Despite the Markov assumption, safety failures in robot reinforcement learning rarely occur instantaneously; they typically emerge over several steps as the policy enters unfamiliar states under disturbances and domain shift. We address this limitation by learning a receding-horizon safety critic that predicts whether a state will remain non-terminating over the next receding horizon, enabling anticipatory detection of impending locomotion failures. The critic is trained from rollout-derived horizon labels with a composite objective that combines horizon classification, control-barrier-function-inspired temporal consistency, and smoothness regularization, and we aggregate an ensemble of critics with a conservative Conditional Value at Risk estimate to account for uncertainty. Building on the learned critic, we derive a closed-form, differentiable CBF-style safety filter that minimally modifies the policy action to improve predicted safety, and integrate it into PPO with an anticipation loss to reduce policy-filter mismatch during training. In simulated quadruped locomotion, our method improves robustness under action noise, external perturbations, and terrain shifts, reducing catastrophic failures while maintaining competitive returns.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20255
Full-duplex speech systems must decide when to enter, hold, or relinquish the conversational floor, even as multiple speakers overlap or backchannel without taking it. Existing evaluations study dyadic turn-taking or end-to-end agent behavior, but lack a unified, controlled evaluation of genuine floor transitions against confusable non-events in multi-party settings. We introduce MultiPartyTurnBench (MPTB), a benchmark of 240 synthetically generated, channel-separated conversations spanning two to five speakers and six interaction types. MPTB evaluates two complementary tasks: End-of-Turn (EOT) detection distinguishes genuine turn completion from temporary holds, while Interruption (INT) detection distinguishes successful floor takeovers from non-floor-taking speech. Exact event-conditioned annotations enable causal evaluation using false-positive-constrained recall and signed latency. Across acoustic, semantic, and turn-projection baselines, we find a stark asymmetry: learned systems achieve 82.5-92.6% EOT recall at 4.3-11.8% false-positive rates, while INT detection suffers from missed takeovers or excessive false activations. This asymmetry extends to five full-duplex agents which achieve 86.1-95.8% balanced accuracy on turn entry, yet perform near chance (46.9-54.7%) on selective interruption handling. Gemini-3.8-Live yields to 97.7% of backchannels, whereas MiniCPM-o-4.5 yields to only 1.4% of genuine interruptions. These findings establish selective floor control as a distinct, unresolved challenge for reliable multi-party voice interaction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20172
Language models often produce semantically similar answers to open-ended questions, even when many plausible alternatives exist. Generating useful alternatives requires identifying both what the query calls for and what existing responses already cover. We introduce Gap Detection, a framework that searches for relevant but unoccupied directions in a shared text embedding space. Its objective, GapScore, combines query relevance (Demand) with dissimilarity to the nearest existing item (Defensibility). The framework optimizes this product on the unit sphere, maps candidate directions to concept words with a language model, and uses task-specific filtering and constrained prompting to turn those concepts into text. On five curated topics and 90 INFINITY-CHAT queries, the reported mean relative reductions in output Collision are 12.8% and 10.8%, respectively. We also instantiate the framework for generative engine optimization over four product markets and for iterative synthetic-data augmentation. In the latter setting, with 100 training examples per method, Gap Detection reduces Collision from 0.324 to 0.298 relative to undirected accumulation and increases the Vendi Score from 27.16 to 29.20; the accuracy difference is one example on a 40-example test set. Component ablations expose the trade-off between semantic separation and relevance, while also showing that better direction scores do not uniformly yield better downstream metrics. These results support explicit gap search as a practical mechanism for diversifying content, with task validity checked separately from geometric novelty.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20162
In various industries, smoke and fire are two of the most important threats in the workplace. One of the common methods for detecting smoke and fire is the use of infrared thermal and smoke sensors, which cannot be used in outdoor applications. Therefore, the use of vision-based methods seems necessary. The problem of smoke and fire detection is spatiotemporal and requires spatiotemporal solutions. This paper presents a method that uses spatial features along with temporal-based features to detect smoke and fire in the scene. It consists of three main parts; the task of each part is to reduce the error of the previous part so that the final model has a robust performance. This method also uses transformer modules to increase the accuracy of the model. The results of our model show the proper performance of the proposed approach in solving the problem of smoke and fire detection and can be used to increase workplace safety.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20141
Tactile sensing is becoming central to robust, adaptive, and dexterous robotic manipulation. Beyond its traditional role in contact detection and reactive control, touch is increasingly used to learn transferable representations, condition manipulation policies, and support embodied physical reasoning. Yet existing surveys largely emphasize tactile hardware and perception, leaving the rapid shift toward learning-based tactile manipulation insufficiently synthesized. This paper reviews tactile-guided skill learning from a learning-centric perspective, organized by the functional role of touch across the learning and control pipeline. We examine tactile representation and policy learning, tactile foundation models, predictive and adaptive control, and generalization across objects, tasks, sensors, embodiments, and simulation-to-real transfer. Across these directions, we identify common design principles and remaining challenges in learning transferable physical representations, integrating semantic reasoning with contact-level control, and scaling tactile learning across heterogeneous data and hardware. Finally, we outline emerging directions toward tactile foundation and world models that can predict, reason about, and adapt physical interactions. Together, this review characterizes the transition of touch from a task-specific feedback signal toward a core modality for general-purpose embodied intelligence. An accompanying database of the reviewed literature and associated resources is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20134
Agent skills encode operational procedures and domain expertise as reusable knowledge assets, yet their distribution in plaintext exposes them to unauthorized copying and leakage. However, practical mechanisms for skill ownership verification and leakage tracing remain underdeveloped. Watermark embedding before distribution offers a potential solution, but structured, compact skill instructions impose stringent requirements for factual and procedural accuracy. To address these challenges, we introduce SkillMarker, a KGW-based watermarking method that jointly targets functionality preservation and strong watermark embedding. SkillMarker unifies quality-constrained rewriting with signal-oriented candidate search. The former separates essential knowledge from flexible expression to preserve instruction fidelity; the latter explores alternative expressions to obtain a stronger watermark signal under preservation constraints. We release an open-source toolkit that integrates watermark embedding, quality auditing, and detection to support the protection of agent skills. SkillMarker targets ownership verification and leakage tracing in distributed skill ecosystems, where content may be copied in whole or in part, or incorporated into other skills. Across four datasets, SkillMarker negligibly affects downstream task performance on average. In our copy-paste tests, window-based detection consistently identifies copied passages containing as few as 1,536 consecutive tokens. Even after merging with one or three background skills, SkillMarker retains watermark detection rates of 72.2--77.8\%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15725
Ambiguous inputs can admit multiple interpretations, each potentially yielding a different answer. Existing work largely treats this ambiguity as a property of the input, yet for a particular language model, only some alternatives may be known and answerable. We therefore distinguish world ambiguity, capturing all alternatives admitted by an input, from model ambiguity, capturing those accessible to the responding model. To characterize these alternatives, we formalize natural-language clarifications through three desiderata: \emph{uniqueness}, \emph{faithfulness}, and \emph{answer equivalence}. We show that these desiderata induce a one-to-one correspondence between valid answers and equivalence classes of clarifications, implying that any interpretation can be represented either by its answer or by the clarifications that uniquely express it. We leverage this correspondence to introduce \circleclar{}, a black-box method that estimates the set of answers available to a model by checking consistency along an answer--clarification--answer cycle. Across open-domain QA and executable Text-to-SQL, \circleclar{} achieves strong recovery of these answer sets. In QA, the recovered support yields the strongest overall performance in model-dependent ambiguity detection and enables effective selection among answering, clarifying, and abstaining. Together, these results demonstrate the practical value of a model-dependent view of ambiguity and its characterization through an answer-clarification correspondence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20052
Large language models often produce fluent but factually incorrect output. Gray-box detectors identify such hallucinations from the token-probability statistics emitted during generation, avoiding the need for white-box access to hidden states that frontier models do not provide. These detectors, however, typically rely only on probability-derived representations and ignore the identities of the candidate tokens. They can therefore observe how uncertain the model is, but not what it is uncertain about. Consequently, they cannot distinguish between a model that is torn between "big" and "small" and one that is torn between "big" and "huge" when the two pairs receive the same probability distribution. We introduce GURI (Gray-box Uncertainty Representations with Identity), a lightweight gray-box hallucination detector that combines candidate-token probabilities with per-token vector identifiers. This exposes which alternatives the model considered while preserving the accessibility and transferability of the gray-box setting. Across three open-weight models and three question-answering benchmarks, GURI increases mean test ROC-AUC from 72.09% to 79.09% over a probability-only baseline. On the closed-source GPT-4.1 model, mean ROC-AUC increases from 67.39% to 71.84%. Among the three open-weight models, GURI outperforms transferred probability-only baseline in 17 of 18 directed cross-model transfers without fine-tuning. For the three open-weight models, cross-dataset transfer between HotpotQA and TriviaQA with the model held fixed improves mean ROC-AUC over transferred LOS-Net by 3.76 points.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19996
