Guaranteed Adaptive Modality Acquisition: When the Policy Chooses Its Own Calibration Group
arXiv:2608. 15520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A multimodal system may begin inference holding only some of its inputs and may acquire the rest at a cost.
The paper introduces RouteCert, a method for ensuring risk control in multimodal systems that acquire inputs adaptively. It shows that conditional calibration can remain valid even when the acquisition policy determines the calibration group, and provides two finite‑sample constructions: threshold‑free routing with terminal‑pattern calibration and simultaneous validation of policy‑pattern pairs. Experiments on a clinical ECG task and masked multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that RouteCert achieves low disagreement rates and competitive answered fractions while validating each acquisition stage separately.
arXiv:2608. 15520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A multimodal system may begin inference holding only some of its inputs and may acquire the rest at a cost.
arXiv:2608.21748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Verifier-guided text-to-image systems increasingly use test-time search to select, refine, or stop among multiple candidates, yet release thresholds ar...
The study investigates how patient‑adaptive ECG lead‑channel allocation policies perform when evaluated by different diagnostic models. Two policies, ECG‑on‑Demand and MGA, trained with a simple logistic evaluator were tested on a more powerful ResNet1D evaluator, revealing that the adaptive advantage observed with the training evaluator disappears or reverses with the stronger evaluator. Across multiple budgets, policies, and metrics, all interactions favor fixed protocols under the strong evaluator, suggesting that adaptive channel selection must be jointly optimized with the diagnostic backbone.
RSD-Poker is a certification framework for residual policies in imperfect‑information games that adapts to game structure and remains robust to shifts in deployment state mixtures. It freezes a bank of residual families and a policy‑visible partition, then assigns each candidate‑group pair weighted upper and lower certificates for risk and utility. The framework guarantees that, with high probability, the selected candidate map meets its declared risk budget and utility bounds across a predeclared uncertainty set of deployment group proportions.
arXiv:2608. 07914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral contamination detectors can return "no evidence" either because a benchmark is clean or because the audit has little power.
The paper introduces a method for deciding whether to adapt a frozen segmentation model at test time, arguing that a fixed adaptation horizon conflates two distinct decisions: how far to adapt and whether to adapt at all. By measuring disagreement geometry—called prediction fragmentation—between the source model and the adapted mask, the authors predict harmful accepted area (HA) without extra labels or backward passes, achieving strong correlation across three medical benchmarks. A case‑level router built on this metric reduces HA significantly while maintaining or improving Dice scores, and the approach generalizes across architectures and domains.
Signal‑Routed Temperature Scaling (SRTS‑BCE) is a 10‑parameter, argmax‑preserving calibration method that separates calibration objectives from adaptive capacity. It cross‑fits a correctness‑risk score over six logit statistics and assigns a top‑label BCE temperature to each of three risk groups, generalizing TvA‑TS when K=1. Experiments on fine‑tuned CIFAR‑100 and ViT‑B/16 show that SRTS‑BCE reduces ECE from 1.65 to 0.96 with a small calibration budget, outperforming higher‑capacity SMART+BCE when only 250 examples are available, and revealing a budget‑dependent ranking reversal on Swin‑T.
The paper investigates test‑time adaptation for medical image segmentation, showing that a fixed adaptation horizon can harm many individual cases. It introduces prediction fragmentation—a measure of disagreement between the source model and the adapted mask—to predict harmful adaptation without extra labels or backward passes. Using a case‑level router based on this metric, the authors reduce harmful adaptation on cardiac MRI from 58.7% to 20% while maintaining accuracy.
arXiv:2606. 29654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent deliberation among LLMs can improve reasoning, but deployment requires deciding when the current answer is reliable enough to act on and when it should be escalated to human review.
The paper investigates conditional calibration contracts for switched inference systems, proposing a branch‑aware audit framework called CA‑MHD that integrates load‑coupled distillation, closed‑loop replay, and a cost‑informed Schmitt router. Experiments across 40 cells reveal that the deployed wide branch consistently underperforms the original teacher in ordinal accuracy, while student‑only serving shows mixed improvements and routing exposes significant violation tails. Retrospective temporal recalibration narrows the ordinal gap in most cells, yet causal delayed‑label verification and incremental per‑mode benefits remain unproven.
NeuronSifter is a framework for planning interventions in central nervous system microenvironments by converting treatment regimens into state‑conditional target‑occupancy fields and propagating them through microenvironment dynamics. It selects measurements based on their expected reduction in intervention loss, integrating typed outcomes into a unified posterior. In synthetic Alzheimer’s disease scenarios, occupancy conditioning improves trajectory probability scores and intervention ordering accuracy, and decision‑directed acquisition reduces terminal risk compared to a Bayesian experimental design planner.
The paper introduces Audit-First VAPO, a method that separates directional admission from magnitude control for selective updates under imperfect verification. It employs an observation-only accept‑appeal‑abstain policy with a finite secondary‑verification budget, freezing the action trace before clean labels are added, and uses finite‑sample bounds to certify harmful risk, coverage, and verifier‑call rate. Experiments on Qwen3.5‑0.8B and GSM8K show that RC‑VAPO achieves high accuracy while maintaining low selected harmful risk and modest verifier cost compared to baseline methods.