arXiv AI

Audit-First VAPO: Risk-Certified Selective Updates under Imperfect Verification

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

A Joint Finite-Sample Certificate for Adaptive Selective Conformal Risk Control

arXiv:2606. 08517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selective predictors answer on confident inputs and abstain elsewhere; deploying one safely needs a single finite-sample certificate that simultaneously upper-bounds the selected risk, lower-bounds the acceptance probability $\pacc$ above a floor $\pmin$, and lower-bounds the deployment utility.

By Xiaoli Yu, Jiamiao Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Resist, Update, Reject: Preference Optimization Installs a Prior-Dependent Reliability Switch

The paper demonstrates that a preference‑optimization objective can learn to distinguish reliable from unreliable sources by installing a prior‑dependent reliability switch. By training on data where a source’s stated reliability is paired with its answer, the model learns to flip its response only when the stated reliability exceeds a threshold that grows with the model’s prior. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑7B‑Instruct and Llama‑3.1‑8B show that this switch generalizes to unseen reliability values and follows stated reliability over role prestige, whereas supervised imitation fails to learn it.

By Sen Yang, Yuen-Hei Yeung
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

Better Policies, Worse Verifier Audits

The paper investigates how verifier components used in post‑training and test‑time loops can collapse when they are refreshed based on aggregate success scores. It shows that as a policy improves on one conjunctive target, the verifier’s on‑policy AUC can shift to favor a worse component, leading to a preference for a full‑outcome predictor over the intended component oracle. The authors provide theoretical thresholds, empirical demonstrations on text control and ECG data, and propose a repair that audits the component on its own failures to prevent damage.

By Daniel Cie\'slak, Jacek {\L}ubi\'nski
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

SafeRestore: Detector-Relative Risk Certificates for Selective Industrial Image Restoration

SafeRestore introduces a framework for certifying when an industrial image restoration should be automatically returned to a detector or require human review. It ranks five restoration candidates using action‑specific fitted scores, selects a threshold gate on tuning data, and evaluates the gate on a separate certification sample with two one‑sided exact binomial bounds—one for evidence‑loss incidents and one for excess‑activation incidents. In a retrospective study of 4,591 Carinthia‑S images, the protocol demonstrates auditable risk‑coverage behavior, with varying pass rates across different policies and morphologies.

By Shaoliang Yang, Jun Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 21

Credit Without Ground Truth: Auditing Step-Level Credit Assignment in LLM Agents Against Executed Replay

arXiv:2608. 19760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audited against causal ground truth from executed replay in a single-agent tool environment (ALFWorld), none of the step-level credit signals used to train LLM agents -- LLM-judge scores, outcome-conditioned logprob ratios, or the policy's own confidence -- identifies which steps causally matter better than chance.

By Haiyue Zhang