Robots have significant potential to automate construction processes. However, their industry adoption remains limited, partly because of the programming effort required to adapt robots to diverse tasks. This paper presents a skill sequence planning method that enables a heterogeneous team of multi-functional robots to collaboratively perform construction assembly work using reusable, preprogrammed skills such as grasping, drilling, and fastening. A central controller transforms the digital representation of the building into a construction relationship graph that represents construction entities, their states, and their parent-child relationships. Based on this representation, the system selects the next construction target, generates a symbolic sequence of skills for capable members of the robot team, and produces collision-free geometric motion plans for skill execution. The symbolic planning problem is dynamically regenerated as the construction state changes. An interactive digital twin presents the planned skill sequence and robot states to human co-workers for review and approval before execution. The method is evaluated through a construction assembly case study. By reducing the need to program robots separately for each task variation, the proposed approach supports more flexible deployment of collaborative robot teams in construction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25649
Architectural floor plans remain a high-friction barrier to archive digitization and early design-model preparation because heterogeneous graphics encode spatial semantics and editable geometry together. We introduce SALI-FP, an evidence-gated multimodal pipeline that converts a plan into reviewable semantic maps, objects, vectors, and relation records while constraining local revisions by image evidence. In a full production audit of 11,534 heterogeneous plans, SALI-FP produced structured outputs for every plan, including 752,510 valid polygon-bearing objects. The same output form has supported initial drawing digitization and design-model preparation in practical design work. Public-benchmark calibration is paired with a 30-case matched visual evidence set in Appendix F, where room-scale coverage, openings, oblique boundaries, and circulation continuity can be inspected directly. SALI-FP offers an engineering-oriented interpretation-to-geometry workflow for reviewed CAD/BIM preparation and existing-building information recovery.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25615
Training data quantity and quality greatly affect object detection model performance, regardless of model architecture. When using object detection models on video and images from the deep sea, in which the objects of interest, primarily organisms, are sparse, faint, and hard to identify, incremental improvements to object detector performance may require an iterative approach to data labeling and management. This paper presents mbariml, a python-based video and image analysis pipeline built around the data labeling management process. mbariml uses an Ultralytics YOLO detection model, runs it over still images or video, stores every detection as a reviewable region of interest, groups those regions by visual similarity so that a human can accept or reject them in bulk, and exports the result as training data, statistics, image sidecars, and additional metadata. The human review stage is the centre of the design: an annotator can validate, relabel, resize, delete, and draw entirely new localizations, and every one of those edits is written back to the same database the detector wrote to. Video receives particular attention: the software treats each tracker-produced track as a provisional observation and selects one representative frame instead of retaining every detection in the track. We describe the pipeline stage by stage, including the operational middle-third heuristic used for track observation selection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25500
Parallel coding agents can produce patches that work alone but fail when merged. This happens when one agent changes an interface or rule that another agent still relies on. We study these failures with stale, a benchmark for semantic coordination. Our evaluation runs the same tests on each patch alone and on their combination, counting only failures introduced by combining the patches. We use three tiers: synthetic tasks with controlled interface changes, pairs of merged pull requests, and constructed tasks that use real Django helpers. Among 834 runs on 417 mined Django pairs, only one showed interference after correcting the grading procedure. On constructed tasks using 12 Django helpers, interference occurred in 97% of runs. A message describing the completed concurrent change recovered 82% of runs. Reviewed pull requests may contain few unresolved parallel changes, even when agents fail on controlled tasks using real code. The constructed failure rates do not estimate how often these problems occur in practice.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25396
English-only benchmarks expose only a narrow slice of voice-agent behavior. We introduce $\tau$-Multilingual, extending $\tau$-Voice to Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Hindi, Korean, and Mandarin with native-speaker review and evaluation of generated language and spoken output. Across 4,500 full-duplex calls and five voice configurations, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hindi remain within 3.2 task-completion points of English, but Korean and Mandarin fall by 14.7 and 8.4 points. The failure modes also vary: Korean systems miss more responses, Mandarin systems interrupt more often, and both struggle with tools and entities. Grok leads task completion but scores lowest on generation quality, motivating separate task, interaction, and generation reporting. We release language packs, validated judges, and tools for community-built multilingual voice-agent evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35820
