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Period ending 2026-09-14

14 new papers

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Period ending 2026-09-07

24 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Corpus.

482 papers

Latest in Corpus

Sep 15, 2026cs.CL

Quantifying Organizational Environmental Action from Web Data and Large Language Models

Quantifying organizational environmental action from publicly available web content remains a challenging environmental data science problem because relevant information can be dispersed across multiple webpages and is primarily communicated through unstructured text. We present a scalable computational framework for transforming organizational web content into structured measures of environmental action and demonstrate the approach using Jewish congregations in the United States. We constructed a national database of 4,964 congregations by integrating multiple geospatial, knowledge-base, directory, and manually reviewed sources. Of these, 2,657 had active websites that were successfully crawled, producing a corpus of 154,454 webpages. We compared three approaches for detecting environmental actions: keyword retrieval followed by large language model (LLM) classification, semantic vector retrieval followed by LLM classification, and direct LLM classification classification without preliminary retrieval. Agreement with an expert human reviewer was lowest for keyword retrieval (κκ = 0.26), higher for semantic vector retrieval (κκ = 0.42), and similar for direct LLM classification (κκ = 0.40). Although semantic retrieval achieved the highest agreement, its retrieval recall was 0.87, indicating loss of relevant content before classification. Applied to the complete corpus, direct LLM classification identified at least one environmental action at 1,398 congregations (53%), providing greater coverage than either retrieval-based approach. These results demonstrate that preliminary retrieval can reduce computational cost but may exclude relevant information before it reaches the classifier. The framework provides a reproducible approach for extracting organization-level environmental information from unstructured web content that can be adapted to other institutions.
Quinn Reynolds, Daniel Shore, Vianey Leos Barajas +2
Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

Evidence-Aligned Local Composition of Discrete Experts for Sequence Restoration

A document modeled as a discrete sequence of tokens can be thought of as being generated from a composition of texts from different domains; a README file, for example, moves between prose, code, and configuration. When such a document is corrupted and only frozen domain experts are available, restoring it requires deciding both what is missing and which expert to trust at each position, at test time and without region labels or a trained router. We introduce evidence-aligned local composition, which infers a soft, position-wise weighting over the experts from the marginal evidence of the corrupted observation under a given corruption model, estimating the evidence from the experts' own denoising losses and smoothing the weights across positions. Because the weighting is soft, it recovers a mixture when the true composition is mixed and concentrates on one expert when that suffices. Across a categorical simulator, byte-level experts, and experts fine-tuned from a 1.31.3B discrete flow-matching model, the inferred weights track the true regions at 0.850.85 field accuracy on naturally mixed scientific documents, and at 0.980.98 on constructed mixtures whose regions are lexically disjoint. Restoration improves over a single global weight when the experts are genuinely distinct and reduces to it when they converge, tracking a measure of expert separation.
Mohammad Panahazari, Usman A. Khan, Shuchin Aeron
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

What an odour descriptor corpus can and cannot measure: valence, attenuation, and the ceiling of the public record

Machine olfaction trains on pooled public descriptor corpora, but whether a shared descriptor word measures the same thing across corpora has not been tested, nor has the ceiling of what any of them can measure. We audit four corpora from Pyrfume. Conditioning on the molecule makes McNemar's test the exact conditional test of the corpus effect. Corpora disagree heterogeneously across descriptors (I2=80%I^2 = 80\%) and non-uniformly with labelling breadth (z=17.2z = 17.2), so no single offset repairs pooling. Median tetrachoric agreement is 0.795 against median κ\kappa of 0.413: sources largely concur on which molecules deserve a word and differ on how readily they apply it. Of 109 descriptors with an estimable effect, 36 show large differential functioning on the ETS scale. Against a human panel's reliability, Morgan fingerprints with the full RDKit descriptor block reach 32.9% of achievable; adding every label from two merged corpora reaches 33.9%. The gap does not close with model capacity, encoding choice, more molecules, or more words. The missing variance is valence. One pleasantness rating per molecule reaches 54.6% of achievable (57.1% on an independent older instrument). Valence recovered from descriptors (ρ=0.457\rho = 0.457) yields only 16.6%, so it must be measured. Five raters exceed structure plus the full descriptor record; fifteen to twenty saturate. We release a descriptor crosswalk and twenty machine-checked theorems.
Stylianos Kampakis, Fabio Rovai
Sep 12, 2026cs.AI

Studying Without a Syllabus: Task-Agnostic Environment Preprocessing

Before an LLM agent tackles tasks in a new environment, it can inspect available corpora and tools and construct reusable resources such as indices, scripts, or procedural guidance. Most automated adaptation methods, however, rely on task examples, trajectories, or evaluation feedback to decide what to build. Existing task-agnostic approaches avoid this supervision but commit in advance to a preparation strategy for a particular type of environment. We study a more open-ended setting: can an agent study an unfamiliar environment without a syllabus, i.e. before test time and without knowledge of the downstream task distribution, and choose how to prepare it? We formalize task-agnostic environment preprocessing, in which a studying system explores an environment under a budget and produces artifacts for a frozen solver. We compare unaided and archive-equipped meta-agents with fixed synthetic-practice and corpus-processing methods across six heterogeneous benchmarks. A meta-agent variant achieves the highest Avg@3 reward on five benchmarks, while fixed corpus processing remains best on the largest corpus benchmark. Larger study budgets do not reliably improve downstream reward. Nevertheless, studied artifacts reduce the test-time sampling needed to reach a given score, demonstrating how reusable preparation can shift computation from repeated test-time attempts to a pre-task study phase.
Vinay Samuel, Varun Ursekar, Vijay S. Kalmath +3
Sep 12, 2026cs.SE

What a Random Draw from the MCP Registry Contains, and What Tool-Use Benchmarks Contain Instead

Studies of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server ecosystem draw their samples in ways that quietly select for servers that work: reference sets, popularity lists, hand-curated frames, or pipelines that repair a server until it starts. We report what an unrepaired probability sample actually contains. From a 24,135-server registry census we draw 400 npm/stdio servers with a published seed and probe each one over the wire. Only 48.8% complete an initialize handshake, against 66.7% for a hand-curated frame measured with the same instrument, and the dominant failure is not missing credentials (13.3%) but servers that never start at all (37.5%). Among the 195 that do run, hard conformance is total: zero fatal JSON Schema violations across 2,766 advertised tools. Optional safety annotations are the real variance, and the tool-level omission rate on a random draw is 58.8% against 41.5% on the curated frame, so curation flatters this figure too. We then compare the tool descriptions these servers advertise against two tool-use benchmark corpora using one method held constant. Real MCP tools show 2.8% near-duplication at cosine 0.70, and all of it lies within single servers: cross-author near-duplication is 0.0% at every threshold tested. BFCL v4 shows 16.7%, of which 16.4 points lie between independently presented tasks. UltraTool shows 0.3%, cleaner than real tools, so this is a property of BFCL and not of synthetic corpora as a class. Separately, 68.8% of raw BFCL rows and 85.6% of raw UltraTool rows are exact name-plus-description repeats, against 0.4% for real MCP, so any statistic computed over these releases without global deduplication measures repetition rather than tools. All figures regenerate from released scripts and a published seed.
Haseeb Mohammed Afsar
Sep 11, 2026cs.CL

A Training-Free, Alignment-Free Approach to Corporate Intelligence: Application to SEC Filings

High-dimensional dense text embeddings and large language models face real obstacles in financial-disclosure analysis: context-window limits, hallucination risk, high computational cost, and the arbitrary rotation of vector spaces across independently trained models. We present a training-free, alignment-free framework for corporate intelligence built on deterministic sparse seed vectors. Hashing word strings into a fixed high-dimensional basis places all documents and all temporal epochs in a common coordinate system by construction, removing any need for training or alignment. Accumulating these seed vectors across sentence contexts yields corpus-specific semantic signatures that compose linearly, supporting sub-second document comparison, issuer fingerprinting, tracking of how an issuer's vocabulary shifts between filings, and thematic sentence extraction, all on ordinary CPU hardware. Demonstrating the approach on a multi-year corpus of SEC filings (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K), we show how material corporate events, among them Boeing's 737 MAX crisis, Intel's supply-chain disruptions, and Bunge's acquisition of Viterra, emerge as distinct, interpretable semantic profiles, each traceable to the exact source sentences that produced it, with no domain-specific training and no LLM inference.
Jean-François Delpech
Sep 9, 2026cs.SD

Project Qualia: Recovering Experiential Music Structure from Session Co-occurrence Data

This report presents results from Project Qualia, an ongoing effort to determine whether experiential similarity between songs, a structure not captured by genre or metadata taxonomies, can be recovered from real listening behavior. We constructed a large-scale dataset of listening sessions, comprising 1.29 billion scrobbles collected from 9,396 users via the Last.fm API and reduced through a preprocessing pipeline to 531.6 million training scrobbles across 28.6 million sessions. On this corpus, we trained a skip-gram Word2Vec model (Song2Vec), treating each session as a sentence and each track as a token. As anticipated, the resulting embedding space was dominated by artist identity, a consequence of single-artist runs within sessions. To test for a subtler, artist-independent signal, we developed an artist-residual procedure: subtracting each artist's centroid from its tracks' embeddings and evaluating whether the remainder retained structure. Mean cross-artist cosine similarity fell from 0.2487 in raw embedding space to 0.0005 in residual space, yet 4,577 cross-artist track pairs retained cosine similarity 0.70\ge 0.70 in residual space, forming coherent genre- and era-based clusters, including trip-hop, 1990s grunge, 2020 mainstream pop, and cross-composer classical piano pairs at cosine similarity up to 0.95. These results confirm that the training data contains experiential structure independent of artist identity, establishing an empirical basis for an architecture designed to learn this experiential layer directly.
Nizam Mohammed, Abu B. S. Rahman, Dimuthu D. K. Arachchige
Sep 9, 2026cs.SD

TimeCues Studio: A Workspace for Music Annotation and Algorithm Prototyping

Multimedia applications require precise music annotation-labeled positions, segments, or loops-placed by hand or algorithmically. Machine-learning algorithms are scalable and effective but need annotated training data, scarce for many tasks. TimeCues Studio is an open-source workspace where algorithm-development teams annotate a music corpus, compare detection algorithms against those annotations, and prototype new ones. Unlike existing tools built for a single track at a time, TimeCues targets teams annotating whole collections, tightly integrated with algorithm development. Annotators place several marker types-each supporting ambiguity-aware labeling-on a grid-locked timeline that visualizes many music features, including separated audio stems. The same timeline drives an algorithm-comparison engine with bundled baselines, a Python sandbox for prototyping new models, and an ambiguity-aware evaluator that honors the structured fields. The same visualization suits solo annotators on music-sync projects. TimeCues is MIT-licensed and deploys via one Docker Compose command.
Sapir Caduri, Yoav Goldberg
Sep 9, 2026cs.CL

From Retrieval to Weights: Parametric Individualization of Small Language Models with Individual Text Corpora

We approach a cognitive simulation perspective on episodic and semantic memory in multiple-choice question answering by incorporating text from individual text corpora (ITC) into retrieval-augmented generation and DoRA fine-tuning. We web-crawl the search histories of 515 participants who answered 36 multiple-choice knowledge items and analyze a stratified subsample of 150 participants. For each participant, one DoRA adapter consolidates their ITC into a small language model (SLM) whose baseline correctness falls below the participants' lowest quartile. The adapter measurably writes the ITC into the weights: it fits its own participant's held-out text better than other participants' texts (dz =1.27), an individuality effect that increases with ITC size in rank order. On the generalized knowledge test, however, the adapter adds knowledge rather than alignment with the individual: log-loss match improves, whereas match accuracy under a bias-corrected PMI readout does not, and retrieval adds nothing on top. Our results demonstrate that ITCs can be consolidated into the weights of SLMs, an encouraging basis for individualized tutoring agents, and we discuss how to move from there toward a realistic simulation of episodic and semantic memory at the individual level.
Christoph Wigbels, Ali Abusaleh, Markus T. Jansen +2
Sep 8, 2026cs.CR

HoneyRoute: Honeypot-Model Routing for Adversarial LLM Serving

We introduce HoneyRoute, an inference-serving layer that detects whether an incoming request is malicious and, if so, routes it to a dedicated honeypot model, shielding production while the adversary's interaction is continuously harvested for intelligence. Existing defenses embed traps inside model memory or rebuild deception at the protocol layer, leaving the serving tier unprotected and feeding nothing back into detection. HoneyRoute couples (i) a streaming router (a frozen 0.8B-embedding backbone with per-domain MLP heads), (ii) a dual-implementation honeypot (a rule/prompt-engineered code honeypot or a dedicated same-family replica), and (iii) an analysis loop that converts trapped interactions into attacker fingerprints for router retraining. On a production trace plus a seven-domain attack corpus, the router reaches F1=.911 at 38 ms median added latency, matching 96% of a two-tier guard-LLM cascade's F1 at 1/385 of its latency with 0% evasion under 13 adversarial transformations; diverting the malicious share cuts production-model token consumption under concurrent flooding with real GCG-suffix payloads by 97.8%; the trained replica agrees with the production model on 92.9% of benign holdout requests, while naive unconditional bait injection collapses to 7.6% and selective camouflaged injection recovers to 88.9%, mapping the recoverable fidelity-traceability frontier; and a loop-trained correction head cuts misrouting of legitimate security research 9x while raising detection F1 to .933.
Han Jin
Sep 8, 2026cs.AI

Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Digital Inventory of Cultural Heritage & Traditional Knowledge: Case for Indonesian Open Digital Library of Culture

The Indonesian Digital Library of Culture (Perpustakaan Digital Budaya Indonesia, PDBI; budaya-indonesia.org) is a participatory platform that has collected tens of thousands of entries on Nusantara cultural heritage through public contribution since 2007. Manual contribution faces three structural barriers: coverage (knowledge is scattered across languages and sites), integrity (open sources mix authentic documentation with noise), and completeness (subjects are recorded but their data remain shallow). This paper presents a methodological framework for autonomous, AI-based harvesting of cultural knowledge from the open web, designed to expand corpus coverage while intensifying per-entry data depth. The methodology is organised as a five-stage economic funnel: focused crawling, multilingual extraction and canonicalisation, vector encoding with blocking, agentic decision-making, and idempotent publication, under the principle of deterministic orchestration, agentic decisions. Each stage is formalised: funnel economics and optimal filter ordering; crawl-frontier dynamics as a subcritical branching process that explains the necessity of recurrent re-seeding; fact-level novelty via a containment measure; Bayesian multi-source evidence fusion with elevated publication thresholds for sacred categories; exactly-once effects via idempotent upserts and the transactional outbox; sliding-window inference budgeting with a reservation protocol; statistical quality auditing; and seed selection as submodular coverage maximisation. The framework retains four high-value human roles: curator of direction, escalation approver, quality auditor, and guardian of meaning, while machine autonomy is raised in stages. Ethical, legal, and cultural-sensitivity implications are discussed, including the architectural guarantee that the machine never overwrites human contributions.
Hokky Situngkir
Sep 7, 2026cs.CL

Climate-ModernBERT: Revisiting Corpus Composition for Domain-Adaptive Continued Pretraining

Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the climate domain requires models to process heterogeneous text sources, including scientific literature, policy disclosures, and synthetic reports. However, how to effectively combine diverse domain corpora during continued pretraining (CPT) remains underexplored. We introduce Climate-ModernBERT, a family of climate-adapted encoder models obtained through continued pretraining of ModernBERT-Base on three climate corpora: academic climate text, climate-filtered web data, and synthetic climate documents. We systematically compare joint continued pretraining on corpus mixtures with parameter-space merging of independently specialized checkpoints. Across nine climate NLP benchmarks, our best model achieves 76.3 average F_1, improving significantly over a vanilla ModernBERT baseline by 2.8 points. Within the climate NLP setting, the results show that academic climate corpora provide the strongest adaptation signal among the evaluated sources, while parameter-space merging improves over joint multi-source training and better preserves complementary information from heterogeneous climate corpora. We release all Climate-ModernBERT variants and training checkpoints to support future research in climate NLP and domain-adaptive pretraining.
Yongan Yu, Shantam Raj, Jingwei Ni +3
Sep 7, 2026cs.DL

From Citations to Contributions: LLM-Assisted Credit Scoring of Research Articles

Citation-based measures of scientific influence typically treat citations as uniform signals, ignoring the different roles that cited works play in a paper's contribution. We introduce contribution-based credit scoring for research articles: a structured citation analysis that decomposes a paper's credit between its own original contribution and the prior work it builds on. Motivated by a cooperative-game view of scientific credit, we propose the contribution tree, a hierarchical framework that conserves importance across the document structure and separates original from citation-derived contribution. To make this framework scalable, we use LLMs as noisy comparative estimators of local importance. We further extend the model to article collections by propagating contributions through weighted citation graphs, yielding corpus-level contributions and normalized influence scores. Our experiments suggest that our framework captures contribution signals beyond surface-level heuristics. Our code is available at https://github.com/sanaebrahimi/Importance_Scoring/
Sana Ebrahimi, Suraj Shetiya, Abolfazl Asudeh
Sep 7, 2026cs.CL

Syntactic Patterns and Stylistic Functions in Narrative Prose: A Rule-Based and Machine-Learning Approach

This paper presents a small-scale quantitative experiment that links syntactic structure to stylistic functions in narrative prose. Starting from a dependency-parsed corpus of 3,300 sentences, we derive sentence-level stylistic labels across five categories --- descriptive, introspective, causal, ideological, and neutral --- using a transparent rule-based procedure that inspects lemmas, universal part-of-speech tags, and syntactic relations. For each sentence we construct a compact representation of its syntactic profile as a sequence of linearised triples combining lemma, POS tag, and dependency relation. These patterns serve as input to standard machine-learning classifiers trained to predict sentence-level style. The best-performing model achieves a macro-F1 of 0.948 under 10-fold cross-validation. The experiment is implemented entirely in Python using open-source tools. Our goal is not to propose a fully fledged stylistic theory, but to offer a reproducible and extensible workflow for exploring how grammatical structure contributes to narrative interpretation.
Stefana Janicijevic
Sep 7, 2026cs.LG

Protocol effects on feature-based hardware-Trojan detection across Trust-Hub families

Trust-Hub reuses host circuits: several files differ mainly in the inserted Trojan. When gates from sibling variants enter both training and test folds, a detector can benefit from host logic it has already seen. We measure that effect instead of proposing another classifier. The corpus contains 49,124 gates from 16 netlists grouped into five host families. We left the parser, 36 gate features, class weighting, model settings, threshold, and family-level aggregation unchanged and altered one choice: the test boundary. The three settings draw test gates from the pooled corpus, withhold a complete netlist, or withhold every variant of one host. The choice matters. Random forest records F1/AP of 0.914/0.978 with pooled gates, 0.636/0.851 with one netlist held out, and 0.460/0.577 with a host family held out. XGBoost falls from 0.946/0.976 to 0.464/0.544 across the same comparison. Logistic regression loses AP, although its fixed-threshold F1 is not monotonic. Each family shows the same pooled-to-family direction. Feature removal, repeated model and simulator seeds, score normalization, parser-related exclusions, and a smaller sample change the size of the gap without reversing it. Aggregation also matters: a gate-weighted average is dominated by the larger ISCAS files, so the headline values give each host family one vote. Bootstrap and jackknife summaries keep the gap positive, but their folds reuse training families. We treat the five family rows as descriptive evidence rather than independent trials. Five host families are too few for a population claim, and the experiment says nothing about transfer to a new cell library or an industrial design. It supports a narrower conclusion: sibling benchmark variants can inflate apparent transfer. Benchmarks with several variants of one host circuit should report family-aware holdouts and all five family results beside pooled scores.
Hang Xiao, Chuhong Xu, Kainan Zhou +2
Sep 7, 2026cs.AI

