MindWatcher: Toward Smarter Multimodal Tool-Integrated Reasoning

Traditional workflow-based agents exhibit limited intelligence when addressing real-world problems requiring tool invocation. Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) agents capable of autonomous reasoning and tool invocation are rapidly emerging as a powerful approach for complex decision-making tasks involving multi-step interactions with external environments. In this work, we introduce MindWatcher, a TIR agent integrating interleaved thinking and multimodal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. MindWatcher can autonomously decide whether and how to invoke diverse tools and coordinate their use, without relying on human prompts or workflows. The interleaved thinking paradigm enables the model to switch between thinking and tool calling at any intermediate stage, while its multimodal CoT capability allows manipulation of images during reasoning to yield more precise search results. We implement automated data auditing and evaluation pipelines, complemented by manually curated high-quality datasets for training, and we construct a benchmark, called MindWatcher-Evaluate Bench (MWE-Bench), to evaluate its performance. MindWatcher is equipped with a comprehensive suite of auxiliary reasoning tools, enabling it to address broad-domain multimodal problems. A large-scale, high-quality local image retrieval database, covering eight categories including cars, animals, and plants, endows model with robust object recognition despite its small size. Finally, we design a more efficient training infrastructure for MindWatcher, enhancing training speed and hardware utilization. Experiments not only demonstrate that MindWatcher matches or exceeds the performance of larger or more recent models through superior tool invocation, but also uncover critical insights for agent training, such as the genetic inheritance phenomenon in agentic RL.

SCPainter: A Unified Framework for Realistic 3D Asset Insertion and Novel View Synthesis

3D Asset insertion and novel view synthesis (NVS) are key components for autonomous driving simulation, enhancing the diversity of training data. With better training data that is diverse and covers a wide range of situations, including long-tailed driving scenarios, autonomous driving models can become more robust and safer. This motivates a unified simulation framework that can jointly handle realistic integration of inserted 3D assets and NVS. Recent 3D asset reconstruction methods enable reconstruction of dynamic actors from video, supporting their re-insertion into simulated driving scenes. While the overall structure and appearance can be accurate, it still struggles to capture the realism of 3D assets through lighting or shadows, particularly when inserted into scenes. In parallel, recent advances in NVS methods have demonstrated promising results in synthesizing viewpoints beyond the originally recorded trajectories. However, existing approaches largely treat asset insertion and NVS capabilities in isolation. To allow for interaction with the rest of the scene and to enable more diverse creation of new scenarios for training, realistic 3D asset insertion should be combined with NVS. To address this, we present SCPainter (Street Car Painter), a unified framework which integrates 3D Gaussian Splat (GS) car asset representations and 3D scene point clouds with diffusion-based generation to jointly enable realistic 3D asset insertion and NVS. The 3D GS assets and 3D scene point clouds are projected together into novel views, and these projections are used to condition a diffusion model to generate high quality images. Evaluation on the Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate the capability of our framework to enable 3D asset insertion and NVS, facilitating the creation of diverse and realistic driving data.

Early warning signals for loss of control

Maintaining stability in feedback systems, from aircraft and autonomous robots to biological and physiological systems, relies on monitoring their behavior and continuously adjusting their inputs. Incremental damage can make such control fragile. This tends to go unnoticed until a small perturbation induces instability (i.e. loss of control). Traditional methods in the field of engineering rely on accurate system models to compute a safe set of operating instructions, which become invalid when the, possibly damaged, system diverges from its model. Here we demonstrate that the approach of such a feedback system towards instability can nonetheless be monitored through dynamical indicators of resilience. This holistic system safety monitor does not rely on a system model and is based on the generic phenomenon of critical slowing down, shown to occur in the climate, biology and other complex nonlinear systems approaching criticality. Our findings for engineered devices opens up a wide range of applications involving real-time early warning systems as well as an empirical guidance of resilient system design exploration, or "tinkering". While we demonstrate the validity using drones, the generic nature of the underlying principles suggest that these indicators could apply across a wider class of controlled systems including reactors, aircraft, and self-driving cars.

