On the Fundamental Limits of Prefill-Based Decoding Length PredictionThis paper derives bounds on predicting an LLM's decode length from prefill-phase hidden states, a primitive for inference scheduling. It models decoding as a stopped stochastic process, giving per-prompt normality and an affine variance law Ο=Ξ±ΞΌ+b. Predictors (MLP, EGTP, FiLM, soft-label, Mixture-of-Experts) converge near the bound, so system error dominates model error. It proposes fixing model, data and sampling in benchmarks and reporting relative-error metrics.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π§ AI
Beyond the Event Horizon of Keccak, Extending the Observation from 2011 and applicationsBeyond the Event Horizon of Keccak extends a 2011 observation that a path in the Keccak sponge from a zero-capacity state back to one yields infinite second-preimage families. Three theorems cover loops from any capacity value x, k-block loops and cycles, and Joux-style multicollisions with search cost independent of k. Verified examples run on Keccak-f[200] and Keccak-f[1600] with c=32; it also proposes bridge-based protocols.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 28 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Data Scaling Laws in Stereo Matching: From In-domain Fitting to Cross-domain GeneralizationThis paper studies data scaling laws in stereo matching and releases XStereo, a realistic synthetic dataset of 200 thousand samples. In-domain training on five large datasets shows two regimes: a standard power law, then saturation, with a transition point roughly fixed for a given model. Cross-domain performance depends only weakly on source data scale, and distribution and coverage diversity reduce domain gaps more.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026π§ AI
Tractable, Not Truncated: Colored-Noise TRNG Security via Fractional Brownian MotionThis ePrint paper models oscillator-based TRNG phase noise, both white and flicker, as fractional Brownian motion. It proves a quasi-renewal property that gives closed-form worst-case min-entropy and sampling requirements, and extends spectral and Allan-variance analysis so noise parameters come from a single timing trace. FPGA and ASIC experiments show flicker noise accounts for over 99% of uncertainty at a 0.99 min-entropy target, allowing a bitrate two to three orders of magnitude higher.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
VideoLVR: Latent Visual Reasoning over Grounded Video EvidenceVideoLVR is a method that lets video multimodal LLMs build latent visual evidence from local regions at relevant moments and reason over it interleaved with text tokens. A visual token prediction objective, defined over a vocabulary derived from the input video, supervises the latents. It extends to reinforcement learning with sampled visual tokens as actions and final-answer rewards, and improves fine-grained video benchmarks without much context growth.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π§ AI- When Visual Evidence Is Insufficient: How Instructions, Post-Training, and Internal Activations Shape Refusal in Multimodal Language Models
This paper studies how multimodal LLMs refuse questions that an image cannot answer, using the MoHoBench benchmark on three MLLMs. It varies the meaning and placement of refusal instructions, compares supervised and preference-based post-training, and intervenes on a refusal-related activation direction. Instructions change refusal at the sample level in ways aggregate rates hide. Post-training raises refusal most but can mix refusal with attempted answers. Activation intervention gives smaller, transferable changes.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π§ AI
p-DCIM: A 28nm Probabilistic SRAM DCIM based Ising Machine for Near-Memory Context Selection in LLM-RAG Pipelinep-DCIM is a 28 nm SRAM digital compute-in-memory macro (0.16 mm2, 0.41 mW) that works as an Ising machine for RAG evidence selection. Selection is cast as a QUBO problem, and the same MAC datapath computes embedding similarities and annealing steps. Replacing LLM reranking with it gives a selection-energy estimate over six orders of magnitude lower and cuts total energy per query by 67%, with comparable token-level F1 on the evaluated examples.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π§ AI
Unshuffling Fisher-Yates: Practical Recovery of Length-128 Permutations and Application to ML-DSAPaper (IACR ePrint 2026/2658) presenting a single-trace side-channel attack on a software Fisher-Yates shuffle of length 128, the butterfly count in one ML-DSA NTT layer. It removes rejection-sampling timing variation, extracts Hamming weight and identity leakage, and enumerates likely permutations with constraint programming. On a shuffled ML-DSA-44 NTT it recovers secret polynomial s1, fully or up to a few coefficients.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Falcon Key Recovery from Joint Sampler LeakagesFalcon Key Recovery from Joint Sampler Leakages is an ePrint paper presenting a power side-channel attack on Falcon and FN-DSA that fuses three SamplerZ leakages (exponent class of the center, sign bit, proposal magnitude). It turns them into slab and halfspace constraints solved by softplus interval regression, with no LLL or BKZ. On PQClean Falcon-512 (ARM Cortex-M4) it recovered all 50 keys with at most 34 signatures; on c-fn-dsa it recovered 38 of 50 keys within 200 signatures.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
When Algebraic Structure Meets Too Many Hints"When Algebraic Structure Meets Too Many Hints" is an ePrint paper (2026/2654) arguing that DDGR hint classes and too-many-hints thresholds are not standalone side-channel security metrics. In synthetic Kyber-512 experiments, NTT-domain residues recover the full secret with about half the hints the uniform mod-q bound predicts. Finite-precision FFT samples need 25% to 55% of the budget for uniform perfect hints. No new attack optimizations are proposed.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 27 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Non-profiled Single-Trace ML-DSA Secret Key Recovery by Horizontal Distribution AnalysisNon-profiled single-trace side-channel attack on ML-DSA-65 (Dilithium) running on ARM Cortex-M4, by Linus Backlund and Elena Dubrova (KTH). It compares observed sample distributions with expected Hamming weight leakage using a Gaussian mixture model, and stacks partitioned trace segments for multiple observations. Information-set decoding corrects misclassifications; with a 2^70 enumeration budget, the full secret key is recovered from one trace in 99% of attacks, using secret key unpacking as the attack point.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Subexponential Algorithms for LWE via Rejection Sampling on SuperlatticesSubexponential Algorithms for LWE via Rejection Sampling on Superlattices is an ePrint paper by Ligeng Fan, Changpeng Shao, Hongbo Li and Dingkang Wang. It extends the Ducas, Engelberts and Loyer superlattice framework to give a provable classical search-LWE algorithm for prime q in [n^2, 2n^2], using m=4n samples and time and space exp(O(n/ln ln n)). A second variant runs in 2^((1/2+o(1))n/ln R) for general parameters. It resolves a gap left by Kirchner and Fouque.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Decision Attacks on Known-Covariance Ring-LWE via Public Gram DeterminantsAnis Bkakria's ePrint 2026/2638 gives polynomial-time decision attacks on Known-Covariance Ring-LWE (KCov-RLWE), the assumption Micciancio and Suhl introduced for simulation-secure threshold encryption. The public sample and covariance hint form a bordered Gram matrix whose determinant leaks a residual that differs between real and uniform samples. The attacks cover broad prime-modulus families at ring rank one and transfer to composite moduli with an odd prime divisor. Power-of-two moduli are not covered, and the paper does not break the full threshold-encryption scheme.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Intervention-Certified Amplification: A Validity Gate for $Ο$-Weighted Post-TrainingIntervention-Certified Amplification (ICA) is a validity gate for sigma-weighted hybrid SFT/RL post-training. The paper shows that DIAA, a per-sample sigma-weighted hybrid, emits unexecuted tool-integrated reasoning on 29% of MATH-500 prompts (three times vanilla GRPO) even with Python fences removed from its anchor. ICA gates sigma with paired-rollout evidence, cutting TIR to 13.8% (frozen) and 11.2% (online) and raising accuracy from 47.5% to 48.7% and 49.3%. It transfers to GSM8K.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026π§ AI
An actively trained neural operator for near-explicit atmospheric chemistryFNO-MoE is a Fourier neural operator with a mixture of experts that predicts the full near-explicit chemical state (Master Chemical Mechanism, thousands of species) over 30 minutes in one call. Expert disagreement selects the most informative box-model simulations, so active sampling beats random or evenly spread sampling at equal cost. Fine-tuning on longer trajectories keeps multi-hour runs stable, and the emulator runs orders of magnitude faster than the numerical solver.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026π§ AI
DRIVE: Fine-tuning via Data Contribution- and Diversity-aware Weighting with Prior RegularizationDRIVE is a per-sample weighting framework for single-stage fine-tuning when the source pre-training data is unavailable. It uses one differentiable objective: Shapley additivity splits each sample's contribution into anti-forgetting and adaptation parts, a covariance-based diversity term reshapes them, and a sample-characteristic prior stabilizes them. The authors prove better stability-plasticity guarantees than existing weighting schemes and report better performance, faster convergence and more robustness.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
Efficient Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection via Signal-Aware Adaptive Fusion (SAAF)Signal-Aware Adaptive Fusion (SAAF) is a training-free zero-shot video anomaly detection framework that cuts the compute cost of vision-language models. It combines a dual-signal sampler (frame-to-frame delta and rolling-context drift in embedding space, OR-gated with EMA thresholds), a threshold-gated cascade from frame-level to video-level analysis, and signal-aware score fusion. It reports AUC-ROC of 92.07% on XD-Violence, 86.70% on MSAD and 80.54% on ShanghaiTech, at 2.2x to 2.6x the throughput of the prior best zero-shot method.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
Sharpness-aware Orthogonalized Momentum AlgorithmsSOMA (Sharpness-aware Orthogonalized Momentum Algorithm) combines sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) with the Muon optimizer for LLM training. It avoids SAM's extra gradient computation by using stale, purely stochastic gradient noise as the adversarial perturbation. The authors prove sample complexity does not depend on perturbation direction, study robustness to heavy-tailed gradient noise, and test SOMA against post-training quantization degradation and catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
