Long-horizon GUI automation remains challenging due to error accumulation over extended interaction sequences. Process Reward Models (PRMs) provide dense step-level supervision for mitigating error accumulation, yet standard PRMs are poorly suited to GUI verification. Standard PRM judgments often rely on superficial visual alignment rather than functional correctness, reflecting an evaluative knowledge gap caused by missing domain-specific adjudication logic. Standard PRMs also perform passive, single-pass visual assessment, which creates Visual Ambiguity when reliable judgment requires actively locating, parsing, or inspecting task-relevant UI evidence. We introduce GUI-PRA, a Process Reward Agent that transforms GUI process evaluation from passive scoring into active investigation. GUI-PRA couples Experience-Injected Criterion Synthesis, which distills generalized verification principles into state-specific criteria, with Criterion-Guided Autoregressive Perception, which uses these criteria to navigate multi-granularity visual tools and gather grounded evidence. On AndroidWorld and Mobile-MiniWoB++, GUI-PRA achieves improvements of 5.0% and 6.5% over standard PRMs on the Qwen-VL series, with Qwen3-VL attaining 54.74% success rate on AndroidWorld. On the offline OS-Critic Bench, GUI-PRA demonstrates strong competitiveness against fully trained critic models.
Tao Xiong, Xavier Hu, Yurun Chen et al.· 0 citations
AI for Industrial Asset Lifecycle Management aims to automate complex operational workflows, such as condition monitoring and maintenance scheduling, to minimize system downtime. While traditional AI/ML approaches solve narrow tasks in isolation, Large Language Model (LLM) agents offer a next-generation opportunity for end-to-end automation. In this paper, we introduce AssetOpsBench, a unified framework for orchestrating and evaluating domain-specific agents for Industry 4.0. AssetOpsBench provides a multimodal ecosystem comprising a catalog of four domain-specific agents, a curated dataset of 140+ human-authored natural-language queries grounded in real industrial scenarios, and a simulated, CouchDB-backed IoT environment. We introduce an automated evaluation framework that uses three key metrics to analyze architectural trade-offs between the Tool-As-Agent and Plan-Executor paradigms, along with a systematic procedure for the automated discovery of emerging failure modes. The practical relevance of AssetOpsBench is demonstrated by its broad community adoption, with 250+ users and over 500 agents submitted to our public benchmarking platform, supporting reproducible and scalable research for real-world industrial operations. The code is accesible at https://github.com/IBM/AssetOpsBench .
Dhaval Patel, Shuxin Lin, James Rayfield et al.· 0 citations
Handling trust is a core requirement of effective interaction between people and AI agents. Thus, any decision-making framework designed to work with people must be able to estimate human trust. In this paper, we propose a mental model-based framework of trust that captures multidimensional aspects of trust and can be used to infer human trust. This framework can also be used as a foundation for any trust-aware decision-making framework. Through our mental model-based framework of trust, we propose a formal framework that captures intuitions about trust present in extant literature. We show how our framework captures various dimensions of trust perception and then use the framework to define trust evolution, human reliance, and decision-making. Additionally, we also propose a formalization of the appropriate level of trust in the agent.
Using human subject studies, we evaluate if (1) changes in trust can be achieved by adjusting human beliefs about the agent according to predictions made by our mental model framework and (2) adjustments in human belief lead to corresponding modifications in trust perceptions; performance, process, and purpose, by controlling different aspects of the model.
Zahra Zahedi, Sarath Sreedharan, Erin Chiou et al.· 0 citations
Bridging model-based control and learned policies in long-horizon manipulation has harbored a silent disagreement: control executes specified objectives, learning amortizes that behavior into a reactive policy, yet existing protocols discard task semantics, leaving rewards hand-crafted and behavior drifting from what control verified.We introduce Semantically UNified (SUN) Programs, typed executables where geometric and contact relations are defined once and compiled into aligned Model Predictive Control (MPC) costs, satisfaction predicates, RL rewards, transition guards, and diagnostics. Our system, Kuafu, driven by large vision language systems, automatically synthesizes SUN Programs from language and scene semantics, screens feasibility via MPC, and retains semantics while training stage-conditioned policies. Across nine tasks, Kuafu achieves 82.03% macro-success, outperforming sparse-reward (35.67%) and Stage-BC (24.75%) baselines. At 8192-way scale, it generates 10.57x the successful trajectory time per hour of human teleoperation. With 500 trajectories per task, Kuafu data trains DP3 policies to 46.0% simulation success (vs. 22.4% for alternatives) and 34.7% on physical Franka and Kinova robots. These results establish that simulation-screened task semantics can effectively amortize control into robust policies, without demonstrations or manual dense rewards, unifying symbolic planning and data-driven execution.
