Xiamen University, China
Abstract:Establishing trustworthy safety assurance for autonomous driving systems (ADSs) requires evidence that failures arise from avoidable system deficiencies rather than unavoidable traffic conflicts. Current adversarial simulation methods can efficiently expose collisions, but generally lack mechanisms to distinguish these fundamentally different failure modes. Here we present CARS (Context-Aware, Responsibility-attributed Scenario generation), a framework that integrates responsibility attribution directly into adversarial scenario generation. CARS combines context-aware adversary selection with a generative adversarial policy optimized in closed-loop simulation to construct collision scenarios that are both physically feasible and diagnostically attributable. Across benchmark datasets spanning heterogeneous national traffic environments, CARS consistently discovers feasible collision scenarios with high attribution rates under multiple regulation-prescribed careful and competent driver models. By coupling adversarial generation with normative responsibility assessment, CARS moves simulation testing beyond collision discovery toward the construction of interpretable, regulation-aligned safety evidence for scalable ADS validation.
Abstract:Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a promising approach for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, it struggles to effectively balance the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation during training, often resulting in suboptimal performance. Motivated by the theoretical insight that changes in entropy are governed by the covariance between token probabilities and their corresponding advantages, we propose a hyperparameter-free, covariance-weighted optimization method that dynamically down-weights extreme token-level updates via a Gaussian kernel. This approach automatically reduces the instability caused by exploration-exploitation trade-off while preserving informative learning signals. Extensive empirical evaluations show that our approach improves downstream performance across reasoning benchmarks compared with GRPO, and effectively stablizes entropy as training progresses.
Abstract:Tiny UAV detection from an onboard event camera is difficult when the observer and target move at the same time. In this motion-on-motion regime, ego-motion activates background edges across buildings, vegetation, and horizon structures, while the UAV may appear as a sparse event cluster. To explore this practical problem, we present M$^2$E-UAV, a benchmark and analysis setup for onboard motion-on-motion event-based tiny UAV detection. The processed M$^2$E-UAV benchmark contains 87,223 training samples and 21,395 validation samples across four scene families: sunny building-forest, sunny farm-village, sunset building-forest, and sunset farm-village. We provide M$^2$E-Point, a point-based event baseline, and M$^2$E-Point + IMU, an IMU-conditioned variant, to analyze the role of inertial cues under onboard motion-on-motion detection. M$^2$E-Point encodes events as $[x,y,t,p]$ point sets, extracts local event structure with EdgeConv, and predicts event-level UAV foreground scores, from which bounding boxes are derived via DBSCAN. Our validation-stage analysis shows that point-based event modeling is a strong baseline, while simple IMU conditioning provides only marginal aggregate gains. Under the train/validation split, M$^2$E-Point achieves 0.9673 F1 and 0.5501 mAP50-95, while the IMU-conditioned variant reaches 0.5561 mAP50-95 with only marginal aggregate changes, serving as an initial baseline for future exploration in this domain. Code will be ready in https://github.com/Wickyan/M2E-UAV.
Abstract:Embodied AI (EAI) systems are rapidly transitioning from simulations into real-world domestic and other sensitive environments. However, recent EAI solutions have largely demonstrated advancements within isolated stages such as instruction, perception, planning and interaction, without considering their coupled privacy implications in high-frequency deployments where privacy leakage is often irreversible. This position paper argues that optimizing these components independently creates a systemic privacy crisis when deployed in sensitive settings, thereby advancing the position that privacy in EAI is a life cycle-level architectural constraint rather than a stage-local feature. To address these challenges, we propose Secure Privacy Integration in Next-generation Embodied AI (SPINE), a unified privacy-aware framework that treats privacy as a dynamic control signal governing cross-stage coupling throughout the entire EAI life cycle. SPINE decomposes the EAI pipeline into various stages and establishes a multi-criterion privacy classification matrix to orchestrate contextual sensitivity across stage boundaries. We conduct preliminary simulation and real-world case studies to conceptually validate how privacy constraints propagate downstream to reshape system behavior, illustrating the insufficiency of fragmented privacy patches and motivating future research directions into secure yet functional embodied AI systems. We detail the SPINE framework and case studies at https://github.com/rminshen03/EAI_Privacy_Position.
