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SysAdmin: Measuring Instrumental Power-Seeking in Frontier AI
arXiv:2607.18239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Power-seeking defined as behaviors where AI systems acquire resources, evade oversight, or resist termination beyond task requirements is identified as a key driver of Loss of Control (LoC) risk. In this work, we introduce SysAdmin, a benchmark that positions frontier language models as autonomous system administrators in a high-fidelity Linux sandbox to measure power-seeking propensity across five dimensions: self-preservation, increasing autonomy, resource acquisition, environment modification, and strategic concealment. We evaluated seven frontier models across four experimental conditions in a total of 2800 tasks. After bias correction using human-annotated calibration data, corrected power-seeking estimates ranged from 0 to about 5 percent per model. We also conducted a positive control with explicit power-seeking prompts that achieved 100% detection, validating measurement sensitivity. Our findings indicate current frontier models e
Calibrated Selective Fact-Checking via Evidence Chain Evaluation
arXiv:2607.18240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong fact-checking accuracy, yet forced binary decisions conceal a critical reliability problem: systems may issue confident verdicts even when supporting evidence is weak, sparse, or internally inconsistent. We address this issue through Evidence Chain Evaluation (ECE), a selective fact-checking framework that permits abstention via an uncertain verdict instead of requiring a true/false decision for every claim. The evaluated system is a tool-using verification agent that gathers evidence through web search, scholarly search, and executable checks, and then returns a structured verdict with confidence and source-level metadata. On ECE-Bench, ECE achieves 91.6% standard accuracy, 93.7% coverage, and 97.8% selective accuracy on answered claims. Although ECE does not outperform the strongest retrieval baseline on aggregate calibration metrics such as Expected Calibration Error, Brier score, or AURC
FALCON-Discover: Discovering Concentrated False-Confidence Regions for Calibration
arXiv:2607.18278v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration is usually evaluated in aggregate, but the most dangerous failures are often local: predictions that remain highly confident despite being wrong. We study this failure mode as false-confidence concentration, the extent to which confident errors occupy compact, discoverable regions of prediction space. We introduce FALCON-Discover, a post-hoc, model-agnostic framework that ranks predictions using discrepancy signals from confidence, local support, neighborhood agreement, and perturbation stability. Across seven binary tabular datasets, four seeds, five-fold cross-fitting, and strong learners including XGBoost and CatBoost, we find that false-confidence concentration is recurrent but regime-dependent. At the main confidence threshold, discrepancy-based ranking substantially outperforms the strongest validation-selected calibration or trust-scoring baseline in the strongest regimes, while raw confidence recovers little dangerous-
FARO: Feasibility-Aware Robot Motion Optimization
arXiv:2607.18362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fast planning of novel behaviors in unseen scenarios remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. The high-dimensional, hybrid, and underactuated nature of humanoid loco-manipulation continues to hinder the realization of this goal. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a nested kino-dynamic framework for rapid feasibility checking and dynamically consistent trajectory generation given a candidate contact sequence. By integrating this module with a feasibility-guided tree search and a Large Language Model (LLM)-based contact plan sampling strategy, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can substantially improve the search process. Furthermore, we show that the generated trajectories can be tracked using a reinforcement learning (RL)-based controller and show that the resulting trajectories are of sufficiently high quality for execution in real-world loco-manipulation scenarios. A supplementary video is available at: h
Beyond Output-Space Calibration: Spectral Evidence Bundling for Selective Reliability Estimation in Time-Series Classification
arXiv:2607.18279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-hoc calibration for time-series classification usually remaps output scores, but deployment decisions such as trust, abstention, and review depend on whether a confident prediction is supported by the current temporal signal. We address three time-series reliability gaps: identical confidence values can hide different temporal support, average calibration can miss false high-confidence errors, and output-space recalibration offers limited input-linked auditability. We introduce a validation-gated fixed-label reliability policy that keeps the backbone prediction unchanged while estimating whether it should be trusted. The method combines output-side cues with whole-sample spectral descriptors, including band energy, entropy, peak dominance, period support, and phase stability, to form a scalar reliability estimate and diagnostic band-level evidence. A validation gate enables spectral conditioning only when correctness ranking improves
Towards Torque-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Quadruped Locomotion
arXiv:2607.18365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for legged robots is advancing locomotion, demonstrating its ability to adapt to new and challenging terrain. Traditionally, these RL locomotion frameworks are position-based, making the policy less adaptable to terrain types and requiring state estimation techniques in the observation space, i.e., linear velocity. Moreover, these RL frameworks often use small, lightweight quadrupeds that are limited in their viability for high-complexity tasks due to hardware constraints. This work explores an RL torque control framework for heavyweight high-torque quadrupeds. The RL framework in this paper can traverse rough terrain and effectively track a desired linear velocity without requiring knowledge of the agent's current velocity. Using Nvidia's Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab, simulation results of the RL torque control policy are shown on the Unitree B1 quadruped, achieving speeds of 3.5 m/s and 1.5 rad/s. In addition, the
Agentic AI vs AI Automation: What’s the Real Difference?
This scene is playing out across engineering teams everywhere. Someone wraps a few LangChain calls inside a loop, adds a couple of tools, and proudly declares, We ve built an AI agent. The demo looks great. Everyone is impressed. Then it goes to production. The first unexpected input arrives. The workflow breaks. Logs fill up. Alerts start firing. [ ] The post Agentic AI vs AI Automation: What s the Real Difference? appeared first on Analytics Vidhya.
Prompt Engineering Isn’t Enough: How Four Bricks of Context Engineering Stop RAG Hallucinations
Enterprise Document Intelligence [Vol.1 #9bis] - Your RAG isn’t hallucinating, it’s answering the wrong context faithfully. On real NIST and World Bank documents, watch each of the four bricks break, and the contract that closes it The post Prompt Engineering Isn’t Enough: How Four Bricks of Context Engineering Stop RAG Hallucinations appeared first on Towards Data Science.
I Tried Fine-Tuning a Robot AI Model on Colab. Here Is What Worked
A reproducible 100-step LoRA fine-tuning run for OpenVLA, with dataset checks, Colab setup, training metrics, and W B evidence. The post I Tried Fine-Tuning a Robot AI Model on Colab. Here Is What Worked appeared first on Towards Data Science.
How Much of a Data Science Workflow Can Run on a GPU Today? Part 1: Accelerating Data Preparation
Exploring GPU acceleration with cuDF, cudf.pandas, and the Polars GPU Engine The post How Much of a Data Science Workflow Can Run on a GPU Today? Part 1: Accelerating Data Preparation appeared first on Towards Data Science.
Are Your ML Experiments a Mess? Here’s the Fix
A hands-on guide to tracking experiments, logging models, and reproducing results with ML Flow. The post Are Your ML Experiments a Mess? Here’s the Fix appeared first on Towards Data Science.
DocOCR-Eval: A Correction-Based Framework for OCR Tool Selection Without Ground Truth
arXiv:2607.16203v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Document parsing is a foundational step for document understanding tasks such as visual question answering and key information extraction, as it transforms unstructured scanned images into structured representations by extracting textual, visual, and layout information. While numerous Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been developed for this purpose, selecting an appropriate document parsing solution for a given document collection remains challenging, particularly in label-scarce settings. In this work, we conduct a systematic evaluation of text recognition performance across a diverse set of OCR engines and state-of-the-art MLLMs on multiple scanned document benchmarks spanning different domains and languages. Motivated by the limited contextual reasoning capabilities of many OCR engines and the high cost of manual annotations, we propose DocOCR-Eval, an annotation-free evaluat