Every evaluation run of a vision-language model (VLM) already produces per-question artifacts (predictions, judged correctness, metadata) that leaderboards reduce to a single score and then discard. We reuse those artifacts to audit the benchmark itself, and add an audit layer to VLMEvalKit: six detectors that run as post-processing over saved outputs, plus one additional text-only rerun with visual inputs removed, emitting a per-question report. The layer reports per-question findings together with aggregate audit statistics; for the headline quantities, it attaches permutation-null excess where applicable, interval estimates for proportions, and sensitivity to the model pool. Auditing MMStar, a benchmark curated specifically so that the image is indispensable, with three models, we find zero aggregate accuracy gain from the image on 20.2% of its questions. An item-matched permutation null accounts for 17.0%, leaving a +3.2 pp excess (corrected permutation p = 0.001). This excess is concentrated in the mathematics and science categories and is absent from coarse perception, a localization consistent with knowledge substituting for visual evidence; confirming that mechanism would require item-level review. A second detector flags 134 questions on which every model that answered in parseable form picked the same non-gold option, and these candidates peak in the perception categories, whereas the zero-gain excess is largest in mathematics and science & technology. Replacing the LLM judge with exact string matching changes no conclusion, and every scoring discrepancy between the two traces to one model whose free-form answers a parser cannot read. On a binary yes/no benchmark the detectors measurably fall out of calibration, a scope boundary that we measure and report. The audit layer, the prediction artifacts and the generated reports accompany this submission.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13548
Runtime failure monitors for robot policies are typically evaluated by how accurately they distinguish failed from successful executions. Yet an accurate alarm may arrive too late for recovery, while an unnecessary intervention may disrupt an execution that would otherwise succeed. We introduce RESCUE, a counterfactual framework for evaluating whether a monitor's alarms enable useful interventions. By restoring simulator and policy states at execution checkpoints, RESCUE compares alternative actions, identifies the latest checkpoint satisfying a specified recovery criterion, and evaluates whether acting on alarms reduces expected task-completion cost. We evaluate RESCUE with OpenVLA-OFT and $\pi_{0.5}$ over LIBERO-Spatial and LIBERO-Plus using 128,340 counterfactual branches. Recoverability depends on the state--intervention pair rather than on robot state alone: at $\tau=0.5$, 14 of 66 OpenVLA-OFT/LIBERO-Plus failures contain a recoverable checkpoint under continuation, compared with 34 of 66 under continuation or scripted recovery, while recovery reduces recoverability in other conditions. On the primary strong-policy conditions, favourable detection scores do not establish lower intervention cost. Under the evaluated stop-and-reset model, even an idealised detector can afford only a 2.0--3.3% false-alarm rate before unnecessary resets outweigh the savings from stopping failures early. These results show that monitor value depends jointly on the intervention available and the workload in which it is deployed.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13516
Vision-language-action models (VLAs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on many robotic manipulation tasks, yet they can still behave unpredictably in out-of-distribution scenarios. Runtime failure detection is therefore essential for the safe real-world deployment of this http URL, existing task failure detectors require computationally expensive action sampling, are based on architectural assumptions that limit their applicability to VLAs, or need access to failure rollouts. We propose VLA-FAIL, a lightweight and broadly applicable failure detection framework for VLAs that combines two novel failure detectors with minimal overhead, without requiring failure data. The first, last-layer Mahalanobis distance (LLMD), detects out-of-distribution states by measuring token-wise deviations in last-layer features relative to the training data. The second, action chunk consistency (ACC), exploits the temporal overlap induced by receding-horizon control and detects failures when consecutive action chunks become inconsistent. To capture the trade-off between detection accuracy and detection latency, we introduce \textsc{AUCPDT}, a threshold-independent metric that jointly evaluates precision, recall, and detection time. Through extensive real-world and simulation experiments, we demonstrate that LLMD and ACC capture complementary failure modes whose combination enables reliable and early failure detection across diverse tasks, frequently outperforming significantly more expensive baseline methods. Project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21386
