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E3AD: An Emotion-Aware Vision-Language-Action Model for Human-Centric End-to-End Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2512.04733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving (AD) systems increasingly adopt vision-language-action (VLA) models, yet they typically ignore the passenger's emotional state, which is central to comfort and AD acceptance. We introduce Open-Domain End-to-End (OD-E2E) autonomous driving, where an autonomous vehicle (AV) must interpret free-form natural-language commands, infer the emotion, and plan a physically feasible trajectory. We propose E3AD, an emotion-aware VLA framework that augments semantic understanding with two cognitively inspired components: a continuous Valenc-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) emotion model that captures tone and urgency from language, and a dual-pathway spatial reasoning module that fuses egocentric and allocentric views for human-like spatial cognition. A consistency-oriented training scheme, combining modality pretraining with preference-based alignment, further enforces coherence between emotional intent and driving actions. Across real-world datasets, E3AD improves visual grounding and waypoint planning and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) VAD correlation for emotion estimation. These evaluation results show that injecting emotion into VLA-style driving yields more human-aligned grounding, planning, and feedback.

Safety in Embodied AI: A Survey of Risks, Attacks, and Defenses

arXiv:2605.02900v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) integrates perception, cognition, planning, and interaction into agents that operate in open-world, safety-critical environments. As these systems gain autonomy and enter domains such as transportation, healthcare, and industrial or assistive robotics, ensuring their safety becomes both technically challenging and socially indispensable. Unlike digital AI systems, embodied agents must act under uncertain sensing, incomplete knowledge, and dynamic human-robot interactions, where failures can directly lead to physical harm. This survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of safety research in embodied AI, examining attacks and defenses across the full embodied pipeline, from perception and cognition to planning, action and interaction, and agentic system. We introduce a multi-level taxonomy that unifies fragmented lines of work and connects embodied-specific safety findings with broader advances in vision, language, and multimodal foundation models. Our review synthesizes insights from over 500 papers spanning adversarial, backdoor, jailbreak, and hardware-level attacks; attack detection, safe training and robust inference; and risk-aware human-agent interaction. This analysis reveals several overlooked challenges, including the fragility of multimodal perception fusion, the instability of planning under jailbreak attacks, and the trustworthiness of human-agent interaction in open-ended scenarios. By organizing the field into a coherent framework and identifying critical research gaps, this survey provides a roadmap for building embodied agents that are not only capable and autonomous but also safe, robust, and reliable in real-world deployment.

Mitochondrial control of glycerolipid synthesis by a PEP shuttle

SLC25A35 is revealed as the mitochondrial PEP exporter that licenses glycerolipid synthesis in lipogenic cells, linking mitochondrial energetics to lipid production. Mitochondrial PEP flux drives glycerol-3-phosphate and triglyceride synthesis, and blocking SLC25A35 reduces hepatic steatosis, offering a target for metabolic therapy.

An Empirical Study of Multi-Agent Collaboration for Automated Research

arXiv:2603.29632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As AI agents evolve, the community is rapidly shifting from single Large Language Models (LLMs) to Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) to overcome cognitive bottlenecks in automated research. However, the optimal multi-agent coordination framework for these autonomous agents remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical study investigating the comparative efficacy of distinct multi-agent structures for automated machine learning optimization. Utilizing a rigorously controlled, execution-based testbed equipped with Git worktree isolation and explicit global memory, we benchmark a single-agent baseline against two multi-agent paradigms: a subagent architecture (parallel exploration with post-hoc consolidation) and an agent team architecture (experts with pre-execution handoffs). By evaluating these systems under strictly fixed computational time budgets, our findings reveal a fundamental trade-off between operational stability and theoretical deliberation. The subagent mode functions as a highly resilient, high-throughput search engine optimal for broad, shallow optimizations under strict time constraints. Conversely, the agent team topology exhibits higher operational fragility due to multi-author code generation but achieves the deep theoretical alignment necessary for complex architectural refactoring given extended compute budgets. These empirical insights provide actionable guidelines for designing future autoresearch systems, advocating for dynamically routed architectures that adapt their collaborative structures to real-time task complexity.

Backdoor4Good: Benchmarking Beneficial Uses of Backdoors in LLMs

arXiv:2603.07452v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Backdoor mechanisms have traditionally been studied as security threats that compromise the integrity of machine learning models. However, the same mechanism -- the conditional activation of specific behaviors through input triggers -- can also serve as a controllable and auditable interface for trustworthy model behavior. In this work, we present \textbf{Backdoor4Good (B4G)}, a unified benchmark and framework for \textit{beneficial backdoor} applications in large language models (LLMs). Unlike conventional backdoor studies focused on attacks and defenses, B4G repurposes backdoor conditioning for Beneficial Tasks that enhance safety, controllability, and accountability. It formalizes beneficial backdoor learning under a triplet formulation $(T, A, U)$, representing the \emph{Trigger}, \emph{Activation mechanism}, and \emph{Utility function}, and implements a benchmark covering four trust-centric applications. Through extensive experiments across Llama3.1-8B, Gemma-2-9B, Qwen2.5-7B, and Llama2-13B, we show that beneficial backdoors can achieve high controllability, tamper-resistance, and stealthiness while preserving clean-task performance. Our findings demonstrate new insights that backdoors need not be inherently malicious; when properly designed, they can serve as modular, interpretable, and beneficial building blocks for trustworthy AI systems. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/bboylyg/BackdoorLLM/B4G.

LLM-enabled Applications Require System-Level Threat Monitoring

arXiv:2602.19844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-enabled applications are rapidly reshaping the software ecosystem by using large language models as core reasoning components for complex task execution. This paradigm shift, however, introduces fundamentally new reliability challenges and significantly expands the security attack surface, due to the non-deterministic, learning-driven, and difficult-to-verify nature of LLM behavior. In light of these emerging and unavoidable safety challenges, we argue that such risks should be treated as expected operational conditions rather than exceptional events, necessitating a dedicated incident-response perspective. Consequently, the primary barrier to trustworthy deployment is not further improving model capability but establishing system-level threat monitoring mechanisms that can detect and contextualize security-relevant anomalies after deployment -- an aspect largely underexplored beyond testing or guardrail-based defenses. Accordingly, this position paper advocates systematic and comprehensive monitoring of security threats in LLM-enabled applications as a prerequisite for reliable operation and a foundation for dedicated incident-response frameworks.
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