UrbanAlign: Post-hoc Semantic Calibration for VLM-Human Preference Alignment

Aligning vision-language model (VLM) outputs with human preferences in domain-specific tasks typically requires fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, both of which demand labelled data and GPU compute. We show that for subjective perception tasks, this alignment can be achieved without any model training: VLMs are already strong concept extractors but poor decision calibrators, and the gap can be closed externally. We propose a training-free post-hoc concept-bottleneck pipeline consisting of three tightly coupled stages: concept mining, multi-agent structured scoring, and geometric calibration, unified by an end-to-end dimension optimization loop. Interpretable evaluation dimensions are mined from a handful of human annotations; an Observer-Debater-Judge chain extracts robust continuous concept scores from a frozen VLM; and locally-weighted ridge regression on a hybrid visual-semantic manifold calibrates these scores against human ratings. Applied to urban perception as UrbanAlign, the framework achieves 72.2% accuracy ($κ=0.45$) on Place Pulse 2.0 across six categories, outperforming the best supervised baseline by +15.1 pp and uncalibrated VLM scoring by +16.3 pp, with full dimension-level interpretability and zero model-weight modification.

TopoPerception: A Shortcut-Free Evaluation of Global Visual Perception in Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically align visual features from an encoder with a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM). However, this makes the visual perception module a bottleneck, which constrains the overall capabilities of LVLMs. Conventional evaluation benchmarks, while rich in visual semantics, often contain unavoidable local shortcuts that can lead to an overestimation of models' perceptual abilities. Here, we introduce TopoPerception, a benchmark that leverages topological properties to rigorously evaluate the global visual perception capabilities of LVLMs across various granularities. Since topology depends on the global structure of an image and is invariant to local features, TopoPerception enables a shortcut-free assessment of global perception, fundamentally distinguishing it from semantically rich tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art models on TopoPerception and find that even at the coarsest perceptual granularity, all models perform no better than random chance, indicating a profound inability to perceive global visual features. Notably, a consistent trend emerge within model families: more powerful models with stronger reasoning capabilities exhibit lower accuracy. This suggests that merely scaling up models is insufficient to address this deficit and may even exacerbate it. Progress may require new training paradigms or architectures. TopoPerception not only exposes a critical bottleneck in current LVLMs but also offers a lens and direction for improving their global visual perception. The data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/Wenhao-Zhou/TopoPerception.

Physics-Driven Local-Whole Elastic Deformation Modeling for Point Cloud Representation Learning

Existing point cloud representation learning tend to learning the geometric distribution of objects through data-driven approaches, emphasizing structural features while overlooking the relationship between the local information and the whole structure. Local features reflect the fine-grained variations of an object, while the whole structure is determined by the interaction and combination of these local features, collectively defining the object's shape. In real-world, objects undergo elastic deformation under external forces, and this deformation gradually affects the whole structure through the propagation of forces from local regions, thereby altering the object's geometric properties. Inspired by this, we propose a physics-driven self-supervised learning method for point cloud representation, which captures the relationship between parts and the whole by constructing a local-whole force propagation mechanism. Specifically, we employ a dual-task encoder-decoder framework, integrating the geometric modeling capability of implicit fields with physics-driven elastic deformation. The encoder extracts features from the point cloud and its tetrahedral mesh representation, capturing both geometric and physical properties. These features are then fed into two decoders: one learns the whole geometric shape of the point cloud through an implicit field, while the other predicts local deformations using two specifically designed physics information loss functions, modeling the deformation relationship between local and whole shapes. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing approaches in object classification, few-shot learning, and segmentation, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Quantitative evaluation of brain-inspired vision sensors in high-speed robotic perception