CAD segmentation datasets are predominantly synthetic or automatically labelled, leaving it unclear how well existing methods transfer to real-world engineering tasks. Fastener-relevant hole detection represents one such task, requiring human annotation and exhibiting greater geometric complexity than commonly used benchmarks. We address this gap through three main contributions. First, we develop two task-specific rule-based methods, one graph-wire-search and one multi-view based, and complement them with a human-annotated benchmark dataset derived from engineering CAD data that also enables training of UV-Net and AAGNet, representative learning-based approaches for B-Rep segmentation. Second, we conduct an extensive experimental study including parameter optimisation, evaluation on our benchmark dataset, cross-domain generalisation on a synthetic dataset, and an assessment of the feasibility of the approaches at varying dataset sizes and IoU thresholds. Third, we provide evidence-based insights into the strengths and limitations of different approaches: rule-based methods generalise well without training data, with the graph-wire-search method favouring recall and the multi-view method favouring precision, whereas learning-based methods achieve strong performance with sufficient annotations but exhibit reduced robustness under domain shift. These findings highlight trade-offs between data requirements, and robustness, and provide guidance not only for hole detection, but more broadly for real-world CAD segmentation tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13466
Anomaly detection, the identification of collision events that deviate from Standard Model expectations, is one of the most promising model-agnostic strategies for new-physics searches at the Large Hadron Collider. Searching for rare events in learned low-dimensional representations removes the need to commit to hand-crafted observables a priori, but sacrifices the immediate physical interpretation those observables provide. For anomaly detection to enter a discovery pipeline, flagged events must therefore be diagnosed locally, both to distinguish potential new physics from mismodeling or detector effects and to identify observables for targeted follow-up searches. We evaluate supervised and self-supervised neural embedding strategies on COLLIDE-2V, a 750-million-event dataset simulated under realistic High-Luminosity LHC conditions, using the reconstruction error of an autoencoder trained in the learned latent space as the anomaly score. Across the configurations and benchmark signals considered, supervised objectives, which exploit simulation process labels during training, generally outperform their self-supervised counterparts and, in their best configurations, improve on an autoencoder trained directly on kinematic features, raising the signal efficiency at 10% background acceptance on all held-out processes. We further introduce a local diagnostic pipeline that fits a Gaussian Mixture Model to the SM latent space, profiles each component through high-level observables without process labels, localizes the flagged events, and ranks observables by their local discriminating power. The ranking recovers the defining kinematics of the held-out processes, while correlating the anomaly score with the same observables quantifies how closely the score tracks them, revealing cases where the most discriminating observable is not the one the score follows most closely.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13437
Reliable real-time failure detection is critical for deploying learned robotic policies, yet defining failures explicitly is infeasible in open-world settings. This motivates failure detection from nominal demonstrations alone. Existing methods, however, struggle to balance robustness to benign variations with the ability to capture semantic and interaction-level errors. We introduce Robot-WATCHDOG, a self-supervised framework that models manipulation scenes as object-centric spatio-temporal graphs. Building on this representation, we investigate two complementary failure scores: Trajectory Projection and Correlation (TPC), a non-parametric measure of geometric deviation and relational consistency, and GnnT, a Graph Attention Network with a Transformer that predicts future object states. We evaluate both on a public benchmark and on a new dataset of semantically complex manipulation tasks, across six tasks and ten random seeds. Both scores outperform image-based failure detectors, particularly on semantic and interaction-level failures. TPC provides the strongest performance in AUPR and MCC on both dataset averages, with low variance across seeds. Qualitative results are made available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13403
