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Wenshuo Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Wenshuo Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Tele-Traversability: Rethinking Traversability for Teleoperated Ground Robots in Terrain Navigation

Teleoperation, a human-in-the-loop control scheme, allows a human operator to remotely command and guide a mobile robot to navigate in off-road environments, yet fluent and user-friendly tele-navigation requires an alignment of traversability evaluation between human and robot. In the teleoperation system, the human operator typically utilizes off-site incomplete and delayed feedback via a human-machine interface to make a judgment of traversability, while the robot makes such an evaluation based on in situ onboard sensory information, which could cause divergent traversability estimation and thus generate mismatched decisions and actions. Existing approaches for traversability modeling, estimation, and prediction are mainly derived from the view of robots, i.e., robot-centric, and are practically suitable for fully autonomous mobile robots, but neglect the influence of human operators. To address this problem, this paper extends the concept of traversability from robot-centric to human-centric by accounting for the operator's cognitive states, such as attention, workload, and risk tolerance or awareness, termed tele-traversability. We first revisit the definitions and roles of traversability in robotics and then extend them to teleoperation settings. Finally, we highlight future trends and open challenges of tele-traversability toward human-centric teleoperation systems.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

SG-WAM: Self-Guided World Modeling in Geometry-Aware Policy Space

World Action Models (WAMs) couple action generation with prediction of future states. Their effectiveness depends on whether future dynamics are modeled in a space that is both aligned with action generation and sufficiently geometry-aware to capture where and how actions change the scene. Existing WAMs typically satisfy only part of this requirement, relying on either perceptually heavy observation-space targets or auxiliary latent spaces that are not jointly structured for action relevance and geometry. We propose SG-WAM, a self-guided framework that learns geometry-aware action-conditioned dynamics directly in the policy-derived representation space. SG-WAM introduces learnable dynamics tokens and a Self-Guided World Predictor that forecasts their future latent states conditioned on intervening robot actions. Prediction targets are generated by an exponential moving average copy of the same policy backbone, providing stable supervision within the representation family used by the action expert. Geometric supervision further structures the policy image-token representations, providing spatially grounded context for the dynamics tokens and yielding a future-alignment space that is both action-relevant and geometry-aware. Latent future prediction, geometric grounding, and flow-matching action generation are jointly optimized end-to-end in a unified framework. Built on a 0.9B model without large-scale embodied pretraining, SG-WAM achieves 98.5% average success on LIBERO and 73% on LIBERO-Plus, while outperforming strong baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-world evaluations.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

When Does AI for PDEs Yield Scientific Evidence?

Existing AI-for-PDE benchmarks primarily assess models in terms of predictive or approximation accuracy. In physics research, however, AI outputs often serve as evidence for scientific claims. These two objectives are not equivalent: the former measures an output's agreement with a reference target or satisfaction of governing constraints; the latter asks whether, given a specified object of study, scientific claim, assumptions, and evidence standard, the output provides sufficient evidence for that claim. To bridge this gap, we extend a widely used PDE-simulation benchmark and a comprehensive benchmark for PDE inverse problems to enable, for the first time in AI for PDEs, evaluation of whether and to what extent model outputs support specified scientific claims. Our results show that numerical accuracy and evidential support can rank models differently, explain when and why they do so, and reveal that existing benchmarks can favor methods whose outputs provide weaker support for the scientific claims of interest. Together, we formalize, empirically demonstrate, and explain this evaluation--use mismatch in AI for PDEs.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Driving Style Recognition Like an Expert Using Semantic Privileged Information from Large Language Models