Perception systems in robotics encounter significant challenges in high-speed and dynamic conditions when relying on traditional cameras, where motion blur can compromise spatial feature integrity and task performance. Brain-inspired vision sensors (BVS) have recently gained attention as an alternative, offering high temporal resolution with reduced bandwidth and power requirements. Here, we present the first quantitative evaluation framework for two representative classes of BVSs in variable-speed robotic sensing, including event-based vision sensors (EVS) that detect asynchronous temporal contrasts, and the primitive-based sensor Tianmouc that employs a complementary mechanism to encode both spatiotemporal changes and intensity. A unified testing protocol is established, including crosssensor calibrations, standardized testing platforms, and quality metrics to address differences in data modality. From an imaging standpoint, we evaluate the effects of sensor non-idealities, such as motion-induced distortion, on the capture of structural information. For functional benchmarking, we examine task performance in corner detection and motion estimation under different rotational speeds. Results indicate that EVS performs well in highspeed, sparse scenarios and in modestly fast, complex scenes, but exhibits performance limitations in high-speed, cluttered settings due to pixel-level bandwidth variations and event rate saturation. In comparison, Tianmouc demonstrates consistent performance across sparse and complex scenarios at various speeds, supported by its global, precise, high-speed spatiotemporal gradient samplings. These findings offer valuable insights into the applicationdependent suitability of BVS technologies and support further advancement in this area.

Mapping at First Sense: A Lightweight Neural Network-Based Indoor Structures Prediction Method for Robot Autonomous Exploration

Autonomous exploration in unknown environments is a critical challenge in robotics, particularly for applications such as indoor navigation, search and rescue, and service robotics. Traditional exploration strategies, such as frontier-based methods, often struggle to efficiently utilize prior knowledge of structural regularities in indoor spaces. To address this limitation, we propose Mapping at First Sense, a lightweight neural network-based approach that predicts unobserved areas in local maps, thereby enhancing exploration efficiency. The core of our method, SenseMapNet, integrates convolutional and transformerbased architectures to infer occluded regions while maintaining computational efficiency for real-time deployment on resourceconstrained robots. Additionally, we introduce SenseMapDataset, a curated dataset constructed from KTH and HouseExpo environments, which facilitates training and evaluation of neural models for indoor exploration. Experimental results demonstrate that SenseMapNet achieves an SSIM (structural similarity) of 0.78, LPIPS (perceptual quality) of 0.68, and an FID (feature distribution alignment) of 239.79, outperforming conventional methods in map reconstruction quality. Compared to traditional frontier-based exploration, our method reduces exploration time by 46.5% (from 2335.56s to 1248.68s) while maintaining a high coverage rate (88%) and achieving a reconstruction accuracy of 88%. The proposed method represents a promising step toward efficient, learning-driven robotic exploration in structured environments.

SenseExpo: Efficient Autonomous Exploration with Prediction Information from Lightweight Neural Networks

This paper proposes SenseExpo, an efficient autonomous exploration framework based on a lightweight prediction network, which addresses the limitations of traditional methods in computational overhead and environmental generalization. By integrating Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Transformer, and Fast Fourier Convolution (FFC), we designed a lightweight prediction model with merely 709k parameters. Our smallest model achieves better performance on the KTH dataset than U-net (24.5M) and LaMa (51M), delivering PSNR 9.026 and SSIM 0.718, particularly representing a 38.7% PSNR improvement over the 51M-parameter LaMa model. Cross-domain testing demonstrates its strong generalization capability, with an FID score of 161.55 on the HouseExpo dataset, significantly outperforming comparable methods. Regarding exploration efficiency, on the KTH dataset,SenseExpo demonstrates approximately a 67.9% time reduction in exploration time compared to MapEx. On the MRPB 1.0 dataset, SenseExpo achieves 77.1% time reduction roughly compared to MapEx. Deployed as a plug-and-play ROS node, the framework seamlessly integrates with existing navigation systems, providing an efficient solution for resource-constrained devices.

Mixture of Prompt Learning for Vision Language Models

As powerful pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP gain prominence, numerous studies have attempted to combine VLMs for downstream tasks. Among these, prompt learning has been validated as an effective method for adapting to new tasks, which only requiring a small number of parameters. However, current prompt learning methods face two challenges: first, a single soft prompt struggles to capture the diverse styles and patterns within a dataset; second, fine-tuning soft prompts is prone to overfitting. To address these challenges, we propose a mixture of soft prompt learning method incorporating a routing module. This module is able to capture a dataset's varied styles and dynamically selects the most suitable prompts for each instance. Additionally, we introduce a novel gating mechanism to ensure the router selects prompts based on their similarity to hard prompt templates, which both retaining knowledge from hard prompts and improving selection accuracy. We also implement semantically grouped text-level supervision, initializing each soft prompt with the token embeddings of manually designed templates from its group and applied a contrastive loss between the resulted text feature and hard prompt encoded text feature. This supervision ensures that the text features derived from soft prompts remain close to those from their corresponding hard prompts, preserving initial knowledge and mitigating overfitting. Our method has been validated on 11 datasets, demonstrating evident improvements in few-shot learning, domain generalization, and base-to-new generalization scenarios compared to existing baselines. The code will be available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/mocoop-6387}

