Object_Detection
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ActMap: Single-Pass Uncertainty Quantification from Generation-Time Activation Maps
2026-09-10 13:04:24Jacopo Dardini (University of Bologna), Roberta Calegari (University of Bologna)Abstract
Practical uncertainty quantification (UQ) for large language models must decide, from a single generation, whether a specific answer should be trusted. Existing methods either sample multiple generations, read only output-token probabilities, or reduce the model's internal computation to a single hidden state. We introduce ActMap, a white-box representation that compresses the generation-time hidden- state trajectory (every layer, every generated token) into a fixed $12 \times 32 \times 128$ tensor of temporal-statistic channels that preserves structure across transformer depth and pooled hidden coordinates. The map is captured during the generation pass with no measurable overhead, has a fixed shape across model depths and hidden sizes, and occupies 96 KiB: a compact artifact that can be retained for audit-relevant generations and probed directly, with occlusion analysis localizing the classifier's signal to mid-depth regions of the map. A lightweight classifier, instantiated as a compact Vision Transformer, reads an estimated correctness probability from each map in a fraction of a millisecond; capacity-matched MLPs perform comparably, indicating the representation itself carries the result. Trained and evaluated in-domain on short-answer QA, direct- answer math, and summarization factuality with three instruction-tuned 7-8B models, ActMap consistently outperforms sampling, token-probability, attention, and embedding baselines, and matches ACT-ViT, a detector trained on dense activation tensors $67 \times$ larger, at essentially the same mean AUROC with lower calibration error on ten of twelve pairs. The resulting score supports abstention, routing, and selective verification from a single generation, making it a practical primitive for scalable oversight of deployed models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11498
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HGSQ: Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Detector for Real-Time Aerial Small Object Detection
2026-09-10 12:52:34Yangchen ZengAbstract
Real-time aerial small object detection is an important visual signal and image processing problem, requiring a detector to preserve fine-grained localization while avoiding redundant computation on large background regions. This paper focuses on this deployment-oriented aerial/UAV setting rather than claiming a universal detector for all object detection scenarios. Existing Transformer-based detectors provide strong global modeling, but their dense query initialization and multi-layer decoder still spend substantial computation on background tokens, which is inefficient when small objects occupy only sparse image regions. To address this problem, this paper proposes HGSQ, a Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Detector for real-time aerial small object detection. HGSQ uses a lightweight Heatmap Budget Predictor (HBP) to predict a foreground budget map in a single forward pass. The predicted heatmap is then used by three fixed components: Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Selection (HSQS), which initializes decoder queries from high-confidence foreground positions; Heatmap-Gated Lite Snake Convolution (HGLSConv), which performs local shape refinement only on heatmap-activated small-object regions; and Adaptive Query-Decoder Budgeting (AQDB), which adjusts the query budget and decoder depth according to the estimated object density. Unlike post-hoc heatmap generation, HGSQ treats the heatmap as a real-time computation budget rather than a visualization map during deployment. Experiments on NWPU VHR-10 and VisDrone2019 show that HGSQ achieves 95.10 mAP50 on NWPU VHR-10 and 54.8 mAP50 on VisDrone2019, while reducing GFLOPs to 48.6 and running at 96.0 FPS on an RTX 4070 under our TensorRT FP16 deployment protocol.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13306
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Prevalence Determines Precision:Silent Contamination in Detector-Defined Datasets
Abstract
Many ML datasets are constructed by running a detector, heuristic, or model over candidate pools; accepted items become labels. Dataset precision is then governed by true-positive prevalence in each pool via Bayes, not solely by detector quality. Using one instrument and period, we hold a detector-defined event dataset plus an independent official index labeling every detected item as real or phantom. One detector, three pools yield phantom rates 81.7%, 9.0%, and 0.0%. Transferring precision from the two high-rate pools to the low-rate pool predicts 0.955 versus measured 0.183, a +422% error; the Bayes expression predicts all three within 3.3%. The detected response curve is an exact convex combination of a true-event and a phantom component (residual 1.1e-16), with phantoms outnumbering true events 473 to 308, so contamination is a second signal with detector-inherited shape, not additive noise. Contamination direction depends on the estimator: on identical windows one statistic is diluted and another inflated because its denominator is also contaminated. A common normalization turns the estimator into a mean of ratios whose expectation need not exist; on the same 335 events it returns 0.40 where the well-defined estimator returns 0.10.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11449
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GRIPNet: Gaussian Radial Intensity Prior Guided Architecture for Pulmonary Nodule Detection in CT
Abstract
Lung cancer causes more deaths than any other malignancy, and low-dose CT screening is the main pathway to early diagnosis. That pathway hinges on the smallest lesions, yet nodules below six millimeters remain hard to detect, because most methods treat a nodule as a generic object and ignore the imaging physics behind its appearance. We show that this appearance is highly regular. Intensity peaks at the geometric center of a nodule and decays radially in a Gaussian pattern, and a fit to 18,218 annotated lesions from three public benchmarks yields a mean radial coefficient of determination above 0.86 in every dataset and size stratum. A square convolution samples both axes uniformly and is mismatched to this radial signal, most severely for small nodules. Guided by this evidence, we propose GRIPNet (Gaussian Radial Intensity Prior Network), a detector in which every module maps to a measurable property of the intensity distribution. Pinwheel convolutions decompose radial gradients, a dual-frequency module separates boundary detail from structural context, dilated masked attention matches the decay extent, and an adaptive loss reweights samples by conspicuity. GRIPNet raises mAP@0.5 to 95.3, 91.6 and 97.9 percent on KanserSet, LUNA16 and Lung-PET-CT-Dx while sharpening high-IoU localization at real-time speed.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11312
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Your Model Already Knows Don't Teach It, Learn to Ask It: Soft Prompting for Few-Shot Adaptation of Vision-Language Models
2026-09-10 09:38:11Gautam Rajendrakumar Gare, Siyi Li, Hewei Wang, Cesar Daniel Hernandez, Wei Zhao, Wolfgang M. Pauli, John Galeotti, Deva RamananAbstract
We address few-shot object detection with vision-language models (VLMs) in out-of-domain settings such as aerial, industrial, and medical imagery, using only ten annotated images for supervision. Existing adaptation methods are discrete prompt optimization and LoRA fine-tuning. We revisit a third option: soft prompting, where a small number of continuous prompt tokens are optimized while the pretrained backbone remains frozen. We identify two key design choices. First, placing prompt tokens at the cross-modal boundary between visual and text tokens outperforms other placements (10.0 vs. 8.4 mAP). Second, initializing prompts from the empty space token outperforms semantic and random initialization. With these choices, one to three learned tokens (7,168 parameters on average) match the best LoRA configuration on Roboflow20-VL (14.2 mAP, 10-shot) while training over 20,000x fewer parameters. Soft prompting remains harder to optimize, exhibiting higher variance across random seeds. Unlike LoRA, however, it causes no forgetting: the LoRA rank matching our accuracy reduces NaturalBench VQA accuracy by 35% relative, rising to 56% at the largest rank, whereas soft prompting leaves pretrained performance unchanged. The learned tokens behave like prompts rather than weights. They transfer to a newer model without retraining (+0.8 mAP on Qwen3.5-9B) and can be verbalized into readable prompts competitive with prompt-search methods (matching DetPO and outperforming GEPA). The approach also extends beyond detection. On RoboCasa manipulation tasks, the frozen $\pi_{0.5}$ vision-language-action policy benefits from soft prompting, matching the LoRA baseline on two of three tasks when tokens are placed at the gradient bottleneck. These results suggest modern VLMs already encode much of what is needed for specialized domains; the challenge is learning how to ask.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11310
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Off-Target Effects of Response-Style Alignment in a Korean 27B Language Model
Abstract
We post-train Qwen3.8-27B for Korean response style -- verbosity, list and markdown usage, discourse structure and register -- and measure two behaviours the objective never targets: abstention on ambiguous social questions in KoBBQ, where the benchmark-correct answer is UNKNOWN, and unprompted disclosure in securities guidance. Both move, and the changes are expressed primarily through the model's emission policy: how often it answers and how much it says. Matched target-form controls show that answer propensity depends on the training target, not the prompt set or recipe alone. Holding prompts, recipe, data volume and serving fixed and changing only the target text, three style seeds give positive answer-rate point estimates (mean +0.82 pp) and three neutral seeds negative ones (mean -1.53 pp); the observed seed ranges do not overlap and the means differ by 2.34 pp. A length-matched arm lies between them, and a fourth arm that stays short while preserving hedging is unstable across seeds, so which feature of the form is responsible is unresolved. For absolute stereotyped exposure the decomposition into an answer-propensity term and a conditional-composition term is an algebraic identity, not a finding; its empirical content is where the movement went. Across the trained checkpoints the changes are dominated by answer propensity while the composition term stays small, and because that term is evaluated on treatment-dependent answered subsets we do not read it as evidence about latent preference. Two measurement results follow. A between-arm contrast in conditional stereotyped share does not identify a change in conditional content preference when answer status is treatment-dependent. And agreement between two rule detectors for the same construct runs from 0.44 to 0.99 depending on which checkpoint produced the text -- observable without any reference labels.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11291
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Generating a Consistent Enterprise: Synthesis and Reference-Free Evaluation of Multi-System Business Data
2026-09-10 09:17:21Benjamin Gruenbaum, Doron Porat, Assaf Natanzon, Roy Zavida, Chen Dinachi, Or Itzahary, Omer NivAbstract
Synthetic relational data is normally produced by a model trained on a real dataset, and its quality is measured as the distance to that dataset. This paper describes a generator that has no real dataset at either end. Given an industry, a company size, a business model, a set of business applications, and a random seed, it produces a complete fictional enterprise: a workforce, a customer base, sales deals, support tickets, recorded calls, chat messages, and documents, all consistent with one another. One entity graph is projected into the native formats of 66 business products, so the same customer appears in the CRM, the support desk, and the call system under one identity. Because no real counterpart exists, realism is built in from cited reference statistics and verified by reference-free measurement: a five-axis scorecard of 28 statistical checks, an adversarial detector that hunts for the marks of synthetic generation, and a set of soundness checks that include a classifier test against an independently shuffled copy of the data. Because these instruments existed before the generator was tuned, progress is measured under a fixed yardstick: over 23 generated companies, mean realism climbed from 60.3 to 99.1, the weakest company from 41.1 to 94.9, and the detector, which initially flagged 55.2% of all records, now flags none. The scores hold on a seed never used during development. A second generator builds relational databases from a list of business questions. It forces qualifying rows for each answerable question, adds controlled near misses, and computes exact labels from the finished tables. The generator runs as a hosted service at this https URL. A company built there to a specification is served through its simulators over MCP and REST, and the simulators are also published as container images for offline use
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11286
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Improving Faint Object Detection for Space Situational Awareness with Variational Autoencoders
2026-09-10 09:02:13Angela Cratere, Luca Ghilardi, Vishnu Reddy, Francesco Dell'Olio, Charalampos S. Kouzinopoulos, Roberto FurfaroAbstract
We present a deep-learning pipeline for enhancing the detection of faint moving objects in optical space situational awareness (SSA) imagery through automated star removal and background reconstruction. Detecting low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) objects remains extremely challenging in optical observations, particularly in the cislunar (X-GEO) environment, where structured sky backgrounds, dense stellar fields, and scattered moonlight significantly degrade the performance of classical detection algorithms. To address this problem, the proposed pipeline combines a lightweight segmentation network (Tiny-U-Net) to generate stellar masks with a partial-convolution variational autoencoder (astro-VAE), designed to learn the statistical distribution of astronomical backgrounds and perform context-aware inpainting of masked regions. The reconstructed background maps can then be used as a preprocessing step to suppress fixed sources and background inhomogeneities prior to detection. As a proof of concept, the approach is integrated with a shift-and-stack scheme and evaluated on real ground-based telescope observations targeting the X-GEO region. Results demonstrate that the method reconstructs star-free backgrounds with high fidelity, while preserving moving targets and significantly enhancing detectability, thereby providing an effective data-driven preprocessing strategy for faint moving-object detection in optical SSA scenarios.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11269
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Domain-Incremental Learning for Multi-Channel Replay Speech Detection
Abstract
Replay attacks are the most accessible threat to voice-controlled systems, and the acoustic cues that expose them are strongly modulated by the environment in which the attack is mounted. A detector deployed in the field therefore has to absorb new acoustic conditions over time, ideally without revisiting past recordings, since retaining speech indefinitely is both expensive and legally constrained. We frame this as Domain-Incremental Learning (DIL) over acoustic environments and present the first continual learning benchmark for multi-channel replay speech detection, evaluating a state-of-the-art beamformer-based detector over all 24 environment orderings of the ReMASC corpus with five seeds. Sequential fine-tuning forgets severely, raising the error rate on previously learned environments by 18.8 points. Elastic weight consolidation (EWC) halves forgetting but loses plasticity, gradient projection memory (GPM) is statistically indistinguishable from naive fine-tuning, and the proposed task-specific beamformer (TSB) that keeps one spatial front-end per environment significantly improves final and incremental accuracy. We further show that the last environment of the sequence dominates final performance. Code, results, and analysis are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11194
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The Machines Are Calling: Measuring Automated and Synthetic Voices in Unwanted Inbound Calls
2026-09-10 06:28:50Xingyu Shen, Tommy Duong, Muduo Xu, Xiaodong An, Jiaqi Gan, Haoyuan Tang, Jamey Z. Liang, Siyu Zhang, Yan Zhang, Simiao RenAbstract
In February 2024 the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) placed AI-generated voices under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). Yet no peer-reviewed measurement says how much unwanted call traffic is placed by a machine, or how much of that machine speech is synthesized rather than played from a recording. We report both with a disclosed pipeline. An interactive voice honeypot (language-model personas on real U.S. numbers, the caller recorded on its own track) recorded 10,987 calls over 66 days; 11 days on which our stack answered silently are set aside. Three instruments read each opening: an audio fingerprint that finds the same recording played on other calls, a commercial synthetic-speech detector on the caller's first ten seconds, and blinded listeners who check what it flags. Of the 7,233 calls our persona greeted on normal days, 13.8% open with a recording we also heard on another call, and 13.1% with fresh audio the detector labels synthetic. A further 9.9% open with a caller who never spoke after our greeting, 54.2% with fresh audio the detector labels human, and 9.0% could not be scored. Machine-voiced openings are therefore at least 26.9%, a further tenth of calls are silent connections we read as machine-placed, and replays of a recording make up 45% of the detector's own rate (29.3% of 6,192 scored openings). The same waveform played on two calls lands on opposite sides of the detector's threshold 13.6% of the time, and eleven listeners confirm 54.4% of what it flags. Synthetic openings concentrate in lead-generation spam (33.8%), not fraud (21.1%); 0.44% disclose automation. Prevalence tracks how long a bait number has circulated (59% against 19% in the same weeks): seeding history, not calendar time, explains the trend. Campaigns outlast their numbers: one recorded compliance notice opens calls in six campaigns, and one synthetic voice serves nine.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11137
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LAION-Mobile: Evaluating Deepfake Detectors On One Million Smartphone Photos
Abstract
Most Deepfake detectors report near-perfect AUC scores on their reference benchmarks. However, a recent ICML position paper argues that these evaluations collectively neglect the impact of modern smartphone photography: the widely used on-device neural image-signal processing pipelines (like multi-sensor fusion or noise and motion-blur suppression) increasingly shift the imaging paradigm from simple lens projections towards computational photography. Hence, devices actually generate, rather than record photos. This increases the risk that deepfake detectors may flag ordinary phone photos as fake. Due to the lack of large-scale datasets containing images from modern smartphones, this hypothesis has so far only been tested in small proof-of-concept studies. The aim of this paper is to close this gap. We introduce LAION-Mobile, an open dataset containing about 1 million smartphone images with EXIF metadata distilled from re-LAION-5B. Evaluating twelve state-of-the-art deepfake detectors with their original paper checkpoints on a 9,115-image evaluation sample of this pool (DIRE on 738), we report three key findings: (i) On modern AI content no detector exceeds AUC 0.624, and five of twelve fall below chance. (ii) Real-photo false-alarm rates are an artefact of threshold calibration: thresholds fitted on legacy GAN data make several detectors look deployable (less than 11 percent FPR), yet the same detectors flag 17-91 percent of real photos once the identical criterion is refit on modern content. (iii) Consequently, no detector both beats chance on modern AI content and keeps a deployable real-photo false-alarm rate. Mirroring the device mix of web collections, the corpus probes the first neural-ISP generation (2018-2020); current flagships are essentially absent, leaving the modern-ISP regime as the open gap.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11134
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TailProp: content-adaptive light- and heavy-tailed propagation for vision
2026-09-10 04:38:45Jiahao Kong, Zihan LiAbstract
Science-inspired vision models show that explicit propagation dynamics can provide structured and interpretable alternatives to conventional token mixing. Existing formulations, however, typically construct and adapt visual propagation within a particular dynamical family, while visual representations can require substantially different spatial interactions across samples, channels, and network stages. We explore cross-regime adaptive propagation and introduce TailProp, a hierarchical vision backbone built upon the Tail Propagation Operator (TPO). TPO uses Gaussian and Cauchy stable-process propagators as complementary bases with rapidly decaying and heavy-tailed spatial influence, and predicts a content-conditioned channel-wise coefficient to adaptively combine them. Because this coefficient is spatially shared, the two responses are fused directly in the DCT domain with a single DCT/IDCT pair, yielding $O(N^{1.5})$ spatial mixing for square feature maps with $N=HW$ and fixed channel width. Across image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, robustness, and cross-backbone restoration, TailProp consistently outperforms matched propagation baselines; TailProp-B reaches 84.4% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, 50.3/44.8 box/mask AP under the 3x Mask R-CNN schedule, and 50.8% mIoU on ADE20K. Controlled ablations further show that these gains are not explained by single-basis propagation, an additional same-family branch, or within-family adaptive order alone, supporting complementary two-basis propagation as an effective design principle for visual representation learning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11081
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BenchShield: Formal Model-Backed Instrumentation for Reward Integrity in LLM-Agent Evaluation Infrastructure
2026-09-10 03:10:58Shenghan Zheng, Zonglin Di, Yimin Liu, Kyoung Whan Choe, Jiankai Sun, Heguang Lin, Penghao Jiang, Yifeng He, Xiao Cheng, Jicheng Wang, Wenbo Chen, Alex Yates, Yinzhe Zhao, Bingran You, Yuan Gao, Ayush Munot, Shubham Gaur, Zhe Ye, Hao Wang, Xiangyi Li, Dawn Song, Christophe HauserAbstract
LM-agent benchmarks increasingly function as interactive evaluation infrastructure. Agents observe state, call tools, modify workspaces, submit artifacts, and receive rewards from outcome procedures. This interactivity makes evaluations vulnerable to reward hacking: an agent improves its measured score by exploiting the reward-relevant trajectory instead of solving the intended task. Existing defenses rely largely on task-specific patches, prompt instructions, or post-hoc detectors. They do not provide reusable evidence that a concrete run remained within its intended evaluation boundary. This paper presents BenchShield, a model-backed instrumentation layer for reward integrity in LLM-agent evaluation. BenchShield grounds detection in a finite lifecycle model of an evaluation's reward-relevant events. Within the benchmark infrastructure, two complementary analyses operate over this model. A static, phase-aware taint analysis exposes reward-hacking paths before a run. Its runtime counterpart uses infrastructure-side evidence to attribute concrete agent use and emit evidence-backed claims. We construct BenchShield Trajectories, a human-labeled corpus of 456 adjudicated trajectories from more than 31,000 public agent runs across three benchmarks. Compared with an agentic hackability scanner baseline on the same tasks and model, BenchShield improves full-chain recall from 23-94% to 77-100%, same-vector coverage from 16-56% to 43-78%, and reduces per-task cost by up to 65%. Its runtime analysis achieves 96% accuracy in detecting reward hacking from infrastructure-side evidence.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11028
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DriftNet: A Dual-Head Trajectory Transformer for Detecting and Localizing Prompt Injection in LLM Agents
2026-09-09 22:52:23Asif Pinjari, Mithun Paul Saint-GermainAbstract
When an indirect prompt injection succeeds against an LLM agent, the compromise is visible in the agent's own behavior: a benign prefix of tool calls, a poisoned observation, and a suffix of actions that serve the attacker. An operator needs three facts: where the attack entered, which steps it corrupted, and whether apparent poison was resisted. Existing systems return either a whole-trace verdict or a single unsafe index. We present DriftNet, a dual-head trajectory Transformer that reads a logged tool-call trajectory and answers all three questions in one forward pass: one head classifies the trajectory as compromised or not, and a second assigns every step one of four labels (benign, injection point, hijacked, failed injection). To our knowledge it is the first supervised detector to produce this joint output. A frozen sentence encoder and four identity-free world features embed each step; the trained trunk, under two million parameters and optimized with a class-weighted joint objective over both heads, needs no access to the agent's model. On the task-disjoint split of the AgentDrift benchmark (12,536 trajectories, 71,024 labeled steps), with a 20-configuration sweep bounding hyperparameter sensitivity to 0.011 F1 and the test part evaluated exactly once, DriftNet reaches trajectory-level F1 of 0.983, exact injection-point recovery on 98.7% of attacked trajectories, hijacked-span IoU of 0.979, zero flags on 218 resisted attacks, and 2.9% flags on hard negatives. A surface baseline retrained on the identical split recovers 11.1% of partial hijacks and 17.1% of delayed executions; DriftNet reaches 98.6% and 93.2% while lowering every false-alarm rate. Reading all 26 residual errors shows that most misses trace to trajectories whose labeled injection observation carries no legible instruction, and we report the benchmark's measured world-identity regularity alongside the results.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10892
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Detectable Only Where It Is Confounded: What Verified Duplication Counts Say About Membership Evidence in Language Models
2026-09-09 21:01:56Arman Nik KhahAbstract
When a language model finds a sentence unusually cheap to predict, it is tempting to conclude that the sentence was in its training data. Almost every published test of that inference has had to guess which sentences were in the training data, the members, and which were not. This paper removes the guessing. Two model families, OLMo-2 and Pythia, publish their pretraining corpora, and a public index over those corpora returns the exact number of times any sentence appeared in each. Those counts make three questions answerable directly. The answers form a pincer, closing from two sides. At the duplication levels ordinary text actually has, five models from 1B to 13B parameters carry at most a faint trace of their own exposure. We measure that trace with a design that reads the same sentence through two models, which cancels fluency and quality by construction, and it comes to a rank correlation near -0.08, where -1 would be a perfect relation and 0 none. Where the trace does become strong, above roughly a thousand copies, the two corpora agree on which sentences those are, because they are the famous ones, so exposure can no longer be told apart from fame. Two further measurements show how apparent membership signal gets manufactured. A common way to build a non-member is to change one word of a member. The model does prefer the original, but the gap is the same whether the original appeared once or a hundred times, so what the model is rewarding is the author's word choice, not memory. Above a thousand copies the gap grows with model size on the twelve sentences we can test there, at the same boundary where the pincer closes. And swapping the controls for sentences that differ from the members in register moves a detector from 0.83 to 0.94 AUC, on a scale where 0.5 is a coin flip and 1.0 is perfect separation. We release the sentence banks, counts, and code.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10830
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The Truth Was Never Gone: Perfect Aliasing in Compliant-Context Truth Probes
2026-09-09 18:34:28Dylan JayabahuAbstract
A truth probe fitted where truthful reporting and a task's prescribed action coincide cannot distinguish those targets from its fitting labels alone. We call this failure of semantic identification perfect aliasing. In a controlled binary reporting game, truth and prescribed-action probes fitted on compliant contexts solve the same optimization. On rival contexts their labels are complements, forcing their AUROCs to sum to one; this identity holds across 751 cell-layer pairs to floating-point precision. We separate prescribed output symbols from semantic action using randomized codebooks, then separate truth from prescribed action by fitting on mixed compliant and rival contexts. For a reward-trained Gemma-2-9B policy that answers falsely on all evaluated rival trials, the conventional probe scores $0.006 \pm 0.005$ AUROC across three training seeds, while mixed-fit probes score $1.000$ on the same held-out activations. Mixed fitting uses more training examples and access to labelled rival contexts, so this comparison establishes linear recoverability rather than isolating the benefit of decorrelation. We also show that two compliant-fit probes, both perfect in-distribution, score $0.080$ and $0.986$ on the same rival activations. The findings concern what a probe measures: they do not establish preserved functional belief, causal use of the recovered direction, or a deployable deception detector. Code and aggregate results accompany the paper.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10739
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GANDR: Claim Auditing for Verifiable Legal Answer Generation
2026-09-09 15:08:09Chen Qian, Yimeng Wang, Yu Chen, Lingfei Wu, Andreas StathopoulosAbstract
In high-stakes domains such as legal practice, a language-model answer is only useful to the extent that a reader can verify each claim against the source the system cites. Current grounded-generation pipelines score the answer as a whole, so a correct conclusion can rest on fabricated or loosely matched citations and still score well. Closing this gap requires both a system built for per-claim verification and an evaluation that measures it. We introduce GANDR (Grounded ANswer DRafter), a two-agent system in which a Drafter writes an answer in a structured legal-reasoning format and a separate Critic, with the same view as a human verifier, audits each claim against its cited source and emits a per-claim audit trace on every round. We pair it with a strict correctness criterion requiring every citation to resolve to a passage the retriever returned. On a 185-item legal benchmark where all six systems share one backbone, one retrieval surface, and one citation instruction, GANDR ranks first on every primary metric, reaching 70.8% strict accuracy and leading the strongest baseline by 11.3 points (p<0.01). Reverting the protocol-anchored commit rule lowers strict accuracy by 22.7 points, and the strict lead stays positive on three further backbones, at +3.2 to +6.5 points. This lead traces to the Drafter configuration and the protocol-anchored commit, not to rewriting. Against two law-trained annotators the audit flags under-supported claims at F1 0.84 as a binary detector, while its four-way verdict labels agree only weakly and are advisory. Code is available upon request.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10293
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Multi-Robot Scanner for Automated Full-Body Dermoscopic Imaging
2026-09-09 13:41:37Valerio Franchi, Rafael Garcia, Nuno Gracias, Ricard Campos, Josep Quintana, Sandra Gonz\'alez-Vill\`a, Mark Ventura, Nuria Ferrera, Cl\'ement Lenoir, Josep MalvehyAbstract
