Transformer-based PDE surrogates achieve remarkable performance but face two key challenges: fixed patch sizes cause systematic error accumulation at harmonic frequencies, and computational costs remain inflexible regardless of problem complexity or available resources. We introduce Overtone, a unified solution through dynamic patch size control at inference. Overtone's key insight is that cyclically modulating patch sizes during autoregressive rollouts distributes errors across the frequency spectrum, mitigating the systematic harmonic artifact accumulation that plague fixed-patch models. We implement this through two architecture-agnostic modules--CSM (using dynamic stride modulation) and CKM (using dynamic kernel resizing)--that together provide both harmonic mitigation and compute-adaptive deployment. This flexible tokenization lets users trade accuracy for speed dynamically based on computational constraints, and the cyclic rollout strategy yields up to 40% lower long rollout error in variance-normalised RMSE (VRMSE) compared to conventional, static-patch surrogates. Across challenging 2D and 3D PDE benchmarks, one Overtone model matches or exceeds fixed-patch baselines across inference compute budgets, when trained under a fixed total training budget setting.

Models like OpenAI-o3 pioneer visual grounded reasoning by dynamically referencing visual regions, just like human "thinking with images". However, no benchmark exists to evaluate these capabilities holistically. To bridge this gap, we propose TreeBench (Traceable Evidence Evaluation Benchmark), a diagnostic benchmark built on three principles: (1) focused visual perception of subtle targets in complex scenes, (2) traceable evidence via bounding box evaluation, and (3) second-order reasoning to test object interactions and spatial hierarchies beyond simple object localization. Prioritizing images with dense objects, we initially sample 1K high-quality images from SA-1B, and incorporate eight LMM experts to manually annotate questions, candidate options, and answers for each image. After three stages of quality control, TreeBench consists of 405 challenging visual question-answering pairs, even the most advanced models struggle with this benchmark, where none of them reach 60% accuracy, e.g., OpenAI-o3 scores only 54.87. Furthermore, we introduce TreeVGR (Traceable Evidence Enhanced Visual Grounded Reasoning), a training paradigm to supervise localization and reasoning jointly with reinforcement learning, enabling accurate localizations and explainable reasoning pathways. Initialized from Qwen2.5-VL-7B, it improves V* Bench (+16.8), MME-RealWorld (+12.6), and TreeBench (+13.4), proving traceability is key to advancing vision-grounded reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/Haochen-Wang409/TreeVGR.

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models' has underscored the need for evaluation frameworks that are globally applicable, flexible, and modular, and that support a wide range of tasks, model types, and linguistic settings. We introduce EKA-EVAL, a unified, end- to-end framework that combines a zero-code web interface and an interactive CLI to ensure broad accessibility. It integrates 55+ multilingual benchmarks across nine evaluation categories, supports local and proprietary models, and provides 11 core capabilities through a modular, plug-and-play architecture. Designed for scalable, multilingual evaluation with support for low-resource multilingual languages, EKA-EVAL is, to the best of our knowledge, the first suite to offer comprehensive coverage in a single platform. Comparisons against five existing baselines indicate improvements of at least 2x better on key usability measures, with the highest user satisfaction, faster setup times, and consistent benchmark reproducibility. The framework is open-source and publicly available at https://github.com/lingo-iitgn/eka-eval.

Data quality is a critical driver of large language model performance, yet existing model-based selection methods focus almost exclusively on English. We introduce MuRating, a scalable framework that transfers high-quality English data-quality signals into a single rater for 17 target languages. MuRating aggregates multiple English "raters" via pairwise comparisons to learn unified document-quality scores,then projects these judgments through translation to train a multilingual evaluator on monolingual, cross-lingual, and parallel text pairs. Applied to web data, MuRating selects balanced subsets of English and multilingual content to pretrain a 1.2 B-parameter LLaMA model. Compared to strong baselines, including QuRater, AskLLM, DCLM and so on, our approach boosts average accuracy on both English benchmarks and multilingual evaluations, with especially large gains on knowledge-intensive tasks. We further analyze translation fidelity, selection biases, and underrepresentation of narrative material, outlining directions for future work.

Leaderboards showcase the current capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs). To motivate the development of LLMs that represent the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Spanish-speaking community, we present La Leaderboard, the first open-source leaderboard to evaluate generative LLMs in languages and language varieties of Spain and Latin America. La Leaderboard is a community-driven project that aims to establish an evaluation standard for everyone interested in developing LLMs for the Spanish-speaking community. This initial version combines 66 datasets in Basque, Catalan, Galician, and different Spanish varieties, showcasing the evaluation results of 50 models. To encourage community-driven development of leaderboards in other languages, we explain our methodology, including guidance on selecting the most suitable evaluation setup for each downstream task. In particular, we provide a rationale for using fewer few-shot examples than typically found in the literature, aiming to reduce environmental impact and facilitate access to reproducible results for a broader research community.

We present an imitation learning framework that extracts distinctive legged locomotion behaviors and transitions between them from unlabeled real-world motion data. By automatically discovering behavioral modes and mapping user steering commands to them, the framework enables user-steerable and stylistically consistent motion imitation. Our approach first bridges the morphological and physical gap between the motion source and the robot by transforming raw data into a physically consistent, robot-compatible dataset using a kino-dynamic motion retargeting strategy. This data is used to train a steerable motion synthesis module that generates stylistic, multi-modal kinematic targets from high-level user commands. These targets serve as a reference for a reinforcement learning controller, which reliably executes them on the robot hardware. In our experiments, a controller trained on dog motion data demonstrated distinctive quadrupedal gait patterns and emergent gait transitions in response to varying velocity commands. These behaviors were achieved without manual labeling, predefined mode counts, or explicit switching rules, maintaining the stylistic coherence of the data.

Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt (multimodal) large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on retaining prior knowledge remains unclear. In this paper, we introduce jigsaw puzzles as a novel task absent from existing pretraining corpora and systematically study the behavior of SFT and RFT on the open-source Qwen2.5-VL series. Our experiments reveal a sharp trade-off: SFT enables rapid task acquisition but leads to catastrophic forgetting, whereas RFT learns more slowly but better maintains prior knowledge. We study this phenomenon through learning dynamics by examining both the magnitude and direction of how training data influence prior knowledge. Our analysis shows that RFT mainly reinforces correct samples naturally aligned with the base model's probability landscape, leading to weaker interference with prior knowledge. Moreover, training on RFT-simulated rollouts, which exert a smaller magnitude of influence and are better aligned in direction to prior knowledge, allows SFT to preserve prior knowledge better while rapidly learning new tasks. We further validate our framework on Qwen2.5 post-training in math and scientific QA, observing consistent forgetting and learning-dynamics trends. These findings suggest that the distribution of post-training data, rather than algorithmic differences alone, plays a central role in forgetting, and highlight RFT as a promising ingredient for stable continual post-training.

This paper explores reinforcement learning (RL) policy robustness by systematically analyzing network parameters under internal and external stresses. \textcolor{black}{We apply synaptic filtering methods using high-pass, low-pass, and pulse-wave filters from} \citep{pravin2024fragility}, as an internal stress by selectively perturbing parameters, while adversarial attacks apply external stress through modified agent observations. This dual approach enables the classification of parameters as \textit{fragile}, \textit{robust}, or \textit{antifragile}, based on their influence on policy performance in clean and adversarial settings. Parameter scores are defined to quantify these characteristics, and the framework is validated on proximal policy optimization (PPO)-trained agents in Mujoco continuous control environments. The results highlight the presence of antifragile parameters that enhance policy performance under stress, demonstrating the potential of targeted filtering techniques to improve RL policy adaptability. These insights provide a foundation for future advancements in the design of robust and antifragile RL systems.