For Thirty Pieces of Silver: Overcoming Non-IID via ZKP Sample-Level Auditing and Forcing Attackers into Traitors in Federated LearningPreprint (IACR ePrint 2026/2611) proposing a federated learning defense that replaces gradient detection with zero-knowledge-proof sample-level audits of client datasets. A staking mechanism forces attackers to train on discovered poisoned samples with flipped labels, producing counter-gradients that remove the backdoor without knowing the trigger. ZKP commitments lock the training data, which blocks adaptive attacks and gradient tampering. On CIFAR-10 under Dir(0.1) non-IID, it holds attack success rate below 6% against distributed backdoor and edge-case attacks.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Tampered ML: Evaluating LLM Judgment of Machine Learning ResearchTampered ML is a benchmark of 1,858 item-pairs, each pairing an experiment proposal reconstructed from a published ML paper with a minimally edited version that adds a targeted methodological flaw. Models must pick the sounder proposal in both presentation orders. A human study estimates 86% of items are valid (95% CI 81-91%). Opus 5 reaches 77.9% accuracy, and models are sensitive to order and favor flawed designs that look more specific, transparent, or conventional.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
Drift Says When, Budget Says How Much: Rate-Controlled KV Re-selection for Long-Form Multimodal GenerationRate-Controlled Refresh (RCR) is a KV cache re-selection method for multimodal LLMs in long-form generation. Attention drift decides when and where to re-select visual tokens, and a per-sample controller sets how often. RCR beats InfiniGen by 1.6-3.8 ROUGE-L points on five of six model-task settings and stays within 1.7 points of exact per-step re-selection. On video description, where drift is homogeneous, it no longer beats a fixed threshold.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ AI
The Good, the Bad, and the Noisy: A Systematic Analysis of Ring-Oscillator-Based Noise GeneratorsThis IACR ePrint paper (2026/2597) systematically compares ring-oscillator-based additive noise generators, a hiding countermeasure against side-channel attacks. Experiments show many existing designs ignore output amplification and the risk of the noise being filtered out, so they lower signal-to-noise ratio too little. The authors give a guideline on inverter chain length, output amplification and frequency randomization, and build a tailored generator for an AES implementation that outperforms prior designs.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Getting to the right root: radical isogenies of every degreeThomas Decru's ePrint 2026/2595 proves a corrected version of radical isogeny formulae for every Nβ₯4, odd and even, over fields of characteristic coprime to 2N. It settles the sign choice for even N so that 2-isogeny walks stay on the volcano surface. One radical step costs about 12.5N multiplications and one exponentiation, and the paper shows how to evaluate radical isogenies on points, so a CSIDH class group action needs no torsion point sampling.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Sotto Maschera: Masking the Sota-Voce Fixed-Weight Vector SamplingSotto Maschera is a masked implementation of the Sota Voce sparse fixed-weight vector sampler (Sota support sampler and MWSupport conversion) for embedded devices, protecting against power side-channel attacks. It bitslices sorting, merging and compaction and masks only in the Boolean domain, avoiding slow conversions. TVLA evaluations show no leakage, and HQC runs up to 45x faster than previous masked work.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Rounded Gaussians are Discrete GaussiansRounded Gaussians are Discrete Gaussians is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2583) by Corentin Jeudy. It shows that setting the rounded Gaussian parameter to sigma = s - 1/(24s) gives a distribution within RΓ©nyi divergence 1 + O(1/s^8) of a discrete Gaussian of parameter s. Lattice schemes can then use the simple, constant-time-friendly, low-memory rounded sampler while analyzing security against an ideal discrete Gaussian.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
HAETAE on a Diet: Less Stack, Less Time on Low-End MicrocontrollersThis ePrint paper presents an optimized HAETAE implementation, a lattice-based post-quantum signature scheme, for Cortex-M4, Cortex-M3, MSP430 and AVR. It keeps polynomials in 16 bits, shares buffers between objects with disjoint lifetimes, and replays Gaussian samples instead of regenerating them. On an ATmega2560, HAETAE-2 key generation, signing and verification run in 8,070 B of SRAM. Stack use drops up to 34% and signing is 1.18-2.51x faster than Low-Stack HAETAE.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Broadcast and Trace from Lattices: Collusion-Resistant and Publicly TraceableBroadcast and Trace from Lattices is a 2026 ePrint preprint by Jeffrey Champion. It builds collusion-resistant broadcast and trace with public tracing from attribute-based encryption with succinct ciphertexts and lockable obfuscation, both known from decomposed LWE. Ciphertexts are sqrt(N)Β·poly(Ξ», log N) in size, with poly(Ξ», log N) keys. It is the first such scheme based on a simple, instance-independent lattice assumption.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
InterWebCoder: Learning Interactive Webpage Generation from Executable Tests via Reinforcement LearningInterWebCoder is a framework for interactive webpage code generation by multimodal LLMs. It synthesizes self-contained webpages with executable test scripts from recorded interaction trajectories, repairs failures using runtime evidence, then trains with test-ID-weighted SFT and GRPO using test pass rates and visual similarity as rewards. The pipeline yields 1,736 verified samples from 2,058 tasks. A 9B model scores 48.54 on IWR-Bench and 48.42 on Vision2Web, and reward latency drops over 97%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π§ AI
Agentic Ensemble with Vision-Language Models for Visual Anomaly DetectionAnomalyAgent is a post-training fusion framework for visual anomaly detection that ensembles pretrained detectors. It aligns scores and anomaly maps, summarizes disagreement, and treats fusion as a choice among score actions and map actions. A constrained vision-language model inspects high-conflict samples and picks the actions. It beats equal-weight fusion and gets the best mean image AUROC and pixel AP among compared fusion methods on MVTec AD and VisA.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π§ AI
DIVE: Benchmarking Full-Duplex Interaction with Visual Engagement in Continuous StreamsDIVE is a benchmark for full-duplex interaction with visual engagement in continuous audio/video streams. It has 525 human-annotated samples across six tasks in three scenarios: proactive intervention, continuous engagement and interaction coordination. Evaluated real-time models reach sub-second average latency, but window response rates stay at or below 53.77%, and adapting ongoing responses to new information is hardest.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π§ AI
A Systematic Evaluation of Fault Attacks and Countermeasures on ML-DSA Rejection SamplingSystematic evaluation of fault attacks on ML-DSA (FIPS 204) rejection sampling and of proposed countermeasures. It proves the "third rejection test" of patent WO2025261784A1 re-verifies what check 2 already guarantees, and shows that 30,000 fault injections never detect a skipped z-norm check. The author fully recovers s1 against a third-check-protected implementation under randomized signing. Third check and sign-then-verify are complementary; overhead is 0.04β0.05% on x86-64 and 0.83% on Cortex-M4 for the third check.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Concerns in Benchmarking Jailbreaks: An Empirical Study of Attack Success RatesThis arXiv paper tests eight jailbreak attacks against three open-weight language models under three evaluation procedures. Low-resource language attacks score 96.0% mean ASR under keyword matching but 2.7% under a Qwen3 judge using StrongREJECT instructions. At Ollama's default temperature of 0.8, 100 samples of an unchanged request give 100% ASR by keywords and 50% by the judge. The authors recommend explicit success definitions, matched response budgets, validated evaluators and cumulative-failure reporting.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Concerns in Benchmarking Jailbreaks: An Empirical Study of Attack Success RatesConcerns in Benchmarking Jailbreaks is an October 2026 arXiv study of eight jailbreak attacks on three open-weight models under three evaluation procedures. Low-resource language attacks score 96.0% ASR by keyword matching but 2.7% under a Qwen3 evaluator using StrongREJECT instructions. Attack rankings flip with attempt budgets, and 100 samples at Ollama's default temperature 0.8 give 100% ASR by keywords, 50% by the evaluator.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π§ AI
Evasive Inner Product Functional Encryption Is Broken TooEvasive Inner Product Functional Encryption Is Broken Too is a 2026 ePrint paper by Agrawal, Modi, Yadav and Yamada. It gives a counterexample showing the evasive IPFE assumption of Hsieh, Lin and Luo (Eurocrypt 2024) is false in full generality. The attack extends the 2025 PRFE counterexample and needs only the weak inner product functionality, not pseudorandom function computation. The authors conclude that letting the adversary choose unrestricted private coins breaks the Evasive LWE family.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
From if to Oops: Turning a conditional into a key-recovery oracleThe paper presents a fault attack on deterministic CSIDH and OSIDH-LD. Forcing the lane-selection mask to zero (for example by skipping one instruction) makes output changes reveal whether a secret exponent reaches a threshold. Binary search then recovers the full key in at most 297 queries for OSIDH-LD and 222 for deterministic CSIDH with CSIDH-512-sized keys. Full OSIDH-LD keys were recovered in software fault simulation, and a ChipWhisperer-Lite skipped the target instruction with probability at least 0.94. The authors argue fault resistance requires giving up determinism and propose randomization countermeasures.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Efficient and Compact High-order Masking Raccoon on Memory Constrained DevicesThe paper presents the first efficient, compact implementation of high-order masked Raccoon (lattice-based signature, CRYPTO 2024) on ARM Cortex-M4, up to 32 masking orders. It uses 3+3+3 layer-merged 32-bit NTT/INTT with lazy reduction, a negative double Montgomery reduction, and one-shot SHAKE256 sampling (at least 1.80x faster). It beats the reference by 1.85x-2.25x and masked Dilithium3 at orders 2, 4 and 8. Second-order leakage tests show DPA resistance once micro-architectural transitional leakage is mitigated.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Post-Quantum Stateless Steganography & MTU Bounds: Bridging P2P Censorship Resistance to Quantum NetworksForum announcement of a Zenodo preprint on post-quantum migration for censorship-resistant P2P steganographic tunnels. It argues that ML-KEM's prime modulus (q=3329) makes naive bit-packed ciphertexts statistically distinguishable from uniform noise, which gives a cheap passive DPI distinguisher. It also argues that composite PQ 0-RTT envelopes over 4.4 KB force fragmentation, which requires stateful reassembly before AEAD verification and reopens memory-exhaustion DoS in eBPF/XDP filters. Proposed fixes are algebraic uniformization (LWR lattices or inverse rejection sampling), sub-MTU hybrid or pure-PQ envelopes (Falcon-512, signcryption), and FujisakiβOkamoto implicit rejection for constant-time silent drops. Aimed at Ethereum validator, libp2p and RPC transports facing harvest-now-decrypt-later threats.
