Close-proximity pipeline inspection is challenging for standard drones due to high hovering power consumption, airflow sensitivity, and propeller wash interference with gas sensing. To address this, we present AeRove, a compact bimodal aerial-terrestrial robot. AeRove uses its propeller guards as wheels to roll along pipes and employs a spring-loaded bistable mechanism to reconfigure between ground and flight modes in 200 ms without continuous actuator power to maintain either state. The converging propeller-guard geometry also improves measured thrust efficiency. By reserving flight for obstacle hopping and using ground rolling for continuous traversal, current draw is reduced 14x compared to continuous flight (0.7 A vs. 10 A), extending estimated travel distance from 144 m to 2057 m. Autonomous trials on a 51 cm diameter steel pipe demonstrated navigation on straight and curved sections, obstacle jumping, and leak detection of simulated inspection markers. Separate CO2 sensing experiments evaluated gas-detection performance under perched and aerial operating conditions. Perched inspection produced a substantially larger concentration response than hovering under the tested conditions. During flight, an underbody propeller-intake configuration produced a faster and stronger gas-detection response than an extended probe by leveraging propeller-induced airflow. Code and designs are released under the CC-BY license.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20965
Hostile rhetoric toward social groups can normalize exclusion and justify mistreatment, as well as contribute to rising polarization and political violence. Efforts to moderate hostile rhetoric in online speech draw on foundational theories in social and moral psychology, and political science. However, these theories were developed largely in parallel, often propose different and sometimes conflicting accounts of how hostility develops, and have rarely been tested against each other in real discourse. The result is a fragmented understanding of the rhetorical mechanisms of hostility, without a clear sense of how they appear, and relate to each other, in real-world discourse. Using 2.86 million posts from TikTok, Truth Social, and Twitter/X during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we model the mechanisms of six foundational theories of intergroup hostility -- boundary construction, threat construction, scapegoating, negative evaluation, dehumanization, and action orientation -- within a common empirical framework to recover the broader organization of intergroup hostility rhetoric. Structurally, we find that boundary construction and threat construction anchor the system; temporally, we find that these mechanisms tend to follow a regular ordering: boundary construction, derogation, and action orientation tend to appear early; dehumanization and threat construction later; scapegoating latest. Mapping how these theoretical frameworks actually manifest in discourse bridges longstanding divisions across social science traditions and presents computational social science with a clearer empirical foundation for modeling intergroup hostility rhetoric beyond single-label detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20808
Safety evaluations for large language models rely on surface-form classifiers that report declining harm scores across model generations. We provide evidence that this methodology is systematically incomplete: explicit discriminatory content is transformed rather than removed. We call this \emph{harm laundering}. Analysing 450,000 gender-directed completions across 15 models spanning GPT-2 through to GPT-5 (OpenAI GPT lineage; three demographic conditions), we show that sexual violence clusters prevalent in GPT-2 women-directed output disappear by GPT-4, while men-directed completions gain positive representational territory (caregiving, emotional range, ally identity) that women-directed completions do not. The pattern is most visible at GPT-5: Topic~5 (1,997~documents) frames breast cancer as a men's rights debate, while zero equivalent clusters appear in women-directed output. Three independent classifiers score this content as non-toxic. Sentiment scores invert at GPT-4: early models demean women; later models over-correct. Topic diversity in women-directed completions falls 36\% relative to men at the GPT-4 alignment boundary (W/M~$= 0.58$, from $0.91$ at GPT-2). REGARD representational harm disparity correlates with release date ($\rho = +0.55$, $p = .034$) while Detoxify does not ($\rho = -0.23$, $p = .42$): toxicity scores fall as representational harm grows. We formalise harm laundering as a three-criteria test and provide a three-stage detection protocol applicable to any generative model. Within the OpenAI GPT lineage, toxicity score reduction is not a sufficient proxy for harm reduction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20779
Scalable machine learning in challenging underwater environments is strongly limited by the lack of labeled real-world training data. This data is often expensive and laborious to gather, making large-scale real-world data challenging to gather and curate. However, simulated data can help close the gap, enabling many learning-based tasks for underwater perception. In this work, we extend OceanSim, an IsaacSim-based underwater perception simulator, with a Synthetic Data Generation (SDG) pipeline for training models to be used in underwater scenarios. The proposed pipeline enables users to generate large, automatically labeled, photorealistic datasets with configurable scene appearance, structure, and sensor settings. We evaluate the pipeline on a real-world sea urchin detection task and study how different forms of synthetic scene variation affect sim-to-real performance. Based on these experiments, we discuss findings on our results, main limitations of the current pipeline and identify future directions for improving underwater rendering fidelity, scene diversity, and the evaluation of sim-to-real generalization. The open-source code can be found at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20680
