OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Campus AI vs. Commercial AI: Comparing How Students and Employees Perceive their University's LLM Chatbot vs. ChatGPT
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

As the use of LLM chatbots by students and researchers becomes more prevalent, universities are pressed to develop AI strategies. One strategy that many universities pursue is to customize pre-trained LLM as-a-service (LLMaaS). While most studies on LLMaaS chatbots prioritize technical adaptations, we focus on psychological effects of user-salient customizations, such as interface changes. We assume that such customizations influence users' perception of the system and are therefore important in guiding safe and appropriate use. In a field study, we examine how students and employees (N = 526) at a German university perceive and use their institution's customized LLMaaS chatbot compared to ChatGPT. Participants using both systems (n = 116) reported greater trust, higher perceived privacy and less experienced hallucinations with their university's customized LLMaaS chatbot in contrast to ChatGPT. We discuss theoretical implications for research on calibrated trust, and offer guidance on the design and deployment of LLMaaS chatbots.
DISPATCH: Distilling Selective Patches for Speech Enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2026
Year: 2026

In speech enhancement, knowledge distillation (KD) compresses models by transferring a high-capacity teacher's knowledge to a compact student. However, conventional KD methods train the student to mimic the teacher's output entirely, which forces the student to imitate the regions where the teacher performs poorly and to apply distillation to the regions where the student already performs well, which yields only marginal gains. We propose Distilling Selective Patches (DISPatch), a KD framework for speech enhancement that applies the distillation loss to spectrogram patches where the teacher outperforms the student, as determined by a Knowledge Gap Score. This approach guides optimization toward areas with the most significant potential for student improvement while minimizing the influence of regions where the teacher may provide unreliable instruction. Furthermore, we introduce Multi-Scale Selective Patches (MSSP), a frequency-dependent method that uses different patch sizes across low- and high-frequency bands to account for spectral heterogeneity. We incorporate DISPatch into conventional KD methods and observe consistent gains in compact students. Moreover, integrating DISPatch and MSSP into a state-of-the-art frequency-dependent KD method considerably improves performance across all metrics.
ConCap: Practical Network Traffic Generation for (ML- and) Flow-based Intrusion Detection Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) have been studied in research for almost four decades. Yet, despite thousands of papers claiming scientific advances, a non-negligible number of recent works suggest that the findings of prior literature may be questionable. At the root of such a disagreement is the well-known challenge of obtaining data representative of a real-world network -- and, hence, usable for security assessments. We tackle such a challenge in this paper. We propose ConCap, a practical tool meant to facilitate experimental research on NIDS. Through ConCap, a researcher can set up an isolated and lightweight network environment and configure it to produce network-related data, such as packets or NetFlows, that are automatically labeled -- hence ready for fine-grained experiments. ConCap is rooted on open-source software and is designed to foster experimental reproducibility across the scientific community by sharing just one configuration file. Through comprehensive experiments on 10 different network activities, further expanded via in-depth analyses of 21 variants of two specific activities and of 100 repetitions of four other ones, we empirically verify that ConCap produces network data resembling that of a real-world network. We also carry out experiments on well-known benchmark datasets as well as on a real ``smart-home'' network, showing that, from a cyber-detection viewpoint, ConCap's automatically-labeled NetFlows are functionally equivalent to those collected in other environments. Finally, we show that ConCap enables to safely reproduce sophisticated attack chains (e.g., to test/enhance existing NIDS). Altogether, ConCap is a solution to the ``data problem'' that is plaguing NIDS research.
I-FailSense: Towards General Robotic Failure Detection with Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Language-conditioned robotic manipulation in open-world settings requires not only accurate task execution but also the ability to detect failures for robust deployment in real-world environments. Although recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have significantly improved the spatial reasoning and task-planning capabilities of robots, they remain limited in their ability to recognize their own failures. In particular, a critical yet underexplored challenge lies in detecting semantic misalignment errors, where the robot executes a task that is semantically meaningful but inconsistent with the given instruction. To address this, we propose a method for building datasets targeting Semantic Misalignment Failures detection, from existing language-conditioned manipulation datasets. We also present I-FailSense, an open-source VLM framework with grounded arbitration designed specifically for failure detection. Our approach relies on post-training a base VLM, followed by training lightweight classification heads, called FS blocks, attached to different internal layers of the VLM and whose predictions are aggregated using an ensembling mechanism. Experiments show that I-FailSense outperforms state-of-the-art VLMs, both comparable in size and larger, in detecting semantic misalignment errors. Notably, despite being trained only on semantic misalignment detection, I-FailSense generalizes to broader robotic failure categories and effectively transfers to other simulation environments and real-world with zero-shot or minimal post-training. The datasets and models are publicly released on HuggingFace (Webpage: https://clemgris.github.io/I-FailSense/).
