Language_Model
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Generate-then-Rank: Learning Symbolic Goal Interpretation for Embodied Agents
2026-11-05 11:05:53Jisen Lei, Huizhi LiangAbstract
Goal interpretation is to translate a natural language instruction into a formal symbolic goal that a planner can execute. It is critical for embodied agents because any error here propagates to every downstream planning and action step. Doing it well requires both generating suitable candidates and reliably selecting among them. We present a two-stage generate-then-rank approach to Goal Interpretation in the Embodied Agent Interface (EAI). First, supervised fine-tuning adapts a Large Language Model (LLM) to EAI's output convention. Second, Candidate-Output Ranking from Errors (CORE) learns preferences over complete outputs from the model's own generated alternatives. We conducted experiments on the household scenes of the Embodied Agent Interface Benchmark. Multiple open source LLMs including DeepSeek-V3 chat, DeepSeek-Reasoner, and Qwen2.5-7B and Qwen2.5-72B were evaluated. The proposed method outperformed the baseline models including LLMs with simple prompting, chain-of-thought, and knowledge graph based approaches.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07825
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Different Corpora, Different Skills? A Paired Study of Small Language Models
2026-11-05 10:50:54Edoardo Vaira, Georgios Chavales, Pierre NuguesAbstract
Small language models are often trained under tight data budgets, where the choice of pretraining corpus may matter as much as model size or training recipe. We compare two contrasting corpora at matched 10-million- and 37-million-word budgets: the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica and the BabyLM 2026 strict pretraining corpus. For each corpus, we train teacher models, distilled 58-million-parameter Baby-Llama students, and no-distillation student ablations, using the same model families, training recipes, and evaluation protocol across corpora. Across BLiMP, BLiMP Supplement, EWoK, Entity Tracking, and COMPS, the corpora produce different skill profiles rather than a single quality ranking. BabyLM 2026 is consistently stronger on linguistic acceptability benchmarks, while Britannica is often stronger on Entity Tracking, a synthetic state-tracking task. The contrast appears across teacher and student models and at both budgets, with the cleanest cross-seed replication in the distilled student comparison. Targeted controls show that the central contrast persists after matching training exposure and at a longer diagnostic context; direct teacher ensembling also does not reproduce the 10M Britannica student's Entity Tracking behavior. Entity Tracking magnitudes nevertheless remain sensitive to training dynamics. For this corpus pair, corpus choice can therefore produce different relative skill profiles at small scale, motivating multi-benchmark evaluation when comparing pretraining data.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07812
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Decodability Is Not Validity: Evaluating Nuisance Sensitivity in Language Model Concept Probes
Abstract
Two concept probes can be equally accurate at predicting a concept from a language model's hidden states while their scores contain different mixtures of the target concept and a correlated nuisance attribute. In four target--nuisance settings (two aspect sentiments in CEBaB; occupation and gender in BiasBios; Amazon review sentiment with negation, and with first-person framing), two LLMs, and a population of concept extractors, we compare decodability with discriminant evidence: the score's dependence on the nuisance at fixed target, and its response to input edits intended to change only the nuisance, filtered by two LLM judges and compared against placebo edits. Under correlated training data, extractors that are statistically equivalent in held-out AUROC differ up to several-fold in nuisance sensitivity in three of the four settings, and decodability is not a reliable proxy for it: their rank correlation changes sign across settings. The effect follows the probe's training data, not the nuisance's natural association with the target: first-person framing, unrelated to sentiment in natural reviews, is absorbed at least as much as negation, which co-occurs with negative sentiment, and decorrelated training removes the systematic effect. Selecting extractors with nuisance-aware development diagnostics, which need nuisance labels but no counterfactuals, lowers counterfactual nuisance sensitivity wherever the default choice is sensitive, at a small accuracy cost. Concept measurements should be validated, not just decoded.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07805
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Bridging Structure and Semantics: Knowledge Graph Verification via Triple-to-Text Alignment
2026-11-05 10:19:27Ziang CuiAbstract
