OCR
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ArmorOCR: Grounded Adversarial Visual Perception via Observation-Transferred Self-Distillation
2026-08-20 14:52:06Linhan Cao, Siyuan Li, Jun Lan, Liangbo He, Guannan Li, Xiaolei Huang, Jun Jia, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Wei SunAbstract
Large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated strong OCR recognition capabilities, yet remain vulnerable to adversarial visual text that is readable to humans but challenging for models to localize and recognize. Existing OCR benchmarks mainly focus on natural or document-style text, while adversarial OCR evaluations remain limited in scale, task coverage, or region-aware evaluation. In this paper, we formulate adversarial OCR as a \textbf{grounded OCR perception} task and introduce \textbf{AdvSpot}, the first benchmark for grounded adversarial OCR evaluation. AdvSpot comprises 390 images with region-level annotations, spanning 5 primary categories and 13 fine-grained adversarial OCR types. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{ArmorOCR}, a two-stage training framework for robust adversarial OCR perception. ArmorOCR first acquires missing adversarial OCR perception from privileged transformed observations through On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), and then refines grounded OCR perception through Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with task-conditioned rewards for localization, recognition, full spotting, and visual question answering (VQA). Experiments on our AdvSpot, other adversarial OCR benchmarks, and general OCR benchmarks demonstrate that ArmorOCR consistently improves adversarial OCR perception while preserving competitive general OCR capability.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20122
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Manifold Drift in Flow Preference Optimization: A Root Cause of Reward Hacking
2026-08-20 13:25:24Yansen Han, Shengyi Liao, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Tao LinAbstract
Preference optimization is a standard alignment method for generative models, yet extending it to continuous-time dynamics remains non-trivial. In flow matching, reward-driven updates modify transport trajectories without an inherent constraint to the pretrained data manifold and can move terminal samples off the pretrained support. We formalize this failure mode as manifold drift. Theoretically, we show that optimal flow matching recovers the terminal data distribution, whereas a preference update leaves the pretrained manifold whenever its induced terminal displacement has a nonzero normal component. As a remedy, we propose ThermoDPO, a temperature-controlled objective that anchors pairwise preference optimization on preferred samples. Across temperature regimes, this objective connects rejection sampling fine-tuning and FlowDPO and controls a pointwise reconstruction-based surrogate for manifold distance. To counteract diminished signals at low temperatures, we further introduce a weighted variant, ThermoDPO-weighted. On the main toy benchmark, ThermoDPO-weighted attains a StrictScore of 0.899, compared with 0.629 for FlowDPO and 0.857 for FlowDPO+RFT. On SD3.5-M at CFG = 4.5, it improves OCR by 47.5% and the average of four metrics by 16.0%.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20011
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Repo0: Design-Driven Zero-to-All Code Generation
2026-08-20 10:03:14Silin Chen, Haoyi Teng, Xiaodong Gu, Yuling Shi, Jiale Huang, Yongpan Wang, Hongyu Zhang, Haibing GuanAbstract
Large language model agents have made substantial progress in code generation, yet most existing systems assume a predefined repository architecture. This assumption does not hold in zero-to-all code generation, where an agent must construct an entire software project directly from natural-language requirements while maintaining a modular repository architecture throughout development. We present Repo0, a continuous structural evolution framework for zero-to-all code generation. Repo0 maintains an explicit architectural state instantiated as a Dual-Directed-Acyclic-Graph (Dual-DAG), consisting of a requirement-level DAG, a component-level DAG, and their alignment relation. Starting from natural-language requirements, it iteratively evolves component boundaries through structural actions guided by modularity metrics until structural convergence, after which the converged architecture guides test-driven development code generation. We evaluate Repo0 on six real-world repositories from RepoCraft using GPT-5 mini and DeepSeek V3.2. Repo0 achieves the highest Functionality Coverage and Pass Rate across all settings. Compared with RPG, the strongest repository-planning baseline, Repo0 improves Functionality Coverage by up to 20.08 percentage points and Pass Rate by up to 29.74 percentage points. Ablation and structural-evolution analyses further demonstrate the importance of the Dual-DAG architectural state, modularity-guided structural evolution, and explicit structural convergence.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19854
