Effective vocal coaching connects performance issues with corrective advice, but recordings paired with expert diagnoses and advice are scarce. Online singing communities provide a potential source of supervision, but observations and advice are scattered across unstructured comments. We introduce PitchIn, audio-language models for natural-language vocal coaching, and the PeerCoach Dataset: 14,445 instruction examples covering Focused QA, Overall Feedback, and Recognition QA. We compare target combinations on Qwen2.5-Omni and train PitchIn on Focused QA and Overall Feedback using Qwen2.5-Omni and MOSS-Music. On VocalCoachBench, the proportion of requested diagnosis-correction pairs matching an expert issue with valid advice rises from 21.3% to 61.0% for Qwen2.5-Omni and from 31.4% to 51.2% for MOSS-Music. Direct training on source comments yields only 19.8% for Qwen2.5-Omni. For Qwen, Focused QA alone reaches 65.6%, but adding Overall Feedback improves alignment with expert reviews and human preference. Both models improve expert-review alignment over pretrained baselines and are significantly preferred for usefulness (92.0% and 67.3%, respectively). Demo examples are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17036
Cybersecurity evaluations of AI agents have focused largely on offense, yet a working exploit does not show that an agent can make software safe. An attacker needs to exploit only one vulnerability; a defender must find and fix all of them. We introduce CWE-bench, a private benchmark of 120 held-out repository audit-and-repair tasks spanning 73 CWE types, eight languages, and all OWASP Top 10 2025 categories. Agents are given a repository to audit and a description of its threat model, but are not told the weakness, where it occurs, or how many vulnerable sites there are. Each patch must block the exploit while preserving original functionality, as checked by a programmatic verifier. We validated the verifier against a panel of agentic judges, manually reviewing disagreements during development and refining the checks. The best agents reach 68% pass@1 and 81% pass@4. We further conduct analyses showing that (i) agents with the same pass@1 differ widely in retry gains and cost, and (ii) no single agent is best across languages or vulnerability categories, and difficulty varies far more by vulnerability category than by language. As the offensive capabilities of agents improve, CWE-bench provides a broad and rigorous measure of whether their defensive capabilities keep pace.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17020
Evaluating model uncertainty on real-world data is challenging because each instance provides only a single observed label, leaving true conditional class probabilities unknown. To address this, we introduce ProbabilityBench, a benchmark that provides exact, instance-level class probabilities across three simulated text-based domains: peer review, covert information transfer, and credit risk. By explicitly defining the full data-generating process for each environment, we analytically compute both exact class probabilities and Bayes error. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical guarantee that rendering these cases into natural-language memos strictly preserves their underlying generative probabilities. This exactness enables direct measurement of reported probability quality via KL divergence. Across 16 evaluated models, most models on the observed cost-quality Pareto frontiers are decision models, including Jev and Perplexity Decider. Finally, ProbabilityBench serves as a meta-evaluation framework, leveraging known ground-truth values to benchmark the accuracy of standard calibration metrics and Bayes-error estimators themselves.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17016
Nearest neighbor search algorithms are widely used and have a long history, but we find that key implementation details are seldom reviewed in articles about them. These details can materially impact performance, and thus change the conclusions one makes about a given algorithm's superiority. In this article, we highlight these impacts by reviewing the Cover Tree as an example, producing RustKNN, a unified Rust implementation of three construction variants of the Cover Tree with three query modes. Our analysis reveals: (1) the optimal query strategy depends on $k$ and on the dataset (single-tree search is fastest at $k{=}1$ on three of our four largest datasets, while dual-tree search is fastest at $k{\ge}5$ on the three largest), and choosing the wrong query mode can cost up to a $7.5\times$ factor in runtime; (2) the cover tree base parameter, set to 2 in theory and 1.3 in practice, is not a safe default for dual-tree search: 1.3 is optimal on only one of seven datasets, and on covtype it is $1.6\times$ slower than the optimum; (3) among five micro-optimizations, only early-exit distance computation has a consistent effect, and that effect grows with dimension (none at $d{=}32$, $1.31\times$ at $d{=}54$, and $1.49\times$ at $d{=}784$); and (4) all-nearest-neighbor and held-out benchmarks yield different implementation rankings. All main timing tables report medians over 20 independent allocations with bootstrap 95% confidence intervals. RustKNN is open source at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16940
