Large language models generate fluent text that can contain unfaithful claims -- a phenomenon known as hallucination. We present a multi-signal detection pipeline combining fine-tuned DeBERTa-v3 classification, Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout uncertainty quantification, and temperature-scaled calibration for response-level hallucination detection. Evaluated on the HaluEval benchmark, our pipeline achieves F1=0.915 and AUROC=0.977 on general-domain tasks, with per-task F1 scores of 0.97 (QA), 0.96 (Summarization), and 0.82 (Dialogue). MC Dropout inference further improves accuracy to 93.2%. A context ablation study confirms the model performs genuine entailment reasoning rather than exploiting surface patterns, with summarization F1 dropping 24% when knowledge context is removed. Learning curve analysis reveals that 25% of training data captures 77% of full-data performance. Beyond detection, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to a Qwen2.5-0.5B generator, reducing its hallucination rate from 85.5% to 37.7% (55.9% relative reduction) as measured by our detector. Cross-domain evaluation on the SciFact biomedical benchmark shows that general-domain training transfers poorly (F1=0.52), motivating domain-specific fine-tuning. PubMedBERT fine-tuned on SciFact achieves F1=0.63 and AUROC=0.81, demonstrating that domain-matched pre-training is the strongest adaptation strategy. Code and models are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11878
Per-token gating of forward/reverse KL losses has become a standard technique for on-policy knowledge distillation (OPD), but existing methods such as EOPD (Jin et al., 2026) and ToDi (Jung et al., 2025) each fix a single gating signal and a single gating direction, and the two have never been compared directly. We introduce a four-coefficient parameterization lambda_t = sigma(a * h_t + b * u(x) + c + d * gap_t) in which direction-aligned proxies of EOPD and ToDi appear as one-dimensional (1D) restrictions, and which adds multi-channel composition and an explicit bias as further degrees of freedom. On TweetEval (Barbieri et al., 2020) emotion and hate, with a Qwen3-32B teacher and a Qwen3-4B student, configurations in the full family reach higher accuracy than the matched-magnitude single-channel (entropy-only / gap-only) 1D restrictions in 33 of 36 comparable cells, and a 26-cell mean-match isolation experiment places dynamic gating ahead of effective-KL-matched static baselines in 19 of 26 cells. Because cells share training data, models, and parameter substructure, we report both counts as exploratory aggregate directional evidence rather than as independent hypothesis tests. Targeted three-seed paired replications of the nine headline comparisons singled out by that sweep -- including a third task, offensive -- are directionally consistent, but individually smaller than the single-seed estimates and not significant at n=3. We therefore present the parameterization primarily as a shared coordinate system for comparing per-token gating designs in short-output classification OPD.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11768
Artificial neural networks rely on vector-matrix multiplications (VMMs), whose implementation in von Neumann architectures is dominated by costly data movement between memory and processing units. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) mitigate this bottleneck by performing in-memory, analog VMMs using memristive crossbar arrays. However, conventional current-mode readout circuits incur significant area and power overhead. This work proposes a fully analog readout architecture based on voltage-to-time conversion of the VMM output. By sensing the column voltage, the proposed approach avoids current-mode summing and scaling circuitry, improving area and energy efficiency. Post-layout simulations of a 10x1 SNN implemented in a 130 nm CMOS technology validate the proposed architecture, while application to a trained 64x10 SNN for digit classification further demonstrates its feasibility for SNN inference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11713
Early diagnosis of melanoma is critical for improving patient survival rates. However, accurately distinguishing melanoma from other skin lesions remains a significant clinical challenge due to the high visual similarity among lesion types and variability in image acquisition conditions. Artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning, has emerged as a promising tool to support dermatological diagnosis by automating feature extraction from medical images. Among the available approaches, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated strong performance in image classification tasks, making them well-suited for analyzing both dermatoscopic and histopathological images, given their ability to capture hierarchical visual patterns relevant to lesion characterization. Nevertheless, despite numerous pre-trained CNN architectures having been proposed, selecting the most appropriate one for a given imaging modality remains an open challenge. In this study, we evaluate pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for skin lesion classification using dermatoscopic and histopathological image datasets. Experiments were conducted on the HAM10000, ISIC 2018, and CR-AI4SkIN datasets, evaluating the ResNet50, VGG16, VGG19, MobileNet, and InceptionV3 architectures under the same training protocol. The experimental evaluation showed that the models achieved accuracies ranging from 71% (InceptionV3 on ISIC 2018) to 84% (ResNet50 on HAM10000) on dermatoscopic images. For histopathological images, accuracies ranged from 72% (VGG19) to 83% (ResNet50) on the CR-AI4SkIN dataset. The results demonstrate that model performance differs between dermatoscopic and histopathological image modalities, showing that architectures exhibiting similar performance on dermatoscopic images exhibit different performance on histopathological data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11550
Reliable, low-latency perception is crucial for Formula Student Driverless vehicles, yet many existing pipelines rely on deep learning and multi-sensor fusion, often requiring GPU acceleration. This paper presents a lightweight LiDAR-only perception pipeline tailored for CPU execution, combining ground removal, IMU-based motion compensation, DBSCAN clustering, and geometric feature-based Random Forest classification. Feature importance analysis reduced the model input from 12 to 7 features while preserving performance. Evaluated on 2,371 labeled clusters collected from real FSD events, the pipeline achieves an F1-score of 98.33% and an end-to-end runtime of 3.13 ms on CPU-only hardware. The released dataset, labeling tool, and trained models provide a practical and reproducible baseline for other resource-constrained autonomous racing teams.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11527
Segmenting bruises is a challenging task in medical imaging due to limited data and annotations, diffuse boundaries, and highly variable appearance. In this work, we propose BruNet, a segmentation framework that combines a ViT-based visual encoder (a self-supervised DINOv3 or a pretrained LingBot-Vision backbone) with a SAM-based mask decoder. BruNet is trained on the HAM10000 skin lesion dataset and evaluated on a separate bruise dataset without additional fine-tuning. Although a small number of prior studies have explored machine learning and computer vision for bruise analysis, existing work has primarily focused on detection, classification, or colour analysis rather than pixel-level localisation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to address automatic bruise segmentation. Our results show that BruNet outperforms CNN-based models, state-of-the-art segmentation models, ChatGPT-4o/5-assisted SAM2 zero-shot baselines, and the medical-oriented MedSAM model, demonstrating strong cross-domain generalisation to bruise segmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11463
Determining the differences between two speakers' accents is a fundamental task in linguistics and speech technology research. The methodology used to measure these differences depends on the specific research area. A phonetics researcher may demonstrate accent variation by comparing vowel formants in paired recordings of individual words. These results will be interpretable, but the recordings will be time-consuming to collect and may not be representative of connected speech. Accented Text-to-Speech (TTS) research has pushed towards using accent embeddings derived from accent classification tasks. These embeddings can be produced from any speech recording, but are not readily interpretable. In this paper, we demonstrate that articulatory representations created through articulatory inversion can be used as an interpretable basis for accent comparison and that optimal transport provides a framework for accent comparison across arbitrary recording types.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11458
This work investigates a number of approaches to prevent catastrophic forgetting in class incremental learning scenarios for sound event classification tasks. We analyze the problem using architectural and regularization approaches, using FSD50K and AudioSet datasets. We design incremental stages and solutions that selectively protect the kernels of the network from weight updates to prevent catastrophic forgetting, and a dynamic head solution that expands itself each time a new task is learned. The findings show that catastrophic forgetting mainly happens in deeper layers, in particular in the classifier head. For the studied in-domain sound classification problem, the solution that seems to alleviate catastrophic forgetting and is the most efficient is a full freezing of the feature extractor with a fine-tuning of the dynamic head classifier, showing little to no forgetting and great training stability, and a good balance between memory-stability and learning plasticity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11447
Heterogeneous model collaboration seeks to exploit the complementary strengths of different models to balance predictive performance and inference cost. Existing approaches typically rely either on trained routers, which tie routing decisions to a fixed task and model pool, or on raw-confidence cascades, whose thresholds lack consistent reliability semantics across heterogeneous models. Consequently, these approaches adapt poorly to changing model pools and deployment budgets. We propose Calibration-Aware Uncertainty Cascades (CAUC), a simple post-hoc framework that independently calibrates each model's confidence and selects deployment policies using validation data. The resulting calibrated confidence scores establish a common reliability scale for accepting an early prediction, invoking a stronger model, or selectively combining model outputs. This unified decision criterion decouples deployment policies from any particular model pool or operating budget. We further show theoretically that calibration gives confidence thresholds an explicit selective-risk interpretation, whereas uncalibrated scores offer no comparable reliability guarantee. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, across six language benchmarks, CAUC achieves an average relative accuracy improvement of 1.9% over strong-model-only inference while avoiding approximately 47% of strong-model calls. On image classification benchmarks, it maintains or improves predictive performance while reducing measured GFLOPs by up to 57%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11446
Adapting natural-image foundation models like DINOv3 to multi-modal medical imaging is challenging due to the significant domain gap between natural color images and multi-channel medical scans. We present a unified, patch-based framework that processes raw multimodal imaging through training-free registration, automated localization, and mask-filtered patch extraction. This architecture culminates in a hierarchical strategy that aggregates patch-level insights into subject-level diagnostics. Using liver fibrosis staging as a case study, we evaluate four patch-level feature representations: handcrafted Radiomics features, learned ResNet features, pre-trained foundation model SAM-Med2D features, and frozen DINOv3 features. To ensure a controlled comparison, all models utilize the same lightweight MLP head and are evaluated across both rigid and deformable registration settings. Our training protocol focuses on mild fibrosis (S1) and cirrhosis (S4) classes only, enabling a single classifier to address both substantial fibrosis detection and cirrhosis staging. Evaluated via 10 random train (90%)/ test (10%) splits on 360 subjects from the CARE 2025 Liver Track 4 cohort, our DINOv3-based framework significantly outperforms all baselines, achieving the best classification accuracy of 78.4% for S1 and 75.8% for S4.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11380
Automated classification of sewer defects is essential for infrastructure condition assessment and maintenance decision-making, but existing deep learning methods struggle to balance classification accuracy and computational complexity in large-scale multi-label scenarios. This study develops Sewer-Transformer-ML, a hierarchical vision Transformer with multi-level feature fusion, together with two lightweight architectures, Sewer-MobileNet-ML and Sewer-Mobile-TransNet, for resource-constrained inspection scenarios. On the Sewer-ML test set, Sewer-Transformer-ML-Base achieved an $F2_{\text{CIW}}$ of 65.68% and an $F1_{\text{Normal}}$ of 92.68%, ranking first on the public leaderboard and exceeding the second-ranked method by 7.6 percentage points in $F2_{\text{CIW}}$. Sewer-MobileNet-ML achieved an $F2_{\text{CIW}}$ of 65.73% with only 17 M parameters, representing an approximately 95% parameter reduction relative to the base model. Under the standard Sewer-Capsule data split, Sewer-Mobile-TransNet achieved 96.43% classification accuracy. When the training set was reduced to 1,177 images, pretraining on Sewer-ML consistently improved model performance. Ablation experiments further showed that direct concatenation was more effective for Transformer features, whereas attention-based fusion better supported multiscale CNN features. These findings provide a computational basis for automated sewer inspection, lightweight model design, and adaptation across civil infrastructure inspection platforms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11375
Natural Language Inference processes pairs of sentences to extract their semantic relations. NLI has been a hot research topic, integrated as a main component in other NLP applications. Despite significant advancements in textual inference across various languages all around the world, Arabic language still suffers from limited resources in this domain. To address this gap, this paper introduces E-CONAN benchmarks that are composed of sentences pairs from various sources: (1) automatically-translated pairs, (2) human-validated machine-translated pairs, (3) hand-crafted pairs from teaching Arabic as foreign language books, and (4) headlines pairs from different news channels containing rumors. E-CONAN contains two benchmark datasets, E-CONAN-2, a 2-way dataset (RTE) and E-CONAN-3, a 3-way dataset (NLI). Additionally, we have used E-CONAN benchmarks to evaluate 9 state-of-the-art multilingual pretrained models using zero-shot classification. Models were evaluated across the ArNLI, XNLI, and E-CONAN datasets. Results show that E-CONAN is a potentially valuable resource for evaluating model generalization and even for fine-tuning pre-trained models. Its diverse composition, derived from a combination of sources, offers a broader and more robust assessment compared to XNLI and ArNLI. In addition, we have evaluated 5 LLMs on E-CONAN-3 dataset. Moreover, we incorporated MARBERT as a representative Arabic-specific baseline and conducted performance evaluation comparison to demonstrate how Arabic-specific models scale against cross-lingual and LLM-based approaches on the E-CONAN benchmarks. Furthermore, we conducted detailed qualitative and quantitative error analysis to analyze frequent error patterns. E-CONAN benchmarks will be publicly available, we hope that it will enrich research community in Arabic textual entailment and natural language inference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11334
Computational recognition of verbal humour remains a challenging task, requiring an understanding of language, delivery style, emotions, and cultural context. Most existing approaches focus on binary classification and lack datasets that capture psychological dimensions of humour alongside variations in expression. We introduce MultiHuSE, a multimodal dataset comprising 2,407 high-definition videos of 50 demographically diverse actors performing 1,463 text samples across four psychological humour styles (affiliative, aggressive, self-enhancing, and self-deprecating), as well as neutral content. A subset is additionally annotated for underlying emotions. The dataset uniquely captures multiple actor interpretations of the same texts, enabling systematic analysis of expressive diversity. Baseline experiments show that multimodal fusion outperforms unimodal approaches (80.1% vs. 77.4% accuracy) in humour style classification, with particularly strong gains for affiliative humour (66% to 74%). While text provides the strongest individual signal, fusion models deliver meaningful improvements. We hope that MultiHuSE provides empirical support for psychological theories linking humour and emotion, while also opening new avenues for research in human communication, well-being, and AI-driven interaction. The dataset is available for academic use under an End-User Licence Agreement.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11322
Reliable railway operations depend increasingly on real-time environmental intelligence delivered through wireless sensor infrastructures, a capability that 6G networks will substantially enhance through integrated sensing and edge computing. Adverse weather, particularly in Arctic regions with extreme temperatures and heavy precipitation, remains a leading cause of train delays, yet most prediction approaches rely on raw meteorological inputs without exploiting domain-informed feature engineering. This paper investigates machine learning for train delay prediction using the Finland Integrated Train-Weather (FI-TW) dataset, which fuses railway operational records with observations from the Finnish Meteorological Institute's nationwide sensor network of approximately 200 stations communicating over wireless links. We evaluate three feature configurations using XGBoost at Oulu central station (101,146 observations): full weather features, instant weather observations only, and derived weather category scenarios. The category-based approach, employing hierarchical classifications such as Blizzard, Heavy Snow, and Extreme Cold, achieved an R^2 of 0.78, root mean squared error of 8.5 minutes, and mean absolute error of 3.7 minutes, representing an 11% R^2 improvement and 10% error reduction over alternative configurations. These results demonstrate that compact, domain-informed features derived from sensor streams outperform raw meteorological observations, offering bandwidth-efficient representations suitable for edge deployment over current and emerging wireless infrastructures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11277
With the existing digital mental health tools specifically developed for Western settings, Pakistani students are exposed to a uniquely compounded stress situation in their university that includes academic, financial, familial, and relational stressors, which have become a serious concern for academic and psychological development of students in Pakistani universities. This paper introduces a new, AI-driven and culturally sensitive stress detection and wellness support system that is tailored to the context of Pakistani university students. The system is based on a machine learning model called Random Forest which is trained using a validated student stress data set of 1100 responses on 20 features from psychological, physiological, academic, environmental and social aspects, with an accuracy of 89.09% and a macro F1-score of 0.89, in three stress severity levels. The classification outputs are passed on to an open-source large language model through OpenRouter API, where an appropriately crafted system prompt, culturally aware, gives the model a conversation about wellness, in English, Urdu and Roman Urdu. The second most predictive stress factor in this population identified by feature importance analysis was teacher-student relationship, which is a culturally important stress factor highlighting the need for region-aware mental health systems. Future research will involve primary data collection from students at various academic levels of Pakistani Universities with the validated DASS-21 instrument focusing on the students who are moving from FSc to undergraduate studies, which is a time of being psychologically vulnerable which is under-researched.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11199
Simulatability is an evaluation protocol for explanations that quantifies their usefulness by how well they help a user predict a task model's outputs. Since human evaluation is costly, automated simulatability replaces human explainees with LLM simulators, as proposed in ConSim (Poché et al., 2025) for large-scale experiments. We qualitatively replicate and extend ConSim's ranking of explanation methods across the tested datasets, explanation families, and simulator LLMs, and identify two limitations. First, when class names are meaningful, simulators can obtain high simulatability by solving the classification task directly, without relying on the explanations. Second, class anonymization can reward explanations for leaking the hidden label mapping, a limitation we expose with a new classes-as-concepts baseline. These results are consistent with a shortcut hypothesis: in the tested settings, simulator predictions mainly rely on task priors, while explanations produce small changes. We derive recommendations for more robust automated simulatability evaluations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08585
