OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
FIRE-VLM: A Vision-Language-Driven Reinforcement Learning Framework for UAV Wildfire Tracking in a Physics-Grounded Fire Digital Twin
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Wildfire monitoring demands autonomous systems capable of reasoning under extreme visual degradation, rapidly evolving physical dynamics, and scarce real-world training data. Existing UAV navigation approaches rely on simplified simulators and supervised perception pipelines, and lack embodied agents interacting with physically realistic fire environments. We introduce FIRE-VLM, the first end-to-end vision-language model (VLM) guided reinforcement learning (RL) framework trained entirely within a high-fidelity, physics-grounded wildfire digital twin. Built from USGS Digital Elevation Model (DEM) terrain, LANDFIRE fuel inventories, and semi-physical fire-spread solvers, this twin captures terrain-induced runs, wind-driven acceleration, smoke plume occlusion, and dynamic fuel consumption. Within this environment, a PPO agent with dual-view UAV sensing is guided by a CLIP-style VLM. Wildfire-specific semantic alignment scores, derived from a single prompt describing active fire and smoke plumes, are integrated as potential-based reward shaping signals. Our contributions are: (1) a GIS-to-simulation pipeline for constructing wildfire digital twins; (2) a VLM-guided RL agent for UAV firefront tracking; and (3) a wildfire-aware reward design that combines physical terms with VLM semantics. Across five digital-twin evaluation tasks, our VLM-guided policy reduces time-to-detection by up to 6 times, increases time-in-FOV, and is, to our knowledge, the first RL-based UAV wildfire monitoring system demonstrated in kilometer-scale, physics-grounded digital-twin fires.
Automated Feedback Generation for Undergraduate Mathematics: Development and Evaluation of an AI Teaching Assistant
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

Intelligent tutoring systems have long enabled automated immediate feedback on student work when it is presented in a tightly structured format and when problems are very constrained, but reliably assessing free-form mathematical reasoning remains challenging. We present a system that processes free-form natural language input, handles a wide range of edge cases, and comments competently not only on the technical correctness of submitted proofs, but also on style and presentation issues. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches to the evaluation of such a system, and show that by the metrics we evaluate, the quality of the feedback generated is comparable to that produced by human experts when assessing early undergraduate homework. We stress-test our system with a small set of more advanced and unusual questions, and report both significant gaps and encouraging successes in that more challenging setting. Our system uses large language models in a modular workflow. The workflow configuration is human-readable and editable without programming knowledge, and allows some intermediate steps to be precomputed or injected by the instructor. A version of our tool is deployed on the Imperial mathematics homework platform Lambdafeedback. We report also on the integration of our tool into this platform.
FROST-Drive: Scalable and Efficient End-to-End Driving with a Frozen Vision Encoder
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