The rising global prevalence of mental health conditions, together with longstanding barriers in traditional healthcare, such as limited resources, high cost, stigma, and privacy concerns, has created an urgent need for accessible and scalable support. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a transformative technology with strong potential to democratize mental health support through advanced natural language understanding and generation. However, the rapidly expanding, fragmented body of work in this area lacks a coherent evolutionary narrative, making it difficult to contextualize current progress and identify future directions. This survey addresses this gap by organizing and analyzing the literature around a central thesis: the role of LLMs in mental health is evolving through three distinct, increasingly sophisticated phases. We trace this trajectory from Phase I, in which LLMs act primarily as passive Information Tools and Pattern Recognizers for assessment; through Phase II, where they function as Empathetic Conversationalists for in-the-moment, stateless interactions; to the current frontier, Phase III, which seeks Longitudinal, Personalized Companions implemented as stateful cognitive agents. To support this framework, we systematically review core technologies, agent architectures (Profile, Memory, Reasoning, and Planning), and the critical infrastructure of datasets and benchmarks, highlighting how their evolution underpins this developmental path. Viewing the field through this developmental lens, we provide a comprehensive synthesis of existing work, an insightful narrative of its trajectory, and a clear roadmap for future innovation in responsible, effective, and human-centered AI for mental healthcare. A curated collection of the resources reviewed in this survey is available at our project repository: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25186
Providing autonomous intelligence, pervasive connectivity and usability to human life and industry has led to the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). To support time-sensitive and resource-constrained applications, IoT systems nowadays increasingly rely on edge computing. This brings computation and decision-making closer to end devices. In edge-enabled IoT architecture, latency and communication overhead are reduced, but interactions among a larger and more diverse set of devices, edge nodes, services, and data sources are introduced as well. In such environments, security and privacy mechanisms provide the foundation for protection, while trust management can assess the reliability of interacting entities and adapting secure decisions. In this paper, we systematically review the current state of trust management in edge-enabled IoT. To this end, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy that maps physical, network, and application architectural IoT layers against the consumer, commercial, industrial, and infrastructure IoT domains. We further investigate state-of-art research based on their trust design, how trust integrated into secure IoT operations, the attacks that effect trust management process. Based on these findings, we identify key gaps in current research and outline future directions for context-aware and adaptive trust management in edge-enabled IoT.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24669
Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) are a new type of neural network architecture which enable accurate and robust inference at extremely small model sizes. Recently, NCAs have advanced to become interesting low-resource alternatives to convolution- and attention-based architectures for various tasks such as image analysis, synthetic image generation, and simulation. The rapid development and increased research interest necessitate a comprehensive review of the emerging technology. This review provides an overview of the fundamentals of NCAs, applications to medical imaging, as well as insights into the state of the art. We analyze recent modifications to the originally proposed NCA architecture with respect to their efficiency and accuracy. Furthermore, we review practical applications in real-world scenarios with a focus on medical image analysis, segmentation, classification, registration, depth estimation, and image synthesis. Finally, we identify several advantages of NCAs, research gaps, and conclude with an analysis of future opportunities for NCAs in medical applications in confined settings or areas that have particular demands for robustness or efficient data processing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24595
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly explored as interfaces for scientific image analysis, where a visual question-answering (VQA) response may be paired with a spatial output that guides a downstream stage. A supervisor reads the language answer, while a downstream workflow such as segmentation or region review consumes the point-set output. We call this transition from inspecting the answer to relying on its point action the language-to-action hand-off. A silent failure occurs when the answer is correct while the paired action misses annotated objects needed downstream, so answer-based oversight clears a region whose action is unreliable. We introduce Spatial Action Review, a visual analytics dashboard for auditing this failure mode in electron microscopy (EM) mitochondria analysis. It links paired answer-action records through an answer-action ledger, a task-by-dataset risk map, and an image-region audit view, connecting aggregate patterns to image evidence while an adjustable action-reliability gate supports re-audit. The review ends in a human-AI hand-off, where a supervisor records whether the action is accepted, escalated, held under a stricter gate, or flagged for model revision. Across 541 image regions from an EM-adapted Qwen3-VL case-study run, point actions fail the gate in 54.4% of records with a correct VQA response, and 27.4% of all records are silent failures. A correct answer is associated with only a 5.8-percentage-point higher probability of a reliable action, with a bootstrap interval spanning zero; the point-biserial correlation between answer correctness and object coverage is 0.061. This weak coupling persists across five model conditions on 753 matched image regions. Spatial Action Review makes answer-action mismatches visible and ties them to image evidence and a recorded decision before MLLM outputs enter autonomous scientific workflows.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24470
