#01Aug 14, 2026
cs.AI
Wyvern: An Agentic Framework for Generating Grounded Multimodal Reports
Beatrice Alessandra Motetti, Emilien Guandalino, Daniele Jahier Pagliari and 4 more
In the current artificial intelligence-driven innovation era, the pace of knowledge growth is accelerating, and is hard to keep up with. While generative models are increasingly used to synthesize content, they often lack in information grounding. To address these peculiarities of our time, we propose Wyvern, a multi-agent framework for the automated generation of grounded, multimodal technical reports. Wyvern allows for the generation of multimodal outputs, integrating images, tables, and text with supporting references in a unified report. Additionally, a particular focus is placed on the grounding of the content, with the implementation of a claims auto-revision stage. We conduct a human evaluation study to assess the quality of our proposed framework. The results show that the figures' informativeness is perceived as superior to that of a recent baseline in 87% of cases. Furthermore, Wyvern's reports are rated as more useful than those produced by three alternative methods in 63% to 100% of instances. We also carry out automatic evaluations showing that Wyvern gains up to 2.3$\times$ in citation recall and 1.6$\times$ in citation precision with respect to the baselines.
#02Aug 14, 2026
cs.CV
GBU-Palm: A Multimodal Video Dataset and Benchmark for Palm Presentation Attack Detection
Yingjie Ma, Zitong Yu, Wei Jia and 2 more
Existing palm presentation attack detection (PAD) datasets are often limited by static imagery, restricted acquisition conditions, or insufficient multimodal video data, hindering systematic evaluation across environments, modalities, and attack types. We present GBU-Palm, a large-scale multimodal video dataset and benchmark containing 21,326 videos from 105 subjects and 210 palms across six acquisition environments, including bona fide, Print, and Replay presentations, with 6,310 synchronized RGB-NIR samples. We construct leakage-controlled protocols that separate palm identity and attack lineage and benchmark four representative video architectures under environment-matched and held-out-environment settings. Results reveal substantial architecture-dependent degradation under environmental shift and show that RGB-NIR fusion does not consistently outperform RGB-only input. We further analyze model behavior through true accept (TA), true reject (TR), false accept (FA), and false reject (FR) decomposition, spectral masking, temporal-order intervention, and frozen-backbone NIR probing, revealing distinct failure patterns and evidence utilization across architectures. GBU-Palm provides a unified and challenging benchmark for developing and evaluating robust multimodal palm PAD methods under cross-environment conditions.
#03Aug 14, 2026
cs.HC
From Style Replication to Style Exploration: Enabling Art Style Exploration with Analyze-Experiment-Resituate Framework
Wen-Fan Wang, TsaiHsuan Lin, Chi-Lan Yang and 2 more
Art style is a signature of professional digital artists that develops through repeated experimentation, reflection, and adaptation. While generative AI (GenAI) can reproduce styles with high fidelity, current tools provide limited support for exploring new stylistic directions and may encourage style replication over exploration. To address this gap, we propose Analyze-Experiment-Resituate (AER), a framework for AI-assisted style exploration derived from interviews with 10 professional digital artists. Rather than prioritizing visually appealing outputs alone, AER supports three core practices of style exploration, including interpreting references, trying out stylistic possibilities, and reflecting on how emerging styles may be received. Specifically, AER enabled artists to (1) analyze artworks into interpretable stylistic elements, (2) have controllable experimentation guided by their own choices, and (3) resituate emerging styles through simulated social perspectives. We implemented AER in a prototype system and evaluated it in a controlled study with 16 artists. Compared with a direct style-transfer workflow, AER increased artists' agency and reflection as they pursued new stylistic directions. A two-week field study with four artists revealed how the AER framework influenced daily style exploration, such as reflection, experimentation, and stylistic decision-making at each stage. We discuss opportunities and challenges in designing AI-assisted style-exploration workflows, and outline implications for future artistic support tools.
#04Aug 14, 2026
cs.AI
The Dynamics of Intelligence Explosions
Toby Ord
AI is increasingly being used to help with AI R&D. Under certain conditions this feedback loop might be able to produce an intelligence explosion, with rapidly escalating AI capabilities. I explore the mathematics of the most explosive possibilities, with an eye to understanding what drives the dynamics. I show that singular growth (towards a vertical asymptote) is harder to achieve than would be expected from recent economics-inspired modelling, and that there is an important but neglected class of growth rates that are faster than exponential but don't lead to a vertical asymptote. I draw out the generation time (the time to go around the feedback loop) as a neglected parameter that plays a pivotal role in determining the behaviour of any intelligence explosion --- one cannot have singular growth unless the generation time rapidly approaches zero.
#05Aug 14, 2026
eess.SY
Optimal Scheduling of Road Maintenance Jobs Considering Impact on Traffic Flows
Charitha Nandepu, Lohitha Kalepu, Gabriele Ciavarella and 1 more
Network-level maintenance planning requires repeated evaluations of equilibrium traffic flows under road capacity reductions. While equilibrium traffic assignment models are well established, their repeated solution quickly becomes computationally prohibitive and challenging to embed within maintenance scheduling problems. This paper investigates data-driven surrogate models that approximate equilibrium arc flows directly from origin-destination demand, using optimization-based equilibrium solutions as ground truth. A real-world case study based on traffic data from the Newark, New Jersey area demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach as a scalable building block for future maintenance scheduling frameworks.