Reconstruction of 3D structures using under-ice AUV video footage has been inaccurate, although it is not certain whether this is due to shortcomings in the methods or an inherent deficiency of the capture system. We test four different models for reconstruction on the same Antarctic under-ice AUV video (Icefin, Kamb Ice Stream): classical feature matching SfM, differentiable photometric splatting, volumetric depth fusion, and a pose-free feed-forward foundation model. All four fail, each in a distinct way: near-total registration yielding almost no structure, geometrically broken output despite healthy photometric metrics, a persistent coverage artifact, and unstable cross-chunk scale. We show that all four are consistent with the same capture regime, a small camera-baseline-to-scene-depth ratio. Following our analysis, we propose a detection system that flags this type of failure in minutes, rather than hours of wasted compute.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19993
Seizure prediction and detection, essential for clinical treatment of epilepsy, remain the crucial task of this neurological disease. EEG and iEEG are widely used to analyze epilepsy due to its capability of capturing discriminative brain activities at high time resolution. However, existing works generally analyze either EEG or iEEG seizure activity separately, where EEG analysis has been well-researched, while more and more works consider iEEG for its higher specificity at the spatial level and signal quality. Currently, most of the existing seizure prediction systems are single-modal in nature, which limits its application to a variety of clinical conditions. Therefore, a common framework to analyze seizures with both EEG and iEEG signals needs to be developed. This paper presents a new framework of multimodal seizure classification integrating the heterogeneous EEG and iEEG recordings from different subjects and sources. A specific framework, called Unified Multimodal Signal Harmonization (UMSH), is developed for harmonizing signals with varied sampling rates and recording conditions. Moreover, to handle the extremely class-imbalanced problem in the data sets, we use a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) based data augmentation technique to generate synthetic samples to balance the class distribution. The proposed framework uses the EEGNet-Vision Transformer (EEGNet-ViT) as the feature extraction and classification network to learn the local discriminative patterns as well as global contextual information in the multimodal seizure data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for robust seizure classification, emphasizing the potential of integrated EEG-iEEG multimodal learning in advancing next-generation epilepsy monitoring and clinical decision-support systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16596
Reliable validation of machine learning models is a crucial step in designing robust and trustworthy systems. Yet validation relies on annotated test sets treated as ground truth, even though annotations can be noisy or ambiguous. In object detection, sources may disagree on object presence, box location, or class label. Standard agreement metrics usually binarize box overlap before computing a summary score, obscuring the degree and structure of disagreement between annotation sets. Here, we study an Optimal Transport (OT)-based metric for measuring agreement between object detection annotations. Instead of binarizing bounding box overlap, this metric assigns graded costs to matched and unmatched labeled boxes. Through theoretical analysis and experiments on real and synthetically perturbed annotations, we show that OT captures graded changes in agreement and distinguishes annotation pairs that thresholded metrics score identically. Our results suggest that OT provides a richer measure of annotation agreement in object detection, especially for domains with many small or ambiguous objects. Such agreement estimates can support more reliable validation when labels are noisy or conflicting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19912
Adapting a single vision-language model to medical image parsing requires training choices that reflect the demands of each task. We study task-specific adaptation with Qwen3.5-9B for FLARE 2026 Task 3, covering six task families and seven imaging modalities. Our system couples a shared, frozen 4-bit backbone with LoRA adapters selected from the input question. We customize adapter ranks and prompts, rebalance rare classification targets, and supplement regression training with dermatology classification examples. On the fixed internal holdout, the task-specific adapters achieve a dataset-macro balanced accuracy of 0.7791 for classification, a dataset-macro micro-F1 of 0.6286 for multi-label classification, a counting mean absolute error (MAE) of 11.73, a dataset-macro detection F1 of 0.8914, a dataset-macro regression MAE of 9.78, and a report-generation CRIMSON score of 0.8204. On the organizer's 1,703-example hidden-validation set, the submitted system achieves 0.8496 classification balanced accuracy, 0.5338 sample-averaged multi-label F1, and 14.5950 regression MAE. The final 30.1 GB container averages 3.1 seconds per case, including model loading, and produces identical outputs across repeated verification runs. The benefits vary across tasks, supporting the use of task-specific adapter configurations and image budgets within a shared medical vision-language model. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19901
