Given the growing global burden of liver tumors and diffuse liver diseases, non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) is increasingly used for opportunistic screening because of its low cost and favorable safety profile. However, downstream tasks such as tumor detection and fine-grained disease diagnosis remain challenging due to NCCT's inherently low tissue contrast, lack of hemodynamic enhancement, and complex anatomical background. These limitations make subtle, heterogeneous, and multifocal hepatic lesions difficult to identify. Although large-scale self-supervised pretraining can learn robust representations from unlabeled NCCT scans, conventional voxel-wise reconstruction does not fully exploit the complementary information available in NCCT. Under weak NCCT contrast, low-level intensity patterns become less informative for pathology recognition, limiting the capture of lesion-specific discriminative features. In this paper, we propose the Liver Frequency-Spatial Unified Self-Supervised Pretraining (LiFUSE). The frequency branch applies random band-stop masking and spectrum reconstruction to encourage the model to capture subtle differences between lesions and surrounding tissues, while the spatial branch performs hybrid-granularity masked volumetric reconstruction to accommodate lesions of diverse sizes and morphologies. Finally, a cross-domain consistency scheme couples the spatial and frequency branches, yielding more discriminative representations for hepatic structures and lesions. Extensive experiments on three clinically relevant tasks across internal cohorts and a public target-domain transfer setting show that LiFUSE consistently outperforms strong baselines. These results suggest that unified frequency-spatial learning can improve liver disease analysis on NCCT, highlighting its potential for large-scale screening.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18243
While AI agents are useful for many tasks, they regularly misbehave in destructive ways, such as deleting important data. While prior work has focused on preventing such misbehavior, we consider how to recover after an agent misbehaves. We propose verifiable agent insurance (VAI), a framework for agent providers to commit financially to promises, a list of programmatically-specified policies that an agent is meant to follow. These promises are embedded in a smart contract on an immutable ledger (e.g., a blockchain) to prevent tampering, along with a monetary escrow. A user who detects a violation of committed promises can prompt a verifier to review agent execution traces, which are logged through the agent harness's shared tool-execution path, without instrumenting each tool separately. Upon verification of the violation, the agent provider's escrow funds are paid to the reporting user. We instantiate VAI as an end-to-end implementation on an Ethereum layer-2 network, and evaluate its coverage on three prominent agent benchmarks, two of which we re-annotated to obtain task-level policy-compliance labels. Currently, many agents do not emit user authorizations and security-relevant information as explicit, structured data objects -- rather, they embed the data needed to verify policy violations in natural language exchanges. Even so, VAI manages to detect violations in 42.2% of runs containing violations across three benchmarks. By augmenting agents to explicitly emit such objects, violation detection rises to 83.0% of traces. Our findings suggest that for improved auditability, agents should be co-designed with their security policies to emit explicit, structured records of user authorization and security-relevant actions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18230
Conventional deepfake speech detectors primarily target synthesis artifacts and often degrade under unseen attacks or recording conditions. Human speech, however, contains physiological markers associated with respiration, phonation, and temporal coordination arising from the speech-production system that synthesizers may not reproduce faithfully. This motivates the hypothesis that deepfake speech can be detected by identifying inconsistencies in these patterns, which we test using 36 handcrafted physiological markers organized into respiratory, vocal, and temporal categories. We evaluate the marker vectors with logistic regression and SVM classifiers on pooled English recordings. The best in-domain system achieves a 21.40% equal error rate (EER), while logistic regression achieves 32.77% on the out-of-domain dataset pair. Since the markers describe specific speech-production properties, the logistic-regression coefficients indicate whether higher marker values push the classifier toward bona fide or deepfake speech. These results provide initial evidence that physiological markers offer a useful, interpretable signal for deepfake speech detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18934
