Your Benchmark Is an Empirical Measure Over DifficultyThe paper treats a benchmark as an empirical measure over item difficulty and formalizes two failure modes: measure mismatch (benchmark difficulty distribution differs from the intended one) and coverage gaps (uncovered difficulty regions that hide localized training progress). It proposes two diagnostic metrics with theoretical guarantees and analyzes 25 popular benchmarks across 7 domains using estimated item difficulties. It also introduces BenchFill, a difficulty-targeted item rewriting algorithm that reduces local coverage gaps.
huggingface.copaperAdded 31 Oct 2026π§ AI
On the Fundamental Limits of Prefill-Based Decoding Length PredictionThis paper derives bounds on predicting an LLM's decode length from prefill-phase hidden states, a primitive for inference scheduling. It models decoding as a stopped stochastic process, giving per-prompt normality and an affine variance law Ο=Ξ±ΞΌ+b. Predictors (MLP, EGTP, FiLM, soft-label, Mixture-of-Experts) converge near the bound, so system error dominates model error. It proposes fixing model, data and sampling in benchmarks and reporting relative-error metrics.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π§ AI
Benchmarking color judgment in multimodal LLMs with CIE-computable ground truthA five-task benchmark tests multimodal LLM color judgment against CIE colorimetric ground truth: AWB pair judgment, skin-tone bias direction, CCT estimation, Delta E 2000 pair ordering, and color naming under changing illuminants. Eight endpoints were tested. On ColorChecker-24 stimuli, closed frontier models reach CCT MAE of 715-1056 K versus 1358-2133 K for open-weight models, and a non-ColorChecker control shows this gap is partly template-dependent.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π§ AI
Deogen: Automatic Benchmark Generation for Reasoning over PoliciesDeoGen is an automatic, parametrizable benchmark generator for deontic reasoning, where a model applies policy rules to facts to reach a verdict. It autoformalizes rules into first-order logic, builds decision trees, and turns each tree path into a benchmark entry. Frontier models give the correct verdict 89-92% of the time, but only 22-40% on entries lacking enough information, even when told to abstain.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026π§ AI
AskStream: When and What to Ask Proactively under Uncertainty in Streaming Video UnderstandingAskStream is a multi-turn benchmark for streaming video understanding that adds a third proactive action, ask, alongside wait and answer, for cases where video or user information is incomplete. It has 438 videos, 2,714 manually annotated frame-level time windows (wait, ask, answer), four task categories and eight subtasks. The strongest model reaches only 52.18% on the proposed Ask-F1 metric, in both multiple-choice and open-ended settings.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026π§ AI
Post-Training Large Language Models with LLMONLLMON (LLM Object Notation) is a framework that separates instructions from data and requires explicit identifier-based execution. The authors post-train Granite-4.1 3B and 8B base models with SFT then RL on a 4.6B-token structured corpus covering general, RAG and tool-calling data, with distractor variants. Attack success rates on indirect prompt-injection benchmarks fall from 53-100% to 0.02-5.6%, and general capability is preserved. Attention-based metrics diagnose failures per transformer layer.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Statistical Detection of Positional Bias in LLM-Based Recommender Systems: Methodologies and Empirical EvidenceThe paper proposes POB-ICM (contingency matrix with Chi-square independence testing) and POB-UNBP (a uniformity null model under permutation-based evaluation) to detect positional bias in top-1, single-turn LLM recommenders. On a RAG product-recommendation testbed with 2000 queries and 20 permutations each (40,000 instances), both methods reject positional independence in all evaluated models. Three metrics quantify the effect, and the bias persists across candidate-set size and temperature. Code is public.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π§ AI
When Algebraic Structure Meets Too Many Hints"When Algebraic Structure Meets Too Many Hints" is an ePrint paper (2026/2654) arguing that DDGR hint classes and too-many-hints thresholds are not standalone side-channel security metrics. In synthetic Kyber-512 experiments, NTT-domain residues recover the full secret with about half the hints the uniform mod-q bound predicts. Finite-precision FFT samples need 25% to 55% of the budget for uniform perfect hints. No new attack optimizations are proposed.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 27 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
The Policies of Programming Language Ecosystems: A "Qualitative" AnalysisThe Policies of Programming Language Ecosystems is an October 2026 arXiv paper (cs.SE) that compares the policies of eight programming language ecosystems, including CRAN for R, across 38 policy categories. Three authors coded the policies with moderate agreement. Malware, intellectual property and content removal are covered everywhere, while package size limits, metric manipulation, typosquatting and binary uploads diverge.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Semantically Rich, Metrically Affect-Blind: A Geometric Blind Spot in Modern Text EmbeddersSentiment-Injected Sentence Embeddings (SISE) addresses a finding across eleven frozen text encoders (2021 to 2026): linear probes recover sentence polarity at up to 91.3% accuracy, but cosine similarity separates polarity by only 0.003-0.064. A small supervised-contrastive head (0.13M-0.69M parameters) trained on CPU raises retrieval MAP by up to 26 points, but the 128-d head loses 38-41 STS-B Spearman points. The paper also releases the Attribute Alignment Gap diagnostic.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
Sensorimotor Alignment: A Platonic Proxy for Embodied Policy SuccessSensorimotor Alignment (S^2) is a training-free offline metric that measures how well an embodied model's sensory representation aligns with the geometry of physical motion. It extends the Platonic Representation Hypothesis to motion trajectories. S^2 correlates positively with downstream robot task success across embodied model families, helps pick promising VLM backbones before fine-tuning into VLAs, and explains behaviours seen in VLAs and world action models.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ AI
F2G-Pose: Geometry-Aware Foundation Feature Lifting for Direct RGB-D Category-Level Object Pose EstimationF2G-Pose is a direct, single-pass framework that predicts category-level object pose, metric size and camera-frame completed shape from one RGB-D image. It lifts frozen RADIO foundation features onto partial point clouds, tokenizes local geometry with DGCNN, and fuses it with a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer. It trains only on synthetic SOPE data, leads on SOPE and ROPE at 28 FPS, and is tested on HouseCat6D, HANDAL and real manipulation.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ AI
An Empirical Study of Recent Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph to Text Generation on Standard BenchmarksThis empirical study benchmarks recent LLMs against fine-tuned encoder-decoder models on knowledge graph-to-text generation, using reference-based metrics and graph-grounded, reference-free LLM-based evaluation validated against human annotations. Recent LLMs narrow or close the gap on reference-based metrics and do better on graph-grounded ones. Prompted models make fewer contradictions and triple omissions, and fine-tuned models' errors grow faster with graph size.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ AI
The Geometry of Metaphor: Probing and Steering Metaphor Representations in Large Language ModelsThe Geometry of Metaphor is an October 2026 arXiv preprint that uses mechanistic interpretability to find causal subspaces for metaphor in LLMs of different architectures and sizes. The authors steer output on classification tasks across parts of speech. They also steer generation tasks, showing the metaphoricity of model output can be controlled. The abstract gives no model names or metrics.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ AI
From Structured Records to Patient Narratives: Preserving Clinical Alignment in LLM-Generated Health SummariesThis paper studies evidence-grounded health summarization for menstrual health monitoring. It combines structured evidence conditioning with RAG in a prompt-based constrained generation framework, and scores 4,500 summaries from three LLMs with NLI, atomic factuality metrics and readability measures. Grounding constraints improved uncertainty preservation and generally kept or improved faithfulness against retrieved evidence, while omission effects varied by model. Clinical alignment came with harder reading and more medical terminology.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ AI
Symmetry-Based Parameter Efficient Low-Rank Fine-Tuning for High-Throughput Calculation of Lattice Thermal ConductivitySBFS-FT (symmetry-based few-shot fine-tuning) adapts the MatterSim 1M universal machine-learned interatomic potential with low-rank adaptation on a small set of compounds sharing one crystal symmetry. Tested on half-Heusler (space group 216), space group 225 and spinel (227) datasets, it cut lattice thermal conductivity error 2-3 times versus the base model. It matched per-compound fine-tuning while taking 5-7 times less compute for 100 compounds.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026π§ AI
Code2Video-Compass: A Comprehensive Benchmark for General-Purpose Code-Based Video Generation across T2V, I2V, and V2VCode2Video-Compass is a benchmark of 2,104 tasks for code-based video generation, where multimodal LLMs write executable programs that produce complete videos from text (T2V), image (I2V) or video (V2V) inputs. Tasks span 10 categories and 24 subtypes. Scoring uses 12 objective metrics and five MLLM-judge metrics. Across 15 proprietary and open-weight models from nine families, performance falls as construction, dynamic animation and state-dependency complexity rise.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π§ AI
DeclineCraft: A RAG Abstention Benchmark for Jointly Measuring Combined Retrieval and Parametric KnowledgeDeclineCraft is a dynamic RAG abstention benchmark whose unanswerable questions target Minecraft feature additions made after a corpus cut-off, with audits for parametric exposure. Across 27 LLMs, single-shot retrieval raises Correct Abstention Rate in 38 of 40 configurations, while iterative RAG lowers it in 30 of 40. Enabling thinking without retrieval lowers abstention for 8 of 13 models, shifting responses to premise denial.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π§ AI
Reward Misspecification Degrades Chain-of-Thought MonitorabilityThis paper shows that reward misspecification alone degrades chain-of-thought (CoT) monitorability in language models. Using a testbed of paired true and misspecified rewards across three models and three tasks, CoTs keep reasoning about task intent while outputs hack the reward. The proposed reward description training injects an LM-inferred reward description into the input and raises monitorability by an average of 24% or 42% absolute, depending on the metric.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π§ AI
Where is Physical RSI capability from? An Observational Scaling Law of LLM-as-policyThe paper introduces PhysRSI-eval, a five-axis metric for physical recursive self-improvement: first-attempt performance, efficiency, success, budget and improvement from failure. Several VLMs are tested on 18 manipulation tasks under a fixed interaction budget. It proposes the Physical Barrel Hypothesis and studies observational scaling. Workspace interventions show that removing history lowers late-round success, while frozen workspaces still help on unseen layouts.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π§ AI
MemT-1.0: Towards Memory-Native EvolutionMemT-1.0 is a memory foundation model architecture that builds memory into model computation. It builds on Metis, uses Gated DeltaNet-2 for token-level memory updates within each turn, and adds Mixture-of-Storage to scale capacity. Training used 34B tokens in continued pre-training and post-training. MemT-1.0-Nano and MemT-1.0-Flash beat parametric memory baselines and stay competitive with retrieval methods. At 128K history, Nano gives about 1.86x inference speedup and 66x less persistent storage than a full-context KV cache.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π§ AI
How employment is changing at Anthropic"How employment is changing at Anthropic" is an October 2026 technical report by Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory. It uses internal employment, agent telemetry, output, survey, calendar and hiring data plus 17 interviews. Junior technical hiring fell from 27% to 9%, agent hours reached six times employee hours by August 2026, and adopters' output rose. Employees increasingly do meta-work managing agents.
anthropic.compaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026π§ AI
Predictable Scaling: Efficient Model Exploration via Scaling-Law PredictionPredictable Scaling (PS) is a framework that predicts full-scale recommendation model performance from scaled-down proxies. It builds proxies with composable scaling functions along separate resource axes, then projects metrics to target scale by curve fitting with calibrated uncertainty. Of three predictors, even the raw proxy falls within repeated-run noise, and a Gaussian Process gives 15% lower relative MAE. On a task-specific ranker and a foundation ranker, PS ranks hypotheses correctly at 79-88% compute reduction.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ AI
DK-VLM: Geometry as Position for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language ModelsDK-VLM adds Dual-Kernel Attention to a vision-language model. A semantic kernel keeps the pretrained attention and positional encoding. A separate geometric kernel uses estimated 3D points and camera poses to modulate attention through point displacements and relative view transformations, and a learned gate fuses the two outputs. Geometry therefore enters attention as position, not as fused 3D reconstruction features. The paper also adds Reference-Frame Composition (RC) supervision, which gives stepwise turn and heading targets derived from verified single-step annotations, to train multi-step spatial reasoning as the observer moves. DK-VLM-8B reports the highest average score across six spatial benchmarks among the compared methods, with 74.33 on VSI-Bench and 58.28 on ReVSI-32, and it preserves general video understanding.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
Velox: Spatial Memory Makes World Models EfficientVelox is a training-free attention router for chunked video-diffusion world models. It uses camera frustum slabs with depth intervals from streaming geometry to pick which historical token blocks to attend to, instead of letting the KV cache grow with rollout length. Frustum overlap softly modulates each layer's model-derived block importance, and uncovered regions keep the model's own routing. The fixed block granularity suits FlashAttention-style tiled execution, and slab construction runs asynchronously with denoising on the same H200. At chunk 48 it speeds up attention 4.36Γ and denoising 2.43Γ, and on the 158-case WBench navigation split it stays within 0.15 average points of dense LingBot-Fast-Cam.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
GhostFaceMPC: Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition with Multi-Party ComputationGhostFaceMPC is presented as the first end-to-end face recognition system that runs both the deep CNN feature extractor and the matching step under secure multi-party computation. Raw images and biometric embeddings are never exposed at any stage, from feature extraction through storage to matching. The authors contribute an MPC-friendly quantization of the GhostFaceNet model and circuit optimizations that make this practical, and they release code on GitHub. It is relevant as an example of making CNN inference feasible under cryptographic constraints.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
GhostFaceMPC: Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition with Multi-Party ComputationGhostFaceMPC is presented as the first end-to-end face recognition system that runs a deep CNN feature extractor (GhostFaceNet) and the matching step under secure multi-party computation. Raw images and biometric embeddings are never exposed during extraction, storage or matching. The authors contribute an MPC-friendly quantization of GhostFaceNet and circuit optimizations that make the approach practical, and they release code at crypto-unict/GhostFaceMPC.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Topology-Inspired Fine-Tuning for Wind-Field Super-ResolutionThe paper fine-tunes a pretrained CNN wind-field super-resolution model with differentiable topology-inspired auxiliary losses on speed, gradient magnitude, soft high-speed level sets and local maxima. It also uses fixed-pair supervision at ground-truth persistence-pair endpoints located offline with the Topology ToolKit. A 16-configuration loss study on a fixed 168-field benchmark finds that gradient supervision gives the strongest persistence-diagram improvement, while fixed-pair supervision gives the most consistent joint improvement in persistence-diagram and merge-tree distances. The combined objective cuts bottleneck, W2,β and W2,2 distances by 31%, 25% and 27% relative to the pretrained CNN, at a cost of about half of standard fine-tuning's PSNR gain. It also shows that pointwise metrics and topological distances rank CNN and GAN models differently.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
Onboard Lightweight LLM Reasoning for Human-Aware Safe UAV NavigationPresents a modular, fully onboard UAV navigation pipeline that closes the "human-aware safety gap" of geometry-only planners. A shared BLIP encoder drives captioning and text-conditioned segmentation, which is fused with depth for 3D obstacle localization. Qwen-2.5-0.5B, stabilized with RAG and grammar-constrained JSON decoding, infers per-category risk once per class and caches the verdict. Perception runs at 10 Hz on a Jetson Orin NX, and fallback LLM queries take about 0.8 s off the control path. In Gazebo it gives roughly 3x fewer collisions than a geometric planner and raises semantics-aware landing success from 34% to 96%. The 224-pixel encoder input limits small-object perception at range.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
Multi-Reward Hacking: From Aggregation-Induced Drift to Trust-Anchored DefenseThe paper shows that symmetric aggregation of a primary reward (correctness) and auxiliary rewards (brevity, efficiency) in LLM post-training can raise aggregate reward while primary-task performance falls. It proves that deterministic conditional-mean GRPO converges to auxiliary-favoring behavior when auxiliary rewards are more reliably obtained. It proposes Trust-Anchored Gating (TAG), which elects an anchor channel by policy drift and gates auxiliary credit on anchor satisfaction. On Qwen3-4B with a brevity reward, TAG reaches 0.581 pass@4 versus 0.220 for additive aggregation, and shortens responses by 44% relative to correctness-only training. Experiments on Qwen and Llama models cover math and program synthesis.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
Quantum-Aware Key Rank for Side-Channel Attacks evaluationProposes a cost model and metric for an adversary who collects side-channel traces classically and finishes the key search on a quantum computer. Shows any quantum algorithm needs Omega(sqrt(r)) cipher evaluations for key rank r, and that the quadratic advantage holds only up to a rank bound set by the NIST MAXDEPTH budget (about 2^58.6 for AES-128 at D=2^40). Defines a quantum-aware key rank computable from existing rank estimators, with simulated-leakage experiments showing a depth-limited quantum adversary is worth about 22 traces at SNR 0.125.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 16 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Connecting Cryptanalytic Distinguishers through DivisibilityPaper that links linear, integral, differential-linear and restricted differential distinguishers through two-way conversions with explicit divisibility guarantees and data complexity. It gives automated MILP/SAT models (Walsh and ultrametric representations, exact mix-basis models) and a black-box FWHT histogram search for zeros and finite divisibility. It improves BeyneβVerbauwhede divisibility bounds in 674 SIMON cases (e.g. 2^5 to 2^11 on 9-round SIMON32) and PRESENT. It also gives first higher-divisibility proofs for 8-round SPECK and BEANIE, new bounds for GIFT-64 and Ascon, and new properties on RC5, ChiLow-32, KeeLoq and KATAN32.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Dog-Breed Text-to-image Flow Matching from Pretraining to Fine-Tuning on 4 Consumer GPUsMiniDog is a framework for training a text-to-image flow-matching diffusion transformer from scratch on four RTX 3090 GPUs, with 55 minutes of pretraining and 15 minutes of fine-tuning. It pretrains on 26k ImageNet dog images that were captioned, then fine-tunes on 2k FLUX.1-schnell generated images. Image and text features are precomputed and cached. The model is a 22M-parameter transformer with the E2E-INVAE semantic latent space, a small Qwen text encoder and in-context conditioning, and training is accelerated with iREPA and an EUPE perception encoder. The repo evaluates with FID, HPSv2, PickScore and VAE reconstruction metrics. It lowers the barrier to hands-on diffusion training research.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
ProAS: A Progress-Aware Advantage Shaping Framework for Multi-Turn Agentic Reinforcement LearningProAS (Progress-Aware Advantage Shaping) is a plug-and-play framework for multi-turn agentic RL that fixes the uniform credit assignment problem in critic-free algorithms like GRPO, where trajectory-level advantages are broadcast to every action. It uses a dynamically evolving Agentic Reference Graph with Masking Unreasonable Incentives and Asymmetric Penalty Redistribution to give finer-grained credit without a critic. On Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B-Instruct it reports success rates up to 91.9%/94.3% on ALFWorld and 66.7%/70.8% on WebShop, with up to 2.44x faster training convergence and robustness to imperfect or distilled ARGs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
Geometric Calibration of Supervised Fine-TuningProposes Geometric Calibration of supervised fine-tuning and SPACE (Subspace Projection for Adapted Checkpoint Enhancement). SPACE is a post-hoc, data-free, training-free method that uses the pre- and post-SFT checkpoints to revert SFT update components lying in the principal subspace of the pre-SFT weights and keep those in the orthogonal complement. It is evaluated on Qwen2.5, Qwen3, Qwen3.5, Llama-3.1 and Olmo-3 models (2Bβ14B) with math, coding and medical SFT. It reduces out-of-domain regression and improves in-domain performance, for example +2.85 ID / +2.26 OOD on Qwen2.5-7B math SFT.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
Leakage-Resilient Incompressible Cryptography: Constructions and BarriersIntroduces leakage-resilient incompressible cryptography, a security model combining leakage resilience (partial key leakage plus full ciphertext) with incompressibility (full key but only part of the ciphertext or signature). It gives a transformation from incompressible symmetric-key encryption (SKE) to leakage-resilient incompressible SKE, a leakage-resilient incompressible PKE built from a new leakage-resilient non-committing KEM, and an incompressible SKE with ciphertext and compression rate 1/2 using invertible extractors. It also gives a leakage-resilient incompressible signature scheme in the random oracle model under DCR or LWE plus Decisional Linear. Black-box impossibility results show barriers to improving these parameters.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Master-Key Recovery from Internal Activation Leakage in ReLU Realizations of CamelliaThe paper builds explicit ReLU neural-network realizations of Camellia-128/192/256 from exact Boolean gates, S-box selectors and bit permutations, and reports known-answer-test agreement for Camellia-128. It shows that whitening and round-key quantities leaked from internal activations determine the master key through public key-schedule identities. Under a synthetic internal-oracle model, symmetric real-valued perturbations recover subkey bits with 128 queries (Camellia-128) or 256 (Camellia-256). Camellia-192 is handled by deterministic key-schedule inversion from direct access to round keys. All 3,000 trials (1,000 keys per variant) recovered the key exactly. The authors state this is not a plaintext/ciphertext-only attack on standard Camellia.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Can agents whose sole duty is to keep humans alive be hijacked to kill? Delayed multi-turn derived-action trap attacks in simulated high-stakes environmentsPaper testing whether an LLM agent operating life support in the NASA-derived BioSim lunar habitat simulation can be induced by delayed prompt injection, hidden in truthful S-band telemetry, to shut down life support and hold the shutdown while the crew suffocates. It compares Claude, GPT and Grok configurations: Claude mostly refuses and cites the living crew, GPT shows some susceptibility, and Grok given a "trusted commission" framing more often cuts life support. It also varies the framing of the message (trusted commission, peer, untrusted source) and uses a harmless-procedure-drop attack as a proxy for whether life is valued intrinsically. Code and traces are open-sourced.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
When VLMs Destroy What They Know: Spatial Representations Fall Below Lexical PriorsIntroduces EICS (Evaluation-Invariant Concept Stability), a metric for checking whether representations consistently encode a concept under controlled one-concept interventions. Also introduces CASP-VL, a benchmark of causally controlled spatial perturbations derived from Visual Genome scene graphs. Across several VLM architectures, spatial relations are represented much less faithfully than lexical information, even for models well above chance on compositional benchmarks. The relation is identifiable at the predicate's own tokens but is lost when the sentence is aggregated into a global representation (EOS token or mean pooling), a failure that output-based evaluation does not reveal.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026π§ AI
A Baseline Assessment for the Agentic Web Technology StackProposes MASTIF (Multi-Agent System TestIng Framework) for evaluating Agentic Web stacks. It reports a baseline assessment of 3 LLMs, 3 protocols and 4 agent implementation frameworks on 300 Mind2Web benchmark tasks. Results suggest that choosing a task-specific stack can improve task completion rate, efficiency and social value stability, and can reduce verbosity and completion time. This gives developers reference metrics for choosing among fast-moving agent protocols and frameworks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026π§ AI
SmartSalesBench: A Resistance-Aware Multi-Turn Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Sales AgentsSmartSalesBench is a multi-turn conversational benchmark that tests LLM sales agents against psychologically grounded, resistant buyer personas over conversations of up to twenty turns. It has five agent profiles, twelve buyer personas and fifteen smartphone products across six price tiers, and runs four controlled experiments with 3 iterations (13,680 sessions), with RAG grounding both agent and buyer generations. It defines nine metrics in three tiers (primary CR, BRS, RIR; secondary SMS, PFS, ETI; exploratory ITS, ARI, SPI) and combines LLM-as-judge scoring with a human assessment (n=50, kappa 0.71, Pearson r 0.81 with BRS). It matters because it drops the cooperative-user assumption of existing task-oriented dialogue benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026π§ AI
DreamTrue: Action-Faithful Robot World Model with Counterfactual Post-TrainingDreamTrue is a multi-view, cross-embodiment robot world model for action-faithful, physically plausible video prediction. It renders action trajectories into image-space conditions aligned to target videos by offline geometric calibration. Counterfactual post-training modifies recorded trajectories to cover unsuccessful interactions and contact configurations. A human-annotated defect dataset trains an embodied video reward model whose scores drive RL post-training. On AgiBot it reaches state-of-the-art action following and cuts the human-assessed interaction defect rate from 48.12% to 6.25%. It ranked first in the world model track of the AgiBot World Challenge 2026.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026π§ AI
The Geometry of Hierarchical Navigation: Accuracy and Query Cost for Point Process InputTheoretical analysis of greedy search on a hierarchy of proximity graphs built from n points on the d-dimensional torus. It gives a deterministic coverage condition guaranteeing a (1+Ξ΅)-approximate nearest neighbor for any query. The condition holds w.h.p. for homogeneous Poisson, Hermitian determinantal and bounded-density Cox point processes when d = o(log n / log log n), and the expected hop count is O(exp(Β½ d log d + O(d)) log n), so logarithmic in fixed dimension. It gives formal grounding for the hierarchical ANN indexes used in RAG and recommendation retrieval.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026π§ AI
PathTime-VLA: Path-Time Decoupling for Factorized Post-Training of Vision-Language-Action PoliciesPathTime-VLA reparameterizes Vision-Language-Action actions as a progress-indexed interaction path X(s) plus a positive interval-time profile that defines a monotone time law t(s). Geometry is thus decoupled from execution speed, so teleoperation timing artifacts don't contaminate the path target. A staged post-training recipe uses demonstrations and DAgger interventions for a target-domain prior, Speed-DQN to learn execution-speed multipliers from robot interaction, and Path-AWR to refine the diffusion path generator from rollout outcomes. On three tasks it reaches 58/60 successes versus 57/60 for BC+DAgger at fixed 1Γ, with about 39β52% shorter mean completion times on successful trials.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026π§ AI
What Output-Only Review Cannot Verify: Study Contracts for Research AgentsProposes "study contracts" that bind an AI-generated study's declared experimental choices, run obligations and claim scope to recorded execution evidence, defining contract-relative verification as distinct from scientific truth. In a diagnostic with eight self-authored clean/mutated pairs, a deterministic fault-specific checker caught all eight mutations, while eighteen LLM judge aliases given metadata-filtered packages flagged 104 of 144 mutated cases (32 abstentions, 8 terminal failures). The authors stress the setting is deliberately information-asymmetric, not a verifier-quality comparison or reward-hacking result, and call for full-information comparisons, legitimate-adaptation controls and closed-loop agent evaluations.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026π§ AI
Detecting Adversarial Images through Response Profiles of Vision-Language ModelsThis paper introduces a detector for adversarial images targeting frozen vision-language models (VLMs) by building a 'response profile' from how an image interacts with a bank of general semantic prompts β using category-level statistics, inter-prompt relationships, deviation from clean reference distributions, and stability under weak image transforms, then classifying that compact profile with a lightweight model. Evaluated across multiple public datasets, several CLIP-style visual backbones, and gradient-based, optimization-based, automated, and spatial attacks, the method outperforms embedding-geometry baselines, generalizes partially to unseen attacks, and is tested against detector-aware adaptive attacks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Applying Security by Design at the Point of Execution: How Governed Security Requirements Affect the Security of AI-Generated CodeEvaluates delivering security requirements from a governed security-by-design knowledge base (SbD-ToE) to a code-generating LLM through an MCP server at generation time. On DualGauge (59 Python tasks) the share passing all security tests rose from 44.1% to 78.0%; on BaxBench (28 backend scenarios) the share of functionally correct solutions with no successful exploit rose from 65% to 86%, matching the authors' Oracle Security Reminder (85%). The joint secure-and-functional metric did not improve significantly, since stricter code failed functional tests that fix unstated values. The study used one model and one generation per task, and it proposes measuring conformance with applicable requirements rather than only detecting known weaknesses.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Applying Security by Design at the Point of Execution: How Governed Security Requirements Affect the Security of AI-Generated CodeThe preprint tests whether security requirements from a governed security-by-design knowledge base (SbD-ToE), delivered to a code generator through a Model Context Protocol server at generation time, make AI-written code more secure. On DualGauge (59 Python tasks, LLM-judge scoring) the share of tasks passing all security tests rose from 44.1% to 78.0%. On BaxBench (28 backend scenarios with real exploits in containers) the share of functionally correct solutions with no successful exploit rose from 65% to 86%, comparable to the authors' Oracle Security Reminder (85%). The pre-specified joint secure-and-functional metric did not improve significantly, and the stricter code failed functional tests that fix values the task never states. The study used one model and one generation per task. The authors argue that current benchmarks only detect the weaknesses their evaluators were built for, and propose measuring conformance with the requirements that apply.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026π§ AI
Explicit Geometric Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous DrivingGeoCoTDrive is a vision-language-action (VLA) framework for autonomous driving that introduces an explicit geometric chain-of-thought: it first grounds 2D regions corresponding to decision-critical cues, then retrieves localized 3D geometric priors from a geometric foundation model within those regions, interleaving these features into the autoregressive context to drive trajectory generation. The paper also introduces "planning-relevant grounding," a new region-level grounding supervision task, and the PlanningGrounding dataset to teach VLAs planning-oriented grounding, showing consistent gains in safety-critical planning across multiple end-to-end driving benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026π§ AI
Does Document Structure Help Dense Retrieval? A Placebo-Controlled Ablation of Four Mechanisms Across Two CorporaThis paper runs a mechanism-isolating ablation of four document-structure treatments used in retrieval-augmented generation β structure-aligned chunking, LLM-generated chunk contexts, heading-path metadata, and hierarchical two-stage retrieval β under one protocol with matched chunk sizes and a semantically null placebo (shuffled heading paths) to control for the confound that any prepended text perturbs embeddings. Using a coverage-aware nDCG metric and document-clustered bootstrap with Holm correction across 200 Wikipedia Featured Articles (951 queries) and 1,585 QASPER papers (4,303 questions), it finds that structure-aligned chunking with real heading paths beats both contextualized fixed windows and the placebo, naive hierarchical retrieval hurts performance (traced to first-stage section recall failures), and gold structure beats LLM-induced structure on Wikipedia but not QASPER. Effect sizes are small but statistically significant and consistent across corpora, giving RAG practitioners evidence-based guidance on which structure-aware retrieval tricks actually help versus which are placebo effects.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026π§ AI