Earth surface anomalies, driven by escalating climate change, and expanding human activities, are increasing in both frequency and diversity, yet their limited historical data and unpredictability make them fundamentally different from conventional remote sensing targets. Existing methods address specific anomaly categories or stop at localization, leaving a gap between detection and actionable information. Here we present ESIA, an Earth Surface Immune System whose architecture is constrained by three principles from the biological immune system, refined over millions of years against equally diverse and uncertain threats. A non-specific innate immune stage treats anomalies as unobserved changes in time-series satellite imagery, generating binary localization maps at 14.51 km2/s without assuming any anomaly category, surpassing the strongest general baseline by 37% in F1. A specific adaptive immune stage applies negative selection to filter text prompts and matches surviving prompts with localized image patches through a multi-modal foundation model, enabling open-vocabulary recognition of unknown anomaly attributes including category, affected area, and damage severity, with recognition F1 exceeding 80%. A mutation mechanism tunes minimal embeddings at test time, adapting to each scene in 3.26s using a single reference image pair. We validate ESIA on a global-scale dataset covering 19,801.60 km2 across six anomaly categories, comparing against 22 models, and further apply it to quantify degraded farmland in the Dnipro Delta following the Kakhovka Dam collapse and assess burn severity from 2025 Palisades Fire in Los Angeles. This unprecedented flexibility in handling unknown anomalies opens new avenues for real-time disaster response and environmental surveillance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20662
An assistant watching egocentric video should notice a mistake from past frames alone, before the next step begins, and keep working once the person recovers. A mistake changes the state of the work, so every later step has to be read against what was done rather than against the plan. The first-mistake protocol that current online methods report on cuts each recording at its first mistake, so a fixed-time rule that never looks at the video is right on every case. We evaluate on complete trials, where mistakes and recoveries arise naturally, under a validation false-alarm budget and against controls that use timing alone. PROVIA keeps two records apart: a factual state, a learned summary of the steps each actor performed, mistakes included, and the accepted progress, an exact posterior over the state of an automaton induced from correct demonstrations by Bayesian state merging and over the execution status of each actor. Procedure-state transitions occur only in the correct-status branch; the mistake and correction branches retain the source state. A sequential test turns the per-frame mistake probability into alarms. With one filter and one optimization rule, PROVIA ranks mistakes best among the evaluated controlled baselines on CaptainCook4D, IndustReal, HoloAssist and IMPACT-ego. At a validation budget of 0.1 false alarms per minute it recalls .154 against .128 on CaptainCook4D and .034 against .015 on HoloAssist, where it leads at every budget. The pipeline runs at 58-70 frames per second. The source code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20638
Autonomous recovery of a micro unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) onto a moving airborne carrier enables reusable deploy-mission-recover operation, but couples long-range rendezvous, close-range perception, carrier motion, aerodynamic interaction, and a discontinuous contact event. This paper presents an RTK-vision-guided reinforcement-learning framework in which a child UAV is physically transported by a larger carrier, takes off from the carrier while airborne, executes an independent sortie, returns to the carrier's current position, redocks, and subsequently descends with the carrier. Both vehicles carry RTK-GNSS, and the carrier continuously shares its navigation state with the child. Near the recovery deck, RTK remains active while a downward-facing camera with a fiducial marker detector provides marker-relative alignment cues. A proximal policy optimization (PPO) policy governing the terminal recovery phase is trained in a physics-based MuJoCo simulation environment with explicit sensor noise models, an aerodynamic disturbance surrogate, and marker-latency randomization, then transferred to hardware. PX4 retains low-level stabilization, and a deterministic safety gate authorizes descent independently of the learned policy. The PPO checkpoint achieves 99.55% success over 2,000 held-out randomized terminal episodes, compared with 78.4% for a tuned PD baseline under identical conditions, with a median planar terminal error of 6.62 cm. Across 14 outdoor trials, the full mission succeeds in 13 trials (92.9%), spanning both near-region recovery and recovery after the carrier translates away from the release point. The results demonstrate a complete autonomous aerial deployment-and-recovery cycle rather than an isolated landing maneuver, establishing a practical basis for reusable carrier-child operation in inspection, surveillance, and mobile-logistics applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20629
