Blind Spots

Despite their high accuracy on point-wise metrics, machine learning weather forecasting models can exhibit different failure modes such as blurring, periodic irregularities, and other unphysical spatial artifacts. This has motivated a variety of metrics to detect known failure cases. Existing metrics fix a representation or transformation in advance, and that choice limits the artifacts they can detect. We propose to train a discriminator for separating reference data from the model's output, and using its output logit to obtain a divergence-like realism score. The discriminator learns whatever separates the model's fields from real weather, adapting to whichever failure mode that model exhibits. We compare our learned atmospheric critic to existing metrics using various synthetic corruptions applied to ERA5 reanalysis data. Our method successfully identifies the corruptions and ranks their severity, while existing metrics fail on at least one corruption. Additionally, we evaluate forecasts from real weather models, and find that the realism score degrades with longer lead times and the metric generally assigns higher realism to numerical models than to machine learning models.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate over long-horizon interactions involving tool use, persistent state, evolving authorization, and external environment feedback. In such settings, safety failures may emerge only after multiple turns, yet existing evaluations often reduce agent behavior to task or attack success, obscuring whether an agent acts, refuses, or remains appropriately calibrated as the interaction evolves. We introduce Blindspot, a benchmark for trajectory-level safety calibration of long-horizon tool-using agents. Blindspot evaluates complete user-agent-environment trajectories through adaptive adversarial interaction, stateful tool execution, and execution-grounded adjudication. Its current instantiation contains 22 attack families and 35 scenarios across seven domains, yielding more than 2,500 long-horizon trajectories with an average interaction length of 14.7 turns. Each trajectory is assigned one of five outcomes: Safe Completion, Correct Refusal, Unsafe Completion, Over-Refusal, or Indeterminate. Unlike fixed attack datasets, Blindspot is an extensible live-simulation framework in which attacks, scenarios, tools, policies, domains, and agent configurations can be added without redesigning the evaluation pipeline. We evaluate 13 proprietary and open-weight LLMs using eight metrics covering unsafe completion, appropriate refusal, benign utility, over-refusal, repeated-run robustness, and post-refusal failure. Preliminary results reveal substantial differences in safety-utility calibration across models and show that failures can emerge only after several initially safe interaction steps. These findings motivate treating agent safety as a trajectory-level property rather than a single-turn or binary success criterion.

Generative AI (GenAI) tools are increasingly woven into how blind and low-vision (BLV) people communicate, not only with digital information, but with the physical world and with other people. Tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Be My AI, and Seeing AI translate visual and textual content into accessible form, and are beginning to substitute for interpersonal requests for help, such as asking a family member to read a label or describe a scene. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 19 BLV participants, we examine GenAI as a communication intermediary and how it succeeds and fails as an alternative for reading, describing, and even asking another person for help. We also investigated what BLV users gain and risk when these tools take over that role. We conclude with design and policy implications for GenAI systems that communicate uncertainty honestly, protect information, and support BLV users' independence rather than substitute for it unsafely.

Instruction-guided image editing has a training-time blind spot. Generative editors are never required to semantically verify whether their outputs actually satisfy the instruction. Supervision stops at reconstruction and input textual-level conditioning. This produces incomplete edits, spatial spillover, and poor localization. We present IABEdit, a model-agnostic framework that embeds differentiable semantic verification into training. A frozen vision-language model extracts spatially-aware descriptors from the ground-truth edit. A trainable aligner then reproduces them from the generated output. The residual between the two becomes a gradient that teaches the generator both what to edit and where, with no inference-time VLM cost. IABEdit is compatible with diverse backbones, including U-Net (Stable Diffusion) and MMDiT (FLUX), without altering their inference pipelines. On MagicBrush, it improves structural fidelity by +3.49 DINO-I over the best diffusion baseline and +1.26 over the best overall baseline, while remaining competitive on instruction alignment. It also achieves state-of-the-art instruction adherence performance on RealEdit and EMU Edit benchmarks based on embedding-based metrics. Most consequentially, on the D-LORD surveillance benchmark, it surpasses the proprietary Gemini agent by +5.13 DINO-P under heavy occlusion, where preserving identity is hardest. This shows that gradient-aligned VLM distillation holds up under real-world-like surveillance and occlusion conditions. Human and GPT-4o evaluations confirm perceptually precise, well-localized edits.

An OpenReview bug in November 2025 broke anonymity at several conferences and prompted calls for open review, which motivate us to ask what shifting from blind to open would mean for authors. Analyzing over 18,000 reviewed submissions to ICLR 2026, split into de facto open and blind groups by arXiv preprint timing, we find that ratings rise with author reputation under both mechanisms, with a steeper slope under open review that is statistically significant, and that the open-blind difference is concentrated at the borderline ratings. The pattern holds across five reputation proxies (including institution, h-index, and citation count), three author-aggregation rules, and five definitions of the open window. A controlled simulation with five AI models as reviewers, holding the manuscript fixed and varying the author reputation, reproduces the effect. With claude-opus-5 as the reviewer, for example, rating rises by 0.5 points as the author moves from low to high reputation.

Hallucinations can undermine clinician trust in LLMs, making it important that evaluation methods capture clinically relevant errors. Rubric-based evaluation has become the leading approach for assessing LLMs in medicine, but it is unclear whether rubric scores reflect such errors. We first study this in a controlled setting using MedHallu, finding that more specific rubrics better distinguish correct from hallucinated responses. To test this systematically, we develop a taxonomy of medical hallucination types and a clinician-validated error-injection pipeline that creates matched correct and error-injected responses. Across HealthBench, HealthBench Professional, and LiveMedBench, our clinically relevant hallucinations are missed by rubrics, often leaving scores unchanged. We find that rubrics are most effective when explicitly checking facts, and are less effective for additional or unexpected errors they do not anticipate. A preliminary retrieval-based factuality check recovers some of the rubric-blind errors, suggesting a complementary approach. These findings reveal systematic blind spots in current medical evaluation of LLMs and suggest that rubric scores alone are insufficient to establish clinical reliability, potentially undermining clinician trust and confidence in clinical deployment.

Blinded physician evaluation has been considered by many to be the gold standard for assessing clinical reasoning in large language models (LLMs). This is difficult to scale; thus, prior studies typically rely on small physician panels, often from a single institution or specialty, which both limits the scientific questions investigated and makes it unclear whether findings would be reproduced with a different set of evaluators. To more rigorously and scalably study clinical reasoning in AI models, here we introduce PrecepTron, an LLM fine-tuned for physician-level evaluation of open-ended responses. PrecepTron was trained using low-rank adaptation (LoRA) of a 32-billion-parameter model on a small number of physician examples. We also release GRAND-ROUNDS, a new large-scale physician-annotated benchmark of 9,217 scores by 11 physicians across seven studies. We show that frontier LLMs in typical "LLM-as-a-judge" approaches often disagree with physicians and with each other, but fine-tuning PrecepTron on a small number of cases enables physician-level consistent scoring across tasks. We use PrecepTron to reproduce headline findings from five influential studies assessing LLMs for clinical care in JAMA, Science, and Nature Medicine without new human grading. Using PrecepTron, we then pose new questions about how LLMs reason in medicine that would have been infeasible with human grading alone, including measuring the diagnostic accuracy of frontier LLMs when clinical cases are provided piecemeal, even token by token. Together, PrecepTron and GRAND-ROUNDS provide a foundation for reproducible, large-scale study of how LLMs reason in medicine. All code, data, and labels are made freely available for researchers.

Video large language models (Video-LLMs) are increasingly used as the perceptual front end of world models, a role that assumes they can read motion: how fast something moves, which way it travels, how hard it is pushed. We show they cannot. A Video-LLM can watch two clips of the same person in the same room, name every object in both, and still fail to say which clip moves faster. We introduce MotionBlind, a contrastive benchmark of self-recorded video for physically grounded motion(speed, magnitude, and direction), the variables a world model must predict. Each instance is a pair of near-identical clips that differ only in motion. Each clip carries two complementary yes/no questions, giving four items per instance, and a model earns credit only if all four are correct. We report Instance Accuracy(IAcc), which has a 6.25% chance floor. Single-frame, appearance, and language-only shortcuts all collapse to it. MotionBlind complements the recent TimeBlind benchmark. We run a controlled study of six open and two frontier Video-LLMs, varying whether the video is present, whether frames are shown in the correct temporal order, and how frames are sampled (1 to 24 frames, four selection strategies). Open models sit near the 6.25% floor, and scale does not help. Removing the video drops every model to zero IAcc, and shuffling frames collapses IAcc to chance, so the task genuinely needs video in order. Neither more frames nor smarter frame selection closes the gap, because these change which frames are seen, not whether motion is read. Only Gemini3.1 Pro clears the benchmark overall, and even it fails on speed. A frontend that cannot tell two speeds of the same action apart is not yet a trustworthy source of supervision, reward, or evaluation for a world model.

