Knowledge Distillation Detection for Open-weights Models

We propose the task of knowledge distillation detection, which aims to determine whether a student model has been distilled from a given teacher, under a practical setting where only the student's weights and the teacher's API are available. This problem is motivated by growing concerns about model provenance and unauthorized replication through distillation. To address this task, we introduce a model-agnostic framework that combines data-free input synthesis and statistical score computation for detecting distillation. Our approach is applicable to both classification and generative models. Experiments on diverse architectures for image classification and text-to-image generation show that our method improves detection accuracy over the strongest baselines by 59.6% on CIFAR-10, 71.2% on ImageNet, and 20.0% for text-to-image generation. The code is available at https://github.com/shqii1j/distillation_detection.

SLAP: Learning Speaker and Health-Related Representations from Natural Language Supervision

Speech encodes paralinguistic information such as demographics, voice quality, and health. Yet no audio foundation model supports zero-shot or out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization to these tasks. We introduce SLAP (Speaker contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining), the first model aligning speech with natural language descriptions of speaker and health metadata through contrastive learning. SLAP combines a Vision Transformer audio encoder with text encoders, trained on more than 3400 hours across 9 datasets with diverse speaker annotations. We evaluated on 38 binary classification tasks spanning demographics, voice characteristics, and clinical assessments across 14 datasets in 7 languages. SLAP achieves 62.9% average F1 in zero-shot evaluation, a 48% relative improvement over CLAP (42.4%), while demonstrating strong OOD generalization to unseen languages and clinical populations. When fine-tuned with linear probing, SLAP reaches 69.3% F1 overall and achieves best-in-class performance on health tasks (57.9% F1), surpassing larger foundation models.

Detecting LLM-Generated Spam Reviews by Integrating Language Model Embeddings and Graph Neural Network

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the generation of highly persuasive spam reviews that closely mimic human writing. These reviews pose significant challenges for existing detection systems and threaten the credibility of online platforms. In this work, we first create three realistic LLM-generated spam review datasets using three distinct LLMs, each guided by product metadata and genuine reference reviews. Evaluations by GPT-4.1 confirm the high persuasion and deceptive potential of these reviews. To address this threat, we propose FraudSquad, a hybrid detection model that integrates text embeddings from a pre-trained language model with a gated graph transformer for spam node classification. FraudSquad captures both semantic and behavioral signals without relying on manual feature engineering or massive training resources. Experiments show that FraudSquad outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 44.22% in precision and 43.01% in recall on three LLM-generated datasets, while also achieving promising results on two human-written spam datasets. Furthermore, FraudSquad maintains a modest model size and requires minimal labeled training data, making it a practical solution for real-world applications. Our contributions include new synthetic datasets, a practical detection framework, and empirical evidence highlighting the urgency of adapting spam detection to the LLM era. Our code and datasets are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FraudSquad-5389/.

A-VERT: Agnostic Verification with Embedding Ranking Targets

The automatic evaluation of Language Model (LM) responses is a critical piece in the development of benchmarks and metrics, both for model training and quality assessment of production model endpoints. The current approaches to response classification relies on methods that are too expensive (i.e. LLM-as-a-Judge) or that are far from real-world conditions (string-matching, logprob). In this paper, a structure-free evaluation method is presented. The method makes use of semantic embedding distances to match target candidates with arbitrary LM-generated text, resulting in a robust classification of the response at a relatively low compute cost (embedding models of less than $10B$ parameters). The results show a regression score of ~0.97 and an accuracy of ~96% against human annotators, tested over 3 data sets and 3 different LM architectures.

microCLIP: Unsupervised CLIP Adaptation via Coarse-Fine Token Fusion for Fine-Grained Image Classification

Unsupervised adaptation of CLIP-based vision-language models (VLMs) for fine-grained image classification requires sensitivity to microscopic local cues. While CLIP exhibits strong zero-shot transfer, its reliance on coarse global features restricts its performance on fine-grained classification tasks. Prior efforts inject fine-grained knowledge by aligning large language model (LLM) descriptions with the CLIP $\texttt{[CLS]}$ token; however, this approach overlooks spatial precision. We propose $\textbf{microCLIP}$, a self-training framework that jointly refines CLIP's visual and textual representations using fine-grained cues. At its core is Saliency-Oriented Attention Pooling (SOAP) within a lightweight TokenFusion module, which builds a saliency-guided $\texttt{[FG]}$ token from patch embeddings and fuses it with the global $\texttt{[CLS]}$ token for coarse-fine alignment. To stabilize adaptation, we introduce a two-headed LLM-derived classifier: a frozen classifier that, via multi-view alignment, provides a stable text-based prior for pseudo-labeling, and a learnable classifier initialized from LLM descriptions and fine-tuned with TokenFusion. We further develop Dynamic Knowledge Aggregation, which convexly combines fixed LLM/CLIP priors with TokenFusion's evolving logits to iteratively refine pseudo-labels. Together, these components uncover latent fine-grained signals in CLIP, yielding a consistent $2.90\%$ average accuracy gain across 13 fine-grained benchmarks while requiring only light adaptation. Our code is available at https://github.com/sathiiii/microCLIP.

CardioBench: Do Echocardiography Foundation Models Generalize Beyond the Lab?

