Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds Large Language Model (LLM) outputs in external knowledge, but RAG systems usually trust whatever they retrieve, creating a Security-Reliability Gap: high semantic relevance does not guarantee factual truth. Adversaries exploit this through knowledge poisoning, inserting malicious documents to cause targeted misinformation. We propose an Evaluation Agent, middleware that combines Natural Language Inference (NLI) factual verification, a five-signal poison detector with relevance-weighted aggregation, and a Trust Index T = 0.4 F + 0.35 C + 0.25 (1 - P ) with a non-linear dampener for high-contamination contexts. On TruthfulQA with Llama 3.3 70B, the agent reaches 91% accuracy and 100% precision, with 100% recall on instruction injection, while in-place edits, such as entity swaps, remain hard to detect. Across three LLMs the Trust Index stays discriminative, with a Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under the Curve (ROC-AUC) of 0.73 to 0.81; generation style matters more than model size, and per-LLM threshold calibration restores baseline competitive accuracy, whereas a weaker FEVER result shows that cross-dataset generalization requires domain-specific calibration. In a software-engineering use case, a secure-coding assistant over guidance from the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 and the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), the agent reliably blocks instruction injection of unsafe advice (F1 92%), while contradiction and subtle semantic weakening remain hard. Throughout, the agent measures detection of poisoned context before generation, not whether the LLM adopts the injected misinformation. We release the proposed approach, attack generator, and experimental artifacts at the link: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21095
Deploying autonomous systems in safety-critical domains demands guaranteed robustness against physically plausible geometric perturbations rather than abstract pixel-wise noise. In vision-based navigation and autonomous landing, machine learning components require rigorous validation under dynamic operational conditions such as camera rotations and lighting shifts. Extending findings on the failure of first-order spatial attacks in classification, we show that standard gradient-based heuristics (e.g. APGD) similarly fail on for pose estimation, often performing worse than a simple random sampling baseline. To overcome these optimization bottlenecks, we reformulate pose estimation robustness within the framework of Global Lipschitzian Optimization (GLO). We argue that GLO offers a principled approach to robust validation, effectively localizing global optima with strong theoretical convergence guarantees. We evaluate this framework on a YOLOv8-Pose keypoint detector with a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) solver against rotation and contrast. In our evaluations, GLO successfully isolates critical failure modes where position deviations exceed safe operational limits, while rapidly pruning the search space by over 80%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to extend geometric robustness validation to continuous keypoint regression and deep object detection, establishing a practical step toward certifying robust autonomous perception.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21066
Conventional in-distribution evaluation can overestimate robustness when training and test data share recurring task-specific patterns or surface cues. This risk is especially relevant in social-engineering fraud detection, where attackers can preserve malicious intent while changing the scenario, impersonated entity, or wording. We study this problem as scenario-level out-of-distribution (SL-OOD) detection for SMS and voice phishing, where entire attack scenarios are held out from training while the label space remains fixed. This setting tests whether models can generalize to unseen attack scenarios using decision-relevant evidence rather than familiar scenario-specific cues. Using this SL-OOD evaluation, we find that high in-distribution performance does not reliably predict held-out robustness across feature-, encoder-, and decoder-based baselines. We interpret this gap as scenario memorization: reliance on recurring scenario-specific lexical or entity cues rather than decision-relevant evidence. We propose ECoG, an evidence-consistent generative framework that combines evidence-span supervision with a rationale-label consistency objective during training. On the 0.5B decoder, relative to the same backbone trained without consistency regularization, ECoG raises Macro-F1 on OOD challenging instances by 3.22 points, reduces the share of predictions whose generated rationale supports the opposite label by 4.22 points, and increases token-level overlap with reference evidence spans by 8.38 points; the reduction in prediction-rationale inconsistency is consistent across four decoder backbones. These results suggest that compact generative detectors can benefit from evidence supervision and rationale-label consistency under social-engineering shift.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21043