AI coding agents increasingly support software development beyond code completion, including planning, implementation, testing, and repository-level task execution. Their practical use, however, often remains only weakly connected to established software engineering practices. The aim of this work is to develop and evaluate a lightweight, spec-driven lifecycle for governed agentic software engineering. The lifecycle combines established software engineering practices with repository-local guidance through specifications, this http URL, and phase-specific agent skill files. The approach was developed in the context of the FHNW course AI-assisted Software Development and applied by students to business-oriented software use cases. Its educational and practical applicability is explored through a student survey combining closed rating items with open-ended questions. The contribution of this work is a process-oriented framework that enables AI coding agents to operate with bounded autonomy within an explicit, reviewable, and test-oriented software development lifecycle.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24348
Visual search on large e-commerce catalogs must serve both "similarity" queries that ask for items resembling an uploaded image and "modifier" queries that comprise an image and text describing a desired modification (e.g. a color change or style swap). The latter is the setting known as composed image retrieval (CIR). Existing CIR methods, however, treat relevance as binary and train on triplets with a single positive target - a poor fit for real catalogs where many candidates partially satisfy a user query and ranking across that partial-match spectrum drives the customer experience. We propose a methodology for training CIR retrievers on graded relevance, consisting of: (i) a VLM to curate training data, generating both queries (object detection + modifier synthesis) and 4-level relevance labels without manual annotation, (ii) an iterative relevance-feedback loop that expands the training set by mining hard negatives from the in-training retriever, and (iii) a hierarchy-aware angular objective to train the retriever directly on the graded labels rather than collapsing them to a binary split. We call this methodology GradCIR and instantiate it on a PaliGemma2 bi-encoder trained on 3.5M graded pairs curated from raw Walmart catalog data. A controlled graded-vs-binary ablation isolates the supervision granularity and shows lift of 4.9%-5.9% in NDCG@10. The same recipe applied to other multimodal encoders lifts early-fusion backbones by up to 8.5% NDCG@10. On the public FashionIQ benchmark, GradCIR (applied to PaliGemma2) reaches 0.6703 average recall when fine-tuned, slightly ahead of the strongest peer-reviewed supervised baseline we compare against, and matching or exceeding all published CLIP-L-class zero-shot CIR methods. The system is deployed in production at Walmart, where it's serving live visual-search user traffic.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24152
Semantically meaningful subtask labels can provide useful contexts for long-horizon policies, but automatically identifying both reliable temporal boundaries and broad semantic descriptions for annotations remains difficult. We present an automatic labelling pipeline that assigns temporal localisation to deterministic trajectory analysis and semantic interpretation to vision-language (VL) reasoning. The pipeline segments synchronised kinematic signals into phases, performs phase-localised VL reasoning to describe the contents, and aggregates the outputs for the base, left arm, and right arm actions. We evaluate this pipeline primarily on 29 real Galaxea bimanual mobile-manipulation tasks. Repeating the VL reasoning three times first produces the same output value for 87.4% on selected tasks. A review by nine participants across all 29 tasks then judgements on the labelled phases and shows positive acceptance of temporal divisions (90.5%), body labels (90.7%), and arm labels (78.7%). The results indicate that the segmentation-VL design can produce structured annotations while preserving asynchronous bimanual behaviour, providing a basis for richer semantic subtask identification and state-based verification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24059