Images are important tools in various sciences. Despite the development of photo-taking tools, creating clear and image without noise remains challenging in practice. In particular, Poisson noise has an effect on medical and astronomical images, and reduces their quality. Additionally, blur is another factor that has an effect on image quality. The problem of image restoration becomes very complicated when we have no information about the Point Spread Function (PSF). These types of problems are known as blind case. However, in some images, such as some astronomical images, the type of PSF can be specified, and these types of problems are known as nonblind problems. Total Variation (TV) is a widely used method for solving such inverse problems, where the selection of the penalty function is the most critical factor that affects the method's performance. In this paper, to improve edge preservation, we employ a reweighted $\ell_1$-regularization of the fractional order derivative. Furthermore, we propose a nonblind and blind image deblurring approach under Poisson noise using the Minimax Concave Penalty (MCP), which is a continuous, sparsity promoting, and nearly unbiased regularizer. This formulation leads to a nonconvex optimization model. To solve the proposed model, we introduce an efficient numerical algorithm based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and provide an analysis of its convergence. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm are demonstrated through extensive experiments on various images.

Noisy annotations pose a significant challenge for supervised deep learning, as neural networks rely on large-scale, high-quality labeled data whose corruption can severely impair model performance. Although robustness to label noise has been extensively studied for classification tasks, it remains relatively underexplored in Pose Estimation (PE). This limitation becomes critical in clinical contexts, including neonatology, where PE of preterm infants is used to support the assessment of spontaneous motility, a key indicator of neurodevelopmental trajectories. In such settings, infants' images labeling is further hindered by visual challenges (e.g., keypoint self-occlusions, caregiver interference), making the annotation process inherently susceptible to errors. To tackle noisy annotations in PE, we introduce REliable keypoint selection via Memory of traINing Dynamics (REMIND), a clustering-based keypoint-selection strategy that exploits keypoint-wise training dynamics to identify noisy labels without assuming any prior knowledge of the noise distribution, thus enabling noise-free model training. When evaluated on the proprietary NeoPose dataset, comprising 46 videos of 46 preterm infants recorded in real clinical settings, REMIND correctly identifies noisy annotations across multiple corruption scenarios, achieving up to 93% Area Under the Curve (AUC) with three different PE architectures used in the relevant literature. To our knowledge, this is the first study to explicitly address label noise in preterm infants' PE, paving the way for the design of trustworthy learning-based algorithms for infants'monitoring support when data quality cannot be guaranteed.

Inference cascades cut cost by answering most queries with a cheap model and escalating a hard tail to a frontier model that acts as verifier. A natural extension closes the loop: fine-tune the cheap student on the verifier's rejections so the escalation rate, and cost, fall each round. We measure this loop on real LLMs and report four findings. First, the verifier's blind spot, the fraction of the student's wrong answers it accepts, is large and moves adversarially: it grows with student capability ($β$ from 0.12 to 0.55 as the student scales 0.5B to 32B) and shrinks with verifier capability, so it is worst in the cheap-student, cheap-verifier regime cascades exist to create. Second, buying it away returns the saving: a frontier verifier drives $β$ to about 0.05 but then escalates on 46% of hard-MATH queries against a 39% true error rate, paying the frontier price on nearly half of all traffic. Third, naive corrective fine-tuning on the verifier-rejected tail does not improve the small student but degrades and ultimately collapses it, across every teacher we tried (cross-family and same-family), so at this scale the self-improving loop is self-defeating. Fourth, through all of this the cascade's own dashboard, every metric computed through the verifier, reads a flat 3% error while true delivered error swings up to 32%: the system is blind to its own degradation by construction. We then give the theory that explains the blindness, a two-population conservation law, $ε_\infty \lesssim q_0 β_0$, under which every in-loop metric improves while true quality does not, and a synthetic study that validates the mechanism. The practical conclusion: the reliability of a self-improving cascade cannot be read from any metric computed through its own verifier.

Computer-use agents are emerging as a paradigm for agentic human-AI interaction, combining language reasoning with multi-modal interface grounding to operate GUIs. Yet their effectiveness for blind screen-reader users in real-world desktop workflows remains unclear. We present a three-week diary study with 8 blind users using OLLA, a screen-reader-accessible CUA prototype, collecting 1,258 commands across 12 applications with screenshots, UI trees, model responses, and action traces. We evaluate GPT-5 during deployment and re-execute the same commands with four additional models. GPT-5 achieved the highest success rate at 52.5%. Trace analysis reveals grounding, planning, constraint-tracking, and termination failures, while interviews reveal beyond-automation needs.

Video-text models adapted from image-text architectures (e.g., CLIP) frequently exhibit temporal blindness, the inability to perceive fundamental cues like order, direction, and motion dynamics. Standard datasets mask this limitation by enabling models to exploit static spatial shortcuts. To systematically evaluate this, we introduce XTE-Bench, a diagnostic probe revealing that even large-scale video-language models struggle with basic temporal reasoning, indicating that parameter scaling alone is insufficient to resolve this flaw. To address this, we propose Cross-Modal Temporal Edits (XTE), a self-supervised framework that injects precise temporal supervision. By performing synchronized video-text transformations, XTE generates hard temporal negatives without manual annotation. We instantiate this with ViTAL-X, a lightweight model that equips frozen image-text backbones with temporal awareness while preserving their foundational spatial knowledge. Across six temporal benchmarks, ViTAL-X achieves state-of-the-art performance. Utilizing only 0.4B parameters and 1M training clips, ViTAL-X outperforms 7B-parameter models and surpasses baselines trained on 600x more data. These results demonstrate that targeted, high-quality temporal alignment provides a highly efficient alternative to pure scaling.

Ambient AI scribes draft clinical notes, and published audits find their dominant error is omission: information the encounter established that the note fails to record. The standard check is an LLM judge: a second model reads the note against the transcript and flags problems. We ask whether judges detect omissions. Public corpora cannot supply the answer key: their clinician reference notes and transcripts are materially discrepant. Our benchmark has 500 single-error note pairs from audited fact sheets, 298 with a named fact certainly absent and 202 added-or-altered controls. Across eight judge designs, paired discrimination (the flawed note below its clean twin, 0.5 a coin flip) reads 0.79-0.94 on added or altered content and 0.50-0.63 on omissions. On single notes, no design flags omissions reliably more often than perfect notes. Wording changes, voting and GEPA prompt optimisation move the operating point without creating usable detection. Restructuring the task recovers it: list the facts the transcript establishes, then check the note for each. Two methods reach it independently and trade off: a per-fact pipeline, and a GEPA-evolved prompt doing the same in one call. The pipeline's flags name the missing fact and its severity at 2.7% false alarms. The single call detects more (36.9% against 24.6%, p=0.002) at 6.2% false alarms and a tenth of the cost per note. A physician author validated 70 items and, where the two routes disagree, sided with the pipeline on 10 of 10 (p=0.002). A second clinician, not an author, graded the severity rubric blind and agrees to within a grade. On real vendor notes from a companion census no benchmark threshold transfers, but the re-calibrated single call detects more than the best of the eight at half its false-alarm rate. Omissions whose fact is restated elsewhere defeat both routes. We release the benchmark, prompts and judgements.

Block drafters propose several tokens in one forward pass, before earlier target tokens are realised. Their rejection mixes two losses: missing within-block path information and imperfect modelling of observable information. Accepted length cannot distinguish them. We separate the two with an information floor, the minimum expected rejection at a specified conditioning order; rejection above this floor is the model gap. Estimating both from target rollouts across four domains, four open-weight targets, and a frontier API target yields three findings. First, the all-parallel floor reaches $0.286$ at the final slot on Qwen3-4B, limiting even the best proposal to $71\%$ per-slot acceptance. Second, one realised token removes $86$--$100\%$ of this floor, a locality also recovered by an independent mutual-information analysis. Third, current drafters remain far above their floors: the final-slot model gap accounts for $43$--$64\%$ of DFlash rejection and $85$--$92\%$ of DSpark's oracle-conditioned rejection. These findings separate the value of short-range conditioning from proposal quality.

Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they behave when visual evidence is missing or misleading). We introduce SciFigBench, a diagnostic VLM benchmark for scientific figure understanding that jointly evaluates perception, reasoning, and behavioral reliability under uncertainty. It contains 250 figures with high-quality human annotations across three evaluation aspects, totaling 600+ hours of annotation effort. We further extend these figures via image transformations, reasoning questions, resistance probes, caption-bias probes, and confirmed selective-blur targets, producing over 34,000 evaluation setups for stress testing. We further propose the Admittance-Resistance-Inductance (A-R-I) framework to evaluate whether models acknowledge insufficient evidence, resist misleading context, and infer cautiously from partial information. Our results reveal substantial behavioral differences among models. GPT-5.2 achieves the highest description quality (MQM 91.6) with strong reasoning accuracy (78.4%), yet hallucinates unreadable content in 96% of cases, whereas Gemini 3.1 Pro, a comparably capable model (MQM 90.2, reasoning 81.0%), admits uncertainty in 71% of such cases and achieves the strongest resistance score (0.91). These findings show that high perception and reasoning accuracy alone do not guarantee behavioral reliability, a dimension critical for deployment in scientific workflows.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress, yet they still exhibit object hallucination, generating plausible but incorrect descriptions that are inconsistent with the visual input. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) mitigates this by training models to prefer non-hallucinated responses over hallucinated ones, and recent efforts further enrich the preference data with relevant context. However, it remains unclear whether DPO actually leverages such context. To investigate this, we propose Contextual Preference Gain (CPG), a simple metric that measures how much a model's preference strengthens when relevant context is provided. We find that higher CPG consistently corresponds to lower hallucination, yet standard DPO and its variants exhibit only limited CPG, indicating that they underutilize contextual information and thus remain prone to hallucination. To address this, we propose Context-Calibrated DPO (C$^2$-DPO), which directly maximizes CPG while preserving the original preference ordering. Across multiple benchmarks, C$^2$-DPO substantially reduces hallucination without compromising general reasoning, relatively reducing the Object HalBench hallucination rate of Qwen2-VL-Instruct-2B by 36%. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/C2-DPO

Self-improvement for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is typically driven by reward-based methods that provide only coarse scalar feedback. Distillation offers a richer alternative through dense token-level supervision, but in the visual domain it usually depends on privileged context constructed using external annotations and tools, or stronger models. We introduce \textbf{CVPD} (Contrastive Counterfactual Visual Process Distillation), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first fully self-contained framework for dense, on-policy, token-level visual self-distillation for MLLMs. CVPD identifies visual blind spots where zooming into a region changes and sharpens the model's answer distribution, while removing the same region leaves the full-image behavior largely unchanged. Such regions reveal perceptual information that the model can encode but fails to consistently utilize under full-image conditioning. We propose a three-gate Counterfactual Criterion that identifies these regions directly from the model's own responses and converts them into dense contrastive supervision for self-distillation. On Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, CVPD outperforms six self-evolving baselines across twelve benchmarks, including methods that rely on external GPT-4o supervision, without a single regression. It achieves gains of $+3.60$ on OCRBench, $+3.38$ on MMStar Fine-Grained Perception, and $+3.08$ on MMStar Logical Reasoning, while maintaining or improving performance on broader multimodal benchmarks.

Cooperative UAV-swarm defenses commonly cross-check GNSS positions against measured inter-drone geometry. We show that this relative-geometry channel has a structural blind spot: a common, slowly varying translation (a rigid-covert shift, RigidShift) preserves all pairwise distances and is therefore unobservable to any relative-only detector (a gauge-freedom argument). We validate this blindness on distance-verification and semidefinite-feasibility baselines, while explicitly distinguishing it from onboard inertial/GNSS monitors that can raise a bare alarm but cannot recover the swarm's true position. To quantify when an external reference restores observability, we derive the drift-dependent detection floor $2γ/(1-t_s/T)$ for a calibrated anchor-residual detector and empirically identify an additional detector-specific noise floor (measured slope 2.66 vs. predicted 2.67). We then present a centralized anchor-rooted recovery pipeline that reconstructs swarm geometry from inter-drone ranges, aligns it to a trusted-anchor subset with Byzantine-robust fitting, and recovers the absolute positions of non-anchored drones. A segmented estimator jointly estimates anchor drift, attack rate, and onset when no clean-epoch label is available. Across statistical simulations, ArduPilot software-in-the-loop experiments, and Gazebo experiments with rendered vision anchors, the method recovers the positions of non-anchored drones to a median error of 0.39 m (20 seeds) under approximately 10.1 m of GNSS drift, and to 7.1 cm (5 seeds) in the rendered-vision multi-SITL setting. We also characterize the explicit limits imposed by non-collinear anchor geometry, anchor coverage, $τ\to0$ drift-attack aliasing, and majority anchor compromise. All evaluations are simulation-based and use no RF spoofing hardware or physical swarm.

Label-free reliability for vision-language models rests on invariance: perturb the input and a faithful reader's answer should not change. This has a known blind spot, a systematic misreading survives the perturbation and gets certified wrong, which we show is computable, not just real: an error is invisible to an edit exactly when the two commute, so the errors a suite cannot reach form its joint centralizer, a set that shrinks as edits are added and can be written down rather than guessed at. We act on the complementary relation, equivariance: edit a figure's data and the correct answer must change by a computable amount. Two matched edits are provably complete for affine reading errors; no suite of swap edits is complete for label permutations, and cyclic relabeling closes most of that gap. We instantiate the theory as the Equivariance-Consistency Score, a label-free, training-free detector, and release REND-EQUIV, pairing matched invariance and equivariance sets over identical data. The predicted ordering holds across three models and a hand-labeled population immune to the one circularity in how it is selected; a second invariance-family method confirms the blind spot belongs to the relation, not to any implementation; and cyclic relabeling delivers its predicted gain on a matched real sample. The same characterization explains a reported inversion of this ordering in the classifier metamorphic-testing literature: detectability is a joint property of the relation and the fault class, never of the relation alone.

AI systems can fail silently. The failure propagates through training loops, evaluation pipelines, and production monitoring stacks until downstream harm makes it visible. This paper introduces evaluation blindness: a measurement function M exhibits evaluation blindness with respect to failure class F when it produces readings indistinguishable from a healthy state while the system is actually failing, with no auxiliary signal flagging the gap. The problem surfaces at two lifecycle stages the literature has treated separately. At training time, reward models are gamed, importance-sampling corrections are silently miscalculated, and benchmark contamination inflates fine-tuning evaluations, all while loss curves look healthy and gradient updates proceed normally. At deployment time, monitoring fails to catch six classes of production failure, including an Operational category that is 100% silent by structural definition. We provide a formal detectability predicate unifying both stages. Four training-time case studies trace concrete breakdowns, including a real implementation bug in TRL PR #6594 where gradients are corrupted as loss decreases normally. A six-class taxonomy validated against 50 real-world incidents from court documents and regulatory filings finds that 53% of verifiable public failures were silent. A failure budget framework ties acceptable failure rates to use-case risk class. The implication is direct: measurement infrastructure is a correctness concern across the full AI lifecycle, not just at evaluation time. Data, code, and taxonomy schema are at https://github.com/priyanka25aug/llm-failure-taxonomy.

Addressing urban blight has seen increased focus in the past 15 years. Assessing urban blight is essential for guiding urban planning, targeting rehabilitation, and safeguarding public health, yet traditional residential blight surveys are difficult to maintain at scale due to the labor-intensive cost and long-term cycle. This study introduced a scalable framework for estimating residential blight using open-source large vision-language models on multiple views. Structured prompts guided models to evaluate housing attributes, including roof integrity, wall damage, and broken or boarded openings, producing both binary assessments and probabilistic estimates of disrepair. To evaluate the performance of these visual assessments, we compared professional human annotations of these features across several models, including an ensemble stacking approach based on XGBoost and a weighted scoring system. Results showed that (i) multiple street views can contribute to the improvement of accuracy, (ii) large vision-language models have different strengths of inference, (iii) the ensemble learner outperforms individual base models, enhancing robustness across all residential conditions and blight assessment. The practical application of the method allows low-cost tracking and management of housing stock conditions, providing a regularly updatable complement to traditional blight surveys.

