News & Research

arXiv:2603.13312v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Interior design is a requirements-to-visual-plan generation process that must simultaneously satisfy verifiable spatial feasibility and comparative aesthetic preferences. While recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a unified foundation for interpreting user intent and producing design rationales, our empirical analysis reveals a persistent contradiction in real-world deployment: MLLMs often produce layouts that are unbuildable and aesthetically inconsistent. These findings indicate that simply adding in-domain text is insufficient; effective interior design requires an alignment mechanism that separates hard constraints from soft preferences and coordinates them during optimization. To address this, we propose Design-MLLM, a reinforcement alignment framework that optimizes a feasibility-first preference objective via a dual-branch, aesthetic-oriented reward. Specifically, Design-MLLM (i) explicitly evaluates spat

arXiv:2603.28768v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has recently emerged as the mainstream architecture for efficiently scaling large language models while maintaining near-constant computational cost. Expert parallelism distributes parameters by partitioning experts across devices, but this introduces token-level load imbalance during inference. Expert replication is a widely adopted load-balancing technique in serving frameworks that alleviates load imbalance in large-scale deployments by replicating experts with high loads. In this work, we demonstrate that existing replication schemes often over-replicate, with many replicas providing marginal improvement. Replicas consume substantial GPU memory, which may lead to resource contention and throughput degradation. We present CRAFT, an efficient expert replication framework that maximizes load balance under a given memory budget by performing fine-grained, per-layer replication based on the estimated repl

arXiv:2605.30237v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Semi-structured knowledge bases (SKBs) embed textual documents in a typed graph of entities and relations, and underpin applications such as product search, academic paper search, and precision-medicine inquiries. Existing hybrid retrieval systems on SKBs either use the graph only for query expansion, mix textual and structural branches under a global weighting, or rely on fine-tuned graph-traversal generators. We present GRASP, a three-stage SKB retrieval framework unifying plan-based graph retrieval, plan-conditioned fusion with a dense retriever, and a fine-tuned reranker over the fused candidates. GRASP substantially advances the state of the art on every metric across the three STaRK benchmarks, lifting average Hit@1 from 62.0 to 73.9. Ablation and sensitivity studies further confirm the effectiveness and robustness of GRASP.

arXiv:2606.00823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In virtual reality, it is challenging to achieve satisfactory text entry speed/accuracy, ergonomics, usability, and learnability. To address this issue, we developed ErgoGlide, a novel lightweight and compact wearable device that facilitates text entry tasks in virtual environments. The proposed ErgoGlide can be regarded as a small trackball that is wearable on a user's finger like a ring. By using ErgoGlide with a hive-like virtual keyboard, the user can rotate the ball for key selections, making text entry intuitive and accurate. We conducted three user studies to evaluate ErgoGlide and found that key confirmation techniques have significant effects on text entry speed and the hive-like keyboard design significantly reduced thumb movements. Furthermore, ErgoGlide can significantly improve typing accuracy, ergonomics, and usability over previous text entry methods. Experimental results also indicated that the typing speed of ErgoGlide ca

arXiv:2606.01410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We discuss a novel approach to Premodern Japanese Language Pedagogy (PJLP) with potential applications in other languages and fields. The integration of artificial intelligence into education has largely operated as a top-down project, affording minimal agency to everyday users. This dynamic mirrors the broader frontier model ecosystem, which concentrates massive human and financial resources within a few labs. Drawing inspiration from grassroots initiatives such as the DIY and Maker movements, this paper advocates for an approach to AI in Education that fosters instructional and student agency over the pedagogical process. Specifically, we discuss a tutoring framework for textual analysis in the context of a graduate seminar in premodern Japanese literature, as well as a bilingual interactive dictionary and a conversational partner created for a language course in Classical Japanese. Created through prompt engineering as custom instances

arXiv:2606.02082v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the ClinicalSkillQA 2026 shared task, which was organized with the BioNLP Workshop at ACL 2026. The goal of this shared task is to evaluate continuous perception and procedural reasoning in clinical skill assessment by requiring systems to reconstruct the correct temporal order of shuffled clinical key frames and generate rationales grounded in clinical workflow knowledge. The benchmark contains 200 test-only instances sampled from clinical skill videos, covering three emergency-care procedures. Each instance is annotated with the ground-truth temporal order and an expert-verified rationale. A total of seven teams participated in the task, collectively making 90 submissions, with four teams providing system description papers. Systems are evaluated using Task Accuracy, Pairwise Accuracy, and BERTScore, which measure exact sequence reconstruction, local temporal consistency, and rationale quality, respect

arXiv:2606.01228v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Public trust in generative artificial intelligence exhibits increasingly divergent patterns across national contexts, yet prevailing research largely overlooks the macro-structural forces underlying this divergence. This study argues that trust in AI is not merely a technical response to performance but a product of institutional refraction. We propose an ``Institutional Prism'' framework to demonstrate how institutional trust shapes user trust in domestic (DeepSeek) and global (ChatGPT) large language models. Drawing on Cognitive-Affective Trust Theory, we distinguish between cognitive and affective dimensions of trust and analyze survey data from 405 Chinese users. The findings show that higher institutional trust is positively associated with stronger affective trust in domestic AI models and shifts cognitive evaluations in a more favorable direction. While under lower institutional trust, this domestic advantage weakens. These findi

