Daily Papers

Omnidirectional vision, using 360-degree vision to understand the environment, has become increasingly critical across domains like robotics, industrial inspection, and environmental monitoring. Compared to traditional pinhole vision, omnidirectional vision provides holistic environmental awareness, significantly enhancing the completeness of scene perception and the reliability of decision-making. However, foundational research in this area has historically lagged behind traditional pinhole vision. This talk presents an emerging trend in the embodied AI era: the rapid development of omnidirectional vision, driven by growing industrial demand and academic interest. We highlight recent breakthroughs in omnidirectional generation, omnidirectional perception, omnidirectional understanding, and related datasets. Drawing on insights from both academia and industry, we propose an ideal panoramic system architecture in the embodied AI era, PANORAMA, which consists of four key subsystems. Moreover, we offer in-depth opinions related to emerging trends and cross-community impacts at the intersection of panoramic vision and embodied AI, along with the future roadmap and open challenges. This overview synthesizes state-of-the-art advancements and outlines challenges and opportunities for future research in building robust, general-purpose omnidirectional AI systems in the embodied AI era.

Assistive technologies for the visually impaired have evolved to facilitate interaction with a complex and dynamic world. In this paper, we introduce AIris, an AI-powered wearable device that provides environmental awareness and interaction capabilities to visually impaired users. AIris combines a sophisticated camera mounted on eyewear with a natural language processing interface, enabling users to receive real-time auditory descriptions of their surroundings. We have created a functional prototype system that operates effectively in real-world conditions. AIris demonstrates the ability to accurately identify objects and interpret scenes, providing users with a sense of spatial awareness previously unattainable with traditional assistive devices. The system is designed to be cost-effective and user-friendly, supporting general and specialized tasks: face recognition, scene description, text reading, object recognition, money counting, note-taking, and barcode scanning. AIris marks a transformative step, bringing AI enhancements to assistive technology, enabling rich interactions with a human-like feel.

Intelligent vehicle cockpits present unique challenges for API Agents, requiring coordination across tightly-coupled subsystems that exceed typical task environments' complexity. Traditional Function Calling (FC) approaches operate statelessly, requiring multiple exploratory calls to build environmental awareness before execution, leading to inefficiency and limited error recovery. We introduce VehicleWorld, the first comprehensive environment for the automotive domain, featuring 30 modules, 250 APIs, and 680 properties with fully executable implementations that provide real-time state information during agent execution. This environment enables precise evaluation of vehicle agent behaviors across diverse, challenging scenarios. Through systematic analysis, we discovered that direct state prediction outperforms function calling for environmental control. Building on this insight, we propose State-based Function Call (SFC), a novel approach that maintains explicit system state awareness and implements direct state transitions to achieve target conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that SFC significantly outperforms traditional FC approaches, achieving superior execution accuracy and reduced latency. We have made all implementation code publicly available on Github https://github.com/OpenMOSS/VehicleWorld.

Roadside Collaborative Perception refers to a system where multiple roadside units collaborate to pool their perceptual data, assisting vehicles in enhancing their environmental awareness. Existing roadside perception methods concentrate on model design but overlook data issues like calibration errors, sparse information, and multi-view consistency, leading to poor performance on recent published datasets. To significantly enhance roadside collaborative perception and address critical data issues, we present the first simulation framework RoCo-Sim for road-side collaborative perception. RoCo-Sim is capable of generating diverse, multi-view consistent simulated roadside data through dynamic foreground editing and full-scene style transfer of a single image. RoCo-Sim consists of four components: (1) Camera Extrinsic Optimization ensures accurate 3D to 2D projection for roadside cameras; (2) A novel Multi-View Occlusion-Aware Sampler (MOAS) determines the placement of diverse digital assets within 3D space; (3) DepthSAM innovatively models foreground-background relationships from single-frame fixed-view images, ensuring multi-view consistency of foreground; and (4) Scalable Post-Processing Toolkit generates more realistic and enriched scenes through style transfer and other enhancements. RoCo-Sim significantly improves roadside 3D object detection, outperforming SOTA methods by 83.74 on Rcooper-Intersection and 83.12 on TUMTraf-V2X for AP70. RoCo-Sim fills a critical gap in roadside perception simulation. Code and pre-trained models will be released soon: https://github.com/duyuwen-duen/RoCo-Sim