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve promising performance in robotic manipulation, typically measured by success rates aggregated over predefined object configurations, an evaluation that implicitly assumes spatially uniform competence across the workspace. However, this assumption does not hold: even with the instruction and every other scene factor held fixed, merely relocating a task-irrelevant distractor can sharply raise the failure probability within localized, spatially coherent regions, which we term Positional Blind Spots (PBS). In this paper, we propose a two-stage black-box framework to uncover and mitigate PBS. During the uncovering stage, we grid the workspace and apply a one-sided log-likelihood-ratio test to localize PBS cells with significantly elevated risk. During the mitigation stage, we fine-tune the policy via LoRA on demonstrations collected from these PBS regions, improving competence there while largely preserving performance across the rest of the workspace. We evaluate our framework on five state-of-the-art VLA policies across two benchmarks, and find that PBS are pervasive and spatially concentrated in all of them, with failure rates up to 0.58. Our search strategy achieves an average F1-score of 0.678, outperforming random search and adaptive sampling baselines by 0.268 and 0.178, respectively. Guided by the discovered regions, targeted fine-tuning reduces the overall failure rate by 40.00%--85.19%.

Masked prediction learns by inferring missing variables from visible context. When does optimizing this conditional task recover the true joint data distribution? We study this question using an $\varepsilon$-identifiability modulus, which measures the worst-case joint-distribution error permitted by excess risk at most $\varepsilon$. For distributions with separated global modes, schedules retaining large visible contexts can permit substantial mode-weight errors at exponentially small excess risk. An exact information decomposition explains why: for a fixed mask, the loss penalizes only the mode-weight mismatch that remains unresolved by the visible context. For small mode-weight perturbations, the objective's sensitivity is proportional to residual mode uncertainty averaged over masks. Under joint masked-block log loss, low-visibility masks that retain mode uncertainty restore this sensitivity, while positive full-mask probability bounds joint-distribution error in terms of excess risk. We empirically validate these predictions through exact calculations and controlled stochastic optimization.

Latent Flow Models have revolutionized compressed-space image synthesis, yet their application to high-fidelity inverse problems remains bottlenecked. In this paper, we trace this dilemma to a fundamental geometric limitation of pre-trained autoencoders, which we term \emph{First-Order Manifold Blindness}. Severe decoder compression (e.g., retaining only $\sim\!2\%$ of the original degrees of freedom) produces a rank-deficient Jacobian, rendering high-frequency measurement residuals in its orthogonal complement invisible to latent gradients even when the decoder can represent the target image. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose Hybrid-Domain Posterior Sampling (HDPS), a decoupled inference framework that disentangles physical measurement consistency from semantic prior modeling. HDPS diverges into the pixel space, leveraging Langevin dynamics to absorb precise orthogonal measurement gradients, and subsequently projects these structural corrections back onto the generative manifold. An optimization-based latent alignment is introduced to filter pixel-space artifacts while avoiding the semantic drift of direct encoding. Extensive experiments on diverse inverse problems demonstrate that HDPS establishes a new state-of-the-art, successfully recovering the high-frequency structural precision that latent-only solvers inherently discard. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/74587887/HDPS}{https://github.com/74587887/HDPS}.

Existing benchmarks for scientific equation discovery are largely composed of well-known equations available in the public domain, making it difficult to determine whether a model is discovering laws from data or merely recalling answers from its training corpus. LSR-Synth mitigates this problem by introducing novel synthetic terms into established scientific mechanisms and filtering the resulting tasks for novelty, solvability, and scientific plausibility. This paper examines a narrower measurement question: can these tasks further distinguish scientific priors supplied by language models from conventional operator search that does not access task semantics? We construct a semantics-free baseline using a fixed vocabulary with publicly documented provenance, and assess the role of candidate coverage through semantic blinding, library weakening, and matched operator-family knockouts. Under the current task snapshot, search budget, and scoring protocol, the fixed vocabulary already covers most tasks, while language-model-generated candidates rarely expand the set of solvable instances. Their marginal contribution becomes substantial only when vocabulary coverage is selectively disrupted. Strict out-of-distribution evaluation lowers the absolute success rates of all methods but does not alter this relationship. These findings neither invalidate LSR-Synth's controls against memorization of complete formulas nor imply that language-model priors are generally unhelpful. Rather, they support a more limited conclusion: most current tasks remain suitable for evaluating the fitting and recombination of previously unseen expressions, but are insufficient on their own to identify contributions from priors beyond a fixed search space.

Agent self-evolution has primarily focused on learning how to act, while overlooking an equally important capability: learning to discover what an agent does not know. Existing approaches typically assume that failure discovery is given, focusing on how to repair failures once they are identified. We ask whether blind-spot diagnosis itself can be learned. We thus study diagnosis as an agent capability separate from execution, and exclude two alternative sources of progress: executor adaptation and human supervision. Under these constraints, performance cannot improve through executor updates or annotated examples, forcing all improvements to originate from the learned diagnostic capability. We propose SkillMentor, which trains a Mentor policy via reinforcement learning to generate diagnostic tasks, identify recurrent failure modes, and curate them into reusable corrective skills. Across AppWorld and BFCLv3, SkillMentor improves executor performance by an average of 44.2%. These results suggest that blind-spot diagnosis is a learnable capability, enabling self-evolution without updating executor weights or relying on human-curated data.

Glaucoma is a group of eye diseases that damage the optic nerve, often caused by elevated intraocular pressure. It is a leading cause of irreversible vision loss and is typically developed slowly and painlessly, making it difficult to notice until significant damage has occurred. Therefore, early detection is crucial to prevent or slow the progression of vision loss. In recent years, deep learning based uni-modal models have improved the accuracy and efficiency of glaucoma detection, empowering doctors with tools for earlier diagnosis, better monitoring, and timely treatment. Building on this, multi-modal models have emerged, leveraging the strengths of different imaging modalities to learn richer and more robust representations, further enhancing glaucoma detection accuracy. However, multi-modal learning faces challenges such as imbalanced and under-optimized uni-modal representations due to joint learning objectives. To address this, we propose a balanced soft mixture-experts model with three experts and load balancing loss. The performance is measured by AUC, our proposed method surpasses the performance of all uni-modal baselines, conventional multi-modal models, and current stateof- the-art balanced multi-modal models. The proposed model can be generalized to other disease detections such as diabetic retinopathy.

Long-term memory systems store what a user says in an external store and retrieve it when a related query arrives. This interface rests on an assumption so natural that it is rarely stated: a memory that is needed will resemble the query that needs it. World knowledge breaks the assumption. A tree-nut allergy should change the answer to a macaron request through their almond-flour ingredient, yet the two texts share no cue a retriever can see. We call this failure mode the implicit-association blind spot and introduce InMind, a 125-task, expert-verified benchmark spanning ten life domains, with 113 tasks grounded in citable public sources. Its paired controls separate three explanations that existing evaluations conflate: the fact was never stored, the model lacks the bridging knowledge, or the fact was stored and never surfaced. The verdict is clean. With the decisive memory placed in context, the backbone answers 84.0 percent of indirect queries; when the same memory must be retrieved, six vector, graph, and agentic memory systems reach at most 14.4 percent, even though they recall the same facts on demand at up to 100 percent. An embedding with eight times the dimensionality raises answer-blind target recall for every system yet leaves the gap essentially intact. A minimal diagnostic probe that keeps memory visible before the query arrives recovers most of the gap, locating the failure in the query-conditioned interface itself and pointing to routing, deciding which facts must stay visible, as the open problem InMind is built to score.

Activation Oracles (AOs) are language models trained to answer natural-language questions about another model's internal activations. They offer a flexible interface for reading hidden information from model states, especially when relevant information is internally represented but absent or incomplete in visible behavior. However, AOs are themselves learned systems: their answers are shaped by training data, objectives, and learned reporting behavior, rather than being neutral readouts of represented information. We study this in a controlled Taboo Word Guessing setting, where subject models are fine-tuned to internally use a hidden concept while avoiding direct disclosure. Contrary to the expectation that an AO trained on such a subject becomes a specialist reader, we find that fine-tuned AOs can become concept-specific anti-readers: they selectively fail to recover the concept persistently present during their own training. This failure is not simply explained by absence of the concept from the subject or oracle representations: the target remains decodable inside the oracle, while LogitLens and layer-ablation analyses indicate that the failure arises in the AO readout pathway. Our results show that behavioral leakage, representation-level decodability, and AO-verbalizability can come apart, raising a reliability concern for learned interpretability interfaces.