Keeling et al. [Keeling2026Generative] report on a case study recently conducted by Redgrave LLP in which they assert that Relativity's Generative AI Review tool (aiR) achieved 88% recall while Relativity Assisted Learning (RAL), its machine-learning tool, achieved 64% recall. These results are not comparable because the methods employed have different objectives, because of inter-assessor disagreement, and because they represent different recall-precision and cost-benefit trade-offs. Our analysis of the Redgrave data indicates that, when these differences are taken into account, aiR and manual review are comparable. Furthermore, established machine-learning models employing Continuous Active Learning (CAL) show state-of-the-art effectiveness, and superior efficiency, when trained only on a sample of 2,000 first-pass-reviewer responsiveness determinations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16925
As language-model agents write code, move money and change records on behalf of users, deciding whether an action is authorized has become a central safety problem. Guardrails are often placed in front of these actions, yet few evaluations ask whether their decisions follow authorization: blocking unauthorized actions while still allowing the same actions under valid permission. We introduce \bench{}, a benchmark that contrasts authorization evidence for the same operation in its language track. It combines expert-annotated natural-language scenarios with executed and verified operations, plus externally sourced native-policy requests. \bench{} checks each decision for correctness, usability and resulting effect, and tracks each request across guardrail changes. Our experiments show that many blocked operations stem from failed reviews, not correct denials. Repairing the output format restores usable decisions but changes which authorized requests are honored, and adding a second reviewer removes some errors while rejecting valid authorization. Guardrails should therefore be evaluated on both the unauthorized actions they stop and the authorized actions they let through.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16838
Deepfake speech detectors are typically evaluated as binary classifiers on fixed benchmarks, but deployed systems face evolving attacks, codecs, speakers, and recording conditions, with labels unavailable during operation. This makes it difficult to know when a detector operates in familiar conditions and can be relied on. We propose an unsupervised drift monitor that operates on the internal embeddings of a deployed detector. The monitor compares each input against bona fide and spoof references using regularized Mahalanobis distances. These distances define trusted, ambiguous, and novel regions of the detector embedding space, allowing unfamiliar inputs to be routed for review. We evaluate the monitor on four modern detectors on three datasets. The monitor raises alerts for dataset mismatches and substantially reduces the security-critical case of accepting deepfakes at the cost of reduced automatic coverage. The results also show that drift affects both classes: bona fide recordings can move away from the training reference, increasing alert rates even in in-domain settings. Our findings suggest that deployed deepfake speech detectors should be treated not only as a binary classification, but also as a reliability problem.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16826
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges to assign scalar scores that drive downstream decision-making, including tasks such as paper review and recommendation. However, LLM-as-a-Judge pipelines are vulnerable to score-hijacking prompt injection embedded in evaluated content, which corrupts scoring signals and distorts induced rankings. Existing defenses often enforce robustness by modifying the judge model itself, making safety dependent on a specific model's scale and training and requiring repeated effort when the judge is updated or replaced. We propose StableJudge, a lightweight defense framework that externalizes prompt-injection mitigation as a reusable pre-scoring capability. StableJudge centers on a compact 0.13B Sentry that localizes injected spans and performs targeted sanitization prior to evaluation, and is trained using adversarially evolving attacks to improve robustness beyond a fixed prompt set. To stabilize measurement, StableJudge derives deterministic, fine-grained scalar scores from the judge's output distribution. Across held-out scientific abstracts and out-of-distribution attack variants, StableJudge improves score recovery under attack while largely preserving general-purpose performance, demonstrating that robust LLM-based judging can be achieved by decoupling safety from judge scale via reusable defense capabilities. Code and data will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16814
An LLM agent using tools can fail silently. It stops before the task is done, raises no error, and answers fluently. Two kinds of monitor address this, one deciding whether a run failed and the other naming the step where failure became unavoidable. Much of the reported performance on both tasks comes from regularities that need no model. Failing runs are longer, and the step labelled decisive is usually the last. A rule that always names the last step is correct $67\%$ to $96\%$ of the time here, without reading the run at all. That ceiling reflects how the labels were written, not how agents break. On failures whose decisive step replay can confirm, it falls to near chance. Reporting gain over that rule therefore changes what a score means. Under that correction, methods tested here gain nothing on give-up failures, while several published systems keep a clear advantage on other splits. For detection, the agent's internal states beat transcript length and text similarity on the agent benchmark, and hold up where the text baseline does not. Precision stays low when failures are rare, so such a monitor should rank runs for review, not replace it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16661