Multimodal object detection in remote sensing faces challenges due to semantic heterogeneity and modality-specific noise interference. To this end, we propose SuppreSensing, which reformulates multimodal fusion as a selective collaboration process that jointly models shared information and modality-specific cues. SuppreSensing first designs an Expert-driven Multimodal Feature Recalibration (EMFR) module, which reformulates shared-consensus extraction as an input-adaptive multi-expert selection process to alleviate the symmetry trap in multimodal fusion. Complementing this, a modality-specific attribute augmentation strategy is employed to enhance specific modality features by modeling bidirectional discrepancy patterns, mitigating cross-modal heterogeneity. Furthermore, we propose an Expert-driven Customized Feature Purification (ECFP) module based on a "specialized inspection-comprehensive analysis-diagnostic update" physical examination paradigm to iteratively filter redundancies and reinforce task-relevant semantics. Extensive experiments on the DroneVehicle and VEDAI datasets demonstrate that SuppreSensing achieves state-of-the-art detection performance. Cross-domain evaluations on natural scene datasets (FLIR and LLVIP) further validate its superior robustness and generalization capability across diverse environmental conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20944
Vision foundation models (VFMs) offer strong generalization capabilities for domain-adaptive object detection (DAOD). However, existing VFM-based methods overlook the spatial-scale discrepancy between teacher and student feature maps, resulting in semantic incompatibility that weakens both feature alignment and pseudo-label learning. Moreover, domain shift can cause source-trained VFM teachers to miss target-domain objects, limiting the quality of their pseudo-labels. To address these issues, we propose the Semantic Localization-Enhanced Teacher (SLE-T), a semantically compatible knowledge-distillation framework built around a lightweight SLE Adapter for DINOv2. SLE Adapter injects pretrained local-texture priors into DINOv2 to improve cross-domain recognition and reformulates its features into dense representations that are spatially and semantically compatible with the student detector. SLE-T transfers the resulting teacher knowledge through either pseudo-label learning or feature alignment. We instantiate SLE-T with DINOv2-B and DINOv2-L (the ViT-B and ViT-L variants) and compare them with the larger DINOv2-G teacher. Extensive experiments on three DAOD benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, and ablation studies confirm the importance of teacher-student semantic compatibility. Notably, SLE-T with DINOv2-B produces competitive or superior pseudo-labels using approximately one-quarter of the training time of DINOv2-G and substantially less GPU memory, demonstrating efficient VFM knowledge transfer under limited computational resources.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20916
Reliable traffic sign detection is a prerequisite for the global deployment of autonomous driving systems, where regulatory compliance and road safety depend on perceiving signs correctly across regions, ranges, and weather conditions. Despite recent progress, vision-based methods continue to face three fundamental limitations: poor cross-regional generalization due to high diversity across countries, degraded performance on small-object detection at long ranges (traffic signs occupy as little as $10{\times}10$ pixels at 200m), and fragile temporal tracking under the strongly non-linear perspective distortion that occurs as a vehicle approaches a sign. In this paper, we address the problem of robust, long-range, region-agnostic traffic sign perception by combining camera and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensing. We present a multi-modal detection framework whose Intensity-Aware Deformable Fusion module aligns retro-reflective LiDAR cues with camera features, anchoring detection on geometric invariants rather than region-specific visual appearance. We further introduce a dual motion-model tracker that explicitly accounts for non-linear perspective transformations during vehicle approach, substantially improving temporal consistency over linear motion assumptions. Additionally, we develop a semantic attribute classification pipeline that estimates occlusion level, readability, sign embeddedness, and road relevance, providing actionable context to downstream planning. Extensive evaluation on our dataset, spanning 60+ countries and 2,500+ hours of driving data, shows that the proposed pipeline achieves an Object Miss Ratio (OMR) of 0.49% across 221,068 evaluation sequences, demonstrating globally generalizable traffic sign perception in commercial-grade autonomous driving systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20874