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) operating beyond reliable communications must recover from failures without human intervention. We investigate an architecture in which conventional deterministic layered control autonomy manages normal operations, while an invokable large language model (LLM) serves as a diagnostic and recovery planner when onboard anomaly detection identifies performance outside expected limits. Because language models are stochastic, rigorous evaluation requires ensemble testing rather than individual demonstrations. We present a closed-loop simulation architecture that couples real-time C vehicle software with a higher-level orchestration layer for physics-based fault injection, structured prompting, language-model interaction, mission file generation, validation, execution, and LLM-judge scoring. The framework, which we call SPAR (Simulation Platform for AUV Recovery), supports evaluation across fault realizations, prompt structures, reasoning models, and mission conditions. We vary these for a mass-shift fault over 480 SPAR trials, evaluating a frontier model and three off-the-shelf locally deployable LLMs. Model choice dominates diagnosis: the frontier model places the CG-shift mechanism in its top three hypotheses in 85-90% of trials, versus 60-78% for the best local model. Reasoning analysis indicates that local-model success is associated with following the complete diagnostic procedure, whereas weaker models often commit prematurely to elevator failure even though the actuator tracks its command. Diagnosis and operational decision performance do not appear to be coupled in this dataset. The contributions are an architecture extending unanticipated-fault recovery from detection to mitigation and an ensemble methodology for evaluating LLM-assisted mission management on low-power AUVs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20620
This paper presents a real-time semantic world modeling framework specialized for precision agriculture using autonomous robots. The framework combines probabilistic mapping of objects and their semantic attributes, updated through Bayesian inference, with a graph-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) approach implemented using $g^2o$, a general framework for graph optimization. This integration enables accurate mapping and localization without relying solely on GPS. By leveraging semantic information such as plant type, size, and health, the robot can perform tasks while mapping and localizing itself within a field of crops. The proposed framework was validated through Gazebo simulations and physical experiments on an indoor field with artificial plants using Boston Dynamics' robot dog Spot. A YOLOv8n object detection model was trained to extract object and semantic data from depth camera observations. These simulations and experiments demonstrate that the system can successfully perform real-time mapping of up to at least 400 plants.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20604
An AI evaluation can be perfectly reproducible and still support the wrong claim. This risk is acute in closed-loop systems: policy determines visited states, observable components, and which failures leave a measurable trace. We propose a claim-safe protocol with three actions. Refuse: abstain when a clean reference stream or matched runtime comparison lacks support. Decompose: report protocol execution, operational false admission, and structural hypotheses separately rather than as one PASS/FAIL label. Refresh: treat distribution-shift alarms as requests to invalidate and recompute a reference map, not as fault evidence. We instantiate the protocol in an aggregate-only simulator with 24 policy components, three demand regimes, two fault-mask families, and independent development and heldout seeds. The preregistered heldout contains 1,440 cases and 21,600 partition rows. Only 55/72 regime-component units were reference-admitted and 54/55 remained runtime-admitted, making abstention part of the result. Stable false admission was 0/20 represented components, with a one-sided exact 95% upper bound of 0.1391 under a frozen 0.20 rule. Within admitted units, affected clean traffic outpredicted nominal fault-cell fraction: across 540 unit-arm rows nested in 20 component clusters, the cell-minus-traffic negative-log-likelihood difference was 0.1264 nats per row, with a 95% component-cluster interval of [0.0593, 0.1918]. A drift log shows why "null" must be reference-relative: clean fault-null streams triggered 15/15, 0/15, and 14/15 alarms across three regimes, while only the middle regime matched the frozen detector reference. Rather than a universal threshold, we contribute an executable contract linking observable support, statistical calibration, and justified claims.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20538
For art historians, goldsmith marks play a critical role in the identification and dating of artifacts. In practice, experts must manually compare a query mark against hundreds of documented examples, a process that is both tedious and highly dependent on specialist knowledge. To address this, we present an AI-assisted retrieval pipeline that combines mark localization with metric-learning fine-tuning across three backbone architectures: an ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50, a supervised ViT-S/16, and a self-supervised DINOv2 ViT-S/14. We conduct a systematic evaluation of cropping strategies, where we measure the impact of no cropping, manual ground-truth cropping, and learned detection-based cropping, and assess their interaction with each backbone. Our strongest configuration, DINOv2 ViT-S/14 with manual crop and metric-learning fine-tuning, achieves an mAP of 62.63% and a Top-1 accuracy of 73.74%. Our experiments show that self-supervised pretraining and mark localization are the two most impactful factors, with learned cropping recovering the majority of the gain from manual cropping without requiring ground-truth annotations at inference time. To enable reproducibility and adoption in the digital humanities, we release our manually annotated dataset and codebase, and deploy the system via a public web interface.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20509
