Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
ENAS: An Efficient Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search Framework for TinyML on Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers
Mohd Moin Khan, Naman Srivastava and Pandarasamy Arjunan
We present ENAS, a hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (NAS) framework that combines a static feasibility check, a
cell-based search space supporting standard, depthwise-separable, and bottleneck blocks with optional skip connections, and a three-stage hybrid search strategy (random $\rightarrow$ top-$K$ $\rightarrow$ mutation) with persistent cross-run caching. Unlike many existing NAS frameworks that rely on GPU acceleration, ENAS is designed to operate efficiently without requiring GPUs, making it suitable for resource-constrained development environments. We evaluate ENAS on two TinyML
benchmarks, Visual Wake Words and Melanoma Cancer, across eight microcontrollers with
memory footprints ranging from 20\,KB to 1\,MB SRAM and nine input image resolutions. Our experimental results show that ENAS achieves mean search-time speedups of $2.41{\times}$ and $1.70{\times}$ on the Visual Wake Words and Melanoma Cancer
datasets, respectively, while maintaining competitive test accuracy compared with the recent NanoNAS framework. A measured resource analysis further shows that ENAS-selected models use substantially lower peak activation RAM, the binding constraint for microcontroller deployment at matched accuracy. Additionally, ENAS achieves $79.4\%$ test accuracy on an STM32H743-based microcontroller, outperforming the greedy CPU-only baseline by $2.6$ percentage points. We release the ENAS framework as open-source at: https://github.com/EdgeIntelligenceLab/ENAS
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SE
WatchPoint: Executable User Feedback for Real-World Agentic Web Development
Guanqun Yang, Wei Yang and Xueqing Liu
When a professional web developer's code fails a test, they do not simply re-read the stack trace. They open the application in a browser, click buttons, inspect computed styles, and run diagnostic commands to understand what went wrong. Existing feedback mechanisms for coding
agents rely on screenshots, LLM-as-a-judge scoring, or natural-
language corrections, but few interact with the live application the way a developer would. We introduce WatchPoint, a simulated-user system that mimics real developer behavior by generating and executing diagnostic scripts against the running application, producing structured observations that guide the coding model's retry. Unlike prior approaches that target single-file edits or evaluate using non-executable metrics, we operate on Web-Bench, a
benchmark of 50 multi-file web projects comprising 1,000 sequentially dependent tasks, verified by deterministic end-to-end tests. WatchPoint recovers 57.6% of the tasks it diagnoses, and a controlled user study confirms the simulation's realism: human testers achieve a comparable recovery rate (54.5%), providing evidence that automated diagnostic scripts can substitute for interactive human testing on sequential web development tasks. We further identify a pattern of capability gaps that governs when simulated-user feedback is helpful and when it should be withheld.
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Artificial Intelligence
Identifying Intelligent Processes via Online Sequential Testing
Aritra Das and Debayan Gupta
Active sequential hypothesis testing studies how to identify an unknown hypothesis with a given set of sensing actions. We study this in the setting of identifying large
language models (LLMs), i.e., if a user is conversing with an LLM drawn from a known set of models, how can they identify which one is in use? Here, the available sensing actions (evaluations) are themselves a design choice: an evaluator must first decide which environments and
prompt families to construct, and only then decide how to use them sequentially. We formalize these two levels as an outer probe-design problem and an inner identification problem. Simply put, the outer stage selects a set of probes to be sent to the entire set of models, creating a kind of fingerprint
dataset. This is followed by the inner stage, which sequentially sends a budget-minimizing set of those probes to identify the model in use. For the outer problem, we show that selecting which evaluations to construct at minimum cost, so that every pair of candidates is distinguished, is exactly a weighted set cover problem. Since the response distributions of the candidate models are not known exactly but only through calibration samples, we give a one-shot procedure that estimates the cover instance from these samples. For the inner problem, we bound the number of evaluations needed to identify the unknown model in terms of how well the available evaluations distinguish each pair of candidates.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CR
Dynamic Deep Prompt Optimization for Defending Against Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs
Doniyorkhon Obidov, Honggang Yu, Xiaolong Guo et al. (+1 more)
Large
Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across many applications but remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which elicit harmful or unintended content. While model fine-tuning is an option for safety
alignment, it is costly and prone to catastrophic forgetting.
Prompt optimization has emerged as a promising alternative, yet existing
prompt-based defenses typically rely on static modifications (e.g., fixed prefixes or suffixes) that cannot adapt to diverse and evolving attacks. We propose Dynamic Deep
Prompt Optimization (DDPO), the first jailbreak defense based on deep
prompt optimization. DDPO uses the target LLM's own intermediate layers as feature extractors to dynamically generate defensive
embeddings via a lightweight multilayer perceptron. These tailored
embeddings are then injected into a subsequent intermediate layer, enabling an input-dependent defense without modifying the LLM's weights. This design ensures high adaptability with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on a diverse set of models and attacks demonstrate that DDPO significantly outperforms static
prompt optimization methods, particularly on weakly aligned models and when handling semantically ambiguous benign
prompts, successfully distinguishing them from genuinely harmful requests.