Semantic accuracy is an important dimension of knowledge graph quality. Graph-based scoring methods exploit relational structure, while textual representations allow classifiers to draw on knowledge encoded by pre-trained language models (PLMs). We present GenVer, a generative verifier that scores triples using both their serialized form and generated natural language representations (NLRs). A triple-text alignment procedure selects training pairs for a sequence-to-sequence generator; a BERT-based classifier then combines features from each triple and its generated NLR. On four FactFB variants, constructed from FB15k using perturbed negative triples, GenVer obtains the highest classification accuracy among the evaluated baselines, ranging from 88.56% to 91.52%. The experiments suggest that generated representations can help triple classification, while the case analysis also exposes semantic drift and high-confidence errors.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07780
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The Intrusion Pathway: How Non-Evidential Context Degrades Language Model Performance
2026-11-05 10:18:07Dikshant Kukreja, Gautam Gupta, Avni Mittal, Avinash Anand, Kritarth Prasad, Zhengkui Wang, Timothy Liu, Rajiv Ratn Shah, Aik Beng Ng, Simon See, Erik CambriaAbstract
Language models lose accuracy when a prompt contains non-evidential context: irrelevant statements from unrelated domains, or random off-distribution tokens, with no competing answer and no semantic overlap with the query. Such noise pervades retrieval-augmented, tool-using, and long-context deployments, yet the failure has lacked a mechanistic account. We trace the corruption to the Intrusion Pathway, which starts with MLPs enriching both query-subject and irrelevant-token representations, parroting heads carry prefix-token content to the prediction position, and relational readers largely avoid unrelated sources. Nevertheless, preserved subject enrichment and selective reading do not prevent intrusion in the broader computation. We then localize part of this interference to a sparse set of attention heads, which we call intrusion heads. Their prefix-derived writes promote distractor-related content, while their reduced support for the correct answer arises primarily from weaker non-prefix contributions rather than direct suppression by the prefix. The same heads transfer across tasks and distractor types and are largely weight-disjoint from the heads that integrate relevant contextual evidence, enabling a class-conditional intervention. Replacing the corrupted last-token residual with its clean counterpart, an oracle probe that requires a matched clean forward pass, recovers 97.6% on average of the distractor-induced drop across four downstream tasks. A deployable mask level knockout of about ten heads, roughly 1% of the model's attention heads, recovers 57% at bounded cost to helpful context.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07778
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RIVER: Evidence-guided multi-agent retrieval for enzyme--reaction discovery
2026-11-05 10:01:08Yifan Chang, Yunze Li, Feifei Jiang, Juntao Wu, Xin Chen, Han Hu, Yucheng Wu, Wei Tang, Mingqian Ma, Wanli Ouyang, Kaipeng Zhang, Lei Bai, Hongting Tang, Feiran Li, Yuchen RenAbstract
Enzyme function annotation and the identification of candidate enzymes for a given reaction are essential steps in connecting genomic information to biochemical reaction networks. However, existing methods rely on sequence or structural similarity or on training with known enzyme--reaction pairs, making it difficult to integrate biochemical evidence across large candidate spaces; they also struggle with retrieval tasks involving enzyme families whose members are highly similar. Here, we introduce RIVER (Reaction--enzyme Inference via Evidence-guided Retrieval), a multi-agent framework for bidirectional enzyme--reaction retrieval that identifies potentially catalyzed reactions for a given enzyme and ranks candidate enzymes for a given reaction. RIVER coordinates large language models, specialized biochemical computational tools, and external knowledge resources to assemble evidence at multiple levels, including reaction chemistry, protein sequences and domains, catalytic mechanisms, and database annotations. Dedicated validation modules further examine evidence gaps and potential conflicts and rerank candidates using traceable evidence records. On public benchmarks, RIVER achieves the highest success rates in both enzyme retrieval and enzyme annotation. In family-specific enzyme retrieval, RIVER outperforms the evaluated baselines on the selected datasets and metrics. In Escherichia coli enzyme retrieval tasks constructed from recent literature, RIVER achieves the best retrieval results with closed-source and open-source model configurations, substantially outperforming closed-source general-purpose and biology-specialized multi-agent systems, including Claude Code, Codex, and Phylo Max. These results suggest that evidence-guided multi-agent retrieval can prioritize biochemically supported enzyme--reaction relationships, providing a basis for subsequent experimental validation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07757
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Automated Video-to-QA Pipeline: End-to-End Question Generation and Verification Using Large Language Models
