AurigaNet: A Real-Time Multi-Task Network for Enhanced Urban Driving Perception

Self-driving cars hold significant potential to reduce traffic accidents, alleviate congestion, and enhance urban mobility. However, developing reliable AI systems for autonomous vehicles remains a substantial challenge. Over the past decade, multi-task learning has emerged as a powerful approach to address complex problems in driving perception. Multi-task networks offer several advantages, including increased computational efficiency, real-time processing capabilities, optimized resource utilization, and improved generalization. In this study, we present AurigaNet, an advanced multi-task network architecture designed to push the boundaries of autonomous driving perception. AurigaNet integrates three critical tasks: object detection, lane detection, and drivable area instance segmentation. The system is trained and evaluated using the BDD100K dataset, renowned for its diversity in driving conditions. Key innovations of AurigaNet include its end-to-end instance segmentation capability, which significantly enhances both accuracy and efficiency in path estimation for autonomous vehicles. Experimental results demonstrate that AurigaNet achieves an 85.2% IoU in drivable area segmentation, outperforming its closest competitor by 0.7%. In lane detection, AurigaNet achieves a remarkable 60.8% IoU, surpassing other models by more than 30%. Furthermore, the network achieves an mAP@0.5:0.95 of 47.6% in traffic object detection, exceeding the next leading model by 2.9%. Additionally, we validate the practical feasibility of AurigaNet by deploying it on embedded devices such as the Jetson Orin NX, where it demonstrates competitive real-time performance. These results underscore AurigaNet's potential as a robust and efficient solution for autonomous driving perception systems. The code can be found here https://github.com/KiaRational/AurigaNet.

Personalized Model-Based Design of Human Centric AI enabled CPS for Long term usage

Human centric critical systems are increasingly involving artificial intelligence to enable knowledge extraction from sensor collected data. Examples include medical monitoring and control systems, gesture based human computer interaction systems, and autonomous cars. Such systems are intended to operate for a long term potentially for a lifetime in many scenarios such as closed loop blood glucose control for Type 1 diabetics, self-driving cars, and monitoting systems for stroke diagnosis, and rehabilitation. Long term operation of such AI enabled human centric applications can expose them to corner cases for which their operation is may be uncertain. This can be due to many reasons such as inherent flaws in the design, limited resources for testing, inherent computational limitations of the testing methodology, or unknown use cases resulting from human interaction with the system. Such untested corner cases or cases for which the system performance is uncertain can lead to violations in the safety, sustainability, and security requirements of the system. In this paper, we analyze the existing techniques for safety, sustainability, and security analysis of an AI enabled human centric control system and discuss their limitations for testing the system for long term use in practice. We then propose personalized model based solutions for potentially eliminating such limitations.

Detection of Deployment Operational Deviations for Safety and Security of AI-Enabled Human-Centric Cyber Physical Systems

In recent years, Human-centric cyber-physical systems have increasingly involved artificial intelligence to enable knowledge extraction from sensor-collected data. Examples include medical monitoring and control systems, as well as autonomous cars. Such systems are intended to operate according to the protocols and guidelines for regular system operations. However, in many scenarios, such as closed-loop blood glucose control for Type 1 diabetics, self-driving cars, and monitoring systems for stroke diagnosis. The operations of such AI-enabled human-centric applications can expose them to cases for which their operational mode may be uncertain, for instance, resulting from the interactions with a human with the system. Such cases, in which the system is in uncertain conditions, can violate the system's safety and security requirements. This paper will discuss operational deviations that can lead these systems to operate in unknown conditions. We will then create a framework to evaluate different strategies for ensuring the safety and security of AI-enabled human-centric cyber-physical systems in operation deployment. Then, as an example, we show a personalized image-based novel technique for detecting the non-announcement of meals in closed-loop blood glucose control for Type 1 diabetics.

