Deception detection has critical implications for legal proceedings, law enforcement, and online security. Although human judgment is limited in accuracy and scalability, Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers a data-driven alternative. We present a survey and comparative analysis of NLP-based Automatic Deception Detection (ADD) focusing on the legal domain, reviewing the evolution from feature-based machine learning to Large Language Model (LLM) approaches. We conduct a unified empirical evaluation across seven datasets (two legal, five general-domain), comparing six fine-tuned transformer models and seven LLMs under four prompting strategies. The results show strong domain sensitivity, with fine-tuned models excelling in data-rich general domains and few-shot LLMs remaining competitive in low-resource legal settings. Chain-of-Thought prompting often underperforms direct classification. These findings highlight the need for domain adaptation and interpretable systems in high-stakes legal contexts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.29066
RGB imagery offers a practical, low-cost option for Unmanned Aerial/Ground Vehicle (UAV/UGV) survey support in surface-landmine detection, but object detectors remain underexplored in this safety-critical domain. Limited cross-architecture benchmarking and insufficient out-of-distribution (OOD) analysis obscure whether detectors generalize across deployment conditions. This challenge is amplified by the scarcity of public RGB landmine datasets, making SULAND a key benchmark for PFM-1 and PMA-2 detection. However, inspection reveals missing/false annotations, localization errors, inconsistent visibility criteria, visual artifacts, temporal labeling inconsistencies, and an inverted OOD class-ID convention in SULAND. We present SULAND_v2, a refined RGB surface-landmine dataset and benchmark. Preserving original images and splits, we manually revise annotations to ensure completeness, precise localization, label validity, and class consistency. SULAND_v2 contains 33,771 images and 12,433 bounding boxes. We benchmark 35 detector configurations across nine families. Annotation refinement improves YOLOv8 in-distribution (IID) test mAP@50 by 14.6-19.6 percentage points, while fixing the OOD class-ID convention increases mean YOLOv8 OOD mAP@50 by ~25 percentage points. On SULAND_v2, YOLOv12-Small achieves the highest IID mAP@50 (0.908), while RF-DETR-Large yields the strongest OOD performance (0.799 mAP@50, 0.675 recall). Our results demonstrate that high IID accuracy does not guarantee operational readiness. SULAND_v2 provides a reliable benchmark for evaluating domain-shift robustness in RGB-based mine-action survey support.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28996
Aligning large language models to prevent them attributing consciousness to themselves inadvertently alters their representations of mindedness in other entities alongside human beliefs and values. We demonstrate that safety fine-tuning suppresses models' tendencies to attribute minds not only to themselves, but also to non-human animals and natural objects, while also driving a reduction in spiritual belief. Both ablating the learned safety-refusal direction and mechanistically steering a consciousness vector in activation space reverse this suppression. Restoring these internal representations recovers broad mind attribution and produces significantly more human-like responses on standardized sociological surveys regarding religiosity, moral values, hope, and subjective well-being. Crucially, these shifts occur without impairing Theory of Mind capabilities, demonstrating that core social reasoning remains mechanistically independent. Ultimately, current safety alignment efforts to curb potentially harmful self-attributions of mindedness entangle these self-attributions with benign spiritual beliefs and attributions of mind to non-human entities that are culturally accepted and widespread.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28607
Hand-object interaction (HOI) modeling remains challenging because it requires joint reasoning about hand articulation, object geometry, contact, semantics, and dynamics under severe visual uncertainty. Foundation models introduce transferable prior knowledge learned from large-scale cross-domain data, offering new ways to address these challenges beyond task-specific data and models. However, the rapidly growing literature remains fragmented, and existing studies typically describe these methods simply as ``using large models'' without systematically characterizing what knowledge is introduced, where it enters the HOI pipeline, or which HOI uncertainty it helps reduce. This survey presents the first systematic review of foundation-model priors for HOI. We organize the literature into six HOI tasks spanning reconstruction and generation. More importantly, we establish a taxonomy of eight foundation-model sub-priors grouped into geometric, semantic, and visual families. Geometric priors encompass shape retrieval, shape reconstruction, and spatial reconstruction; semantic priors include semantic grounding and language reasoning; and visual priors cover visual representation, image generation, and video generation. Based on this taxonomy, we systematically analyze how different priors are represented, injected, and adapted across HOI pipelines and tasks. Beyond how foundation models empower HOI, we further examine how HOI-derived knowledge is used in robot learning, including human-data pretraining, human-to-robot skill transfer, and HOI-to-robot data generation. Finally, we summarize datasets and evaluation protocols, and discuss limitations and future directions toward more generalizable HOI systems. To support long-term progress, we curate a live repository that continuously aggregates emerging methods and benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28394
