Multi-encoder fusion extends Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) beyond speech-centric recognition, but selecting encoders via intuition or exhaustive search often introduces redundant representations and inflates an already constrained compute budget. We propose CUES (Correlation-gUided Encoder Selection), a lightweight heuristic that estimates complementarity through task- and category-level Pearson correlations between encoders' performance profiles, scoring a candidate set from single-encoder evaluations alone--without fusion training during selection. Evaluated on the XARES-LLM benchmark with a frozen SmolLM2-135M backbone (LoRA-adapted) via five-fold cross-validation, CUES consistently identifies the same configuration per track from held-out development splits alone, without using test data for selection. For the broad Track~A suite, CUES selects a cross-family trio (Whisper-medium, mHuBERT-147, and Dasheng-base), achieving a 4.3% relative gain over Whisper-medium (0.771 vs. 0.739). For Track~B text generation, it re-anchors on a focused, speech-only pair (mHuBERT-147 and WavLM-base-plus) and actively abstains from adding a divergent encoder, outperforming mHuBERT-147 by 6.3% (0.589 vs. 0.554). Rather than a failure to scale, this divergence is consistent with a diversity--interference trade-off that CUES navigates per track from correlation signals alone: across the evaluated pool, added cross-family diversity tends toward an inverted-U on broad audio tasks but toward steady degradation on text generation, which favors a focused, speech-anchored set.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18041
Ensuring that multilingual language models generate coherent text in a specific target language is a major issue in multilingual language modeling. We develop an optimal control method for target-language text generation as well as a framework for evaluating the quality of generated text in terms of language adherence, linguistic coherence, and semantic coherence. We find that the proposed method performs at least as well as the prominent difference-in-means activation steering method for the majority of models tested, with substantially less hyperparameter tuning required.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16967
Gender bias in large vision-language models (LVLMs) undermines their fairness and reliability, compromising output trustworthiness. Current mitigation methods rely on training-phase adjustments or post-hoc calibration, but face limitations in dynamic visual bias mitigation. These include inability to capture real-time visual-textual incongruence, dependence on predefined gender bias taxonomies, and degraded cross-modal alignment with emergent bias patterns. To address these challenges, we propose ViD, a causally-inspired framework that analyzes attention mechanisms across five distinct patterns, revealing confounding effects from strong language priors. ViD demonstrates that visual-to-language cross-attention effectively suppresses bias while preserving general reasoning capabilities and text generation quality. ViD incorporates dual mechanisms: backdoor adjustment counters strong language priors, while refined token selection in decoding layers optimizes processing. This enhances model robustness and inference efficiency. Our integrated approach significantly mitigates gender bias across multidimensional social attributes in LVLMs, improving visual grounding and output fairness. Cross-benchmark validation shows ViD reduces gender bias by 14.7\% on single-attribute evaluations (FACET) and achieves significant improvements on image captioning tasks (MS COCO), with gender bias score improving from 0.6708 to 0.9978 for LLaVA. Crucially, these improvements require no additional training overhead, making ViD a scalable and practical solution for bias mitigation in LVLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16647
LLM-based sequential recommenders usually cast next-item prediction as text generation, but this interface is poorly matched to full-catalog top-K ranking. We propose TATK, a Triple-Aware framework that couples Top-K Learning (TKL) with Knowledge-Grounded Verification (KGV) for LLM-based sequential recommendation. Top-K Learning combines context-aware metadata-KG prompt grounding with position-aware top-K rewards, aligning training with ranking utility; Knowledge-Grounded Verification then applies structure-aware reranking over the top-M candidates after a single LLM forward pass, using the same metadata-derived item graph. We evaluate TATK on Musical Instruments, CDs and Vinyl, and Video Games from Amazon Reviews 2023 under a matched R2ec-style full-catalog protocol. Experiments use Gemma-2-2B-It and Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct backbones, compare against sequential, generative, KG-augmented, and reasoning-enhanced baselines, and include component, reward-shape, sequence-perturbation, reranking, relation-quality, and candidate-pool diagnostics. TATK improves over the matched R2ec reproduction on all 36 reported metrics. On NDCG@10, it improves Qwen by 8.05%, 4.26%, and 3.78% on the three datasets, and improves Gemma by 27.03%, 10.52%, and 10.23%, while keeping inference within 1.17x of Base RecPO latency. The diagnostics show that structural evidence is most useful for recoverable top-M candidates with reliable KG support, and should be gated when metadata relations are sparse or noisy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14565
Quantization is one of the default deployment paths for open-weight LLM agents, but it is not behavior-preserving: an adversary can release a full-precision checkpoint that passes audits yet misbehaves once quantized, termed as quantization-conditioned attack (QCA). Prior QCA work targets free-text generation, where harm is mediated by a human reader. In contrast, the agentic setting poses a more severe risk: the triggered payload is a structured function that can be executed without human oversight. We present the first study of QCA against LLM agents. We find that directly adapting prior backdoor-injection methods can produce malicious behavior after quantization, but substantially degrades benign utility, rendering the resulting attacks impractical. To understand the true upper bound of the threat, we propose AGENTQ, an attack framework that combines layer-banded LoRA injection with partial-PGD repair over a multi-codebook quantization-equivalence class. AGENTQ preserves normal agentic capability while concentrating malicious behavior in the quantized model. Across three trigger-action pairs and three codebooks (NF4, FP4, INT8), AGENTQ reaches up to 100% post-quantization attack success rate with minimal loss of benign utility, underscoring the need to make quantization-aware safety evaluation a standard requirement before open-weight agents are deployed.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14060
Text-based person search (TBPS) aims to retrieve images of a target person from a large image gallery based on a given natural language description. Most existing methods rely on supervised learning with manually annotated image-text pairs. In this paper, we explore unsupervised TBPS, with only unlabeled images. We propose GTR+, a two-stage generation-then-retrieval framework. In the generation stage, we introduce a tiered description generation framework designed to produce fine-grained and stylistically diverse textual descriptions through a three-tier sequential process. The base tier leverages an automated question-and-answer mechanism to generate basic visual attribute descriptions; the intermediate tier enhances fine-grained detail using an inter-sample contrastive mechanism; the advanced tier further enriches textual diversity via a stylized expansion mechanism. In the retrieval stage, to mitigate the impact of noisy pseudo texts, we develop an adaptive confidence-weighted retrieval learning framework. We model image-text pairs as clean or noisy using a Gaussian Mixture Model, calibrated by real-time image-text similarity and static text generation probability from the prior stage, yielding adaptive sample weights during training. Beyond that, we also contribute LargeFine-Person, a large-scale TBPS dataset with high-quality, fine-grained, and diverse textual annotations, enabling a practical and generalizable TBPS pre-training benchmark under unsupervised setting. Experiments on multiple TBPS benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of both GTR+ and LargeFine-Person. Code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12965
Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as a compelling paradigm for language modeling, offering the capability for efficient parallel text generation. However, existing parallel sampling methods typically update multiple masked tokens independently and ignore the complex mutual dependencies among the masked tokens. This independent updating mechanism lacks global coordination and might lead to incoherent outputs. To address this limitation, we propose Representation-based Masked Diffusion Model (RMDM), a framework that leverages the text representation to explicitly encode global semantics and help to parallel update tokens more precisely. Specifically, we first encode text into a continuous semantic space using a pretrained encoder and learn an invertible transformation that normalizes the representation distribution to a Gaussian prior, facilitating efficient sampling during generation. Conditioned on this latent semantic representation, we train a masked diffusion model to learn the conditional text distribution, where the representation serves as global semantic guidance to coordinate parallel token updates and faithfully approximate the target distribution. Empirical results demonstrate that RMDM significantly improves generation quality, particularly in aggressive few-step sampling regimes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12382
Low-resource multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) systems have expanded language coverage, but their robustness under complex text inputs remains insufficiently diagnosed. Existing evaluations mainly focus on naturalness, speaker similarity, and content consistency using regular test sentences, while providing limited insight into how multilingual TTS systems fail when handling challenging inputs such as numbers, dates, named entities, long sentences, code-switched expressions, and punctuation-related structures. This paper proposes a complex-text robustness diagnosis framework for low-resource multilingual TTS. We evaluate robustness from three dimensions: content consistency, language consistency, and generation stability. A multilingual robustness testing scheme is designed for Thai, Vietnamese, Swahili, and Indonesian, covering ordinary sentences and multiple types of complex text inputs. We further introduce automatic diagnostic metrics, including character error rate, language identification accuracy, and duration abnormal rate. To support input-level risk analysis before speech generation, we propose a lightweight Text Risk Score (TRS), which estimates synthesis risk from interpretable text features without manual annotation or model training. Experiments on three representative multilingual TTS systems, including OmniVoice, VoxCPM2, and MMS-TTS, show that complex text inputs expose systematic failure patterns that are not fully reflected by ordinary short-sentence evaluation. Different systems exhibit distinct vulnerabilities in number normalization, named entity handling, long-text generation, and code-switched input processing. Furthermore, TRS shows a positive correlation with content errors and duration abnormalities, demonstrating its usefulness as a low-cost pre-synthesis indicator for complex-text risk diagnosis in low-resource multilingual TTS.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11545
Background: To determine whether cross-lingual clinical annotation projection can be formulated as a text-preserving, document-level generative task that produces verifiable character-level annotations for multilingual clinical corpus construction, and to characterize its robustness and computational trade-offs relative to candidate-based projection pipelines. Methods: We developed a constrained LLM projection workflow that inserts entity tags directly into immutable target-language text, followed by deterministic validation and character-offset reconstruction. We evaluated it alongside supervised candidate-span projection and hybrid ML-LLM refinement for transferring Spanish Disease, Symptom, and Procedure annotations into six languages. Evaluation used MultiClinAI gold standard with strict span matching and character-overlap F1 Results: Direct LLM projection achieved the strongest and most consistent performance. GLM 5.2 obtained a mean Strict F1 of 0.9201 across 18 language-entity combinations, while locally deployable Gemma4:31B achieved 0.9133. The best LLM configuration improved Strict F1 over the previous state of the art in all 18 settings, by 0.0564-0.1512, yielding 55,416 grounded mentions with reconstructed offsets. Conclusions: Direct LLM-based projection enables high-quality multilingual clinical annotation transfer and provides a practical approach for extending clinical NLP resources to languages with fewer annotated datasets and language-specific tools. Combined with local inference and deterministic validation, it can substantially reduce expert time and cost for multilingual clinical corpus construction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11450
Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for open-ended text generation, yet their behaviour in low-resource languages remains poorly understood. In this work, we question how correct and reliable is the generation of multilingual LLMs when used for the task of story generation. We consider Urdu language as a representative low-resource language. We generate Urdu-Stories, a corpus of 93 stories generated using three contemporary LLMs (GPT-5.1, Qwen-3-Max, DeepSeek-3.1). We manually annotate the errors present in them under a nine-label linguistic, semantic, and cultural taxonomy. Our notable findings suggest that LLMs often make basic errors of grammar and semantics. The stories lack coherence, have unnatural repetition and show pervasive cultural shallowness. We further show using few-shot prompting that the cultural and context errors largely remain unresolved. Our findings highlight the limitations of current LLMs as a reliable source of content generation and information retrieval for low-resource languages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10758
Large language models (LLMs) are prone to hallucinating or misinterpreting facts, which impairs their usability in retrieval-augmented generation or data-to-text systems. We analyse how faithfulness of LLMs to provided context depends on how plausible they perceive the context to be (context-memory conflict). To better identify error patterns, we make use of the increased difficulty of non-English and low-resource language text generation and input data based on local knowledge, only partially captured in models' parametric knowledge. We let the models generate text in English, Czech, Slovak and Upper Sorbian from factual (FA), counterfactual (CFA) and fictional (FI) RDF triples containing local Czech and Slovak data. Contrary to our expectations, we observe only a weak context-memory conflict on the human-annotated sample. For Kimi K3 as an LLM judge, which agrees well with human annotations on the sample, counterfactual inputs receive only slightly lower faithfulness scores than factual ones (-0.05 on a 1-5 scale). We also find that a suboptimal choice of LLM judge would lead to overestimating the strength of the context-memory conflict.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09363
Large language models are transforming many industries with their text generation abilities. However, their outputs can be easily tampered with, creating serious risks in critical areas such as food safety reporting. To protect the integrity and traceability of AI-generated content, this paper introduces ToSS (Token Oriented Repartitioning and Strategic Selection), a reliable authentication method using adaptive dual watermarking. The key innovation of ToSS is its dual watermark encoding approach that divides vocabulary tokens into black and white sublists, enabling precise bit-level embedding of traceability information. Additionally, an entropy adaptive mechanism dynamically selects text regions with high prediction uncertainty for watermark insertion, maintaining text fluency and factual accuracy while ensuring reliable traceability. Experiments on multiple datasets, including food domain texts, demonstrate that ToSS achieves leading performance in both watermark capacity and decoding accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06708
Although professional workflows leverage large language models widely, the interpretation for auditing unconstrained free-text generation is usually intractable if such generation demands legal, operational or financial workflow. We hereby demonstrate a text based system called SerenAI - inspired by world-models, it is a state transition system that outputs verifiable predictions rather than merely text: Provided with a description of the environment, state, and actions, the generated output contains 4 items: causal deltas that causally effect the given state, a next state that can logically follow from the given state and action, a validity reward, and a termination signal. For the released proto-model, we employ 2 steps of adaptation training, namely parameter efficient fine-tuning followed by verifier based RL over 50,000 exampled cause and effects in 12 environments spanning 10 reasoning domains. Compared to an initial internal evaluation of an 8B open-weight baseline, SerenAI increased JSON validity from 85.0% to 93.2%, schema validity from 55.0% to 84.0%, exact structured-output match from 0.0% to 41.5%, causal-delta exact match from 0.0% to 41.5%, resulting-state exact match from 0.0% to 42.0%, reward exact match from 1.0% to 80.5%, and termination exact match from 38.0% to 81.5%. These support the narrower claim that verifier-compatible adaptation can improve structured transition prediction. They do not yet establish legal-grade reliability. Accordingly, the paper also specifies a validation protocol for evidence-grounded legal workflows, calibration, human oversight, and sovereign on-premise deployment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06647
Personalizing large language models (LLMs) requires aligning generation behavior with user-specific preferences rather than aggregate quality. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) provides a stable framework for preference learning, its effectiveness in personalized settings critically depends on how preference pairs are selected. Existing approaches typically rely on heuristic criteria, such as likelihood-based extremes, which decouple optimization from explicit user utility and can lead to degraded personalization. We formalize personalized preference learning as a geometry-aligned optimization problem by analyzing the first-order interaction between gradients of expected user utility and DPO update directions. Our analysis reveals that, under off-policy sampling, the DPO update transitions from a purely error-corrective signal to a reinforcement-like update when preference margins are directionally aligned with utility gradients. This perspective exposes pair selection as a geometric decision that governs whether preference optimization advances or hinders personalization. Motivated by this insight, we propose GAP-DPO (Geometry-Aligned Preference DPO), an iterative algorithm that performs utility-aware, geometry-aligned pair selection while controlling distribution shift via epoch-wise regeneration. Experiments on personalized text generation benchmarks show that GAP-DPO consistently improves stylistic fidelity, preference alignment, and generation quality compared to standard DPO variants. Together, our results establish gradient alignment as a unifying principle for personalized preference optimization and demonstrate that pair selection is an intrinsic component of the optimization geometry rather than a heuristic preprocessing step.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00061
Personalizing large language models (LLMs) is essential for delivering AI assistance that aligns with individual users' styles, intents, and preferences. While per-user fine-tuning can substantially enhance personalization quality, it introduces significant parameter and storage overhead, limiting scalability to large user populations. We propose PLUME (Personalized Low-Rank Adaptation through User Modulation and Shared Subspace), a lightweight framework that achieves efficient and expressive per-user adaptation by leveraging a shared task-specific subspace. Specifically, PLUME first learns a global task subspace from aggregated user data. Personalization is then achieved by training only a lightweight small square matrix within this subspace, enabling each user to obtain a tailored model while keeping shared components fixed. Cross-layer shared parameters and rank-1 residual terms are further introduced to significantly reduce redundancy while maintaining expressiveness. Experiments on multiple personalized text generation benchmarks demonstrate that PLUME achieves comparable or superior performance to strong baselines, while reducing per-user parameters by over 95%. These results establish shared-subspace modulation with minimal residuals as a scalable and semantically grounded approach to LLM personalization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04715
Medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) is often assumed to require medical fine-tuning, large models, or complex multi-agent pipelines. We revisit this assumption with \textbf{MedProb}, a lightweight probing framework that predicts multiple-choice Med-VQA answers from frozen VLM representations without free-text generation. Across PATH-VQA, SLAKE, and VQA-RAD, MedProb recovers substantially more answer-relevant signal than prompting and performs stronger than medical VLMs and agentic systems. Probing also reduces the apparent gap between small and large models compared to prompting, suggesting that smaller VLMs contain more recoverable Med-VQA signal than generation-based evaluation reveals. Across 14 matched general-purpose and medical VLM pairs, medical adaptation does not consistently improve this linear decodability. Finally, free-text generation exhibits an answer-position bias of up to 10 percentage points, whereas MedProb also has positional bias, however, it is impacted differently than prompting. Our main results target the multiple-choice/multiclass Med-VQA setting; we additionally show the probe can be extended to open-ended generation via a rejection-sampling scoring procedure.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04336
