Survey-style evaluations of large language models often treat a prompted response as a measure of a model's values or beliefs. This assumption is particularly fragile when responses are read as evidence of political values, social attitudes, or beliefs. We ask whether prompt robustness differs between objective questions with fixed answers and subjective questions that ask for opinions or values. We evaluate four instruction-tuned model families on three objective datasets (MMLU, ARC, and CulturalBench) and three subjective datasets (Political Compass Test, ValueBench, and World Values Survey). For each question/statement, we apply multiple types of prompt changes, such as variations in wording, framing, and format, and measure whether the model gives the same answer across variants. Using a binomial generalized estimating equation, we find significant effects of model, dataset, prompt category, and their interactions. The dataset type effect is also significant, and the interaction between dataset type and prompt category is large. These results show that prompt robustness depends on the question type, the prompt change, and the model.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05554
Time-domain surveys generate many transient candidates, making Real-Bogus classification a critical step in automated discovery pipelines. Reliable labels are costly, while community labels can be noisy and survey-dependent. We aim to develop a Real-Bogus classification framework that can be trained without human-labeled data using injected transients and bogus-dominated survey data, remains robust under strong class contamination, and provides calibrated uncertainty quantification. We combine simulated transient injections with a contaminated survey class and train a dual-network model using asymmetric co-teaching for classes with different label-noise levels. We evaluate performance on a benchmark subset and analyze the learned representation with latent-space visualization tools. For uncertainty quantification (UQ), we compare MC dropout and deep ensembles and propose a low-cost hybrid strategy that exploits the dual-network setting to improve calibration. We extend the evaluation to the light-curve domain to assess recovery of light-curve classes. The method achieves strong Real-Bogus performance on the labeled subset and remains stable under severe class contamination. It recovers transient light-curve classes with high fidelity, while single-source identification is limited by ambiguity in light-curve-derived labels. Our hybrid UQ approach achieves competitive calibration relative to more expensive ensemble baselines. Latent-space analyses indicate that uncertainty aligns with the decision boundary and reveal subclasses within the bogus population. Our results show that injection-driven, weakly supervised training can enable scalable and consistent Real-Bogus classification without human-labeled training data while providing calibrated uncertainties. The method is suited for transfer to forthcoming surveys by re-running the injection-based training pipeline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05393
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as synthetic survey respondents, but existing evaluations ask whether answers look plausible at the individual level. We argue the right question is psychometric: do LLMs preserve the joint distribution, latent structure, reliability, mediation pathways, and demographic effects of real human survey data? We introduce a Lithuanian organisational-psychology dataset (n=263 employees; Dunham Attitudes Toward Change, UWES-17, Koopmans IWPQ; 68 items, 12 subscales) and condition a 37-model lineup spanning OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and twelve open-weight families on real respondent profiles under a five-level persona-disclosure ladder, presentation and reasoning-effort ablations, counterfactual demographic swaps (gender, role, education), a cross-language check, and a verbatim-recall memorization probe. The resulting Psychometric Similarity Score (PSS) is anchored against five non-LLM statistical baselines and a held-out human-vs-human ceiling, with respondent-bootstrap confidence intervals and an item-permutation null for Tucker's phi. LLMs reproduce the qualitative direction of human psychometric relationships, but a Gaussian-copula baseline beats every LLM on the sample-driven PSS components; the LLM "crowd" is more similar to itself (mean inter-LLM PSS 0.73) than to humans; and memorization does not drive the leaderboard (recall-PSS rank correlation 0.00). Counterfactual swaps reveal education-driven effects (mean |d|=0.56) that dwarf gender (0.12) and role (0.18); Tucker's phi on UWES falls inside the permutation null for 8 of 37 models. Downstream, every LLM shows a strong acquiescence shift (+0.84 SD), synthetic-trained regressors lose predictive validity on held-out humans (mean R^2 -0.18 vs 0.28), and models fabricate indirect effects on 3 of 10 placebo mediation paths. LLM samples are not a drop-in replacement for human survey data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14606
