ML Reads

Personal arXiv list

ML papers to read today.

Pick a topic and keep a small daily list of papers worth opening.

Refresh queueDaily mix

Today's queue

5 papers

#01Oct 29, 2026

cs.LG

Machine Learning-Based Detection of Mobile Money Scan Messages in Ghana: A Comparative Evaluation of Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, and Randon Forest Classifiers

Ibrahim Salifu, Muhaisin Tiyumba Nantogmah

Mobile money (MoMo) is Ghana's preferred retail payment channel, recording GHC518.4 billion in transactions in December 2025 and over 26.7 million active accounts (Graphic Online, 2026). This growth has coincided with increased social-engineering fraud over Short Message Service (SMS) and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), where fraudsters impersonate network operators, agents, relatives, or regulators to obtain personal identification numbers (PINs), identity data, or funds. We present a supervised machine-learning pipeline for classifying scam and legitimate Ghanaian MoMo SMS messages using a labelled corpus of 220 messages across 18 scam and legitimate subcategories. Domain-specific normalisation of currency amounts, phone numbers, and USSD codes preceded TF-IDF vectorisation of unigrams and bigrams. Using stratified five-fold cross-validation and a 20% held-out test set, we trained and evaluated Multinomial Naive Bayes, linear support vector machine (SVM), and Random Forest classifiers using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC). Held-out accuracy, F1, and AUC were 1.00 for Naive Bayes and linear SVM; cross-validated accuracy averaged 96.6% (+/-3.3), 94.9% (+/-4.6), and 92.0% (+/-4.2). Discriminative n-grams reflected imperative urgency ("send," "claim," "please send") and PIN solicitation ("PIN," "pincode"); legitimate messages featured confirmatory and cautionary language ("balance," "successful," "do not share"). Findings are contextualised in Sub-Saharan African SMS fraud detection, small template-based corpus ceiling effects, and a pathway toward larger naturalistic multilingual corpora. Interpretable classical classifiers achieve high accuracy on structured MoMo scam text and suit carrier- or handset-level filtering in low-resource, on-device settings.

#02Oct 29, 2026

cs.AI

Efficient Scalable Oversight via Rewinding

Ziyi Guan, Yael Tauman Kalai, Ron Rothblum and 1 more

Scalable oversight asks how a weak verifier can check the outputs of computations performed by more powerful AI systems. One proposed approach uses relativizing interactive proofs, in which a weak verifier checks the output of a complex oracle-aided computation by interacting with one or more powerful provers. A prominent example is debate, which is highly efficient but assumes that one of two powerful AI models, or provers, is truthful. For certain classes of oracle-aided computations, this assumption can be removed, but at substantially greater computational cost. In this work, we introduce \emph{rewindable interactive proofs} (RIPs), a new model of relativizing interactive proofs for scalable oversight. In an RIP, the verifier may rewind the prover to an earlier state of the interaction and continue from there. This is possible when the prover is an AI model, since the verifier can save a snapshot of the model's state and later restore it. We construct a relativizing RIP for computations whose outputs are robust to changing a small fraction of oracle answers. Our construction is more efficient than prior relativizing proofs that do not assume a truthful prover, and it uses no cryptography. In our construction the honest prover runs in time linear in that of the original computation, and the verifier, after a one-time preprocessing step, runs in time nearly linear in the input length (which can be much smaller than the computation itself). We implement our protocol, report a preliminary MNIST experiment, and show that an RIP can be faster than a state-of-the-art deployed proof system. RIPs may be of independent interest. Rewinding is possible whenever the verifier controls the prover's machine, for example when the prover runs on trusted hardware or in a virtual machine whose state can be checkpointed.

#03Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

Luggage re-identification: A study of strategies towards a real-world application

Quentin Dhôte, Romaric Audigier

Luggage re-identification (ReID) is a critical task in video surveillance for forensics, security or border management (suspicious or abandoned luggage recognition), as well as luggage management (lost luggage recovery). It enables the association of observations of the same luggage across disjoint camera views in complex environments such as airports, train stations and border crossing. While existing approaches primarily focus on appearance-based cropped image matching under relatively clean conditions, real-world scenarios are characterized by frequent occlusions, cluttered background and crowded scenes which significantly degrade performance. Yet, strategies leveraging the complementarity of multiple shots and views from different video streams is overlooked. In this paper, we study strategies for an end-to-end pipeline that operates from multiple video streams to detect and re-identify luggage. We evaluate different variants on a benchmark dataset acquired in real-world environments to address the questions of selecting and merging different views and shots of the same luggage as well as training on different environment datasets for an overall ReID performance improvement in practical applications.

#04Oct 29, 2026

cs.CL

Homebrewed SLMs: Autoregressive and Masked Diffusion Language Models Built at Home for Portuguese

Pedro Carvalho Brom

Building a language model of one's own no longer requires a data centre. This tutorial trains one from scratch, tokenizer included, on one consumer GPU, and shows how to tell whether it is good for the tasks of a specialist domain. It proposes no new method. It releases a tested Python package and two notebooks in Brazilian Portuguese with autoregressive and masked diffusion generation on one network, a preregistered comparison protocol, legal tasks built from text alone with a Kneser-Ney floor and public yardsticks, reference numbers for models of 11 to 12M parameters, and a catalogue of defects that only measurement revealed. On Brazilian prose and federal laws, at minutes per run, the autoregressive mode peaks at 64 epochs over the same text and then memorises it, while masked diffusion improves up to 256. At their best points on test, the diffusion bound exceeds the autoregressive likelihood by 0.06 bits per byte, within the preregistered minimum effect. On held-out laws and on acts published after training, the model ties a 6-gram floor in likelihood on the same windows, and it loses to the floor at continuing those acts. It beats the floor at detecting tampered text, and fills cross-references more often than the floor and public models of 160M and 630M parameters, only in decrees, a genre absent from training, where those scorers stay near or below chance, and in filling the blank only when each group weighs the same, since per item it ties the 630M model. On laws, the public models, trained with about 5x10^2 to 10^5 times its compute, lead in tampered text and continuation. The blind human reading is preregistered and not part of this version.

#05Oct 29, 2026

cs.AI

Comparing Human Role-Players and LLM-Simulated Clients in Online Counselling Training: An Analysis of Counselling Patterns

Eric Rudolph, Philipp Steigerwald, Jens Albrecht

This study investigates the capabilities of Large Language Models to simulate counselling clients in educational role-plays in comparison to human role-players. Initially, we recorded role-playing sessions, where novice counsellors interacted with human peers acting as clients, followed by role-plays between humans and clients simulated by Mistrals Mixtral 8x7b using 4-bit quantization. These interactions were analysed with a counselling communication pattern system at sentence level. We investigated two key questions: (1) to what extent LLM-generated responses replicate authentic conversational dynamics and (2) whether counsellors' communication behaviour differs when interacting with human versus LLM-simulated clients. The findings highlight both similarities and differences in the application of counselling patterns across scenarios, showing the potential of LLM-based role-playing exercises to enhance counselling competencies and to identify areas for further refinement in virtual client simulations.