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents have enabled systems capable of performing complex tasks across domains such as human-computer interaction, planning, and web navigation. However, many existing frameworks struggle in real-world or resource-constrained environments due to their reliance on cloud-based computation, limited robustness in dynamic contexts, and lack of persistent autonomy and environmental awareness. We present Amico, a modular, event-driven framework for building autonomous agents optimized for embedded systems. Written in Rust for safety and performance, Amico supports reactive, persistent agents that operate efficiently across embedded platforms and browser environments via WebAssembly. It provides clean abstractions for event handling, state management, behavior execution, and integration with reasoning modules. Amico delivers a unified infrastructure for constructing resilient, interactive agents suitable for deployment in settings with limited compute and intermittent connectivity.

Social media is now the predominant source of information due to the availability of immediate public response. As a result, social media data has become a valuable resource for comprehending public sentiments. Studies have shown that it can amplify ideas and influence public sentiments. This study analyzes the public perception of climate change and the environment over a decade from 2014 to 2023. Using the Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) algorithm, we identify sentiment and explore prevailing emotions expressed within environmental tweets across various social media platforms, namely Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. Accuracy on a human-annotated dataset was 0.65, higher than Vader score but lower than that of an expert rater (0.90). Our findings suggest that negative environmental tweets are far more common than positive or neutral ones. Climate change, air quality, emissions, plastic, and recycling are the most discussed topics on all social media platforms, highlighting its huge global concern. The most common emotions in environmental tweets are fear, trust, and anticipation, demonstrating public reactions wide and complex nature. By identifying patterns and trends in opinions related to the environment, we hope to provide insights that can help raise awareness regarding environmental issues, inform the development of interventions, and adapt further actions to meet environmental challenges.

We use images of cars of a wide range of varieties to compose an image of an animal such as a bird or a lion for the theme of environmental protection to maximize the information about cars in a single composed image and to raise the awareness about environmental challenges. We present a novel way of image interaction with an artistically-composed photomosaic image, in which a simple operation of "click and display" is used to demonstrate the interactive switch between a tile image in a photomosaic image and the corresponding original car image, which will be automatically saved on the Desktop. We build a multimodal custom GPT named TalkMosaic by incorporating car images information and the related knowledge to ChatGPT. By uploading the original car image to TalkMosaic, we can ask questions about the given car image and get the corresponding answers efficiently and effectively such as where to buy the tire in the car image that satisfies high environmental standards. We give an in-depth analysis on how to speed up the inference of multimodal LLM using sparse attention and quantization techniques with presented probabilistic FlashAttention (PrFlashAttention) and Staircase Adaptive Quantization (SAQ) methods. The implemented prototype demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the presented approach.

Human-produced emissions are growing at an alarming rate, causing already observable changes in the climate and environment in general. Each year global carbon dioxide emissions hit a new record, and it is reported that 0.5% of total US greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to data centres as of 2021. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked social interest in Large Language Models (LLMs), the new generation of Language Models with a large number of parameters and trained on massive amounts of data. Currently, numerous companies are releasing products featuring various LLMs, with many more models in development and awaiting release. Deep Learning research is a competitive field, with only models that reach top performance attracting attention and being utilized. Hence, achieving better accuracy and results is often the first priority, while the model's efficiency and the environmental impact of the study are neglected. However, LLMs demand substantial computational resources and are very costly to train, both financially and environmentally. It becomes essential to raise awareness and promote conscious decisions about algorithmic and hardware choices. Providing information on training time, the approximate carbon dioxide emissions and power consumption would assist future studies in making necessary adjustments and determining the compatibility of available computational resources with model requirements. In this study, we infused T5 LLM with external knowledge and fine-tuned the model for Question-Answering task. Furthermore, we calculated and reported the approximate environmental impact for both steps. The findings demonstrate that the smaller models may not always be sustainable options, and increased training does not always imply better performance. The most optimal outcome is achieved by carefully considering both performance and efficiency factors.