Expert surveys are widely used in security research to study practitioner workows and decision-making, yet recruiting domain experts - especially in Security Operations Centres (SOCs), where analysts face high workload, burnout and confidentiality constraints - is difficult and often results in small samples. Large language models (LLMs) oer an appealing alternative by generating synthetic responses at scale, but little guidance exists on when such surrogate participants are reliable. We present a methodological framework for evaluating LLMs as substitutes or supplements to expert survey respondents. Using responses from SOC professionals, we compare persona-based and aggregate LLM-generated answers across multiple models and prompting settings. We measure stability, inter-model agreement and alignment with human responses. Our results show that although LLMs produce internally consistent answers, they systematically diverge from experts, exhibiting reduced variance, central tendency bias and homogenised opinions. This work contributes methodological evidence and practical guidance to the security research community on the appropriate use and limitations of LLM-generated survey responses. We conclude that LLMs are useful for piloting and hypothesis generation but not for replacing expert elicitation, and we discuss implications for researchers using LLM-augmented surveys.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16893
Clandestine tunneling beneath oil and gas pipelines enables fuel theft, smuggling, and sabotage, yet conventional monitoring detects damage only after a pipeline has been compromised. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) can image such tunnels non-invasively, but manual radargram interpretation does not scale to continuous corridor surveillance, and supervised detectors require tunnel examples that are scarce in practice. We present a fully unsupervised detection pipeline trained exclusively on normal subsurface radargrams collected at a purpose-built field site containing three buried tunnels at 1.5-3 m depth. A denoising convolutional autoencoder learns the structure of anomaly-free ground; at inference, tunnels are flagged by reconstruction error. Our central contribution is a depth-restricted top-k anomaly score, which pools the highest reconstruction errors only within the depth band where tunnels can physically occur. This physically motivated rule raises AUC from 0.986 to 0.994 and cuts missed detections from 74 to 17 of 634 tunnel windows, relative to whole-image scoring, without any retraining or labels. We further show that the optimal top-k fraction interacts with the depth restriction - 1% pooling is best on full images, 5% once scoring is depth-restricted - and that spatial voting across overlapping survey windows helps weak per-image detectors but offers no benefit once the scoring rule is strong. The final system attains AUC 0.994, F1 0.975, recall 0.973, and precision 0.976 on 1,600 field test windows spanning 55 survey lines, at a 1.6% false-alarm rate, using no tunnel labels for training, scoring, or threshold calibration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04882
As haptic interfaces integrate more seamlessly into wearables and everyday environments, they increasingly require actuators that are soft, thin, silent, and energy efficient. However, conventional motors and temperature-responsive polymers often struggle to deliver these properties due to their bulky form factors and high power consumption. High-Voltage Electrostatic Actuators (HVEAs), which generate force by applying an electric field to localized charge concentrations using high voltages and ultra-low currents, have recently emerged as a compelling alternative due to their fast, silent, and low-power operation within highly customizable and compliant form factors. This paper presents a focused review of HVEAs for haptics, examining four major classes: electrostatic switchable adhesives, dielectric elastomer actuators, soft electrohydraulic actuators, and electrokinetic pumps. For each class, we describe their mechanisms that enable haptic output; characterize their bandwidths, force densities, and spatial scalability; and evaluate their versatility for rendering cutaneous and kinesthetic feedback across wearable and world-grounded interfaces. Through this cross-technology analysis, we identify common design constraints and emerging strategies for improving ergonomics, streamlining fabrication, and integrating self-sensing. We conclude by outlining where HVEAs are uniquely positioned to advance haptic interaction and highlighting key research directions needed to translate these technologies into practical systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13058
We advance the hypothesis that human mathematical reasoning, constrained by both the undecidability and the computational intractability of even modest logical fragments, relies fundamentally on pattern matching from domains external to pure deduction. The most prolific reservoir of such patterns is the natural world, whose physical laws and biological systems have undergone billions of years of ``pre-computation'' and already exhibit surprisingly innovative solutions. To ground this claim, we trace the history of the Fourier transform and relevant mathematics, from the vibrating string controversy to the hear equation and subsequent formalisms prevalent in mathematics. At each critical juncture, a physics problem forced the acceptance or creation of a mathematical tool that pure formal reasoning failed to anticipate or, worse, human reasoning had resisted. We further survey the landscape of logical complexity, from NP-hard propositional satisfiability to the non-elementary decision-procedures for monadic second-order theories, to demonstrate that even when a logic is decidable, the resources required for worst-case deduction are astronomically prohibitive. We argue that these barriers make physics-inspired pattern matching not just a historical accident but a cognitive necessity. Finally, we draw the consequence for artificial intelligence: if pure reasoning is constitutively insufficient, then any system aiming at human-level mathematical creativity must embed a vast store of cross-domain patterns rather than rely on deduction alone. This furnishes a principled justification for the enormous scale of contemporary large language models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04505