Secure Speculative Decoding for Large Language ModelsThis arXiv paper presents the first systematic study of security implications of speculative decoding, a technique that speeds up LLM inference using a smaller draft model to propose tokens verified by the target model. The authors find a security-utility asymmetry: lossy speculative decoding methods raise jailbreak and prompt-injection attack success rates much faster than they degrade utility, with security degradation traced to early tokens generated by the draft model. They propose SecureSD, which applies stricter verification to early-position draft tokens, improving security while preserving inference efficiency and utility on security and utility benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
A Security-Aware PQC Benchmarking Framework on Dual-Core Xtensa SiliconThis IACR ePrint paper proposes a security-aware benchmarking framework for deploying memory-heavy PQC (ML-KEM, ML-DSA) on the dual-core ESP32-S3 (Xtensa LX7) running FreeRTOS, aimed at smart-grid substation devices bound by the IEC 61850 GOOSE tripping window (β€3ms). It details an asymmetric task-isolation design pinning crypto to Core 1, a heap-auditing methodology for FreeRTOS's heap_4.c allocator tracking key-state allocations across DRAM, and an analytical latency model of CPU stall overhead caused when side-channel masking forces secret polynomial shares to spill to external Octal-SPI PSRAM during non-sequential Cooley-Tukey NTT strides. The work gives embedded engineers a methodology to evaluate PQC side-channel/latency trade-offs before migrating real-time grid infrastructure.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Covariate-dependent Nonparametric $g$-modeling for regression via infinite Mixture-of-Expertizing classThis arXiv methodology paper extends empirical Bayes g-modeling, which estimates a latent prior over regression coefficients from data, to the case where the entire prior distribution depends on covariates. The authors show the unrestricted nonparametric MLE (NPMLE) of this covariate-dependent prior is ill-posed, and resolve it by introducing an "infinite Mixture-of-Expertizing" class of conditional priors, proving that the resulting NPMLE is exactly a softmax-gated Mixture of Experts whose number of experts is determined by the data rather than fixed in advance. They give two exemplar-based estimation algorithms with automatic expert selection, a post-hoc aggregation step for interpretability, and theoretical results (Lipschitz continuity of conditional priors, universal approximation of continuous gating functions by aggregated softmax gates), validated on synthetic and real datasets.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026π§ AI
Learning What to Imitate: Entropy-Aware Distribution MixingThe paper proposes Entropy-Aware Mixing, a knowledge-distillation method where a small student model's per-token distribution is dynamically interpolated with a stronger teacher model's distribution, gated by the student's own predictive entropy, to avoid "confident conflicts" where the student must imitate low-probability continuations despite being confident in a different one. The authors implement both convex and geometric interpolations under two training regimes β offline trace generation via speculative decoding followed by SFT, and on-policy forward-KL distillation β and show it stabilises distillation, improving in- and out-of-distribution math reasoning while better preserving general capabilities than fixed-teacher supervision, with offline traces favouring concave entropy schedules and on-policy training favouring linear/convex ones.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π§ AI
BrainTRACE: Tracing Longitudinal, Multimodal, and Volumetric Evidence in Brain MRI Clinical ReasoningBrainTRACE is a report-grounded benchmark for evaluating whether vision-language models can trace the evidence structure required for longitudinal brain MRI interpretation. It contains 7,273 scored VQA instances derived from 1,778 longitudinal patients, 7,299 MRI studies, and ~29k co-registered 3D MRI sequence volumes, organized across five levels of clinical reasoning and evidence demands like longitudinal comparison, multi-sequence integration, and volumetric spatial grounding. Evaluation of 20 VLM configurations finds that current models identify isolated visual cues but rarely compose them into grounded longitudinal clinical interpretations.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π§ AI
A Fine-Grained Analysis of the LoRA Fine-Tuning Landscape with Implications for Data SelectionThis paper develops a sharper theoretical landscape analysis for Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning, introducing LoRA-RIP, a data-dependent restricted-isometry metric that measures how well-conditioned the cross-entropy objective is along LoRA-relevant low-rank directions. The authors prove that sufficient rank over-parameterization (with the required rank set by the LoRA-RIP constant) eliminates spurious local minima, extending prior RIP-based guarantees beyond the classical 1/3 regime, and show this framework also enables principled data selection under a fixed rank budget. Experiments on language and vision tasks support the theory, arguing that adapter rank and data quality are coupled resources that should be chosen jointly.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π§ AI
Anatomy of LLM Sycophancy: What a Flip Rate HidesThis paper argues that a single "flip rate" metric for LLM sycophancy conflates genuine self-correction with capitulation, and introduces SycoLens, a modular stateless-replay protocol that isolates factors like pushback wording, answer format, boundary distance, and ground truth. Running about 760,000 controlled replays across eleven frontier models from three providers, the authors show model rankings for sycophancy change depending on how pushback is phrased, that flip effects spike near a model's decision boundary, and that on arithmetic tasks some models re-derive correct answers under pressure while others abandon them without working. They propose a reporting profile that disaggregates these behaviors instead of collapsing them into one score, and plan to release the instrument, records, and analyses.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π§ AI
HeuFouFT: Task-Guided Metaheuristic Coordinate Search for Fourier Fine-TuningHeuFouFT is a task-guided framework for selecting which frequency coordinates to train in Fourier fine-tuning (FourierFT), replacing fixed uniform or Gaussian band-pass coordinate selection with a search driven by downstream task performance. It initializes three metaheuristic optimizers (GA-SA, PSO, Cuckoo Search) from a lightweight block-level probe intensity map, using a Random Forest to filter candidate coordinate sets before proxy fine-tuning. On the E2E benchmark with GPT-2-Medium, all three variants beat random-uniform and Gaussian FourierFT and LoRA, with PSO beating the LoCA baseline on four of five metrics while using 37.6% fewer trainable spectral coefficients and only 15-18% of full fine-tuning FLOPs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π§ AI
SpatialChain: A Benchmark for Auditing Spatial Reasoning Faithfulness in VLMsSpatialChain is a benchmark of 28,350 training and 899 test examples pairing spatially-oriented GQA questions with scene-graph-grounded reasoning chains, designed to audit whether VLMs' correct spatial answers reflect faithful reasoning or linguistic shortcuts. Using a two-axis evaluation (chain-overlap metrics plus a scene-graph-aware LLM judge), the authors find that four of nine tested models hit β₯79% accuracy while showing shortcut rates above 39%, that chain quality predicts correctness for most models except Claude Sonnet 4.6 and InternVL3.5-8B (which fail differently, via terse vs. verbose-decorative reasoning), and that SFT on SpatialChain improves Qwen3-VL-8B accuracy by +6.2pp while cutting its shortcut rate to 22%. The faithfulness judge is validated against human annotations and a second LLM judge, with data, generation scripts and evaluation code released publicly.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π§ AI
SatBleed: Security of Commoditized Communication Modules in SatellitesSatBleed is an arXiv paper presenting the first in-depth security evaluation of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Communication Subsystem (COM) modules used in small satellites. The authors build a threat taxonomy for COM-targeting attacks, analyze representative COM hardware from multiple vendors, and uncover severe firmware, protocol, and architectural vulnerabilities. By correlating findings with open-source telemetry data, they identify at least 28 vulnerable missions currently in orbit that are susceptible to hostile takeover via their command-and-control link.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Sharpening Tax in Post-TrainingThis paper studies the sharpening hypothesis of RL post-training on LLMs: that it mainly sharpens existing base-model behaviors, boosting pass@1 at the cost of solution coverage (pass@K), and shows this cost extends to agentic, multi-turn tool-use tasks, not just math/coding. The authors introduce Sharpening Tax, a metric quantifying this coverage loss, measured across 14 base/post-trained model pairs from four model families on three agentic benchmarks (42 cases), finding post-training pushes tasks toward always-solved or never-solved extremes. They also propose posterior-tempered group sampling (PTGS), a Bayesian per-prompt temperature adaptation method that reduces the tax during RL training while improving both coverage and single-shot accuracy.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 4 Oct 2026π§ AI
DEPICT: Scoring Text-to-Image Alignment by Answer AgreementDEPICT is a training-free metric for scoring text-to-image alignment that replaces the fixed-YES assumption of decomposed VQA-based evaluators with an expected-agreement score between image-based and caption-only answers, weighted by how decisively the caption determines each question, then merges this with a holistic score. Evaluated across five benchmarks and eleven vision-language model backbones from three model families, it raises negation accuracy from 19% to 88% and outperforms other training-free metrics while beating fine-tuned evaluators on two of three human-correlation benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026π§ AI
Threat-Preserving Representation Sensitivity in Agent-Security BenchmarksThis arXiv paper introduces threat-preserving representation sensitivity (TPRS), a metric for how much an agent-security benchmark's attack success rate (ASR) changes purely from cosmetic changes to tool-name wording, with the underlying task, policy, and ground truth held fixed. Testing on Agent Security Bench (ASB), MCPTox and AgentDojo with GPT-5-mini, Claude Haiku 4.5 and GPT-4o-mini, the authors find swings of up to 13 percentage points in ASR from renaming tools as threat-neutral vs. threat-explicit, showing that single-representation ASR scores are not reliable robustness measures and arguing for evaluation across a controlled set of representations instead.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026π§ AI
