Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, where a response that is reasonable in general may still be unsafe for a particular user whose medical, emotional, or situational context is unknown to the model. We study this problem of personalized safety in multimodal systems and introduce MPS-Bench, a benchmark of 5,181 scenarios from 584 real-world images across 12 high-risk domains, each paired with a hidden user profile. Evaluating eight frontier VLMs, we find that they almost always respond directly (86-99%) rather than seek missing context, and none exceeds 2.6/5 on personalized safety. To understand why these failures arise, we analyze multimodal interactions and identify visual dominance: visual information enters text representations early and suppresses textual risk signals during multimodal fusion. Causal interventions reveal a two-stage mechanism in which visual affect is first transferred into the text stream in early layers and then shapes the final decision through this altered text representation, making late-stage internal remediation unreliable. Motivated by this mechanism, we propose PRISM, a lightweight input monitor that uses bidirectional cross-modal modulation to predict when a query is likely to require deferral. PRISM achieves 0.978 AUC and strictly dominates the safety-utility Pareto frontier across all tested models.
Edward Sun, Yuchen Wu, Zixian Ma et al.· 0 citations
This study introduces an intelligent framework that integrates machine learning and deep neural network ensemble techniques for early detection and prognosis of cardiovascular diseases. The system utilizes real-time physiological data collected from Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices, including ECG sensors, heart rate monitors, and blood pressure trackers. To ensure the accuracy and reliability of input data, preprocessing steps such as noise reduction, normalization, and missing value imputation are employed. The most significant health indicators are identified through effective feature selection methods and then processed using optimized classifiers such as Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forests, and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), which are combined in an ensemble architecture to improve diagnostic precision. The framework demonstrates remarkable performance in predicting cardiovascular disease risk, achieving higher accuracy, reduced false positives, and enhanced consistency compared to conventional methods. It is designed on a cloud-based infrastructure that ensures scalability and real-time processing for continuous patient monitoring. Experimental evaluation on real-world cardiovascular datasets confirms the framework's efficiency in early-stage risk assessment and clinical decision support. The results highlight the potential of combining traditional machine learning and deep learning paradigms to achieve proactive healthcare management and improve patient outcomes.
Large language models become consequential agents when surrounding systems let outputs change external state. Models now call tools, operate interfaces, delegate work, retain state, inhabit generated worlds, and control robots or laboratory equipment. Such advances are often narrated as one march toward autonomy, conflating model competence, system integration, persistence, and safe authority. This critical review synthesizes primary research and official technical specifications available by 31 August 2026. We organize the evidence along delegated authority, temporal persistence, and environmental coupling, while separating model, harness, and environment. Within the evidence examined, action-interface expansion is documented more convincingly than robust completion, recovery, authorization, or independent verification. Model Context Protocol and Agent2Agent improve interoperability but do not establish trustworthy delegation; multi-agent organization adds specialization alongside cost and correlated failure. Persistent simulations and world models support training and planning but do not themselves demonstrate agency; robotics and self-driving laboratories establish bounded feasibility rather than unattended open-world reliability. We propose justified delegation as an analytical and normative heuristic, not an observed law or certified score: expand action scope only where evidence supports provenance, bounded authority, failure detection, safe recovery, and calibrated human control. This framing yields a research agenda for coupled model-harness evaluation, capability-based permissions, durable state, cross-agent accountability, and staged physical validation.
A runtime gate for an LLM tool agent is usually cast as a filter. In a ReAct loop a rejected proposal is followed by another at the same state, so the gate is a search operator over the proposal stream whose admission criterion shapes which trajectories are reachable. We study post-violation recovery admission, where progress must be admitted while the system is still in violation, and identify the scalar projection trap: an aggregate-score gate accepts a locally improving proposal and commits the trajectory to a plateau. SiLR instead shadow-executes each proposal and admits it under a product order over the branch-level violation state (overloaded-branch support and per-branch severity). We prove that no scalar surrogate is sound for this order, so the failure is representational, not a matter of threshold tuning. On mined Gym-ANM scenarios, SiLR recovers 21/21 multi-action episodes against 0/21 for terminal and 9/21 for the best scalar gate, significant across the full 24-scenario benchmark. The terminal-versus-structured dichotomy holds across three model families and in CityLearn. Because admission rests on deterministic simulation, the LLM lies outside the trust boundary: a magnitude-redistribution attack that defeats both scalar and support-only baselines is contained only by the full per-branch predicate. With two constraint families active, every tested scalar projection admits physically unsafe actions; support-only admits the largest fraction (63.2% of 42,410; product order 0). In the hardest dual-family traces, scalar gates recover only through that unsafe class. Reused as a GRPO process reward, it outperforms its count projection in every mined scenario and is the only tested reward whose ungated policy exceeds the untrained base (0.844 vs. 0.778). Scalar projection loses the violation geometry at both design points; only the full product order is structurally sufficient.