Sustainability encompasses three key facets: economic, environmental, and social. However, the nascent discourse that is emerging on sustainable artificial intelligence (AI) has predominantly focused on the environmental sustainability of AI, often neglecting the economic and social aspects. Achieving truly sustainable AI necessitates addressing the tension between its climate awareness and its social sustainability, which hinges on equitable access to AI development resources. The concept of resource awareness advocates for broader access to the infrastructure required to develop AI, fostering equity in AI innovation. Yet, this push for improving accessibility often overlooks the environmental costs of expanding such resource usage. In this position paper, we argue that reconciling climate and resource awareness is essential to realizing the full potential of sustainable AI. We use the framework of base-superstructure to analyze how the material conditions are influencing the current AI discourse. We also introduce the Climate and Resource Aware Machine Learning (CARAML) framework to address this conflict and propose actionable recommendations spanning individual, community, industry, government, and global levels to achieve sustainable AI.

This work pioneers evaluating emergent planning capabilities based on situational awareness in large language models. We contribute (i) novel benchmarks and metrics for standardized assessment; (ii) a unique dataset to spur progress; and (iii) demonstrations that prompting and multi-agent schemes significantly enhance planning performance in context-sensitive planning tasks. Positioning this within a situated agent and automated planning research, we highlight inherent reliability challenges--efficiently mapping world states to actions without environmental guidance remains open despite simulated domain advances. Although out-of-scope, limitations around validation methodology and data availability indicate exciting directions, including fine-tuning on expanded planning corpora and optimizations for triggering fast latent planning. By conclusively demonstrating current methods' promise and limitations via rigorous comparison, we catalyze investigating reliable goal-directed reasoning for situated agents.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in text-based tasks but often struggle to provide actionable guidance in real-world physical environments. This is because of their inability to recognize their limited understanding of the user's physical context. We present SituationalLLM, a novel approach that integrates structured scene information into an LLM to deliver proactive, context-aware assistance. By encoding objects, attributes, and relationships in a custom Scene Graph Language, SituationalLLM actively identifies gaps in environmental context and seeks clarifications during user interactions. This behavior emerges from training on the Situational Awareness Database for Instruct-Tuning (SAD-Instruct), which combines diverse, scenario-specific scene graphs with iterative, dialogue-based refinements. Experimental results indicate that SituationalLLM outperforms generic LLM baselines in task specificity, reliability, and adaptability, paving the way for environment-aware AI assistants capable of delivering robust, user-centric guidance under real-world constraints.

Latent Action Models (LAMs) enable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems to learn semantic action representations from large-scale unannotated data. Yet, we identify two bottlenecks of LAMs: 1) the commonly adopted end-to-end trained image encoder suffers from poor spatial understanding; 2) LAMs can be fragile when input frames are distant, leading to limited temporal perception. Such factors inevitably hinder stable and clear action modeling. To this end, we propose Farsighted-LAM, a latent action framework with geometry-aware spatial encoding and multi-scale temporal modeling, capturing structural priors and dynamic motion patterns from consecutive frames. We further propose SSM-VLA, an end-to-end VLA framework built upon Farsighted-LAM, which integrates structured perception with a visual Chain-of-Thought module to explicitly reason about environmental dynamics, enhancing decision consistency and interpretability. We validate SSM-VLA on multiple VLA tasks in both simulation and real-world settings, and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our results demonstrate that our strategy of combining geometry-aware modeling, temporal coherence, and explicit reasoning is effective in enhancing the robustness and generalizability of embodied intelligence.

In industrial anomaly detection (IAD), accurately identifying defects amidst diverse anomalies and under varying imaging conditions remains a significant challenge. Traditional approaches often struggle with high false-positive rates, frequently misclassifying normal shadows and surface deformations as defects, an issue that becomes particularly pronounced in products with complex and intricate surface features. To address these challenges, we introduce PA-CLIP, a zero-shot anomaly detection method that reduces background noise and enhances defect detection through a pseudo-anomaly-based framework. The proposed method integrates a multiscale feature aggregation strategy for capturing detailed global and local information, two memory banks for distinguishing background information, including normal patterns and pseudo-anomalies, from true anomaly features, and a decision-making module designed to minimize false positives caused by environmental variations while maintaining high defect sensitivity. Demonstrated on the MVTec AD and VisA datasets, PA-CLIP outperforms existing zero-shot methods, providing a robust solution for industrial defect detection.