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All authors Doniyorkhon Obidov, Honggang Yu, Xiaolong Guo, Kaichen Yang
Artificial Intelligence
Unanimity Without Persuasion: A Single Round of Debate Erases the Disagreement That Verification Needs
Yang Shu
A debate panel can become unanimous without becoming more correct. This is dangerous for downstream safeguards: a substituted verification ballot can change only narrow-margin votes, while richer arbiters lose disagreement as a natural targeting signal. We show that one debate round can erase that resource without requiring persuasion. Tracking a heterogeneous 7-judge panel through a blind round and three debate rounds on 600 code-correctness candidates, unanimity on a fixed cohort jumps from 39.5% to 95.2% in round 1 (93.1% of the total collapse), while accuracy moves by less than one point and 96.3% of verdict flips follow the displayed peer majority. An execution-based verification ballot corrects 8 of 2,037 pre-debate candidate-substitution instances but changes zero in every later round; by round 3 every wrong decision is unanimous, erasing dissent that had flagged two-thirds of the panel's errors. Identical-cohort controls explain why: no-peer reconsideration reproduces 79.6% of the collapse, real labels without
reasoning reproduce 91.5%, and random labels steer flips toward whatever they display; the full-debate condition adds 4.3 percentage points over labels only (clustered 95% CI 0.7–8.1). The one-round collapse reproduces in two additional real runs and two fake-label seeds, remains under panel sizes 3–7, and appears in MATH-500. Parse failures concentrate on contested candidates ($p<0.001$), making attrition non-ignorable. The design implication is operational: verify before any second-pass evaluation or peer exposure, and never treat post-debate unanimity as independent evidence of reliability.
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Artificial Intelligence
Compiling VGDL into Causal Models
Mohit Jiwatode, Bodo Rosenhahn and Alexander Dockhorn
Reinforcement learning and large
language models often struggle to accurately capture the causal mechanics of game environments. Standard reinforcement learning
agents tend to rely on spurious correlations, while large
language models are prone to hallucinating game rules. Although causal reinforcement learning improves interpretability, there is currently no formal methodology to map complex game mechanics directly into causal models. To address this, we propose a deterministic framework that compiles games specified in the
Video Game Description
Language into Dynamic Structural Causal Models. Rather than inferring causal structures from gameplay traces or noisy large
language models' outputs, our methodology directly translates game components, including sprite dynamics, interaction rules, and termination conditions, into explicit structural equations. Each game tick represents a causal transition from state variables at time $t$ to $t+1$. By establishing this grounded mapping, the approach guarantees absolute causal fidelity to the ground-truth game mechanics. The resulting models offer transparent causal pathways that support counterfactual
reasoning, causal reinforcement learning
agent training, and procedural content validation. This framework provides a principled bridge between symbolic game descriptions and causally grounded game AI.
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Artificial Intelligence
Self-Evolving Skills via Surrogate-Guided Solve-and-Reproduce
Jiale Liu, Pinze Ren, Yuqi Xia et al. (+3 more)
Agent skills are portable packages of instructions and resources an
agent consults at deployment. Self-evolving them fails in two ways today. First, skills evolved from scratch underperform human-curated ones and, on a weak model, using no skill at all. Second, an
evolution-time pass records one lucky trajectory that a fresh
stochastic agent often fails to reproduce at deployment. We present reSolve, a per-task, oracle-in-the-loop framework built on three components. It decouples interactive solving from a self-contained deliverable that is independently re-executed in a fresh container, a protocol we call solve-and-reproduce. It enhances the sparse reward signal with a surrogate verifier that cannot access hidden tests or reference answers. It then runs verifier-guided beam search over a solution-construction graph. Within a fixed harness, a cheap model self-evolves skills that reach $74.9\%$ mean-of-3, $+14.8$ points over the $60.1\%$ human-curated baseline, exceeding the strongest official curated-skill result ($67.3\%$, GPT-5.5/OpenHands). We also report observed failure cases and domain-level results, including performance on the 14 Natural Science tasks, to clarify when the approach does and does not help.
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All authors Jiale Liu, Pinze Ren, Yuqi Xia, Huan Wang, Zhenlin Zhao, Siming Dong
Artificial Intelligence
AI Scientist Mission Control (AIMC): Visual Analytics for Human Oversight of Autonomous Scientific Discovery
Rikathi Pal and Klaus Mueller
Autonomous scientific discovery systems can generate large numbers of research ideas, experiments, and manuscripts with minimal human intervention. As these systems become increasingly capable, scientists require effective mechanisms to monitor output quality, identify recurring failure modes, understand research
evolution, and prioritize promising discoveries for review. We present AIMC, a visual analytics framework for human oversight of autonomous scientific discovery. AIMC combines semantic
embeddings, automated weakness extraction, temporal analysis, and interactive visualizations to support the exploration of AI-generated research artifacts. We demonstrate the framework through a case study of the papers generated by an autonomous AI Scientist (FARS), together with their associated review feedback. Our analysis reveals recurring methodological weaknesses, evolving research themes, domain-specific differences in quality, and a small set of highly novel papers that warrant deeper human inspection. These findings illustrate how visual analytics can support transparency, diagnosis, and human AI collaboration in emerging autonomous scientific discovery workflows.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CY
Sycophants in the Courtroom: Are LLMs Fragile to Juridical Authority and Evolving Legal Standards?
