Algorithmic Reflectivity in Large Language Models: Methodological Study of Linguistic Structure in Mentalization

2 días 1 hora ago
arXiv:2512.08945v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mentalization is a core human capacity involving the interpretation of one's own and others' behavior in terms of underlying mental states. Large language models (LLMs) can generate linguistically reflective discourse, raising the question of whether the formal linguistic structure of mentalization can be reproduced without experiential and affective processes. This study assessed whether an LLM can generate mentalization profiles structurally coherent with the dimensions of mentalization-based treatment (MBT) and recognized as formally mentalizing by expert clinicians. Fifty human-model dialogues were generated with GPT-4.1 under standardized conditions; at the end of each, the model produced a narrative mentalization profile. Five MBT-trained psychiatrists independently rated each profile on 4 canonical MBT axes and 2 higher-order dimensions (regulatory functions, synthetic profile) for evaluative and argumentative coherence. Interrater reliability was assessed with ICC(3,k). Mean scores ranged from 3.63 to 3.98, indicating moderate-to-high structural coherence; ICC(3,k) in the evaluative domain ranged from 0.60 to 0.84. Evaluative and argumentative coherence were strongly associated (Pearson r 0.826-0.967). A negative control with mismatched dialogue-profile pairs yielded minimal ratings. Clinicians described outputs as linguistically organized and clinically interpretable, but with limited affective variability and contextual integration. The findings suggest that LLMs can reproduce the formal linguistic structure of reflective discourse - a phenomenon we term algorithmic reflectivity - which appears more consistent with structural language regularities than with experiential or intentional processes. LLMs may serve as research and training tools for studying the linguistic aspects of mentalization.
Stefano Epifani (Digital Transformation Institute, Rome, Italy, Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy), Giuliano Castigliego (Digital Transformation Institute, Rome, Italy, Psychoanalytic Academy of Italian…

Align, Don't Blend: Orthogonal Supervision Disentanglement As the Key to Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection

2 días 1 hora ago
arXiv:2512.06746v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in AI-Generated Image (AIGI) detection have largely focused on model architectures, loss design, and training strategies, while overlooking a more fundamental factor: how supervision is structured. Existing detectors typically train on benchmark-defined data that implicitly blends semantic and artifact signals, leaving supervision design unexplored. In this paper, we examine supervision structure through controlled experiments and show that such blended supervision is not merely suboptimal but fundamentally counterproductive. Replacing it with disentangled, orthogonal supervision - paired with inductively matched models - suffices to achieve strong cross-generator generalization. We formalize this as Orthogonal Supervision Disentanglement and instantiate it in AlignGemini, a two-branch detector in which a VLM receives purely semantic supervision and a vision expert receives purely artifact supervision. With disentangled supervision coupled with inductively matched models, even the simplest training recipe achieves a significant improvement of 9.5% across five in-the-wild benchmarks - trained on images from only two generators, without complex training strategies or diverse generator coverage. We further introduce AIGI-Now, a diagnostic benchmark covering eight contemporary generators, including five closed-source commercial models, with disentangled semantic and pixel evaluation subsets for fine-grained analysis of detector capabilities. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/GzZning/Align-Don-t-Blend.
Ruoxin Chen, Jiahui Gao, Kaiqing Lin, Keyue Zhang, Yandan Zhao, Isabel Guan, Taiping Yao, Shouhong Ding

Operon: Incremental Construction of Ragged Data via Named Dimensions

2 días 1 hora ago
arXiv:2511.16080v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern data processing workflows frequently encounter ragged data: multidimensional collections whose inner lengths vary and are revealed only at runtime. Ragged data is prevalent in domains throughout science and computing, yet existing workflow engines treat it as nested containers. This representation leaves shape semantics ambiguous, obscures task dependencies when upstream coordinates are not yet enumerated, and imposes coarse synchronization barriers that stall independent work across tasks. We argue that ragged data is fundamentally a flat function over a coordinate space, and that making this view explicit resolves all three difficulties at once. We realize this insight in Operon, a statically verifiable workflow engine built around a formalism of named dimensions with explicit dependency relations. Users declare pipelines in the Operon DSL by annotating data flow with dimension names, where the static checker verifies that every task does not include faulty iterations regardless of runtime lengths. At runtime, the system models in-progress arrays as partial functions over downward-closed coordinate domains, which provides a natural representation for partially-unknown data states, an exact notion of per-task indegree before all upstream coordinates are enumerated, and a sound basis for fault recovery without programmer intervention.
Sungbin Moon, Jiho Park, Suyoung Hwang, Donghyun Koh, Seunghyun Moon, Minhyeong Lee

Structured Temporal Causality for Interpretable Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

2 días 1 hora ago
arXiv:2510.16511v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world multivariate time series anomalies are rare and often unlabeled. Additionally, prevailing methods rely on increasingly complex architectures tuned to benchmarks, detecting only fragments of anomalous segments and overstating performance. In this paper, we introduce OracleAD, a simple and interpretable unsupervised framework for multivariate time series anomaly detection. OracleAD encodes each variable's past sequence into a single causal embedding to jointly predict the present time point and reconstruct the input window, effectively modeling temporal dynamics. These embeddings then undergo a self-attention mechanism to project them into a shared latent space and capture spatial relationships. These relationships are not static, since they are modeled by a property that emerges from each variable's temporal dynamics. The projected embeddings are aligned to a Stable Latent Structure (SLS) representing normal-state relationships. Anomalies are identified using a dual scoring mechanism based on prediction error and deviation from the SLS, enabling fine-grained anomaly diagnosis at each time point and across individual variables. Since any noticeable SLS deviation originates from embeddings that violate the learned temporal causality of normal data, OracleAD directly pinpoints the root-cause variables at the embedding level. OracleAD achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple real-world datasets and evaluation protocols, while remaining interpretable through SLS.
Dongchan Cho, Jiho Han, Keumyeong Kang, Minsang Kim, Honggyu Ryu, Namsoon Jung

Sculpting the Latent Space: Disentanglement with WAE-MMD and Programmable Priors

2 días 1 hora ago
arXiv:2510.11953v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning disentangled representations, where semantic features are independently captured in a latent space, is dominated by Variational Auto Encoders (VAE) and Adversarial Training. In this paper, we provide direct quantitative and visual evidence that these methods consistently fail to enforce the target factorized representation on the aggregate posterior, leading to entangled representations. We quantify this failure using the Latent Predictability Score (LPS), an unsupervised metric of mutual predictability that empirically lower bounds the level of entanglement in a latent space. To address these limitations, we leverage the non-parametric Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to directly sculpt the aggregate posterior enabling programmable priors. We demonstrate (1) state-of-the-art unsupervised statistical independence, with a 70% reduction in detected entanglement compared to leading baselines; (2) the flexibility to optionally inject semi-supervised information for explicit semantic alignment; and (3) precise shaping of the aggregate posterior distribution (validated through quantization-aware training) without sacrificing reconstruction quality.
Quentin Fruytier, Akshay Malhotra, Shahab Hamidi-Rad, Aditya Sant, Aryan Mokhtari, Sujay Sanghavi

Protecting De-identified Documents from Search-based Linkage Attacks

2 días 1 hora ago
arXiv:2510.06383v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While de-identification models can help conceal the identity of the individuals mentioned in a document, they fail to address linkage risks, defined as the potential to map the de-identified text back to its source. One straightforward way to perform such linkages is to extract phrases from the de-identified document and check their presence in the original dataset. This paper presents a method to counter search-based linkage attacks while preserving the semantic integrity of the text. The method proceeds in two steps. We first construct an inverted index of the N-grams occurring in the text collection, making it possible to efficiently determine which N-grams appear in fewer than $k$ documents, either alone or in combination with other N-grams. An LLM-based rewriter is then iteratively queried to reformulate those spans until linkage is no longer possible. Experimental results on two datasets (court cases and Wikipedia biographies) show that the rewriting method can effectively prevent search-based linkages while remaining faithful to the original content. However, we also highlight that linkages remain feasible with the help of more advanced, semantics-oriented approaches.
Pierre Lison, Mark Anderson

AFFORD2ACT: How Far Can Sparse Keypoints Go for Robot Manipulation?

2 días 1 hora ago
arXiv:2510.01433v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-based manipulation policies are commonly learned from rich visual observations, typically using dense visual features extracted from full resolution images. It remains unclear how much of this visual information is really needed for effective policy learning. In this paper, we investigate the opposite end of the spectrum: how effective can manipulation policies be if they use as input only a compact visual representation. Sparse 2D keypoints provide a deliberately compact representation, giving the policy spatial information while removing direct access to appearance, texture, and background. We design AFFORD2ACT (Affordance-Guided Keypoints to Act) to study how much manipulation capability can be retained under this representation constraint. An off-the-shelf language-conditioned affordance model identifies the task-relevant region, from which up to 15 object keypoints are selected, together with 4 end-effector keypoints. The policy input is therefore reduced to only 19 2D keypoints (38 coordinates). A lightweight gating further decides which keypoints to pay attention to during execution. Across six real-robot manipulation tasks, this compact state outperforms the evaluated RGB, RGB-D, and dense-affordance behavior cloning baselines, degrades less as the number of demonstrations is reduced, and achieves 82% average success in held-out settings. Replacing learned gating with uniform weights reduces success from 92% to 52%. At the same time, the representation depends on reliable affordance localization and keypoint tracking, and remains vulnerable to incorrect masks, occlusion, tracking drift, and distractors.
Anukriti Singh, Kasra Torshizi, Khuzema Habib, Kelin Yu, Ruohan Gao, Pratap Tokekar

