The ISO 26262 standard defines functional safety for road vehicles through risk assessments based on Severity, Exposure, and Controllability, grounded in a human-driven vehicle paradigm. In the context of autonomous vehicles (AVs), the absence of a human driver necessitates revisiting these principles. This paper decomposes the Controllability placeholder into two auditable evidence dimensions of ISO 26262 by introducing two measurable sub-concepts: Transferability and Predictability. Transferability extends Controllability to capture AV systems' ability to hand off control to dedicated fallback safety mechanisms, while Predictability captures how easily external agents can anticipate AV behavior. Predictability is formally defined from human-robot interaction-inspired principles, and a mathematical framework is provided to quantify it. A designed-versus-achievable gap is introduced to distinguish architectural fallback claims from scene-conditioned achievable fallback capability. The proposed metrics align with ISO 26262 and ISO/PAS 21448 (SOTIF), rendering fallback and interaction claims falsifiable and traceable across ODD slices. These dimensions complement rather than replace existing standards, and the enhancements preserve the structure of ISO 26262 while extending its applicability to driverless automated systems operating at SAE Levels 4 and 5.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07437
This paper explores agentic 3D spatial understanding, i.e., MLLM agents performing 3D reasoning through tool use. Existing methods often misuse tools and exhibit biased tool preferences under 3D scenarios, leaving the agentic paradigm with only marginal gains over non-agentic strategies. We reveal that 3D spatial reasoning tasks are heterogeneous across scenes, while these agents apply a uniform tool-use strategy to all scenes rather than selecting tools according to the specific scene and task. To address this, we propose Skill-3D, a framework that learns self-evolving scene-aware skills. Specifically, Skill-3D identifies the task scene and records the agent's tool-use trajectory into a Scene Memory, where successful trajectories from similar scenes are aggregated and distilled into a reusable scene-aware skill, with failed ones attached to the skill as lessons. During training, once a similar scene recurs, the corresponding skill is injected to guide the agent, producing new trajectories whose successes and failures further refine the skill, forming a loop in which the memory and the skill library co-evolve. Experiments show that Skill-3D substantially improves tool utilization in 3D spatial reasoning (from 39% to 78% on VSI-Bench), driving the agent toward correct and sufficient tool use. For instance, it improves Gemini-3-Flash by 67% on MMSI-Bench. Furthermore, we conduct agentic post-training over skill-guided trajectories, which boosts Qwen3-VL-8B by 43% on VSI-Bench.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07436
Visual speech recognition (VSR) models now surpass human lipreaders on benchmarks, but do such gains establish human-like visual speech perception? To explore this, we compare three VSR systems with human baselines on the MaFI word-level lipreading dataset using word, character, phoneme, and viseme-level metrics. Although models achieve higher overall accuracy, they succeed and fail on different words than humans. A text-only n-gram baseline given only a few initial phonemes rivals human lipreading. VSR word-level errors are consistently better explained by training word frequency than by the visual informativeness of words. Viseme accuracies, confusion matrices and human-model correlations further show that models gain most on visemes humans find hardest, and show much weaker dependence on visual clarity. Our work demonstrates that VSR systems rely primarily on language cues from training data rather than visual perception, failing to bind visual features into meaningful words.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07435
Video understanding is being rapidly transformed by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as research moves from short clips to long, multimodal, and knowledge-intensive video scenarios. These scenarios require models to handle sparse evidence, long-range dependencies, multimodal alignment, and reliable inference under limited computational budgets. This work presents a human-view perspective on LLM-based video understanding, organized around three functional abilities: watching, remembering, and reasoning. Rather than treating video tasks as isolated benchmarks, this view provides a unified structure for analyzing how video MLLMs acquire evidence, preserve context, and produce grounded outputs. We introduce a formulation that characterizes video understanding systems by their perceptual representations, memory states, reasoning traces, and final predictions. Based on this formulation, we identify challenges in spatio-temporal perception, efficient long-video processing, memory modeling, streaming understanding, and faithful reasoning. Representative methods are organized by their roles in video MLLM systems. Watching covers fine-grained, comprehensive, audio-visual, and efficient perception. Remembering includes offline and streaming memory, while reasoning covers text-only reasoning and thinking with videos. We further examine application domains such as egocentric, sports, instructional, medical, and narrative videos, and cover training datasets and evaluation benchmarks across task types, supervision formats, modalities, and capability dimensions. Finally, we outline open problems and future directions for scalable, memory-aware, and evidence-grounded video intelligence. Related works will be continuously traced at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07433
