Securing Cryptography in the Age of Quantum Computing and AI: Threats, Implementations, and Strategic Response

This review paper analyzes the dual threats posed by quantum computing and artificial intelligence to current cryptographic systems, concluding that a comprehensive defense requires a dynamic, multi-layered strategy combining post-quantum algorithms, implementation hardening, and cryptographic agility to address the limitations of any single solution.

Viraaji Mothukuri, Reza M. Parizi2026-03-10💻 cs

VSL-Skin: Individually Addressable Phase-Change Voxel Skin for Variable-Stiffness and Virtual Joints Bridging Soft and Rigid Robots

This paper introduces VSL-Skin, a novel voxel-based phase-change system that bridges soft and rigid robotics by enabling individually addressable, centimeter-scale stiffness modulation, 30% axial compression, and autonomous self-repair to create programmable virtual joints and variable-stiffness morphologies.

Zihan Oliver Zeng, Jiajun An, Preston Luk, Upinder Kaur2026-03-10💻 cs

Optimizing Multi-Modal Models for Image-Based Shape Retrieval: The Role of Pre-Alignment and Hard Contrastive Learning

This paper proposes a novel approach to image-based shape retrieval that leverages pre-aligned multi-modal encoders and a hard contrastive learning loss to achieve state-of-the-art performance in both zero-shot and supervised settings, eliminating the need for explicit view-based supervision or view synthesis.

Paul Julius Kühn, Cedric Spengler, Michael Weinmann, Arjan Kuijper, Saptarshi Neil Sinha2026-03-10💻 cs

Perception-Aware Multimodal Spatial Reasoning from Monocular Images

This paper proposes a perception-aware multimodal reasoning framework that enhances Vision-Language Models' spatial understanding in monocular driving scenarios by representing objects with Visual Reference Tokens and utilizing a Multimodal Chain-of-Thought dataset, achieving significant performance gains on the SURDS benchmark through standard supervised fine-tuning.

Yanchun Cheng, Rundong Wang, Xulei Yang, Alok Prakash, Daniela Rus, Marcelo H Ang Jr, ShiJie Li2026-03-10💻 cs

ADAS-TO: A Large-Scale Multimodal Naturalistic Dataset and Empirical Characterization of Human Takeovers during ADAS Engagement

This paper introduces ADAS-TO, the first large-scale naturalistic multimodal dataset of 15,659 ADAS-to-manual takeover events from 327 drivers, which combines kinematic and vision-language analysis to characterize safety-critical scenarios and demonstrate that actionable visual cues often precede takeovers by over three seconds.

Yuhang Wang, Yiyao Xu, Jingran Sun, Hao Zhou2026-03-10💻 cs

Foundational World Models Accurately Detect Bimanual Manipulator Failures

This paper introduces a lightweight, probabilistic world model built on a pretrained vision foundation model that generates uncertainty-based runtime monitors to accurately detect anomalous failures in bimanual manipulators, outperforming existing baselines while requiring significantly fewer trainable parameters.

Isaac R. Ward, Michelle Ho, Houjun Liu, Aaron Feldman, Joseph Vincent, Liam Kruse, Sean Cheong, Duncan Eddy, Mykel J. Kochenderfer, Mac Schwager2026-03-10💻 cs

AdaGen: Learning Adaptive Policy for Image Synthesis

AdaGen introduces a general, learnable framework that employs reinforcement learning with an adversarial reward to dynamically adapt step-specific parameters during iterative image synthesis, thereby overcoming the limitations of static, manually-designed schedules and achieving superior performance across diverse generative models with reduced inference costs.

Zanlin Ni, Yulin Wang, Yeguo Hua, Renping Zhou, Jiayi Guo, Jun Song, Bo Zheng, Gao Huang2026-03-10💻 cs

TrajPred: Trajectory-Conditioned Joint Embedding Prediction for Surgical Instrument-Tissue Interaction Recognition in Vision-Language Models

TrajPred is a novel framework that enhances surgical instrument-tissue interaction recognition in vision-language models by encoding instrument trajectories to capture temporal motion cues and generating fine-grained visual semantic embeddings, thereby significantly improving performance and vision-text alignment on the CholecT50 benchmark.

Jiajun Cheng, Xiaofan Yu, Subarna, Sainan Liu, Shan Lin2026-03-10💻 cs

Mozart: Modularized and Efficient MoE Training on 3.5D Wafer-Scale Chiplet Architectures

The paper introduces Mozart, an algorithm-hardware co-design framework that leverages 3.5D wafer-scale chiplet architectures with specialized expert allocation and scheduling strategies to overcome communication and memory bottlenecks in the efficient training of large-scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models.

Shuqing Luo (Katie), Ye Han (Katie), Pingzhi Li (Katie), Jiayin Qin (Katie), Jie Peng (Katie), Yang (Katie), Zhao (Kevin), Yu (Kevin), Cao, Tianlong Chen2026-03-10💻 cs

SuperSkillsStack: Agency, Domain Knowledge, Imagination, and Taste in Human-AI Design Education

This study analyzes how 80 student design teams integrated generative AI into their creative process, revealing that while AI serves as a cognitive accelerator for early-stage tasks like brainstorming, human competencies in agency, domain knowledge, imagination, and taste remain essential for interpreting context, validating outputs, and refining design solutions.

Qian Huang, King Wang Poon2026-03-10💻 cs

OV-DEIM: Real-time DETR-Style Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with GridSynthetic Augmentation

This paper presents OV-DEIM, a real-time end-to-end DETR-style open-vocabulary object detector that combines the DEIMv2 framework with a query supplement strategy and a novel GridSynthetic data augmentation technique to achieve state-of-the-art performance and efficiency, particularly for rare categories.

Leilei Wang, Longfei Liu, Xi Shen, Xuanlong Yu, Ying Tiffany He, Fei Richard Yu, Yingyi Chen2026-03-10💻 cs