Existing driving style recognition systems largely depend on low-level sensor-derived features for training, neglecting the rich semantic reasoning capability inherent to human experts. This discrepancy results in a fundamental misalignment between algorithmic classifications and expert judgments. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel framework that integrates Semantic Privileged Information (SPI) derived from large language models (LLMs) to align recognition outcomes with human-interpretable reasoning. First, we introduce DriBehavGPT, an interactive LLM-based module that generates natural-language descriptions of driving behaviors. These descriptions are then encoded into machine learning-compatible representations via text embedding and dimensionality reduction. Finally, we incorporate them as privileged information into Support Vector Machine Plus (SVM+) for training, enabling the model to approximate human-like interpretation patterns. Experiments across diverse real-world driving scenarios demonstrate that our SPI-enhanced framework outperforms conventional methods, achieving F1-score improvements of 7.6% (car-following) and 7.9% (lane-changing). Importantly, SPI is exclusively used during training, while inference relies solely on sensor data, ensuring computational efficiency without sacrificing performance. These results highlight the pivotal role of semantic behavioral representations in improving recognition accuracy while advancing interpretable, human-centric driving systems.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Knowledge Distillation Must Account for What It Loses

This position paper argues that knowledge distillation must account for what it loses: student models should be judged not only by retained task scores, but by whether they preserve the teacher capabilities that make those scores reliable. This matters because distillation is increasingly used to turn large teacher models into deployable students, yet headline metrics can obscure losses in the capabilities that make teacher behavior reliable. Conceptually, we show that current evaluation often assumes retained task scores imply retained teacher capabilities. Reframing distillation as a lossy projection exposes this flaw: students may match selected teacher observables without preserving the capabilities that make them reliable. We then synthesize existing evidence into a taxonomy of off-metric distillation losses, showing that such losses are concrete, recurring, and measurable, yet often unaccounted for when studies report what students retain rather than what they lose. To make the position actionable, we propose scenario-specific preservation targets and a Distillation Loss Statement that reports what was preserved, what was lost, and why the remaining losses are acceptable. The goal is not lossless distillation, but accountable distillation.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Posterior-First Neural PDE Simulation: Inferring Hidden Problem State from a Single Field

Neural PDE simulators often receive only a single observed field at deployment. In this setting, a field-to-future predictor can collapse distinct latent problem states into the same deterministic interface, losing the ambiguity needed for reliable rollout and downstream decisions. We propose posterior-first neural PDE simulation: first infer a posterior over the minimal task-sufficient problem state, then condition prediction on that posterior. The resulting theory connects the object, the learning target, and the failure mode: Bayes downstream values factor through this posterior, refinement labels make it learnable by proper scoring rules, and deterministic collapse incurs an ambiguity barrier whenever the true posterior is non-Dirac. Synthetic exact-ambiguity experiments show that point-versus-posterior gaps track the predicted barrier. On metadata-hidden PDEBench tasks, posterior recovery reduces pooled rollout nRMSE from 0.175 to 0.132, closing 59.4% of the direct-to-oracle gap. These results suggest that single-observation neural PDE simulation should be posterior-first rather than monolithic field-to-future prediction.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

LLMs Should Not Yet Be Credited with Decision Explanation

This position paper argues that LLMs should not yet be credited with decision explanation. This matters because recent work increasingly treats accurate behavioral prediction, plausible rationales, and outcome-conditioned reasoning traces as evidence that LLMs explain why people decide as they do, risking a premature redefinition of what counts as explanatory progress in human decision modeling. We first distinguish three claims with different evidential burdens: decision prediction, rationale generation, and decision explanation. We then argue that the evidence most commonly offered for LLM-based decision accounts directly supports the first two claims, and sometimes explanatory hypothesis generation, but does not distinguish decision explanation from prediction-supportive rationalization. Next, we propose a bridge standard for decision-explanation credit: stronger claims should specify explanatory targets, discriminate against weaker rationalizer alternatives, use target-appropriate process- or intervention-sensitive validation, and bound their scope. We then situate this standard against competing views and related literatures, clarifying why it preserves the value of LLMs as predictors, narrators, and hypothesis generators while resisting premature explanatory credit. We conclude with a principle of credit calibration: LLMs should be credited for the strongest claim their evidence warrants, and no stronger; if adopted, this principle can help turn LLMs from persuasive narrators of decisions into more reliable instruments for discovering, testing, and communicating explanations of human behavior.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

EEG-Based Emergency Braking Intensity Prediction Using Blind Source Separation

Electroencephalography (EEG) signals have been promising for long-term braking intensity prediction but are prone to various artifacts that limit their reliability. Here, we propose a novel framework that models EEG signals as mixtures of independent blind sources and identifies those strongly correlated with braking action. Our method employs independent component analysis to decompose EEG into different components and combines time-frequency analysis with Pearson correlations to select braking-related components. Furthermore, we utilize hierarchical clustering to group braking-related components into two clusters, each characterized by a distinct spatial pattern. Additionally, these components exhibit trial-invariant temporal patterns and demonstrate stable and common neural signatures of the emergency braking process. Using power features from these components and historical braking data, we predict braking intensity at a 200 ms horizon. Evaluations on the open source dataset (O.D.) and human-in-the-loop simulation (H.S.) show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving RMSE reductions of 8.0% (O.D.) and 23.8% (H.S.).

cs.HC↗
arXiv2026

LLM Reasoning Is Latent, Not the Chain of Thought

This position paper argues that large language model (LLM) reasoning should be studied as latent-state trajectory formation rather than as faithful surface chain-of-thought (CoT). This matters because claims about faithfulness, interpretability, reasoning benchmarks, and inference-time intervention all depend on what the field takes the primary object of reasoning to be. We ask what that object should be once three often-confounded factors are separated and formalize three competing hypotheses: H1, reasoning is primarily mediated by latent-state trajectories; H2, reasoning is primarily mediated by explicit surface CoT; and H0, most apparent reasoning gains are better explained by generic serial compute than by any privileged representational object. Reorganizing recent empirical, mechanistic, and survey work under this framework, and adding compute-audited worked exemplars that factorize surface traces, latent interventions, and matched budget expansions, we find that current evidence most strongly supports H1 as a default working hypothesis rather than as a task-independent verdict. We therefore make two recommendations: the field should treat latent-state dynamics as the default object of study for LLM reasoning, and it should evaluate reasoning with designs that explicitly disentangle surface traces, latent states, and serial compute.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Fall into a Pit, Gain in a Wit: Cognitive-Guided Harmful Meme Detection via Misjudgment Risk Pattern Retrieval

Internet memes have emerged as a popular multimodal medium, yet they are increasingly weaponized to convey harmful opinions through subtle rhetorical devices like irony and metaphor. Existing detection approaches, including Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based techniques, struggle with these implicit expressions, leading to frequent misjudgments. This paper introduces PatMD, a novel approach that detects harmful memes by learning from and proactively mitigating these potential misjudgment risks. Our core idea is to move beyond superficial content-level matching and instead identify the underlying misjudgment risk patterns, proactively guiding the MLLMs to avoid known misjudgment pitfalls. We first construct a knowledge base where each meme is deconstructed into a misjudgment risk pattern explaining why it might be misjudged, either overlooking harmful undertones (false negative) or overinterpreting benign content (false positive). For a given target meme, PatMD retrieves relevant patterns and utilizes them to dynamically guide the MLLM's reasoning. Experiments on a benchmark of 6,626 memes across 5 harmful detection tasks show that PatMD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average of 8.30% improvement in F1-score and 7.71% improvement in accuracy, while exhibiting consistent robustness on unseen and adversarial memes.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

iTAG: Inverse Design for Natural Text Generation with Accurate Causal Graph Annotations

A fundamental obstacle to causal discovery from text is the lack of causally annotated text data for use as ground truth, due to high annotation costs. This motivates an important task of generating text with causal graph annotations. Early template-based generation methods sacrifice text naturalness in exchange for high causal graph annotation accuracy. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-dependent methods directly generate natural text from target graphs through LLMs, but do not guarantee causal graph annotation accuracy. Therefore, we propose iTAG, which performs real-world concept assignment to nodes before converting causal graphs into text in existing LLM-dependent methods. iTAG frames this process as an inverse problem with the causal graph as the target, iteratively examining and refining concept selection through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning so that the induced relations between concepts are as consistent as possible with the target causal relationships described by the causal graph. iTAG demonstrates both extremely high annotation accuracy and naturalness across extensive tests, and the results of testing text-based causal discovery algorithms with the generated data show high statistical correlation with real-world data. This suggests that iTAG-generated data can serve as a practical surrogate for scalable benchmarking of text-based causal discovery algorithms.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Derived Fields Preserve Fine-Scale Detail in Budgeted Neural Simulators