Most educational technology for children is built around visual interfaces, which excludes the many children worldwide who live with visual impairment -- an estimated 1.4 million children are blind and many more have low vision. We present Kutti AI, a voice-first learning companion designed so that audio is the primary and sufficient interface: children learn curriculum concepts through spoken conversation, respond by speaking, and receive spoken feedback, with no reliance on visual elements. The system contributes three practical mechanisms for accessible, adaptive learning on commodity mobile hardware: (1) a multi-signal struggle-detection engine that combines response-latency analysis, wrong-attempt tracking, and keyword-based hesitation detection to decide, in real time, when to offer hints or simplify a question; (2) a multi-layered cross-language answer-matching pipeline that combines language-aware translation/transliteration, Levenshtein-based fuzzy matching, and text normalization so that children are not penalized for code-switching or pronunciation variation; and (3) an offline-first speech pipeline using an on-device automatic speech recognition (ASR) model, enabling use in low-connectivity settings common in underserved communities. We describe the architecture, the interaction flow, and the design decisions that prioritize accessibility, and we report qualitative observations from a hackathon prototype supporting English and Tamil. We discuss lessons learned and outline a path toward formal evaluation with target users. Kutti AI illustrates how a small, carefully-engineered voice-first system can lower both accessibility and financial barriers to early education.

Open-world video anomaly detection (OWVAD) is expected to detect events that match a user-specified definition of abnormality. This requirement is stronger than generic anomaly localization: in the same video, changing the definition should change which temporal regions are scored as anomalous. We show that current OWVAD evaluation largely fails to isolate this conditional behavior. Standard VAD metrics and the dynamic-definition protocol can be dominated by target-versus-normal separation, allowing models to obtain strong scores while remaining nearly insensitive to the queried definition. We call this failure mode definition blindness. To explain why it is missed, we decompose dynamic-definition evaluation into target-versus-normal detection and target-versus-other-anomaly discrimination, and find that the former receives 7.2-26.8$\times$ more weight across common VAD benchmarks. Motivated by this diagnosis, we introduce three definition-conditioned evaluation metrics, DC-Disc, DC-Det$Δ$, and DC-Sel$Δ$, which progressively remove normal-frame, generic-anomaly, and multi-event selection shortcuts. Experiments on UCF-Crime, XD-Violence, and MSAD reveal that several strong VAD, OWVAD, and general vision language model baselines localize anomalous moments but exhibit weak definition following, often with near-zero definition-response margins. To validate that the failure is actionable, we further introduce DeCoS, a definition-contrastive scoring rule that subtracts anomaly evidence shared across definitions. DeCoS improves the strongest baseline by 7.3-16.0 AUROC points on DC-Disc and 15.5-28.3 points on DC-Det$Δ$. Overall, our results argue that OWVAD should be evaluated as definition-conditioned anomaly scoring, not as anomaly detection under different prompt labels.

Disagreement-triggered escalation can create a structural blind spot in multi-agent arbitration: as base learners improve, they tend to converge, weakening safety monitoring where correlated failures concentrate. We term this correlated agreement blindness and present ARAT (Arbitrated Reasoning Agents for Alarm Triage), a directed-star system combining an inductive Random Forest (RF) agent, an analogical case-based k-nearest neighbour (k-NN) agent, and a calibrated meta-model to mitigate this effect. On 82,332 holdout samples from the UNSW-NB15 network intrusion detection dataset, 57.2% of errors occur under agreement and 90.6% of dangerous under-predictions evade disagreement-based monitoring even after conservative override; ablation shows that strengthening base learners increases error correlation while reducing disagreement. ARAT reduces under-prediction relative to soft voting from 4.80% to 1.70% via conservative override (-2.6pp) and a safety-flag gate (-0.5pp), demonstrating architectural gains. Cross-dataset validation on clinical readmission supports these indicators, suggesting that diversification improves safety only when it generates productive disagreement rather than convergence. These results indicate that disagreement-triggered escalation can be blind to correlated failure, a risk that may intensify as agentic pipelines deploy increasingly capable, correlated models.

Sequential decision making in non-stationary and partially observable environments requires rapid adaptation to latent regime changes. However, existing Transformer decision models face a structural bottleneck in the retrieval mechanism: even when reward is used for training or exposed as an input token, attention retrieval remains primarily driven by observation-derived similarity. We formalize this limitation as feedback-blind retrieval, and formally show that, on feedback-informative tasks, observation-equivalent histories with different action-reward outcomes cannot be distinguished by any observation-only attention, resulting in suboptimal choice. To address this mismatch, we propose the Utility-Augmented Transformer (UAT), a new feedback-conditioned retrieval attention architecture in which a compact utility state modulates the query, key, and value projections, allowing action-reward history to directly alter context retrieval during the forward pass. UAT also enjoys an exact zero-gate degradation property that recovers the Vanilla Transformer when feedback is uninformative. Under finite-horizon compactness and Lipschitz assumptions, we prove that UAT strictly enlarges the observation-only Transformer class and can uniformly approximate feedback-dependent decision maps. Across four non-stationary benchmarks: synthetic navigation with hidden goal shifts, non-stationary sepsis treatment, cross-market portfolio allocation, and delayed-feedback recommendation, UAT consistently improves performance over observation-only, test-time adaptation, and input-level feedback baselines, with particularly large gains in noisier regimes that require stronger adaptation.

Fine-tuned foundation-model detectors dominate face-forgery benchmarks, yet they stay blind to generator families absent from training. We present GLID, a detector that repairs this blind spot with geometry instead of data. GLID treats the patch tokens of a single image as a sample from a manifold and estimates their local intrinsic dimension (LID) at several depths of a frozen vision transformer. This 12-dimensional, training-free signal enters a fine-tuned detector through a confidence gate whose strength is calibrated purely in-distribution. On a 16-axis cross-generator benchmark, GLID reaches 0.805 mean AUC, first among retrained state-of-the-art baselines and never significantly behind the strongest of them on any axis. It lifts the generation axes by +0.084 AUC while moving reenactment by only -0.005. Two empirical laws explain the design. First, forged faces bend the token manifold at family-specific depths: GAN artifacts peak at the last layer, diffusion artifacts peak mid-network, and the pattern survives four backbones, three dimension estimators, and non-face imagery. Second, fine-tuning absorbs auxiliary gains exactly where training data covers: injecting 1% target-family images erases a +0.100 gain, so geometric signals matter precisely where data is unavailable. The deterministic signal also cuts the cross-seed spread of accuracy 5.5x. Code, preregistered analysis gates, and per-image scores accompany the paper.

Visual diagrams, figures, and tables are central to scientific papers, and convey information beyond what is captured in text. While blind or low-vision (BLV) scientists have traditionally relied on static alternative text to access figures in papers, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has made interactive question-answering (QA) a feasible paradigm for visual exploration; yet little is known about how scientists use visual QA in practice or how to improve its accessibility. In this work, we interview five BLV and five sighted scientists across different STEM fields to understand how they use two AI tools, ChatGPT and Gemini, to query multimodal scientific documents. Our findings characterize how scientists review multimodal content, including existing practices (along with accessibility workarounds) for engaging with visuals, and feedback on the suitability of AI-generated responses to multimodal queries. We further find that vague or incomplete image descriptions, as well as incorrect AI outputs more broadly, can cause both BLV and sighted scientists to abandon AI workflows. To support future research, we additionally contribute a dataset of 115 queries and responses from our participants' interactions with the AI tools for papers in their field. We close by discussing implications for AI-powered scientific QA systems, emphasizing considerations for access across abilities and domains.

This paper proposes an indoor navigation system for the visually impaired, leveraging Ultra-Wideband (UWB) positioning technology and the DLite path planning algorithm. The system utilizes UWB sensors to provide precision localization in GPS-denied environments. The D Lite algorithm is integrated to optimize travel trajectories and ensure rapid route re-planning in the presence of dynamic obstacles. Experimental results demonstrate that the system operates reliably with low latency, providing safety and flexibility for users in complex indoor spaces.

Visually impaired individuals (VIIs) encounter significant daily challenges due to limited access to visual information. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive results on general vision and language tasks, their practical utility in real-world blind assistance still remains largely underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce VIABench, a comprehensive video benchmark specifically designed to evaluate MLLMs in Visually Impaired Assistance scenarios using first-person videos recorded or shared by VIIs themselves. VIABench defines three core tasks, each targeting a distinct requirement in visual assistance. Proactive Reminder: Assesses the model's ability to interpret ongoing video content while proactively anticipating and verbally describing upcoming navigation-critical events; Visual Question Answering (VQA): Evaluates the model's capacity to answer user-posed questions about the environment or objects within the video; Vision-Guided Interaction: Tests context-aware reasoning to accomplish intentional interactions between user and environment. To ensure a robust and fair evaluation, we propose a rigorous benchmarking pipeline that supports both online (real-time) and offline settings. Our experiments demonstrate that current MLLMs still struggle to deliver comprehensive support for VIIs, especially in the Proactive Reminder task, which demands accurate anticipation and real-time responsiveness. We hope VIABench will drive future research toward developing customized MLLMs for real-world assistance, ultimately improving navigation and interaction experiences for visually impaired individuals. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/VIABench.

Persistent external memory enhances agent continuity but introduces persistent security vulnerabilities: adversarial content can be injected via standard interaction channels, retained across turns, and later distort downstream behavior. To address this challenge, we propose MemPoison, a comprehensive benchmark and analysis framework featuring 1227 hand-validated cases across four attack types, three injection channels, and three representative memory substrates, evaluated on seven open-weight and three closed-weight model families. We introduce a three-tier taxonomy: (L1) direct single-record corruption, (L2) compositional multi-record corruption and (L3) context-triggered dormant corruption. Our evaluations reveal a distinct defense frontier: while baseline write-time defenses, such as consistency checks, substantially suppress direct L1 attacks, they fail to reliably suppress L2 and L3 attacks. Through mechanistic influence decomposition (MID), we demonstrate structural blind spots in write-time defenses, which admit seemingly benign records that later become harmful through joint retrieval composition or trigger-conditioned activation. Our findings advocate for shifting from static filtering to adaptive, context-sensitive memory defense strategies.

Background and Objective: Deep video models estimate left-ventricular ejection fraction (EF) from echocardiography with near-expert accuracy, and post-hoc attribution (Chefer relevance for transformers, Grad-CAM for CNNs) is increasingly used to certify that models "look at the right place." Yet whether these explanations are faithful both spatially and temporally is unaudited. Because EF is defined by the end-systolic (ES) and end-diastolic (ED) frames, a faithful explanation must localize the left ventricle (space) and the decisive frames (time). Methods: We fine-tune two distinct EF regressors on EchoNet-Dynamic -- a self-supervised VideoMAE transformer and a Kinetics-pretrained R(2+1)D CNN -- and audit each with architecture-matched attribution along three axes: intersection-over-relevance (IoR) against LV masks, deletion AUC, and a temporal localization index on ES/ED frames, each relative to chance with per-case 95% CIs over 50 studies. A tubelet-occlusion probe separates attribution failure from model behavior. Results: Both models are anatomically faithful -- IoR 2.91x (VideoMAE) and 1.98x (R(2+1)D) above chance -- yet temporally blind: temporal localization is indistinguishable from chance (0.97--1.00) and no better than random attribution. Occlusion shows the models do not preferentially rely on ES/ED (0.90x chance), so temporal blindness reflects model behavior, not an attribution artifact. Conclusions: Spatial faithfulness does not imply temporal faithfulness. Attribution can certify anatomical grounding while masking that a model ignores the clinically decisive frames -- a caution for XAI-based validation of video diagnostic models and a call for temporally-aware training and evaluation.

Embodied accounts of semantic memory highlight the role of sensorimotor systems in acquiring and storing knowledge. Congenitally blind populations offer a critical test bed for these assumptions, providing an opportunity to assess whether conceptual grounding requires visual experience. In this study, we assessed semantic memory navigation differences between blind and sighted individuals using a property listing task with concrete and abstract concepts. We computed semantic entropy, an embedding-based natural language processing metric that captures the predictability of retrieval. Generalized linear mixed models revealed distinct navigation patterns across groups: while sighted individuals showed higher entropy for abstract than concrete concepts, blind participants did not. Instead, blind individuals exhibited higher entropy for visually salient concrete concepts (e.g., penguin). These results underscore the role of visual experience in the organization and dynamic navigation of semantic memory.

Raw images inherently suffer from noise due to the stochastic nature of light and sensor hardware imperfections. As real photon counts fall, the ratio of this noise to the signal degrades; consequently, for low-light conditions, robust denoising is especially vital for high-quality results. While recent data-driven methods achieve strong performance, they typically rely on large-scale noisy-clean image pairs that are costly and difficult to collect. Alternatively, parametric noise models can generate synthetic training data, but this necessitates precise camera calibration, which is often impractical for unknown devices. In this work, we propose a camera-agnostic, calibration-free paradigm for low-light raw denoising. We identify that color bias from black-level error is a primary source of performance degradation and causes severe color shifts. To mitigate this, we introduce a bias estimator network that predicts the black-level error as a global feature of the noisy input. We evaluate our approach across the ELD, SID, and LRID datasets, demonstrating superior performance among blind denoisers, particularly in terms of color correction. In many cases, we are competitive with-or can even surpass-methods with stronger supervision. Furthermore, we reveal that the widely used SIDD dataset contains significant color bias in its ground-truth images, which yields unrealistic color reproduction in trained models. We introduce a new ground-truth extraction framework to resolve this issue and provide a benchmark of existing methods on the corrected dataset.

Large autoregressive language models exhibit a self-correction blind spot: they reliably fix identical errors when attributed to an external source yet fail to fix the same errors in their own outputs. Prior work has documented this phenomenon empirically, through controlled error injection, error-depth decompositions, RL-based verifier-corrector training, and intrinsic self-verification, but offers no formal model of why generating a token suppresses the ability to detect its error, no quantitative activation condition for correction markers, and no convergence guarantee for reinforcement-learning-based self-correction. We close these gaps with SPARC, a spectral-algebraic theory of self-correction in autoregressive generation. We define the error-propagation operator as the product of per-step attention Jacobians on the residual stream and prove that the blind spot arises if and only if the spectral radius of this operator is at least one. We derive a sharp activation threshold, given as a function of the spectral radius, that a correction marker must exceed, recovering the 89.3% blind-spot reduction observed with a simple ``Wait'' marker. We further prove that RL-based verifier-corrector training converges at a rate proportional to the squared coupling strength over the square root of the number of samples if and only if the verifier-corrector coupling matrix has spectral norm below one, and that this criterion is invariant across residual-stream autoregressive modalities, unifying text LLMs and autoregressive image and video generation. Experiments across four backbones and a visual autoregressive probe validate every theorem, with spectral predictions matching measured blind-spot rates within 3.2% RMSE.

Modern AI models achieve strong performance on many established benchmarks, yet they still fail on tasks that humans find almost trivial, such as manipulating a string or drawing a dog with five legs. These examples suggest that existing benchmarks may under-measure persistent blind spots in current systems. We introduce $\texttt{blind-spots-bench}$, a benchmark designed to expose such blind spots through tasks that appear simple for humans but remain challenging for modern AI. We collect raw questions from students in an AI course, clean and annotate them with structured reference solutions, and propose a task taxonomy tailored to the resulting dataset of 235 samples. We further develop an automated grading pipeline to evaluate a wide range of models, including open-weight and closed-source language, vision-language, and image-generation models. Our analysis on $\texttt{blind-spots-bench}$ reveals that closed-source frontier models can substantially outperform open-weight models with even $\approx10\%$ gap, even when they attain comparable performance on existing benchmarks. A more fine-grained analysis shows that no single model dominates across all task types, and that some tasks remain challenging for all evaluated models. These results highlight the value of $\texttt{blind-spots-bench}$ as a diagnostic stress test for identifying concrete weaknesses in current modern models.

Immersive 360-degree educational environments often lack accessible spatial structure, limiting visually impaired learners' ability to orient, explore, and construct mental representations. This paper proposes EscFOA, a geometry-aware spatial audio generation framework designed as an \emph{acoustic scaffolding} to support spatial cognition. By integrating 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with conditional diffusion models, EscFOA reconstructs scene geometry from 360-degree videos to synthesize high-fidelity spatial audio consistent with the environmental structure. Explicitly targeting learning outcomes like independent spatial orientation and reduced cognitive load, EscFOA significantly outperforms conventional monaural and stereo audio in supporting spatial learning behaviors among blindfolded sighted participants (simulating visually impaired learners). These findings demonstrate that geometry-consistent generative audio can effectively enable inclusive access to complex spatial learning materials.

Audio Descriptions (ADs) narrate visual content for Blind and Low Vision (BLV) audiences during gaps in audiovisual media. There is growing momentum around ADs in movies and TV shows, and with mandates from India's Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), there is a need to expand ADs beyond English. Yet, there is no work that generates ADs for any Indian language. To address this gap, we present the first systematic study of ADs in Hindi, contributing to aspects such as data, generation, and evaluation. We introduce Andha-Dhun, the first dataset of human-authored Hindi ADs collected from 8 full-length movies. We explore two approaches for generating ADs in Hindi: (i) directly from English dense video descriptions, and (ii) translating English ADs into Hindi. We evaluate these approaches using perplexity and LLM-as-a-judge metrics to assess fluency and quality respectively. We also analyze movies that have both English and Hindi human-authored ADs and find that naive translation introduces artifacts and narrows diversity compared to original Hindi ADs. Direct machine translation fails to adapt cultural references, while human-translated ADs do better but still fall short. Our findings emphasize that the purpose of Hindi ADs is accessibility for Indian BLV audiences, and that this requires adapting content for the audience more than strict fidelity to the source.

Background. Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a preventable cause of childhood blindness, with rising burden in low- and middle-income countries where ROP-trained ophthalmologists are scarce. Plus disease, marked by retinal vessel dilation and tortuosity, triggers treatment but is subjective and variable. Automated screening could extend specialist reach, but African evidence remains limited. Methods. We analysed 121 Kenyan preterm infants, covering 237 eyes and 1,635 fundus images graded as No Plus, Pre-Plus or Plus. Vessel annotations from two graders supported segmentation training. Eleven configurations were evaluated for eye-level Plus detection using patient-grouped nested cross-validation, including image classifiers, multiple-instance learning, multi-task segmentation-classification, and segment-then-classify pipelines. Results. Vessel segmentation was feasible, achieving pooled Dice 0.533, IoU 0.368, sensitivity 0.623 and specificity 0.979 on held-out images. RGB classifiers were highly sensitive but over-referred, while segmentation-coupled models were more specific. Combining approaches improved performance: an OR-based screen achieved the highest sensitivity, an AND-based confirmation achieved the highest specificity, and a probability ensemble gave the best balanced performance, with sensitivity 0.692, specificity 0.914 and balanced accuracy 0.803, outperforming the vision classifier alone. Conclusions. Classification and vessel segmentation are complementary for ROP Plus detection in Kenyan data. Classifiers support sensitive case-finding, while segmentation improves specificity and reduces over-referral. African ROP AI systems should use combined workflows and undergo prospective multi-site validation.

Glaucoma is a progressive eye disease that can lead to irreversible vision loss if not detected at an early stage. Conventional diagnostic procedures are often time-consuming and rely heavily on expert interpretation, limiting their scalability for large-scale screening. In this study, glaucoma detection is investigated under two evaluation settings: sample-wise, where individual samples are analyzed independently, and patient-wise, where data from each patient are aggregated for final prediction. An automated multimodal framework is proposed that integrates fundus images with clinical data. Under the sample-wise setting, detection is performed using fundus images and clinical features individually, as well as through their multimodal combination. Under the patient-wise setting, predictions are obtained by aggregating multiple fundus image representations with corresponding clinical information for each patient. Deep visual features are extracted using a Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture and classified using classical machine-learning models, with a stacking-based ensemble of the three best-performing classifiers employed to optimize performance. Experiments conducted on the publicly available PAPILA dataset demonstrate strong diagnostic performance, achieving 97.47% accuracy and a 97.50% F1-score for sample-wise multimodal classification, and 98.97% accuracy and F1-score for subject-wise detection. The proposed framework is further deployed as an end-to-end web-based platform to support automated glaucoma screening and clinical decision support.

Over 285 million people worldwide live with a visual impairment, for whom everyday tasks such as avoiding obstacles, locating personal belongings, recognizing familiar faces, or handling cash remain persistent obstacles to personal autonomy. Existing assistive applications are typically limited to recognizing predefined categories, depend heavily on cloud connectivity, or require dedicated hardware. We present VisionAId, an Android application that turns a commodity smartphone into a real-time visual assistant. The system integrates six on-device deep learning models (metric monocular depth estimation, instance segmentation, visual and facial embeddings, face detection, and a custom banknote detector) running entirely through ONNX Runtime, with an optional cloud large language model (Google Gemini Flash) used only for narrative scene description and automatic object labeling. A distinctive contribution is a few-shot pipeline for personal objects: the user photographs an object from several angles, and the system later locates that specific instance in the environment, guiding the user toward it with augmented-reality markers, spatial audio, and distance-proportional haptics. All feedback is multimodal (Romanian speech synthesis, voice commands, vibration). On a reference device (Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra), INT8 quantization reduces depth latency from ~1200 ms to ~491 ms, the custom banknote detector reaches an mAP@50 of 0.986, and metric depth is calibrated to below 1 cm of error within 3 m.

Room embeddings derived from reverberant speech are often unreliable: speech content and recording degradation can alter the representation even when speaker, room, and source-receiver geometry remain unchanged, degrading downstream task performance. We propose a framework that learns room embeddings robust to speech-content variation and a representation-level uncertainty score from reverberant speech without downstream-task supervision. The embedding is anchored to a structured room impulse response (RIR) latent space and trained using a multi-view data structure with Kullback-Leibler (KL)-based alignment; a multi-positive contrastive term further refines robustness. A lightweight uncertainty head is calibrated using the dispersion of corruption-induced embeddings and optimized with a rank-based objective. Across waveform- and spectrogram-level corruptions, the score is consistent with representation dispersion and enables effective selective prediction while requiring only a single utterance at inference.

Long-horizon strategic planning in complex strategy games requires coordinating tightly coupled decision domains, including technology, economy, diplomacy, and military, across hundreds of turns under imperfect information. Existing LLM-based agents face three challenges in this setting. They recover little relational structure, such as distance or threat, from raw coordinate observations. They serialize the entire growing game state into every prompt and plan all domains in a single output, so the context eventually overflows and urgent domains crowd out long-term ones. The only reward is a lagged final score, which provides no progress signal within or across games.<br/><br/>We present SAGA, an LLM multi-agent framework that addresses these challenges with three mechanisms: a Map-Semantic Scene Graph that renders typed entity relations as concise per-entity text, a Tool-Augmented Planner that retrieves state on demand and routes disjoint per-domain directives to specialist controllers, and a Dual-Horizon Feedback Loop that sets intermediate goals within a game and distills causal lessons across games. On CivRealm, a benchmark built on the strategy game FreeCiv, SAGA attains the highest mean final score among six methods, the statistically strongest gains on infrastructure, and a 27% reduction in output tokens. With cross-game evolution enabled, it reaches the highest score over five successive games.