Stance detection remains challenging for large language models (LLMs) due to implicit opinions, sarcasm, and context-dependent expressions of stance. Although automatic prompt optimization offers an alternative to fine-tuning without updating model parameters, existing structured approaches are not specifically designed around stance-label semantics and class-specific ambiguities. We introduce MoPrO-SD, a stance-specific prompt optimization framework that decomposes prompts into functional semantic modules and refines them sequentially using LLM-based feedback. We study three refinement strategies: instruction-only optimization (I), instruction with reasoning (I+R), and instruction with per-example reasoning (I+R+E), using class-conditioned errors for stance-label refinement. We also introduce VaccineStance, a new human-annotated benchmark for vaccine stance detection. Experiments across four datasets and five open-weight LLMs show that MoPrO-SD improves upon the human-written Base prompt in many settings. On SemEval-2016, class-conditioned feedback achieves higher mean Macro-F1 than pooled feedback for four of five backbones. Both reasoning-based strategies, I+R and I+R+E, achieve strong performance, with their relative effectiveness varying across models and datasets, while remaining competitive with recent prompt optimization methods. The MoPrO-SD code and VaccineStance dataset are available on GitHub.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13386
6D pose estimation of novel objects without CAD models remains an open challenge: model-free methods must build the object representation from scratch during onboarding and have long trailed their model-based counterparts. We present NovaSplat, a model-free pipeline that closes this gap. From a short smartphone video captured at onboarding, we train a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model that serves both as a template source for detection and coarse pose estimation and as a differentiable backbone for pose refinement. Our refiner optimizes the object-to-camera pose with combined photometric and geometric losses under a continuous rotation parametrization free of gradient singularities. On a household-object benchmark, NovaSplat surpasses all model-based methods. On a challenging industrial benchmark with textureless and specular surfaces, it outperforms all model-free competitors while substantially narrowing the gap to model-based ones. We further introduce NovaSplat-Lite, an inference variant that is $3.1\times$ faster at negligible accuracy cost. Code will be made available at \href{this https URL}{this https URL}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13309
API specifications serve as critical documentation for modern software development, directly impacting integration efficiency and client code generation. While recent advancements have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate initial specifications from source code, existing approaches treat this process as a one-time event - overlooking the needs for continuous validation, long-term maintenance, and market-driven evolution of these artifacts. To address this issue, we present Agent4Spec, an autonomous multi-agent framework featuring two distinct pipelines: (1) a validation pipeline that detects and self-corrects OpenAPI syntax errors, and (2) a market analysis pipeline that conducts competitive research, identifies functional gaps against industry leaders, and automatically generates missing API-spec functionalities. We evaluate Agent4Spec on two curated datasets of API specifications spanning both general-purpose and industrial scenarios. Among 9 SOTA LLMs, the top-performer achieves 100% syntax error detection rates and over 95% implementation success for proposed corrections, while securing over 50% adoption rates for suggested endpoint improvements, representing a practical tool for API development.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13273
Currently, the animal production sector is undergoing rapid development of techniques that allow automatic monitoring of animal behaviour and health. This paper presents a computer vision-based approach for the automatic recognition of labor contractions in cows. During the course of the study, videos depicting 100 cow births were collected. From the obtained videos, 8500 cow contraction actions and about 25 000 non-contraction sequences were extracted which constituted the dataset. Leveraging image processing techniques and deep learning algorithms like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs), our methodology extracts relevant features from video frames to detect and classify contractions. Our study demonstrates a high accuracy rate of over 95% in detecting labor contractions. This automated system has the potential to enhance productivity and animal welfare in the dairy industry by providing real-time monitoring and facilitating timely intervention during difficult calvings. The video demonstration of the system can be found at the following URL: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13242