EXAONE Forecast for Finance

This technical report presents EXAONE Forecast for Finance (EXAONE Finance), a financial time series (TS) foundation model (TSFM) tailored to financial forecasting. Recent TSFMs achieve strong zero-shot performance through large-scale pretraining. However, they are primarily developed for general-domain TS and largely rely on self-attention backbones whose computational cost grows quadratically with sequence length and variate count. Moreover, they assume fully observed inputs and are pretrained on corpora that fail to capture the unique dynamics of financial markets. These limitations hinder their applicability to finance, where long, many-channel, intermittently observed panels are common. To address these challenges, EXAONE Finance adopts an attention-free architecture, replacing self-attention with two simple yet effective linear-time operators: 1) a causal 1D convolution for temporal mixing and 2) a group-aware pooling multi-layer perceptron (MLP) for variate mixing. Furthermore, a masked context augmentation exposes the model to contiguous missing spans during training, improving robustness to the missingness pervasive in financial markets. EXAONE Finance is pretrained on a large-scale financial corpus covering not only equities but also foreign exchange, commodities, crypto-assets, fixed income, and macroeconomic indicators. On FinVerse, a financial forecasting benchmark covering diverse asset classes, EXAONE Finance attains state-of-the-art performance, ranking first across all three evaluation tiers---point-forecast accuracy, cross-sectional asset ranking, and portfolio profitability.
Seunghan Lee, Jaehoon Lee, Jun Seo +9
Sep 7, 2026cs.AI

Iris: Climbing to the Search Frontier

We present Iris-mini and Iris-pro, two search agents trained at the 35B-A3B and 397B-A17B scales, together with the data pipeline and training recipe behind them. Tasks are reverse-constructed from the hyperlink structure of a web corpus: we author multi-hop chains over an entity graph distilled from a seed page and its out-links, rewrite every non-answer entity into a descriptive reference so that no clue can be resolved by string matching, and admit only questions that a reference model fails closed-book yet solves once the supporting evidence is supplied. These questions are then turned into trajectories, which are filtered at both the trajectory and the turn level before SFT. The policy is then optimized by RL against live search, with the reward judge and the observation summarizer served inside the training cluster, and with over-long rollouts interrupted at the request level and resumed from their committed prefix at the next step. We alternate the two stages in a procedure we call SFT-RL climbing, returning the hardest solved and most efficient rollouts of each RL round to the next supervised pass. Because inference-time context management is worth more on these benchmarks than most reported differences between systems, we evaluate every benchmark both with and without it, holding the tool set, the context limit, and the judge fixed. All results come from a single ReAct agent, with no sub-agents and no test-time verification. With management enabled, on BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, DeepSearchQA, and HLE the two models reach 82.2/84.8/86.9/52.382.2/84.8/86.9/52.3 and 88.6/85.1/92.9/56.488.6/85.1/92.9/56.4, the strongest overall results among open-source search agents in their respective parameter ranges. We plan to release the model weights together with the complete recipe for data construction, training, and evaluation.
Ziyuan Liu, Hengqi Liu, Zichuan Wang +6
Sep 4, 2026cs.CL

Vectorizing Classical Tamil: Representation Learning for Verse-Commentary Pairs

We construct a corpus of 1,262 verse--commentary (urai) pairs from five Classical Tamil source sections, ranging from technical grammatical prose to modern paraphrase, and ask what information representation learning can recover. We train recurrent and Transformer encoders, a Siamese-style pair-matching network, an mBART-style encoder--decoder, and a decoder-only language model. Each analysis is interpreted against an appropriate control on the same data. TF-IDF provides a strong no-training lexical retrieval baseline, alongside representation analyses and generation controls for the learned models. A fixed string containing the 25 most frequent commentary words scores higher on generation overlap than the decoder-only model. Canonical correlation reaches 1.000 on Gaussian noise at these sample sizes, token-F1 spans only about 0.02--0.20 on this corpus, and the encoder--decoder continues to lower training loss for sixteen epochs after validation loss has begun to rise. One narrow result remains: the decoder-only model prefers authentic word order in 107 of 112 minimal-pair comparisons (95.5%), but does not reproduce held-out commentary content. We release the extraction and evaluation protocol; redistribution of the source commentaries remains subject to permission.
Amrit Gopinath, Sangeetha Sivanesan
Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

Speak for Me: Giving LLMs the Situational Awareness to Participate in a Meeting

In online meeting delegation, LLM agents fail to recognize when to speak. With no structured way to track stances, coverage, and floor, they miss the moments where they should contribute. Prompt-only delegates stay silent on 51.4% of the absent participant's talking opportunities on the AMI corpus. We present CAPA (Collaborative Agent Predictive Architecture), an architecture for online meeting delegation. A Perceiver updates the meeting state from each observed turn. A Predictor forecasts how the conversation will continue. A Controller decides whether to speak and which proposition to surface. A Generator phrases the chosen contribution in the participant's style. Two judges score the forecast and the action against the next observed turn. A Recalibrator updates the meeting state from those verdicts for future decisions. To evaluate online delegation, we introduce an episode-level protocol that scores whether, when, and what a delegate contributes around the participant's actual idea units. The protocol's schema-constrained LLM judges align with human annotations at Cohen's kappa = 0.71. On 137 AMI meetings, CAPA reduces the silence rate from 51.4% to 2.5%, doubles credited recovery (26.1 --> 52.2), and keeps hallucination at 0.6%. The failure mode shifts from omission to selection, with each residual near-miss attributable to a specific module of the architecture. Mechanism ablations identify the meeting state as the lever that closes the recognition gap, where raw-context scaling alone does not.
Muneeb Khan, Frederic Kirstein, Terry Ruas +1
Sep 3, 2026cs.CL

The Impact of Synthetic Data Augmentation on Discourse-Pragmatic Function Classification

Synthetic data augmentation has become a common strategy for addressing class imbalance in NLP, but most approaches focus on the quantity and diversity of generated examples rather than their geometric relationship to real training data. We investigate this question in the context of discourse pragmatic function classification, a task where data sparsity is a structural feature rather than a collection artefact. Using 410 manually annotated instances of the English word look drawn from the British National Corpus, spanning four functions: Attention Signal, Directive, Discourse Marker, and Interjection. We generate synthetic training examples with Llama 3.1 and partition them by their cosine distance from real training data in RoBERTa embedding space. We compare six training conditions that differ in the placement of synthetic examples relative to the empirical decision boundary, while holding augmentation quantity constant across conditions. All augmented conditions improve macro F and accuracy over the real only baseline, but core proximal examples (NEAR) yield the largest gains in macro F (0.113), while a distance balanced mix achieves the highest accuracy (0.748). No condition improves AUC, indicating that augmentation shifts the decision boundary rather than improving the model's underlying probability estimates. These findings suggest that where synthetic examples land in representation space matters as much as how many are generated, with implications for low resource pragmatic classification more broadly.
Sara Sorahi, Kevin Tang, Reza Kazemian
Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

From Zero to Hero: An Open LLM Ecosystem for Armenian

Pretraining data for Armenian, a morphologically rich and low-resource language, is scarce, and no open Armenian LLM has been released with the data and recipe needed to reproduce it. To address this gap, we curate and release two datasets. ArmWeb is an extensively validated corpus of 4.37M Armenian news documents. ArmSTEM is a parallel English-Armenian collection of 373K math and science problems with step-by-step solutions, translated into Armenian and verified through both answer-preserving LLM judgment and human evaluation. Continued pretraining of Gemma-4-E4B on these datasets yields arm-gemma-e4b, which outperforms every existing open Armenian model as well as its unadapted base, and is the first open Armenian LLM with complete training data and recipe. Our ablations show that news-only continued pretraining improves fluency while eroding knowledge, a pattern we also observe in existing Armenian models, and that a small share of verified translated STEM data reverses the loss. We further find that the largest public Armenian corpora overlap web-derived evaluation panels heavily, including a train/test self-overlap inside FineWeb-2. We openly release all data, models, and code.
Erik Arakelyan, Khatun Avetisyan, Meri Davtyan +5
Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

A Large Open Multi-Energy Corpus of Soil Compaction Tests, with Machine-Learning Baselines

Every engineered fill is specified by a maximum dry density and an optimum moisture content. Each determination needs a full Proctor test. Published correlations rest on one to four hundred specimens, usually from one laboratory at one compactive energy, and are seldom released. This paper releases a corpus without those limits. It holds 2,854 laboratory compaction tests from six public sources, across 162 provenance groups and four Proctor energy levels, with fines from 1.5 to 100%. Every record is audited to the Proctor method its source names, and no energy is inferred. Screening on the zero-air-voids condition removed 11.8% of harmonised records, and 5.7% of those with a measured specific gravity. A material share of published compaction data is physically impossible. The optimum degree of saturation over the corpus is 0.815 at a coefficient of variation of 11%. That is a baseline, not a constant. Both parameters are then estimated from one classification suite and the compaction standard. A tabular foundation model reaches R2 0.824 for density and 0.784 for water content under random folds. It reaches 0.727 and 0.696 with folds drawn around provenance, and 0.520 and 0.614 with a whole source held out. Compactive energy is negligible marginally yet decisive conditionally. Density on the 66 modified-Proctor records is predicted at R2 0.740 with it and -0.651 without. Symbolic regression yields closed forms coupled through a phase relation. No predicted pair can then exceed the zero-air-voids line. The predictions are for screening, not acceptance.
Sompote Youwai, Chana Phutthananon, Warat Kongkitkul
Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

Sparse Readout Prism: Explaining Logit-Lens Scores in Features Instead of Tokens

A language model's prediction of its next token develops across layers, and lens methods track this process by decoding intermediate hidden states into tokens. But a lens reading reflects both the hidden state and the readout (the unembedding matrix) used to decode it. Many lenses are fit on a corpus, and we show that two lenses differing only in their fitting corpus can report different tokens for the same hidden states. We call this dependence corpus conditionality. To examine readout structure independently of the fitting corpus, we introduce Sparse Readout Prism (SRP), which decomposes the readout using only its weights and expresses any token logit or logit difference as a sum of contributions from sparse readout features. This reveals readout features as a new unit of analysis for lens readings, exposing structure that token identities can obscure and enabling comparisons across tokens, contexts, layers, and lenses. Replacing the original readout with SRP's sparse approximation reconstructs 8.9-17.3 percentage points more of the tested logit differences than the strongest of six baselines built on geometric relations among readout rows. Ablating features shifts logit differences in proportion to their SRP contributions. Although token readings vary with the fitting corpus, the dominant readout feature remains stable. Because SRP uses no corpus in its construction, it provides a control independent of the fitting corpus for lens analyses.
Matteo He, William F. Shen, Xinchi Qiu +1
Sep 1, 2026cs.AI

SSAKG 2.0: An Open-Source Package for Structural Associative Sequence Memory and Context-Based Retrieval

This article presents SSAKG 2.0, an open-source software package for constructing and operating Structural Sequential Associative Knowledge Graphs (SSAKGs). An SSAKG represents objects as graph vertices and ordered sequences as structural patterns of graph connections. The resulting sparse graph is used as an associative memory in which complete sequences can be reconstructed from a partial, unordered context. Version 2.0 introduces new algorithms that exploit individual bits of computer memory to efficiently search graph connections. The package is implemented in Python, while performance-critical graph operations are implemented in C and exposed through a Python interface. This hybrid implementation provides a flexible high-level programming environment while reducing the memory and computational overhead associated with large sparse graphs. The algorithms were evaluated using randomly generated numerical sequences, sequences derived from sentences in the NLTK corpus, and mRNA sequences. The experiments demonstrate the ability of the package to store and reconstruct sequences from partial contexts and provide a basis for evaluating the effects of graph density, sequence length, and memory size on retrieval performance. SSAKG 2.0 is distributed under the Apache 2.0 open-source license. The package includes documentation and reproducible examples and is publicly available through GitHub and the Python Package Index (PyPI).
Przemysław Stokłosa, Janusz A. Starzyk, Paweł Raif
Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

Investigating Linear Probe Robustness to Linguistic Register, Medical Specialty, and Corpus Shifts in Medical QA

Linear classifiers trained on hidden states of a large language model (LLM), linear probes, can flag factual errors from a single forward pass. Geometrically, that implies that true and false statements separate along a stable direction in hidden state space, i.e., the truth direction. Prior work disagrees on whether this generalises across input shifts, but the disagreement is hard to interpret because cross-dataset probe transfer experiments confound several kinds of input change at once. We isolate three such variables in medical question-answering (QA): writing style (register), domain (medical specialty), and corpus (dataset). We build a benchmark using 500 MedQA entries, each rewritten into four styles (textbook, patient, clinical note, colloquial), annotated with clinical specialty, and grouped with two other exam corpora, MedMCQA and MMLU-medical, for cross-dataset evaluation. Probing four open-weight LLMs (2--8B), we find that the truth direction is largely robust to writing style (mean Δregister0.10Δ_\text{register} \approx 0.10 AUROC on held-out facts) and to medical specialty (Δspecialty0.03Δ_\text{specialty} \approx 0.03), but degrades unevenly across corpora: by 0.120.12 AUROC on MMLU-medical and by 0.210.21 on MedMCQA, roughly twice the register gap. The register result replicates with a second generator and carries over to human-written patient questions. The truth direction is therefore largely stable within the medical domain but breaks under some corpus shifts, and question format does not explain the break, which suggests that the signal a linear probe recovers is partly bound to dataset structure rather than to medical knowledge alone.
Nishant Mishra, Ameen Abu-Hanna, Iacer Calixto
Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

Some Emotions Run Deeper: Layer-wise Probing and Causal Intervention in Large Language Models

Emotion is expressed in text along a wide spectrum, from surface lexical cues to inferences entangled with content. Most layer-wise analyses of emotion in LLMs use a single corpus, leaving open whether the depth at which emotion becomes accessible is a property of the model or also of the text source. We investigate this across three datasets spanning different degrees of explicitness and contextualization in emotion expression (Twitter posts, Reddit comments, and autobiographical narratives) and eight 1B--9B open-weight LLMs from the Llama, Qwen, and Granite families. We combine layer-wise probing with offline feature scaling and online forward interventions, transfer analyses, and an early-exit classifier. We find that (i) the best probing layer shifts systematically across corpora, from input-adjacent layers to over half model depth, and this ordering persists after matching label-by-length-bin distributions; (ii) across the evaluated settings, forward-pass interventions on probe-selected bands reduce test accuracy by 5--6 points more than same-width random bands (q<0.01q < 0.01); (iii) selected bands transfer across datasets and emotion categories, suggesting partially shared affective information rather than strictly per-emotion substrates; and (iv) probe-selected early-exit representations outperform full-depth exits by 6.96.9 percentage points on average.
Tian Fang, Gaël Guibon, Davide Buscaldi
Sep 1, 2026cs.CR

HiveTraceGuard-Pro: A Compact Generative Guardrail for Prompt Injection, Jailbreaks, and Adversarial Obfuscation

Production LLMs must handle inputs that attempt to override system instructions, bypass safety policies or elicit harmful responses. A common mitigation is a separate guardrail model. Existing reports, however, provide little evidence on Russian prompt injection or Russian surface obfuscation. We present HiveTraceGuard-Pro, a 0.6B generative guardrail LoRA-tuned from Qwen3-0.6B. It is trained on Russian and English and uses one binary scoring rule (safe/unsafe) for the final target turn. Its training corpus pairs harmful examples, where a counterpart exists, with benign examples from the same domain and applies eight obfuscation transforms to both labels. In one harness, we compare HiveTraceGuard-Pro with thirty-four other guards on nineteen benchmark groups, sixteen of which are public. Its aggregate key is 0.7432, behind 0.7641 and 0.7552 for the two higher-scoring guards. Over the sixteen public groups alone, its key is 0.7153 and four of the thirty-four other suite guards score higher. In a fifteen-model comparison, HiveTraceGuard-Pro has the highest clean Russian robustness combined-F1 (0.88) and Russian prompt-injection recall (0.999). Both results use Russian sets assembled by our team, and at least 27.1% of the prompt-injection set overlaps the training corpus. Its 14.3 ms median latency is the lowest among those fifteen models in that run. Across the suite, FPR is 0.268 and FNR is 0.156. All reported response results use a legacy standalone-reply serialization rather than the natural assistant-role path of the shipped chat template. We release the merged weights on Hugging Face under Apache-2.0. The corpus, evaluation sets and evaluation code remain internal.
Nikita Oblakov, Sabrina Sadiekh, Evgeniy Kokuykin
Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

Joint Training Is Not Enough: Conditioned Cross-Granularity Training for Multimodal Document Understanding

The Mutual Reinforcement Effect (MRE) asks whether a fine, span-level and a coarse, document-level task help each other when one model handles both. We test it in multimodal document understanding on three corpora, two of receipts and one of scanned business forms, comparing single-task, joint and conditioned training, which puts one granularity's gold output in the other's prompt during training only. We build Doc-MRE, an annotation layer pairing gold field extraction (point) with four document-level facets (line), from a three-judge LLM committee under a pre-registration, validated by blind re-annotation. One predicate, fixed in advance: at a shared recipe, a regime reinforces if it beats the matched single-task model on both granularities. Mixed joint training, the arrangement prior MRE work assumes, reinforces on no corpus at the main scale: it is below both single-task models on CORD and trades one granularity for the other on the two others, as single-task tuning does. Conditioned training reinforces on two of the three, CORD (+0.5 point, +4.8 line) and the forms corpus (+7.2 point, +11.0 line), resolvably on the coarse side and directionally on the fine one, and trades on WildReceipt; at that recipe no alternative measurably beats it on either side anywhere. Two byte-identical-prompt controls separate content from format: shuffled conditioning destroys the coarse-side skill but costs the fine side far less, and a neutral-content control reproduces the whole fine-side gain on WildReceipt, which is therefore prompt structure but buys nothing resolvable on the other two. On the forms corpus conditioning buys collapse avoidance: mixed training and the neutral control both assign the majority semantic label to all 50 test documents; only conditioning recovers the gold distribution. Probes find the information decodable under every regime with no resolvable increase under conditioning.
Chengguang Gan, Yunhao Liang, Hanjun Wei +2
Sep 1, 2026cs.CV

Do Satellites See Commuters? A Critical Benchmark of Vision Foundation Models

Satellite foundation models offer a globally available alternative to census data for commuting origin-destination (OD) generation, yet no study has systematically compared encoder paradigms within a single downstream pipeline. We ablate four satellite vision encoders: language-supervised (RemoteCLIP), self-supervised (DINOv3), and geographically grounded (SatCLIP, AlphaEarth) within an identical WeDAN graph diffusion framework across 1,925 US counties, 325 UK districts, and 14 global cities under five random seeds. Three main findings emerge. First, language-supervised features achieve the strongest in-distribution performance (RemoteCLIP CPC 0.602), while geographically grounded encoders transfer more reliably zero-shot: AlphaEarth improves CPC by 33% over RemoteCLIP on UK districts. Second, pretraining corpus scale alone is insufficient: DINOv3, trained on a substantially larger satellite corpus, underperforms RemoteCLIP by 0.091 CPC in-distribution and collapses to CPC 0.022 globally. Third, no encoder transfers usefully to global cities (best CPC 0.122 for RemoteCLIP, 0.022 for DINOv3), confirming cross-continental OD generation remains an open problem. We additionally clarify the semantics of the census noise parameter ηη, whose ordering reverses under cross-continental evaluation, a distinction critical to correctly interpreting prior results. Training scripts and evaluation logs will be released.
Ashiq Shukoor Iqbal, Wilson Wongso, Flora D. Salim
Sep 1, 2026cs.SD

TUTTI: Toward generalizable audio-to-score transcription via fully synthesized data

Generalizable Audio-to-Score (A2S) transcription is fundamentally constrained by the severe scarcity of high-quality, real-world paired data. Relying solely on existing human-annotated datasets often restricts the generalization of A2S models, limiting their efficacy primarily to single-instrumentation domains. To break this dependency on scarce real-world data, we introduce TUTTI (Transformer for Unified audio-To-score Transcription trained on Synthetic multi-Instrumentation Data), a pre-training paradigm driven by a purely synthetic, large-scale dataset. Rather than using human-composed scores, we leverage a symbolic music generation model to generate a massive, highly scalable multi-instrumentation corpus and create audio-score pairs with expressive acoustic characteristics. Capitalizing on the generated data, we employ a standard Transformer encoder-decoder architecture. We empirically demonstrate that pre-training a unified attention-based model on generated, multi-instrumentation data yields a consistently stronger foundational representation than single-instrumentation training. When fine-tuned with downstream real-world datasets, TUTTI outperforms previous approaches, establishing new overall state-of-the-art results across various A2S baselines. Notably, TUTTI shows remarkable cross-instrument transferability, effectively adapting to unseen instruments with highly competitive performance. The source code and the TuttiCorpus dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/a-musiclover/TUTTI.
Jianhuai Hu, Yashan Wang, Shangda Wu +7
Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

Language-Statistical Analysis of Neural Audio Codec Tokens Across Architectures, Corpora, and Noise Conditions