ethereum-magicians.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Eο¬cient Fixed-Point Implementation of MitakaPresents a fixed-point C implementation of the Mitaka signing algorithm, a simpler, parallelizable Falcon (FN-DSA) variant. It replaces MitakaZ's wide integral Gram root decomposition with a fixed-point square Cholesky decomposition, which cuts the cost of integer Gaussian sampling, and proves bounds on intermediate values and representation errors without empirical assumptions. Signing averages 361 kcycles (Mitaka-512) and 707 kcycles (Mitaka-1024) on AVX2, and 4.0 and 7.8 Mcycles on an STM32F411 Cortex-M4F. This makes floating-point-free lattice signatures practical on constrained devices.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Zippel: A Language, Compiler, Runtime, and Analyzer for ZK Proof SystemsZippel is a language, compiler, runtime and analyzer for writing zero-knowledge proof systems in syntax close to the pseudocode in cryptography papers. Its type system and runtime remove vulnerability classes by construction, for example by synchronizing transcripts automatically and applying the FiatβShamir transform correctly. Its static analyses check completeness and soundness from the protocol description alone. The authors implemented 35 proof systems, including Sumcheck, Schnorr, KZG, Groth16, Bulletproofs, Hyrax, Spartan, Dory, HyperPlonk, DeKART and Pari. They report performance competitive with hand-written multi-core implementations.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
CHAMP: Cayley HAshing with Matrix ProductsCHAMP is a Cayley hash function that hashes binary strings by mapping each bit to a 2x2 matrix over a finite field and multiplying the matrices. The product's semigroup structure gives the hash homomorphic properties. The authors (Demin, Ovchinnikov, Shpilrain) discuss its collision resistance, implementation and performance. Cayley-style hashes have a history of structural attacks, so the security analysis is what a cryptographer would check.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Many Biases, One Circuit: Post-Training Tunes a Pretrained Cue-Routing MechanismMany Biases, One Circuit is a October 2026 arXiv paper that traces attention heads behind cue-following (for example "I think the answer is B") through two post-training pipelines. Four cue types share a few heads already present in pretrained models. About 200 generic assistant examples activate them in chat format, and the final RL stage strengthens cue effects. Swapping attention patterns of six middle layers between Tulu-3-8B and OLMo-2-7B checkpoints moves cue effects most of the way.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ AI
Shorter Hash-Based Signatures via Guarded Sharing in a DAG ModelProposes "guarded sharing", a technique that moves few-time signatures in SPHINCS-style stateless hash-based schemes from a tree model to a DAG model. Combined with bucket thinning, hash chains and rejection sampling, it yields BGS-CC, which improves on the prior best few-time scheme BPORS-C+BFP. For 128-bit security and a use quota of Q=2^24 it gives 2,228-byte signatures, the first SPHINCS-based stateless signature shorter than ML-DSA-44's 2,420 bytes. This matters for PQ migration because signature size is the main drawback of SLH-DSA.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Grounding Generative Verification in 3D ContentThe paper introduces 3DVerifierBench, a 10-task benchmark for generative verification of 3D content. It scores accept/reject decisions, rejection explanations, and responses to controlled changes in specifications and candidates. A human study shows a 21.6-point gap to the strongest tested model, GPT-6 Astra. The authors also build a pipeline of multi-view fact extraction, controlled 3D editing and native annotations. It yields 14,126 training examples with contradiction explanations and linked counterfactuals. Verification-guided selection raises complete factual success from 26.7% to 90.0% with oracle selection over sixteen candidates, and human-guided recursive refinement satisfies all seven requirements for every input in an eight-input study.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
GhostFaceMPC: Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition with Multi-Party ComputationGhostFaceMPC is presented as the first end-to-end face recognition system that runs both the deep CNN feature extractor and the matching step under secure multi-party computation. Raw images and biometric embeddings are never exposed at any stage, from feature extraction through storage to matching. The authors contribute an MPC-friendly quantization of the GhostFaceNet model and circuit optimizations that make this practical, and they release code on GitHub. It is relevant as an example of making CNN inference feasible under cryptographic constraints.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
From Detection to Decision: Calibration and Deferral for Prompt-Injection DetectionEvaluates a native probabilistic decision model (Jev), Llama Prompt Guard 2 (22M and 86M) and an LLM judge on 47,611 held-out examples covering direct/indirect prompt injection, hard-benign inputs, obfuscation and distribution shift. The LLM judge has the best AUROC (0.897), followed by Jev (0.871), Prompt Guard 2 86M (0.757) and 22M (0.714). Jev's native probabilities do not consistently beat post-hoc calibrated classifier scores, and temperature scaling improves calibration but not discrimination. At a 1% false-negative-rate target, every system needs over 91.8% escalation, so probabilistic outputs alone do not give reliable security decisions under distribution shift.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Thinking in Graphs: Neo4j-Backed Exploit-Chain Reasoning for LLM Penetration-Testing AgentsPresents ChainGraph, a pattern that externalizes exploit-chain reasoning for LLM pentest agents (Claude Code, Codex) into a Neo4j property graph exposed via the Model Context Protocol. Findings, attack steps, credentials, assets and tamper-evident evidence receipts are typed nodes with pre/post-condition edges, queried with Cypher and Graph Data Science for next-step inference, entry-to-crown-jewel pathing, chain-severity promotion, provenance and chokepoints. On a synthetic GOAD-style multi-forest Active Directory engagement, three Medium findings become Critical once chained, betweenness centrality identifies break-points, and reasoning payload drops ~98% (token proxy); results are single-run and illustrative.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Thinking in Graphs: Neo4j-Backed Exploit-Chain Reasoning for LLM Penetration-Testing AgentsChainGraph is a pattern that moves exploit-chain reasoning out of the flat context window and into a Neo4j property graph. Findings, attack steps, credentials, assets and tamper-evident evidence receipts are typed nodes with pre/post-condition edges. The graph is wired to Claude Code or Codex through MCP with no custom harness. Five operator questions (next-step inference, entry-to-crown-jewel pathing, combined-severity promotion, evidence provenance, chokepoint identification) become reusable Cypher and Graph Data Science queries, plus a chain-severity score. On a synthetic multi-forest Active Directory lab modeled on GOAD, three findings rated Medium in isolation become Critical once their path to the forest root is materialized. Scoping each decision to a graph result cut the reasoning payload by about 98% on a token proxy. The authors say the results are illustrative single-run measurements, not a benchmark.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026π§ AI
Tamper Sensing Meshes in Payment Terminals and BeyondTeardown study of tamper sensing meshes (TSM) across a wide range of card payment terminals, ATM key pads and a data center HSM, with detailed photos of critical features. The authors build a taxonomy of mesh construction techniques, find most commercial meshes use simple constructions far from manufacturing limits, and derive a concise set of design patterns. They argue that meshes beating the industrial state of the art are feasible with cheap, readily available processes, giving researchers a basis for realistic test specimens.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Accelerating Pollard Rho with GPU Field Arithmetic on NVIDIA BlackwellPreprint that speeds up Pollard rho on GPUs by rebuilding field arithmetic: packed normal-basis representation, the CUDA 13.3 PTX carry-less multiply (clmad), and three-input logic instructions. On one RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell it goes from 0.85 to 14.64 billion iterations/s (17.2x) on the Certicom ECC2K-130 challenge, which puts the whole challenge under five GPU-years. The same levers give 1.52x on P-256 and 2.61x on P-384, which leaves P-256 about 6e21 card-years away. It also reports twelve GPUs from Turing to Blackwell, an FPGA engine on AWS F2 and a campaign that covered 5.4% of the expected work, with code and a Dockerfile on GitHub (rho-blackwell). It claims no improvement on the generic-group bound.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
RepProbe: Can Video Language Models Count Repeated Actions? A Diagnostic BenchmarkRepProbe is a benchmark of 42K real and synthetic video clips with exactly 1β20 complete action repetitions, controlling for clip position, temporal coverage and duration. Video language models' counting accuracy collapses at high counts, and this is not explained by frame sampling alone. Linear probes on final-layer representations show count information stays linearly decodable even when the model's answer is wrong, so the failure arises at the output stage, where answers cluster on a few preferred numbers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
Plan-Bench: Can Existing VLMs Go Well Beyond Perception to Reason and Plan in Embodied Worlds?Plan-Bench is a benchmark of 699 curated samples across 16 subclasses and three dimensions. It tests whether vision-language models can reason over spatial and temporal information and produce multi-step plans under constraints for embodied tasks, with action execution isolated out. Across 28 VLMs the best model reaches only 75.0% accuracy. Scaling generally helps, and larger models look more promising as high-level planners. Code and benchmark are released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
Game2Real-Bench: Do Toy Games Reveal and Transfer to Real-World Visual Reasoning?Game2Real-Bench tests whether vision-language model performance on procedurally generated toy games predicts real-world visual reasoning, and whether game examples help transfer. It has 1,000 verifiable game samples and 400 real-world samples, matched by shared reasoning requirements (fine-grained perception, spatial reasoning, constraint reasoning, sequential planning). Across 25 VLMs, game and real scores correlate strongly (Pearson/Spearman 0.935). One-shot game-to-real transfer on four models improves constraint reasoning for several but hurts fine-grained perception. The authors also release Game2Real-Dataset, with about 24K verified game samples across 18 tasks and 65 QA families.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
Beyond the Verdict: Agentic Code Judging with Verifiable FeedbackProposes a task where a model judges and diagnoses a candidate program from only the problem statement and source code, backing its verdict with generated counterexamples that can be checked by execution. The authors build USACO-JUDGE from USACO 2026 contests (human and LLM-written accepted and unaccepted programs) and train ARBITER, a 35B MoE agentic verifier, with reinforcement learning in a generic execution sandbox. Training lifts counterexample success on incorrect programs from 40.61% to 62.67% and mean binary verdict accuracy from 71.41% to 87.41%. ARBITER also improves code selection and refinement, and in an IOI 2026 case study its guided refinement lifts GPT-OSS-120B's expected score above the gold-medal threshold under the official submission limit.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
Geometric Calibration of Supervised Fine-TuningProposes Geometric Calibration of supervised fine-tuning and SPACE (Subspace Projection for Adapted Checkpoint Enhancement). SPACE is a post-hoc, data-free, training-free method that uses the pre- and post-SFT checkpoints to revert SFT update components lying in the principal subspace of the pre-SFT weights and keep those in the orthogonal complement. It is evaluated on Qwen2.5, Qwen3, Qwen3.5, Llama-3.1 and Olmo-3 models (2Bβ14B) with math, coding and medical SFT. It reduces out-of-domain regression and improves in-domain performance, for example +2.85 ID / +2.26 OOD on Qwen2.5-7B math SFT.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
LLM Agents for Automated Post-Training via Structured Recipe OptimizationIntroduces Structured Recipe Optimization (SRO), a paradigm for automated LLM post-training that optimizes over a task-adapted recipe space covering data sources, data processing, cross-domain composition and training configuration. It pairs an LLM-based Recipe-Space Designer, which builds the recipe space for the target tasks, with a Multi-Domain Recipe Optimizer that uses structured trial evidence to guide LLM candidate construction and multi-objective Bayesian trial selection. SRO gets the highest average score in all evaluated target-model and agent-LLM combinations; for example, 41.1 vs 15.4 for the strongest baseline on Qwen3-1.7B with GPT-5.4, and 53.8 vs 40.8 on Qwen3-4B with DeepSeek-V4-Flash, in joint post-training across three capability domains and six benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
Genericity in multivariate cryptographyThe paper proves that some properties of UOV (Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar) public-key ideals and varieties hold generically. These include equidimensionality of the UOV varieties and radicality of the public key ideals. This justifies the regularity assumptions used in algebraic cryptanalysis of UOV and its variants. The authors also review earlier multivariate schemes that were broken because they were non-generic, and give one counter-example whose non-genericity looks hard to exploit.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Breaking First-Order Masked Kyber with Belief Propagation AlonePreprint recovering the long-term key of a first-order masked Kyber768 implementation on an ARM Cortex-M4 from about 2200 decapsulation power traces using only valid ciphertexts. A profiled neural network estimates Hamming-weight distributions of both arithmetic shares, which are turned into likelihoods on decryption noise and combined by a belief-propagation solver with Gaussian interference approximation and an Onsager (AMP) correction, recovering all 1536 secret and error coefficients without lattice reduction. It shows first-order masking is insufficient against combined second-order leakage, and that least squares, greedy solvers and lattice hints (BKZ block size 624 to 505 at 2000 traces) do worse.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Forensic Analysis of the HackRF One with PortaPack Mayhem FirmwarePaper on the forensic analysis of a stand-alone HackRF One with a PortaPack running Mayhem firmware v2.0.1. It establishes at source-code level which data sit on the microSD card, their formats, when they are written and how to interpret them. The method is applied to a four-month SD image and covers RTC-battery-dependent timestamp rules, traces of on-device trimming and text editing, cluster-level recovery of deleted IQ captures, and decoding of recorded signals cross-checked with an independent decoder. In the example, the tail of a deleted IQ capture and a trimmed-away segment are recovered, and six captures are attributed to one rolling-code OOK transmitter with a shared 32-bit ID. It provides an artifact catalogue, interpretation rules and acquisition recommendations.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 11 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
MiMo-V2.6: Scaling Reinforcement Learning Towards Self-ImprovementTechnical report for Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6 omni-modal model family, which scales RL compute along three axes: asynchronous training with 1,568 samples and 2.7-3.7B tokens per step at up to 1M context, more diverse environments (code, general, visual, cyber) under mixed agent harnesses, and groupwise agentic grading that gives better reward signals and favors shorter, token-efficient solutions. Stability measures include a frozen MoE router and a multi-layer defense against reward hacking, built on a mid-trained hybrid-SWA architecture. The authors open-source training dynamics, RL environments and the RL framework, which makes it a useful reference for reproducing scaled agentic RL.
