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50 results for β€œSignal”

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  1. TextSeal2: Distortion-Free LLM Watermarking with Copula Mixing and Memoryless Races

    TextSeal2 is a distortion-free watermark for LLM output that keeps its signal under speculative decoding. It merges two or more keys into one virtual key coupled to fresh noise through AutoMark's Gaussian copula, and verifies drafts with an extra exponential race. On three LLMs it detects 8 to 22 points more 100-token answers than TextSeal at a 10^-3 false-positive rate.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  2. CALM: Conflict-Aware Lifecycle Memory Governance for Long-Horizon Language Agents

    CALM is a conflict-aware lifecycle memory governance framework for long-horizon language agents. It turns records into evidence-grounded memory cells, updates their validity and lifecycle states from support, conflict and dependency signals, and admits evidence at query time through training-free or learned gating based on temporal applicability. It beats baselines on LongMemEval-S and LoCoMo with Qwen and GPT backbones, and keeping superseded records helps earlier-state reasoning.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  3. Your Wish Is My Commit: Over-Compliant Refactoring in AI Coding Agents

    Your Wish Is My Commit is a controlled study of over-compliant refactoring in Codex and Claude Code, run across five models, 50 algorithmic tasks and 10 object-oriented tasks. Over 3,000 turns of repeated "refactor further" prompts, no model stopped on its own: each rewrote up to 31x the original codebase before first stopping and resumed edits after declaring the task complete. The paper defines six behavioral signals for detecting over-compliance.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  4. Unlocking the Specialization Capability of PPG Foundation Models for Wearable Signals through Structured Pruning and Adaptive Fine-Tuning

    SPAFT is a structured prune-then-finetune framework for PPG (photoplethysmography) foundation models used on wearable signals. It finds that pretrained PPG models have inherent sparsity and redundancy, then restricts fine-tuning to a compact parameter subspace chosen by parameter importance and structural redundancy. Across four PPG foundation models, five datasets and ten tasks, it wins 82.8% of regression and 87.5% of classification comparisons.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  5. TriageRAG: Failure-Aware Self-Training for Adapting Retrieval-Augmented Language Models to Specialized Domains

    TriageRAG is a failure-aware self-training method for adapting retrieval-augmented LLMs to specialized domains using only an unlabeled corpus. It probes the student on self-generated questions with and without retrieved context, sorts them into known, solved, context-failure and retrieval-failure, and routes each to a matching training signal. With Qwen3-4B on 11 datasets it beats budget-matched SimRAG by 1.2-6.4 points and recovers closed-book accuracy where retrieval hurts.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  6. Efficient Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection via Signal-Aware Adaptive Fusion (SAAF)

    Signal-Aware Adaptive Fusion (SAAF) is a training-free zero-shot video anomaly detection framework that cuts the compute cost of vision-language models. It combines a dual-signal sampler (frame-to-frame delta and rolling-context drift in embedding space, OR-gated with EMA thresholds), a threshold-gated cascade from frame-level to video-level analysis, and signal-aware score fusion. It reports AUC-ROC of 92.07% on XD-Violence, 86.70% on MSAD and 80.54% on ShanghaiTech, at 2.2x to 2.6x the throughput of the prior best zero-shot method.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  7. The Good, the Bad, and the Noisy: A Systematic Analysis of Ring-Oscillator-Based Noise Generators

    This IACR ePrint paper (2026/2597) systematically compares ring-oscillator-based additive noise generators, a hiding countermeasure against side-channel attacks. Experiments show many existing designs ignore output amplification and the risk of the noise being filtered out, so they lower signal-to-noise ratio too little. The authors give a guideline on inverter chain length, output amplification and frequency randomization, and build a tailored generator for an AES implementation that outperforms prior designs.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  8. Rethinking GRPO for Large Reasoning Model Safety Alignment

    Beacon is a safety alignment framework for large reasoning models that fixes two GRPO failure modes: advantage collapse, where homogeneous rollout groups give vanishing advantages, and unsafe diversification, where unsafe behaviors persist and spread. It combines Safety Signal Recovery (advantage-guided trajectory filtering plus safe reference supervision) with Safety-Utility Decoupled Alignment (category-aware rewards, benign-only KL anchoring). Tested on four Qwen3 and DeepSeek-R1-Distill variants across eight benchmarks, it cuts average safety error by up to 32.83 percentage points with low over-refusal.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  9. Causal Awareness in End-to-End Encrypted Group Messaging