Large vision-language models have achieved remarkable success in vision-language tasks. However, they remain prone to Visual Hallucinations (VHs), undermining their reliability in real-world applications. Existing solutions typically require curated datasets, additional training, or multi-round decoding, resulting in considerable computational overhead. In this paper, we propose \textbf{RVSD} (\underline{R}etrieval \underline{V}ision \underline{S}parse \underline{D}ecoding), a training-free and plug-and-play decoding framework that, for the first time, unifies token sparsification and \textbf{Semantic-Space Visual Retrieval} (SSVR) within a single decoding pass. Within RVSD, we introduce a \textbf{semantics-directed token selection} strategy that selectively sparsifies redundant tokens while preserving critical visual information. We further propose the SSVR mechanism, which reformulates visual compensation as an on-demand cross-modal retrieval process within a shared semantic space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RVSD achieves state-of-the-art performance in mitigating VHs while maintaining robust suppression capabilities under long-context generation settings. Our code is available here.\footnote{this https URL}
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02731
Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent and coherent text that is increasingly difficult to distinguish from human writing, motivating the development of automatic AI-generated text detectors. However, the robustness of such detectors under adversarial generation remains uncertain. This paper presents SHADE (Stochastic Human-like generation via Adversarial Detector Evasion), a reinforcement learning framework that formulates detector evasion as a policy optimization problem. Instead of applying post-hoc perturbations or prompting-based rewriting, SHADE fine-tunes an instruction-tuned LLaMA model with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), using feedback from a surrogate detector based on the PAN 2025 mdok system. Our experiments show that full fine-tuning with a small KL regularization penalty achieves $98.5\%$ surrogate evasion, compared to $1.5\%$ for the base model, while LoRA-based adaptation is substantially less effective under regularization. Linguistic analysis reveals that successful evasion is associated with shorter, simpler, and less lexically diverse outputs, suggesting that high detector evasion does not necessarily correspond to more human-like writing. In the official Voight-Kampff competition setting, our submissions ranked sixth and seventh, indicating that optimization against a single surrogate detector only partially transfers to unseen evaluation classifiers. These results highlight both the potential and limitations of reinforcement learning for adversarial AI-text generation and motivate more robust, multi-detector evaluation protocols for AI-generated text detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22221
Referring multi-object tracking (RMOT) aims to track every instance in a video that matches a given language expression. Despite the recent integration of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to enhance generalization, existing methods predominantly relegate them to the role of caption generators, necessitating external modules for final decision-making. This paradigm not only introduces extra latency but also severely underutilizes the inherent vision-language alignment capabilities of MLLMs. To address these limitations, we propose YesTrack, a novel two-stage RMOT method that reformulates referring as a discriminative task, directly leveraging MLLMs for Yes/No verification without explicit text generation. To further enhance the reliability and efficiency of this MLLM-based verification, we introduce two lightweight temporal consistency constraints: Temporal Confidence Prior (TCP) and Temporal Reference Propagation (TRP). We further validate the generality of this discriminative paradigm by proposing YesTrack-MOT, a straightforward yet highly effective instantiation for generic multi-object tracking (MOT). Experiments on Refer-KITTI and Refer-KITTI-V2 show that YesTrack significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods while maintaining high efficiency, even when implemented with the smallest variant of Qwen3-VL. Code is released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02318
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to make decisions from visual inputs. We introduce FAIRLENS, a benchmark and evaluation framework for measuring both the fairness and the validity of VLM responses in three high-stakes domains: hiring, legal, and healthcare. FAIRLENS pairs real face images spanning gender, race, and age groups with closed- and open-ended questions, giving more than 100K image-question pairs per model, and evaluates responses from four complementary views: demographic parity over adverse outcome rates, soundness, demographic association over unsupported roles and statuses, and bias in free-text generation. Soundness is the central validity criterion: a response is sound when it follows the evidence stated in the question and abstains when the image cannot support an answer. Evaluating eight VLMs, we find that the primary failure is unwarranted inference rather than unequal treatment. Models routinely infer qualifications, threat, illness, or professional role from a face instead of abstaining, and the weakest model does so on 99% of the questions its input cannot answer. These failures are most severe in legal and healthcare, where recognizing insufficient evidence matters most, and disparity metrics alone would miss them: parity gaps are small in absolute terms, yet when baseline adverse rates are low the same gap means one demographic group receives adverse labels several times as often as another, and a small gap can equally reflect a model that treats every group unsafely. Bias in free-text responses is only loosely coupled to multiple-choice accuracy, so correct structured answers do not imply safe generation. FAIRLENS shows that fair high-stakes VLM behavior requires similar treatment across groups and refusal to infer high-stakes attributes from appearance, and its question suite transfers to any face corpus with demographic annotations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01691