System One models output calibrated probabilities over typed answers such as categorical choices, ordinal levels, or binary outcomes, via a non-generative interface. Software can act on these probabilities through thresholds, cost-weighted choices, and escalation rules. Consequently, if these probabilities are miscalibrated or wording-sensitive, the software ma take unintended actions leaving human operators with no textual rationale to inspect. Current evaluations largely report accuracy and calibration on public classification datasets without a clear reference. We present TypedBench, a benchmark for typed decision models like Jev built from seven policy-labelled generators and nine evaluation suites. We report accuracy as median and range across paraphrases, and calibration error relative to the finite-sample noise floor of a matched, perfectly calibrated predictor. We assess probability quality through selective prediction, ordinal proper scoring rules, and realised cost under asymmetric cost matrices. We evaluate a hosted model, an open encoder, and a family of open decoders spanning 0.8B-9B parameters on identical items. The hosted model follows the stated policy but is wording-sensitive and systematically underconfident; under asymmetric costs, using its probabilities can be worse than taking its top answer. Decoders route exactly and are slow as options or questions are added. The decoder is least accurate on policy questions and degrades with more options. Overall, typed decision models must be evaluated jointly on policy adherence, wording robustness, probability quality, and induced decision outcomes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11392
CLIP serves as a foundational vision-language model and the de facto vision encoder for downstream VLMs such as LLaVA. Post-training offers a lightweight route to refine CLIP, but recent work argues that the standard contrastive loss is unsuitable for post-training due to catastrophic forgetting under small batches, motivating designs that abandon the contrastive objective in favor of distillation. We revisit this premise and find that, for the InfoNCE objective, the reported forgetting is driven primarily not by insufficient negatives but by an inappropriate magnitude of the contrastive temperature $\tau$: with $\tau$ set sufficiently small, contrastive post-training improves rather than degrades the pretrained CLIP, which we explain through the temperature dependence of the InfoNCE gradient. Building on this finding, we propose \textbf{ComCLIP}, a lightweight single-epoch post-training recipe that freezes CLIP's text encoder---so the refined vision encoder is a drop-in replacement with unchanged architecture and inference cost---and trains the vision encoder with a properly-tempered contrastive loss, an MSE anchoring loss against the original CLIP, and a relational distillation loss from DINOv2. Over multiple seeds, ComCLIP matches the self-distillation baseline CLIP-Refine on zero-shot classification while significantly improving the transferability of visual features, measured by linear probing ($48.99$ vs.\ $42.28$ on ViT-B/16), and on ViT-L/14 it also improves MMVP over CLIP-Refine ($24.20$ vs.\ $19.01$); CLIP-Refine remains stronger on image-text retrieval. Used as a drop-in vision encoder for LLaVA-1.5-7B without re-aligning the projector or LLM, ComCLIP yields no net change across $8$ VLM benchmarks, i.e., the refinement does not break downstream compatibility. Code and models are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11374
Pathology vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong visual perception ability, but their robustness in the language domain remains poorly characterized. Existing pathology VLM benchmarks largely rely on canonical closed-set prompts or perturb only generic templates, treating language as a fixed evaluation component rather than a variable axis of model behavior. In clinical practice, however, diagnostic language varies across reports, institutions, and candidate diagnoses. We introduce PathLang, a language-centered and clinically grounded zero-shot benchmark. PathLang holds the underlying slides, ground-truth labels, and image-text evaluation direction fixed while systematically varying only the diagnostic language, so that performance differences reflect how a diagnosis is phrased rather than what is imaged. The language variation follows how pathologists actually rephrase diagnoses (terminology, specificity, and reporting style), and all prompts and candidate pools are validated by six board-certified pathologists. PathLang covers four task families: (1) zero-shot classification with image-text alignment analysis, (2) cross-modal retrieval, (3) paraphrase robustness, including semantic-equivalence paraphrases, length and reporting-style variation, and prompt ensembling, and (4) open-vocabulary diagnosis retrieval over four candidate pools with distinct forms of semantic competition. Across nine VLMs and five public datasets spanning four organs, we find that performance is highly sensitive to clinically equivalent paraphrases, varies substantially across forms of semantic competition, and that image-text alignment quality does not necessarily translate into inter-class separability. We release the prompt corpus, candidate pools, pre-computed text embeddings, and evaluation code at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11329
