OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Class Uncertainty Propagation in Perception-Based Motion Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are being increasingly deployed in urban environments. In order to operate safely and reliably, AVs need to account for the inherent uncertainty associated with perceiving the world through sensor data and incorporate that into their decision-making process. Uncertainty-aware planners have recently been developed to account for upstream perception and prediction uncertainty. However, such planners may be sensitive to prediction uncertainty miscalibration, the magnitude of which has not yet been characterized. Towards this end, we perform a detailed analysis on the impact that perceptual uncertainty propagation and calibration has on perception-based motion planning. We do so by comparing two novel prediction-planning pipelines with varying levels of uncertainty propagation on the recently-released nuPlan planning benchmark. We study the impact of upstream uncertainty calibration using closed-loop evaluation on the nuPlan challenge scenarios. We find that the method incorporating upstream uncertainty propagation demonstrates superior generalization to complex closed-loop scenarios.
CLAA: Cross-Layer Attention Aggregation for Accelerating LLM Prefill
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

The prefill stage in long-context LLM inference remains a computational bottleneck. Recent token-ranking heuristics accelerate inference by selectively processing a subset of semantically relevant tokens. However, existing methods suffer from unstable token importance estimation, often varying between layers. Evaluating token-ranking quality independently from heuristic-specific architectures is challenging. To address this, we introduce an Answer-Informed Oracle, which defines ground-truth token importance by measuring attention from generated answers back to the prompt. This oracle reveals that existing heuristics exhibit high variance across layers: rankings can degrade sharply at specific layers, a failure mode invisible to end-to-end benchmarks. The diagnosis suggests a simple fix: aggregate scores across layers rather than relying on any single one. We implement this as Cross-Layer Attention Aggregation (CLAA), which closes the gap to the oracle upper bound and reduces Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) by up to 39\% compared to the Full KV Cache baseline.
Can Generative Artificial Intelligence Survive Data Contamination? Theoretical Guarantees under Contaminated Recursive Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as large language models (LLMs), has become a transformative force across science, industry, and society. As these systems grow in popularity, web data becomes increasingly interwoven with this AI-generated material and it is increasingly difficult to separate them from naturally generated content. As generative models are updated regularly, later models will inevitably be trained on mixtures of human-generated data and AI-generated data from earlier versions, creating a recursive training process with data contamination. Existing theoretical work has examined only highly simplified settings, where both the real data and the generative model are discrete or Gaussian, where it has been shown that such recursive training leads to model collapse. However, real data distributions are far more complex, and modern generative models are far more flexible than Gaussian and linear mechanisms. To fill this gap, we study recursive training in a general framework with minimal assumptions on the real data distribution and allow the underlying generative model to be a general universal approximator. In this framework, we show that contaminated recursive training still converges, with a convergence rate equal to the minimum of the baseline model's convergence rate and the fraction of real data used in each iteration. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first (positive) theoretical result on recursive training without distributional assumptions on the data. We further extend the analysis to settings where sampling bias is present in data collection and support all theoretical results with empirical studies.
Access in the Shadow of Ableism: An Autoethnography of a Blind Student's Higher Education Experience in China
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

The HCI research community has witnessed a growing body of research on accessibility and disability driven by efforts to improve access. Yet, the concept of access reveals its limitations when examined within broader ableist structures. Drawing on an autoethnographic method, this study shares the co-first author Zhang's experiences at two higher-education institutions in China, including a specialized program exclusively for blind and low-vision students and a mainstream university where he was the first blind student admitted. Our analysis revealed tensions around access in both institutions: they either marginalized blind students within society at large or imposed pressures to conform to sighted norms. Both institutions were further constrained by systemic issues, including limited accessible resources, pervasive ableist cultures, and the lack of formalized policies. In response to these tensions, we conceptualize access as a contradictory construct and argue for understanding accessibility as an ongoing, exploratory practice within ableist structures.
"You Can Actually Do Something": Shifts in High School Computer Science Teachers' Conceptions of AI/ML Systems and Algorithmic Justice
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

The recent proliferation of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) systems highlights the need for all people to develop effective competencies to interact with and examine AI/ML systems. We study shifts in five experienced high school CS teachers' understanding of AI/ML systems after one year of participatory design, where they co-developed lessons on AI auditing, a systematic method to query AI/ML systems. Drawing on individual and group interviews, we found that teachers' perspectives became more situated, grounding their understanding in everyday contexts; more critical, reflecting growing awareness of harms; and more agentic, highlighting possibilities for action. Further, across all three perspectives, teachers consistently framed algorithmic justice through their role as educators, situating their concerns within their school communities. In the discussion, we consider the ways teachers' perspectives shifted, how AI auditing can shape these shifts, and the implications of these findings on AI literacy for both teachers and students.
Managing Credible Anonymous Identities in Web 3.0 Services: A Scalable On-Chain Admission Framework with Recursive Proof Aggregation
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2026
Year: 2026