End-to-end (E2E) models in autonomous driving aim to directly map sensor inputs to control commands, but their ability to generalize to novel and complex scenarios remains a key challenge. The common practice of fully fine-tuning the vision encoder on driving datasets potentially limits its generalization by causing the model to specialize too heavily in the training data. This work challenges the necessity of this training paradigm. We propose FROST-Drive, a novel E2E architecture designed to preserve and leverage the powerful generalization capabilities of a pretrained vision encoder from a Vision-Language Model (VLM). By keeping the encoder's weights frozen, our approach directly transfers the rich, generalized world knowledge from the VLM to the driving task. Our model architecture combines this frozen encoder with a transformer-based adapter for multimodal fusion and a GRU-based decoder for smooth waypoint generation. Furthermore, we introduce a custom loss function designed to directly optimize for Rater Feedback Score (RFS), a metric that prioritizes robust trajectory planning. We conduct extensive experiments on Waymo Open E2E Dataset, a large-scale datasets deliberately curated to capture the long-tail scenarios, demonstrating that our frozen-encoder approach significantly outperforms models that employ full fine-tuning. Our results provide substantial evidence that preserving the broad knowledge of a capable VLM is a more effective strategy for achieving robust, generalizable driving performance than intensive domain-specific adaptation. This offers a new pathway for developing vision-based models that can better handle the complexities of real-world application domains.
Personalization of Large Foundation Models for Health Interventions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Large foundation models (LFMs) transform healthcare AI in prevention, diagnostics, and treatment. However, whether LFMs can provide truly personalized treatment recommendations remains an open question. Recent research has revealed multiple challenges for personalization, including the fundamental generalizability paradox: models achieving high accuracy in one clinical study perform at chance level in others, demonstrating that personalization and external validity exist in tension. This exemplifies broader contradictions in AI-driven healthcare: the privacy-performance paradox, scale-specificity paradox, and the automation-empathy paradox. As another challenge, the degree of causal understanding required for personalized recommendations, as opposed to mere predictive capacities of LFMs, remains an open question. N-of-1 trials -- crossover self-experiments and the gold standard for individual causal inference in personalized medicine -- resolve these tensions by providing within-person causal evidence while preserving privacy through local experimentation. Despite their impressive capabilities, this paper argues that LFMs cannot replace N-of-1 trials. We argue that LFMs and N-of-1 trials are complementary: LFMs excel at rapid hypothesis generation from population patterns using multimodal data, while N-of-1 trials excel at causal validation for a given individual. We propose a hybrid framework that combines the strengths of both to enable personalization and navigate the identified paradoxes: LFMs generate ranked intervention candidates with uncertainty estimates, which trigger subsequent N-of-1 trials. Clarifying the boundary between prediction and causation and explicitly addressing the paradoxical tensions are essential for responsible AI integration in personalized medicine.
From Bits to Chips: An LLM-based Hardware-Aware Quantization Agent for Streamlined Deployment of LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Deploying models, especially large language models (LLMs), is becoming increasingly attractive to a broader user base, including those without specialized expertise. However, due to the resource constraints of certain hardware, maintaining high accuracy with larger model while meeting the hardware requirements remains a significant challenge. Model quantization technique helps mitigate memory and compute bottlenecks, yet the added complexities of tuning and deploying quantized models further exacerbates these challenges, making the process unfriendly to most of the users. We introduce the Hardware-Aware Quantization Agent (HAQA), an automated framework that leverages LLMs to streamline the entire quantization and deployment process by enabling efficient hyperparameter tuning and hardware configuration, thereby simultaneously improving deployment quality and ease of use for a broad range of users. Our results demonstrate up to a 2.3x speedup in inference, along with increased throughput and improved accuracy compared to unoptimized models on Llama. Additionally, HAQA is designed to implement adaptive quantization strategies across diverse hardware platforms, as it automatically finds optimal settings even when they appear counterintuitive, thereby reducing extensive manual effort and demonstrating superior adaptability. Code will be released.
Reasoning Pattern Alignment Merging for Adaptive Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Recent large reasoning models (LRMs) have made substantial progress in complex reasoning tasks, yet they often generate lengthy reasoning paths for every query, incurring unnecessary computation and latency. Existing speed-up approaches typically rely on retraining the model or designing sophisticated prompting, which are either prohibitively expensive or highly sensitive to the input and prompt formulation. In this work, we study model merging as a lightweight alternative for efficient reasoning: by combining a long chain-of-thought (Long-CoT) reasoning model with a Short-CoT instruction model, we obtain an adaptive reasoner without training from scratch or requiring large-scale additional data. Building on this idea, we propose Reasoning Pattern Alignment Merging (RPAM), a layer-wise model merging framework based on feature alignment to facilitate query-adaptive reasoning. RPAM first constructs a small pattern-labeled calibration set that assigns each query an appropriate reasoning pattern. It then optimizes layer-wise merging coefficients by aligning the merged model's intermediate representations with those of the selected model, while a contrastive objective explicitly pushes them away from the non-selected model. Experiments on seven widely used reasoning benchmarks show that RPAM substantially reduces inference cost while maintaining strong performance. Upon article acceptance, we will provide open-source code to reproduce experiments for RPAM.
A Critical Analysis of the Medibank Health Data Breach and Differential Privacy Solutions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

This paper critically examines the 2022 Medibank health insurance data breach, which exposed sensitive medical records of 9.7 million individuals due to unencrypted storage, centralized access, and the absence of privacy-preserving analytics. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose an entropy-aware differential privacy (DP) framework that integrates Laplace and Gaussian mechanisms with adaptive budget allocation. The design incorporates TLS-encrypted database access, field-level mechanism selection, and smooth sensitivity models to mitigate re-identification risks. Experimental validation was conducted using synthetic Medibank datasets (N = 131,000) with entropy-calibrated DP mechanisms, where high-entropy attributes received stronger noise injection. Results demonstrate a 90.3% reduction in re-identification probability while maintaining analytical utility loss below 24%. The framework further aligns with GDPR Article 32 and Australian Privacy Principle 11.1, ensuring regulatory compliance. By combining rigorous privacy guarantees with practical usability, this work contributes a scalable and technically feasible solution for healthcare data protection, offering a pathway toward resilient, trustworthy, and regulation-ready medical analytics.
Bootstrapping Code Translation with Weighted Multilanguage Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2026
Year: 2026

Code translation across multiple programming languages is essential yet challenging due to two vital obstacles: scarcity of parallel data paired with executable test oracles, and optimization imbalance when handling diverse language pairs. We propose BootTrans, a bootstrapping method that resolves both obstacles. Its key idea is to leverage the functional invariance and cross-lingual portability of test suites, adapting abundant pivot-language unit tests to serve as universal verification oracles for multilingual RL training. Our method introduces a dual-pool architecture with seed and exploration pools to progressively expand training data via execution-guided experience collection. Furthermore, we design a language-aware weighting mechanism that dynamically prioritizes harder translation directions based on relative performance across sibling languages, mitigating optimization imbalance. Extensive experiments on the HumanEval-X and TransCoder-Test benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements over baseline LLMs across all translation directions, with ablations validating the effectiveness of both bootstrapping and weighting components.
Deploy-Master: Automating the Deployment of 50,000+ Agent-Ready Scientific Tools in One Day
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2026
Year: 2026

Open-source scientific software is abundant, yet most tools remain difficult to compile, configure, and reuse, sustaining a small-workshop mode of scientific computing. This deployment bottleneck limits reproducibility, large-scale evaluation, and the practical integration of scientific tools into modern AI-for-Science (AI4S) and agentic workflows. We present Deploy-Master, a one-stop agentic workflow for large-scale tool discovery, build specification inference, execution-based validation, and publication. Guided by a taxonomy spanning 90+ scientific and engineering domains, our discovery stage starts from a recall-oriented pool of over 500,000 public repositories and progressively filters it to 52,550 executable tool candidates under license- and quality-aware criteria. Deploy-Master transforms heterogeneous open-source repositories into runnable, containerized capabilities grounded in execution rather than documentation claims. In a single day, we performed 52,550 build attempts and constructed reproducible runtime environments for 50,112 scientific tools. Each successful tool is validated by a minimal executable command and registered in SciencePedia for search and reuse, enabling direct human use and optional agent-based invocation. Beyond delivering runnable tools, we report a deployment trace at the scale of 50,000 tools, characterizing throughput, cost profiles, failure surfaces, and specification uncertainty that become visible only at scale. These results explain why scientific software remains difficult to operationalize and motivate shared, observable execution substrates as a foundation for scalable AI4S and agentic science.
A Reinforcement Learning-Based Model for Mapping and Goal-Directed Navigation Using Multiscale Place Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2026
Year: 2026

Autonomous navigation in complex and partially observable environments remains a central challenge in robotics. Several bio-inspired models of mapping and navigation based on place cells in the mammalian hippocampus have been proposed. This paper introduces a new robust model that employs parallel layers of place fields at multiple spatial scales, a replay-based reward mechanism, and dynamic scale fusion. Simulations show that the model improves path efficiency and accelerates learning compared to single-scale baselines, highlighting the value of multiscale spatial representations for adaptive robot navigation.
A Tool for Estimating Success Rates of Raycasting-Based Object Selection in Virtual Reality
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

As XR devices become widespread, 3D interaction has become commonplace, and UI developers are increasingly required to consider usability to deliver better user experiences. The HCI community has long studied target-pointing performance, and research on 3D environments has progressed substantially. However, for practitioners to directly leverage research findings in UI improvements, practical tools are needed. To bridge this gap between research and development in VR systems, we propose a system that estimates object selection success rates within a development tool (Unity). In this paper, we validate the underlying theory, describe the tool's functions, and report feedback from VR developers who tried the tool to assess its usefulness.
Layer-Order Inversion: Rethinking Latent Multi-Hop Reasoning in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Large language models (LLMs) perform well on multi-hop reasoning, yet how they internally compose multiple facts remains unclear. Recent work proposes \emph{hop-aligned circuit hypothesis}, suggesting that bridge entities are computed sequentially across layers before later-hop answers. Through systematic analyses on real-world multi-hop queries, we show that this hop-aligned assumption does not generalize: later-hop answer entities can become decodable earlier than bridge entities, a phenomenon we call \emph{layer-order inversion}, which strengthens with total hops. To explain this behavior, we propose a \emph{probabilistic recall-and-extract} framework that models multi-hop reasoning as broad probabilistic recall in shallow MLP layers followed by selective extraction in deeper attention layers. This framework is empirically validated through systematic probing analyses, reinterpreting prior layer-wise decoding evidence, explaining chain-of-thought gains, and providing a mechanistic diagnosis of multi-hop failures despite correct single-hop knowledge. Code is available at https://github.com/laquabe/Layer-Order-Inversion.
Dissolving a Digital Relationship: A Critical Examination of Digital Severance Behaviours in Close Relationships
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

