#01Oct 29, 2026
cs.CL
When to Assist and What to Suggest: Joint Gating and Memory-Grounded Hint Generation in One Compact Decoder
A. J. A. Jubayer Talukder, Mohammad Ariful Haque
Proactive assistants offer short, memory-grounded hints during a conversation, deciding when to assist and what to suggest. Current systems split this between a gate and a larger generator; we evaluate both together on 28,058 decision points. Stage-wise generation scores are oracle-gate ceilings: behind a real gate, end-to-end exact match is 0.2619 against a ceiling of 0.2971, and end-to-end precision is 0.2387, leaving substantial headroom. A gate pays off through precision and compute, whose saving falls from 4.39x with an 8B generator to 1.38x with a 1B one. The memory profile drives hint quality: removing it costs 24.7 exact-match points (rescaled BERTScore 0.57 to 0.35), while retrieval and a larger generator add nothing on exact match. One 1B decoder can do both, gating from an intermediate layer and generating in the same pass. At its final checkpoint it matches or exceeds the two-model pipelines on automatic end-to-end measures with 1.31-1.76x less wall-clock time than the matched 1B pipeline; across three seeds, its deeper exit ties the separate gate. A human evaluation (1,144 ratings over 32 dialogues) supports the memory effect and rates the single model level with the matched 1B pipeline and below the 8B one. Graded metrics and LlamaPIE's native judge track human ratings more closely than exact match, which we report as a strict lower bound.
#02Oct 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.
#03Oct 29, 2026
cs.AI
On the Fundamental Limits of Prefill-Based Decoding Length Prediction
Haowen Shi, Xuzhe Yan, Fahao Chen and 1 more
Predicting how many tokens a large language model (LLM) will decode, using only prefill-phase hidden states, is a key primitive for inference scheduling. We show that current benchmarks conflate predictor quality with task hardness: when the target model, dataset, or sampling configuration changes, reported accuracy collapses even though the predictor is unchanged. We trace this instability to an overlooked error source---the inherent stochasticity of autoregressive decoding---and derive bounds that every prefill-side method must obey. Our analysis treats decoding as a stopped stochastic process. The per-step stopping probability of a response is not constant but ramps up over hundreds of steps, so the decode length inherits a central limit theorem from the many local decisions that determine where a response ends; this yields per-prompt normality with an explicit error term, together with an affine variance law $σ=αμ+b$ whose slope is the coefficient of variation of the number of response segments. Empirically, the normal law reproduces the per-prompt MAE and the central mass of the decode-length distribution to within a few percent, and the residual departures from normality (mild right skew, slight excess kurtosis) are the ones predicted by the sampling-noise correction. Under fixed model, data, and sampling conditions, a broad design space of predictors (MLP, EGTP, FiLM, soft-label, and Mixture-of-Experts variants) converges to similar performance close to the bound, confirming that \emph{system error dominates model error}. We argue for a benchmarking protocol that fixes the model, data, and sampling parameters and that reports relative-error metrics alongside absolute ones. Code and analysis tools are available at https://github.com/ShwStone/DecodingPredict.
#04Oct 29, 2026
cs.CV
Difficulty Calibration Across Time for Membership Inference in Diffusion Models
Michael Joseph, Yedid Hoshen
Modern diffusion models are trained on massive datasets that often include copyrighted or private images. Membership inference attacks (MIAs) address this by testing whether a given image was in a model's training set. The standard approach scores an image by its reconstruction loss and flags low-loss images as members. This often fails because some images are simply easier to reconstruct than others, so a simple unseen image can score a lower loss than a complex training image. Difficulty calibration separates memorization from how difficult an image is to begin with. We show how to calibrate along two axes of time: training time and diffusion time. First, across training time, we introduce Reference-Model Calibration (RMC), which compares a fine-tuned model's loss against an earlier checkpoint. This cleanly isolates newly memorized data and gives near-perfect auditing, even without text captions. Since earlier checkpoints are not always available, we next present Temporal Self-Calibration (TSC), which calibrates across diffusion time using only a single model. Our key observation is that an image's difficulty persists across noise levels, whereas memorization is localized in time. By comparing the loss at a target timestep against neighboring timesteps from the same model, TSC attenuates image difficulty using the model's own trajectory. Empirically, our methods beat the state of the art by a wide margin, and unlike most existing attacks, generalize across different model parameterizations such as $x$-, $v$-, and $ε$-prediction models. Code is available at https://github.com/MichaelJoseph777/TSC.
#05Oct 29, 2026
cs.CR
TextSeal2: Distortion-Free LLM Watermarking with Copula Mixing and Memoryless Races
Tom Sander, Pierre Fernandez, Itai Gat and 11 more
We present TextSeal2, a distortion-free watermark for large language models that keeps its signal under speculative decoding: tokens that replace rejected drafts remain watermarked with the same keys, and the acceptance rate is unchanged. It also preserves output diversity and adds no measurable inference latency. Its predecessor, TextSeal, restores diversity in the Gumbel-max scheme by routing each token to one of two keys via a coin flip. This is suboptimal because the detector averages the scores from both keys without knowing which key was used. TextSeal2 instead merges two or more keys into a single virtual key and couples it to fresh noise through AutoMark's Gaussian copula. Any number of keys, including publicly shared keys, can be merged this way without diluting detection. Under speculative decoding, TextSeal2 verifies keyed drafts with one more exponential race, run on the leftovers of the draft races. By memorylessness, this race reproduces block verification, so the output follows the target model exactly. We evaluate TextSeal2 on three LLMs. At equal output token diversity, TextSeal2 detects 8 to 22 percentage points more 100-token answers than TextSeal at a false-positive rate of $10^{-3}$, and is comparable to textGrain while requiring no post-logits optimization. Under speculative decoding, it detects 18 and 22 percentage points more 200-token answers than TextSeal and textGrain, respectively, at the same acceptance rate.