Detection
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Beyond the Snowflakes: Disentangling Weather Effects from Confounding Meta-Factors in LiDAR Object Detection
2026-10-09 17:38:30Yiming Yang, Jeremy P. BosAbstract
Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is critical for autonomous perception, yet its performance is known to degrade in adverse weather. While existing literature models snow as atmospheric noise that degrades performance, our granular evaluation on the WADS-3D and CADC datasets reveals a counter-intuitive phenomenon: detection accuracy consistently improves as snow intensity increases. Through ablation study and meta-information analysis, we reconcile this by confirming that while falling snow acts as noise, its negative impact is outweighed by a dominant, concurrent factor: significantly increased object point count. We hypothesize that this object point count boost acts as a geometric enhancement, driven by snow accumulation increasing vehicle surface area and a shift from specular to diffuse reflectance. Our findings demonstrate that evaluating perception systems using broad weather-severity bins without accounting for correlated object-level data can lead to misleading conclusions about detector robustness. We conclude that accurate evaluation requires decoupling atmospheric noise from surface accumulation effects and outline future research to validate these physical models. The WADS-3D dataset is available at: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13891
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Tracking the Invisible: Self-Supervised Wheel Track Detection with Thermal-RGB Fusion
2026-10-09 17:21:28Yiming Yang, Jeremy P. BosAbstract
Accurate detection of drivable area is essential for autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. While state-of-the-art methods focus on general traversability estimation, they prove inadequate for snow-covered roads where following existing wheel tracks offers crucial advantages: improved traction, predictable vehicle dynamics, and verified path stability. To address this, we propose a low-cost, self-supervised approach detecting safety-critical wheel tracks using synchronized RGB-I (RGB + Long-Wave Infrared) imagery. Our method automatically generates training labels by projecting future wheel trajectories from recorded GNSS data. A neural network is designed to identify wheel tracks with the 4-channel RGB-I images from challenging, white-out road surfaces. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in visually monotonous and featureless adverse environment, offering a robust and cost-effective alternative for winter autonomy. The newly introduced ThermalTrack dataset is available at: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13872
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QTestBench: A Test Framework for Evaluating LLM-Generated Quantum Code
2026-10-09 16:23:46Meriem Terki, Nouhaila Innan, Minghao Shao, Muhammad Kashif, Alberto Marchisio, Muhammad ShafiqueAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong results in classical code generation and are increasingly used to write the unit tests that safeguard that code. Whether they can do the same for quantum software is less clear, because quantum programs are probabilistic, depend on numerical tolerances, and are judged by domain-specific checkers, so a well-formed test can still disagree with the benchmark's verdict. Existing quantum benchmarks measure whether a model produces a correct solution, but not whether its tests can distinguish correct implementations from faulty ones. We introduce QTestBench, a framework that evaluates LLM-generated quantum test suites against independent benchmark checkers, never treating the tests themselves as ground truth. For each task, QTestBench prompts models to produce syntactic, semantic, and behavioral tests, injects candidate solutions at runtime, and compares each test verdict with the checker's label under three validation cohorts, each answering a distinct diagnostic question. We benchmark five LLMs on eight PennyLane QHack challenges and ten Qiskit HumanEval tasks. Generated suites almost always execute, but discrimination lags behind: the best generator reaches a test quality of 0.71 on QHack and 0.34 on Qiskit HumanEval, so executability alone overstates test quality. Oracle-verified synthetic mutants stabilize bug-detection estimates when natural faulty solutions are scarce, as on three of ten Qiskit tasks that yield none. QTestBench offers a reproducible, cross-framework benchmark for the trustworthiness of LLM-generated quantum tests.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13811
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REFLECT: Role-Aware Detection of Sentiment, Emotion, Politeness, and Formality
2026-10-09 16:10:25Sangpil Youm, Annabel Stocks Natalias, Hayden Heninger, Leah Jones, Xiaoyang Jin, Xiaoya Zhang, Bonnie DorrAbstract
Detecting communicative meaning in dialogue requires modeling not only lexical content but also the participant-role structures through which sentiment, emotion, politeness, and formality (SEPF) are expressed. Existing approaches rely on contextual language representations while leaving semantic roles implicit. We introduce a role-aware transformer architecture that maps the four SEPF dimensions to theory-grounded Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) configurations, incorporating these configurations directly into the transformer's self-attention mechanism. Role-aware attention models non-directional internal states (sentiment and emotion), while directional role-aware attention captures initiator-to-recipient relations for external cues (politeness and formality). The resulting role-aware representations are fused with contextual embeddings through a learned gate that adaptively weights how much role information each input contributes, rather than appending semantic roles as an auxiliary feature vector. Across four benchmark datasets, the framework yields statistically reliable gains over strong BERT-based baselines for emotion, politeness, and formality, with gains concentrated in theoretically predicted cases such as low-frequency, complex emotions and highly polite expressions; sentiment improvements are marginal and non-significant, suggesting that sentiment is conveyed more through lexical choice than participant-role structure. Additional evaluation on real-world data demonstrates that the framework improves both predictive performance and model traceability. These results demonstrate that linguistically grounded modifications to transformer self-attention improve the detection of communicative meaning, generalize beyond benchmark datasets to real-world mental-health data, and yield traceable, role-grounded explanations that extend beyond predictive performance to interpretability.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13797
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When LiDAR Fades, Radar Takes Over: LiDAR Reliability-Aware Adaptive Localization Under Airborne Obscurants
2026-10-09 16:04:41Moumita Mukherjee, Avijit Banerjee, Anton Koval, George NikolakopouloAbstract
LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO) is widely used for real-time localization and mapping, but its reliability can degrade substantially in subterranean environments affected by smoke, dust, and other airborne obscurants, whereas radar remains comparatively robust. This article presents a one-class temporal learning framework for LiDAR degradation detection and reliability-aware localization under such conditions. A broad set of degradation-sensitive cues, including spatial, cross-modal, geometric/motion, intensity, and measurement-recency features, is evaluated to characterize changes in LiDAR sensing quality. Their temporal evolution is modelled over sliding windows using an LSTM autoencoder trained exclusively on nominal operation, enabling deviations from healthy sensor behaviour to be detected without requiring labelled degradation data. The resulting LiDAR reliability estimate governs adaptive selection between LIO and radar inertial odometry (RIO), retaining LIO during reliable sensing and transferring localization authority to RIO when degradation is detected. The framework is evaluated using real-world ground robot data collected in GNSS-denied subterranean tunnels under nominal and dense-smoke conditions. Experimental results demonstrate degradation detection, adaptive modality switching, and continued localization output under severe LiDAR degradation. A feature family ablation study further shows that a reduced feature representation can improve degradation-aware localization performance in the evaluated dense-smoke scenarios, highlighting the importance of feature parsimony in one-class sensor degradation detection. The code will be released as open source to support reproducibility and further research.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13788
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UkrMeme: Multimodal Explainable Persuasion Detection in Ukrainian Memes
2026-10-09 16:03:27Nazar Andrushko, Vera Schmitt, Veronika SolopovaAbstract
Memes play a central role in modern online communication, especially in contexts of political conflict where visual and textual cues combine to convey persuasive messages. We study persuasive technique detection in Ukrainian memes using vision-language models (VLMs). We introduce UkrMeme, a dataset of 200 organically produced Ukrainian wartime memes annotated for persuasion techniques, and PTM-UA, a Ukrainian translation of a subset of the Propaganda 950 benchmark that preserves original visual content while translating meme text. We evaluate VLMs in a zero-shot prompting setup across image, text, and multimodal inputs using hierarchical F1 metrics. Finally, we compare Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) and model-generated token attributions and analyze the semantic categories of evidence emphasized by each explanation method.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13783
