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Add to EdgeARIS: Autonomous Research via Adversarial Multi-Agent Collaboration
May 04, 2026
This report describes ARIS (Auto-Research-in-sleep), an open-source research harness for autonomous research, including its architecture, assurance mechanisms, and early deployment experience. The performance of agent systems built on LLMs depends on both the model weights and the harness around them, which governs what information to store, retrieve, and present to the model. For long-horizon research workflows, the central failure mode is not a visible breakdown but a plausible unsupported success: a long-running agent can produce claims whose evidential support is incomplete, misreported, or silently inherited from the executor's framing. Therefore, we present ARIS as a research harness that coordinates machine-learning research workflows through cross-model adversarial collaboration as a default configuration: an executor model drives forward progress while a reviewer from a different model family is recommended to critique intermediate artifacts and request revisions. ARIS has three architectural layers. The execution layer provides more than 65 reusable Markdown-defined skills, model integrations via MCP, a persistent research wiki for iterative reuse of prior findings, and deterministic figure generation. The orchestration layer coordinates five end-to-end workflows with adjustable effort settings and configurable routing to reviewer models. The assurance layer includes a three-stage process for checking whether experimental claims are supported by evidence: integrity verification, result-to-claim mapping, and claim auditing that cross-checks manuscript statements against the claim ledger and raw evidence, as well as a five-pass scientific-editing pipeline, mathematical-proof checks, and visual inspection of the rendered PDF. A prototype self-improvement loop records research traces and proposes harness improvements that are adopted only after reviewer approval.
MotionHiFlow: Text-to-motion via hierarchical flow matching
Apr 25, 2026Text-to-motion generation aims to generate 3D human motions that are tightly aligned with the input text while remaining physically plausible and rich in fine-grained detail. Although recent approaches can produce complex and natural movements, they usually operate at only one temporal scale, which limits both semantic alignment and temporal coherence. Inspired by the fact that complex motions are conceptualized hierarchically rather than at a single temporal scale in the human cognitive system, we propose \textit{MotionHiFlow}, a hierarchical flow matching framework to generate motion progressively by constructing flow path from low to high temporal scales. The flows at lower scales capture high-level semantics and coarse motion structures, while flows at higher scales refine temporal details. To link the flows across scales, we introduce a novel cross-scale transition process, ensuring continuity and preserving noise consistency. Furthermore, by integrating a Text-Motion Diffusion Transformer and a topology-aware Motion VAE, MotionHiFlow explicitly models structural dependencies among joints via joint-aware positional encoding and skeletal topology, enabling precise semantic alignment alongside fine-grained motion details. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with ablation studies confirming the effectiveness of the hierarchical design and key components. Code is available at https://github.com/ai-lh/MotionHiFlow.
Task-Adaptive Admittance Control for Human-Quadrotor Cooperative Load Transportation with Dynamic Cable-Length Regulation
Apr 20, 2026The collaboration between humans and robots is critical in many robotic applications, especially in those requiring physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). Previous research in pHRI has largely focused on robotic manipulators, employing impedance or admittance control to maintain operational safety. Conversely, research in human-quadrotor cooperative load transportation (CLT) is still in its infancy. This letter introduces a novel admittance controller designed for safe and effective human-quadrotor CLT using a quadrotor equipped with an actively-controlled winch. The proposed method accounts for the system's coupled dynamics, allowing the quadrotor and its cable to dynamically adapt to contact forces during CLT tasks, thereby enhancing responsiveness. We experimentally validated the task-adaptive capability of the controller across the entire CLT process, including in-place loading/unloading and load transporting tasks. To this end, we compared the system performances against a conventional approach, using both variable and fixed cable lengths under low- and high-stiffness conditions. Results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the conventional approach in terms of system responsiveness and motion smoothness, leading to improved CLT capabilities.