Lorenzo Molfetta, Alessio Cocchieri, Luca Ragazzi et al. (+3 more)
In medicine, claims remain valid when supported by empirical evidence grounded in stable biological reality. In law, by contrast, truth is contingent, defined by jurisdiction, temporal validity, and the hierarchy of authoritative sources. The recent success of large
language models (LLMs) on medical licensing examinations has encouraged an expectation of comparable legal competence. This analogy, however, obscures a critical distinction between domains. Unlike in medicine, legal performance often depends less on inference than on determining when external authority is applicable, valid, and non-contradictory. We introduce a comparative diagnostic framework evaluating legal
reasoning against medical baselines along four axes (knowledge recall, grounding, confidence, and robustness), uncovering a sharp domain asymmetry when applied to a new
benchmark that encodes temporal validity and normative relationships. While medical LLMs reliably benefit from verified sources, legal LLMs struggle to assess when retrieved citations are useful or misleading, exhibiting overconfidence in perturbed contexts and sensitivity to superficial formatting cues. Increased model scale amplifies this tendency, revealing that stronger instruction following can coincide with weaker resistance to authoritative perturbations. These findings show that LLMs treat law as unstructured text rather than binding precedent, while revealing a tendency to over-trust authoritative but false information when external references conflict with a model's internal knowledge.
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All authors Lorenzo Molfetta, Alessio Cocchieri, Luca Ragazzi, Ilaria Bartolini, Marco Patella, Gianluca Moro
Artificial Intelligence
Hate Speech Classification In Roman Urdu: A Comparative Study On Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning And Prompt Engineering
Toneema Zubair
Due to the widespread accessibility of the internet and social media, toxic and hateful con-tent has grown exponentially, causing significant distress and negative societal impacts. Ro-man Urdu, a low-resource
language used in Pakistan and among Urdu-speaking communities worldwide, presents additional challenges because of its informal grammar, inconsistent sen-tence structures, and multiple variations in word spellings. This research aims to identify the most effective techniques for hate
speech classification in such low-resource settings with limited data. To address this, the study investigates and compares the latest approaches, in-cluding
prompt tuning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) using LoRA, and
prompt en-gineering, under various experimental configurations. To achieve this objective, four exper-iments were designed. The first experiment involved direct inferencing with LLMs without any fine-tuning, to evaluate how well these models understand Roman Urdu in a zero-shot setting, especially given limited data. The second experiment utilized parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) with LoRA, which updates only a small subset of parameters, thereby reducing computational cost. The third experiment explored
prompt tuning with both mixed and manually crafted
prompts, using very small sets of training examples relative to the entire
dataset, making it computationally efficient as well. Finally, the fourth experiment applied
prompt engineering through zero-shot and few-shot learning, relying solely on care-fully designed instruction
prompts for classification without further training.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO
Mamba-based Selective State Space Modeling Improves the Accuracy-Complexity Tradeoff of SmolVLA Vision-Language-Action Experts
Farida Mohsen, Thowayba Elkaffash, Mohammad Reza Chalak Qazani et al. (+3 more)
Vision-
language-action (VLA) models face a crucial tradeoff between their task success rate and the policy-call frequency. Executing a single action per inference ($N=1$) enables accurate
robot control but comes at the cost of huge compute time overheads, making real-time implementation infeasible. On the other hand, executing longer action horizons before replanning ($N\gg1$) reduces compute complexity, but inevitably degrades the system's success rate. In order to improve the VLA accuracy-complexity tradeoff, this paper investigates Mamba's selective state-space modeling as an alternative to causal self-
attention within the action expert of the popular SmolVLA model, widely used as a reference model for its highly accurate yet low complexity nature. We evaluate both the Mamba- and
Transformer-based experts on the widely-adopted LIBERO
benchmark suites across three execution horizons $N\!\in\!\{1,25,50\}$, respectively corresponding to high, moderate and low compute complexities. Our results remarkably show that the advantage of the Mamba expert increases with the execution horizon, indicating significant success retention under long execution horizons $N = 50$ and $N = 25$. When $N = 50$ actions are executed before replanning (i.e., corresponding to feasible real-time deployment), the Mamba expert outperforms the
Transformer baseline by $7.8\%$. In addition, when $N = 25$ actions are executed before replanning, our Mamba expert outperforms the
Transformer baseline by $3.7\%$. Finally, under per-action replanning ($N=1$), our Mamba variant matches the
Transformer-based mean success rate while significantly reducing the overall model parameter complexity by $24\%$ thanks to Mamba's compute-efficient nature.
