Detection
-
The Wisdom of Artificial Deliberative Crowds
2026-09-18 19:01:43Federico Barrera-Lemarchand, Mariano Sigman, Joaquin NavajasAbstract
The aggregation of many lay estimates often outperforms individual expert judgment, a phenomenon known as the wisdom of crowds. While this is usually attributed to the independence of estimates, an even stronger effect arises through deliberation: averaging the consensus estimates of small deliberating groups outperforms the classical wisdom of crowds, with individual judgments themselves also becoming more accurate after deliberation. Whether these improvements transfer to large language models deliberating amongst themselves is unknown. Here we adapt a three-stage deliberation paradigm previously used with human participants for use with large language models from three different families, and test it across four domains of increasing real-world stakes: visual numerical estimation (Study 1), peer review of machine-learning papers (Study 2), detection of hidden malicious behavior by an artificial intelligence agent (Study 3), and sports forecasting against a real prediction market (Study 4). Across domains, deliberation reduced collective error beyond passive aggregation of independent responses, and post-deliberation individual judgments retained this collective gain. Notably, the advantage required model diversity: groups composed of clones of a single model did not benefit from deliberating. These results establish machine deliberation as a general-purpose aggregation mechanism, and point to diversity as an active ingredient.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22497
PDF
-
Layered e-skin for Shear Sensing
2026-09-18 18:59:35Qingzheng Cong, Alexis W. M. Devillard, Abu Bakar Dawood, Xinxin Zhang, Wen Fan, Neri Niccol\`o Dei, Cem Suulker, Kaspar Althoefer, Etienne Burdet, Dandan ZhangAbstract
This paper presents a stacked two-layer force-sensing resistor (FSR) array designed for robotic fingertips that combines high-resolution pressure mapping with shear-force estimation. A compliant lattice elastomer spacer converts shear loading into a measurable inter-layer displacement, producing relative center-of-pressure (CoP) shifts between layers. A physics-based moment balance links inter-layer CoP displacement to shear force, while an end-to-end CNN--GRU model captures nonlinear effects from load-dependent compression and contact redistribution. This model, with both layers as input, achieves coefficients of determination $R^2 = 0.914$ for $F_x$ and $R^2 = 0.944$ for $F_y$, consistently outperforming single-layer baselines for shear-force estimation. Robotic manipulation experiments show that, for contact-motion tracking, the deep layer tracks the translation and rotation imposed by the robot arm, whereas the superficial layer tracks the slip at the contact surface. Transient changes in the difference between the total pressure responses of the two layers provide the best slip-event detection performance among the tested cues. These results demonstrate that two-layer FSR arrays can provide three-axis force estimation, contact-motion tracking, and slip-event detection beyond conventional normal-force sensing.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22493
PDF
-
Spatiotemporal Flux Probing for Single-Photon Videography
2026-09-18 18:42:48Jerry Yan, Matteo Forlivesi, Bowen Tan, Andrew Xie, Siddharth Somasundaram, Sotiris NousiasAbstract
We address the problem of recovering high-speed videos from dynamic scenes under extreme photon sparsity. Existing methods rely on aggregating photon detections in local spatiotemporal windows to improve signal-to-noise ratio; however, this local grouping discards global structure and fails in low-light regimes where photon detections are sparse in space and time. In this work, we show that the information needed to recover both motion and illumination is encoded in correlations over the full space-time pattern of photon arrivals. Building on this insight, we develop a spatiotemporal flux probing theory and an algorithm that estimates the Fourier coefficients of the underlying intensity directly from the photon stream. We demonstrate that our approach (1) recovers fast motion and temporal illumination dynamics with substantially fewer photons than prior methods, (2) enables velocity-selective videography that automatically refocuses video onto specific detected motions, and (3) generalizes across sensing modalities including single-photon, event, and spike cameras.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22479
PDF
-
Neutrosophic Ensemble Classification for Uncertainty-Aware Bearing Fault Detection: Evidence from Laboratory and Variable-Speed Industrial Benchmarks
2026-09-18 18:24:20Maikel Leyva-Vazquez, Dayron Rumbaut Rangel, Lorenzo Cevallos-Torres, Alexis Matheu PerezAbstract
