AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide

AI-assisted research is crossing a threshold: fully automated systems can now generate research papers for as little as $15, while long-horizon agents can execute experiments, draft manuscripts, and simulate critique with minimal human input. Yet this productivity frontier exposes a deeper integrity problem: under scientific pressure, even frontier LLMs still fabricate results, miss hidden errors, and fail to judge novelty reliably. Studying developments through April 2026, we present an end-to-end analysis of AI across the complete research lifecycle, organized into four epistemological phases: Creation (idea generation, literature review, coding & experiments, tables & figures), Writing (paper writing), Validation (peer review, rebuttal & revision), and Dissemination (posters, slides, videos, social media, project pages, and interactive agents). We identify a sharp, stage-dependent boundary between reliable assistance and unreliable autonomy: AI excels at structured, retrieval-grounded, and tool-mediated tasks, but remains fragile for genuinely novel ideas, research-level experiments, and scientific judgment. Generated ideas often degrade after implementation, research code lags far behind pattern-matching benchmarks, and end-to-end autonomous systems have not yet consistently reached major-venue acceptance standards. We further show that greater automation can obscure rather than eliminate failure modes, making human-governed collaboration the most credible deployment paradigm. Finally, we provide a structured taxonomy, benchmark suite, and tool inventory, cross-stage design principles, and a practitioner-oriented playbook, with resources maintained at our project page.

Online Learning-to-Defer with Varying Experts

Learning-to-Defer (L2D) methods route each query either to a predictive model or to external experts. While existing work studies this problem in batch settings, real-world deployments require handling streaming data, changing expert availability, and shifting expert distribution. We introduce the first online L2D algorithm for multiclass classification with bandit feedback and a dynamically varying pool of experts. Our method achieves regret guarantees of $O((n+n_e)T^{2/3})$ in general and $O((n+n_e)\sqrt{T})$ under a low-noise condition, where $T$ is the time horizon, $n$ is the number of labels, and $n_e$ is the number of distinct experts observed across rounds. The analysis builds on novel $\mathcal{H}$-consistency bounds for the online framework, combined with first-order methods for online convex optimization. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach effectively extends standard Learning-to-Defer to settings with varying expert availability and reliability.

Is Your Driving World Model an All-Around Player?

Today's driving world models can generate remarkably realistic dash-cam videos, yet no single model excels universally. Some generate photorealistic textures but violate basic physics; others maintain geometric consistency but fail when subjected to closed-loop planning. This disconnect exposes a critical gap: the field evaluates how real generated worlds appear, but rarely whether they behave realistically. We introduce WorldLens, a unified benchmark that measures world-model fidelity across the full spectrum, from pixel quality and 4D geometry to closed-loop driving and human perceptual alignment, through five complementary aspects and 24 standardized dimensions. Our evaluation of six representative models reveals that no existing approach dominates across all axes: texture-rich models violate geometry, geometry-aware models lack behavioral fidelity, and even the strongest performers achieve only 2-3 out of 10 on human realism ratings. To bridge algorithmic metrics with human perception, we further contribute WorldLens-26K, a 26,808-entry human-annotated preference dataset pairing numerical scores with textual rationales, and WorldLens-Agent, a vision-language evaluator distilled from these judgments that enables scalable, explainable auto-assessment. Together, the benchmark, dataset, and agent form a unified ecosystem for assessing generated worlds not merely by visual appeal, but by physical and behavioral fidelity.

Beyond Augmented-Action Surrogates for Multi-Expert Learning-to-Defer

Learning-to-Defer routes each input to the expert that minimizes expected cost, but it assumes that the information available to every expert is fixed at decision time. Many modern systems violate this assumption: after selecting an expert, one may also choose what additional information that expert should receive, such as retrieved documents, tool outputs, or escalation context. We study this problem and call it Learning-to-Defer with advice. We show that a broad family of natural separated surrogates, which learn routing and advice with distinct heads, is inconsistent even in the smallest non-trivial setting. We then introduce an augmented surrogate that operates on the composite expert--advice action space and prove an $\mathcal{H}$-consistency guarantee together with an excess-risk transfer bound, yielding recovery of the Bayes-optimal policy in the limit. Experiments on tabular, language, and multi-modal tasks show that the resulting method improves over standard Learning-to-Defer while adapting its advice-acquisition behavior to the cost regime; a synthetic benchmark confirms the failure mode predicted for separated surrogates.

SpikeCLR: Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Few-Shot Event-Based Vision using Spiking Neural Networks

Event-based vision sensors provide significant advantages for high-speed perception, including microsecond temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and low power consumption. When combined with Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), they can be deployed on neuromorphic hardware, enabling energy-efficient applications on embedded systems. However, this potential is severely limited by the scarcity of large-scale labeled datasets required to effectively train such models. In this work, we introduce SpikeCLR, a contrastive self-supervised learning framework that enables SNNs to learn robust visual representations from unlabeled event data. We adapt prior frame-based methods to the spiking domain using surrogate gradient training and introduce a suite of event-specific augmentations that leverage spatial, temporal, and polarity transformations. Through extensive experiments on CIFAR10-DVS, N-Caltech101, N-MNIST, and DVS-Gesture benchmarks, we demonstrate that self-supervised pretraining with subsequent fine-tuning outperforms supervised learning in low-data regimes, achieving consistent gains in few-shot and semi-supervised settings. Our ablation studies reveal that combining spatial and temporal augmentations is critical for learning effective spatio-temporal invariances in event data. We further show that learned representations transfer across datasets, contributing to efforts for powerful event-based models in label-scarce settings.