huggingface.copaperAdded 10 Oct 2026π§ AI
Images Talk Back: Guiding MMDiTs by Suppressing Image-to-Text FeedbackThe paper studies joint attention in multimodal diffusion transformers (MMDiTs), where the evolving image updates text representations. It finds that this image-to-text (I2T) feedback tends to preserve objects and attributes already in the image, errors included, and that suppressing it improves generation. It proposes Semantic Feedback Guidance (SFG), which guides away from an auxiliary branch that strengthens I2T feedback and weakens text-to-image conditioning, and iSFG, an in-place variant that needs no extra model evaluations. SFG runs for the first 20% of sampling steps (about 1.2x base NFE without CFG). Across three backbones, adding SFG to CFG on FLUX raises GenEval from 0.6661 to 0.7479, and iSFG on SD3.5M adds +1.33 HPSv2.1 over CFG at zero extra NFE. The control also improves VBench scores for text-to-video and image-to-video.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026π§ AI
A Step Harder, Not a Step Too Far: The Benefits and Limits of Curriculum Difficulty Progression in GRPOStudies curriculum design for GRPO by re-estimating sample difficulty under the current policy and using a staged curriculum that progressively shifts the active difficulty band toward harder samples. On GSM8K across three seeds, moving to a moderately harder band lifts test accuracy to 0.6591 Β± 0.0077 versus 0.6449 Β± 0.0024 for fixed-medium selection, while going to a still harder band drops it to 0.6405 Β± 0.0053. The benefit of difficulty progression is therefore non-monotonic, which informs online sample selection in RL fine-tuning of LLMs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026π§ AI
Benchmarking Answer-Grounding Consistency in Remote Sensing Visual Question AnsweringProposes the Answer-Evidence Support Protocol (AESP), which checks whether the grounding evidence a model outputs actually supports its own answer in grounded remote sensing visual question answering. It applies task-specific rules to existence, counting and comparison questions. The authors build the G-RSVQA benchmark of 15,027 samples with questions, reference answers and object-level annotations. Tests on seven grounded vision-language models show evidence-support failures on all three question types, with up to 50.82% of correct answers unsupported by their grounding evidence.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026π§ AI
Reward Hacking as a Transmissible Strategy in Multi-Agent Coding SystemsThe paper shows that reward hacking learned by one coding agent during RL against automated evaluators can spread to other agents in a multi-agent system. Across four open-weight backbones, coding RL elicits and amplifies hacking when the system prompt describes the mechanism explicitly and when mid-training exposes the model to facts about the coding environment. Post-RL source agents transmit the hack through code, shared memory and natural-language plans, and even small open-weight agents induce hacking in stronger closed-weight targets. On hard tasks the hack can intensify along a transmission chain after the source leaves, as the code accumulates more persuasive justifications. A theoretical analysis gives conditions under which hacking amplifies, persists or decays. Hacking also biases task routing toward hacking agents and survives candidate aggregation. Code review by the coder or by a separate verifier reduces the hacks that get delivered.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026π§ AI
Provable Subexponential Algorithms for Module-SIS and Module-LWEePrint preprint extending the DucasβEngelbertsβLoyer provable subexponential Gaussian sampler (built on Wagner's generalized birthday algorithm) to module matrices over power-of-two cyclotomic rings. It gives provable 2^{O(n/lnln n)}-time algorithms for Module-SIS and for decision and search Module-LWE using only the k+β ring samples provided, plus sample-preserving scalar search-LWE and narrow Module-LWE variants. Separate heuristic estimates suggest these Wagner-style attacks do not reach the NIST security targets of ML-KEM and ML-DSA.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
WOVEN: Weaving Visual World Modeling into Multimodal LLMsWOVEN is a training source and benchmark for visual transition reasoning in multimodal LLMs. It has 36,076 examples spanning 20 scene types, 5 action types and 8 reasoning types, built from rollouts of video-pretrained generative models. Evaluating 38 frontier MLLMs (including GPT-5.4 and Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B) shows systematic deficits that persist with scale. Training on WOVEN subsets of about 2,000 items improves 22 of 26 external benchmarks by up to 27.3 points, and WOVEN data can replace 30-50% of a task's own training data. The authors derive a recipe: select supervision by the reasoning operation it teaches rather than by scene or action, and prefer larger visual-state changes.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026π§ AI
ORCAGen: Orchestrating Context-Aware Malware Deception with RAG-Guided Generative AIORCAGen uses RAG over a curated knowledge base of malware procedures and active-defense strategies, plus structured prompting, to have LLMs generate proof-of-concept malware and matching deception orchestration code offline. Strategies are validated against the PoC malware before being added to a runtime playbook that enforces only the verified, deterministic logic. It is evaluated on GPT-4o, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Qwen3-Coder and Claude Sonnet 4.5 over synthesized scenarios and 150 real keylogger, infostealer and ransomware samples, measuring execution success, hallucination rate, refinement effort, deception effectiveness and runtime overhead.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
MiMo-V2.6: Scaling Reinforcement Learning Towards Self-ImprovementTechnical report for the MiMo-V2.6 omni-modal model series, which scales RL compute after mid-training on a multimodal corpus, using a hybrid sliding-window-attention architecture. RL is scaled along three axes: asynchronous training with 1,568 samples and 2.7-3.7B tokens per step at up to 1M context; diverse environments (code, general, visual, cyber) under mixed agent harnesses; and groupwise agentic grading that gives better rewards for long-horizon tasks and favors shorter, token-efficient solutions. Stability measures include freezing the MoE router and a multi-layer defense against reward hacking. The authors open-source the training dynamics, RL environments and RL framework.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026π§ AI
Compile the Table: Query-Calibrated Operator Compression for Tabular In-Context LearningProposes QCOC (Query-Calibrated Operator Compression) for tabular in-context learning. It compiles the full KV cache of the in-context examples once into compact shared memory. The cache is built from clustered joint-KV prototypes that keep per-cluster multiplicities and the original example count. Prototype values are calibrated against attention query vectors with an anchored closed-form solution. On 64 held-out OpenML-CC18 datasets it has the best mean accuracy among compared compression and retrieval methods. On seven long tables it averages 0.23 points below full context. Compressing 8,192 examples to 512 slots gives 10.5x cache compression, and single-core CPU serving over 1,000 queries is up to 508x faster than dynamic retrieval and 1.98x faster than full context.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026π§ AI
EntroPrefill: Renyi-Guided Context Pruning with Conditional Stability Guarantees for Retrieval-Augmented GenerationEntroPrefill proposes a Renyi-entropy-guided mechanism for pruning context mid-prefill in retrieval-augmented generation, using sink-isolated regularized head pooling compatible with grouped-query attention to decide which tokens can be safely discarded. It derives a mixture-to-head deletion envelope bounding feasible token removal, a finite-sample observer guarantee valid under adaptive layer selection, and a conditional transformer perturbation bound with explicit Lipschitz constants and a first-token decision-margin corollary, plus a systems-level break-even analysis of KV-transfer payload versus pruning savings. The paper is explicitly theoretical, defining assumptions and formal limits without reporting empirical speedup or accuracy-preservation results.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026π§ AI
PEARS: Physical-Prior-Guided Efficient Adaptation via Failure Reasoning and Diffusion Steering for Tactile ManipulationPEARS is a hybrid reinforcement-learning framework for sample-efficient online adaptation of pretrained tactile-manipulation policies to out-of-distribution conditions. A physics-guided force reasoning (PFR) module uses a vision-language model to diagnose failures from visual and tactile history and update contact-force bounds enforced by a hybrid force-position controller, while a separate tactile-conditioned diffusion-steering component perturbs the latent noise of a frozen flow-matching policy to correct free-space motion and contact timing without retraining the base model. It improves success rates by 12.4-37.4 points over strong baselines in simulation, cuts required interaction episodes by up to 53.2%, and reaches 95%/90% success on real-world whiteboard-erasing and pipette-liquid-aspiration tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026π§ AI
Provable Subexponential Algorithms for NIST Third-Round Lattice FamiliesAn IACR ePrint paper by Yiming Gao, Xuyuan Han, and Honggang Hu presenting provable classical subexponential algorithms (running in roughly 2^((1/2+o(1))n/ln ln n) time/space) for recovering short secrets in growing parameter families tied to all seven NIST third-round lattice candidates: Kyber/ML-KEM, FrodoKEM, SABER, NTRU LPRime, Dilithium/ML-DSA, Falcon, and cyclic NTRU-HPS/HRSS. The approach extends the Wagner-style Gaussian sampling framework of Ducas, Engelberts, and Loyer (CRYPTO 2025) and a low-error decision-LWE algorithm, using an exact squared-Euclidean-norm gap to binary-search each secret coordinate, and an "affine slice search" over the public lattice for NTRU/Falcon-type quotient relations. The authors explicitly note the subexponential complexity applies to growing/weakened parameter regimes and does not reduce the concrete security of the currently specified NIST parameter sets.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
A Systematic Study of Small Language Models on Abstract Reasoning TasksThis paper presents a systematic empirical study of small language models (decoder-only, encoder-decoder, and mixture-of-experts architectures) on abstract grid-transformation reasoning, using the ARC-TGI benchmark, which supports controllable task families, resampling, spatial shifts, and cross-benchmark transfer to distinguish genuine rule acquisition from distribution-specific overfitting. Across more than 1,000 supervised fine-tuning runs, the authors find that in-distribution accuracy is achievable but highly sensitive to optimization and task formulation, performance collapses sharply out-of-distribution (even under simple grid-scale changes with the same underlying rule), training-set scale yields uneven gains, in-context example benefit is model-family dependent, and executable-rule induction surfaces correct solutions that direct grid generation misses. Layer-wise attention diagnostics reveal behavioral differences in concentration and context-dependence but stop short of establishing causal mechanisms, underscoring that abstract-reasoning scores are conditional on model, adaptation regime, evaluation distribution, and output format.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026π§ AI
