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artificial intelligence

4,334 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Label Over Logic? How Source Cues Bias Human Fallacy Judgments More Than LLMs

As AI-generated and AI-assisted content floods online spaces, source labels attached to such content can distort human reasoning judgments, with downstream consequences for moderation, evaluation, and decision-making. Whether LLMs share this vulnerability, or offer more source-agnostic evaluation, remains an open question with strong implications for human-AI collaboration. We examine this issue using logical fallacies as a controlled setting to isolate source-label effects on reasoning quality, independent of domain knowledge. We conduct an online study (N=505) where participants are assigned to a source condition (human, AI, human with AI assistance, AI with human assistance, or no disclosure) and evaluate comments containing logical fallacies, comparing their judgments with those of LLMs (GPT-5.2, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5), which were evaluated across the same source conditions. Human evaluators were significantly more susceptible to fallacies labeled as 'written by human' or 'written by human with AI assistance' and assigned higher trust ratings in these conditions. LLM evaluations remained comparatively stable across source labels, though performance varied across models. Confidence levels were similarly high across conditions for both humans and LLMs, regardless of the presence of fallacies. Our findings indicate that source-label bias is primarily a human vulnerability for logical fallacy evaluation, with potential implications in human-LLM collaboration in increasingly AI-mediated environments.

Mahjabin Nahar, Nafis Irtiza Tripto, Aiping Xiong et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Less Data, Faster Training: repeating smaller datasets speeds up learning via sampling biases

This work investigates the ``small-vs-large gap'', where repeating on fewer samples can lead to compute saving during training compared to using a larger dataset. This is observed across algorithmic tasks, architectures and optimizers and cannot be explained using prior theory. We argue that the speedup comes from appropriate layer-wise growth enabled by sampling biases, which is more pronounced when the dataset size is smaller. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence from various interventions. Our results suggest that using a smaller dataset with more repetitions is not just a fallback strategy under data scarcity, but can be proactively leveraged as a favorable inductive biases for optimization, particularly in reasoning tasks.

Jingwen Liu, Ezra Edelman, Surbhi Goel et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Towards Generalization of Block Attention via Automatic Segmentation and Block Distillation

Block attention, which processes the input as separate blocks that cannot attend to one another, offers significant potential to improve KV cache reuse in long-context scenarios such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, its broader application is hindered by two key challenges: the difficulty of segmenting input text into meaningful, self-contained blocks, and the inefficiency of existing block fine-tuning methods that risk degrading performance. To address these, we first construct SemanticSeg, a large and diverse semantic segmentation dataset containing over 30k instances across 16 categories-including books, code, web text, and conversations with text lengths ranging from 2k to 32k. Using this dataset, we train a lightweight segmenter to automatically partition text into human-instinct-aligned blocks with controllable granularity. Second, we propose block distillation, a training framework that is more efficient than block fine-tuning, which uses a frozen full-attention teacher model to guide the block-attention student. This framework integrates three novel components: block sink tokens to mitigate information loss at block boundaries, block dropout to leverage training signals from all blocks, and token-level loss weighting to focus learning on block-attention-sensitive tokens. Experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate that our segmenter outperforms heuristic and statistical baselines, and block distillation achieves near-full-attention performance under block attention, establishing a practical and scalable pathway for deploying block attention.

Shuaiyi Li, Zhisong Zhang, Yan Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

HLS-Seek: QoR-Aware Code Generation for High-Level Synthesis via Proxy Comparative Reward Reinforcement Learning

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) compiles algorithmic C/C++ descriptions into hardware, with Quality of Results (QoR)---latency and resource utilization---critically governed by pragma configurations and code structure. Existing natural-language-to-HLS (NL-to-HLS) training approaches prioritize functional correctness while largely ignoring QoR. We observe that reinforcement learning (RL) for HLS does not require absolute synthesis results---only relative comparisons between candidates. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{HLS-Seek}, a QoR-aware NL-to-HLS framework that avoids full synthesis-in-the-loop RL via a comparative proxy reward model achieving 99.53\% Pareto-dominance accuracy. To prevent reward hacking, we introduce \textit{uncertainty-aware Monte Carlo (MC) dropout switching} that selectively invokes real Vitis HLS synthesis for low-confidence candidates and online updates the proxy, creating a self-improving reward system. HLS-Seek achieves 84.7\% syntax correctness pass@1 and 81.4\% functional correctness pass@5 on HLS-Eval~\cite{abikaram2025hlseval} with only 7B parameters, surpassing GPT-5.1 on functional pass@5, while achieving 8.5$\times$ faster training than real-reward RL. On QoR evaluation, HLS-Seek achieves the lowest latency on 19/30 kernels and Pareto-dominates HLS-specific baselines on 9 kernels.