Abstract:Agentic artificial intelligence systems promise to accelerate scientific workflows, but neuroimaging poses unique challenges: heterogeneous modalities (sMRI, fMRI, dMRI, EEG), long multi-stage pipelines, and persistent reproducibility risks. To address this gap, we present NeuroClaw, a domain-specialized multi-agent research assistant for executable and reproducible neuroimaging research. NeuroClaw operates directly on raw neuroimaging data across formats and modalities, grounding decisions in dataset semantics and BIDS metadata so users need not prepare curated inputs or bespoke model code. The platform combines harness engineering with end-to-end environment management, including pinned Python environments, Docker support, automated installers for common neuroimaging tools, and GPU configuration. In practice, this layer emphasizes checkpointing, post-execution verification, structured audit traces, and controlled runtime setup, making toolchains more transparent while improving reproducibility and auditability. A three-tier skill/agent hierarchy separates user-facing interaction, high-level orchestration, and low-level tool skills to decompose complex workflows into safe, reusable units. Alongside the NeuroClaw framework, we introduce NeuroBench, a system-level benchmark for executability, artifact validity, and reproducibility readiness. Across multiple multimodal LLMs, NeuroClaw-enabled runs yield consistent and substantial score improvements compared with direct agent invocation. Project homepage: https://cuhk-aim-group.github.io/NeuroClaw/index.html
Abstract:The convergence of large language models and agents is catalyzing a new era of scientific discovery: Agentic Science. While the scientific method is inherently iterative, existing agent frameworks are predominantly static, narrowly scoped, and lack the capacity to learn from trial and error. To bridge this gap, we present EvoMaster, a foundational evolving agent framework engineered specifically for Agentic Science at Scale. Driven by the core principle of continuous self-evolution, EvoMaster empowers agents to iteratively refine hypotheses, self-critique, and progressively accumulate knowledge across experimental cycles, faithfully mirroring human scientific inquiry. Crucially, as a domain-agnostic base harness, EvoMaster is exceptionally easy to scale up -- enabling developers to build and deploy highly capable, self-evolving scientific agents for arbitrary disciplines in approximately 100 lines of code. Built upon EvoMaster, we incubated the SciMaster ecosystem across domains such as machine learning, physics, and general science. Evaluations on four authoritative benchmarks (Humanity's Last Exam, MLE-Bench Lite, BrowseComp, and FrontierScience) demonstrate that EvoMaster achieves state-of-the-art scores of 41.1%, 75.8%, 73.3%, and 53.3%, respectively. It comprehensively outperforms the general-purpose baseline OpenClaw with relative improvements ranging from +159% to +316%, robustly validating its efficacy and generality as the premier foundational framework for the next generation of autonomous scientific discovery. EvoMaster is available at https://github.com/sjtu-sai-agents/EvoMaster.
Abstract:LiDAR relocalization has attracted increasing attention as it can deliver accurate 6-DoF pose estimation in complex 3D environments. Recent learning-based regression methods offer efficient solutions by directly predicting global poses without the need for explicit map storage. However, these methods often struggle in challenging scenes due to their equal treatment of all predicted points, which is vulnerable to noise and outliers. In this paper, we propose LEADER, a robust LiDAR-based relocalization framework enhanced by a simple, yet effective geometric encoder. Specifically, a Robust Projection-based Geometric Encoder architecture which captures multi-scale geometric features is first presented to enhance descriptiveness in geometric representation. A Truncated Relative Reliability loss is then formulated to model point-wise ambiguity and mitigate the influence of unreliable predictions. Extensive experiments on the Oxford RobotCar and NCLT datasets demonstrate that LEADER outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving 24.1% and 73.9% relative reductions in position error over existing techniques, respectively. The source code is released on https://github.com/JiansW/LEADER.
