Carman K. M. Lee | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

From Benchmark to Deployment: Shift-Robust Fabric Recognition for Industrial Textile Onboarding

Automatically recognising a fabric's construction (jersey, twill, satin) is a bottleneck in textile sourcing, where incoming swatches are still typed by hand. Benchmark accuracy suggests the problem is solved, yet rarely survives deployment. On the \numClasses{}-class FabricFlow benchmark we expose three gaps that headline accuracy hides. First, a duplication audit reveals train/test leakage that inflates accuracy; we rebuild leakage-free splits that report the true difficulty. Second, on the clean data the binding failure is acquisition-source shift between catalogues, not the peripheral shortcuts one might fear: on an archive-exclusive hold-out, standard training holds 58.0\% Top-1 at a calibration error of 0.158, while a simple, architecture-agnostic central-texture recipe adds 13.5 Top-1 points and restores calibration. Third, because confusing one fabric family for another is costlier than a within-family slip, we optimise a taxonomic-severity cost: a confidence-gated routing policy auto-types confident swatches and refers only the uncertain minority to a human, sharply cutting onboarding cost. Throughout we report honest negatives: hierarchical classification, OCR fusion and zero-shot vision--language models all fail to help, yielding a concrete, calibrated, cost-aware recipe for deployable textile onboarding.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Self-Aware Active Learning Enables Continual Improvement in Autonomous Driving

Learning-based autonomous driving (AD) systems can perform reliably in familiar conditions, yet rare distribution shifts and long-tail events remain a major source of abrupt failure. A central limitation is that most agents learn primarily from passive experience and lack mechanisms to estimate when their competence is insufficient, seek timely assistance, and convert safety-critical encounters into targeted improvement. Here we present self-aware guided exploration (SAGE), an active learning framework for post-training adaptation in AD. SAGE learns a predictive world model that generates two online intrinsic signals: fear, which estimates short-horizon predictive risk and model uncertainty, and curiosity, which measures novelty through prediction error. Curiosity adaptively calibrates the intervention threshold for fear, allowing the agent to regulate risk in a context-dependent manner. When predicted fear exceeds this adaptive threshold, the agent transfers control to an expert or fallback policy and uses the resulting takeover trajectories for focused imitation learning. In parallel, fear is integrated into policy optimization and evaluation as a safety-oriented constraint to reduce performance regressions during adaptation. We evaluate SAGE in simulated route-transfer tasks, Waymo-based logged driving scenarios, CARLA occlusion hazards, and real-world mobile robot navigation tests. Across these settings, SAGE improves robustness in novel and safety-critical scenarios, reduces safety violations, and maintains task performance comparable to strong baseline policies. These results suggest that agents can improve after initial training by estimating the limits of their competence, requesting guidance when needed, and learning selectively from rare high-value events.

cs.RO↗