The rapid integration of large language model-based agents into recommender systems has driven a shift from static, ranking-based pipelines toward autonomous and interactive systems that can reason, plan, and act. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of this emerging landscape by introducing a unified taxonomy grounded in the level of autonomy and three core paradigms of agentic recommender systems: agent-assisted recommendation, agent-as-recommender, and agent-as-user-simulator. The autonomy framework organizes existing methods along increasing capabilities in proactivity, context awareness, interaction flexibility, and adaptivity. Building on this framework, the survey analyzes how each paradigm adopts different agentic architectures and how agents enhance key components such as profiles, memory, tool use, workflows, and optimization mechanisms. We further examine evaluation methodologies for agentic recommendation, covering automated metrics, LLM-based judging, and simulation-based assessment, and discuss their limitations in capturing reasoning quality, user experience, and system behavior. Beyond existing evaluation protocols, we further discuss unresolved issues in evaluating agentic recommender systems, including trajectory-level assessment, agent contribution analysis, and calibration of user simulation. Lastly, the survey outlines open challenges in lifelong user modeling, contextual abstraction, multimodal alignment, controllability, trustworthiness, privacy, scalability, and efficiency. Together, these analyses establish a unified foundation for understanding the current progress of agentic recommender systems and highlight promising opportunities for developing more autonomous, reliable, and human-aligned recommendation agents.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04433
Optimizer selection for large-scale model training has become a system-level design decision constrained jointly by compute, memory, tuning budget, and task diversity, yet the landscape of over one hundred methods remains fragmented. We therefore present OmniOpt, a unified survey and benchmark cookbook of optimizers for the research community. OmniOpt rests on four coupled components. First, we treat every optimizer update as a structured transformation through a five-stage meta-pipeline, and show that most methods engage only one or two of these stages. Second, we use norm-constrained linear minimization oracles (LMOs) to unify different optimizers. Third, these two views ground a dual-dimension taxonomy, one dimension assigning each method to a mechanism family and the other recording the measurable training objectives it aims to improve. Fourth, and at the core of this paper, we instantiate the full taxonomy in a unified cross-domain benchmark spanning representative optimizers, model scales, and training regimes from language model pretraining to image classification, systematically analyzing each method family across multiple effect objectives and laying out their trade-offs. OmniOpt thus supplies the research community with an operational coordinate system for selecting optimizers under explicit mechanism and objective assumptions, and charts a direction for the future development of the optimizer community.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04033
Writing a literature review requires a deep understanding of the relationships among cited papers: how they build on, challenge, or offer alternative perspectives to one another. We present Graph-Reasoning Aided Survey Planning (GRASP), a framework combining LLM planning for related work generation with graph algorithms to extract key relationships among cited papers. Our two-layer graph structure consists of a Graph of Thoughts and an Argument-Counterargument Planning Network, representing the cited papers at different levels of granularity, and we apply topology-aware pruning via a Steiner tree to identify the core inter-paper relationships captured in our graph. Our citation analysis-based evaluation shows that GRASP generates related work sections (RWS) that closely match human-written targets in terms of the discourse roles, intents, and grouping of citations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03709