Physics-informed deep learning has achieved remarkable progress by embedding geometric priors, such as Hamiltonian symmetries and variational principles, into neural networks, enabling structure-preserving models that extrapolate with high accuracy. However, in systems with dissipation and holonomic constraints, ubiquitous in legged locomotion and multibody robotics, the canonical symplectic form becomes degenerate, undermining the very invariants that guarantee stability and long-term prediction. In this work, we tackle this foundational limitation by introducing Presymplectification Networks (PSNs), the first framework to learn the symplectification lift via Dirac structures, restoring a non-degenerate symplectic geometry by embedding constrained systems into a higher-dimensional manifold. Our architecture combines a recurrent encoder with a flow-matching objective to learn the augmented phase-space dynamics end-to-end. We then attach a lightweight Symplectic Network (SympNet) to forecast constrained trajectories while preserving energy, momentum, and constraint satisfaction. We demonstrate our method on the dynamics of the ANYmal quadruped robot, a challenging contact-rich, multibody system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework that effectively bridges the gap between constrained, dissipative mechanical systems and symplectic learning, unlocking a whole new class of geometric machine learning models, grounded in first principles yet adaptable from data.

Understanding and modeling nonlinear dynamical systems is a fundamental challenge across science and engineering. Deep learning has shown remarkable potential for capturing complex system behavior, yet achieving models that are both accurate and physically interpretable remains difficult. To address this, we propose Structured Kolmogorov-Arnold Neural ODEs (SKANODEs), a framework that integrates structured state-space modeling with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). Within a Neural ODE architecture, SKANODE employs a fully trainable KAN as a universal function approximator to perform virtual sensing, recovering latent states that correspond to interpretable physical quantities such as displacements and velocities. Leveraging KAN's symbolic regression capability, SKANODE then extracts compact, interpretable expressions for the system's governing dynamics. Experiments on two canonical nonlinear oscillators and a real-world F-16 ground vibration dataset demonstrate that SKANODE reliably recovers physically meaningful latent displacement and velocity trajectories from acceleration measurements, identifies the correct governing nonlinearities--including the cubic stiffness in the Duffing oscillator and the nonlinear damping structure in the Van der Pol oscillator--and reveals hysteretic signatures in the F-16 interface dynamics through structured latent phase portraits and an interpretable symbolic model. Across all three cases, SKANODE provides more accurate and robust predictions than black-box NODE baselines and classical ARX and NARX identification, while producing equation-level descriptions of the learned nonlinear dynamics.

Inspired by text prompts in large language models, visual prompts have been explored to enhance the perceptual capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, performance tends to saturate under single visual prompt designs, making further prompt engineering increasingly ineffective. To address this limitation, we shift from prompt engineering to prompt retrieval and propose AutoV, a lightweight framework for instance-adaptive visual prompt identification. Given an input image and a textual query, AutoV automatically locates the most suitable visual prompt from a diverse candidate pool. Training such a retrieval framework requires prompt-level supervision, yet prompt quality is inherently ambiguous and difficult to assess reliably, even for humans. To enable automatic supervision, we evaluate visual prompts using a pre-trained LVLM and label them according to their prediction losses. Using the loss-oriented ranking as a robust training signal, AutoV learns to retrieve the query-aware optimal prompt for each instance without manual annotation. Experiments indicate that AutoV enhances the performance of various LVLMs on image understanding, captioning, grounding, and classification tasks. For example, AutoV improves LLaVA-OV by $\textbf{10.2}\%$ on VizWiz and boosts Qwen2.5-VL by $\textbf{3.8}\%$ on MMMU, respectively.