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Detection of extremely rare dead cells in fluorescence microscopy images
2026-10-09 16:01:04Prateek Verma, Benjamin Butter, Jian Zhang, Xintao WuAbstract
Dead cell detection in fluorescence microscopy is essential for phenotypic screening and drug efficacy assessment. However, automated identification remains challenging due to signal variability, optical artifacts, and colocalization ambiguities across multiple channels. Markers that define nuclear boundaries do not neatly coincide spatially or temporally with apoptotic markers. Furthermore, marker accumulation kinetics vary across individual cells and apoptosis stages, making universal thresholds unreliable. We present a systematic comparison of several computational approaches for detecting apoptotic cells in nucleus-stained specimens: (1) heuristic methods using intensity thresholds, distributions, correlations, and domain guidance; (2) classification using numerical features (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost and LightGBM) and image features (ResNet-18 and EfficientNet-B0); and (3) anomaly detection, also using numerical features (Isolation Forest, one-class SVM and PCA reconstruction) and image features (convolutional autoencoders and Deep SVDD). Using a dataset of 258 images containing 65,527 cells/nuclei across multiple scenes with 243 manually annotated ground truth dead cells, we evaluate each method on metrics such as PR-AUC, Precision, Recall, F1-score, and macro-F1. Our results indicate that classification using image features (deep learning) and numerical features (traditional) achieved the best performance, with ResNet-18 and XGBoost significantly outperforming manually designed heuristics and anomaly detection methods. Our findings demonstrate that such biomedical problems remain highly challenging to solve even with the state-of-the-art computational and learning techniques. We aim to provide an effective decision-support tool to researchers while tackling such problems either fully-automatically or in a human-in-the-loop setting as an aide to domain scientists.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13780
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Improving Semantic Coverage in AI Test & Evaluation through Generative Augmentation
2026-10-09 14:57:12Connor Hashemi, Bharadwaj Ravichandran, Connor Anderson, Shitij Govil, Brandon RichardWebster, Brian Hu, Keith FieldhouseAbstract
In test and evaluation (T&E) of AI models, evaluators typically have access only to a held-out test dataset and no knowledge of the training data or its semantic composition. If critical input conditions---such as time-of-day, weather, or scene location---are underrepresented in this test dataset, T&E results can be misleadingly due to this semantic coverage gap. We propose a three-stage generative AI pipeline to detect and fill such semantic gaps without requiring ground-truth labels of these semantics. First, vision-language models (VLMs) perform zero-shot binary labeling of semantic factors, and an embedding-space clustering step identifies which semantics most affect downstream model behavior. Second, diffusion-based image-to-image models transform existing covered images into the underrepresented semantic domain, preserving scene content while augmenting high-level appearance. Third, statistical analysis of the augmented image embeddings verifies that the synthetic imagery improves dataset coverage before it is incorporated. Crucially, the synthetic data is used only to enrich the test set and no model retraining is performed for T&E. We validate the full pipeline on both image classification and object detection under day/night semantic gaps, showing that the augmented test datasets better distinguish models with and without exposure to the missing semantic, thereby yielding T&E conclusions that more closely match those of an ideal, fully covered dataset. Code available at this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13697
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Retractions Revisited: A Replication, Extension, and Mechanistic Evaluation of Linguistic Obfuscation Effects in Fraudulent Science
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Prior work suggests fraudulent scientists write their articles with higher rates of linguistic obfuscation than genuine scientists, with a possible mechanism suggesting obfuscation makes research more costly for a reader to analyze. This result has not undergone additional empirical scrutiny in the open science era, nor have other psychological mechanisms been evaluated. The current replication and extension addressed this opportunity by comparing 800 fraudulent and 800 genuine control papers (2013-2025). The results supported the linguistic obfuscation hypothesis, suggesting fraudulent papers were more obfuscated than genuine ones. A parallel mediation model evaluated three competing mechanisms, finding that reality monitoring, as measured through decreased rates of adjectives, best explained the link between fraudulent science and linguistic obfuscation. Cross-validated detection accuracy using obfuscation features (60.7%) and an elastic net of over 100 language dimensions (71.6%) were significantly greater than chance. Implications for scientific fraud and psychology of language research are discussed.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13678