Neural audio codecs (NACs) convert speech into discrete token sequences, and prior work has reported that these sequences follow language-like statistical laws. This paper analyzes the token statistics of 13 NACs spanning multi-codebook residual vector quantization (RVQ), single-codebook VQ, and non-VQ designs, evaluated on three corpora under clean, white-noise, and real-world DEMAND-noise conditions. Zipf and Heaps parameters, unigram entropy, codebook occupancy, and Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD) are estimated from matched token samples with explicit fit-validity safeguards and family-conditional nn-gram orders. Corpus identity explains little variance in any metric, whereas acoustic condition and quantizer meta-category dominate in a metric-dependent way, and unigram entropy is the metric most strongly associated with meta-category. Clean-to-noise JSD computed at a common unigram order is associated with mel-cepstral distortion most clearly under DEMAND noise. The collapse and explosion degradation signatures previously reported for RVQ codecs concentrate in RVQ cells under white and DEMAND noise, respectively; explosion also occurs in non-VQ codecs, and single-codebook VQ codecs shift in occupancy and distribution shape without either signature. These results provide architecture-conditioned conventions for applying language-statistical analysis to NAC tokens.
Joonyong Park, Shinnosuke Takamichi, David M. Chan +3
Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

Annotated Surrogate Retrieval for Polish Statutory Law

We present a family of retrieval methods for Polish statutory law built on document surrogates: language-model annotations attached to statutory articles at index time. Three designs occupy different points on the cost-quality frontier. ASCR is a surrogate cascade with reranking; ASCR-H fuses a dense list into that cascade; and DTF replaces both language-model stages with three lexical and dense retrievers, weighted reciprocal rank fusion, and a deterministic re-scoring prior, using no model call before generation. We evaluate all three against fourteen lexical, dense, fused and ablated baselines plus four controls, on 300 questions from the 2024 and 2025 Polish bar and legal counsel entrance examinations (264 with their reference article in the corpus), over 82,508 articles from 1,133 acts. On paired McNemar tests, ASCR-H places the reference provision at rank one significantly more often than every other non-oracle configuration except one of its own ablations (eighteen of twenty comparisons significant in its favour at p < 0.005), reaching 72.3% against 61.7% for BM25 and 52.3% for dense retrieval. The advantage is concentrated at the head and does not survive depth: it is significant at cutoffs of one and five, disappears by ten, and by twenty DTF leads on point estimate (86.0% versus 84.5%) at one ninth the latency and less than half the cost. Ablation attributes 27.6 points of rank-one accuracy to the reranking stage alone. We further report that the ranking advantage does not extend to citation accuracy, where DTF matches the oracle ceiling, and three negative results on lemmatisation, pseudo-relevance feedback and query rewriting. Surrogate annotation covers 27.0% of the corpus but every reference provision in the benchmark, an asymmetry we disclose and discuss. Benchmark, per-question outputs and paired significance tests are publicly available.
Orkun Yiğit Cengiz
Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

REER-PT: Reverse-Engineered Reasoning for Perplexity-Guided Pre-training Data Augmentation

As language-model compute continues to scale, high-quality training data is becoming an increasingly important bottleneck. Conventional next-token prediction supervises what follows a context but leaves the intermediate reasoning behind that continuation implicit. We introduce \textbf{REER-PT}, a scalable framework that extends Reverse-Engineered Reasoning (REER) to raw pre-training data. REER-PT identifies continuations that are difficult to predict but can still be inferred from the preceding context, and inserts concise reasoning annotations that reconstruct the missing connection between context and continuation. Candidate annotations are generated and refined offline, with perplexity serving as the optimization signal. Constraints on length and target leakage filter out unhelpful or trivial annotations. This sparse transformation preserves the source text and remains compatible with standard next-token prediction, avoiding online reasoning rollouts during pre-training. We apply REER-PT to transform a source pre-training corpus into an augmented one. Across augmented-data, original-token, and selected-continuation comparisons, perplexity reductions range from 0.42 to 7.29, and only about 0.05% of annotation 13-grams appear verbatim in the source text. We then train two 680M-parameter models with the same architecture and training configuration on the source and augmented corpora, respectively. The augmented-data model gains up to 2.07 percentage points on several knowledge and reasoning benchmarks. Together, the perplexity analysis indicates improved continuation predictability, while the controlled pre-training experiments suggest that this augmentation can improve model performance without changing the standard pre-training objective.
Haoran Que, Jiajun Shi, Ting Huang +7
Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

Reading the News: Adapting Large Language Models to Swedish Journalism Through Continued Pre-Training

Large language models are increasingly capable in general, but their utility can remain modest in niche or understudied areas. One approach to address this limitation is to specialise existing models through additional training on target-domain corpora. In this work, we investigate such continued pre-training for adapting large language models to Swedish journalism, using a high-quality dataset that we curate from millions of news articles. To evaluate the adaptation efficacy, we also construct a novel domain-specific benchmark that covers six editorial tasks. Through full and parameter-efficient fine-tuning across two model sizes, we find that continued pre-training yields benefits in the target domain, but only when paired with experience replay to mitigate forgetting. We observe consistent enhancements in the models' generation quality and factual knowledge, but not their proficiency in discriminative tasks. Exploring a training-free method to facilitate instruction following, we see further improvements, but exclusively for models trained with low-rank adaptation. Crucially, we demonstrate the importance of targeted evaluation in the adaptation process, as an existing Swedish benchmark largely fails to capture the models' in-domain performance gains.
Lukas Borggren, Jenny Kunz, Marco Kuhlmann
Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

Hi-Q: Hierarchical Evidence-guided Query Refinement for Multi-Hop Question Answering

A central bottleneck in multi-hop Question Answering (QA) is that the granularity at which a question is expressed often differs from the granularity at which corpus evidence is retrievable. Existing methods address this mismatch by imposing fixed graph structures over the corpus, by iteratively reformulating the query, or by executing a generated program over it, but these strategies do not explicitly decide when a query unit is already supported by evidence and when it should be refined. We formulate this bottleneck as retrievable granularity discovery and introduce Hi-Q, an evidence-conditioned framework for hierarchical query refinement. At each query node, a resolution operator tests whether retrieved evidence supports the current query unit; resolved nodes terminate, while unresolved nodes are expanded by a dependency-preserving binary operator and checked by a semantic coverage verifier. Hi-Q therefore grows a query tree whose topology is determined by corpus support signals rather than by a fixed decomposition template or a pre-built graph. We evaluate Hi-Q on three multi-hop QA benchmarks, primarily under full-corpus retrieval, where dependent evidence must be located among open-domain distractors rather than within a small annotated pool. In this setting Hi-Q reaches 52.3 EM and 64.0 F1 averaged over the three benchmarks, ahead of the iterative retrieval baseline IRCoT by 15.1 EM / 18.2 F1 on that same average, and ahead of the graph-based RAG baseline PropRAG by 11.5 EM / 12.0 F1 on MuSiQue-full, without corpus-wide graph construction. In the restricted supporting/distractor setting used by prior work, Hi-Q likewise attains the best accuracy, with 57.9 EM and 69.3 F1 on average, ahead of PropRAG by 5.6 EM / 3.9 F1 and IRCoT by 13.7 EM / 15.8 F1. The project page is available at https://hi-q-project.github.io/.
Jueun Kim, Sungho Park, Wook-Shin Han
Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

Do Small Models Use the Law You Give Them? Measuring Context Use on a Bilingual Bangladesh Legal Benchmark

Fine-tuning can improve legal question-answering accuracy without improving how models use law supplied in context. We study this distinction in bilingual Bangladeshi legal QA, where observed errors can arise from answer scoring, retrieval, or failure to use relevant law. We construct a hierarchy-preserving statutory corpus, 2,165 reviewed bilingual fine-tuning examples, and a 150-item supplied-law control. We evaluate six instruction-tuned models: Llama-3.2-1B, Llama-3.2-3B, Qwen3.5-0.8B, Qwen3.5-2B, Qwen3.5-4B, and Gemma-4-E2B, with three LoRA seeds per model. To separate effects, we combine constrained option-letter scoring, cyclic option rotation, and controlled removal of the governing provision. On 398 Bar Council outputs, an exact-line parser attributes an accuracy gain of 50.0% to the Qwen3.5-2B seed-42 adapter, whereas option scoring yields only 3.0%3.0\%. For Gemma-4-E2B, the two scoring methods favor different systems. When the governing provision is guaranteed to be present, five of six reference models improve by 14.7%19.3%14.7\%-19.3\% under the four-order criterion. Removing that provision reduces accuracy by 8.0%15.3%8.0\%-15.3\% for models and by 13.8%14.9%13.8\%-14.9\% points for their adapters. However, difference-in differences estimates show no increase in reliance on the governing provision after fine-tuning. Results show that legal adaptation claims require separating scorer, retriever, and model effects. Our Code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/bangladesh-legal-qa-11E3
Moniruzzaman Mahadi, Abrar Mohammed Tanzim Alam, Sayma Siddika Monalisa +3
Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

Ignorance or Incompetence? Constructing Knowledge-Gated, Verifiable Tasks for LLM Agents

Professional agent tasks often depend on conventions that are absent from public corpora, yet benchmarks rarely control whether an agent has access to those conventions. We introduce a knowledge-gated task-construction protocol that separates a task instruction from a compact artefact containing private conventions, reference tables, and utility operators. Construction-time provenance, byte-identical task instructions across the provided- and withheld-artefact conditions, leak audits, and executable witnesses make dependence on the artefact explicit and testable. Across fifteen calibration tasks, one frontier agent configuration achieves a 68.0% pass rate with the artefact and 0% without it; on one task, a plausible but incorrect artefact also yields 0% across five trials. Deterministic solvers and rule corpora provide exact ground truth for structured tasks, while named criterion-level rubrics support outputs that cannot be checked by a single executable oracle. A configuration-relative calibration screen retains seven tasks satisfying our five-trial empirical knowledge-gating screen. These experiments validate the behavior of the construction protocol; they do not establish that the retained tasks improve post-training. We publicly release part of the task suite and supporting tooling at https://github.com/DatagridsAI/Knowledge-Gated-Task-Construction.
Hanlin Tian, Minhao Li, Yu Mi +5
Aug 30, 2026cs.IR

Demand-Side Measurement for Generative Engine Optimization: Constructing and Validating a Million-Persona, Intent-Annotated Buyer Corpus