Verification and validation (V&V) of classification models is crucial to enable a wide range of sensor processing applications. Currently, the V&V process relies on time-consuming manual inspection of erroneous samples to find meaningful patterns. This work explores the use of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to speed up this laborious process. VLMs are trained to embed images into a semantically meaningful vector representation, from which human-interpretable systematic errors can be distilled. Deploying such VLM-based methods in a defence context introduces two major challenges: (1) the defence domain is underrepresented in the training data of VLMs, and (2) surroundings and context are less diverse than for other domains. This study provides an initial assessment of the suitability of VLM-based methods for V&V of defence applications. We propose a VLM-based error slice detection (ESD) method that independently groups and labels systematic errors made by a classification model. We demonstrate that this method is able to identify operationally-relevant artificially added perturbations in a non-military dataset. In a military context, our method clusters and describes images based on their surroundings, but also exhibits overlap between cluster descriptions. We further investigate the difference in embedding variation between our military and non-military dataset, which remains a topic of interest. Although the results do not yet warrant fully automated V&V through VLM-based ESD, they show that VLMs could be used to accelerate V&V processes in the future.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11126
Science-inspired vision models show that explicit propagation dynamics can provide structured and interpretable alternatives to conventional token mixing. Existing formulations, however, typically construct and adapt visual propagation within a particular dynamical family, while visual representations can require substantially different spatial interactions across samples, channels, and network stages. We explore cross-regime adaptive propagation and introduce TailProp, a hierarchical vision backbone built upon the Tail Propagation Operator (TPO). TPO uses Gaussian and Cauchy stable-process propagators as complementary bases with rapidly decaying and heavy-tailed spatial influence, and predicts a content-conditioned channel-wise coefficient to adaptively combine them. Because this coefficient is spatially shared, the two responses are fused directly in the DCT domain with a single DCT/IDCT pair, yielding $O(N^{1.5})$ spatial mixing for square feature maps with $N=HW$ and fixed channel width. Across image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, robustness, and cross-backbone restoration, TailProp consistently outperforms matched propagation baselines; TailProp-B reaches 84.4% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, 50.3/44.8 box/mask AP under the 3x Mask R-CNN schedule, and 50.8% mIoU on ADE20K. Controlled ablations further show that these gains are not explained by single-basis propagation, an additional same-family branch, or within-family adaptive order alone, supporting complementary two-basis propagation as an effective design principle for visual representation learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11081
No Free Lunch theorem implies that any performance gains achieved by a classifier on a particular image distribution are necessarily offset by a loss of performance over the set of all possible problems; thus, no single model is universally optimal. Selecting the most suitable classifier for image datasets is a critical yet challenging task due to the intrinsic complexity and diversity of images. This paper proposes a meta-learning framework that leverages a comprehensive set of meta-features capturing dataset complexity to predict classifier performance without exhaustive training. By extracting and selecting features using methods such as autoencoders, pre-trained networks, and dimensionality reduction techniques, we train regression models to efficiently estimate classifier accuracies. Additionally, clustering techniques are employed to group classifiers with similar performance patterns, simplifying the recommendation process. The datasets used span a wide range of concepts, including nature, animals, numbers, motorcycles, medical images, and human bodies, to ensure broad generalization. Evaluated on 56 diverse image datasets, our approach achieves an average ranking prediction accuracy exceeding 86%, demonstrating its effectiveness in guiding model selection. This scalable and interpretable framework provides a practical solution to improve classification performance while reducing computational costs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11041
The fusion of hyperspectral (HS) and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data plays a crucial role in enhancing land-cover classification by jointly exploiting spectral, spatial, and structural cues. However, existing multimodal fusion methods still struggle to model long-range dependencies and complex anisotropic interactions while maintaining computational efficiency. This paper introduces M2Heat, a physics-inspired framework that investigates multimodal fusion through the lens of heat conduction. At its core, a physics-driven visual heat conduction module (vHeat) and enhanced Frequency Value Embeddings (FVEs) simulate anisotropic information flow, enabling the capture of global dependencies with sub-quadratic complexity and physical interpretability. This mechanism, combined with a hybrid spatial-frequency fusion strategy named Cross-Frequency Fusion (CFF) module, produces highly discriminative and robust feature representations. M2Heat achieves competitive overall performance on three benchmarks, i.e., Trento, Houston2013, and Augsburg, while providing an interpretable heat-conduction-guided perspective for multimodal feature fusion. These results indicate the potential of heat-conduction-guided neural operators for efficient and interpretable RS multimodal fusion. The source code is publicly available at https: /github.com/Weikan0425/M2Heat_HSI_LiDAR.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11040