Qingyun Zou, Feng Yu, Hongshi Tan et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Octopus Protocol: One-Shot Hardware Discovery and Control for AI Agents via Infrastructure-as-Prompts

Bringing a previously unintegrated device under the control of an AI agent still requires device-specific engineering: driver selection, dependency resolution, interface design, and deployment, repeated per device and per platform. We present Octopus, a hardware onboarding framework in which a coding agent, rather than a shipped integration, is the runtime that produces the required infrastructure. Given shell access and a model API key, a single bootstrap command drives the agent through a five-stage pipeline that enumerates operating-system- visible hardware, infers device identity and capabilities, generates typed Model Context Protocol tools and the hardware-facing code behind them, and activates the result as a live endpoint. A persistent daemon then maintains the result, repairing defined classes of failure in the deployment it produced. Across four hosts spanning two processor architectures, three operating- system families, and two device-access paths, identical prose specifications produced working interfaces with no per-host edits and no hand-written integration code. Five consecutive runs on the reference host completed end to end on first attempt. We report both the resulting capability and a failure mode of unattended repair loops observed over eleven hours of continuous operation.

Quilee Simeon, Justin M. Wei, Yile Fan · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

ARGOS: Who, Where, and When in Agentic Multi-Camera Person Search

Existing person search methods assume access to complete visual queries or exhaustive tracking, yet real-world witness accounts are vague, partial, and spread across cameras and time. We introduce ARGOS (Agentic Retrieval with Grounded Observational Search), a benchmark and agent framework that recasts multi-camera person search from one-shot retrieval on a complete query into interactive reasoning from partial clues. To our knowledge, ARGOS is the first interactive benchmark to couple witness dialogue with camera-network topology, requiring an agent to plan, question, and eliminate under information asymmetry. An ARGOS agent receives a vague witness statement and must decide what to ask, when to invoke spatial or temporal tools, and how to interpret ambiguous natural-language responses, all within a limited turn budget. To ground reasoning in physical constraints, the agent accesses a Spatio-Temporal Topology Graph (STTG) encoding camera connectivity and empirically validated transition times. The benchmark comprises 2{,}691 tasks across 14 real-world scenarios in three progressive tracks: semantic perception (\emph{Who}, 989 tasks), spatial reasoning (\emph{Where}, 550 tasks), and temporal reasoning (\emph{When}, 1{,}152 tasks). We propose Turn-Weighted Success (TWS) as the primary metric, jointly measuring correctness and turn efficiency. Experiments with four LLM backbones show the benchmark is far from solved: the best agent achieves TWS of 0.383 (Track~2) and 0.590 (Track~3). Ablations confirm each component is essential: removing domain-specific tools drops Top-1 accuracy by up to 49.6 percentage points, and removing strategic reasoning halves TWS while barely affecting Top-1.

Myungchul Kim, Kwanyong Park, Junmo Kim et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

X-VC: Zero-shot Streaming Voice Conversion in Codec Space

Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to convert a source utterance into the voice of an unseen target speaker while preserving its linguistic content. Although recent systems have improved conversion quality, building zero-shot VC systems for interactive scenarios remains challenging because high-fidelity speaker transfer and low-latency streaming inference are difficult to achieve simultaneously. In this work, we present X-VC, a zero-shot streaming VC system that performs one-step conversion in the latent space of a pretrained neural codec. X-VC uses a dual-conditioning acoustic converter that jointly models source codec latents and frame-level acoustic conditions derived from target reference speech, while injecting utterance-level target speaker information through adaptive normalization. To reduce the mismatch between training and inference, we train the model with generated paired data and a role-assignment strategy that combines standard, reconstruction, and reversed modes. For streaming inference, we further adopt a chunkwise inference scheme with overlap smoothing that is aligned with the segment-based training paradigm of the codec. Experiments on Seed-TTS-Eval show that X-VC achieves the best streaming WER in both English and Chinese, strong speaker similarity in same-language and cross-lingual settings, and substantially lower offline real-time factor than the compared baselines. These results suggest that codec-space one-step conversion is a practical approach for building high-quality low-latency zero-shot VC systems. Our audio samples, code and checkpoints are released at https://github.com/Jerrister/X-VC.

Qixi Zheng, Yuxiang Zhao, Tianrui Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

YOLO with Kolmogorov-Arnold networks and vision-language foundation models for interpretable object detection with trustworthy multimodal AI in computer vision perception

The trustworthy object detection capabilities of a novel Kolmogorov-Arnold network framework are examined here. The approach addresses a key limitation in computer vision for vehicle detection perception, and beyond. These systems offer limited transparency regarding the reliability of their confidence scores in visually degraded or ambiguous scenes. To this end, a Kolmogorov-Arnold network is employed as an interpretable post-hoc surrogate to model the trustworthiness of the You Only Look Once (Yolov10) detections using seven geometric and semantic features. The additive spline-based structure of the Kolmogorov-Arnold network enables direct visualisation of each feature's influence. This produces smooth and transparent functional mappings that reveal when the model's confidence is well supported and when it is unreliable. Furthermore, a bootstrapped language-image (BLIP) foundation model generates descriptive captions of each scene. This tool enables a lightweight multimodal interface without affecting the interpretability layer. Experiments on both Common Objects in Context (COCO), and images from the University of Bath campus demonstrate that the framework accurately identifies low-trust predictions under blur, occlusion, or low texture. This provides actionable insights for acceptance, review, or downstream risk mitigation. The resulting system delivers interpretable object detection with trustworthy confidence estimates. It offers a powerful tool for transparent and practical perception component for autonomous and multimodal artificial intelligence applications.

