Prism

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2 papers in the last 28 days · 0.0% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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Period ending 2026-09-07

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Prism.

82 papers

Latest in Prism

May 12, 2026cs.AI

Allegory of the Cave: Measurement-Grounded Vision-Language Learning

Vision-language models typically reason over post-ISP RGB images, although RGB rendering can clip, suppress, or quantize sensor evidence before inference. We study whether grounding improves when the visual interface is moved closer to the underlying camera measurement. We formulate measurement-grounded vision-language learning and instantiate it as PRISM-VL, which combines RAW-derived Meas.-XYZ inputs, camera-conditioned grounding, and Exposure-Bracketed Supervision Aggregation for transferring supervision from RGB proxies to measurement-domain observations. Using a quality-controlled 150K instruction-tuning set and a held-out benchmark targeting low-light, HDR, visibility-sensitive, and hallucination-sensitive cases, PRISM-VL-8B reaches 0.6120 BLEU, 0.4571 ROUGE-L, and 82.66% LLM-Judge accuracy, improving over the RGB Qwen3-VL-8B baseline by +0.1074 BLEU, +0.1071 ROUGE-L, and +4.46 percentage points. These results suggest that part of VLM grounding error arises from information lost during RGB rendering, and that preserving measurement-domain evidence can improve multimodal reasoning.
Kepeng Xu, Li Xu, Gang He +1
May 12, 2026cs.CL

PRISM: A Geometric Risk Bound that Decomposes Drift into Scale, Shape, and Head

Comparing post-training LLM variants, such as quantized, LoRA-adapted, and distilled models, requires a diagnostic that identifies how a variant has drifted, not only whether it has degraded. Existing similarity scores such as CKA and SVCCA can flag degradation, but they do not directly link representation drift to risk or mechanism. We propose PRISM, Proxy Risk Inference via Structural Mapping, which exploits the linear output head of LLMs and the empirically near-isometric structure of their backbones to derive a closed-form upper bound on the cross-entropy risk gap between a target model and a post-training variant. The bound is calibrated for variant ranking and decomposes drift into three independently measurable axes: scale mismatch, shape mismatch, and head divergence. Each axis corresponds to a distinct failure mode, including shape distortion under low-bit quantization, scale separability under LoRA forgetting, and head divergence under GGUF k-quantization. As a result, the dominant axis suggests a remediation direction rather than merely raising a degradation flag. Because the shape term is differentiable, the same geometry can also serve as a training-time regularizer against catastrophic forgetting. Across two model families and five benchmarks, PRISM ranks variants with mean Spearman correlations of 0.820 for post-training quantization and 0.831 for LoRA forgetting, and its axis-guided shape regularizer outperforms experience replay in aggregate at mitigating downstream forgetting.
Chieh-Yen Lin, Shao-Hua Sun
May 12, 2026cs.RO

PRISM: : Planning and Reasoning with Intent in Simulated Embodied Environments

When an LLM-based embodied agent fails at a household task, the culprit could be misidentified objects, forgotten sub-goals, or poor action sequencing -- yet existing benchmarks report only a single success rate, making it impossible to tell which cognitive module is responsible. We present PRISM, a diagnostic benchmark that reframes this problem: rather than asking only \textit{did the agent succeed?}, PRISM asks \textit{which capability is most likely responsible for failure?} Built on five photorealistic multi-room apartments (4--8 rooms each), PRISM structures 300 human-verified tasks into three capability tiers -- \textit{Basic Ability}, \textit{Reasoning Ability}, and \textit{Long-horizon Ability} -- that isolate perception-to-action grounding, implicit intent resolution, and sustained multi-step coordination respectively. PRISM exposes an agent-agnostic executable action API that allows arbitrary agents: LLM agents, VLM agents, symbolic planners, RL policies, and hybrid systems, to be evaluated end-to-end under the same benchmark protocol. To support deeper diagnosis, optional probes for perception, memory, and planning can be adopted, replaced, or bypassed entirely, enabling controlled component-level analysis when desired. Experiments on seven contemporary LLMs establish a clear hierarchy: explicit spatial grounding is not the dominant failure source under oracle perception, implicit intent resolution is a significant bottleneck for all model families, and long-horizon coordination exposes a stark capability cliff -- lightweight models collapse to as low as 20.0% success while simultaneously consuming more tokens than their frontier counterparts, a signature of compensatory over-reasoning rather than genuine planning capability. Project page: \href{https://sj-li.com/PROJ/PRISM}{link}.
Yunn Kang Lim, Pengzhan Sun, Ziyi Bai +4
May 11, 2026cs.AI

