arXiv Machine Learning By Esther Xin

When a Data Artifact Isn't a Shortcut: Causal Auditing of Synthetic RLVR Corpora

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper audits whether synthetic distractors in RLVR corpora act as shortcuts for learning policies. A classifier using only surface statistics barely outperforms chance, and manual inspection reveals that code distractors are almost identical to correct answers. Experiments with a paraphrase‑matched control show no exploitation advantage for the unmodified data, indicating that the detectable artifact was not used by the policy.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Fidelity Is Not Enough: Dispatch-Level Instrumentation for Agentic Datasheet Extraction

The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.

By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Detectable Only Where It Is Confounded: What Verified Duplication Counts Say About Membership Evidence in Language Models

The paper investigates whether language models can identify sentences from their training data by using exact duplication counts from publicly released corpora for two model families, OLMo‑2 and Pythia. It finds that for typical duplication levels, models show only a weak trace of exposure, with a rank correlation near –0.08, and that strong signals only appear when a sentence appears roughly a thousand times, at which point fame rather than memory dominates. The study also demonstrates that common membership tests can be misleading, as changing a single word does not alter the model’s preference, and that controlling for register can significantly improve detector performance.

By Arman Nik Khah
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

RAGuard: A Layered Defense Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems Against Data Poisoning

arXiv:2607. 26339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems ground large language models (LLMs) in external corpora, but this reliance exposes them to corpus poisoning: maliciously injected passages that manipulate retrieved evidence.

By Pushkal Kumar, Tucker Nielson, Tanish Kolhe, Shubham Zala, Vincent Li
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

VeriPhy: Agentic Physical Reasoning for World Model Evaluation and Refinement

VeriPhy is an auditable physical‑verification system that evaluates generated video by compiling prompts into typed physical obligations and a statically validated execution plan before any frames are observed. During execution, it gates calls to frozen low‑level experts (e.g., segmentation, tracking, counting, depth, OCR, audio‑event detection) and returns provenance‑carrying evidence records, which are mapped to a three‑valued state (supported, contradicted, unknown) with full traceability. On a 1,500‑clip corpus of human‑annotated flaw records, VeriPhy accounts for 228 failures out of 304, outperforming a published question‑decomposition evaluator that accounts for 164, while also providing auditable evidence for each verdict.