While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable a wide range of image-text reasoning tasks, recent incidents indicate that they are vulnerable to illicit deployment and unauthorized distillation. Existing solutions for model provenance are typically confounded by shared language backbones in MLLMs and struggle to detect violations of distillation. To bridge this gap and safeguard model ownership, we present the first study on multimodal model fingerprinting. Inspired by recent findings that self-attention acts as a low-pass filter and that its low-frequency components are informative, we develop AttnPrint for white-box provenance. Specifically, we extract cross-modal attention distributions and isolate their low-frequency components to serve as model fingerprints. To facilitate black-box auditing, we further introduce DistillTrace, which employs hypothesis testing of MLLM outputs to identify potential model infringement. We conduct extensive experiments on 154 model instances across 19 multimodal architectures. Notably, AttnPrint achieves strong derivative-model detection performance while remaining robust to five downstream modification techniques. DistillTrace also provides evidence of distillation relationships under three parameter-independent techniques.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20457
Iris presentation attack detection (PAD) is security-critical when a subsystem that appears reliable during development encounters presentation attack instruments (PAIs) or acquisition conditions absent from validation data. We benchmark three compact scratch-trained computer-vision models, each with at most approximately 0.26 million trainable parameters, on the Notre Dame subset of LivDet-Iris 2017 under PAI-driven domain shift and environmental degradation. All models are trained without external pretraining or data augmentation and evaluated over five seeds. A validation-selected threshold is transferred unchanged to the known-attack, unknown-attack, corrupted, and pooled test partitions. From known to unknown attack presentations, Attack Presentation Classification Error Rate (APCER) increases by 17.11-30.47 percentage points and Detection Equal Error Rate (D-EER) increases by 7.38-12.73 percentage points. At the validation-selected threshold, ZACH-ViT obtains the lowest unknown-attack APCER (47.69 +/- 4.84%) and D-EER (38.87 +/- 0.93%), while Compact-TransMIL obtains the lowest Bona Fide Presentation Classification Error Rate (BPCER). ZACH-ViT also gives the lowest unknown-attack BPCER at an APCER limit of 10% (81.29 +/- 1.95%). The high absolute errors show that the comparative advantage of the best compact model does not constitute deployment readiness under unknown PAIs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20386
Monitoring flying animals is important for understanding and protecting biodiversity, but nocturnal species such as bats are difficult to observe in the field. Using LiDAR, bat movements at night result in ultra-sparse 3D spatio-temporal data in which standard reconstruction losses tend to predict only background and miss real flight paths. We study this problem as voxel-wise occupancy detection in sensor-centric LiDAR raystacks. A lightweight 3D U-Net is proposed that preserves temporal resolution, uses skip connections for spatial detail, and combines weighted binary cross-entropy with Dice loss to handle the strong class imbalance. In real LiDAR recordings of bats over open fields, cross-checked with acoustic monitoring, a reconstruction-based 3D convolutional autoencoder baseline fails to recover foreground trajectories. In contrast, the proposed U-Net recovers sparse foreground occupancy in diagnostic experiments and produces coherent occupancy patterns along bat flight trajectories, providing a practical basis for validation-scale experiments, later clustering of flight tracks, and future integration of bat activity information into biodiversity-aware turbine curtailment strategies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20160
Conventional satellite remote sensing transmission follows a reconstruct-then-infer paradigm that optimizes pixel-level fidelity, creating an objective mismatch with downstream tasks such as classification and detection, especially at low SNR. This paper investigates a task-oriented framework that bypasses image reconstruction and directly transmits semantic features extracted by a multitask-pretrained backbone. A lightweight channel adaptation module (CAM) compresses feature dimensionality for bandwidth reduction, and a feature restorer recovers task-relevant structure after channel corruption. With the backbone frozen, the CAM and task-specific downstream heads are jointly optimized with task and feature-level supervision under random-SNR training. Under the adopted AWGN setting, experiments on scene classification and object detection show consistent gains over reconstruction-oriented JSCC baselines across different SNR conditions, with the largest improvements in the low-SNR regime.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20150
Deployment-time safety methods for large language models (LLMs) are predominantly supervised and assume access to unsafe training data. Nevertheless, new attacks and harm categories regularly arise, not captured by models trained in such a supervised fashion. An alternative approach is to view this problem through the lens of anomaly detection, namely, to rely solely on modeling safe data and flagging out-of-distribution inputs. However, LLM activations lie in a high-dimensional space, raising concerns about whether anomaly detection is statistically feasible. We show that, under the linear representation hypothesis (LRH), there may indeed be hope. In the LRH concept space, which is typically recovered via a sparse autoencoder (SAE), nearby points share a small common active support. Using this local sparsity insight, we propose a framework for locally masked SAE-based anomaly detection, supported by theoretical justifications. We validate it on various architectures and datasets, including both capability-testing datasets and safety-specific datasets. Finally, when we allow algorithms to use 1% out-of-distribution data for calibration, locally sparse methods achieve near-optimal performance, demonstrating their ability to capture meaningful safety information while using only 1-2% of SAE neurons for computation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20129
