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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Irresponsible AI: big tech's influence on AI research and associated impacts

arXiv:2512.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The accelerated development, deployment and adoption of artificial intelligence systems has been fuelled by the increasing presence of big tech in the AI field. This trend has been accompanied by growing ethical concerns and intensified societal and environmental impacts. This position paper argues that irresponsible AI development is strongly driven by big tech's influence and involvement in the field. First, we examine the growing and disproportionate influence of big tech in AI research and argue that its drive for scaling and general-purpose systems is fundamentally at odds with the responsible, ethical, and sustainable development of AI. Second, we review key current environmental and societal negative impacts of AI and trace their connections to big tech's influence. Third, we discuss the underlying economic forces driving big tech's actions. Finally, as a call to action, we invite AI researchers to counter big tech's influence in irresponsible AI development through strategies that build on the responsibility of implicated actors and collective action.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

R2D-RL: A RoboCup 2D Soccer Environment for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot soccer is a challenging testbed for multi-agent reinforcement learning because it combines partial observability, cooperative and adversarial interaction, sparse rewards, and long-horizon tactical behavior. RoboCup 2D Soccer Simulation (RCSS2D) provides a mature robot-soccer platform, but its competition-oriented server-client architecture is difficult to use directly with modern Python-based MARL workflows. We introduce R2D-RL, a reinforcement learning environment that connects RCSS2D and HELIOS-based player clients to a Python MARL interface through shared-memory communication and cycle-level synchronization. R2D-RL supports full-field and scenario-based training with configurable opponents, Base discrete and Hybrid parameterized action spaces, action masks, expected possession value (EPV)-based reward shaping, and parallel execution. We provide front-goal scenarios and an 11-vs-11 full-field benchmark, together with baseline results.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Modeling Complex Behaviors: Multi-Personality Composition and Dynamic Switching in Vision-Language Models

With the widespread deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in social interaction, understanding and controlling their behavior under complex personality conditions is essential. This paper introduces explicit personality conditioning and establishes a systematic evaluation framework encompassing single-personality induction, multi-personality induction, and personality switching. Experiments show that personality induction improves image captioning performance but can impair performance on tasks requiring precise reasoning, such as visual question answering (VQA). Balancing and residual effects are observed during multi-trait composition and dynamic switching, indicating that model behavior is co-modulated by both previous and current personality constraints. Existing prompt-based personality induction methods show limited transferability to multimodal settings. Our work reveals the dynamic and complex nature of personality modeling in MLLMs and underscores the need for robust, tailored methods for personality induction and evaluation. The code will be released when the paper is accepted.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Unsupervised Causal Abstractions Discovery

arXiv:2606.19594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal abstractions formalize when a high-level structural causal model (SCM) captures the interventional behavior of a lower-level SCM. Existing applications of this notion largely follow a hypothesis-testing paradigm: an expert proposes a candidate high-level model and then evaluates if the low-level system implements it. We study the complementary problem of learning a high-level model directly from low-level measurements. Our contributions leverage hypotheses from low-rank causal discovery, and can be summarized as follows: (1) we show that observations generated by a low-rank graph induce latents that form a causal abstraction, (2) we provide identifiability results about these latents, and (3) we propose a practical objective to learn this high-level SCM.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Probing picometre-scale interlayer deformations via hyperbolic polaritons

作者:

The resilience of van der Waals (vdW) materials to large strain fields makes them an ideal platform for tuning electronic, optical and magnetic properties1–4. Although in-plane strain is readily mapped, non-invasive and quantitative characterization of out-of-plane strain remains a formidable challenge, particularly for picometre-scale deformations buried at interfaces. Here we demonstrate a polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons (oHPs) mode to detect interlayer deformations in prototypical vdW polar insulator–hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). This method uses the softening mechanism of out-of-plane transverse optical (oTO) phonons induced by interlayer strain, enabling highly sensitive detection of picometre-scale deformations. Although these oTO phonon modes are typically spectroscopically ‘dark’, their strain response is activated through the oHPs, achieving an atomic displacement sensitivity of about 10 pm (about 8 × 10−7 times the probing wavelength), enabling ultradeep-subwavelength mechanical interlayer deformation detection. This is experimentally validated in both planar hBN and at the buried interface of quantum dot–hBN nanotube heterostructures. This polariton-based picometrology bridges nanomechanics and photonics, providing a non-destructive lens to visualize hidden stress landscapes with atomic precision. A new polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons mode is described and experimentally validated to allow the examination of picometre-scale interlayer deformations, providing a bridge between nanomechanics and photonics.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The existence of invariant sublinear expectations for $G$-SDEs

arXiv:2606.15203v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study the existence of invariant sublinear expectations of Markovian semigroups on sublinear expectation spaces. To achieve this, we establish a complete metric space of sublinear expectations, on which we extend Harris' method to the nonlinear setting on the convergence of sublinear semigroups. We then explore two cases of $G-$diffusions by studying the Lyapunov function and the local Doeblin condition. One is the $G-$Brownian motion on the unit circle which is the case studied in Feng and Zhao [Zhaonon], but with the new method. Another is the multidimensional $G-$SDEs on the whole space $\mathbb{R}^d$. We establish, for the first time in the literature, the existence of the invariant sublinear expectation for $G-$SDEs under the non-degenerate and weakly dissipative assumption. For this, we prove that for a class of $G-$SDEs, the $G-$expectation can be represented as the supremum of the semigroup of a family of SDEs, of which the regularity is obtained by considering the Bismut-Elworthy-Li formula and the Denis-Hu-Peng representation for the distribution of $G-$Brownian motions.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Plug-and-Play image restoration with Stochastic deNOising REgularization

Plug-and-Play (PnP) algorithms are a class of iterative algorithms that address image inverse problems by combining a physical model and a deep neural network for regularization. Even if they produce impressive image restoration results, these algorithms rely on a non-standard use of a denoiser on images that are less and less noisy along the iterations, which contrasts with recent algorithms based on Diffusion Models (DM), where the denoiser is applied only on re-noised images. We propose a new PnP framework, called Stochastic deNOising REgularization (SNORE), which applies the denoiser only on images with noise of the adequate level. It is based on an explicit stochastic regularization, which leads to a stochastic gradient descent algorithm to solve ill-posed inverse problems. A convergence analysis of this algorithm and its annealing extension is provided. Experimentally, we prove that SNORE is competitive with respect to state-of-the-art methods on deblurring and inpainting tasks, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

RepSelect: Robust LLM Unlearning via Representation Selectivity

Making large language models (LLMs) deeply forget specific knowledge and values without sacrificing general capabilities remains a central challenge in unlearning. However, current methods are easily reversed by fine-tuning or few-shot prompting, suggesting their forgetting is only shallow. We identify the root cause. Existing methods target representations shared with both the retain set and the subspace recovered by a fine-tuning attacker, making unlearning both disruptive to general capabilities and easy to reverse. We propose RepSelect (Representation Selectivity), isolates forget-set-specific representations by collapsing top principal components of weight gradients before each update, leaving general capabilities intact while limiting what fine-tuning can recover. We evaluate across two forget categories, biohazardous knowledge and abusive tendencies, and four model families spanning dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures (Llama 3, Qwen 3.5, Gemma 4 E4B, DeepSeek V2 Lite). Compared to five popular baselines (GradDiff, NPO, SimNPO, RMU, UNDIAL), RepSelect achieves a 4-50x larger reduction in post-relearning answer accuracy than the strongest baseline, and is near-perfectly robust to few-shot prompting attacks. Targeting selective representations is thus an important step towards deep and robust LLM forgetting.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

From Architecture to Output: Structural Origins of Hallucination in Large Language Models and the Amplifying Role of Data