Results of the 2024 CommonRoad Motion Planning Competition for Autonomous Vehicles

Over the past decade, a wide range of motion planning approaches for autonomous vehicles has been developed to handle increasingly complex traffic scenarios. However, these approaches are rarely compared on standardized benchmarks, limiting the assessment of relative strengths and weaknesses. To address this gap, we present the setup and results of the 4th CommonRoad Motion Planning Competition held in 2024, conducted using the CommonRoad benchmark suite. This annual competition provides an open-source and reproducible framework for benchmarking motion planning algorithms. The benchmark scenarios span highway and urban environments with diverse traffic participants, including passenger cars, buses, and bicycles. Planner performance is evaluated along four dimensions: efficiency, safety, comfort, and compliance with selected traffic rules. This report introduces the competition format and provides a comparison of representative high-performing planners from the 2023 and 2024 editions.

Out-of-Distribution Detection for Continual Learning: Design Principles and Benchmarking

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in the development of machine learning models across a wide range of fields, fueled by increased computational resources, large-scale datasets, and the rise of deep learning architectures. From malware detection to enabling autonomous navigation, modern machine learning systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities. However, as these models are deployed in ever-changing real-world scenarios, their ability to remain reliable and adaptive over time becomes increasingly important. For example, in the real world, new malware families are continuously developed, whereas autonomous driving cars are employed in many different cities and weather conditions. Models trained in fixed settings can not respond effectively to novel conditions encountered post-deployment. In fact, most machine learning models are still developed under the assumption that training and test data are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), i.e., sampled from the same underlying (unknown) distribution. While this assumption simplifies model development and evaluation, it does not hold in many real-world applications, where data changes over time and unexpected inputs frequently occur. Retraining models from scratch whenever new data appears is computationally expensive, time-consuming, and impractical in resource-constrained environments. These limitations underscore the need for Continual Learning (CL), which enables models to incrementally learn from evolving data streams without forgetting past knowledge, and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection, which allows systems to identify and respond to novel or anomalous inputs. Jointly addressing both challenges is critical to developing robust, efficient, and adaptive AI systems.

Characterizing Human Feedback-Based Control in Naturalistic Driving Interactions via Gaussian Process Regression with Linear Feedback

Understanding driver interactions is critical to designing autonomous vehicles to interoperate safely with human-driven cars. We consider the impact of these interactions on the policies drivers employ when navigating unsigned intersections in a driving simulator. The simulator allows the collection of naturalistic decision-making and behavior data in a controlled environment. Using these data, we model the human driver responses as state-based feedback controllers learned via Gaussian Process regression methods. We compute the feedback gain of the controller using a weighted combination of linear and nonlinear priors. We then analyze how the individual gains are reflected in driver behavior. We also assess differences in these controllers across populations of drivers. Our work in data-driven analyses of how drivers determine their policies can facilitate future work in the design of socially responsive autonomy for vehicles.

CARScenes: Semantic VLM Dataset for Safe Autonomous Driving

CAR-Scenes is a frame-level dataset for autonomous driving that enables training and evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs) for interpretable, scene-level understanding. We annotate 5,192 images drawn from Argoverse 1, Cityscapes, KITTI, and nuScenes using a 28-key category/sub-category knowledge base covering environment, road geometry, background-vehicle behavior, ego-vehicle behavior, vulnerable road users, sensor states, and a discrete severity scale (1-10), totaling 350+ leaf attributes. Labels are produced by a GPT-4o-assisted vision-language pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification; we release the exact prompts, post-processing rules, and per-field baseline model performance. CAR-Scenes also provides attribute co-occurrence graphs and JSONL records that support semantic retrieval, dataset triage, and risk-aware scenario mining across sources. To calibrate task difficulty, we include reproducible, non-benchmark baselines, notably a LoRA-tuned Qwen2-VL-2B with deterministic decoding, evaluated via scalar accuracy, micro-averaged F1 for list attributes, and severity MAE/RMSE on a fixed validation split. We publicly release the annotation and analysis scripts, including graph construction and evaluation scripts, to enable explainable, data-centric workflows for future intelligent vehicles. Dataset: https://github.com/Croquembouche/CAR-Scenes