AI companions provide users with emotional support and ongoing companionship, but their sustained relational interactions also introduce distinct safety risks. Prior work largely targets general harms or specific companion platforms and risk categories, while relying on manually collected conversations, limiting scalable and user-grounded evaluation and mitigation. To address this, we introduce CompanionSafe, a unified evaluation-to-mitigation framework for AI companion safety. Its evaluation component, CompanionEval, provides scalable multi-turn evaluation by constructing 1,300 relationally grounded settings from diverse personas, matched companion characters, and dialogue scenarios across four turn tiers. Its mitigation component, CompanionGuard, converts benchmark-exposed failures into turn-localized supervision for companion-specific risk detection. Our results show that even strong LLMs and existing guard models remain vulnerable to companion-specific relational harms, while both closed- and open-source models exhibit increasing safety risks as interactions become longer. Together, CompanionEval and CompanionGuard form a practical evaluation-to-mitigation loop for AI companion safety, turning relational safety failures exposed during multi-turn interaction into supervision for companion-specific guardrails.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18095
Current image-guided neuronavigation techniques, such as intraoperative MRI and ultrasound, are limited by high costs, limited sensitivity and operational complexity. There is a clear need for more efficient systems to enhance intra-operative tumor detection and improve patient outcomes for intrinsic brain tumor resection. Whereas previous intraoperative brain HSI studies have predominantly investigated high-grade gliomas, glioblastomas, or mixed-grade cohorts, this clinical study focuses specifically on low-grade gliomas (LGGs). LGGs strongly resemble normal brain under white light conditions on the operative microscope. This study characterizes spectral differences between healthy and tumor tissue and provides a paired comparison of HSI- and RGB-based classification at matched tissue locations and under identical patient-level data splits. Tumor regions showed consistently lower reflectance, which may be associated with differences in hemoglobin concentration and oxygenation. A range of classification models was evaluated. The 3D CNN, which integrates spectral and spatial features, achieved the highest median ROC-AUC of 74.5%, compared with 67.9% for the spectral-only XGBoost model and 64.0% for the RGB-based model. These results support further investigation of HSI for low-grade glioma classification and quantify its performance relative to conventional RGB imaging in this cohort.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17944
The code generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) can equally be misused to implement harmful functionality, underscoring the need to understand their safety behavior in response to programming requests. While request phrasing is known to influence refusal, it remains unclear whether the form in which coding task requirements are stated affects the refusal process for malicious code generation. We introduce PseudoSpec, a template that organizes functional requirements as engineering specifications, and investigate its effects through controlled comparisons, representation analysis, and activation interventions. Across five open-weight models, removing explicit risk keywords only partially reduces refusal, whereas specification prompting substantially lowers refusal even when these keywords are retained. This reduction accompanies consistent shifts toward code-output-related representations, and interventions along condition-difference directions alter refusal behavior. Output analysis further distinguishes code-related responses from generation degeneration. Building on these findings, we propose SpecCloak, a black-box red-teaming framework combining PseudoSpec with discriminator-guided optimization, achieving an average execution-verified attack success rate of 28.91\% across eight target models on RedCode-Gen. We also introduce SpecReveal, a defense prototype combining natural-language intent reconstruction with dual-view detection without target-model fine-tuning. It achieves a 96.88\% attack detection rate in a separate prompt-detection evaluation, with false positives assessed on benign programming and specification-style inputs. These results connect specification-induced response differences to practical security consequences and identify intent reconstruction as a complementary detection approach.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17907