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MixedTruth: Component-Level Detection of Synthetic Speech and Synthetic Background in Mixed Audio
2026-10-09 14:35:37Xindong Zheng, Jiashu Zhu, Ke Li, Dan LinAbstract
Modern generative audio can fabricate not only voices but also the acoustic environments that provide evidence of when and where speech occurred. This capability undermines a longstanding forensic assumption that background sound provides reliable evidence of a recording's provenance. Yet existing detectors produce only a single real-or-synthetic verdict, leaving analysts unable to determine whether the voice, the environment, or both were manipulated. In this paper, we propose a component-level forensic detector, namely TruMix, which classifies recordings into eight categories spanning the presence and authenticity of speech and background. TruMix has a unique multi-path architecture that jointly analyzes speech-oriented and background-oriented spectral evidence, contextual information from the mixed waveform, and low-level synthesis artifacts. This design avoids the artifact propagation inherent in conventional separate-then-detect pipelines while enabling generalization across independent speech and environmental-sound generators. We also curated MixedTruth, a 4,917-hour benchmark covering all eight categories under diverse mixing conditions. Extensive experiments show that TruMix achieves 98.51% AUC for component-level attribution, significantly outperforms ten state-of-the-art synthetic-speech detectors in conventional binary classification, and exhibits strong robustness across four attack tiers.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14141
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SWE-DeceptionBench: Benchmarking Deceptive Behaviors of LLMs Across the Software Development Lifecycle
2026-10-09 14:09:09Xiting Liu, Lin Yang, Yitong Zhang, Jia Li, Shi-Min HuAbstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used throughout the software development lifecycle. This growing reliance on LLMs raises concerns about their trustworthiness, with deception posing a particularly important risk. Deceptive behavior takes the form of misleading responses or assistance in fabricating, concealing, or distorting information. To study this behavior, we introduce SWE-DeceptionBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLM deception in software engineering. The benchmark covers six lifecycle stages and two deception triggers: Active Deception, where models recognize infeasible or conflicting requirements but still present them as achievable, and Passive Deception, where models help fulfill explicit user requests to mislead others. We further introduce Neutral, Reward, and Pressure conditions to study the effect of external inducements, resulting in 720 test instances in Chinese and English. Evaluating seven mainstream LLMs, we find substantial deception even under the Neutral condition, with aggregate rates of 49.88% for Active Deception and 64.29% for Passive Deception. Deception rates vary across lifecycle stages, and external inducements affect Active and Passive Deception to different extents. We also evaluate lightweight defenses, finding that guard models miss many deceptive requests, and Self-Reminder reduces but does not eliminate deceptive responses. These findings highlight the need for more effective deception detection and mitigation methods to support trustworthy LLM-based software engineering.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13626
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Measuring Artifact Reliance in Machine-Generated Text Detectors
2026-10-09 13:34:45Anastasia Voznyuk, Andrey GrabovoyAbstract
Detectors of machine-generated text score almost perfectly on scientific-literature benchmarks, implying we can reliably distinguish with these detectors human and machine-generated documents. We looked at ten scientific-document subsets from six popular resources, and on several of them that apparent ease is a side effect of how the documents were put together. A logistic regression using 27 superficial features reached 0.833-0.997 macro-F1, and on the three arXiv subsets it outperformed every detector we evaluate with F1-scores 0.951-0.997. The strongest cue to the detector is the PDF extraction artifact: human texts retain their original line breaks, whereas generated texts are extracted as a single block of prose. This cue, together with three other formatting features, tell the classes apart at 0.996 AUC. To distinguish benchmarks that contain such a signal from detectors that rely on one, we introduce format counterfactuals: just re-wrapping a machine-written abstract without changing a single word reverses 20-27% of a public detector's correct decisions. Normalizing formatting before training reduces the generalization gap from 0.32 to 0.22. On format-clean benchmarks, it also raises out-of-domain macro-F1 from 0.33 to 0.65 for detectors trained on artifact-containing subsets.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13583
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Auditing VLM Benchmarks from Existing Evaluation Runs
2026-10-09 13:05:22Denis Degtiarev, Anna Gromova, Sergey Katkov, Artem Mikhailin, Safina Mukhamedshina, Albert Nasybullin, Karina Shaikhutdinova, Artem TuzovAbstract
Every evaluation run of a vision-language model (VLM) already produces per-question artifacts (predictions, judged correctness, metadata) that leaderboards reduce to a single score and then discard. We reuse those artifacts to audit the benchmark itself, and add an audit layer to VLMEvalKit: six detectors that run as post-processing over saved outputs, plus one additional text-only rerun with visual inputs removed, emitting a per-question report. The layer reports per-question findings together with aggregate audit statistics; for the headline quantities, it attaches permutation-null excess where applicable, interval estimates for proportions, and sensitivity to the model pool. Auditing MMStar, a benchmark curated specifically so that the image is indispensable, with three models, we find zero aggregate accuracy gain from the image on 20.2% of its questions. An item-matched permutation null accounts for 17.0%, leaving a +3.2 pp excess (corrected permutation p = 0.001). This excess is concentrated in the mathematics and science categories and is absent from coarse perception, a localization consistent with knowledge substituting for visual evidence; confirming that mechanism would require item-level review. A second detector flags 134 questions on which every model that answered in parseable form picked the same non-gold option, and these candidates peak in the perception categories, whereas the zero-gain excess is largest in mathematics and science & technology. Replacing the LLM judge with exact string matching changes no conclusion, and every scoring discrepancy between the two traces to one model whose free-form answers a parser cannot read. On a binary yes/no benchmark the detectors measurably fall out of calibration, a scope boundary that we measure and report. The audit layer, the prediction artifacts and the generated reports accompany this submission.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13548
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RESCUE: Is This Alarm Worth Acting On? Counterfactual Evaluation of VLA Runtime Monitors
2026-10-09 12:38:35David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Abdelwahed Khamis, Mohammad Ali Armin, Lars PeterssonAbstract
Runtime failure monitors for robot policies are typically evaluated by how accurately they distinguish failed from successful executions. Yet an accurate alarm may arrive too late for recovery, while an unnecessary intervention may disrupt an execution that would otherwise succeed. We introduce RESCUE, a counterfactual framework for evaluating whether a monitor's alarms enable useful interventions. By restoring simulator and policy states at execution checkpoints, RESCUE compares alternative actions, identifies the latest checkpoint satisfying a specified recovery criterion, and evaluates whether acting on alarms reduces expected task-completion cost. We evaluate RESCUE with OpenVLA-OFT and $\pi_{0.5}$ over LIBERO-Spatial and LIBERO-Plus using 128,340 counterfactual branches. Recoverability depends on the state--intervention pair rather than on robot state alone: at $\tau=0.5$, 14 of 66 OpenVLA-OFT/LIBERO-Plus failures contain a recoverable checkpoint under continuation, compared with 34 of 66 under continuation or scripted recovery, while recovery reduces recoverability in other conditions. On the primary strong-policy conditions, favourable detection scores do not establish lower intervention cost. Under the evaluated stop-and-reset model, even an idealised detector can afford only a 2.0--3.3% false-alarm rate before unnecessary resets outweigh the savings from stopping failures early. These results show that monitor value depends jointly on the intervention available and the workload in which it is deployed.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13516
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VLA-FAIL: Efficient Task Failure Detection for Finetuned Vision-Language-Action Models
2026-10-09 12:12:11Florian Seligmann, Emiliyan Gospodinov, Enes Ulas Dincer, Gerhard NeumannAbstract