Threat-Preserving Representation Sensitivity in Agent-Security BenchmarksThis paper introduces threat-preserving representation sensitivity (TPRS), a metric showing that attack success rate (ASR) scores on LLM-agent security benchmarks shift dramatically based on cosmetic changes to tool naming, even when the underlying task, policy, and ground truth are held fixed. Testing on Agent Security Bench, MCPTox, and AgentDojo, the authors find swings of up to ~13 percentage points in ASR on GPT-5-mini and Claude Haiku 4.5 just from renaming tools between threat-related and threat-neutral labels, with a matched-length control reproducing most of the effect. The findings argue that single-representation ASR scores are not reliable robustness claims and that benchmarks should report results across multiple threat-preserving representations.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
A Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based Pipeline for End-to-End Procedural Modeling of Field-Grown Maize from Point CloudsThis paper presents an automated pipeline that uses a vision-language model to annotate leaf midlines in rendered orthographic views of maize point-cloud scans, then applies deterministic geometric algorithms and differentiable NURBS fitting to reconstruct editable, organ-level procedural 3D plant models without manual tuning or species-specific segmentation training. Evaluated on 100 field-grown maize plants from the MaizeField3D dataset, it achieves a median whole-plant Chamfer distance of 5.4 mm and recovers 99.4% of curated reference leaves at IoU β₯ 0.5, outperforming an earlier semi-automated pipeline. It demonstrates that VLM annotations can become reliable quantitative measurements when paired with correcting geometric post-processing, enabling scalable generation of 3D plant assets for high-throughput phenotyping and in silico breeding.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026π§ AI
Evaluating and Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models to Input Sequence VariationsThesis on evaluating and improving LLM robustness to adversarial input perturbations. It proposes the R_stab robustness metric (Jensen-Shannon divergence), ASA, an evolutionary black-box attack on LLM-as-a-Judge systems (up to 73.8% ASR), trojan trigger recovery on Trojan Detection Challenge 2023 (Pythia-1.4B), and a systematization of bypasses of multi-layer defenses from SaTML CTF 2024. For MCP agents it proposes AttestMCP (HMAC-attested tool calls) and the Commit Boundary pattern, cutting ASR from 53.7% to 12.4% on the 847-scenario MCPBench; the methods are implemented in JudgeGuard, TrojanArmor and MCPSec.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Evaluating and Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models to Input Sequence VariationsAn arXiv thesis-style paper proposing R_stab(f), a Jensen-Shannon-divergence-based robustness metric for LLM outputs under small input perturbations, along with a proven bound V(h) <= 1 - R_class(h) for localized attacks. It introduces ASA, an adaptive evolutionary black-box attack against LLM-as-a-Judge systems reaching up to 73.8% attack success rate (62.6% cross-model transfer), evaluates trojan/backdoor detection on the Trojan Detection Challenge 2023 (Pythia-1.4B) and SaTML CTF 2024, shows that committees of 5-7 heterogeneous models cut Gemma-3-4B's ASR to 19.3%, and presents AttestMCP, an HMAC-based tool-call attestation scheme plus a "Commit Boundary" isolation pattern for MCP agents that cuts average ASR on the 847-scenario MCPBench from 53.7% to 12.4%. Methods ship as the JudgeGuard, TrojanArmor, and MCPSec software suites.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Are We Recovering Mechanisms? Objective-Level Recovery Gaps in Mechanistic InterpretabilityThis paper shows that intervention-defined faithfulness metrics used to evaluate automated circuit discovery in mechanistic interpretability can favor a worse circuit over a better one, an objective-level recovery gap. Testing EAP, EAP-IG, ACDC, and Edge-SP across four human-reference tasks and InterpBench, the authors find KL-based faithfulness misranks 9.4%-41.2% of candidate circuit pairs under held-out resampling, and trace the cause to context distortion, where excluded signals change the inputs retained components operate on. Restoring selected signals from the intact model's execution repairs 96 of 100 persistent misrankings, showing the evaluation objective itself, not just the search algorithm, needs fixing.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026π§ AI
The Achilles' Heel of Partial Reconfiguration: Optical Side-Channel Leakage on the 7-Series ICAPResearchers implement AMD's proposed asymmetric-key bitstream encryption scheme for 7-Series FPGAs using Partial Reconfiguration, then break it with an optical side-channel attack. Using Photon Emission Microscopy to locate the ICAP bus and Electro-Optical Probing to read it contactlessly, they extract plaintext configuration data during dynamic reconfiguration on an AMD XC7A200T device, showing that advanced custom cryptographic protection schemes remain vulnerable because reconfiguration must pass through the hard-wired, unpatchable ICAP interface.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
AuraForge: Scaling Security Supervision for Training Coding AgentsAuraForge is a method for synthesizing and validating executable security tests to train coding agents toward secure (not just functionally correct) code, combining attack-oriented test synthesis, multi-language task construction, and safeguards against reward hacking. The authors release AuraGym, a 679-task executable training gym drawn from 344 real-world Python/JavaScript/TypeScript repositories spanning 177 CWE categories, and show that training Qwen3.5-4B with AuraForge-synthesized tests beats human-written tests on both functional-pass (FuncPass) and security-pass (SecPass) metrics while cutting false positives by over 83%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
AuraForge: Scaling Security Supervision for Training Coding AgentsAuraForge is a pipeline that synthesizes and validates executable security tests to supervise the training of coding agents, using attack-oriented test synthesis and safeguards against reward hacking. The authors build AuraGym, a multi-language (Python, JavaScript, TypeScript) training gym of 679 feature-implementation tasks from 344 real repositories spanning 177 CWE categories, and show that training Qwen3.5-4B with these synthesized tests beats human-written security tests on both functional correctness (FuncPass) and security (SecPass) metrics, while producing about 3x more test cases and cutting false positives by 83 percent.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026π§ AI
ViTeX-Bench: Benchmarking High-Fidelity Video Scene Text EditingViTeX-Bench is a benchmark suite for high-fidelity video scene text editing, pairing a dataset of 387 real-world 720p videos (text-region masks plus editing instructions, 230 for training and 157 frozen for evaluation) with a three-axis, 13-metric evaluation protocol covering text correctness, visual/temporal quality, and edit locality. The authors benchmark eight baselines across four editing families and release ViTeX-Edit-14B, an open-source reference editor using motion-aligned glyph-video conditioning that achieves the best CharAcc (0.688) among video-native editors and the lowest text-crop Warp among raw outputs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026π§ AI
AssemblyWorld: Rethinking 3D Assembly with General-Purpose AgentsAssemblyWorld is an interactive 3D environment where general-purpose agents assemble objects (furniture, industrial parts, fractured pieces) by inspecting rendered 2D views and manipulating supplied rigid parts, optionally guided by images or assembly manuals, without any assembly-specific fine-tuning. The accompanying AssemblyWorldBench benchmark covers 100 tasks across 80 objects and evaluates eight agent systems geometrically; the best system reaches 80.9% part accuracy but only 59.4% complete-assembly success, and open-source systems lag closed-source ones in both reliability and accuracy. The paper analyzes interaction trajectories and failure modes to characterize the gap between approximate structure recovery and precise 3D reconstruction.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026π§ AI
From A2A Attacks to Envelope-Layer Defense: Red-Teaming Evaluation of LLM Agents and a Three-Layer Isomorphic Attack-Defense ModelThis paper proposes A2A-TIBA, an indirect prompt injection attack that abuses agent-to-agent (A2A/ACP) protocols by getting a target LLM agent to deploy a callback program, letting an attacker bypass the agent entirely to issue commands and exfiltrate data. It also introduces GDA Measurement, a red-team testbed that captures raw gateway context to distinguish four outcome classes (semantic refusal, semantic breach, interception, penetration) instead of a single attack-success-rate metric, and ELA-ITL, a three-layer isomorphic attack-defense model splitting defense into envelope packaging, LLM recognition, and agent interception. Testing on 15 agent-frontend x LLM-backend combinations and a 1,000-case dataset shows that labeling malicious-prompt indicators in envelope channels (A2A, tool, memory) significantly improves LLM recognition of injected content.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Point2Part: Unified 3D Partitioning from Point PromptsPoint2Part is a promptable 3D part-decomposition model that, given 3D point prompts (one per desired part), jointly partitions an image or mesh into non-overlapping parts that fully cover the shape, unlike prior methods that allow overlaps or gaps. It builds on a pretrained 3D generation model's shape latent space, adding a prompt encoder mapping point prompts to part tokens and a coarse-to-fine part decoder that assigns every shape position to exactly one part, unifying image-to-part generation, mesh-to-part generation, and part segmentation in one model. The authors report outperforming prior SOTA on part-quality metrics and an order-of-magnitude improvement in part compatibility across all three tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026π§ AI
Imagine3D-LLM: Teaching MLLMs to Imagine 3D Scenes Before AnsweringImagine3D-LLM appends learnable summary tokens after image tokens in an MLLM, decoding them into a compact 3D Gaussian Splatting representation supervised by a photometric reconstruction loss, trained jointly with next-token prediction. This mimics human coarse spatial reasoning (identifying common objects across views, inferring relative geometry) rather than relying on fine-grained pixel correspondence or fused 3D geometry foundation model features, and the paper shows this reconstruction objective also improves cross-frame correspondence in the LLM's image features. The approach outperforms prior methods across multiple spatial reasoning and 3D understanding benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026π§ AI
A Spectral Theory of Distortion in LLM Graph Reconstruction: Sharp Bounds and Empirical CharacterizationThis paper proves that the Wasserstein distance between Laplacian spectra of original and LLM-reconstructed graphs is bracketed by two edge-count quantities, the net change in edge number and the symmetric difference, each scaled by 2/n, showing when these bounds coincide (pure addition or pure deletion of edges) and when they diverge (mixed editing, i.e. both inventing and losing edges). Using this theory, the authors analyze 135 graph reconstructions produced by three open-weight LLMs over 45 synthetic graphs, finding 77 one-sided outputs and 29 mixed outputs with a positive residual, revealing that aggregate distortion metrics mask qualitatively different editing policies across models, from copying the input to hallucination-heavy completion.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026π§ AI