Open Web 3.0 platforms increasingly operate as \emph{service ecosystems} (e.g., DeFi, DAOs, and decentralized social applications) where \emph{admission control} and \emph{account provisioning} must be delivered as an always-on service under bursty demand. Service operators face a fundamental tension: enforcing Sybil resistance (one-person-one-account) while preserving user privacy, yet keeping on-chain verification cost and admission latency predictable at scale. Existing credential-based ZK admission approaches typically require per-request on-chain verification, making the provisioning cost grow with the number of concurrent joiners. We present \textbf{ZK-AMS}, a scalable admission and provisioning layer that bridges real-world \emph{Personhood Credentials} to anonymous on-chain service accounts. ZK-AMS combines (i) zero-knowledge credential validation, (ii) a \emph{permissionless} batch submitter model, and (iii) a decentralized, privacy-preserving folding pipeline that uses Nova-style recursive aggregation together with multi-key homomorphic encryption, enabling batch settlement with \emph{constant} on-chain verification per batch. We implement ZK-AMS end-to-end on an Ethereum testbed and evaluate admission throughput, end-to-end latency, and gas consumption. Results show stable verification cost across batch sizes and substantially improved admission efficiency over non-recursive baselines, providing a practical and cost-predictable admission service for large-scale Web 3.0 communities.
CHAI: CacHe Attention Inference for text2video
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Text-to-video diffusion models deliver impressive results but remain slow because of the sequential denoising of 3D latents. Existing approaches to speed up inference either require expensive model retraining or use heuristic-based step skipping, which struggles to maintain video quality as the number of denoising steps decreases. Our work, CHAI, aims to use cross-inference caching to reduce latency while maintaining video quality. We introduce Cache Attention as an effective method for attending to shared objects/scenes across cross-inference latents. This selective attention mechanism enables effective reuse of cached latents across semantically related prompts, yielding high cache hit rates. We show that it is possible to generate high-quality videos using Cache Attention with as few as 8 denoising steps. When integrated into the overall system, CHAI is 1.65x - 3.35x faster than baseline OpenSora 1.2 while maintaining video quality.
Human-AI Collaboration in Large Language Model-Integrated Building Energy Management Systems: The Role of User Domain Knowledge and AI Literacy
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

This study aimed to comprehend how user domain knowledge and artificial intelligence (AI) literacy impact the effective use of human-AI interactive building energy management system (BEMS). While prior studies have investigated the potential of integrating large language models (LLMs) into BEMS or building energy modeling, very few studies have examined how user interact with such systems. We conducted a systematic role-playing experiment, where 85 human subjects interacted with an advanced generative pre-trained transformer (OpenAI GPT-4o). Participants were tasked with identifying the top five behavioral changes that could reduce home energy use with the GPT model that functioned as an LLM-integrated BEMS. Then, the collected prompt-response data and participant conclusions were analyzed using an analytical framework that hierarchically assessed and scored human-AI interactions and their home energy analysis approaches. Also, participants were classified into four groups based on their self-evaluated domain knowledge of building energy use and AI literacy, and Kruskal-Wallis H tests with post-hoc pairwise comparisons were conducted across 20 quantifiable metrics. Key takeaways include: most participants employed concise prompts (median: 16.2 words) and relied heavily on GPT's analytical capabilities; and notably, only 1 of 20 metrics, appliance identification rate, showed statistically significant group differences (p=0.037), driven by AI literacy rather than domain knowledge, suggesting an equalizing effect of LLMs across expertise levels. This study provides foundational insights into human-AI collaboration dynamics and promising development directions in the context of LLM-integrated BEMS and contributes to realizing human-centric LLM-integrated energy systems.
ASPEN: Spectral-Temporal Fusion for Cross-Subject Brain Decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Cross-subject generalization in EEG-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) remains challenging due to individual variability in neural signals. We investigate whether spectral representations offer more stable features for cross-subject transfer than temporal waveforms. Through correlation analyses across three EEG paradigms (SSVEP, P300, and Motor Imagery), we find that spectral features exhibit consistently higher cross-subject similarity than temporal signals. Motivated by this observation, we introduce ASPEN, a hybrid architecture that combines spectral and temporal feature streams via multiplicative fusion, requiring cross-modal agreement for features to propagate. Experiments across six benchmark datasets reveal that ASPEN is able to dynamically achieve the optimal spectral-temporal balance depending on the paradigm. ASPEN achieves the best unseen-subject accuracy on three of six datasets and competitive performance on others, demonstrating that multiplicative multimodal fusion enables effective cross-subject generalization.
Bellman-Ford in Almost-Linear Time for Dense Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2026
Year: 2026