Wei-Qi Wang, Zhi Li, Yuliang Lei et al.· 0 citations
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The 2025--2026 AI market has seen a wave of stealth releases: frontier models launched anonymously on developer platforms under codenames. For their users, identity determines data-handling terms, supply-chain risk, and capability expectations. No validated methodology exists for black-box identity verification of anonymous models: practitioner checklists lack accuracy evidence, and self-identification is untrustworthy by design. We propose a four-stage forensic audit protocol for API-served models. Stage 0 reconstructs launch-time configuration from archived platform snapshots (Internet Archive), exposing preview--production drift. Stage 1 fingerprints configuration (context, output ceiling, reasoning, modality) against the platform catalog. Stage 2 tests tokenizer identity with a cross-length differential that rejects short-prompt collisions. Stage 3 corroborates with behavioral probes. We test declaration consistency on 10 known-identity releases (7 exact, 2 precision-differences, 1 partial, 0 counter-directional), not end-to-end identification under anonymity. Identification is validated prospectively on a flagship case whose 2026-08-23 analysis pointed to the GLM-5.3 version line and whose official reveal confirmed those family and version-line inferences (deployment variant was not pre-asserted; Flash was consistent post-reveal), and on three Stage-0-only cases where the protocol produced a graded hypothesis or declined rather than guessed. A standard-library-only implementation is provided as supplementary material.
We propose a lightweight two-stage framework for real-time video anomaly detection. The first stage employs YOLO v11n-pose to detect persons and extract seventeen skeletal keypoints in a single forward pass. The second stage encodes each cropped person region through CLIP ViT-B/32 and computes cosine similarity against predefined textual descriptions of anomalous behaviors. This architecture eliminates the need for optical flow, standalone pose estimators, and density-based scoring modules. Experiments on CUHK Avenue, ShanghaiTech Campus, and a custom indoor dataset collected at Chulalongkorn University demonstrate an end-to-end throughput of approximately 51 FPS on an NVIDIA Titan XP GPU, a 3.36x speedup over the multi-feature baseline, while maintaining frame-level AUROC values of 89.26%, 70.26%, and 84.13%, respectively.
Vanodhya G. Warnasooriya, Amir Hajian, Watchara Ruangsang et al.· 0 citations
Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) produces rich sequential data such as temporal cine videos and spatial LGE/mapping stacks, yet most deep learning approaches process individual 2D slices, discarding this context. We present MR-JEPA, a self-supervised video foundation model for CMR that extends LeJEPA to 3D spatiotemporal inputs through tubelet tokenization, spatiotemporal masking augmentation, and initialization from a 2D CMR foundation model. Unlike prior CMR video models limited to cine data, MR-JEPA is pretrained on multi-sequence data (cine, LGE, mapping) from 10,505 patients across two centers without annotations. We evaluate the frozen encoder on six downstream tasks using a unified multi-view gated attention architecture: LV ejection fraction, RV ejection fraction, three myocardial strains (GLS, GCS, GRS), and four-class disease detection. MR-JEPA outperforms other compared methods on all five regression tasks, including both a domain-specific CMR model pretrained on more data with text supervision and a natural-video foundation model, achieving an LV EF MAE of 4.79% (r =0.764) and a GLS MAE of 1.87 (r=0.805), with 21-27% MAE reductions over baselines on strain tasks. For disease detection, MR-JEPA achieved a macro AUG of 0.868, remaining competitive with the domain-specific baseline despite using a fully self-supervised pretraining objective. These results demonstrate the potential of a unified video encoder for robust, multi-view utilization of diverse CMR sequences in clinical cardiac quantification and diagnosis.
Athira J. Jacob, Puneet Sharma, D. Comaniciu et al.· 0 citations
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) still struggle on tasks requiring complex visual understanding. We argue that the core issue is not high-level reasoning, but instead failing to locate critical details in the image. Due to this shortcoming, VLMs generate often plausible but incorrect reasoning based on flawed perceptual grounding. To address this, we propose Locator-Critic (LOCI), a training-free framework that decouples visual search from evidence verification. LOCI employs a Locator agent to propose candidate visual evidence and a separate Critic agent to evaluate its relevance and sufficiency. These agents engage in an iterative refinement loop, progressively improving the evidence until it is adequate to answer the given question. This decoupled, self-correcting process yields substantial performance gains, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple complex visual benchmarks. LOCI improves accuracy for both open-weight models like Qwen3-VL (+12.1 on V*, +5.8 on HR-Bench and +11.2 on VisualProbe-Hard) and proprietary models like Gemini 2.5 Pro (+8.9 on V*, +4.3 on HR-Bench, +4.8 on VisualProbe-Hard).