Machine learning classifiers for bearing fault detection produce scalar confidence scores that conflate confident errors with genuinely ambiguous predictions, and the conventional truth/falsity pair (F = 1 - T) is algebraically redundant by construction. We operationalize a refined neutrosophic decomposition of a Random Forest + XGBoost + Logistic Regression ensemble into four indicators -- T-hat (top-class evidence), F-hat (best-competitor evidence), predictive entropy I1-hat, and decision disagreement I2-hat -- evaluated on two bearing benchmarks (CWRU and JNU, 600-1000 rpm) under a leave-one-condition-out protocol. On CWRU, after correcting a file-to-class mapping error, the ensemble reaches 100.00 percent accuracy on three of four held-out loads (92.27 percent on the fourth), leaving too few errors for uncertainty analysis. On JNU, holding out 1000 rpm, accuracy collapses to 40.64 percent, below a majority-class baseline; Logistic Regression (57.91 percent) generalizes far better than the tree ensembles. I1-hat shows a robust association with error beyond T-hat/F-hat, while I2-hat contributes little; standalone Logistic Regression confidence outperforms the full decomposition, a boundary condition we report honestly. Two further results extend this: fusing a time-domain and a frequency-domain model of the same signal and scoring their Jensen-Shannon divergence beats that model own entropy (AURC 0.29 vs. 0.36 on the standard split; 0.54 vs. 0.73 under a harder single-condition reproduction), the only indicator moving correctly under a CWRU-versus-JNU distributional-shift contrast; and, on CWRU alone, literature-verified bearing fault frequencies, correctly demodulated via the envelope spectrum, separate most fault classes almost perfectly (99.57 percent) using three interpretable features. Code, logs, and figures are released for independent verification.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06880
PDF
-
Traffic Sign Recognition for Autonomous Driving Using Branched YOLOv2 and Geometric Features
2026-09-18 17:52:00Arefeh RezaeiAbstract
Traffic sign recognition (TSR) is an important perception task for autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems, where a system must both localize traffic signs and determine their semantic classes efficiently. This work presents a TSR system based on YOLOv2 for simultaneous detection and classification. Two complementary modifications are studied. First, YOLOv2 is extended with intermediate prediction layers, forming a branched architecture that can terminate inference early for easy cases and reduce computation time. Both whole-image and cell-wise branching strategies are investigated. Second, geometric information is introduced to reduce classification errors between visually similar signs. An unsupervised Bayesian image-segmentation method produces binary representations that are compared with class-specific geometric templates inside YOLOv2 bounding boxes. This information is used either during inference or as an additional signal during training. A dedicated dataset is constructed by combining GTSDB and GTSRB samples using seamless cloning and controlled image transformations. Experiments cover ten traffic-sign classes, with 3,000 training and 300 test samples. The selected branched architecture reports 0.647 s runtime and 0.680 mAP, compared with 0.6607 s and 0.680 mAP for baseline YOLOv2. Geometric verification during inference increases mAP to 0.713, while the geometric-feature training variant achieves 0.697 mAP with a reported runtime of 0.6608 s.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22060
PDF
-
A Lie Detector Test for Language Models: Reading Knowledge a Model Won't Reveal
2026-09-18 16:57:00Hiskias DingetoAbstract
Large language models can hold knowledge they do not report. A model may sandbag on a capability evaluation, or answer against what it internally knows, and its outputs alone cannot tell whether it is hiding an answer or simply does not have one. We borrow the Concealed Information Test, a forensic method that identifies guilty knowledge by presenting a suspect with the true detail among plausible decoys and measuring a stronger response to the item they recognize. Our method, Probe of Internal Recognition (PIR), does the same inside a model. It presents a question with its candidate answers and reads, from the model's internal states, which candidate the model recognizes as correct. PIR is reference-free, needing no honest reference model and no labeled truth corpus. Across eight models from five families (Gemma, Qwen, Llama, Mistral, and Phi), PIR recovers the recognized answer at 0.70 to 0.87 balanced accuracy, well above the 0.28 to 0.40 unknown-item baseline and the 0.25 chance rate. It stays readable across every form of concealment we test, from prompted deception and trained sandbagging to external password-locked and circuit-broken checkpoints, with recognition between 0.85 and 0.93. When the model hides a known answer, recognition stays high. When unlearning removes the knowledge, recognition drops to the level of a question the model never knew. PIR therefore separates a model that will not answer from one that cannot, which supports sandbagging audits and unlearning verification. The signal is causal, adds information beyond black-box behavioral cues, and extends from multiple-choice questions to free-form generation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21996
