AI News Today

arXiv:2607.01934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work introduces AIriskEval-edu-db2, a new dataset designed to train and evaluate auditors based on LLMs for an explainable pedagogical risk assessment in instructional content for grades K-12. The dataset comprises 1,639 explanations from 170 curated ScienceQA questions, covering science, language arts, and social sciences. For each question, the dataset includes an explanation written by a human teacher alongside 11 explanations generated by

arXiv:2607.01960v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we describe NAVER LABS Europe's submission to the instruction-following speech processing short track at IWSLT 2026. We participate again in the constrained setting, developing systems capable of jointly performing ASR, ST, and SQA from English speech into Chinese, Italian, and German. Building on our previous submission, ranked first in last year's short track, we update our multi-stage training pipeline by replacing the speech proj

arXiv:2607.01964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rewriting inputs to improve frozen downstream models has become a common strategy in modern NLP pipelines. Prior work on incremental dialogue discourse parsing (DDP) shows that supervised clarification models can rewrite fragmentary or underspecified utterances, such as resolving ellipsis or references, to improve parsing accuracy. In this work, we revisit this idea under realistic deployment conditions, where no clarification supervision is availa

arXiv:2607.01965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural TTS systems can sound natural across languages, but naturalness does not guarantee the preservation of sound contrasts that distinguish words from their grammatical forms. Standard metrics like MOS do not test for this. We propose a classifier-based framework that audits TTS output against language-specific phonological patterns using human speech as a benchmark. Testing Assamese advanced tongue root (ATR) vowel harmony with Meta's MMS TTS,

arXiv:2607.01972v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often asked to produce JSON conforming to a fixed schema, powering information extraction, tool calling, agentic planning, and knowledge-graph construction. Measuring how closely an output matches a gold reference is essential yet surprisingly hard: exact match is brittle, text similarity ignores structure, and an LLM judge is expensive, opaque, and non-deterministic. We address this with Object Aligner (OA), an ope

arXiv:2607.02007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models now score near ceiling on general benchmarks, but these aggregate measures reveal little about how models behave within single disciplines. Existing art-focused evaluations rely on synthetic questions and rarely report item-level properties. This paper introduces EduArt, an educational-level benchmark for art-historical knowledge and visual reasoning in multimodal LLMs. EduArt comprises 871 human-authored questions from Italia

arXiv:2607.02047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe completion requires models to provide useful assistance without enabling harm, but this behavior is difficult to evaluate with isolated prompts. We introduce OpenSafeIntent, a benchmark of controlled prompt-sets that vary intent while holding the underlying task fixed. Each datapoint contains benign, dual-use, and malicious variants of the same task. This design lets us evaluate whether models calibrate assistance across intent shifts, rather

arXiv:2607.02049v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in emotional-support contexts and crisis-related situations. Nevertheless, their cross-lingual abilities in these circumstances remain underexplored. Existing benchmarks emphasize multilingual performance but rarely examine crisis-related empathy and cultural grounding in low-to-mid-resource languages. We introduce SPLIT, a 500-prompt benchmark designed to evaluate LLM consistency in generating emotio

arXiv:2607.02079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present HaloGuard 1.0, an open-weights implementation of the constitutional-classifier paradigm for input safety. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on English and multilingual prompt-safety benchmarks at roughly one-tenth the model size of current leading open guard models. The safety constitution is the organising structure of the corpus: a natural-language constitution of 46 policies and 2,940 subcategories drives synthetic data generat

arXiv:2607.02214v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Instruction tuning for speech language models (SLMs) is substantially more challenging than for text-based large language models (LLMs), as it requires learning a new modality and a wide range of speech-specific instructions in addition to those supported by text LLMs. Existing SLM training approaches largely replicate the text LLM training paradigm by synthesizing large-scale speech pre-training and instruction-tuning datasets. However, this strat

arXiv:2607.02235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-as-a-Judge has become the dominant evaluation paradigm for many natural language generation tasks, due to shortcomings of conventional metrics and high correlations with human judgment, albeit mostly in English. There are now attempts to extend LLM-as-a-Judge to multilingual settings including low-resource languages. However, LLMs have limited proficiency in low-resource languages, and there is often no adequate human validation in these settin

arXiv:2607.02369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs stage a new form of cultural encounter that is massive, automated, and monolingual. Literary disciplines have always negotiated cultural struggles with comparative reading of literature, narratological and poetic analysis, critical theory, world literature, and translation. These tools have now become indispensable for building culturally literate AI. The essay develops a layered framework toward more nuanced textual models and pluralistic int

arXiv:2607.02381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper describes the participation of HULAT2-UC3M in the Spanish track of MER-TRANS 2026, a shared task on multilingual Easy-to-Read translation. Three fully automatic Spanish runs were submitted. RUN1 and RUN2 used a LangGraph-based multi-agent workflow combining Gemini 2.5 Flash and RigoChat-7B-v2, parallel generation strategies, internal quality signals, Event-Condition-Action routing, controlled editing and traceable decisions. RUN1 used th