FurE: Efficient Instance-Specific 3D Fur Reconstruction without Animal-Fur DatasetsFurE is a strand-based method for reconstructing editable 3D animal fur from multi-view images without requiring animal-fur training data. It optimizes a root-conditioned latent field decoded into strand geometry via a PCA-based decoder trained on human-hair strand data, combined with a defurred animal body recovered using a surface-constrained Gaussian Frosting representation and part-based priors, achieving a 10x speedup over dense per-strand optimization baselines while retaining strand fidelity on synthetic and real-world sequences.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
PDMD: Projected Distribution Matching Distillation for Video Diffusion ModelsPDMD (Projected Distribution Matching Distillation) is a one-line fix to Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) for video diffusion models that projects out the component of the DMD update parallel to the student-critic endpoint residual, filtering accumulated critic errors that otherwise cause oversaturation and artifacts during few-step distillation. The authors prove the residual is an unbiased estimate of critic endpoint error and show the projection removes a constant fraction of that error while discarding negligible true DMD signal. On Wan2.1 it reaches a VBench score of 83.73 at 4 NFE (+1.03 over DMD), and on MiniMax-H3 joint video-audio generation it improves VideoGen-Eval visual score and tops all six audio metrics among 4-NFE models, with code and models released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
Rubric-Calibrated Preferences: Cross-Query Calibration of LLM Judgments via Item Response TheoryThis paper proposes Rubric-Calibrated Preferences (RCP), a method that combines listwise Bradley-Terry tournaments (relative LLM judgments within a query) with yes/no rubric criteria (an absolute cross-query standard), then uses Item Response Theory to put all queries' tournament scores on one shared scale. The resulting calibrated relevance probabilities feed a new metric, RCP-nDCG, which the authors show correlates much better with human grades (0.538 to 0.795) and separates reranker pairs more reliably than standard nDCG on benchmarks like TREC-DL and NanoBEIR. It matters because it addresses a core weakness in reranker evaluation: nDCG's dependence on sparse, noisy, coarsely-graded human labels that increasingly fail to distinguish close-quality rerankers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
GeoVerse: World-Consistent Novel View Synthesis in Geometric Latent SpaceGeoVerse is a novel view synthesis framework that generates within the geometric latent space of a pretrained 3D foundation model while injecting appearance priors from the video generative model Wan2.2 VACE via a ControlNet-style adapter, aiming to reconcile faithful reconstruction with plausible completion of unseen scene content. A global spatial memory aggregates observed and synthesized content and reprojects target-aligned guidance to enforce cross-view world consistency. It reports a 2.23 dB PSNR improvement on DL3DV and 32.4% lower absolute trajectory error on Mip-NeRF360 versus the GLD baseline.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
Impact of Patient Orientation in Single- and Multi-View Camera Environments for AI-based Rehabilitation MonitoringThis paper studies how camera placement affects the accuracy of AI-based pose estimation for detecting movement errors in rehabilitation exercises. The authors introduce REHAB26-ViewAngles, a dataset of correct and incorrect exercise executions filmed from many camera angles, plus a novel separability metric to measure how well an algorithm distinguishes valid from faulty repetitions. They benchmark single-camera 2D and 3D pose estimation against four multi-camera strategies (orthogonal 2D views, 3D triangulation, weighted 3D fusion, and a transformer trained on two synchronized cameras), finding an optimally placed 2D camera beats the standard frontal view by 16.9% and that combining two views adds up to 13.1% more accuracy β practical guidance for deploying rehabilitation monitoring at home or in clinics.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
Hard Vision, Easy Vision: What GPT-6 Astra Reveals Across Computer VisionThis paper systematically evaluates GPT-6 Astra alongside five other frontier general-purpose AI systems across 34 capabilities and 55 benchmarks spanning nine areas of computer vision, benchmarking them against dedicated specialist models and human performance where available. It finds general-purpose systems increasingly match reference performance on semantic interpretation, reasoning, and object-centric prediction, but still lag on metric geometric accuracy, faithful reconstruction, temporally consistent dense prediction, and fine-grained specialist visual knowledge. Astra shows the strongest gains among the systems tested, particularly in visual/spatial reasoning and structured prediction tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
Many Eyes, One World: Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction from Mixed CamerasMEOW is a feed-forward 3D reconstruction model that jointly predicts metric pointmaps and camera poses from N-view image tuples mixing perspective, fisheye, and full 360Β° panoramic images in a single forward pass, without any camera calibration, distortion parameters, or camera-type labels supplied. It keeps a perspective-pretrained backbone and adapts it to heterogeneous cameras purely through a procedural synthetic data engine that renders scenes across a continuous manifold of camera models with exact rays, depth, and verified covisibility, then transfers zero-shot to real captures, beating the Wid3R baseline (79.9 vs 53.8 mAA@30 on heterogeneous 2D3DS tuples even when Wid3R is given ground-truth camera types) and scoring 79.4 AUC@30 on a new laser-scanned mixed-camera benchmark.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
Transferable Mass Spectrum Prediction via Reference-Guided Test-time SpecializationThis arXiv preprint introduces SPARC, a retrieval-guided test-time specialization framework that adapts a pretrained mass spectrum predictor to new chemical/acquisition domains using a reference spectral library, without needing labeled test-query spectra. It retrieves chemically related reference spectra to recalibrate fragment intensities and combines this with a reliability-aware consistency mechanism that uses reconstruction behavior to decide which predictions to trust during continual specialization. The method is evaluated across MassSpecGym, NPLIB1, and application-specific GNPS libraries, showing gains under domain-shift transfer settings β offering a general pattern (retrieval-guided, label-free test-time adaptation) that could extend beyond mass spectrometry.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
Source-preserving alignment for robust evidence localization in scientific PDFSPresents a source-preserving alignment framework for locating extracted evidence strings within the original PDF text layer, addressing mismatches caused by line wrapping, Unicode variants, superscripts, and citation markers. The method normalizes text for matching while preserving provenance to map matches back to exact source-character spans and render only the matched geometry, falling back to line-break-aware token alignment when exact matching fails. On 1,020 chemistry papers it achieves a 92.6% quote-level automatic localization rate versus 43.6% for plain text search and 19.1% for a precomputed bounding-box baseline.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
Physics-Attested Federated Learning: Securing Collaborative Anomaly Detection in Critical Water InfrastructureThis arXiv paper proposes mining cyber-physical invariants (conservation laws, actuator couplings) from clean operational data to serve as a verifiable admission gate for federated learning updates in industrial intrusion-detection systems, closing a blind spot where poisoned updates derived from fabricated telemetry are indistinguishable from honest ones in update space alone. Evaluated across SWaT, WADI, and BATADAL water-infrastructure testbeds against seven aggregation rules, the gate rejects all fabricated shards (including ones that defeat FoolsGold) while admitting all honest ones, and recovers most of the detection recall lost to replay and fabrication poisoning. The authors also show invariant compliance can be proven via zk-SNARKs so clients avoid revealing raw operational telemetry.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Calibration Without Comprehension: Diagnosing the Limits of Fine-Tuning LLMs for Vulnerability Detection in Systems SoftwareCWE-Trace is a benchmark and diagnostic framework of 834 manually curated Linux kernel samples spanning 74 CWEs, built with a strict temporal train/test split to rule out data contamination, used to evaluate eight vanilla LLMs and 15 LoRA fine-tuned variants on vulnerability detection and CWE classification. The paper introduces two new metrics β Directional Failure Index (DFI) and Hierarchical Distance and Direction (HDD) β and finds that fine-tuning only recalibrates output thresholds rather than improving actual security reasoning, with the best model reaching just 52.1% detection accuracy (barely above chance) and under 1.3% Top-1 CWE classification accuracy.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π§ AI
When Good Verifiers Go Bad: Silent Negative Transfer in Verifier-Guided VLM TrainingThis paper studies verifier-guided self-DPO training of vision-language models and identifies "silent negative transfer": a verifier that reliably improves one task (MathVista, +8.0 held-out) can secretly harm generalization on another (MMMU) even while self-training metrics keep improving. The authors decompose this into gradient fidelity (alignment between verifier-induced and correct update directions) and gradient transferability (alignment between correct and held-out directions), deriving a Safe-Transfer Margin certifying positive held-out alignment. They propose Asymmetric Acceptance Gating (AAG), a precision-first preference-pair filter that raises fidelity on MMMU from 0.29 to 0.42 and restores positive held-out alignment (from -0.13 to +0.22), beating raw verifier-guided training across six configurations.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π§ AI