We consider the single-source shortest paths problem on a directed graph with real-valued (possibly negative) edge weights and solve this problem in $n^{2+o(1)}$ time by refining the shortcutting procedure introduced in Li, Li, Rao, and Zhang (2026).
LLMs Exhibit Significantly Lower Uncertainty in Creative Writing Than Professional Writers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

We argue that uncertainty is a key and understudied limitation of LLMs' performance in creative writing, which is often characterized as trite and cliché-ridden. Literary theory identifies uncertainty as a necessary condition for creative expression, while current alignment strategies steer models away from uncertain outputs to ensure factuality and reduce hallucination. We formalize this tension by quantifying the "uncertainty gap" between human-authored stories and model-generated continuations. Through a controlled information-theoretic analysis of 28 LLMs on high-quality storytelling datasets, we demonstrate that human writing consistently exhibits significantly higher uncertainty than model outputs. We find that instruction-tuned and reasoning models exacerbate this trend compared to their base counterparts; furthermore, the gap is more pronounced in creative writing than in functional domains, and strongly correlates to writing quality. Achieving human-level creativity requires new uncertainty-aware alignment paradigms that can distinguish between destructive hallucinations and the constructive ambiguity required for literary richness.
HiPER: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Explicit Credit Assignment for Large Language Model Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Training LLMs as interactive agents for multi-turn decision-making remains challenging, particularly in long-horizon tasks with sparse and delayed rewards, where agents must execute extended sequences of actions before receiving meaningful feedback. Most existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches model LLM agents as flat policies operating at a single time scale, selecting one action at each turn. In sparse-reward settings, such flat policies must propagate credit across the entire trajectory without explicit temporal abstraction, which often leads to unstable optimization and inefficient credit assignment. We propose HiPER, a novel Hierarchical Plan-Execute RL framework that explicitly separates high-level planning from low-level execution. HiPER factorizes the policy into a high-level planner that proposes subgoals and a low-level executor that carries them out over multiple action steps. To align optimization with this structure, we introduce a key technique called hierarchical advantage estimation (HAE), which carefully assigns credit at both the planning and execution levels. By aggregating returns over the execution of each subgoal and coordinating updates across the two levels, HAE provides an unbiased gradient estimator and provably reduces variance compared to flat generalized advantage estimation. Empirically, HiPER achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging interactive benchmarks, reaching 97.4\% success on ALFWorld and 83.3\% on WebShop with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (+6.6\% and +8.3\% over the best prior method), with especially large gains on long-horizon tasks requiring multiple dependent subtasks. These results highlight the importance of explicit hierarchical decomposition for scalable RL training of multi-turn LLM agents.
Image Measurement Method for Automatic Insertion of Forks into Inclined Pallet
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

In order to insert a fork into a hole of a pallet by a forklift located in front of a pallet, it is necessary to control the height position, reach position, and tilt angle of the fork to match the position and orientation of the hole of the pallet. In order to make AGF (Autonomous Guided Forklift) do this automatically, we propose an image measurement method to measure the pitch inclination of the pallet in the camera coordinate system from an image obtained by using a wide-angle camera. In addition, we propose an image measurement method to easily acquire the calibration information between the camera coordinate system and the fork coordinate system necessary to apply the measurements in the camera coordinate system to the fork control. In the experiment space, a wide-angle camera was fixed at the backrest of a reach type forklift. The wide-angle images taken by placing a pallet in front of the camera were processed. As a result of evaluating the error by comparing the image measurement value with the hand measurement value when changing the pitch inclination angle of the pallet, the relative height of the pallet and the fork, and whether the pallet is loaded or not, it was confirmed that the error was within the allowable range for safely inserting the fork.
EnterpriseBench Corecraft: Training Generalizable Agents on High-Fidelity RL Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