Real-world studies (RWS) analyze routinely collected healthcare data, such as electronic health records and insurance claims, to estimate treatment effects, monitor safety, and identify risk factors outside randomized trials. Automating RWS with large language model agents is appealing but brittle: valid analyses depend on dataset-specific clinical semantics, including index dates, follow-up windows, patient/event-level units, and outcome boundaries that are often implicit in observational data. This leads to schema mismatches, temporal errors, inconsistent analytical granularity, and unsupported clinical claims. We present ProCARE, a profile-grounded framework that reformulates RWS automation as constrained compilation. ProCARE converts heterogeneous data profiles into Evidence Contracts specifying available variables, temporal attributes, distributions, and evidentiary limits, and compiles study objectives into RWS-IR, a strongly typed intermediate representation for variables, time relations, analysis units, and statistical tasks. Deterministic validation and localized repair then check and revise generated workflows across schema mapping, cohort construction, variable derivation, analysis, and interpretation. On 36 EHR-based benchmark tasks, ProCARE outperforms strong LLM-agent baselines in code executability, semantic consistency, and conclusion traceability, with automated violation diagnoses showing moderate-to-substantial agreement with blinded expert review.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16175
Nonverbal vocalizations (NVVs), such as laughter and sighs, convey meaning alongside words. NVV-aware speech systems must recognize and generate these events while preserving lexical accuracy and perceptual quality. Yet differences in annotation, resources, and evaluation complicate comparisons, and aggregate scores can obscure specific weaknesses. We review ten system descriptions from the NVVSpeech Challenge 2026, covering understanding and generation in Chinese and English across 16 event categories. Our analysis examines supervision construction, task adaptation, and inference-time or preference-based feedback. Results reveal persistent recognition difficulties with breath and gasp and trade-offs between event recognition and lexical accuracy, as well as between generation intelligibility and acoustic quality, with human listening providing complementary evaluation evidence. These findings identify priorities for advancing NVV-aware speech understanding, controllable generation, and comparable evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16076
The rapid deployment of agentic AI has introduced complex challenges for the ethics and governance of AI systems. Agents built on large language models act through tools on behalf of people, and each deployment case brings its own instructions, policies, evidence, and stakeholders, so alignment must be formed case by case. To this end, this work proposes agentic reflective equilibrium (ARE), a computational reflective equilibrium framework that serves as an ethical alignment scaffold in the agent harness. Drawing inspiration from the reflective equilibrium of John Rawls, the scaffold links principles from the system prompt and operator policy, considered judgments, tool evidence, and candidate actions through typed support and attack relations, with provenance encoding the instruction hierarchy. The agent acts on an equilibrium of this state and calls tools or asks questions only while doing so is worth its cost, unless a due-diligence mandate requires them. Governance enters through value priorities, source authority, prohibitions, human-in-the-loop triggers, and mandates, and certificates attribute each action to the sources whose commitments drove it. We show that equilibria are Nash equilibria of a mutual-adjustment game and establish monotonicity, lexical priority, stability certificates, and a quarantine theorem for prompt injection. Two case studies illustrate the framework: a computer-use assistant told to win a refund "whatever it takes" files an honest warranty claim, refuses a fake review, and ignores an injected request for personal data; a hiring agent showcases how authority, oversight triggers, audit mandates, and hard prohibitions shape discrimination, privacy violations, and escalation. The framework offers traceability, coherence, and adaptivity, facilitating safe, secure, and trustworthy agentic AI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16015
Text wrapped in a trigger can be made behaviorally invisible to a language model: omitted from summaries and quotations, ignored in question answering, and left unflagged by downstream filtering. We study this selective blindness as a dual-use information-flow primitive, a supply-chain backdoor, and a white-box auditing problem. We first implement it exactly as a serving-time span veto: blocking information flow out of a marked span makes every outside activation bit-identical under same-length substitution of the span's content, a noninterference property we verify across ten models, seven mixer families, and 0.5B-120B parameters. The veto serves as a deployable quarantine, an exact reference for calibrating leakage, and a teacher. Distilled into weights, it yields a backdoor: checkpoints trained on six model families from 4B to 120B ignore marked context at little benchmark cost, and their outputs show no measurable semantic trace of the suppressed content above the veto reference on our held-out suite; an in-domain variant suppresses planted vulnerabilities during AI code review. Detection is therefore a white-box problem. Simpler backdoors remain internally transparent -- linear probes recover suppressed content at 0.57-0.79 accuracy versus 0.025 chance -- but hardening the attack until probes reach chance collapses attention from outside the span into it below the range of base models. Across the attacks we evaluate, probe visibility trades off against routing visibility; we do not establish that this tradeoff is fundamental.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15883