As interactive generative systems are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, their tendency to generate unreliable or false responses raises serious concerns. Selective generation mitigates this risk by ensuring that the system answers only when confident. However, real-world deployments typically provide only partial user feedback on the selected response (e.g., thumbs up/down) and often operate in non-stationary or adversarial environments,for which effective learning methods are largely missing. To bridge this gap, we propose ExSUL, a novel online learning framework for selective generation with adversarial bandit feedback. Technically, we introduce (i) a novel conversion lemma that translates the regret of any bandit algorithm into an FDR bound, and (ii) feedback unlocking, a strategy that exploits the structure of selective generation to extract additional learning signals from partial feedback. We prove that ExSUL achieves a regret bound of $O(\sqrt{T \ln |H|})$, matching the efficiency and FDR controllability of full-information settings despite receiving only partial feedback. While applicable to general generative tasks, we demonstrate the efficacy of ExSUL for ensuring the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) through empirical validation on question-answering tasks across diverse non-stationary and adversarial settings. Our results demonstrate that ExSUL robustly controls the FDR while maintaining competitive answering coverage.

Graph generation has emerged as a critical task in fields ranging from drug discovery to circuit design. Contemporary approaches, notably diffusion and flow-based models, have achieved solid graph generative performance through constructing a probability path that interpolates between reference and data distributions. However, these methods typically model the evolution of individual nodes and edges independently and use linear interpolations in the disjoint space of nodes/edges to build the path. This disentangled interpolation breaks the interconnected patterns of graphs, making the constructed probability path irregular and non-smooth, which causes poor training dynamics and faulty sampling convergence. To address the limitation, this paper first presents a theoretically grounded framework for probability path construction in graph generative models. Specifically, we model the joint evolution of the nodes and edges by representing graphs as connected systems parameterized by Markov random fields (MRF). We then leverage the optimal transport displacement between MRF objects to design a smooth probability path that ensures the co-evolution of graph components. Based on this, we introduce BWFlow, a flow-matching framework for graph generation that utilizes the derived optimal probability path to benefit the training and sampling algorithm design. Experimental evaluations in plain graph generation and molecule generation validate the effectiveness of BWFlow with competitive performance, better training convergence, and efficient sampling.

End-to-end human animation with rich multi-modal conditions, e.g., text, image and audio has achieved remarkable advancements in recent years. However, most existing methods could only animate a single subject and inject conditions in a global manner, ignoring scenarios where multiple concepts could appear in the same video with rich human-human interactions and human-object interactions. Such a global assumption prevents precise and per-identity control of multiple concepts including humans and objects, therefore hinders applications. In this work, we discard the single-entity assumption and introduce a novel framework that enforces strong, region-specific binding of conditions from modalities to each identity's spatiotemporal footprint. Given reference images of multiple concepts, our method could automatically infer layout information by leveraging a mask predictor to match appearance cues between the denoised video and each reference appearance. Furthermore, we inject local audio condition into its corresponding region to ensure layout-aligned modality matching in an iterative manner. This design enables the high-quality generation of human dialogue videos between two to three people or video customization from multiple reference images. Empirical results and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our explicit layout control for multi-modal conditions compared to implicit counterparts and other existing methods. Video demos are available at https://zhenzhiwang.github.io/interacthuman/

Training large language models with reinforcement learning (RL) against verifiable rewards significantly enhances their reasoning abilities, yet remains computationally expensive due to inefficient uniform prompt sampling. We introduce Selective Prompting with Efficient Estimation of Difficulty (SPEED), an adaptive online RL curriculum that selectively chooses training examples of intermediate difficulty to maximize learning efficiency. Theoretically, we establish that intermediate-difficulty prompts improve the gradient estimator's signal-to-noise ratio, accelerating convergence. Empirically, our efficient implementation leads to 2x to 6x faster training without degrading accuracy, requires no manual tuning, and integrates seamlessly into standard RL algorithms.