DiffusionNFT: Online Diffusion Reinforcement with Forward Process
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to post-training language models, but its extension to diffusion models remains challenging due to intractable likelihoods. Recent works discretize the reverse sampling process to enable GRPO-style training, yet they inherit fundamental drawbacks, including solver restrictions, forward-reverse inconsistency, and complicated integration with classifier-free guidance (CFG). We introduce Diffusion Negative-aware FineTuning (DiffusionNFT), a new online RL paradigm that optimizes diffusion models directly on the forward process via flow matching. DiffusionNFT contrasts positive and negative generations to define an implicit policy improvement direction, naturally incorporating reinforcement signals into the supervised learning objective. This formulation enables training with arbitrary black-box solvers, eliminates the need for likelihood estimation, and requires only clean images rather than sampling trajectories for policy optimization. DiffusionNFT is up to $25\times$ more efficient than FlowGRPO in head-to-head comparisons, while being CFG-free. For instance, DiffusionNFT improves the GenEval score from 0.24 to 0.98 within 1k steps, while FlowGRPO achieves 0.95 with over 5k steps and additional CFG employment. By leveraging multiple reward models, DiffusionNFT significantly boosts the performance of SD3.5-Medium in every benchmark tested.
When Bugs Linger: A Study of Anomalous Resolution Time Outliers and Their Themes
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2026
Year: 2026

Efficient bug resolution is critical for maintaining software quality and user satisfaction. However, specific bug reports experience unusually long resolution times, which may indicate underlying process inefficiencies or complex issues. This study presents a comprehensive analysis of bug resolution anomalies across seven prominent open-source repositories: Cassandra, Firefox, Hadoop, HBase, SeaMonkey, Spark, and Thunderbird. Utilizing statistical methods such as Z-score and Interquartile Range (IQR), we identify anomalies in bug resolution durations. To understand the thematic nature of these anomalies, we apply Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) for textual feature extraction and KMeans clustering to group similar bug summaries. Our findings reveal consistent patterns across projects, with anomalies often clustering around test failures, enhancement requests, and user interface issues. This approach provides actionable insights for project maintainers to prioritize and effectively address long-standing bugs.
Designing Culturally Aligned AI Systems For Social Good in Non-Western Contexts
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

AI technologies are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as education, healthcare, law, and agriculture to address complex challenges in non-Western contexts. This paper examines eight real-world deployments spanning seven countries and 18 languages, combining 17 interviews with AI developers and domain experts with secondary research. Our findings identify six cross-cutting factors - Language, Institution, Safety, Task, End-User Demography, and Domain - that structured how systems were designed and deployed. These factors were shaped by Sociocultural (diversity, practices), Institutional (resources, policies), and Technological (capabilities, limits) influences. We find that building effective AI systems required extensive collaboration between AI developers and domain experts, with human resources proving more critical to achieving safe and effective outcomes in high-stakes domains than technological expertise alone. Additionally, we present 12 guidelines synthesizing these dynamics for designing AI for social good systems that are culturally grounded, equitable, and responsive to the needs of non-Western contexts.
Towards an Adaptive Social Game-Playing Robot: An Offline Reinforcement Learning-Based Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

HRI research increasingly demands robots that go beyond task execution to respond meaningfully to user emotions. This is especially needed when supporting students with learning difficulties in game-based learning scenarios. Here, the objective of these robots is to train users with game-playing skills, and this requires robots to get input about users' interests and engagement. In this paper, we present a system for an adaptive social game-playing robot. However, creating such an agent through online RL requires extensive real-world training data and potentially be uncomfortable for users. To address this, we investigate offline RL as a safe and efficient alternative. We introduce a system architecture that integrates multimodal emotion recognition and adaptive robotic responses. We also evaluate the performance of various offline RL algorithms using a dataset collected from a real-world human-robot game-playing scenario. Our results indicate that BCQ and DDQN offer the greatest robustness to hyperparameter variations, whereas CQL is the most effective at mitigating overestimation bias. Through this research, we aim to inform the selection and design of reliable offline RL policies for real-world social robotics. Ultimately, this work provides a foundational step toward creating socially intelligent agents that can learn complex and emotion-adaptive behaviors entirely from offline datasets, ensuring both human comfort and practical scalability.
