Auditing and Fixing Economic Validity in Tabular Foundation Models for Discrete Choice

Tabular foundation models achieve strong accuracy on choice prediction tasks, but their predictions often violate the economic logic those tasks require: raising a price sometimes increases predicted demand, and implied willingness-to-pay estimates are frequently negative or implausible. We propose a two-stage adapter that embeds foundation model predictions within a utility-maximization framework. In the first stage, we estimate a standard choice model whose parameters are constrained to obey economic theory. In the second stage, we freeze those parameters and train a correction term that incorporates the foundation model's predictions as additional information. The result is a model that inherits the foundation model's accuracy gains while guaranteeing monotonic price-demand relationships under policy perturbation and producing analytically computable trade-off measures. On two transportation datasets, the adapter recovers up to 13 percentage points of accuracy over a standard logit model while maintaining perfect economic consistency, something neither the raw foundation models nor conventional distillation achieve.

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.

Masked Generative Transformer Is What You Need for Image Editing

Diffusion models dominate image editing, yet their global denoising mechanism entangles edited regions with surrounding context, causing modifications to propagate into areas that should remain intact. We propose a fundamentally different approach by leveraging Masked Generative Transformers (MGTs), whose localized token-prediction paradigm naturally confines changes to intended regions. We present EditMGT, an MGT-based editing framework that is the first of its kind. Our approach employs multi-layer attention consolidation to aggregate cross-attention maps into precise edit localization signals, and region-hold sampling to explicitly prevent token flipping in non-target areas. To support training, we construct CrispEdit-2M, a 2M-sample high-resolution (>1024) editing dataset spanning seven categories. With only 960M parameters, EditMGT achieves state-of-the-art image similarity on multiple benchmarks while delivering 6x faster editing, demonstrating that MGTs offer a compelling alternative to diffusion-based editing.

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.

RingMo-Agent: A Unified Remote Sensing Foundation Model for Multi-Platform and Multi-Modal Reasoning

Remote sensing (RS) images from multiple modalities and platforms exhibit diverse details due to differences in sensor characteristics and imaging perspectives. Existing vision-language research in RS largely relies on relatively homogeneous data sources. Moreover, they still remain limited to conventional visual perception tasks such as classification or captioning. As a result, these methods fail to serve as a unified and standalone framework capable of effectively handling RS imagery from diverse sources in real-world applications. To address these issues, we propose RingMo-Agent, a model designed to handle multi-modal and multi-platform data that performs perception and reasoning tasks based on user textual instructions. Compared with existing models, RingMo-Agent 1) is supported by a large-scale vision-language dataset named RS-VL3M, comprising over 3 million image-text pairs, spanning optical, SAR, and infrared (IR) modalities collected from both satellite and UAV platforms, covering perception and challenging reasoning tasks; 2) learns modality adaptive representations by incorporating separated embedding layers to construct isolated features for heterogeneous modalities and reduce cross-modal interference; 3) unifies task modeling by introducing task-specific tokens and employing a token-based high-dimensional hidden state decoding mechanism designed for long-horizon spatial tasks. Extensive experiments on various RS vision-language tasks demonstrate that RingMo-Agent not only proves effective in both visual understanding and sophisticated analytical tasks, but also exhibits strong generalizability across different platforms and sensing modalities.

ViRefSAM: Visual Reference-Guided Segment Anything Model for Remote Sensing Segmentation

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), with its prompt-driven paradigm, exhibits strong generalization in generic segmentation tasks. However, applying SAM to remote sensing (RS) images still faces two major challenges. First, manually constructing precise prompts for each image (e.g., points or boxes) is labor-intensive and inefficient, especially in RS scenarios with dense small objects or spatially fragmented distributions. Second, SAM lacks domain adaptability, as it is pre-trained primarily on natural images and struggles to capture RS-specific semantics and spatial characteristics, especially when segmenting novel or unseen classes. To address these issues, inspired by few-shot learning, we propose ViRefSAM, a novel framework that guides SAM utilizing only a few annotated reference images that contain class-specific objects. Without requiring manual prompts, ViRefSAM enables automatic segmentation of class-consistent objects across RS images. Specifically, ViRefSAM introduces two key components while keeping SAM's original architecture intact: (1) a Visual Contextual Prompt Encoder that extracts class-specific semantic clues from reference images and generates object-aware prompts via contextual interaction with target images; and (2) a Dynamic Target Alignment Adapter, integrated into SAM's image encoder, which mitigates the domain gap by injecting class-specific semantics into target image features, enabling SAM to dynamically focus on task-relevant regions. Extensive experiments on three few-shot segmentation benchmarks, including iSAID-5$^i$, LoveDA-2$^i$, and COCO-20$^i$, demonstrate that ViRefSAM enables accurate and automatic segmentation of unseen classes by leveraging only a few reference images and consistently outperforms existing few-shot segmentation methods across diverse datasets.