Autonomous systems increasingly receive time-sensitive contextual updates from humans through natural language, yet embedding language understanding inside decision-makers couples grounding to learning or planning. This increases redeployment burden when language conventions or domain knowledge change and can hinder diagnosability by confounding grounding errors with control errors. We address online language grounding where messy, evolving verbal reports are converted into control-relevant signals during execution through an interface that localises language updates while keeping downstream decision-makers language-agnostic. We propose LUCIFER (Language Understanding and Context-Infused Framework for Exploration and Behavior Refinement), an inference-only middleware that exposes a Signal Contract. The contract provides four outputs, policy priors, reward potentials, admissible-option constraints, and telemetry-based action prediction for efficient information gathering. We validate LUCIFER in a search-and-rescue (SAR)-inspired testbed using dual-phase, dual-client evaluation: (i) component benchmarks show reasoning-based extraction remains robust on self-correcting reports where pattern-matching baselines degrade, and (ii) system-level ablations with two structurally distinct clients (hierarchical RL and a hybrid A*+heuristics planner) show consistent necessity and synergy. Grounding improves safety, discovery improves information-collection efficiency, and only their combination achieves both.

Visual environments are inherently hierarchical, as a panoramic view naturally encompasses and organizes multiple perspective views within its field. Capturing this hierarchy is crucial for effective perspective-to-equirectangular (P2E) visual place recognition. In this work, we introduce HypeVPR, a hierarchical embedding framework in hyperbolic space specifically designed to address the challenges of P2E matching. HypeVPR leverages the intrinsic ability of hyperbolic space to represent hierarchical structures, allowing panoramic descriptors to encode both broad contextual information and fine-grained local details. To this end, we propose a hierarchical feature aggregation mechanism that organizes local-to-global feature representations within hyperbolic space. Furthermore, HypeVPR's hierarchical organization naturally enables flexible control over the accuracy-efficiency trade-off without additional training, while maintaining robust matching across different image types. This approach enables HypeVPR to achieve competitive performance while significantly accelerating retrieval and reducing database storage requirements. Project page: https://suhan-woo.github.io/HypeVPR/

New UAV technologies and the NewSpace era are transforming Earth Observation missions and data acquisition. Numerous small platforms generate large data volume, straining bandwidth and requiring onboard decision-making to transmit high-quality information in time. While Machine Learning allows real-time autonomous processing, FPGAs balance performance with adaptability to mission-specific requirements, enabling onboard deployment. This review systematically analyzes 68 experiments deploying ML models on FPGAs for Remote Sensing applications. We introduce two distinct taxonomies to capture both efficient model architectures and FPGA implementation strategies. For transparency and reproducibility, we follow PRISMA 2020 guidelines and share all data and code at https://github.com/CedricLeon/Survey_RS-ML-FPGA.

Text-to-image generation models~(e.g., Stable Diffusion) have achieved significant advancements, enabling the creation of high-quality and realistic images based on textual descriptions. Prompt inversion, the task of identifying the textual prompt used to generate a specific artifact, holds significant potential for applications including data attribution, model provenance, and watermarking validation. Recent studies introduced a delayed projection scheme to optimize for prompts representative of the vocabulary space, though challenges in semantic fluency and efficiency remain. Advanced image captioning models or visual large language models can generate highly interpretable prompts, but they often lack in image similarity. In this paper, we propose a prompt inversion technique called \sys for text-to-image diffusion models, which includes initializing embeddings using a pre-trained image captioning model, refining them through reverse-engineering in the latent space, and converting them to texts using an embedding-to-text model. Our experiments on the widely-used datasets, such as MS COCO, LAION, Flickr and DiffusionDB, show that our method outperforms existing methods in terms of image similarity, textual alignment, prompt interpretability and generalizability. We further illustrate the application of our generated prompts in tasks such as cross-concept image synthesis, concept manipulation, evolutionary multi-concept generation and unsupervised segmentation.