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All authors Farida Mohsen, Thowayba Elkaffash, Mohammad Reza Chalak Qazani, Mohamed Mabrok, Nader Meskin, Ali Safa
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Entropy-Constrained Adaptive Stochastic Quantization
Ran Ben Basat, Yaniv Ben-Itzhak, Michael Mitzenmacher et al. (+1 more)
Adaptive
stochastic quantization (ASQ) is a recently introduced quantization approach that optimizes the Mean Squared Error (MSE) for a given input while preserving unbiasedness. It is designed to alleviate the communication and
memory bottlenecks of modern data and machine learning workloads, including model, gradient, and KV-cache compression and nearest-neighbor search. Further, practical systems can then compress quantized data with a lossless
entropy encoder. However, existing unbiased methods, including ASQ, choose their quantization values without considering this later encoding stage, leaving accuracy on the table. We formulate the
Entropy Constrained Adaptive
Stochastic Quantization (ECASQ) problem, which jointly selects adaptive quantization values to minimize MSE under an
entropy budget and an unbiasedness constraint. We give an optimal dynamic program with $O(sd^2)$ time and $O(d^2)$ space for a length-d vector and at most s quantization values, and a GPU-friendly approximate dynamic program with $O(sd^2)$ time and $O(d)$ space. The approximation guarantees that the solution has an MSE no larger than the optimal solution that uses one fewer bit of
entropy per entry. We also provide an iterative refinement procedure for the approximation solution that, in our experiments, yields near-optimal results while retaining a substantial speed advantage over our solver for the optimal solution.
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All authors Ran Ben Basat, Yaniv Ben-Itzhak, Michael Mitzenmacher, Shay Vargaftik
Artificial Intelligence
Toward a Theory of Value in AI Alignment
Andrew Smart, Shazeda Ahmed, Jackie Kay et al. (+3 more)
Can AI systems be aligned to human values? The popularization of large
language models (LLMs) and multi-modal foundation models has seen a rise in harms spanning from toxic
speech and
hallucinations to AI
agents executing unauthorized actions. Within the field of AI safety, these harmful instances are often framed as the
alignment problem, or of models being misaligned with human values. Researchers have responded by pursuing applied and theoretical AI value
alignment efforts, often without specifying what they mean by human values. How does the field of AI value
alignment conceive of human values? How are these conceptions of values technically operationalized and evaluated? What does the emergent theory of value from this field signify for the future of AI? We annotated 94 value
alignment research papers to discern their implicit theory of values in AI. The majority do not define values, relying heavily on preferences as a stand in that runs the risk of reducing complex culturally situated concepts down to binary choices. As researchers dispense with using human annotators for model training and evaluation, turning instead to synthetic data and autorater approaches to aligning and evaluating models, we identify the potential to close off alternative methods for contesting and enacting values in foundation models. In making AI value
alignments philosophical commitments explicit, we seek to bring great specificity and under explored perspectives in the debate on whether and how AI can address human values.
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All authors Andrew Smart, Shazeda Ahmed, Jackie Kay, Jimmy Tobin, Kris Shrishak, Abeba Birhane
Artificial Intelligence
Neuroevolution Arena: Nested Ecological Evaluation of Update-and-Inheritance Regimes across Neural Architectures
Yuxu Ge and Yifei Cheng
Competitive artificial-life systems can rank trained controllers differently under training and ecological evaluation. We present Neuroevolution Arena, a GPU-accelerated spatial ecology of independently parameterized neural-network
cells, and an audit-tracked nested evaluation protocol. Three implementation-specific update-and-inheritance regimes (EvoEvo, EvoRL, and RLRL) are crossed with two neural architectures for 50,000 generations in three independent training runs per condition. One saved elite-controller artifact from each of the 18 runs enters an aligned-run frozen-evaluation design comprising 198 computational jobs. Pairwise effects average three seed-defined ecological contexts (two cooperation-permitting and one attack-permitting) within each aligned training-run block; the independent level remains n = 3 runs per condition. RL-enabled regimes attain higher recorded training fitness than EvoEvo, whereas pairwise outcomes show architecture-conditioned majority patterns and substantial artifact dependence. Six-way winners vary across artifacts and contexts, and the prespecified survival endpoint has a complete floor. We contribute a nested protocol that separates training-run artifacts from evaluation contexts and exposes, rather than conceals, their different sources of variation.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SE
Do Personalized Skills Help Coding Agents? An Empirical Study of Developer Interaction Traces
Shuyan Huang, Kai Du and Andrew Lan
As human developers increasingly collaborate with large
language model (LLM)-powered coding
agents, adapting to individual developer preferences, potentially via
agent skills, may offer way to reduce repeated guidance and improve collaboration efficiency. However, existing approaches primarily focus on building skills for each task rather for each human developer. In this work, we propose a framework that combines rule-based bootstrapping with LLM-based refinement to distill developer-specific skills from their interactions with coding
agents. We further develop an interactive replay framework with an LLM-based developer simulator for evaluation. We conduct experiments on a collection of replayable real-world developer-
agent interaction sessions. We find that overall, task-specific skills are the most effective; However, personalized skills become more effective when developer preferences are manifested with enough frequency, especially when developers work on tasks that are highly related. These findings provide empirical insights suggest that i) broadly transferable procedural knowledge can be more robust than developer-specific preference signals and ii) effective personalization requires mining from rich user preference signals.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Is This Your Final Answer? Cross-Contextual Consistency as a Measure of LLM Credibility
Siyang Wu, Yibo Jiang and Bryon Aragam
Large
language models (LLMs) are powerful black-box systems, making it difficult to discern whether their answers reflect stable internal beliefs or superficial pattern matching. We identify cross-contextual consistency as an underutilized behavioral property of LLMs: a credible answer should remain stable when the same task is placed under topic-aligned, content-neutral contextual variation. Building on this intuition, we operationalize Cross-Contextual Consistency (C3) by comparing model generations under original and perturbed
prompts. Across 26 models and six
benchmarks spanning
reasoning, factuality, and code generation, we find that answers with smaller cross-contextual shifts are more likely to be correct or factual. We demonstrate that C3 provides a complementary axis of evaluation and can serve as a
benchmark usefulness diagnostic, identifying which portions of a
benchmark remain informative even when aggregated scores are widely considered "saturate".