Symbols and icons in archival maps represent an expansive source of evidence for historical geography. In this paper, we present a two-stage framework for (1) detecting cartographic signs in historical maps and (2) generating interpretable sign embeddings that capture both semantics and stylistic variations. We also introduce CaSiDD, an open benchmark dataset spanning multiple sign categories and diverse cartographic styles, designed for generic sign detection. Using YOLOv10-X, we demonstrate the practicality of automated sign detection on historical maps. We then present strategies for creating contrasted, informative embeddings of cartographic signs. We approach embedding design systematically, maximizing expressiveness while suppressing digitization or background material confounders. Our final method, based on an adapted RADIOv4 backbone, effectively encodes both sign form and semantics, while producing interpretable representations. This work lays a foundation for scalable evidence extraction for the comparative study of map signs within cartographic culture and geohistorical research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13224
The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based maritime surveillance is becoming an important part of maritime Internet of Things (IoT) and intelligent transportation systems. It provides a flexible and cost-effective way to large-scale maritime traffic monitoring. However, achieving robust situational awareness remains challenging in practical maritime environments. The main challenges arise from heterogeneous sensing modalities, adverse imaging conditions, and spatial misalignment caused by UAV motion. To address these problems, this paper proposes an airborne multi-modal graph learning-driven framework, termed AMGT, for vessel identification and tracking in UAV-assisted maritime IoT. Specifically, visible and infrared images are first aligned and fused through a multi-parameter perspective transformation model. This improves visual perception under low visibility and complex illumination conditions. Automatic identification system (AIS) messages are then temporally synchronized using interpolation and linear prediction. To detect small and oriented vessels, we develop a mixed-modality MAir-YOLOv8-OBB detector, followed by the MAir-SORT algorithm for stable vessel tracking. We further design a graph learning-driven association network to model temporal dynamics and spatial dependencies among vessels and between vessels and UAVs. A motion-aware coordinate unification (MCU) strategy is also introduced to reduce nonlinear misalignment caused by UAV motion. Experiments on the MAP-M2UAV50 dataset show that AMGT achieves high accuracy and efficiency. The results demonstrate its potential for UAV-assisted maritime IoT applications, including vessel monitoring, traffic situational awareness, and intelligent maritime transportation services. The dataset and code will be available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13220
Fake news detection under low resource conditions is challenged by the scarcity of labeled data and the difficulty of capturing subtle deceptive patterns. In this work, we focus on low resource fake news detection, where only a small labeled set is available for training, while evaluation is performed under a fixed and unchanged test protocol. This setting is motivated by costly, ambiguous fact-checking and emerging topics and domains that are poorly covered by existing benchmarks. Existing data augmentation methods, such as synonym substitution, generative adversarial networks, and large language model (LLM)-based generation, often produce fluent but overly generic content, lacking the task-specific relevance needed for accurate detection. To address this, we propose SharP, a boundary-aware text generation framework guided by soft and hard prompts, which leverages LLMs as tools adapted to produce task-specific synthetic samples. SharP employs a dual prompt mechanism: hard prompts provide structured guidance and factual constraints, while soft prompts introduce learned semantic patterns from the data. These two types of prompts are combined to guide the generation process, enabling the model to produce samples that closely align with the characteristics of news. To further enhance detection performance, we incorporate a boundary-aware strategy that steers generation toward areas where the classifier is less confident, helping to clarify subtle distinctions between real and fake content. In addition, we adopt a dual objective optimization that balances semantic alignment with the source data and classifier feedback. This encourages the generation of samples that are both domain-consistent and helpful for refining decision boundaries, ultimately improving model robustness and generalization in low resource fake news detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13207
