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 Computer Vision
Aug 25

VinciCoder: Unifying Multimodal Code Generation via Coarse-to-fine Visual Reinforcement Learning

VinciCoder is a unified framework for multimodal code generation that addresses the limitations of single-task models by training on a large-scale curated corpus of 1.3 M direct generation pairs and 300 k visual‑refinement tasks. It introduces a coarse‑to‑fine Visual Reinforcement Learning (ViRL) approach that uses visual similarity across multi‑scale patches to provide an implementation‑agnostic reward, improving alignment between rendered outputs and input visuals. Experiments on diverse benchmarks show VinciCoder outperforms existing methods, and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of ViRL.

By Xuanle Zhao, Deyang Jiang, Zhixiong Zeng, Lei Chen, Haoyue Yang, Haibo Qiu, Jing Huang, Yufeng Zhong, Liming Zheng, Yilin Cao, Lin Ma
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

WADE: A Reasoning-Annotated Benchmark for Multi-Instance Floating-Waste Grounding with Compact Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2608.22950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Floating waste in inland waterways threatens aquatic ecosystems and requires timely monitoring under cluttered, multi-object conditions. Existing aquat...

By Md. Asaduzzaman Shuvo, Ahsan Farabi, Md. Abdul Ahad Minhaz, Mahedi Hasan, Israt Khandaker, Ibrahim Khalil Shanto, Muhammad Nomani Kabir
arXiv AI
Aug 25

A Physical Response-and-Memory Model for Muon Optimization

The paper introduces a physical response-and-memory model for the Muon optimizer, explaining its semi‑orthogonalized momentum update as the maximally dissipative direction under an output‑side safety budget. It treats the weight matrix as a responsive medium with internal stress, showing that momentum corresponds to accumulated stress whose relaxation occurs over multiple timescales—fast and slow. Based on this, the authors propose the Bi‑Maxwell optimizer, which uses a two‑timescale memory kernel and achieves target loss in fewer steps on a public large‑language‑model benchmark.

By Yinze Hu, Hongjun Xiang, Xingao Gong, Hongyu Yu
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Why we need an AI-resilient society- Profiling Large Language Models

The article discusses the evolution of AI across three generations—from explicit logic to neural networks to large language models (LLMs)—and how LLMs introduce new systemic risks. It applies a forensic‑psychology profiling method to identify ten key features of LLMs, such as hallucinations, bias, and cognitive atrophy, revealing an entity that confabulates, amplifies user biases, and erodes human competence. The report concludes with a four‑pillar framework for AI resilience, emphasizing cognitive sovereignty, measurable control, partial autonomy, and openness to safeguard society.

By Thomas Bartz-Beielstein, Eva Bartz
arXiv AI
Aug 25

TEE-X: TEE-aware Acceleration Framework for Large Vision Models at the Edge

TEE-X is a TEE‑aware acceleration framework designed to run large vision models, such as Vision Transformers, entirely within Trusted Execution Environments. It introduces a sensitivity‑aware modularization technique and vectorization to overcome memory constraints and latency challenges on edge devices. The framework is validated on OP‑TEE for Arm TrustZone and optimized for the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier, achieving GPU‑level inference latency with minimal accuracy‑latency trade‑offs.

By Kurt M Wilson, Mohaiminul Al Nahian, Abeer Matar A. Almalky, Sadat Shahriyar, Souvik Kundu, Zhishan Guo, Abdullah Al Arafat, Adnan Siraj Rakin
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Do Spoken Language Models Hear Speech as They Read Text? Bridging Structural Gaps Between Speech and Text

The paper investigates how Spoken Language Models (SLMs) process speech compared to text, noting that current SLMs show weak alignment between speech and text representations despite strong downstream performance. The authors propose a framework that separates length mismatch from semantic alignment to better match speech and text representations. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that this approach yields competitive results against strong baselines, highlighting the need to explicitly address structural differences between speech and text in SLM training.

By Hyeonyu Kim, Hwayeon Kim, Youngwon Choi, Myeongkyun Cho, Huu-Kim Nguyen
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Can LLMs Truly Forget? Revealing Unlearning Gaps Through Adversarial Evaluation

arXiv:2608.21606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of targeted training data from a model while preserving its remaining capabilities, but evaluating whet...

By Ayush Gupta, Hima Varshini Surisetty, Sreevidya Bollineni, Varad Ingale, Tuhina Tripathi, Abhishek Lalwani, Somya Chatterjee, Sadid Hasan
arXiv AI
Aug 25

ONOTE: Hypergraph-Grounded Omnimodal Reasoning for Computational Music Science

ONOTE is a unified framework that treats music as a scientifically structured domain of measurable cross-representation correspondences, focusing on omnimodal notation processing centered on sheet music. It introduces a test-only benchmark drawing from diverse musical sources—including staff, Jianpu, and tablature—across varied genres, instruments, and structural conditions, with aligned multimodal derivatives. The framework supports four complementary tasks—score understanding, notation conversion, audio transcription, and symbolic generation—while constructing a provenance-bearing proposition hypergraph from external music-theory materials for evidence retrieval and deterministic validity checks.

By Menghe Ma, Siqing Wei, Yuecheng Xing, Ziyue Zhu, Zhenghong Lin, Yaheng Wang, Fanhong Meng, Peijun Han, Luu Anh Tuan, Haoran Luo