Fine-scale-faithful neural simulation under fixed storage budgets remains challenging. Many existing methods reduce high-frequency error by improving architectures, training objectives, or rollout strategies. However, under budgeted coarsen-quantize-decode pipelines, fine detail can already be lost when the carried state is constructed. In the canonical periodic incompressible Navier-Stokes setting, we show that primitive and derived fields undergo systematically different retained-band distortions under the same operator. Motivated by this observation, we formulate Derived-Field Optimization (DerivOpt), a general state-design framework that chooses which physical fields are carried and how storage budget is allocated across them under a calibrated channel model. Across the full time-dependent forward subset of PDEBench, DerivOpt not only improves pooled mean rollout nRMSE, but also delivers a decisive advantage in fine-scale fidelity over a broad set of strong baselines. More importantly, the gains are already visible at input time, before rollout learning begins. This indicates that the carried state is often the dominant bottleneck under tight storage budgets. These results suggest a broader conclusion: in budgeted neural simulation, carried-state design should be treated as a first-class design axis alongside architecture, loss, and rollout strategy.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

System-Anchored Knee Estimation for Low-Cost Context Window Selection in PDE Forecasting

Autoregressive neural PDE simulators predict the evolution of physical fields one step at a time from a finite history, but low-cost context-window selection for such simulators remains an unformalized problem. Existing approaches to context-window selection in time-series forecasting include exhaustive validation, direct low-cost search, and system-theoretic memory estimation, but they are either expensive, brittle, or not directly aligned with downstream rollout performance. We formalize explicit context-window selection for fixed-window autoregressive neural PDE simulators as an independent low-cost algorithmic problem, and propose \textbf{System-Anchored Knee Estimation (SAKE)}, a two-stage method that first identifies a small structured candidate set from physically interpretable system anchors and then performs knee-aware downstream selection within it. Across all eight PDEBench families evaluated under the shared \(L\in\{1,\dots,16\}\) protocol, SAKE is the strongest overall matched-budget low-cost selector among the evaluated methods, achieving 67.8\% Exact, 91.7\% Within-1, 6.1\% mean regret@knee, and a cost ratio of 0.051 (94.9\% normalized search-cost savings).

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

FD-VLA: Force-Distilled Vision-Language-Action Model for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Force sensing is a crucial modality for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks, as it enables fine-grained perception and dexterous manipulation in contact-rich tasks. We present Force-Distilled VLA (FD-VLA), a novel framework that integrates force awareness into contact-rich manipulation without relying on physical force sensors. The core of our approach is a Force Distillation Module (FDM), which distills force by mapping a learnable query token, conditioned on visual observations and robot states, into a predicted force token aligned with the latent representation of actual force signals. During inference, this distilled force token is injected into the pretrained VLM, enabling force-aware reasoning while preserving the integrity of its vision-language semantics. This design provides two key benefits: first, it allows practical deployment across a wide range of robots that lack expensive or fragile force-torque sensors, thereby reducing hardware cost and complexity; second, the FDM introduces an additional force-vision-state fusion prior to the VLM, which improves cross-modal alignment and enhances perception-action robustness in contact-rich scenarios. Surprisingly, our physical experiments show that the distilled force token outperforms direct sensor force measurements as well as other baselines, which highlights the effectiveness of this force-distilled VLA approach.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Gradient-Informed Temporal Sampling Improves Rollout Accuracy in PDE Surrogate Training