Cyberbullying is a growing concern in online communities, yet existing Bengali corpora remain limited in contextual information, annotation transparency, scale, accessibility, and support for multidimensional analysis, thereby hindering robust detection and comprehensive study of harasser behaviors and networks. To address these gaps, we introduce the Bengali Contextual and Diverse Cyberbullying (\textit{BenCoDiC}) corpus, a publicly available contextual cyberbullying resource for Bengali political news discourse comprising 50,250 textual instances collected from 100 YouTube videos and their associated discussions. The corpus preserves caption--comment--reply relationships and is organized through a nine-dimensional star schema covering users, videos, textual content, context, time, engagement, political parties, target identities, and language categories. Five AI chatbots were initially evaluated for annotation but did not meet the predefined reliability criterion. Consequently, a two-tier human annotation process with expert verification was adopted, achieving Fleiss' $\kappa=0.86$ and Krippendorff's $\alpha=0.86$. Statistical analyses characterize the corpus, while transformer-based experiments show that incorporating conversational context yields modest but consistent improvements over isolated-text classification. \textit{BenCoDiC} supports context-aware cyberbullying detection and perpetrator-oriented behavioral and network analysis. The corpus is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13121
Large audio-language models (LALMs) frequently exhibit object hallucination, affirming absent sounds. The dominant mitigation, Audio-Aware Decoding (AAD), contrasts logits under real audio against an all-zero "blank" waveform, flagged by prior review as out-of-distribution. We introduce a black-box causal test that isolates the claimed evidence itself: localize a claim's evidence region via CLAP similarity, remove it by spectral gating, and compare against a random-window control across a 2x2x2 grid on three LALMs. On Qwen2-Audio-7B, localized ablation's raw AUROC trails blank's (0.613 vs. 0.721); this is a duration confound, not a localization failure, since blank removes the entire clip versus the grid's 2-4 s. Holding duration fixed, localization beats random removal at every cell on both models. Raw detection value remains model-dependent, especially on Audio Flamingo 3. The same evidence corrects decoding: contrastive decoding combining blank and language-prior contrasts, gated and ensembled, raises Qwen2-Audio accuracy from 57.1% to 71.9%, beating AAD alone. A unified causal-grounding profile does not transfer between models, indicating different grounding regimes. The source code and a detailed report of our findings, including identified limitations, are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13112
Broadcast archives offer scale and diversity for self-supervised learning (SSL) but contain substantial noisy, non-speech, and multilingual content. Prior work typically relies on voice activity detection or language identification (LID) to extract speech, ensuring presence rather than quality. Whether and how to filter unlabeled speech by quality for SSL, particularly from noisy broadcasts, remains underexplored. We present a large-scale Finnish SSL study starting from 2.1M hours of unconstrained broadcast audio. We propose automatic speech recognition (ASR) confidence as a proxy for pretraining data quality and show 3-7% relative WER improvements over LID-based filtering despite a smaller training set. We further address the lack of controlled architectural comparisons in speech SSL by evaluating Transformer, Macaron-Net, Conformer, and E-Branchformer at matched parameter budgets. Our models improve upon prior Finnish SSL baselines, particularly at Base scale and out-of-domain.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13102
Recent advances in large-scale foundation models have enabled strong generalization across a wide range of clinical and research tasks in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, existing vision-language MRI models remain limited in anatomy-specific localization and pathology-aware representation, particularly in real-world settings. We introduce A4-MR, a 3D vision-language foundation model trained on approximately 50,000 MRI studies comprising 491,000 series, roughly half of which are paired with radiology reports. A4-MR is designed to: (1) learn anatomy localization through large-scale pretraining with noisy labels; (2) align image and text representations at the anatomical level; and (3) learn distinct representations of healthy and abnormal anatomy. Across a diverse set of downstream tasks, A4-MR outperforms existing foundation models, including a +1.7 AUROC improvement over MedSigLIP for abnormality detection. Using a frozen encoder, A4-MR also surpasses an end-to-end task-specific MedNeXt model for knee segmentation by +1.4 Dice and performs comparably to the best task-specific model for abdominal organ segmentation on AMOS, within 0.4 Dice. Finally, without anatomical prompts, A4-MR localizes 3D anatomy comparably to MedSAM2 provided with ground-truth bounding boxes. Together, these results demonstrate that anatomy-level multimodal alignment and abnormality-aware representation learning can enable a single MRI foundation model to support localization, segmentation, and pathology-related tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13056