General-purpose Dataflow Model with Neuromorphic Primitives

Neuromorphic computing exhibits great potential to provide high-performance benefits in various applications beyond neural networks. However, a general-purpose program execution model that aligns with the features of neuromorphic computing is required to bridge the gap between program versatility and neuromorphic hardware efficiency. The dataflow model offers a potential solution, but it faces high graph complexity and incompatibility with neuromorphic hardware when dealing with control flow programs, which decreases the programmability and performance. Here, we present a dataflow model tailored for neuromorphic hardware, called neuromorphic dataflow, which provides a compact, concise, and neuromorphic-compatible program representation for control logic. The neuromorphic dataflow introduces "when" and "where" primitives, which restructure the view of control. The neuromorphic dataflow embeds these primitives in the dataflow schema with the plasticity inherited from the spiking algorithms. Our method enables the deployment of general-purpose programs on neuromorphic hardware with both programmability and plasticity, while fully utilizing the hardware's potential.

Solution-oriented Agent-based Models Generation with Verifier-assisted Iterative In-context Learning

Agent-based models (ABMs) stand as an essential paradigm for proposing and validating hypothetical solutions or policies aimed at addressing challenges posed by complex systems and achieving various objectives. This process demands labor-intensive endeavors and multidisciplinary expertise. Large language models (LLMs) encapsulating cross-domain knowledge and programming proficiency could potentially alleviate the difficulty of this process. However, LLMs excel in handling sequential information, making it challenging for analyzing the intricate interactions and nonlinear dynamics inherent in ABMs. Additionally, due to the lack of self-evaluation capability of LLMs, relying solely on LLMs is insufficient to effectively accomplish this process. In this paper, we present SAGE, a general solution-oriented ABM generation framework designed for automatic modeling and generating solutions for targeted problems. Unlike approaches reliant on expert handcrafting or resource-intensive neural network training, SAGE establishes a verifier-assisted iterative in-context learning process employing large language models (LLMs) to leverages their inherent cross-domain knowledge for tackling intricate demands from diverse domain scenarios. In SAGE, we introduce an semi-structured conceptual representation expliciting the intricate structures of ABMs and an objective representation to guide LLMs in modeling scenarios and proposing hypothetical solutions through in-context learning. To ensure the model executability and solution feasibility, SAGE devises a two-level verifier with chain-of-thought prompting tailored to the complex interactions and non-linear dynamics of ABMs, driving the iterative generation optimization. Moreover, we construct an evaluation dataset of solution-oriented ABMs from open sources.It contains practical models across various domains.

General Automatic Solution Generation of Social Problems

Given the escalating intricacy and multifaceted nature of contemporary social systems, manually generating solutions to address pertinent social issues has become a formidable task. In response to this challenge, the rapid development of artificial intelligence has spurred the exploration of computational methodologies aimed at automatically generating solutions. However, current methods for auto-generation of solutions mainly concentrate on local social regulations that pertain to specific scenarios. Here, we report an automatic social operating system (ASOS) designed for general social solution generation, which is built upon agent-based models, enabling both global and local analyses and regulations of social problems across spatial and temporal dimensions. ASOS adopts a hypergraph with extensible social semantics for a comprehensive and structured representation of social dynamics. It also incorporates a generalized protocol for standardized hypergraph operations and a symbolic hybrid framework that delivers interpretable solutions, yielding a balance between regulatory efficacy and function viability. To demonstrate the effectiveness of ASOS, we apply it to the domain of averting extreme events within international oil futures markets. By generating a new trading role supplemented by new mechanisms, ASOS can adeptly discern precarious market conditions and make front-running interventions for non-profit purposes. This study demonstrates that ASOS provides an efficient and systematic approach for generating solutions for enhancing our society.