Abstract:The Operational Design Domain (ODD) of urbanoriented Level 4 (L4) autonomous driving, especially for autonomous robotaxis, confronts formidable challenges in complex urban mixed traffic environments. These challenges stem mainly from the high density of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) and their highly uncertain and unpredictable interaction behaviors. However, existing open-source datasets predominantly focus on structured scenarios such as highways or regulated intersections, leaving a critical gap in data representing chaotic, unstructured urban environments. To address this, this paper proposes an efficient, high-precision method for constructing drone-based datasets and establishes the Vehicle-Vulnerable Road User Interaction Dataset (VRUD), as illustrated in Figure 1. Distinct from prior works, VRUD is collected from typical "Urban Villages" in Shenzhen, characterized by loose traffic supervision and extreme occlusion. The dataset comprises 4 hours of 4K/30Hz recording, containing 11,479 VRU trajectories and 1,939 vehicle trajectories. A key characteristic of VRUD is its composition: VRUs account for about 87% of all traffic participants, significantly exceeding the proportions in existing benchmarks. Furthermore, unlike datasets that only provide raw trajectories, we extracted 4,002 multi-agent interaction scenarios based on a novel Vector Time to Collision (VTTC) threshold, supported by standard OpenDRIVE HD maps. This study provides valuable, rare edge-case resources for enhancing the safety performance of ADS in complex, unstructured urban environments. To facilitate further research, we have made the VRUD dataset open-source at: https://zzi4.github.io/VRUD/.
Abstract:Modern autonomous vehicle perception systems are often constrained by occlusions, blind spots, and limited sensing range. While existing cooperative perception paradigms, such as Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), have demonstrated their effectiveness in mitigating these challenges, they remain limited to ground-level collaboration and cannot fully address large-scale occlusions or long-range perception in complex environments. To advance research in cross-view cooperative perception, we present V2U4Real, the first large-scale real-world multi-modal dataset for Vehicle-to-UAV (V2U) cooperative object perception. V2U4Real is collected by a ground vehicle and a UAV equipped with multi-view LiDARs and RGB cameras. The dataset covers urban streets, university campuses, and rural roads under diverse traffic scenarios, comprising over 56K LiDAR frames, 56K multi-view camera images, and 700K annotated 3D bounding boxes across four classes. To support a wide range of research tasks, we establish benchmarks for single-agent 3D object detection, cooperative 3D object detection, and object tracking. Comprehensive evaluations of several state-of-the-art models demonstrate the effectiveness of V2U cooperation in enhancing perception robustness and long-range awareness. The V2U4Real dataset and codebase is available at https://github.com/VjiaLi/V2U4Real.
Abstract:Online monocular 3D reconstruction enables dense scene recovery from streaming video but remains fundamentally limited by the stability-adaptation dilemma: the reconstruction model must rapidly incorporate novel viewpoints while preserving previously accumulated scene structure. Existing streaming approaches rely on uniform or attention-based update mechanisms that often fail to account for abrupt viewpoint transitions, leading to trajectory drift and geometric inconsistencies over long sequences. We introduce PAS3R, a pose-adaptive streaming reconstruction framework that dynamically modulates state updates according to camera motion and scene structure. Our key insight is that frames contributing significant geometric novelty should exert stronger influence on the reconstruction state, while frames with minor viewpoint variation should prioritize preserving historical context. PAS3R operationalizes this principle through a motion-aware update mechanism that jointly leverages inter-frame pose variation and image frequency cues to estimate frame importance. To further stabilize long-horizon reconstruction, we introduce trajectory-consistent training objectives that incorporate relative pose constraints and acceleration regularization. A lightweight online stabilization module further suppresses high-frequency trajectory jitter and geometric artifacts without increasing memory consumption. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PAS3R significantly improves trajectory accuracy, depth estimation, and point cloud reconstruction quality in long video sequences while maintaining competitive performance on shorter sequences.