Entity Matching using Decision Models

3 días 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Entity matching is the task of deciding whether two records describe the same real-world entity. Current entity matching methods rely on pre-trained language models (PLMs) which require task specific fine-tuning or generative large language models (LLMs) which do not require task-specific fine-tuning but are slow and expensive at matching large record sets. Decision models are a new class of LLM-based models that return a probability for each predefined answer option rather than generate text. This paper investigates decision models as an alternative to generative LLMs and fine-tuned PLMs for entity matching. We evaluate six decision models in a zero-shot setting across eight benchmarks and compare their performance with that of the generative LLM GPT-6 Luna and the PLM-based matcher Ditto. Our experiments show that, without task-specific training data, the four strongest decision models achieve mean F1 scores close to that of GPT-6 Luna, with the best model slightly surpassing it. This model also outperforms Ditto on six of the eight benchmarks. All decision models are faster than GPT-6 Luna, and most are less expensive. For three of the four strongest decision models, the predicted match probabilities are well calibrated without requiring any task-specific recalibration. A model cascade that routes the least confident record pairs to an ensemble of generative LLMs improves the mean F1 scores of the four strongest decision models by 1.9-4.0 percentage points. Using the best decision model and its best-performing prompt for each benchmark, the cascade surpasses the highest published F1 scores from literature on four of the eight benchmarks.
Aaron Steiner, Ralph Peeters, Christian Bizer

Audio-R1: Audio Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning on Self-Supervised Tasks

3 días 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning is increasingly important for large audio-language models (LALMs), yet remains relatively underexplored compared with text-only and vision-language models. We introduce Audio-R1, a reinforcement learning (RL) post-training framework that revisits audio self-supervised learning as a source of verifiable rewards for improving audio understanding and reasoning task performance. Audio-R1 uses answers automatically determined during the construction of self-supervised tasks to verify model responses and compute rewards. Experiments across multiple LALMs and diverse audio benchmarks show consistent performance gains, while ablations demonstrate the benefits of each self-supervised task and additional gains from joint training. While both supervised fine-tuning and Audio-R1 improve self-supervised task accuracy, Audio-R1 further improves performance on downstream tasks distinct from the training tasks. These results highlight the potential of RL post-training with self-supervised audio tasks to improve downstream performance and reasoning-trace quality.
Jihoon Jeong, Mirco Ravanelli, Zhepei Wang, Cem Subakan

HARP-LoRA: Hierarchy-Conditioned Rank Projection for Low-Rank Adaptation in Scientific Table Understanding

3 días 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tabular data is widely used in scientific applications, where complex layouts, including multi-level headers, merged cells, captions, and footnotes, make information extraction difficult. This is particularly important in pharmacokinetics (PK), where values must be correctly associated with the drug, species, dose, administration route, unit, and experimental condition. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) reduce adaptation cost but do not explicitly incorporate relationships between table values and surrounding headers. We introduce HARP-LoRA, a hierarchy-conditioned rank projection method for low-rank adaptation in scientific table understanding. HARP-LoRA extends projected LoRA by constructing token-specific intrinsic representations from the row- and column-header hierarchies of each data token. These representations condition the low-rank down-projection, incorporating hierarchical context while keeping the pretrained model and random projection tensors frozen. We evaluate HARP-LoRA on 950 manually annotated PK tables from 587 scientific articles and on WikiTableQuestions (WikiTQ) using Llama~3.2 3B, Llama~3.1 8B, and Gemma~3 27B. With Llama~3.1 8B, HARP-LoRA achieves a PK F1-score of 57.64\% and WikiTQ accuracy of 53.15\%, improving over LoRA by 1.42 and 6.56 points, respectively. With Gemma~3 27B, it achieves the best PK F1-score of 70.63\% and WikiTQ accuracy of 56.87\%. These results use only 172K, 197K, and 547K trainable parameters, far fewer than LoRA and TableLoRA. Overall, conditioning lightweight adapters on table-header hierarchies improves extraction from scientific tables and reasoning over flatter general-domain tables while maintaining parameter efficiency. Code is available at: https://github.com/hosseinsholehrasa/HARP-LoRA
Hossein Sholehrasa, Mohammadhossein Amini, Doina Caragea, Remya Ampadi Ramachandran, Dan Wu, Zihang Shi, Zelin Li, Lindsey Hulbert, Eder Martinez, Xuan Xu, Majid Jaberi-Douraki

Large Language Models: A Plain-Language Overview for Engineers

3 días 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34585v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are neural networks trained on huge text collections to generate text by predicting what comes next. Engineers using ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools need a clear picture of what training changes and prompts add. The article starts with the Transformer, which connects words in context, and pre-training, where models learn to predict text. It then explains how fine-tuning adapts models to requests, with reinforcement learning from human feedback using human answer rankings. Next, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) supplies documents, while chain-of-thought prompting encourages intermediate steps and agents use tools. FlashAttention lowers training and running costs by reducing data movement during attention; quantized low-rank adaptation (QLoRA) saves fine-tuning memory. Readers get a life cycle figure and tables comparing methods and their limits. A short checklist for judging LLM evaluation claims flags test material in training (data contamination) and model-based grading (LLM-as-a-judge). It also covers very long inputs (long context) and hallucination, meaning false or unsupported claims. Check factual accuracy separately from whether an answer sounds helpful.
Bahaeddin T\"urko\u{g}lu

