Synthetic Data Augmentation for Satellite-Based Analysis of Battle-Damaged Agricultural Fields in Ukraine

Monitoring war-induced damage to agricultural land in Ukraine is important for understanding threats to food security, environmental stability, and post-war recovery. However, the development of computer-vision systems for satellite-based damage analysis is limited by the scarcity of labeled imagery, especially for damaged agricultural fields. This work investigates synthetic data augmentation as a method for improving classification under limited and imbalanced training data. We train class-conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) architectures on real satellite images and use them to generate additional bombed and not-bombed agricultural-field samples. The generated images are used only for training augmentation, while all downstream evaluation is performed on an exclusively real test set. A Vision Transformer classifier is trained under multiple real and synthetic data configurations to measure the practical utility of each generative approach. The best configuration, based on balanced DDPM augmentation, improves accuracy from 84\% to 88\%, balanced accuracy from 67\% to 81\%, macro F1 from 65\% to 78\%, and recall for the underrepresented not-bombed class from 41\% to 69\%. These results demonstrate the potential of synthetic satellite imagery for data-scarce geospatial applications in war-affected regions.

SLAM in Low-Light Environments: Project Report

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is one of the fundamental problems in robotics, as it enables autonomous operations in real-world scenarios. Under low illumination, reduced contrast, sensor noise, and motion blur degrade both feature extraction and feature matching, while compensating with LiDAR, depth, or thermal sensors raises cost, power draw, and integration complexity. Existing benchmarks remain dominated by well-lit indoor or daylight sequences, leaving open how far SLAM with standard RGB cameras can be pushed in the dark. We benchmark six systems spanning the feature-based, direct, filter-based, and learning-based paradigms - ORB-SLAM3, DSO, Kimera-VIO, OpenVINS, DPVO, and DPV-SLAM - on five LaMARia sequences of varying difficulty and illumination, reporting absolute and relative pose error alongside control-point recall. Kimera-VIO is the only system to track all five sequences to completion, combining the lowest relative pose error with steadily growing absolute error due to the absence of loop closure; DPVO and DPV-SLAM never lose tracking but incur absolute errors of roughly 100 m under low light; and the classical monocular pipelines (ORB-SLAM3, DSO) together with the filter-based OpenVINS fail outright or diverge on most of the harder and low-light sequences. The results suggest that RGB-only SLAM maintains stable low-light tracking only when both inertial fusion and global optimization are present. Closing the remaining gap will likely require low-light-specific learned front-ends or a return to complementary sensing.

Reinforcement Learning for Computer-Use Agents with Autonomous Evaluation

Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) execute high-level user goals by perceiving and acting directly within graphical user interfaces. However, reinforcement learning for CUAs remains difficult because open-ended desktop environments rarely provide scalable, machine-readable reward signals: task success is often visually grounded and hard to specify with handcrafted reward functions or dense manual labels. We propose an RL fine-tuning framework that uses autonomous vision-language evaluation as a scalable supervision signal for GUI agents. Given a final screenshot and the original instruction, a Vision-Language Model judges task completion and provides terminal feedback without task-specific heuristics or manual labels during policy optimization. Because autonomous evaluators are imperfect, we model their feedback as a noisy binary reward channel and derive a noise-corrected reward estimator for Proximal Policy Optimization. Experiments across macOSWorld, Windows Agent Arena, and OSWorld show that corrected evaluator rewards outperform both zero-shot baselines and raw evaluator rewards, improving success rates by an average of 12.6 percentage points over zero-shot performance and 5.1 points over raw evaluator fine-tuning. These results suggest that autonomous evaluation can serve as a practical reward signal for RL in GUI environments when evaluator noise is explicitly modeled and corrected.

Toward Agentic RAG for Ukrainian

We present an initial investigation into Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for Ukrainian, conducted within the UNLP 2026 Shared Task on Multi-Domain Document Understanding. Our system combines two-stage retrieval (BGE-M3 with BGE reranking) with a lightweight agentic layer performing query rephrasing and answer-retry loops on top of Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct. Our analysis reveals that retrieval quality is the primary bottleneck: agentic retry mechanisms improve answer accuracy but the overall score remains constrained by document and page identification. We discuss practical limitations of offline agentic pipelines and outline directions for combining stronger retrieval with more advanced agentic reasoning for Ukrainian.

CUAAudit: Meta-Evaluation of Vision-Language Models as Auditors of Autonomous Computer-Use Agents

Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) are emerging as a new paradigm in human-computer interaction, enabling autonomous execution of tasks in desktop environment by perceiving high-level natural-language instructions. As such agents become increasingly capable and are deployed across diverse desktop environments, evaluating their behavior in a scalable and reliable manner becomes a critical challenge. Existing evaluation pipelines rely on static benchmarks, rule-based success checks, or manual inspection, which are brittle, costly, and poorly aligned with real-world usage. In this work, we study Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as autonomous auditors for assessing CUA task completion directly from observable interactions and conduct a large-scale meta-evaluation of five VLMs that judge task success given a natural-language instruction and the final environment state. Our evaluation spans three widely used CUA benchmarks across macOS, Windows, and Linux environments and analyzes auditor behavior along three complementary dimensions: accuracy, calibration of confidence estimates, and inter-model agreement. We find that while state-of-the-art VLMs achieve strong accuracy and calibration, all auditors exhibit notable performance degradation in more complex or heterogeneous environments, and even high-performing models show significant disagreement in their judgments. These results expose fundamental limitations of current model-based auditing approaches and highlight the need to explicitly account for evaluator reliability, uncertainty, and variance when deploying autonomous CUAs in real-world settings.

Hidden Persuasion: Detecting Manipulative Narratives on Social Media During the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine

This paper presents one of the top-performing solutions to the UNLP 2025 Shared Task on Detecting Manipulation in Social Media. The task focuses on detecting and classifying rhetorical and stylistic manipulation techniques used to influence Ukrainian Telegram users. For the classification subtask, we fine-tuned the Gemma 2 language model with LoRA adapters and applied a second-level classifier leveraging meta-features and threshold optimization. For span detection, we employed an XLM-RoBERTa model trained for multi-target, including token binary classification. Our approach achieved 2nd place in classification and 3rd place in span detection.

Characterizing Knowledge Manipulation in a Russian Wikipedia Fork

Wikipedia is powered by MediaWiki, a free and open-source software that is also the infrastructure for many other wiki-based online encyclopedias. These include the recently launched website Ruwiki, which has copied and modified the original Russian Wikipedia content to conform to Russian law. To identify practices and narratives that could be associated with different forms of knowledge manipulation, this article presents an in-depth analysis of this Russian Wikipedia fork. We propose a methodology to characterize the main changes with respect to the original version. The foundation of this study is a comprehensive comparative analysis of more than 1.9M articles from Russian Wikipedia and its fork. Using meta-information and geographical, temporal, categorical, and textual features, we explore the changes made by Ruwiki editors. Furthermore, we present a classification of the main topics of knowledge manipulation in this fork, including a numerical estimation of their scope. This research not only sheds light on significant changes within Ruwiki, but also provides a methodology that could be applied to analyze other Wikipedia forks and similar collaborative projects.