Foundation models (FMs) are reshaping medical imaging, yet their application in echocardiography remains limited. While several echocardiography-specific FMs have recently been introduced, no standardized benchmark exists to evaluate them. Echocardiography poses unique challenges, including noisy acquisitions, high frame redundancy, and limited public datasets. Most existing solutions evaluate on private data, restricting comparability. To address this, we introduce CardioBench, a comprehensive benchmark for echocardiography FMs. CardioBench unifies eight publicly available datasets into a standardized suite spanning four regression and five classification tasks, covering functional, structural, diagnostic, and view recognition endpoints. We evaluate several leading FM, including cardiac-specific, biomedical, and general-purpose encoders, under consistent zero-shot, probing, and alignment protocols. Our results highlight complementary strengths across model families: temporal modeling is critical for functional regression, retrieval provides robustness under distribution shift, and domain-specific text encoders capture physiologically meaningful axes. General-purpose encoders transfer strongly and often close the gap with probing, but struggle with fine-grained distinctions like view classification and subtle pathology recognition. By releasing preprocessing, splits, and public evaluation pipelines, CardioBench establishes a reproducible reference point and offers actionable insights to guide the design of future echocardiography foundation models.

A Tale of LLMs and Induced Small Proxies: Scalable Agents for Knowledge Mining

At the core of Deep Research is knowledge mining, the task of extracting structured information from massive unstructured text in response to user instructions. Large language models (LLMs) excel at interpreting such instructions but are prohibitively expensive to deploy at scale, while traditional pipelines of classifiers and extractors remain efficient yet brittle and unable to generalize to new tasks. We introduce Falconer, a collaborative framework that combines the agentic reasoning of LLMs with lightweight proxy models for scalable knowledge mining. In Falconer, LLMs act as planners, decomposing user instructions into executable pipelines, and as annotators, generating supervision to train small proxies. The framework unifies classification and extraction into two atomic operations, get label and get span, enabling a single instruction-following model to replace multiple task-specific components. To evaluate the consistency between proxy models incubated by Falconer and annotations provided by humans and large models, we construct new benchmarks covering both planning and end-to-end execution. Experiments show that Falconer closely matches state-of-the-art LLMs in instruction-following accuracy while reducing inference cost by up to 90% and accelerating large-scale knowledge mining by more than 20x, offering an efficient and scalable foundation for Deep Research.

Multi-View Camera System for Variant-Aware Autonomous Vehicle Inspection and Defect Detection

Ensuring that every vehicle leaving a modern production line is built to the correct \emph{variant} specification and is free from visible defects is an increasingly complex challenge. We present the \textbf{Automated Vehicle Inspection (AVI)} platform, an end-to-end, \emph{multi-view} perception system that couples deep-learning detectors with a semantic rule engine to deliver \emph{variant-aware} quality control in real time. Eleven synchronized cameras capture a full 360{\deg} sweep of each vehicle; task-specific views are then routed to specialised modules: YOLOv8 for part detection, EfficientNet for ICE/EV classification, Gemini-1.5 Flash for mascot OCR, and YOLOv8-Seg for scratch-and-dent segmentation. A view-aware fusion layer standardises evidence, while a VIN-conditioned rule engine compares detected features against the expected manifest, producing an interpretable pass/fail report in \(\approx\! 300\,\text{ms}\). On a mixed data set of Original Equipment Manufacturer(OEM) vehicle data sets of four distinct models plus public scratch/dent images, AVI achieves \textbf{ 93 \%} verification accuracy, \textbf{86 \%} defect-detection recall, and sustains \(\mathbf{3.3}\) vehicles/min, surpassing single-view or no segmentation baselines by large margins. To our knowledge, this is the first publicly reported system that unifies multi-camera feature validation with defect detection in a deployable automotive setting in industry.

Mixture of Detectors: A Compact View of Machine-Generated Text Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs) are gearing up to surpass human creativity. The veracity of the statement needs careful consideration. In recent developments, critical questions arise regarding the authenticity of human work and the preservation of their creativity and innovative abilities. This paper investigates such issues. This paper addresses machine-generated text detection across several scenarios, including document-level binary and multiclass classification or generator attribution, sentence-level segmentation to differentiate between human-AI collaborative text, and adversarial attacks aimed at reducing the detectability of machine-generated text. We introduce a new work called BMAS English: an English language dataset for binary classification of human and machine text, for multiclass classification, which not only identifies machine-generated text but can also try to determine its generator, and Adversarial attack addressing where it is a common act for the mitigation of detection, and Sentence-level segmentation, for predicting the boundaries between human and machine-generated text. We believe that this paper will address previous work in Machine-Generated Text Detection (MGTD) in a more meaningful way.

Universal Legal Article Prediction via Tight Collaboration between Supervised Classification Model and LLM

Legal Article Prediction (LAP) is a critical task in legal text classification, leveraging natural language processing (NLP) techniques to automatically predict relevant legal articles based on the fact descriptions of cases. As a foundational step in legal decision-making, LAP plays a pivotal role in determining subsequent judgments, such as charges and penalties. Despite its importance, existing methods face significant challenges in addressing the complexities of LAP. Supervised classification models (SCMs), such as CNN and BERT, struggle to fully capture intricate fact patterns due to their inherent limitations. Conversely, large language models (LLMs), while excelling in generative tasks, perform suboptimally in predictive scenarios due to the abstract and ID-based nature of legal articles. Furthermore, the diversity of legal systems across jurisdictions exacerbates the issue, as most approaches are tailored to specific countries and lack broader applicability. To address these limitations, we propose Uni-LAP, a universal framework for legal article prediction that integrates the strengths of SCMs and LLMs through tight collaboration. Specifically, in Uni-LAP, the SCM is enhanced with a novel Top-K loss function to generate accurate candidate articles, while the LLM employs syllogism-inspired reasoning to refine the final predictions. We evaluated Uni-LAP on datasets from multiple jurisdictions, and empirical results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, showcasing its effectiveness and generalizability.