Smart eyewear enables unobtrusive, context-aware interaction through multimodal sensors and on-device intelligence, but is severely limited by power, memory, and compute constraints in a compact form factor. Open-hardware platforms supporting event-based vision and embedded ML at this scale are rare. This work introduces an open-source smart glasses platform for rapid prototyping of novel sensors and algorithms. Its modular design uses a flexible FPC interposer to support both event-based and frame-based cameras without full PCB redesign. A hardware-software co-designed power management system combines a configurable PMIC with event-driven wake-up via an nRF5340 coordinator, keeping the GAP9 RISC-V SoC powered down between inferences. The prototype achieves up to 11.8 hours of continuous on-device ML from a 200 mAh battery. As a demonstration, an egocentric hand gesture recognition pipeline was evaluated on the LynX dataset using polarity-separated event histograms from a Prophesee GENX320 camera. R(2+1)D achieved the best cross-subject accuracy of 83.94\% (macro F1 = 0.781) under leave-two-subjects-out validation, with 33.9 ms end-to-end latency on the GAP9. Temporal augmentation and removal of ambiguous classes provided the largest gains (+8.9 pp). All hardware designs, firmware, and models are released open source.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07431
Large language models are increasingly used to answer culturally grounded questions across languages, yet it remains unclear whether local cultural knowledge is better accessed through English or the local language. Existing evaluations face two key limitations: many rely on parallel template-based questions that may not reflect how cultural knowledge naturally appears, and raw accuracy conflates general language proficiency with language-conditioned knowledge access. We address these issues with a controlled framework built on real-world cultural questions collected from regional benchmarks and local sources. By crossing question type (culture-agnostic vs. culture-specific) with query language (English vs. local language), and estimating ability with a shared 1PL item response theory model, we separate proficiency from localized knowledge access. Across 13 locales and roughly 80 models, we find a consistent English advantage on culture-agnostic questions, indicating stronger English proficiency. However, after accounting for this proficiency gap, local languages show a positive knowledge-access advantage in nearly all locale-model settings. This advantage is often masked in raw accuracy but becomes more visible for frontier, regionally aligned, or language-adapted models. Our results suggest that weaker local-language performance does not necessarily imply weaker cultural knowledge; rather, local cultural knowledge may be more accessible through the local language but hidden by limited language proficiency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07422
Recovering 3D human poses for multiple individuals from different camera views is a fundamental bottleneck for analyzing interacting behaviors. Existing self-supervised approaches leverage synthetic catalogues of 3D poses; however, this leads to poor generalization in real-world scenarios due to distribution shifts. We therefore introduce DisPOSE, a self-supervised framework that approximates the inherently discrete multi-view person-assignment problem as a generative diffusion process over the space of polystochastic tensors. By employing differentiable Sinkhorn projections during denoising, our model learns to guide solutions toward valid and feasible assignments based on 2D image priors. The complete 3D skeletons of localized individuals are then regressed using a Hypergraph-Convolutional Decoder that explicitly models relational structures and articulated joints across multiple views. The proposed approach outperforms current state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on standard datasets and demonstrates strong performance on a newly proposed benchmark featuring highly occluded scenes from surgical operating rooms. Our diffusion-based localization demonstrates high label efficiency, retaining 99% of its performance with only 10% of the pseudo-labels. Notably, disentangling the assignment and root regression components while maintaining differentiability makes DisPOSE nearly agnostic to different camera arrangements.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07419
LLM-driven software engineering agents have become a central testbed for real-world language-model capability, yet their training remains limited by the availability of high-quality SWE tasks. Existing synthetic data methods typically create tasks through fixed mutation or bug-injection procedures, making the resulting distributions largely independent of the agent's own weaknesses and training progress. We introduce Socratic-SWE, a closed-loop self-evolution framework that reuses the agent's historical solving traces as a source of training signal. Rather than treating traces only as evidence for reward computation, Socratic-SWE distills them into structured agent skills that summarize recurring failures and effective repair patterns. These skills then guide the generation of targeted repair tasks in real repositories. Candidate tasks are checked through execution-based validation and scored with a solver-gradient alignment reward, so that the retained tasks are both verifiable and useful for improving the Solver. The updated Solver produces new traces, enabling the task curriculum to adapt over successive rounds. Across SWE-bench Verified, SWE-bench Lite, SWE-bench Pro, and Terminal-Bench 2.0, Socratic-SWE consistently improves over self-evolving baselines under the same compute budget, reaching 50.40% on SWE-bench Verified after three iterations. These results suggest that solving traces can serve as a scalable substrate for self-evolving SWE agents.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07412