2026-11-05 10:00:50Jaival Chauhan, Vikram Singh, Pruthwik MishraAbstract
The exponential growth of educational and informational video content on platforms like YouTube presents a challenge for efficient knowledge retrieval and assessment. This paper proposes an end-to-end automated pipeline for extracting structured summaries and generating high-fidelity Question-Answer (QA) pairs from video streams. The framework integrates a cascade of state-of-the-art models: audio extraction is handled via FFmpeg, followed by automatic speech recognition (ASR) using Whisper (A library in Python) to generate accurate transcripts. Due to the token constraints of Large Language Models (LLMs), transcripts are segmented and summarized using Facebook's BART. A key innovation of this work is a Self-Verification and Fine-Tuning Loop. We utilize meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8BInstruct to generate candidate QA pairs from transcript chunks, which are then fed back into the model to rigorously assess their relevance and importance. Only verified, high-quality pairs are retained to construct a synthetic dataset. This dataset is subsequently used to fine-tune the Llama model using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), resulting in a specialized model capable of generating domain-aligned assessment questions. This approach demonstrates a scalable method for creating self-improving educational tools without the need for manual data annotation. The proposed model can be downloaded from Kaggle with all the codes from GitHub.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07755
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Extending Reasoning in Typed Decision Models via Looping
2026-11-05 09:46:17David Berghaus, Arber Zela, Behzad Shomali, Markus Frey, Mehdi Ali, Rafet Sifa, Volkan CevherAbstract
Typed decision models choose among a fixed set of answer options in a single forward pass, so unlike generative language models they cannot spend more test-time compute on hard inputs by generating more tokens. Looping a block of layers offers this compute in latent space without adding parameters, but prior work found no gain from loops retrofitted into conventionally pretrained models. We show that such loops help when trained together with the decision model. Our method, RELOAD (retrofitted loops for adaptive decisions), fine-tunes a pretrained encoder or decoder with a damped loop over its middle block and a lightweight controller picks the number of passes adaptively for each input. Across six models from 0.4B to 4B parameters, looping improves both accuracy and calibration, mostly on problems that need longer chains of reasoning than any seen in training, where encoders gain up to 23 points. Neither matched training compute nor more data closes this gap, and separate layers for each pass come close only with nearly twice the parameters. The controller keeps most of the gain at about three quarters of the compute.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07736
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Evaluating Token Probabilities as Confidence Estimators in Human Behavior Simulations: A Case Study in Luxembourgish Next Like Prediction
2026-11-05 09:45:49Nils Schwager, Simon M\"unker, Alistair Plum, Achim RettingerAbstract
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human behavior, their operational validity is typically assessed through accuracy alone, implicitly treating human behavior as deterministic. We argue that on noisy digital trace data, a model's performance depends not only on predicting the correct outcome but on its calibration. We present a case study testing whether the token probabilities of open-weight LLMs can serve as confidence estimates in a Next Like Prediction task: predicting how a user of the Luxembourgish news platform this http URL rates a comment, conditioned on their prior interactions. Evaluating Ministral 3 (3B, 8B), we find that, with in-context learning only, the tested models are overconfident and are outperformed on accuracy and calibration by a simple statistical baseline. Accuracy and calibration do not move together: scaling from 3B to 8B improves accuracy while degrading calibration, and longer behavioral histories raise accuracy while confidence declines. Task-specific supervised fine-tuning acts as an effective calibration intervention, reducing Expected Calibration Error from 0.2 to 0.006 while improving accuracy from 0.536 to 0.758. We conclude that confidence estimation should be evaluated alongside accuracy to improve validity when using LLM-based agents.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07735
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Continued Training of Continuous Language Flows with Token Identity Squared Supervision
2026-11-05 09:38:06Jiawei Jiang, Zhaoxiang Zang, Zhengtao YuAbstract