Bio AI Agent: A Multi-Agent Artificial Intelligence System for Autonomous CAR-T Cell Therapy Development with Integrated Target Discovery, Toxicity Prediction, and Rational Molecular Design

Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy represents a paradigm shift in cancer treatment, yet development timelines of 8-12 years and clinical attrition rates exceeding 40-60% highlight critical inefficiencies in target selection, safety assessment, and molecular optimization. We present Bio AI Agent, a multi-agent artificial intelligence system powered by large language models that enables autonomous CAR-T development through collaborative specialized agents. The system comprises six autonomous agents: Target Selection Agent for multi-parametric antigen prioritization across >10,000 cancer-associated targets, Toxicity Prediction Agent for comprehensive safety profiling integrating tissue expression atlases and pharmacovigilance databases, Molecular Design Agent for rational CAR engineering, Patent Intelligence Agent for freedom-to-operate analysis, Clinical Translation Agent for regulatory compliance, and Decision Orchestration Agent for multi-agent coordination. Retrospective validation demonstrated autonomous identification of high-risk targets including FcRH5 (hepatotoxicity) and CD229 (off-tumor toxicity), patent infringement risks for CD38+SLAMF7 combinations, and generation of comprehensive development roadmaps. By enabling parallel processing, specialized reasoning, and autonomous decision-making superior to monolithic AI systems, Bio AI Agent addresses critical gaps in precision oncology development and has potential to accelerate translation of next-generation immunotherapies from discovery to clinic.

Simulating an Autonomous System in CARLA using ROS 2

Autonomous racing offers a rigorous setting to stress test perception, planning, and control under high speed and uncertainty. This paper proposes an approach to design and evaluate a software stack for an autonomous race car in CARLA: Car Learning to Act simulator, targeting competitive driving performance in the Formula Student UK Driverless (FS-AI) 2025 competition. By utilizing a 360° light detection and ranging (LiDAR), stereo camera, global navigation satellite system (GNSS), and inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor via ROS 2 (Robot Operating System), the system reliably detects the cones marking the track boundaries at distances of up to 35 m. Optimized trajectories are computed considering vehicle dynamics and simulated environmental factors such as visibility and lighting to navigate the track efficiently. The complete autonomous stack is implemented in ROS 2 and validated extensively in CARLA on a dedicated vehicle (ADS-DV) before being ported to the actual hardware, which includes the Jetson AGX Orin 64GB, ZED2i Stereo Camera, Robosense Helios 16P LiDAR, and CHCNAV Inertial Navigation System (INS).

MonoCLUE : Object-Aware Clustering Enhances Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection offers a cost-effective solution for autonomous driving but suffers from ill-posed depth and limited field of view. These constraints cause a lack of geometric cues and reduced accuracy in occluded or truncated scenes. While recent approaches incorporate additional depth information to address geometric ambiguity, they overlook the visual cues crucial for robust recognition. We propose MonoCLUE, which enhances monocular 3D detection by leveraging both local clustering and generalized scene memory of visual features. First, we perform K-means clustering on visual features to capture distinct object-level appearance parts (e.g., bonnet, car roof), improving detection of partially visible objects. The clustered features are propagated across regions to capture objects with similar appearances. Second, we construct a generalized scene memory by aggregating clustered features across images, providing consistent representations that generalize across scenes. This improves object-level feature consistency, enabling stable detection across varying environments. Lastly, we integrate both local cluster features and generalized scene memory into object queries, guiding attention toward informative regions. Exploiting a unified local clustering and generalized scene memory strategy, MonoCLUE enables robust monocular 3D detection under occlusion and limited visibility, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark.