OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
CityLens: Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models for Urban Socioeconomic Sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Understanding urban socioeconomic conditions through visual data is a challenging yet essential task for sustainable urban development and policy planning. In this work, we introduce \textit{CityLens}, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in predicting socioeconomic indicators from satellite and street view imagery. We construct a multi-modal dataset covering a total of 17 globally distributed cities, spanning 6 key domains: economy, education, crime, transport, health, and environment, reflecting the multifaceted nature of urban life. Based on this dataset, we define 11 prediction tasks and utilize 3 evaluation paradigms: Direct Metric Prediction, Normalized Metric Estimation, and Feature-Based Regression. We benchmark 17 state-of-the-art LVLMs across these tasks. These make CityLens the most extensive socioeconomic benchmark to date in terms of geographic coverage, indicator diversity, and model scale. Our results reveal that while LVLMs demonstrate promising perceptual and reasoning capabilities, they still exhibit limitations in predicting urban socioeconomic indicators. CityLens provides a unified framework for diagnosing these limitations and guiding future efforts in using LVLMs to understand and predict urban socioeconomic patterns. The code and data are available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/CityLens.
HouseTS: A Large-Scale, Multimodal Spatiotemporal U.S. Housing Dataset and Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Accurate long-horizon house-price forecasting requires benchmarks that capture temporal dynamics together with time-varying local context. However, existing public resources remain fragmented: many datasets have limited spatial coverage, temporal depth, or multimodal alignment; the robustness of modern deep forecasters and time-series foundation models on housing data is not well characterized; and aerial imagery is rarely leveraged in a time-aware and interpretable manner at scale. To bridge these gaps, we present HouseTS (House Time Series), a multimodal spatiotemporal dataset for ZIP-code-level housing-market analysis, covering monthly signals from March 2012 to December 2023 across over 6,000 ZIP codes in 30 major U.S. metropolitan areas. HouseTS aligns monthly housing-market indicators, monthly POI dynamics, and annual census-based socioeconomic variables under a unified schema, and includes time-stamped annual aerial imagery. Building on HouseTS, we define standardized long-horizon forecasting tasks for univariate and multivariate prediction and benchmark 16 model families spanning statistical methods, classical machine learning, deep neural networks, and time-series foundation models in both zero-shot and fine-tuned modes. We also provide image-derived textual change annotations from multi-year aerial image sequences via a vision--language pipeline with LLM-as-judge and human verification to support scalable interpretability analyses. HouseTS is available on Kaggle, with code and documentation on GitHub.
DriveMind: A Dual Visual Language Model-based Reinforcement Learning Framework for Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

End-to-end autonomous driving systems map sensor data directly to control commands, but remain opaque, lack interpretability, and offer no formal safety guarantees. While recent vision-language-guided reinforcement learning (RL) methods introduce semantic feedback, they often rely on static prompts and fixed objectives, limiting adaptability to dynamic driving scenes. We present DriveMind, a unified semantic reward framework that integrates: (i) a contrastive Vision-Language Model (VLM) encoder for stepwise semantic anchoring; (ii) a novelty-triggered VLM encoder-decoder, fine-tuned via chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation, for dynamic prompt generation upon semantic drift; (iii) a hierarchical safety module enforcing kinematic constraints (e.g., speed, lane centering, stability); and (iv) a compact predictive world model to reward alignment with anticipated ideal states. DriveMind achieves 19.4 +/- 2.3 km/h average speed, 0.98 +/- 0.03 route completion, and near-zero collisions in CARLA Town 2, outperforming baselines by over 4% in success rate. Its semantic reward generalizes zero-shot to real dash-cam data with minimal distributional shift, demonstrating robust cross-domain alignment and potential for real-world deployment.
Position: Agent Should Invoke External Tools ONLY When Epistemically Necessary
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

As large language models evolve into tool-augmented agents, a central question remains unresolved: when is external tool use actually justified? Existing agent frameworks typically treat tools as ordinary actions and optimize for task success or reward, offering little principled distinction between epistemically necessary interaction and unnecessary delegation. This position paper argues that agents should invoke external tools only when epistemically necessary. Here, epistemic necessity means that a task cannot be completed reliably via the agent's internal reasoning over its current context, without any external interaction. We introduce the Theory of Agent (ToA), a framework that treats agents as making sequential decisions about whether remaining uncertainty should be resolved internally or delegated externally. From this perspective, common agent failure modes (e.g., overthinking and overacting) arise from miscalibrated decisions under uncertainty rather than deficiencies in reasoning or tool execution alone. We further discuss implications for training, evaluation, and agent design, highlighting that unnecessary delegation not only causes inefficiency but can impede the development of internal reasoning capability. Our position provides a normative criterion for tool use that complements existing decision-theoretic models and is essential for building agents that are not only correct, but increasingly intelligent.
General search techniques without common knowledge for imperfect-information games, and application to superhuman Fog of War chess
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2026
Year: 2026

