Few-Shot
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IntLawNER: A Named Entity Recognition Dataset and Benchmark in International Law
2026-09-18 19:36:30Genis Skura, Roland Bouffanais, Didier WernliAbstract
International law provides the normative framework through which states coordinate action, regulate armed conflict, and protect human rights, yet its texts remain without token-level named entity recognition (NER) resources. We introduce IntLawNER, a NER dataset and benchmark for codified sources of international law, covering 2,987 gold-annotated sentences and 8,094 entity spans from International Court of Justice (ICJ) decisions, UN Security Council resolutions, and European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments, annotated with seven institution-specific entity types. We construct IntLawNER with a cost-effective hybrid algorithmic-agentic pipeline that reduces 468k source sentences to a compact annotation set through candidate retrieval, LLM-based vetting, and human review, with 89.6% of gold spans accepted unchanged from the silver layer. However, the silver-to-gold analysis reveals that human-machine aggregate agreement metrics can be misleading in domain-specific NER: Cohen's kappa=0.964 on boundary-matched spans masks a macro-F1 of 0.753 when missing entities, boundary errors, and label corrections are included. The benchmark shows that zero-shot span-based GLiNER collapses on entity types dependent on institutional function rather than surface form (0.243 micro-F1), while fine-tuned transformers struggle on rare labels. Carefully selected few-shot examples that demonstrate label contrasts improve every LLM over zero-shot prompting, with Claude Opus 4.6 reaching the best score of 0.873 micro-F1. We release IntLawNER as a benchmark and reusable resource for extracting references in international legal texts.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22529
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Neural Cellular Automata Learn General Features in their Hidden Channels
2026-09-18 14:58:18Etienne Guichard, Stefano NicheleAbstract
Modern deep learning models achieve impressive generalization through over-parameterization, but this paradigm often struggles with overfitting and memorization in few-shot regimes. Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) offer a highly parameter-efficient alternative, yet research has focused primarily on their output, leaving the role of their internal hidden channels largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the internal dynamics of NCA hidden channels and introduce a novel transfer-learning mechanism that injects a pretrained teacher's hidden states into a student model to guide early optimization. Evaluated on few-shot and scale-variant MNIST benchmarks, NCAs outperform comparable recurrent and feed-forward architectures, demonstrating superior generalization with a minimal parameter budget (~9,800 parameters). Mechanistic analysis reveals that the hidden channels decouple feature extraction from uniform classification consensus by absorbing morphological complexity and converging to mutually orthogonal states. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these hidden channels capture general, scale-invariant topological primitives rather than class-specific templates. This allows a student model to achieve strong few-shot performance on unseen classes using features transferred from a teacher trained only on a subset of digits (0-5). Our results highlight the potential of utilizing hidden-state dynamics as a robust, decentralized computational substrate for parameter-efficient transfer learning
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21870
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Evaluating In-Context Learning and Retrieval Strategies for Devanagari Post-OCR Correction
2026-09-18 10:26:08Abhishek Bhandari, Gaurav HaritAbstract
In-context learning using Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a compelling path to training-free post-OCR correction, yet its effectiveness for Devanagari script remains entirely unexplored. We present the first systematic evaluation of LLMs (3B-32B) for post-OCR correction in Hindi and Marathi, comparing three in-context example retrieval strategies: domain-random selection, dense semantic retrieval, and our proposed CharBM25, which retrieves examples by character n-gram BM25 similarity over OCR inputs to target shared error patterns with the test sentence. Across a 20,000-sentence benchmark spanning five news domains, retrieval strategy is the decisive factor in correction quality: CharBM25 outperforms domain-random selection by 2.8-4.0pp absolute WER on Hindi and 2.9-3.8pp on Marathi, using character trigrams, which consistently outperform bigrams and unigrams. Scale dominates performance: Gemma-3-27B achieves WER reductions of 55.0% for Hindi and 33.3% for Marathi under CharBM25-5. Few-shot gains are capacity-gated: models below 8B do not reliably improve over the OCR baseline, and on Marathi the smallest models (3B) degrade more sentences than they improve. Marathi is persistently harder to correct than Hindi across all scales, reflecting its greater morphological complexity. These findings establish CharBM25 as an effective, GPU-free retrieval strategy that matches or exceeds dense retrieval at negligible computational cost, and show that combining it with a general-purpose LLM of 12B+ parameters delivers reliable, training-free Devanagari post-OCR correction without task-specific fine-tuning. Dataset: this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21595