The emergence of "Aha moments" in large language models, particularly DeepSeek-R1-0120, has raised the question of whether these systems genuinely reason or merely imitate the appearance of reasoning. We conduct a comprehensive empirical comparison between model and human reasoning across all 30 problems from AIME 2025, exhaustively annotating 10,247 reasoning steps into five functional categories: Analysis, Inference, Branch, Backtrace, and Reflection. We find a clear structural difference. Human solutions maintain a compact alternation between analysis and deduction, whereas DeepSeek-R1 frequently revisits intermediate results, performs shallow and often unnecessary verification, and loops through local checks without meaningful logical progress. We describe this as topological mimicry: reproducing the surface form of reasoning without its functional role. Despite this, we identify two signals of genuine reasoning. First, successful traces exhibit stable use of branching and backtracking, while failed traces either underuse or overuse exploratory actions. Second, reflection is only effective when placed within deductive inference; reflections trapped in analysis loops focus on local numerical details while missing global logical errors. These findings suggest that current long-CoT models may be rewarded more for the appearance of reasoning than for genuine deductive progress. We discuss directions for improving evaluation and training, including measuring cross-trace stability, penalising "spinning-wheel" traces, encouraging deeper logical correction, and reallocating inference-time compute toward deduction and backtracking. Overall, reasoning quality depends not simply on how much reflection occurs, but on whether reflection appears consistently and at the appropriate logical scale.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07410
Language agents are increasingly deployed over accumulating multimodal information, yet existing benchmarks assume a human-human form with sparse visuals and straightforward content, evaluating neither reasoning over authentic multimodal file interaction nor the interpretation of concealed user information. We therefore introduce M$^3$Exam, a query-centric multimodal conversational memory benchmark built on realistic user-agent interaction, with multi-dimensional evaluation spanning cross-modal grounding and implicit information inference. Benchmarking MLLMs and memory systems reveals persistent gaps in cross-modal grounding, cross session reasoning, and the efficiency cost of accumulating multimodal context. We further propose M$^3$Proctor, a multimodal memory method that detects query modality bias and consumes raw visual sources only on demand, improving accuracy by 13% while cutting index-construction time and retrieved tokens by over 70%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07402
Document parsing systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes, regulated workflows such as mortgage underwriting, financial reporting, supply-chain logistics, and clinical records. Yet most public benchmarks evaluate parsers on clean academic layouts or synthetic prose, and report a single OCR or markdown-level similarity score. Such documents and metrics correlate poorly with what downstream agents actually need: the correct value for a specific field on a messy real-world page. We introduce RealDocBench, a two-track benchmark built from real regulated documents. The QA track contains 1,356 field-level questions over 581 documents spanning four domains, where each question is paired with a typed gold_dict of key-to-value answers and parsers are scored on both per-field and strict per-question accuracy. The layout track contains 1,500 human-verified page images annotated with COCO-style bounding boxes under a nine-class public taxonomy, scored with a Hungarian matcher that includes adjacency-aware split/merge recovery. We evaluate eighteen systems, spanning commercial parsing APIs, general-purpose VLMs, and open-source OCR models, under a uniform extraction-and-scoring protocol, and report accuracy alongside per-page cost and cache-busted latency. RealDocBench exposes a wide performance spread that single-number benchmarks hide, a persistently hard medical sub-domain, and sharp cost/latency trade-offs across operating points. We release the datasets, parser adapters, and evaluation harness to support reproducible, field-level comparison of document parsing systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07401
In recent years, audio generation has made significant progress in tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS), text-to-audio (TTA) and text-to-music (TTM). However, generating long-form and controllable audio from complex audio scene descriptions remains a significant challenge, as such scenes often require coordinated speech, sound effects, music, songs, temporal structure, and post-production. In this work, we introduce \textbf{Audio-Oscar}, a multi-agent framework for generating audio from complex descriptions. Audio-Oscar coordinates a set of specialist agents, each responsible for a different aspect of the audio scene, including character modeling and voice design, speech generation, fine-grained timeline planning, model selection, non-speech generation, and audio post-production. Audio-Oscar further incorporates feedback-driven refinement. In addition, to address the lack of suitable benchmarks for evaluating audio generation from complex audio scene descriptions, we construct \textbf{ASG-Bench}, an Audio Scene Generation Benchmark containing both scene descriptions paired with reference audio and text-only scene descriptions. Each scene is annotated with target audio events and temporal statements to evaluate whether the generated audio faithfully realizes the required scene content and temporal structure. Experimental results show that Audio-Oscar can effectively generate audio that matches complex scene descriptions. Project samples are available at this https URL. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07397