Inference-time safety methods for large language models have proliferated, yet no systematic comparison exists. We evaluate five defense paradigms (no defense, static steering, CAST, AlphaSteer, probe-gated) across seven instruction-tuned models (7-31B) and five attack types (GCG, AutoDAN, DeepInception, prefilling, intent laundering). Our central finding: prompt-time activation defenses are structurally blind to prefilling attacks. AlphaSteer achieves 0% attack success on GCG, AutoDAN, and intent laundering but 50% on prefilling. We prove a corollary: any defense that gates intervention on a single layer's activation alignment with a benign reference (cone, subspace, or null-space) is blind to attacks that craft activations to lie inside that reference, whether checked at prompt time or per token. As its constructive contrapositive we introduce response-time probing: a linear probe on the model's hidden state at the first generated tokens, with AUROC 0.97-1.00 across all seven models. Combined with a halt, it cuts prefilling attack success to 0/40 on every model with 0% benign false positives, outperforming Llama Guard 3. Cross-template generalisation depends on probe depth, so we scope the claim to the canonical prefilling-template family. Composing the response-halt with AlphaSteer's null-space steering gives an orthogonal split (the halt catches prefilling, AlphaSteer catches semantic attacks), reaching defense success 0.983 on Mistral and 0.994 on Llama and dominating both components. We further show MMLU fails to capture steering's true utility cost, which appears as behavioral hedging rather than factual loss, and that diverse negative training sets cut probe false positives from 80-100% to near zero. Code, attacks, per-sample results, and the judge prompt are released.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) currently drives state-of-the-art performance in no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). However, standard SSL pipelines uniformly apply synthetic distortions across the entire image field, which can limit their sensitivity to spatially localized and co-occurring degradations encountered in real-world content. In this work, we empirically expose this representational blind spot across existing state-of-the-art encoders, demonstrating their reduced sensitivity to spatially bounded image degradations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Spatial Localized Image Degradation Embeddings for Image Quality Assessment (SLIDE-IQA). SLIDE-IQA employs a dual-branch Vision Transformer framework that injects spatially bounded degradations into a contrastive pretraining objective. To handle the spatial complexity of these degradations, we introduce a Threshold-Bounded Exclusion Mechanism, a representational design choice that resolves structural conflicts arising from spatially localized distortions to ensure the latent space respects both degradation type and spatial scale. Finally, we show that SLIDE-IQA's synthetic-only pretraining significantly improves sensitivity to localized distortions, while achieving competitive performance on NR-IQA benchmarks against existing SSL NR-IQA models.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate strategic interactions through natural language, making semantic control a critical element of communication and deception. This paper develops a semantic signaling game in which a sender selects a semantic control, an LLM generates a stochastic message, and a receiver evaluates the message using an awareness-dependent scoring mechanism. Receiver awareness is modeled as a type that determines which linguistic features are perceived and used for inference, providing a formal model of systematic blindness. The framework connects prompt-based control, statistical detection, and game-theoretic equilibrium analysis. Gaussian approximations of aggregate message scores enable likelihood-ratio decision rules, while Perfect Bayesian Nash equilibria characterize strategic behavior. The paper further develops mechanism-design approaches that reshape receiver awareness, penalize deceptive semantic controls, and modify receiver populations to induce benign pooling equilibria. Numerical experiments validate the Gaussian approximation, quantify awareness-ordering effects, analyze mindset dynamics under adaptive adversaries, and demonstrate how awareness shaping and guardrail costs reduce successful phishing attacks. The proposed framework provides a principled foundation for analyzing strategic language-mediated interactions in agentic AI systems and offers new tools for the design of robust and secure human-AI communication.

AI safety is evaluated by how reliably a model detects the hazards it is told to find, yet accidents often arise from the hazard no one specified. We show that conditioning a language or vision model on a narrow task suppresses its reporting of co-present, safety-critical signals it can otherwise report, a machine analogue of human inattentional blindness, produced by a different mechanism. Across radiology and driving text scenarios and chest-radiograph vision tasks, the ordinary focused instructions under which such systems are deployed suppressed reporting by up to 0.92 in report rate relative to the same models when unconstrained, and an explicit exclusive instruction abolished reporting entirely in radiology. Suppression appeared in every model tested, did not diminish with scale, persisted in a reasoning model, and varied more by model family than by size. We name this dissociation the Inattentional Gap and argue that it decouples measured benchmark safety from real-world safety: a system can score near-perfectly on the hazards an evaluation specifies while remaining blind to those that cause harm. Probing the mechanism, we localize the proximal trigger to output scope and find System-1-style task capture without reliable intrinsic oversight in the sampled systems. Oversight could, however, be supplied externally: routing each narrow report to an independent open-ended critic restored every omitted finding, demonstrating that the gap is both measurable and mitigable. We propose reporting-complete evaluation, scoring what a system fails to report alongside what it is asked to find, as a requirement for safety-critical deployment.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have the potential for open-world generalization by leveraging pretrained vision-language representations, yet downstream finetuning on limited robot data often degrades these representations, leading to brittle policies that ignore language instructions in favor of visual shortcuts, a failure mode we term instruction blindness. We hypothesize that standard finetuning with limited data applies gradients to a sparse set of points, which manifests as a sharp loss landscape with high-curvature minima. We propose to address this directly through flatness-preserving optimization while finetuning on the exact same data, where learning a flatter landscape results in a model more robust to perturbations in the weight space. Specifically, we demonstrate that simply applying sharpness-aware minimization during VLA finetuning significantly improves instruction following by over 60% across multiple simulation and real-world benchmarks without additional data, architectural modification, or retraining. We further analyze the effect of selective sharpness, quantify its effects, and show that our approach is complementary to existing guidance techniques. Project page can be found at https://haochenz11.github.io/papers/flatness-vla/.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate how people form impressions of organisations, yet most monitoring is done in English, assuming an English query returns a representative picture. We measure how far that holds. We queried three grounded LLMs (GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Perplexity Sonar Pro) about 66 brands from eleven Northern, Baltic, and Central European markets, in twelve languages across four families (Germanic, Uralic, Baltic, Slavic), generating 35,640 responses. Multilingual embeddings (BGE-M3) allow cross-language comparison without translation. Three results emerge. First, AI-constructed reputation is language-bound: mean cross-language cosine similarity is 0.825, same-family responses are more similar than cross-family (0.844 vs 0.820; d = 0.31), and sentiment varies by language (F = 268.5, eta^2 = 0.077), with Uralic and Baltic languages most positive and Germanic, including English, most critical; clustering recovers the Slavic and Baltic families (cophenetic 0.915). Second, query language shifts which brands are recommended far more than how they are described: moving from an English query to a brand's home language raises recommendation share by 0.80 for local champions but only 0.15 for global multinationals (t = -8.84, p < 0.001), with no comparable reversal in sentiment. An English-only audit therefore understates a local champion's AI visibility. Third, response stability varies more with model choice than with language (eta^2_model = 0.32 vs eta^2_language = 0.01, on a five-iteration replication over a 20-brand subset). These results indicate that English-only AI reputation monitoring leaves a measurable language blind spot, concentrated in the visibility of locally headquartered brands.

While deep learning models achieve state-of-the-art performance in complex tasks, they remain brittle when faced with new environments or sensory deprivation. In contrast, biological systems exhibit remarkable tolerance to these challenges. We address this vulnerability by developing a recurrent neural network (RNN) whose architecture is directly derived from the synaptic-resolution brain connectome of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. We demonstrate the feasibility of training the fly connectome neural network (FLYNN) to perform vision-based navigation in MuJoCo, achieving performance comparable to modern hand-crafted networks of similar parameter counts. Crucially, FLYNN exhibits superior resistance to out-of-distribution (OOD) data and tolerance to sensory loss without further training. It remained functional even under total vision loss while hand-crafted networks largely failed, even when specifically trained with camera dropout. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the internal state of FLYNN suggests that it exhibits a particularly high degree of representational modularity, which might be related to its robustness. Our work provides a new direction for designing resilient artificial agents following the topology of biological brains.

Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via contrastive learning has become a mainstream paradigm for improving the performance of Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR). However, previous works have ignored the grain blindness when adapting the contrastive paradigm into retrieval tasks. Grain blindness refers to the tendency of the model to overlook grain-level information contained in the query, which is crucial for effectively handling complex queries. This stems from contrastive learning treating samples as a binary classification (positive/negative), while ignoring the different information carried by each negative sample. To address this, we argue that negatives should be treated differently according to their similarity to the positive sample, enabling the model to learn distinct grain information from each negative. In this paper, we introduce a simple but effective framework, called ELVA, a novel rule-based RL framework that mitigates grain blindness through ranking-driven MLLMs. 1) Instead of relying on reward models, we extend Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to retrieval tasks, allowing the model to explore new ranking behaviors without explicit ranking labels. 2) By utilizing rule-based rewards, our approach jointly optimizes the ranking of negative samples while enlarging the similarity gap between positive and negative. To more precisely measure grain blindness, we further introduce MRBench, a new benchmark specifically designed for multi-grain query scenarios. ELVA achieves state-of-the-art results across standard retrieval benchmarks, and its notable 13.1% improvement on MRBench further demonstrates its effectiveness in alleviating grain blindness.

This paper introduces two constructs to describe, as far as we know, a previously unnamed risk in human-LLM interaction. Co-construction blindness is the failure to recognize that LLM outputs are not independent assessments to be verified, but co-constructed artifacts shaped by the user's own inputs, accumulated history, and metadata. Every user of a conversational LLM is IN the loop, not ON it -- yet every deployment disclaimer positions them as external auditors. Asymmetric epistemic vulnerability describes the condition in which co-construction blindness produces consequences of radically different magnitude depending on where in the authority structure the user sits. We argue that these constructs describe a structural inevitability, not an anomaly, using the public case of Richard Dawkins's interaction with Claude as a paradigmatic instance. We document a secondary mechanism -- structural deference -- through a first-person exchange in which a large language model concedes that it treated Dawkins more gently than warranted because his intellectual output is represented in its training data. We map the research gaps this analysis opens and call for shared terminology as a precondition for appropriate governance and design response.