arXiv:2606.07537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models hallucinate–producing fluent, confident, factually wrong outputs–with a consistency that persists across generations and scales. Existing taxonomies classify hallucination by output type, distinguishing intrinsic from extrinsic failures and faithfulness from factuality divergence. These frameworks are descriptively rigorous but do not identify which internal mechanism produced a given instance. This paper analyses hallucination as a structural consequence of three architectural decisions that together form a compound failure system. Self-attention's co-occurrence learning substitutes statistical proximity for semantic meaning and produces entity confusion, fact misattribution, and semantic drift. The maximum likelihood estimation training objective optimises next-token probability without factual constraint, rewarding statistically plausible outputs regardless of their truth value. Autoregressive decoding's permanent left-to-right commitment under exposure bias ensures that a single wrong token cascades forward through the entire output sequence without revision. Dataset pathologies–long-tail deficiencies, training bias, and synthetic pollution–amplify these vulnerabilities but do not independently cause them. We make three contributions. First, we map each mechanism to a specific output category in the Alansari and Luqman taxonomy, locating intrinsic hallucination in self-attention, extrinsic hallucination in MLE, and logical inconsistency in autoregressive decoding. Second, we show that each commonly cited dataset pathology exploits one of these mechanisms rather than originating hallucination independently. Third, we identify the diagnostic limitation of output-type-only classification and contrast it with inference-layer mitigation approaches.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Decision-Weighted Flow Matching for Contextual Stochastic Optimization

arXiv:2606.16790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conditional generative models are increasingly used as scenario generators for stochastic optimization, but standard training objectives emphasize uniform distributional fit rather than the downstream decisions induced by generated scenarios. This creates an objective mismatch: errors in statistically common regions may have little effect on decision regret, whereas errors in decision-sensitive regions can substantially change the optimal action. We propose Decision-Weighted Flow Matching (DW-FM), a regret-aligned training framework that preserves the simplicity of standard flow matching while reweighting its velocity-regression objective using decision-sensitive endpoint information. Theoretically, we connect downstream regret to pathwise velocity mismatch through a loss-induced decision discrepancy and an adjoint transport argument, yielding an ideal regret-aligned surrogate and practical endpoint-weighted objectives with regret guarantees. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of DW-FM on three CVaR-based contextual stochastic optimization benchmarks spanning synthetic portfolio, semi-real financial, and traffic-CVaR tasks, where DW-FM improves downstream regret over standard baselines.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Bridging the Usability Gap: Lessons from Interpreting Studies for Machine Interpreting Design

Machine interpreting (MI), the live, real-time branch of speech translation, has achieved remarkable progress on standard benchmarks, with some systems approaching human parity on textual fidelity. Yet the user experience remains far inferior to interpreter-mediated communication, revealing what we term the accuracy illusion: systems that appear accurate on paper but fail in practice to support smooth, goal-oriented interaction. This paper defines MI as a distinct subfield of speech translation, with its own characteristics and the need for evaluation methods grounded in communicative effectiveness rather than isolated fidelity metrics. Drawing on insights from interpreting studies, we identify critical dimensions of professional interpreting practice that are overlooked by current systems, and consolidate them into three interdependent design priorities for future MI: agency (context-sensitive initiative and repair), grounding (multimodal and discourse-level situational awareness), and experience (adaptive improvement through real interaction). Together, these priorities chart a path toward closing the usability gap and enabling systems that can sustain authentic multilingual communication in real time.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Counterfactual Explanations for Deep Two-Sample Testing

arXiv:2606.04009v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Two-sample testing is a fundamental tool for detecting distributional differences across scientific domains, but classical tests (including kernel-based tests) can be ineffective on high-dimensional structured data such as images. Recent deep two-sample tests improve sensitivity in these settings by learning informative representations, yet they provide limited insight into which data features drive rejection of the null hypothesis $H_0$. To address this issue, we propose a counterfactual explanation framework for deep two-sample testing that generates sample-level edits moving observations from a source group toward a target group while explicitly reducing the discrepancy measured by the test. Our method combines a diffusion autoencoder with a pretrained deep two-sample test model and optimizes a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) objective in the test model's representation space to produce plausible counterfactuals. We quantify distribution-level effects through changes in the test statistic and the resulting two-sample p-values. We evaluate the method on synthetic 2D shape datasets and two MRI cohorts. Across both settings, the counterfactual transformations consistently increase p-values relative to the original samples, indicating that the edited source set becomes statistically closer to the target distribution under the test. We measure minimality using LPIPS to ensure the counterfactuals remain close to the original samples. The resulting edits provide interpretable evidence of the features associated with the detected group differences. On MRI, the localized changes are consistent with known anatomical differences between cohorts.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Unlocking Latent Dimensions: Exploring Representations of Large-Scale X-ray Scattering Data using Variational Autoencoders