PDF
-
Detecting Pretraining Data in Large Language Models from a Free-Energy Perspective
2026-09-18 15:16:51Chenye Ke, Zirui Liu, Qi Liu, Yan Zhuang, Jintao Zhang, Zhenya Huang, Shijin WangAbstract
Detecting pretraining data in large language models is challenging because high likelihood can reflect either training exposure or strong generalization. In the joint space of prediction loss and predictive entropy, a likelihood-only detector uses a horizontal boundary and can mistake predictable non-members for members. Motivated by this, we introduce an inclined boundary that evaluates prediction loss relative to predictive entropy. Our analysis shows that entropy correction can preserve the expected membership signal while reducing its variance, thereby improving standardized member--non-member separation. We further extend the mean--variance analysis to the more general setting with a nonzero mean entropy gap. Interestingly, this entropy-adjusted score admits a Helmholtz free-energy interpretation, leading to Energy Transfer Detection (ETD), which views pretraining data detection from a macroscopic residual free-energy transfer perspective. Extensive experiments show that ETD achieves the best average detection performance, improving average AUROC by up to 3.5\% and TPR@5\%FPR by up to 5.1\%, while remaining robust across diverse settings.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21888
PDF
-
Catena: A Comprehensive Software Suite for Large-Scale Connectomics
2026-09-18 15:16:37Samia Mohinta, Pedro G\'omez-G\'alvez, Shi Yan Lee, Daniel Franco-Barranco, Michael Clayton, Stephan Preibisch, Jan Funke, Albert CardonaAbstract
The gold standard datasets for mapping connectomes are electron microscopy volumes of densely labeled neural tissue at nanometer resolution. Yet reconstructing and proofreading neuronal arbors and annotating all synapses requires pipelining multiple software tools that are often fragmented, inconsistently maintained, or proprietary, hindering reproducibility and automation. Here, we introduce Catena, an open-source, comprehensive, developer-centric software suite for connectomics that integrates modules for 3D neuron and organelle segmentation, synapse detection, microtubule tracking, and neurotransmitter inference. Catena organizes its modules in composable, chunk-wise processing pipelines in a completely documented, extensible, and adaptable design. We further reduce compute and ground-truth data requirements with pretrained machine learning models, facilitating fine-tuning. Catena ships fully containerized modules that encapsulate evolving dependencies for consistent execution across workstations and clusters. By consolidating open components, shareable models, and containerized runtimes, Catena delivers a reproducible and scalable approach to mapping cellular connectomes from electron microscopy volumes. Code and documentation: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21887
PDF
-
VIRGA: Virtual-Agent-Intermediated Riemannian Geometry for Active-Sensing Air-Ground Coordination
2026-09-18 15:13:19Fenghe Guo, Runjie Shen, Chenyang Sun, Junrui ZhangAbstract
Air-ground autonomy becomes harder when the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) must remain observable by a gimbal light detection and ranging (LiDAR) mounted on the unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The platforms must avoid dynamic obstacles while coordinating heterogeneous motion, limited sensing, and changing task initiative within one closed loop. This paper presents VIRGA, a neural geometric coordination framework that turns dual-LiDAR observations into bounded source-specific Riemannian fields and couples them through a virtual agent with reciprocal elastic feedback. Platform-aware execution maps convert the shared coordination reference into feasible UAV, UGV, and gimbal commands while enforcing active-observation safeguards. Evaluation against three complementary baselines reveals distinct limitations. An adapted Ray-RMP controller provides the fastest Riemannian response but produces insufficient clearance in the coupled air-ground task. A dense analytical Riemannian field improves geometric avoidance, yet its high evaluation cost prevents stable field-of-view maintenance. An adapted ColAG controller achieves the lowest latency but still incurs safety and observability violations. VIRGA completes all paired warehouse conditions safely, while a long-range cave stress test without retraining demonstrates sustained coordination in irregular and confined geometry. Ablations confirm contributions from online geometric evaluation, virtual-agent mediation, and reciprocal feedback.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21883