Researchers train neural simulators on uniformly sampled numerical simulation data. But under the same budget, does systematically sampled data provide the most effective information? A fundamental yet unformalized problem is how to sample training data for neural simulators so as to maximize rollout accuracy. Existing data sampling methods either tend to collapse into locally high-information-density regions, or preserve diversity but remain insufficiently model-specific, often leading to performance that is no better than uniform sampling. To address this, we propose a data sampling method tailored to neural simulators, Gradient-Informed Temporal Sampling (GITS). GITS jointly optimizes pilot-model local gradients and set-level temporal coverage, thereby effectively balancing model specificity and dynamical information. Compared with multiple sampling baselines, the data selected by GITS achieves lower rollout error across multiple PDE systems, model backbones and sample ratios. Furthermore, ablation studies demonstrate the necessity and complementarity of the two optimization objectives in GITS. In addition, we analyze the successful sampling patterns of GITS as well as the typical PDE systems and model backbones on which GITS fails.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Breaking Scale Anchoring: Frequency Representation Learning for Accurate High-Resolution Inference from Low-Resolution Training

Zero-Shot Super-Resolution Spatiotemporal Forecasting requires a deep learning model to be trained on low-resolution data and deployed for inference on high-resolution. Existing studies consider maintaining similar error across different resolutions as indicative of successful multi-resolution generalization. However, deep learning models serving as alternatives to numerical solvers should reduce error as resolution increases. The fundamental limitation is, the upper bound of physical law frequencies that low-resolution data can represent is constrained by its Nyquist frequency, making it difficult for models to process signals containing unseen frequency components during high-resolution inference. This results in errors being anchored at low resolution, incorrectly interpreted as successful generalization. We define this fundamental phenomenon as a new problem distinct from existing issues: Scale Anchoring. Therefore, we propose architecture-agnostic Frequency Representation Learning. It alleviates Scale Anchoring through resolution-aligned frequency representations and spectral consistency training: on grids with higher Nyquist frequencies, the frequency response in high-frequency bands of FRL-enhanced variants is more stable. This allows errors to decrease with resolution and significantly outperform baselines within our task and resolution range, while incurring only modest computational overhead.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

UV-M3TL: A Unified and Versatile Multimodal Multi-Task Learning Framework for Assistive Driving Perception

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) need to understand human driver behavior while perceiving their navigation context, but jointly learning these heterogeneous tasks would cause inter-task negative transfer and impair system performance. Here, we propose a Unified and Versatile Multimodal Multi-Task Learning (UV-M3TL) framework to simultaneously recognize driver behavior, driver emotion, vehicle behavior, and traffic context, while mitigating inter-task negative transfer. Our framework incorporates two core components: dual-branch spatial channel multimodal embedding (DB-SCME) and adaptive feature-decoupled multi-task loss (AFD-Loss). DB-SCME enhances cross-task knowledge transfer while mitigating task conflicts by employing a dual-branch structure to explicitly model salient task-shared and task-specific features. AFD-Loss improves the stability of joint optimization while guiding the model to learn diverse multi-task representations by introducing an adaptive weighting mechanism based on learning dynamics and feature decoupling constraints. We evaluate our method on the AIDE dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate that UV-M3TL achieves state-of-the-art performance across all four tasks. To further prove the versatility, we evaluate UV-M3TL on additional public multi-task perception benchmarks (BDD100K, CityScapes, NYUD-v2, and PASCAL-Context), where it consistently delivers strong performance across diverse task combinations, attaining state-of-the-art results on most tasks.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Experimentation on Endogenous Graphs

We study experimentation under endogenous network interference. Interference patterns are mediated by an endogenous graph, where edges can be formed or eliminated as a result of treatment. We show that conventional estimators are biased in these circumstances, and present a class of unbiased, consistent and asymptotically normal estimators of total treatment effects in the presence of such interference. We show via simulation that our estimator outperforms existing estimators in the literature. Our results apply both to bipartite experimentation, in which the units of analysis and measurement differ, and the standard network experimentation case, in which they are the same.

stat.ME↗