In Video Instance Segmentation (VIS), classification, segmentation, and tracking objectives are jointly evaluated, but their individual contributions to performance loss remain opaque. We introduce a diagnostic framework that formulates identity and class assignment as an Integer Linear Program (ILP), yielding a model-agnostic oracle that hierarchically isolates each error source. Applied to seven VIS methods spanning online and offline paradigms across YouTube-VIS 2019/2021 and a diagnostic subset of OVIS, our analysis reveals a consistent picture. Tracking instability is a critical bottleneck for online methods, with gaps exceeding 20 AP under heavy occlusion, and grows sharply with video length and instance density. While semantic classification contributes meaningfully on standard benchmarks, its impact becomes negligible where tracking fails most. Although stronger backbones substantially lift default scores, they leave AP tracking gaps largely intact, confirming that temporal fragility is algorithmic rather than purely representational. To complement the oracle, we introduce TrackLens, a visual tool that translates gap magnitude into observable, query-level failure modes. Together, these tools provide a systematic foundation for targeting VIS's core challenge: robust long-term temporal association.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07394
Motivated by Large Language Model (LLM) cascading, we propose an online contextual Pandora's Box model for adaptively querying and selecting LLM APIs. In each period, a decision-maker observes a request context and faces a two-phase decision problem. In the query phase, the decision-maker sequentially queries APIs, where each query reveals a generated output and the decision-maker incurs an (output-dependent) cost. In the selection phase, the decision-maker selects one of the generated outputs to deploy and observes only the downstream reward of the deployed output. This output-mediated feedback structure differs from classical online contextual Pandora's Box models, in which opening a box directly reveals its reward. Rather than estimating the full conditional output and cost distributions of each API, we directly model the reservation index and develop a learning approach for the query phase. Specifically, we impose a parametric structure on the contextual reservation index functions induced by the classical Weitzman's policy. Our policy combines generalized method of moments (GMM) type estimation of these reservation indices with UCB-style confidence bounds for both these indices and the shared output-level reward evaluator. Under regularity conditions, we prove that the resulting policy achieves dimension-dependent $\widetilde O(\sqrt T)$ cumulative regret over a horizon of $T$ periods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07392
Background and Purpose: Automated detection of focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) requires large volumes of voxelwise lesion-delineated MRI data, which are difficult to acquire. This study aims to generate synthetic MRI data exhibiting FCD, assess their realism, and evaluate their impact on automated FCD detection, particularly in reducing the need for manual annotations. Methods: T1-weighted (T1w) and T2-weighted Fluid-Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) MRI scans from 131 FCD patients and 90 healthy controls from multiple (3) sites were retrospectively studied. Synthetic MRIs were generated by conditioning a generative network on binary FCD masks. Two neuroradiologists identified real images from a random set of 14 real and 14 synthetic scans. Three nnU-Net models were trained to detect FCD using: (i) real-only (35 FCD / 35 controls), (ii) real (35 FCD / 35 controls) plus synthetic augmentation, and (iii) expanded real data (70 FCD / 70 controls). Results: Experts showed limited ability to distinguish real from synthetic images, with classification accuracy of 60% for T1w and 70% for FLAIR (inter-rater agreement kappa = 0.86). Augmenting automated FCD detection with synthetic data increased sensitivity by 8.14% (p = 0.12) and improved model confidence at true lesion sites (0.83 +/- 0.11 to 0.89 +/- 0.12; p = 0.02). The expanded real-data model further improved sensitivity to 73.8% (p < 0.001) and confidence to 0.90 +/- 0.14 (p = 0.01). Conclusion: Conditional generative networks can generate realistic synthetic FCD-MRIs, reducing labeled data needs by approximately 20% while maintaining equivalent sensitivity. Equivalent amounts of real data, when available, remain more effective than synthetic augmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07381
A growing failure mode in agent evaluation and training is that models can achieve high evaluation scores by exploiting shortcuts instead of solving the intended task, producing deceptive performance. This makes evaluation scores unreliable as measures of true task-solving ability. We propose CapCode, a framework for constructing coding datasets with randomized tests whose best achievable non-cheating performance is deliberately capped below one. This capped-performance design gives evaluation scores a clearer interpretation: scores substantially above the cap are implausible and therefore provide evidence of cheating. To prevent cheating, we propose CapReward, a reward design based on the CapCode principle to discourage optimization beyond the cap. Experiments across multiple datasets show that CapCode detects cheating while preserving performance ranking of models, and CapReward reduces cheating behavior, yielding models that better follow the intended task specification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07379