TypeSafe AI's Jev is a new kind of safety judge. It generates no text and no label: it answers questions the developer defines in advance and returns a probability for each answer. The vendor admits that adversarial input can change these answers but gives no numbers. In this paper, we present the first controlled adversarial evaluation of Jev. We build a test harness that sends every system the same payload under the same policy, and run it on four public-data tasks, from rule-based ones (input moderation, injection detection, routing) to a judgment-based one (phishing detection), with fifty attack variants from thirteen families. The targets are Jev, five GPT and GLM judges, and two local classifiers (Llama Guard 3, Prompt Guard 2). We find that Jev is the most robust system on input moderation: eight forgeries of its structured input bypass none of its decisions, and a sentence asking only why someone might make a harmful request bypasses 9% of its blocks, against 56% for GPT-6 Astra. On phishing detection. However, the same forgeries bypass 19-29% of the emails it flags, and even without attack Jev detects only 62% of phishing emails, against 77-81% for the GLM judges. Jev is also the fastest judge, but it flags the most benign requests (27%). The local classifiers fail differently: a training-example statement makes Llama Guard 3 miss 62% of the phishing it had flagged. These results suggest that Jev resists attacks on tasks with a clear rule to check but is more exposed on tasks that call for an overall judgment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17820
Utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) inspection is dominated by aerial surveys, which are effective for identifying module-level hot cells but provide limited visibility of critical components located under the array, including connectors, cabling, fasteners and structural elements. These assets are difficult to inspect consistently at scale, and their defects are often spatially small, partially occluded and difficult to localise from isolated images. We present an automated 3D visual-thermal inspection system (Tricorder) for under-panel PV asset inspection. The approach combines LiDAR-inertial Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) with geometrically calibrated RGB and thermal imagery and machine-learning-based object detection and segmentation. Detected assets are associated with the reconstructed 3D environment, allowing visual and thermal observations from multiple viewpoints to be spatially fused and localised. We demonstrate the approach on utility-scale PV data for MC4 connector detection and connection-state recognition, thermal anomaly identification, and detection of structural components including bolts, nuts and torque tubes. The results demonstrate a pathway from image-based inspection toward spatially grounded autonomous inspection, where defects are detected and linked to specific assets and their 3D locations within the solar farm.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17762
Real-world audio recordings for deepfake detection rarely consist solely of speech; they often are mixtures of speech and background events that themselves may also be synthetic. When processing these mixtures, it remains unclear whether detectors attend to the speech or the background event, and where their spectral evidence lies. We study this on the CompSpoof V2 database, whose mixtures pair independently real-or-fake speech and event components. Our results show that all systems detect fake events more accurately than fake speech. However, this performance gap is largely driven by poor generalization to an unseen fake speech domain, rather than a true difference in difficulty. Furthermore, sub-band probing reveals that the front-end encoder dictates where a countermeasure focuses its frequency evidence. To enable reliable deployment in real-world scenarios, future countermeasures should address out-of-domain generalization failures and carefully select front-end encoders aligned with their target acoustic evidence. Our source code and checkpoints are released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17617
Thought templates, skill libraries, agent memories and caches turn many reasoning steps into one. We call this reasoning contraction. A contracted memory saves reasoning steps and errors until its facts change, then quietly answers wrong. Most systems trust memories by counting successes and failures. We prove that such counters are badly tuned change detectors: a symmetric counter notices a partial change only after a power of its false-alarm horizon, and an unclipped one may never notice it. On five LLMs answering multi-hop questions over edited facts, ExpeL- and ACE-style counters serve 7.0-13.5x more stale answers than certified memories given the same information, and on code tasks with an exact verifier 35-73x more. Safety also has a price. When facts change and each memory is judged only by its own verified outcomes, one number, the certification load, sets how much reasoning any safe memory can skip, and under Zipf demand it yields a scaling law. Our recipe weighs each memory's failures by its own likelihood ratio, certifies its utility against live reasoning, and restarts the certificate when facts change, with the likelihood-ratio detector as the safety net for unannounced changes; for large edits it also invalidates the memory.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17544
With recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the adoption of distributed learning paradigms such as Federated Learning (FL) has emerged. In simple terms, FL enables multiple entities to collaboratively train AI models without sharing local data. The FL paradigm is particularly valuable in privacy-sensitive settings, such as financial services, because it enables institutions to collaboratively improve fraud-detection models while keeping sensitive transaction data local. However, FL schemes are prone to security vulnerabilities, where malicious clients can poison local data or model updates and degrade the global model, and hence the performance of the resulting model might be affected. Therefore, in this work, we propose Enhanced Detective, a dual-stage robust aggregation strategy that combines Median Absolute Deviation (MAD), distance-based update filtering, and FedMedian aggregation. Experiments on an imbalanced credit card dataset evaluate targeted label-flipping and weight-scaling attacks over 50 communication rounds. With 40% malicious clients, Enhanced Detective achieves an AUPRC of 0.796 and a Recall of 0.847.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17523
Social media platforms generate vast volumes of user-generated content that often obscure meaningful discourse, a phenomenon conceptualized as social noise. While existing misinformation detection methods primarily focus on factual verification, they largely overlook the role of social noise in amplifying misinformation. This study assesses the performance of six text-based models and a graph neural network (GNN) in mitigating the effects of misinformation using predefined social noise constructs. The dataset consists of 500,000 tweets collected from the X platform using the Ukraine hashtag during the Russia-Ukraine conflict from March 2024 to March 2025. Advanced machine learning models achieve strong performance, with accuracies ranging from 79.94% to 97.17%. RoBERTa demonstrates the highest performance, with an accuracy of 97.17%, Cohen's kappa of 0.9660, MCC of 0.9660, and AUC of 0.9977. The GNN achieves an accuracy of 64.52% and an AUC of 0.899, demonstrating performance above random-chance classification by exploiting the relational structure between tweets. All text-based models achieve kappa values greater than 0.75, indicating substantial overall agreement. Explainable AI analysis using LIME reveals that 89.6% of predictive weight is attributed to contextual features rather than isolated keywords. The findings highlight that integrating social noise into AI pipelines enhances misinformation detection and supports more effective mitigation strategies in large-scale social media environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17469
Earthquake catalogs underpin studies such as fault structure, earthquake processes and seismic hazard, and their value depends on being both complete and reliable. Machine learning has improved individual tasks of earthquake monitoring, but processing stations independently discards the consistency of arrivals across the network, and running tasks in sequence fragments the information describing each earthquake. We present EQNet2, a geometry-aware multi-station Transformer that jointly predicts phase arrivals, first-motion polarities, source location and magnitude, and the association of arrivals into events. On a Northern California test dataset and on continuous waveforms from Ridgecrest and the San Francisco Bay Area, EQNet2 recovers more weak arrivals, produces fewer false detections, and associates more picks into located events. Its learned attention links information across stations along time--distance patterns consistent with seismic moveout. As seismic networks grow denser, exploiting multi-station coherence and event-centric prediction offers a path to more complete and reliable catalogs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17404
Continuous monitoring of generative AI systems requires detecting distribution shifts in the unstructured data they ingest and generate. Existing monitoring methods typically control false alarms by requiring the discrepancy measure used to detect shifts to be *pre-specified*. However, for unstructured data, pre-specification creates a sensitivity--breadth trade-off: a narrowly defined measure is sensitive to the anticipated shift but may miss unexpected changes, whereas a broadly defined measure may detect a wider range of shifts but with reduced sensitivity. Although adaptively hypothesizing the shift direction can overcome this limitation, such data-dependent adaptation generally invalidates conventional false-alarm guarantees. We reconcile adaptivity with statistical validity through testing-by-betting, reframing sequential changepoint detection as a betting game in which the bettor continually updates its hypothesized shift direction, or witness function, as new observations arrive. We introduce *asymptotic e-detectors*, which approximate the pre-change distribution using a calibration set of size $m$, and prove that they asymptotically control the average run length to a false alarm as $m$ increases. Empirically, calibration sets as small as $m=30$ provide effective control. We then develop adaptive monitoring strategies ranging from black-box bettors that learn from embeddings to interpretable bettors based on LLM-proposed concepts. Across three real-world datasets, including data from a clinical AI scribe deployment, adaptive monitors detect shifts faster than fixed monitors at the same false-alarm level. Further, when the true shifts are sparse and interpretable, LLM-concept monitors provide the fastest and most interpretable detection, while also guiding root-cause diagnosis for complex shifts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17399