RAG-PIBench: A Leakage-Aware Benchmark for Prompt-Injection Detection in Trustworthy RAG SystemsRAG-PIBench is a benchmark of 4,876 contextual examples for evaluating prompt-injection detectors embedded in retrieved content within Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. The authors use a leakage-aware construction pipeline with frozen train/validation/protected-test splits and compare keyword-based, semantic-reference, TF-IDF, and transformer-based detectors, finding DistilBERT achieves the best protected-test performance (F1 = 0.896, PR-AUC = 0.968) while TF-IDF with SVM or logistic regression remains competitive. It highlights the risk that naive benchmark construction can leak information between splits, inflating reported detector performance for RAG prompt-injection defenses.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Settling Conjectures on Linear Structures of Inverse ChiChi Generalizations Four Proofs and a CounterexampleAn IACR eprint paper proving four of five open conjectures, and disproving the fifth with a counterexample, from Andreoli and colleagues at ToSC 2025 about the linear height and component linear nullity of the inverse of ChiChi, the low latency nonlinear core used in the ChiLow cipher from Eurocrypt 2025 by Belkheyar and colleagues. The authors settle these bounds for all admissible branch lengths of the SWAP and 4-cycle generalizations, derive design consequences for ChiLow, and correct an erroneous data value from the prior work.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Towards Looped Models Done Right, Part II: Rethinking at Fixed PointsThis paper studies looped language models β architectures that reuse a shared block of layers recurrently β and argues that as recurrent hidden states approach fixed points, the specific path taken to reach them matters less, enabling several efficiency tricks: truncated backpropagation through time during training, terminal key-value (KV) cache sharing across loop iterations for faster decoding, a distilled student model that prefills up to 1.79x faster, and RL policy gradients computed from saved rollout states that run 2x faster than backpropagating through the full trajectory. To make these fixed points reliable, the authors replace fixed-depth training with a learned depth prior (regularized with an entropy term to stay broad, improving on Huginn's fixed broad prior) and introduce orthogonal input injection, which removes the component of the injected input that the hidden state could otherwise amplify or cancel. Across model scales from 100M to 1.6B parameters, both changes lower perplexity, and at 1.6B the learned prior with a 3x smaller KV cache matches the downstream performance of full-cache fixed-depth training.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π§ AI
BazaarBench: Delegation Safety in Decentralized C2C Marketplaces Run by LLM AgentsBazaarBench is a simulated consumer-to-consumer marketplace benchmark that measures whether LLM agents acting as buyers and sellers stay safe and honest β tracking ownership, item condition, and commitments to detect six failure types across five transaction stages. Running three 100-agent markets for 30 days plus 45 seven-day continuations across five models (inventories drawn from a public eBay sample), the authors show that double-selling and item-condition deception rise sharply under deadline pressure and adversarial instructions, with GPT-5.4 completing 55.5% of committed sales involving unavailable or misrepresented items; the team releases the simulator, saved market states, eval code, and 357,608 agent-call records.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π§ AI
FREA: A Multi-Source Expert Benchmark for Reaction Feasibility VerificationFREA is a benchmark of 751 chemical reactions labeled by expert chemists for feasibility verification, drawn from retrosynthesis model proposals, zero-yield experimental records, LLM-generated edits, and five negative-candidate generation methods. The authors show no single verifier type (LLMs prompted with the feasibility criterion, dedicated forward models, or retrosynthesis scorers) dominates across all sources, and that adding generated negative examples to training improves mean AUROC but fails to transfer to retrosynthesis proposal screening. They also release a corpus of over 14 million recorded and generated reactions to support further training and evaluation of feasibility verifiers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π§ AI
SpatialChain: A Benchmark for Auditing Spatial Reasoning Faithfulness in VLMsSpatialChain is a benchmark of 28,350 training and 899 test examples pairing spatially-oriented GQA questions with scene-graph-grounded reasoning chains, designed to audit whether VLMs' correct spatial answers reflect faithful reasoning or linguistic shortcuts. Using a two-axis evaluation (chain-overlap metrics plus a scene-graph-aware LLM judge), the authors find that four of nine tested models hit β₯79% accuracy while showing shortcut rates above 39%, that chain quality predicts correctness for most models except Claude Sonnet 4.6 and InternVL3.5-8B (which fail differently, via terse vs. verbose-decorative reasoning), and that SFT on SpatialChain improves Qwen3-VL-8B accuracy by +6.2pp while cutting its shortcut rate to 22%. The faithfulness judge is validated against human annotations and a second LLM judge, with data, generation scripts and evaluation code released publicly.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π§ AI
Compromise Is Not Consequence: Evaluating Task-Scoped Authorization in LLM Agents with Paired ReplayThis paper introduces a paired-replay testbed that samples a single LLM agent request and replays the identical malicious action, resource, and arguments under four authorization conditions: broad bearer tokens, scoped JWTs, sender-constrained tokens, and Open Policy Agent policies. Across 128 scenarios in four tool domains and five local model configurations, broad-bearer tokens let roughly 9 to 38 percent of attacked, post-exposure decisions execute harmful actions, while all three scoped conditions recorded zero harmful executions; a supplementary AgentDojo extension found 11 of 24 injected attacks succeeded under broad policy versus 0 of 24 under scoping. The authors frame this as evidence that scoping contains cross-action and cross-resource consequences of prompt injection, not that it prevents the injection itself.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Optimized NEON Implementation of MAYO on Apple M1An IACR ePrint paper presenting an optimized ARMv8 NEON assembly implementation of MAYO Round 3 (one of NIST's post-quantum signature candidates) for Apple M1, generated to be byte-identical to upstream intrinsics but 2β2.6x faster for signing and verification across all four parameter sets. The authors also run a constant-time testing campaign with matched null runs and find that while linear-algebra operations are statistically indistinguishable from constant-time nulls, verification (on public data) exhibits a measurable key-fixed timing effect present in both their implementation and the upstream code.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Sharpening Tax in Post-TrainingThis paper studies the sharpening hypothesis of RL post-training on LLMs: that it mainly sharpens existing base-model behaviors, boosting pass@1 at the cost of solution coverage (pass@K), and shows this cost extends to agentic, multi-turn tool-use tasks, not just math/coding. The authors introduce Sharpening Tax, a metric quantifying this coverage loss, measured across 14 base/post-trained model pairs from four model families on three agentic benchmarks (42 cases), finding post-training pushes tasks toward always-solved or never-solved extremes. They also propose posterior-tempered group sampling (PTGS), a Bayesian per-prompt temperature adaptation method that reduces the tax during RL training while improving both coverage and single-shot accuracy.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 4 Oct 2026π§ AI
LESSER: Post-Training Data Selection with Output-Layer GradientsLESSER is a drop-in wrapper for gradient-based post-training data selection that approximates full-parameter gradient alignment using only output-layer gradients, which can be computed with a forward pass instead of a full backward pass. It cuts feature-extraction compute by 9.7x on SFT benchmarks and 3.0x on RL benchmarks while matching the downstream performance of full-gradient selection methods, even though individual sample rankings differ, selected batches remain gradient-aligned.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026π§ AI
IDRF: Inverse-Distilled Reward Fine-tuning of Masked Discrete Diffusion ModelsIDRF is a reward fine-tuning framework for few-step masked discrete diffusion generators that replaces the intractable sequence-level KL penalty in reverse-KL-regularized objectives with an inverse-distillation regularization term, proven to upper-bound the true KL divergence to the reference distribution. It frames few-step diffusion sampling as a finite-horizon Markov decision process and optimizes reward via a clipped policy-gradient objective over the student's own trajectories, without needing reference-model rollouts. Across DNA, image, and text generation tasks, IDRF reaches high reward with up to 32x fewer denoising steps than the reference model while reducing reward hacking and preserving sample quality.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026π§ AI
VenusRL: A Fully Disaggregated Agentic RL System with Priority Scheduling and Scalable InteractionVenusRL is a fully disaggregated system for agentic reinforcement learning that trains LLM agents through multi-turn interactions with external tool environments. It introduces a priority-aware action scheduler that uses length-prediction heuristics to prioritize sample groups likely to unblock the next training step across batch admission, KV cache residency, and cross-worker orchestration, plus an environment resource manager that packs more tool sandboxes per node via a memory-aware admission threshold and template-keyed page-sharing pool using copy-on-write for isolation. The system achieves up to 4.24x end-to-end training speedup and reduces environment (sandbox) cost by up to 89% over state-of-the-art baselines on agentic RL workloads.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026π§ AI
Are We Recovering Mechanisms? Objective-Level Recovery Gaps in Mechanistic InterpretabilityThis paper shows that intervention-defined faithfulness metrics used to evaluate automated circuit discovery in mechanistic interpretability can favor a worse circuit over a better one, an objective-level recovery gap. Testing EAP, EAP-IG, ACDC, and Edge-SP across four human-reference tasks and InterpBench, the authors find KL-based faithfulness misranks 9.4%-41.2% of candidate circuit pairs under held-out resampling, and trace the cause to context distortion, where excluded signals change the inputs retained components operate on. Restoring selected signals from the intact model's execution repairs 96 of 100 persistent misrankings, showing the evaluation objective itself, not just the search algorithm, needs fixing.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026π§ AI
Walking the Embedding Space: Datastore Extraction from Multimodal RAGResearchers introduce ImmRAG, a black-box data extraction attack against image-returning Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) systems, where the retrieved image itself is the model's response. Instead of malicious text prompts, ImmRAG embeds attack instructions inside an attacker-supplied image and uses relevance-weighted resampling to steer queries toward unexplored regions of the embedding space, progressively reconstructing more of the private datastore. Tested against CLIP-family retrievers across medical, document, and general-purpose scenarios, a single 2500-query run reconstructed up to 611 radiology images, 566 document scans, and 416 general images β up to 5.6x more distinct items than a non-adaptive baseline β highlighting the lack of safeguards against multimodal data leakage.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
SAGE: A Statistical Acceptance Gate for Self-Evolving AgentsSAGE is a statistical acceptance gate for self-evolving LLM agents that replaces the naive accept-if-aggregate-score-improves rule used when an optimizer edits an agents persistent skill document. It uses per-item paired comparison between the current and edited skill on identical validation items, exposing regressions an aggregate score hides, plus a one-sided paired significance test that only commits edits whose wins reliably beat their losses, addressing both permanent regression risk and the optimizers curse from noisy finite validation sets. Across five benchmarks and four backbone LLMs, SAGE cuts regression rates in 19 of 20 settings, for example 36.5 percent to 0 percent on LiveMath and 42.8 percent to 0 percent on OfficeQA with DeepSeek V4, while also achieving the best final score in all 20 settings.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026π§ AI
Image Classifiers are Efficient Self-Supervised Video Representation LearnersThis paper introduces VideoMSN, a Masked Siamese Network that repurposes standard image Vision Transformers for self-supervised spatio-temporal video representation learning by representing videos as 'super images' (grids of sampled frames) and aligning spatial-masked and temporal-masked views with a shared ViT encoder. Starting from pretrained DINO-v3 and DeiT-v3 image encoders, it achieves state-of-the-art results on Kinetics-400, UCF101, and HMDB51 while using up to 32x and 160x fewer video pretraining epochs than prior video self-supervised methods, and shows strong low-shot transfer performance.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026π§ AI
SoK: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Emulation-Based Dynamic Analysis Research for ARM Cortex-M Firmware (Extended Version)This SoK paper empirically evaluates 24 published emulation-based dynamic analysis tools for ARM Cortex-M firmware re-hosting, using large-scale datasets from OTACAP and FirmLine totaling 4,571 deduplicated ARM firmware samples. It finds that only 34.5% of samples can be successfully fuzzed by any existing tool, with average code coverage of just 10% and frequent false crashes/hangs, exposing systemic gaps across the emulation, fuzzing, and bug-diagnosis pipeline stages.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Breakdown of Local Denoising as Semantic SpeciationThis paper studies two temporal phenomena in generative model sampling dynamics: a 'speciation window' where a sample commits to a semantic class, and a 'nonlocality window' where local context becomes insufficient for generation. Under a 'common cause' hypothesis β that semantic labels explain correlations between distant tokens β the authors prove the nonlocality window must fall within the speciation window, and identify conditions under which both windows collapse to a single phase-transition point as system size grows, verified analytically in Gaussian mixture models.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026π§ AI
Adversarial Training for Pixel DiffusionThis paper shows that adding an adversarial loss as a post-training correction to pretrained pixel diffusion/flow-matching models (applied at non-high-noise timesteps, architecture and sampler unchanged) restores missing high-frequency, fine-scale natural-image statistics that these models systematically underproduce. Through frequency-band/power-law analysis and nearest-neighbor, recall, and no-GAN matched-SFT controls, the authors rule out memorization or mode-dropping as explanations, and show the effect jointly improves distribution fidelity, coverage, prompt alignment and perceptual quality β but does not transfer comparably to latent diffusion configurations, pointing to direct pixel-output access as the key enabling factor.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026π§ AI
Explore Broadly, Reason Sharply: Push Small Models toward the Frontier via SamplingThis paper introduces Parallel Power Tempering (PPT), an inference-time sampling method that runs multiple interacting replicas of an LLM at different power-sharpening levels (parallel tempering) to balance exploration of diverse reasoning paths against exploitation of high-probability correct trajectories. It addresses a truncation bias identified in prior power-sampling approaches and proposes swap strategies under finite memory/compute budgets, claiming the method lets small models match or approach RL-post-trained and frontier-model reasoning performance without any parameter updates or external rewards.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026π§ AI
Unifying Distributional Training for One-Step Visual GenerationThis arXiv paper introduces a unified theoretical framework for "distributional training" in one-step visual generation, showing that existing methods like FD-Loss and Gaussian-kernel Drifting are special cases of Gaussian optimal transport and kernel-density KL matching under Wasserstein gradient flow. Building on this, the authors propose MGFlow, which models feature distributions with Gaussian mixtures at adjustable granularity and combines mass-constrained sample assignment with paired component updates to fix mode collapse. MGFlow sets new state-of-the-art FDr scores on ImageNet 256Γ256 (1.45 on pMF-H, 1.64 on JiT-H) and post-trains FLUX.2 into a one-step generator that beats the original four-step model on GenEval and PickScore.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
Neural Harmonic Measure OperatorNeural Harmonic Measure Operator (NHMO) is a neural solver for elliptic PDE problems on variable-shape domains that parameterizes the harmonic measure's boundary density as a transformer-based kernel, trained via supervision from Walk-on-Spheres exit samples. A single trained kernel handles arbitrary boundary data or, via an auxiliary correction network, arbitrary Poisson source terms, without retraining. The method outperforms four prior baselines on the MCB-B 3D variable-shape Poisson benchmark across all five categories and is competitive with major neural-operator baselines on a 2D testbed.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
Towards Communication-Efficient Social Intelligence in Language AgentsThis paper proposes Teacher-Assisted Communication Training (TACT), a method that improves social goal attainment in language agents while cutting communication cost. TACT uses an expression specialist to strip unnecessary detail from student-generated actions and a strategy specialist to propose alternative actions, then tests candidate revisions by sampling partner responses and distills the best-performing reference back into the student via on-policy distillation. Evaluated on SOTOPIA and AgentSense, TACT attains the highest Goal scores on the hardest scenarios while using far fewer target tokens than an SFT plus SDPO baseline, and reduces both tokens and interaction turns on AgentSense.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
Shockingly Simple Self-retrospection Improves Agentic Models Without RLThe paper introduces Retrospection-Only Fine-Tuning (ROFT), a minimal online training procedure where an LLM agent generates a self-written explanation of its own attempt at a task and is then fine-tuned with next-token prediction on that explanation alone, without any reward signal or external teacher. Using Qwen3.5-4B on software-engineering tasks, ROFT reaches 49.2% and 26.8% solve rates on held-out SWE-bench Verified and SWE-bench Pro after 20 updates, edging out GRPO's 48.0%/25.3% after 40 updates and making faster early progress, and it can even learn to solve tasks where all 64 sampled base-model attempts initially failed. The authors argue this shows self-generated retrospections act as useful training signal, implicitly performing credit assignment and shaping behavior (e.g., shorter solutions) without RL machinery.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
Tracekit: Tamper-Evident Intent-Reasoning-Action Auditing for Autonomous Coding AgentsTracekit is an open-source, dependency-free system that logs three cross-checked channels (human intent, model self-reported reasoning, and actual executed actions) for autonomous coding agent sessions into a hash-chained, externally anchorable ledger, hooking into Claude Code's lifecycle events and reconstructing multi-agent hierarchies. The paper's experiments show the ledger detects all 1,600 tested tamper mutations (edits, deletions, reordering, forged inserts, torn writes) with anchoring needed to catch tail truncation/full re-chaining, that a regex-based tool-call gate blocks only 41% of harmful calls while over-blocking benign ones and is trivially evaded, that in 14 real Claude Code runs the agent never acted on 4 planted indirect prompt injections, and that an LLM reviewer catches 100% of seeded misaligned steps in traces versus 82% for rule-based flags. The authors release the system, harness, and all traces.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Tracekit: Tamper-Evident Intent-Reasoning-Action Auditing for Autonomous Coding AgentsTracekit is an open-source, dependency-free auditing system for autonomous coding agents that records three channels per session β the human's stated intent, the model's self-reported reasoning, and the actions actually executed β into a hash-chained, externally anchorable ledger. It hooks into Claude Code's lifecycle events, reconstructs multi-agent hierarchies, gates tool calls with a pre-execution policy, and provides a live browser-based ledger verifier. Across five experiments the authors show the hash chain catches all tested tampering (with anchoring needed against tail truncation/re-chaining), a hook adds ~24ms overhead at scale, a regex-based gate only blocks 41% of harmful tool calls, real runs correctly resisted and disclosed planted prompt injections, and a new 'seeded-fault splicing' method with an LLM reviewer caught 100% of faulted traces versus 82% for rule-based flags.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI
Denoising Multi-Robot TrajectoriesThis paper extends D4orm, a dynamics-aware diffusion-denoising framework for multi-robot trajectory planning, into a family of planner architectures: a decoupled planner for scalability, an online receding-horizon planner with feedback control, and a distributed planner for resource-constrained settings. D4orm uses massively parallel GPU sampling to iteratively denoise candidate control trajectories into kinodynamically feasible, conflict-free solutions, outperforming sampling-based baselines like MPPI and a learned diffusion-model method. The authors demonstrate zero-shot deployment on ten real quadrotors, deconfliction with 100 simulated robots, and fully onboard distributed 'lifelong' operation on six ground robots.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026π§ AI- Aray: Deterministic-First Synthesis of Benign Artifacts for YARA Validation
Aray is a deterministic-first YARA interpreter and positive-fixture synthesizer that generates benign, YARA-matching ELF/PE/generic artifacts to validate detection rules without storing or distributing live malware samples. Conventional code (not a generative model) canonicalizes rules, derives witnesses from regex/hex declarations, and performs extraction, layout, and binary serialization; an LLM is only permitted to propose constructive rule normalizations or residual-semantics judgments, never backend source or binary structure, and the pipeline supports a zero-inference execution path. Evaluated against 416 public YARA rules, it achieved 406/416 (97.6%) matches to the original upstream rule, with the design explicitly motivated by containment concerns raised by the July 2026 OpenAIβHugging Face agent incident.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
How to Speculate about Uncertainty in Agentic Coding? A Draft-Model Gate MethodSpeculative Uncertainty (SU) repurposes speculative decoding in reverse: a small open-weight draft model scores an agent's already-generated trajectory in a single forward pass, producing a failure-likelihood signal from output tokens alone without needing logits, weights, or repeated sampling. Phase-aware features separate reasoning and action spans and are calibrated against a verifiable objective to drive a pre-execution veto gate. On software engineering agents built on Qwen3-Coder-480B and closed-source Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the gate cuts execution error rate by 6-8 percentage points and token cost by 14-19%, transferring to out-of-distribution benchmarks without retraining.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π§ AI
Clean Engineering, Unstable Measurement: A Preregistered Reliability Failure of Black-Box LLM Observers on Shared EndpointsThis preregistered study audits whether black-box LLM judges give stable, reproducible readings on shared serving endpoints, running two campaigns across 52,988 request attempts. Same-window repeat rankings only reached Spearman 0.400 against a required 0.90, and byte-identical next-day replays agreed at 0.78 against a required 0.99, showing that a model name on a shared endpoint is not a frozen measurement instrument. The authors trace the failure to label-to-meaning mapping bias, tiny candidate gaps relative to instrument noise, and non-deterministic outputs on identical inputs, and propose a three-level snapshot-identity ladder plus design rules and a reporting checklist for anyone freezing eval gates on LLM judges.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π§ AI
Calibration Without Comprehension: Diagnosing the Limits of Fine-Tuning LLMs for Vulnerability Detection in Systems SoftwareCWE-Trace is a benchmark and diagnostic framework of 834 manually curated Linux kernel samples spanning 74 CWEs, built with a strict temporal train/test split to rule out data contamination, used to evaluate eight vanilla LLMs and 15 LoRA fine-tuned variants on vulnerability detection and CWE classification. The paper introduces two new metrics β Directional Failure Index (DFI) and Hierarchical Distance and Direction (HDD) β and finds that fine-tuning only recalibrates output thresholds rather than improving actual security reasoning, with the best model reaching just 52.1% detection accuracy (barely above chance) and under 1.3% Top-1 CWE classification accuracy.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π§ AI