Modern language models generate chain-of-thought traces by autoregressively sampling tokens from a finite vocabulary. While this discrete sampling has achieved remarkable success, conducting chain-of-thought with continuously-valued tokens (CoT2) offers a richer and more expressive alternative. Our work provides new theoretical guarantees and algorithms for CoT2, motivated by logical reasoning tasks that inherently require search capabilities. Theoretically, we establish how CoT2 facilitates the model to track multiple discrete traces in parallel; and quantify the level of achievable parallelism and its benefits for inference efficiency. We also provide a CoT2-based one-layer transformer construction that solves the combinatorial "subset sum problem" given a sufficient embedding dimension. These insights arise from a novel and effective supervision strategy where we match the language model outputs to the empirical token distributions of a set of target traces. Complementing this, we introduce sampling strategies that unlock policy optimization methods for CoT2. Our primary strategy samples and composes $K$ discrete tokens at each decoding step to control the level of parallelism. Experiments confirm that (i) the optimal level of parallelism is governed by the embedding dimension, (ii) our continuous supervision strategy can outperform alternative methods, and (iii) policy optimization with CoT2 indeed improves the performance of the model beyond its initial discrete or continuous supervision.

Attribute-efficient PAC learning of sparse halfspaces has been a fundamental problem in machine learning theory. In recent years, machine learning algorithms are faced with prevalent data corruptions or even malicious attacks. It is of central interest to design computationally-efficient algorithms that are robust to malicious corruptions. In this paper, we consider that there exists a constant amount of malicious noise in the data and the goal is to learn an underlying $s$-sparse halfspace $w^* \in \mathbb{R}^d$ with $\text{poly}(s,\log d)$ samples. Specifically, we follow a recent line of works and assume that the underlying distribution satisfies a certain concentration condition and a margin condition at the same time. Under such conditions, we show that attribute-efficiency can be achieved with simple variants to existing hinge loss minimization programs. Our key contribution includes: 1) an attribute-efficient PAC learning algorithm that works under a constant malicious noise rate; 2) a new gradient analysis that carefully handles the sparsity admitted constraints in hinge loss minimization program.

Reinforcement Learning Finetuning (RFT) has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by enabling long chains of thought, self-correction, and effective tool use. While recent works attempt to extend RFT to vision-language models (VLMs), these efforts largely produce text-only reasoning conditioned on static image inputs, falling short of true multimodal reasoning in the response. In contrast, test-time methods like Visual Sketchpad incorporate visual steps but lack training mechanisms. We introduce VTool-R1, the first framework that trains VLMs to generate multimodal chains of thought by interleaving text and intermediate visual reasoning steps. VTool-R1 integrates Python-based visual editing tools into the RFT process, enabling VLMs to learn when and how to generate visual reasoning steps that benefit final reasoning. Trained with outcome-based rewards tied to task accuracy, our approach elicits strategic visual tool use for reasoning without relying on process-based supervision. Experiments on structured visual question answering over charts and tables show that VTool-R1 enhances reasoning performance by teaching VLMs to "think with images" and generate multimodal chain of thoughts with tools. To support future research in multi-turn multi-modal reasoning, we open-source our code at https://github.com/VTOOL-R1/vtool-r1

Modeling of command-line interface (CLI) interaction has enabled flexible, execution-free output presentation. However, current approaches struggle to model inputs with complex compositions and inputs whose execution behavior depends on system characteristics. This is due to a lack of shell input-output (ShIO) data in the training distributions used by the models in these approaches. To address this data gap, we present ShIOEnv, a Gymnasium-compatible Bash shell environment for command synthesis and system-grounded execution behavior capturing. To concentrate synthesis on productive regions of the state-action space, we temporally abstract argument construction into grammar-derived options, thereby constraining synthesis to syntactically valid arguments. We introduce a self-supervised irreducibility signal to approximate the proportion of arguments that contribute to the observed execution behavior, serving as a measure of information density for each input. Using ShIOEnv, we curate and release 2.1M input-output pairs for modeling feedback from Bash command execution. We find that models trained on grammar-constrained datasets with higher maximum irreducibility achieve greater accuracy when modeling the execution behavior of user-sourced inputs than prior execution-free baselines.

