As image generation models become increasingly capable of producing highly realistic content, traditional forensic techniques are struggling to keep up. This paper investigates whether MLLMs can instead be used as a form of forensic analysis by identifying synthetic media. Specifically, the study aims to determine whether these models detect fake images by recognising physical inconsistencies, or whether they rely on digital artefacts such as embedded this http URL MLLMs: GPT-4o, GPT-5, GPT-5.2, Gemini 2.5, Gemini 3, and Seed 1.6, are benchmarked using a dataset of 400 images. Fifty images are authentic photographs, while the remaining 350 are generated using seven leading image models: Gemini 3, Gemini 2.5, Flux.2 Pro, GPT-Image-1, GPT-Image-1.5, Seedream 4.0, and Seedream 4.5. The evaluation is structured in three stages: single-image classification, pairwise comparison, and a focused "self-detection" experiment on Gemini. Several MLLMs achieved a high detection accuracy, with GPT-5.2 reaching a peak of 97.9% in the pairwise experiment, against specific generators and an overall mean pairwise accuracy of 82.5% by identifying structural or physical inconsistencies within images. However, results from the self-detection experiment indicate that the presence of invisible SynthID watermarks leads to a 10% reduction in Gemini's detection accuracy compared to the clean control group. One possible explanation is that SynthID embedding reduces some of the visible artefacts the models rely on for this http URL results imply that MLLMs can detect structural artefacts without relying on watermarks, but performance varies substantially across model generations. The findings from comparison C5 also suggest that SynthID embedding may suppress some of the structural artefacts used during detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21760
Anomaly detection is a fundamental task for time-series analytics, with important implications for the downstream performance of many applications. Despite the large number of anomaly detection methods proposed in the literature, recent benchmark studies have shown that no single detector performs best across highly heterogeneous time series. Therefore, a practical and scalable solution is to develop a model-selection method that, for a given time series, selects the anomaly detector most likely to perform well. Nevertheless, the model selection approaches proposed in the literature suffer from a significant drop in accuracy when applied in Out-of-Distribution (OOD) settings. In this paper, we tackle the aforementioned limitation and propose RAMSAD, a retrieval-based framework for model selection in time-series anomaly detection. Given a new time series, our method queries a knowledge base of previously observed instances, retrieves the top-k most similar series, and transfers detector recommendations from their performance profiles. The framework can operate with standard similarity measures as well as embedding-based representations. Our results show that RAMSAD outperforms existing baselines in In-Distribution (ID) settings and is the most robust selector in OOD, where, when selecting a small subset of detectors, it matches or exceeds ensembles that run the entire detector pool, at a fraction of their cost. Overall, we demonstrate that similarity-based retrieval constitutes a strong and efficient foundation for model selection in time-series anomaly detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20243
Medical segmentation uncertainty is often evaluated with calibration error or pixel-level error-detection scores, but these metrics do not show whether uncertainty improves downstream review decisions. We propose a decision-aware evaluation protocol that separates uncertainty estimation from deferral policy and evaluates their combination under fixed review budgets: which pixels, regions, or images should be accepted, and which should be reviewed. The protocol reports fixed-budget error reduction, risk-coverage behaviour, region-level review proxies, structural failure modes, probability-derived baselines, and sensitivity to review assumptions. We instantiate it across retinal vessel, skin lesion, and polyp segmentation with multiple backbones and uncertainty estimators. Under matched inference budgets and canonical multi-layer MC Dropout, test-time augmentation (TTA) gives a stronger error-detection signal across matched MC--TTA comparisons, including architecture and dropout-placement checks. However, estimator rankings are not universal. For example, probability-derived scores remain competitive, deep ensembles can outperform TTA, learned deferral helps mainly when the base estimator is weak, and rankings can change with review unit, uncertainty target, correction assumptions, and cost model. Structural and second-observer analyses further show that boundary and thin-structure failures are partly tied to annotation ambiguity. These findings support evaluating uncertainty as an estimator-policy-review configuration, not as a standalone score map. Code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21616