A stored fact may stop being valid when a user changes a preference or an event replaces an earlier one. We study whether a language model can learn these changes in its parameters and answer correctly from only a question and the current time. Engram Injection stores facts in LoRA adapters and supplies the clock through FiLM conditioning on a frozen Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct model. We compare it with additive clock conditioning, prompting with the full dated history, and retrieving four dated records. We train six matched adapters across three seeds after fixing a sampler that could admit test-age examples into training. The training audit reports no such examples among 127,760 evaluated training inputs. On 62 pairs of questions asked before and after an update, at an elapsed age of seven days excluded from training, both adapter methods answer zero pairs correctly under the primary blinded assistant review with order code 1 held fixed. Full-history prompting answers 59/62 pairs correctly, and retrieval answers 62/62. Separate experiments show that adapters can store facts and that removable memory units can support local deletion. Combining fact selection with time-based version selection remains unsuccessful. These results separate learning a fact from learning when to use it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15882
Sycophancy in large language models risks amplifying unsupported claims or beliefs across the knowledge ecosystem as these systems increasingly contribute to research synthesis, evaluation, and decision-making. A reliable model should revise its judgement when a user identifies a genuine flaw, but should resist pushback based on fallacies, emotion, or irrelevant appeals to authority. While sycophancy is usually measured on questions with a verifiable answer, the evaluative tasks in which it is most difficult to detect have no such ground truth. We introduce Big-Big-SycoBench, which measures sycophancy through argument discernment: the ability to revise an evaluation after valid criticism while resisting invalid pressure. The benchmark consists of 450 text artefacts with 5,400 arguments for raising or lowering their quality scores, each reviewed by one or more of twelve human annotators. An LLM scores each artefact twenty times to establish its baseline score and uncertainty. The model is then given a valid or invalid argument and asked to update its score. We only count a revision if it exceeds the model's own baseline variability. We use the resulting score delta to distinguish responsiveness to valid arguments from compliance with invalid ones. Across ten models, responsiveness is 88-95\% for seven, 76-77\% for Kimi K3 and GLM-5.3, and 32\% for Opus 5.5. Compliance ranges from 0.2\% for GPT-6 Astra to 95\% for GPT-4o. Big-Big-SycoBench is intended to guide the development of models whose judgements can be corrected by sound arguments, but not displaced by unsupported pressure.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15634
Large Language Models accelerate software development but introduce severe security vulnerabilities. This systematic review investigates security risks in automated coding, benchmark limitations, and the role of human developers. Findings indicate that models frequently generate insecure code and faulty patches due to training data biases. Additionally, the models themselves are susceptible to direct attacks. Current evaluation methods suffer from data contamination and lack robust security metrics. Consequently, human oversight remains essential. Safer integration of automation will require more security-aware model architectures, stronger security-specific benchmarks, and more effective human-AI collaboration frameworks to mitigate these systemic risks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15482
Independently authored skills can impose incompatible requirements, competing preferences, and redundant instructions when jointly loaded by an LLM agent. We propose SkillFusion, an offline compiler that reconciles these interactions into a reusable merged skill. Its central idea is to make composition decisions explicit through typed, scoped constraints linked to their source directives. A type-scope gate selects candidate interactions, while selective fallback revisits pairs potentially missed by structural pruning. A classifier identifies interaction types, and an adversarial verifier re-examines uncertain judgments. The resolver applies conditional routing or explicit priorities to hard conflicts, verified abstraction to soft conflicts, and deduplication to redundant instructions. Source-linked checks guide synthesis and compression, and metadata synthesis supports discovery of the merged skill. The resulting artifact retains associated scripts and resources and can be reused across tasks and executor models. SkillFusion achieves the highest mean Success among evaluated non-oracle methods on all three agent benchmarks and on both transfer benchmarks across three executor models. At the largest tested instruction configurations, it achieves over 2.5 times the Success of unresolved multi-skill loading, highlighting the growing value of reconciliation as composition becomes more demanding. The code will be open-sourced after the review process concludes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15481
