S R Das

h-index3
22papers
37citations

22 Papers

6.1CVJul 16
Unsupervised Keypoints for Real-Time Fall Detection: Comparative Analysis Under Real-world Conditions with Predictive Bandwidth Reduction

Tasmiah Haque, Jacob Kosinski, Sumit Mohan et al.

Falls among older adults are a major safety challenge, but continuous monitoring is difficult to sustain. Video captures fall-related posture and motion, yet deployment is limited by privacy, computation, and bandwidth. Supervised pose estimation is anatomically interpretable but vulnerable to occlusion and partial body visibility. We propose a privacy-preserving framework that replaces RGB transmission with compact motion representations based on unsupervised keypoints and predictive temporal modeling. Local processing performs segmentation and keypoint extraction; variational recurrent prediction and sequence classification then detect falls from observed and forecasted motion. We evaluate the framework on the UR Fall Detection and Human Fall datasets using random, subject-disjoint, and occlusion-based splits. Under random splits, neither representation consistently dominates, suggesting that standard protocols may hide meaningful differences. Under subject-disjoint evaluation, supervised keypoints show a statistically significant advantage, but performance varies by subject: they perform better when anatomical landmarks are visible, whereas unsupervised keypoints are more robust to occlusion and partial visibility, though they produce more false positives for complex activities. Under occlusion-based evaluation, supervised keypoints miss nearly half of all falls, while unsupervised keypoints retain strong sensitivity and substantially outperform them. Their anatomical independence allows spatial anchors to adapt to visible body structure rather than fail on absent landmarks. The gap widens under bandwidth constraints, where supervised localization errors compound through the temporal model. These findings show that representation choice should reflect expected visual conditions and that unsupervised keypoints offer an advantage when body visibility is compromised.

7.7CVJul 15Code
XCT-SAM: Sequential Parameter-Efficient Domain Adaptation of SAM for Industrial XCT Defect Segmentation

Md Mahedi Hasan, Md Mushfiqur Rahaman, Alan Pachkovskiy et al.

Defect segmentation in additive manufacturing (AM) X-ray computed tomography (XCT) images remains challenging due to severe class imbalance and large distribution shifts across scan conditions. Although recent foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) provide strong general-purpose segmentation priors, their natural-image pre-training transfers poorly to the AM XCT domain, where defects appear as subtle non-semantic microstructural anomalies. Moreover, adapting SAM to the AM domain is further limited by the large domain gap and scarcity of labeled real XCT data. We present XCT-SAM, a sequential parameter-efficient adaptation framework for AM XCT defect segmentation. Instead of adapting SAM directly from natural images to XCT data, we first fine-tune Conv-LoRA adapters on an alloy-microstructure dataset and subsequently transfer the adapted model to XCT images, progressively bridging the domain gap. Using Conv-LoRA adapters with rank r=2, the framework injects convolutional spatial inductive bias into SAM's backbone while training approximately 4.15M parameters and keeping over 99% of the model frozen. We evaluate XCT-SAM on out-of-distribution CycleGAN-XCT benchmarks and real-world NIST XCT scans. Across both settings, XCT-SAM consistently outperforms zero-shot SAM and other domain-adapted SAM baselines, achieving the best overall IoU and Dice scores. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of intermediate domain adaptation with parameter-efficient adapters for industrial XCT defect segmentation. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Mahedi-61/XCT-SAM.git

18.4CVJul 9Code
Mixture of Probes: Learning from Privileged Modalities in Multimodal LLMs Through Probing