TrajPrism: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Language-Grounded Urban Trajectory Understanding

Urban mobility is naturally expressed both as trajectories in space and as natural-language descriptions of travel intent, constraints, and preferences. However, prior work rarely evaluates these two modalities together on the same real-world trajectories: trajectory modeling often stays geometry-centric, while language-centric mobility benchmarks frequently target route planning and tool use rather than fine-grained, verifiable alignment between text and the underlying route. We introduce TrajPrism, a multi-task benchmark for language-trajectory alignment that unifies (i) instruction-conditioned trajectory generation, (ii) language-driven semantic trajectory retrieval, and (iii) trajectory captioning, together with an evaluation protocol that measures trajectory fidelity, retrieval quality, and language groundedness. We construct TrajPrism by pairing real urban trajectories with judge-filtered language annotations generated under a four-dimensional travel-intent taxonomy. The benchmark contains 300K selected trajectories across Porto, San Francisco, and Beijing, yielding 2.1M task instances from three instruction variants, three retrieval queries, and one caption per trajectory. We further develop proof-of-concept models for each task: TrajAnchor for instruction-conditioned trajectory generation, TrajFuse for semantic trajectory retrieval, and TrajRap for trajectory captioning. These models instantiate the proposed tasks and show that geometry-only trajectory baselines leave a large gap on our protocol, especially where language is part of the input-output interface. We release TrajPrism with code and a reproducible annotation pipeline that is designed to be portable across cities, given compatible trajectory inputs and map resources.
Lihuan Li, Wilson Wongso, Baiyu Chen +6
May 11, 2026cs.AI

PRISM: Generation-Time Detection and Mitigation of Secret Leakage in Multi-Agent LLM Pipelines

Multi-agent LLM systems introduce a security risk in which sensitive information accessed by one agent can propagate through shared context and reappear in downstream outputs, even without explicit adversarial intent. We formalise this phenomenon as propagation amplification, where leakage risk increases across agent boundaries as sensitive content is repeatedly exposed to downstream generators. Existing defences, including prompt-based safeguards, static pattern matching, and LLM-as-judge filtering, are not designed for this setting: they either operate after generation, rely primarily on surface-form patterns, or add substantial latency without modelling the generation process itself. To resolve these issues, we propose PRISM, a real-time defence that treats credential leakage as a sequential risk accumulation problem during generation. At each decoding step, PRISM combines 16 signals spanning lexical, structural, information-theoretic, behavioural, and contextual features into a calibrated risk score, enabling per-token intervention through green, yellow, and red risk zones. Our central observation is that credential reproduction is often preceded by a measurable shift in generation dynamics, characterised by entropy collapse and increasing logit concentration. When combined with text-structural cues such as identifier-pattern detection, these temporal signals provide an early warning of leakage before a secret is fully reconstructed. Across a 2,000-task adversarial benchmark covering 13 attack categories and three pressure levels in a heterogeneous four-agent pipeline, PRISM achieves F1 = 0.832 with precision = 1.000 and recall = 0.712, while producing no observed leakage on our benchmark (0.0% task-level leak rate) and preserving output utility of 0.893. It substantially outperforms the strongest baseline, Span Tagger, which achieves F1 = 0.719 with a 15.0% task-level leak rate.
Riya Tapwal, Abhishek Kumar, Carsten Maple
May 7, 2026cs.LG

PRISM: Iterative Cross-Modal Posterior Refinement for Dynamic Text-Attributed Graphs

Dynamic text-attributed graphs (DyTAGs) provide a powerful framework for modeling evolving systems in which node semantics and time-dependent interactions are tightly coupled. Recently, multimodal learning has emerged as a promising yet underexplored direction for enhancing DyTAG representation learning. However, existing methods typically rely on rigid modality partitions and one-shot fusion strategies, which limit their ability to capture the intrinsic and evolving dependencies between node semantics and interaction behaviors. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{PRISM}, an iterative cross-modal posterior refinement framework for DyTAG representation learning. PRISM organizes DyTAG information into semantic and behavioral modalities, providing a more intrinsic alternative to carrier-level modality partitions. Instead of fusing the two modalities in a single step, PRISM learns a refinement trajectory that progressively transforms semantic priors into behavior-conditioned posterior states through cross-modal interaction with behavioral evidence. Extensive experiments on DTGB benchmark datasets show that PRISM achieves strong performance on temporal link prediction and destination node retrieval tasks. Further ablation studies validate the effectiveness of semantic--behavioral modeling and iterative posterior refinement.
Trimble Chang, Yihang Liu, Mingjing Han +1
May 6, 2026cs.AI

PRISM: Perception Reasoning Interleaved for Sequential Decision Making

Scaling LLM-based embodied agents from text-only environments to complex multimodal settings remains a major challenge. Recent work identifies a perception-reasoning-decision gap in standalone Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which often overlook task-critical information. In this paper, we introduce PRISM, a framework that tightly couples perception (VLM) and decision (LLM) through a dynamic question-answer (DQA) pipeline. Instead of passively accepting the VLM's description, the LLM critiques it, probes the VLM with goal-oriented questions, and synthesizes a compact image description. This closed-loop interaction yields a sharp, task-driven understanding of the scene. We evaluate PRISM on the ALFWorld and Room-to-Room (R2R) benchmarks. We show that: (1) PRISM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art image-based models, (2) our Interactive goal-oriented perception pipeline yields systematic and substantial gains, and (3) PRISM is fully automatic, eliminating the need for handcrafted questions or answers.
Mohamed Salim Aissi, Clemence Grislain, Clement Romac +4
May 1, 2026cs.LG

PrismAgent: Illuminating Harm in Memes via a Zero-Shot Interpretable Multi-Agent Framework

The rapid spread of memes makes harmful content detection increasingly crucial, as effective identification can curb the circulation of misinformation. However, existing methods rely heavily on high-volume annotated data, which leads to substantial training costs and limited generalization. To address these challenges, we propose PrismAgent, a zero-shot, multi-agent, interpretable framework. PrismAgent conceptualizes this task as a criminal case investigation, employing four specialized agents responsible for the analysis, investigation, prosecution, and judgment stages within a structured collaborative workflow. In the first stage, the analyst agent paraphrases each meme under benevolent and malicious assumptions to probe its underlying intent. The investigator agent then retrieves supporting evidence from an unannotated dataset and constructs contextual interpretations for the meme and its variants. Next, the prosecutor agent performs three independent preliminary judgments by pairing the original meme with each of the three interpretations. Finally, the judge agent deliberates across all evidence to render a final verdict. Moreover, PrismAgent's explicit multi-stage reasoning chain makes the model inherently interpretable, as every intermediate step is explicitly explained rather than only producing a final detection result. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that PrismAgent significantly outperforms existing zero-shot detection methods.
Zihan Ding, Ziyuan Yang, Yi Zhang
Apr 30, 2026cs.CV

Beyond SFT-to-RL: Pre-alignment via Black-Box On-Policy Distillation for Multimodal RL

The standard post-training recipe for large multimodal models (LMMs) applies supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated demonstrations followed by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). However, SFT introduces distributional drift that neither preserves the model's original capabilities nor faithfully matches the supervision distribution. This problem is further amplified in multimodal reasoning, where perception errors and reasoning failures follow distinct drift patterns that compound during subsequent RL. We introduce PRISM, a three-stage pipeline that mitigates this drift by inserting an explicit distribution-alignment stage between SFT and RLVR. Building on the principle of on-policy distillation (OPD), PRISM casts alignment as a black-box, response-level adversarial game between the policy and a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) discriminator with dedicated perception and reasoning experts, providing disentangled corrective signals that steer the policy toward the supervision distribution without requiring access to teacher logits. While 1.26M public demonstrations suffice for broad SFT initialization, distribution alignment demands higher-fidelity supervision; we therefore curate 113K additional demonstrations from Gemini 3 Flash, featuring dense visual grounding and step-by-step reasoning on the hardest unsolved problems. Experiments on Qwen3-VL show that PRISM consistently improves downstream RLVR performance across multiple RL algorithms (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO) and diverse multimodal benchmarks, improving average accuracy by +4.4 and +6.0 points over the SFT-to-RLVR baseline on 4B and 8B, respectively. Our code, data, and model checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/XIAO4579/PRISM.
Sudong Wang, Weiquan Huang, Xiaomin Yu +9
Apr 23, 2026cs.LG

