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 Computation and Language
Sep 2

Closing Cost-Quality Gap in Document VLMs: Difficulty-Aware Data Curation and Quality-Adjusted Deployment Economics

arXiv:2609.01575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extracting structured fields from hundreds of millions of documents annually remains costly in regulated industries: bespoke OCR cascades cover only a...

By Maksim Evdokimov, Matvey Ivanov, Dmitrii Tsiupin, Olga Tsymboi, Anatolii Potapov, Aleksandr Ivanov
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

Conditional Flow Matching for ML-Based Inverse Design Problems

The paper introduces Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) for engineering inverse design, comparing it to conditional diffusion models and cGANs on EngiBench structural and thermal benchmarks. CFM outperforms the baselines in cumulative and final optimality gaps, mean volume‑fraction deviation, and throughput, achieving up to 66× faster sample generation with fewer network evaluations. The study demonstrates CFM’s effectiveness as a warm‑start generator for gradient‑based refinement in PDE‑constrained design problems.

By Juliana Felder, Milad Habibi, Soheyl Massoudi, Mark Fuge
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

CRAFT: Fine-Tuning Pre-hoc Explainability in AI-native 6G RAN

The paper introduces CRAFT, a data‑centric fine‑tuning approach that aligns small language models (SLMs) for pre‑hoc reasoning in AI‑native 6G radio access networks (RAN). By automatically generating verified (input, trace, label) triplets and fine‑tuning with low‑rank adaptation, CRAFT achieves high accuracy and F1 scores on TRACTOR and IC xApp datasets while avoiding parse failures that plague RL methods like GRPO. It also reduces energy consumption by 59% compared to GRPO baselines, offering a more sustainable path to auditable AI in 6G RAN.

By Pranshav Gajjar, Vijay K Shah
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

AdaSearch: Balancing Parametric Knowledge and Search in Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning

AdaSearch introduces a two‑stage reinforcement learning framework that separates problem solving from the decision to search in large language models. By using an F1‑based decision metric, it explicitly evaluates when external search is needed, reducing unnecessary search calls while maintaining high question‑answering performance. Experiments show that AdaSearch improves search‑decision quality with only a minor impact on accuracy compared to always‑search strategies.

By Tzu-Han Lin, Wei-Lin Chen, Chen-An Li, Hung-yi Lee, Yun-Nung Chen, Yu Meng
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

Can LLMs Use Relational Transformer Embeddings?

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can leverage frozen relational‑transformer embeddings by injecting them as soft tokens. Using a learned MLP projection and LoRA adaptation, the authors fine‑tune Qwen3.5‑4B on chain‑of‑thought reasoning traces and group‑based reinforcement learning, then evaluate on ten binary classification tasks across six RelBench databases. The hybrid approach consistently underperforms the standalone relational transformer, showing sensitivity to serialization format, token budget, and RL stability, leading the authors to conclude that stronger alignment objectives and schema‑aware design are needed for reliable relational prediction.

By Francisco Galuppo Azevedo, Clarissa Lima Loures
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

Uncovering Understanding-Generation Synergy in Native Unified Multimodal Models: From Representation, Task to System

The paper investigates how visual understanding and generation objectives interact within unified multimodal models (UMMs). At the representation level, each objective enriches the other, but forcing them through the same computation path can cause one to dominate; a task‑decoupled architecture mitigates this. At the task and system levels, the authors demonstrate bidirectional transfer between shared knowledge and superior performance of an end‑to‑end UMM over a planner–executor pipeline on complex tasks.

By Penghao Wu, Haiwen Diao, Weichen Fan, Lewei Lu, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu