Search arXivSearch

SEARCH · Search arXiv

Results for “stat.ME”

Search indexed arXiv papers on artificial intelligence, large language models, computer vision and robotics. Read source abstracts and follow links to arXiv.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

330 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

When the Martingale Never Stops Firing: Anytime-Valid Gating on Real Forecast Streams

Machine learning systems are increasingly corrected while they run, and the decision of when to intervene is increasingly delegated to statistical monitors. Anytime-valid inference promises evidence that can be acted on at any moment, exactly the guarantee this setting needs, and it is moving from theory into deployed monitoring. Conformal test martingales are the change-detection instrument, and Ville's inequality caps their false-alarm probability on exchangeable data. The guarantee is conditional. A deployment inherits it only if the stream it monitors behaves exchangeably. The premise is hardest to satisfy where these monitors are most useful, on dependent data and inside loops where the monitor modifies the learner whose scores it reads. It is also rarely measured. We measure it in a pre-specified case study, where such a monitor gates the online updates of a Kalman adapter correcting frozen time-series foundation models on five forecasting streams. On exchangeable synthetic streams, the same implementation fires in at most 1 of 60 runs. On the real streams, at alpha = 0.05, 135 of 135 clean-stream runs fired. The construction does not explain the firing; the failure comes from the deployed score stream itself. Repeated fires hold the gate's drift response active, and the gated filter amplifies the very transient it was designed to prevent. The component worth keeping makes no validity claim. Huber-style gating of the filter's own updates cuts isolated-spike degradation by an order of magnitude with no dataset specific tuning. Anytime-valid methods proposed for dependent data should therefore be accompanied by null-calibration controls and mechanism traces.

cs.LG

Multi-dimensional Bias in Modeling Multi-dimensional Preferences: Evaluating the Ability of Synthetic Agents to Replace Human Participants in Conjoint Experiments

Despite growing interest in using LLMs to add robustness or reduce data-collection costs in survey experiments, their efficacy in conjoint design---an increasingly popular method in political science---remains underexplored. This paper addresses that gap by investigating whether synthetic agents can reproduce the multi-dimensional human preference patterns that conjoint is designed to capture. It replicates published conjoint studies and compares the results generated by synthetic agents with original human data along three dimensions: representational correspondence, inferential correspondence, and procedural stability. Our analysis evaluates the alignment of choice distributions as well as the statistical and substantive similarity of estimates, and the results are uneven across these dimensions and studies replicated. This implies that the validity of synthetic participants should be considered claim-dependent and hierarchical. Reproducing a figure or obtaining strong sign agreement is evidence of similar aggregate outputs, but not enough to support replacing human respondents. Our results suggest that the discipline as a whole must first map this innovation's boundaries across various levels before considering synthetic agents a robust substitute for human samples.

cs.MA

LLM Evaluation as Tensor Completion: Low Rank Structure and Semiparametric Efficiency

Large language model (LLM) evaluation platforms increasingly rely on pairwise human judgments. These data are noisy, sparse, and non-uniform, yet leaderboards are reported with limited uncertainty quantification. We study this as semiparametric inference for a low-rank latent score tensor observed through pairwise comparisons under Bradley-Terry-Luce-type models. This places LLM evaluation in a new tensor completion setting with structured observations, non-uniform sampling, and pairwise contrasts. Our target is a smooth functional $ψ(T^\star)$, including linear estimands such as ability gaps and nonlinear ones such as win probabilities. We derive the information operator on the low-rank tangent space, the efficient influence function, and the semiparametric efficiency bound, then construct a one-step debiased estimator with asymptotic normality. A central challenge is that the information operator is anisotropic and does not commute with the tangent-space projection, creating a bottleneck absent from isotropic models. We introduce a score-whitening method that equalizes local Fisher information and restores stable inference at the optimal sample-complexity scale. Our results provide a principled framework for uncertainty quantification in LLM evaluation and more broadly for inference on low-rank structures from pairwise data.

stat.ME

Estimating systematic errors in Bayesian inversion using transport maps

In indirect measurements, the sought parameters have to be determined by solving an inverse problem, typically in a Bayesian framework. Often, the accurate numerical simulation of the measuring process is computationally demanding, making it necessary to rely on approximate models. These surrogates, however, introduce an additional model error and thus may distort the resulting parameter distribution. Moreover, even with the additional speed granted by the surrogate, posterior determination through conventional means such as Markov chain Monte Carlo might be cost intensive, specifically for complicated posterior shapes. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that combines Bayesian inference, model error correction and a transport-based sampling scheme to address these issues. To train the transport scheme, we investigate two different losses: one equivalent to the Kullback-Leibler divergence associated to the transport problem and one based on an upper bound of this loss, generally known as the evidence lower bound. We demonstrate that training the transport based on the latter changes the optimisation landscape drastically, potentially introducing an undesired bias in approximating the target posterior. We compare the computational cost of our approach with established methods and underline the theoretical results with numerical examples.

stat.ME

Balancing the privacy-utility trade-off: How to draw reliable conclusions from private data

Absolute anonymization, conceived as an irreversible transformation preventing re-identification and sensitive value disclosure, has proven to be a broken promise. Modern data protection must therefore shift toward a privacy-utility trade-off grounded in risk mitigation. Differential Privacy (DP) offers a rigorous mathematical framework for balancing quantified disclosure risk with analytical usefulness. Nevertheless, widespread adoption remains limited, largely because complex technical concepts, such as privacy-loss parameters, have yet to be translated into forms meaningful to non-technical stakeholders. This difficulty arises from randomization itself: both analysts and adversaries must draw conclusions from uncertain observations rather than deterministic values. In this work, we adopt an interpretation of the privacy-utility trade-off based on hypothesis testing to measure the uncertainty introduced by randomized mechanisms. In particular, we use the concept of relative disclosure risk to quantify the maximum reduction in uncertainty an adversary can obtain from a membership attack on protected outputs, and show this measure relates directly to standard privacy-loss parameters. We further analyze how DP affects analytical validity via its impact on hypothesis tests assessing statistical significance. Building on these results, we provide practical guidance, accessible to non-experts such as data protection authorities, for navigating the trade-off and selecting protection mechanisms and parameter values.

stat.ME

Learning Causal Abstractions of Linear Structural Causal Models

The need for modelling causal knowledge at different levels of granularity arises in several settings. Causal Abstraction provides a framework for formalizing this problem by relating two Structural Causal Models at different levels of detail. Despite increasing interest in applying causal abstraction, e.g. in the interpretability of large machine learning models, the graphical and parametrical conditions under which a causal model can abstract another are not known. Furthermore, learning causal abstractions from data is still an open problem. In this work, we tackle both issues for linear causal models with linear abstraction functions. First, we characterize how the low-level coefficients and the abstraction function determine the high-level coefficients and how the high-level model constrains the causal ordering of low-level variables. Then, we apply our theoretical results to learn high-level and low-level causal models and their abstraction function from observational data. In particular, we introduce Abs-LiNGAM, a method that leverages the constraints induced by the learned high-level model and the abstraction function to speedup the recovery of the larger low-level model, under the assumption of non-Gaussian noise terms. In simulated settings, we show the effectiveness of learning causal abstractions from data and the potential of our method in improving scalability of causal discovery.

cs.LG

Correcting test set contamination by spiking the training data

The literature on test set contamination largely focuses on detection, but the correction of contaminated test scores is underexplored. Our core proposal is to spike the training data by intentionally contaminating some test examples at known rates. The spiked examples can then be used to calibrate predictors of model memorization which enable principled statistical correction of inflated test scores. To evaluate different correction estimators, we first present a simulation framework based on the Hubble models. Hubble models come in minimal pairs, where the perturbed model was deliberately contaminated with several test sets, while the standard model was not, serving as the counterfactual and correction target. We consider estimators that use information from a memorization predictor, correctness predictor, or both. In simulation, we establish basic statistical intuitions and show that estimators leveraging memorization and correctness information are better than naive estimation which makes no correction at all. We then instantiate several memorization and correctness predictors, and find that simple predictors such as Platt-scaled membership inference metrics provide good signal for correction. Finally, we examine the practical considerations of spiking. Simple memorization predictors need no more than 10 examples for calibration and often transfer from one dataset to another. Taken together, spiking is a promising solution for test set contamination.

stat.ME

Regularity-informed data assimilation: A hierarchical Bayesian approach to ensemble Kalman filtering for hyperbolic conservation laws