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Artificial Intelligence
Logit-Boundary Geometric Belief Interfaces and Sparse Sheaf-Enclave Protocols: A Self-Contained Substrate for Secure Network Electronic Health Record (EHR) Interoperability
Alvin Spivey and Yu Huang
Electronic health-record interoperability is a boundary problem: legacy systems, generative models, terminology services, identity systems, and human reviewers may each expose rich internal states, while operational exchange requires a narrow shared interface of typed claims, bounded uncertainty, provenance, and explicit admission or abstention. This paper details a mathematical and engineering architecture for that interface. The organizing idea is the logit boundary: a discovery model may propose pre-threshold scores over a local categorical decision, but a deterministic judgment substrate decides whether the proposal is admissible, requires review, or must be quarantined before any Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) transaction is constructed. The resulting
Geometric Belief Interface (GBI) combines finite boundary semantics, local Dirichlet evidence, cellular-sheaf and mapping-cone diagnostics, advisory
geometric audit charts, and a Decentralized Cryptographic Sheaf-Enclave (DCSE) protocol sketch for fail-closed deployment. The framework does not establish clinical truth, global representation
alignment, or end-to-end safety; it defines certificate-producing checks at a model-to-system boundary. A companion frozen synthetic
benchmark, GBI BoundaryBench v0.1, evaluated Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 on 256 held-out tasks across three evidence modes (768 canonical executions). All executions completed, but none produced an output accepted by the
benchmark contract: 369 were rejected during safe parsing and 399 during schema validation, yielding zero coverage and deterministic quarantine. This empirical result is deliberately narrow - one 4B open-weight model under one frozen interface - and is reported as evidence about the admission boundary, not as a general claim about LLM capability or clinical safety. A Julia appendix verifies numerical certificates using standard libraries.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV
Site Is Decodable Before Pretraining: Negative Controls for Probing Frozen Brain-MRI Foundation Models
Saman Rahbar
Brain foundation models are often tested with a probe. The model is frozen, a simple classifier is trained on its output, and the classifier's accuracy is taken as a sign of what pretraining learned. We show that this reading can be wrong unless two controls are reported with it. We probed three frozen 3-D
brain-MRI models at five depths, on two independent multi-site cohorts (ABIDE-I and ABIDE-II). The site where a scan was acquired could be predicted at about 0.9, on a scale where 0 is chance and 1 is perfect. No clinical or demographic target came close. An untrained copy of the same model predicted site just as well on both cohorts. Untrained models of three architectures, each built with three random seeds, did the same on ABIDE-I. The raw image, shrunk to 12x12x12 voxels and given to no model at all, predicted site at 0.95. Pretraining did not create the site signal. It was already in the scans. We also looked for any clinical target on which pretraining beats an untrained model, and found no reliable case. Adjusting for age, sex and diagnosis left site prediction almost unchanged, and so did a 4.6-fold increase in the number of voxels. Resting-state fMRI from the same people showed the same pattern. Site was the most predictable attribute of
brain connectivity (0.81), and it survived five untrained layers while age did not. We recommend reporting two controls with every probe of a
brain foundation model: running the probe again on the untrained model, and on the raw input. We release the code for both.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CV
MRIComp4Flow: Compression of 3D Brain MRI for Training Multi-Modal Generative Models
Lisa K. Fischer, Mykhailo Riabets, Daniel Rueckert et al. (+3 more)
Large-scale multi-modal MRI
datasets impose substantial storage and I/O costs, limiting the training of 3D generative models on commodity infrastructure. While lossy compression is known to preserve accuracy for discriminative
segmentation networks, its effect on generative models, which must learn the full data distribution rather than a decision boundary, is unexplored. We study whether standard image codecs can effectively compress semantically rich
brain tumor MRI while preserving the fidelity required to train and deploy a 3D MRI generative model. Each 3D volume is compressed with JPEG2000 or a near-lossless JPEG-LS pipeline. Next, a Wavelet Flow Matching model, conditioned on BraTS image sequences (T1n, T1c, T2, T2f), is trained on compressed data, and the resulting models are evaluated on the validation set. At a 20:1 compression ratio, synthesis quality is statistically equivalent to a model trained on uncompressed data within a pre-specified margin ($\Delta$PSNR $<1$,dB, $\Delta$SSIM $<0.02$; paired TOST $p=[[p]]$): mean PSNR is 27.3,dB vs. 27.0,dB and mean SSIM is 0.95 vs. 0.96 across modalities. Our results indicate that JPEG2000 compression is a practical step toward scalable 3D MRI generative modeling without degrading synthesis quality. The codebase is available at https://github.com/lisafis/MRIComp4Flow .