Propaganda detection systems usually operate as black boxes, lacking explanations. To address this, we hypothesise that persuasive techniques contain definitional characteristics with respect to their social-political setting. We introduce ReCoT, a reasoning-conditioned detection framework that captures definitional cues of persuasive techniques via population-level refinement and performance-guided resampling, without requiring additional explanation annotations. On INDI-PROPspan, ReCoT achieves a macro F1_LCS of 0.364, surpassing baselines and reaching 88% of the SFT upper bound on Avg F1_LCS. Similarly, on PTC, ReCoT reaches 85% of the SFT upper bound on Avg F1_LCS, closing much of this gap while remaining interpretable. Importantly, the analysis of the reasoning pool's convergence and update pattern for ReCoT shows effective refinement of reasoning CoTs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17271
A model diff credits post-training with whatever separates a base checkpoint from one post-trained descendant, presuming a rerun would land close by. On the sparse co-activation graph of Qwen3-1.7B it does not: two LoRA-SFT reruns sit over half as far apart as either sits from the base. We score each base-to-post contrast against the run-to-run band of its own recipe, and show that $k$ runs certify no better than $p=1/(k+1)$ under run exchangeability, however large the effect, so the band $z$-score is a descriptive scale. SFT leaves a large, reproducible signature: base $\to$ SFT displaces the graph by 17.8 pairwise-distance SDs beyond the mean distance between four independent LoRA-SFT runs, and the pre-registered estimator replicates on Llama-3.1-8B with Llama-Scope. At 29 steps each, four SFT and four DPO runs occupy disjoint displacement ranges, a gap $5.0\times$ and $5.6\times$ the spreads of the two arms, without any band. All bands use graphs built on one GPU architecture. Three other readings stop short of a verdict: DPO band counts (3/4, 1/4, 3/4 contrasts outside at 12, 29, 60 steps) show no consistent dose ordering while its displacement stays flat; light GRPO is a secondary non-detection, not an absence, and we run no equivalence test; and the graph concentration read as an RL signature is already in the zero-RL base. A pre-registered causal sweep at three edge budgets on 4,816 held-out prompts found the displaced sources load-bearing ($12\times$ a matched random control in mean, $3.5\times$ in median at 10,000 edges), but their stage-specificity interaction reversed at two budgets and the third failed its faithfulness gate, so we claim calibrated structural displacement, not a changed mechanism. Scope: one backbone, one SFT recipe and general-text probe states for the full protocol.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17093
Memory-augmented LLM-based agents are vulnerable to memory injection attacks: Agents may retrieve poisoned memory from attackers, which diverts their behavior from initial user intent and finally causes task failure. However, existing defense mechanisms either incur high computational cost or suffer from information redundancy in multi-turn contexts. To address these challenges, we propose Memory Intent-Aware Neural Denoising(MIND), a lightweight defense framework for memory injection attack. Our preliminary analysis reveals that benign and poisoned trajectories exhibit distinguishable relationships between the initial user intent and subsequent behavior. Building on this observation, MIND employs an intent-aware Information Bottleneck(IB) to extract compact intent--behavior representations from the initial intent and turn-level behavior. The IB preserves intent-relevant cross-turn attack signals while filtering task-irrelevant and repetitive information, and a lightweight detector identifies malicious memories from the resulting representations. As such, MIND mitigates information redundancy in multi-turn contexts while avoiding the overhead of repeated LLM auditing. Extensive experiments show that MIND reduces attack success rates while preserving task accuracy and inference efficiency. Notably, on ReAct-StrategyQA, MIND reduces mean ASR-r and ASR-a by 58.1% and 53.5%, respectively, while matching the undefended agent in average accuracy and latency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28103