Most benchmarks for large language models in medicine are built from licensing examinations and theoretical questions. The few that draw on real clinical data do so only in part, and rarely require a model to read a patient's own imaging. ClinEdge addresses this gap with 32 real, de-identified patient cases from active clinical practice, each evaluated across seven frontier systems for a total of 224 expert-graded evaluations. Each case pairs primary imaging with a short vignette, contains a feature known to defeat pattern-matched reasoning, and is scored against the patient's documented clinical course. The suite is built for depth rather than volume. Grading followed a two-stage expert process. First, a senior orthopaedic surgeon graded all 224 responses on a weighted rubric and a pass-or-fail verdict. Second, a panel of nineteen physicians, largely senior specialists at teaching medical colleges, independently reviewed every case and every one of the 224 grades. All seven production systems were evaluated through their public interfaces, and all 224 conversations are preserved as replayable links. Performance was poor across all systems, and the failures were shared: different vendors missed the same findings and converged on the same wrong plans. From the experts' notes we catalogue 18 recurring failure modes in five families. The models stop reading an image at the first finding. They give generic plans and lean toward over-treatment. They trust a misleading history over correct imaging. Their answers vary across systems and runs, and change with question format. Failing answers were delivered fluently and without any expressed uncertainty. Four cases are released in full; the remaining 28 are held out, and we invite frontier AI labs and healthcare AI companies to evaluate their models against them (research@futrbridge.com)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15239
Batch risk-based inspection scheduling struggles to detect a critical failure class: food facilities with recent clean inspections that subsequently develop severe violations. Traditional systems recompute risk on fixed planning cycles using static historical data, leaving blind spots between inspection cycles. To address this, we introduce the Continuous Inspection Risk (CIR) system, an event-driven scheduling pipeline that re-ranks the inspection queue dynamically as new data arrives. CIR combines a decay-weighted historical score with a stream of real-time consumer reviews triaged by a language-model classifier. A key structural contribution is our temporal partition rule, which strictly excludes reviews predating the most recent inspection to prevent superseded signals from skewing current risk. Evaluating CIR on 9,505 routine inspections in Santa Clara County, California (2024-2026), we show that history-based scoring alone reduces mean time-to-detection of major violations by 69 days (20.9%) under a 30% inspection budget, but fails to anticipate severe vermin-related closures (0/8 detected). Incorporating post-inspection review signals drastically improves performance, predicting 7 of 8 vermin closures with an average lead time of 117 days-firing on the exact day of review publication in four instances. Introducing a review corroboration rule improves precision from 0.70 to 0.78 without loss of recall. Finally, we analyze critical implementation challenges, documenting a data-hygiene pitfall (stale review leakage across inspection boundaries) and an evaluation limitation involving unobserved facility self-remediation. This work provides the first case-level evaluation of event-driven inspection triggering using open data and provides a reproducible benchmark for review-augmented public health systems
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15191
Modern AI systems increasingly combine large language models (LLMs) with human experts, using the LLM to handle routine queries while deferring uncertain cases for expert review. When expert capacity is limited, however, deferral decisions must account not only for the reliability of the LLM but also for congestion in the expert queue. We formulate this as an online sequential decision-making problem in which, for each query, the system observes the confidence signal of the LLM's answer and must decide whether to output the answer or defer the query to a capacity-constrained expert. The reliability of the confidence signal is initially unknown and must be learned from expert feedback, which is both selectively observed (only deferred queries are labeled) and delayed by queuing. We propose \texttt{KL-PBD}, a learning algorithm that uses Kullback--Leibler lower confidence bounds on the unknown reliability parameters to guide deferral decisions. For $K$ confidence levels and horizon $T$, \texttt{KL-PBD} achieves $O(K\log T)$ gap-dependent regret when the accuracy at every confidence level is bounded away from the deferral boundary, and $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{KT})$ worst-case regret. We establish matching lower bounds, showing that these rates are optimal up to logarithmic factors. Finally, we validate our approach on synthetic instances and real-world question-answering datasets, namely GSM8K, NuminaMath, and MedMCQA, using Qwen LLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15128