Hyperdimensional Probe: Decoding LLM Representations via Vector Symbolic Architectures

2 días 1 hora ago
arXiv:2509.25045v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite their capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) remain opaque with limited understanding of their internal representations. Current interpretability methods either focus on input-oriented feature extraction, such as supervised probes and Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), or on output distribution inspection, such as logit-oriented approaches. A full understanding of LLM vector spaces, however, requires integrating both perspectives, something existing approaches struggle with due to constraints on latent feature definitions. We introduce the Hyperdimensional Probe, a hybrid supervised probe that combines symbolic representations with neural probing. Leveraging Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) and hypervector algebra, it unifies prior methods: the top-down interpretability of supervised probes, SAE's sparsity-driven proxy space, and output-oriented logit investigation. By combining the supervised learning paradigm of traditional probes with the dictionary-based representation principle of SAEs, our approach enables deeper input-focused feature extraction while supporting output-oriented analysis. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently extracts meaningful semantic information across different LLMs, embedding sizes, and configurations, uncovering concept-oriented insights into LLM inference across two distinct scenarios: input-completion tasks and QA-focused text generation. VSA-based probing overcomes the limitations of logit-based analyses, which are constrained by the model's token vocabulary, while also mitigating the noisier interpretability outcomes often produced by SAEs in settings with a bounded conceptual feature space. By supporting a joint investigation of input-output features, this work advances the semantic understanding of neural representations while unifying the complementary perspectives of prior methods.
Marco Bronzini, Carlo Nicolini, Bruno Lepri, Jacopo Staiano, Andrea Passerini

Can synthetic data reproduce real-world findings in epidemiology? A replication study using adversarial random forests

2 días 1 hora ago
arXiv:2508.14936v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic data hold substantial potential to address practical challenges in epidemiology due to restricted data access and privacy concerns. However, many current methods suffer from limited quality, high computational demands, and complexity for non-experts. Furthermore, common evaluation strategies for synthetic data often fail to directly reflect statistical utility and measure privacy risks sufficiently. Against this background, a critical underexplored question is whether synthetic data can reliably reproduce key findings from epidemiological research while preserving privacy. We propose adversarial random forests (ARF) as an efficient and convenient method for synthesizing tabular epidemiological data. To evaluate its performance, we replicated statistical analyses from six epidemiological publications covering blood pressure, anthropometry, myocardial infarction, accelerometry, loneliness, and diabetes, from the German National Cohort (NAKO Gesundheitsstudie), the Bremen STEMI Registry U45 Study, and the Guelph Family Health Study. We further assessed how dataset dimensionality and variable complexity affect the quality of synthetic data, and contextualized ARF's performance by comparison with commonly used tabular data synthesizers in terms of utility, privacy, generalization, and runtime. Across all replicated studies, results on ARF-generated synthetic data consistently aligned with original findings. Even for datasets with relatively low sample size-to-dimensionality ratios, replication outcomes closely matched the original results across descriptive and inferential analyses. Reduced dimensionality and variable complexity further enhanced synthesis quality. ARF demonstrated favourable performance regarding utility, privacy preservation, and generalization relative to other synthesizers and superior computational efficiency.
Jan Kapar, Kathrin G\"unther, Lori Ann Vallis, Klaus Berger, Nadine Binder, Hermann Brenner, Stefanie Castell, Beate Fischer, Volker Harth, Bernd Holleczek, Timm Intemann, Till Ittermann, Andr\'e Karch, Thomas Keil, Lilian Krist, Berit Lange, Michael F…

UniPrompt-CL: Efficient Single-Inference Continual Learning for Medical Image Classification

2 días 1 hora ago
arXiv:2508.10954v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Medical AI systems must remain reliable as data distributions shift across hospitals, imaging devices, and patient populations, yet privacy constraints often prevent storing or revisiting past patient data. We present UniPrompt-CL, a rehearsal-free domain-incremental learning framework for medical image classification using a single backbone and a single inference. Rather than relying on multiple backbones, repeated ViT inferences, or independent layer-wise prompt pools, UniPrompt-CL shares a unified prompt pool across transformer layers and expands it with only a few prompts per new domain. This reduces cross-layer redundancy while enabling efficient adaptation. On diabetic retinopathy, UniPrompt-CL improves average accuracy by 2.0 percentage points and substantially reduces forgetting relative to the strongest backbone-matched baseline. On skin cancer, it achieves competitive accuracy at the lowest training cost among DINOv2-B configurations. A controlled comparison varying only pool organization shows that the benefit arises from retention rather than learning each new domain: it is largest on the medical benchmarks, smaller on OfficeHome, and reverses on a heterogeneous six-stage DomainNet stream. These results suggest that cross-layer prompt sharing with lightweight expansion is practical for medical models requiring repeated retraining under limited on-site compute, while identifying the domain shifts under which it helps.
Gyutae Oh, Jitae Shin