Foundation model development attracts a rapidly expanding body of contributors, scientists, and applications. To help shape responsible development practices, we introduce the Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: a growing collection of 250+ tools and resources spanning text, vision, and speech modalities. We draw on a large body of prior work to survey resources (e.g. software, documentation, frameworks, guides, and practical tools) that support informed data selection, processing, and understanding, precise and limitation-aware artifact documentation, efficient model training, advance awareness of the environmental impact from training, careful model evaluation of capabilities, risks, and claims, as well as responsible model release, licensing and deployment practices. We hope this curated collection of resources helps guide more responsible development. The process of curating this list, enabled us to review the AI development ecosystem, revealing what tools are critically missing, misused, or over-used in existing practices. We find that (i) tools for data sourcing, model evaluation, and monitoring are critically under-serving ethical and real-world needs, (ii) evaluations for model safety, capabilities, and environmental impact all lack reproducibility and transparency, (iii) text and particularly English-centric analyses continue to dominate over multilingual and multi-modal analyses, and (iv) evaluation of systems, rather than just models, is needed so that capabilities and impact are assessed in context.

Nearly 6.7 million lives are lost due to air pollution every year. While policymakers are working on the mitigation strategies, public awareness can help reduce the exposure to air pollution. Air pollution data from government-installed sensors is often publicly available in raw format, but there is a non-trivial barrier for various stakeholders in deriving meaningful insights from that data. In this work, we present VayuBuddy, a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered chatbot system to reduce the barrier between the stakeholders and air quality sensor data. VayuBuddy receives the questions in natural language, analyses the structured sensory data with a LLM-generated Python code and provides answers in natural language. We use the data from Indian government air quality sensors. We benchmark the capabilities of 7 LLMs on 45 diverse question-answer pairs prepared by us. Additionally, VayuBuddy can also generate visual analysis such as line-plots, map plot, bar charts and many others from the sensory data as we demonstrate in this work.

Air pollution constitutes a global problem of paramount importance that affects not only human health, but also the environment. The existence of spatial and temporal data regarding the concentrations of pollutants is crucial for performing air pollution studies and monitor emissions. However, although observation data presents great temporal coverage, the number of stations is very limited and they are usually built in more populated areas. The main objective of this work is to create models capable of inferring pollutant concentrations in locations where no observation data exists. A machine learning model, more specifically the random forest model, was developed for predicting concentrations in the Iberian Peninsula in 2019 for five selected pollutants: NO_2, O_3 SO_2, PM10, and PM2.5. Model features include satellite measurements, meteorological variables, land use classification, temporal variables (month, day of year), and spatial variables (latitude, longitude, altitude). The models were evaluated using various methods, including station 10-fold cross-validation, in which in each fold observations from 10\% of the stations are used as testing data and the rest as training data. The R^2, RMSE and mean bias were determined for each model. The NO_2 and O_3 models presented good values of R^2, 0.5524 and 0.7462, respectively. However, the SO_2, PM10, and PM2.5 models performed very poorly in this regard, with R^2 values of -0.0231, 0.3722, and 0.3303, respectively. All models slightly overestimated the ground concentrations, except the O_3 model. All models presented acceptable cross-validation RMSE, except the O_3 and PM10 models where the mean value was a little higher (12.5934 mu g/m^3 and 10.4737 mu g/m^3, respectively).

