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2026-11-04

arXiv cs.CV13:00

Co-Occurrence Priors Override Visual Spatial Evidence: Understanding False Alarms in Vision-Language Models for Construction Struck-By Hazard Detection

arXiv:2611.04112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly support construction hazard monitoring, yet their frequent false alarms remain poorly understood. This study investigates whether false struck-by hazard warnings arise from failures in object recognition, spatial relation encoding, or hazard decisions dominated by learned co-occurrence priors. We evaluated Qwen2.5-VL-7B and InternVL3.5-8B using 355 counterfactual worker-excavator scene pairs with controlled spatial proximity and worker-removal variants, combining behavioral analysis, internal representation probing, causal interventions, and decision correction. Both models recognized the entities and encoded their spatial relations (out-of-fold AUROC: 0.82 and 0.91), assigning higher hazard scores to near than far scenes in 79% and 73% of pairs. Nevertheless, 74% and 100% of far scenes were falsely classified as hazardous. Removing the worker reduced Qwen's hazard rate to 11%, while worker presence exerted 2.4- and 3.2-times greater influence on hazard scores than spatial proximity in the respective models. Attention-head interventions, neuron-level interventions, and activation steering failed to eliminate this co-occurrence bias. However, conditioning hazard decisions on the model's own spatial-relation representation improved Qwen's specificity from 0.36 to 0.58 at matched sensitivity, outperforming threshold recalibration. These findings reveal that VLM struck-by false alarms stem primarily from decision-making failures rather than deficiencies in object recognition or spatial encoding, suggesting that future efforts should prioritize conditioning hazard decisions on encoded spatial evidence rather than further improving visual recognition alone.

arXiv cs.CL13:00

Say Less, Mean Better: Training-Free Verbosity Control for Language Models

arXiv:2611.04107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often generate responses longer than necessary, increasing inference latency and computational cost. While prompting can encourage conciseness, controlling output length without compromising response completeness remains challenging. Aggressive early stopping can reduce generation costs but risks terminating responses prematurely. We introduce MinimalLM, a training-free framework for reliable verbosity control that combines uncertainty-aware, length-dependent stop-token adjustment with structural completeness guardrails. MinimalLM separates the decision of when to stop from whether stopping is structurally appropriate, coordinating response-level instructions, decoding-time intervention, and completion checks without modifying model parameters or requiring auxiliary models. We evaluate MinimalLM across three open-source LLMs and 330 questions, producing 5,940 responses across baseline and ablation configurations. MinimalLM reduces generated tokens by 47.6%, accelerates individual responses by 19-68%, and eliminates structurally truncated outputs in the primary evaluation. Despite substantial token savings, it achieves an average quality score of 8.04/10, compared with 8.42/10 for unmodified models and 6.46/10 for length-matched truncation. Evaluations across diverse subject domains (such as healthcare, programming, law, and science) demonstrate robust efficiency gains, while ablations establish the complementary roles of decoding control and completeness constraints. Our findings highlight that efficient generation requires more than producing fewer tokens: it requires controlling when generation ends while preserving response integrity. MinimalLM offers a lightweight, training-free approach toward this goal.

arXiv cs.CV13:00

ScienceVision: Can AI Observe and Reason Like a Scientist?

arXiv:2611.04087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific discovery builds on accurate observations interpreted through domain knowledge and reasoning. For scientific 3D data, this requires understanding structures and spatial relationships, from protein contacts to anatomical organization. Existing multimodal benchmarks largely evaluate text and 2D images, while scientific 3D evaluations vary in representations and protocols across disciplines, limiting cross-disciplinary comparison. To assess these foundational capabilities, we introduce ScienceVision, a cross-domain benchmark for scientific 3D understanding and reasoning through expert-level visual question answering (VQA). We construct 250 questions, with 50 each from Biology, Chemistry, Medical Imaging, Mechanical CAD, and Architecture, through a pipeline combining synthetic question generation with domain-expert review and annotation. Each task pairs a native 3D artifact with a scientific question, a specified response format, and a task-specific reference answer, requiring domain knowledge to be applied to geometric or topological evidence. We evaluate 12 models on the same questions in three settings: visual question answering with native 3D artifacts accessed through an agent harness's file and code-execution tools; the same workflow augmented with expert-inspired viewer inspection and measurement tools exposed through the Model Context Protocol (MCP); and visual question answering from prescribed rendered 2D images using an agent harness. All settings use the same task-specific deterministic final-answer scoring. The inspection environment supports view changes, target isolation, and slice inspection. In this main comparison, the best mean answer score is 0.53 out of 1. Mean scores in the native-artifact workflow without additional MCP tools exceed those in the rendered-image workflow for every model, by 17.2 percentage points on average.

arXiv cs.LG13:00

Stress-Testing the Robustness of LLM-Based Causal Inference

arXiv:2611.03656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Why do some of the world's most powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems still struggle to reason about cause and effect? Causal discovery, the ability to discern the underlying drivers of a system, is fundamental to scientific inquiry and has traditionally relied on structured data and statistical methods. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been explored as an alternative paradigm for causal inference, leveraging their broad knowledge and reasoning capabilities. Yet, despite their linguistic fluency, LLMs often rely on surface-level pattern recognition rather than genuine causal logic. While it is known that LLMs stumble in this domain, we lack a precise map of where, why, and how significantly these failures occur. In this paper, we propose a systematic stress-test framework across six critical dimensions: model scale, causal graph complexity, prompting strategy, metadata quality, data quality, and sensitivity to uncertainty. Our findings reveal a significant "optimism bias" in LLMs; models consistently overestimate causal links, leading to low precision across the board. Furthermore, we demonstrate that traditional evaluation metrics can be deceptive: while reasoning-heavy models lead in performance, the highest scores often occur when uncertainty in inference is overlooked. Once uncertainty is integrated into the evaluation, performance drops, providing a more honest reflection of causal reliability. We also find that, while scaling model size improves outcomes, these gains are fragile; performance degrades sharply as the quality of metadata decreases. This work serves as a practical guide to the blind spots of LLMs, offering a clear-eyed assessment of when these tools can be integrated into a causal discovery pipeline and when they are likely to lead researchers astray.

2026-10-30

arXiv cs.AI12:00

FilingLoop: Evaluating and Evolving LLM Agents for Corporate Disclosure Review and Revision

arXiv:2610.37905v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public disclosure repositories such as SEC EDGAR support informed investment through web access to corporate filings. Supporting their review with language model agents requires discovering unstated deficiencies across related documents, acquiring missing company facts, and verifying that requested revisions satisfy evidence-backed requirements. Existing financial question-answering evaluations provide limited evidence of these interactive capabilities. We introduce \textbf{FilingLoop}, an interactive benchmark and a self-evolving agent framework for corporate disclosure review and revision. Grounded in historical U.S.\ Securities and Exchange Commission correspondence, FilingLoop reconstructs 380 predominantly IPO review tasks from 96 compan

2026-11-04

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