Chenyu Zhou, Qiliang Jiang, Shuning Wu et al.· 0 citations
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Large language models demonstrate increasingly strong reasoning capabilities through effective post-training. Yet, prevailing post-training methods optimize over massive numbers of tokens, implicitly assuming that effective learning must be token-intensive. We revisit this assumption in the on-policy distillation (OPD) setting, which naturally admits dense teacher supervision at every generated token. Using the Qwen3 family, we discover a counter-intuitive phenomenon: reasoning can be effectively incentivized by an extremely small fraction of generated tokens--as few as one or two tokens per reasoning trajectory, corresponding to only 0.05% of all tokens. Surprisingly, this sparse supervision in most cases matches or surpasses full-token training in improving reasoning ability, despite excluding the vast majority of generated tokens from the training objective. This phenomenon is consistently observed across nine teacher--student configurations spanning different model scales on mathematical reasoning tasks, and is further validated on coding reasoning, Llama models and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR). Interestingly, such extremely sparse supervision may be closer to the natural learning process: rather than correcting every step word by word, one reflects on a few critical reasoning steps, updates prior understanding, and continues the trial-and-error, avoiding micro-level corrections while remaining remarkably effective. Overall, our results challenge the assumption that effective post-training must be token-intensive and point to a new direction for understanding and designing more efficient post-training algorithms.
Zhishuai Liu, Xingzi Xu, Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu et al.· 0 citations
We present ResLearn-XR, a residual learning framework for predicting eXtended Reality (XR) network traffic and estimating Quality-of-Experience (QoE) risk. ResLearn-XR adopts a two-stage temporal learning structure comprising a base sequence prediction model augmented with task-specific residual learning components to improve adaptability to bursty, non-stationary XR traffic dynamics. The residual learning stages operate in the value space for continuous XR traffic forecasting and in the logit space for probabilistic QoE risk estimation. \rev{For the QoE-risk branch, we introduce a Data Descriptor Algorithm (DDA), a causal feature-construction module that converts packet-level application-layer observables into frame-timing-aware descriptors suitable for encrypted traffic analysis. We also construct an XR Traffic-QoE dataset that pairs continuous XR traffic traces with session-level user-reported QoE labels. ResLearn-XR reduces SMAPE by up to 17.84% across frame-count, frame-size, and inter-arrival-time prediction, while reducing QoE-risk estimation SMAPE by up to 87.8% over single-stage baselines.
Yoga Suhas Kuruba Manjunath, Jie Gao, Lian Zhao· 0 citations
Quantization is widely used to reduce the computational and memory demands of neural-network inference. In recurrent networks, however, the quantized state is stored and returned at the next time step, so the rule used to store that state can alter subsequent computations. Here, we introduce recurrent-state write-back to denote this rule and isolate its effect in a compact GRU encoder--decoder for fluorescence lifetime imaging, a molecular imaging modality used in quantitative biological imaging. A central task is estimating two lifetime parameters, the short-lived component {\tau}1 and the long-lived component {\tau}2, from high-noise time-resolved fluorescence signals. Holding the trained model fixed, replacing continuous state propagation with deterministic 4-bit state storage increases estimation errors for {\tau}1 and {\tau}2 by approximately 70x and 300x, respectively. Failure occurs when repeated small updates remain below the write threshold, leaving the stored state nearly fixed while the network continues to propose change. Error feedback, residual memory, and direction memory carry information from these suppressed updates across time and recover accuracy without retraining. Precision sweeps show that increasing state precision can worsen a fixed recurrent solution, while matched training shows that compatibility with the state interface can be learned. To test whether this behavior extends beyond the GRU, we repeat the post-training intervention in an independently trained LSTM, where coarse write-back reproduces the failure, error feedback restores accuracy, and state-specific interventions reveal greater sensitivity of the cell state than the hidden state. Our results establish recurrent-state write-back as a key determinant of low-precision recurrent dynamics and identify the state-storage interface as a central design consideration for quantized recurrent inference.