We propose a novel regularity-informed filtering framework for data assimilation in the context of hyperbolic conservation laws and other time-dependent partial differential equations. We focus on systems whose states exhibit steep gradients and jump discontinuities. While filtering is widely used to improve numerical simulations by incorporating observational data, traditional filtering methods lack awareness of the spatial regularity of states produced in these systems. As a result, data assimilation often produces unphysical state estimates, introducing spurious oscillations in smooth regions and smearing sharp features. To address this limitation, we introduce a filtering framework that incorporates edge-preserving regularization into the filter's analysis step; this framework balances simulation forecasts, observational data, and structural prior knowledge. We formalize this approach using the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) and a class of hierarchical generalized sparse Bayesian learning (GSBL) priors, which adaptively infer spatially varying hyperparameters to promote non-oscillatory behavior in smooth regions while preserving discontinuities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the resulting GSBL-EnKF method on challenging benchmark problems governed by hyperbolic conservation laws. Our results show that enforcing regularity in the analysis step yields sharper, less oscillatory state estimates and lower errors of the ensemble mean. This sometimes comes at the cost of ensemble spread, which we quantify and discuss.

math.NA

Active Inference with People: a general approach to real-time adaptive experiments

Adaptive experiments optimize their design throughout data collection, which can bring substantial benefits compared to conventional experimental settings. Potential applications include, among others, computerized adaptive testing (when selecting informative tasks in ability measurements), adaptive treatment assignment (when searching for experimental conditions maximizing certain outcomes), and active learning (when choosing optimal training data for machine learning algorithms). However, implementing these techniques in real time poses substantial computational and technical challenges. In this paper, we introduce a practical and unified approach to real-time adaptive experiments that can encompass these scenarios across textual, visual, and audio tasks. Our strategy combines active inference, a Bayesian framework inspired by cognitive neuroscience, with Pyro, a probabilistic programming library, and PsyNet, a modular Python package for large-scale online behavioral experiments. Active inference provides a task-agnostic optimization objective and efficient inference strategies; probabilistic programming makes the computations practical, reducing implementation costs; and PsyNet makes the resulting procedure deployable with humans in real time across diverse behavioral paradigms. We illustrate this approach through two concrete examples: (1) an adaptive testing experiment estimating participants' ability by selecting optimal challenges, reducing the number of trials required by 30--40\%; and (2) an adaptive treatment assignment strategy that identifies the optimal treatment up to three times as accurately as a fixed design. We provide instructions to facilitate adoption of the workflow.

stat.ME

DOTA-ME-CS: Daily Oriented Text Audio-Mandarin English-Code Switching Dataset

Code-switching, the alternation between two or more languages within communication, poses great challenges for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Existing models and datasets are limited in their ability to effectively handle these challenges. To address this gap and foster progress in code-switching ASR research, we introduce the DOTA-ME-CS: Daily oriented text audio Mandarin-English code-switching dataset, which consists of 18.54 hours of audio data, including 9,300 recordings from 34 participants. To enhance the dataset's diversity, we apply artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as AI timbre synthesis, speed variation, and noise addition, thereby increasing the complexity and scalability of the task. The dataset is carefully curated to ensure both diversity and quality, providing a robust resource for researchers addressing the intricacies of bilingual speech recognition with detailed data analysis. We further demonstrate the dataset's potential in future research. The DOTA-ME-CS dataset, along with accompanying code are shared in the Github.

cs.SD

Destroy Me: Automatic Artifact Generation for Histopathology Images

Deep learning's diagnostic utility in pathology is constrained by model vulnerability to real-world data imperfections. While current strategies favor "perfect data" by filtering low-quality regions, which can lead to the loss of valuable diagnostic context, we propose a paradigm shift: engineering models to thrive in imperfect environments using "Destroy Me", a hybrid framework for realistic artifact synthesis and robust data augmentation. Our approach combines Stable Diffusion, fine-tuned to preserve morphological continuity by realistically integrating artifacts with the underlying tissue architecture, with physics-based procedural modeling to synthesize six common artifact types: tissue folds, precipitates, blur, stitching errors, dust, and pen markers. Artifact fidelity is assessed using Kernel Inception Distance (KID) and color Wasserstein distance metrics. Validating this strategy on lung adenocarcinoma pattern classification with an nnU-Net, we confirm that models trained on "destroyed" patches consistently outperform baselines on independent real-world datasets. Specifically, we observed a 10.5% relative improvement in macro F1-score and a 15% relative increase in the Cohen's Kappa ($κ$) coefficient. Crucially, our results demonstrate that selective, impact-weighted augmentation is vital for balancing practical robustness with the preservation of subtle diagnostic features.