Internal solitary wave (ISW) remote sensing requires task parameters and spatial information to be transferred across image acquisition, detection, stripe extraction, and propagation prediction. Here, we present ISW-Agent, which integrates large language model (LLM) interpretation with n8n workflows and independent scientific models through structured task constraints, geospatial transformations, and stage-specific output validation. In tests of 120 Chinese instructions per backend, GPT-5.6 Sol and DeepSeek both achieved a strict task-match rate of 94.2%, with all intents and execution decisions matching the reference. Sentinel-1 cases demonstrated continuous processing from dialogue requests to wavefront prediction for the specified scene. Of 50 timed scenes, 39 completed detection, extraction, and prediction with a median turnaround time of 48.04 s; 11 stopped after empty extraction. Across 3,408 controlled fault-injection runs, retries recovered 234 transient-failure conditions and output validation rejected 234 structural defects, while 61 provenance or completeness errors indicated the need for content-consistency checks. Overall, ISW-Agent thus connects natural-language requests to traceable spatial processing chains for multimodel ISW analysis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21502
Large language models can produce fluent answers that the supplied context does not support. A compact frozen proxy model can detect such answers by reading the context and another model's response, even from a proprietary generator. Attention-based detectors use summary statistics of the proxy's attention weights, but standard pipelines materialize the attention matrix, whose memory grows quadratically with sequence length. We compute these statistics without materializing attention, by accumulation in the FlashAttention pass, sparse lookups after it, or a second tiled pass over the scores, and classify them by this path into nearly free and costlier ones. On an H100, the statistics of five published detectors add 16% to the latency of a Qwen3-8B forward at 2K tokens, falling to 1.4% at 35K, and store 22.5 KiB per response token. On three benchmarks, probes trained on frozen Qwen3 proxies of 0.6B to 8B parameters prove strong detectors: a 4B proxy outperforms the strongest of nine zero-shot 4-9B LLM judges in F1 on two of the three, the proxies match or outperform specialized grounding checkers of up to 7B parameters, probing each proxy beats prompting it as a judge, and adding attention features significantly improves F1 in half of the 12 benchmark-proxy pairs, never significantly lowering it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21483
Existing deepfake detection models are built upon manipu- lated images that are tampered with either exclusively fully swapped or fully synthesised faces, which leads us to an open question: Can off-the-shelf deepfake models detect manipulation effectively while tampering is confined to a local facial sub-region? To fill this gap, we introduce RLDF (Region-Level Deepfake), the first dataset for region-level deepfake evaluation. Employing the proposed region-aware partial swap synthesis model, we generate over 2M par- tial face-swap images by using eight face-swapping meth- ods. Altogether, we considered seven face regions, among which there are four discrete regions (eye, nose, mouth and eyebrow) and four composite facial regions (eye and nose; eye, nose and mouth; eye, nose, mouth and eye- brow; and full face). In addition, we define three evalu- ation protocols and benchmark 12 state-of-the-art detectors across the five popular standard cross-dataset evaluations, DF40, and the proposed RLDF, providing a comprehen- sive audit of where and why existing detectors underper- formed. Our evaluation reveals that existing detectors fail to generalize consistently across partial facial regions, re- sulting in an overall drop of 10.5% AUC and 10% accu- racy under region-level evaluation. Further, we propose a mask-guided cross-attention model as a baseline approach that can effectively detect region-level manipulation. The proposed dataset, code, and checkpoints are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21438
Understanding video content requires reasoning at multiple levels of granularity, from identifying objects to interpreting their interactions and localizing when specific actions occur. This thesis studies three query-guided grounding tasks that answer where key objects are (object-level grounding), how they interact (relationship-level grounding), and when specific moments occur (moment-level grounding). For object-level grounding, we present QDETRv, a query-guided extension of the Detection Transformer for one-shot localization of unseen objects in videos, which combines query-context fusion, a memory module for temporal consistency, and unsupervised pretraining on synthetic object trajectories. We further propose the Temporal Object-Aware Vision Transformer (TOViT) for few-shot video object detection, which builds on a language-aligned open-set vision encoder and propagates high-confidence object features across frames. For relationship-level grounding, we introduce few-shot referring relationships in videos: given a (subject, predicate, object) query and a few support videos sharing the predicate, the entities are localized by optimizing a T-partite random field using a meta-learned relation network with query-conditioned translational embeddings, Global Semantic Aggregation, Local Localization Aggregation, and belief-propagation-based message passing. For moment-level grounding, we propose the Moment Alignment Transformer (MATR) for video-to-video moment retrieval, which uses dual-stage Dynamic Time Warping for pre- and post-fusion alignment, learnable queries for boundary prediction, and self-supervised pretraining with temporal augmentations; MATR also extends to text-to-video moment retrieval with performance comparable to, or better than, the state of the art. These contributions advance query-guided video understanding across spatial, relational, and temporal grounding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21422
Early stress detection and risk prediction are crucial for timely mental health assessment and support. While large language models have recently shown promise for social media stress prediction, relying on accuracy can obscure false positives. Also, prompt revisions yield inconsistent gains across models and tasks, with unclear links to strategy combinations and instruction changes. By comparing six methods on social media stress and emotion data across two model sizes, we found that GEPA and its extension combining instructions from two prompts (GEPA+merge) improved prediction over initial prompts in several settings. We also identified five prompting strategies associated with development gains. These strategies included directing attention to emotional evidence, distinguishing current from past distress, illustrating indirect cues, requiring emotional context, and guiding label selection. Moreover, we documented four observations across tasks and evaluation settings. In a separate set of searches, binary stress prediction improved early, whereas multilabel emotion prediction initially declined and partly recovered. The other three concerned incorrect or conflicting instructions, gains on small comparison samples that did not hold on full development data, and changes in selected prompts' development and reported test rankings. These findings identify effective prompt evolution methods, strategy combinations associated with gains, and task and evaluation limits, providing guidance for applying prompt evolution methods to social media stress detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21407
Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) are fundamental to many real-world applications. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have spurred progress in solving these NP-hard problems. However, most existing approaches assume that input instances are error-free, neglecting the presence of faults commonly encountered in real-world data. In this work, we systematically investigate the capability of LLMs to detect (and correct) errors in VRP instances, and identify key limitations, particularly in handling complex instances or errors that substantially increase the LLM's reasoning burden. To overcome these challenges, we propose a self-guided reasoning framework in which LLMs autonomously generate code that provides structured insights to aid in error diagnosis. Experiments across diverse problem settings and LLMs demonstrate that our framework significantly improves error detection performance, achieving near-perfect accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21393
Accurate localization is critical for a wide range of applications, including navigation, augmented reality, safety management, and healthcare. However, achieving accurate positioning remains challenging, especially in GPS-degraded environments. Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR), which estimates position based on inertial sensor data, offers a promising alternative but typically demands substantial effort in algorithm design and system integration. This complexity often leads to prolonged development timelines and elevated costs. To address these challenges, we present the PDR Sensor (PDRS), a plug-and-play, black-box PDR module optimized for seamless integration into wearable and IoT platforms. PDRS integrates a microprocessor and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) within a compact, low-power module. It executes real-time sensor fusion onboard, providing position updates via standard interfaces (I2C, SPI, UART). Experimental evaluations demonstrate its high robustness, achieving a step detection error of just 0.16% over 1250 steps and a traveled distance error of 1.87% under diverse conditions. The system further exhibits low latency (2.5 ms) and modest power consumption (52.35 mA). Unlike conventional studies, the PDRS leverages a holistic co-design of hardware and software to enhance performance and integration aspects, simplifying adoption without requiring deep expertise. By lowering technical barriers, PDRS enables developers and researchers to prioritize innovation in IoT and wearable technologies, accelerating prototyping, reducing development time, and advancing industry progress. Future work aims to enhance accuracy, reduce power usage and module size, and integrate AI-driven techniques to better mitigate drift.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21353
Natural language messages often contain quasi-identifiers that are weak in isolation but can jointly reveal an individual's private attributes. We call such a jointly revealing set of cues a quasi-evidence group. Existing privacy benchmarks focus on explicit identifiers, attribute inference, or task-driven disclosures, leaving inference from quasi-evidence groups largely unmeasured. In practice, whether exposing such a quasi-evidence group violates privacy also depends on sender-specified disclosure policies. We introduce QuasiLeak-Bench, a benchmark for policy-conditioned quasi-evidence group recovery, which evaluates whether detectors recover complete quasi-evidence groups and flag the disclosures the given policy prohibits. To obtain reliable ground truth at scale, a reverse-construction pipeline first selects weak quasi-identifiers, composes them into quasi-evidence groups verified to jointly reveal a target attribute, and generates documents around this evidence, followed by automated quality control. Experiments show that existing privacy detectors transfer poorly to QuasiLeak-Bench, and locally deployable LLM-based detectors fall far behind proprietary models, mainly because they miss most quasi-evidence groups altogether. However, a 4B model fine-tuned on our training split surpasses the strongest prompted model on held-out documents, showing that the task is learnable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21333
Exact $k$-nearest-neighbor (kNN) search over image descriptors and embeddings underlies visual retrieval, near-duplicate detection, the evaluation of learned representations, and increasingly the memory of LLM agents. However, exhaustive search computes every distance at full precision, whereas approximate indexes return recall below one. We observe that exact search only needs a proof that each excluded vector cannot be a neighbor. Because such a proof only has to be conservative, it can be checked in low precision, much as the retina examines the whole scene at low resolution. We call this principle certified exclusion and realize it in an exact kNN method for GPUs, which we call \certex. Specifically, \certex\ stores a lower-bounding projection of each vector in half precision and folds a rounding certificate into the same tensor-core dot product, so that only the few vectors that the test keeps need exact distances. We prove that \certex\ returns the exact kNN of every query. On sixteen datasets with up to 100M vectors, \certex\ is exact for every query at 7.1$\times$ to 18.0$\times$ the throughput of the fastest cuVS search on one H100 and outperforms quantized and graph indexes whenever every query must be exact.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21325
Money-mule networks move criminal funds through many small transfers, each of which looks ordinary on its own. What marks an account as a mule lies outside any single transfer: in the counterparties and addresses its network shares, and in the shape of its activity over time. Production systems remain largely rule-based and see neither, while most research classifies transactions rather than accounts, recovering account-level risk only by aggregating afterwards. We instead score the account directly, reading the bank's relational schema as a heterogeneous graph in which rows are nodes and foreign keys are edges. Each account is scored from a multi-hop neighbourhood using per-column encoders, a relative-time encoding and HeteroGraphSAGE message passing, with that neighbourhood restricted to rows predating the account's own pre-flag cutoff so that no model sees evidence recorded only after the account was flagged. On a five-year Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH) retail-banking dataset of 400 million transactions and 94{,}063 labelled accounts, 2.6\% of them confirmed mules, we compare against RelGNN, XGBoost, LightGBM and CatBoost trained on identical labels, splits and cutoffs. Our detector recovers nine in ten held-out mules at 83\% precision and a 0.5\% false-alarm rate, finding 115 more mules than the strongest tree ensemble given the same evidence. At the tuned thresholds the gap is mostly in recall: XGBoost and LightGBM lead across the first hundred alerts, but only the graph models hold their precision deep into the queue. Since the graph is the schema itself and every score is dated per account, the approach deploys on a bank's existing database without a custom feature graph build.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21314
