arXiv Machine Learning

Self-Poisoning in Adaptive Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Sharp-Threshold Theory and Certified Label-Free Calibration

arXiv:2607. 21673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time adaptive out-of-distribution (OOD) detectors update a memory bank from the unlabelled stream.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

The Price of Self-Calibration: Exact Evidence Budgets and Manufactured Blind Sets in Adaptive Monitoring

The paper derives precise cost formulas for self‑calibrating monitors that adjust thresholds online to maintain a specified long‑run false‑alarm rate under arbitrary drift. It shows that the guarantee is an accounting identity, independent of the monitored signal, and provides exact evidence identities for both step and ramp drift scenarios, as well as an exact law for the fluctuation of the certificate’s own alarm rate. Additionally, it proves that any monitor designed to tolerate a drift class is blind to all faults in the difference of that class, identifying the blind set for speed‑bounded drift classes and quantifying power outside this set with a sharp Gaussian projection bound.

By Abdou-Raouf Atarmla
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Harness-agnostic detection and immunization of reward hacking in self-evolving language models

The paper introduces HackProbe, a black‑box monitoring tool that can be attached to any self‑evolving language model loop without accessing internal weights or activations. HackProbe uses a fixed‑distribution comparison core and a rotated fresh layer to detect reward hacking through four statistical tests, and it can immunize the model by selecting honest candidates from the proposal pool. Experiments on a controlled host with injected hacking channels show that HackProbe achieves higher AUROC and lower false‑positive rates than the strongest baseline, and its bandwidth‑limited reselection improves true capability under hacking more than it harms clean runs.

By Rongxin Yang, Yang Liu, Shang Luo, Haoxuan Jia, Chongyang Zhang, Hao Zheng, Yingguang Yang, Yulin Huang, Jianshen Zhang, Yongzhi Qi, Kefu Xu, Congjing Ran, Bin Chong