Some backdoor attacks never touch an image. FLIP only changes labels: on CIFAR-10, flipping 3% of them makes a ResNet-32 send 99.7% of triggered source-class images to the attacker's class. The usual defenses look for the poison inside a model trained on those same labels. So when they struggle, is the problem the test they run, or the space they run it in? We answer with a controlled swap: we keep the test, the labels and the metric fixed, change only the feature space, and judge each defense by retraining the victim on what it keeps. The space decides. On dog$\to$cat the same nearest-neighbor check scores AUROC 0.546 on the poisoned model's features, 0.967 on frozen DINOv2 features that never saw a label, and 0.995 on the same network trained on clean labels, an oracle control rather than a defense. We reproduce SPECTRE, the defense FLIP's authors recommend, to 90.94 / 0.97 against its published 91.47 / 1.7, then price it: on truck$\to$deer it deletes 20% of every class, while a prototype audit on the frozen features deletes 6% for higher clean accuracy and lower attack success. On three harder pairs that audit leaves about a quarter of the attack standing. A count read off encoder geometry and clean labels, before any attack is run, separates the pair where the audit removes the attack from those where it only partly does, though on a single zero-count pair. Three results warn against the easy story. A better detection score does not mean a safer model: on two of four pairs Confident Learning scores the higher AUROC, and on dog$\to$cat leaves 2.6 times the attack success. The prototype family, our best static performer, is the first an adaptive attacker slips past. And past a point, catching more poisons stops reducing attack success. Check labels in a space that never learned them, and judge a defense by the retrained model, not by its detection score.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13051
Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to reduce performance degradation due to distribution shifts between training (source) and testing (target) datasets. However, owing to insufficient modeling of fine-grained features and limited instance-level alignment, existing approaches become less effective under complex environmental conditions, such as extreme weather conditions and object occlusion. We overcome these challenges by proposing JMT-YOLO, a novel joint multi-task learning framework for DAOD. JMT-YOLO is based on the Mean Teacher architecture. It introduces an auxiliary semantic segmentation task and a masking mechanism to enhance the modeling of foreground-background semantic boundaries in the target domain. Specifically, fine-grained feature degradation is reduced by introducing a multiscale context-aware segmentation head equipped with a dense connection structure to effectively capture local and global contextual features. A mask-consistency loss is formulated by applying random masking operations to target images, thereby guiding the network to learn structural context and improving instance-level feature alignment. Extensive experiments on three benchmark domain adaptation tasks (Pascal VOC to Clipart1k, Cityscapes to Foggy Cityscapes, and KITTI to Cityscapes) demonstrate that JMT-YOLO achieves detection performances of 46.9%, 57.3%, and 61.0%, respectively. These results demonstrate superior performance over existing state-of-the-art and baseline methods, thereby validating the effectiveness and generalization of JMT-YOLO.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12901
A conversational speech model has to decide, at every pause, whether to speak. Existing evaluations test boundary detection, policy adherence, or aggregate statistics, not this decision. We place real-time speech systems at 427 pauses and 482 turn ends from 176 unscripted conversations in Seamless Interaction, give each the conversation so far, and score what it generates against what the person did: whether and how soon it speaks at a pause; its latency, length, and wording at a turn end; and whether it can answer a question about the preceding 30 to 120 seconds. Across six systems, the hosted APIs (GPT Realtime, Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, Grok Voice) respond at almost every pause whichever endpointer they use; only their latency, about 1 to 4 s with silence-based endpointers and about 8 s with semantic turn detection, decides whether the words land inside the pause. The full-duplex models (PersonaPlex, Moshi) are the only systems that regularly stay silent and the only ones that interrupt within a human reaction time. Hosted systems reply longer than the person. Given the history as text, hosted systems recall 41 to 60% of conversation facts under a Claude Opus 5.5 judge and 19 to 26% under a strict word matcher; hearing it as audio, full-duplex models recall 17 to 22% and 12 to 15%. We release the labels, points, harness, and every output.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12802