Dominick Reilly, Qiyu Wu, Hiromi Wakaki et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are typically designed under the assumption that all modalities available during training will also be accessible at inference. However, many real-world settings violate this assumption, requiring models to operate under a privileged modality setting, where auxiliary modalities are available only during training. While these modalities contain valuable information, existing MLLMs largely fail to leverage them effectively, as they treat modalities as interchangeable inputs rather than sources of complementary supervision. We propose Mixture of Probes (MoP), a novel framework that disentangles modality-specific and modality-general signals within the MLLM, allowing the model to preserve modality-dependent structure while learning transferable representations across modalities. At its core, MoP achieves this through a structured probing mechanism that extracts and organizes information from intermediate representations of a shared modality encoder, rather than relying only on final-layer alignment as done in existing MLLMs. To support this disentanglement, we further introduce MoP Cross-modal Training (MoP-X), a training strategy for MoP centered around a probe disentanglement loss that prevents probe collapse and encourages cross-modal learning. We evaluate MoP across two domains spanning eight tasks and four modalities under a comprehensive evaluation protocol tailored to the privileged modality setting, where each modality is independently treated as the sole input at inference time. MoP consistently outperforms strong MLLM baselines, achieving up to 65% relative improvement, demonstrating that auxiliary modalities, even when unavailable at inference, can provide substantial gains when effectively leveraged during training. Code, model checkpoints, and evaluation protocols will be made available at https://github.com/Sony/MoP.

24.6AIJul 8
The Harness Effect: How Orchestration Design Sets the Token Economics of Enterprise Agentic AI

Muayad Sayed Ali, Aliaksandra Novik, Anji Boddupally et al.

Agentic AI development today runs on token maxing: buying capability with tokens -- longer reasoning traces, more turns, wider tool payloads, bigger replayed contexts -- so tokens per task grow faster than task value. Falling per-token prices mask the pattern; total spend rises anyway. We argue the decisive lever against token maxing is the harness: the orchestration layer that assembles context, exposes tools, sequences turns, delegates work, and carries enterprise observability and governance. We isolate it with a controlled swap: 22 locked evaluation tasks, six foundation models (Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1, Gemini Flash 3.5, Qwen 3.6, GLM 5.1, Palmyra X6), changing only the orchestration layer -- a frozen conventional production loop versus the Writer Agent Harness. Holding models constant, the harness cuts blended cost per task 41% ($0.21->$0.12), median wall-clock 44% (48s->27s), and tokens per task 38% (14.2k->8.8k), with task-completion quality at parity (0.78->0.81, directional at this sample size). Efficiency is model-invariant -- every model gets cheaper (33-61%) -- while quality gains are capability-dependent: a model's gain correlates almost perfectly with its baseline strength (r=0.99, n=6), a phenomenon we term harness leverage. Quality per dollar rises 82%; task-completions per million tokens rise from 54.9 to 92.0. On this workload the orchestration layer moved cost per task more than the full spread of the model menu did. We formalize token economics at the orchestration layer (including effective input price under prompt caching), detail the six mechanism families behind the effect -- cache-shape discipline to failure-spend governance -- compare six widely used agent systems on the same axes, and argue the harness is the one component whose efficiency multiplies across every model an organization runs -- present and future.

8.2CVJul 9
3D FaceShell: Attribute Transfer in 3D Face Avatars as a VLM Defense Mechanism

Weston Bondurant, Srijan Das, Hieu Le et al.

Photorealistic 3D face avatars are increasingly deployed as reusable digital assets across applications such as telepresence, animation, and personalized media. At the same time, vision-language models (VLMs) can infer sensitive attributes from rendered images with open-ended semantic reasoning without any fine-tuning. This creates a new privacy challenge: once a 3D face avatar is shared, any of its renderings can be analyzed to extract high-level facial attributes. Existing defenses largely operate in 2D image space and do not address identity-preserving semantic manipulation of 3D facial representations. We propose 3D FaceShell, a framework for steering VLM interpretations of faces rendered from 3D models while preserving geometric fidelity and facial identity. 3D FaceShell augments the original 3D representation with a learnable Gaussian shell that produces subtle, spatially distributed perturbations optimized through multi-view embedding alignment. The perturbations are designed to be visually inconspicuous yet sufficient to redirect VLM-based attribute inference in a view-consistent manner. Extensive experiments on reconstructed celebrity face avatars and multiple black-box VLMs demonstrate that 3D FaceShell significantly increases attribute injection and mismatch rates while maintaining high perceptual similarity and identity consistency. Our results show that it is possible to manipulate VLM-level semantic interpretation of 3D faces without compromising their human-recognizable appearance.

2.0LGJul 7
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Reliability Based Bi-Objective Portfolio Optimization

Sounaq Das, Tanmay Sen, Raghu Nandan Sengupta et al.

