arXiv subjects

Qianpu Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Qianpu Chen.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Now You See the Hate: Adaptive View Retrieval for Hidden Hateful Illusions

Hateful optical illusions expose a serious gap in current multimodal safety systems. On original-view hateful illusions, previous work shows that six moderation classifiers achieve at most 20.9 to 24.5% accuracy and nine state-of-the-art VLMs remain at or below 10.2% with illusion-aware prompting, leaving most hidden hate undetected. We formulate hidden hateful illusion detection as a perceptual retrieval problem and propose Adaptive View Retrieval. This retrieve-and-calibrate framework assembles a complementary view bank for the image and hidden-message templates, adaptively selects which views to trust, retrieves hidden-message identities, and calibrates whether the recovered evidence is harmful. On HatefulIllusion with a frozen CLIP encoder, Adaptive View Retrieval reaches 93.2% balanced accuracy on the held-out test split. It substantially outperforms original-view baselines and fixed single-transform filters across hate slangs, hate symbols, and visibility levels. The same design also surpasses official fine-tuned CLIP baselines, matches or exceeds human performance on IllusionMNIST, IllusionFashionMNIST, and IllusionAnimals, and outperforms zoom-out preprocessing on HC-Bench under the SemVink protocol. Together, these results show that robust multimodal moderation requires recovering hidden meaning before deciding whether it is harmful.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

In Trust We Survive: Emergent Trust Learning

We introduce Emergent Trust Learning (ETL), a lightweight, trust-based control algorithm that can be plugged into existing AI agents. It enables these to reach cooperation in competitive game environments under shared resources. Each agent maintains a compact internal trust state, which modulates memory, exploration, and action selection. ETL requires only individual rewards and local observations and incurs negligible computational and communication overhead. We evaluate ETL in three environments: In a grid-based resource world, trust-based agents reduce conflicts and prevent long-term resource depletion while achieving competitive individual returns. In a hierarchical Tower environment with strong social dilemmas and randomised floor assignments, ETL sustains high survival rates and recovers cooperation even after extended phases of enforced greed. In the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, the algorithm generalises to a strategic meta-game, maintaining cooperation with reciprocal opponents while avoiding long-term exploitation by defectors. Code will be released upon publication.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

When Visual Evidence is Ambiguous: Pareidolia as a Diagnostic Probe for Vision Models

When visual evidence is ambiguous, vision models must decide how to interpret face-like patterns. Face pareidolia, the perception of faces in non-face objects, provides a controlled probe of such decisions. We introduce a diagnostic framework that analyzes detection, localization, uncertainty and bias across class, difficulty and emotion. We evaluate six models spanning four representational regimes: vision-language models (VLMs; CLIP-B/32, CLIP-L/14, LLaVA-1.5-7B), pure vision classification (ViT), object detection (YOLOv8), and face detection (RetinaFace). Our results reveal that uncertainty and bias are decoupled: low uncertainty can signal either safe suppression, as in detectors, or extreme over-interpretation, as in VLMs. VLMs exhibit semantic overactivation, systematically interpreting ambiguous non-human regions as Human, with LLaVA over-calling on 73% of non-human pareidolic images, especially for negative emotions. ViT instead follows an uncertainty-as-abstention strategy, remaining diffuse yet largely unbiased. Detection-based models achieve low bias through conservative priors that suppress pareidolia responses even when localization is controlled. Together, these results show that behavior under ambiguity is governed more by representation than thresholds, establishing face pareidolia as a diagnostic of semantic robustness and a source of ambiguity-aware hard negatives for vision models. Code will be released upon publication.

cs.CV↗