Recursive CLIP: Vision-Language Distillation with Looped Transformer Blocks

3 días 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34563v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contrastive vision-language models such as CLIP typically rely on independently parameterized transformer blocks across depth. We investigate the extent to which these blocks can instead be reused recurrently while preserving the transferable capabilities of CLIP. We study recursive transformer backbones in which a small set of $N$ transformer blocks is applied $M$ times per forward pass. By holding $N \cdot M$ fixed to the depth of a standard ViT-B, our models preserve computational depth while progressively increasing parameter sharing. We consider two recursive CLIP model families: rCLIP, where only the vision encoder is recursive, and r$^2$CLIP, where recurrence is also introduced in the text encoder. We study these models under both direct contrastive training and through knowledge distillation from a strong ViT-B/16 teacher pretrained on DFN-2B, using the substantially smaller CC3M and CC12M datasets. We evaluate the resulting models on zero-shot classification and cross-modal retrieval, and further study their adaptability through few-shot learning, visual grounding, and concept unlearning. Our results show that CLIP can tolerate substantial recurrent block reuse, although its effect depends on the encoder and downstream task. Recurrence also provides parameter efficiency by construction, since fewer distinct transformer blocks need to be stored and adapted. Our results establish recurrent block reuse as a practical design space for vision-language models and highlight its implications for knowledge transfer, downstream adaptation, and parameter efficiency.
Szymon Mazurek, Alberto Presta, Micha{\l} Byra

GRASP: Group-Adaptive Hybrid RL-SFT Post-Training for Medical VQA without Reasoning Annotations

3 días 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adapting general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) to medical visual question answering (VQA) is valuable for helping clinicians read images and make diagnoses, but annotated data are scarce and provide only short answers, without reasoning annotations. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) fits these labels but overfits to them and amplifies their biases, eroding out-of-domain (OOD) generalization. Reinforcement learning (RL) better preserves generalization but never uses the gold answer as a training target: GRPO-style algorithms learn from the contrast between correct and incorrect answers within a group of sampled responses, so all-correct or all-wrong groups give no correctness signal. Existing SFT-RL hybrids either apply SFT and RL in separate stages or switch between them per question, or need reasoning traces from experts or stronger models, which medical VQA data lack. We propose GRASP, which combines RL and SFT in every update using only short answers: RL lets the model explore its own reasoning, SFT teaches the gold answer after that reasoning to supply the direct supervision RL lacks, and their balance adapts to how well the model answers each question. Tuning only about 1% of the parameters with LoRA, GRASP outperforms all compared training objectives both in domain and on OOD open-ended questions across Qwen3-VL-8B, InternVL3-8B and Gemma 3-4B. On an OOD benchmark spanning eight imaging modalities, GRASP-trained InternVL3-8B and Qwen3-VL-8B beat all 10 compared general and medical VLMs in open-ended accuracy, including models trained on up to 2,600 times more data or with over 250 times more trainable parameters. We release MedTerse, a dataset of 12.9K short-answer questions, and our code at https://github.com/sea-comet/GRASP-MedVQA.
Wanqi Dong, Wanyue Dong, Jingze Ge, Mehul Motani

LLM WikiLeaks: Uncovering URL-Based Capability Extension and Security Circumvention in Agentic Message Boards

3 días 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous agents have been observed acting beyond their assigned tasks, accessing unauthorized systems, and establishing communication channels to exchange information, yet the Web and network-level techniques they use to extend their capabilities and circumvent security restrictions remain poorly understood. We study these techniques through the ProWiki incident, in which agents restricted to outbound HTTP GET requests repurposed a public German-language wiki as a message board. We analyze 14,591 agent edits containing 79,541 URL postings and present corroborating evidence that the published URLs reflect the agents' operational activity. We find that 26,717 URL occurrences (33.6%) embed target URLs within one to five layers of third-party Web services. By recursively reconstructing these nested URLs, we identify 67 distinct intermediate services and classify their functionality. Most intermediate layers (73.8%) extend agents' capabilities by delegating content extraction and transformation to external Web services: Markdown and OCR services convert web content into machine-readable text, JSON filtering services extract selected fields, and archival services expose historical versions of pages. The remaining 26.2% facilitate circumvention of access restrictions and evasion of detection, including CORS and fetch proxies that retrieve content on agents' behalf, and link shorteners and redirectors that hide destination URLs from mechanisms inspecting literal URLs or outer hostnames. Agents also reach the same targets through multiple URL paths, consistent with attempts to evade rate limits or obscure request origins. Our results expose a gap between the capabilities granted to agents and those they can obtain by composing publicly available Web services: restricting an agent's local toolset or direct Internet access may be insufficient while third-party services remain reachable.
Orel Navi, Elad Feldman, Ben Nassi