PERCEPT-Net: A Perceptual Loss Driven Framework for Reducing MRI Artifact Tissue Confusion
Apr 12, 2026Purpose: Existing deep learning-based MRI artifact correction models exhibit poor clinical generalization due to inherent artifact-tissue confusion, failing to discriminate artifacts from anatomical structures. To resolve this, we introduce PERCEPT-Net, a framework leveraging dedicated perceptual supervision for structure-preserving artifact suppression. Method: PERCEPT-Net utilizes a residual U-Net backbone integrated with a multi-scale recovery module and dual attention mechanisms to preserve anatomical context and salient features. The core mechanism, Motion Perceptual Loss (MPL), provides artifact-aware supervision by learning generalizable motion artifact representations. This logic directly guides the network to suppress artifacts while maintaining anatomical fidelity. Training utilized a hybrid dataset of real and simulated sequences, followed by prospective validation via objective metrics and expert radiologist assessments. Result: PERCEPT-Net outperformed state-of-the-art methods on clinical data. Ablation analysis established a direct causal link between MPL and performance; its omission caused a significant deterioration in structural consistency (p < 0.001) and tissue contrast (p < 0.001). Radiologist evaluations corroborated these objective metrics, scoring PERCEPT-Net significantly higher in global image quality (median 3 vs. 2, p < 0.001) and verifying the preservation of critical diagnostic structures. Conclusion: By integrating task-specific, artifact-aware perceptual learning, PERCEPT-Net suppresses motion artifacts in clinical MRI without compromising anatomical integrity. This framework improves clinical robustness and provides a verifiable mechanism to mitigate over-smoothing and structural degradation in medical image reconstruction.
Adaptive Depth-converted-Scale Convolution for Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation
Apr 09, 2026Self-supervised monocular depth estimation (MDE) has received increasing interests in the last few years. The objects in the scene, including the object size and relationship among different objects, are the main clues to extract the scene structure. However, previous works lack the explicit handling of the changing sizes of the object due to the change of its depth. Especially in a monocular video, the size of the same object is continuously changed, resulting in size and depth ambiguity. To address this problem, we propose a Depth-converted-Scale Convolution (DcSConv) enhanced monocular depth estimation framework, by incorporating the prior relationship between the object depth and object scale to extract features from appropriate scales of the convolution receptive field. The proposed DcSConv focuses on the adaptive scale of the convolution filter instead of the local deformation of its shape. It establishes that the scale of the convolution filter matters no less (or even more in the evaluated task) than its local deformation. Moreover, a Depth-converted-Scale aware Fusion (DcS-F) is developed to adaptively fuse the DcSConv features and the conventional convolution features. Our DcSConv enhanced monocular depth estimation framework can be applied on top of existing CNN based methods as a plug-and-play module to enhance the conventional convolution block. Extensive experiments with different baselines have been conducted on the KITTI benchmark and our method achieves the best results with an improvement up to 11.6% in terms of SqRel reduction. Ablation study also validates the effectiveness of each proposed module.
Monocular Depth Estimation From the Perspective of Feature Restoration: A Diffusion Enhanced Depth Restoration Approach
Apr 09, 2026Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is a fundamental computer vision task with important applications in 3D vision. The current mainstream MDE methods employ an encoder-decoder architecture with multi-level/scale feature processing. However, the limitations of the current architecture and the effects of different-level features on the prediction accuracy are not evaluated. In this paper, we first investigate the above problem and show that there is still substantial potential in the current framework if encoder features can be improved. Therefore, we propose to formulate the depth estimation problem from the feature restoration perspective, by treating pretrained encoder features as degraded features of an assumed ground truth feature that yields the ground truth depth map. Then an Invertible Transform-enhanced Indirect Diffusion (InvT-IndDiffusion) module is developed for feature restoration. Due to the absence of direct supervision on feature, only indirect supervision from the final sparse depth map is used. During the iterative procedure of diffusion, this results in feature deviations among steps. The proposed InvT-IndDiffusion solves this problem by using an invertible transform-based decoder under the bi-Lipschitz condition. Finally, a plug-and-play Auxiliary Viewpoint-based Low-level Feature Enhancement module (AV-LFE) is developed to enhance local details with auxiliary viewpoint when available. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods on various datasets. Specifically on the KITTI benchmark, compared with the baseline, the performance is improved by 4.09% and 37.77% under different training settings in terms of RMSE. Code is available at https://github.com/whitehb1/IID-RDepth.
LiftFormer: Lifting and Frame Theory Based Monocular Depth Estimation Using Depth and Edge Oriented Subspace Representation
Apr 08, 2026Monocular depth estimation (MDE) has attracted increasing interest in the past few years, owing to its important role in 3D vision. MDE is the estimation of a depth map from a monocular image/video to represent the 3D structure of a scene, which is a highly ill-posed problem. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a LiftFormer based on lifting theory topology, for constructing an intermediate subspace that bridges the image color features and depth values, and a subspace that enhances the depth prediction around edges. MDE is formulated by transforming the depth value prediction problem into depth-oriented geometric representation (DGR) subspace feature representation, thus bridging the learning from color values to geometric depth values. A DGR subspace is constructed based on frame theory by using linearly dependent vectors in accordance with depth bins to provide a redundant and robust representation. The image spatial features are transformed into the DGR subspace, where these features correspond directly to the depth values. Moreover, considering that edges usually present sharp changes in a depth map and tend to be erroneously predicted, an edge-aware representation (ER) subspace is constructed, where depth features are transformed and further used to enhance the local features around edges. The experimental results demonstrate that our LiftFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on widely used datasets, and an ablation study validates the effectiveness of both proposed lifting modules in our LiftFormer.
