Xiaolong Sun, Qichao Wang, Hangyu Li +1cs.AI cs.CV
Multimodal product models can complete missing e-commerce attributes, yet current methods still optimize attribute-answer accuracy without verifying visual support, conflate transient prediction with persistent index admission, and lack explicit risk control over factually incorrect or visually unsupported values. We address these gaps with Counterfactual Visual Evidence-Guided Selective Attribute Indexing (CVE-SAI), which first infers and freezes an ontology-constrained candidate from the primary image and attribute question without catalog text, and then decides whether that candidate should enter the index. Focus-Zone Distortion (FZD) constructs an attribute-specific visual-dependence proxy through a controlled counterfactual intervention, and Evidence-Guided Attention Redistribution (EGAR) uses the proxy to refine ontology-constrained scoring. The canonical candidate is frozen before evidence necessity, evidence retention, nuisance-transformation stability, and candidate-specific catalog-text conflict audits; catalog text can only tighten admission and cannot revise the candidate. Independent family-level calibration selects one policy with a simultaneous one-sided finite-sample bound under a 5% unsafe-admission budget. Experiments on five visual attributes derived from Amazon Berkeley Objects show that CVE-SAI improves attribute inference and evidence localization, achieves the highest certified admission coverage under the shared risk protocol, and yields the strongest controlled retrieval performance with the lowest unsafe auto-induced exposure among automatic-admission systems. Separating inference from admission therefore enables visually supported attribute completion to improve retrieval while limiting persistent index contamination.
Reusable skills are becoming a standard interface for extending language agents with task procedures. Yet evaluators usually infer skill use from visible reasoning or the agent's own attribution. These signals show what the agent appears to use, not whether the skill changed its decision. We ask whether skill-augmented agents exhibit a \textbf{Reasoning Backroom}, a systematic gap between stated skill use and intervention-measured influence. We introduce BACKTRACE, an evaluation framework that pairs each skill-conditioned answer with a matched no-skill counterfactual, intervenes on skill meaning, wording, identity, content, and assignment, and elicits attribution only after the answer is committed. We instantiate the framework as BACKROOMBench, a verified testbed spanning controlled logic and competition mathematics, multiple skill conditions, single-agent and multi-agent settings, and diverse model families. Our evaluation reveals a pervasive provenance failure. Across models and domains, stated skill use often remains stable while causal reliance and signed utility vary, producing both silent uptake and performative use. Behavioral effects follow procedural content more reliably than displayed skill identity, whereas stated attributions respond strongly to artifact availability. Observational detectors based on direct skill-use claims, text mentions, trace similarity, and an LLM judge do not identify which decisions actually depend on the skill. In multi-agent systems, skill influence can survive communication even after its source is lost, while no-skill teams still name skills and sources that were never supplied. These findings establish the Reasoning Backroom as a general AI provenance problem whose audit requires intervention.
The rapid advancement of AI-generated videos poses increasing security risks and calls for robust detectors with strong cross-domain generalization. Although existing methods achieve promising results under in-domain evaluation, their performance often degrades substantially when tested on unseen generators. A key reason is shortcut learning, where detectors rely on domain-specific spurious cues, such as generator-dependent fingerprints and generation styles, instead of intrinsic forgery traces. To address this issue, we propose G2VD, a Generalizable AI-Generated Video Detection framework based on counterfactual intervention and causal disentanglement. First, G2VD introduces a counterfactual intervention pipeline (CFIPipeline) that generates controlled counterfactual samples via variational autoencoders (VAEs), followed by frequency-domain and pixel-domain alignment, thereby encouraging the detector to focus on generator-intrinsic cues. Building on this intervention process, we further design a causal disentanglement classifier consisting of two domain-anchored branches with distinct classification objectives, combined with an HSIC-based independence constraint to encourage the separation of task-relevant cues from domain-specific bias. Across four public datasets, G2VD shows strong average cross-domain performance and consistent gains over matched backbones. On the challenging GenVidBench cross-domain setting, it exceeds 90% accuracy and reaches an AUC close to 0.95. Notably, this performance is obtained using only 10% of the original training data. The code is available at https://github.com/dumeng98/G2VD.
CLIP-style contrastive pretraining typically curates web-scale image-text pairs using sample-level filtering signals, often based on pair-level alignment. We show that this signal saturates: once coarse mismatches are removed, stricter global filtering no longer tracks the compositional supervision provided by the retained captions. The reason is structural - a global score conflates whether a pair is broadly plausible with whether the individual object, attribute, and relation phrases inside the caption materially support the image-text match. The latter is what compositional generalization demands, yet pair-level filters are blind to it. We address this with Counterfactual Phrase Intervention (CPI), a phrase-level curation framework that converts controlled nonce-token substitutions into image-conditioned phrase-sensitivity scores. CPI uses global alignment only for coarse mismatch removal, then ranks the surviving pool by whether caption phrases measurably affect the image-text score under controlled substitution. We frame CPI as a first-order phrase-sensitivity signal rather than a grounding or identification result, and evaluate it at CC3M scale. Ranking by this signal yields a 50%-data subset that improves VL-CheckList-VG Relation by +1.91 over the full-data baseline and +1.00 over alignment-only filtering at matched budget, while improving SugarCrepe overall and preserving general transfer. CPI is loss-orthogonal: applied unchanged to NegCLIP, it further improves VL-CheckList-VG Relation by +3.84, with additional CE-CLIP gains in the main text.