DLW-CI: A Dynamic Likelihood-Weighted Cooperative Infotaxis Approach for Multi-Source Search in Urban Environments Using Consumer Drone Networks

Consumer-grade drones equipped with low-cost sensors have emerged as a cornerstone of Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AISs) for environmental monitoring and hazardous substance detection in urban environments. However, existing research primarily addresses single-source search problems, overlooking the complexities of real-world urban scenarios where both the location and quantity of hazardous sources remain unknown. To address this issue, we propose the Dynamic Likelihood-Weighted Cooperative Infotaxis (DLW-CI) approach for consumer drone networks. Our approach enhances multi-drone collaboration in AISs by combining infotaxis (a cognitive search strategy) with optimized source term estimation and an innovative cooperative mechanism. Specifically, we introduce a novel source term estimation method that utilizes multiple parallel particle filters, with each filter dedicated to estimating the parameters of a potentially unknown source within the search scene. Furthermore, we develop a cooperative mechanism based on dynamic likelihood weights to prevent multiple drones from simultaneously estimating and searching for the same source, thus optimizing the energy efficiency and search coverage of the consumer AIS. Experimental results demonstrate that the DLW-CI approach significantly outperforms baseline methods regarding success rate, accuracy, and root mean square error, particularly in scenarios with relatively few sources, regardless of the presence of obstacles. Also, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified in a diffusion scenario generated by the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. Research findings indicate that our approach could improve source estimation accuracy and search efficiency by consumer drone-based AISs, making a valuable contribution to environmental safety monitoring applications within smart city infrastructure.

GeoNav: Empowering MLLMs with Explicit Geospatial Reasoning Abilities for Language-Goal Aerial Navigation

Language-goal aerial navigation is a critical challenge in embodied AI, requiring UAVs to localize targets in complex environments such as urban blocks based on textual specification. Existing methods, often adapted from indoor navigation, struggle to scale due to limited field of view, semantic ambiguity among objects, and lack of structured spatial reasoning. In this work, we propose GeoNav, a geospatially aware multimodal agent to enable long-range navigation. GeoNav operates in three phases-landmark navigation, target search, and precise localization-mimicking human coarse-to-fine spatial strategies. To support such reasoning, it dynamically builds two different types of spatial memory. The first is a global but schematic cognitive map, which fuses prior textual geographic knowledge and embodied visual cues into a top-down, annotated form for fast navigation to the landmark region. The second is a local but delicate scene graph representing hierarchical spatial relationships between blocks, landmarks, and objects, which is used for definite target localization. On top of this structured representation, GeoNav employs a spatially aware, multimodal chain-of-thought prompting mechanism to enable multimodal large language models with efficient and interpretable decision-making across stages. On the CityNav urban navigation benchmark, GeoNav surpasses the current state-of-the-art by up to 12.53% in success rate and significantly improves navigation efficiency, even in hard-level tasks. Ablation studies highlight the importance of each module, showcasing how geospatial representations and coarse-to-fine reasoning enhance UAV navigation.

10K is Enough: An Ultra-Lightweight Binarized Network for Infrared Small-Target Detection

The widespread deployment of InfRared Small-Target Detection(IRSTD) algorithms on edge devices necessitates the exploration of model compression techniques. Binary neural networks (BNNs) are distinguished by their exceptional efficiency in model compression. However, the small size of infrared targets introduces stringent precision requirements for the IRSTD task, while the inherent precision loss during binarization presents a significant challenge. To address this, we propose the Binarized Infrared Small-Target Detection Network (BiisNet), which preserves the core operations of binarized convolutions while integrating full-precision features into the network's information flow. Specifically, we propose the Dot-Binary Convolution, which retains fine-grained semantic information in feature maps while still leveraging the binarized convolution operations. In addition, we introduce a smooth and adaptive Dynamic Softsign function, which provides more comprehensive and progressively finer gradient during back-propagation, enhancing model stability and promoting an optimal weight distribution.Experimental results demonstrate that BiisNet not only significantly outperforms other binary architectures but also demonstrates strong competitiveness among state-of-the-art full-precision models.

CityEQA: A Hierarchical LLM Agent on Embodied Question Answering Benchmark in City Space

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) has primarily focused on indoor environments, leaving the complexities of urban settings - spanning environment, action, and perception - largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce CityEQA, a new task where an embodied agent answers open-vocabulary questions through active exploration in dynamic city spaces. To support this task, we present CityEQA-EC, the first benchmark dataset featuring 1,412 human-annotated tasks across six categories, grounded in a realistic 3D urban simulator. Moreover, we propose Planner-Manager-Actor (PMA), a novel agent tailored for CityEQA. PMA enables long-horizon planning and hierarchical task execution: the Planner breaks down the question answering into sub-tasks, the Manager maintains an object-centric cognitive map for spatial reasoning during the process control, and the specialized Actors handle navigation, exploration, and collection sub-tasks. Experiments demonstrate that PMA achieves 60.7% of human-level answering accuracy, significantly outperforming frontier-based baselines. While promising, the performance gap compared to humans highlights the need for enhanced visual reasoning in CityEQA. This work paves the way for future advancements in urban spatial intelligence. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/BiluYong/CityEQA.git.

Streaming Speaker Change Detection and Gender Classification for Transducer-Based Multi-Talker Speech Translation

Streaming multi-talker speech translation is a task that involves not only generating accurate and fluent translations with low latency but also recognizing when a speaker change occurs and what the speaker's gender is. Speaker change information can be used to create audio prompts for a zero-shot text-to-speech system, and gender can help to select speaker profiles in a conventional text-to-speech model. We propose to tackle streaming speaker change detection and gender classification by incorporating speaker embeddings into a transducer-based streaming end-to-end speech translation model. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods can achieve high accuracy for both speaker change detection and gender classification.