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Purification and Regulation: Comorbidity-Aware Multi-Label Few-Shot Learning for Medical Image Classification
2026-09-18 09:31:26Ying-Chih Lin, Po-Chih Kuo, Yong-Sheng ChenAbstract
Multi-label few-shot learning (MLFSL) remains a significant challenge in medical image analysis (MIA). Current metric-based meta-learning methods face two critical limitations in MIA. First, conventional prototype generation often entangles irrelevant disease information, leading to contaminated prototypes and degraded performance. Second, prior studies typically enforce inter-class separability in embedding space, largely neglecting the inherent correlations among diseases. To overcome these challenges, we propose Prototype Purification and Regulation (PPR), a novel MLFSL framework for MIA. PPR first performs prototype purification by leveraging sample-level comorbidity scores to emphasize disease-specific features, producing purified prototypes that better characterize each disease. Building upon these purified prototypes, PPR further addresses the underexplored problem of inter-class prototype distance in MIA by incorporating disease-level comorbidity statistics to adaptively regulate inter-class similarity, forming a comorbidity-aware embedding space. Overall, PPR sequentially enables the model to capture pure disease features and inter-class relationships for reliable MLFSL in MIA. Extensive experiments across four chest X-ray benchmark datasets, including cross-domain evaluation, show that PPR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving disease detection while demonstrating robust generalization and clinical applicability.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21541
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Refine Then Fusion: Training-Free 3D Point Cloud Adaptation with Priority Refinement and Multi-Modal Knowledge Fusion
2026-09-18 09:11:55Hang Cheng, Yan Chen, Mingyu Fan, Long ZengAbstract
Recent pre-trained foundation models provide rich multi-modal priors for downstream 3D vision tasks. However, the effectiveness of these representations in few-shot scenarios is limited by two fundamental challenges: High-dimensional features often contain substantial channel redundancy and task-irrelevant noise, while the reliability of different modalities varies across samples. Consequently, direct aggregation of heterogeneous representations overlooks sample-dependent modality reliability and may obscure the discriminative cues essential. To address these limitations, we propose Refine Then Fusion(RTF), a training-free framework for few-shot 3D recognition. RTF first identifies discriminative feature channels by jointly modeling inter-class similarity and intra-class stability, thereby decoupling domain-specific knowledge refinement from the cached representations of pre-trained models. It then introduces a reliability-aware fusion mechanism that estimates sample-wise modality reliability from the distribution shifts induced by feature refinement, enabling adaptive aggregation of multi-modal representations. Furthermore, RTF constructs a memory cache that integrates instance-level support features with class-level prototypes to infer query labels. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that RTF consistently outperforms single-modal baselines, partial-fusion variants, and existing lightweight adaptation methods, achieving state-of-the-art few-shot 3D recognition performance without gradient optimization, additional training data, auxiliary training, or parameter updates.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21522
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P$^3$-SAM: SAM with Perceptual Parallel Prompt for Few-Shot Strip Steel Surface Defect Segmentation
2026-09-18 07:38:17Qian Xu, Hang Xiong, Anpeng Wang, Sam Kwong, Cong Zhang, Runmin CongAbstract
Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) of strip steel surface defects (S$^3$D) has posed significant challenges distinct from natural scenes. Unlike natural images, S$^3$D task exhibits unique characteristics including low local contrast, uneven illumination, and complex fine-grained texture patterns. Although recent methods based on Segment Anything Model (SAM) have shown promise in FSS on natural images by leveraging SAM's powerful pre-trained representations, these unique industrial characteristics of S$^3$D images lead to performance drop when directly applying SAM to industrial defect scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel Perceptual Parallel Prompt (P$^3$) framework that empowers SAM, creating the P$^3$-SAM model to address these challenges through two core strategies. First, we develop a Perceptual-Optimized Encoding (POE) strategy that enhances local contrast and preserves critical texture details for S$^3$D segmentation. Second, we introduce the Parallel Prompt Generator (PPG) strategy that simultaneously generates both semantic and spatial prompts, enabling comprehensive guidance for SAM's decoder across varying images. Extensive experiments on three few-shot S$^3$D benchmarks demonstrate that P$^3$-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particularly notable improvements of 12.00% in mIoU on Surface Defects-4i dataset.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21424
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Style as Cover: Deep Image Steganography via Stylized Transmission
2026-09-18 07:19:45Qi Li, Jidong Yang, Huaike Yu, Chunpeng Wang, Suo Gao, Herbert Ho-Ching Iu, Yuantian Miao, Bin Ma, Xiao ChenAbstract
Image steganography hides secret message within normal images, with most existing works relying on cover-preserving transmission. However, such a paradigm becomes vulnerable once the original cover is exposed or can be reliably approximated. In this paper, we propose StyleStegaNet, a stylized image hiding framework that replaces cover matching with style-concealment transmission. Instead of transmitting a cover-like stego image, StyleStegaNet generates stylized stego images conditioned on publicly available style references, redefining steganography invisibility from cover-preserving concealment to behavior-level camouflage based on style transformation. Such a setting poses a substantial challenge to reliable secret recovery, since neural stylization can significantly alter the feature statistics exploited by deep hiding methods. To address this challenge, StyleStegaNet decouples the overall task into four coordinated stages: stego generation, stylized transmission, structure-preserving reconstruction, and secret recovery. Moreover, StyleStegaNet is optimized with a progressive three-stage training strategy, in which wavelet-domain constraints and perceptual supervision guide the recoverable information toward structural representations. We further provide an analysis showing that secret recoverability is largely restricted to the normalized structural subspace, offering a mechanistic explanation for why directly stylized baselines fail and why a reconstruction-guided recovery path is necessary. Extensive experiments on DIV2K and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of StyleStegaNet. And few-shot image steganalysis with two deep detectors further shows detection accuracy near random guessing, approximately 51\%.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22392
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A Free Lunch? Adapting PP-OCRv6 for Historical Text Recognition
2026-09-17 11:15:07Benjamin Kiessling (ALMAnaCH)Abstract
Despite impressive reported scores, large vision-language models have seen limited practical uptake in historical automatic text recognition because of their computational cost, dependence on large-scale pretraining, and hallucination. Historical ATR therefore continues to rely largely on compact CRNN line recognizers, which are visually grounded and trainable on modest data. Lightweight recurrence-free recognizers promise the accuracy of larger models with the practical advantages of CRNNs, yet have not been comprehensively evaluated on historical writing. We adapt PP-OCRv6, a recent compact text recognizer without strong language modeling, for historical line recognition and compare it with a conventional CRNN across generalized pretraining, domain-specific training, corpus-level fine-tuning, and manuscript-specific few-shot adaptation on multilingual Latin- and Arabic-script material. While PP-OCRv6 does not consistently outperform the baseline when trained from scratch, heterogeneous pretraining produces markedly better generalization. Comparisons with the Qwen3.5-based Medusa recognizer further show that fine-tuned PP-OCRv6 can outperform a large VLM tailored towards historical Latin-script HTR.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20064
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CliniCIRCA: A Modular LLM Framework for Constructing Longitudinal Mental Health Patient Journeys from Raw EHR Narratives
2026-09-17 02:13:21Aiwei Ivy Zhang, Nimra Ishfaq, Mohit Chandra, Santiago Alvarez Lesmes, Adam Coscia, Khatiya Chelidze Moon, Xiaohan Ding, Munmun De ChoudhuryAbstract
