#01Oct 15, 2026
cs.SD
Backward Compatibility in Zero-Bit Neural Audio Watermarking
Admir Krnić, Kosta Pavlović, Petar Nedić and 3 more
Neural watermarking systems are typically trained as tightly coupled embedder-detector pairs and implicitly assume static deployment. In real-world deployments, embedders and detectors are frequently updated and selectively decoupled for security and versioning purposes, which can break detection in previously embedded content and, more critically, increase false-positive rates on embedders that a given detector is intentionally not intended to recognize. In this paper the concept of backward compatibility in zero-bit audio watermarking is formalized. A training framework is proposed that pairs a new detector with a sequence of frozen legacy embedders (its legacy chain), using a performance-weighted sampling strategy so that the detector retains accuracy across all earlier versions. This coupling, while necessary for backward compatibility, is shown to induce an embedder-collapse effect that catastrophically degrades the true negative rate (TNR) against out-of-chain embedders. To counteract this, a Angular Diversity Loss (ADL) is introduced that explicitly forces each new embedder to occupy a distinct region of the output space. The combined approach restores near-perfect TNR with no measurable cost to detection accuracy or perceptual audio quality.
#02Oct 15, 2026
cs.RO
Asking Smarter Questions: Targeted Active Preference Learning for Underspecified Rewards
Helena Merker, Nick Walker, Andreea Bobu
Reward learning typically assumes the human's input covers everything that matters for the task. In practice, humans can only attend to so much at once, so their teaching naturally captures some features---or aspects of the task---better than others. Prior work has shown how the robot can identify which features were poorly supervised directly from its teaching data. But the current solution is to ask the human to try again, putting the burden on someone who already struggled to convey those features. We propose shifting this burden to the robot. Our key insight is that the same information that tells the robot what it doesn't know can help it ask better questions. Preference queries offer a low-effort channel for resolving this uncertainty, but only if the robot knows where to direct them and the human knows what to attend to when answering. We act on this insight in two ways: we build an informed prior that targets preference queries at the features that need resolving, and we accompany each query with an explanation that focuses the human's attention on exactly those features. In simulation, the informed prior beats the standard active preference learning baseline by up to $30.8\%$ in the low-query regime, where reducing human effort matters most. In a user study, the informed prior and explanations each significantly improve reward recovery and amplify each other.
#03Oct 15, 2026
cs.CR
Language Is a Security Surface for Agent Guards
Hasan Demirkiran, Jens Ernstberger
Step-level guards decide, before each tool call, whether an agent's next action is safe given the user's request and the trajectory so far. Users write those requests in many languages, while guard prompts and the benchmarks on which purpose-built guards are trained and evaluated are English. We ask whether a guard's verdict depends on the language of the request. We build LinguaGuardBench from the 1,220 labelled steps of TS-Bench AgentDojo-Traj: we translate only the user instruction into German, French, Turkish, Swahili and Amharic, and keep every tool call, observation and label byte-identical, so any change in a verdict is attributable to language alone. Six English rewordings and a whitespace placebo serve as controls, and managed guards are run three times to measure their noise. Across 19 guards, from frontier APIs to 4B open models and four purpose-built agent guards, most open, small and purpose-built guards change verdicts under translation beyond their own noise floor, and the effect grows with the rarity of the language: among the nine guards below 13B parameters, the mean placebo-adjusted flip rate rises from +1.5 pp on French to +4.4 pp on Amharic. Purpose-built guards are the most sensitive. The direction of the damage tends to follow guard size: open guards of 12-30B parameters block more benign steps (up to +5.0 pp false positives), and every significant loss of recall is in a guard below 10B (up to -7.4 pp). Frontier guards shift by at most about one point; the strongest, Gemini 3.8 Flash, returns identical verdicts with and without the request. The damage is concentrated in a few instructions and, in a post-hoc analysis, falls on steps where the agent's reasoning restates the English request, consistent with guards reacting to inconsistency between channels. English paraphrase moves every guard less than translation does. We release the benchmark and all 489k verdicts.
#04Oct 15, 2026
cs.LG
Rethinking Routing Exploration in Modern Mixture-of-Experts
Bingcong Li, Hao Ma, Michael Muehlebach and 2 more
Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models have become an important approach for scaling model parameters. Modern MoE architectures increasingly combine two design choices: fine-grained expert segmentation and shared experts. The former increases expressiveness by enabling more expert combinations at a fixed activation ratio, and the latter introduces experts that are active for every token. We identify an exploration dilemma between these designs: shared experts can make routing less exploratory by reducing the variability of token representations. This conflicts with the greater need for exploration induced by fine-grained expert segmentation due to the combinatorially enlarged routing space. Consequently, the additional expressiveness offered by fine-grained segmentation may not be fully realized in practice. MirrorMoE is proposed to reconcile this exploration dilemma by shrinking the exploration space through token-adaptive suppression of unnecessary experts. MirrorMoE consistently improves performance across model scales.
#05Oct 15, 2026
cs.LG
Topology-Inspired Fine-Tuning for Wind-Field Super-Resolution
Arjun Dadhwal, Brian Summa
Scientific super-resolution (SR) models are typically optimized with pointwise reconstruction losses, yet scientific interpretation often hinges on extrema, connected regions, and multiscale scalar structure. We characterize this tension with pretrained CNN and GAN wind-field SR models. Pointwise metrics, bottleneck persistence-diagram (PD) distance, and merge-tree (MT) distance favor the CNN, whereas order-2 Wasserstein PD distances favor the sharper GAN, so even different distances on the same topological descriptor reward different properties. Motivated by this disagreement, we fine-tune the pretrained CNN with differentiable topology-inspired auxiliary losses on scalar speed, gradient magnitude, soft high-speed level sets, and local maxima, and with fixed-pair supervision, which constrains predicted values and persistence at ground-truth persistence-pair endpoints located offline with the Topology ToolKit. A loss study of 16 fine-tuning configurations, each compared with a matched standard fine-tuning control that uses only the original reconstruction loss, on a fixed 168-field benchmark (with topology evaluated on a fixed 160 by 160 subregion of each field), shows that, among the scalar-field losses, gradient supervision provides the strongest PD improvement but does not improve mean MT distance, whereas fixed-pair supervision gives the largest and most consistent joint improvement in PD and MT distances. The final objective combines these two signals. Relative to the pretrained CNN, it lowers mean bottleneck, $W_{2,\infty}$, and $W_{2,2}$ distances by 31%, 25%, and 27% (and by 32-35% relative to the control, which on its own worsens all three), lowers all three on 150 of 168 fields, and gains 1.30 dB PSNR, about half the gain of standard fine-tuning. Mean MT distance also improves, but on only 91 of those 150 fields, indicating that PD and MT capture complementary structure.