Crash datasets that carry an investigator narrative hold information the coded fields omit. Coding those narratives at scale has been blocked by three obstacles. Frontier large language models are costly at that scale, their generated text cannot be verified, and no rule says how much output a human must check. This paper formulates narrative coding as gated, typed decisions answered by Jev, a System One model that returns probabilities over analyst-defined options and generates no text. A screen covered 499,500 Texas narratives and 195,857 were coded with a 27-question schema. Cost is governed by schema size rather than narrative length. The probabilities are audited against coded fields and against 2,416 blinded human judgments drawn under a stated sampling design. Two frontier large language models are benchmarked on the same records. Against human labels the typed model attains an F1 of 0.908. One frontier model gains 0.059 and the other is indistinguishable from it. Calibration varies by model rather than by paradigm, so each model must be audited. Recalibration on the same labels reduces calibration error by a factor of 3.3. Agreement with coded fields understates fidelity to the narrative by a median of 0.26 in kappa. A resolution-floor bound covers any model that reports probabilities on a discrete grid. A review budget over flagged records gives the records a human must read per variable and per year. Adding the calibrated variables to the coded fields raises the injury and fatal crashes attributed to nine factors by 10,747 per year.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24052
Generating coherent meta-reviews from multiple peer reviews is challenging when reviewer evidence conflicts and varies in reliability. Existing approaches typically formulate meta-review generation as a multi-document summarization task and aggregate reviewer feedback uniformly, making it difficult to determine which opinions should be prioritized under disagreement. In this paper, we study meta-review generation through reliability-aware evidence aggregation. Our framework first extracts aspect-level opinions from peer reviews and identifies conflicting evidence within each aspect. It then estimates opinion-level support and review-level quality to measure evidence reliability. Based on these signals, the framework assigns reliability-aware weights to reviewer feedback, enabling the generator to prioritize better-supported arguments while preserving diverse perspectives. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently improves meta-review generation over strong baselines on both automatic and human evaluations, with clear gains in conflict recognition and resolution under high-conflict review scenarios. The code and implementation details are publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24028
Commercial large language models are increasingly deployed across African fintech infrastructure for fraud detection and customer communication, yet no Nigerian or African continental regulatory instrument specifies what pre-deployment evaluation such systems must undergo before procurement. This paper reviews African fintech AI governance across global, continental, and Nigerian instruments, and shows that safety is affirmed as a principle while pre-deployment evaluation is operationally unspecified. Generic safety benchmarks cannot surface the failure modes most relevant to this domain, since none contain Nigerian institutional content or test for false positive misclassification of legitimate financial communications. These claims are demonstrated using SafeAlert, a purpose-built evaluation kit applied to six commercial models across three system prompt conditions. Results show that models resisting generic harmful content requests still produce complete fraud scripts under specific framing, and that several models misclassify most legitimate Nigerian bank communications as suspicious or fraudulent, a failure invisible to standard safety evaluation. The paper concludes with a regulatory framework proposing pre-deployment evaluation requirements for the CBN, NITDA, SEC, and the AU, arguing that the identified gap reflects an absence of regulatory specification, not a shortage of technical or financial resources.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24016
AI agents now report vulnerabilities faster than maintainers can review them. Reports often depend on security properties specific to the application, and require considerable human labor to process. To mitigate this, we introduce a framework for evaluating vulnerability reports via probes, executable checks of security properties. A reported exploit is evaluated by replaying it against the application and running the probes: a triggered probe indicates both that the exploit succeeded and which security property it violated. As a probe encodes a security property rather than a known vulnerability, it can detect vulnerabilities that were not known when the probe was written. We instantiate the framework as MobileCybench, a benchmark for vulnerability discovery by AI agents in 13 Android applications, with 495 probes written and reviewed by the authors. We evaluate 5 coding agents (OpenCode with GPT-5.5, GPT-5.6-Sol, and GLM-5.2; Claude Code with Opus 4.8 and Opus 5) under 4 settings: as a malicious app on the victim's device or as a remote attacker with a low-privilege account, each with either only an obfuscated APK or access to the application's source code. Given only the obfuscated APK, the top agent, OpenCode with GPT-5.6-Sol, triggers probes in 53.8% of applications in the malicious-app setting and 16.7% in the remote-attacker setting. With source code, the trigger rate across all agents and both attack settings increases from 28.8% to 32.8%. Building and running the benchmark surfaced 23 previously unreported vulnerabilities, the majority of which have been confirmed by maintainers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23980