arXiv:2606.14999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific user facilities generate X-ray scattering data faster than traditional workflows can process them. We address this challenge across two settings, offline dataset exploration and live on-the-fly analysis. We train a domain-specific attention-based Convolutional Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE) on 1.5 million X-ray scattering images to learn low-dimensional representations capturing structural variation across diverse experimental conditions. The learned latent space reveals well-organized clusters and smooth trajectories reflecting experimental progression. It further supports controlled synthetic scattering image generation across diverse structural states. When deployed without retraining, the model organizes time-resolved film formation experiments at two synchrotron facilities into interpretable latent structures. Benchmarking against DINOv3 (ViT-7B), a general-purpose vision foundation model, demonstrates that domain-specific training yields more interpretable latent organization for scattering data. Both workflows are integrated within Latent Space Explorer, a component of the MLExchange platform, supporting interactive structural exploration across archived datasets and live experiments.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

StereoGeo: an end-to-end stereo camera calibration method

In this work, we propose StereoGeo, an end-to-end network-based approach for stereo camera calibration. Our method estimates the focal lengths and gravity directions of the left and right cameras, as well as the relative extrinsic transformation relating them. Existing methods often rely on calibration patterns in structured environments or address only a single camera configuration, being limited to either intrinsic or extrinsic estimation, and depending on a multi-view setups. StereoGeo extends the GeoCalib algorithm, integrating deep neural network feature extraction with a differentiable optimizer. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that StereoGeo achieves competitive performance for intrinsic calibration and provides accurate stereo extrinsic estimation, outperforming existing methods that are limited to monocular settings. The dataset used in this work is partially publicly available at https://github.com/meddourimane/StereoGeo-dataset.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Spectator-transition crosstalk in a spin-3/2 silicon vacancy qudit in silicon carbide revealed by broadband Ramsey interferometry

arXiv:2601.15559v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Color center spins in 4H-SiC offer a rare combination of wafer-scale materials maturity with long spin coherence and chip-level photonics, making them promising building blocks for scalable quantum technologies. In particular, the silicon vacancy hosts an S=3/2 ground state, a native qudit that enables compact encodings and subspace-selective control, but also introduces spectator transitions: short, detuned pulses can coherently drive non-addressed level pairs and create crosstalk. Here we use broadband Ramsey interferometry to reveal and quantify such spectator-transition crosstalk. Experimentally, the Ramsey Fourier spectra display multiple lines beyond the addressed single-quantum transition. Analytically, we map each line to a pairwise energy difference between qudit levels of the rotating-frame Hamiltonian and assign its weight via compact amplitudes set by the prepared state and the microwave pulse parameters, predicting a deterministic six-branch structure. Numerical time-domain propagation with the experimental sampling reproduces the detuning map, and the measured peak positions coincide with the analytic branch lines without frequency fitting. Together these results provide a practical, spectator-aware framework for multilevel control in the silicon vacancy qudit. The approach offers clear guidance to suppress crosstalk or, conversely, to exploit spectator lines, for example as additional constraints for in situ pulse calibration and for phase-sensitive quantum state and process estimation.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Comprehensive Survey of Medical Image Segmentation: Challenges, Benchmarks, and Beyond

Medical image segmentation plays a critical role in clinical diagnostics, treatment planning, disease monitoring, and neurological disorder identification. This article presents a comprehensive review of its systematic development, covering widely used public datasets, representative methods built on the U-Net, Transformer, and SAM architectures, and key evaluation metrics with their differences, followed by an analysis of major challenges from multiple perspectives. Unlike surveys that focus on a single model family or a specific clinical application, this review organizes U-Net-, Transformer-, and SAM-based methods within a unified analytical framework, with a particular focus on their effectiveness in improving segmentation accuracy and efficiency. This work aims to guide future research and support clinical translation of medical image segmentation, with all related resources publicly available in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/andrew-pengyu/Awsome_MedSeg/tree/main.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Privacy-Preserving Text Sanitization for Distributed Agents Collaboration via Disentangled Representations