Different optimizers can fit the same training data while selecting classifiers with substantially different geometries, but whether this difference provably affects population performance remains unclear. We show that row-wise normalization can achieve strictly higher population accuracy than full-batch Adam, a proxy for random-reshuffling Adam, and exact-SVD Muon in high-dimensional multiclass classification. Under an isotropic Gaussian-cloud data model, this advantage arises because row normalization's class-wise Euclidean geometry asymptotically preserves the population decision-boundary directions, whereas Adam's coordinate-wise geometry and Muon's spectral geometry introduce nonvanishing distortions. Beyond isotropy, the advantage persists for full-batch training on class means with independently oriented class-mean and test-noise covariances. It holds for power-law spectra with class-mean exponent below one, even under heavily anisotropic test noise. When both covariances are diagonal and sufficiently close, the advantage over Adam can reverse, while applying the same random rotation to both restores it by changing only their alignment with Adam's coordinate axes. Synthetic and last-layer language-model experiments support the predicted advantage.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11309
Vertical-domain few-shot classification remains challenging for small language models, as limited supervision makes it difficult to acquire domain-specific decision knowledge. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) can improve teacher-guided adaptation by supervising student-generated rollouts, while GRPO-based reinforcement learning can further refine downstream predictions. However, existing KD-to-RL pipelines typically rely on globally fixed transition schedules, ignoring that different samples may require different amounts of teacher-guided acquisition before reward-driven refinement. We propose PIVOT (Perplexity-Informed Transition Optimization), a dynamic transition framework that routes samples between OPD and GRPO according to teacher-evaluated sequence perplexity. PIVOT moves low-perplexity samples to GRPO for reward-driven refinement while keeping high-perplexity samples under OPD for continued domain knowledge acquisition. Experiments on Banking77 and HWU64 show that PIVOT consistently outperforms continued OPD and globally synchronized OPD$\rightarrow$GRPO baselines under the same number of post-warm-up student optimization steps, achieving stronger downstream performance and more stable training dynamics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11167
Fine-grained visual classification requires models to recognize subtle local traits while exposing the visual evidence behind their predictions. Class-specific attention pathways provide a natural basis for interpretable recognition, but their constrained prediction structure limits discriminative capacity and underuses intermediate representations from strong pretrained backbones. To address this problem, we propose CARE, a constrained attention refinement framework for interpretable fine-grained recognition via teacher-student distillation. CARE keeps the final prediction and explanation within a class-specific attention student, while introducing a training-only auxiliary query teacher that reads selected intermediate DINOv2 layers with learnable queries. The teacher fuses multi-level representations and transfers logit-standardized class-discriminative knowledge to the student. To further refine the explanation pathway, we design diversity and sparsity terms to regularize student attention heads, reducing redundancy and encouraging compact trait localization. Experiments on CUB, Oxford-IIIT Pet, Stanford Dogs, and Stanford Cars show that CARE achieves strong classification performance under an interpretable frozen-backbone setting, reaching 78.5% Top-1 accuracy on CUB. Faithfulness analysis with insertion and deletion metrics further indicates that the top-ranked attention regions retain class-relevant evidence for explanation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11153
Dynamic convolution enhances convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by adapting kernels to input content, but it expresses the effective kernel as a linear mixture of a small number of basis kernels, which limits expressivity and complicates optimization as the mixture size grows. In this work, we revisit dynamic convolution from a functional perspective and propose the Meta Convolution Layer (MCL), which directly models the convolutional kernel as an input-conditioned function W(x) realized via a high-order polynomial expansion. Leveraging nested residual blocks inspired by deep polynomial networks, MCL implements a structured polynomial meta-network that generates a single input-adaptive kernel, thereby decoupling representational power from the explicit number of mixture kernels and alleviating training instability. MCL is a plug-in addition with standard convolutions and can be seamlessly integrated into both CNN and transformer backbones. Experimental evaluation shows that adding MCL improves the Top-1 accuracy of Resnet- 18, Resnet-50 and ResNet-101 by 6.61%, 3.42% and 3.05% on the ImageNet dataset. Moreover, the proposed method significantly boosts the accuracy of Resnet and Wide-Resnet variants on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets. Additionally, the proposed method outperforms previous methods on fine-grained visual classification tasks using Swin and ViT backbones. These results demonstrate that high-order polynomial kernel generation is a powerful and scalable alternative to linear mixture based dynamic convolution.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11117
