Post-hoc explanation methods are widely used to inspect image classifiers, but their reliability depends on design choices that are often treated as implementation details. We study this issue for LIME on document image classification, focusing on the segmentation step that defines the interpretable units being perturbed. Standard image-based LIME typically relies on natural-image superpixels, which are poorly aligned with document structure such as text regions, layout blocks, and identification codes. Using RVL-CDIP, we compare Quickshift and SLIC with document-aware segmentations based on OCR bounding boxes and regular grids. Our results show that segmentation strongly affects explanation consistency, correctness, and local fidelity. Document-aware segmentations produce more stable and faithful explanations, require fewer perturbations to converge, and expose shortcut behaviour based on document identification codes, a known RVL-CDIP bias that superpixel-based LIME often obscures. These findings show that reliable post-hoc explanation requires domain-aware interpretable representations, and that segmentation should be treated as part of the explanation method rather than as neutral preprocessing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07462
Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown promise for historical entity linking, but preference optimization for this task is often formulated with only one negative candidate per training instance. This discards information from the remaining candidates retrieved for the same mention. We introduce multi-negative direct preference optimisation (MDPO), a reference-based pairwise objective that compares the correct entity with all valid rejected candidates associated with each mention. MDPO preserves the Bradley-Terry formulation of DPO while exploiting the complete candidate set through masked, length-normalised sequence scores. We evaluate MDPO on hipe-2020 and newseye, covering French, German, English, Swedish, and Finnish historical newspaper text. Experiments show that MDPO improves over supervised fine-tuning and single-negative DPO, with particularly strong gains for NIL mentions, semantic ambiguity, OCR noise, and historically difficult names. Further analyses disentangle candidate-generation and selection errors, showing that candidate retrieval remains a key bottleneck for end-to-end entity linking. These results demonstrate that incorporating all within-instance negative candidates is a simple and effective improvement for LLM-based historical entity linking.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07379
Converting in-service reinforced-concrete (RC) building blueprints into simulation-ready models---structured frame representations that support deterministic FEM export and qualified-engineer review---underpins safety assessment and seismic retrofit, but the process remains manual. Direct prompting of a multimodal large language model (MLLM) over a scanned sheet is unreliable: outputs often violate engineering constraints on beam--column support, span count, or 3D continuity. We present BlueprintAgent (BPA), a constraint-triggered multimodal agent for simulation-ready frame extraction from scanned blueprints. BPA treats the MLLM as the primary reader and decision maker, with OCR and computer vision supplying localized evidence. Its central mechanism realizes engineering constraints as callable validators whose entity-level conflict reports trigger targeted MLLM revisits over the local region---an inference-time control distinct from fixed pipelines and free-form self-reflection. We evaluate BPA on 300 real scanned blueprint sheets from 20 anonymized RC frame projects, against five baselines and six ablations. BPA reaches a macro-averaged Beam F1 of 0.994, against 0.301 for single-MLLM zero-shot and 0.820 for a fixed pipeline; removing MLLM-led axis adjudication collapses Beam and Column F1 on complex multi-sheet projects. For dense technical drawings, engineering constraints are best deployed as triggers for entity-level targeted revisits rather than as post-hoc output filters.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07362
Reward hacking during reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) can induce reward seeking and broad misalignment in language models. Studying this misgeneralization is important for developing better threat models and countermeasures, but is often infeasible due to the cost of RL on large models. As an alternative, we propose studying emergent misalignment from iterative DPO, which preserves important properties of RLVR while reducing costs and enabling training on popular finetuning APIs. In practice, we find that training GPT-4.1 with iterative DPO on a single-turn reward hacking environment induces covert misaligned power-seeking and alignment faking, the first openly available (semi)-online training pipeline to induce these concerning forms of misalignment. We also find that training Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct with the same pipeline induces both misalignment and improved instruction following accuracy, showing that iterative DPO can be used as a testbed for selective generalization. Overall, we think iterative DPO can help democratize and accelerate the study of emergent misalignment from RLVR.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06649
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform strongly on general visual understanding tasks such as visual question answering, yet they often struggle with a basic comparative skill: identifying what has changed between two similar images. We introduce VDiff-Bench, a challenging multiple-choice benchmark for fine-grained Image Difference Identification. VDiff-Bench contains 1,756 four-way questions over image pairs and covers 10 change categories: position, motion, regional image color, overall image color, appearance/disappearance, noise/resolution, texture, substitution/size, OCR/text, and illumination. Each question corresponds to two image inputs with 4 choices: the true difference, two hard negative descriptions, and a "no difference" distractor. To make the task challenging, we specifically curate ground-truth-conditioned negatives that require models to distinguish the actual change from nearby semantic alternatives. Experiments with 11 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source MLLMs show that fine-grained visual comparison remains brittle: models exhibit uneven performance across sources and change categories, with persistent failures on subtle low-level changes like noises and textures. For instance, three 7-8B-scale open-source MLLMs score 52.5-70.6% on semantic changes but only 8.7-33.3% on low-level changes like noise and texture, falsely assuming no changes between two image inputs. Surprisingly, despite strong performance of other closed-source commercial models, Grok 4.3 demonstrate remarkable performance drop on identifying noise and texture differences between images, falling significantly behind large open-source models like Kimi K2.5 and K3. Overall, VDiff-Bench provides a targeted diagnostic for evaluating comparative visual understanding in MLLMs, exposing failures that are not captured by standard single-image vision-language tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06245
Large language models answering questions over multi-page documents are expected to cite the supporting pages, yet supplied citations are sometimes inaccurate, and current evaluations score citations at generation time or against text passages: no existing benchmark evaluates whether a system can verify and correct a page-level citation already attached to an answer. We propose AtomCite, an agentic framework that parses an answer into claims, checks each claim against the image of its cited page, and applies a deterministic repair policy. To evaluate it, we introduce DocCite, to our knowledge the first benchmark for systems that verify and correct page-level citations in document images. Built on MP-DocVQA and DUDE, it combines 928 validated injected instances with 2,468 candidate natural errors harvested from frontier- and efficiency-tier models, of which a two-annotator audit confirms 1,909 as genuine errors. Primary labels are assigned deterministically, not by LLM judges, with the human audit as a separate validation layer. Across three model families (Gemini, Claude, and GPT), AtomCite reaches around 93% binary verification accuracy on the injected benchmark, significantly outperforming every OCR-only condition, including a compute-matched control, and exceeding every prior text-based baseline given the same OCR text. Its repair policy lifts citation precision on the injected mix from a constructed 34% to 87-90% while retaining over 90% of correct claims. AtomCite also transfers: with frozen prompts and zero training, it raises the hallucination-detection scores of two open 7-8B models on five public benchmarks above the same models prompted as direct judges. Finally, the audit shows that noise in automatic labels biases measured verifier accuracy and can reverse system rankings, so evaluations relying only on synthetic or automatic labels risk mismeasuring verification capability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05802
We present Discovery Loop, a lightweight system that uses a large language model (LLM) to iteratively evolve optimization algorithms. Starting from a simple seed solver, the LLM proposes algorithmic improvements guided by a scoreboard of results and a history of prior ideas. Each candidate is evaluated against an independent verifier; improvements are kept and failures discarded. Applied to the Packomania circle-packing benchmark (csqv: maximize the sum of radii of N variable-radius circles in the unit square), the system improved the best known solutions for 10 values of N in the range 101-114, with gains of 2.4%-5.4% over prior records, all within 15 iterations and at a total LLM cost of $27.72. These results have been independently accepted by Packomania. We describe the method, analyze cost-efficiency dynamics including an adaptive plateau-detection mechanism, and discuss implications for democratizing automated scientific discovery.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05093
Land ownership in Bangladesh is recorded in Ana-Ganda-Kora-Kranti-Til, a base-16 positional fraction system with dedicated Unicode glyphs, no mainstream font, and no coverage in any OCR pipeline or tokenizer. The handwritten records that carry these fractions, RS Khatians, are the authoritative title record for millions of parcels and a frequent subject of civil litigation, yet no benchmark has asked whether a machine can read one. We introduce KhatianDoc, a four-task benchmark built from 107 real RS Khatian records from the Vumi (land) Office of Munshiganj, Bangladesh: symbol recognition, base-16-to-decimal conversion, structured field extraction, and legal document question answering over 1,634 QA pairs. Ground truth was transcribed by hand, verified by a land-law practitioner to full agreement, and anonymized through positional tokens that keep the referential distinctions multi-hop questions depend on. We evaluate six multimodal LLMs (8B to 72B+, open and closed) under a fixed zero-shot protocol. Five QA categories, 39.3% of our stratified set, return zero correct answers from every model; on the arithmetic task, every model that emits a number does worse than a constant-mean baseline, with exact- and near-match scores coinciding: decorrelation, not approximation. Auditing our own metrics surfaced two artifacts in opposite directions: we correct a refusal-scoring bug and report the fixed scores beside the originals, and flag an inflated metadata metric as an upper bound. KhatianDoc documents not a performance gap but the absence of a capability, with verified ground truth for future systems. Code and data, with a redacted image release, are publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03597
We investigate what makes synthetic OCR supervision transfer to real Thai documents and use the resulting insights to build Wayu-Paxa-OCR-Zero, a Thai OCR model adapted without OCR labels from real Thai document pages. Synthetic data provide exact labels at scale, but "realism" conflates source domain, page context, typography, spatial structure, and glyph variation. We disentangle these factors with a controlled document-reconstruction pipeline and evaluate each variant under page- and crop-level training on printed and handwritten Thai documents. Non-text context has little consistent effect, whereas typeface diversity, two-dimensional structure, and real handwriting glyphs improve transfer; moreover, source-domain matching depends on training granularity, with in-domain reconstruction approaching real printed supervision under page-level training (1.82% versus 1.31% median character error rate) but underperforming out-of-domain reconstruction under crop-level training (15.59% versus 5.52%). Guided by these findings, we adapt the 0.9B-parameter PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 into Wayu-Paxa-OCR-Zero using 45,723 synthetic pages: relative to its base checkpoint, it reduces median character error rate from 6.64% to 1.24% on printed pages and from 74.87% to 20.55% on handwriting and outperforms Typhoon OCR v1 7B on all five evaluation sets, showing that synthetic-only training can be competitive.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03595
Although document OCR systems perform increasingly well on routine documents, complex formulas, structured text, and long-tail formats remain error-prone. OCR predictions may omit fine-grained content or hallucinate unsupported outputs, while equivalent encodings of the same visible content must be accommodated. Existing OCR evaluation methods mostly report aggregate metrics, offering limited support for analyzing case-level errors and improving OCR performance. We propose OCR-EDR (OCR Error Diagnosis and Repair), a rendering-aware framework that advances from fine-grained diagnosis to iterative repair. Given a source image, an editable OCR prediction, and its rendered image, OCR-EDR first jointly assesses whether the prediction and its rendering are consistent with the source, preserving valid predictions, including rendering-equivalent ones, while diagnosing and localizing genuine errors. It then applies executable edits and may request an updated rendering for iterative reassessment. We construct OCRErrBench from diverse real OCR predictions, covering text and formulas, exact and rendering-equivalent positives, and genuine errors, and develop the DocEDR model to execute the diagnosis--repair loop. On OCRErrBench, DocEDR achieves 94.78% diagnostic accuracy. It repairs 86.23% of erroneous inputs to visual consistency, raises formula Case-F1 by 30.99 percentage points over DOCR-Inspector-7B on DOCRcaseBench, and improves formula CDM by up to 4.62 percentage points on the identified Bad subsets of four OCR systems on UniMER-Test. These results show that OCR-EDR turns fine-grained OCR analysis into verified corrections and performance gains.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03445
We present Jina-OCR-v1, an end-to-end document parsing model built to serve on low-budget GPUs. It combines the compressed-vision encoder and the 3B mixture-of-experts decoder of DeepSeek-OCR, which activates about 570M parameters per token, with a FastMTP speculative decoding head that shares a single draft block recursively across K=3 prediction steps. Greedy verification makes decoding lossless. Post-training combines instruction alignment, robustness fine-tuning on difficult documents, and GRPO under dense verifiable rewards: deterministic formula, table, and structural checks that award partial credit. The training data mixes cleaned public corpora with targeted synthetic pages. At the default dynamic-resolution setting, Jina-OCR-v1 scores 91.14 on OmniDocBench v1.6 and 83.4 on olmOCR-Bench, and reaches the highest page throughput in our comparison at 2.57 pages per second. On a low-budget GPU such as the NVIDIA L4, FastMTP doubles decoding speed over greedy autoregressive decoding. The model is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03181
Visual fluency in generated video does not imply physical reliability, and a scalar quality score alone is incapable of indicating the obligation a clip violates or the moment it fails. We present VeriPhy, an auditable physical-verification system in which a text-only planner compiles the prompt into typed physical obligations and a statically validated execution plan before any frame is observed. During execution, observations gate and scope only declared calls to frozen low-level experts (e.g., segmentation and tracking, counting, eleven typed physical measurements over the resulting tracks, depth, OCR, and audio-event detection). Each action returns a provenance-carrying evidence record whose payload, when usable, is either a typed measurement or an explicitly tagged learned state. Typed resolvers and fixed composition map usable records to a three-valued state (supported, contradicted, or unknown, surfaced as plausible, implausible, or abstain) with full provenance, so that every verdict is traceable to the evidence that produced it. We anchor evaluation in a 1,500-clip corpus of human-annotated flaw records that localize real generation failures in prompt reference, space, and time. On a 149-clip core carrying 304 such records, VeriPhy accounts for 228, against 164 for a published question-decomposition evaluator given the same clips and the same claims. Recall alone does not separate it from prompting the same backbone monolithically, which reaches 222; what separates them is that each decision retains its evidence record and provenance, making the traces auditable one verdict at a time and usable as the interface through which a critic verdict could be written back into generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03153
To scale up collective decision-making, participatory democracy platforms such as Polis and Remesh enable online deliberation among thousands of participants. However, at this scale, participants cannot review every opinion submitted by others, producing highly sparse voting data that misrepresent patterns of consensus, conflict, and minority support. Platforms therefore increasingly rely on Preference Inference (PI) models to predict missing votes. Yet this automation is not neutral: inferred preferences can artificially amplify, suppress, or reorder existing patterns of support, ultimately reshaping how the outcomes of a deliberation are interpreted. More generally, we lack a systematic understanding of how existing PI methods affect the collective preference landscape. To address this gap, we benchmark several existing PI approaches in this context. Moving beyond conventional user-centric evaluations centered on the accuracy of individual predictions, we introduce a collective-centric evaluation framework that measures whether inferred votes preserve salient properties of the broader preference landscape. We further contribute the largest multilingual dataset of its kind: four consultations spanning over 90k participants, 1M votes, and 22 languages. Our experiments show that models with comparable predictive accuracy can differ substantially in the degree to which they preserve the collective structure. These results demonstrate that accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating \emph{PI} in democratic settings. By contributing a novel comprehensive and collective-centric evaluation benchmark for the task of PI, this work aims to support the development of AI systems that scale deliberation without compromising the integrity of its democratic outcomes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02990
Sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) models use an independently parameterized router at each sparse layer to select experts for every token. Prior work has shown that routing decisions across depth can often be predicted from earlier routing signals, suggesting that routing is not fully independent across layers. However, the structure behind this predictability remains unclear. In this work, we provide evidence that routing-relevant states across layers share a common geometric structure that is obscured by layer-specific coordinate systems. We isolate the control subspace of each router and align these spaces into a shared canonical representation using generalized orthogonal Procrustes analysis. After alignment, a single linear transition reaches $R^2=0.39$--$0.71$ and retains 79--90\% of the predictive power of separately fitted layer-specific dynamics, indicating that much of routing-state evolution follows a reusable process across depth. We then ask whether this shared dynamics is specific to routing or simply reflects the smooth evolution of hidden representations. A matched-rank comparison shows that residual representations are often easier to predict across layers, while router-control states preserve the model's expert choices much more faithfully. This separates generic cross-layer predictability from routing-specific information. Finally, we test whether the predicted canonical states remain meaningful when used in place of native routing states. The transported states preserve local routing behavior, while learned state evolution reduces $\Delta\mathrm{NLL}$ relative to simple persistence by 15.7\% on OLMoE and 6.2\% over a 10-router horizon on Phi.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02404
Autoregressive vision language models unify heterogeneous perception tasks but are highly susceptible to compounding errors. On-policy distillation (OPD) bridges the training-inference mismatch by training students on their own rollouts. However, unreliable student predictions, especially early in training, can derail the trajectory and degrade the quality of teacher supervision. While recent interleaved distillation methods allow the teacher to verify and replace student tokens, they primarily rely on rigid ranking metrics rather than exact teacher confidence, and they overlook how intervention decisions can inform token-level supervision. To address this, we introduce Confidence-Aware On-Policy Distillation (CA-OPD), a framework that couples reliable rollout construction with adaptive supervision. CA-OPD utilizes teacher confidence to selectively correct unreliable student transitions, gradually transferring rollout control to the student via a strict-to-relaxed schedule. Crucially, CA-OPD aligns knowledge transfer with these intervention decisions: corrected positions receive direct cross-entropy supervision from the teacher's prediction, while retained positions benefit from the teacher's full predictive distribution. Evaluated in a multi-teacher setting for GUI grounding and optical character recognition, CA-OPD substantially improves the Qwen3.5-0.8B baseline across all six target benchmarks, including gains of $9.50$ points on ScreenSpot-Pro and $6.72$ points on OCRBench-v2 English. Controlled studies further show that the gains depend on intervention placement, progressive rollout control, and intervention-aligned supervision, rather than intervention frequency alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02401
Traffic sign detection faces a long-tailed data distribution. Many rare signs matter as much as common ones from a regulatory standpoint, yet they have very few samples. Generative data augmentation is one way out. General-purpose inpainting models, however, distort digits, deform geometry and perspective, and shift colours when applied directly to sign regions. We trace this to a single gap: the conditioning signal is too abstract for the physical composition of a sign. We propose a structured-prior-guided diffusion inpainting framework with physical consistency. It injects the semantic, appearance and geometric priors of a sign through three orthogonal pathways: a JSON-formatted text prompt, a front-view vector template rendered with measured dominant colours (via IP-Adapter), and an affine-aligned vector template (via ControlNet). Two physical consistency losses constrain colour with a CIELAB chromaticity $L_1$ term and edge structure with a Sobel gradient term. We train by self-supervised reconstruction on a large set of images collected in-house at AMAP, then evaluate zero-shot on the public TT100K-2021 dataset, a different source. Our method uses a Stable Diffusion 1.5 backbone of about 1.4B parameters. It beats seven representative competitors on every metric of reconstruction fidelity, physical consistency and semantic controllability. Its OCR exact-match rate reaches 91.1\%, against 44.2\% for the 12B industrial model FLUX.1 Fill [dev], and it needs only $1/14$ of that model's inference time. Leave-one-out ablations confirm that each of the three prior pathways and both loss terms contribute on their own. In downstream detection, the synthetic data raises the group-pooled AP50 of rare classes by $1.23\times$ to $7.40\times$ over a real-data-only baseline. Code and pre-trained models are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02348
Recent text-to-image models have become increasingly capable of rendering explicit text, but reliable localized text control requires more than generating the correct string. In applications such as product labeling, signage, and interface design, target text should be rendered within a designated text-bearing region without altering the predefined subject identity or surrounding scene semantics. We refer to violations of this requirement as target-text-associated semantic leakage, in which target-text semantics are expressed through non-textual visual content beyond the designated anchor. Existing visual-text benchmarks primarily evaluate readability, spelling accuracy, and layout, leaving this form of semantic leakage largely unexamined. We introduce T2LSC-Bench, a controlled diagnostic benchmark comprising 50 seed subjects and 1,200 prompt cases per