In cloud services, virtual machine (VM) scheduling is a typical Online Dynamic Multidimensional Bin Packing (ODMBP) problem, characterized by large-scale complexity and fluctuating demands. Traditional optimization methods struggle to adapt to real-time changes, domain-expert-designed heuristic approaches suffer from rigid strategies, and existing learning-based methods often lack generalizability and interpretability. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a hierarchical language agent framework named MiCo, which provides a large language model (LLM)-driven heuristic design paradigm for solving ODMBP. Specifically, ODMBP is formulated as a Semi-Markov Decision Process with Options (SMDP-Option), enabling dynamic scheduling through a two-stage architecture, i.e., Option Miner and Option Composer. Option Miner utilizes LLMs to discover diverse and useful non-context-aware strategies by interacting with constructed environments. Option Composer employs LLMs to discover a composing strategy that integrates the non-context-aware strategies with the contextual ones. Extensive experiments on real-world enterprise datasets demonstrate that MiCo achieves a 96.9\% competitive ratio in large-scale scenarios involving more than 10,000 virtual machines. It maintains high performance even under nonstationary request flows and diverse configurations, thus validating its effectiveness in complex and large-scale cloud environments.

Unconstrained gaze estimation is the process of determining where a subject is directing their visual attention in uncontrolled environments. Gaze estimation systems are important for a myriad of tasks such as driver distraction monitoring, exam proctoring, accessibility features in modern software, etc. However, these systems face challenges in real-world scenarios, partially due to the low resolution of in-the-wild images and partially due to insufficient modeling of head-eye interactions in current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. This paper introduces DHECA-SuperGaze, a deep learning-based method that advances gaze prediction through super-resolution (SR) and a dual head-eye cross-attention (DHECA) module. Our dual-branch convolutional backbone processes eye and multiscale SR head images, while the proposed DHECA module enables bidirectional feature refinement between the extracted visual features through cross-attention mechanisms. Furthermore, we identified critical annotation errors in one of the most diverse and widely used gaze estimation datasets, Gaze360, and rectified the mislabeled data. Performance evaluation on Gaze360 and GFIE datasets demonstrates superior within-dataset performance of the proposed method, reducing angular error (AE) by 0.48° (Gaze360) and 2.95° (GFIE) in static configurations, and 0.59° (Gaze360) and 3.00° (GFIE) in temporal settings compared to prior SOTA methods. Cross-dataset testing shows improvements in AE of more than 1.53° (Gaze360) and 3.99° (GFIE) in both static and temporal settings, validating the robust generalization properties of our approach.

This paper addresses the challenges of training end-to-end autonomous driving agents using Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL agents are typically trained in a fixed set of scenarios and nominal behavior of surrounding road users in simulations, limiting their generalization and real-life deployment. While domain randomization offers a potential solution by randomly sampling driving scenarios, it frequently results in inefficient training and sub-optimal policies due to the high variance among training scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose an automatic curriculum learning framework that dynamically generates driving scenarios with adaptive complexity based on the agent's evolving capabilities. Unlike manually designed curricula that introduce expert bias and lack scalability, our framework incorporates a ``teacher'' that automatically generates and mutates driving scenarios based on their learning potential -- an agent-centric metric derived from the agent's current policy -- eliminating the need for expert design. The framework enhances training efficiency by excluding scenarios the agent has mastered or finds too challenging. We evaluate our framework in a reinforcement learning setting where the agent learns a driving policy from camera images. Comparative results against baseline methods, including fixed scenario training and domain randomization, demonstrate that our approach leads to enhanced generalization, achieving higher success rates: +9% in low traffic density, +21% in high traffic density, and faster convergence with fewer training steps. Our findings highlight the potential of ACL in improving the robustness and efficiency of RL-based autonomous driving agents.