PrismaDV: Automated Task-Aware Data Unit Test Generation

Data is a central resource for modern enterprises, and data validation is essential for ensuring the reliability of downstream applications. However, existing automated data unit testing frameworks are largely task-agnostic: they validate datasets without considering the semantics and requirements of the code that consumes the data. We present PrismaDV, a compound AI system that analyzes downstream task code together with dataset profiles to identify data access patterns, infer implicit data assumptions, and generate task-aware executable data unit tests. To further adapt the data unit tests over time to specific datasets and downstream tasks, we propose "Selective Informative Feedback for Task Adaptation" (SIFTA), a prompt-optimization framework that leverages the scarce outcomes from the execution of data unit tests and downstream tasks. We evaluate PrismaDV on two new benchmarks spanning 60 tasks across five datasets, where it consistently outperforms both task-agnostic and task-aware baselines in generating unit tests that reflect the end-to-end impact of data errors. Furthermore, we show that with SIFTA, we can automatically learn prompts for PrismaDV's modules that outperform prompts written by hand or generated from a generic prompt optimizer. We publicly release our benchmarks and prototype implementation.
Hao Chen, Arnab Phani, Sebastian Schelter
Apr 23, 2026cs.SE

A systematic review of generative AI usage for IT project management

This paper aims to synthesize current knowledge on generative AI in IT project management using the PRISMA methodology to provide researchers with a comprehensive perspective on techniques, applications, adoption trends, limitations, and integration across project management tools and process groups. The analysis reveals a clear dominance of OpenAI's GPT in the included studies but relying primarily on prompt engineering, suggesting that research in this area remains at an exploratory stage. Finally, it identifies and discusses three promising research directions for AI-enabled project management, including process group-specific AI agents, project role-based AI agents, and hybrid collaborative networks that enable human-guided orchestration.
Ionut Anghel, Tudor Cioara
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

PRISMA: Preference-Reinforced Self-Training Approach for Interpretable Emotionally Intelligent Negotiation Dialogues

Emotion plays a pivotal role in shaping negotiation outcomes, influencing trust, cooperation, and long-term relationships. Developing negotiation dialog systems that can recognize and respond strategically to emotions is, therefore, essential to create more effective human-centered interactions. Beyond generating emotionally appropriate responses, interpretability - understanding how a system generates a particular emotion-aware response, is critical for fostering reliability and building rapport. Driven by these aspects, in this work, we introduce PRISMA, an interpretable emotionally intelligent negotiation dialogue system targeting two application domains, viz. job interviews and resource allocation. To enable interpretability, we propose an Emotion-aware Negotiation Strategy-informed Chain-of-Thought (ENS-CoT) reasoning mechanism, which mimics human negotiation by perceiving, understanding, using, and managing emotions. Leveraging ENS-CoT, we curate two new datasets: JobNego (for job interview negotiation) and ResNego (for resource allocation negotiation). We then leverage these datasets to develop PRISMA by augmenting self-training with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), guiding agents toward more accurate, interpretable, and emotionally appropriate negotiation responses. Automatic and human evaluation on JobNego and ResNego datasets demonstrate that PRISMA substantially enhances interpretability and generates appropriate emotion-aware responses, while improving overall negotiation effectiveness.
Prajwal Vijay Kajare, Priyanshu Priya, Bikash Santra +1
Apr 18, 2026cs.CV

D-Prism: Differentiable Primitives for Structured Dynamic Modeling

Capturing both geometry and rigid motion for structured dynamic objects, like multi-part assemblies or jointed mechanisms, remains a key challenge. Existing dynamic methods, such as deformable meshes or 3DGS, rely on unstructured representations and fail to jointly model suitable geometry and articulated motion. Primitive-based methods excel at structured static scenes, but their dynamic potential is still unexplored. We propose D-Prism, the first framework to achieve high-fidelity structured dynamic modeling by extending differentiable primitives to the dynamic domain. Specifically, we bind 3DGS to primitive surfaces, leveraging their respective strengths in appearance and geometry. We introduce a deformation network to control primitive motion, ensuring it accurately matches the object's movement. Furthermore, we design a novel adaptive control strategy to dynamically adjust primitive counts, better matching objects' true spatial footprint. Experiments confirm that our method excels at structured dynamic modeling, providing both structured geometry and precise motion tracking.
Xingyuan Yu, Yijin Li, Chong Zeng +3
Apr 18, 2026cs.CL