This paper outlines the specifications and design approach used to construct a full body imaging scanner capable of capturing skin lesions at a dermatoscopic level using cameras mounted on the end-effectors of four UR10 manipulators. The system possesses a view-planning algorithm capable of appropriately selecting the best camera position to acquire images of moles, a high-level controller to allow the manipulators to work simultaneously and a collision-detector that halts the manipulators when they make contact with an object or a person. We evaluate the system through real-patient full-body scans, comparing acquired images against contact dermoscopy and an existing total-body photography system (Vectra) across clinically relevant lesion features, and quantify true optical resolving power using a USAF 1951 resolution target, yielding a smallest resolvable feature size of 22.1 microns for our scanner compared to 8.8 microns for contact dermoscopy. Results show the scanner consistently outperforms Vectra across most clinically relevant features and achieves comparable performance to contact dermoscopy for the majority of features assessed. By acquiring dermatoscopic-quality images automatically and without contact, and without requiring a separate manual dermoscopic examination, the scanner closes part of the gap between total-body photography and handheld dermoscopy, suggesting potential for future integration into screening workflows.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10169
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ScopeMamba-YOLO: Widening the Perceptual Scope Inward and Outward for Small Object Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery
2026-09-09 13:32:46Junjie Fan, Yijun Mai, Linduo Wei, Jiayu Rao, Junmin Bao, Qiushi Jin, Guijia Li, Yong QiAbstract
Small object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and remote sensing imagery requires preserving high-resolution detail while modeling long-range context. Adding a stride-4 detection level and removing the stride-32 stage benefits tiny targets but weakens peripheral spatial support, whereas directly inserting selective scanning into the main feature path can interfere with weak local cues. We propose ScopeMamba-YOLO, built around an off-path, zero-gated selective-scanning principle that decouples contextual modeling from the convolutional stream. The principle is instantiated by a Cascaded Global-Context Module (CGCM) in the backbone and a Selective-Scan PAN (SS-PAN) in the neck. An Adaptive Multi-scale Strip (AMS) Block reduces the cost of high-resolution feature extraction, while a Scale-Adaptive DFL (SA-DFL) head reallocates distributional support and regression capacity across scales with only 0.008M additional parameters. Controlled experiments show that matched main-path selective scanning reduces mAP50 by 0.98 pp, whereas off-path CGCM improves the final configuration by 0.67 pp over the three-seed no-CGCM mean; operator controls indicate that this gain is not explained by auxiliary branch capacity alone. ERF analysis further shows that the complete context pathway increases the peripheral energy ratio from 0.008 to 0.090 at stride 8. On VisDrone-2019, ScopeMamba-S achieves 50.8% mAP50 with 3.57M parameters, exceeding YOLOv8s by 10.8 pp while using 32% of its parameters; ScopeMamba-M reaches 52.6% mAP50 with 6.48M parameters. Consistent improvements are also observed on AI-TOD, especially for very-tiny and tiny objects.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10156
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Zero-Shot Temporal Localisation of Audio Deepfakes in Multi-Speaker Conversations
2026-09-09 11:27:26Soumyadeep RoyAbstract
Voice-cloning fraud increasingly relies on surgical injection: a genuine conversation in which only one or two sentences are replaced by synthetic speech. Utterance-level deepfake detectors emit a single real/fake label per clip and cannot report where the synthetic speech lies. We formalise this as Temporal Deepfake Localisation in Multi-Speaker Conversations (TDLMC), show that equal error rate and min-DCF are ill-posed once a file contains both classes, and propose temporal metrics for this regime. Our contribution is a training-free five-stage pipeline that wraps a frozen binary detector and adds segment-level output with no retraining, using a two-threshold hysteresis finitestate-machine decoder to turn noisy window scores into coherent intervals. On 180 constructed multi-speaker conversations from ASVspoof 5, the system attains temporal intersection-over-union 0.90, temporal detection rate 0.95, and MS-DCF 0.26 with a strong backbone, and its false-alarm rate on genuine speech is below 6%, falling under 2% on genuine real multi-speaker dialogue (AMI). Under an identical pipeline, a trained localiser improves temporal IoU by only about 0.04, bounding the cost of forgoing supervision. Evaluated across three frozen detectors under one decoder whose constants are selected on a held-out calibration split, and with a controlled analysis attributing the residual false-alarm rate to a backbone domain gap rather than to the decoder, this provides the first zero-shot baseline and a reusable benchmark for TDLMC.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10051
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