Vision-language-action models (VLAs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on many robotic manipulation tasks, yet they can still behave unpredictably in out-of-distribution scenarios. Runtime failure detection is therefore essential for the safe real-world deployment of this http URL, existing task failure detectors require computationally expensive action sampling, are based on architectural assumptions that limit their applicability to VLAs, or need access to failure rollouts. We propose VLA-FAIL, a lightweight and broadly applicable failure detection framework for VLAs that combines two novel failure detectors with minimal overhead, without requiring failure data. The first, last-layer Mahalanobis distance (LLMD), detects out-of-distribution states by measuring token-wise deviations in last-layer features relative to the training data. The second, action chunk consistency (ACC), exploits the temporal overlap induced by receding-horizon control and detects failures when consecutive action chunks become inconsistent. To capture the trade-off between detection accuracy and detection latency, we introduce \textsc{AUCPDT}, a threshold-independent metric that jointly evaluates precision, recall, and detection time. Through extensive real-world and simulation experiments, we demonstrate that LLMD and ACC capture complementary failure modes whose combination enables reliable and early failure detection across diverse tasks, frequently outperforming significantly more expensive baseline methods. Project page: this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21386
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A Real-World CAD Segmentation Benchmark: Comparing Rule-Based and Learning-Based Approaches through Hole Detection
2026-10-09 12:03:15Kai Sch\"utte, Edgar Heinert, Matthias RottmannAbstract
CAD segmentation datasets are predominantly synthetic or automatically labelled, leaving it unclear how well existing methods transfer to real-world engineering tasks. Fastener-relevant hole detection represents one such task, requiring human annotation and exhibiting greater geometric complexity than commonly used benchmarks. We address this gap through three main contributions. First, we develop two task-specific rule-based methods, one graph-wire-search and one multi-view based, and complement them with a human-annotated benchmark dataset derived from engineering CAD data that also enables training of UV-Net and AAGNet, representative learning-based approaches for B-Rep segmentation. Second, we conduct an extensive experimental study including parameter optimisation, evaluation on our benchmark dataset, cross-domain generalisation on a synthetic dataset, and an assessment of the feasibility of the approaches at varying dataset sizes and IoU thresholds. Third, we provide evidence-based insights into the strengths and limitations of different approaches: rule-based methods generalise well without training data, with the graph-wire-search method favouring recall and the multi-view method favouring precision, whereas learning-based methods achieve strong performance with sufficient annotations but exhibit reduced robustness under domain shift. These findings highlight trade-offs between data requirements, and robustness, and provide guidance not only for hole detection, but more broadly for real-world CAD segmentation tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13466
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Local Diagnostics of Learned Event Representations for Anomaly Detection at the HL-LHC
2026-10-09 11:37:06Donatella Genovese, Philip Ploner, Simone Scardapane, Stefano Giagu, Thea Klaeboe AarrestadAbstract
Anomaly detection, the identification of collision events that deviate from Standard Model expectations, is one of the most promising model-agnostic strategies for new-physics searches at the Large Hadron Collider. Searching for rare events in learned low-dimensional representations removes the need to commit to hand-crafted observables a priori, but sacrifices the immediate physical interpretation those observables provide. For anomaly detection to enter a discovery pipeline, flagged events must therefore be diagnosed locally, both to distinguish potential new physics from mismodeling or detector effects and to identify observables for targeted follow-up searches. We evaluate supervised and self-supervised neural embedding strategies on COLLIDE-2V, a 750-million-event dataset simulated under realistic High-Luminosity LHC conditions, using the reconstruction error of an autoencoder trained in the learned latent space as the anomaly score. Across the configurations and benchmark signals considered, supervised objectives, which exploit simulation process labels during training, generally outperform their self-supervised counterparts and, in their best configurations, improve on an autoencoder trained directly on kinematic features, raising the signal efficiency at 10% background acceptance on all held-out processes. We further introduce a local diagnostic pipeline that fits a Gaussian Mixture Model to the SM latent space, profiles each component through high-level observables without process labels, localizes the flagged events, and ranks observables by their local discriminating power. The ranking recovers the defining kinematics of the held-out processes, while correlating the anomaly score with the same observables quantifies how closely the score tracks them, revealing cases where the most discriminating observable is not the one the score follows most closely.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13437