A Complex-valued SAR Foundation Model Based on Physically Inspired Representation Learning

Vision foundation models in remote sensing have been extensively studied due to their superior generalization on various downstream tasks. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) offers all-day, all-weather imaging capabilities, providing significant advantages for Earth observation. However, establishing a foundation model for SAR image interpretation inevitably encounters the challenges of insufficient information utilization and poor interpretability. In this paper, we propose a remote sensing foundation model based on complex-valued SAR data, which simulates the polarimetric decomposition process for pre-training, i.e., characterizing pixel scattering intensity as a weighted combination of scattering bases and scattering coefficients, thereby endowing the foundation model with physical interpretability. Specifically, we construct a series of scattering queries, each representing an independent and meaningful scattering basis, which interact with SAR features in the scattering query decoder and output the corresponding scattering coefficient. To guide the pre-training process, polarimetric decomposition loss and power self-supervision loss are constructed. The former aligns the predicted coefficients with Yamaguchi coefficients, while the latter reconstructs power from the predicted coefficients and compares it to the input image's power. The performance of our foundation model is validated on six typical downstream tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results. Notably, the foundation model can extract stable feature representations and exhibits strong generalization, even in data-scarce conditions.

RingMoE: Mixture-of-Modality-Experts Multi-Modal Foundation Models for Universal Remote Sensing Image Interpretation

The rapid advancement of foundation models has revolutionized visual representation learning in a self-supervised manner. However, their application in remote sensing (RS) remains constrained by a fundamental gap: existing models predominantly handle single or limited modalities, overlooking the inherently multi-modal nature of RS observations. Optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and multi-spectral data offer complementary insights that significantly reduce the inherent ambiguity and uncertainty in single-source analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce RingMoE, a unified multi-modal RS foundation model with 14.7 billion parameters, pre-trained on 400 million multi-modal RS images from nine satellites. RingMoE incorporates three key innovations: (1) A hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture comprising modal-specialized, collaborative, and shared experts, effectively modeling intra-modal knowledge while capturing cross-modal dependencies to mitigate conflicts between modal representations; (2) Physics-informed self-supervised learning, explicitly embedding sensor-specific radiometric characteristics into the pre-training objectives; (3) Dynamic expert pruning, enabling adaptive model compression from 14.7B to 1B parameters while maintaining performance, facilitating efficient deployment in Earth observation applications. Evaluated across 23 benchmarks spanning six key RS tasks (i.e., classification, detection, segmentation, tracking, change detection, and depth estimation), RingMoE outperforms existing foundation models and sets new SOTAs, demonstrating remarkable adaptability from single-modal to multi-modal scenarios. Beyond theoretical progress, it has been deployed and trialed in multiple sectors, including emergency response, land management, marine sciences, and urban planning.

SA-Occ: Satellite-Assisted 3D Occupancy Prediction in Real World

Existing vision-based 3D occupancy prediction methods are inherently limited in accuracy due to their exclusive reliance on street-view imagery, neglecting the potential benefits of incorporating satellite views. We propose SA-Occ, the first Satellite-Assisted 3D occupancy prediction model, which leverages GPS & IMU to integrate historical yet readily available satellite imagery into real-time applications, effectively mitigating limitations of ego-vehicle perceptions, involving occlusions and degraded performance in distant regions. To address the core challenges of cross-view perception, we propose: 1) Dynamic-Decoupling Fusion, which resolves inconsistencies in dynamic regions caused by the temporal asynchrony between satellite and street views; 2) 3D-Proj Guidance, a module that enhances 3D feature extraction from inherently 2D satellite imagery; and 3) Uniform Sampling Alignment, which aligns the sampling density between street and satellite views. Evaluated on Occ3D-nuScenes, SA-Occ achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially among single-frame methods, with a 39.05% mIoU (a 6.97% improvement), while incurring only 6.93 ms of additional latency per frame. Our code and newly curated dataset are available at https://github.com/chenchen235/SA-Occ.

SemStereo: Semantic-Constrained Stereo Matching Network for Remote Sensing

Semantic segmentation and 3D reconstruction are two fundamental tasks in remote sensing, typically treated as separate or loosely coupled tasks. Despite attempts to integrate them into a unified network, the constraints between the two heterogeneous tasks are not explicitly modeled, since the pioneering studies either utilize a loosely coupled parallel structure or engage in only implicit interactions, failing to capture the inherent connections. In this work, we explore the connections between the two tasks and propose a new network that imposes semantic constraints on the stereo matching task, both implicitly and explicitly. Implicitly, we transform the traditional parallel structure to a new cascade structure termed Semantic-Guided Cascade structure, where the deep features enriched with semantic information are utilized for the computation of initial disparity maps, enhancing semantic guidance. Explicitly, we propose a Semantic Selective Refinement (SSR) module and a Left-Right Semantic Consistency (LRSC) module. The SSR refines the initial disparity map under the guidance of the semantic map. The LRSC ensures semantic consistency between two views via reducing the semantic divergence after transforming the semantic map from one view to the other using the disparity map. Experiments on the US3D and WHU datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for both semantic segmentation and stereo matching.