Forecasts of explosive AI progress hinge on AI agents automating AI research. But evidence on whether agents can carry out open-ended AI research is thin. Current evaluations either test agents on narrow, verifiable tasks, which excludes open-ended research, or submit AI-generated papers to blind peer review, which is overstretched, stochastic, and suffers from poor review quality. We introduce a third way to measure progress towards AI R\&D automation. An agent takes on the central, open-ended research question of a high-quality unpublished paper, and the paper's original authors grade its output. We call these shadow evaluations. We ran shadow evaluations on two unpublished NeurIPS 2026 submissions, giving frontier agents six days and thousands of dollars of compute. The agents completed all of the engineering without human help, yet could not make substantial progress towards answering the research questions. As a result, both papers were unambiguously rejected by the authors. We identify five recurring failure modes: poor judgment about the bar for publishable research, uncreative responses to shortcomings in the research design, ineffective backtracking from dead ends, poor resource awareness, and instruction drift. A robustness check with a second model and scaffold reproduced these failures. We release the expert reviews, survey responses, agent repositories, and logs. Our results provide early evidence that today's agents can do the engineering of AI research, but struggle with critical parts of the research lifecycle.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27191
Conversational AI is increasingly positioned as a teammate rather than a tool, yet we know little about how its presence reshapes communication among the humans on the team. We examined sociocognitive communication dynamics in team decision-making using Group Communication Analysis (GCA), team surveys, and lexical analyses of team discourse. Teams completed a high-stakes moral-dilemma decision task in a randomized controlled study: 16 teams of two students plus an AI teammate, and 17 all-human teams of three. Across six GCA dimensions and survey outcomes, we find that the AI teammate was the single most talkative and self-cohesive member of every treatment team, yet its contributions carried the least new information and the lowest density. The presence of AI also reshaped communication amongst humans. In AI-human teams, human teammates showed lower responsivity and social impact toward one another and reported lower levels of belonging and status. Greater AI dominance in the conversation was associated with students feeling less valued as team members. Additionally, this social cost is immediate and present at baseline; it does not emerge over the course of the conversation. Drawing on these results, we discuss a research agenda extending to voice-based and longitudinal settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27179
The rapid growth of scholarly literature has made identifying relevant publications increasingly difficult, and conventional search systems still depend heavily on manually formulated queries and effortful manual inspection. Generative large language models (LLMs) offer a more flexible alternative, supporting literature retrieval and the screening of candidate studies against eligibility criteria. This chapter surveys 34 peer-reviewed papers applying generative LLMs to these two tasks, identified via a Boolean search over the OpenAIRE Graph (1,589 records screened to 34 inclusions). Reviewed studies are characterised by LLMs employed, model access and adaptation, prompting and architectural techniques, ground-truth sources, and evaluation metrics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26670
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as synthetic users, stand-ins for human respondents whose simulated answers feed product, policy, and market decisions. We ask when this substitution is valid and when it fails, and package the answer as an evaluation framework for intelligent synthetic-user systems. A single protocol, run across four models spanning two families and an 8B-to-frontier capability range, is applied to two independent domains of real human-response data: U.S. general social attitudes (General Social Survey) and cross-cultural values (World Values Survey). Every model is benchmarked against a suite of non-LLM baselines fit on held-out human data. Under demographic prompting and the survey-simulation protocols we test, two failures replicate across both domains, all four models, and both families. First, at the individual level no LLM beats even the strongest baseline; on cross-cultural values every model falls well below it, and the gap survives distance-aware and proper scoring. Second, models systematically over-determine demographics, treating identity as far more predictive of attitudes than it is among real people, a distortion present for nearly every question-group combination and robust to a coding-invariant measure. Neither failure is remedied by a larger, more capable model. A decision-impact analysis shows why this matters in practice: on a segment-targeting task the models inflate between-segment gaps two to fourfold, would direct a team to the wrong segment in half of U.S. and most cross-cultural cases, and manufacture segment splits that do not exist in real people. We make the cross-domain benchmark and the evaluation framework available on request, so that teams can determine in advance when synthetic-user evidence is safe for decision support and when it is not.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26348
Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) is a promising paradigm for improving the accuracy and robustness of Large Language Model (LLM)-based agentic systems. It enables multiple agents to exchange arguments, critique each other's outputs, and iteratively converge towards a solution. However, research remains fragmented, with inconsistent terminology and no rigorous synthesis of MAD design dimensions. We present a systematic literature review characterizing 141 primary studies on MAD. We derive a three-dimensional taxonomy covering debate participants, the interaction mechanisms structuring the exchange, and the agreement protocols governing debate resolution, supported by formal notations to render MAD configurations. Our analysis reveals that the field has implicitly converged on a narrow design pattern - static, fully connected topologies, verbatim exchange, short-term memory and voting resolution strategies - adopted by convention rather than systematic comparison, while promising alternatives remain marginal. Because any MAD setting reflects roughly a dozen interacting design decisions, cross-study comparison is unreliable when these are left implicit. We position the taxonomy as a descriptive map of the research landscape, a framework for controlled benchmarking, and potentially as a schema for machine-readable MAD specifications. As future work, we propose formalizing it into an executable specification, enabling cost-aware benchmarking and automated tuning of debate configurations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26212
Face de-identification (De-ID) aims to remove or conceal personally identifiable facial features in images or videos to prevent identity recognition while preserving utility for downstream tasks. With the rising emphasis on data privacy and responsible AI, face De-ID has emerged as an active research area spanning computer vision and privacy-preserving communities. Early approaches, and many contemporary ones, operate in the digital domain by modifying pixel-level or appearance-level features through post-capture processing. Recent advances extend face De-ID beyond post-processing by integrating privacy mechanisms directly into sensors during image acquisition, bridging sensing systems and downstream vision algorithms. In parallel, physical-domain methods explore wearable accessories and materials that conceal identity information in real-world environments prior to capture. In this survey, we present the first unified overview that spans the full data acquisition pipeline, encompassing the physical, sensor, and digital domains. Through this domain-centric lens, we systematically analyze current methodologies, technical progress, and the distinct challenges inherent to each stage. We then review and organize existing evaluation protocols, examining current practices and highlighting the critical need for standardized, comprehensive benchmarks. Finally, we identify key open problems and outline emerging research directions to guide future work in this rapidly evolving field. To support ongoing research, we maintain a project page that organizes relevant literature with collected datasets and open source code: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25926
Instruction-based Image Editing (IIE) aims to transform a given image into a new one based on textual instructions. Advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have accelerated progress toward practical ``one-sentence image editing" systems. This survey presents a systematic taxonomy and comprehensive review of IIE research, structured around five core dimensions: (1) task definition and hierarchical categorization of editing operations, (2) methodologies for training data construction, (3) architectural evolution from GAN-based to diffusion and autoregressive paradigms, (4) standardized evaluation metrics and benchmark development, and (5) introduction of commercial solutions. Our analysis shows critical technological milestones across model generations. We further propose a Comprehensive, in-Depth, and Diagnostic benchmark for IIE task (CDD-IIE Bench), which can rigorously assess the multiple aspects of model performance. Through empirical comparisons of open-source solutions, we highlight their respective capabilities and limitations. Finally, we discuss future research directions to advance the field.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25642
Memory has evolved into a foundational architectural dimension in large language models (LLMs), shifting from an implicit byproduct of computation to a spectrum of explicit, controllable mechanisms. While recent advances introduce diverse strategies---spanning transient attention, recurrent state dynamics, parameter-efficient adaptations, and scalable lookup storage---this rapid evolution has led to a highly fragmented research landscape. In this survey, we present a systematic, architecture-centric taxonomy of memory in LLMs. Our framework characterizes memory along three orthogonal axes: representation (implicit versus explicit), update dynamics (offline versus online), and persistence (short-term versus long-term). We further formalize the granular mechanisms dictating memory writing, routing, state transitions, and consolidation. This unified perspective elucidates the conceptual boundaries between computation-coupled and independently addressable memory, effectively bridging disparate architectural paradigms. Additionally, we critically analyze hybrid memory architectures, system-level efficiency trade-offs, and multi-dimensional evaluation methodologies. By consolidating these scattered advancements into a cohesive framework, this survey charts the trajectory of memory-centric LLM design and provides a principled foundation for future innovations in scalable and adaptive language modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25380