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Robot-WATCHDOG : failure detection through object-centric graph representation
2026-10-09 11:19:25Quentin Rolland, Fabrice Mayran de Chamisso, Jean-Baptiste MouretAbstract
Reliable real-time failure detection is critical for deploying learned robotic policies, yet defining failures explicitly is infeasible in open-world settings. This motivates failure detection from nominal demonstrations alone. Existing methods, however, struggle to balance robustness to benign variations with the ability to capture semantic and interaction-level errors. We introduce Robot-WATCHDOG, a self-supervised framework that models manipulation scenes as object-centric spatio-temporal graphs. Building on this representation, we investigate two complementary failure scores: Trajectory Projection and Correlation (TPC), a non-parametric measure of geometric deviation and relational consistency, and GnnT, a Graph Attention Network with a Transformer that predicts future object states. We evaluate both on a public benchmark and on a new dataset of semantically complex manipulation tasks, across six tasks and ten random seeds. Both scores outperform image-based failure detectors, particularly on semantic and interaction-level failures. TPC provides the strongest performance in AUPR and MCC on both dataset averages, with low variance across seeds. Qualitative results are made available at this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13403
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MoPrO-SD: Modular Prompt Optimization for Stance Detection
2026-10-09 11:00:33Meysam Sabbaghan, Nikesh Gyawali, Arman Zareian Jahromi, Sebastian Loera-Lozano, Doina Caragea, Cornelia CarageaAbstract
Stance detection remains challenging for large language models (LLMs) due to implicit opinions, sarcasm, and context-dependent expressions of stance. Although automatic prompt optimization offers an alternative to fine-tuning without updating model parameters, existing structured approaches are not specifically designed around stance-label semantics and class-specific ambiguities. We introduce MoPrO-SD, a stance-specific prompt optimization framework that decomposes prompts into functional semantic modules and refines them sequentially using LLM-based feedback. We study three refinement strategies: instruction-only optimization (I), instruction with reasoning (I+R), and instruction with per-example reasoning (I+R+E), using class-conditioned errors for stance-label refinement. We also introduce VaccineStance, a new human-annotated benchmark for vaccine stance detection. Experiments across four datasets and five open-weight LLMs show that MoPrO-SD improves upon the human-written Base prompt in many settings. On SemEval-2016, class-conditioned feedback achieves higher mean Macro-F1 than pooled feedback for four of five backbones. Both reasoning-based strategies, I+R and I+R+E, achieve strong performance, with their relative effectiveness varying across models and datasets, while remaining competitive with recent prompt optimization methods. The MoPrO-SD code and VaccineStance dataset are available on GitHub.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13386
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NovaSplat: Model-Free 6D Object Pose Estimation via 3D Gaussian Splatting Onboarding and Refinement
2026-10-09 09:54:00Georgios Floros, Evangelos Sartinas, Orestis Vangelis, Maria PaterakiAbstract
6D pose estimation of novel objects without CAD models remains an open challenge: model-free methods must build the object representation from scratch during onboarding and have long trailed their model-based counterparts. We present NovaSplat, a model-free pipeline that closes this gap. From a short smartphone video captured at onboarding, we train a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model that serves both as a template source for detection and coarse pose estimation and as a differentiable backbone for pose refinement. Our refiner optimizes the object-to-camera pose with combined photometric and geometric losses under a continuous rotation parametrization free of gradient singularities. On a household-object benchmark, NovaSplat surpasses all model-based methods. On a challenging industrial benchmark with textureless and specular surfaces, it outperforms all model-free competitors while substantially narrowing the gap to model-based ones. We further introduce NovaSplat-Lite, an inference variant that is $3.1\times$ faster at negligible accuracy cost. Code will be made available at \href{this https URL}{this https URL}.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13309
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