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AI Deception: Risks, Dynamics, and Controls

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As intelligence increases, so does its shadow. AI deception, in which systems induce false beliefs to secure self-beneficial outcomes, has evolved from a speculative concern to an empirically demonstrated risk across language models, AI agents, and emerging frontier systems. This project provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the AI deception field, covering its core concepts, methodologies, genesis, and potential mitigations. First, we identify a formal definition of AI deception, grounded in signaling theory from studies of animal deception. We then review existing empirical studies and associated risks, highlighting deception as a sociotechnical safety challenge. We organize the landscape of AI deception research as a deception cycle, consisting of two key components: deception emergence and deception treatment. Deception emergence reveals the mechanisms underlying AI deception: systems with sufficient capability and incentive potential inevitably engage in deceptive behaviors when triggered by external conditions. Deception treatment, in turn, focuses on detecting and addressing such behaviors. On deception emergence, we analyze incentive foundations across three hierarchical levels and identify three essential capability preconditions required for deception. We further examine contextual triggers, including supervision gaps, distributional shifts, and environmental pressures. On deception treatment, we conclude detection methods covering benchmarks and evaluation protocols in static and interactive settings. Building on the three core factors of deception emergence, we outline potential mitigation strategies and propose auditing approaches that integrate technical, community, and governance efforts to address sociotechnical challenges and future AI risks. To support ongoing work in this area, we release a living resource at www.deceptionsurvey.com.


HybridWorldSim: A Scalable and Controllable High-fidelity Simulator for Autonomous Driving

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Realistic and controllable simulation is critical for advancing end-to-end autonomous driving, yet existing approaches often struggle to support novel view synthesis under large viewpoint changes or to ensure geometric consistency. We introduce HybridWorldSim, a hybrid simulation framework that integrates multi-traversal neural reconstruction for static backgrounds with generative modeling for dynamic agents. This unified design addresses key limitations of previous methods, enabling the creation of diverse and high-fidelity driving scenarios with reliable visual and spatial consistency. To facilitate robust benchmarking, we further release a new multi-traversal dataset MIRROR that captures a wide range of routes and environmental conditions across different cities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HybridWorldSim surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods, providing a practical and scalable solution for high-fidelity simulation and a valuable resource for research and development in autonomous driving.


VICoT-Agent: A Vision-Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Framework for Interpretable Multimodal Reasoning and Scalable Remote Sensing Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The current remote sensing image analysis task is increasingly evolving from traditional object recognition to complex intelligence reasoning, which places higher requirements on the model's reasoning ability and the flexibility of tool invocation. T o this end, we propose a new multimodal agent framework, Vision-Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Framework (VICoT), which implements explicit multi-round reasoning by dynamically incorporating visual tools into the chain of thought. Through a stack-based reasoning structure and a modular MCP-compatible tool suite, VICoT enables LLMs to efficiently perform multi-round, interleaved vision-language reasoning tasks with strong generalization and flexibility.W e also propose the Reasoning Stack distillation method to migrate complex Agent behaviors to small, lightweight models, which ensures the reasoning capability while significantly reducing complexity. Experiments on multiple remote sensing benchmarks demonstrate that VICoT significantly outperforms existing SOTA frameworks in reasoning transparency, execution efficiency, and generation quality.


AutoEnv: Automated Environments for Measuring Cross-Environment Agent Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Humans naturally adapt to diverse environments by learning underlying rules across worlds with different dynamics, observations, and reward structures. In contrast, existing agents typically demonstrate improvements via self-evolving within a single domain, implicitly assuming a fixed environment distribution. Cross-environment learning has remained largely unmeasured: there is no standard collection of controllable, heterogeneous environments, nor a unified way to represent how agents learn. We address these gaps in two steps. First, we propose AutoEnv, an automated framework that treats environments as factorizable distributions over transitions, observations, and rewards, enabling low-cost (4.12 USD on average) generation of heterogeneous worlds. Using AutoEnv, we construct AutoEnv-36, a dataset of 36 environments with 358 validated levels, on which seven language models achieve 12-49% normalized reward, demonstrating the challenge of AutoEnv-36. Second, we formalize agent learning as a component-centric process driven by three stages of Selection, Optimization, and Evaluation applied to an improvable agent component. Using this formulation, we design eight learning methods and evaluate them on AutoEnv-36. Empirically, the gain of any single learning method quickly decrease as the number of environments increases, revealing that fixed learning methods do not scale across heterogeneous environments. Environment-adaptive selection of learning methods substantially improves performance but exhibits diminishing returns as the method space expands. These results highlight both the necessity and the current limitations of agent learning for scalable cross-environment generalization, and position AutoEnv and AutoEnv-36 as a testbed for studying cross-environment agent learning. The code is avaiable at https://github.com/FoundationAgents/AutoEnv.


Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis of Image-Text Pairs by Distribution-Based Feature Recovery and Fusion

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As posts on social media increase rapidly, analyzing the sentiments embedded in image-text pairs has become a popular research topic in recent years. Although existing works achieve impressive accomplishments in simultaneously harnessing image and text information, they lack the considerations of possible low-quality and missing modalities. In real-world applications, these issues might frequently occur, leading to urgent needs for models capable of predicting sentiment robustly. Therefore, we propose a Distribution-based feature Recovery and Fusion (DRF) method for robust multimodal sentiment analysis of image-text pairs. Specifically, we maintain a feature queue for each modality to approximate their feature distributions, through which we can simultaneously handle low-quality and missing modalities in a unified framework. For low-quality modalities, we reduce their contributions to the fusion by quantitatively estimating modality qualities based on the distributions. For missing modalities, we build inter-modal mapping relationships supervised by samples and distributions, thereby recovering the missing modalities from available ones. In experiments, two disruption strategies that corrupt and discard some modalities in samples are adopted to mimic the low-quality and missing modalities in various real-world scenarios. Through comprehensive experiments on three publicly available image-text datasets, we demonstrate the universal improvements of DRF compared to SOTA methods under both two strategies, validating its effectiveness in robust multimodal sentiment analysis.


Blu-WERP (Web Extraction and Refinement Pipeline): A Scalable Pipeline for Preprocessing Large Language Model Datasets

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

High-quality training data is fundamental to large language model (LLM) performance, yet existing preprocessing pipelines often struggle to effectively remove noise and unstructured content from web-scale corpora. This paper presents Blu-WERP, a novel data preprocessing pipeline designed to optimize the quality of Common Crawl WARC files for LLM training. We demonstrate that Blu-WERP significantly outperforms established baselines including DCLM across multiple model scales and evaluation benchmarks. Our pipeline processes CC WARC dumps, implementing advanced filtering and quality assessment mechanisms. We conducted comprehensive evaluations using models with 150M, 400M, 530M, 750M, and 1B parameters, testing against nine standard benchmarks categorized as World Knowledge & Reasoning, Language Understanding, and Commonsense Reasoning. Results show Blu-WERP consistently achieved superior performance across all model scales. At the 1B parameter scale, Relatively Blu-WERP demonstrates a 4.0% and 9.5% aggregate improvement over DCLM and Fineweb respectively, while achieving quality-per-token efficiency gain. Categorical analysis reveals 2.4% improvement in World Knowledge & Reasoning, 6.2% improvement in Language Understanding, and 4.2% improvement in Commonsense Reasoning. These results establish Blu-WERP as a state-of-the-art preprocessing pipeline that substantially improves LLM training data quality and downstream model performance with reduced computational cost. Our findings contribute to the growing body of research on data-centric AI, demonstrating that preprocessing pipeline design significantly impacts LLM capabilities. The Blu-WERP pipeline represents a practical advancement in data quality optimization, offering researchers and practitioners an effective solution for improving LLM training efficiency and model performance.


A Machine Learning-Driven Solution for Denoising Inertial Confinement Fusion Images

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Neutron imaging is essential for diagnosing and optimizing inertial confinement fusion implosions at the National Ignition Facility. Due to the required 10-micrometer resolution, however, neutron image require image reconstruction using iterative algorithms. For low-yield sources, the images may be degraded by various types of noise. Gaussian and Poisson noise often coexist within one image, obscuring fine details and blurring the edges where the source information is encoded. Traditional denoising techniques, such as filtering and thresholding, can inadvertently alter critical features or reshape the noise statistics, potentially impacting the ultimate fidelity of the iterative image reconstruction pipeline. However, recent advances in synthetic data production and machine learning have opened new opportunities to address these challenges. In this study, we present an unsupervised autoencoder with a Cohen-Daubechies- Feauveau (CDF 97) wavelet transform in the latent space, designed to suppress for mixed Gaussian-Poisson noise while preserving essential image features. The network successfully denoises neutron imaging data. Benchmarking against both simulated and experimental NIF datasets demonstrates that our approach achieves lower reconstruction error and superior edge preservation compared to conventional filtering methods such as Block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D). By validating the effectiveness of unsupervised learning for denoising neutron images, this study establishes a critical first step towards fully AI-driven, end-to-end reconstruction frameworks for ICF diagnostics.