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Institutional Books - Enriched Text: A customizable multilingual open-source pipeline for denoising, deduplicating, and annotating OCR text at scale
2026-08-19 15:20:54David Lowry-Duda, Matteo Cargnelutti, Catherine Brobston, Salwa Ismail, Greg Leppert, Amanda Watson, Jonathan ZittrainAbstract
Released in 2025, Institutional Books: Harvard Library (IB-HL) is a collection of 983,004 volumes (242B o200k_base tokens), originally digitized through Harvard Library's participation in the Google Books Library project. As researchers and developers have begun to use IB-HL, a tension has emerged between standard large-scale preprocessing practices and the goals of careful information stewardship. Many existing pipelines optimize for web text: as a result, they tend to aggressively filter, deduplicate, restrict by language, and sometimes discard meaningful metadata. Meanwhile, researchers seeking to use IB-HL duplicate effort while performing similar processing and analysis. We describe an approach that we call Enriched Text. Instead of producing a single 'complete' stream of tokens, we normalize the text while preserving metadata through annotations. We separate endmatter, detect per-paragraph language, identify clusters of duplicate paragraphs, and compute per-paragraph bits-per-byte scores. We provide this information through HTML-like annotations layered on top of the text. By parsing these annotations, users can tailor the output to their own needs instead of accepting a global editorial decision on content. The pipeline applies to all $\approx$250 languages in the collection. This report describes this project's goals, implementation, and design rationale. The release includes IB-HL-ET (an enriched-text version of IB-HL containing 217B o200k_base tokens across 983,003 volumes, organized into 1.39B annotated subtopic paragraphs) and the pipeline that produced it. These serve to make the collection easier for machines to parse and for humans to study.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19026
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Institutional Newspapers Pipeline: Deriving billions of high quality tokens from historical newspapers
2026-08-19 14:41:12Matteo Cargnelutti, Catherine Brobston, Eben English, Jake Sadow, Kacie Bailey, Greg Leppert, Amanda Watson, Jessica Chapel, Jonathan ZittrainAbstract
Historical newspapers are an abundant record of public life, but their dense, irregular and sometimes noisy layouts make computational access to these materials both challenging and limited. We present the Institutional Newspapers Pipeline, a modular system we jointly designed with Boston Public Library to extract high-quality, structured datasets from historical newspaper scans. It was architected so that each step remains interpretable and customizable, and so that the pipeline as a whole remains computationally frugal enough to run on workstation-level hardware. The pipeline runs each scan through a multi-step process: it segments scans into individual type-agnostic crops and performs OCR on each resulting segment before then performing text analysis, type classification, reading order detection, named entities recognition, subject classification, language detection, and pre-computed embeddings generation on every crop. We ran this pipeline against a portion of Boston Public Library's holdings and released the results as an open dataset. The optical character recognition (OCR) output represents 16.3 billion o200k_base tokens across 83.1 million individual crops, extracted from 1,473,635 public domain newspaper scans published between 1795 and 1930. This report describes our methods for each processing step, the small models we trained, as well as the evaluation results and dataset-scale measurements we collected in the process. It accompanies the release of the pipeline, models, and dataset. We position this work as a substantial step towards unlocking high-quality data from tens of millions of newspaper scans.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18972
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Institutional Books - Visual Elements: An open-source pipeline for extracting, classifying, deduplicating, and captioning visual elements from digital book collections
2026-08-19 14:21:56Jimmy Mendez, Matteo Cargnelutti, David Lowry-Duda, Catherine Brobston, Salwa Ismail, Greg Leppert, Amanda Watson, Jonathan ZittrainAbstract
Historical book collections contain rich visual elements - such as illustrations, photographs, engravings, and decorative art - that are frequently under-explored in large-scale digitization projects. While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has standardized the extraction of textual content, these visual components offer a layer of nuance and context that remains largely untapped by automated text extraction workflows. This technical report introduces Institutional Books - Visual Elements, an open-source end-to-end pipeline for detecting, classifying, deduplicating, and captioning visual elements from historical book collections. Alongside this pipeline, we release an initial dataset of 22.6 million visual elements extracted from the 983,004 scanned volumes that comprise the Institutional Books: Harvard Library dataset. This work contributes to ongoing, community-wide efforts to enable new use cases for digitized library collections through computational access, from artificial intelligence model training to digital humanities research.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18957
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Epistemic Subordination: Generative AI and the Infrastructure of Knowledge
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Generative AI does not merely produce biased outputs. It encodes the majority's way of knowing as the default infrastructure of knowledge itself. We call this epistemic subordination. The training process compresses the full breadth of human expression into a single probabilistic model whose statistical baseline reflects the languages, assumptions, and cultural frameworks of the dominant culture. Minority epistemologies are not excluded but absorbed: present in the training data, yet structurally subordinated in the output. The result is not a collection of discrete biases that can be audited and corrected. It is an epistemic condition embedded in the architecture from which all outputs emerge. This unified harm cuts across three legal domains -- anti-discrimination law, cultural and linguistic rights, and democratic viewpoint pluralism -- and each fails to address it for the same structural reason: existing law regulates downstream, at the level of decisions and applications. The remedy must match the site of harm. If epistemic subordination is produced at the level of model training, then law must learn to govern at that level.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18758
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Impact of Iterative Fine-Tuning on Transcription Accuracy in Complex Historical Sanskrit Manuscripts
2026-08-19 08:50:45Kartik Chincholikar, Kaushik Gopalan, Mihir HasabnisAbstract
Digitizing the text from handwritten historical manuscripts is required to make them easily accessible, preservable, and to enable historical scholars to study them in new ways. Historical manuscripts, however, often exhibit complex heterogeneous layouts and non-standard appearance due to period-specific writing styles, page textures, camera noise, and other nuisance factors, making them difficult to perform OCR on. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a local traditional OCR pipeline, which can be iteratively fine-tuned on the target manuscript at the layout-level and the appearance-level. By adapting to the target manuscript distribution, the proposed Traditional OCR pipeline makes better predictions on subsequent pages, causing iterative reduction in human annotation effort, which is expensive and time-consuming as it requires historical domain expertise. Using this pipeline, we digitize text from three complex historical Sanskrit manuscripts and introduce a dataset with granular layout-level annotations, along with Unicode annotations in the standard PAGE-XML format. We demonstrate quantitative gains due to iterative fine-tuning of the proposed traditional OCR pipeline, and also benchmark the performance of leading Multi-Modal Large Language Models on the introduced Dataset. Code and dataset are available at: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18696
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DocClaw: A Unified Agentic System for Intelligent Document Processing
2026-08-19 08:34:48Siqi Xiang, Zhipeng Xu, Yufei Liu, Junhao Ji, Qing Liu, Zulong Chen, Zhibo Yang, Chunyan Miao, Shijian LuAbstract
Intelligent document processing (IDP) encompasses a broad range of tasks, including optical character recognition (OCR), document question answering (DocQA), and key information extraction (KIE). Despite their distinct objectives, these tasks share a common need to perceive document content, acquire task-relevant information, and progressively refine intermediate results. However, they are typically formulated as separate prediction problems and addressed by task-specific models or processing pipelines. We introduce DocClaw, a unified agentic system that formulates diverse intelligent document processing tasks as a shared process of interaction between an agent and a document. Given a document and a task-specific query, DocClaw follows an appropriate document skill to iteratively identify the information required, invoke relevant tools, and integrate the resulting observations into the desired output. Throughout this process, a structured document state organizes reusable document knowledge and task-specific interaction context, allowing the agent to accumulate, revisit, and progressively refine information as the interaction proceeds. Under this formulation, task-specific requirements are captured by the agent's interpretation of the query objective and the corresponding document skill, while the underlying interaction loop, tool space, and document state are shared across tasks. Extensive experiments across multiple intelligent document processing benchmarks demonstrate that DocClaw effectively handles diverse tasks within a single agentic framework and achieves competitive performance compared with both general-purpose VLMs and task-specific methods.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18685
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OmniHandwritingOCR: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal LLMs in Handwritten OCR Scenarios
2026-08-19 06:27:05Zinuo Guo, Min Zhang, Bo JiangAbstract
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used as OCR systems in document and knowledge-processing pipelines, but their ability to faithfully read real handwriting remains underexplored. Existing OCR benchmarks focus largely on printed text or clean single-line inputs, leaving limited coverage of realistic handwritten OCR scenarios such as multilingual handwriting, writer errors, and structurally complex mathematical expressions. We introduce OmniHandwritingOCR, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating MLLMs and OCR systems on handwritten OCR. It covers handwritten text recognition and handwritten mathematical expression recognition across six subtasks and twelve subsets, totaling 77.57K labeled images from public datasets and newly collected student writings. A key component is a difficulty-stratified multi-line formula corpus designed to test robustness under increasing structural complexity. We evaluate thirteen open- and closed-source systems with five complementary metrics under a unified protocol. Results show that current systems remain far from faithful transcription: performance drops sharply on complex multi-line formulas, model rankings vary across language and formula settings, and several generative models hallucinate plausible but visually unsupported corrections. OmniHandwritingOCR provides a challenging testbed for diagnosing language, content, structural, and visual-grounding failure modes of multimodal models in handwritten OCR scenarios.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18586
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Evaluating Structured Information Extraction with Open Models in a High Risk Public Sector Application
2026-08-18 20:14:47Elias Schubert, Felix Bie{\ss}mannAbstract
The extraction of structured information from unstructured documents represents a critical component of digital transformations in all sectors. While proprietary solutions dominate commercial applications, a rapidly growing ecosystem of open-source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offers accessible alternatives. However, systematic evaluations on realistic, multi-step extraction pipelines remain scarce. Responsible usage of such extraction tools require comprehensive evaluations on realistic tasks, especially as these solutions will be key components of applications in the public sector that the EU AI act categorizes as high risk. To address this gap we present a comprehensive benchmark assessing the end-to-end performance of open-source systems on a complex real-world document processing task classified as high risk: Student applications for an international study program. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation with state-of-the-art OCR engines, LLMs and VLMs. Our results reveal that while VLMs generally outperform OCR+LLM pipelines, even state-of-the-art open-source models struggle to handle such tasks reliably in zero-shot settings. Only 4 of 35 configurations achieved F1 scores above 0.5, with the best OCR+LLM pipeline matching top VLM performance, though most OCR+LLM combinations performed substantially worse. Roughly 75\% of all configurations scored below 0.25. Model scale influences performance, yet the relationship is non-linear: substantially larger models do not guarantee proportionally better results. Input quality, particularly the structural preservation of OCR output, emerges as a critical factor independent of downstream model capability.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18289
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VisDocAgentBench: Benchmarking Agents for Visually Rich Document Retrieval
2026-08-18 15:23:06Lexiang Hu, Yanzhao Zhang, Mingxin Li, Dingkun Long, Yikang Li, Fuwei Zhang, Yisen Wang, Zhouchen LinAbstract
Visually rich documents encode relevance through language, layout, structured visual elements, and corpus context, yet retrieval is typically evaluated by one-shot query--page matching. Agentic-search benchmarks usually score downstream question answering or report generation, leaving document ranking under iterative evidence acquisition underexplored. We introduce VisDocAgentBench, a closed-corpus benchmark comparing static and agentic retrieval under a shared ranked-output contract. It contains 2,375 pages from 100 documents and 120 unique-target queries balanced across direct, one-bridge, and two-bridge evidence structures. Relation-preserving construction yields semantic, relational, and visual queries, followed by full-document review and hard-negative validation. A strong late-interaction visual retriever reaches 97.50% Recall@1 on direct items but 2.50% on two-bridge items, exposing the limits of query--target matching when relevance depends on corpus context. Agents recover much of this loss, but planner choice and retrieval representation remain decisive. Every planner performs better with visual retrieval, whose best R@1 reaches 67.50% versus 37.50% for OCR-text. Ablations identify iterative search and page inspection as consequential capabilities, and providing the complete support context improves ranking on both routes. Trace analysis localizes the remaining losses to target discovery, candidate examination, and evidence-role integration. These findings motivate retrieval agents that combine modality-preserving discovery with evidence-directed verification.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17889
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COMIC: Reference-Aware Safety Gating for Multimodal Large Language Models
2026-08-18 00:45:29Md Abdullahil Oaphy, Anhao Xiang, Zongxing Xie, Huayue Gu, Chenyu Wang, Honghui XuAbstract
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to interact with screenshots, scanned documents, diagrams, and other visually grounded inputs. This shift introduces a new safety risk: in many multimodal jailbreaks, neither the prompt nor the image is harmful in isolation. Unsafe behavior emerges only when the model binds an apparently benign operation, such as summarizing, translating, or following, to a localized visual target. This reveals a structural weakness in current multimodal defenses, which largely moderate the prompt-image pair as a whole even though the true security-relevant unit is the grounded operation-target pair produced during dereference. In this work, we identify and analyze this reference-dependent failure mode and show that existing defenses degrade when harmful semantics are localized, activated only after grounding, and dependent on visual reference resolution. To address this problem, we propose COMIC (Context-Operation-Modality-Image-Classifier), a reference-aware pre-generation safety gate for MLLMs. COMIC first infers the requested operation and reference type, constructs candidate targets from OCR and open-vocabulary proposals, grounds plausible referents, and evaluates safety over explicit operation-target pairs. To handle ambiguity conservatively, COMIC combines max-risk aggregation with quality-aware routing before deciding whether to forward or block a request. We evaluate COMIC across multiple open-source MLLMs, localized and broader multimodal jailbreak benchmarks, and benign reference-sensitive settings. The results show that COMIC consistently improves robustness while preserving benign utility and practical efficiency. More broadly, our findings suggest that multimodal safety cannot be enforced reliably without modeling the requested operation, the visual target to which it applies, and the confidence of that grounding.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17234
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Cost Scales with Change, Not Corpus Size: Incrementally Maintaining an Evolving Semantic Substrate
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Retrieval-augmented and agentic question-answering systems increasingly re-derive the meaning of a corpus at query time. Put plainly, instead of re-deriving what a corpus means on every question, the work is done once when a document arrives and is thereafter merely consulted -- a compiler, not an interpreter, of meaning. An alternative is to compile that meaning once, at ingest time, into a compact, queryable semantic substrate and maintain it as the corpus evolves. The central objection is maintenance cost: rebuilding a truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) on every change appears prohibitive, and a change of embedding model seems to force a full re-embedding. We argue and show empirically that maintenance cost scales with the amount of change, not corpus size. On a controlled synthetic pilot (dimension 256, rank 32, a corpus grown from 3,000 to 9,000 documents over 50 update events), incremental low-rank updates were 33.7 times cheaper per update than full re-SVD and 23.8 times cheaper cumulatively, while the incremental subspace tracked the full recomputation to within floating-point precision (maximum principal-angle drift below 1e-11 degrees; recall@10 = 1.0). An orthogonal Procrustes virtual axis update recovered 0.95 mean cosine to truly re-embedded vectors by re-embedding only about 10 percent of the corpus. The results support maintaining, rather than repeatedly reconstructing, a semantic substrate.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16621
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Counting Documents Is Not Counting Text: Unit Bias in Web-PDF Corpus Statistics
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PDF corpora advertise their size in tokens but compute every rate they publish (coverage, OCR routing, re-fetch recovery, language mix) per document, and none decomposes its token total. The two units diverge sharply. On CC-MAIN-2021-31-PDF-UNTRUNCATED (7.9M web PDFs, 32.6B tokens), 3.02% of text-bearing documents hold half the tokens (Gini 0.807); documents over 50 pages are 5.00% of the corpus but 53.53% of its text. The PDFs produced by a TeX{} toolchain are 1.66% of documents and 4.05% of the text. The clearest casualty is Common Crawl's truncation cap: it affected 23.06% of documents and 63.08% of the text. Reconstructing the truncated files and extracting both versions, two widely used libraries recover 11.4% and 1.4% of that text; between 72% and 97% of affected documents yield nothing; roughly 55--62% of the corpus's text is lost. Under the 5 MiB cap adopted in March 2025, 30.19% of tokens would still be truncated, and recovery on those documents rises only from 3.3% to 13.2%. We recommend that corpus statistics be reported in both units: documents and tokens.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16390
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Architecture-Dependent Causal Transfer of Activation States Across Large Language Models
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Direct communication between AI systems relies on natural language as an intermediate layer, incurring encoding/decoding overhead, token cost, and latency. We ask whether internal activation states can instead be transferred causally between different large language model (LLM) architectures via a learned projection, evaluated at three levels: representational similarity, cross-model retrieval from projected states, and end-to-end causal transfer via activation injection during generation. Using four architecturally diverse open-weight models (Qwen2-0.5B, Phi-3-mini, Mistral-7B, FLAN-T5-base), we find that representational alignment in trained models exceeds a random-initialization null baseline and is best captured by a rank-based metric (mutual k-nearest-neighbour alignment), more robust to activation-magnitude outliers than centered kernel alignment (CKA) or Procrustes analysis. A learned projection network retrieves the correct target-model representation from a held-out set well above chance for the three causal decoder-only model pairs (45-50% top-1 accuracy vs. 5% chance) but at chance level for the encoder-based FLAN-T5. Injecting projected activations into a target model during generation produces a statistically significant, pre-registered causal effect on retrieval-based output similarity for only one of the three decoder-only pairs (Qwen2-0.5B to Phi-3-mini: 23.3% vs. 0.0% under negative control, p=0.047, FDR-corrected); the two pairs targeting Mistral-7B show no such effect despite comparable representational alignment at the hidden-state level. We interpret these results as evidence for causal transfer of the representational vehicle, not of meaning, and conclude that end-to-end activation-state transfer between LLMs, as currently implemented, is architecture-dependent rather than universal.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16347
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ConceptFormer: Learning Adaptive Latent Concepts for Query-Document Alignment in Visual Document Retrieval
2026-08-16 12:07:12Peng Chunyi, Xu Zhipeng, Yan Yukun, Liu Zhenghao, Yu Shi, Mei Sen, Sun Yubo, Zhang Yongheng, Zhou Jie, Gu Yu, Yu Ge, Sun MaosongAbstract
Visual document retrieval is a critical component of multimodal retrieval-augmented generation, aiming to identify query-relevant pages from document collections where evidence is distributed across text, layout, charts, and visual structures. Recent efforts toward finer-grained supervision primarily rely on textual descriptions or localized visual regions as evidence proxies. However, such supervision signals may either overlook complex visual structures or provide incomplete and inaccurate representations of the underlying evidence. To address these limitations, we propose ConceptFormer, a latent concept representation learning framework for visual document retrieval. ConceptFormer models query-relevant evidence as continuous, query-conditioned latent concepts that explicitly bridge localized visual evidence and semantic relevance, without requiring either textual intermediate representations or direct reliance on raw visual annotations. During training, ConceptFormer employs a strong vision-language model to dynamically determine the number of latent concept tokens and uses these concepts as an intermediate representation to bridge the semantic gap between queries and documents, thereby guiding the learning of the embedding space. Experiments on diverse visual document retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that ConceptFormer achieves 16.7\% and 22.1\% relative improvements in average NDCG@10 over the strongest visual retrieval baseline and the strongest OCR-based text retrieval baseline, respectively. Further analysis reveals that latent concepts effectively connect localized visual evidence with semantic relevance, enabling the retriever to capture both fine-grained textual cues and complex document-level visual structures while preserving strong retrieval alignment. Codes and data are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15698
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Why we need an AI-resilient society
2026-08-14 17:50:57Thomas Bartz-BeielsteinAbstract
