2026-08-06 04:00 UTCOriginal source2 min readUpdated: 2026-08-06 08:33 UTC

Adversarially Robust Abductive Fusion of Pre-trained Transformer-based Perception Models

arXiv:2608.04190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying pre-trained perception models in novel environments degrades their accuracy under distributional shift, and assembling them alone does not recover it: combiners such as majority voting trade recall for precision and are brittle to coordinated failures. Prior metacognitive methods learn logical rules that flag a model's errors, but rely on hand-authored domain-knowledge cues (object-size priors, segmentation masks) that do not transfer to genuinely novel scenes. We show that this metacognitive layer can be learned without any domain knowledge by exploiting vector-space geometry: per-model Label Vector Pools (LVP), built from each model's own training embeddings, yield error-detection rules from the geometry of detections relative to training-determined prototypes, reaching parity with domain-knowledge rules to within $0.002$ every F1 on test set. Because the approach remains neurosymbolic, these geometric rules share a single logical framework and can still be complemented by domain knowledge when available. We frame the fusion of multiple imperfect ViT-based detectors as a consistency-based abduction problem solved at test time by an exact Integer Program (IP) and a polynomial-time heuristic. On an aerial-imagery benchmark of 15 weather-shifted test sets and six ViT detectors, our domain-knowledge-free layer matches the strongest majority-vote variant on clean data (within $0.005$ F1) and, unlike every majority-vote baseline, retains its performance under a coordinated label-flipping attack: at a $90\%$ flip rate it averages $0.42$ F1 versus $0.35$ for MV-Plurality (a $22\%$ relative gain) and attains the highest F1 on \emph{every} test set once the flip rate exceeds $0.4$

SourcearXiv AIAuthor: Mario Leiva, Yue Ma, Qinru Qiu, Gerardo Simari, Paulo Shakarian

-->

[Submitted on 4 Aug 2026]

Title:Adversarially Robust Abductive Fusion of Pre-trained Transformer-based Perception Models

View a PDF of the paper titled Adversarially Robust Abductive Fusion of Pre-trained Transformer-based Perception Models, by Mario Leiva and 4 other authors

View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract:Deploying pre-trained perception models in novel environments degrades their accuracy under distributional shift, and assembling them alone does not recover it: combiners such as majority voting trade recall for precision and are brittle to coordinated failures. Prior metacognitive methods learn logical rules that flag a model's errors, but rely on hand-authored domain-knowledge cues (object-size priors, segmentation masks) that do not transfer to genuinely novel scenes. We show that this metacognitive layer can be learned without any domain knowledge by exploiting vector-space geometry: per-model Label Vector Pools (LVP), built from each model's own training embeddings, yield error-detection rules from the geometry of detections relative to training-determined prototypes, reaching parity with domain-knowledge rules to within $0.002$ every F1 on test set. Because the approach remains neurosymbolic, these geometric rules share a single logical framework and can still be complemented by domain knowledge when available. We frame the fusion of multiple imperfect ViT-based detectors as a consistency-based abduction problem solved at test time by an exact Integer Program (IP) and a polynomial-time heuristic. On an aerial-imagery benchmark of 15 weather-shifted test sets and six ViT detectors, our domain-knowledge-free layer matches the strongest majority-vote variant on clean data (within $0.005$ F1) and, unlike every majority-vote baseline, retains its performance under a coordinated label-flipping attack: at a $90\%$ flip rate it averages $0.42$ F1 versus $0.35$ for MV-Plurality (a $22\%$ relative gain) and attains the highest F1 on \emph{every} test set once the flip rate exceeds $0.4$

Subjects:

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO)

Cite as: arXiv:2608.04190 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.04190v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.04190

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Mario Leiva [view email] [v1] Tue, 4 Aug 2026 19:46:57 UTC (6,917 KB)

Full-text links:

Access Paper:

View a PDF of the paper titled Adversarially Robust Abductive Fusion of Pre-trained Transformer-based Perception Models, by Mario Leiva and 4 other authors

View PDF

HTML (experimental)

TeX Source

view license

Current browse context:

cs.AI

new | recent | 2026-08

Change to browse by:

cs cs.CV cs.LG cs.LO

References & Citations

NASA ADS

Google Scholar

Semantic Scholar

Data provided by:

Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)

Connected Papers Toggle

Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)

Litmaps Toggle

Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)

scite.ai Toggle

scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)

Links to Code Toggle

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)

DagsHub Toggle

DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)

GotitPub Toggle

Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)

Huggingface Toggle

Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)

ScienceCast Toggle

ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Replicate Toggle

Replicate (What is Replicate?)

Spaces Toggle

Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)

Spaces Toggle

TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)