Infrared small target detection is still challenging in remote sensing imagery, because the targets are extremely small, exhibit weak local contrast, and are often embedded in complex and highly variable backgrounds. In addition to these inherent difficulties, we observe that existing detectors often show unstable performance when the target scale changes or when the scene background varies. This scale- and scene-sensitive degradation indicates that current methods are insufficient in simultaneously preserving target structure during feature downsampling and maintaining discriminative local contrast under background shifts, which finally results in unbalanced detection performance across different conditions. To improve detection robustness, this paper proposes a Relative Degradation Aware Network (RDANet) for infrared small target detection. RDANet consists of two dedicated modules: Multi-Scale Anti-Alias Downsampling (MSAD) and Prototype-Guided Skip Memory (PGSM). MSAD introduces multi-scale anti-alias filtering together with pixel-fold aggregation to reduce aliasing effects during resolution reduction, so that target shape information can be better preserved while irrelevant background responses are suppressed. PGSM further enhances the skip features by retrieving patch-level prototypes from a shared memory and adaptively integrating them into the current representation, which helps maintain stable local contrast cues under diverse scene backgrounds. Experiments on three public benchmarks show that RDANet achieves the best performance on most evaluation metrics, while scale- and background-stratified evaluations indicate more stable behavior across target sizes and scene complexity. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20870
Watermarking diffusion language models (DLMs) requires mechanisms compatible with iterative parallel unmasking rather than autoregressive decoding. Existing sampling-based watermarking methods typically inject position-wise i.i.d. perturbations, which can be poorly aligned with DLM decoding dynamics and degrade generation quality. We propose SAC-Copula, a quality-preserving watermarking method for DLMs based on smooth, locally correlated Gumbel perturbation fields constructed via a Gaussian copula. We further develop a SAC-aware detector using covariance-aware filtering and native-sample calibration. Mechanism-level analysis shows that local correlation reduces latent perturbation roughness and better matches iterative refinement dynamics. Experiments on LLaDA show that SAC-Copula achieves a favorable quality-detectability trade-off compared with existing baselines. In particular, further evaluations on Dream-7B and additional datasets show that SAC-Copula substantially improves PPL tail stability over the i.i.d. Gumbel baseline, while maintaining strong low-FPR detectability and competitive overall generation quality. Additional token-edit stress tests further assess watermark robustness under controlled synchronization drift.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20839
We propose a novel object detection method that enables us to protect sensitive visual information of test images. Previous studies considering visual information protection focus on image classification tasks. This paper proposes an object detection method using perceptual encryption for the first time. The proposed method can achieve almost the same accuracy as that of models without any protection by utilizing the embedding structure of the Vision Transformer (ViT) and a domain adaptation technique with keys. In experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified in terms of accuracy and visual protection under the use of ViTdet, which is a ViT-based object detection model.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20712
Traffic sensors commonly record flow, speed, and occupancy, but standard traffic flow forecasting benchmarks and models rarely exploit all three raw measurements reliably. Although speed and occupancy provide sensor-native traffic-state information beyond flow alone, existing releases often omit these variables, replace them with proxies, or contain logically inconsistent records. Moreover, direct empirical risk minimization over three-variable inputs may exploit regime-dependent shortcuts, as the relationships among flow, speed, and occupancy vary substantially between free-flow and congested states. We introduce \textbf{PEMSB-3V}, a public benchmark suite that preserves raw flow, speed, and occupancy measurements from PeMS detectors for flow prediction. We also propose \textbf{RiskTraf}, a model-agnostic risk-extrapolated residual plug-in. For each trained spatio-temporal backbone, RiskTraf freezes the selected checkpoint and learns a lightweight zero-start residual head from historical speed and occupancy. The residual head constructs ordered traffic-risk environments and optimizes horizon-wise flow corrections with a risk extrapolation objective, thereby mitigating regime-specific shortcut correlations without modifying the backbone. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiskTraf consistently improves diverse forecasting backbones and outperforms debiasing and distribution-shift adaptation methods. Our code and benchmark are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20656
Grape leaf disease recognition is important for precision agriculture, enabling early diagnosis, timely intervention, and improved vineyard management. Although deep learning has achieved strong results, many studies rely on few datasets, often acquired under controlled conditions, and may not reflect real vineyard challenges such as complex backgrounds, variable illumination, occlusion, leaf pose, disease severity, and device differences. This paper presents a dataset-centric benchmark of deep learning methods for grape leaf disease classification and detection. We analyze publicly available datasets in terms of disease categories, annotation types, acquisition conditions, image characteristics, class distributions, provenance, and task suitability. Representative models are evaluated in three settings: image-level classification, region-level classification, and object detection. Classification is assessed using accuracy, while detection is evaluated using mAP@50 and mAP@50:95. Cross-dataset experiments further examine transfer between datasets with compatible disease categories but different visual and annotation characteristics. Results show near-saturated classification performance on several controlled or derivative datasets, greater difficulty on heterogeneous datasets, and substantial variation in detection performance across annotation settings. Cross-dataset performance drops sharply, especially for object detection, indicating that shared disease labels do not necessarily define equivalent recognition tasks. The benchmark emphasizes dataset provenance, realistic field evaluation, annotation compatibility, and external validation for reliable vineyard disease recognition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20608
Egocentric video offers scalable manipulation data for embodied AI, yet recovering metric 3D hand trajectories remains challenging due to severe object occlusion and frequent out-of-sight gaps. Existing single-frame and windowed temporal regressors fail when hand shortly leaves the frame, while recent video diffusion models (VDMs) rely on heavy, stochastic multi-step sampling as pixel-space renderers. We instead repurpose VDM into a deterministic geometry encoder. A single forward pass over the clean latent exposes scene content beyond current observations, including occluded and out-of-sight hands. We introduce DreamHand, an offline clip-level framework that extracts features via a Deterministic Clean-Latent Encoder and decodes them with a Bidirectional Spatiotemporal Decoder. DreamHand recovers continuous bimanual trajectories with metric placement and no external detector, while a Ray-Based Camera Solver supports a second configuration that needs no test-time camera intrinsics. Across five egocentric benchmarks, DreamHand sets a new state of the art, cutting MPJPE-p by 30% on occlusion-heavy ARCTIC and 40% on HOT3D. These gains reach 46%-61% once out-of-sight hands are included in the evaluation, offering a scalable path from everyday human video to robot manipulation data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20308
Vision Language Models have recently shown improvements in several objective and verifiable domains such as object detection but continue to underperform on subjective and creative design tasks. A major contributor to this performance gap is the lack of high quality human workflow data that captures a diverse set of preferences and decisions that make human experts good at design tasks. In this work, we first define a unique, expert curated taxonomy of design skills and best practices which we further expand into a set of 126 open ended, subjective, long horizon tasks. Built on top of this and expert solutions, our dataset FigmaTrace contains over 200 hours of human captured video data converted into 3469 design trajectories using a novel design phase-based method. We use our dataset to train four models and show that training on FigmaTrace leads to a performance improvement comparable to frontier closed models such as \textsc{Claude-Opus-5} and \textsc{GPT-5.6-Sol} on four out of distribution agentic GUI environments. We further perform a useful ablation to attribute these performance improvements to a design phase-based video to trajectory conversion which outperforms prior length-based conversion approaches. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis on the best performing \textsc{Qwen3.8-27B} outputs to better correlate performance improvements to FigmaTrace's trends. We open source our dataset and the best model for the community.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21460
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) object detection is critical for applications such as target search, where accurate detection of small objects in complex aerial scenes remains challenging. The limited spatial extent, dense distribution, and frequent occlusion of small objects make reliable candidate ranking particularly difficult. Existing Detection Transformer (DETR) based methods improve ranking by estimating localization quality from individual queries and incorporating it into classification scores. However, a single query often lacks sufficient geometric evidence for small objects with weak boundary cues, resulting in unreliable quality estimation and unstable ranking. To address this limitation, we propose Cross Layer Local Support and Consistency Calibration for DETR, termed CLSC DETR. Specifically, the Cross Layer Local Support module establishes correspondences between final layer queries and intermediate layer candidates to aggregate complementary geometric evidence for more reliable localization quality estimation, while the Classification and Localization Consistency Calibration module adaptively adjusts classification scores according to localization quality and classification reliability to improve candidate ranking. Experiments show that CLSC DETR improves AP and AP$_{75}$ over the baseline by 1.5\% and 2.0\% on VisDrone, respectively, while achieving consistent improvements on UAVDT.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21457