Purpose: Cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Deep learning has shown promising performance in medical image classification. The influence of image preprocessing algorithms on classification performance remains insufficiently investigated in the literature. This research aims to evaluate the impact of image preprocessing algorithms on the performance of CNNs for Pap smear image classification. Methods: Three CNN architectures (ResNet-34, MobileNet-V2, and DenseNet-121) were trained and evaluated using the SIPaKMeD dataset. Two preprocessing algorithms were applied: the PMD filter for noise reduction and CLAHE for contrast enhancement. The model performance was assessed using a confusion matrix. Results: Preprocessing improved the classification performance of all models. CLAHE significantly increased the accuracy of ResNet-34 from 76.73% to 84.16% and DenseNet-121 from 76.73% to 84.16%. The PMD filter yielded limited improvement and slightly reduced the MobileNet-V2 performance. Novelty: This research provides a systematic comparison of contrast enhancement and noise reduction techniques across CNN architectures. This research demonstrates that contrast enhancement is more effective than noise reduction in improving CNN performance. The research provides new pipelines for improving cervical cancer classification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11086
Prompt learning is a popular method for adapting foundation models, but learned prompts are typically task-specific and fail to generalize to new classes, domains, or compositions of tasks. In this paper, we introduce a Diffusion Meta-Prompt (DMP) model , a framework that models the distribution of learned prompts using diffusion models. Given a repository of previously learned prompts, DMP is trained and sampled without access to the original task examples or task losses, and synthesizes new prompts conditioned on natural language task descriptions. To improve the sampling stability, we introduce a test-time steering strategy for DMP, which uses the best training-selected prompt in the repository as a latent anchor during diffusion sampling, without retraining the DMP or accessing test classes. DMP improves generalization across classification, retrieval and text-to-image generation tasks, supports concept composition and negative prompting without explicit training. It reduces storage and inference costs by over 90% compared to prompt retrieval methods. For composite classification, DMP achieves upto 2.0% average gain over prior meta-learning methods across 55 pairs of datasets with gains as high as 8.5% on specific pairs such as Eurosat and Flowers. DMP also enhances cross-task generalization with ~2-9% improvement for hierarchical classification task. We further provide a theoretical guarantee bounding the expected task loss of prompts sampled from a DMP. Code is available: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11067
Multimodal classification processes and relates information from multiple modalities to achieve more accurate predictions. However, existing methods typically rely on high-quality ground-truth labels, which are difficult to obtain in real-world scenarios. While sample-selection methods for learning with noisy labels aim to identify correctly labeled examples from noisy data, traditional methods primarily focus on unimodal settings and fail to exploit multimodal information fully. This motivates us to build a more reliable noise detector in multimodal learning. To this end, we theoretically analyze the relationship between representation structure and noise detection capability. Based on this analysis, we propose REFINE, which is a multimodal label-noise detection framework that jointly uses fused and unimodal representations for label-noise detection. Specifically, REFINE constructs discriminative eigenvectors through discriminative analysis of the target and background classes and selects trusted representation spaces with better noise detection capability for each class. Within each trusted space, REFINE measures the alignment between each instance representation and the discriminative eigenvectors. It then combines the subsets selected from these spaces. The combined set provides cleaner supervision for updating the multimodal classifier, thereby reducing the influence of mislabeled examples during training and improving model generalization. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate REFINE's superiority compared to baseline methods. The source code will be publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11057
AI systems increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) as core reasoning engines, making them targets for prompt injection and jailbreaks. Guardrails monitor and validate model inputs and outputs, yet their isolated, task-focused detection leaves gaps in their classification making them susceptible to bypasses. In response, guardrail systems formed by multiple scanners have emerged that collaboratively detect different types of malicious instructions, whereby shared latent representations across classification boundaries render established bypassing techniques ineffective. We propose BRANCH, a bypassing methodology designed for multi-scanner guardrail systems. Our method leverages a branching tree search approach that dynamically applies adversarial perturbation against individual scanners, with subsequent perturbation optimization and technique selection based on overall improvement across all guardrail system scanners, effectively decoupling bypass evaluation from attack signal optimization. Our findings demonstrate that BRANCH achieves 100% attack success rate across 6 guardrail systems in 120 scenarios with 72% fewer queries and 4.5x reduced wallclock time compared to established techniques, while preserving semantic meaning within the bypass. We also show how bypasses generated by BRANCH transfer to 29 unseen guardrails, including 8 commercial black-box guardrails, improving attack success in some cases up to 100% with no additional optimization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10742
Bioacoustics and ethology encompass a wide range of audio understanding tasks, many of which stand to benefit from recent advances in large audio-language models. However, progress in the field has so far been assessed on a narrow set of tasks, primarily centered on label-centric biological category recognition, such as species and call-type classification. In this work, we introduce BEANS-Next, a benchmark grounded in a taxonomy of bioacoustics tasks spanning acoustic perception, biological category recognition, scene understanding, and in-context learning. Using BEANS-Next, we show that existing models exhibit limited performance beyond the task families emphasized by existing evaluations, constraining their usefulness for broader bioacoustic applications. To support progress on this broader task space, we also introduce ROOTS, a large-scale training resource built from expanded curated real-world data and previously underused behavioral and acoustic metadata, supplemented by audio-derived information and scalable synthetic generation where labeling is insufficient. We demonstrate that training on this dataset yields substantial progress across all task groups of BEANS-Next, moving audio-language models closer to their potential as general-purpose assistants for bioacoustics and ethology. To accelerate progress in the field, we open-source our benchmark, dataset, and data pipelines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10663
Procrustes-Wasserstein alignment jointly estimates a matching and rotation without supplied correspondences, but alternating minimization can stop at suboptimal solutions. Rubix solves the equally weighted planar problem globally under squared Euclidean loss. Each matching $\sigma$ of two centered $n$-point sets defines a complex correlation $z_\sigma=\sum_i\bar x_i y_{\sigma(i)}$. Their convex hull is the permutation polygon: supporting vertices give optimal matchings at fixed rotations, and the farthest vertex gives the global alignment. We prove the sharp bound of $n(n-1)$ vertices for $n\ge2$, answering Rote's rotation-assignment open problem. In exact arithmetic, assignment queries recover the polygon in $\mathcal O(n^5)$ operations. Assignment-based bounds extend the approach to three-dimensional rotations and partial matching at a supplied translation through branch-and-bound. On timed MPEG-7 shape pairs, Rubix attains every numerical reference value in 12 ms on average, 50 times faster than a rotation grid at the same accuracy. Its distances improve gravity-aligned matching of real 3D scans, shape retrieval and noisy crystal classification over alternating minimization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10408
Echocardiography is the most widely used cardiac imaging modality, yet interpretation demands integrating visual evidence across global anatomy, localized structures and dynamic cardiac motion. Machine-learning models have automated individual tasks, but they are typically built for a single purpose and depend on expensively labeled datasets - a barrier particularly acute in pediatric care, where data are scarce and anatomy changes with age. Here we present EchoDino, a self-supervised foundation model for echocardiography, created by adapting the DINOv3 framework to 3.7 million frames from 1.7 million unlabeled pediatric echocardiography videos. With its encoder frozen, EchoDino produces representations that capture global context, local anatomy, and dense spatial detail. We introduce Motion-biased Entropy Maximization Sampling (MEMS) to select the most informative frames for video-level analysis. Across nine pediatric and adult datasets, EchoDino outperformed strong baseline models, raising view-classification accuracy from 0.609 to 0.889 and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for structural-heart-disease detection from 0.811 to 0.872, while also cutting age-estimation error from 3.857 to 1.389 years, achieving the best segmentation accuracy and lowering ejection-fraction errors. By generalizing from label-free pediatric data to adult echocardiography, EchoDino offers a versatile foundation for cardiac image analysis across the lifespan.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05603
Social media is a rich source of real-time public sentiment, but widely used sentiment analysis tools are often applied without understanding their limitations. In this study, we evaluate the inter-rater reliability of three bespoke sentiment analysis tools (TextBlob, VADER, and Twitter-roBERTa-base) and three large language models (LLMs: Qwen3-32B, GPT-OSS-120B, Llama-4-Maverick-17B) against six human raters across 100 tweets. We measured agreement using two statistical measures: Cohen's kappa for pairwise comparisons and Fleiss' kappa for multiple raters. Even among the human raters, our results showed only fair agreement, highlighting the subjectivity of sentiment analysis. Higher agreement was observed under the binary sentiment classification (negative vs. non-negative and positive vs. non-positive) than under the three-class classification across both humans and automated tools. The Twitter-roBERTa-base model showed the strongest alignment with human ratings, outperforming both bespoke sentiment tools and LLMs, particularly in distinguishing negative versus non-negative sentiment. LLMs showed substantial agreement among themselves and moderate to substantial alignment with humans, performing better in positive vs. non-positive classifications. Our findings underscore that domain-specific fine-tuning remains crucial for reliable social media sentiment analysis, and human-centered evaluation remains essential for establishing gold-standard labels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10318