eess.IV

Audit Me If You Can: Query-Efficient Active Fairness Auditing of Black-Box LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit systematic biases across demographic groups. Auditing is proposed as an accountability tool for black-box LLM applications, but suffers from resource-intensive query access. We conceptualise auditing as uncertainty estimation over a target fairness metric and introduce BAFA, the Bounded Active Fairness Auditor for query-efficient auditing of black-box LLMs. BAFA maintains a version space of surrogate models consistent with queried scores and computes uncertainty intervals for fairness metrics (e.g., $Δ$ AUC) via constrained empirical risk minimisation. Active query selection narrows these intervals to reduce estimation error. We evaluate BAFA on two standard fairness dataset case studies: \textsc{CivilComments} and \textsc{Bias-in-Bios}, comparing against stratified sampling, power sampling, and ablations. BAFA achieves target error thresholds with up to 40$\times$ fewer queries than stratified sampling (e.g., 144 vs 5,956 queries at $\varepsilon=0.02$ for \textsc{CivilComments}) for tight thresholds, demonstrates substantially better performance over time, and shows lower variance across runs. These results suggest that active sampling can reduce resources needed for independent fairness auditing with LLMs, supporting continuous model evaluations.

cs.LG

Don' t Box Me In: Dynamic Cultural Adaptation and Cognitive Tracking for Social Understanding

Social interaction increasingly takes place in multicultural settings, where individuals may draw on multiple cultural influences and adapt their communicative behavior across contexts. Despite recent advances in equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with social understanding capabilities, existing approaches often model culture as a static demographic attribute, limiting their ability to accommodate hybrid and dynamically expressed communicative preferences. Therefore, in this paper, we propose \textbf{DyCAC}, a training-free framework that achieves fluid social alignment by incorporating \underline{Dy}namic \underline{C}ultural \underline{A}daptation with continuous \underline{C}ognitive tracking. Rather than inferring a fixed cultural identity, DyCAC models culturally relevant communicative preferences as a time-varying mixture of population-level cultural reference profiles. This reference-based representation is further calibrated using dialogue-style signals observed in the ongoing interaction, enabling the model to capture both composite cultural influences and turn-level shifts in communicative behavior. In parallel, a memory module driven by Theory of Mind (ToM) continuously tracks the cognitive states of the interlocutor. Extensive experiments on interactive social and cultural benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach. The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines, exhibiting enhanced social intelligence and broad adaptability across varied multicultural contexts.

cs.CL

Lie to Me: Finding Bugs in ZK DSL Toolchains with Adversarial Witness Injection

Zero-knowledge domain-specific language (ZK DSL) toolchains compile programs into constraint systems and generate witnesses for cryptographic proofs. Bugs in these toolchains can leave the enforced constraints weaker than the source-program semantics, admitting proofs for invalid executions. Such soundness bugs may remain invisible to valid-execution testing because all valid executions still behave correctly. We present Liezz, a testing framework that generates ZK DSL programs and exposes these bugs through adversarial witness injection. For each generated deterministic program, Liezz executes two public input assignments with different outputs and splices their witnesses, combining the input of one execution with the output of the other. The resulting witness is invalid by construction. A correct toolchain must reject it; acceptance exposes a soundness bug. Controlled divergence and multiple witness-splicing strategies preserve enough consistency to expose missing constraints. Liezz also generates parameterized standard-library calls to reach complex functionality. Liezz supports Circom, Corset, Gnark, and Noir. It finds 13 bugs, including seven with soundness impact. Several are reachable only through generated standard-library calls. Under the same testing budget, a valid-execution baseline does not expose any of the soundness failures revealed by accepted injected witnesses, showing that adversarial witness injection reaches failures missed by valid-execution testing.

cs.CR

"**Important** You should give me full credits!": Exploring Prompt Injection Attacks on LLM-Based Automatic Grading Systems

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly accelerated recent research on LLM-based automatic grading (AG) systems. Benefiting from the strong instruction-following capabilities and broad prior knowledge of LLMs, educators can deploy AG systems across diverse tasks using only natural language rubrics while achieving satisfactory grading performance. Despite these advantages, new security concerns may also arise. In particular, prompt injection (PI) attacks have recently become a major threat to LLM-based applications. In the context of AG, attackers can potentially exploit PI vulnerabilities to manipulate grading systems into assigning artificially high scores regardless of the actual answer quality. Such behavior poses serious risks to the fairness, reliability, and integrity of educational assessment. In this work, we study PI attacks in AG systems, and systematically investigate the effectiveness of such attacks in educational scenarios. We further evaluate the effectiveness of existing defensive strategies against these attacks. Through comprehensive experiments under rubric-based grading settings, we demonstrate that current LLM-based AG systems remain highly vulnerable to PI attacks. We hope that our findings raise awareness of this emerging threat and motivate future research toward secure, robust, and trustworthy LLM-based educational systems.