PRISM: Probing Reasoning, Instruction, and Source Memory in LLM Hallucinations

As large language models (LLMs) evolve from conversational assistants into agents capable of handling complex tasks, they are increasingly deployed in high-risk domains. However, existing benchmarks largely rely on mixed queries and posterior evaluation, output-level scoring, which quantifies hallucination severity but offers limited insight into where and why hallucinations arise in the generation pipeline. We therefore reformulate hallucination evaluation as a diagnostic problem and propose PRISM, a controlled benchmark that disentangles hallucinations into four dimensions: knowledge missing, knowledge errors, reasoning errors, and instruction-following errors, grounded in three stages of generation (memory, instruction, and reasoning). PRISM contains 9,448 instances across 65 tasks and supports fine-grained, stage-aware diagnostic evaluation. Evaluating 24 mainstream open-source and proprietary LLMs, we uncover consistent trade-offs across instruction following, memory retrieval, and logical reasoning, showing that mitigation strategies often improve specific dimensions at the expense of others. We hope PRISM provides a framework for understanding the specific mechanisms behind LLMs hallucinations, ultimately accelerating the development of trustworthy large language models.
Yuhe Wu, Guangyu Wang, Yuran Chen +6
Apr 16, 2026cs.PL

Prism: Symbolic Superoptimization of Tensor Programs

This paper presents Prism, the first symbolic superoptimizer for tensor programs. The key idea is sGraph, a symbolic, hierarchical representation that compactly encodes large classes of tensor programs by symbolically representing some execution parameters. Prism organizes optimization as a two-level search: it constructs symbolic graphs that represent families of programs, and then instantiates them into concrete implementations. This formulation enables structured pruning of provably suboptimal regions of the search space using symbolic reasoning over operator semantics, algebraic identities, and hardware constraints. We develop techniques for efficient symbolic graph generation, equivalence verification via e-graph rewriting, and parameter instantiation through auto-tuning. Together, these components allow Prism to bridge the rigor of exhaustive search with the scalability required for modern ML workloads. Evaluation on five commonly used LLM workloads shows that Prism achieves up to 2.2×2.2\times speedup over best superoptimizers and 4.9×4.9\times over best compiler-based approaches, while reducing end-to-end optimization time by up to 3.4×3.4\times.
Mengdi Wu, Xiaoyu Jiang, Oded Padon +1
Apr 16, 2026cs.CL

PeerPrism: Peer Evaluation Expertise vs Review-writing AI

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in scientific peer review, assisting with drafting, rewriting, expansion, and refinement. However, existing peer-review LLM detection methods largely treat authorship as a binary problem-human vs. AI-without accounting for the hybrid nature of modern review workflows. In practice, evaluative ideas and surface realization may originate from different sources, creating a spectrum of human-AI collaboration. In this work, we introduce PeerPrism, a large-scale benchmark of 20,690 peer reviews explicitly designed to disentangle idea provenance from text provenance. We construct controlled generation regimes spanning fully human, fully synthetic, and multiple hybrid transformations. This design enables systematic evaluation of whether detectors identify the origin of the surface text or the origin of the evaluative reasoning. We benchmark state-of-the-art LLM text detection methods on PeerPrism. While several methods achieve high accuracy on the standard binary task (human vs. fully synthetic), their predictions diverge sharply under hybrid regimes. In particular, when ideas originate from humans but the surface text is AI-generated, detectors frequently disagree and produce contradictory classifications. Accompanied by stylometric and semantic analyses, our results show that current detection methods conflate surface realization with intellectual contribution. Overall, we demonstrate that LLM detection in peer review cannot be reduced to a binary attribution problem. Instead, authorship must be modeled as a multidimensional construct spanning semantic reasoning and stylistic realization. PeerPrism is the first benchmark evaluating human-AI collaboration in these settings. We release all code, data, prompts, and evaluation scripts to facilitate reproducible research at https://github.com/Reviewerly-Inc/PeerPrism.
Soroush Sadeghian, Alireza Daqiq, Radin Cheraghi +3
Apr 1, 2026cs.LG