Diffusion and flow models have recently been extended to language modeling, generating text through continuous denoising in token embedding spaces. Pretrained models provide token representations and contextual prediction capabilities, but improving generation with limited additional training requires an appropriate connection between supervision and continuous generation. Continuous MSE evaluates a predicted vector obtained by weighting token embeddings with predicted probabilities; different probability distributions can yield the same vector and are therefore indistinguishable under this objective. We propose Token Identity Brier Flow (TIBF), which applies squared supervision directly to token identities when continuing pretrained language flows. TIBF combines network scores with token-matching scores under a Gaussian observation model, supervises token probabilities using the Brier loss, and uses probability-weighted embeddings for continuous generation. With fixed token embeddings, we show that the squared error between predicted token probabilities and the true posterior bounds the squared errors of continuous denoising predictions and flow velocities. A risk decomposition separates uncertainty inherent in the observation from posterior fitting error, motivating continued training that preserves pretrained embeddings and focuses on probability prediction. We also establish convergence to token embeddings under ideal predictions and sufficient conditions for local convergence with prediction error. From common pretrained initializations and under matched continuation budgets, frozen-embedding TIBF achieves this http URL values of 33.96 on OWT and 81.17 on LM1B, outperforming continuous-MSE and CE continuation controls. It attains the lowest this http URL at every tested sampling budget on both datasets, together with the lowest repetition rate on LM1B.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07721
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Evaluating Language Model Features for Zero-Shot Time-Series Anomaly Detection Under Isolation Assumption
2026-11-05 09:37:57Romain Hermary, Nesryne Mejri, Djamila AouadaAbstract
Time-Series Anomaly Detection (TSAD) is a fundamentally challenging task: it is unsupervised, requires high local precision capabilities, and suffers from limited labelled data. Recent work has explored adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to time-series via cross-modal transfer. However, existing approaches are poorly suited to Multivariate TSAD (MTSAD), as tokenisation often obscures fine-grained temporal and variables structures, and most methods optimise auxiliary objectives such as forecasting or reconstruction. We posit that these surrogate objectives become unreliable as model capacity increases. Highly expressive models risk reconstructing or forecasting anomalies, undermining the foundations of both strategies. Instead, we propose to use LLMs purely as feature extractors and directly analyse their induced feature spaces. In this work, investigate the ability of LLMs to provide useful representations for MTSADs in a zero-shot setting through classification. To this end, we study the separability of the extracted features, under the assumption that anomalous features should be isolated from normal ones. We analyse their temporal and contextual discriminative ability using simple step-wise tokenisation schemes, with one time-step per token, which preserve fine-grained local information. Their usability for MTSAD is assessed using an unsupervised Isolation Forest, enabling a direct evaluation of the resulting representation quality. We further investigate whether the observed performance can be attributed to the language-related pre-training of the LLMs or arises independently of it. Our results provide empirical insight into the ability of LLMs to represent multivariate time-series for anomaly detection and highlight broader applications of cross-modal foundation models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07720
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CAMP: Context-Aware Mapping and Placement for LLMs on 3D-IMC Arrays
2026-11-05 09:27:31Orhun G\"orkem, Athanasios Vasilopoulos, Georgios Pagonis, Victoria Clerico, Hadjer Benmeziane, Irem Boybat, Hsinyu Tsai, Abu Sebastian, William Andrew SimonAbstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) incur severe memory-access overheads due to the cost of loading large weight matrices and key-value (KV) caches. Analog In-Memory Computing (AIMC) is an emerging solution that enables computation directly on static weights stored in memory, substantially reducing energy and latency. 3D-IMC further stacks memory arrays into vertical tiers, increasing capacity but revealing a new challenge: how weights are placed in memory determines which matrix-vector multiplications (MVMs) can execute concurrently, affecting latency and throughput. The concurrency aspect of 3D-IMC weight-mapping remains underexplored in the literature, leading to sub-optimal utilization of compute resources on 3D-IMC chips. In this context we propose CAMP (Context-Aware Mapping and Placement), an inference-context-aware weight mapping algorithm for 3D-IMC-based LLM accelerators. CAMP captures the potential resource contention resulting from the architecture, targeted network, and runtime context in a conflict matrix, enabling throughput-optimized weight mapping. This mapping is refined through a profiling-driven feedback loop that efficiently prunes the search space and returns optimized mappings within practical runtimes. CAMP is an offline, software-based solution requiring no hardware changes and improving 3D-IMC compute utilization from 42.4% to 60.3%, delivering up to 2.0x higher 3D-IMC throughput and 1.74x higher end-to-end throughput over state-of-the-art mapping algorithms.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07707