Learning-to-Defer with Expert-Conditioned Advice

Learning-to-Defer routes each input to the expert that minimizes expected cost, but it assumes that the information available to every expert is fixed at decision time. Many modern systems violate this assumption: after selecting an expert, one may also choose what additional information that expert should receive, such as retrieved documents, tool outputs, or escalation context. We study this problem and call it Learning-to-Defer with advice. We show that a broad family of natural separated surrogates, which learn routing and advice with distinct heads, are inconsistent even in the smallest non-trivial setting. We then introduce an augmented surrogate that operates on the composite expert--advice action space and prove an $\mathcal{H}$-consistency guarantee together with an excess-risk transfer bound, yielding recovery of the Bayes-optimal policy in the limit. Experiments on tabular, LLMs, and multi-modal tasks show that the resulting method improves over standard Learning-to-Defer while adapting its advice-acquisition behavior to the cost regime.

Learning to Defer in Non-Stationary Time Series via Switching State-Space Models

We study Learning to Defer for non-stationary time series with partial feedback and time-varying expert availability. At each time step, the router selects an available expert, observes the target, and sees only the queried expert's prediction. We model signed expert residuals using L2D-SLDS, a factorized switching linear-Gaussian state-space model with context-dependent regime transitions, a shared global factor enabling cross-expert information transfer, and per-expert idiosyncratic states. The model supports expert entry and pruning via a dynamic registry. Using one-step-ahead predictive beliefs, we propose an IDS-inspired routing rule that trades off predicted cost against information gained about the latent regime and shared factor. Experiments show improvements over contextual-bandit baselines and a no-shared-factor ablation.

The RoboSense Challenge: Sense Anything, Navigate Anywhere, Adapt Across Platforms

Autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in open and dynamic environments -- from city streets to aerial and indoor spaces -- where perception models must remain reliable under sensor noise, environmental variation, and platform shifts. However, even state-of-the-art methods often degrade under unseen conditions, highlighting the need for robust and generalizable robot sensing. The RoboSense 2025 Challenge is designed to advance robustness and adaptability in robot perception across diverse sensing scenarios. It unifies five complementary research tracks spanning language-grounded decision making, socially compliant navigation, sensor configuration generalization, cross-view and cross-modal correspondence, and cross-platform 3D perception. Together, these tasks form a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating real-world sensing reliability under domain shifts, sensor failures, and platform discrepancies. RoboSense 2025 provides standardized datasets, baseline models, and unified evaluation protocols, enabling large-scale and reproducible comparison of robust perception methods. The challenge attracted 143 teams from 85 institutions across 16 countries, reflecting broad community engagement. By consolidating insights from 23 winning solutions, this report highlights emerging methodological trends, shared design principles, and open challenges across all tracks, marking a step toward building robots that can sense reliably, act robustly, and adapt across platforms in real-world environments.

WorldLens: Full-Spectrum Evaluations of Driving World Models in Real World

Generative world models are reshaping embodied AI, enabling agents to synthesize realistic 4D driving environments that look convincing but often fail physically or behaviorally. Despite rapid progress, the field still lacks a unified way to assess whether generated worlds preserve geometry, obey physics, or support reliable control. We introduce WorldLens, a full-spectrum benchmark evaluating how well a model builds, understands, and behaves within its generated world. It spans five aspects -- Generation, Reconstruction, Action-Following, Downstream Task, and Human Preference -- jointly covering visual realism, geometric consistency, physical plausibility, and functional reliability. Across these dimensions, no existing world model excels universally: those with strong textures often violate physics, while geometry-stable ones lack behavioral fidelity. To align objective metrics with human judgment, we further construct WorldLens-26K, a large-scale dataset of human-annotated videos with numerical scores and textual rationales, and develop WorldLens-Agent, an evaluation model distilled from these annotations to enable scalable, explainable scoring. Together, the benchmark, dataset, and agent form a unified ecosystem for measuring world fidelity -- standardizing how future models are judged not only by how real they look, but by how real they behave.

Learning to Remove Lens Flare in Event Camera

Event cameras have the potential to revolutionize vision systems with their high temporal resolution and dynamic range, yet they remain susceptible to lens flare, a fundamental optical artifact that causes severe degradation. In event streams, this optical artifact forms a complex, spatio-temporal distortion that has been largely overlooked. We present E-Deflare, the first systematic framework for removing lens flare from event camera data. We first establish the theoretical foundation by deriving a physics-grounded forward model of the non-linear suppression mechanism. This insight enables the creation of the E-Deflare Benchmark, a comprehensive resource featuring a large-scale simulated training set, E-Flare-2.7K, and the first-ever paired real-world test set, E-Flare-R, captured by our novel optical system. Empowered by this benchmark, we design E-DeflareNet, which achieves state-of-the-art restoration performance. Extensive experiments validate our approach and demonstrate clear benefits for downstream tasks. Code and datasets are publicly available.