Online Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Controllers for Autonomous Driving via Real-Time Recurrent RL

Deploying pretrained policies in real-world applications presents substantial challenges that fundamentally limit the practical applicability of learning-based control systems. When autonomous systems encounter environmental changes in system dynamics, sensor drift, or task objectives, fixed policies rapidly degrade in performance. We show that employing Real-Time Recurrent Reinforcement Learning (RTRRL), a biologically plausible algorithm for online adaptation, can effectively fine-tune a pretrained policy to improve autonomous agents' performance on driving tasks. We further show that RTRRL synergizes with a recent biologically inspired recurrent network model, the Liquid-Resistance Liquid-Capacitance RNN. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this closed-loop approach in a simulated CarRacing environment and in a real-world line-following task with a RoboRacer car equipped with an event camera.

Hybrid guided variational autoencoder for visual place recognition

Autonomous agents such as cars, robots and drones need to precisely localize themselves in diverse environments, including in GPS-denied indoor environments. One approach for precise localization is visual place recognition (VPR), which estimates the place of an image based on previously seen places. State-of-the-art VPR models require high amounts of memory, making them unwieldy for mobile deployment, while more compact models lack robustness and generalization capabilities. This work overcomes these limitations for robotics using a combination of event-based vision sensors and an event-based novel guided variational autoencoder (VAE). The encoder part of our model is based on a spiking neural network model which is compatible with power-efficient low latency neuromorphic hardware. The VAE successfully disentangles the visual features of 16 distinct places in our new indoor VPR dataset with a classification performance comparable to other state-of-the-art approaches while, showing robust performance also under various illumination conditions. When tested with novel visual inputs from unknown scenes, our model can distinguish between these places, which demonstrates a high generalization capability by learning the essential features of location. Our compact and robust guided VAE with generalization capabilities poses a promising model for visual place recognition that can significantly enhance mobile robot navigation in known and unknown indoor environments.

Faramesh: A Protocol-Agnostic Execution Control Plane for Autonomous Agent Systems

Autonomous agent systems increasingly trigger real-world side effects: deploying infrastructure, modifying databases, moving money, and executing workflows. Yet most agent stacks provide no mandatory execution checkpoint where organizations can deterministically permit, deny, or defer an action before it changes reality. This paper introduces Faramesh, a protocol-agnostic execution control plane that enforces execution-time authorization for agent-driven actions via a non-bypassable Action Authorization Boundary (AAB). Faramesh canonicalizes agent intent into a Canonical Action Representation (CAR), evaluates actions deterministically against policy and state, and issues a decision artifact (PERMIT/DEFER/DENY) that executors must validate prior to execution. The system is designed to be framework- and model-agnostic, supports multi-agent and multi-tenant deployments, and remains independent of transport protocols (e.g., MCP). Faramesh further provides decision-centric, append-only provenance logging keyed by canonical action hashes, enabling auditability, verification, and deterministic replay without re-running agent reasoning. We show how these primitives yield enforceable, predictable governance for autonomous execution while avoiding hidden coupling to orchestration layers or observability-only approaches.

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.

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.

Correcting Autonomous Driving Object Detection Misclassifications with Automated Commonsense Reasoning

Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technology has been heavily researched and sought after, yet there are no SAE Level 5 AVs available today in the marketplace. We contend that over-reliance on machine learning technology is the main reason. Use of automated commonsense reasoning technology, we believe, can help achieve SAE Level 5 autonomy. In this paper, we show how automated common- sense reasoning technology can be deployed in situations where there are not enough data samples available to train a deep learning-based AV model that can handle certain abnormal road scenarios. Specifically, we consider two situations where (i) a traffic signal is malfunctioning at an intersection and (ii) all the cars ahead are slowing down and steering away due to an unexpected obstruction (e.g., animals on the road). We show that in such situations, our commonsense reasoning-based solution accurately detects traffic light colors and obstacles not correctly captured by the AV's perception model. We also provide a pathway for efficiently invoking commonsense reasoning by measuring uncertainty in the computer vision model and using commonsense reasoning to handle uncertain sce- narios. We describe our experiments conducted using the CARLA simulator and the results obtained. The main contribution of our research is to show that automated commonsense reasoning effectively corrects AV-based object detection misclassifications and that hybrid models provide an effective pathway to improving AV perception.