arXiv subjects

Anjila Budathoki

Publications and source records attributed to Anjila Budathoki.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Authority Bias in Conversational Search Engines for Academic Paper Recommendation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as conversational search engines for academic literature, yet whether they judge papers on content or on authority signals has not been tested causally. We investigate authority bias: systematic preference for papers based on author prestige, venue, and citations rather than content. Holding title and abstract constant, we vary authority metadata across three counterfactual conditions (original, flipped, boosted) over eight LLMs (five open-weight and three frontier closed-weight) in an in-context, single-turn, top-1 recommendation setting. Our experiments show that authority bias is substantial and directional, varies markedly across models, and is only partially addressable through prompt-level debiasing. We further document a say-do gap: debiasing instructions suppress authority mentions far faster than authority-driven flips, so surface auditing systematically underestimates behavioral bias.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Handoff Debt: The Rediscovery Cost When Coding Agents Take Over Interrupted Tasks

Coding-agent benchmarks evaluate whether a single uninterrupted agent can resolve a repository issue. Real software work is messier: tasks are interrupted, reassigned, reviewed, and resumed from partial states left by another agent or engineer. We study this missing dimension through handoff debt: the rediscovery cost imposed when a predecessor's work is opaque or incomplete. Our takeover protocol interrupts a coding agent at deterministic handoff points, freezes the repository, and evaluates successor agents under four handoff views: repository state only, raw trace, summary notes, and structured notes. Across 75 source tasks, the protocol generates 181 handoff-point tasks and 724 takeover runs per successor model. Across three successor models, context-bearing handoffs reduce median agent events by 20-59% and cumulative prompt tokens by 42-63% relative to repository-only takeover. Solved-rate effects are smaller and model-dependent, but efficiency gains are consistent. These findings suggest that coding-agent evaluation should report not only whether a task is solved, but also how costly that work is for another agent to resume.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

DistillLens: Symmetric Knowledge Distillation Through Logit Lens

Standard Knowledge Distillation (KD) compresses Large Language Models (LLMs) by optimizing final outputs, yet it typically treats the teacher's intermediate layer's thought process as a black box. While feature-based distillation attempts to bridge this gap, existing methods (e.g., MSE and asymmetric KL divergence) ignore the rich uncertainty profiles required for the final output. In this paper, we introduce DistillLens, a framework that symmetrically aligns the evolving thought processes of student and teacher models. By projecting intermediate hidden states into the vocabulary space via the Logit Lens, we enforce structural alignment using a symmetric divergence objective. Our analysis proves that this constraint imposes a dual-sided penalty, preventing both overconfidence and underconfidence while preserving the high-entropy information conduits essential for final deduction. Extensive experiments on GPT-2 and Llama architectures demonstrate that DistillLens consistently outperforms standard KD and feature-transfer baselines on diverse instruction-following benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/manishdhakal/DistillLens.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Adversarial Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language Models in Medical Image Segmentation

Adversarial attacks have been fairly explored for computer vision and vision-language models. However, the avenue of adversarial attack for the vision language segmentation models (VLSMs) is still under-explored, especially for medical image analysis. Thus, we have investigated the robustness of VLSMs against adversarial attacks for 2D medical images with different modalities with radiology, photography, and endoscopy. The main idea of this project was to assess the robustness of the fine-tuned VLSMs specially in the medical domain setting to address the high risk scenario. First, we have fine-tuned pre-trained VLSMs for medical image segmentation with adapters. Then, we have employed adversarial attacks -- projected gradient descent (PGD) and fast gradient sign method (FGSM) -- on that fine-tuned model to determine its robustness against adversaries. We have reported models' performance decline to analyze the adversaries' impact. The results exhibit significant drops in the DSC and IoU scores after the introduction of these adversaries. Furthermore, we also explored universal perturbation but were not able to find for the medical images. \footnote{https://github.com/anjilab/secure-private-ai}

cs.CV↗