Portfolio optimization under uncertainty is inherently a multi-objective decision problem involving complex interactions among return, risk, market dynamics, and practical investment constraints. Existing reliability based portfolio optimization approaches primarily rely on static optimization frameworks and often fail to capture sequential decision making, tail risk, and market frictions such as transaction costs. To address these limitations, we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework for multi-objective reliability based portfolio optimization (MORP-DRL). The proposed framework jointly optimizes expected return and downside risk using three complementary risk measures: variance, Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), and Entropic Value-at-Risk (EVaR). To model uncertainty and heavy-tailed market behavior, asset returns are represented using GARCH(1,1), Extreme Value Theory, and a t-copula dependence structure, while realistic scenarios are generated through quasi-Monte Carlo simulation. A Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) based strategy is developed under practical constraints including transaction costs and portfolio bounds, and is benchmarked against NSGA-II. Experiments on ten global equity indices across pre-COVID, COVID, and post-COVID market regimes demonstrate that MORP-DRL achieves competitive risk-return performance, reduced downside risk during periods of market stress, and scalability to high-dimensional portfolio settings.

LGJun 25
Diffusion-corrected Autoregressive Fourier Neural Operator for Droplet Evolution Prediction

Jinghao Cao, Minsung Kang, Hongyue Sun et al.

Predicting droplet evolution in material jetting, or Inkjet Printing (IJP), is essential for maintaining printing quality. However, long-horizon forecasts remain challenging due to error accumulation and the complex coupling of process variables. In this work, we introduce the Diffusion-corrected Auto-Regressive Fourier Neural Operator (DiffARFNO), a two-stage framework that combines an autoregressive Fourier-MIONet with a conditional Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) corrector. Fourier-MIONet is trained as a coarse predictor and deployed autoregressively for long-horizon forecasting. In the second stage, a DDIM-based conditional corrector refines the coarse prediction within each sliding window through efficient iterative denoising. By combining coarse predictions from Fourier-MIONet with a DDIM corrector that restores fine details, DiffARFNO aims to provide high-fidelity predictions for long-horizon forecasts. Extensive experiments on droplet datasets from ANSYS Fluent demonstrate that DiffARFNO significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models.

3.7MEJul 3
CaSPECT: Discovering Causally Homogeneous Subgroups via Directed Spectral Clustering

Arghya Pratihar, Shinjon Chakraborty, Swagatam Das

We propose \textbf{CaSPECT}, a causal spectral clustering framework for discovering causally homogeneous subgroups from observational data. Rather than clustering in covariate space, CaSPECT defines similarity through the topology of a learned directed acyclic graph (DAG); a bootstrap-stabilised PC algorithm recovers the causal skeleton; a novel \emph{Orientation Validation Score} (OVS) combines PC bootstrap evidence with DirectLiNGAM to orient edges robustly; directed edges are weighted by backdoor-identified average treatment effects estimated via OLS or double machine learning. Chung's directed Laplacian provides a spectral embedding in which individuals close together share the same causal propagation pathways. We establish almost-sure consistency of the full pipeline and validate the method through a controlled simulation study and on LaLonde CPS1, IHDP, and 401(k) datasets, where CaSPECT recovers a positive and statistically significant treatment effect within the causally comparable subpopulation and corrects for severe confounding without requiring a pre-specified propensity score model.

8.3ROJul 2
HERMES: Heterogeneous Edge-Relational Multi-Head Embedded SSM Attention for Traffic Conflict Prediction at Signalized Intersections