We show that training AI agents on high-fidelity reinforcement learning environments produces capabilities that generalize beyond the training distribution. We introduce CoreCraft, the first environment in EnterpriseBench, Surge AI's suite of agentic RL environments. CoreCraft is a fully operational enterprise simulation of a customer support organization, comprising over 2,500 entities across 14 entity types with 23 unique tools, designed to measure whether AI agents can perform the multi-step, domain-specific work that real jobs demand. Frontier models such as GPT-5.2 and Claude Opus 4.6 solve fewer than 30% of tasks when all expert-authored rubric criteria must be satisfied. Using this environment, we train GLM 4.6 with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and adaptive clipping. After a single epoch of training, the model improves from 25.37% to 36.76% task pass rate on held-out evaluation tasks. More importantly, these gains transfer to out-of-distribution benchmarks: +4.5% on BFCL Parallel, +7.4% on Tau2-Bench Retail, and +6.8% on Tool Decathlon (Pass@1). We believe three environment properties are consistent with the observed transfer: task-centric world building that optimizes for diverse, challenging tasks; expert-authored rubrics enabling reliable reward computation; and enterprise workflows that reflect realistic professional patterns. Our results suggest that environment quality, diversity, and realism are key factors enabling generalizable agent capabilities.
Towards Secure and Scalable Energy Theft Detection: A Federated Learning Approach for Resource-Constrained Smart Meters
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Energy theft poses a significant threat to the stability and efficiency of smart grids, leading to substantial economic losses and operational challenges. Traditional centralized machine learning approaches for theft detection require aggregating user data, raising serious concerns about privacy and data security. These issues are further exacerbated in smart meter environments, where devices are often resource-constrained and lack the capacity to run heavy models. In this work, we propose a privacy-preserving federated learning framework for energy theft detection that addresses both privacy and computational constraints. Our approach leverages a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) model, suitable for deployment on low-power smart meters, and integrates basic differential privacy (DP) by injecting Gaussian noise into local model updates before aggregation. This ensures formal privacy guarantees without compromising learning performance. We evaluate our framework on a real-world smart meter dataset under both IID and non-IID data distributions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive accuracy, precision, recall, and AUC scores while maintaining privacy and efficiency. This makes the proposed solution practical and scalable for secure energy theft detection in next-generation smart grid infrastructures.
Rethinking Input Domains in Physics-Informed Neural Networks via Geometric Compactification Mappings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Several complex physical systems are governed by multi-scale partial differential equations (PDEs) that exhibit both smooth low-frequency components and localized high-frequency structures. Existing physics-informed neural network (PINN) methods typically train with fixed coordinate system inputs, where geometric misalignment with these structures induces gradient stiffness and ill-conditioning that hinder convergence. To address this issue, we introduce a mapping paradigm that reshapes the input coordinates through differentiable geometric compactification mappings and couples the geometric structure of PDEs with the spectral properties of residual operators. Based on this paradigm, we propose Geometric Compactification (GC)-PINN, a framework that introduces three mapping strategies for periodic boundaries, far-field scale expansion, and localized singular structures in the input domain without modifying the underlying PINN architecture. Extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that this approach yields more uniform residual distributions and higher solution accuracy on representative 1D and 2D PDEs, while improving training stability and convergence speed.
Nonplanar Model Predictive Control for Autonomous Vehicles with Recursive Sparse Gaussian Process Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

This paper proposes a nonplanar model predictive control (MPC) framework for autonomous vehicles operating on nonplanar terrain. To approximate complex vehicle dynamics in such environments, we develop a geometry-aware modeling approach that learns a residual Gaussian Process (GP). By utilizing a recursive sparse GP, the framework enables real-time adaptation to varying terrain geometry. The effectiveness of the learned model is demonstrated in a reference-tracking task using a Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controller. Validation within a custom Isaac Sim environment confirms the framework's capability to maintain high tracking accuracy on challenging 3D surfaces.
Regret and Sample Complexity of Online Q-Learning via Concentration of Stochastic Approximation with Time-Inhomogeneous Markov Chains
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

We present the first high-probability regret bound for classical online Q-learning in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes, without relying on optimism or bonus terms. We first analyze Boltzmann Q-learning with decaying temperature and show that its regret depends critically on the suboptimality gap of the MDP: for sufficiently large gaps, the regret is sublinear, while for small gaps it deteriorates and can approach linear growth. To address this limitation, we study a Smoothed $ε_n$-Greedy exploration scheme that combines $ε_n$-greedy and Boltzmann exploration, for which we prove a gap-robust regret bound of near-$\tilde{O}(N^{9/10})$. To analyze these algorithms, we develop a high-probability concentration bound for contractive Markovian stochastic approximation with iterate- and time-dependent transition dynamics. This bound may be of independent interest as the contraction factor in our bound is governed by the mixing time and is allowed to converge to one asymptotically.