Walid Bousselham, Mathilde Caron, Arsha Nagrani et al.· 0 citations
Counterfactual explanations (CEs) are widely used in explainable artificial intelligence (AI) to show how a model's outputs would change if the input features were manipulated. This technique is used for a range of tasks such as debugging models, explaining predictions, justifying decisions, and providing algorithmic recourse. In this paper, we explore the normative legitimacy of employing counterfactuals in real-life model deployment settings. We discuss the different stakes involved in these different purposes for which CEs are commonly employed, and find stricter requirements for justification and recourse. In particular, we find that naive application of CEs for justification and recourse can lead to ignoring contestable choices made throughout the machine learning (ML) pipeline, thus obfuscating that decisions and counterfactuals for those decisions are also artifacts of an organization's materialized design and governance choices. We demonstrate this with four empirical experiments involving interventions at stages of the ML pipeline ``upstream"of the explanation itself, and show that these affect the generated counterfactuals. We find that an organization's choices on measurement models for feature and labels, business requirements, model validation, and the metric of model success have as much or more impact on the generated counterfactuals as the specifics of the generating method. Our findings underline the need to account for such choices upon providing justification and recourse, providing a stark reminder of the relational nature of these tasks. As putative justifications or recourse recommendations, CEs do not provide adequate answers to some important"why"-questions because they preclude consideration of whether the decision-maker ought to have acted differently.
Mattia Cerrato, Otto Sahlgren, Xenia Heilmann· 0 citations
Generative music systems are increasingly presented as tools that democratize music creation, yet their practical suitability for musicians remains underexplored. Prior work includes openness-focused evaluation frameworks, such as MusGO (Music-Generative Open AI), as well as qualitative studies of musicians'experiences with generative systems. However, these approaches do not support systematic comparison or early-stage discovery of models for creative use. Motivated by such limitations, we introduce MusGU+, a musician-centered evaluation framework organized around three dimensions: Adaptability, Usability, and Controllability. Together, these capture whether a model can be feasibly trained or fine-tuned on personal data, integrated into real-world music workflows, and controlled in musically meaningful ways. We evaluate 10 representative generative music systems and present an interactive discovery tool that enables musicians to explore and filter models according to these criteria. While MusGO remains valuable for promoting responsible research practices, MusGU+ supports informed selection and practical adoption of generative systems by musicians.
Laura Ibáñez-Martínez, Roser Batlle-Roca, Xavier Serra et al.· 0 citations
Embodied navigation requires agents to translate heterogeneous goals and visual observations into actions across tasks, environments, and robot embodiments. Modern vision-language models (VLMs) already encode spatial priors for visual grounding, spatial reasoning, and pointing, but these capabilities are rarely elicited directly for robot control. Existing navigation systems instead rely on task- or embodiment-specific components, fragmenting perception, reasoning, and action while offering limited generalization. Here we present LightNav-0, a compact generalist embodied navigation model that elicits the spatial intelligence of a pretrained VLM and aligns it with navigation, without task-specific prediction heads. LightNav-0 represents diverse navigation tasks through a unified token interface: dual-channel pointing expresses task-, scene-, and embodiment-agnostic spatial intent, while a residual vector-quantized action tokenizer maps this intent to precise, embodiment-specific trajectories. Together with temporally aware visual history compression, ER mid-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning, this formulation supports instruction following, open-vocabulary object navigation, and visual tracking within a single model. The navigation training corpus spans 2K+ scenes and 4K+ hours of embodied navigation data. LightNav-ER, the embodied-reasoning checkpoint used to initialize LightNav-0, attains the highest complete-set average across 8 embodied-reasoning benchmarks, while LightNav-0 achieves state-of-the-art monocular success rates across all 10 public navigation simulation settings. Real-world evaluations further demonstrate zero-shot generalization across robot embodiments, diverse scenes, and static and dynamic targets. These results establish compact VLMs as a unified and transferable backbone for generalist embodied navigation.
Shao-An Wang, Aocheng Luo, Fei Huang et al.· 0 citations
Whisper exposes speech through a fixed 1500-token encoder interface, now a default representation for ASR decoders and Whisper-based speech language models (SpeechLMs), yet its redundancy remains largely unexamined. We propose stride-k subsampling, a deterministic indexing operation that retains every k-th token after the convolutional stem or encoder transformer. Across five Whisper scales, k=2 preserves baseline WER at both positions, with CKA attributing this stability to acoustic overlap at the stem and attention-induced redistribution at the encoder output. Applying stride-2 at both positions cuts audio tokens by 75% and total GFLOPs by 52-58%, with small WER costs on most ASR benchmarks and larger costs on harder ones. The same configuration extends to three Whisper-based SpeechLMs, yielding modest accuracy drops on stronger baselines and larger drops on weaker ones, while reducing end-to-end latency by 19.6-27.4%. Requiring no training or auxiliary computation, stride-k subsampling exploits Whisper's preprocessing redundancy, indicating that its audio-token interface carries more capacity than downstream tasks require.