PDF
-
TrialAtlas: Multi-Agent Research Organization for Clinical Trial Design and Optimization
2026-09-18 14:53:34Jiacheng Lin, Zifeng Wang, Zheng Chen, Erick Scott, Ziwei Yang, Fanyang Yu, Sheng Zhong, Jimeng SunAbstract
Nearly 90% of drugs entering clinical development ultimately fail, despite billions of dollars in investment. Pharmaceutical companies therefore rely on clinical development planning (CDP) and probability of technical and regulatory success assessment to anticipate development risks, yet these decisions remain labor-intensive and subjective, requiring experts across clinical science, statistics, regulatory affairs, and competitive intelligence to jointly acquire, synthesize, and reason over heterogeneous evidence. Here, we introduce TrialAtlas, a memory-augmented multi-agent research organization for CDP that mirrors this collaborative process by coordinating specialized agents for literature synthesis, competitive trial intelligence, regulatory precedent analysis, and integrated reasoning over trial design and development risk. TrialAtlas further learns from historical clinical trials and regulatory outcomes, including prior New Drug Applications (NDAs), to ground its decisions in accumulated development experience. To evaluate these capabilities in an authentic regulatory setting, we introduce TrialAtlasBench, constructed from 291 FDA Complete Response Letters and spanning three practical tasks: detecting trial design deficiencies, recommending actionable design improvements, and predicting technical and regulatory success. TrialAtlas achieves an F1 score of 50.0% for deficiency detection, outperforming the strongest baseline by 6.1 points, and reaches 85.3% balanced accuracy and 84.7% F1 for prediction of technical and regulatory success, improving over the best baselines by 6.7 points in balanced accuracy and 12.0 points in Cohen's kappa. In expert evaluation, 86.4% of TrialAtlas-generated concerns were judged valid, compared with 83.1% for OpenAI DeepResearch and 59.3% for Gemini DeepResearch.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21859
PDF
-
Object Detection Benchmarks are Incomplete: The Role of Label Errors and Annotation Uncertainty
2026-09-18 14:25:32Sarina Penquitt, Jonathan Klees, Antonia van Betteray, Parssa Jashnieh, Peter Stehr, Matthias Rottmann, Lars SchmarjeAbstract
While object detection has advanced through improved architectures and open-vocabulary models, we provide strong evidence that benchmark quality is limited by annotation incompleteness. Across four widely used datasets (COCO, Pascal VOC, Cityscapes, KITTI), re-annotation reveals substantial increases in annotated objects (e.g., up to +60% on KITTI and +40% on COCO), driven primarily by previously unlabeled small, occluded, or densely packed instances. While some differences arise from dataset-specific annotation conventions, we consistently find that missing annotations are the main source of label errors across all datasets. To achieve high data quality, we introduce a scalable annotation pipeline that emphasizes high recall and captures ambiguity through soft labels aggregated from at least 11 annotators per object. The resulting annotations improve coverage and align well with human calibration. We show that benchmark performance is highly sensitive to annotation quality, although model rankings remain largely stable. We introduce two large-scale benchmarks: (i) an uncertainty-aware object detection benchmark, and (ii) a label error detection benchmark grounded in real label errors. We show that current detectors are strongly depended on annotation quality and are misaligned with human perception. Current label error detection methods, which have been shown to perform well on synthetic noise, struggle to achieve high recall and precision on real label errors. Our results highlight the need for future object detection benchmarks to move beyond deterministic annotations toward high-recall, uncertainty-aware evaluation that maximizes valid instances and better reflects real-world ambiguity.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21822
PDF
-
LLM-Generated Feature Pools for Time Series Anomaly Detection
2026-09-18 14:14:21Youssef Attia El Hili, Malik Tiomoko, Corinne AncourtAbstract
We study how far a simple statistical pipeline can go on univariate time series anomaly detection under a strict selection protocol. The method extracts a small pool of statistics over sliding windows, scores each window with a transductive robust (MAD) model, and selects a feature subset per domain on a held-out tuning split. On TSB-AD-U it reaches $0.529$ per-series VUS-PR, above the best neural ($0.45$) and statistical ($0.44$) entries on the public leaderboard and within $0.06$ of the strongest pretrained foundation model, several of which use more supervision than ours. Ablations locate the cause: across three selection strategies and a hindsight oracle the score moves by $0.031$, and across the aggregation grid by $0.096$, while changing the candidate pool moves it by $0.226$. The candidate pool sets the ceiling; the search over it is second-order. We therefore generate a pool per domain by prompting a multimodal LLM with in-context example windows from that domain. The generated pools match the hand-crafted one under matched selection, and the two cover different domains: selecting over their union improves on the generated pool in all twelve generator-seed pairs and lifts the pipeline to $0.588$, matching the performance of the best entry on the leaderboard.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21801