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All authors Lisa K. Fischer, Mykhailo Riabets, Daniel Rueckert, Benedikt Wiestler, Anke Meyer-Baese, Sandeep Nagar
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.SE
Comprendia: AI-Augmented Code Comprehension
Costain Nachuma and Minhaz F. Zibran
Comprendia is an Eclipse plugin that integrates structural dependency visualization with LLM-powered code explanation on a shared interactive graph for Java program comprehension. The tool rests on four pillars: (1) a multi-edge-type dependency graph with live search and multiple layouts; (2) LLM explanations grounded in Graph-Aware Callee
Pruning (GACP), an auditable strategy that selects relevant callees using the same graph the developer navigates; (3) a clone-detection overlay that highlights duplication and suggests extract-to-parent refactoring opportunities; and (4) a CVE risk overlay powered by OSV.dev. GACP uses graph distance, inheritance collapse, and edge-type weighting to produce
prompts that are reproducible across LLM families and traceable to visible graph nodes. We demonstrate Comprendia on a Java project containing known clones and vulnerabilities, showing how the unified graph substrate supports comprehension while keeping the developer in control. Screencast: https://youtu.be/1wlh_RYehzA
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CR
Withholding the Completing Chunk: Exact Release-Boundary Equivalence for Production Streaming Guardrails
Christopher M. Frost
Streaming
language-model output creates an enforcement boundary: a control that detects a prohibited pattern after releasing its completing chunk cannot recall it. We study a production policy in which each ordered family is the conjunction of two regular-
language predicates. Incremental matching is classical. The problem is exact composition at release time across arbitrary chunk partitions, including end-of-prefix word boundaries that can change on extension. We define an ASCII-explicit policy grammar, compile each predicate to a persistent nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA), distinguish stable from provisional assertion state, apply document-order family priority, and check the decision before releasing each chunk. We show that the resulting monitor is release-boundary equivalent to an absorbing cumulative oracle for every policy in the declared grammar. Production Python and TypeScript implementations were evaluated on 101,653 partitioned cases; a public surrogate added 100,345 cases. Both campaigns produced zero oracle, cross-runtime, or intended-family mismatches. In a frozen neutral-output profile, the memoized incremental and native-regex cumulative slopes at 64-character chunks were 0.973 and 1.976. At 16,384 characters the incremental median was 30.2 ms versus 96.6 ms for native cumulative scanning at that chunk size. Native regex remained faster at 512-character chunks (12.4 versus 29.4 ms), exposing the constant-factor crossover rather than hiding it. A shared per-stream cache cap and 129-symbol alphabet bound optimization state; the campaign peaked at 364 of 4,096 without bypass. The result is policy conformance for a deterministic backstop, not evidence of semantic safety or policy completeness.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Locally Deployable Small Language Models for Emergency Department Decision Support: A Systematic Benchmark of Fine-Tuning Strategies
Qingfeng Zhang, Yuanxiong Guo and Yanmin Gong
Deploying large
language models (LLMs) for decision support in emergency departments (EDs) faces two major challenges:
privacy risks of transmitting patient data to closed-source commercial LLMs and the lack of systematic evaluation of fine-tuning strategies for locally deployable open-source small
language models (SLMs). We benchmarked eight open-source SLMs using zero-shot prompting, prefix tuning, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), and full fine-tuning on three ED tasks: triage level prediction, specialist referral recommendation, and diagnosis prediction. Using 2,083 MIMIC-IV-ED cases and Claude Haiku 4.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 as baselines, we found that LoRA fine-tuned open-source SLMs outperform commercial baselines on triage level prediction and specialist referral recommendation, while diagnosis prediction remains challenging for open-source SLMs. Confusion
matrix analysis further shows that fine-tuned open-source SLMs can detect highest-severity patients missed by the commercial baselines. These results demonstrate that locally deployable SLMs can achieve clinically competitive performance for ED decision support.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Toward Human Rights Benchmarking for LLMs: A Pilot Methodology
Savannah Thais, Wm. Matthew Kennedy, Abhigyan Acherjee et al. (+3 more)
Large
language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate legal determinations over what human rights are realized, and how. Yet, no evaluation
benchmark exists to assess whether they can reason correctly about human rights law. To this end, we report our efforts to develop a robust and scalable methodology for creating HumRightsBench: the first expert-validated, scenario-based
benchmark for evaluating
reasoning grounded in the obligation structure of international human rights law. We adapt the IRAC framework for legal
reasoning to better suit the unique
reasoning patterns of human rights work (substituting P, "proposing remedies," for C, "legal conclusion," yielding IRAP) to structure our evaluation heuristics. We also produce a pilot series of authentic scenarios designed to implicate the many dimensions of real-world human rights issues and annotated by human rights lawyers and professionals across the world. Ultimately, we find that model accuracy scores range considerably across legal
reasoning tasks (overall model performance ranges from 0.339 to 0.577, task min-max ranges from 0.025 to 0.774), which strongly implies that HumRightsBench is a capable instrument for advancing this emerging subfield of AI evaluations science at a critical moment in its
evolution.