model, yielding 7,160 evaluated images across six models. Its factorized design varies semantic relation, scene openness, prompt mode, and language. A dual-branch protocol combines OCR-VLM text verification with structured VLM semantic judgments to measure Text-at-Anchor Accuracy (TAA), Semantic Subject Preservation (SSP), Semantic Leakage Rate (SLR), and Conditional Semantic Leakage Rate (cSLR). Under stress-test conditions, SLR increases from 1.2% to 18.1% and cSLR from 1.3% to 18.2%, whereas TAA decreases only from 91.4% to 90.9%. Anti-leakage prompting reduces SLR from 16.6% to 8.4% without degrading rendering accuracy. Human validation on 420 images shows strong agreement between automatic and adjudicated annotations. These results show that accurate text rendering does not guarantee local containment of target-text semantics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02255
Real-world personally identifiable information (PII) redaction often operates on document images---scans, screenshots, and PDF renderings---where OCR errors, layout structure, and visual noise determine whether sensitive information is actually removed. Existing PII benchmarks are mostly text-centric and do not measure document-level redaction risk: a page remains unsafe if even one identifier is missed. We introduce LeakageBench, a challenge set of 500 document images with 11,954 GDPR-aligned PII annotations spanning direct identifiers, linkage keys, and contextual re-identification surfaces. We evaluate generic OCR pipelines, commercial and task-adapted OCR-dependent detectors, and OCR-free vision-language models using entity-level F1, group-wise leakage, and document-level leakage metrics. Code Interpreter raises GPT-5.5 localization F1 from 0.090 to 0.249, but critical page-level leakage remains 0.968. These results show that stronger detection and tool assistance improve localization without making most pages safe for release. LeakageBench provides a diagnostic benchmark for high-recall, spatially grounded PII redaction in document images.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02207
Multilingual dictionaries are among the most valuable documentary resources for low-resource and endangered languages, yet many remain available only as scans. For many decades, their digitization and conversion into a machine-readable format was nearly impossible due to language-specific scripts, complex multi-column layouts full of entries with abbreviations and cross-references. Recent vision-language models offer a promising solution, but it is unclear how well they preserve characters, markup, and process lexicographic structure. We introduce MUDIDI, a two-stage framework for multi-lingual dictionary digitization. Stage One evaluates the quality of character recognition and markup preservation; Stage Two focuses on dictionary entry segmentation with subsequent mapping into a machine-readable lexicographic schema, SIL's Multi-Dictionary Formatter. We also release a dataset that consists of human-annotated lexicographic entries collected from 30 public-domain dictionaries featuring diverse writing systems, language families, and formats. We benchmark OCR systems, general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs), and Vision Language Models (VLMs) on the dataset, demonstrating superior performance of LLMs across most writing systems and languages in both stages, and provide practical guidelines on improving the results for more challenging scenarios. Finally, we show that supplementing additional information, such as dictionary introduction, to the LLMs can improve the quality of the digitized dictionary. Github: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09435
Spontaneous movement is one of the earliest windows onto an infant's neuromotor health, and structured clinical instruments that score it are validated early predictors of cerebral-palsy risk. However, they require specially trained raters, are time-consuming, and carry inter-rater variability. This motivates automated, video-based markerless assessment, especially as marker-based motion capture is impractical in infants. Yet the foundation models that make markerless capture possible are trained almost entirely on adults: our recent multi-view infant study found that no single model is jointly best, with strong 2D keypoint accuracy and direct 3D body recovery split across different models. While that study identifies this trade-off, it does not resolve it. Here, we perform cross-model distillation from the Sapiens 2 pose model into the SAM 3D Body model, using unannotated infant video alone. A frozen teacher supplies dense pseudo-labels, and a differentiable renderer aligns the predicted mesh to them in the training loop. On eleven held-out infants (18 sessions, 173 recordings) under our prior study's multi-view protocol, fine-tuning improves same-view 2D keypoint agreement with the Sapiens reference (median body percentage of correct keypoints @ 10px 0.22 -> 0.42, face 0.22 -> 0.42) and Procrustes-aligned mean per joint 3D position error (25.5 -> 22.2 mm). This demonstrates how cross-model distillation improves SAM 3D Body model performance on infants.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01840