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MCPHallu: Benchmarking Reasoning, Execution, and Memory Hallucinations in MCP Agents
2026-11-05 09:14:26Yizhen Jiang, Haowei Guo, Tianyi Bai, Zengjie Hu, Lu Ma, Zhengyang Zhao, Haoze Sun, Peng Pei, Wentao ZhangAbstract
Large language model agents are increasingly deployed through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which allows them to discover and invoke tools across multiple servers at runtime. Existing MCP benchmarks primarily measure task completion; where they diagnose failures, they do so after execution rather than building specific reasoning, execution, and memory failure risks into task construction. We introduce MCPHallu, a benchmark for diagnosing hallucination-prone agent failures in MCP environments along three axes: reasoning, execution, and memory. MCPHallu contains 358 tasks across five capability domains and runs on 36 production MCP servers in isolated containers. Each task is designed with a structural trigger that makes one of four subtypes the dominant failure risk: Branch Collapse, Unreachable Goal, Tool Misuse, or Context Forgetting. This design enables subtype-level analysis rather than aggregate task success alone. We evaluate fourteen frontier LLM agents from eight vendors on 5{,}012 trajectories. Current MCP agents remain vulnerable to hallucination-inducing tool environments, achieving an average score of 0.642 on a $[0,1]$ scale (higher is better). Failures concentrate on Unreachable Goal tasks, where the average score drops to 0.458 and 23.2\% of runs pass, indicating that agents often continue issuing tool calls or claim successful completion rather than recognizing infeasible goals. Subtype rankings diverge sharply: a model's rank shifts by 6.9 of 13 positions on average across subtypes, and Branch Collapse is uncorrelated with Unreachable Goal across models ($r = -0.12$). MCPHallu is released at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07689
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Egocentric Action Recognition with Objects and Vision-Language Affordances
2026-11-05 09:02:25Ra\'ul Boix-Aldeguer, Manuel Benavent-Lledo, David Ortiz-Perez, Jose Garcia-RodriguezAbstract
Action recognition, and more specifically egocentric action recognition, is a core task in computer vision, with applications such as monitoring the daily life activities of elderly people and task assistance. Recent methods rely on visual modalities such as RGB video or depth. However, in egocentric video, an action is largely defined by its objects, which these methods rarely model. We propose a method that combines a frozen SlowFast video expert with an attention-based object expert by late fusion. Each object is represented with its affordances, that is, what can be done with it, generated zero-shot by a vision-language model. Since datasets such as MECCANO annotate only the objects involved in each action, evaluating with these boxes tells the model which objects are active. We therefore train on annotated boxes and evaluate the method with detections from the official active-object detector, and with annotated boxes as an upper bound. Without affordances, our fusion reaches 68.4% Top-1 with annotated boxes but 49.0% with detections. About half of this drop comes from non-active detections. To remove them, the same vision-language model generates an interaction affordance that decides whether a hand is manipulating each detected object. On MECCANO, objects raise the Top-1 of the video expert from 44.9% to 49.0%, and the two affordances raise it to 49.9%, above SlowFast and object-aware RGB baselines. Code will be released upon acceptance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07673
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English Calibration Erodes Lithuanian in Expert-Pruned Mixture-of-Experts Language Models
Abstract
Expert pruning compresses Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models by removing the experts that a calibration set marks as unimportant. Studies of high-resource languages largely find that English calibration transfers well to other languages. We test this for Lithuanian: we pruned four MoE models with REAP, removing 25% or 50% of the experts with English, Lithuanian or mixed calibration, and evaluated both languages on reading comprehension, translation and language modelling. English calibration does not transfer to Lithuanian: at 25% pruning, English comprehension fell by a median of 1.7 points but Lithuanian by 21.4. The transfer is asymmetric. Lithuanian calibration removed most of the Lithuanian loss and never significantly hurt English comprehension, which was on average 2.5 points better than under English calibration; only English language modeling got slightly worse. Routing suggests why: in the last layers, Lithuanian sends 55-72% of its expert selections to just eight experts, against 19-39% for English, and English calibration removes some of these experts. Compressed models should be calibrated, and evaluated, in every language they must serve.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07654
