When the Database Fails: Prompting LLM Dialogue Agents for Safe Recovery in Task-Oriented Dialogue

Large language models used in task-oriented dialogue often produce fluent but unsafe responses when backend database calls fail, return empty results, or surface mismatched information, inventing venues, confirmations, or booking details not grounded in the database. We study a lightweight prompting-based recovery approach that improves robustness without retraining or additional model calls. We compare three response strategies, including a guided recovery prompt conditioned on structured database status, across six open-weight model families (DeepSeek-R1, Gemma-2, Llama-3, Mistral, Phi-3, and Qwen-2.5) and four database conditions: empty result, wrong-domain retrieval, API error, and clean retrieval. Using fault-injected benchmarks built on two structurally different datasets, MultiWOZ 2.2 (5 domains) and SGD (20 domains), we find that naive agents hallucinate on 30.5% of failure turns on MultiWOZ and 20.9% on SGD. Our Guided-Retry strategy reduces hallucination by 50% on MultiWOZ (30.5 to 15.3%) and by 42% on SGD (20.9 to 12.2%) without retraining. However, residual hallucination remains substantial (6-37% across models), with wrong-domain failures the hardest case. Results are consistent across both datasets and all six model families, and human annotation shows substantial agreement while supporting the validity of the automatic commitment-safety metric.

From Full Boards to Tiny Defects: Scale-Aware Tile Inference with Topology-Aware Merging for High-Resolution PCB Defect Detection

High-resolution printed circuit board (PCB) inspection suffers from resolution collapse when full-board images are resized to standard detector inputs: micro-scale defects shrink to a few pixels and are missed. Tile-based inference preserves local detail but introduces boundary artefacts at tile edges, causing split detections and false negatives. We present a systematic comparison of five inference strategies evaluated on two high-resolution PCB defect datasets, PCB-Defect (230 images, 1704 annotations) and HRIPCB (693 images, 2 953 annotations), spanning six defect classes. We show that training-inference scale consistency is critical: a detector trained on full images collapses to mAP@50 = 0.01 under tile inference, while the same architecture trained on 640*640 tile crops achieves 0.72 and 0.94 on the two datasets respectively. We further exploited Topology-Aware Tile Merging (TA-TM), a training-free post-processing method that builds a tile-adjacency graph and adjusts boundary-sensitive detection scores using neighbour-tile agreement before global NMS. Across both datasets, adding 128 px tile overlap raises boundary-zone recall from ~26-63% to ~70-100%, TA-TM achieves the best mAP@50 on both benchmarks, and tile inference recovers 46-100% of small defects missed entirely by full-image methods. Results are consistent across datasets, confirming the generalizability of the proposed strategy. TA-TM requires no retraining and is architecture-agnostic, making it directly applicable to existing PCB inspection pipelines.

Anomaly Generation using Generative Adversarial Networks in Host Based Intrusion Detection

Generative adversarial networks have been able to generate striking results in various domains. This generation capability can be general while the networks gain deep understanding regarding the data distribution. In many domains, this data distribution consists of anomalies and normal data, with the anomalies commonly occurring relatively less, creating datasets that are imbalanced. The capabilities that generative adversarial networks offer can be leveraged to examine these anomalies and help alleviate the challenge that imbalanced datasets propose via creating synthetic anomalies. This anomaly generation can be specifically beneficial in domains that have costly data creation processes as well as inherently imbalanced datasets. One of the domains that fits this description is the host-based intrusion detection domain. In this work, ADFA-LD dataset is chosen as the dataset of interest containing system calls of small foot-print next generation attacks. The data is first converted into images, and then a Cycle-GAN is used to create images of anomalous data from images of normal data. The generated data is combined with the original dataset and is used to train a model to detect anomalies. By doing so, it is shown that the classification results are improved, with the AUC rising from 0.55 to 0.71, and the anomaly detection rate rising from 17.07% to 80.49%. The results are also compared to SMOTE, showing the potential presented by generative adversarial networks in anomaly generation.