Jr. AI Scientist and Its Risk Report: Autonomous Scientific Exploration from a Baseline Paper

Understanding the current capabilities and risks of AI Scientist systems is essential for ensuring trustworthy and sustainable AI-driven scientific progress while preserving the integrity of the academic ecosystem. To this end, we develop Jr. AI Scientist, a state-of-the-art autonomous AI scientist system that mimics the core research workflow of a novice student researcher: Given the baseline paper from the human mentor, it analyzes its limitations, formulates novel hypotheses for improvement, validates them through rigorous experimentation, and writes a paper with the results. Unlike previous approaches that assume full automation or operate on small-scale code, Jr. AI Scientist follows a well-defined research workflow and leverages modern coding agents to handle complex, multi-file implementations, leading to scientifically valuable contributions. For evaluation, we conducted automated assessments using AI Reviewers, author-led evaluations, and submissions to Agents4Science, a venue dedicated to AI-driven scientific contributions. The findings demonstrate that Jr. AI Scientist generates papers receiving higher review scores than existing fully automated systems. Nevertheless, we identify important limitations from both the author evaluation and the Agents4Science reviews, indicating the potential risks of directly applying current AI Scientist systems and key challenges for future research. Finally, we comprehensively report various risks identified during development. We hope these insights will deepen understanding of current progress and risks in AI Scientist development.

Entity-NeRF: Detecting and Removing Moving Entities in Urban Scenes

Recent advancements in the study of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) for dynamic scenes often involve explicit modeling of scene dynamics. However, this approach faces challenges in modeling scene dynamics in urban environments, where moving objects of various categories and scales are present. In such settings, it becomes crucial to effectively eliminate moving objects to accurately reconstruct static backgrounds. Our research introduces an innovative method, termed here as Entity-NeRF, which combines the strengths of knowledge-based and statistical strategies. This approach utilizes entity-wise statistics, leveraging entity segmentation and stationary entity classification through thing/stuff segmentation. To assess our methodology, we created an urban scene dataset masked with moving objects. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Entity-NeRF notably outperforms existing techniques in removing moving objects and reconstructing static urban backgrounds, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Non-uniform Sampling Strategies for NeRF on 360{\textdegree} images

In recent years, the performance of novel view synthesis using perspective images has dramatically improved with the advent of neural radiance fields (NeRF). This study proposes two novel techniques that effectively build NeRF for 360{\textdegree} omnidirectional images. Due to the characteristics of a 360{\textdegree} image of ERP format that has spatial distortion in their high latitude regions and a 360{\textdegree} wide viewing angle, NeRF's general ray sampling strategy is ineffective. Hence, the view synthesis accuracy of NeRF is limited and learning is not efficient. We propose two non-uniform ray sampling schemes for NeRF to suit 360{\textdegree} images - distortion-aware ray sampling and content-aware ray sampling. We created an evaluation dataset Synth360 using Replica and SceneCity models of indoor and outdoor scenes, respectively. In experiments, we show that our proposal successfully builds 360{\textdegree} image NeRF in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. The proposal is widely applicable to advanced variants of NeRF. DietNeRF, AugNeRF, and NeRF++ combined with the proposed techniques further improve the performance. Moreover, we show that our proposed method enhances the quality of real-world scenes in 360{\textdegree} images. Synth360: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1suL9B7DO2no21ggiIHkH3JF3OecasQLb.