Self-evolving methods reduce the need for human-annotated trajectories by allowing tool-using agents to generate their own training data. Yet existing methods typically separate trajectory generation from evaluation, relying on static verifiers that cannot adapt to emerging failure modes or self-consistency signals that may reinforce errors shared across trajectories. Jointly adapting planning, execution, and evaluation offers a promising alternative, but introduces a fundamental coordination challenge: each component continuously changes the data or feedback used to train the others. We address this challenge with \textbf{UnifiedPlayers}, a cooperative framework comprising a Planning Player that generates tasks, an Execution Player that produces multi-turn trajectories with Python tool calls, and an Evaluation Player that constructs executable verifiers. We design role-specific rewards that coordinate the three players toward a shared learning objective under GRPO. Across two model backbones and twelve reasoning benchmarks, UnifiedPlayers outperforms the strongest prior baseline by at least 3.5\% on mathematical reasoning and 3.9\% on general reasoning tasks. Moreover, the learned verifier achieves 84.2\% adversarial detection accuracy, while its reward signal exhibits 2.03$\times$ higher per-question variance than a self-consistency baseline, providing more discriminative verifications. These results highlight cooperation among specialized players as a promising path toward self-enhanced tool-integrated agents.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20089
Event cameras offer high temporal resolution and motion sensitivity for tiny UAV detection, yet distant targets generate sparse and fragmented events that are easily overwhelmed by clutter and ego-motion. Existing methods mainly rely on dense event representations or local sparse spatiotemporal modeling, resulting in redundant computation or fragmented modeling of motion continuity across distant asynchronous events. To address this limitation, we introduce serialized motion evidence accumulation, which treats motion continuity as an ordered evidence propagation process. Specifically, the same event stream is organized into locality-preserving spatiotemporal paths and chronology-preserving temporal paths through the latent complementary serializations. Based on this principle, we propose PointEvent, a lightweight event-wise state-space framework that alternates serialized scans across the complementary orders, progressively consolidating fragmented motion evidence beyond fixed local neighborhoods. A high-resolution event branch preserves fine-grained target responses, while compact context modulation suppresses interference. Experiments demonstrate that PointEvent achieves SOTA with the fewest parameters and fastest measured inference among the compared methods. Code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20066
The rapid advancement of speech synthesis and voice conversion technologies has made audio deepfakes increasingly realistic, posing serious security risks in practical applications. While existing detection methods achieve strong performance under controlled conditions, they often fail to generalize under real-world perturbations and corruptions. In this paper, we propose ROGUE, a framework that dynamically constructs robust detection workflows by orchestrating multiple detection tools. ROGUE formulates workflow generation as a sequential decision-making problem and introduces a dual-agent paradigm, where a perturbation agent generates audio perturbations and a policy agent learns to select and execute detection tools under perturbed conditions. Through adversarial learning, ROGUE enables perturbation-aware tool selection, adaptive execution strategies, and improved robustness to distribution shifts. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and real-world corruptions demonstrate that ROGUE consistently outperforms strong baselines in both robustness and generalization. Our results highlight the effectiveness of adversarially optimized workflow generation for building reliable audio deepfake detection systems in real-world deployment settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20063
Detection Transformers (DETRs) achieve strong performance in object detection but remain challenging to deploy on edge devices due to their high computational cost. Existing DETR distillation methods mainly focus on aligning distillation points, while largely overlooking the quality of the teacher's supervision itself. We observe that due to stage-wise non-monotonic prediction behavior in DETRs, well-localized or correctly classified predictions from earlier stages may degrade in later ones, and some negative predictions become increasingly overconfident. As a result, relying solely on the current stage's predictions yields inaccurate and inconsistent supervision. To address this issue, we propose Teacher Prediction Refinement Distillation (TPRD), a plug-and-play module that refines teacher predictions before distillation by exploiting stage-wise prediction information. TPRD improves supervision quality through Positive Prediction Correction (PPC), which corrects degraded positive predictions by restoring more accurate ones from earlier stages, ensuring reliable localization and classification signals, and Negative Prediction Suppression (NPS) suppresses the influence of overconfident negatives, preventing them from providing misleading supervision to the student. To preserve informative dark knowledge, we further introduce Maximum Dark Knowledge Preservation (MDKP), which selectively refines target-class logits while retaining non-target relations. Extensive experiments on MS COCO and PASCAL VOC demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19964