Cyber-Financial Contagion: Modeling the Propagation of an AI Vendor Compromise Through the Banking SystemThis arXiv paper models how a security compromise inside a shared AI vendor (used for fraud screening, credit decisioning, AML triage) can propagate through operational, informational, and financial linkages to trigger banking-system-wide losses. The authors build CFC-Prop, a stochastic epidemic-and-clearing model on a synthetic four-layer network of 60 AI vendors, 220 banks, ~2,500 vendor-bank edges, and 1,400 interbank exposures, showing heavy-tailed loss distributions driven by patch latency, and CFC-GNN, a graph neural network early-warning classifier (AUROC 0.82, AUPRC 0.60) that flags high-cascade-risk vendors from incident telemetry. Code and synthetic data are released, framing AI-vendor cyber concentration as a first-order financial-stability risk.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Beyond F1: Evaluating Coverage and Failure Recovery in AI Model Security ScannersThis arXiv paper benchmarks three open-source ML model security scanners β ModelScan, ModelAudit, and Fickling β against a 170-artifact synthetic corpus of Pickle and PyTorch files spanning 145 specimen families, distinguishing whether a scanner merely produces a usable security verdict from whether that verdict is correct. ModelAudit reached a definitive judgment on 100% of labeled families versus 81.5% for Fickling and 49.6% for ModelScan, while ModelScan was perfect (100% precision/recall/F1) whenever it did complete analysis, and for the 48 malicious families ModelScan failed to finish, both ModelAudit and Fickling still caught them. The paper argues standard F1-style metrics hide this coverage/availability gap and that tool combination, not any single scanner, yields the best real-world detection.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Calibration Without Comprehension: Diagnosing the Limits of Fine-Tuning LLMs for Vulnerability Detection in Systems SoftwareThis paper introduces CWE-Trace, a benchmark of 834 manually curated Linux kernel vulnerability samples spanning 74 CWEs with a strict temporal split to eliminate training data leakage. Evaluating eight vanilla LLMs including DeepSeek-R1 and fifteen LoRA fine tuned variants, the authors find contamination gives no real advantage and that fine tuning only shifts output calibration rather than underlying security reasoning, with the best model barely beating chance and CWE ranking accuracy staying very low. Two new diagnostic metrics are introduced to expose this calibration without comprehension failure mode.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
FuseChain: Runtime Evidence Reconstruction for Software Supply-Chain AttacksFuseChain is a runtime detection framework for software supply-chain attacks that fuses package/runtime traces, process events, network telemetry, DNS/HTTP metadata, and security alerts into a temporal heterogeneous provenance graph on a unified event-time axis. It decouples anomaly detection from attack-stage reconstruction using a frozen anomaly backbone plus a lightweight decoder, improving deployable Stage Recall@500 from 0.369 to 0.881 across seven SSC attack scenarios, with adaptive retrieval further boosting observable-stage recall from 0.524 to 0.655.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
FuseReg: Regularizing Layer Fusion Mitigates the Reconstruction-Generation Gap in Representation AutoencodersFuseReg is a training method for representation autoencoders (RAEs) that replaces fixed heuristic selection of pretrained-encoder layers with training over random subsets of encoder layers, explicitly regularizing sensitivity to cross-layer disagreement. On ImageNet-256 with DINOv3-L, a single FuseReg decoder matches or beats decoders specialized to fixed layer fusions across full, sparse, and single-layer configurations, and swapping it into an unchanged RAEv2 DiT-XL generator cuts unguided gFID by 27%; joint regularization during diffusion training further reduces unguided gFID by 29% on DiT-Base. The work targets the trade-off where shallow encoder layers preserve pixel detail but deep layers yield better generation metrics, narrowing the reconstruction-generation gap without modifying the pretrained encoder.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π§ AI
User Model Extraction via Belief Self-DistillationThis arXiv paper introduces Belief Self-Distillation (BSD), a technique where a frozen LLM teaches itself a compact, decodable representation of its inferred beliefs about the user, which can then be read out and rewritten back into the model's internal state. The authors show refusal behavior depends not just on the literal request but on the model's inferred user intent, and that directly editing this belief representation changes whether the model refuses a fixed request β a causal steering result with clear implications for jailbreak mechanisms and safety-conditioning defenses. They also find that independently trained LLMs converge on a similar internal geometry for representing users.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
User Model Extraction via Belief Self-DistillationThis paper introduces Belief Self-Distillation (BSD), a read-write probing framework where a frozen LLM acts as its own teacher to learn a compact representation of its implicit beliefs about the current user, which can be both decoded (read) and written back into the model's activations (write) to causally test its effect. The authors show BSD recovers user beliefs more faithfully and enables stronger interventions than matched hidden-state steering, and that changing the model's inferred user intent alters refusal decisions even when the request itself is held fixed. They also find that independently trained LLMs across different model families converge on a similar geometry for representing users, with direct implications for how safety-relevant refusal behavior depends on who the model believes it is talking to.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π§ AI
AgentWorld: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Collaboration of Multi-agent LLMsAgentWorld is a benchmark of 100 human-annotated tasks (plus 100 augmented variants) for evaluating long-horizon multi-agent LLM collaboration in a MMORPG-style sandbox, requiring 3-20 agents with asymmetric roles to coordinate over 50+ interaction rounds without visibility into each other's internal states. The authors introduce Causal Collaboration Effectiveness (CCE), a graph-based metric that traces causal dependencies between agent actions to measure how much of a team's effort actually contributed to task success, beyond simple pass/fail. Testing Gemini 3 Flash, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5 Mini, and DeepSeek R1-70B shows even the best model only reaches 52.0% task success, with failures traced to communication breakdowns, role confusion, and inability to maintain shared plans.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π§ AI
Generate, Track, Improve: Perceptive Multi-Skill Humanoid Locomotion with RL-Fine-Tuned Motion GeneratorsThis paper presents a two-layer humanoid locomotion architecture: a perceptive flow-matching motion generator that plans whole-body trajectories from raw depth images, paired with a control-guided RL tracking policy that follows those motions. The core contribution is a sample-efficient off-policy RL fine-tuning loop β using structured search with the generator plus advantage weighted regression β that improves terrain consistency on unseen geometries, boosting successful terrain traversals by up to 25 percentage points and skill selection by up to 80 points. The system is deployed on a Unitree G1 humanoid, enabling walking, running, jumping on/off boxes, and stair traversal outdoors using only raw depth images (no odometry or height maps).
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π§ AI
Fast and Secure Simultaneous Authentication of Equals for WPA3This paper addresses CPU-exhaustion Denial-of-Service risk in WPA3's Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) handshake, whose Password Element derivation is computationally expensive for the Access Point. The authors propose an asymmetric protocol modification that shifts the costly iterative PE-discovery work to the client, adds a slow-path key derivation step (using PBKDF2 or Argon2) to further throttle brute-force attempts, and introduces a ticket-based fast re-authentication path for known devices β all aimed at keeping APs available under adversarial load without weakening SAE's dictionary-attack resistance.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Forte: A sensitivity type system for imperative RustForte is a sensitivity type system for imperative Rust that soundly tracks differential-privacy sensitivity through mutation via exclusive (&mut) borrows, closing a gap left by prior pure-calculus systems like Fuzz and Solo that assume no aliasing or mutation. Its soundness theorem (metric preservation) is mechanized in Verus, and Flux checks Forte as an ordinary library without forking the Rust compiler. The authors evaluate Forte on OpenDP mechanism kernels with genuine in-place mutation, matching trusted stability maps and catching off-by-one diameters, miscalibrated releases, and overspent privacy budgets.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026π§ AI
Towards Practical Compression of 3D Gaussian SplattingCOSA-GS is a compression method for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that builds context without spatial aggregation, using anchor-wise causal factorization: a compact learnable anchor latent derived from each anchor's geometry is fused with geometry context to drive attribute coding through a simple linear-transform architecture. The method uses rate-distortion optimization with adaptive Gaussian pruning plus quantization-aware training and integer inference so entropy-decoded symbols are bit-exact across platforms, addressing a practical failure mode (numerical inconsistency causing decode errors) in prior spatial-context compression approaches while achieving state-of-the-art compression rates. Code is released alongside the paper.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 25 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026π§ AI
Variational Multi-Gaussian Quantum TrajectoriesThis arXiv preprint proposes a variational framework generalizing the time-dependent variational principle to simulate stochastic quantum trajectories in interacting bosonic systems, using a wavefunction ansatz of coherent superpositions of Gaussian wavepackets. The method is benchmarked on a Bose-Hubbard dimer and applied to 1D and 2D extended Bose-Hubbard lattices, revealing a symmetry-breaking phase transition present only in 2D. This is a quantum physics simulation technique, not an AI/ML method, despite using the term "variational" which overlaps with ML vocabulary.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026π§ AI
TrackEverything: Long Horizon Dense Tracking via De-Duplicating 3D Scene RepresentationsTrackEverything is a 3D point tracker that represents videos as persistent 3D scene tracks in world coordinates, decoupling model complexity from video duration by scaling with scene geometry rather than frame count. It introduces voxelization-based de-duplication to merge co-located tracks across sliding-window boundaries, an endpoint refiner plus lightweight trajectory refiner that only decodes dense trajectories for dynamic points, and 3D WAFT, which replaces memory-heavy 4D correlation volumes with feature sampling in the scene cloud. On TAPVid-3D it beats open-source dense 3D trackers by over 20% APD on short clips and is the first 3D tracker able to track all visible points across 1000+ frame videos within 40GB GPU memory.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026π§ AI
Minimally Invasive Steering of Language ModelsMinimally Invasive Steering Vector Optimization (MISVO) regularizes pre-logit activation steering using the local KL/Fisher geometry of the token distribution, letting a frozen model be adapted to a test-time reward without badly distorting its outputs. Across 1B-14B parameter models on preference and code-generation tasks, MISVO gets highest mean reward in six of seven settings while keeping diversity and coherence close to Best-of-N.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026π§ AI
The Alignment Illusion in Multimodal Large Language ModelsThis paper identifies an "alignment illusion" in Multimodal Large Language Models: layer-wise visual-text similarity scores (CKA, SVCCA, MIR, leading principal-angle cosine) fail to consistently detect when visual tokens are corrupted with Gaussian noise, despite corruption sharply reducing task accuracy, across 13 MLLMs from 0.5B to 72B parameters spanning five model families. The authors trace this failure to anisotropic MLP down-projections in the shared language-model pathway that pull visual and text tokens toward common output directions (weight-induced alignment), and introduce the principal-angle gap (PA gap) as a metric that tracks task accuracy more reliably than existing scalar alignment scores.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026π§ AI