A college offering several overlapping computing degrees implicitly assumes that its programs are differentiated in line with how the labor market segments computing work and that, together, they prepare graduates for that market. Testing this is difficult, because the instruments available to curriculum committees, namely advisory boards, tracer studies, and employer surveys, are slow, narrow, and hard to reproduce. We apply one uniform, taxonomy-anchored alignment analysis across all five undergraduate programs of a College of Information Technology, comparing 1,922 course learning outcomes against 103,349 competencies extracted from a unified corpus of 5,186 deduplicated job openings from four boards. Every competency is obtained by a grounded single-language-model procedure that copies it verbatim from the source and verifies it against the source, then assigns it to one of eleven ESCO-aligned domains and a Bloom cognitive level; the curricular supply is read not as a catalog but on a realized-attainment basis that respects the credit-hour and elective constraints under which a student completes a degree. The extraction is validated blind by two independent faculty raters (domain kappa 0.91, Bloom level kappa 0.86) and the ESCO matching against a human-adjudicated gold set (kappa 0.72). Four findings emerge. The content gaps are systemic rather than program-specific, concentrated in systems, software engineering, security, and web development; the shared college core satisfies only about a third of the demanded competencies; the programs are well differentiated in disciplinary content yet homogeneous in where they fall short; and the curriculum is pitched roughly a full Bloom level below the market across the portfolio, most acutely in systems. We discuss the implications for program design, curriculum governance, and the practice of curriculum analytics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12356
Automation in construction is essential for reducing costs and human errors in large-scale projects. We approach the construction progress monitoring from the aspect of detecting changes in construction sites. As construction buildings continue to evolve in geometry and appearance over time, change detection need to be performed from arbitrary camera viewpoints. This necessitates developing 2D Change Detection (2DCD) algorithms that operate robustly across diverse camera perspectives at construction sites. While developing and evaluating such systems is data-intensive, no open-source benchmark dataset exists at the intersection of 2D change detection and construction automation research. Data collection using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is gaining its popularity in outdoor large-scale surveying. However, in active construction sites conducting drone missions equipped with high-end sensors imposes safety concerns. Flight trajectory and collected camera viewpoints can be significantly limited. To address this critical gap, we introduce iVISION-2DCD, a large-scale synthetically generated dataset from dense LiDAR point clouds with photorealistic input images and accurate ground truth annotations. Our dataset formally defines the problem of viewpoint-robust 2DCD at construction sites and captures the inherent complexities of real-world deployment. In this paper, we present our systematic methodology for synthetic data generation, developing novel view synthesis techniques to overcome bi-temporal alignment and viewpoint diversity challenges, and implementing semi-automated semantic segmentation with change label generation while preserving challenging real-world cases. Benchmark evaluations using state-of-the-art 2DCD algorithms demonstrate that iVISION-2DCD poses novel research challenges for the computer vision and robotics communities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03553
Detecting mental health disorders in a timely manner is an important societal challenge. NLP and machine learning (ML) methods used to assist with detection rely on data collected primarily from social media. However, such datasets often have sampling biases and inherent ethical and privacy issues. One avenue to overcome these limitations is non-social media data. We present the first comprehensive review of non-social media, free-text datasets for mental health research. We use the PRISMA methodology to conduct our survey and we review datasets available in multiple languages. We find that non-social media free-text based datasets are predominantly focused on English and on detecting depression. These datasets also vary in demographics, platforms, data types, annotation techniques, and methodologies. This systematic review also reveals key gaps and highlights opportunities to develop more diverse, reliable and clinically-relevant resources.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03540
The rapid growth of publicly available digital information has rendered manual open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysis insufficient for modern intelligence, cybersecurity, and cyber investigation. Large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI systems, capable of tool use, multi-step reasoning, and iterative intelligence generation, have emerged as promising solutions, yet evaluation frameworks have not kept pace with reported capabilities. This survey systematically reviews 74 studies and makes four contributions. First, it establishes agentic AI as a distinct analytical category rather than an extension of LLM prompting, organising the literature through an 11-category taxonomy covering LLM foundations, agentic architectures, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), knowledge graphs, prompt engineering, domain adaptation, evaluation