A Noise Constrained Diffusion (NC-Diffusion) Framework for High Fidelity Image Compression
Apr 08, 2026With the great success of diffusion models in image generation, diffusion-based image compression is attracting increasing interests. However, due to the random noise introduced in the diffusion learning, they usually produce reconstructions with deviation from the original images, leading to suboptimal compression results. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a Noise Constrained Diffusion (NC-Diffusion) framework for high fidelity image compression. Unlike existing diffusion-based compression methods that add random Gaussian noise and direct the noise into the image space, the proposed NC-Diffusion formulates the quantization noise originally added in the learned image compression as the noise in the forward process of diffusion. Then a noise constrained diffusion process is constructed from the ground-truth image to the initial compression result generated with quantization noise. The NC-Diffusion overcomes the problem of noise mismatch between compression and diffusion, significantly improving the inference efficiency. In addition, an adaptive frequency-domain filtering module is developed to enhance the skip connections in the U-Net based diffusion architecture, in order to enhance high-frequency details. Moreover, a zero-shot sample-guided enhancement method is designed to further improve the fidelity of the image. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve the best performance compared with existing methods.
CWRNN-INVR: A Coupled WarpRNN based Implicit Neural Video Representation
Apr 08, 2026Implicit Neural Video Representation (INVR) has emerged as a novel approach for video representation and compression, using learnable grids and neural networks. Existing methods focus on developing new grid structures efficient for latent representation and neural network architectures with large representation capability, lacking the study on their roles in video representation. In this paper, the difference between INVR based on neural network and INVR based on grid is first investigated from the perspective of video information composition to specify their own advantages, i.e., neural network for general structure while grid for specific detail. Accordingly, an INVR based on mixed neural network and residual grid framework is proposed, where the neural network is used to represent the regular and structured information and the residual grid is used to represent the remaining irregular information in a video. A Coupled WarpRNN-based multi-scale motion representation and compensation module is specifically designed to explicitly represent the regular and structured information, thus terming our method as CWRNN-INVR. For the irregular information, a mixed residual grid is learned where the irregular appearance and motion information are represented together. The mixed residual grid can be combined with the coupled WarpRNN in a way that allows for network reuse. Experiments show that our method achieves the best reconstruction results compared with the existing methods, with an average PSNR of 33.73 dB on the UVG dataset under the 3M model and outperforms existing INVR methods in other downstream tasks. The code can be found at https://github.com/yiyang-sdu/CWRNN-INVR.git}{https://github.com/yiyang-sdu/CWRNN-INVR.git.
Determined by User Needs: A Salient Object Detection Rationale Beyond Conventional Visual Stimuli
Apr 04, 2026Existing \textbf{s}alient \textbf{o}bject \textbf{d}etection (SOD) methods adopt a \textbf{passive} visual stimulus-based rationale--objects with the strongest visual stimuli are perceived as the user's primary focus (i.e., salient objects). They ignore the decisive role of users' \textbf{proactive needs} in segmenting salient objects--if a user has a need before seeing an image, the user's salient objects align with their needs, e.g., if a user's need is ``white apple'', when this user sees an image, the user's primary focus is on the ``white apple'' or ``the most white apple-like'' objects in the image. Such an oversight not only \textbf{fails to satisfy users}, but also \textbf{limits the development of downstream tasks}. For instance, in salient object ranking tasks, focusing solely on visual stimuli-based salient objects is insufficient for conducting an analysis of fine-grained relationships between users' viewing order (usually determined by user's needs) and scenes, which may result in wrong ranking results. Clearly, it is essential to detect salient objects based on user needs. Thus, we advocate a \textbf{User} \textbf{S}alient \textbf{O}bject \textbf{D}etection (UserSOD) task, which focuses on \textbf{detecting salient objects align with users' proactive needs when user have needs}. The main challenge for this new task is the lack of datasets for model training and testing.