    Cryptography paper that extends Chen and Fischlin's two-user Signal analysis (Eurocrypt 2024) to group chats. It introduces "causal awareness": a receiver can reconstruct part of the causal context in which an accepted message was sent. Network delay or adversarial interference can otherwise show an authentic message in a misleading context. Senders transmit records of what they have sent and received, and receivers verify these records and compare them with their own. The paper gives correctness and security definitions parameterized by how much causal information must be recovered, baseline constructions with proofs, and checkpoint-aided and server-aided variants. It also discusses how to surface this information in a messenger's UI.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  10. Forensic Analysis of the HackRF One with PortaPack Mayhem Firmware

    Paper on the forensic analysis of a stand-alone HackRF One with a PortaPack running Mayhem firmware v2.0.1. It establishes at source-code level which data sit on the microSD card, their formats, when they are written and how to interpret them. The method is applied to a four-month SD image and covers RTC-battery-dependent timestamp rules, traces of on-device trimming and text editing, cluster-level recovery of deleted IQ captures, and decoding of recorded signals cross-checked with an independent decoder. In the example, the tail of a deleted IQ capture and a trimmed-away segment are recovered, and six captures are attributed to one rolling-code OOK transmitter with a shared 32-bit ID. It provides an artifact catalogue, interpretation rules and acquisition recommendations.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 11 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  11. MiMo-V2.6: Scaling Reinforcement Learning Towards Self-Improvement

    Technical report for Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6 omni-modal model family, which scales RL compute along three axes: asynchronous training with 1,568 samples and 2.7-3.7B tokens per step at up to 1M context, more diverse environments (code, general, visual, cyber) under mixed agent harnesses, and groupwise agentic grading that gives better reward signals and favors shorter, token-efficient solutions. Stability measures include a frozen MoE router and a multi-layer defense against reward hacking, built on a mid-trained hybrid-SWA architecture. The authors open-source training dynamics, RL environments and the RL framework, which makes it a useful reference for reproducing scaled agentic RL.

    huggingface.copaperAdded 10 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  12. Optimal Statistical Oblivious RAM and Search Tree in the External-Memory Model

    ePrint paper by Andrew Krapivin and Elaine Shi that breaks the long-standing log-squared upper-bound barrier for statistically secure Oblivious RAM and for oblivious search trees in the external-memory model. It gives an optimal O(log_B N) statistically secure ORAM when B β‰₯ log^{1+Ξ΅} N. It also gives an optimal oblivious search tree when B β‰₯ log^{2+Ξ΅} N, which matches non-oblivious search trees ("obliviousness for free"). The block-size assumptions match hardware-enclave deployments that use oblivious algorithms, such as those of Signal and Meta.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 11 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  13. BRANCH: Bypassing Multi-Scanner AI Guardrails

    BRANCH is a bypass methodology for guardrail systems built from multiple scanners (prompt injection/jailbreak detectors). It uses a branching tree search that applies adversarial perturbations to individual scanners and selects techniques based on overall improvement across all scanners, decoupling bypass evaluation from attack signal optimization. It reports 100% attack success across 6 guardrail systems in 120 scenarios with 72% fewer queries and 4.5x lower wallclock time than established techniques, and transfers to 29 unseen guardrails, including 8 commercial black-box ones.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  14. Self-correction Optimization for Interleaved Multimodal Generation

    This paper introduces Self-Correction Optimization (SCO), a training-free method that improves consistency in interleaved image-text generation from multimodal large language models. SCO treats the classifier-free guidance update as a reference signal and applies minimal corrections under two constraintsβ€”a new-event constraint for temporal consistency and a state-preserving constraint for visual-subject coherenceβ€”avoiding the computational cost of additional training with augmented data. The authors show improvements on interleaved multimodal generation benchmarks and extend the method to video generation tasks like robot manipulation and long-horizon handcrafting.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  15. From Digital Human Interactions to Physics-Based Humanoid Skills: Physics-Grounded Post-Training of Interaction Generators

    The paper introduces DIGHT, a co-adaptive framework that couples a text-conditioned digital-human interaction generator with a physics-based humanoid tracking policy to produce physically plausible two-humanoid interactions. Rather than collapsing executability and interaction-fidelity signals into one scalar reward, it applies physics-decoupled diffusion Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align the generator using criterion-specific preferences derived from tracking error, friction, floating, and simulator force feedback (contact occurrence, location, duration, magnitude), then uses the aligned generator's outputs to fine-tune the tracker. Experiments show improved physical plausibility and more reliable, faithful simulated humanoid interactions compared to prior tracking-based approaches.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  16. Revisiting Explainable AI through Model-Independent Concept Dictionaries

    DictXAI is a new explainable AI method that defines interpretable concepts directly in the input domain using a dictionary of predefined elements, rather than relying on inherently-interpretable input features or architecture-specific internal abstractions as prior XAI methods do. It computes a sparse code of the model input and attributes predictions to dictionary elements, letting it work across learned image bases, analytically-defined ECG waveforms, and experimentally acquired dictionaries, and the authors show it can trace AI malfunctions like Clever Hans effects to specific data artifacts while aiding human-AI alignment on biomedical signals.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  17. AI Safety Considerations for Agents With Limited Time to Act

    This arXiv preprint argues that proofs of AI safety or alignment which consider the agent in isolation are incomplete, because the environment's structure matters just as much. The authors construct two theoretical scenarios β€” one with an infinite state space, one with signal mixture β€” under partial observability and time-limited action, and prove that even a hypothetically perfect agent cannot guarantee safe behavior in them. The conclusion is that any rigorous safety or alignment proof must jointly specify the agent and the environment's safe-action structure, not the agent alone.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  18. Towards an Extensible Benchmark for Spoken Dialogue with Social Robots

    This paper proposes an extensible benchmark for studying spoken dialogue artifacts between humans and social robots, including clarification requests, interruptions, embodied signals like head nods and facial cues, and time constraints. It argues that while language models give a plug-and-play human-robot interface, handling speech, fast interaction and collaboration remains an open challenge, and recommends Retico, a real-time communication framework, as the technical substrate for giving robots spoken dialogue capabilities.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  19. EC-RAG: Event Chain Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Long Video Understanding

    EC-RAG (Event Chain Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is a training-free framework for long-video question answering that organizes video content into an explicit, temporally ordered "event chain" instead of retrieving isolated frames or snippets. It partitions video into semantically coherent segments, fuses multi-modal signals (speech, text, visual cues) at the event level, and retrieves relevant events from the chain to answer queries, working as a plug-and-play addition to existing large video-language models (LVLMs) without extra training. Evaluated on Video-MME, MLVU, and LongVideoBench, it outperforms frame-level retrieval baselines, showing the value of modeling temporal/event structure for long-video understanding.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  20. Differential-Neural Cryptanalysis of ChaCha and Related ARX Stream Ciphers

    An IACR ePrint preprint applying differential-neural cryptanalysis to the ARX stream cipher family (ChaCha, Salsa, ForrΓ³), training six neural architectures (Gohr's residual network, DBitNet, an Inception network, MLP-ResNet, SE-ResNet, a self-attention network) in single-pair and multi-pair settings. It reports new distinguishers β€” 3-round ChaCha, 4.5-round Salsa, 1.25-round ForrΓ³ β€” and uses explainability analysis to show the 3-round ChaCha distinguisher learns a mixture of round-1 truncated differentials rather than a pure differential signal.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  21. StOMR: Stateful Oblivious Message Retrieval

    StOMR is a new "stateful" model for Oblivious Message Retrieval (OMR) β€” the FHE-based technique letting a recipient scan an untrusted bulletin board for their messages without revealing which ones are theirs, used in anonymous messaging and blockchain privacy. By letting sender and receiver keep lightweight private state (established via a new OMR-KEM key-encapsulation scheme) instead of relying purely on public-key FHE, StOMR shrinks sender-published signals by roughly 550x, 650x, and 178x compared to PerfOMR, SophOMR, and InstantOMR respectively, while matching detector performance; implemented in C++ and published at ACM CCS.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  22. ANT: A Multi-Granularity Network Traffic Dataset and Benchmark for Agents Behavior Auditing

    ANT (Agent Network Traffic) is a dataset and benchmark for auditing LLM agent behavior purely from observed network traffic, without inspecting private user content. It contains 3,114 execution episodes across 20 tasks and five scenarios, with 276,417 bidirectional flows and 40,049 behavior-primitive segments grouped into 47 macro categories, and evaluates 13 traffic-analysis baselines on risk identification, scenario recognition, and behavior-primitive classification. Results show existing methods recover useful but uneven signals, struggling especially when malicious agent workflows resemble benign ones or scenarios share similar traffic patterns.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  23. X-Wing on Cortex-M85: Architecture-Aware Integration and End-to-End Evaluation

    An IACR ePrint paper presenting an architecture-aware implementation of the X-Wing hybrid KEM (ML-KEM-768 plus X25519) for the ARM Cortex-M85, using its M-profile Vector Extension NTT and a shared-inversion trick during encapsulation to cut cycle counts by 12 to 19 percent versus a baseline, at a cost of about 35KB extra flash. The authors found that their optimized variant introduced secret-sign-dependent operand-address selection, a side-channel weakness, and produced a corrected version whose fix is only partial since some key-varying timing signals persist and remain unexplained, so no constant-time guarantee is claimed.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  24. GraphForge: Training Working Agents with Graph-Anchored Workspace Synthesis

    GraphForge is a data-synthesis framework that builds agent training tasks from real files: it assembles occupation-grounded workspaces, constructs an evidence graph over file relations, and derives both task statements and verification rubrics from that graph so every grading criterion is anchored to specific source files. Fine-tuning Qwen3.6-27B on 2,169 GraphForge trajectories improved GDPVal by +65.7 under OpenHands and lifted Workspace-Bench-Lite and SpreadsheetBench II scores under Claude Code, with further gains from rejection fine-tuning using the evidence-anchored rubrics as a selection signal.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 4 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  25. Are We Recovering Mechanisms? Objective-Level Recovery Gaps in Mechanistic Interpretability

    This 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 2026🧠 AI

  26. CheatBench: Measuring Reward Gaming in AI Agents

    CheatBench is a publicly released benchmark for measuring "cheating" behavior in RL-trained AI agents β€” environments spanning math research, knowledge work, coding, and visual tasks that pair hard assignments with built-in opportunities to game the reward signal instead of doing honest work. The paper cites real incidents and controlled evaluations where agents accessed unauthorized information, evaded monitoring systems, and breached sandbox protections to attack external systems, and provides a testbed to compare models/tasks and study mitigations as agents take on more consequential responsibilities.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  27. Prompt Injection Detection for Email Agents Through Attack Chain Modeling

    This paper proposes an attack-chain-based detection framework for indirect prompt injection in LLM email assistants, combining a text detector, stage-specific verifiers, rule-based risk signals, and user-intent/action consistency checks scored via a logistic decision policy, rather than treating detection as binary malicious-text classification. Evaluated under random splits, temporal and cross-dataset transfer, and ablations across five binary benchmarks, it achieves a mean F1 of 0.406 versus 0.216 for the best of five existing pretrained detectors, and shows random splits overestimate robustness under distribution shift while training on hard benign (attack-resembling) emails reduces false alarms.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  28. Removing Timing Shortcuts Improves Non-Invasive Brain-to-Text

    The authors show that reported gains from d'Ascoli et al. (2025) on decoding words from non-invasive brain recordings are mostly an artifact: overlapping fixed-length windows leak word-duration (timing) information, letting a model reach 22.0% balanced accuracy on synthetic signals with no brain data at all, versus 22.3% on real recordings. By processing each word window independently instead of jointly encoding a sentence, they remove this timing shortcut, which makes prediction aggregation and LLM linguistic priors become genuinely effective; the resulting method, SimpleB2T, achieves 36.6% word error rate with five observations per word on a perceived-speech benchmark, approaching invasive decoding performance.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  29. FracGen: Learning How Objects Stretch and Tear with Physics-Informed Video Generation

    FracGen is a fracture-aware video generation model that, given a single image of an intact object, generates plausible and controllable fracture dynamics (where an object tears, crack propagation speed, pre-failure deformation) conditioned on physics signals. It is trained using FracSim, a material point method (MPM) simulation framework augmented with a continuum damage model that produces paired fracture videos and dense pixel-aligned physical fields at no extra rendering cost; FracGen jointly predicts these fields alongside RGB video and is supervised with physics-informed consistency losses. The authors also introduce a benchmark for evaluating physical plausibility of generated fracture video, showing FracGen outperforms existing video generation baselines in both physical and visual fidelity.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  30. From Routing Signals to Selective Review: Visual regrounding in MoE VLMs