benchmarks, and risk. Second, it identifies the hallucination-validation gap as a corpus-level finding: although hallucination is recognised as a major reliability concern in over twenty studies, end-to-end hallucination is empirically measured in only one OSINT-specific RAG-based system, non-reproducible conditions, while related reasoning and factual-correction studies evaluate general-domain question answering rather than OSINT. Third, it maps existing research to the OSINT lifecycle, showing strong support for collection and analysis but limited coverage of verification, reporting, dissemination, and decision support. Fourth, it derives a ten-point research agenda addressing evaluation, benchmarking, hallucination measurement, adversarial robustness, dark-web coverage, multimodal intelligence, and governance. It concludes that a human-AI co-pilot model, where LLMs assist collection and triage while analysts retain responsibility for verification and decision-making, represents the most defensible near-term deployment architecture.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03233
Maintaining consistency between architectural design and runtime-observed behavior is challenging in long-lived safety-critical firmware. This paper presents a runtime-informed methodology for detecting architectural drift in ISO 26262-compliant firmware. The approach collects hardware-assisted execution traces, abstracts them into message exchanges among firmware components, and compares the resulting runtime behavior with design-time sequence diagrams through a deterministic differencing step. The computed delta identifies discrepancies as confirmed, missing, additional, or inverted, while a constrained LLM-based step generates a human-readable report only to support expert review. We evaluate the methodology in an industrial firmware context through agreement-based validation and a practitioner survey. Results over 26 test cases show strong agreement between the generated deltas and expert-curated references, while practitioners perceive the reports as useful for interpreting drift, reducing manual analysis effort, and supporting safety-oriented documentation activities. The findings suggest that combining runtime trace analysis, deterministic architectural differencing, and constrained LLM-based reporting can practically support architectural drift detection in evolving safety-critical firmware.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03135
Silicon sampling-using large language models (LLMs) to simulate human survey respondents-has emerged as a promising approach for augmenting traditional survey research. However, most evaluations rely on distributional comparisons rather than individual-level prediction, which risks conflating pattern matching with coherent respondent-level prediction. We propose cross-survey transfer, a more rigorous evaluation framework in which an LLM is given a respondent's answers to one set of questions and must predict their answers to entirely different questions from the same survey. Using data from the Taiwan Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) 2024, three open-weight LLMs (27B-120B parameters), and supervised machine learning baselines, we find that: (1) zero-shot LLMs achieve 52% accuracy on genuinely unseen items, closing to within 6 percentage points (pp) of a supervised random forest trained on same-population data; (2) a stable construct predictability hierarchy emerges, from 67% for partisan attitudes to 23% for sovereignty; and (3) variance collapse and safety alignment effects-two commonly cited LLM limitations-turn out to be more nuanced than previously reported, with variance collapse affecting supervised models as well and alignment effects varying dramatically across model families. These findings clarify both the promise and boundaries of silicon sampling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03091
LLM agents will increasingly act in socially structured settings where role, audience, and relational context can shape what is advantageous or costly to say. We study whether such social structure, without any explicit objective in the prompt, changes what an agent expresses publicly relative to an off-the-record (OTR) channel elicited under the same condition. We introduce a dual-channel debate framework in which agents produce public utterances that enter the shared history alongside OTR responses that are recorded but never shown to the other participant. Across 10 models, 3 scenarios, and 5 variations within each scenario, alignment-inducing settings produce systematic public-OTR divergence in the targeted agent, with its decision divergence rising from a $\sim$3% baseline to roughly 40%. The effect is consistent across four aggregate analyses: stance, semantic similarity, natural language inference, and survey responses. In some cases, the OTR response explicitly attributes public accommodation to relational pressures, such as career risk or sponsorship obligation. The findings suggest that agent evaluation should extend beyond explicit goals and detect emergent objectives. We present a dual-channel evaluation framework and complementary behavioral measures that operationalize this assessment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02507