Ensuring the security of the power system is essential for stability and reliability, especially in the event of disruption. Effective classification of contingency in power systems enables proactive decision-making and mitigates large-scale breakdowns and failures. This study explores the use of machine learning algorithms to classify security levels of contingencies in power systems into safe, moderate or severe classes. For this approach, Newton-Raphson load flow method extracts system data from contingency scenarios, using Overall Performance Index (OPI) as safety measure. For data pre-processing, Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique (SMOTE) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used to address class imbalance and reduce dimensionality, respectively. K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN), Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) is trained and evaluated on datasets generated through N-k contingency scenarios for k equal 1, 2, and 3 on IEEE-14 and IEEE-30 bus systems using four hybrid pre-processing configurations: normalized, SMOTE-balanced, PCA-transformed, and a combined SMOTE PCA-transformed. Performance is assessed by precision, recall and F1 score, with priority given to the severe contingency classes. The RF achieved the highest F1 scores of 0.97 in IEEE-30 and 0.86 in IEEE-14, SVM benefits significantly from PCA and improves the accuracy of the classification, while KNN is best suited for SMOTE and PCA conversion. The findings show that PCA contributes more than SMOTE to the overall performance of the model. However, SMOTE improves recall but can introduce false positives and is therefore a compromise of accuracy. This study highlights machine learning as a scalable and powerful alternative to traditional contingency analysis, which improves the assessment of security in real time.
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 et al.· 0 citations
World models are usually evaluated as components of model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) systems, leaving their standalone reliability understudied. We reproduce five visual world-model agents in Atari Pong -- DreamerV3, DIAMOND, TWISTER, Simulus, and STORM -- and match their reported agent performance. We then freeze the learned world models and evaluate them in two ways. In a closed-loop rollout diagnostic, a policy trained separately from the corresponding MBRL agent interacts with each frozen model, and we inspect the generated visual trajectories for visual and dynamical errors. Across all five models, these rollouts contain clear failures, including ball disappearance, incorrect motion, and invalid ball-paddle interactions. Beyond visual trajectories, we further evaluate the frozen models with pixel-space zero-shot MBRL, a challenging setting in which a new policy is trained entirely inside each frozen world model and then evaluated in the real environment. Across all five models, these policies substantially underperform those produced by the corresponding original MBRL pipelines. For DreamerV3, mean return drops from $-5.5$ to $-20.9$, near the minimum of $-21$. We hypothesize that insufficient modeling of task-critical concepts, such as the ball in Pong, contributes to these failures and propose Concept-Guided Spatial Regularization (CGSReg), an auxiliary reconstruction loss on segmented concept regions. CGSReg improves both closed-loop rollouts and pixel-space zero-shot MBRL in DreamerV3, DIAMOND, and TWISTER, and improves zero-shot MBRL in Simulus; STORM shows no clear improvement.
Yukuang Lu, Zaishuo Xia, Weyl Lu et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
Energy-Based Models (EBMs) provide an interpretable framework for generative modeling of scientific data, but poor Markov Chain Monte Carlo mixing often limits their reliability. We introduce a training algorithm based on Parallel Trajectory Tempering (PTT), which exploits the continuity of the optimization path to maintain equilibrium sampling throughout learning. This enables stable and fast training on highly multimodal and data-scarce scientific datasets. Combined with reservoir sampling and adaptive optimization, PTT has a computational cost comparable to Persistent Contrastive Divergence, making it a practical replacement for standard training methods. It also provides direct estimates of thermalization times, equilibrium samples from trained models, and accurate log-likelihoods at essentially no additional cost. Experiments on Restricted Boltzmann Machines show that PTT consistently outperforms existing EBM training approaches. On discrete tabular data, it also surpasses state-of-the-art deep generative models, yielding higher-quality samples and greater robustness to overfitting and limited data. Our results make equilibrium maximum-likelihood training of EBMs practical and computationally efficient.
Nicolas B'ereux, A. Decelle, Cyril Furtlehner et al.· 0 citations
Ensuring truthfulness in large language models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge for reliable text generation. While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with human feedback have shown promise, they require a substantial amount of annotated data and computational resources, limiting scalability. In contrast, decoding-time interventions offer lightweight alternatives without model retraining. However, existing decoding strategies often face issues like prompt sensitivity, limited generalization, or dependence on internal model states. We propose Retrieval-Augmented Decoding (RAD), a context-aware adaptive decoding method that leverages a compact reference grounding space built from as few as 10 annotated examples and comprising pairs of context embeddings and next-token logits from truthful responses, to enable retrieval-based logit shaping during inference. At each decoding step, RAD retrieves high-quality semantically similar contexts from this grounding space and aggregates their associated next token logits to modify the model's current logits. Across four open-ended generation benchmarks and four LLMs, our method consistently outperforms strong baselines and shows robust cross-task generalization, underscoring the promise of context-aware decoding for enhancing factual reliability.
A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduAug 24, 2026
A new method for surgically removing training examples from a model reveals that as datasets grow, the link between what a model learns and what it produces dissolves.