PDF
-
A Principled Approach to Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
2026-09-18 14:14:11James Myles, Matthew Baugh, Johanna P. M\"uller, Bernhard Kainz, Yingzhen LiAbstract
Traditional unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) methods are designed to flag or localise deviations from a normative distribution, ignoring the underlying generative mechanisms of the anomalies. Yet the nature of an anomaly is often as important as its presence. We reformulate UAD as a Bayesian inverse problem, in which the objective is to infer the most probable corruption responsible for each observation. Our framework yields a probabilistic anomaly score as the energy of the inferred corruption parameters, and serves as a principled recipe for developing new UAD algorithms. We derive several existing methods as instances of the general framework, each corresponding to the same energy score under different modelling choices. Experimentally, we study the framework's components in a controlled setting, and improve object-class AUROC on the MVTec AD dataset by 2.3% by adapting the underlying corruption model. Finally, we validate the framework on a brain MRI benchmark, achieving strong detection performance while producing estimates of pathology intensity, bias, and geometry. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21800
PDF
-
PointLAM: Local Attentive Mamba for Efficient Point-based 3D Object Detection
2026-09-18 13:53:15Xuanming Shang, Weijia Zhang, Chao MaAbstract
3D object detection from LiDAR point clouds faces a fundamental dilemma: voxel-based methods achieve efficiency at the cost of geometric quantization, while point-based methods preserve fidelity but suffer from prohibitive computational bottlenecks. Specifically, point-based architectures are crippled by slow downsampling strategies (e.g., FPS) and expensive dynamic neighbor queries (e.g., k-NN) coupled with costly continuous interactions. To tackle these systemic inefficiencies, we propose PointLAM, a highly efficient and powerful point-based architecture driven by two synergistic innovations. First, to resolve the downsampling bottleneck, we develop the Laplacian Point Sampler (LPS). LPS employs an implicit discrete Laplacian high-pass filter and Doubly Sorted Sampling to achieve fast, structure-aware foreground preservation. Second, to overcome local modeling latency, we design the Local Hadamard Aggregator (LHA). LHA decouples spatial indexing from feature representation using transient grids, and replaces complex continuous interactions with a Hadamard Gating mechanism for topology-aware, attentive modulation. By coupling this local gating with Bi-Directional Mamba (BDM) layers for global sequence modeling, we formulate the Local Attentive Mamba (LAM) block. Powered by this architecture, PointLAM achieves competitive performance on nuScenes and Waymo for point-based detectors. It rivals highly optimized voxel competitors while requiring a fraction of the computational footprint, demonstrating marked superiority in detecting small instances and handling extreme sparsity. Project page: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21780
PDF
-
XCalib Depth-Guided Geometric Optimization for Dense Thermal-Visible Video Registration
2026-09-18 13:39:00Aurelien Godet, Gabriel Jobert, Mauro Dalla MuraAbstract
Image registration is a vital preprocessing step in multimodal perception tasks, including image fusion, object detection, and semantic segmentation. In Advanced Driver- Assistance Systems (ADAS), spatial misalignment between visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) cameras -caused by non-coincident optical axes and field-of-view differences- introduces non-uniform parallax and visual ghosting. Classical keypoint-based methods are restricted to global homographies that fail under dynamic depth, while unconstrained dense flow algorithms lack structural regularization and suffer from temporal instability. In this paper, we propose XCalib, an unsupervised dense thermal-visible registration framework that bridges this gap. Rather than serving as an absolute metric calibration tool, XCalib leverages virtual pinhole camera parameterization strictly as a geometric constraint space. By optimizing effective relative pose and intrinsics alongside predicted monocular metric depth, XCalib restricts the search space of spatial displacements to physically valid projection geometries. Our key contributions are: (1) a novel registration paradigm that uses camera parameterization as an implicit regularizer for dense cross-modal warping; (2) Normalized Edges Correlation (NEC), a robust structural similarity metric tailored to cross- spectral alignment; and (3) extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations across public ADAS datasets, demonstrating superior temporal stability and alignment accuracy over unconstrained dense flow baselines.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21770
PDF
-
CRISP: Contact-Rich Robotic Simulation Platform with Extensive Geometries and Contact Solvers
2026-09-18 13:31:48Somang Lee, Sunkyung Park, Jinhee Yun, Seoki An, Dongjun LeeAbstract
We present CRISP (Contact-RIch Simulation Platform), a high-fidelity physics engine tailored for complex multi-contact simulations such as tight-tolerance robotic manipulation. Achieving high physical fidelity in robotic simulation requires both expressive modeling of geometry and contact interactions, as well as accurate numerical resolution via robust collision detection and contact solvers. However, existing simulators often either rely on limited support for geometric representations and simplified modeling of contact interactions, or employ numerical resolution methods whose accuracy or robustness is inherently constrained. Accordingly, we develop a new simulator that supports diverse geometric representations with accurate optimization-based collision detection, and combines contact modeling with robust augmented Lagrangian-based contact solvers. This integration enables efficient and consistent detection of contact information across complex geometries while accurately resolving multi-contact constraints without problematic relaxations, which is essential for simulating contact-intensive and sharp interactions. We validate the physical fidelity of our simulator against state-of-the-art platforms and further demonstrate its capabilities through complex robotic manipulation scenarios. CRISP is publicly available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21761
PDF
-
GenTraceBench: A Benchmark for Tracing Audio Deepfakes Across Pre- and Post-training Stages
2026-09-18 13:15:52Li Wang, Kunyu Feng, Wan Lin, Dekun Chen, Qinke Ni, Xueyao Zhang, Lei Wang, Jie Shi, Haizhou Li, Zhizheng WuAbstract
Modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems are rarely deployed as unchanged pre-trained models. They are often adapted through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or preference optimization such as DPO and GRPO. This raises a practical question for audio deepfake forensics: do fingerprints learned from a foundation generator remain valid after adaptation? We present GenTraceBench, a controlled benchmark spanning five TTS architectures, 16 pre-/post-training variants, and 49,728 utterances generated with fixed texts and speaker prompts. Under a train-on-foundation, test-on-adapted protocol, we evaluate binary detection, closed-set attribution, and open-set verification. DPO and GRPO generally preserve fingerprints, whereas some SFT and pre-training-data changes cause substantial drift; effect sizes vary across three forensic backbones. Repeated training runs confirm the largest W2V-BERT attribution drop, while a data-mixture control with comparable speech quality shows that composition change need not cause drift. In W2V-BERT verification, multi-shot enrollment reduces EER for the SFT condition from 44.4% to 11.0%, whereas the SingNet-only condition remains at or above 45% EER.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21738
PDF
-
CIBuzzBench: A Benchmark for Cross-Lingual Understanding of Chinese Internet Buzzwords
2026-09-18 12:57:10Yifan Wang, Junyu Lu, Qifan Wang, Shun Zhang, Chaozhuo Li, Jiahao Liu, Zhijun Cao, Lingbin Bu, Fanliang BuAbstract
Chinese social media has generated a vast and continually evolving lexicon of internet buzzwords whose meanings are often non-literal and deeply rooted in local cultural and pragmatic contexts. Existing research has primarily focused on interpreting these buzzwords within Chinese, leaving largely unexplored whether LLMs can transfer such culturally grounded knowledge across languages and accurately convey the intended meanings in English. This cross-lingual capability is also critical for safety, as harmful expressions may obscure their offensive content through culture-specific homophony, euphemism, irony, or coded language. In this paper, we investigate the ability of advanced LLMs to understand Chinese internet buzzwords across languages. To this end, we introduce CIBuzzBench, the first benchmark for cross-lingual Chinese-to-English understanding of Chinese internet buzzwords. CIBuzzBench comprises 3,001 Chinese internet buzzwords annotated with English meaning explanations, English equivalents, category labels, and harmfulness