The rapid expansion of AI has intensified concerns about its environmental sustainability. Yet, current assessments predominantly focus on operational carbon emissions using secondary data or estimated values, overlooking environmental impacts in other life cycle stages. This study presents the first comprehensive multi-criteria life cycle assessment (LCA) of AI training, examining 16 environmental impact categories based on detailed primary data collection of the Nvidia A100 SXM 40GB GPU. The LCA results for training BLOOM reveal that the use phase dominates 11 of 16 impact categories including climate change (96\%), while manufacturing dominates the remaining 5 impact categories including human toxicity, cancer (99\%) and mineral and metal depletion (85\%). For training GPT-4, the use phase dominates 10 of 16 impact categories, contributing about 96\% to both the climate change and resource use, fossils category. The manufacturing stage dominates 6 of 16 impact categories including human toxicity, cancer (94\%) and eutrophication, freshwater (81\%). Assessing the cradle-to-gate environmental impact distribution across the GPU components reveals that the GPU chip is the largest contributor across 10 of 16 of impact categories and shows particularly pronounced contributions to climate change (81\%) and resource use, fossils (80\%). While primary data collection results in modest changes in carbon estimates compared to database-derived estimates, substantial variations emerge in other categories. Most notably, minerals and metals depletion increases by 33\%, demonstrating the critical importance of primary data for non-carbon accounting. This multi-criteria analysis expands the Sustainable AI discourse beyond operational carbon emissions, challenging current sustainability narratives and highlighting the need for policy frameworks addressing the full spectrum of AI's environmental impact.

Industrial operations have grown exponentially over the last century, driving advancements in energy utilization through vehicles and machinery.This growth has significant environmental implications, necessitating the use of sophisticated technology to monitor and analyze climate data.The surge in industrial activities presents a complex challenge in forecasting its diverse environmental impacts, which vary greatly across different regions.Aim to understand these dynamics more deeply to predict and mitigate the environmental impacts of industrial activities.

Anthropogenic ecological crisis constitutes a significant challenge that all within the academy must urgently face, including the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. While recent years have seen increasing work revolving around climate-centric discourse, crucial environmental and ecological topics outside of climate change remain largely unaddressed, despite their prominent importance. Mainstream NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, dominate the scene, but there remains an untouched space in the literature involving the analysis of environmental impacts of certain events and practices. To address this gap, this paper presents EcoVerse, an annotated English Twitter dataset of 3,023 tweets spanning a wide spectrum of environmental topics. We propose a three-level annotation scheme designed for Eco-Relevance Classification, Stance Detection, and introducing an original approach for Environmental Impact Analysis. We detail the data collection, filtering, and labeling process that led to the creation of the dataset. Remarkable Inter-Annotator Agreement indicates that the annotation scheme produces consistent annotations of high quality. Subsequent classification experiments using BERT-based models, including ClimateBERT, are presented. These yield encouraging results, while also indicating room for a model specifically tailored for environmental texts. The dataset is made freely available to stimulate further research.

From an environmental standpoint, there are a few crucial aspects of training a neural network that have a major impact on the quantity of carbon that it emits. These factors include: the location of the server used for training and the energy grid that it uses, the length of the training procedure, and even the make and model of hardware on which the training takes place. In order to approximate these emissions, we present our Machine Learning Emissions Calculator, a tool for our community to better understand the environmental impact of training ML models. We accompany this tool with an explanation of the factors cited above, as well as concrete actions that individual practitioners and organizations can take to mitigate their carbon emissions.

In this paper, we introduce an expert-annotated dataset for detecting real-world environmental claims made by listed companies. We train and release baseline models for detecting environmental claims using this new dataset. We further preview potential applications of our dataset: We use our fine-tuned model to detect environmental claims made in answer sections of quarterly earning calls between 2012 and 2020 -- and we find that the amount of environmental claims steadily increased since the Paris Agreement in 2015.

In the field of environmental science, it is crucial to have robust evaluation metrics for large language models to ensure their efficacy and accuracy. We propose EnviroExam, a comprehensive evaluation method designed to assess the knowledge of large language models in the field of environmental science. EnviroExam is based on the curricula of top international universities, covering undergraduate, master's, and doctoral courses, and includes 936 questions across 42 core courses. By conducting 0-shot and 5-shot tests on 31 open-source large language models, EnviroExam reveals the performance differences among these models in the domain of environmental science and provides detailed evaluation standards. The results show that 61.3% of the models passed the 5-shot tests, while 48.39% passed the 0-shot tests. By introducing the coefficient of variation as an indicator, we evaluate the performance of mainstream open-source large language models in environmental science from multiple perspectives, providing effective criteria for selecting and fine-tuning language models in this field. Future research will involve constructing more domain-specific test sets using specialized environmental science textbooks to further enhance the accuracy and specificity of the evaluation.