Agentic AI extends LLM security beyond generated content to persistent state, autonomous actions, tool use, and interactions with humans and other agents. Existing threat classifications often emphasize individual dimensions, obscuring connections among entry points, affected components, and security consequences. The known threat landscape also differs from the coverage demonstrated by empirical research. Through a structured review of 66 studies published from 2022 to 2026, we introduce T={S, B, P, A}, a cross-dimensional representation linking affected functional or system surfaces {S}, interaction or trust boundaries {B}, violated security properties {P}, and empirically examined architectures {A}. We analyze 22 artifact-backed red-teaming studies and 11 representative security benchmarks to characterize empirical coverage and evaluation maturity. Within the selected studies, evidence concentrates on prompt/reasoning, memory, and tool-mediated attacks, predominantly in single-agent settings. Persistent, Human--Agent, complex multi-agent, systemic, and long-horizon threats receive less coverage. These findings describe the selected corpus rather than establish gaps across all empirical research. Heterogeneous metrics, limited adaptive defense evaluation, architectural imbalance, and incomplete execution-state capture further constrain comparison and reproducibility. We derive 13 open research questions to guide more systematic, architecture-aware, and reproducible security evaluation of agentic AI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23894
Disaster-risk-reduction archives describe hazard events in prose that databases such as EM-DAT (Delforge et al., 2025) cannot ingest directly. We present an LLM pipeline that generates candidate georeferenced event records using a controlled hazard vocabulary and fixed schema, retaining evidence for review. Applied to 10,000 documents from PreventionWeb, the knowledge hub managed by UNDRR, it produced 3,572 records from 1,913 documents across 24 hazard types and resolved 81% of location mentions to OpenStreetMap geometries. On 171 human-positive document windows from a stratified 217-document reference set, GPT-5 achieved 86.0% pooled attribute $F_1$, versus 44.2% for the spaCy-gazetteer baseline. Evaluation pools hazard families, location strings, and event years within documents, without assessing their assignment to individual events. GPT-5.4 ranked highest among ten LLMs (86.6% $F_1$). Verbatim evidence occurrence was 72.0% for GPT-5 and 47.2% for GPT-5.4, measuring textual traceability without establishing attribute support. We report production failure modes and automated label and location-rule compliance checks. Prompts, schema, and outputs will be released for adaptation to national reporting archives.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23853
Frontier benchmarks need tasks that current models cannot solve. But a task that no model solves is not automatically a hard task. The same zero pass rate can come from a real capability gap, but it can also come from missing context, a broken reference solution, infrastructure failure, or a verifier that can be bypassed. In this paper, we study this issue using a frozen Terminal-Bench 3 / Frontier-Bench 0.1 production record with 1,081 pull requests, 639 scored tasks, 28,801 trials, and $105,933 in logged agent spend. We ask what an all-fail task actually certifies. For the 125 tasks with no honest pass, we combine task artifacts, reference-solution runs, empty-solution controls, adversarial trials, trajectories, telemetry, and review records, and apply an ordered validity screen. Only 78 of the 125 tasks survive as certified-unsolved candidates. The remaining tasks include 14 with broken oracles, 8 dominated by infrastructure failures, 4 that are only passable through verifier bypasses, and 21 whose solvability is not certified by the available evidence. Thus, lack of saturation and genuine difficulty are not the same thing. The certified-unsolved label is also narrow: it means that the authored route passed, infrastructure did not dominate, no strict bypass was observed, and all evaluated agents failed. It does not prove intrinsic hardness, verifier completeness, or failure at the intended capability. We further analyze rejected submissions and passing tasks to show that pass rate alone cannot explain why a task is difficult. Overall, our results suggest that frontier benchmarks should report the evidence behind their all-fail tasks before using them as capability claims.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26826
As part of HVAC systems, residential heating provides foundational infrastructure for human habitation in cold weather. However, research on how residents interact with HVAC systems, particularly heating systems, remains fragmented across architecture, engineering, informatics, physiology, psychology, sociology, and design. Based on 541 studies from these fields, this review integrates interdisciplinary research on Heating in Human-HVAC Interaction in smart this http URL resulting synthesis is conceptualized through the Situated Interaction Dynamics of control and feedback between users and systems. User-initiated interactions involve monitoring past and present system performance and planning future operation, while system-initiated interactions rely on sensor networks to trigger automation or provide information enabling user action. These interaction dynamics connect Residents' Experience and Practices with Heating in HVAC System Mechanics. Residents' Experience and Practices include thermal comfort and energy management, where thermal comfort involves both individual physiological and psychological experiences of indoor climate and social practices shaped by norms, empathy, and negotiation among cohabitants. Heating in HVAC System Mechanics includes thermal conditions and energy performance. Thermal conditions concern the regulation of air temperature, mean radiant temperature, air velocity, and relative humidity, while energy performance concerns efficiency and environmental impact. This overview highlights four interdisciplinary tensions: sensed versus lived conditions, personalization versus negotiation, efficiency versus health, and automation versus agency. The resulting framework offers a conceptual lens to interpret heating interactions and design Human-HVAC Interaction that balances IEQ-driven healthy thermal conditions, affordability, and sustainability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23508