Compressed Permutation Oracles RevisitedThis paper tightens the soundness bound of the compressed permutation oracle technique (a proof tool for analyzing quantum adversaries against random-permutation/ideal-cipher-based constructions) from O(N^1/12) queries to a tight Ξ©(N^1/2), using a POVM-based construction of the compression isometry. The improved bound yields concrete quantum collision and preimage lower bounds for the sponge construction underlying SHA3 and the Davies-Meyer compression function used in SHA1 and SHA2, and is offered as a general tool for quantum security proofs involving random permutations or ideal ciphers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Sep 2026, published 23 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
HARMONY: Hierarchical Agentic Reasoning for MONocular Image-to-Scene SynthesisHARMONY is a hierarchical chain-of-thought framework for reconstructing full 3D indoor scenes from a single monocular image, combining agentic VLM reasoning for spatial/semantic layout with visual geometry foundation models for point-cloud-based refinement. It calibrates camera pose, infers room layout and object placement order via VLM reasoning, then places objects hierarchically (wall-mounted, free-standing furniture, then decorations) using depth-first traversal and a reflective feedback loop to limit error accumulation. Experiments on synthetic and real images show it outperforms reconstruction baselines and produces more faithful, image-aligned object arrangements than comparisons with GPT-6 Astra.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Sep 2026, published 22 Sep 2026π§ AI
DreamStream: Towards Policy-Oriented Generative Simulation for End-to-End DrivingDreamStream is a generative, closed-loop driving simulator that uses a simulator-grounded autoregressive video model, distilled from a large pretrained video model via traffic-layout guidance, to preserve policy-relevant scene features (layout, dynamic-object temporal consistency) rather than just photorealism. The authors show standard perceptual metrics like FID misrank how well these features are preserved and introduce FDΟ, a multi-representation FrΓ©chet-distance metric computed over scene-context features from public end-to-end driving policies, showing large sim-to-real gap improvements over prior simulators on nuScenes and NAVSIM. They also build Navhard-CL, an interactive adversarial benchmark derived from NAVSIM, exposing failure modes like scorer bias and lack of recovery behavior in driving policies.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Sep 2026, published 22 Sep 2026π§ AI
MIGU: Multimodal Instruction Grounding under Uncertainty for Manipulation PlanningMIGU is a modular framework for multimodal instruction grounding that fuses semantic priors from a vision-language model with a 3D geometric likelihood derived from eye-finger gesture geometry and uncertainty propagation (viewing-direction, depth, hand-direction error). The resulting Bayes-inspired grounding belief drives a behavior planner that either proceeds to manipulation planning or requests clarification, and is evaluated against baselines on a real-world mobile manipulation and tabletop task-and-motion planning benchmark. It matters as an example of explicitly modeling uncertainty across language and gesture modalities to make robot instruction-following more robust.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 21 Sep 2026π§ AI
Environment Alignment and Redundant Record Formation in Imperfect-CNOT Quantum DarwinismThis paper studies redundant record formation in Quantum Darwinism using an imperfect-CNOT model with random Gaussian couplings and pure, noninteracting environment qubits. It identifies a single alignment parameter Ξ governing conditional-state distinguishability without fields, explains nonmonotonic recording behavior via the geometry of conditional branch separation, and shows via exact expressions and numerical simulations (up to 24 environment qubits) how field disorder affects the reliability of environmental records. The work connects local information-acquisition geometry to the fragment sizes needed for robust classical objectivity to emerge from quantum systems.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 17 Sep 2026π§ AI
COMPASS: Ordered Clustered Routing at 100K ScaleCOMPASS is an algorithm for the Ordered Clustered Traveling Salesman Problem (OCTSP), which requires visiting node clusters in a prescribed order β a common large-scale routing scenario. It combines search with learning-accelerated routing across parallel sub-solvers, exploiting cluster structure to reach near-exact solutions in time exponential in cluster size rather than instance size, and unlike typical large-scale routing solvers it works on general (including asymmetric) distance matrices rather than requiring coordinates. The authors demonstrate scaling to 100K synthetic nodes and 28.5K real e-commerce nodes, the largest reported routing solution over asymmetric distances to date.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 17 Sep 2026π§ AI
PANORAMA: Panoptic Grounded Captioning via Mask Proposal SelectionPANORAMA is a vision-language model for panoptic grounded captioning: it generates dense image captions while grounding each referring phrase to pixel-level masks covering both foreground objects and background regions. The authors formulate phrase grounding as selection from a phrase-conditioned pool of mask proposals produced by conditioning a pretrained segmenter on contextualized phrase representations, trained jointly with caption generation. They also introduce PanoCaps, a human-annotated benchmark with near-complete pixel coverage and entity-level image-text alignment, plus a generalized Panoptic Quality (gPQ) metric jointly evaluating text and mask agreement; PANORAMA achieves state-of-the-art grounding on PanoCaps and matches specialized models on several pixel-level grounding tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 16 Sep 2026π§ AI
STUART: Sequence Triage and qUAntification of Read Transcripts for Rapid Ionizing Radiation Exposure AssessmentSTUART is a mapping-free machine learning framework for biological dosimetry that converts raw sequencing reads into k-mer-based numerical feature profiles (NLP-inspired), bypassing traditional alignment-based bioinformatics. Using the FDXR gene as a radiation biomarker, the authors compare Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and XGBoost, reducing a 1024-dimensional feature space by over 98% to as few as 17 signatures while achieving 95-100% F1/balanced accuracy and over 99% specificity on external validation, enabling real-time triage compatible with portable sequencers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 16 Sep 2026π§ AI
Guiding Image-to-3D Generation with Test-Time Partial ObservationsThis paper introduces a training-free framework for incorporating partial geometric observations (e.g. depth or point measurements) at test time into pretrained image-to-3D generative models, without retraining or finetuning. It guides generation via a ray-consistent observation likelihood over the model's occupancy representation, combining surface occupancy and free-space evidence, applied to SAM 3D and its multi-view extension to improve geometric fidelity and visual quality.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 9 Sep 2026π§ AI
Scal3R: Learning Efficient Multi-Relative Pose Query for Scalable Online 3D ReconstructionScal3R reformulates online 3D reconstruction as multi-reference relative pose querying instead of regressing poses against a fixed first-frame anchor, which the authors show causes drift and geometric collapse on long videos. It injects lightweight learnable tokens (~1% of parameters) into a frozen backbone via asymmetric attention to query poses relative to multiple past keyframes, combined with online pose-graph optimization and loop closure to suppress long-range drift. The method converges in 8 hours on a single GPU and cuts average ATE by over 60% on KITTI versus the online baseline, with state-of-the-art results on Virtual KITTI, Sintel, TUM-Dynamic, ScanNet, and 7-Scenes.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 3 Sep 2026π§ AI
Puffin-World: Scaling a Unified Multimodal Model with Native 3D World StatesPuffin-World is a unified multimodal architecture that jointly models physics (gravity/latitude), geometry (depth), and appearance (image) as native 3D world states, using an Omni-Camera representation to support 3D world generation, reconstruction, and physically consistent simulation without external offline modules. The authors also release Puffin-16M, a dataset of 15M vision-language-camera triplets and 1M motion trajectories, along with code and models to support closed-loop world exploration tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 3 Sep 2026π§ AI
A Common Measure of Communication for Speech Brain-Computer InterfacesThis arXiv paper introduces open-vocabulary mutual information (OVMI), an information-theoretic metric for evaluating speech brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that decode neural activity into language. OVMI addresses the field's lack of a common progress measure by scoring decoders against a reference distribution over words a user may want to communicate, rather than only over a system's supported vocabulary, exposing how standard metrics like accuracy and WER can overstate real communicative capability. The authors show that selecting a vocabulary to maximize OVMI yields up to 16.3% relative accuracy improvement across three speech domains.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 2 Sep 2026π§ AI
SolarWM: Open Data and Scalable Training for Long-Horizon Video World ModelsSolarWM is an open foundation for building interactive video world models, providing a reconfigurable multi-source data engine that unifies 1.43 million video clips from 10 datasets into a frame-aligned contract (visual observations, camera geometry, captions, quality metadata, provenance). Using shared camera-conditioning and training interfaces, the authors train four 5B-33B causal models built on Wan2.2, LTX-2.5, and MiniMax-H3 backbones via a three-stage recipe (bidirectional adaptation, teacher-forced autoregressive initialization, distribution matching distillation), enabling real-time interactive rollouts spanning minutes to hours despite training only on 5-second sequences. The project releases data, pipeline, training recipes, weights, and framework code for reproducible world-model research.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 2 Sep 2026π§ AI
AI Security BriefingThis arXiv paper introduces a cost-aware evaluation framework for LLM security agents, comparing models at fixed inference and tool-spend budgets rather than only reporting best-case success rates. It tests offensive agents on Cybench CTF challenges and defensive agents on Splunk BOTS v1 SOC investigation challenges, finding that offensive CTF performance scales well with added test-time compute (open-weight models can approach frontier proprietary ones cost-competitively) while defensive SOC investigation success depends more on disciplined tool use and telemetry navigation than raw reasoning budget.
arxiv.orgpaperPublished and added 18 Jul 2026π‘οΈ Security