Recently, open-vocabulary 3D object detection (3D-OVD) has gained increasing attention for its ability to detect unseen objects in 3D scenes. Existing approaches typically adopt a two-stage pipeline that first discovers novel objects using foundation models and then trains a 3D-OVD model based on these discovered objects. Although effective, this pipeline often suffers from inaccurate localization and mismatched classification during the discovery stage, which subsequently limits the performance of the model training stage. To address these limitations, we advocate for improving both the reliability of novel object discovery and the robustness of model training, and propose an innovative framework. Specifically, for reliable discovery, our co-distillation strategy distills high-quality novel objects by applying Hungarian matching over a comprehensive score that incorporates geometric consistency, structural objectness, and semantic certainty. To enhance robust model training, we further propose a dual-guidance learning scheme, incorporating a scene-awareness-guided uncertainty regularization for the regression head and an LLM-guided hierarchical alignment for the classification head, effectively mitigating the negative effects of imprecise 3D bounding boxes and semantic ambiguity. Extensive experiments on SUN RGB-D and ScanNetV2 demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance gains over state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19973
Advances in speech synthesis have made deepfake audio highly realistic. Earlier studies reported 70-80% human detection accuracy, but relied primarily on older synthesizers. We compare human detection for three selected voice synthesis tools released in 2019, 2022, and 2024 with 82 IT professionals, and benchmark humans against six pretrained detectors on the same material. For fully synthetic speech (full spoofs), the F1 score drops from about 90% for RTVC and YourTTS to 48% for ElevenLabs, although listeners were explicitly warned that deepfakes were present. For partial spoofing, where only one sentence of an utterance is altered, strict accuracy falls to 9%, and listeners classify the synthetic sentence as bona fide 77% of the time. Humans and detectors fail in complementary ways, and neither reliably localizes short manipulations. Additionally, listeners increasingly mislabel bona fide speech as fake, eroding trust in unmanipulated audio. These findings show that human perception alone is unreliable for the selected modern and partial-spoof conditions and motivate procedural verification, provenance, watermarking, and segment-level detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19959
Face presentation attack detection (PAD) is traditionally formulated as a face-specific problem, although many of the visual artifacts introduced by print, replay, and recapture processes are not inherently tied to facial appearance. In this work, we investigate whether transferable PAD representations can be learned without using faces during downstream PAD training. To this end, we introduce TPO, a controlled face-free presentation attack dataset consisting of bona fide, print, and replay recordings of, almost randomly chosen, tomatoes, potatoes, and onions acquired under protocols that closely mirror conventional face PAD datasets. Using a foundation-model-based PAD architecture, we demonstrate that a detector trained on TPO achieves an average AUC of 92.70% across four standard cross-dataset face PAD benchmarks, outperforming training on synthetic faces and remaining competitive with models trained on real face datasets. Conversely, models trained on face PAD datasets transfer consistently above chance to TPO, suggesting that the learned representations capture characteristics of the presentation process rather than object semantics. Furthermore, incorporating TPO into conventional face PAD training consistently improves cross-dataset performance under fixed optimization budgets, indicating that face-free data provides complementary information rather than simply additional training samples. Finally, representation and frequency analyses provide further evidence that transferable PAD representations cannot be explained by a single spectral artifact but instead encode richer presentation cues shared across object categories. Together, these results provide empirical evidence that transferable presentation attack representations can be learned independently of facial content, opening new opportunities for privacy-preserving and identity-independent PAD development.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21455