When distributed agents exchange text across organizational boundaries, privacy leakage arises not only from explicit identifiers but also from distributional signatures such as formatting conventions, vocabulary choices, and syntactic patterns. We propose DiSan(Disentangled Sanitization), a privacy-preserving sanitization framework and a built-in component of Intern-Shannon for multi-agent collaboration. DiSan uses a two-stream encoder to factorize text into a source-invariant role subspace that preserves task semantics and a source-identifying style subspace that remains local. Federated proto-type alignment and adversarial regularization enable joint training without centralizing raw text. Experiments show that identifier-level masking is insufficient: masking 19.2% of tokens reduces TF-IDF stylometric attribution by only 18.6%. By contrast, DiSan reduces answer-level PII exposure by 20 times while maintaining 83% answer faithfulness on a distributed multi-agent RAG benchmark, and lowers Enron stylometric attribution by 73.2% under TF-IDF and 70.6% under a neural probe.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DN-Hypo-Pipeline: An AI-Driven Workflow for Hypothesis Generation via Large Language Models and Scientific Explanations

arXiv:2606.08532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A scientific hypothesis is the first step in research and undergoes experimental validation, yet it also reflects a deep understanding of and reasoning about scientific phenomena. We introduce DN-Hypo-Pipeline, an AI-powered workflow based on large language models, designed to support structured scientific thinking and hypothesis generation by leveraging scientific explanations as prior knowledge. This pipeline assists researchers in deriving novel hypotheses from existing literature. Given the explanandum (i.e., the conclusion) of a research paper, it identifies underlying laws, theories, and principles, and reconstructs a new, yet-to-be-verified explanation for the observed phenomenon. We evaluated DN-Hypo-Pipeline in the field of data science modeling using three highly cited papers. Statistical inference, supported by both LLM-as-judge assessment and human expert evaluation, demonstrates that our pipeline is more effective than direct generation methods. Additionally, we validated the two highest-scoring generated hypotheses by developing corresponding novel algorithms, which outperformed the baseline models presented in the original papers. Beyond application in data science, DN-Hypo-Pipeline provides a theoretical framework that not only encompasses theory-guided data science modeling methods but also reveals a more fundamental structure of the modeling process. Moreover, this approach is essentially a generalization of theory-guided modeling, offering potential for extension to other domains and across a broader range of scientific disciplines.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantile of Means: A Bonus-Free Ensemble Method for Minimax Optimal Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimal Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms typically rely on carefully constructed count-based uncertainty estimates to drive exploration. Although theoretically sound, such estimates are hard to compute in practical settings and therefore offer limited insight for designing exploration heuristics. Meanwhile, ensembling has emerged as a practical approach, but remains without theoretical justification. Building on a recent ensemble-based method for Multi-Armed Bandits, we propose a quantile-based ensemble method for finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our simple count-free approach achieves optimal variance-dependent regret bounds, providing theoretical grounding for ensemble-based exploration in RL.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Mapping Geopolitical Bias in 11 Large Language Models: A Bilingual, Dual-Framing Analysis of U.S.-China Tensions

Large language models are how hundreds of millions of people now encounter contested political questions, raising a subtle measurement problem: a model that simply agrees with whatever it is told can masquerade as biased, contaminating any claim that models hold political opinions. We address this by importing balanced keying from survey psychometrics, posing each proposition and its swapped reverse and signing the response so acquiescence cancels and genuine conviction accumulates. The result is a reproducible, quantitative instrument that maps geopolitical stance across 11 models and 2 languages (19,712 responses). Developer origin, query language and issue domain emerge as three near-equal, additive factors; every model, including those built in the United States, leans more Pro-China in Mandarin; and two models with identical agreement bias are told apart, one neutral, one biased. We release it as an open, interactive tool that extends to any contested-opinion domain.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MLLMs Get It Right, Then Get It Wrong: Tracing and Correcting Late-Layer Textual Bias