arXiv:2607.02383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is increasingly used for automated fact-checking (AFC) and related tasks. By grounding LLM outputs in retrieved evidence, RAG-based systems provide transparent justifications while allowing external information to be updated independently of the underlying model. However, existing approaches often assume retrieved evidence is reliable, although real-world information may be conflicting, outdated, and c

arXiv:2607.02416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Natural Language Processing (NLP) has traditionally been published in its core disciplinary venues like ACL. However, advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a blurring of the disciplinary lines between NLP and general Machine Learning (ML), with authors regularly publishing in venues from both fields. Here, we ask whether the disciplinary center of gravity is shifting. Using NLP research published from 2010 to 2026 and studies of both

arXiv:2607.02459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models are increasingly used to quantify cultural phenomena, but what makes such measurement distinctively cultural? This paper argues that NLP work on culture is a material-discursive practice: the apparatus -- model, data, annotation, evaluation -- participates in constituting the cultural reality it measures, rather than passively recording it. Drawing on Karen Barad's concept of the agential cut -- the contingent boundary between pheno

arXiv:2607.02464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) social simulations are a promising research method, but they are not yet faithful enough to be adopted widely. In this work, we investigate whether the current scaling paradigm in language modeling is likely to close these gaps, or whether simulation fidelity is orthogonal to general capabilities and therefore deserving of more research attention. We use scaling laws to study the relationship between LLMs' compute scale,

arXiv:2607.01661v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent systems are increasingly used for forecasting future events, as deliberation among multiple LLMs is believed to improve reasoning and calibration. Yet existing approaches overlook a critical design choice: what information each agent receives. When all agents are given identical evidence, deliberation collapses into herding rather than genuine belief revision, leaving multi-agent systems little better than a single agent. We identify th

arXiv:2607.01674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In multi-source ECG deployment, models may need to incorporate new data sources when earlier raw ECGs cannot be retained or replayed. Freezing a pretrained backbone and assigning each source an isolated classifier prevents parameter interference, but deployment still requires selecting an expert when source metadata are unavailable. We study this distinction through \ours{}, an incremental expert bank built on frozen 1024-dimensional ECGFounder fea

arXiv:2607.01709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agents are increasingly used to construct workflows and assist humans in completing recurring tasks more efficiently. As these workflows become repeated and domain-specific, agent memory and reusable skills become increasingly important: agents should be able to recall workflow patterns, execution constraints, and user preferences from previous runs. We study this problem in workflow-based image generation and introduce COMFYCLAW, an agentic skill

arXiv:2607.01715v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing robust preference optimization for language-model alignment mainly studies pairwise supervision and places robustness at the dataset, prompt, or preference-pair level. We instead study listwise preference optimization under ranking-label uncertainty: given a prompt and a candidate list, the observed ranking over that list may be ambiguous due to annotator inconsistency, near-ties, lossy rankwise feedback, or reward-model noise. We propose

arXiv:2607.01729v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning models for speech classification are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where malicious triggers cause misclassification at inference time. While sample-specific attacks can bypass many defenses, they often rely on poisoned label attack, making them detectable via manual data defense. In this paper, we propose DRL-CLBA, a novel clean label backdoor attack for speech classification that leverages Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG)

arXiv:2607.01740v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public LLM leaderboards optimise for global average performance and do not capture the specific cognitive demands of financial-services work: a model that leads on MMLU-Pro may underperform on document-grounded compliance reasoning, and a coding leader may handle multi-turn customer interactions poorly. We present a meta-benchmarking framework that organises 452 publicly reported benchmarks into 41 O*NET Generalized Work Activities and aggregates t

arXiv:2607.01754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy exploration is a crucial component for training robust Vision-Language Navigation agents, as it exposes the policy to a broader state distribution. However, such exploration inevitably leads to trajectories that deviate from expert demonstrations, resulting in a semantic mismatch between the executed visual stream and the original language instruction. In this work, we address this challenge by introducing Phi-Nav, a unified on-policy fra

arXiv:2607.01764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Repository-level vulnerability reproduction is a demanding software engineering (SE) task: an agent must inspect a codebase, infer the input grammar that reaches a vulnerable path, construct a proof-of-conceptv(PoC), and verify that the crash disappears on the patched build. Recent LLM agents can often execute these steps when the approach is correct, yet they still fail by choosing the wrong strategy. This paper argues that strategy, rather than t

arXiv:2607.01766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly used to translate natural language into 3D scenes in a procedural way, but existing systems focus on static output. Dynamic 4D scenes from text alone, in which liquids flow, particles emit, rigid bodies cascade, and articulated mechanisms move, remain largely unexplored despite their value as editable content and as physics-grounded training data for video generation and embodied AI. Two challenges set the dynamic case a