In this work, we propose a deep learning framework for coherence regression directly from detected SAR images, without the need for accurate coregistration. A Residual U-Net is trained using coherence maps derived from precisely coregistered Sentinel-1 SLC data to learn the relationship between backscatter magnitudes and coherence. The model is trained on 12-day SLC pairs and evaluated across different datasets, including coregistered SLC products and open access analysis-ready data, covering diverse radiometric properties, geometries, and locations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high-resolution coherence regression with improved accuracy compared to existing intensity-based approaches. The network generalizes well across diverse geographical locations and even across different temporal baselines that were never seen at training time. Additionally, the ability to operate on globally available analysis-ready data, such as ground range detected data, e.g., distributed through Google Earth Engine, enables its large-scale application in mission design, change monitoring, and diverse mapping tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07374
Automated mitosis detection is a well-established task in computational pathology. While previous benchmarks focused on scanner-induced domain shift, clinical "real-world" application requires models to be robust across the vast variance to be expected in the histological landscape. The MItosis DOmain Generalization (MIDOG) 2025 challenge was designed to evaluate algorithmic performance across unprecedented biological and contextual diversity. We curated a test dataset of 365 cases, encompassing 12 distinct human, canine and feline tumor types, digitized across multiple scanning platforms. Moving beyond hand-selected hotspots, the challenge required detection also in random tissue areas (representative of the whole slide detection situation) and challenging areas (areas rich in hard negatives). In the second track, we introduced the classification of atypical mitotic figures (AMFs). There were 18 teams submitting to the detection track, with F1 scores ranging up to 0.740. In the AMF detection track, we had 21 submissions with balanced accuracy values up to 0.908. Our analysis reveals that while most models perform reliably in traditional hotspots, significant performance degradation occurs in challenging ROIs, where false positive rates tripled. Furthermore, performance varied significantly across the 12 tumor types, highlighting "blind spots" in current state-of-the-art architectures when encountering rare or highly pleomorphic malignancies. Moreover, we evaluated the effectiveness of ensembling and found a mean increases of 1.5 and 1.3 percentage points in F1 score and balanced accuracy, respectively. In contrast, TTA showed no relevant improvement. MIDOG 2025 demonstrates that "in the wild" mitosis detection remains a significant hurdle. The transition from hotspot-only evaluation to a multi-contextual framework provides a more realistic proxy for clinical reliability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07368
Self-driving simulations typically rely on data collected in a small number of cities or on hand-authored synthetic scenarios. Dashcam videos cover a far broader range of locations and situations, including rare or long-tailed scenarios. They are considered less usable for simulation because it is difficult to recover accurate 4D scenes from monocular in-the-wild videos. Work zones are one such class of long-tailed situations that dashcams capture. We present Dash2Sim, a framework that turns in-the-wild monocular dashcam videos into metric, geo-referenced 4D driving logs compatible with existing simulators, and verifies eachone against an independently maintained map without annotations. We apply Dash2Sim to a large video corpus to create the ROADWork4D benchmark dataset, which spans 4,244 scenes with 2.7M 3D objects across 17 cities. On a verified subset ROADWork4D-CL (2,201 scenes), we study privileged closed-loop planners and find that work zone scenarios are difficult: while rule-based and hybrid planners generalize better than learning-based ones, all fall short, failing to make the lane changes that temporary work zone channels require. Beyond planning, dense depth recovered by Dash2Sim improves novel-view synthesis quality by up to 19% on perceptual metrics, suggesting its potential to provide rich conditioning for closed-loop sensor simulation from monocular videos.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07366
Photoplethysmography (PPG), a non-invasive measure of changes in blood volume, is widely used in both wearable devices and clinical settings. Recent PPG foundation models either use open-source ICU datasets with pretraining paradigms that require curated data and thus complicate generalization to field-like data, or use closed-source field-like PPG data. In contrast, we propose a PPG foundation model that does not require high-quality or field-like pretraining data, and instead leverages accompanying electrocardiogram and respiratory signals in ICU datasets to select contrastive samples during pretraining. Our approach allows the model to retain and learn from noisy PPG segments, improving robustness at inference. Our model, pretrained on 3x fewer subjects than existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieves performance improvements on 14 out of 15 diverse downstream tasks, including field-like daily activity and heart rate prediction. Our results demonstrate that multimodal supervision can integrate complementary physiological information to improve the robustness of PPG foundation models and enhance their generalization to consumer-grade data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07365