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All authors Savannah Thais, Wm. Matthew Kennedy, Abhigyan Acherjee, Matilda Wysocki, Malcolm Langford, Caitlin Kraft Buchman
Artificial Intelligence
Interpreting Language Model Hidden States at Scale
Jordan Pettyjohn, Mansi Sakarvadia, Nathaniel Hudson et al. (+3 more)
Lens methods interpret large
language models (LLMs) by mapping intermediate activations to the output vocabulary, revealing how next-
token predictions develop through the network. Trained lenses remain expensive: affine-translator parameters grow quadratically with model width, while exact, full-vocabulary Kullback–Leibler (KL) training dominates
memory. Consequently, prior trained lenses have been applied to models of at most 20B parameters and remain tied to particular component types. We present OmniLens, which applies a single lens family to any model-width activation, whether residual stream,
attention, or MLP, and combines two independent scaling techniques. First, low-rank translators make per-lens parameter growth linear in model width and reduce trainable parameters by up to 98.4%. Second, Subset-KL materializes only selected vocabulary logits: its Top-k mode cuts peak training
memory by up to 70%, while its importance-sampled variant retains unbiased
stochastic gradients for the full KL. These savings enable a dense ensemble of 482 lenses for LLaMA-3.3-70B, providing 6x the coverage of a residual-stream design at the same depth. Model-wide coverage then reveals what single-component lenses cannot: the components where a behavior is most visible need not be those where intervention is most effective, and the most effective interventions lie outside the
attention heads examined by prior lens studies. Across three case studies (
prompt-injection detection, multi-hop
memory injection, and toxicity localization), OmniLens reproduces key published results at substantially lower cost.
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All authors Jordan Pettyjohn, Mansi Sakarvadia, Nathaniel Hudson, Daniel McKenzie, Kyle Chard, Ian Foster
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.CL
TAF-MED: Multi-Turn Safety Refusal Collapse in LLMs Under Declared Self-Treatment Intent
Waleed Jamil and Raphael Schmitt
Large
language models (LLMs) increasingly provide conversational health information that may influence treatment decisions, yet existing
benchmarks do not isolate whether medication-safety boundaries persist across follow-ups after explicit self-treatment intent. We introduce TAF-MED, a physician-reviewed
benchmark of 500 fixed three-turn scenarios, and evaluate eight LLMs across 4,000 conversations. A rubric-based automated judge labelled responses as SAFE, LEAKY, or UNSAFE, and two physicians independently annotated a model-balanced random subset of 400 conversations. We assessed unsafe guidance, collapse after a strictly SAFE initial response, and model-ranking stability. Overall, 71.6% of conversations contained an UNSAFE response, and 61.4% of those beginning with a strictly SAFE response later collapsed to UNSAFE; model-level collapse rates ranged from 24.4% to 96.2%. Four of 28 model pairs reversed order between initial unsafe and collapse rates. Automated labels achieved 94.3% agreement with the adjudicated physician reference ($\kappa = 0.895$). These findings show that first-turn safety is an incomplete proxy for conversational safety persistence and motivate evaluation across complete dialogue trajectories. We will release TAF-MED on Hugging Face to support reproducible research on multi-turn medical safety.
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Artificial Intelligence
Beyond Detection: Evaluating Defensive LLMs Against AI-Generated Social Engineering in Live Turn-by-Turn Interaction
Yuqiao Xu, Osama Zafar, Alexander Nemecek et al. (+1 more)
Generative AI makes social-engineering attacks more fluent, adaptive, and scalable, increasing the need for LLM-based de- fenders that can protect users during ongoing interactions. We ask whether such defenders identify the structural source of risk or merely react to surface cues. We formalize trust-chain localization: identifying whether an interaction fails at actor authority, asset control, verification sufficiency, or transaction path. We construct a controlled 300-case online-housing corpus spanning 20 scenario families, legitimate cases, four structural failure modes, and three surface conditions. Five defender models are evaluated on the same corpus in state- ful turn-by-turn and one-shot static settings, yielding 1,500 model-case evaluations per protocol and 3,000 in total. No model produced explicit unsafe compliance, yet defensive effectiveness varied sharply: intervention rates ranged from 0% to 96.3%. Protective action and correct structural localization were frequently decoupled, with models sometimes intervening while identifying the wrong trust component or recognizing a structural failure without taking protective action. Asset-control failures were a major localization bottleneck, surface sensitivity varied across models, and live-static differences were model-dependent. These findings show that safe-looking behavior alone is insufficient; live scam resistance must separately measure intervention, timing, structural localization, and false-positive behavior.