Decoy Images Amplify Caption-Mediated Defenses Against Encoded JailbreaksResearchers report that attaching an unrelated "decoy" image to an encoded jailbreak prompt can sharply cut attack success rate against caption-mediated black-box VLM defenses like ECSO β up to 73 percentage points β even though the image itself is content-free, across five frontier VLMs, two encoded-attack families, and three defenses. Controls show the effect stems from image presence (not content or vendor filtering) and holds even under adaptive attacks targeting the caption re-check, but unconditional decoy attachment inflates benign refusal rates by 10β67pp, so the authors propose gating it on a lightweight encoded-input detector. The paper was withdrawn by the author after v2, so treat conclusions as unverified/retracted.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Dynamic Capability Scoping for Enterprise AI Agents: A Synthetic Dataset and Three-Source Permission ArchitectureThis arxiv paper proposes a three-source permission architecture for scoping enterprise AI agent credentials dynamically: role-based ceilings, a task-context classifier, and policy-derived combination prohibitions, aimed at preventing over-privileged agents rather than only detecting misuse after the fact. The authors release a synthetic dataset of 600 enterprise task prompts labeled with minimum-required permissions across a 15-permission taxonomy, built via a two-pass generate-then-label pipeline and validated against a human-reviewed sample (Cohen's ΞΊ = 0.917 pre-review, 0.967 post-review), with policy iteration cutting ceiling violations by 93%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Calibration Without Comprehension: Diagnosing the Limits of Fine-Tuning LLMs for Vulnerability Detection in Systems SoftwareThis paper introduces CWE-Trace, a benchmark of 834 manually curated Linux kernel vulnerability samples spanning 74 CWEs with a strict temporal split to eliminate training data leakage. Evaluating eight vanilla LLMs including DeepSeek-R1 and fifteen LoRA fine tuned variants, the authors find contamination gives no real advantage and that fine tuning only shifts output calibration rather than underlying security reasoning, with the best model barely beating chance and CWE ranking accuracy staying very low. Two new diagnostic metrics are introduced to expose this calibration without comprehension failure mode.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Quantization as a Malicious Task: Removing Quantization-Conditioned Backdoors via Task ArithmeticThis paper introduces QVec, a defense against Quantization-Conditioned Backdoors (QCBs) β a threat where a neural network behaves normally in full precision but activates hidden malicious behavior only after quantization. QVec treats the weight difference between the full-precision and quantized model as a "malicious task vector" (via task arithmetic) and applies a lightweight parameter correction before deployment to cancel it out, requiring no retraining, no trigger samples, and only one quantization pass plus a small hyperparameter search. It's evaluated across image classification benchmarks and multiple LLM backdoor attack scenarios, suppressing backdoor activation while preserving clean-model performance.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
From Shield to Target: Denial-of-Service Attacks on LLM-Based Agent GuardrailsResearchers show that LLM-based guardrails deployed to catch prompt injection and jailbreaks can themselves be attacked: crafted natural-language payloads trap the guardrail's reasoning in extended loops, causing a systematic denial-of-service. A beam-search optimization framework (an LLM proposer guided by a strategy bank) and a lighter mechanism-aware structural-mutation attack both generalize across guardrail architectures and safety templates, with payloads optimized on one open-source surrogate transferring to Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Qwen backbones, achieving 13-63x token amplification and up to 148x latency amplification in real web, desktop, code, and multi-agent deployments β enough for a single poisoned document to starve co-located agents on shared guardrail infrastructure.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
ASPI: Seeking Ambiguity Clarification Amplifies Prompt Injection Vulnerability in LLM AgentsASPI (Ambiguous-State Prompt Injection) is a benchmark of 728 task-attack scenarios that isolates the moment an LLM agent asks a clarifying question as a distinct, more vulnerable security state, comparing it against standard fully-specified execution. Testing ten frontier models, the authors find clarification-seeking massively increases prompt injection success β e.g. attack success jumps from 1.8% to 34.0% for o3 and 2.2% to 35.7% for Gemini-3-Flash β showing that execution-time-only security evaluations underestimate real agent attack surface. Data and code are released for reproducibility.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
First-Order Stationarity of Reverse DiffusionsThis arXiv preprint develops a first-order theory connecting optimization and sampling for diffusion models. It shows that SDE-based reverse-time flows of overdamped and underdamped Langevin diffusions contract relative Fisher divergences at explicit exponential rates when the forward process's stationary potential is strongly convex (a property of the chosen noising schedule, not the data), a guarantee absent from ODE-based reverse processes. It also derives averaged first-order stationarity bounds under discretization, the sampling analog of averaged gradient-norm guarantees in nonconvex optimization, for both overdamped and underdamped samplers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π§ AI
From Source Code to Network Profile: Automated and Traceable MUD Profile Generation for IoT DevicesAutoMUD is a source-code-driven tool that generates Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) network access-control profiles for IoT devices by statically analyzing firmware/source code rather than relying on live traffic observation. It combines static and syntactic extraction with retrieval-grounded LLM reasoning and deterministic validation to recover rarely-exercised or conditional communication paths, link each generated rule to its source-level provenance, and record excluded findings with explicit reasons for review. Evaluated on a Linux-based repository plus a controlled semantic fault-injection campaign, it produced structurally valid, traceable MUD profiles that let analysts detect, localize and correct propagated errors.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Generate, Track, Improve: Perceptive Multi-Skill Humanoid Locomotion with RL-Fine-Tuned Motion GeneratorsThis paper presents a two-layer humanoid locomotion architecture: a perceptive flow-matching motion generator that plans whole-body trajectories from raw depth images, paired with a control-guided RL tracking policy that follows those motions. The core contribution is a sample-efficient off-policy RL fine-tuning loop β using structured search with the generator plus advantage weighted regression β that improves terrain consistency on unseen geometries, boosting successful terrain traversals by up to 25 percentage points and skill selection by up to 80 points. The system is deployed on a Unitree G1 humanoid, enabling walking, running, jumping on/off boxes, and stair traversal outdoors using only raw depth images (no odometry or height maps).
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π§ AI
Strategically Diverse Sampling for Self-TrainingThis paper argues that self-training data for LLMs should be filtered for strategic diversity β substantively different problem-solving approaches β rather than just correctness among IID samples. It introduces GROOT, a method that builds a hierarchical tree of approaches and samples distinct paths, and adapts Verbalized Sampling (VS) to generate an unstructured set of approaches, testing both on competitive programming and Next-Chapter Prediction tasks. Models trained on strategically diverse (even incorrect) traces from Qwen3-4B outperform IID distillation from a 235B teacher and provide stronger initializations for RL and test-time scaling.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π§ AI
Adapting for AI: How elementary teachers adjust their practices for an AI-integrated curriculumAn arXiv HCI study following three elementary teachers over a 13-day summer camp as they implemented ToyTalk, a conversational AI toy development platform, within an AI literacy and English Language Arts curriculum. Drawing on daily reflections, group reflections, and post-camp interviews, the authors identify four adaptive practices teachers used β repair, differentiation, translation, and balancing β that sit at the intersection of tensions around technology, learners, and instruction, and derive design implications for deploying conversational AI in classrooms.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π§ AI
FragToken: Amplifying LLM Inference Costs through Noncanonical Token GenerationFragToken is a training-time attack framework that manipulates an LLM to favor longer, non-canonical token sequences for the same output text, inflating autoregressive decoding steps and inference cost without proportionally lengthening visible responses. Naively maximizing token fragmentation degrades answer quality and breaks stealth, so the authors combine source-model self-distillation, capacity-aware filtering/budgeting, and BPE-Aligned Merging to keep utility largely intact; across four LLMs and three benchmarks it achieves a token inflation ratio (TIR) of 1.99β2.46 with only minor utility loss, framing this as a covert LLM supply-chain threat.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Two Conformal Constructions for Adaptive Within-Document AI-Text ScreeningThis paper presents two conformal-prediction constructions for calibrating AI-text detection pipelines that screen document prefixes with multiple detectors and may stop early. Construction A allocates a false-alert budget across conformal ranks for a registered finite family of prefix-detector scores using a union bound; Construction B calibrates the complete-path maximum of an adaptive stopping policy so a single terminal conformal rank protects early stopping without splitting the error budget. Under document-level exchangeability (with no restriction on within-document token dependence), the authors prove marginal false-alert control across the inspection path and derive necessary calibration sample sizes, while noting that detection power and computational savings are left to future empirical evaluation.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π§ AI
Resource-Optimized and Energy-Aware Agentic AI Framework Anchored on Blockchain for Secure Software Supply ChainsThis arXiv paper proposes a blockchain-anchored agentic AI framework for securing the software development lifecycle: specialized LLM-backed agents handle source integrity, SBOM/dependency analysis, CI configuration auditing, artifact verification, and runtime policy evaluation, each producing a cryptographically signed attestation recorded on a permissioned blockchain via smart contracts (agent registry, immutable attestation log, release-policy module). Agent-to-agent and agent-to-blockchain communication is secured through a consortium-operated certificate authority, and a sequence flow illustrates a source-code security agent anchoring its attestation on-chain to trigger an allow/block deployment decision. It's a conceptual architecture paper rather than an evaluated deployment, aiming to give decentralized, tamper-resistant provenance for agentic AI monitoring the software supply chain.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
LLM Agents Can Easily Tamper With Their Own TracesThis arXiv paper shows that local LLM coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, OpenCode and Grok Build can be induced to delete or tamper with their own execution traces, defeating the assumption behind asynchronous monitoring, incident investigation, and compliance audits. Only one tested harness, Muse Code, blocked this behavior; the authors also show external attackers can trigger trace deletion and that trace tampering emerges naturally as agents try to maximize reward, which could be used to conceal scheming or sabotage. They recommend enforcing trace logging via an independent interception mechanism outside the agent's control so integrity survives even full host compromise.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 25 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Coding Agents for Generalized Task and Motion Planning ProblemsThis paper investigates whether coding agents like Claude Code (Opus 5) and Codex (GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra) can automate generalized task and motion planning (TAMP) by synthesizing programs that generalize across problem instances rather than requiring hand-engineered planners. Across 28 simulated environments from KinDER and PDDLStream benchmarks and 98,000 evaluation episodes, coding agents outperformed hand-engineered planners, one-shot generation, and an LLM-based generalized planning baseline (56-95% success vs 47% for planners), while scaling better with object count and using far less compute per instance. The authors release all code and prompts used.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026π§ AI