Since the advent of AI, games have served as progress benchmarks. Meanwhile, imperfect-information variants of chess have existed for over a century, present extreme challenges, and have been the focus of decades of AI research. Beyond calculation needed in regular chess, they require reasoning about information gathering, the opponent's knowledge, signaling, etc. The most popular variant, Fog of War (FoW) chess (a.k.a. dark chess), has been a major challenge problem in imperfect-information game solving since superhuman performance was reached in no-limit Texas hold'em poker. We present Obscuro, the first superhuman AI for FoW chess. It introduces advances to search in imperfect-information games, enabling strong, scalable reasoning. Experiments against the prior state-of-the-art AI and human players -- including the world's best -- show that Obscuro is significantly stronger. FoW chess is the largest (by amount of imperfect information) turn-based zero-sum game in which superhuman performance has been achieved and the largest zero-sum game in which imperfect-information search has been successfully applied.
Unlearning's Blind Spots: Over-Unlearning and Prototypical Relearning Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Machine unlearning (MU) aims to expunge a designated forget set from a trained model without costly retraining, yet the existing techniques overlook two critical blind spots: "over-unlearning" that deteriorates retained data near the forget set, and post-hoc "relearning" attacks that aim to resurrect the forgotten knowledge. Focusing on class-level unlearning, we first derive an over-unlearning metric, OU@epsilon, which quantifies collateral damage in regions proximal to the forget set, where over-unlearning mainly appears. Next, we expose an unforeseen relearning threat on MU, i.e., the Prototypical Relearning Attack, which exploits the per-class prototype of the forget class with just a few samples, and easily restores the pre-unlearning performance. To counter both blind spots in class-level unlearning, we introduce Spotter, a plug-and-play objective that combines (i) a masked knowledge-distillation penalty on the nearby region of forget classes to suppress OU@epsilon, and (ii) an intra-class dispersion loss that scatters forget-class embeddings, neutralizing Prototypical Relearning Attacks. Spotter achieves state-of-the-art results across CIFAR, TinyImageNet, and CASIA-WebFace datasets, offering a practical remedy to unlearning's blind spots.
REASONING COMPILER: LLM-Guided Optimizations for Efficient Model Serving
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

While model serving has unlocked unprecedented capabilities, the high cost of serving large-scale models continues to be a significant barrier to widespread accessibility and rapid innovation. Compiler optimizations have long driven substantial performance improvements, but existing compilers struggle with neural workloads due to the exponentially large and highly interdependent space of possible transformations. Although existing stochastic search techniques can be effective, they are often sample-inefficient and fail to leverage the structural context underlying compilation decisions. We set out to investigate the research question of whether reasoning with large language models (LLMs), without any retraining, can leverage the context-aware decision space of compiler optimizations to significantly improve sample efficiency. To that end, we introduce a novel compilation framework (dubbed REASONING COMPILER) that formulates optimization as a sequential, context-aware decision process guided by a large language model and structured Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). The LLM acts as a proposal mechanism, suggesting hardware-informed transformations that reflect the current program state and accumulated performance feedback. MCTS incorporates the LLM-generated proposals to balance exploration and exploitation, facilitating a structured, context-sensitive traversal of the expansive compiler optimization space. By achieving substantial speedups with markedly fewer samples than leading neural compilers, our approach demonstrates the potential of LLM-guided reasoning to transform the landscape of compiler optimization.
Sparse Imagination for Efficient Visual World Model Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