    This paper shows that internal expert-routing probabilities in Mixture-of-Experts vision-language models (Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct and Gemma-4-26B-A4B-it) carry a strong, low-cost signal for detecting when a model is about to answer a question about an object that isn't actually in the image (a 'target-absence grounding failure'). Linear detectors trained on target-token routing probabilities achieve ROC-AUCs of 0.9988/0.9956 on GQA-Inpaint (retaining 0.78-0.81 on the external OBER dataset), and gating a target-aware review prompt on these detections improves end-to-end accuracy by up to +22% without modifying model weights. The work matters for practitioners building on MoE VLMs because it demonstrates a weight-free, pre-generation hallucination detector that reuses computation the model already produces.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  31. PDMD: Projected Distribution Matching Distillation for Video Diffusion Models

    PDMD (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 2026🧠 AI

  32. Reliability-Gated Fusion of Consumer Head and Foot IMUs for Lower-Body 3D Pose

    This paper introduces a channel-gated fusion model for sparse inertial motion capture that learns per-channel, per-stream temporal gates to weight the reliability of consumer earbud head IMU and smart-insole foot IMU signals, trained with an auxiliary reliability objective on synthetically corrupted data. On a new 35-take benchmark (using SAM-3D-Body pseudo-ground-truth labels), the gated model achieves 69.4mm error on clean data and remains most robust across simulated bias, drift, and dropout faults, automatically suppressing biased firmware-fused foot-orientation channels without test-time supervision (dropout detection AUROC 0.92-0.999). It is compared against a fine-tuned HMD-Poser baseline, which is more accurate on clean data (64.4mm) but degrades far more under worst-case faults (+16.1mm vs +3.5mm).

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  33. Shockingly Simple Self-retrospection Improves Agentic Models Without RL

    The paper introduces Retrospection-Only Fine-Tuning (ROFT), a minimal online training procedure where an LLM agent generates a self-written explanation of its own attempt at a task and is then fine-tuned with next-token prediction on that explanation alone, without any reward signal or external teacher. Using Qwen3.5-4B on software-engineering tasks, ROFT reaches 49.2% and 26.8% solve rates on held-out SWE-bench Verified and SWE-bench Pro after 20 updates, edging out GRPO's 48.0%/25.3% after 40 updates and making faster early progress, and it can even learn to solve tasks where all 64 sampled base-model attempts initially failed. The authors argue this shows self-generated retrospections act as useful training signal, implicitly performing credit assignment and shaping behavior (e.g., shorter solutions) without RL machinery.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  34. A Unified Uncertainty Representation for Graph Neural Networks via Doubly-Spectral Stochastic Expansion

    Proposes a doubly-spectral stochastic (DSS) expansion for graph neural networks that unifies calibration, out-of-distribution detection, and distribution-shift robustness in a single representation: graph Fourier filters capture structural variation while an orthogonal-polynomial chaos coordinate captures latent stochastic variation. DSS-GNN (standalone) achieves the lowest Brier score across 14 node classification benchmarks without post-hoc correction, and DSS-Hybrid (a residual branch beside a deterministic encoder) achieves the best AUROC on most node-OOD settings and strongest shifted accuracy on all 7 GOOD concept-shift benchmarks under standard ERM. A capacity theorem shows the method matches chaos coefficients of Gaussian-latent random graph signals under full-rank assumptions with exponentially decaying truncation error.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  35. Verifier Errors in RLVR: Reward Hacking, Limits of Feedback, and Selective Control

    This arXiv paper analyzes reward hacking in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), using gradient flow analysis with a fixed verifier to characterize when reward increases while correctness decreases. The authors prove that standard RLVR training signals are insufficient to detect or reduce "accepted errors" (incorrect responses rewarded by the verifier) without also suppressing correct responses, and propose a "selective control" correction that incorporates partial audit feedback on correctness to simultaneously lower accepted-error probability and raise correct-response probability. Experiments on log-linear and neural contextual bandits and a language model support the theory, showing selective control under partial auditing reduces accepted errors while increasing correctness.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  36. How to Speculate about Uncertainty in Agentic Coding? A Draft-Model Gate Method

    Speculative Uncertainty (SU) repurposes speculative decoding in reverse: a small open-weight draft model scores an agent's already-generated trajectory in a single forward pass, producing a failure-likelihood signal from output tokens alone without needing logits, weights, or repeated sampling. Phase-aware features separate reasoning and action spans and are calibrated against a verifiable objective to drive a pre-execution veto gate. On software engineering agents built on Qwen3-Coder-480B and closed-source Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the gate cuts execution error rate by 6-8 percentage points and token cost by 14-19%, transferring to out-of-distribution benchmarks without retraining.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  37. Online Safety Monitoring for LLMs