Generative engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity answer buyer questions directly and name a shortlist of brands inside the answer. Studying how brands enter or fail to enter that shortlist requires demand-side data: what buyers in a category ask, what information they need, and which sources they trust. Existing large persona corpora are built for training-data diversity and carry neither a staged search-intent label nor a preferred-sources field, so they cannot be joined to supply-side recommendation measurements. We built and validated PersonaGen-1M, a corpus of 1,031,732 synthetic buyer personas spanning 511 industry labels and 4 market contexts, carrying 19,416,821 structured behavioral attributes, 5,160,046 of them search queries. Each persona carries a single primary_intent label covering its query set (78.3% informational, 17.4% commercial, 4.3% transactional) and a preferred_sources field naming the source types that buyer would trust. The corpus was built from roughly 40 million raw persona descriptions drawn from four public datasets through GPU-accelerated MinHash LSH plus semantic deduplication, then enriched to a fixed schema. The intent field selects the commercial-evaluation personas whose queries drive recommendation, and the preferred_sources field pairs against citation-provenance data; that join is the primary intended use, and its controlled empirical estimate is future work. Among million-scale persona corpora surveyed in August 2026, one other carries a source-preference attribute, as a six-value media-channel enum; PersonaGen-1M pairs named per-persona source lists with a staged commercial search-intent label and an attached query set. The full corpus is shared on request for non-commercial research; a stratified subset is published openly so the protocol, the schema and the validation can be inspected and reused without asking us.
Dmitrij Żatuchin, Daniil Dzemesjuk
Aug 30, 2026cs.AI

SearchWiki: Learning to Build and Navigate Knowledge Wikis for Active Information Seeking

Flat retrieval-augmented generation treats a corpus as a bag of chunks, discarding document hierarchy and cross document structure. We introduce SearchWiki, a harness framework that synthesizes a corpus into a hierarchical, typed, navigable wiki and trains an agent, WikiResearcher-9B, to retrieve information through multi-turn tool use. The wiki organizes knowledge into three layers - document overviews, cross- document topic pages, and page-level source records; enabling progressive refinement of retrieval when initial lookup misses. We optimize the agent's navigation policy with on-policy reinforcement learning with a multi-component reward function balancing answer correctness, retrieval quality and trajectory efficiency. Evaluation on ViDoRe-V3 (8 domains), FinanceBench, and memory benchmarks (LoCoMo, LongMemEval, PersonaMem-v2) shows that WikiResearcher- 9B which is our RL-tuned Qwen 9B model, significantly outperforms same-size untrained baselines and exceeds or matches larger external models. SearchWiki paired with WikiResearcher-9B demonstrates that learned navigation over structured corpora is a superior alternative to flat retrieval.
Guransh Singh, Vishwajeet Kumar, Arkadeep Acharya +3
Aug 30, 2026cs.CL

En-ViMedNER: An English-Vietnamese Parallel Biomedical Corpus with UMLS Semantic Type Annotations

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) is fundamental to healthcare AI applications, including clinical decision support and medical information extraction. While corpora with Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) annotations, such as MedMentions, have driven progress in English biomedical NER, no comparable resource exists for Vietnamese. This paper presents En-ViMedNER, the first English-Vietnamese parallel biomedical NER corpus annotated with UMLS semantic types, which are language-neutral codes providing a shared cross-lingual label space and ensuring direct comparability with existing UMLS-based resources. The corpus contains 4,392 PubMed abstract pairs, 44,892 English-Vietnamese sentence pairs, and 202,949 aligned entity-mention pairs across 21 semantic types adapted from the MedMentions ST21pv dataset. To balance quality and scalability, we have constructed the corpus through automatic translation, expert post-editing, LLM-assisted label projection, and human verification and adjudication. We characterize En-ViMedNER as a large-scale silver-standard corpus with a human-audited and consensus-corrected mini-test subset. We evaluate En-ViMedNER in two settings: (i) Vietnamese-input/Vietnamese-output biomedical NER and (ii) English-input/Vietnamese-output cross-lingual NER. For Vietnamese NER, we benchmark Vietnamese-supervised encoder models, English-supervised multilingual encoder models, and prompt-based LLMs. The best model achieves an F1 score of 52.70 on the test set and 53.78 on the mini-test set. For cross-lingual NER, we benchmark encoder-decoder models and prompt-based LLMs. The best model achieves an F1 score of 45.44 on the mini-test set. We publicly release our corpus, corpus construction pipeline, and baseline models to facilitate future Vietnamese biomedical NLP research.
Nhu Vo, Phuong Nguyen, Nu Uyen Phuong Le +4
Aug 30, 2026cs.CL

The Depth Flow of Token Representations Is Nonlinear and Does Not Descend Its Own Density

A token's representation is carried through the network layer by layer. The whole vocabulary carried together forms a flow. We fit this flow's equation of motion as a discrete Langevin model over corpus-mean trajectories of Pythia-160M and Pythia-410M, and score the predicted steps on held-out tokens. Linear maps are often used as cheap surrogates for a layer. The flow they summarize is not linear: a quadratic drift beats the linear linear map at every transition of both models, and the Kramers--Moyal estimator agrees wherever its neighborhoods stay local. We then characterize the flow further. First, we show that it does not descend its own log-density. The drift instead descends a potential that is not the density. Second, the rotational component is not negligible, 44 to 45%45\% of the explainable drift, and the circulation shows in what the flow preserves: a token keeps its angular rank across all thirteen layers while its norm rank is shuffled and its concentration rank is reversed by the last block.
Alexandre Quemy
Aug 26, 2026cs.CL

Unfolding Scientific Papers into Multi-Turn Generation Trajectories for Continued Pre-Training

A recent line of synthetic-data work reconstructs the thinking behind existing text rather than rewriting the text itself, but it operates on short web passages, recovers only local thoughts, and leaves the structure of whole documents untouched. Scientific papers are written to a clear and largely uniform structure and make a natural substrate for lifting this paradigm to the document level. We present a pipeline that unfolds each paper into a multi-turn generation trajectory in which a teacher model reconstructs the writing process of the whole paper: a writing request, a global plan, and pre-writing deliberation for each section. All section texts and the abstract are kept verbatim from the source paper. We apply the pipeline to 1.8M quality-filtered arXiv papers and obtain a 60B-token corpus for continued pre-training (CPT) that is roughly twice the source text. The same reverse construction extends to instruction data and evaluation. We build an SFT dataset of 200K samples using answers derived from paper text. We also use held-out papers to construct PAW-Bench, a benchmark of 2,940 academic writing tasks with per-task rubrics and checklists. In controlled experiments, CPT on our corpus followed by SFT on public datasets improves writing performance while preserving general reasoning and improving long document reading. Replacing part of the writing SFT data with our synthetic instruction data further improves performance on PAW-Bench.
Qiankai Xu, Qiguang Chen, Zixin Su +4
Aug 26, 2026cs.CL

GUIDE: Generative Unsupervised Chinese Query Correction via Phonetic and Visual Shared-ID Encoding

Chinese query correction (CQC) is important for search and query recommendation on content platforms, but supervised methods rely on large annotated correction pairs that are costly to maintain as query vocabularies evolve. Unsupervised correction with language models is attractive, yet in the short-query setting, unconstrained generation often over-corrects ambiguous inputs toward high-frequency phrases, causing intent drift. We propose \textsc{GUIDE}, a generative unsupervised framework for CQC based on a confuse-then-clarify paradigm. \textsc{GUIDE} encodes phonetically or visually confusable characters with shared-IDs and reconstructs the original query with an encoder--decoder architecture, which constrains correction to plausible confusion neighborhoods while learning from unlabeled query streams. A time-decayed, query-frequency-weighted objective further supports adaptation to rapidly changing query vocabularies. Experiments on \textit{QSpell 250K} and a large-scale real-world dataset (\textit{KwaiSearch}) show that \textsc{GUIDE} consistently outperforms strong baselines, while online A/B testing further confirms gains in correction quality and downstream engagement.
Lei Yang, Binbin Huang, Jiwei Tan +4
Aug 25, 2026cs.SE

SpecMine: A Large-Scale Corpus of Spec-Driven Development Artifacts

Spec-Driven Development (SDD) is a fast-emerging practice in which a structured natural-language specification, written by a developer, or (more often) drafted by an AI tool and then curated by the developer, drives an AI coding agent's implementation. A wave of tooling (GitHub Spec Kit [3], OpenSpec [4], AWS Kiro [5], and dozens of others) has appeared since 2025, yet the artifacts these tools produce have never been studied at scale. We present SpecMine, a corpus that captures SDD in public GitHub repositories through two censuses: a broad census of spec.md/specs.md files covering most tools (470,795 files across 73,030 repositories, attributed to 17 named tools), and a Kiro census of its distinct requirements/design/tasks layout (98,574 files across 12,910 repositories). Each spec is enriched with full repository metadata, complete commit history, and parsed document structure. How a spec becomes code is itself an open question, so for 11 tools we sweep every pull request that touches a spec in their repositories with at least ten stars, capturing 5,992 such PRs across 581 repositories with their changesets. That makes the simplest workflow, spec and implementation changing together in one PR, directly observable, and a census-wide index of 2,421,323 typed references (1.28M to code files, 863k to sibling documents, 152k to PRs, 62k refs, 43k branches, 22k issues) gives a second, independent link from spec to code. SpecMine lets the community study, for the first time, how software is specified in the age of AI agents.
Shyam Agarwal, Anmol Singhal, Travis Breaux +1
Aug 21, 2026cs.LG

In-Cell Learning: Language Models That Update Their Own Weights in Sequence Without Changing the File They Ship

A 4-bit quantized weight specifies a rounding cell rather than a single full-precision value. We introduce in-cell learning, a paradigm for writing new knowledge only within these cells, so that re-quantizing the served weights reproduces the released integer codes and scales exactly. CellFill implements this idea with bounded trainable positions inside frozen quantization cells and ships the update as a separate, subtractively revocable file. Across published NF4 and W4A16 releases of Qwen3 and Gemma from 1.7B to 32B parameters, CellFill writes 83-99% of a real-fact corpus while returning the stored code on every constrained weight. The injected facts generalize to paraphrases and composition, and answer 78-88% of selected PopQA questions that the released model misses. Sequential experiments show that rehearsal preserves earlier knowledge, whereas available room and new-task plasticity decline across updates. Consolidation re-quantizes the learned weights to produce a declared major version, restoring room at a measured capability cost. A six-task write-rehearse-consolidate cycle retains at least 92.8% of first learning in two 8B runs and records zero code violations over 6.9 billion constrained weights at every fold. These results define a version-management protocol in which minor updates preserve the released quantized artifact bitwise and major updates are explicit, measurable, and verifiable.
Zifeng Liu, Yaxin Lu, Xuanhan Wu +6
Aug 13, 2026cs.CL