Md Monzurul Islam, Subasish Das

Surrogate safety measures (SSMs) enable proactive traffic safety assessment, but many existing methods evaluate pairwise interactions independently or flatten multi-agent scenes into fixed feature vectors, limiting their ability to represent heterogeneous interaction structure and evolving scene-level risk. This study formulates traffic conflict assessment as temporal heterogeneous scene-graph classification and proposes HERMES, a heterogeneous edge-relational graph neural network with SSM-informed multi-head attention. Vehicles and pedestrians are represented as heterogeneous nodes, while vehicle-vehicle, vehicle-pedestrian, and pedestrian-pedestrian interactions are encoded as relation-specific edges with continuous kinematic and surrogate-safety descriptors. Relation-specific attention, dynamic node-edge updates, safety-aware graph pooling, and temporal sequence learning are jointly used to estimate scene-level conflict probability. HERMES was evaluated using 109,028 trajectory-derived sequences from a signalized urban intersection and tested on an independently collected comparable intersection dataset. Enhanced HERMES achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.9898 +/- 0.0013, an AUC-PR of 0.9412 +/- 0.0067, and an F1 score of 0.8449 +/- 0.0103. At a 5% false-alarm rate, it detected 95.7% of conflict sequences, outperforming the strongest Transformer baseline and XGBoost. In zero-shot external evaluation, HERMES achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.9752 and an AUC-PR of 0.7829. Joint source-target training further improved target-site performance with limited target-site data. These findings show that preserving heterogeneous interaction topology, safety-informed edge semantics, and short-term temporal evolution improves scene-level conflict classification and supports transferable roadside safety monitoring at signalized intersections.

3.6LGJun 30
A Bayesian Filtering Approach for Learning Lagrangian Dynamics from Noisy Measurements

Kundan Kumar, Shreya Das, Simo Särkkä

This paper proposes a Bayesian filtering-based approach for learning the dynamics of a physical system from partial, noisy measurements. We model the system dynamics using a Lagrangian mechanics formulation. As in Lagrangian neural networks (LNNs), we parameterize the kinetic and potential energies with neural networks. The unknown external forces in the Lagrangian formulation are modeled as white Gaussian noise. The corresponding Euler--Lagrange equations then yield a continuous-time stochastic state-space model (SSM) that describes the system dynamics. The neural network parameters and system states are then jointly learned via a maximum-likelihood method using Gaussian-approximation-based Bayesian filters. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on pendulum and Duffing oscillator examples, and its performance is compared with conventional LNNs and with approximate Bayesian filters using known system models.

8.4STJun 30
On Optimal Data Splitting for Split Conformal Prediction

Sayan Das, Bahram Yaghooti, Todd A. Kuffner et al.

Conformal prediction and its variants, including the split conformal prediction, provide a distribution-free framework for uncertainty quantification by constructing prediction intervals or sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees. The statistical efficiency of these intervals depends critically on how the data are split into training and calibration samples. Despite its practical importance, a principled characterization of the training-calibration split that minimizes prediction interval length while maintaining coverage has remained largely unresolved. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework for optimal data splitting in split conformal prediction. We first analyze the problem in a general setting and derive analytical characterizations of the length-optimal split ratio under both symmetric and asymmetric regimes. We then show how the general results specialize to several commonly used regression settings, including linear regression, nonparametric regression, and neural networks, thereby demonstrating the scope of the framework. We also describe a data-based method for selecting the optimal proportion. Our analysis clarifies how model-related features govern the optimal allocation of samples between training and calibration and provides principled guidance for constructing shorter prediction intervals. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology across a variety of practical scenarios.

5.5CVJun 29
Benchmarking Geospatial Foundation Models for Agriculture Applications

Zhuocheng Shang, Sanmay Das, Ahmed Eldawy

Geospatial foundation models pretrained on satellite imagery promise broad generalization across remote sensing tasks and regions, but their geographic transferability has not been systematically tested, especially in agriculture applications. This paper presents a controlled benchmark that evaluates three models, Prithvi, SpectralGPT, and SatMAE, on multi-temporal crop segmentation and change detection across four U.S. states, Iowa, North Carolina, California, and Minnesota. By assigning each train, validation, and test split to a separate region, we measure how well each model transfers to land it has not seen. All three degrade sharply under regional distribution shift, predicting only the most common crops while missing rare ones. We further find that fitting these models to a shared input format affects each one differently, which complicates direct architectural comparison. These results expose key limitations of current geospatial foundation models for agriculture and point to region aware evaluation as a necessary standard.

10.9CYJun 29
Can LLMs Rank? A Tale of Triads and Triage

Gaurab Pokharel, Shafkat Farabi, Patrick J. Fowler et al.