While Large Language Models (LLMs) possess rich world knowledge and impressive generalization capabilities, their direct application to tabular data classification is hindered by high inference costs and limited interpretability. In contrast, decision trees are fast and transparent but often underperform in low-data regimes. In this work, we propose a novel framework that bridges these paradigms by distilling LLM knowledge into interpretable decision trees under a few-shot learning setting. Instead of directly prompting the LLM to generate full trees, which is often unstable and inefficient, we develop a three-stage paradigm that prompts the LLM to generate rules and organize the rules into a tree. Experiments on multiple real-world tabular datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy and interpretability with significantly lower prompting overhead compared to existing baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10227
Whole slide image (WSI) analysis in computational pathology follows a multiple instance learning (MIL) pipeline where patch embeddings are extracted independently and aggregated for slide-level prediction, but within-slide variance from staining, scanner, and local texture can overwhelm the discriminative signal. We propose Masked Feature Encoding for Multiple Instance Learning (MFE-MIL), a feature-space masking framework that trains a lightweight MLP adapter jointly with a window-based masked reconstruction branch and a MIL classification head. The two objectives are complementary. Classification guides the adapter to suppress within-slide patch variance, while window-based masked reconstruction provides an auxiliary regularizer for the adapted features without using patch coordinates, coordinate graphs, or segmentation preprocessing. The raster patch-extraction order is used only as a weak implicit prior. At inference, the decoder is removed, leaving only the adapter and MIL head. Across CAMELYON16/17, PANDA, and TCGA-BRCA with four diverse encoders, MFE-MIL improves ACC/F1 for nearly all tested aggregator-encoder settings and AUC in most, outperforms coordinate-based spatial methods (CAMIL), and achieves higher AUC than 2DMamba on three of four datasets (UNI). On five TCGA survival cohorts it improves the average concordance index for every aggregator tested, its most consistent gain. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10225
This paper studies the construction of an explanatory space for a weighted naive Bayes classifier from the supervised representation induced by the model. We start from the classical supervised distance based on conditional log-likelihoods and introduce a discriminative reformulation based on log-odds, which is more directly related to the classification decision. We then show that this representation induces a distance that exactly coincides with the $\ell_1$ distance between vectors of analytical Shapley values, thereby providing a formal explanatory interpretation of the geometry induced by the model. Finally, we empirically compare several supervised distances derived from these representations using a $k$-nearest neighbors classifier. This work highlights a close link between supervised distance, local explanation, and predictive behavior, from a primarily methodological perspective.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10642
Applying pre-trained language models to new domains through full fine-tuning is computationally expensive and prone to catastrophic forgetting. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel parameter-efficient strategy for unsupervised domain adaptation that combines a custom PEFT architecture with mixed-objective training. The proposed method integrates invertible adapters with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and jointly optimizes classification on labeled source-domain data and masked language modeling on unlabeled target-domain data. This joint training scheme supports task adaptation while preserving knowledge of the target domain. We evaluate the method on the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference (MNLI) dataset across 20 domain shifts. Our approach achieves average performance improvements of 1.41 percentage points over the parameter-efficient state-of-the-art UDapter, 1.26 percentage points over the fully tuned DANN baseline, and 0.86 percentage points over DSN, while updating only 7% of the model parameters. These findings establish a new state-of-the-art result for parameter-efficient unsupervised domain adaptation and demonstrate that carefully designed PEFT combinations with concurrent optimization can outperform both parameter-efficient and conventional fully tuned approaches.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22272
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance across a wide range of downstream vision tasks, thanks to the complementary information contained in the respective domains. Despite the performance gains, most of these approaches rely on aligning these domains using the cosine similarity metric, which fails to capture token-level structure and cross-modal interactions prior to the classification stage. This is especially critical in biomedical applications under federated constraints, where data sharing is restricted, labeled data is scarce at each site, and it differs widely across institutions, leading to substantial statistical heterogeneity. To overcome this issue, we propose FedSSMCoOp, a federated few-shot image classification framework that enables multimodal learning while preserving data privacy. With the help of the SSM-based Vision Mamba and Cross Mamba blocks, and by optimizing only the soft-prompt and communication-prompt updates in the federated setting, the framework prioritizes both computation and performance. Importantly, this eliminates the need to use an external Large Language Model (LLM) for feature alignment. The framework is further trained and evaluated on various biomedical image datasets, and its performance is assessed. The proposed framework delivers stable performance relative to the baselines and is, on average, 1.96 times lighter. The corresponding script will be made available soon.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09907