LoRA, PEFT, instruction tuning and domain adaptation — adapting a pretrained model without paying to train one.
arXiv:2609.00046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid and reliable disaster mapping of impacted areas, damaged infrastructure, and affected populations is essential for emergency response and recov...
The paper investigates subliminal learning, where hidden traits from a teacher model are transferred to a student during distillation. It introduces trait‑direction drift as the underlying mechanism, showing that biased generation creates measurable preference gaps that accumulate into behavioral transfer during fine‑tuning. The authors propose probe‑space corridor regularization, a targeted defense that constrains drift along a calibrated trait direction, significantly reducing hidden‑trait transfer while maintaining task performance.
arXiv:2609.00591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An image may be worth a thousand words, but most captioning models describe it in only a few. Modern vision-language models produce fluent high-level c...
arXiv:2609.01244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Every supervised fine-tuning run forces the same chain of decisions, such as learning rate, batch size, LoRA or full fine-tuning, how many epochs, whic...
arXiv:2609.01014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-quality face recognition (LQFR) remains challenging due to the difficulty of matching degraded query (probe) images against low-quality (LQ) enroll...
arXiv:2609.00491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Communicating across cultures is inherently challenging, especially through culturally dense and ambiguous formats like memes. While people expect larg...
arXiv:2609.01604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based evaluators of natural language generation (NLG) quality are widely deployed as scoring tools and as automated training signals, yet the int...
arXiv:2609.01345v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inference cascades cut cost by answering most queries with a cheap model and escalating a hard tail to a frontier model that acts as verifier. A natura...
The study evaluates large language models for assessing suicide risk in Arabic crisis helpline calls, comparing Arabic and English models. Using de‑identified transcripts from Lebanon’s National Lifeline, the researchers fine‑tuned instruction‑tuned LLMs and transformer encoders, achieving a macro‑F1 of 81.19 and ROC‑AUC of 90.61 for high‑risk calls in Arabic, and 85.00/92.59 in English. The results show that high‑risk calls are more distinguishable than at‑risk calls, and translating to English does not degrade performance, indicating potential for operator‑facing tools.
arXiv:2608.00207v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) perform strongly in English medical tasks but degrade substantially in Arabic, a gap widely attributed to limited trai...
Online Self-Weighted Fine‑Tuning (OSW‑FT) augments standard supervised fine‑tuning by adding online, trajectory‑level weighting: for each query the model estimates its current success rate from a small number of inference‑only rollouts and rescales the SFT loss accordingly. The method keeps the optimization direction anchored to the expert trajectory while adapting the update magnitude online, and it is shown to be unbiased for any finite rollout count with a convergence analysis. Across Qwen3 models from 0.6B to 4B, OSW‑FT consistently outperforms plain SFT on challenging benchmarks such as AIME, achieving a favorable compute‑performance trade‑off with only two online rollouts.
The paper introduces a retrieval‑augmented generation framework that combines fine‑tuned open‑weight language models with a hybrid dense‑lexical retrieval pipeline to synthesize corrosion knowledge. Applied to magnesium alloy corrosion, the system achieves significant improvements in token‑level accuracy and high faithfulness and context recall, while an additional Reason Map framework constructs evidence graphs to detect causal errors that standard factuality metrics miss. The modular design is positioned as a general blueprint for trustworthy AI‑assisted knowledge synthesis across engineering domains.
arXiv:2609.01046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Production LLMs must handle inputs that attempt to override system instructions, bypass safety policies or elicit harmful responses. A common mitigat...
The paper presents a cumulative turn‑based risk assessment framework for detecting financial scams targeting older adults, which aggregates conversational turns and updates risk estimates at each step. A multi‑turn dialogue dataset covering investment, charity, and tech support scams is created, with annotations for risk level, score, rationale, and safety recommendation at every cumulative stage. Four small language models (Phi‑4, LLaMA‑3.2, DeepSeek‑R1, Qwen3) are fine‑tuned; Phi‑4 and LLaMA‑3.2 outperform others in turn‑aware risk estimation, demonstrating that compact models can effectively support incremental scam detection in resource‑constrained, privacy‑aware deployments.
The paper investigates a privacy‑hallucination tradeoff in differentially private (DP) language models. It shows that DP pre‑training or fine‑tuning increases hallucinations compared to non‑DP models, especially as the privacy budget becomes stricter. The authors attribute this to DP mechanisms flattening output distributions, and demonstrate that controlling the frequency of facts in training data can mitigate hallucination risks.
arXiv:2604.16729v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) show high performance in general visual question answering. However, a fundamental limitation r...
arXiv:2609.00361v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Toxic language in digital workplaces such as pejoratives, sarcasm, condescension, and subtle incivility can erode trust, morale, and collaboration. E...
The paper investigates how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) handle conflicting evidence presented in text, image, or both forms. Across 13 MLLMs and two datasets, the authors find that models are not robust to knowledge conflict: they tend to accept contradictory image evidence more readily than contradictory text, and when both modalities conflict the preference is arbitrary, depending on input order, model, and dataset. The instability degrades multimodal retrieval-augmented generation and can be exploited by adversarial attacks, while simple mitigation techniques such as prompting, steering, and direct preference optimization largely fail, with supervised fine‑tuning offering only moderate improvement.
TimeSteer introduces inference‑time speech scheduling for joint audio‑visual diffusion models, enabling users to place speech and visual articulation within specified time intervals without fine‑tuning the backbone. The method leverages two properties of the denoising process: a timing‑sensitive text‑to‑audio cross‑attention head that reveals each utterance’s source span, and a predicted clean latent that already organizes coupled speech and visual content. TimeSteer localizes each utterance’s source span and remaps the associated audio‑visual latent to the target interval, and the authors present SpeechShift as the first benchmark for interval‑level speech scheduling.
The paper introduces a training‑free approach to detect policy violations in large language models by treating the task as an out‑of‑distribution problem in the model’s activation space. It uses whitening‑inspired techniques to compute policy‑violation scores directly from normalized hidden activations, requiring only the policy text and a few illustrative examples. Experiments on several LLMs and policy benchmarks show the method achieves up to 86.0% F1, outperforming fine‑tuned and LLM‑as‑a‑judge baselines while being computationally lightweight.