arXiv:2604.00142v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We conducted a between-subjects experiment (N=92) comparing three conditions in a calculus learning environment: no self-explanation (control), menu-based self-explanation, and open-ended self-explanation with LLM-generated feedback. All conditions showed positive learning gains within a fixed 60-minute practice session, with no significant between-condition differences in post-test performance. On transfer questions, the open-ended condition produced significantly higher-quality explanations than control on "Not Enough Information" (NEI) problems ($\beta$=+11.9 percentage points, $p$=.030), though the corresponding NEI multiple-choice accuracy advantage was not significant ($p$=.183). Moreover, across all post-test open-ended explanations, the open-ended condition showed a marginally significant advantage ($\beta$=+7.3%, $p$=.057). These findings suggest that LLM-supported open-ended self-explanation can improve explanation quality o

arXiv:2604.03238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) assumes that annotation responses reflect genuine human preferences. They often do not. Behavioral scientists have documented for sixty years that people produce responses without holding genuine opinions, construct preferences on the spot from contextual cues, and interpret identical questions differently. Importantly, these failures are common for the judgments on values that matter most for AI alignment. We argue that measurement validity is logically prior to preference aggregation. Before asking how to combine annotations, the field must ask whether the responses being combined are preferences at all. We organize annotation responses along a spectrum, from non-attitudes (no signal) to genuine preferences (full signal), and develop diagnostics that locate responses on this spectrum. In two RLHF datasets, we show that inconsistency is systematic and directionally biased. Filtering h

arXiv:2605.30706v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Permacomputing is a nascent concept and community of practice concerned with developing alternative computing systems grounded in principles of resilience, reuse, sufficiency, and ecological limits. However, research engaging with permacomputing remains in an early stage of development, raising concerns about whether permacomputing can move beyond reflective critique to become a meaningful alternative practice. Through a research-through-design case study, we documented our experience moving a personal website from a data centre in Texas to a self-hosted solar-powered server built from reclaimed electronics. Guided by permacomputing principles and relational aesthesis, we explore what it takes for permacomputing to reconfigure material and perceptual relations. Our findings reveal the frictions of moving away from a maximalist techno-aesthetic while attempting to re-use already existing technologies, potential ways to overcome these c

arXiv:2606.00053v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models follow a data-driven paradigm and are constrained by the coverage of training data, making them prone to failure on edge-case configurations after deployment. To mitigate such risks, it is essential to expose high-quality failure modes and convert the resulting failures into supervisory data for model enhancement. Existing studies largely stop at failure detection and lack a mechanism for leveraging discovered failures for model repair. We propose VLAMotor, the first analysis framework for VLA enhancement, which integrates distance-aware model testing for failure exposure and agent-based data synthesis for model finetunning. First, VLAMotor estimates input uncertainty based on the distance to training samples, and combines uncertainty ranking with redundancy elimination to build compact test sets that expose diverse failures. Then, VLAMotor abstracts failure trajectories into structured semantic represe

arXiv:2606.00097v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work presents RocketSmith, an agentic system capable of the design, manufacturing, and optimization processes in high powered rocket development. The system enables the intelligent automation of software tools as to not only validate factors such as flight stability but also generate the parametric design components for the rocket assembly. A collection of subagents and skills enable optimization workflows of flight parameters via iteration in both zero-shot and human-in-the-loop workflows. With this system, four distinct high power rockets with various motor and assembly configurations were developed utilizing the unique design capabilities of additive manufacturing. These assembly components were fabricated using various FDM printers, manually evaluated for flight readiness, and flight tested at a launch event. From these tests, all rockets achieved a stable launched and two of the four rockets were successfully recovered in reflya

arXiv:2606.00113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic manipulation depends on the ability to anticipate how actions reshape objects, contacts, and scene geometry before execution. Learned world models provide this capability by predicting task-relevant future evolution under robot intervention, yet the term now spans latent dynamics models, action-conditioned video generators, three- and four-dimensional scene predictors, physics-informed simulators, and predictive modules inside vision-language-action systems. This breadth has fragmented the literature and obscured the design choices that matter for manipulation. We survey world models for robotic manipulation through three questions: what future representation is predicted, how prediction is connected to action, and when prediction is used in the robot-learning pipeline. We operationally define a world model as an action-conditioned predictive system and distinguish it from perception modules, inverse models, policies, rewards, and

arXiv:2606.00162v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic systems generate large volumes of multimodal sensor data, but converting ROS bag recordings into machine learning datasets is often handled by ad hoc sequential scripts, creating engineering overhead and slow iteration cycles. We model dataset construction as an artifact-based build process over a dependency graph and implement this approach in Bagzel, an open-source Bazel extension for reproducible, incremental dataset generation (including nuScenes-format export). We compare Bagzel and Bagzel-xattr (server-side digest management) against a sequential rosbag2nuscenes baseline. Bagzel reduces runtime in all evaluated execution modes, with the largest gains in iterative workflows (up to 386.26x in warm builds and 7.21x in incremental builds on a 20.4 GB dataset). Across dataset sizes from 5.1 to 20.4 GB, Bagzel variants show markedly better scaling behavior than the baseline, especially in warm and incremental modes. Bagzel-xattr p

arXiv:2606.00253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for mobile manipulators with heterogeneous joint spaces can produce a counterintuitive result: the checkpoint with the lowest aggregate MSE is not the one that performs best on the real robot. We argue this is a predictable consequence of collapsing heterogeneous joint groups (arm, gripper, head, wheeled base) into a single metric, where easy-to-predict joints can mask joints that still fail. We fine-tune SmolVLA (450M, action-expert only) on the 11-DoF Toyota HSR and compare it against $\pi_{0.5}$ (3.3B), a stronger pretrained baseline. Per-group analysis exposes two patterns: in SmolVLA, the mobile base converges slowest and limits overall performance. In expert-only fine-tuning of $\pi_{0.5}$ (training only the action head, backbone frozen), total MSE drops below the baseline but arm accuracy degrades. On 60 real-robot trials (20 per model), $\pi_{0.5}$ 80k (4.0/4) significantly outperfor