In mental health care, reasoning over patient journeys is a key task for clinicians. Yet these journeys, encompassing a longitudinal progression of biological, psychological, and social events, are often spread across disparate unstructured text narratives, making temporal recovery challenging. We present CliniCIRCA, a multi-stage LLM framework for Calendar-anchored, Imprecision-aware Reconstruction of Clinical Annals. To our knowledge, CliniCIRCA is the first to temporally classify clinical events across unstructured discharge summaries without event-level timestamps. From 14,882 MIMIC-III mental health admissions, we first construct a benchmark of 52 discharge summaries on which CliniCIRCA produces 15,891 temporally tagged events. After correcting 629 errors based on a clinician-in-the-loop evaluation, we produce verified gold-standard labels. Finally, the corrected timelines drive a temporally grounded summarization stage that compresses each source 1.52 times into a date-grouped chronological record. We then scale the framework to generate 1,000 silver-standard timelines and evaluate them as training data. Compared with zero- and few-shot prompting, instruction tuning generally improves five open-weight models on event extraction, temporal tagging, and summarization across silver and clinician-verified evaluations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19585
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From Gameplay to Policy: Towards Scalable Robot Data Collection via Gamified Robot-Free Interaction
2026-09-16 13:33:06Zheng Li, Liang Zhu, Junzhe Wang, Huayuan Chen, Ziyun Liu, Jiahang Cao, Xinyu Sheng, Pei Qu, Yufei Jia, Ximeng Zhang, Jiarui Xie, Zizhao Yuan, Haoang Li, Yi Cai, Jinni Zhou, Jun MaAbstract
Learning generalizable robot manipulation policies requires large-scale and diverse interaction data, yet collecting real-world demonstrations remains costly and difficult to scale. Existing approaches to data collection are either dependent on specific robot hardware that limits crowdsourcing and transferability, or suffer from incomplete annotation and limited behavioral diversity. Inspired by how games sustain long-term human engagement, we explore an alternative paradigm that turns data collection into an engaging gameplay experience and transfers the resulting human manipulation experience to real robots. We present Project Kitchen, a VR-based gamified egocentric data collection platform that elicits diverse, goal-directed manipulation while remaining independent of specific robot embodiments and hardware, making it applicable to broader and potentially large-scale deployment. To bridge the game-to-real gap, we further introduce Game2Policy, which extracts embodiment-invariant affordance cues, including contact points and sub-goal states, from gameplay trajectories. An affordance model is pre-trained on game-collected data and then jointly fine-tuned with downstream policies using only a handful of real-robot demonstrations. Experiments show that Game2Policy improves average success rates by 10.0 points in simulation and 18.3 points on real robots in the few-shot setting. User studies and quantitative analyses further show that Project Kitchen promotes diverse manipulation behaviors and provides an engaging data collection experience. These results demonstrate the potential of gamified virtual environments as a scalable source of manipulation knowledge. The platform and code will be released upon acceptance.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18650
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Reasoning through Evolution: Automatic Meta-path Discovery for LLM-based Fake News Detection
2026-09-16 12:51:51Ziyi Zhou, Xiaoming Zhang, Hui Pang, Yuting Zhang, Tiesunlong Shen, Bingyu Yan, Erik Cambria, Litian ZhangAbstract
Propagation structures provide crucial evidence for fake news detection, yet existing approaches primarily rely on supervised GNN-based models, which require substantial labeled data and exhibit limited generalization. Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, directly feeding them raw propagation graphs creates a significant modality mismatch and severe information overload, making structure-aware reasoning unreliable in zero-shot and few-shot settings. To bridge this gap, we propose MAGER, a multi-agent genetic evolution framework that automatically discovers meta-paths optimized for LLM reasoning. By compressing complex propagation graphs into informative subgraphs, the evolved meta-paths alleviate both information overload and modality mismatch, enabling frozen LLMs to perform structure-aware veracity reasoning. We further introduce a graph in-context learning strategy that retrieves semantically and structurally similar demonstrations to strengthen classification and reasoning. Extensive experiments show that MAGER substantially improves frozen LLMs as standalone fake news detectors in data-efficient settings. Our code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18597
