Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to reduce performance degradation due to distribution shifts between training (source) and testing (target) datasets. However, owing to insufficient modeling of fine-grained features and limited instance-level alignment, existing approaches become less effective under complex environmental conditions, such as extreme weather conditions and object occlusion. We overcome these challenges by proposing JMT-YOLO, a novel joint multi-task learning framework for DAOD. JMT-YOLO is based on the Mean Teacher architecture. It introduces an auxiliary semantic segmentation task and a masking mechanism to enhance the modeling of foreground-background semantic boundaries in the target domain. Specifically, fine-grained feature degradation is reduced by introducing a multiscale context-aware segmentation head equipped with a dense connection structure to effectively capture local and global contextual features. A mask-consistency loss is formulated by applying random masking operations to target images, thereby guiding the network to learn structural context and improving instance-level feature alignment. Extensive experiments on three benchmark domain adaptation tasks (Pascal VOC to Clipart1k, Cityscapes to Foggy Cityscapes, and KITTI to Cityscapes) demonstrate that JMT-YOLO achieves detection performances of 46.9%, 57.3%, and 61.0%, respectively. These results demonstrate superior performance over existing state-of-the-art and baseline methods, thereby validating the effectiveness and generalization of JMT-YOLO.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12901
Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policies fail on memory tasks, behaviour that depends on events observed long before the current frame, because their training data is overwhelmingly Markov and mapping episodic memory directly to action chunks is hard. Yet the same policy, finetuned once to follow a privileged oracle's grounded-subgoal text, nearly solves these tasks: the difficulty lies entirely in mapping memory to a grounded symbolic subgoal. Existing work entrusts this stage to a single VLM that selects keyframes and reasons over raw frames, and falls far short of the oracle: key identities and dynamics are buried in noisy pixels, the reasoning spans hundreds of frames in an unbounded context, and hallucination corrupts the memory itself. We instead present GAMMA (Grounded multi-Agent Memory with Mechanical Audit), which builds the stage as a collaborating two-agent memory system: a detector tool (SAM-3) for spatial grounding, a VLM writer that distils each replan window into one grounded text line, an append-only text memory bank, and a VLM reasoner that reads the bank and emits the next grounded subgoal at the oracle's cadence, wrapped in a propose-verify harness that admits, defers, corrects, or rejects every agent claim against mechanical visual evidence, at training-corpus construction and at deployment alike. On a sixteen-task memory-manipulation suite GAMMA recovers a large fraction of the oracle ceiling with the policy held fixed, reaching the ceiling on several tasks, and transfers with unchanged contracts to a second benchmark.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12793
Unlearning in large reasoning models (LRMs) requires removing forget-set information from both the reasoning trace and the final answer. Existing approaches achieve this objective at the cost of reasoning collapse, where the model fails to produce a coherent chain-of-thought (CoT) and does not properly terminate its reasoning process. To address this challenge, we propose REDaCT (REgenerate via Detection and Corrective Tuning), an inference-time unlearning framework for LRMs. REDaCT consists of two key components: (1) a binary leak detector that identifies sentences in the reasoning trace that leak forget-set information, and (2) an embedding optimization module that learns a corrective embedding offline, such that when injected at the first detected leak during inference, it guides subsequent reasoning towards sentences that do not leak forget-set information. Experimental results show that REDaCT completely avoids reasoning collapse, substantially improving reasoning preservation compared to state-of-the-art unlearning methods while maintaining perfect answer forgetting and near-perfect CoT forgetting. Our code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12769
Very-high-resolution Earth-observation satellites acquire more data than they can store and downlink, while in maritime surveillance the vessels cover a tiny fraction of each scene. We study onboard vessel detection as a way to select what is downlinked, which reduces the data according to its content rather than coding every pixel; it is complementary to conventional onboard compression. The work follows three axes. (i) Data and algorithm: a controlled dataset is generated from 68 annotated Maxar scenes with 43 vessel classes, and a YOLOX-S detector is trained on it. (ii) Embedded deployment: the detector is quantized and deployed on the DPU of a Versal VC1902, with a limited loss of detection quality and a processing time of a few seconds per scene. (iii) Data reduction: we propose several downlink modes, from metadata only (box, class and score of each detection) to image crops around vessels, tiles holding detections, or the whole scene with a degraded background, and estimate from the measured detection errors the trade-off each offers between the vessels kept and the volume downlinked. On our dense harbor and coastal scenes, tiles keep 98% of the vessels with 29% of the scene volume, and crops 83% with 3%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12182
A login screen that appears after a tap on Sign in is expected; the same screen after a tap on View order is an attack. For GUI agents, safety is therefore a property of the transition rather than of the screen, and a monitor that inspects only screens can be defeated by reusing a legitimate one. Judging a transition requires an expectation of what should have followed the action. Existing GUI world models provide one, but they output it as text, code, or images, so checking it against the observed screen requires a second model to judge the two. We argue that a world model meant for verification should instead predict in the space in which observations are encoded, and present LGWM, a decoder-free, action-conditioned world model that predicts the representation of the next screen directly, trained without semantic annotation on 1.85M real GUI transitions. Verification reduces to a vector comparison, and the same signal reveals whether a mismatch is harmful. We evaluate on RSWT-BENCH, a diagnostic where each credential screen appears under both a legitimate and a hijacked transition, so detectors that see only the screen are at chance by construction. The training-free score reaches 0.987 AUC at 17 ms per decision, on par with the strongest closed-source VLMs and about ten AUC points above generative GUI world models at over three orders of magnitude lower latency. The residual direction reaches 0.953 AUC at separating harmful from benign violations, where prompted VLMs are near chance. Further analyses show that the prediction is a usable future state rather than an anomaly score. World models have mostly served as simulators or planners; our results point to a third role, verification, for which predicting in representation space is the natural design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11942
Generative models can now synthesize highly realistic images, simultaneously increasing the risks of misinformation and visual forgery. Therefore, detecting AI-generated images becomes more essential, and a reliable detector must generalize to unseen generators and stay robust to unseen perturbations in the wild. Existing detectors are typically trained on either independently collected real and generated images or aligned real-generated pairs designed to mitigate content bias. Building on aligned pairs, recent methods form a mixed view by replacing some patches of the real image with their generated counterparts. However, we find that self-attention lets real and generated patches interact, so the feature of each patch no longer reflects its own source alone. This contextual shift makes a per-patch source label an imprecise target. To this end, we propose Relative Patch Response Learning (PRL). Instead of labeling each patch, PRL compares the same patch across two mixed views of an aligned pair and learns from its patch response, the change of its score between the views. (i) To give precise supervision under the contextual shift, a relative response objective measures the responses of source-changed patches against those of source-unchanged patches, which respond to the shift alone. (ii) To provide a reliable reference for the shift, a reference coherence objective keeps each group of source-unchanged patches moving as a whole. (iii) Since the two views contain different amounts of generated content, an area ranking objective asks the view with the larger generated area to have a higher mean patch score. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of PRL, which surpasses the best prior methods by 4.3% and 5.9% in average balanced accuracy across eight standard and three in-the-wild benchmarks, respectively.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11876
Journals and conferences have begun to screen submitted manuscripts for text written using large language models (LLMs). The reliability of this screening rests on benchmark evaluations against a fixed set of LLM versions, while the versions in actual use keep changing. Here we quantify how this LLM turnover affects the screening of scientific manuscripts. We paired 4,000 pre-ChatGPT abstracts from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with their rewrites by 23 LLM versions from three vendors, released between June 2023 and August 2026. We then trained detectors under maintenance scenarios ranging from a detector retrained on every new version to one trained once and never updated. Detectors trained only on a vendor's past versions can collapse at the boundaries between model generations: calibrated to falsely flag 1% of human-written abstracts, they catch above 99% of rewrites just before the sharpest boundary and 3.8% just after it. Detectors trained on later versions can also miss rewrites of earlier ones. Vocabulary differences between versions largely track where detection transfers and where it fails. In the two screening scenarios we simulated, screens covering all 23 versions either flagged one in eight human-written abstracts or missed one in three rewrites of the newest version. Indeed, a commercial detector missed most rewrites of the version just after the sharpest boundary while flagging almost no human-written abstracts. Research-integrity policy should therefore treat the benchmark accuracy of a detector as provisional, to be re-verified with every LLM release, including earlier versions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11599
Reliable and practical audio-visual DeepFake detection requires benchmarks that reflect diverse linguistic contexts and modern data synthesis pipelines for visual as well as audio manipulations. However, existing datasets predominantly contain footage of English-speakers, often include outdated manipulation types, or overlook the audio modality. Further, many datasets feature individuals who did not consent to be used in DeepFake creation. We introduce BabelFake, a multilingual audio-visual DeepFake benchmark recorded with consenting participants. BabelFake contains 399k clips (1,323 hours) from 496 individuals spanning five languages (English, German, Italian, French, Spanish). Our modular data generation pipeline pairs 11 modern video manipulation methods with 4 voice cloning engines, distinguishing visual-only (face swapping) and joint audio-visual manipulations (lip synchronization and portrait animation). By benchmarking state-of-the-art detectors, we show that detection difficulty depends on the audio-visual generation pairing, with substantial performance degradation when authentic audio is preserved. Cross-language/demographic evaluation reveals sensitivity varying across detector architectures and training data, while human evaluation reveals that perceived realism and machine-detection difficulty do not necessarily align.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06339
We changed the agent: did it actually get better? Every self-improving agent loop answers this hundreds of times, and every answer comes from a verifier. On open-ended tasks none exists, so the loop is handed a hand-written rubric or a bare LLM judge grading output from a model like itself, inviting reward hacking and shared blind spots. We make the verifier the evolving object: an inspectable expression over small, mostly deterministic drawback detectors, synthesized from clustered failures, gated at birth, and selected for agreement with a ten-item anchored reference set plus consensus over unlabeled outputs, never for the agent's score. On MBPP+ it gains +0.21 held-out agreement over the hand-authored seed composition, on every seed, and ends ahead of the bare LLM judge it contains. One finding should change how co-evolved verifiers are validated: removing the anchor guards collapses the verifier into a vacuous always-pass grader, yet that collapsed verifier trains skills just as well. Downstream task score cannot certify a self-evolved verifier. Score does answer sufficiency, and there an evolved verifier can substitute: Double Ratchet, pairing the verifier with a lifecycle-managed skill loop, retains 88-110% of the lift that ground truth or a rubric buys the same loop, across code generation, enterprise text-to-SQL, and reference-free report generation. When evolved skills gamed the report rubric, an outer judge caught it and one added detector repaired it; the judge itself was wrong until given the task contract.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11464
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, while capable of producing highly fluent outputs, remain vulnerable to hallucinations, which are translations that are natural yet semantically unrelated to the source. This vulnerability is acute in low-resource settings like Sinhala-to-English, where weak cross-lingual alignment leads to hallucinations. This paper introduces a framework for reference-free hallucination detection in this language pair. We present a 45,000-sample synthetic dataset generated through a probabilistic chain of five linguistically motivated corruption strategies, with a semantic rescue mechanism that uses character-level similarity to distinguish hallucinations from morphological variants. We fine-tune mDeBERTa-v3 for token-level sequence labelling, reaching a token-level F1 of 0.841 +/- 0.001 over three seeds on a source-disjoint test set, and study a three-signal ensemble integrating neural risk scores, sequence log-probabilities, and cross-lingual semantic embeddings (LaBSE). A source-ablation control shows that the detector relies on the Sinhala source rather than on surface artefacts of the corruption process: shuffling or removing the source reduces sentence-level AUROC from 0.970 to chance. We benchmark eight NMT systems spanning five model families and find that detector firings vary by an order of magnitude across architectures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11389
AI-generated image detectors are commonly trained on fixed generator domains and become difficult to maintain as new generative models emerge. Continual adaptation is challenging because replaying historical generated images is costly, whereas updating shared parameters with limited current-domain data can overwrite prior forensic knowledge. We propose EvoKnow, a replay-free framework that formulates continual AI-generated image detection as forensic knowledge evolution. EvoKnow preserves a shared forensic basis learned from base domains, incrementally adds isolated residual experts for complementary generator-relevant evidence, and retrieves expertise through an Analytical Incremental Router (AIR) updated in closed form from current-stage generated images and accumulated sufficient statistics. Experiments demonstrate effective cross-generator generalization, few-shot expansion, and long-horizon continual adaptation. With ten generated images per arriving generator, EvoKnow achieves 96.70% average accuracy on non-base GenImage generators and 94.48% accuracy on Chameleon without target-benchmark adaptation. Under a strict replay-free continual learning protocol, EvoKnow achieves state-of-the-art continual learning performance, attaining 96.32% mean stage-wise accuracy and 4.32% average forgetting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11381
Advances in image generation have made visual authenticity increasingly difficult to assess. Although image forensics now examines both generation artifacts and higher-level visual inconsistencies, a plausible image can still contradict real-world facts or rules. We introduce WorldFact-Bench to evaluate image-world consistency from a single image, without a predefined claim or verification target. The benchmark contains 1,274 source-aligned real-fake pairs across four verification regimes and ten semantic domains. Each pair introduces a specific, evidence-supported factual conflict while seeking to preserve non-target content and visual plausibility. Images are evaluated independently, and pair accuracy requires both members of a pair to be classified correctly. We further propose PERSIST-Agent, which organizes iterative verification around a persistent state linking candidate facts, visual observations, evidence, and verification statuses. This state guides subsequent inspection and retrieval while retaining unresolved candidates. With backbone weights fixed, harness self-optimization refines the agent's prompts and execution rules through validation feedback. Experiments reveal strong label biases in several detectors and uneven gains from retrieval. On the evaluated 8B backbones, PERSIST-Agent improves pair accuracy over both direct judgment and retrieval-augmented baselines, while ablations support the role of persistent verification state. These findings highlight the value of state-guided verification and the remaining gap between visual plausibility and factual correctness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11184
Presupposing the boundaries of bias is itself a form of bias. We study closed-loop bias governance for Dutch government documents, where a system must detect biased language, ground decisions in legal and contextual evidence, rewrite problematic sentences when intervention is warranted, and verify that the rewrite mitigates harm without distorting meaning. Existing methods face three challenges: (i) discriminative classifiers capture surface regularities but lack normative grounding; (ii) zero-shot LLMs often adopt generic viewpoints and over-flag ambiguous administrative language; and (iii) fixed taxonomies inherit the Closed-World Assumption, missing emerging local targets. We propose MARS-Gov, a standpoint-aware multi-agent framework that combines legal retrieval, open-set target screening, specialized jurors, conservative routing, and rewrite verification. When screening finds an uncovered group, MARS-Gov instantiates a dynamic "10th juror" to deliberate outside the fixed panel. On DGDB, MARS-Gov sets a new SOTA with 0.880 F1, outperforming the strongest zero-shot LLM detector by 20.2 points (29.8% relative) and the best supervised Dutch encoder by 6.8 points, while reducing unnecessary interventions to 2.5%. Leave-One-Category-Out (LOCO) evaluation recovers held-out categories with 85.1% Correct@1 and 93.8% Correct@3.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11136
Multimodal classification processes and relates information from multiple modalities to achieve more accurate predictions. However, existing methods typically rely on high-quality ground-truth labels, which are difficult to obtain in real-world scenarios. While sample-selection methods for learning with noisy labels aim to identify correctly labeled examples from noisy data, traditional methods primarily focus on unimodal settings and fail to exploit multimodal information fully. This motivates us to build a more reliable noise detector in multimodal learning. To this end, we theoretically analyze the relationship between representation structure and noise detection capability. Based on this analysis, we propose REFINE, which is a multimodal label-noise detection framework that jointly uses fused and unimodal representations for label-noise detection. Specifically, REFINE constructs discriminative eigenvectors through discriminative analysis of the target and background classes and selects trusted representation spaces with better noise detection capability for each class. Within each trusted space, REFINE measures the alignment between each instance representation and the discriminative eigenvectors. It then combines the subsets selected from these spaces. The combined set provides cleaner supervision for updating the multimodal classifier, thereby reducing the influence of mislabeled examples during training and improving model generalization. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate REFINE's superiority compared to baseline methods. The source code will be publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11057
Audio deepfake detectors remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations that suppress the acoustic cues used for detection, allowing manipulated utterances to evade the detector. Although existing defenses can improve robustness, they require retraining the detector or introduce additional distortion. Diffusion-based purification instead leaves the pretrained detector unchanged, but existing methods use the same purification strength for all inputs, creating a trade-off between removing adversarial perturbations and preserving the subtle spoofing cues needed for detection. In this paper, we propose Detection-Guided Adaptive Purification (DGAP), a diffusion-based defense that adjusts purification strength per input. Building on the observation that a light purification perturbs the detector score of an adversarial input far more than that of a benign one, the framework uses the resulting score shift as a reference-free indicator of adversarial manipulation. Inputs with small shifts are passed unchanged, whereas flagged inputs undergo stronger purification before final detection. We evaluate the framework against three adversarial attack settings across three deepfake detectors, and compare it with nine existing defenses. Our results show that DGAP achieves the best defense performance across all detectors while leaving benign inputs nearly unaffected, and remains effective under the defense-aware adaptive attack.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10752
Adversarial perturbations can alter the predictions of frozen vision-language models (VLMs) while leaving their confidence and image--text similarity patterns seemingly plausible. We investigate whether we can identify adversarial inputs based on the broader way an image interacts with a collection of general semantic prompts. Our detector summarizes these responses using category-level statistics, relationships among prompts, deviations from clean reference distributions, and stability under weak image transformations, producing a compact response profile that is classified by a lightweight model while the VLM remains fixed. We evaluate the approach on multiple public image datasets, several CLIP-style visual backbones, and a range of gradient-based, optimization-based, automated, and spatial attacks. The detector achieves strong discrimination in attack-specific settings and retains substantial performance when evaluated on attacks not seen during training. Under a controlled detector-specific protocol, the response-profile representation outperforms the evaluated embedding-geometry baselines. Additional analyses show that the feature groups provide complementary information and that the method remains effective under variations in the prompt configuration. We also examine inference cost and performance against detector-aware adaptive attacks. Overall, the results indicate that response patterns across semantic prompts provide a useful complementary signal for adversarial image detection in frozen VLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10436
Adversarial example detectors are often tied to the classifier backbone they were trained on, limiting reuse when the protected model is replaced or upgraded. Directly transferring such detectors across backbones is challenging because different networks generally produce incompatible internal representations. We propose GraphRectify, a graph-based framework for transferring adversarial image detectors across classifier backbones. GraphRectify learns a structured representation of intermediate classifier features and adapts representations from a new backbone to the detector learned on the original model, enabling detector reuse. We evaluate GraphRectify across multiple datasets, backbone architectures, and adversarial attacks, including detector-aware adaptive attacks that jointly target the classifier and detector. Across the complete evaluation matrix, GraphRectify achieves higher aggregate ROC-AUC than training a detector from scratch on the new backbone and the evaluated transfer ablations. The gains are particularly strong for transfers between different backbone families and when sufficient data are available. In contrast, training from scratch remains competitive in the most data-limited settings. These results show that adversarial detection knowledge can transfer effectively across heterogeneous classifier architectures rather than being relearned whenever the protected backbone changes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10423
Monitoring the chain-of-thought of reasoning artificial intelligence (AI) models remains a key approach to detecting deception and other forms of misbehavior in such models. However, semantic chain-of-thought monitoring depends on reasoning traces being legible and sufficiently faithful to the underlying computations that produced the model's behavior, not to mention accessible. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that chain-of-thought outputs may soon become illegible or unfaithful, if they even remain accessible. Based on cognitive load theory, we investigate a lower-bandwidth signal -- the number of reasoning tokens generated -- which does not require access to the content of the reasoning trace. Three reasoning-capable large language models answered 210 multiple-choice questions -- across analytic, descriptive, and normative reasoning types as well as moral and non-moral domains -- under system prompts instructing them to respond truthfully, falsely, or without regard for truth. Across all three models, truth-directed responding elicited fewer reasoning tokens than both lie-directed and truth-indifferent responding. These findings show that explicitly prompted untruthful response policies can produce robust group-level differences in test-time reasoning-token use. While not yet establishing reasoning-token count as a detector of spontaneous deception or general misalignment, our results are a proof of concept that it can serve as a simple, content-independent candidate signal for differentiating untruthful from truthful model behavior when raw reasoning traces are unavailable or unreliable. Future work should test instance-level detection rates, out-of-distribution generalization, learned deceptive policies, hidden objectives, and robustness under adversarial pressure.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10405
Previous speech deepfake detectors can adaptively capture spectro-temporal dependencies through graph attention, yet they largely overlook the co-variation between spectral and temporal representations. To address this gap, we construct a normalized affinity graph from their joint covariance and apply polynomial graph filtering to capture higher-order covariance-induced dependencies. We first develop Cov-ST to isolate the contribution of covariance-based relational modeling. Although it improves detection performance, its sensitivity to the polynomial order suggests limited robustness when covariance relations are modeled alone. We therefore propose DuRe-ST, which jointly exploits covariance-induced and graph-attention-induced relations to capture complementary second-order co-variation and adaptive spectro-temporal dependencies. Experiments show that DuRe-ST achieves an average relative EER reduction of 25.9% over XLSR-AASIST on the ASVspoof benchmarks and 28.4% across four cross-dataset benchmarks with only 4-8k additional trainable back-end parameters. It further outperforms the strongest publicly available comparison models by 2.2-13.2% in relative EER on four benchmarks, while remaining smaller than the publicly available models considered.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10121
Collaborative perception extends the sensing range of autonomous vehicles, but its performance degrades when shared features arrive stale or incomplete. Most latency-robust methods compensate delayed collaborator features through flow-guided alignment or direct feature transport. In this work, we formulate asynchronous collaborative perception as temporal residual prediction. Our Temporal Residual Bottleneck keeps a deterministic pose-warped collaborator feature as a conservative anchor and uses a $\Delta t$-conditioned xLSTM to extract residual temporal evidence from the available history. A detector-facing residual bottleneck then applies only gated, regularized corrections before ego-side fusion, reducing the risk of overwriting reliable static structure when temporal correspondence is uncertain. Experiments on DAIR-V2X and OPV2V show that our method is especially effective under severe fixed/irregular delays and packet drops. On DAIR-V2X, the reported checkpoint trades a small amount of synchronized peak accuracy for better robustness under stronger communication degradation. Controlled diagnostics further indicate that direct feature transport has oracle headroom but can become unreliable when deployed without accurate correspondence. These results support temporal residual fusion as a practical alternative for asynchronous and incomplete collaborative perception. Code will be publicly released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10090