arXiv:2607.01767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As agent planning moves from short tool chains toward persistent workflows with thousands or tens of thousands of steps, failures will occur inside large planning graphs rather than in isolated predictions. Replanning the entire graph after every mistake is neither computationally realistic nor desirable: full-graph replay consumes large context budgets, exposes the LLM to many irrelevant symptoms, and can degrade long-context retrieval. This paper

arXiv:2607.01774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models. Unlike standard diffusion-based approaches, DLMs are not explicitly conditioned on a timestep, raising a natural question: do these models internally represent denoising progress, and how is such information used downstream? In this work, we show that DLMs do in fact encode a latent representation related to the diffusion timestep within thei

arXiv:2607.01793v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly perform autonomous actions through external tools, leading to complex and evolving safety risks. However, existing safety testing targets expert-designed safety violations, and the corresponding outcomes are evaluated by hard-coded rules, making them costly to extend as agents evolve. To this end, we present Vera, an end-to-end automated safety testing framework that instantiates software engineering testing principles for n

arXiv:2607.01814v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) diagnosis, particularly through tongue inspection, faces persistent challenges in subjectivity and reproducibility. The application of multimodal artificial intelligence to TCM clinical tasks, such as syndrome differentiation and prescription generation, is significantly hampered by the semantic gap between visual tongue features and textual reasoning, as well as the lack of large-scale, standardized datasets. To

arXiv:2607.01829v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed for aviation business operations, from documentation and training generation to customer facing assistants. General purpose benchmarks do not measure whether a model reasons safely and correctly about aviation specific operational knowledge, and the high stakes, regulated nature of the domain makes that gap consequential. We present Pre-Flight, an open source benchmark of 300 multiple choice qu

arXiv:2607.01846v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Domain agents often face noisy business data, uncertain post-training gains, offline/application mismatch, and adapter-release risk. This paper presents CLAP (Closed-Loop Agent Post-training), a closed-loop method that converts business data into structured SFT samples, decision-preference samples, holdout sets, risk diagnostics, and release-gate records. CLAP combines data validation, target/evidence normalization, reward/KL diagnosis, offline gat

arXiv:2607.01859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety training for large language models (LLMs) is conducted predominantly in English, leaving uncertain how well safety mechanisms generalize to low-resource languages and mixed-language code-switching. We show that this creates an epistemic gap in which models confidently generate harmful responses for inputs that fall outside the distribution of their safety training. To study this phenomenon, we introduce STEER (Safety Targeted Embedding Explo

arXiv:2607.01870v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to locate and segment objects that blend into their surroundings, presenting challenges due to weak edge cues and ill-defined boundaries. Traditional COD models rely on hand-designed architectures and multi-scale feature fusion, which are often guided by intuition rather than systematic search. This paper introduces CamoNAS, a frequency-aware multi-resolution Neural Architecture Search (NAS) framework for COD

arXiv:2607.01874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Skills are becoming a reusable operational layer for LLM agents, encoding SOPs, domain rules, tool workflows, scripts, and validation routines. In realistic skill repositories, overlapping skills make reliable skill-use difficult. Final verifier success is too coarse for both evaluation and training, since an agent may pass through trial and error while selecting distractor skills, skipping required steps, composing workflows incorrectly or omittin

arXiv:2607.01893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by drafting a block of tokens that the target model verifies left-to-right, committing only the longest accepted prefix. Block (DLM-style) drafters predict the whole block in parallel, which is fast but trained with a full-block cross-entropy that supervises every position against the gold continuation -- even though inference discards every token after the first rejection. Recent acceptanc

arXiv:2607.01903v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-integrated applications blend natural language prompts with program code, and much of their runtime behavior originates in the prompt layer rather than in the code itself. Existing complexity metrics, however, operate solely at the code level and therefore overlook this behavioral logic entirely. We present HECATE, the first tool designed to assess complexity in both the prompt and code layers of such applications. Central to HECATE is Prompt-a

arXiv:2603.06254v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generalizing across unknown targets is critical for open-world perception, yet existing 3D Multi-Object Tracking (3D MOT) pipelines remain limited by closed-set assumptions and ``semantic-blind'' heuristics. To address this, we propose Next-step Open-Vocabulary Autoregression (NOVA), an autoregressive association formulation that shifts the data association stage from fragmented distance-based matching toward trajectory-conditioned spatio-seman

arXiv:2603.06275v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion transformer (DiT) architectures show great potential for real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR). However, their computationally expensive iterative sampling necessitates one-step distillation. Existing one-step distillation methods struggle with Real-ISR on DiT. They suffer from fundamental trajectory mismatch and generate severe grid-like periodic artifacts. To tackle these challenges, we propose StrSR, a novel one-step adversa

arXiv:2603.06852v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse-view computed tomography (CT) is critical for reducing radiation exposure to patients. Recent advances in radiative 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled fast and accurate sparse-view CT reconstruction. Despite these algorithmic advancements, practical reconstruction fidelity remains fundamentally bounded by the quality of the captured data, raising the crucial yet underexplored problem of X-ray active view selection. Existing active