Marios Impraimakis, Daniel Vazquez, Feiyu Zhou · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

SNAP: Speaker Nulling for Artifact Projection in Speech Deepfake Detection

Recent advancements in text-to-speech technologies enable generating high-fidelity synthetic speech nearly indistinguishable from real human voices. While recent studies show the efficacy of self-supervised learning-based speech encoders for deepfake detection, these models struggle to generalize across unseen speakers. Our quantitative analysis suggests these encoder representations are substantially influenced by speaker information, causing detectors to exploit speaker-specific correlations rather than artifact-related cues. We call this phenomenon speaker entanglement. To mitigate this reliance, we introduce SNAP, a speaker-nulling framework. We estimate a speaker subspace and apply orthogonal projection to suppress speaker-dependent components, isolating synthesis artifacts within the residual features. By reducing speaker entanglement, SNAP encourages detectors to focus on artifact-related patterns, leading to state-of-the-art performance.

Kyudan Jung, Jihwan Kim, Minwoo Lee et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

MultihopSpatial: Multi-hop Compositional Spatial Reasoning Benchmark for Vision-Language Model

Spatial reasoning is foundational for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), particularly when deployed as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) agents in physical environments. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on elementary, single-hop relations, neglecting the multi-hop compositional reasoning and precise visual grounding essential for real-world scenarios. To address this, we introduce MultihopSpatial, offering three key contributions: (1) A comprehensive benchmark designed for multi-hop and compositional spatial reasoning, featuring 1- to 3-hop complex queries across diverse spatial perspectives. (2) Acc@50IoU, a complementary metric that simultaneously evaluates reasoning and visual grounding by requiring both answer selection and precise bounding box prediction - capabilities vital for robust VLA deployment. (3) MultihopSpatial-Train, a dedicated large-scale training corpus to foster spatial intelligence. Extensive evaluation of 37 state-of-the-art VLMs yields eight key insights, revealing that compositional spatial reasoning remains a formidable challenge. Finally, we demonstrate that reinforcement learning post-training on our corpus enhances both intrinsic VLM spatial reasoning and downstream embodied manipulation performance.

Youngwan Lee, Soojin Jang, Yoorhim Cho et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Post Fusion Bird's Eye View Feature Stabilization for Robust Multimodal 3D Detection

Camera-LiDAR fusion is widely used in autonomous driving to enable accurate 3D object detection. However, bird's-eye view (BEV) fusion detectors can degrade significantly under domain shift and sensor failures, limiting reliability in real-world deployment. Existing robustness approaches often require modifying the fusion architecture or retraining specialized models, making them difficult to integrate into already deployed systems. We propose a Post Fusion Stabilizer (PFS), a lightweight module that operates on intermediate BEV representations of existing detectors and produces a refined feature map for the original detection head. The design stabilizes feature statistics under domain shift, suppresses spatial regions affected by sensor degradation, and adaptively restores weakened cues through residual correction. Designed as a near-identity transformation, PFS preserves performance while improving robustness under diverse camera and LiDAR corruptions. Evaluations on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that PFS achieves state-of-the-art results in several failure modes, notably improving camera dropout robustness by +1.2% and low-light performance by +4.4% mAP while maintaining a lightweight footprint of only 3.3 M parameters.

Trung Tien Dong, Dev Thakkar, Arman Sargolzaei et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

AnchorWeave: World-Consistent Video Generation with Retrieved Local Spatial Memories

Maintaining spatial world consistency over long horizons remains a central challenge for camera-controllable video generation. Existing memory-based approaches often condition generation on globally reconstructed 3D scenes by rendering anchor videos from the reconstructed geometry in the history. However, reconstructing a global 3D scene from multiple views inevitably introduces cross-view misalignment, as pose and depth estimation errors cause the same surfaces to be reconstructed at slightly different 3D locations across views. When fused, these inconsistencies accumulate into noisy geometry that contaminates the conditioning signals and degrades generation quality. We introduce AnchorWeave, a memory-augmented video generation framework that replaces a single misaligned global memory with multiple clean local geometric memories and learns to reconcile their cross-view inconsistencies. To this end, AnchorWeave performs coverage-driven local memory retrieval aligned with the target trajectory and integrates the selected local memories through a multi-anchor weaving controller during generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnchorWeave significantly improves long-term scene consistency while maintaining strong visual quality, with ablation and analysis studies further validating the effectiveness of local geometric conditioning, multi-anchor control, and coverage-driven retrieval.

Zun Wang, Han Lin, Jaehong Yoon et al. · 0 citations

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