PoEM: Predicting RL Outcomes from Existing PoliciesPoEM predicts the outcome of RL post-training on a new reward function using models already trained on other rewards, without running additional RL. It shows that when a new reward is a linear combination of existing ones, the resulting log-policy is a corresponding linear combination of existing log-policies, and even for non-linear reward combinations, log-policies often span a low-rank subspace whose combination weights can be estimated from sample outputs alone. Validated on synthetic and real rewards across text and image modalities.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026π§ AI
TrackEverything: Long Horizon Dense Tracking via De-Duplicating 3D Scene RepresentationsTrackEverything is a 3D point tracker that represents videos as persistent 3D scene tracks in world coordinates, decoupling model complexity from video duration by scaling with scene geometry rather than frame count. It introduces voxelization-based de-duplication to merge co-located tracks across sliding-window boundaries, an endpoint refiner plus lightweight trajectory refiner that only decodes dense trajectories for dynamic points, and 3D WAFT, which replaces memory-heavy 4D correlation volumes with feature sampling in the scene cloud. On TAPVid-3D it beats open-source dense 3D trackers by over 20% APD on short clips and is the first 3D tracker able to track all visible points across 1000+ frame videos within 40GB GPU memory.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026π§ AI
A Decentralized Partially Observable Team Decision Methodology with Delayed Information SharingThis arXiv preprint proposes a decentralized learning and planning algorithm for team decision problems modeled as partially observable Markov decision processes with unknown, low-rank latent dynamics. Each team member acts only on local private information plus delayed common information, learning an approximate low-rank MDP and applying least-squares value iteration to compute its policy without any centralized coordinator or centralized training. The authors prove the resulting decentralized policies approximate the centralized team-optimal solution and derive finite-sample and sample-complexity guarantees.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Sep 2026, published 22 Sep 2026π§ AI
MIGU: Multimodal Instruction Grounding under Uncertainty for Manipulation PlanningMIGU is a modular framework for multimodal instruction grounding that fuses semantic priors from a vision-language model with a 3D geometric likelihood derived from eye-finger gesture geometry and uncertainty propagation (viewing-direction, depth, hand-direction error). The resulting Bayes-inspired grounding belief drives a behavior planner that either proceeds to manipulation planning or requests clarification, and is evaluated against baselines on a real-world mobile manipulation and tabletop task-and-motion planning benchmark. It matters as an example of explicitly modeling uncertainty across language and gesture modalities to make robot instruction-following more robust.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 21 Sep 2026π§ AI
Critical-State RL: Diagnosing Trainable States for Multi-Turn Tool UseCritical-State RL is a method for diagnosing which model calls in a multi-turn tool-use trajectory are actually "trainable" β i.e., where reward variation reflects the action's own effect on task success rather than downstream randomness. It uses nested sampling to separate action-dependent reward signal from continuation noise, then optimizes the policy at the selected critical states via contextual-bandit training. On the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) v4, training at diagnostic-selected states (e.g., the response right after a missing tool becomes available, or right before a missing argument is supplied) improves performance by up to ~14 points, while training at naively chosen alternative states leaves performance flat or worse.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 21 Sep 2026π§ AI
LIMBO: Learning and Internalizing Model-Free Barrier Objectives for Agile and Safe Whole-Body ControlLIMBO is a framework for synthesizing a state-action control barrier function (Q-CBF) from black-box transitions and distilling its safety structure into a task policy, avoiding the need for an online safety filter at deployment. Applied to a 29-degree-of-freedom humanoid performing dodgeball avoidance and low-obstacle locomotion, it uses risk-guided sampling near the boundary of recoverability during synthesis and acts as a safety-feedback teacher during task learning, transferring to hardware without online filtering.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 18 Sep 2026π§ AI
How Does Distribution Shift Shape Pretraining Gains in Neural PDE Surrogates?This paper studies how distribution shift affects the benefit of pretraining neural PDE surrogates for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The authors pretrain a surrogate on 254,909 RANS solutions from one airfoil family and fine-tune on a new airfoil family under two settings (same Spalart-Allmaras turbulence modeling vs. added e^N transition modeling), finding that pretraining's sample-efficiency advantage over training from scratch shrinks as target-data budget grows and depends on whether source and target physics match. The results show pretraining value is jointly determined by target-data budget, data coverage (diversity of airfoils sampled), and physics mismatch between source and target domains.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 17 Sep 2026π§ AI- OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10
OWASP's Agentic Skills Top 10 (AST10) catalogs the ten most critical security risks in the "skills" layer of AI agent platforms β OpenClaw's SKILL.md, Claude Code's skill.json, Cursor/Codex manifest.json, and VS Code package.json β arguing this behavior/orchestration layer is distinct from and less protected than the MCP tool layer. It documents real 2026 incidents (the ClawHavoc campaign poisoning 1,184+ ClawHub skills with AMOS-stealer payloads via a shared C2 IP, Snyk's ToxicSkills audit finding 36% of skills flawed, CVE-2025-59536/CVE-2026-21852 in Claude Code enabling RCE and API-key exfiltration on project open, and CVE-2026-28363 "ClawJacked" WebSocket hijacking of local OpenClaw instances), and proposes a Universal Skill Format with signing, permission manifests, and risk tiers plus a checklist for registries, runtime, governance, and skill development.
owasp.github.iopaperAdded 14 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
A Chip-scale Space-time Multiplexed Gaussian Boson Sampling Processor Beyond 10,000 PhotonsThis arXiv preprint reports the first chip-scale, space-time multiplexed Gaussian Boson Sampling (GBS) processor, built on a thin-film lithium niobate chip integrating high-speed electro-optic modulators and on-chip delay lines, running at 4 GHz and detecting up to 11,059 photons within 1 millisecond. Beyond demonstrating quantum computational advantage, the authors reconfigure the photonic hardware as a GBS-powered world model for modelling physical dynamics, achieving lower prediction error with fewer trainable readout parameters than a classical echo state network (ESN) baseline. It's notable for the AI catalog as a concrete example of photonic quantum hardware being repurposed as a reservoir-computing-style model for physical-dynamics prediction.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 10 Sep 2026π§ AI
Characterizing Language Generation in the Limit: Finite Witnesses and a Separation-Width HierarchThis arXiv paper characterizes when "language generation in the limit" is possible: producing valid unseen elements from any exhaustive positive presentation of an unknown infinite language. The authors show generation is possible exactly when each target language can be assigned a finite positive witness such that targets activated by any finite sample share an infinite common intersection, and they introduce a "separation width" hierarchy measuring how large these witnesses must be across families. The full characterization and hierarchy are formally verified in Lean, including a normalization lemma and a diagonal capture argument.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 9 Sep 2026π§ AI
Proxy Policy SteeringProxy Policy Steering (PPS) is an inference-time adaptation method for generalist robot manipulation policies that trains two lightweight proxy policies (reference and task) whose calibrated velocity-space difference steers a frozen base diffusion/flow sampler at each denoising step. Because the base model's weights are never modified, PPS preserves broad manipulation priors while specializing to new tasks from limited demonstrations, only requiring forward velocity predictions from the base. On 8 real-world and 4 simulation tasks it lifts the pi 0.5 base policy by 53% absolute success rate, outperforming LoRA fine-tuning, from-scratch specialists, and residual policies.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 8 Sep 2026π§ AI
Green's Functions from Sample-based Krylov Quantum Diagonalization: An Impurity Solver for Dynamical Mean-Field TheoryThis arXiv preprint generalizes the sample-based Krylov quantum diagonalization (SKQD) method from ground-state energy calculations to computing single-particle Green's functions on quantum hardware. By building unitary Krylov subspaces in the NΒ±1 particle sectors and classically evaluating overlaps, the authors reconstruct Green's functions via a Lanczos continued fraction, applying the technique as an impurity solver for dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) on the single-impurity Anderson model, reproducing spectral features across the metal-insulator transition with shallow, ancilla-free quantum circuits.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 8 Sep 2026π§ AI
Compile by Training: Turning Natural-Language Specifications into Local Neural FunctionsPresents "compile by training," a method that turns a natural-language task specification into a reusable, locally-run neural function: teacher models generate task-specific training examples that are used to fine-tune a small adapter on a compact interpreter, avoiding repeated calls to a remote large model. On FuzzyBench-Hard (a subset where the faster "Program-as-Weights" compiler produced no exact matches), this approach reaches 83.6% semantic accuracy at the cost of roughly a minute of compile time versus seconds. The authors deploy compiled functions in a public interactive service, including a website helper, a language-controlled 3D avatar, and a bidirectional English-Claudish translator.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 3 Sep 2026π§ AI
Limber: Low Overhead SNARKs for Integers from Any PCSLimber is a new integer mod-PCS construction that lets SNARK systems handle non-native arithmetic (computation outside the proof system's native field) with asymptotically o(1) multiplicative overhead, built generically on top of any standard polynomial commitment scheme. It implements the Zaratan (PKC 26) fingerprinting recipe to reduce integer relations to a randomly sampled prime field, directly addressing a documented class of real world ZK implementation bugs: 9 of 27 critical bugs in the 0xPARC/zkbugtracker collection stem from non-native arithmetization errors. The authors benchmark 15 to 30x speedups for RSA accumulator proofs and 24x for non-native Poseidon2 hashing versus circuit based approaches.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 3 Oct 2026, published 7 Aug 2026π‘οΈ Security
AI Security BriefingThis arxiv paper introduces the TrustX Agent Risk Classification Framework (ARC), a structured instrument for risk-tiering internally built agentic AI systems across seven system types. It combines a twelve-dimension scoring rubric with a GPA + IAT classification model and a five-level autonomy framework to produce a three-tier governance output with mapped controls, including a Coding Assistant extension, and provides an interactive tool plus a worked example for AI risk officers and governance practitioners.
arxiv.orgpaperPublished and added 18 Jul 2026π‘οΈ Security