DETR-style detectors use one-to-one bipartite matching during training to assign object queries to ground-truth objects, enabling end-to-end set prediction without non-maximum suppression (NMS). However, without an explicit de-duplication procedure, multiple queries can still produce highly similar hypotheses for the same object, making training unstable and predictions less decisive. Inspired by the sequential ordering of NMS, we propose DETRNN, a plug-and-play module that turns unordered object queries into a competition-aware sequence for recurrent refinement. DETRNN builds an explicit confidence-and-similarity based order from prior predictions, then refines queries with an RNN along this order to model competition inside the decoder. This ordered recurrent refinement reduces redundant predictions, stabilizes optimization, and improves final detection accuracy. Experiments on multiple DETR-style detectors show consistent gains with comparable efficiency. Code repository: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05191
Contrastive vision-language (VL) pretraining in computational pathology has generally relied on curated image-caption datasets sourced from social media, educational videos, and research publications. These corpora are sparse relative to the diversity of tissue morphology and difficult to scale further, as pathologists do not routinely produce descriptive captions in clinical practice. We propose to instead leverage slide-level pathology reports which can be generated during routine diagnostic workflows in a scalable manner. A key challenge in this weakly-supervised setting is that pathology reports describe macroscopic, diagnostic findings while patch-level visual features describe microscopic findings. We introduce Locked Image Multiple Instance PreTraining (LIMIT), which addresses this gap by freezing a pretrained vision encoder and fine-tuning only the text encoder: report embeddings serve as cross-attention queries over bags of patch features, producing report-conditioned slide representations optimized via InfoNCE. Using LIMIT, we establish CONCH-Z, which aligns the text encoder of CONCH v1.5 to 335k clinical reports. Evaluated across 22 tasks spanning patch-level classification, tumor detection, and slide-level subtyping, CONCH-Z establishes state-of-the-art zero-shot performance over VL encoders trained on curated caption datasets, while simultaneously closing the gap with slide-level foundation models trained with substantially more parameters and compute. The code and model is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17233
Trustworthy biomedical AI requires reliable action selection when evidence is missing, stale, conflicting, or late, not only accurate answers on static inputs. We instantiate an episode-level evaluation protocol as 400 synthetic healthcare workflow episodes: 40 hand-authored semantic seeds across four task classes, two surface parameterizations, and five controlled variants, scored on ANSWER/ASK CLARIFICATION/ABSTAIN/ESCALATE under a pre-declared 5:1 missed-versus-unnecessary escalation cost. Reference actions are single-author study-policy labels, not clinician-adjudicated ground truth. Across five open-weight configurations (1.7B--9.7B), clean decision accuracy reaches 0.97, yet uncertainty-prompted models miss 32--97% of required escalations. The stronger 9.7B configuration narrows but does not remove the gap, falling from 0.97 clean accuracy to 0.78 under conflict. Verbalized confidence is inconsistent (ECE 0.10--0.54; failure AUROC 0.48--0.77), and a development-tuned confidence-only policy yields no utility gain. A transparent workflow-aware controller improves 5:1 utility for every model and reduces missed escalations to 0.12--0.24, at specificity 0.83--0.93. However, a 30-concept lexical stress test reduces each rule detector's recall from 1.00 on trigger phrases to 0.00 on unseen paraphrases, limiting the controller claim to this benchmark. Seed-clustered statistics, ablations, cross-task transfer, raw outputs, and manifests are packaged for audit. The results motivate explicit workflow-state evaluation while showing that apparently effective routing controls need their own generalization tests.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21270
Continuous video and clinical records provide complementary information for understanding how patient behavior evolves over a hospital stay. A central challenge is how to represent behavior across the entire stay while preserving access to fine-grained visual and clinical evidence. We introduce TRACER, a training-free multimodal harness that constructs minute-level action records from video and combines them with clinical records into hourly reports. The harness equips an LLM agent with tools to query this hierarchy, inspect relevant video, and retrieve clinical records. To evaluate TRACER, we construct two benchmarks. The first contains 397 annotated one-minute clips spanning 15 atomic actions; the second poses 144 clinician-informed multiple-choice questions, grounded in 264 hours of video and clinical records from two ICU patients. TRACER achieves up to 84.8% accuracy for action detection and 61.0% QA accuracy versus 49.3% for the strongest baseline using the same backbone. Across 280 patients spanning approximately 60,000 camera-hours, TRACER identifies significantly less purposeful activity in patients with a positive delirium assessment during their stay than in those without (p < 0.0001). Our results show that combining continuous video with clinical records can support understanding of patient behavior over time and across patient cohorts without training on protected health data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21266