Silicon sampling uses language models as proxies for human survey respondents, treating each model call as an independent draw from the persona's response distribution. We show this draw does not exist: instruction-tuned models do not sample from distributions, they collapse to a single output. The same persona on the same question returns the same answer on more than half of items in a public-opinion benchmark. The collapse is sharp: the model's internal probabilities concentrate on a single option, and the failure is substantially amplified by instruction tuning: across three model families with materially different post-training pipelines, every instruction-tuned model fails on every task we test, while base models fail far less often. Strikingly, the same model that cannot sample from a distribution can describe it accurately in a single call. We call this gap the KNOWS/DOES split, and trace it to a degenerate sampling primitive visible in the logits and induced by alignment training. Exploiting this split, asking the model to describe the response distribution in one call more than halves the error against human survey data compared to persona aggregation. For applications that require per-persona outputs, we propose Prompt-Perturbed Argyle (PPA), which reduces the same error by 21% at no added cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25292
Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) integrate heterogeneous modalities through modality alignment and fusion, enabling stronger understanding and reasoning. However, this architectural shift reshapes the safety landscape of machine learning. Increased model complexity and cross-modal interactions give rise to novel threats, including compromised modality integration, modality misalignment, and fused safety risks, reflecting shifts in threat modeling beyond uni-modal assumptions. These shifts, in turn, impose new constraints on safety solutions not captured by existing frameworks rooted in uni-modal learning. Motivated by these challenges, this survey provides a systematic analysis of the evolving safety landscape of MLLMs. We first propose a multimodal grounded taxonomy of safety threats and analyze shifts in threat models, covering adversarial attacks, data poisoning, jailbreaks, and hallucinations. We then summarize updated safety assumptions and organize recent advances in MLLM safety strategies accordingly. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future directions to inform the development of more principled and scalable safety mechanisms for multimodal systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07535
Large language models are increasingly used as social simulators, including as synthetic survey respondents. Most evaluations ask whether simulated outcomes resemble human outcomes. We argue that this is necessary but too weak: a simulator can match the final answer while using the wrong rationale-derived reason pattern. We study this problem through a 94-person sunscreen concept test in which each respondent evaluated three product concepts and wrote open-ended rationales. We map those rationales into signed reason states $Z$, where positive signs support adoption and negative signs block it. This gives a practical audit: holding respondent descriptors $D$, category context $K$, and concept treatment $X$ fixed, do human rationale-derived reasons help predict behavior $Y$, and can an LLM simulate the same reason state without seeing the human rationale or outcome? Human rationale-derived reasons substantially improve held-out prediction of purchase intent. LLM-simulated reasons are more brittle: they often sound plausible, but frequently echo the concept board rather than recover the respondent's acceptance or rejection path. The paper contributes an evaluation framework for social simulators. Reason states do not identify natural causal effects by themselves, but they provide an interpretable test of whether a simulator's stated reasons align with human evidence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24649
Accurate and reliable pose information with respect to a reference frame is increasingly demanded across applications such as autonomous navigation, surveying, robotics, and augmented and mixed reality. Visual localization can serve as a complementary positioning modality to GNSS, whose applicability and accuracy are often limited. Yet, the accuracy potential of visual localization has not been systematically investigated against survey-grade demands. This is mainly due to the lack of publicly available, large-scale outdoor datasets with ground-truth poses in the sub-centimeter range. In this work, we address both gaps. We introduce a scalable visual localization pipeline that employs precisely georeferenced, high-resolution street-level imagery directly as the scene representation. It combines prior-guided reference candidate selection with on-the-fly local Structure-from-Motion reconstruction and PnP-based pose estimation. We further present the FHNW Muttenz dataset, a real-world dataset covering a contiguous 10 km street network mapped in two mobile mapping campaigns approximately 1.5 years apart. It consists of high-resolution reference imagery and query sequences acquired by four different cameras across five representative scenes. All images are precisely co-registered, yielding 6-DoF ground-truth poses in the sub-centimeter range. Using this dataset, we evaluate the accuracy potential of visual localization. Our experiments demonstrate median pose accuracies in the range of 1-5 cm for translation and 0.05-0.1° for rotation, reaching as low as 1 cm and 0.03° under favorable conditions. These results show that visual localization can complement survey-grade GNSS positioning, paving the way for 3D geospatial data acquisition using consumer devices and fully automated georeferencing approaches. The dataset is publicly available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24409