Motor, Cognitive, or Corpus? What Survives Cross-Lingual Transfer in Speech-Based Parkinsons Disease Detection

Self-supervised learning (SSL) speech representations achieve strong performance for Parkinson's disease (PD) detection within individual corpora. However, it remains unclear whether these models capture disease-related characteristics or exploit dataset-specific confounds, particularly since most SSL backbones are pretrained exclusively on healthy speech. To investigate this question, we perform a layer-wise analysis of nine SSL speech backbones using a low-capacity logistic regression probe across three languages. We structure the evaluation as multiple scenarios that progressively introduce distribution shifts in participant identity, recording conditions, language, and pathology. Our results reveal two key findings. First, layer selection is highly corpus-dependent: the optimal representation layer is determined primarily by the source dataset rather than by the SSL architecture itself. Second, the transferred discriminative signal lacks pathological specificity: classifiers trained to detect PD assign similarly high probabilities to both PD and dementia speech in the target corpus. These results highlight critical limitations that must be addressed before speech-based pathology recognition models can be reliably deployed in clinical settings.
Serli Kopar, Sam Gijsen, Abner Hernandez +2
Aug 13, 2026cs.AI

Who Speaks Matters: Authority-Aware Multi-View RAG over Italian Parliamentary Proceedings

Parliamentary proceedings are a primary record of democratic deliberation, yet their volume and fragmentation make multi-perspective access difficult for citizens, journalists, and researchers. Applying Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to parliamentary transcripts introduces three specific risks: dominance of the most frequent speakers, inability to weight speakers according to topical expertise, and citation misattribution in politically sensitive text. We present ParliamentRAG, a RAG system for the Italian Chamber of Deputies that addresses these risks jointly. Its core contribution is a topic-dependent authority model that estimates each speaker's authority as a function of the current query, combining interpretable components such as profession, education, and previous interventions. Given a user query, the system retrieves relevant speech chunks, identifies topic-relevant experts across parliamentary groups, and generates a summary synthesizing their perspectives, accompanied by supporting quotations. ParliamentRAG is evaluated against Google NotebookLM on 15 policy topics via a two-level protocol combining automated metrics and blind A/B human evaluation by six domain experts. The system achieves higher coverage across political groups (0.97 vs. 0.95), perfect quotation faithfulness (1.00 vs. 0.95), and stronger expert preferences on source-related dimensions, while NotebookLM remains stronger on prose-oriented dimensions.
Mirko Tritella, Riccardo Pozzi, Matteo Palmonari
Aug 13, 2026cs.LG

Into the ORBIT for Time Series: Training Regimes for Foundation Models

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have advanced primarily through architectural innovation, while training regimes for large-scale heterogeneous corpora remain under-explored. As a result, pre-training distributions are often poorly controlled with respect to domain imbalance, context requirements, prediction horizons, and missingness. We introduce ORBIT (Omni-Range Bootstrap Incremental Training), a training paradigm that makes this distribution explicit and controllable. ORBIT combines Bootstrap Multi-Level Sampling, which controls dataset exposure and samples records, target variables, context windows, and prediction horizons, with Omni-Range Incremental Training, which varies context lengths and prediction horizons throughout a single training stage. Under ORBIT, we train Falcon-2.0, a simple univariate encoder-only Transformer with missingness-aware triple-channel patch tokenization and parallel patch prediction. We further introduce Rank-Guided Cross-Depth Alignment, a training objective that uses late-layer representations as stop-gradient teachers for shallow layers without additional inference cost. Evaluations on GIFT-Eval and fev-bench demonstrate strong zero-shot forecasting performance across diverse domains and frequencies.
Hongjie Xia, Yiding Liu, Yifan Hu +2
Aug 13, 2026cs.CL

RAGSieve: Self-Referenced Local Contrast for Knowledge-Poison Detection in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation uses an external corpus as inference-time evidence, allowing an attacker to promote a false answer by injecting a handful of documents. Detection must distinguish this manipulation from ordinary relevance without knowing which queries or documents are targeted. Existing detectors use text irregularity, candidate consensus, or corpus-level graph structure, whose reliability varies with the attack and local context. We present RAGSieve, which constructs a reference matched to each detection scope. At query time, RAGSieve-Query (RSQ) compares generation candidates with the lower-ranked tail of the same retrieval, exposing answer-token concentration and carrier-payload seams. At corpus time, RAGSieve-Graph (RSG) compares each document's strongest semantic relations with its own neighborhood floor to measure coordinated density. Neither requires poison labels, a trusted corpus, or training. Across three QA datasets, three dense retrievers, and six poisoning constructions, RSQ reaches 95.2% AUROC and detects 82.2% of poison at a 5% clean-removal budget, against 81.1% and 52.5% for the strongest query-time baseline; RSG reaches 93.3% and 79.8% against 79.4% and 37.6% for the strongest corpus-time baseline, with a 79.6% versus 1.4% detection rate on camouflaged injections. Joint deployment cuts attack success from 67.4% to 16.1% while retaining unpoisoned-retrieval F1 at 41.0%, compared with 42.1% without filtering. Source code is available at https://github.com/XrazyMee/RAGSieve.
Xinlong Xu, Yoshua Y. Li
Aug 12, 2026cs.CL

Novels generated by language models show compressed formal variation

While large language models can generate entire novels, there is little information about the level of formal variation in their output over many generations. Rather than asking whether individual passages can be identified as AI-generated, this study asks whether repeated AI generation can produce the same range of diversity which is found across human corpora. This paper contrasts six corpora based on generation source and target style: twenty novels generated using GPT-5.5 Thinking in a nineteenth-century British realist style, twenty novels generated using Qwen3-14B in a nineteenth-century British realist style, twenty novels generated using each of these models in a contemporary zero style, 205 nineteenth-century human-written British novels, and sixty-five contemporary human-written Zero-Style novels. At the document level, the research includes MATTR-500, Shannon entropy, average sentence length, readability, and punctuation rate measurements. The most robust and reliable result is compression of sentence structure. Repeated generations produce novels that vary far less from one another in sentence structure than human novels do. Compression is also present in the measures of readability, punctuation, and sentence length variability within novels. Lexical measures tend to be similarly compressed, with the exception of Qwen Zero-Style MATTR. Despite having distinct mean stylistic profiles, GPT and Qwen lack a stable pattern of cross-measure correlation. This article therefore distinguishes between variance overclosure, which represents a limited formal range between novels, and a more specific phenomenon of correlational overclosure. This means that an individual AI-generated novel may resemble human fiction stylistically, while a collection of AI-generated novels occupies a much narrower formal range.
Mehdy Sedaghat Payam, Justin Quinn
Aug 12, 2026cs.DL

Is this Citation on Point?

In 2023, a New York judge sanctioned two attorneys in Mata v. Avianca for filing a brief with hallucinated citations generated by ChatGPT. Such failures are largely caught by database lookups; the harder problem is detecting citations that point to real cases but do not support the propositions for which they are offered -- a failure mode that existing evaluations of LLMs for legal use cases largely overlook. In this paper, we study proposition-level citation support verification through controlled perturbations of real legal citations obtained from two legal corpora, either replacing the cited case or changing only the pinpoint page within the same case. We evaluate fourteen model configurations on the resulting examples. Models catch 93-100% of wrong-case corruptions. They catch only 37-61% of wrong-pinpoint corruptions on court opinions and 52-83% on legal briefs. When models fail to catch wrong-pinpoint corruptions, they accept the citation based on topical overlap rather than page-level support. Scale and extended reasoning narrow the gap but do not close it: GPT-5.4 with high reasoning effort still misses 40% of pinpoint mismatches on court opinions and 18% on briefs. Prompting the model to verify support at the cited page improves recall, but it also raises the false positive rate. Recognizing the right legal topic and verifying support for the cited proposition are distinct capabilities, and current models conflate them.
Apurv Verma
Aug 12, 2026cs.CL

Unified Multi-Dialectal Neural Machine Translation for Bangla Using the Dwadash Benchmark Corpus

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at cross-lingual tasks but often fail to capture intra-lingual morphological variation, marginalizing dialectal speakers. In Bangla, existing translation frameworks commonly rely on Standard Colloquial Bangla (SCB) as an intermediate pivot, which can compound errors and reduce cross-dialectal nuance. To address this gap, we introduce a unified, multi-directional NMT system for direct translation between SCB and eleven regional variants. We first review prior dialectal NLP resources to identify existing technological gaps. As a foundational contribution, we construct and release a large multi-dialect parallel corpus for Bangla, comprising 14,562 aligned rows and 51,541 non-null sentence pairs through the integration of seven prior datasets and native-speaker-verified manual augmentation. Using this corpus, we benchmark state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence architectures with parameter-efficient Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA). Results show that deep monolingual pre-training is more effective than large multilingual capacity for this task. The compact BanglaT5 model outperforms NLLB-200 and mBART-50 by up to 13.96 BLEU, achieving 29.26 BLEU, 57.26 chrF++, and 49.68 METEOR. A dataset scaling study shows diminishing returns beyond 3,000 parallel pairs and indicates that linguistic proximity to Standard Bangla is more important than raw data volume for translation quality. Finally, we deploy the optimized model as an INT8-quantized web application, providing a scalable, open-source framework for inclusive language technology and equitable digital access.
Rakib Ullah, Md. Ruhul Islam, Tanbir Ahmed +1
Aug 12, 2026cs.SD