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CADSplat: Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting Aided by CAD Models for Robust, Photorealistic Digital-Twin Reconstruction
2026-09-16 11:07:21Kristof Overdulve, Lode Jorissen, Nick MichielsAbstract
We present CADSplat, a framework that reconstructs photorealistic, geometrically accurate digital twins from sparse ($<15$ views), wide-baseline posed images of an object by regularizing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with an explicit CAD shape prior. Using such a prior requires finding a CAD model whose shape resembles the object depicted in the images and determining the pose of each camera relative to the object. We obtain both by matching segmented object silhouettes against silhouettes rendered from a CAD library and keeping the camera-to-object poses of the best-matching model. We then anchor 3D Gaussian primitives to the surface of the retrieved model and jointly optimize the 3DGS parameters, the camera-to-object registration, and a non-rigid deformation field to account for shape differences between the physical object and the CAD model. Across two real-world datasets, CADSplat outperforms unconstrained, few-shot, and mesh-texturing baselines and degrades gracefully to as few as 3 views. Our experiments show that most of the gain in rendering quality comes from how the splats are constrained---a fixed set of splats tied to a surface and moved by a single smooth deformation field---rather than from the CAD shape itself. The CAD model adds shape knowledge where views are scarcest, in the sparsest captures and on strongly self-occluded objects, and it places every camera in the object's own frame. This enables applications beyond novel-view synthesis, such as markerless augmented reality registration, per-image object pose estimation, physical simulations, and the transfer of part labels from the design to the reconstruction.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18473
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PDA++: Field-Aligned Planning and Scene-Adaptive Insertion in Remote Sensing
2026-09-16 08:53:30Xianchi Dong, Yingyan Hou, Chao Ren, Wanxuan Lu, Zihan Wei, Hongfeng Yu, Yixiao Wang, Chubo Deng, Xian SunAbstract
Remote sensing recognition is often constrained by scarce observations of rare targets and costly annotations, making realistic synthetic augmentation particularly valuable for few-shot and long-tailed scenarios. Object insertion provides an efficient way to increase target diversity while preserving authentic background scenes, but realistic insertion in overhead imagery requires the generated target to adapt coherently to its surrounding environment. To this end, we propose PDA++, a unified environment-aware object insertion framework organized as Plan, Decouple, and Assimilate. Planning determines scene-compatible poses through an affordance field that combines geometric clearance with structure- and scale-aware cues. Decoupling introduces a pose-conditioned background that provides precise spatial guidance together with target-scene context, allowing the reference object to preserve its identity while adapting to the target observation. This construction also naturally provides pixel-level masks for segmentation augmentation. Assimilation further improves local coherence by aligning multi-scale texture distributions through optimal transport. On the optical benchmark, PDA++ achieves a whole-image FID of 6.28 and improves average few-shot recognition mAP50 by 17.69 points, corresponding to a 28.8% relative gain over the real-data baseline. On SAR imagery, it improves ship detection by 4.10 mAP50 points and remains effective under cross-dataset transfer and amorphous-target insertion. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18329
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ALPINE: Adaptive Localization for Parameter- and Sample-Efficient Few-Shot Learning
2026-09-16 03:00:34Neeraj YadavAbstract
Few-shot learning research is predominantly evaluated on accuracy alone, with limited attention to the parameter and training-sample budgets required to reach that accuracy - a real constraint for practitioners without large-scale compute. We present an ultra-lightweight (22,249-34,917 parameter) spatial-relational architecture for few-shot image classification that combines fixed Gabor edge-energy guidance with a windowed, content-adaptive patch locator. Under a strictly matched, iso-episode-budget protocol (250 meta-training episodes, 5 canonical seeds, 600 evaluation episodes per seed), our architecture achieves 5-shot accuracy gains, consistent across all five seeds, over Prototypical Networks, Relation Networks, and MAML on both CIFAR-FS and MiniImageNet, while using 27-53% fewer parameters than any baseline. It also converges in fewer training episodes, generalizes better to an unseen fine-grained domain (CUB-200-2011 birds, zero retraining), and is more robust to 50% occlusion and 25% spatial translation than all three baselines. A series of falsification ablations - zeroing relational tokens at inference and retraining without them entirely - shows that the architecture's pairwise relational computation, while present, is not the primary driver of its performance; the content-adaptive patch locator is. We report this honestly, together with a capacity sweep showing a genuine accuracy plateau near 22-35k parameters, and release full seed-level results and checkpoint hashes for reproducibility.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22323
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When to Call an LLM: A Confidence-Gated Hybrid for Cost-Effective Emotion Recognition in Conversational AI
2026-09-16 01:05:22Sai Babu Udayagiri, Arjun Chouhan, Ravisekhar Kanagala, Trishala PavagadaAbstract
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a production capability behind agent-assist prompts, escalation routing, and post-call analytics in contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) platforms, where cost and latency constraints matter as much as accuracy. We report a systems-level comparison of three deployment options for dialogue-contextual ERC: a low-cost stacked ensemble (sentence embeddings, windowed context, RandomForest/XGBoost/logistic-regression stacking), off-the-shelf LLM prompting (GPT-4o-mini; zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought), and a confidence-gated hybrid that escalates only the ensemble's least-confident predictions to the LLM - modeled on IVA-to-human-agent escalation policies used in production contact centers. On IEMOCAP, the ensemble significantly outperforms every LLM configuration (0.595 vs. 0.460-0.536 weighted F1, p < 0.0001) at a fraction of the cost and sub-10ms latency; on MELD and CMU-MOSI the ranking reverses, showing neither pure system is a safe default. The confidence-gated hybrid resolves this by Pareto-dominating both pure systems on all three datasets (0.620, 0.643, 0.824 weighted F1) while routing the majority of traffic through the near-zero-cost ensemble, translating to roughly $10-85 per million utterances versus $99-170 for an LLM-only pipeline. The escalation policy is not an opaque cost/accuracy dial: escalated turns disproportionately follow an emotion or sentiment shift, giving operators an interpretable, auditable routing signal, and the ensemble's confidence is well-calibrated and safely under- rather than over-confident. The pattern holds across three datasets and two LLM providers. Confidence-gated cascading is established in general ML systems; our contribution is showing it transfers cleanly to dialogue-contextual ERC, yielding a concrete deployment recipe for CCaaS and conversational-AI platforms deciding how to allocate LLM spend.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17977
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Enhancing Accessibility of Medical Texts through Large Language Model-Driven Plain Language Adaptation
2026-09-15 16:33:38Ting-Wei Chang, Hen-Hsen Huang, Hsin-Hsi ChenAbstract
This paper addresses the challenge of making complex healthcare information more accessible through automated Plain Language Adaptation (PLA). PLA aims to simplify technical medical language, bridging a critical gap between the complexity of healthcare texts and patients' reading comprehension. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT and BART, have opened new possibilities for PLA, especially in zero-shot and few-shot learning contexts where task-specific data is limited. In this work, we leverage the capabilities of LLMs such as GPT-4o-mini, Gemini-1.5-pro, and LLaMA for text simplification. Additionally, we incorporate Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) techniques to enhance adaptability and robustness in PLA tasks. Key contributions include a comparative analysis of prompting strategies, finetuning with QLoRA on different LLMs, and the integration of MoA technique. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM-driven PLA, showcasing its potential in making healthcare information more comprehensible while preserving essential content.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17398
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Towards Detecting AI-Assisted Responses in Online Surveys
2026-09-15 15:27:04Qizhou Wang, Bogdan Mamaev, Christopher LeckieAbstract
The use of LLMs to complete online surveys impacts the validity of survey-based research, but detecting such usage remains underexplored. We introduce an initial benchmark dataset, namely ASURRE, for AI-assisted survey participation to capture usage strategies ranging from full generation and revision to persona-grounded agentic completion. Controlled by these strategies, LLM-assisted survey responses are generated using multiple LLMs on three real-world surveys in different disciplines, paired with genuine human responses. Our evaluation of existing machine-generated text (MGT) detectors shows that naive AI usage is readily detectable, whereas persona-grounded agents that mimic entire respondents push detector performance toward chance. We further show that agentic completion cannot fully replicate respondent-level behaviour and leaves distinctive behavioural traces. While individual cues can be circumvented by targeted prompting, a simple few-shot, training-free aggregator over these cues improves mean AUROC by +0.14 over the best existing detector across agentic settings. Our project is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17317
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Zero-shot narrative detection in social messaging
2026-09-15 15:20:49Jes\'us M. Fraile-Hern\'andez, Anselmo Pe\~nas, Patrick GiedemannAbstract
This study investigates the zero-shot ability of large language models (LLMs) to identify and classify hidden narratives in social messages. Our research hypothesis is that LLMs' extensive contextual knowledge allows them to interpret messages on a deeper, pragmatic level, going beyond basic sentiment or topic analysis. Experiments on the Dipromats and SemEval datasets show that providing models with human-written narrative descriptions significantly improves performance, without the need of training examples. In contrast, automatically generated descriptions or the use of few examples (few-shot) often degrade accuracy due to subtle shifts in framing. The study also finds that ensemble methods, particularly majority voting, enhance robustness and that larger models perform best while also being less sensitive to prompt variations. The findings validate that LLMs can effectively detect strategic narratives in a zero-shot setting, and when combined with simple ensembling and human-written descriptions, they can rival supervised systems, offering a scalable solution for narrative detection, specially when there is no training data for the vast majority of domains.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17310
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Sample-Conditioned Representation Selection for Audio Few-Shot Learning
2026-09-15 12:15:12Fengrui Liu, Ningxin Shen, Yi Li, Yiwei Fu, Feng Liu, Jiangmeng LiAbstract
Few-shot audio classifiers may rely on foreground-background co-occurrences and fail when those correlations shift. On SpurAudio, the resulting representation shift is concentrated and class dependent: for ResNet12, the top 10 percent of channels explain 82.80 percent of the null-corrected shift contribution. We propose SAMPLESELECT, which predicts a fixed-budget feature mask independently for each input while keeping the encoder and source classifier frozen. Training uses differentiable Gumbel Top-k selection with foreground classification and cross-background contrastive losses; inference uses deterministic Top-k masks and support-only linear adaptation. Across ResNet12 and Conv64 in 5-way 1-shot and 5-shot evaluation, SAMPLESELECT gives the best OOD accuracy among the compared methods and improves the matched full-representation control by 4.90-8.38 percentage points. Ablations and representation analyses further support the learned selection mechanism. Code is available at this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17076
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TecoPrompt: Temporal-Conservative Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models
2026-09-15 08:49:07Zeyi Shao, Haowen Hua, Jiaxin Zhang, John See, Zeyd Boukhers, Cong YangAbstract
Prompt learning adapts vision-language models, such as CLIP, by adjusting a small set of context tokens. However, under few-shot supervision, even moderate label noise can disrupt prompt optimization. To address this issue, we propose TecoPrompt, a closed-loop robust prompt-learning framework that revisits optimal transport (OT) pseudo-labeling from a temporal perspective. TecoPrompt employs an entropic OT plan in the CLIP semantic space to obtain globally consistent label candidates. It verifies the reliability of these candidates by examining trajectory stability: a noisy label is only rewritten if the OT candidate remains unchanged within a K-epoch temporal stability window and passes a confidence gate based on Exponential Moving Average (EMA). This approach helps reduce confirmation bias. The rewritten labels are then integrated back into prompt training using a tri-group objective that includes three loss functions aligned with clean, mid, and noisy subsets. Experiments on seven datasets with synthetic symmetric and asymmetric noise, as well as Food101N, demonstrate significant performance improvements. For example, on the OxfordPets dataset, with 50% asymmetric noise, TecoPrompt achieves an accuracy of 0.843, up from 0.775.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16858
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