Centralized orchestration provides comprehensive multi-agent coordination but creates bottlenecks in scalability, adaptability, and collective performance. Decentralized approaches alleviate these bottlenecks by distributing coordination across agents, yet often leave responsibility for delegated dependencies and failure recovery unclear. To address this gap, we propose RCM, a responsibility-centered coordination mechanism that leverages commitments to couple task delegation with explicit responsibilities of the involved parties. Through recursive delegation, agents retain their upstream responsibilities while locally orchestrating downstream commitments, thereby preserving accountability across delegation chains, creating a network of local orchestration. We operationalize this mechanism locally through responsibility-constrained decision-making and a responsibility-oriented communication protocol (RCP), enabling agents to autonomously establish, manage, and terminate commitments. As agents act in parallel, their local actions continuously evolve the commitment graph, allowing global coordination to emerge and adapt toward a shared mission without centralized control. Experiments across reasoning, coding, and executable agent environments demonstrate that RCM outperforms strong centralized and decentralized coordination baselines by up to 18.7 points in task performance and 10.2 points in Responsibility, while improving failure and harm detection without task-specific training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21243
Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based web agents provide practical, high-precision solutions for visual browser automation; however, they inherently expand the attack surface, introducing novel vision-based vulnerabilities. Existing adversarial evaluations targeting these agents frequently rely on permissive threat models and visually conspicuous artifacts. In this paper, we investigate a constrained vulnerability detection setting: a trusted web platform where the evaluator acts solely as an unprivileged third party, such as a merchant or advertiser, controlling only a semantically legitimate, spatially constrained region, such as an ad slot, a sponsored card, or a localized widget. Operating under these realistic constraints, we propose MIRAGE, a novel visual indirect prompt injection framework for targeted next-action hijacking. Our approach leverages diffusion models to generate perceptually benign adversarial images strictly confined to the attacker-controlled boundaries permitted by the trusted service provider. To maximize attack efficacy within such a restrictive setting, we introduce a robust optimization technique combining curvature-aware adversarial diffusion guidance with sparse, dark-pixel residual perturbations. Comprehensive evaluations against prominent MLLM web agent frameworks, specifically SeeAct and OpenClaw, empirically demonstrate the potency, realism, and stealth of our proposed MIRAGE.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20717
Artificial microbots capable of precise and autonomous navigation could provide versatile platforms for microscale transport, manipulation, and task execution in complex environments. However, reliable navigation becomes increasingly challenging at the micrometre scale, particularly when the surrounding environment changes dynamically. Here, we develop a vision-guided closed-loop navigation framework for light-driven cube-shaped hematite/TiO2 Janus microbots with a characteristic size of approximately 3 {\mu}m. Real-time visual localization using a custom-trained YOLOv11 object-detection model is integrated with discretized waypoint-based magnetic steering to enable precise navigation along complex prescribed trajectories, with more than 90% of the measured trajectory deviations remaining below 6 {\mu}m across the tested path geometries. The framework further enables arbitrary user-defined free-hand trajectories and autonomous navigation through a physically confined maze. In dynamically changing environments, A* path planning enables real-time path replanning while avoiding multiple independently swimming 5 {\mu}m spherical Janus micromotors. Finally, the microbot selectively captures multiple cargo particles and autonomously transports and delivers them to a predefined location while simultaneously avoiding dynamic obstacles. These results establish an integrated platform combining programmable trajectory control, autonomous path planning, real-time environmental adaptation, and task execution within a single light-driven Janus microbot system.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21222