From housing allocation for households experiencing homelessness to triage in emergency departments, LLMs are increasingly being considered as judges of consequential decisions that require ranking people for scarce resources. Ranking large groups simultaneously is cognitively demanding and error-prone. A natural solution, drawing on decades of social choice theory, elicits pairwise comparisons and aggregates them into a total order. However, a fundamental question remains when LLMs serve as the pairwise judge: how can a practitioner tell, before committing to a ranking, whether the LLM's judgments are sufficiently consistent to trust the result? We discuss two different ways of identifying consistency. A classical diagnostic, the coefficient of consistency $ζ$, originally developed to measure judge reliability by counting circular triads in tournament graphs, provides a cheap, model-free measure of intra-run consistency. Various standard measures of distance between rankings, for example Kendall's $τ$, can measure inter-run variability. We show, in both theory and practice, that these measures are independently valuable, and advocate for using both to assess reliability of rankings. We demonstrate the practical importance of our results across two high-stakes prioritization tasks: homelessness service allocation and emergency department triage. Three different leading LLMs have considerably different performance profiles across these two axes of consistency. We provide guidelines for how practitioners could think about measuring and assessing consistency before committing to a model for ranking or prioritization.

13.7ROJun 25
World Action Models Enable Continual Imitation Learning with Recurrent Generative Replays

Manish Kumar Govind, Dominick Reilly, Smit Patel et al.

Going beyond predicting robot actions, World Action Models (WAMs) can also generate future visual observations. We build on this generative capability to propose Recurrent Generative Replay (REGEN), a continual imitation learning framework that synthesizes pseudo-replay trajectories, enabling a robot policy to rehearse previously learned tasks without storing their original human demonstrations. During continual adaptation, REGEN recursively queries the WAM to synthesize pseudo-replay trajectories conditioned only on prior task instructions and current-task observations. Experiments in both simulation and real-world manipulation settings show that REGEN reduces catastrophic forgetting by up to $50\%$ relative to sequential fine-tuning, while approaching the performance of privileged experience replay methods that require access to real replay data. Finally, we analyze the factors limiting generated replay, identifying long-horizon visual degradation and action-observation inconsistency as the primary bottlenecks. Our results establish WAMs as a promising foundation for continual robot learning without stored demonstrations.

2.8CVJun 28
Bit-ViP: Leveraging Bit-planes to Preserve Visual Privacy in Images through Obfuscation

Vishesh Kumar Tanwar, Ashish Gupta, Sanjay Madria et al.

The unprecedented growth of computer vision applications, such as surveillance systems and social media, raises security and visual privacy concerns, especially when data is stored on cloud servers. Image obfuscation offers a way to preserve visual privacy while maintaining an adequate level of usability; thus, it has been a topic of great interest in recent years. However, prior obfuscation schemes are either vulnerable to malicious attacks, such as model inversion to reconstruct original images from obfuscated images, or generate non-trainable obfuscated images, making them unusable for achieving reasonable accuracy. This paper proposes a novel bit-plane-based image obfuscation scheme, {\em Bit-ViP}, to preserve visual privacy for image-based recognition tasks. The Bit-ViP scheme produces secure, usable images by incorporating an innovative end-to-end obfuscation function. While doing so, the obfuscated image would contain non-invertible noise (generated by Lorenz's chaotic system and differential privacy), making it hard for an adversary to reconstruct the original image. We conduct extensive experiments on two popular activity recognition datasets, namely UCF101 and HMDB51, to validate the effectiveness of Bit-ViP. In the face of attacks on reconstruction, pixel frequency, information entropy, and pixel inter-correlation, we present a rigorous security analysis demonstrating tangible improvements over existing schemes.

8.1CVJun 25
DnA: Denoising Attention for Visual Tasks

Ron Campos, Subhajit Maity, Xin Li et al.

The softmax activation in multihead attention (MHA) is the de facto standard for attention-based models in visual perception tasks. However, standard softmax can produce noisy attention patterns that dilute relevant features and degrade its performance. In this paper, we propose Denoising Attention or DnA, in which, first, a positive query identifies which image features belong to the correct class, and a negative query identifies closely associated but irrelevant image features. DnA then projects these interactions into two distinct subspaces with larger principal angles, promoting subspace separation and improved discriminability. Using a ViT-B backbone, our proposed DnA achieves an absolute gain of 0.8% on ImageNet-1K compared to the baseline. We further show improvements across multiple visual understanding tasks, including video understanding with video transformers (1.8%) and video LLMs (0.5%). Our extensive empirical analyses justify the design choices involving two interacting subspaces and the denoising effect of DnA.