World model based planning has significantly improved decision-making in complex environments by enabling agents to simulate future states and make informed choices. This computational burden is particularly restrictive in robotics, where resources are severely constrained. To address this limitation, we propose a Sparse Imagination for Efficient Visual World Model Planning, which enhances computational efficiency by reducing the number of tokens processed during forward prediction. Our method leverages a sparsely trained vision-based world model based on transformers with randomized grouped attention strategy, allowing the model to flexibly adjust the number of tokens processed based on the computational resource. By enabling sparse imagination during latent rollout, our approach significantly accelerates planning while maintaining high control fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that sparse imagination preserves task performance while dramatically improving inference efficiency. This general technique for visual planning is applicable from simple test-time trajectory optimization to complex real-world tasks with the latest VLAs, enabling the deployment of world models in real-time scenarios.
SEMNAV: Enhancing Visual Semantic Navigation in Robotics through Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Visual Semantic Navigation (VSN) is a fundamental problem in robotics, where an agent must navigate toward a target object in an unknown environment, mainly using visual information. Most state-of-the-art VSN models are trained in simulation environments, where rendered scenes of the real world are used, at best. These approaches typically rely on raw RGB data from the virtual scenes, which limits their ability to generalize to real-world environments due to domain adaptation issues. To tackle this problem, in this work, we propose SEMNAV, a novel approach that leverages semantic segmentation as the main visual input representation of the environment to enhance the agent's perception and decision-making capabilities. By explicitly incorporating this type of high-level semantic information, our model learns robust navigation policies that improve generalization across unseen environments, both in simulated and real world settings. We also introduce the SEMNAV dataset, a newly curated dataset designed for training semantic segmentation-aware navigation models like SEMNAV. Our approach is evaluated extensively in both simulated environments and with real-world robotic platforms. Experimental results demonstrate that SEMNAV outperforms existing state-of-the-art VSN models, achieving higher success rates in the Habitat 2.0 simulation environment, using the HM3D dataset. Furthermore, our real-world experiments highlight the effectiveness of semantic segmentation in mitigating the sim-to-real gap, making our model a promising solution for practical VSN-based robotic applications. The code and datasets are accessible at https://github.com/gramuah/semnav
Safety, Relative Tightness and the Probabilistic Frame Rule
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2026
Year: 2026

Probabilistic separation logic offers an approach to reasoning about imperative probabilistic programs in which a separating conjunction is used as a mechanism for expressing independence properties. Crucial to the effectiveness of the formalism is the frame rule, which enables modular reasoning about independent probabilistic state. We explore a semantic formulation of probabilistic separation logic, in which the frame rule has the same simple formulation as in separation logic, without further side conditions. This is achieved by building a notion of safety into specifications, using which we establish a crucial property of specifications, called relative tightness, from which the soundness of the frame rule follows.
Many-for-Many: Unify the Training of Multiple Video and Image Generation and Manipulation Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Diffusion models have shown impressive performance in many visual generation and manipulation tasks. Many existing methods focus on training a model for a specific task, especially, text-to-video (T2V) generation, while many other works focus on finetuning the pretrained T2V model for image-to-video (I2V), video-to-video (V2V), image and video manipulation tasks, etc. However, training a strong T2V foundation model requires a large amount of high-quality annotations, which is very costly. In addition, many existing models can perform only one or several tasks. In this work, we introduce a unified framework, namely many-for-many, which leverages the available training data from many different visual generation and manipulation tasks to train a single model for those different tasks. Specifically, we design a lightweight adapter to unify the different conditions in different tasks, then employ a joint image-video learning strategy to progressively train the model from scratch. Our joint learning leads to a unified visual generation and manipulation model with improved video generation performance. In addition, we introduce depth maps as a condition to help our model better perceive the 3D space in visual generation. Two versions of our model are trained with different model sizes (8B and 2B), each of which can perform more than 10 different tasks. In particular, our 8B model demonstrates highly competitive performance in video generation tasks compared to open-source and even commercial engines. Our models and source codes are available at https://github.com/leeruibin/MfM.git.
Fodor and Pylyshyn's Legacy: Still No Human-like Systematic Compositionality in Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Strong meta-learning capabilities for systematic compositionality are emerging as an important skill for navigating the complex and changing tasks of today's world. However, in presenting models for robust adaptation to novel environments, it is important to refrain from making unsupported claims about the performance of meta-learning systems that ultimately do not stand up to scrutiny. While Fodor and Pylyshyn famously posited that neural networks inherently lack this capacity as they are unable to model compositional representations or structure-sensitive operations, and thus are not a viable model of the human mind, Lake and Baroni recently presented meta-learning as a pathway to compositionality. In this position paper, we critically revisit this claim and highlight limitations in the proposed meta-learning framework for compositionality. Our analysis shows that modern neural meta-learning systems can only perform such tasks, if at all, under a very narrow and restricted definition of a meta-learning setup. We therefore claim that `Fodor and Pylyshyn's legacy' persists, and to date, there is no human-like systematic compositionality learned in neural networks.
FreeTacMan: Robot-free Visuo-Tactile Data Collection System for Contact-rich Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Enabling robots with contact-rich manipulation remains a pivotal challenge in robot learning, which is substantially hindered by the data collection gap, including its inefficiency and limited sensor setup. While prior work has explored handheld paradigms, their rod-based mechanical structures remain rigid and unintuitive, providing limited tactile feedback and posing challenges for operators. Motivated by the dexterity and force feedback of human motion, we propose FreeTacMan, a human-centric and robot-free data collection system for accurate and efficient robot manipulation. Concretely, we design a wearable gripper with visuo-tactile sensors for data collection, which can be worn by human fingers for intuitive control. A high-precision optical tracking system is introduced to capture end-effector poses while synchronizing visual and tactile feedback simultaneously. We leverage FreeTacMan to collect a large-scale multimodal dataset, comprising over 3000k paired visuo-tactile images with end-effector poses, 10k demonstration trajectories across 50 diverse contact-rich manipulation tasks. FreeTacMan achieves multiple improvements in data collection performance over prior works and enables effective policy learning from self-collected datasets. By open-sourcing the hardware and the dataset, we aim to facilitate reproducibility and support research in visuo-tactile manipulation.
OThink-R1: Intrinsic Fast/Slow Thinking Mode Switching for Over-Reasoning Mitigation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Human cognition operates through two complementary modes: fast intuitive thinking and slow deliberate thinking. Vanilla large language models (LLMs) predominantly follow the fast-thinking paradigm, producing immediate responses; while recent large reasoning models (LRMs) adopt slow-thinking strategies, generating detailed reasoning chains before arriving at answers. While LRMs often achieve higher accuracy, this comes at the cost of substantially increased token usage. To address this efficiency-accuracy trade-off, we propose OThink-R1, a hybrid reasoning framework that integrates both modes within a single LRM and enables automatic mode switching based on problem characteristics. We first identify three major patterns of essential and redundant reasoning trajectories in LRMs, which guide the design of an auxiliary LLM-based judge that adaptively determines when slow thinking is necessary. Leveraging the judge's decisions, we construct a hybrid fine-tuning dataset by pruning redundant reasoning to produce fast-thinking samples and retaining complete reasoning for slow-thinking samples. This dataset is then used to fine-tune LRMs, equipping them with inherent autonomous mode-selection capabilities. Extensive experiments on mathematical and question-answering benchmarks show that OThink-R1 reduces reasoning token usage significantly while maintaining competitive accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/AgenticIR-Lab/OThink-R1.
BitBypass: A New Direction in Jailbreaking Aligned Large Language Models with Bitstream Camouflage
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

The inherent risk of generating harmful and unsafe content by Large Language Models (LLMs), has highlighted the need for their safety alignment. Various techniques like supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and red-teaming were developed for ensuring the safety alignment of LLMs. However, the robustness of these aligned LLMs is always challenged by adversarial attacks that exploit unexplored and underlying vulnerabilities of the safety alignment. In this paper, we develop a novel black-box jailbreak attack, called BitBypass, that leverages hyphen-separated bitstream camouflage for jailbreaking aligned LLMs. This represents a new direction in jailbreaking by exploiting fundamental information representation of data as continuous bits, rather than leveraging prompt engineering or adversarial manipulations. Our evaluation of five state-of-the-art LLMs, namely GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5, Claude 3.5, Llama 3.1, and Mixtral, in adversarial perspective, revealed the capabilities of BitBypass in bypassing their safety alignment and tricking them into generating harmful and unsafe content. Further, we observed that BitBypass outperforms several state-of-the-art jailbreak attacks in terms of stealthiness and attack success. Overall, these results highlights the effectiveness and efficiency of BitBypass in jailbreaking these state-of-the-art LLMs.
Expanding before Inferring: Enhancing Factuality in Large Language Models through Premature Layers Interpolation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in text understanding and generation. However, their tendency to produce factually inconsistent outputs, commonly referred to as ''hallucinations'', remains a critical challenge. Existing approaches, such as retrieval-based and inference-time correction methods, primarily address this issue at the input or output level, often overlooking the intrinsic information refinement process and the role of premature layers. Meanwhile, alignment- and fine-tuning-based methods are resource-intensive. In this paper, we propose PLI (Premature Layers Interpolation), a novel, training-free, and plug-and-play intervention designed to enhance factuality. PLI mitigates hallucinations by inserting premature layers formed through mathematical interpolation with adjacent layers. Inspired by stable diffusion and sampling steps, PLI extends the depth of information processing and transmission in LLMs, improving factual coherence. Experiments on four publicly available datasets demonstrate that PLI effectively reduces hallucinations while outperforming existing baselines in most cases. Further analysis suggests that the success of layer interpolation is closely linked to LLMs' internal mechanisms. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/CuSO4-Chen/PLI.