ScatterPrism: convergence for generative simulation and inverse problems in particle and nuclear physics

High-fidelity simulations and complex inverse problems, such as detector modeling and unfolding, are computationally intensive bottlenecks across subatomic physics, yet essential for accurate physical interpretation. While Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) offers a robust acceleration approach, we demonstrate its standard training loss is fundamentally misleading. Specifically, utilizing a Jefferson Lab Nuclear Physics (NP) kinematic dataset (γp→ρ0p→π+π−pγp \to ρ^0 p \to π^+π^- p), we expose that CFM loss plateaus prematurely, obscuring ongoing physical refinement. To verify this disconnect is a dataset-agnostic pathology, we introduce ScatterPrism, an efficient generative surrogate evaluated against both the NP data and synthetic stress tests modeling challenging 1D distribution topologies. Coupling these benchmarks, we establish that physics-informed metrics continue improving long after standard loss converges. Consequently, we propose a multi-metric diagnostic protocol to ensure true kinematic fidelity without data memorization. Driven by NP challenges relevant to the forthcoming Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), this unified machinery has strong potential to extend to High-Energy Physics (HEP) applications, such as jet modeling. Furthermore, the framework holds promise for broader domains requiring rigorous generative reliability, including medical imaging, astrophysics, and quantitative finance.
Zeyu Xia, Tyler Kim, Trevor Reed +3
Mar 30, 2026cs.SE

Reachability Across the NL/PL Boundary: A Taxonomy-Driven Dataflow Model for LLM-Integrated Applications

LLM API calls have become a standard programming primitive, but they create a program boundary that disrupts traditional dataflow analysis. A runtime value may be inserted into a natural-language prompt through a template placeholder, transformed opaquely by the LLM, and returned as code, JSON, or text consumed by downstream logic. Existing analyses such as taint analysis and program slicing require a dataflow summary that describes how a callee maps inputs to outputs; an LLM call provides no such summary, breaking analysis at what we call the NL/PL boundary. We introduce PRISM, the first reachability model for this boundary. PRISM abstracts the missing dataflow summary of an LLM call as placeholder-to-output reachability. Because the LLM's internal transformation is opaque, the only observable signal is the input-output relationship, which spans an unbounded range of behaviors. PRISM therefore uses a finite taxonomy grounded in quantitative information flow theory. It classifies placeholder-output behavior into 25 labels along two dimensions: information preservation and output modality. Each label yields a reachability predicate for a placeholder. The model is sound with respect to its labeling, with residual error bounded empirically. PRISM is dependable and effective. Independent models and human annotators assign its labels consistently (Fleiss' kappa >= 0.72), and the labels cover 8,119 real-world pairs, leaving no pair unclassifiable; the Good-Turing discovery probability is 0.09%. For taint analysis, PRISM nearly doubles the conservative baseline and outperforms a direct LLM baseline, achieving F1 = 81.7%. Across six real OpenClaw CVEs, it detects every vulnerable flow and confirms every patch (F1 = 100%). In backward slicing, it removes about a quarter of irrelevant code without discarding any true dependency.
Zihao Xu, Xiao Cheng, Ruijie Meng +1
Feb 20, 2026cs.LG

Communication-Efficient Byzantine-Robust Federated Conformal Prediction via Partial Sharing

We propose PRISM-FCP (Partial shaRing and robust calIbration with Statistical Margins for Federated Conformal Prediction), a communication-efficient Byzantine-robust federated conformal prediction framework that uses partial model sharing to mitigate stochastic model-poisoning attacks during training and histogram-based filtering to mitigate adversarial calibration submissions. Existing robust FCP approaches primarily address adversarial behavior during calibration, leaving training-stage poisoning to separate robust-training mechanisms. PRISM-FCP instead considers the coupling between the two stages. During training, clients partially share updates by transmitting only MM of DD parameters per round. Under the stated stochastic attack model, this attenuates the expected energy of each Byzantine client's perturbation contribution to the aggregate by a factor of M/DM/D relative to full sharing. When this benefit outweighs the optimization slowdown caused by partial updates, it can reduce training error and improve interval efficiency. During calibration, the server uses client-provided characterization vectors to filter suspected Byzantine clients before estimating the conformal quantile from the retained clients. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and the UCI Superconductivity and YearPredictionMSD datasets, including Gaussian, ALIE, and sign-flipping training-stage attacks, demonstrate near-nominal empirical coverage and favorable communication--performance tradeoffs in the studied settings.
Ehsan Lari, Reza Arablouei, Stefan Werner
Jan 20, 2026cs.CL

