Commercial vision-language models are reshaping computer vision, with visual priors broad enough to rival task-specific systems. This raises a natural question: do they reduce the need for classic, physics-informed low-level vision? We study this through shadow removal, a problem shaped by scene geometry, illumination, materials, and occluders, where paired shadow and shadow-free data are hard to collect at scale. We find that a commercial generative editor, used directly, can produce clean shadow-free edits that preserve surface texture and local appearance. However, this comes with a new failure mode: the same editor can regenerate scene content, hallucinate objects, or misread a shadow as material or geometry, producing plausible but physically wrong edits. We address this with an agentic candidate-selection pipeline: the editor generates a guided probe, an evaluator screens for major failures, retries when needed, samples multiple candidates, filters them, and selects a final result balancing shadow removal against scene preservation. Grounding this process in shadow-formation physics makes it more reliable: prompting the generator and evaluator to treat shadows as illumination effects caused by light occlusion, not material or object structure, measurably improves quality and consistency. On the ShadowRemovalRefine benchmark, our physics-oriented pipeline achieves a CDD of 0.0075, reducing CDD by at least 47% over the strongest prior method. These results suggest that commercial vision-language models do not replace classic low-level vision priors; instead, such priors remain useful for constraining and steering physically underconstrained generation.
Dmitrii Pantiukhin, Boris Shapkin, Ivan Kuznetsov +2physics.ao-ph cs.AI
The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) has generated thousands of peer-reviewed publications documenting model configurations, evaluation procedures, emergent constraints, and projection uncertainties. As the community transitions toward CMIP7, efficiently extracting and operationalizing this unstructured knowledge alongside live data analysis represents a critical bottleneck. Here we present CMIP-Forge, a hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and autonomous analysis system that bridges the gap between scientific literature and Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) data archives. The system pairs a curated corpus of 6,581 CMIP6-related open-access publications (101,828 indexed chunks) with an agentic pipeline in which a tool-augmented worker plans and executes Python workflows over live climate data, while a panel of independent reviewer models audits its methodology end to end. CMIP-Forge introduces a multi-layered Defense-in-Depth architecture that enforces physical and methodological invariants through executable mechanisms: Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) static analysis, audited scientific primitives, and an autonomous adversarial peer-review protocol. We demonstrate the system's capabilities through end-to-end autonomous research pipelines spanning atmospheric teleconnections, ocean dynamics, regional extremes, and global warming projections. An agentic analysis system grounded in peer-reviewed literature, constrained by automated code guardrails, and audited by an independent adversarial review loop can complete complex climate-research workflows autonomously. The same experiments expose concrete failure modes of the review loop (sycophantic regression, REVISE verdicts that are never resolved, and the submission of stub code for review), each diagnosable from the immutable telemetry and provenance record released with the article.
Enabling Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to perform spatial reasoning remains challenging. Existing approaches treat VLMs as passive observers, which is difficult for real-world applications. Moreover, reinforcement learning methods rely on sparse rewards, limiting their effectiveness for complex reasoning tasks. Inspired by pigeons' building and exploiting cognitive maps for navigation, we propose a novel agentic pipeline for spatial reasoning. First, we introduce a new \emph{dynamic cognitive map} parameterizing scene layout as object positions and orientations, serving as persistent memory for new observations. Second, we propose a novel \emph{Spatial Assertion Codes (SAC)}, Python expressions programmatically describing spatial relationships. By collaborating with the dynamic cognitive map, SAC enables verification of intermediate reasoning steps, providing dense reward signals. We optimize the model via supervised and reinforcement finetuning. Experiments on the MindCube benchmark demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with \emph{80.5\%} overall accuracy, outperforming the best current method by \emph{29.5} accuracy points (a relative improvement of \emph{53.2\%}) on the challenging \textsc{Rotation} subset. Our code and data are open-sourced at https://github.com/dw-dengwei/active-spatial-reasoning.git.
This paper presents an agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for domain-specific technical reasoning support, instantiated over a curated corpus of approximately 2,100 academic papers in intelligent tires, vehicle dynamics, and vehicle control. Unlike conventional single-pass RAG systems, the proposed architecture employs a 13-step autonomous pipeline that classifies queries by intent, scores evidence sufficiency against a multi-dimensional rubric, performs agentic retry with drift-guarded query reformulation, searches external academic databases (Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar) through iterative optimize--search--vet loops, traverses a Neo4j knowledge graph for relational context, verifies citation integrity, and applies post-generation quality checks with automatic regeneration. Key contributions include a 100-point evidence sufficiency scoring framework across five dimensions with relevance damping and hybrid rule-based/LLM review; a route-dependent external search architecture with iterative agentic loops; a knowledge graph constructed via LLM-based entity extraction and OpenAlex author validation with intra-corpus citation resolution; and a self-correcting generation loop with citation verification and quality assessment. The framework is presented as a practical, implemented case study illustrating how agentic, evidence-grounded RAG can support literature navigation and technical reasoning over large, domain-specific corpora.