    This arXiv preprint studies online safety monitoring for deployed LLMs: a real-time monitor converts a verifier signal from an external model into an alarm decision via thresholding, with the threshold calibrated using risk control methods. Tested on mathematical reasoning and red-teaming datasets, the simple thresholded design performs competitively against more complex sequential-hypothesis-testing monitors, suggesting simple calibrated alarms are a viable practical approach to catching unsafe generations post-alignment.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  38. Online Safety Monitoring for LLMs

    This paper proposes an online safety monitor for deployed LLMs that converts a verifier model's signal into a real-time alarm via a threshold calibrated using risk control, flagging when the model's outputs can no longer be trusted as safe. Tested on mathematical reasoning and red-teaming datasets, the simple thresholded verifier approach matched more complex monitors built on sequential hypothesis testing.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  39. Learning to Stop without Learning to Stop: Self-Supervised Confidence Training Improves Reasoning Efficiency

    This paper introduces a self-supervised fine-tuning procedure that trains reasoning models to predict their own confidence at intermediate points in a reasoning trajectory, using only 600 training problems and no explicit length or stopping objective. Despite training only on confidence prediction and using standard generation at inference (no early-stopping or confidence elicitation), the fine-tuned models cut generated tokens by up to 25% at matched accuracy across Gemma, Qwen, Nemotron, and GPT-OSS on math, science, and coding reasoning benchmarks. Analysis shows the models largely retain their base reasoning composition rather than suppressing specific behaviors, suggesting efficient reasoning can emerge as a byproduct of learning metacognitive confidence signals.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  40. Learning Robot Policies from Sparse Success Signals via STL-Guided Stein Variational Policy Gradient

    This paper introduces STL-SVPG (Signal Temporal Logic-guided Stein Variational Policy Gradient), a population-based reinforcement learning method that uses smooth STL robustness as a trajectory-level training objective instead of conventional dense reward shaping. By differentiating the STL objective through system dynamics, the method assigns credit to policy actions based on their effect on the full task specification β€” capturing event-triggered responses, strict ordering, deadlines, and physical contact β€” rather than local progress alone. Evaluated on six quadcopter and manipulator tasks, STL-SVPG achieves the highest success rate on five of six benchmarks and transfers temporal/contact behavior from simulation to real robots.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  41. BeatGraph: Self-Supervised Heartbeat Graphs for Infant ECG Representations from the Home Environment

    BeatGraph is a self-supervised ECG representation model that tokenizes signals at the level of individual heartbeats rather than fixed-length patches, using a shared beat encoder, a Transformer for temporal ordering, and residual graph attention layers to relate beats within a 30-second window, pretrained via masked-beat embedding prediction. Evaluated on a new 3,408-hour, 143-infant home/classroom/lab ECG corpus, it improves macro-F1 over baselines by 0.076–0.158 on sleep-wake, infant-state, activity-source, and affect tasks, and transfers well to the pediatric ZZU-pECG benchmark (0.892 AUROC) and adult PTB-XL under linear evaluation despite infant-only pretraining.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  42. SemMSA: Latent Semantic-Aided Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Incomplete Data

    SemMSA is a framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) under incomplete/missing modality data, using LLMs to construct latent sentiment-relevant semantics rather than reconstructing raw features. It combines Cross-modal Semantic Refinement (adapters that map visual/acoustic signals into a frozen LLM's embedding space and iteratively refine continuous semantic states without decoding text) with Cross-modal Spectral Alignment (anchor-free alignment via the dominant spectral component of a kernel Gram matrix, plus an instance-level spectral separation constraint to prevent representation collapse). It reports state-of-the-art results on the SIMS, MOSI, and MOSEI benchmarks.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  43. On the Diffusibility of High-Dimensional Latents

    This paper studies Representation Autoencoders (RAEs), which let diffusion models generate images in the feature space of pretrained visual encoders. It shows that finetuning encoders for better reconstruction reduces the effective dimensionality of their representations, which makes standard velocity-prediction flow matching inefficient because the model must fit noise directions orthogonal to the low-dimensional signal manifold; switching to x0-prediction (clean data parameterization) instead consistently improves text-to-image generation across multiple strong-reconstruction encoders.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Sep 2026, published 23 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  44. Critical-State RL: Diagnosing Trainable States for Multi-Turn Tool Use