Fulfilling social connections are crucial for human well-being and belonging, but not all relationships last forever. As interactions increasingly move online, the act of digitally severing a relationship - e.g. through blocking or unfriending - has become progressively more common as well. This study considers actions of "digital severance" through interviews with 30 participants with experience as the initiator and/or recipient of such situations. Through a critical interpretative lens, we explore how people perceive and interpret their severance experience and how the online setting of social media shapes these dynamics. We develop themes that position digital severance as being intertwined with power and control, and we highlight (im)balances between an individual's desires that can lead to feelings of disempowerment and ambiguous loss for both parties. We discuss the implications of our research, outlining three key tensions and four open questions regarding digital relationships, meaning-making, and design outcomes for future exploration.
How Do Large Language Models Learn Concepts During Continual Pre-Training?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Human beings primarily understand the world through concepts (e.g., dog), abstract mental representations that structure perception, reasoning, and learning. However, how large language models (LLMs) acquire, retain, and forget such concepts during continual pretraining remains poorly understood. In this work, we study how individual concepts are acquired and forgotten, as well as how multiple concepts interact through interference and synergy. We link these behavioral dynamics to LLMs' internal Concept Circuits, computational subgraphs associated with specific concepts, and incorporate Graph Metrics to characterize circuit structure. Our analysis reveals: (1) LLMs concept circuits provide a non-trivial, statistically significant signal of concept learning and forgetting; (2) Concept circuits exhibit a stage-wise temporal pattern during continual pretraining, with an early increase followed by gradual decrease and stabilization; (3) concepts with larger learning gains tend to exhibit greater forgetting under subsequent training; (4) semantically similar concepts induce stronger interference than weakly related ones; (5) conceptual knowledge differs in their transferability, with some significantly facilitating the learning of others. Together, our findings offer a circuit-level view of concept learning dynamics and inform the design of more interpretable and robust concept-aware training strategies for LLMs.
PsychEthicsBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Against Australian Mental Health Ethics
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

The increasing integration of large language models (LLMs) into mental health applications necessitates robust frameworks for evaluating professional safety alignment. Current evaluative approaches primarily rely on refusal-based safety signals, which offer limited insight into the nuanced behaviors required in clinical practice. In mental health, clinically inadequate refusals can be perceived as unempathetic and discourage help-seeking. To address this gap, we move beyond refusal-centric metrics and introduce \texttt{PsychEthicsBench}, the first principle-grounded benchmark based on Australian psychology and psychiatry guidelines, designed to evaluate LLMs' ethical knowledge and behavioral responses through multiple-choice and open-ended tasks with fine-grained ethicality annotations. Empirical results across 14 models reveal that refusal rates are poor indicators of ethical behavior, revealing a significant divergence between safety triggers and clinical appropriateness. Notably, we find that domain-specific fine-tuning can degrade ethical robustness, as several specialized models underperform their base backbones in ethical alignment. PsychEthicsBench provides a foundation for systematic, jurisdiction-aware evaluation of LLMs in mental health, encouraging more responsible development in this domain.
Controllable LLM Reasoning via Sparse Autoencoder-Based Steering
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit human-like cognitive reasoning strategies (e.g. backtracking, cross-verification) during reasoning process, which improves their performance on complex tasks. Currently, reasoning strategies are autonomously selected by LRMs themselves. However, such autonomous selection often produces inefficient or even erroneous reasoning paths. To make reasoning more reliable and flexible, it is important to develop methods for controlling reasoning strategies. Existing methods struggle to control fine-grained reasoning strategies due to conceptual entanglement in LRMs' hidden states. To address this, we leverage Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to decompose strategy-entangled hidden states into a disentangled feature space. To identify the few strategy-specific features from the vast pool of SAE features, we propose SAE-Steering, an efficient two-stage feature identification pipeline. SAE-Steering first recalls features that amplify the logits of strategy-specific keywords, filtering out over 99\% of features, and then ranks the remaining features by their control effectiveness. Using the identified strategy-specific features as control vectors, SAE-Steering outperforms existing methods by over 15\% in control effectiveness. Furthermore, controlling reasoning strategies can redirect LRMs from erroneous paths to correct ones, achieving a 7\% absolute accuracy improvement.