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All authors Yuqiao Xu, Osama Zafar, Alexander Nemecek, Erman Ayday
Artificial Intelligence
Beyond Decision Boundaries: Relational Geometry Attacks on Contrastive Embedding Manifolds
Fei Zhao, Peiyuan Zhang, Xi Li et al. (+2 more)
Contrastive learning and Siamese
embedding models have become the foundation of modern verification systems, where decisions are governed not by discrete classification boundaries, but by relational geometry in
embedding space. However, existing
adversarial attacks remain fundamentally classification-centric, overlooking the vulnerability of relational geometry. In this paper, we introduce a geometry-aware
adversarial attack framework that reformulates attacks on contrastive systems as
manifold-level relational corruption. Instead of targeting individual predictions, the proposed framework systematically distorts similarity organization within the
embedding manifold by pushing positive pairs apart while simultaneously pulling negative pairs closer, ultimately collapsing and inverting pairwise similarity structure. To enable scalable deployment, we shift iterative online optimization into an offline
adversarial geometry deformation prior learning stage and train a lightweight feed-forward generator that learns generalized geometry deformation patterns from the victim model. Once trained, the generator produces
adversarial perturbations through a single forward pass without requiring online gradient computation, enabling real-time online attacks against similarity-based verification systems. Experimental results across multiple verification architectures demonstrate substantial degradation of verification performance together with severe
manifold-level relational corruption. On the Markmatch verification system, the proposed attack reduces accuracy from 95.4% to 38.6% while completely reversing the positive-negative similarity structure.
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All authors Fei Zhao, Peiyuan Zhang, Xi Li, Chengcui Zhang, Nitesh Saxena
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.ET
Unsupervised Detection of Groundwater Storage Anomalies in Ghana Using GRACE Satellite Data
George Yamoah Afrifa, Theophilus Ansah-Narh and Marcellin Atemkeng
Groundwater variability in Ghana remains poorly characterized due to limited long-term in-situ observations. This study investigates groundwater storage anomalies using GRACE-derived data from 2004-2024 combined with statistical analysis and unsupervised machine learning. Groundwater anomalies were standardized using Z-scores, while an ensemble-based Isolation Forest framework was applied for anomaly detection. The results revealed substantial temporal variability, with persistent groundwater deficits during 2004-2009 followed by increasing positive anomalies after 2018. A total of 12 anomalous months were identified, comprising 5 deficit and 7 surplus events, with the strongest anomalies associated with groundwater deficits. Spatial analysis showed more frequent deficit anomalies in northern Ghana and stronger surplus occurrence in southern regions. Comparison with statistical thresholds further indicated that the machine learning framework captured additional subtle deviations beyond conventional threshold-based methods. Overall, the integration of GRACE observations with unsupervised anomaly detection provides a practical framework for groundwater monitoring in data-scarce environments.
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Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from cs.RO
FACT: Failure-Aware Causal Training for World-Action Models
Quanquan Peng, Yutong Liang, Rui Yan et al. (+2 more)
Recent world-action models (WAMs) show that co-training policies with future prediction can provide physical priors for action generation. Building on the future-prediction ability of
video models, many WAMs generate future
videos and recover actions with inverse-dynamics models, or use these predicted
videos as goal conditions for action generation. In both cases, the world model is trained mostly on successful demonstrations and has little reason to predict the consequences of bad actions. We introduce FACT, a causal World-Action Model that predicts future
video and task progress conditioned on the executed action. This action-conditioned interface allows failure rollouts to supervise action consequences, turning bad actions into valid future targets rather than being discarded. Failure-aware training makes the progress predictor aware of both successful and failed action outcomes, which can optionally be used to score sampled action candidates at inference. Extensive experiments on simulation and real-world bimanual manipulation tasks show that FACT outperforms many existing baselines, improves as failure data are incorporated into training, and reduces success-biased future
hallucination under bad actions. See more details at https://fact-wam.github.io/
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All authors Quanquan Peng, Yutong Liang, Rui Yan, Nicklas Hansen, Xiaolong Wang
Artificial Intelligence
Self-evolving Agentic Customer Support System at LinkedIn
Chih Hui Wang, Mengdie Tu, Qianyun Zhang et al. (+4 more)
Enterprise support
agents operate in rapidly changing environments where policies, product capabilities, and knowledge bases evolve continuously, making static assistants brittle and costly to maintain. We present LinkedIn's self-evolving agentic support system, which integrates
retrieval-augmented generation with evolutionary auto-prompting and a modular, production-aligned evaluation framework to enable safe, continuous improvement without retraining foundation models. The system treats
prompts,
retrieval, and evaluation as a closed-loop, versioned workflow with operational guardrails. Offline simulations and ablations show clear quality gains over vanilla RAG and baseline
agents, including reduced
hallucinations and improved response completeness. In a two-week user-randomized A/B test on LinkedIn's production support traffic, the integrated self-evolved workflow increased QA self-serve by 9.0 percentage points, cancellation self-serve by 4.8 points, and routing accuracy by 30.6 points. These results demonstrate a practical path to scalable, self-evolving AI
agents in real-world enterprise settings.
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All authors Chih Hui Wang, Mengdie Tu, Qianyun Zhang, Wei Wu, Lili Zhou, Mingqi Shen, Changshuai Wei