Reliable fault detection is crucial for industrial machinery in large-scale facilities, where unexpected failures can cause costly downtime and production interruptions. Although acoustic monitoring provides a scalable solution for machine condition monitoring, its deployment is often constrained by high false-positive rates. We propose a two-step approach to automatic anomalous sound detection: first, when only normal operating audio samples are available, a regularized unsupervised model is deployed; then, after the first machine fault, a few-shot adaptation strategy exploits the anomalous samples acquired during the fault to improve the system. This adaptation increases the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPR) from 23.0 to 64.0 and improves detection in the low false-positive-rate region, with the partial area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (pAUROC) increasing from 39.6 to 72.8. We also show that covariance regularization improves both prediction accuracy and training stability in the unsupervised model. These results provide a practical strategy for acoustic anomaly detection systems, enabling improved accuracy and reduced false alarms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19893
AI-text detection generally asks whether a machine wrote a text. As AI becomes an increasingly integral and accepted part of writing, the more relevant question is no longer whether AI was used, but how much of the text reflects human contribution. A prominent line of work estimates this by measuring how predictive a person's prompt is of the final text. We show that this measure can be easily manipulated. We introduce SPECIFICITY PADDING that simply asks the model to copy a few random IDs from the prompt, and that alone makes a title-only request look more human than one that supplies the article's key ideas. A context-swap audit then holds each document fixed, and only shows or hides the IDs to the evaluator. The score of the unchanged text swings by a third to half of its scale, and it rises for every document we test, on news and scientific abstracts, across varied LLMs from 3.8B to 753B parameters. The same articles can average 85\% human or 15\% human depending only on which prompt is on record, and even with no prompt at all, the output-only variant rewards the random strings themselves. An exact identity, the credit ledger, explains why. The score is a surprisal-weighted average over the text, so rare strings that the context makes copyable collect the credit, whatever they mean. A two-point bound marks a deeper limit. If the prompt could have been machine-written, every transcript-only method must, in the worst case, miss by half the contribution at stake. Likelihood-based scores alone cannot reliably establish human contribution without evidence of what the person added and how the text was produced.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19767
Discriminative models are trained with task-specific objectives such as classification, detection, or representation learning, yet their practical utility depends on generalizing beyond the training task to unseen samples from the same domain. This suggests that a discriminative model may retain an implicit trace of the data manifold beyond its task labels. We ask whether this trace can be exposed as a generative signal without task-specific guidance. We introduce the Discriminative Score Function (DSF), which extracts an image-space generative field from the loss-gradient geometry of a pretrained discriminative model. DSF provides a training-free update rule that moves images toward model-consistent visual regions without retraining or task-specific targets. We apply DSF to diverse pretrained discriminative models, including ResNet classifiers, DETR detectors, and DINOv2 ViT encoders. DSF generates unconditional images from noise and supports conditional guidance, editing, inpainting, and explanation through the same field. DSF-generated samples also provide effective zero-shot quantization calibration when real images or labels are unavailable, preserving feature geometry better than data-free calibration baselines. These results show that discriminative training leaves a generative functional signal for synthesis and calibration. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19743
Autonomous navigation of planetary rovers is challenged by visually repetitive, featureless terrain. SLAM systems based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offer dense mapping but rely on RGB appearance descriptors that degrade under perceptual aliasing - a common failure mode in extraterrestrial environments where physically distinct locations appear visually identical. This paper presents HyperLoop, the first framework integrating hyperspectral imaging (HSI) into the loop closure module of a 3DGS-based SLAM system. Hyperspectral descriptors encode material-level spectral signatures complementing RGB features, providing robustness to illumination changes and visual repetitiveness. Two HSI descriptor families are introduced: Bag-of-Spectral-Words (BoSW), encoding spectral material distributions via TF-IDF weighted histograms, and PCA-K VLAD (PCAK-VLAD), capturing first-order residual statistics of PCA-compressed spectral signatures. Both are evaluated with SIFT-VLAD and NetVLAD RGB descriptors under Strict-AND and Weighted fusion strategies on a custom dataset from the Moon-Mars Outdoor Test Site (MMOTS) at DLR, comprising synchronized RGB-D and hyperspectral sequences across four planetary analog traverses (65.5 m total). A key finding is that the sensor's Red-NIR range (600-860 nm) provides limited discriminability for rock terrain: the best HSI fusion (SIFT-VLAD + BoSW, Strict-AND) achieves 5.04 cm ATE RMSE, within 1.8% of SIFT-VLAD alone (4.95 cm). The gain over NetVLAD (8.81 cm) is attributable to SIFT-VLAD, not HSI fusion. This motivates future adoption of SWIR sensors capturing diagnostic mineral absorption features absent from the 600-860 nm range for planetary SLAM missions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19742