PRiSM: Benchmarking Phone Realization in Speech Models

Phone recognition (PR) serves as the atomic interface for language-agnostic modeling for cross-lingual speech processing and phonetic analysis. Despite prolonged efforts in developing PR systems, current evaluations only measure surface-level transcription accuracy. We introduce PRiSM, the first open-source benchmark designed to expose blind spots in phonetic perception through intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation of PR systems. PRiSM standardizes transcription-based evaluation and assesses downstream utility in clinical, educational, and multilingual settings with transcription and representation probes. We find that diverse language exposure during training is key to PR performance, encoder-CTC models are the most stable, and specialized PR models still outperform Large Audio Language Models. PRiSM releases code, recipes, and datasets to move the field toward multilingual speech models with robust phonetic ability: https://github.com/changelinglab/prism.
Shikhar Bharadwaj, Chin-Jou Li, Yoonjae Kim +13
Oct 2, 2025cs.RO

SPARC: Spine with Prismatic And Revolute Compliance for Faster Quadrupedal Bounding

Quadruped mammals coordinate sagittal spinal bending with axial extension and compression during dynamic locomotion. Yet most robotic quadrupeds use rigid trunks, passively compliant spines with fixed properties, or actively controlled spines that track prescribed trajectories. Whether actively regulated spinal compliance can support faster dynamic locomotion remains unclear. We present SPARC, a compact 1.26-kg, 3-DoF sagittal-plane spine that combines revolute and prismatic motion with independently tunable task-space stiffness and damping. A floating-base impedance controller renders the desired task-space compliance, and benchtop tests show that the fitted axial stiffness matches commanded values within 1.5%. We integrate SPARC into an 8-DoF quadruped and evaluate it across 97 bounding trials under three spine configurations: impedance-controlled SPARC, the same SPARC module held near a fixed pose using position control, and a lightweight rigid spine. Impedance-controlled SPARC reaches 1.029 m/s, compared with 0.769 m/s for position-controlled SPARC and 0.673 m/s for the rigid spine. Impedance-controlled SPARC reaches higher speeds with larger axial motion and greater mechanical power exchange, while at matched speed it has a higher electrical cost of transport than the rigid spine, revealing an energetic trade-off. Code and hardware are available at: https://github.com/YueWang996/sparc
Yue Wang, Yanran Xu
Date pendingcs.MM

PRISM-Bench: An Audio-Centric Diagnostic Benchmark for Text-to-Audio-Video Generation

Text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation has advanced rapidly, but its evaluation still underestimates the audio modality. Existing benchmarks either treat audio as an auxiliary component of video quality or assess it in isolation from audiovisual grounding, making it difficult to diagnose where current systems truly succeed or fail in audio generation. We present PRISM-Bench, the first audio-centric diagnostic benchmark for T2AV generation. Built from a rigorously curated dataset of 900 human-verified samples, PRISM-Bench factorizes audio evaluation along two orthogonal axes: audio type (Speech, Music, and Sound) and sound-source visibility (On-screen vs. Off-screen). It evaluates generated content across four perceptual dimensions (Audio-Visual Coherence, Audio Quality, Audio Expressiveness, and Prompt Following) with 35 fine-grained criteria. To ensure reliable assessment, we adopt an enhanced MLLM-as-a-Judge protocol based on blind, side-by-side comparison against ground-truth references, demonstrating strong alignment (over 70% mean agreement) with human raters. Our evaluation of recent T2AV systems highlights a significant performance gap between frontier and open-source models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that current generation paradigms overfit to perceptual fidelity while struggling with complex grounding and control tasks, particularly in generating music and synchronized On-screen audio.
Yuchen Sun, Qian Yang, Jun Wang +4