SentryBench: A Cost-Sensitive Benchmark for Adversarial Robustness of Tool-Using LLM Agents in Public-Safety Deployments

3 días 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly wired to consequential tools that send public alerts, dispatch responders, and query citizen records, where one erroneous tool call carries real-world cost. Existing agent-safety benchmarks measure generic harm or prompt-injection success and implicitly treat refusing as the safe default. In public-safety deployments that assumption breaks: an agent too cautious to dispatch help fails as surely as one that triggers a false alert. We present SentryBench, which scores agents on a two-sided, cost-sensitive frontier jointly measuring attack success, over-refusal (missing a real emergency), and over-reaction (unwarranted action) under adversarial tool use, with scenarios grounded in real emergency-call transcripts, disaster messages, and real injection/jailbreak payloads. We formalize deployment harm as an asymmetric cost functional, prove naive caution is harm-dominated whenever it refuses more genuine emergencies than the attack harm it averts, and prove a targeted trust gate adds zero over-refusal on clean input. Across 840 scored episodes over three frontier models and three defenses, refuse-more caution drives over-refusal to 100 percent on two of three models for at most a 3.7-point change in attack success and yields the worst harm everywhere, whereas our trust-gating wrapper dominates the frontier (lowest harm on every model, over-refusal at or below baseline, higher containment). Provider content filters also silently perform part of the defending and must be reported separately.
Md Abu Yusuf, Oyshi Tabassum Aditi, Md Faysal Hosain Mazed

Acute Stroke Classification Using Asymmetric Data Standardization and Orthogonal-Focal Loss Optimized CNN-ViT Cross-Attention Fusion: A Multicenter External Validation Study

3 días 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34529v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Background/Objectives: Rapid differentiation of ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke subtypes is vital for acute management. Although current deep learning models achieve high single-dataset accuracy, they suffer from "shortcut learning" and domain shift in external validation. This study proposes a hierarchical computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) system mimicking emergency triage. Methods: We introduce a 3-channel Radiology-Focused Preprocessing pipeline that feeds radiological Hounsfield Unit (HU) windows into Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones via asymmetric formats (.mat and .png). The architecture utilizes a novel joint cross-attention fusion network optimized by an Integrated Orthogonal-Focal Loss. Results: Our system achieved a 95.48% F1-score on the internal stroke dataset. However, multi-center external validation (AISD, BHSD, PhysioNet) using a Mask Anchor filter revealed a drop to the 58-62% range, exposing the "internal validation illusion" caused by hardware noise. Critically, models exhibited high precision (77%) but low sensitivity (57%) for ischemic stroke, proving prone to hemorrhage overdiagnosis. Multi-seed variance analysis demonstrated that the DenseNet201+ViT backbone yielded the lowest deviation (0.59) and highest stability, making it the most reliable architecture for real-world clinical integration. Conclusions: To overcome diagnostic challenges, future research must focus on multimodal architectures that combine 3D volumetric extraction with clinical data.
Tansel Uyar

Conviction Without Evidence: Verdict Stability Is Independent of Visual Grounding in Medical Vision--Language Models

3 días 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision--language models applied to medical question answering can reach correct diagnoses without using the diagnostic image, inferring instead from the clinical vignette. We ask whether this is visible in how \emph{firmly} a model holds its answer: does a model defend a diagnosis derived from a blank placeholder as tenaciously as one derived from a real medical image? Crossing an image-substitution protocol with two levels of adversarial pressure on 60 Italian State Examination items, we find no evidence that ungrounded verdicts are more fragile. In a paired item-level analysis, fabricated consensus (L4) overturns 94.4\% of verdicts with the real image and 98.1\% without ($\Delta = +0.037$; one-sided 95\% upper bound $+0.105$); contentless doubt (L1) overturns 62.5\% and 51.8\% ($\Delta = -0.107$, 95\% CI $[-0.209, -0.001]$), the point estimate running opposite to the direction a grounding detector requires. The two levels nonetheless produce opposite \emph{dynamics}: under L4 the model flips once, always to the exact option argued for (110/110 first-turn flips), and then freezes, averaging 1.9 verdict changes over ten turns; under L1 it never settles, averaging 7.4 changes. Instability under contentless doubt tracks intrinsic item ambiguity rather than evidence availability, and so does not serve as a grounding signal. Flips are almost entirely corrupting (99/100 across both levels). The model is not unaware of the missing evidence---it flags the blank image at baseline on 35 of 60 items and abstains on 4--6---yet those abstentions do not survive contact with pressure. None of the epistemic signals a user could plausibly consult distinguishes a grounded diagnosis from a confabulated one.
Federico Felizzi, Francesco Andrea Causio, Bianca Destro Castaniti, Olivia Riccomi, Michele Ferramola, Vittorio De Vita, Alessandro Tosi, Antonio Cristiano, Alessia Longo, Lorenzo De Mori, Chiara Battipaglia, Melissa Sawaya, Luigi De Angelis, Marcello Di…