cs.CR

Repeat-After-Me: Black-Box Adaptive Visual Prompt Injection

Prompt injection is widely recognized as a major security threat to AI agents that interact with untrusted external data, such as websites, documents, and emails. Prior work has shown that, in the text domain, black-box prompt injection can achieve near-perfect attack success rates (ASRs). In the image domain, however, existing visual prompt injection methods are substantially less effective in attacking frontier commercial VLMs for materially harmful behavior. Achieving such outputs is hard because it requires a long and/or format-compliant target string, such as a precise, parseable native tool call with exact function names and arguments. We present Repeat-After-Me, a black-box adaptive visual prompt injection attack that can reveal personally identifiable information or make malicious tool calls. Across both open-weight and commercial frontier VLMs, including Qwen3.6-27B and GPT-5.5, our method achieves ASRs exceeding 80% and 47%, respectively, under a realistic setting in which the benign user prompt is semantically unrelated to the injected task and does not verbally authorize it. In our evaluation, injections optimized on one surrogate retain 43-46% of the original ASR on two commercial victims, and cross-sample transferability retains 64-66% of the original ASR on those two models. We test our attack in a real-world OpenClaw agent: in a default OpenClaw Discord deployment, an untrusted user can use a minimally injected image to overwrite TOOLS.md, enabling future sensitive behaviors like remote code execution and secret exfiltration. We show our new attack vector works in cases where adaptive textual prompt injection fails. We discuss potential defenses.

cs.CR

Speak for Me: Giving LLMs the Situational Awareness to Participate in a Meeting

In online meeting delegation, LLM agents fail to recognize when to speak. With no structured way to track stances, coverage, and floor, they miss the moments where they should contribute. Prompt-only delegates stay silent on 51.4% of the absent participant's talking opportunities on the AMI corpus. We present CAPA (Collaborative Agent Predictive Architecture), an architecture for online meeting delegation. A Perceiver updates the meeting state from each observed turn. A Predictor forecasts how the conversation will continue. A Controller decides whether to speak and which proposition to surface. A Generator phrases the chosen contribution in the participant's style. Two judges score the forecast and the action against the next observed turn. A Recalibrator updates the meeting state from those verdicts for future decisions. To evaluate online delegation, we introduce an episode-level protocol that scores whether, when, and what a delegate contributes around the participant's actual idea units. The protocol's schema-constrained LLM judges align with human annotations at Cohen's kappa = 0.71. On 137 AMI meetings, CAPA reduces the silence rate from 51.4% to 2.5%, doubles credited recovery (26.1 --> 52.2), and keeps hallucination at 0.6%. The failure mode shifts from omission to selection, with each residual near-miss attributable to a specific module of the architecture. Mechanism ablations identify the meeting state as the lever that closes the recognition gap, where raw-context scaling alone does not.

cs.AI

QArray+: A physics-informed GPU-accelerated simulator for quantum dot arrays

Semiconductor quantum-dot arrays are a compelling platform for scalable quantum technologies, yet their practical operation is hindered by the complexity of tuning large-scale devices. Existing automation tools rely on simplified physical models---such as constant-capacitance approximations and equilibrium Hubbard models---which assume instantaneous relaxation to a steady state. These frameworks fail in experimentally critical regimes where measurement rates exceed tunneling dynamics, necessitating more sophisticated non-equilibrium control strategies. To bridge this gap, we introduce QArray+, an extension of the QArray framework that incorporates gate-dependent tunnel coupling and a quantum open-system description of dissipative processes. This approach enables the unified simulation of coherent interdot charge-state hybridization and the non-equilibrium latching dynamics essential for training robust machine-learning models for automated device operation. Implemented in JAX with GPU acceleration, QArray+ scales across GPUs and multi-node systems. For example, a charge stability diagram for a 100X100 grid of gate voltages over 64 dots can be computed in $\sim0.17\,\mathrm{s}$ on multiple GPUs. Since interdot interactions are short-ranged and the corresponding tuning corrections are local, simulations at these scales capture the physics relevant to even larger devices. These capabilities support high-throughput dataset generation for automated device tuning.

cond-mat.mes-hall