7.8CVJun 18
UNIEGO: Proxies as Mediators for Unified Egocentric Video Representation Learning

Wenhao Chi, Arkaprava Sinha, Dominick Reilly et al.

Egocentric video understanding is inherently limited by the narrow perspective of wearable cameras: a single viewpoint, a single modality, a single model cannot capture the full richness of human action. We argue that a truly expressive egocentric representation must subsume complementary knowledge across viewpoints, modalities, and foundation model representations, yet remain deployable from egocentric video alone. To this end, we introduce a hierarchical multi-teacher distillation framework that produces UNIEGO, a unified egocentric encoder trained with nine teachers spanning ego-exo viewpoints, RGB, depth, and skeleton modalities, and four foundation models. Rather than distilling directly from heterogeneous teachers whose incompatible architectures and feature geometries induce conflicting gradients, our framework interposes a layer of representation-specific Proxy models that translate diverse teacher knowledge into a homogeneous egocentric space. A second distillation stage, Selective Proxy Distillation (SPD), then adaptively selects, for each training sample, the subset of proxies that are both correct and confident, distilling exclusively from reliable supervision and suppressing erroneous signals. SPD is further stabilized by initializing UNIEGO as a learned convex combination of proxy parameters, placing the unified model in a well-conditioned region of the loss landscape before distillation begins. UNIEGO achieves state-of-the-art performance across three egocentric video understanding tasks - action recognition, video retrieval, and action segmentation on three challenging ego-exo benchmarks, outperforming naive multi-teacher distillation baselines and demonstrating that structured, proxy-mediated knowledge transfer yields richer and more discriminative egocentric representations.

2.2CRJun 18
Privacy-Preserving Compliance on Public Ledgers via Selective Disclosure Authorization Schemes

Supriya Khadka, Sanchari Das

Public distributed ledgers enforce integrity through radical transparency, creating tension with data minimization principles required for regulatory compliance. While Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) offer a theoretical privacy solution, existing constructions often overlook adversarial constraints in smart contract environments. Specifically, the asynchronous decoupling of off-chain proof generation from on-chain submission introduces front-running and proof-reuse risks in public mempools. In this work, we formalize Selective Disclosure Authorization Schemes (SDAS), a cryptographic primitive for granular and revocable compliance checks on public ledgers without revealing the underlying witness. We define a security model for SDAS, introducing Ledger-Bound Attribute Unlinkability and Context-Aware Sender Binding to capture how valid proofs remain bound to their intended authorization context. To validate sender binding, we present ZK-Compliance, an Ethereum-based instantiation that operationalizes a user-controlled "Grant, Verify, Revoke" lifecycle. We implement the sender-binding component using a 14-constraint Circom circuit that anchors the zero-knowledge proof to the executing on-chain sender address. Our Sepolia evaluation confirms practical viability: browser-based proof generation executes in under 200 ms, and on-chain verification costs 240,512 gas, neutralizing proof reuse by different callers while preserving strict attribute privacy.

12.0CVJun 18
TimeProVe: Propose, then Verify for Efficient Long Video Temporal Reasoning in Activities of Daily Living

Arkaprava Sinha, Dominick Reilly, Siddharth Krishnan et al.

Long Video Question Answering (LVQA) requires identifying sparse, query-relevant evidence within hours-long untrimmed videos. Existing approaches either process videos densely with large vision-language models (VLMs), incurring prohibitive computational cost, or rely on sparse caption-based reasoning, which often misses temporally localized and motion-centric evidence. We introduce TimeProVe, a cost-efficient hybrid framework for temporally grounded reasoning in long videos. TimeProVe first employs lightweight modules to generate action-grounded answer--evidence hypotheses and subsequently invokes an expensive VLM only for targeted verification. The core of our framework lies in the Action-based Candidate Evidence (ACE) module, which converts temporally localized actions into query-conditioned candidate answers and supporting evidence windows through lightweight LLM reasoning. We further introduce OpenTSUBench (OTB), an open-ended benchmark designed to evaluate temporally grounded reasoning in real-world Activities of Daily Living (ADL) scenarios. Experiments show that TimeProVe outperforms the strongest baseline on OTB by 7.3%, while reducing VLM calls by 75% and inference cost by 93%. Furthermore, without explicit temporal grounding training, TimeProVe achieves competitive performance on Charades-STA, and reaches state-of-the-art results when enhanced with grounding VLMs.

16.7AIJun 17
Decoupling Search from Reasoning: A Vendor-Agnostic Grounding Architecture for LLM Agents

Emmanuel Aboah Boateng, Kyle MacDonald, Amardeep Kumar et al.

Production LLM agents increasingly depend on real-time search, yet native search grounding bundles retrieval policy, provider choice, evidence injection, cost, latency, and generation behavior behind a single model-provider boundary. This coupling makes grounding hard to inspect, tune, reuse, or port, and can trigger Search-Induced Verbosity that breaks strict output contracts. We present Decoupled Search Grounding (DSG), a vendor-agnostic boundary that moves grounding outside the reasoning model through an MCP-compatible gateway, exposing provider routing, source-aware context rendering, configured fallback, retrieval-depth control, and exact plus semantic caching as first-class controls. Across five frontier models on SimpleQA, FreshQA, and HotpotQA, native search leads on recency-sensitive FreshQA, but DSG exposes a stronger frontier when control matters: on SimpleQA it nearly matches native accuracy (86.1% vs. 87.7%) at 91% lower search cost, preserves concise answer contracts, and reaches a 99.4% warm-cache hit rate with 68% lower latency. Deployed as a shared production grounding layer for large-scale agentic workloads with interchangeable models, DSG matches or slightly exceeds native-search accuracy on an e-commerce query-understanding (QIU) workload while cutting search cost by over 98%. Real-time grounding is best treated as an optimizable interface boundary, not a fixed model feature.

10.7CYJun 13
The Perils of Agency: How Developers Perceive, Prioritize, and Address Risks in Agentic AI Products

Hao-Ping Lee, Jessica He, David Piorkowski et al.

Agentic AI systems act autonomously, use tools, adapt to context, and operate in complex real-world environments. However, these same characteristics can create or exacerbate product risks. We studied how industry developers (n=35) perceive, prioritize, and address the risks in their agentic AI products. We found that developers' perceptions of risk were closely tied to the qualities that made the product agentic, such as autonomy, tool use, and usage in a real-world context. Developers prioritized product and business risks before considering downstream societal risks like job displacement and end-user privacy. This prioritization also impacted developers' ability and motivation to mitigate agentic risks. Finally, developers lacked mature controls for containing agentic risks, often relying on constraining the same characteristics that make agents useful: e.g., autonomy and goal complexity. These findings reveal a capability vs. risk control tension in agentic AI development: developers need to address risks that emerge from agentic capabilities, yet they currently have limited support for doing so without constraining agentic functionality.

1.8LGJan 30, 2022
Machine learning based modelling and optimization in hard turning of AISI D6 steel with newly developed AlTiSiN coated carbide tool

A Das, S R Das, J P Panda et al.

In recent times Mechanical and Production industries are facing increasing challenges related to the shift toward sustainable manufacturing. In this article, machining was performed in dry cutting condition with a newly developed coated insert called AlTiSiN coated carbides coated through scalable pulsed power plasma technique in dry cutting condition and a dataset was generated for different machining parameters and output responses. The machining parameters are speed, feed, depth of cut and the output responses are surface roughness, cutting force, crater wear length, crater wear width, and flank wear. The data collected from the machining operation is used for the development of machine learning (ML) based surrogate models to test, evaluate and optimize various input machining parameters. Different ML approaches such as polynomial regression (PR), random forest (RF) regression, gradient boosted (GB) trees, and adaptive boosting (AB) based regression are used to model different output responses in the hard machining of AISI D6 steel. The surrogate models for different output responses are used to prepare a complex objective function for the germinal center algorithm-based optimization of the machining parameters of the hard turning operation.