Weiming Zhang | Search arXiv

arXiv2026

The Safeguard Worked. Is the LLM System Safer?

Safeguards in deployed LLM services are evaluated by refusal, attack success, and policy violation rates. Those rates characterize how a control performed on the requests it was tested on. A deployment has to answer a different question: how much help with harmful tasks the service still gives an attacker who keeps adapting or finds another way in. We determine what each reported result implies for that question, allowing results from different safeguard families to be compared under one deployment criterion. The evidence requirements are strongly asymmetric. One attack that obtains harmful help from the deployed service suffices to establish that such help remains, and such attacks appear repeatedly in the coded record. Establishing that little remains cannot follow from the safeguard's own numbers alone; it also requires evidence about what the surrounding system still allows after the safeguard performs its local function. Such evidence is supported or derived in only a small minority of the depth-coded claims, and one such claim bounds its scoped residual. A better local score is therefore not, by itself, a stronger claim about the deployment. Safeguard research cannot stop at raising local scores; a gain has to be judged by whether it makes a deployed system any safer.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

AdapToPASS: Ambiguity-aware Adaptive Spherical Transformer for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation

Spherical Transformers have emerged as a promising framework for panoramic semantic segmentation (PASS) by operating directly on spherical geometry and alleviating projection-induced distortions. However, existing architectures often assume canonical spherical structure and stable viewpoints, which are frequently violated in real-world imagery due to unconstrained camera motion, introducing contextual and geometric ambiguity. Consequently, they lack adaptive mechanisms to handle such ambiguity, limiting robustness to unseen spherical transformations. In contrast, biological perception is inherently ambiguity-aware, adapting to fluctuations in cue reliability caused by geometric and contextual variations to maintain stable interpretation under complex transformations. Motivated by this, we first systematically analyze existing PASS architectures under various unseen spherical transformations. We then introduce AdapToPASS, a novel bio-inspired Spherical Transformer that adaptively models contextual and geometric ambiguities for robust PASS. At its core, Adaptive Spherical Attention (AdaSpA) blocks dynamically modulate attention according to local contextual ambiguity, mimicking adaptive, context-driven biological perception. To address geometric ambiguity, AdapToPASS employs Bifocal Spherical Representation to balance field of view and spatial resolution, together with boundary supervision inspired by the boundary-sensitive nature of biological vision. Across indoor and outdoor semantic segmentation, AdapToPASS consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods. Under unseen spherical transformations, it surpasses the next-best method by +13.38% relative mIoU on Stanford2D3D and +18.77% on WildPASS. We further introduce AdapToPASS-Swift, a lightweight variant with fewer than 2M parameters, which surpasses compact baselines while retaining robustness to spherical transformations.

cs.CV↗