RE-POSE: Synergizing Reinforcement Learning-Based Partitioning and Offloading for Edge Object Detection

Object detection plays a crucial role in smart video analysis, with applications ranging from autonomous driving and security to smart cities. However, achieving real-time object detection on edge devices presents significant challenges due to their limited computational resources and the high demands of deep neural network (DNN)-based detection models, particularly when processing high-resolution video. Conventional strategies, such as input down-sampling and network up-scaling, often compromise detection accuracy for faster performance or lead to higher inference latency. To address these issues, this paper introduces RE-POSE, a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-Driven Partitioning and Edge Offloading framework designed to optimize the accuracy-latency trade-off in resource-constrained edge environments. Our approach features an RL-Based Dynamic Clustering Algorithm (RL-DCA) that partitions video frames into non-uniform blocks based on object distribution and the computational characteristics of DNNs. Furthermore, a parallel edge offloading scheme is implemented to distribute these blocks across multiple edge servers for concurrent processing. Experimental evaluations show that RE-POSE significantly enhances detection accuracy and reduces inference latency, surpassing existing methods.

Aligning Large Language Models for Faithful Integrity Against Opposing Argument

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, they can be easily misled by unfaithful arguments during conversations, even when their original statements are correct. To this end, we investigate the problem of maintaining faithful integrity in LLMs. This involves ensuring that LLMs adhere to their faithful statements in the face of opposing arguments and are able to correct their incorrect statements when presented with faithful arguments. In this work, we propose a novel framework, named Alignment for Faithful Integrity with Confidence Estimation (AFICE), which aims to align the LLM responses with faithful integrity. Specifically, AFICE first designs a Bilateral Confidence Estimation (BCE) approach for estimating the uncertainty of each response generated by the LLM given a specific context, which simultaneously estimate the model's confidence to the question based on the internal states during decoding as well as to the answer based on cumulative probability ratios. With the BCE, we construct a conversational preference dataset composed of context, original statement, and argument, which is adopted for aligning the LLM for faithful integrity using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Extensive experimental results on a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements in the LLM's ability to maintain faithful responses when encountering opposing arguments, ensuring both the practical utility and trustworthiness of LLMs in complex interactive settings. Code and data will be released via https://github.com/zhaoy777/AFICE.git

Hadamard Attention Recurrent Transformer: A Strong Baseline for Stereo Matching Transformer

In light of the advancements in transformer technology, extant research posits the construction of stereo transformers as a potential solution to the binocular stereo matching challenge. However, constrained by the low-rank bottleneck and quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms, stereo transformers still fail to demonstrate sufficient nonlinear expressiveness within a reasonable inference time. The lack of focus on key homonymous points renders the representations of such methods vulnerable to challenging conditions, including reflections and weak textures. Furthermore, a slow computing speed is not conducive to the application. To overcome these difficulties, we present the \textbf{H}adamard \textbf{A}ttention \textbf{R}ecurrent Stereo \textbf{T}ransformer (HART) that incorporates the following components: 1) For faster inference, we present a Hadamard product paradigm for the attention mechanism, achieving linear computational complexity. 2) We designed a Dense Attention Kernel (DAK) to amplify the differences between relevant and irrelevant feature responses. This allows HART to focus on important details. DAK also converts zero elements to non-zero elements to mitigate the reduced expressiveness caused by the low-rank bottleneck. 3) To compensate for the spatial and channel interaction missing in the Hadamard product, we propose MKOI to capture both global and local information through the interleaving of large and small kernel convolutions. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our HART. In reflective area, HART ranked \textbf{1st} on the KITTI 2012 benchmark among all published methods at the time of submission. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ZYangChen/HART}.

Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models: A Survey

Although large language models (LLMs) store vast amount of knowledge in their parameters, they still have limitations in the memorization and utilization of certain knowledge, leading to undesired behaviors such as generating untruthful and inaccurate responses. This highlights the critical need to understand the knowledge boundary of LLMs, a concept that remains inadequately defined in existing research. In this survey, we propose a comprehensive definition of the LLM knowledge boundary and introduce a formalized taxonomy categorizing knowledge into four distinct types. Using this foundation, we systematically review the field through three key lenses: the motivation for studying LLM knowledge boundaries, methods for identifying these boundaries, and strategies for mitigating the challenges they present. Finally, we discuss open challenges and potential research directions in this area. We aim for this survey to offer the community a comprehensive overview, facilitate access to key issues, and inspire further advancements in LLM knowledge research.

Motif Channel Opened in a White-Box: Stereo Matching via Motif Correlation Graph

Real-world applications of stereo matching, such as autonomous driving, place stringent demands on both safety and accuracy. However, learning-based stereo matching methods inherently suffer from the loss of geometric structures in certain feature channels, creating a bottleneck in achieving precise detail matching. Additionally, these methods lack interpretability due to the black-box nature of deep learning. In this paper, we propose MoCha-V2, a novel learning-based paradigm for stereo matching. MoCha-V2 introduces the Motif Correlation Graph (MCG) to capture recurring textures, which are referred to as ``motifs" within feature channels. These motifs reconstruct geometric structures and are learned in a more interpretable way. Subsequently, we integrate features from multiple frequency domains through wavelet inverse transformation. The resulting motif features are utilized to restore geometric structures in the stereo matching process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MoCha-V2. MoCha-V2 achieved 1st place on the Middlebury benchmark at the time of its release. Code is available at https://github.com/ZYangChen/MoCha-Stereo.