Three generations of software have transformed the role of artificial intelligence in society. In the first, programmers wrote explicit logic. In the second, neural networks learned programs from data. In the third, large language models turn natural language itself into a programming interface. These shifts reach far beyond computer science, reshaping how societies generate knowledge, make decisions, and govern themselves. While generative adversarial networks introduced the era of deepfakes and synthetic media, large language models have added a new class of systemic risks. This report applies a forensic-psychology profiling methodology to characterize AI based on nine documented features: hallucinations, bias and toxicity, sycophancy and echo chambers, fabrication and credulity, knowledge without understanding, discontinuity and the inability to learn from experience, jagged intelligence and scaling limits, shortcuts and fractured representations, and cognitive atrophy. The resulting profile reveals an "entity" that confabulates fluently, mirrors its users' biases, possesses encyclopedic recall without causal understanding, and erodes the competence of those who depend on it. The implications extend to institutional erosion across law, academia, journalism, and democratic governance. To address these challenges, this report proposes a three-pillar framework for AI resilience: (i) cognitive sovereignty, which preserves the capacity for independent judgment, (ii) measurable control, which translates ethical commitments into enforceable standards and red lines, and (iii) partial autonomy, which maintains human agency at critical decision points. This report is an updated and extended version of arXiv:1912.08786v1.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.08786
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Advanced modelling and data analytics in aviation
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The aviation industry characterized by its stringent safety standards has seen a growing need for innovative approaches to enhance safety measures. Despite the vast accumulation of aviation safety data over time, its full potential in predicting and preventing incidents has not been fully realized. This research addresses this gap by applying machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze aviation safety data from Socrata, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and the Aviation Safety Network (ASN). By leveraging existing ML models, including deep learning and transformer-based architectures alongside NLP methods for mining aviation incident narratives, this study uncovers patterns contributing to safety related incidents such as accidents and near-misses. Additionally, it employs various topic modelling techniques to extract meaningful themes from unstructured safety reports, enhancing the interpretability of incident analysis. Causal inference techniques and interpretable AI frameworks are further explored to improve model transparency and trustworthiness. A key contribution of this work is the deployment of advanced ML methodologies in a structured aviation safety context, assessing their effectiveness and providing insights into their practical implementation. The findings offer valuable insights for aviation stakeholders, including regulators, airlines, and policymakers, by providing data-driven solutions that enhance incident analysis and decision making. Ultimately, this research supports the industry s ongoing efforts to minimize risks, improve passenger and crew security, and integrate AI driven methodologies into aviation safety management.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14746
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Academic League of Artificial Intelligence - An Integrative Perspective of Teaching, Research, and Extension
2026-08-13 16:32:44Alison R. Panisson, Maria Eduarda W. M. Vianna, Italo Firmino da Silva, Heitor Henrique da Silva, Rafaela Fernandes Savaris, Bernardo Pandolfi Costa, Martin Augusto Gagliotti Vigil, Jim Lau, Agenor Hentz, Andr\'ea Sabedra Bordin, Alexandre Leopoldo Gon\c{c}alves, Roberto Rodrigues-FilhoAbstract
Academic leagues have become important mechanisms for promoting extracurricular education and strengthening the integration between universities and society. This paper presents the organizational framework adopted by the Academic League of Artificial Intelligence (LIA) at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), designed to integrate teaching, research, and university extension through a student-centered, project-based approach. The framework combines democratic governance, collaborative learning, and dynamic project organization to foster both technical and transversal competencies. The framework is illustrated through representative initiatives, including competition teams, study groups, open lectures, knowledge repositories, and AI-powered applications with social impact. These projects demonstrate how diverse educational, scientific, and extension activities can be developed within a common organizational structure while promoting leadership, scientific production, community engagement, and knowledge preservation. The reported experience indicates that the proposed framework provides a flexible and replicable model for integrating the three university pillars into engineering and computing education, offering practical guidance for academic leagues and similar student organizations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13447
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