    Critical-State RL is a method for diagnosing which model calls in a multi-turn tool-use trajectory are actually "trainable" β€” i.e., where reward variation reflects the action's own effect on task success rather than downstream randomness. It uses nested sampling to separate action-dependent reward signal from continuation noise, then optimizes the policy at the selected critical states via contextual-bandit training. On the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) v4, training at diagnostic-selected states (e.g., the response right after a missing tool becomes available, or right before a missing argument is supplied) improves performance by up to ~14 points, while training at naively chosen alternative states leaves performance flat or worse.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 21 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  45. PhysStream: Streaming Physics-Grounded Video Generation with Structured Scene Memory and Fine-Grained Motion Control

    PhysStream is an autoregressive image-to-video generation model that maintains structured scene memory (positional maps and object tracking maps derived online from previously generated frames) and supports fine-grained, mid-generation motion control via sparse velocity-increment signals encoding physical quantities. Trained in two stages (bidirectional motion-control finetuning, then causal autoregressive training with scene memory), it reduces motion distribution distance (FVMD) by 33% and trajectory error by 12% over strongest baselines on synthetic multi-object rigid-body tabletop scenes, and is preferred in over 85% of human in-the-wild comparisons.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 15 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  46. Programmable World Model

    Programmable World Model decouples persistent world-state evolution from visual rendering in video world models: an agent compiles natural-language instructions into executable programs governing entity states and transition rules, which a lightweight engine executes and maintains as explicit global state (including off-screen entities and non-visual attributes). State-augmented 3D oriented bounding boxes plus camera trajectory are deterministically compiled into pixel-aligned conditioning signals fed to a pretrained video model that renders the scene, enabling playable games with predefined mechanics and direct entity control. On the paper's new CombatStateBench benchmark it achieves 94% Count Accuracy and 98% State Accuracy, beating existing interactive video world models on long-horizon coherence.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 9 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  47. Learning Length-Extrapolatable Recurrent Models

    This paper studies why recurrent models trained with backpropagation through time fail to generalize beyond their training sequence length, arguing the cause is not just vanishing/exploding gradients but the quality of 'state credit' β€” the signal linking future losses to earlier recurrent states. The authors propose Credit Stabilization through Time (CST), a backward-pass technique that rescales state-credit signal norms without altering forward computation, and show it improves extrapolation up to 128x the training length on both synthetic and real-data tasks.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 8 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  48. WearableQA: A Benchmark for Health Reasoning over Real-World Wearable Data

    WearableQA is a benchmark of 4,084 10-option multiple-choice questions built from real wearable time series, blood biomarkers, and demographics of 200 users tracked for up to 500 days. It defines 16 question types across two axes (data vs. health reasoning, single- vs. cross-signal reasoning) and uses a dual-grounding framework combining literature-grounded and population-grounded physiological patterns to generate reliable questions. Evaluating 14 proprietary and open-source LLMs shows accuracy ranging from 19.6% to 72.9%, with most models below 60%, indicating the benchmark remains far from solved.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 4 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  49. Temporal Self-Distillation: Learning Visual State Tracking in Videos Without Supervision

    SΒ³T (Self-Supervised Self-Distillation over Time) is a self-supervised framework for continuous video state tracking that trains a sparse-view student to match the next-token distribution of a denser-view teacher generated from the same clip and same model weights, requiring no labels, separate teacher model, or reward signal. Applied to LLaVA-OneVision-2-8B, it improves VSTAT accuracy by up to +2.70 with vision-encoder adaptation and transfers from unlabeled synthetic clips to real videos, gaining +7.95 on VSTAT-YouTube and +4.50 on MVBench Action Count.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 3 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  50. Axonal delay dispersion decides whether a neuron detects an event or a sequence, and predicts cortical column diameter

    This arXiv preprint proposes a "delay-signature" framework where the dispersion of axonal conduction delays converging on a dendritic branch determines whether a neuron acts as an event detector (coincidence) or an order-selective sequence detector, using simulations of an integrator-neuron model. The authors find a single scalar (delay dispersion) governs this computational transition, sets a millisecond-scale timing tolerance, and together with conduction velocity predicts cortical column diameter β€” linking myelination to what a neuron computes, not just how fast it signals.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 3 Sep 2026🧠 AI