labels. Based on these annotations, we design three evaluation tasks: Meaning Explanation, Cross-lingual Equivalent Matching, and Culturally Grounded Harmfulness Detection. We evaluate representative state-of-the-art proprietary and Chinese LLMs under both English- and Chinese-prompting settings. Our results show that LLMs continue to struggle with the cross-lingual understanding of Chinese internet buzzwords, particularly in fine-grained non-literal interpretation, robust equivalent matching under option perturbations, and calibrated harmfulness detection. These findings highlight the persistent challenges posed by culturally grounded language phenomena for multilingual LLMs and safety-oriented evaluation. The dataset and code are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21722
PDF
-
Configurable Multi-Stage Vision Pipeline for Crop Disease and Pest Diagnosis
2026-09-18 11:48:46Naga Ganesh, Chandrashekar M S, Lakshmi Pedapudi, Aakash Singh, Vineet SinghAbstract
this http URL is Digital Green's farm advisory service for smallholder farmers. When something looks wrong with a crop, the farmer takes a photograph and sends it, and that photograph is the whole question: no symptom described, no crop named, often no text at all. The service has to determine whether the picture can be used, what crop it shows, and what is wrong with it, from images taken on cheap phones in a field, in poor light and with a moving camera. The system doing this today cannot be adjusted. It has no adjustable thresholds for photograph rejection, crops and problems cannot be added, and there is no confidence cut-off to set. We study about 1.16 million photographs sent to this http URL from Ethiopia, India, Kenya and Nigeria. The production quality gate rejected 46.8% of the images it judged, over a quarter of those reaching diagnosis returned no crop name, and 35.8% of the labelled problems filed under "disease" are pests, identifiable without the crop. We therefore split the work into three stages: a quality gate (M0), a crop detector (M1), and a disease or pest detector (M2). Route A fills all three with one fine-tuned vision-language model (Qwen3-VL-4B) answering in a single call. Route B fills each with a small specialist model (DaViT, YOLO26). We replace our production GPT-4o quality gate with a small MobileNetV3 gate at 86.9% F1 in 12 ms. On one test set scored the same way for every system, a hierarchical DaViT-Base achieves 95.41% crop accuracy against 91.46% for the production baseline. It also leads on diagnosis and never declines to answer, while every language model in the comparison leaves a large share of rows with no diagnosis. The fine-tuned model retains two capabilities the specialists do not have: one call for all three stages, and a request for a better photograph when the image cannot support an answer.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21651
PDF
-
Detection is solved, delineation is not: what governs tooth segmentation on panoramic radiographs
2026-09-18 11:08:02Muhammad Rehan, Moaz Amjad, Syed Danial Ahmed, Mariam Adnan, Haider AliAbstract
Automatic tooth segmentation and FDI numbering on panoramic radiographs underpins computer-assisted dental diagnosis, yet which factors govern performance remains unclear. We assemble a corpus of 1,422 panoramic radiographs containing 42,142 expert-delineated tooth polygons across the 32-class FDI taxonomy, annotated by 30 dental practitioners and independently reviewed by two others, and use it to isolate input resolution, architecture and anatomical priors under a single evaluation protocol. First, resolution dominates: across a controlled 640/1024/1280 ablation, mask mAP50-95 rises 0.656 -> 0.710 -> 0.717 while mAP50 stays flat at ~0.982. Both gains are significant under a paired bootstrap over images (p < 0.001, p = 0.024); neither mAP50 change is distinguishable from zero. Added resolution buys boundary precision, not detection. Second, architecture is nearly irrelevant in-domain: a query-based transformer with 2.1x the parameters is statistically equivalent to a one-stage detector (95% CI [-0.0064, +0.0064]), only marginally better under domain shift, 5.5x slower on CPU and not executable under standard ONNX runtimes. Third, three targeted interventions fail: a LoRA-adapted self-supervised encoder underperforms, a promptable foundation segmenter degrades masks by 39%, and globally optimal anatomical label assignment yields +0.0007 despite correcting a constraint violated in 40% of out-of-domain predictions. Zero-shot transfer to an independent multi-centre cohort, verified overlap-free, costs 62% of mask mAP50-95 but only 18% of mAP50, reproducing the dissociation. Decomposing masks along the tooth axis localises the residual error to the apical third. Boundary precision is therefore the binding constraint, and effort is better directed at resolution and acquisition diversity than at architectural novelty.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21628
PDF