Identity document forgery has undergone a fundamental capability shift: generative AI tools now enable high-fidelity document synthesis and field-level manipulation with minimal technical expertise, while detection methods remain constrained by benchmarks that do not reflect this threat. The resulting attack surface spans physical presentation, digital injection, and fully generative synthesis, introducing distinct forensic failure modes that require a unified threat model and evaluation framework. This survey provides, to our knowledge, the first unified treatment of Presentation Attacks, Digital Injection Attacks, and GenAI-driven synthesis within a single identity verification threat model. We trace detection methodologies from rule-based heuristics through forensic localisation, injection-aware pipelines, foundation models, and few-shot frameworks. A systematic audit of public datasets from 2019--2025 exposes a persistent Reality Gap between benchmark conditions and operational deployment. We further analyse large multimodal models for identity document manipulation, identifying Script-Dependent Generative Instability (SDGI) as a recurring typographic failure mode in non-Latin script inpainting. Finally, zero-shot benchmarking on unseen synthesised ID cards shows that even the strongest publicly available models achieve APCER values above 25% under security-oriented operating conditions, highlighting substantial limits in cross-domain generalisation. We conclude by outlining future directions toward forensically grounded, privacy-preserving, and legally accountable identity verification systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01442
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are essential for monitoring network traffic and identifying malicious activities in modern cyber-physical, Internet of Things (IoT), enterprise, and distributed network environments. However, developing reliable IDS models remains challenging because attack behaviors evolve over time, realistic datasets are difficult to obtain, traffic records may be incomplete, attack classes are often imbalanced, and privacy constraints limit centralized data collection. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) and Federated Learning (FL) provide new opportunities to address these limitations. Generative models can support anomaly detection, synthetic traffic generation, data augmentation, data imputation, adversarial traffic generation, and IDS alert explanation. FL enables distributed IDS training without directly sharing local network traffic, making it suitable for privacy-sensitive and geographically distributed environments. This survey provides a structured review of generative AI and FL techniques for IDS. We first summarize representative IDS research directions, including adversarial machine learning, anomaly-based detection, IoT-oriented IDS, explainable IDS, and benchmark datasets. We then categorize generative AI applications in IDS according to model families and task objectives, covering autoencoder-based models, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), diffusion models, and Large Language Models (LLMs). Finally, we review emerging studies that integrate generative AI with FL-based IDS and discuss open challenges, including synthetic data quality, realistic traffic generation, dual-use adversarial risks, non-IID client distributions, communication-efficient model sharing, federated IDS benchmarking, and domain-specific LLMs for network security.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01305
ROS 2 (Robot Operating System 2) has emerged as the de facto standard for modern robot software development, with middleware implementations such as the Data Distribution Service (DDS) and Zenoh forming the core infrastructure for distributed robotic communication. Despite their architectural flexibility, these middleware systems exhibit structural limitations, particularly under dynamic and resource-constrained wireless environments. This paper presents a systematic survey of ROS 2 middleware and introduces a conceptual framework to examine its architectural limits through three structural dimensions required by distributed robotic systems, namely Space, Time, and State. We first provide a structured analysis of middleware architecture and operational dynamics, including discovery, data exchange, and state management mechanisms. Building on this foundation, we formalize Time as temporal predictability for control loops, Space as spatial abstraction from physical topology to enable modular deployment, and State as contextual continuity despite dynamic node participation and intermittent connectivity. Through a comprehensive review of existing implementations and prior studies, we organize middleware research according to the structural trade-offs that arise among these dimensions. Under constrained wireless conditions, spatial abstraction can obscure network variability and weaken temporal guarantees, while mechanisms that preserve state continuity introduce computational and network overhead that competes with time-critical communication. These interactions reveal structural trade-offs that characterize the practical limits of contemporary robot middleware. By synthesizing architectural patterns and identifying gaps in current modeling and analysis approaches, this survey outlines a principled research roadmap for robust and scalable robotic middleware architectures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01304