arXiv:2609.12116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Editing a knowledge graph embedding (KGE) model to promote a desired answer can displace correct answers from the returned list. Locality tests based only on facts that reuse the edited parameter can miss this ranking effect. We introduce a common rank-displacement audit at three scopes: facts supported by the edited parameter, other correct answers to the target query, and correct answers across queries with the same relation. We also derive dimensional and geometric conditions for an update to improve the target while exactly preserving selected scores. On FB15k-237 with DistMult and ComplEx, direct promotion always moves the target into the top ten, but does so without damage in only 23.0--23.2\% of edits. Strict preservation causes no measured damage, yet succeeds in only 1.3--1.4\%. Support-regularized entity editing gives the highest joint success, 36.3--37.7\%, while rank-truncated preservation reaches 32.8--34.7\% and reduces the mean number of displaced answers from about 14 to 1.2. Experiments across dimensions, scorers, ranking conventions, and a learned editor show that locality depends on both the protected scope and the editing mechanism. KGE editing should therefore report correction success together with the incidence and severity of rank displacement.

arXiv:2609.00067v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: External text can override conflicting image evidence in multimodal large language models, a failure we call multimodal contextual sycophancy. We introduce a 998-case diagnostic that independently varies visual evidence, commonsense priors, and external text, and probe when this failure arises by moving the information boundary around a context-blind visual witness. On abnormal images paired with Gemini-generated false text, GPT-5.1 scores 7.9% under joint conditioning, 49.7% when the context-blind witness report is scored directly, 63.7% under a matched two-call witness-arbiter pipeline that exposes the witness to the text, and 84.2% under System-2 Visual Arbitration (S2VA), which withholds the text from the witness. Across six models, S2VA improves over the direct witness report by 19.7 to 44.1 points, with all paired 95% confidence intervals excluding zero. The best information boundary is not uniform: textual context scaffolds some models, and a GPT-4o-regenerated subset changes the relative ordering of joint conditioning, Witness-Only, and S2VA. Contextual sycophancy is therefore sensitive to when text is introduced, as well as to the model and context source.

arXiv:2510.15514v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) relies on LLM judges as preference measurement instruments, yet these instruments are fundamentally limited by random measurement errors -- stochastic fluctuations that manifest as preference cycles (e.g., $A \succ B \succ C \succ A$), occurring in 5-9% of evaluations across state-of-the-art models. While repeated sampling mitigates noise by averaging multiple judgments, it treats each comparison in isolation and fails to exploit the structural constraints that distinguish systematic signals from random noise. We introduce Topological Consensus Rewards (TCR), a framework that leverages transitivity as a denoising mechanism via topological majority voting: systematic signals reinforce each other through transitive chains, while random errors cluster into topologically exposed cycles. TCR approximates the Maximum Acyclic Subgraph to filter stochastic noise from preference signals. We also propose Cycle Incidence Rate (CIR) as a diagnostic metric that measures the proportion of samples containing preference cycles. Under our noise model, these cycles arise primarily from stochastic measurement errors rather than genuine intransitivity. Experiments on Arena-Hard, MT-Bench, and WritingBench demonstrate that TCR consistently outperforms pairwise baselines and classical ranking algorithms, while exhibiting robust performance across different judge models.