Learning robust driving policies that generalize beyond their training domain remains a central challenge in motion planning. We propose an uncertainty-driven self-play scheme, in which half of the agents are rewarded for increasing their neighbors' epistemic uncertainty, while the other half learn to drive safely as the exploring agents continuously seek out their weaknesses. Epistemic uncertainty indicates where the policy is least confident and serves as an automatic proxy for scenario difficulty. Exploring agents use this signal to seek out hard cases, generating a challenging curriculum without manual scenario design. The resulting policy outperforms standard self-play, achieving best-in-class zero-shot transfer to nuplan Val14 (99.12% vs. 97.97%) and Argoverse 2 (82.39% vs. 78.03%) without fine-tuning, while also improving performance over standard self-play on Waymo. Our diversity-driven approach achieves 85% higher LSTM hidden-state coverage than the baseline, indicating a much richer set of behaviors. Further analysis shows that epistemic uncertainty serves as a calibrated difficulty detector, with highest-uncertain agents exhibiting 14.8 times the combined failure rate across collision, off-road, and DNF, of lowest-uncertain agents, enabling automatic prioritization of challenging scenarios without ground-truth labels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19714
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly help users arrange appointments, plan journeys, and allocate limited resources. These tasks require models to satisfy constraints on time, cost, capacity, and order, or determine that no feasible solution exists. Bangla is the world's seventh most widely spoken language, and existing benchmarks cover many language and reasoning tasks. However, benchmarks for evaluating planning and decision-making in Bangla under explicit constraints remain lacking. We introduce BANGLAPLAN, a benchmark of 1,000 problems across ten task families grounded in everyday life and institutions in Bangladesh. It includes feasible and infeasible problems in four language registers: everyday, formal, colloquial, and Bangla--English mixed. Answers cover eight structured types, including schedules, routes, allocations, and ordered steps, in a common JSON format. We construct the benchmark through language-model-assisted drafting and independent human validation. We evaluate 11 open-weight and proprietary model configurations using exact match, separately reporting feasible-case accuracy, infeasibility detection, and format errors. We find a large performance gap: GPT-6.1 Sol achieves 98.7% accuracy and Qwen3.5-27B with thinking reaches 80.3%, while direct-answer configurations score at most 30.9%. Seven of eleven configurations perform below the always-``infeasible'' baseline. Our findings also suggest that harder problems primarily reduce plan-construction accuracy, while infeasibility detection remains more robust. BANGLAPLAN provides a reproducible basis for evaluating planning and decision-making in Bangla. BANGLAPLAN is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19704
Accurate 3D reconstruction in real-world environments remains a significant challenge due to the coexistence of reflective and non-reflective surfaces, which pose distinct modeling demands. Existing methods often treat these surface types separately, limiting their generalizability and physical plausibility. To bridge this gap, we propose MicroSDF, a novel neural implicit framework that facilitates geometry and reflectance modeling through microfacet theory. Our approach incorporates three core innovations: (i) a microfacet-guided geometry model that extracts multi-scale surface normals (macroscopic and microfacet) from a signed distance field (SDF), regularized by a proposed microfacet normal consistency loss to enforce physically plausible surface orientations; (ii) an enhanced dual-branch color model, where the specular branch leverages the microfacet normals to model high-frequency reflectance, and the vanilla branch, unlike prior works, uses reflection direction (instead of viewing direction) to better model diffuse and low-frequency specular components; and (iii) a detection-guided color blending strategy that adaptively fuses the color outputs based on reflection priors, providing more physically intuitive blending than implicitly learned blending weights. Combined with a tailored multi-stage optimization scheme, the proposed MicroSDF achieves robust and high-fidelity reconstruction across reflective and non-reflective surfaces. Extensive experiments on DTU, Shiny Blender, Ref-NeRF, and DeepVoxels datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, establishing a new direction for physically grounded neural reconstruction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19681
To operate distributed applications with high availability, operators must rapidly diagnose and mitigate any incident. LLM-based agents can help, but unlike experienced human operators they do not improve as they handle more incidents. Each investigation starts from scratch, re-deriving likely causes and re-testing hypotheses even when a similar fault was resolved in the past. We present a self-defining operator (SDO) that improves with time by updating its operational behavior and memory. When SDO resolves an incident, it distills that experience into playbooks, which describe reusable diagnostic instructions for future incidents with similar faults, and detectors, scripts that take application telemetry as input and output relevant playbook(s). SDO continuously runs the detectors and invokes LLMs only when one fires, so its token cost scales with incident count rather than with operational time. Across 11 open-source microservice applications, SDO cuts resolution time by 52% on recurring faults while keeping per-incident cost low. SDO is open source at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14547