gap between winning and losing trajectories while neglecting absolute likelihood constraints on optimal path, often yields unsafe or hallucinated behaviors. To address this, we further introduce Bias-DPO, a novel alignment objective that injects an inductive bias toward expert trajectories by explicitly maximizing likelihood on ground-truth actions while penalizing overconfident hallucinations. By anchoring the policy to the expert manifold and mitigating causal misalignment, SVLL, powered by Bias-DPO, ensures strict adherence to environmental affordances and effectively suppresses physically impossible shortcuts. Finally, extensive experiments on the interactive AI2-THOR benchmark and real-world robotic deployments demonstrate that SVLL outperforms both state-of-the-art open-source (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL-7B) and closed-source models (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini-2.0-flash) in task success rate, while significantly reducing physical constraint violations.
CAETC: Causal Autoencoding and Treatment Conditioning for Counterfactual Estimation over Time
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Counterfactual estimation over time is important in various applications, such as personalized medicine. However, time-dependent confounding bias in observational data still poses a significant challenge in achieving accurate and efficient estimation. We introduce causal autoencoding and treatment conditioning (CAETC), a novel method for this problem. Built on adversarial representation learning, our method leverages an autoencoding architecture to learn a partially invertible and treatment-invariant representation, where the outcome prediction task is cast as applying a treatment-specific conditioning on the representation. Our design is independent of the underlying sequence model and can be applied to existing architectures such as long short-term memories (LSTMs) or temporal convolution networks (TCNs). We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real-world data to demonstrate that CAETC yields significant improvement in counterfactual estimation over existing methods.