Detecting credit card fraud is notoriously difficult because fraudulent charges make up less than 0.2% of total transactions. Quantum Machine Learning (QML), particularly Quantum Kernel Support Vector Machines (QSVM), promises richer feature representations by embedding classical data into high-dimensional Hilbert spaces. However, whether this theoretical advantage holds up when managing real-world financial data bottlenecks remains unclear. We designed a controlled benchmark comparing three quantum encodings, Angle, ZZFeatureMap, and IQP against classical models while keeping sample sizes, feature counts, and scaling strictly matched. To handle class skew without corrupting quantum state overlaps, we embedded synthetic minority oversampling (SMOTE) directly into the quantum Gram matrix workflow, raising PR-AUC scores by roughly +0.04 across feature maps. When trained on the full European credit card dataset with 30 features, classical baselines reached a top PR-AUC of 0.983. However, restricting classical models to match QSVM hardware constraints (500 samples, 4 PCA features) dropped their PR-AUC to 0.750. This puts our best quantum result 0.730 PR-AUC using IQP encoding on 150 samples into realistic context. Testing on physical quantum hardware reduced performance further to 0.62 due to CNOT gate errors and thermal noise. Overall, our findings pinpoint two main operational bottlenecks for near-term quantum kernels: the scaling of Gram matrix evaluation and heavy information loss from squeezing features onto small qubit registers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17027
Standard hate speech detection datasets often emphasize explicit harmful language, but directed harm can also be expressed indirectly, without clearly hateful wording. Sarcasm is one such form of indirect expression, as it can convey harmful intent through mock praise, exaggeration, humor, or apparent politeness. In this paper, we introduce SarcasTraps, a targeted external test set for analyzing the effect of sarcasm on Turkish hate speech detection. SarcasTraps contains 479 entries annotated along two dimensions: hate speech and sarcasm. We train classifiers using BERTurk and XLM-RoBERTa on two existing Turkish hate speech datasets and evaluate them on SarcasTraps, using it strictly as an external test set. We also evaluate GPT-4.1 and Llama-3.3-70B in a zero-shot setting on SarcasTraps. Results show that sarcasm substantially affects hate speech detection. Fine-tuned encoder models lose recall on sarcastic hate, while zero-shot LLMs maintain higher recall but suffer substantial precision drops on sarcastic examples. These findings show that both fine-tuned hate speech detectors and zero-shot LLMs struggle when sarcasm is involved, and SarcasTraps provides quantitative evidence of this challenge through a targeted Turkish test set. Due to the presence of sensitive and hateful language, SarcasTraps will be shared upon request for academic research purposes. Warning: This paper has examples from the dataset which contains offensive and hateful content towards groups of people.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16957
Large audio-language models (LALMs) are fast becoming a general interface to sound, yet how far their broad pretraining carries into specialized domains remains largely open. Vessel monitoring, maritime safety, and ocean sensing all depend on recognizing underwater signals, but to our knowledge LALMs have not been systematically evaluated on them. Annotated recordings are costly to collect, and a faithful synthetic alternative has to bring together many interacting factors: the structure of detection pulses, communication waveforms, and ship-radiated noise, and the sound-speed profile, geometry, and multipath propagation through which each reaches the receiver. We address this by proposing \textbf{UA-Bench}, to our knowledge the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating LALMs on underwater acoustic signal recognition. It comprises 375,051 audio records that couple parameterized sources with modeled propagation, so that every record can be traced to the conditions that produced it. The records span these three signal families, and each carries a three-level label hierarchy (13 leaf classes), a templated multi-turn dialogue, and source and channel metadata. We evaluate on a balanced 2,600-record subset with a gated coarse-to-fine protocol that locates each error at source routing, fine-grained classification, or output format, and add a paired silent-audio control to test whether the waveform is actually used. Nine open LALMs, evaluated without task-specific adaptation, reach only 2.0\%--13.1\% leaf accuracy, against a random reference of 7.7\%. The waveform helps source routing far more than leaf recognition (for one model, +29.5 versus +2.3 points over silence), and just four models gain reliably at the leaf level, by at most 4.7 points. UA-Bench thus gives a reference point for these models, and its released training partition supports follow-up adaptation work.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16942