AI safety and alignment

Alignment, interpretability, red-teaming, bias and privacy: the research on what these systems do when they misbehave.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Continual Learning with Vision-Language Models via Semantic-Geometry Preservation

arXiv:2603. 12055v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning of pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) is prone to catastrophic forgetting, yet current approaches adapt to new tasks without explicitly preserving the cross-modal semantic geometry inherited from pretraining and previous stages, allowing new-task supervision to induce geometric distortion.

By Chiyuan He, Zihuan Qiu, Fanman Meng, Runtong Zhang, Linfeng Xu, Qingbo Wu, Hongliang Li
arXiv AI
Jul 31

SciFigAlign: Scoring Scientific Figures by Fine-tuned Alignment of Visuals with Manuscript Evidence

arXiv:2607. 27066v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific figure assessment in peer review differs fundamentally from general image quality evaluation: a figure must be visually legible, faithfully support the manuscript's claims, and communicate evidence with a clear visual hierarchy.

By Chuanzhi Xu, Zihan Deng, Huiqi Liang, Chengkun Yue, Zhanlin Cui, Pengfei Ye, Weidong Cai
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Foundation-Model Earth Representations Enable Regional-Scale Forest Aboveground Biomass Monitoring Across the Northeastern United States

arXiv:2607. 27217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is a critical indicator of ecosystem productivity and terrestrial carbon storage, yet regional carbon monitoring remains constrained by the sparse spatial and temporal availability of field inventories and airborne structural measurements.

By Shashika Lamahewage, Chandi Witharana
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

ClawTrack: Towards Trace-Level Evaluation and Improvement of Real-World Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2607. 28037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM-based agents are deployed in complex, multi-step workflows, a critical evaluation gap has emerged: most existing benchmarks judge only final outcomes, unable to distinguish reliable reasoning from lucky success or attribute failures to specific process deficiencies, hindering attribution in long-horizon tasks.

By Xingjian Wu, Xuhang Zhu, Xingchen Liu, Junlin Liu, Jianing Wang, Linsen Guo, Xiaoyu Li, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Psych-ECA: A Reproducible Semi-Synthetic Benchmark for Synthetic Control Arms in Longitudinal Psychiatry

arXiv:2607. 27224v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: External and synthetic control arms (ECAs) are entering psychiatric drug development, but the field lacks a benchmark that evaluates the properties regulators care about: not only how accurately a method reconstructs untreated trajectories, but whether its uncertainty is calibrated, whether it is robust to the informative observation times common in mental-health records (sicker patients are seen more often), and what false-positive rate it induces in go/no-go trial decisions.

By Aakash Bhagat, Shashank Choudhary
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Contrastive Reinforced Policy Optimization via Privileged Self-Distillation

arXiv:2607. 28026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) or On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD).

By Xingjian Wu, Junlin Liu, Xingchen Liu, Xuhang Zhu, Jianing Wang, Linsen Guo, Xiaoyu Li, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Beyond Binary Rewards: A Comparative Study of Reward Design for Reinforcement Unlearning

arXiv:2607. 27968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning seeks to selectively remove specific knowledge from trained language models without full retraining, a growing necessity under privacy regulations such as GDPR and the EU AI Act.

By Efstratios Zaradoukas, Davide Gabrielli, Bardh Prenkaj, Gjergji Kasneci
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Personalized RewardBench: Evaluating Reward Models with Human Aligned Personalization

arXiv:2604. 07343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pluralistic alignment has emerged as a critical frontier in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), with reward models (RMs) serving as a central mechanism for capturing diverse human values.

By Qiyao Ma, Dechen Gao, Rui Cai, Boqi Zhao, Hanchu Zhou, Junshan Zhang, Zhe Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

ZAPs: A Reward Attribution Framework for DeFi Ecosystems with Adversarial-Robust Scoring via Parallel Anomaly Ensemble Detection

arXiv:2607. 27859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Incentive programs are central to user acquisition in decentralized finance, but many reward systems rely on raw volume, transaction count, and wallet count, making them vulnerable to bots and sybil operations.

By Girish G N, Ashutosh Sahoo, Ajay Bhat, Akshay SP, Gurukiran S, Parag Paul, Dhanashekar Kandaswamy
arXiv AI
Jul 31

Zero-Fi: Zero-Shot Wi-Fi-Based Human Activity Recognition via Contrastive Signal-Language Alignment

arXiv:2607. 26381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition has advanced substantially, but most existing methods assume a closed set of activities and require labeled Wi-Fi samples for every target class, limiting their ability to recognize unseen activities.

By Yitong Shen, Cheng Guo, Peiliang Wang, Jingzhe Zhang, Yi Sheng, Haopeng Zhang, Hongfei Xue, Yili Ren