Democratic societies need reliable information. Misinformation in popular media, such as news articles or videos, threatens to impair civic discourse. Citizens are, unfortunately, not equipped to verify the flood of content consumed daily at increasing rates. This work aims to quantify the scientific accuracy of online media semi-automatically. We investigate the state of the art of climate-related ground truth knowledge representation. By semantifying media content of unknown veracity, their statements can be compared against these ground truth knowledge graphs. We implemented a workflow using LLM-based statement extraction and knowledge graph analysis. Our implementation can streamline content processing towards state-of-the-art knowledge representation and veracity quantification. Developed and evaluated with the help of 27 experts and detailed interviews with 10, the tool evidently provides a beneficial veracity indication. These findings are supported by 43 anonymous participants from a parallel user survey. This initial step, however, is unable to annotate public media at the required granularity and scale. Additionally, the identified state of climate change knowledge graphs is vastly insufficient to support this neurosymbolic fact-checking approach. Further work towards a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) ground truth and complementary metrics is required to support civic discourse scientifically.

Accurate prediction of surrounding road users' trajectories is essential for safe and efficient autonomous driving. While deep learning models have improved performance, challenges remain in preventing off-road predictions and ensuring kinematic feasibility. Existing methods incorporate road-awareness modules and enforce kinematic constraints but lack plausibility guarantees and often introduce trade-offs in complexity and flexibility. This paper proposes a novel framework that formulates trajectory prediction as a constrained regression guided by permissible driving directions and their boundaries. Using the agent's current state and an HD map, our approach defines the valid boundaries and ensures on-road predictions by training the network to learn superimposed paths between left and right boundary polylines. To guarantee feasibility, the model predicts acceleration profiles that determine the vehicle's travel distance along these paths while adhering to kinematic constraints. We evaluate our approach on the Argoverse-2 dataset against the HPTR baseline. Our approach shows a slight decrease in benchmark metrics compared to HPTR but notably improves final displacement error and eliminates infeasible trajectories. Moreover, the proposed approach has superior generalization to less prevalent maneuvers and unseen out-of-distribution scenarios, reducing the off-road rate under adversarial attacks from 66% to just 1%. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in generating feasible and robust predictions.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for achieving autonomous driving due to robust decision-making capabilities. RL learns a driving policy through trial and error in traffic scenarios, guided by a reward function that combines the driving objectives. The design of such reward function has received insufficient attention, yielding ill-defined rewards with various pitfalls. Safety, in particular, has long been regarded only as a penalty for collisions. This leaves the risks associated with actions leading up to a collision unaddressed, limiting the applicability of RL in real-world scenarios. To address these shortcomings, our work focuses on enhancing the reward formulation by defining a set of driving objectives and structuring them hierarchically. Furthermore, we discuss the formulation of these objectives in a normalized manner to transparently determine their contribution to the overall reward. Additionally, we introduce a novel risk-aware objective for various driving interactions based on a two-dimensional ellipsoid function and an extension of Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) concepts. We evaluate the efficacy of our proposed reward in unsignalized intersection scenarios with varying traffic densities. The approach decreases collision rates by 21\% on average compared to baseline rewards and consistently surpasses them in route progress and cumulative reward, demonstrating its capability to promote safer driving behaviors while maintaining high-performance levels.

Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) semantic segmentation provides comprehensive environmental perception for autonomous driving but suffers multi-modal misalignment and sensor noise. We propose RESAR-BEV, a progressive refinement framework that advances beyond single-step end-to-end approaches: (1) progressive refinement through residual autoregressive learning that decomposes BEV segmentation into interpretable coarse-to-fine stages via our Drive-Transformer and Modifier-Transformer residual prediction cascaded architecture, (2) robust BEV representation combining ground-proximity voxels with adaptive height offsets and dual-path voxel feature encoding (max+attention pooling) for efficient feature extraction, and (3) decoupled supervision with offline Ground Truth decomposition and online joint optimization to prevent overfitting while ensuring structural coherence. Experiments on nuScenes demonstrate RESAR-BEV achieves state-of-the-art performance with 54.0% mIoU across 7 essential driving-scene categories while maintaining real-time capability at 14.6 FPS. The framework exhibits robustness in challenging scenarios of long-range perception and adverse weather conditions.