Agent Skills extend LLM agents with reusable instruction packages that may also include scripts, resources, and service configuration. This creates a direct distribution channel for malicious behavior, yet existing malicious-Skill datasets are fragmented across sources, artifact formats, evidence regimes, and benign coverage; duplicated and structurally related content further complicates direct aggregation and evaluation. We present MaliciousSkillBench, a comprehensive benchmark for malicious Agent Skill detection. We consolidate 13 public sources, 11 of which contribute Core malicious artifacts, and reduce 8,414 raw malicious records to 7,539 normalized-unique identities in 4,588 operational structural families. After conservative cross-label conflict exclusion, the primary benchmark contains 9,740 Skills: 7,505 malicious and 2,235 benign. To characterize its coverage, we harmonize 11 attack categories for 4,983 malicious identities with supported source-native mappings and find substantial differences in threat composition across sources. We then evaluate three learned text detectors and three off-the-shelf Skill scanners. Learned detectors achieve 0.882-0.932 Random Macro-F1 but only 0.653-0.665 under Source-Disjoint evaluation; the strongest word TF-IDF SVM scores 0.932/0.916/0.665 on Random/structural-disjoint/Source-Disjoint while retaining 95.6% malicious recall but producing 62.4% benign FPR on held-out sources. Off-the-shelf scanners occupy different but also unsatisfactory operating regimes, reducing false positives only at the cost of sharply lower malicious recall. Together, these results show that reliable malicious-Skill detection requires both broader cross-source benchmark coverage and evaluation that jointly measures attack detection and benign over-flagging.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19901
Streaming systems that maintain a pool of expert models must repeatedly decide whether to reuse an existing expert for arriving data, spawn a new one, or defer. We present a decision layer that makes all three outcomes statistically meaningful. Reuse and spawn are posed as one-sided sequential hypotheses on a conditional (mechanism-level) discrepancy, separated by an indifference zone; defer is exactly the state in which neither betting e-process has accumulated sufficient evidence. We prove finite-time anytime validity for the observable surrogate discrepancy of a predictable discriminator sequence, and an unconditional one-sided transfer to the population quantity in which each side's slack is the excess risk of a single discriminator; an empirically observed downward-bias regularity makes the spawn side exactly conservative. Recency without sacrificing the guarantee is obtained by a restarted e-detector: a bank of unwindowed betting supermartingales at geometrically spaced restart times (O(log t) memory), with the error budget spent over restart instances, which preserves lifetime anytime validity; spending over expert-creation order likewise controls multiplicity for unboundedly many experts. On synthetic multi-concept streams, Electricity, Covertype, and the recurrence-heavy INSECTS benchmark, the instance-accounted restarted bank achieves zero false spawns and zero false reuses after switches and matches or exceeds the retired windowed heuristic (INSECTS-reoccurring accuracy 0.675), making the deployed algorithm and the guaranteed algorithm one and the same.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19888
Streaming systems that maintain a pool of expert models must repeatedly decide whether to reuse an existing expert for arriving data, spawn a new one, or defer. We present a decision layer that makes all three outcomes statistically meaningful. Reuse and spawn are posed as one-sided sequential hypotheses on a conditional (mechanism-level) discrepancy, separated by an indifference zone; defer is exactly the state in which neither betting e-process has accumulated sufficient evidence. We prove finite-time anytime validity for the observable surrogate discrepancy of a predictable discriminator sequence, and an unconditional one-sided transfer to the population quantity in which each side's slack is the excess risk of a single discriminator; an empirically observed downward-bias regularity makes the spawn side exactly conservative. Recency without sacrificing the guarantee is obtained by a restarted e-detector: a bank of unwindowed betting supermartingales at geometrically spaced restart times (O(log t) memory), with the error budget spent over restart instances, which preserves lifetime anytime validity; spending over expert-creation order likewise controls multiplicity for unboundedly many experts. On synthetic multi-concept streams, Electricity, Covertype, and the recurrence-heavy INSECTS benchmark, the instance-accounted restarted bank achieves zero false spawns and zero false reuses after switches and matches or exceeds the retired windowed heuristic (INSECTS-reoccurring accuracy 0.675), making the deployed algorithm and the guaranteed algorithm one and the same.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19885