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Don't Prompt Your Agents. Equip Them: Skillware as a Modular Standard for Sovereign, Auditable, and Deterministic Capability Execution for Logical Systems
2026-11-05 08:38:51Vladimiros Peilivanidis (ARPA Hellenic Logical Systems)Abstract
Current autonomous logical systems rely on a fragile assumption: that language models should dynamically write code, guess API payloads, and memorize operational constraints through prompt engineering. In practice, this burns massive context windows, inflates API bills, and produces brittle agents that fail unpredictably in production. In this work, we present Skillware, an open architectural framework and capability registry that formally separates what an agent wants to do from how that task is executed. Instead of prompting models with loose text instructions or markdown files baptized as 'skills', Skillware equips them with modular, versioned software capability bundles. Much like skill hotkeys in video games that execute deterministically under fixed world rules, each bundle combines a typed JSON input contract, deterministic Python code, task directives, bundled datasets, and automated unit tests. In-process adapters translate these capabilities into native tool declarations for any model, from frontier cloud APIs to local open-weight runtimes with zero network latency. Evaluating 23 frontier and open-weight models across 368 benchmark conditions, we show that small local models (3B to 8B parameters) equipped with Skillware consistently outperform unequipped frontier models on complex multi-step workflows. They cut token usage by up to 84.8%, slash inference costs by up to 97.3%, and eliminate parameter errors entirely. True agent reliability does not come from larger models or longer prompts, but from equipping logical systems with verified, deterministic software. Finally, we articulate the trajectory of capability bundles across an invariant continuum of information processing systems: from digital logical systems today, to IoT, drones, and embodied robotics tomorrow, establishing a foundation for auditable, real-time capability execution.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07652
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What the Middleman Delivers: Answer Behavior, Tool Permissions, and Billed Usage in LLM API Relays
2026-11-05 08:35:38Xiaodong Wu, Zhimin Zhao, Qi Li, Chaklam Cheong, Xiangman Li, Jianbing NiAbstract
Third-party application programming interface (API) relays offer access to large language models (LLMs), often at lower prices. Users depend on these services for model quality, instruction compliance, and accurate billing. However, existing studies leave unclear whether relays meet these expectations together. We test 20 relays offering GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5. First, we compare answers to knowledge questions with batch-matched official responses. In our first-round sample, the analysis flags 7/10 low-price and 2/10 same- or higher-price relays for behavioral differences. On retesting 35 pairs, seven gain or lose a flag under the original rules, and six under matched correction families. Because answer comparisons cannot reveal every delivery problem, we examine returned content and tool permissions. No injection is confirmed in 3,332 screened responses to a fixed, non-adversarial code and setup workload, yet four relays return tool calls despite instructions disabling them in the first round. Finally, to connect reported usage to actual costs, we compare input-token counts with official references and check balances. For identical requests, five relays report 4,200 to 60,000 more input tokens than the official API. Where balances are available (six services), charges follow reported usage at listed prices, including extra reported input tokens at one service. Our study shows that advertised models and prices are insufficient to judge relay reliability. It identifies unexplained billed token quantities and tool-permission violations as risks and shows why service evaluations need repeated measurements.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07650
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Redacting Personal Data: A Speed and Accuracy Comparison of Regex, Presidio and Hybrid Designs
2026-11-05 08:18:36Sai Yashwant, Manoj Kumar Gondimalla, Arjun Sharma, ShubhamAbstract
Many enterprise projects now pass free text to large language models (LLMs), and that text often contains personally identifiable information (PII) such as names, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses and dates of birth. Once a prompt is sent, this data is copied into provider systems, application logs and observability traces. Redacting PII before the call is an obvious control, yet teams seldom have numbers on what it costs in latency or what it lets through. This paper compares four redaction designs that any LLM pipeline can adopt: a pure regular-expression (regex) redactor, Microsoft Presidio running on a spaCy model, a hybrid in which Presidio finds only person names while regex handles structured identifiers, and a fast hybrid that calls spaCy's named-entity component directly. All four share a known-entity rule, which removes the person the system already knows it is handling, and a consistent placeholder scheme, so the LLM can still tell one person from another after redaction. We evaluate the designs on a sample workflow, which we call ProfileAssist, that turns resumes into structured profiles, using 100 synthetic resumes (523 characters on average, with 900 PII values and 600 business terms that must survive). Regex ran at a 0.20 ms median but caught only 88.9% of PII, because it cannot find names that are not known in advance, such as the references listed in a resume. Presidio, hybrid and fast hybrid each caught 100% of PII and kept 100% of business terms, at median latencies of 37.59 ms, 30.23 ms and 13.48 ms. Measured against a 9,120 ms median LLM call, even the slowest option adds only 0.41% to the request. We therefore recommend the fast hybrid as a default for LLM pipelines that handle personal data, with regex kept as a safety net rather than as the only control.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07633
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Embedding-Space Fingerprinting of LoRA Fine-Tunes: Recovering the Training-Data Domain from the Model Artifact Alone
Abstract
When a base language model is fine-tuned with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), how much of the training data domain leaks into the resulting artifact? This paper studies whether a simple classifier can recover the domain of a fine-tune given only the model artifact (weight deltas, internal activations on a fixed probe set, or generated text) without ever observing the training data. Using one base model (Qwen3.5-0.8B), 36 LoRA fine-tunes are produced over 18 public datasets in five domains (medical, code, mathematics, non-English text, narrative prose), and three feature families are extracted at decreasing levels of access: white-box weights, gray-box activations, and black-box outputs. A leave-one-dataset-out (LODO) protocol, frozen before any result was seen, tests whether the domain of a fine-tune trained on a previously unseen dataset can be identified. The domain is recoverable well above chance (20%) from gray-box activations (61%) and black-box outputs (64%); white-box weight statistics reach 42%. Contrary to the pre-registered hypothesis that signal decays monotonically from weights to activations to outputs, activations and outputs were more informative than the weight-delta statistics. The black-box result holds unchanged (64%) when only generated text is used, without token probabilities. Domain accuracy is also stable when a third run per dataset is trained on an independently drawn data subsample, and black-box predictions are unaffected by the LoRA rank (8-64). All code and per-run feature vectors are released.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07610
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Align Before Aggregation: Basis-Consistent Federated LoRA under Heterogeneous Ranks
2026-11-05 07:46:29Pengpeng Qiao, Yang Cao, Lingling Zhang, Guo Cheng, Junwei Chen, Manjiang Yu, Wei Yang Bryan Lim, Masatoshi YoshikawaAbstract
Federated fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) under heterogeneous client capacities is increasingly important, and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) with heterogeneous ranks makes it practical. Existing server-side aggregators compose local matrix updates $\Delta W_i$ from client-specific LoRA factors $(A_i,B_i)$ before aggregating them. Although these matrix updates lie in the same weight space $\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ and can be averaged directly, the LoRA factors that generate them may expressed client-specific local basis. In the typical compose--aggregate--factorize--dispatch loop, this basis inconsistency can make the rank-$r_i$ reference prefix dispatched to lower-rank clients unstable after server-side refactorization. In this work, we propose \textbf{FedAbA}, a basis-consistent federated LoRA aggregation framework for heterogeneous ranks. FedAbA first extracts each client's local basis, aligns it to the corresponding prefix of the global reference basis, and constructs a basis-consistent reconstruction of each local matrix update before aggregation. It then aggregates these reconstructions with weights that combine client data size and consistency score, followed by exact coefficient-space SVD refactorization and gauge fixing before rank-prefix dispatch. Our theoretical analysis clarifies the role of basis consistency and supports the proposed consistency-aware aggregation mechanism. Extensive experiments show that FedAbA outperforms representative federated LoRA baselines, with the largest gains under the strongest rank heterogeneity.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07598
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