As the possibilities for Artificial Intelligence (AI) have grown, so have concerns regarding its impacts on society and the environment. However, these issues are often raised separately; i.e. carbon footprint analyses of AI models typically do not consider how the pursuit of scale has contributed towards building models that are both inaccessible to most researchers in terms of cost and disproportionately harmful to the environment. On the other hand, model audits that aim to evaluate model performance and disparate impacts mostly fail to engage with the environmental ramifications of AI models and how these fit into their auditing approaches. In this separation, both research directions fail to capture the depth of analysis that can be explored by considering the two in parallel and the potential solutions for making informed choices that can be developed at their convergence. In this essay, we build upon work carried out in AI and in sister communities, such as philosophy and sustainable development, to make more deliberate connections around topics such as generalizability, transparency, evaluation and equity across AI research and practice. We argue that the efforts aiming to study AI's ethical ramifications should be made in tandem with those evaluating its impacts on the environment, and we conclude with a proposal of best practices to better integrate AI ethics and sustainability in AI research and practice.

Sustainability reports are key for evaluating companies' environmental, social and governance, ESG performance, but their content is increasingly obscured by greenwashing - sustainability claims that are misleading, exaggerated, and fabricated. Yet, existing NLP approaches for ESG analysis lack robustness against greenwashing risks, often extracting insights that reflect misleading or exaggerated sustainability claims rather than objective ESG performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce A3CG - Aspect-Action Analysis with Cross-Category Generalization, as a novel dataset to improve the robustness of ESG analysis amid the prevalence of greenwashing. By explicitly linking sustainability aspects with their associated actions, A3CG facilitates a more fine-grained and transparent evaluation of sustainability claims, ensuring that insights are grounded in verifiable actions rather than vague or misleading rhetoric. Additionally, A3CG emphasizes cross-category generalization. This ensures robust model performance in aspect-action analysis even when companies change their reports to selectively favor certain sustainability areas. Through experiments on A3CG, we analyze state-of-the-art supervised models and LLMs, uncovering their limitations and outlining key directions for future research.

Mitigating methane emissions is the fastest way to stop global warming in the short-term and buy humanity time to decarbonise. Despite the demonstrated ability of remote sensing instruments to detect methane plumes, no system has been available to routinely monitor and act on these events. We present MARS-S2L, an automated AI-driven methane emitter monitoring system for Sentinel-2 and Landsat satellite imagery deployed operationally at the United Nations Environment Programme's International Methane Emissions Observatory. We compile a global dataset of thousands of super-emission events for training and evaluation, demonstrating that MARS-S2L can skillfully monitor emissions in a diverse range of regions globally, providing a 216% improvement in mean average precision over a current state-of-the-art detection method. Running this system operationally for six months has yielded 457 near-real-time detections in 22 different countries of which 62 have already been used to provide formal notifications to governments and stakeholders.

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has raised concerns regarding its global environmental impact that extends beyond greenhouse gas emissions to include consideration of hardware fabrication and end-of-life processes. The opacity from major providers hinders companies' abilities to evaluate their AI-related environmental impacts and achieve net-zero targets. In this paper, we propose a methodology to estimate the environmental impact of a company's AI portfolio, providing actionable insights without necessitating extensive AI and Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) expertise. Results confirm that large generative AI models consume up to 4600x more energy than traditional models. Our modelling approach, which accounts for increased AI usage, hardware computing efficiency, and changes in electricity mix in line with IPCC scenarios, forecasts AI electricity use up to 2030. Under a high adoption scenario, driven by widespread Generative AI and agents adoption associated to increasingly complex models and frameworks, AI electricity use is projected to rise by a factor of 24.4. Mitigating the environmental impact of Generative AI by 2030 requires coordinated efforts across the AI value chain. Isolated measures in hardware efficiency, model efficiency, or grid improvements alone are insufficient. We advocate for standardized environmental assessment frameworks, greater transparency from the all actors of the value chain and the introduction of a "Return on Environment" metric to align AI development with net-zero goals.