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of Vision Foundation Models for Atypical Mitotic Figure Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Atypical mitotic figures (AMFs) are rare abnormal cell divisions associated with tumor aggressiveness and poor prognosis. Their detection remains a significant challenge due to subtle morphological cues, class imbalance, and inter-observer variability among pathologists. The MIDOG 2025 challenge introduced a dedicated track for atypical mitosis classification, enabling systematic evaluation of deep learning methods. In this study, we investigated the use of large vision foundation models, including Virchow, Virchow2, and UNI, with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. We conducted extensive experiments with different LoRA ranks, as well as random and group-based data splits, to analyze robustness under varied conditions. Our best approach, Virchow with LoRA rank 8 and ensemble of three-fold cross-validation, achieved a balanced accuracy of 88.37% on the preliminary test set, ranking joint 9th in the challenge leaderboard. These results highlight the promise of foundation models with efficient adaptation strategies for the classification of atypical mitosis, while underscoring the need for improvements in specificity and domain generalization.
The SAGES Critical View of Safety Challenge: A Global Benchmark for AI-Assisted Surgical Quality Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for surgical quality assessment promise to democratize access to expertise, with applications in training, guidance, and accreditation. This study presents the SAGES Critical View of Safety (CVS) Challenge, the first AI competition organized by a surgical society, using the CVS in laparoscopic cholecystectomy, a universally recommended yet inconsistently performed safety step, as an exemplar of surgical quality assessment. A global collaboration across 54 institutions in 24 countries engaged hundreds of clinicians and engineers to curate 1,000 videos annotated by 20 surgical experts according to a consensus-validated protocol. The challenge addressed key barriers to real-world deployment in surgery, including achieving high performance, capturing uncertainty in subjective assessment, and ensuring robustness to clinical variability. To enable this scale of effort, we developed EndoGlacier, a framework for managing large, heterogeneous surgical video and multi-annotator workflows. Thirteen international teams participated, achieving up to a 17% relative gain in assessment performance, over 80% reduction in calibration error, and a 17% relative improvement in robustness over the state-of-the-art. Analysis of results highlighted methodological trends linked to model performance, providing guidance for future research toward robust, clinically deployable AI for surgical quality assessment.
Event-Based Visual Teach-and-Repeat via Fast Fourier-Domain Cross-Correlation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Visual teach-and-repeat (VT&R) navigation enables robots to autonomously traverse previously demonstrated paths using visual feedback. We present a novel event-camera-based VT\&R system. Our system formulates event-stream matching as frequency-domain cross-correlation, transforming spatial convolutions into efficient Fourier-space multiplications. By exploiting the binary structure of event frames and applying image compression techniques, we achieve a processing latency of just 2.88 ms, about 3.5 times faster than conventional camera-based baselines that are optimised for runtime efficiency. Experiments using a Prophesee EVK4 HD event camera mounted on an AgileX Scout Mini robot demonstrate successful autonomous navigation across 3000+ meters of indoor and outdoor trajectories in daytime and nighttime conditions. Our system maintains Cross-Track Errors (XTE) below 15 cm, demonstrating the practical viability of event-based perception for real-time VT\&R navigation.
Autiverse: Eliciting Autistic Adolescents' Daily Narratives through AI-guided Multimodal Journaling
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Journaling can potentially serve as an effective method for autistic adolescents to improve narrative skills. However, its text-centric nature and high executive functioning demands present barriers to practice. We present Autiverse, an AI-guided multimodal journaling app for tablets that scaffolds daily narratives through conversational prompts and visual supports. Autiverse elicits key details of an adolescent-selected event through a stepwise dialogue with peer-like, customizable AI and composes them into an editable four-panel comic strip. Through a two-week deployment study with 10 autistic adolescent-parent dyads, we examine how Autiverse supports autistic adolescents to organize their daily experience and emotion. Our findings show Autiverse scaffolded adolescents' coherent narratives, while enabling parents to learn additional details of their child's events and emotions. Moreover, the customized AI peer created a comfortable space for sharing, fostering enjoyment and a strong sense of agency. Drawing on these results, we discuss implications for adaptive scaffolding across autism profiles, socio-emotionally appropriate AI peer design, and balancing autonomy with parental involvement.