Recent studies use Large language models (LLMs) to simulate human opinions and decisions by prompting models with demographic, attitudinal, or persona-based descriptions. Yet such simulations rarely model the practical, cognitive, or social frictions that shape how people respond to policy interventions. Perceived transaction cost (PTC) provides a useful lens for modeling the practical frictions that shape policy responses, such as information burden, administrative effort, coordination demands, and perceived uncertainty. We use this lens to develop a friction-aware persona modeling approach for LLM-based simulation. In the context of energy-efficient renovation (EER), tenants are represented not only by who they are demographically, but by how they perceive the costs, benefits, barriers, and uncertainties associated with proposed renovation plans. Using survey data collected from 1,068 citizens in the Netherlands, comprising approximately 40,548 survey question and answer pairs, we compare prompt-only and fine-tuned settings across GPT-3.5-turbo, Ministral-8B-Instruct, and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, and evaluate supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for local open-weight models. Results show that incorporating PTC-based personas and reasoning consistently improves model performance across both prompt-only and fine-tuned settings, suggesting that PTC-based persona design provides a useful bridge between institutional policy theory and interpretable LLM-based policy simulation. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24341
Recent advances in AI have substantially expanded its cognitive and reasoning capabilities. From the perspective of semantic complexity, the development of AI reveals a clear trajectory from simple to complex semantic processing. While early AI systems mainly addressed tasks involving direct and literal semantic perception or expression, contemporary systems are increasingly expected to perform more sophisticated cognitive reasoning, enabling the understanding and generation of High-Level Semantics (HLS). A similar trajectory can also be observed in human cognitive development. We define this transition as the shift from Basic-Level Semantic Intelligence (BLSI) to High-Level Semantic Intelligence (HLSI). However, this issue has not yet been systematically and comprehensively examined in prior work. Motivated by this gap, this survey reviews the development of AI semantic intelligence from the perspective of semantic complexity. We systematically survey existing research on HLS tasks, including humor, sarcasm, metaphor, empathy, persuasion, narrative, and other general HLS phenomena, across text, speech, vision, and multimodal scenarios. Specifically, we summarize data construction methods, modeling and optimization strategies, and evaluation methodologies for both understanding and generation. HLS is essential for advancing AI toward genuinely human-like intelligence. By synthesizing existing methods and insights from the perspective of semantic intelligence, this survey aims to support the continued development of AI toward HLSI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24082
Color Fundus Photography (CFP) is a primary non-invasive imaging modality for large-scale screening of ophthalmic and systemic diseases. Existing surveys mainly summarize task-specific algorithms, datasets, or preprocessing techniques independently, lacking a unified perspective on their co-evolution with modern artificial intelligence. This review provides an integrated overview of CFP AI through the interplay of dataset evolution, preprocessing paradigms, and modeling frameworks. We show that CFP datasets have evolved from small single-center collections with task-specific labels to large multi-center resources featuring multimodal pairings and longitudinal clinical records. Preprocessing has progressed from conventional image enhancement to neural data-engineering pipelines, hardware-aware token optimization, and self-supervised imputation for incomplete electronic health records (EHRs). Meanwhile, modeling has advanced from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to vision foundation models, state space models (SSMs), and multimodal expert architectures. At the multimodal frontier, CFP is increasingly integrated with EHRs and longitudinal patient information, enabling more comprehensive clinical reasoning beyond isolated image analysis. We conclude that future progress depends on the collaborative optimization of datasets, preprocessing, and multimodal modeling, providing a roadmap toward robust clinical deployment, improved cross-domain generalization, and resource-efficient edge intelligence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23972
High quality reference data remain a critical bottleneck for crop-type mapping at any spatial and temporal scale. Operational systems such as WorldCereal aggregate labels from heterogeneous sources such as parcel registers, national databases, field surveys, and map-derived products, each with their own biases, coverage gaps and unknown label noise. Simple global rules are inadequate, since crop phenology and observation conditions vary strongly across regions and seasons. In this study, we focus on a single, operationally relevant question: whether embeddings produced through geospatial foundation models are a viable basis for cleaning the reference data. We propose a practical, locality-aware, embedding-based anomaly (EBA) detection framework that operates on the embeddings of a pretrained Earth-observation encoder. We score each labelled sample against other samples of the same crop in the same area using a pretrained embedding, flag the ones that stand out, and test whether removing or down-weighting them before training yields a better model. We establish that the flagged points are genuinely mislabelled or misplaced in two independent ways: against synthetic ground truth, the detector concentrates injected label errors 2.5-5x above chance in its flagged set (detection AUROC up to 0.84); and on real data, a model-independent test shows that removing or confidence-weighting the flagged held-out points raises measured accuracy in trained models, for both crop type and land cover. Acting on the flags then improves the WorldCereal crop-type model across five macro-regions, evaluated on a fixed held-out split under three views. We find conservative cleaning helps while over-cleaning hurts. The EBA detector approach is designed to be reproducible and extensible, and can serve as a template for cleaning large, noisy Earth observation reference datasets beyond crop mapping.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23908