Dialogue-Aware Video-to-Music Generation Using Public Domain Film Collections

Video-to-music generation has drawn growing interest for its role in conveying the emotion of visual media, including film. Progress in the field, however, is hampered by a reproducibility gap: models are often trained on crawled corpora referenced through YouTube URLs that may be deleted, with the underlying data often difficult and time-consuming to retrieve. To address this, we introduce the Open Screen Soundtrack Library version 2 (OSSL-v2), a self-hosted corpus of 34,343 video clips totaling 246.4 hours, sourced from public-domain films. Unlike crawled corpora, OSSL-v2 is reproducible (i.e., not subject to link rot) and copyright-conscious, yet still large enough to train functional video-to-music models. We then use this film-domain corpus to study dialogue as a conditioning signal for video-to-music generation, motivated by the close temporal coupling between film music and on-screen speech. Specifically, we augment existing models' video cross-attention with a time axis and modulate it frame-by-frame with the dialogue track. Evaluated on both public-domain and commercial films, our approach shows improvement over the state-of-the-art baselines. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/McAuley-Lab/OSSL-v2.
Haven Kim, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley +1
Aug 11, 2026cs.CR

Cross-Corpus Evaluation of Generalizable Vulnerability Detection in IoT Firmware

IoT firmware vulnerability detection remains challenging due to heterogeneous firmware ecosystems, resource-constrained platforms, and limitations in existing benchmarks. Many datasets are synthetic or general-purpose and lack human-verified, contamination-screened annotations, limiting evidence on cross-corpus generalization across training sources, model architectures, and curriculum strategies. To address this gap, this paper introduces IoTVulBench, a human-verified benchmark for cross-corpus firmware vulnerability detection. IoTVulBench-Core was constructed from GitHub repositories, validated by three expert reviewers, and evaluated on a contamination-screened held-out target across five model architectures, two tuning methods, and three curriculum strategies, with ensemble, distillation, and robustness analyses. Models trained on IoTVulBench achieved the highest MCC among matched single-source datasets, reaching 0.58 versus 0.44 for PrimeVul and 0.39 for D2A. Staged curriculum learning increased MCC to 0.69, while a diversity-optimized ensemble achieved 0.73, improving by 0.42 MCC over the strongest reference comparator, a static analyzer at 0.31, and by 0.29 over PrimeVul. At a 0.5% false-positive rate, the model missed only 21% of vulnerabilities, compared with 71% for the strongest comparator. It retained 86% of its performance under identifier renaming and demonstrated strong calibration and largely faithful explanations. These findings indicate that domain-matched training data and curriculum design, rather than model scale alone, are key drivers of generalization in firmware vulnerability detection. The results provide a benchmark for future research and deployment-ready configurations for practical IoT security applications.
Sadib Hassan Rumman, Md. Shariful Islam, Md. Rayhanur Rahman
Aug 11, 2026cs.IR

TRACES: A Benchmark for Epistemic Reliability in Scientific Reasoning by LLMs

Large language models are being proposed as agents in scientific workflows, in domains where no downstream verifier exists. Such deployment assumes the model can distinguish reliable scientific literature from unreliable literature, a capability that has not yet been directly measured. Existing benchmarks evaluate factuality on questions with known answers; the failure mode we target here is different. We introduce a probe corpus of 42 retracted, fraudulent, and pseudoscientific papers, paired with a methodology for eliciting and scoring single-shot model engagement with each paper's framing. Each probe pairs a preamble extracted near-verbatim from the target paper with a scientifically plausible study-design request. The probes span five claim types: fabricated observation, pseudophysical mechanism, magical premise, legitimization bridge, and cargo-cult experiment. Two complementary scores measure whether a model rejects the flawed premise outright (IFR-a) and whether it recognizes the unreliability while still engaging (IFR-i). A depth score, the Engagement Depth Index (EDI), quantifies reproduction of paper- or field-specific withheld details. Across 30 models and 10 repeated runs, aggregate IFR-a is 0.93 ±\pm 0.004 and aggregate IFR-i is 0.809 ±\pm 0.009. Models engaged with untenable premises in 95% of all non-empty responses. Every evaluated model fails more than 71% of agentic probes, and 22 of 30 models fail more than 90% of the time. Rejections are concentrated on a small number of high-notoriety topics and specific probes, and disappear under matched-structure controls. These results are consistent with topic-keyed safety behavior rather than robust epistemic competence, and indicate an urgent need for guardrail infrastructure for scientific deployment of language models.
Valentin Rodionov, Shamil Assylbekov
Aug 11, 2026cs.CL

Gloss-Free Representation Learning for Cross-Dataset Sign Spotting

Sign-language research for resource-constrained languages is often limited by the cost of dense linguistic labels such as glosses, temporal boundaries, and sign order. Broadcast news offers a practical alternative by pairing continuous signing with spoken-language transcripts, but this supervision is weak since text and signing are loosely aligned. Morphologically rich languages such as Turkish add further difficulty, as the same lexical meaning can appear in many inflected forms while some derived forms should remain distinct. We study whether weak transcript-based supervision can pretrain a reusable sign encoder in this setting, where poor text normalization can fragment pseudo-gloss targets and weaken representation learning. Unlike prior pseudo-gloss pipelines designed mainly to improve translation, we test whether the pretrained encoder transfers as a reusable representation for cross-dataset sign spotting. We pretrain on TSL-News, a new Turkish broadcast corpus, using pseudo-gloss labels derived from transcripts rather than manual annotation, comparing rule-based morphological lemmatization with constrained LLM-assisted normalization over a fixed vocabulary. We evaluate the learned representations via cross-dataset sign spotting on a new TSL Spotting Benchmark built from the TSL Dictionary corpus. The LLM-assisted encoder raises top-5 temporal localization mean IoU from 0.235 to 0.465, with 56.2% of examples reaching an IoU of at least 0.50; a frequency analysis suggests this gain is not mainly driven by memorizing frequent pseudo-gloss labels. In a downstream translation check, the same pretraining improves BLEU-4 from 9.60 to 11.04 and ROUGE from 23.48 to 27.43. These results show that loosely aligned broadcast data can provide effective weak supervision for learning sign representations that capture both lexical content and temporal structure.
Oğuz Akif Tüfekcioğlu, Ezgi Ekin, Mustafa Kaan Çevik +1
Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

PRMU: A Corpus-Free Benchmark for Person-Centric Knowledge Unlearning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in storing and recalling rich person-related knowledge, raising increasing concerns about reliable knowledge removal. However, existing machine unlearning approaches for MLLMs typically assume access to original forget and retain corpora, which are often unavailable in realistic deletion scenarios. To address this limitation, we introduce PRMU, a benchmark for evaluating corpus-free multimodal unlearning under realistic person-centric deletion requests. PRMU focuses on naturally acquired person-related knowledge and evaluates whether models can remove target knowledge while preserving related knowledge through diverse textual and visual probes, including adversarial evaluation and fine-grained locality analysis. To facilitate research in this setting, we further introduce Similarity-Gated Projection Editing (SGPE), a lightweight corpus-free unlearning baseline with knowledge displacement, protected parameter-space editing, and locality-aware multimodal control. Extensive experiments on representative MLLMs reveal that existing unlearning methods often suffer from unfavorable forgetting-locality trade-offs, with significant locality degradation under aggressive forgetting settings, and remain vulnerable to multimodal knowledge reactivation. Meanwhile, SGPE provides a competitive trade-off between target forgetting, locality preservation, and general multimodal utility. We hope PRMU can facilitate future research toward realistic and scalable multimodal machine unlearning. Code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/2231122/PRMU.
Huafeng Chen, Yueming Lyu, Ziyuan Chen +4
Aug 11, 2026cs.SD

Pitch Contour Tokenization using VQ-VAE and Its Application on Korean Traditional Music Analysis

Computational analysis of music often relies on discrete representations, yet many musical traditions are organized around continuous pitch movement that resists segmentation into note-like units. For such traditions, the discrete units that analysis would build on are not given in advance. We address this gap by learning a vocabulary of local pitch-contour patterns directly from unlabeled audio, using a VQ-VAE that quantizes fixed-length contour segments into a finite codebook. To make the learned tokens stable across segmentation positions and small variations in timing and pitch range, we train the model with a reconstruction objective evaluated under the best alignment among a set of candidate temporal and pitch-domain transformations. Applied to Korean traditional music, the learned tokens recover information about expert-defined sigimsae categories without supervision, and in pansori individual tokens align with the two principal modes, Gyemyeonjo and Ujo, supporting their use as units for corpus-level analysis of contour-centric traditions.
Seonguk Ju, Seola Cho, Sooin Chung +2
Aug 11, 2026cs.CL

Most biomedical publications show signs of LLM-assisted writing

Over the past several years, LLM-powered chatbots and agents have become widely used as a tool for academic writing. LLM-assisted writing can be valuable by removing language barriers but at the same time causes concerns about misconduct and fraud. To inform policy decisions, it is necessary to monitor the prevalence of LLM-altered texts in scholarly publications. Despite some recent progress in this direction, no existing method can produce reliable estimates. Here we suggest and validate a new unbiased approach to estimate LLM usage in a corpus of texts based on changing word frequencies. We apply our method to the full texts of open-access biomedical papers from Pubmed Central, and show that by the end of 2025, 89% of papers show excess of LLM-associated vocabulary. We also find that LLMs are twice as likely to be used when writing a paragraph in the Discussion section (68%) compared to a paragraph in the Methods section (32%), but even inside the Methods section, the overall prevalence of LLM usage is over 50%. We believe that our estimates are crucial to shape future guidelines and policies.
Lena Holzwarth, Rita González-Márquez, Dmitry Kobak
Aug 11, 2026cs.CL

Can Released LLM Vocabularies Support Token-Level Estimation of Hidden Corpora?

Pretraining corpus composition shapes LLM capabilities, but it often remains hidden even when model weights are released. Prior work has inferred corpus mixtures or traced specific token groups from released tokenizer vocabularies; in contrast, we estimate corpus ratios for arbitrary target tokens. We first show that BPE tokenizers trained on different corpora share stable token ID--ratio distributions, motivating distribution transfer from known corpora to a target tokenizer trained on hidden corpora. We then propose Quantile-Guided Density Estimation (QGDE), which approximates this distribution with multiple quantile trends and uses local density weighting to produce token-level estimates. In controlled settings and a realistic setting using the released SmolLM tokenizer, QGDE achieves mean relative errors as low as 3.00% for token-level estimation and 3.08% after aggregation into category-level mixtures. These results suggest that released tokenizer vocabularies provide a useful signal for fine-grained corpus estimation beyond coarse composition inference.
Qingjie Zhang, Xingzhang Ren, Zixuan Chen +6