AuditoryBench++: Can Language Models Understand Auditory Knowledge without Hearing?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Even without directly hearing sounds, humans can effortlessly reason about auditory properties, such as pitch, loudness, or sound-source associations, drawing on auditory commonsense. In contrast, language models often lack this capability, limiting their effectiveness in multimodal interactions. As an initial step to address this gap, we present AuditoryBench++, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating auditory knowledge and reasoning in text-only settings. The benchmark encompasses tasks that range from basic auditory comparisons to contextually grounded reasoning, enabling fine-grained analysis of how models process and integrate auditory concepts. In addition, we introduce AIR-CoT, a novel auditory imagination reasoning method that generates and integrates auditory information during inference through span detection with special tokens and knowledge injection. Extensive experiments with recent LLMs and Multimodal LLMs demonstrate that AIR-CoT generally outperforms both the off-the-shelf models and those augmented with auditory knowledge. The project page is available at https://auditorybenchpp.github.io.
Depth Edge Alignment Loss: DEALing with Depth in Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Autonomous robotic systems applied to new domains require an abundance of expensive, pixel-level dense labels to train robust semantic segmentation models under full supervision. This study proposes a model-agnostic Depth Edge Alignment Loss to improve Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation models across different datasets. The methodology generates pixel-level semantic labels from image-level supervision, avoiding expensive annotation processes. While weak supervision is widely explored in traditional computer vision, our approach adds supervision with pixel-level depth information, a modality commonly available in robotic systems. We demonstrate how our approach improves segmentation performance across datasets and models, but can also be combined with other losses for even better performance, with improvements up to +5.439, +1.274 and +16.416 points in mean Intersection over Union on the PASCAL VOC / MS COCO validation, and the HOPE static onboarding split, respectively. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/DTU-PAS/DEAL.
Trust Me, I Can Convince You: The Contextualized Argument Appraisal Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Emotions that somebody develops based on an argument do not only depend on the argument itself - they are also influenced by a subjective evaluation of the argument's potential impact on the self. For instance, an argument to ban plastic bottles might cause fear of losing a job for a bottle industry worker, which lowers the convincingness - presumably independent of its content. While binary emotionality of arguments has been studied, such cognitive appraisal models have only been proposed in other subtasks of emotion analysis, but not in the context of arguments and their convincingness. To fill this research gap, we propose the Contextualized Argument Appraisal Framework to model the interplay between the sender, receiver, and argument. We adapt established appraisal models from psychology to argument mining, including argument pleasantness, familiarity, response urgency, and expected effort, as well as convincingness variables. To evaluate the framework and pave the way for computational modeling, we develop a novel role-playing-based annotation setup, mimicking real-world exposure to arguments. Participants disclose their emotion, explain the main cause, the argument appraisal, and the perceived convincingness. To consider the subjective nature of such annotations, we also collect demographic data and personality traits of both the participants and ask them to disclose the same variables for their perception of the argument sender. The analysis of the resulting ContArgA corpus of 4000 annotations reveals that convincingness is positively correlated with positive emotions (e.g., trust) and negatively correlated with negative emotions (e.g., anger). The appraisal variables particularly point to the importance of the annotator's familiarity with the argument.
Intra-Cluster Mixup: An Effective Data Augmentation Technique for Complementary-Label Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

In this paper, we investigate the challenges of complementary-label learning (CLL), a specialized form of weakly-supervised learning (WSL) where models are trained with labels indicating classes to which instances do not belong, rather than standard ordinary labels. This alternative supervision is appealing because collecting complementary labels is generally cheaper and less labor-intensive. Although most existing research in CLL emphasizes the development of novel loss functions, the potential of data augmentation in this domain remains largely underexplored. In this work, we uncover that the widely-used Mixup data augmentation technique is ineffective when directly applied to CLL. Through in-depth analysis, we identify that the complementary-label noise generated by Mixup negatively impacts the performance of CLL models. We then propose an improved technique called Intra-Cluster Mixup (ICM), which only synthesizes augmented data from nearby examples, to mitigate the noise effect. ICM carries the benefits of encouraging complementary label sharing of nearby examples, and leads to substantial performance improvements across synthetic and real-world labeled datasets. In particular, our wide spectrum of experimental results on both balanced and imbalanced CLL settings justifies the potential of ICM in allying with state-of-the-art CLL algorithms, achieving significant accuracy increases of 30% and 10% on MNIST and CIFAR datasets, respectively.