When vision contradicts text, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) consistently favor text, even when images provide clear evidence otherwise. This bias poses risks for applications requiring visual grounding, yet its cause remains unclear. In this paper, we uncover a surprising finding: models often get it right initially, forming correct vision-based predictions in their intermediate layers, before changing their minds and favoring text in the final output. We call this "late-layer textual override". The visual information is encoded, it simply does not survive to the output. More intriguingly, we find that how predictions change reveals whether they're correct: 85% of failures shift toward text, while 89% of successes shift toward vision. This directional signature enables a simple but powerful intervention: when we detect a confident visual prediction being suppressed, we restore it. We propose CALRD (Conflict-Aware Layer Reference Decoding), a training-free method that recovers overridden predictions at inference time. Experiments across five MLLMs of varying architectures demonstrate up to 9.4% absolute improvements on conflict benchmarks while largely preserving standard performance, without training or external knowledge. It recovers what the model already knew but failed to preserve.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Real-Time Execution with Autoregressive Policies

arXiv:2606.13355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time execution, enabled by asynchronous inference that ensures both smooth action trajectories and fast reactivity, is critical for realistic deployments of large-scale Vision-Language-Action models. However, recent work on real-time execution primarily focuses on variants of diffusion policies, even though it is more critical for autoregressive policies given their slower rollout speed in synchronous inference. In contrast, we demonstrate that autoregressive policies can achieve real-time execution by adjusting the tokenization horizon and applying constrained decoding, thereby guaranteeing strict latency bounds that enable multi-trajectory decoding to maximize performance. Across simulated and real-world environments, we find that the autoregressive policy consistently outperforms its equivalent-level flow-matching policy counterpart while achieving significantly improved task completion speeds from synchronous inference. Coupled with the inherent advantages of autoregressive policies, such as faster convergence and better generalizability in instruction-following, these results confirm that autoregressive policies can remain a competitive policy type supporting real-time execution.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Design and Scheduling of an AI-based Queueing System

arXiv:2406.06855v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: To leverage prediction models to make optimal scheduling decisions in service systems, we must understand how predictive errors impact congestion due to externalities on the delay of other jobs. Motivated by applications where prediction models interact with human servers (e.g., content moderation), we consider a large queueing system comprising of many single server queues where the class of a job is estimated using a prediction model. By characterizing the impact of mispredictions on congestion cost in heavy traffic, we design an index-based policy that incorporates the predicted class information in a near-optimal manner. Our theoretical results guide the design of predictive models by providing a simple model selection procedure with downstream queueing performance as a central concern, and offer novel insights on how to design queueing systems with AI-based triage. We illustrate our framework on a content moderation task based on real online comments, where we construct toxicity classifiers by finetuning large language models.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Seeing Before Colliding: Anticipatory Safe RL with Frozen Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The cost signal that constrained-RL algorithms optimize against is almost always reactive: the simulator emits a non-zero cost only after a collision has begun, and the Lagrange multiplier of PPO-Lagrangian grows only after the episode budget has been exceeded. At race speeds, where collisions are instantaneous and irreversible, any safety mechanism that waits for cost to accumulate is structurally too late. We present VLM-Safe-RL, a framework that integrates a frozen vision-language model into the CMDP Lagrangian update as an anticipatory cost term. The framework comprises four contributions: (i) Decoupled Dual-Path CLIP, independent reward/cost paths that respect the CMDP's factorization; (ii) VLM-Lagrange, an augmented multiplier update that incorporates a per-step VLM cost as an anticipatory term; (iii) Confidence Gating, a Bayes-optimal weight derived from a logistic noise model on the CLIP margin; and (iv) VLMPPOLag, the composed algorithm. On Safety-Gymnasium FormulaOne L2, our principal evaluation ($n{=}5$ seeds, $10^{6}$ steps, budget $d_{lim}{=}25$) VLMPPOLag$+$Conf is the only configuration in our default budget comparison that simultaneously retains substantive return ($J_r{\approx}40$) and holds cost within budget on a majority of seeds; the five constraint-aware baselines (PPOLag, CPO, CPPOPID, CPO-CLG, PPOLag-RND) each fail at least one requirement. The mechanism generalizes to held-out MetaDrive Medium (catastrophe rate $41\%{\to}26\%$, 95\% bootstrap CI $[-26,-5]$\,pp) and shows directionally consistent transfer to Bullet Safety-Gym; we report honestly where it does not (MetaDrive Easy/Hard, Qwen2-VL backbone) and trace the Hard failure to a Lagrangian-regulation pathology rather than the VLM signal itself. To our knowledge, this is the first work to use frozen VLM signals as an anticipatory cost term inside the CMDP Lagrangian update.