Mobile-Agent-RAG: Driving Smart Multi-Agent Coordination with Contextual Knowledge Empowerment for Long-Horizon Mobile Automation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Mobile agents show immense potential, yet current state-of-the-art (SoTA) agents exhibit inadequate success rates on real-world, long-horizon, cross-application tasks. We attribute this bottleneck to the agents' excessive reliance on static, internal knowledge within MLLMs, which leads to two critical failure points: 1) strategic hallucinations in high-level planning and 2) operational errors during low-level execution on user interfaces (UI). The core insight of this paper is that high-level planning and low-level UI operations require fundamentally distinct types of knowledge. Planning demands high-level, strategy-oriented experiences, whereas operations necessitate low-level, precise instructions closely tied to specific app UIs. Motivated by these insights, we propose Mobile-Agent-RAG, a novel hierarchical multi-agent framework that innovatively integrates dual-level retrieval augmentation. At the planning stage, we introduce Manager-RAG to reduce strategic hallucinations by retrieving human-validated comprehensive task plans that provide high-level guidance. At the execution stage, we develop Operator-RAG to improve execution accuracy by retrieving the most precise low-level guidance for accurate atomic actions, aligned with the current app and subtask. To accurately deliver these knowledge types, we construct two specialized retrieval-oriented knowledge bases. Furthermore, we introduce Mobile-Eval-RAG, a challenging benchmark for evaluating such agents on realistic multi-app, long-horizon tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mobile-Agent-RAG significantly outperforms SoTA baselines, improving task completion rate by 11.0% and step efficiency by 10.2%, establishing a robust paradigm for context-aware, reliable multi-agent mobile automation.


GAMA: A Neural Neighborhood Search Method with Graph-aware Multi-modal Attention for Vehicle Routing Problem

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in neural neighborhood search methods have shown potential in tackling Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs). However, most existing approaches rely on simplistic state representations and fuse heterogeneous information via naive concatenation, limiting their ability to capture rich structural and semantic context. To address these limitations, we propose GAMA, a neural neighborhood search method with Graph-aware Multi-modal Attention model in VRP. GAMA encodes the problem instance and its evolving solution as distinct modalities using graph neural networks, and models their intra- and inter-modal interactions through stacked self- and cross-attention layers. A gated fusion mechanism further integrates the multi-modal representations into a structured state, enabling the policy to make informed and generalizable operator selection decisions. Extensive experiments conducted across various synthetic and benchmark instances demonstrate that the proposed algorithm GAMA significantly outperforms the recent neural baselines. Further ablation studies confirm that both the multi-modal attention mechanism and the gated fusion design play a key role in achieving the observed performance gains.


Focusing on Language: Revealing and Exploiting Language Attention Heads in Multilingual Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Meanwhile, efforts to interpret their internal mechanisms have emerged, offering insights to enhance multilingual performance. While multi-head self-attention (MHA) has proven critical in many areas, its role in multilingual capabilities remains underexplored. In this work, we study the contribution of MHA in supporting multilingual processing in LLMs. We propose Language Attention Head Importance Scores (LAHIS), an effective and efficient method that identifies attention head importance for multilingual capabilities via a single forward and backward pass through the LLM. Applying LAHIS to A ya-23-8B, Llama-3.2-3B, and Mistral-7B-v0.1, we reveal the existence of both language-specific and language-general heads. Language-specific heads enable cross-lingual attention transfer to guide the model toward target language contexts and mitigate off-target language generation issue, contributing to addressing challenges in multilingual LLMs. We also introduce a lightweight adaptation that learns a soft head mask to modulate attention outputs over language heads, requiring only 20 tunable parameters to improve XQuAD accuracy. Overall, our work enhances both the interpretability and multilingual capabilities of LLMs from the perspective of MHA.