Your Benchmark Is an Empirical Measure Over DifficultyThe paper treats a benchmark as an empirical measure over item difficulty and formalizes two failure modes: measure mismatch (benchmark difficulty distribution differs from the intended one) and coverage gaps (uncovered difficulty regions that hide localized training progress). It proposes two diagnostic metrics with theoretical guarantees and analyzes 25 popular benchmarks across 7 domains using estimated item difficulties. It also introduces BenchFill, a difficulty-targeted item rewriting algorithm that reduces local coverage gaps.
huggingface.copaperAdded 31 Oct 2026π§ AI
Retrieving from Your Own Mistakes: On-Policy Training of Embedding Models for Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented GenerationOn-policy state training is a method for training chain embedding retrievers for multi-hop RAG on the states the encoder itself reaches, including those built on its own wrong retrievals. Each state is labeled with the earliest missing gold passage, other missing gold passages are masked, and updates are contrastive and mixed with teacher-forced states. It retrieves complete evidence more often than teacher-forced training and graph-based systems, and transfers to harder long-chain HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA variants the authors built.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π§ AI
Understanding and Mitigating Role Spoofing in LLMsUnderstanding and Mitigating Role Spoofing in LLMs is an arXiv paper (October 2026) on role spoofing, a prompt injection where malicious tool output impersonates the user. It shows models track "who said what" using both content cues (semantics, style) and structure cues (control tokens, formatting). Attacks combining fake structure and content succeed often, adversarial training stops only content-based attacks, and linear probes trained to predict conversation roles detect spoofing across settings.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
A Unified Hessian-Guided Framework for Post-Training QuantizationThis preprint proposes a unified post-training quantization framework for large language models. It derives a Hessian-guided approximation of the output change caused by joint weight and activation quantization, using a tractable Fisher approximation. Quantization ranges, linear transformations and weight rounding are optimized together under one output-sensitivity objective. The authors report gains over state-of-the-art transformation and rounding methods in channel-wise and block-wise settings.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π§ AI
MAServeBench: Benchmarking Multi-Agent LLM Serving Systems with Hierarchical Collaboration WorkloadsMAServeBench is a benchmark that treats multi-agent collaboration as a configurable dimension of LLM serving workloads. Its composable stages model how agents coordinate and exchange context in documented multi-agent workflows, and Hierarchical Semantic Traces record operations and dependencies for reproducible comparisons. Task-linked measurements tie workloads to GPU/NPU behavior, showing serving efficiency does not always mean timely task completion. Code is released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π§ AI
Benchmarking color judgment in multimodal LLMs with CIE-computable ground truthA five-task benchmark tests multimodal LLM color judgment against CIE colorimetric ground truth: AWB pair judgment, skin-tone bias direction, CCT estimation, Delta E 2000 pair ordering, and color naming under changing illuminants. Eight endpoints were tested. On ColorChecker-24 stimuli, closed frontier models reach CCT MAE of 715-1056 K versus 1358-2133 K for open-weight models, and a non-ColorChecker control shows this gap is partly template-dependent.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π§ AI- Quasi-polynomial time algorithms for block basis reduction of linear codes
Kolesnikov and Novoselov give block basis reduction (BKZ) algorithms for linear codes that need polynomial or quasi-polynomial numbers of calls to a minimum weight codeword oracle at fixed block size. The earlier Ghentiyala and Stephens-Davidowitz bounds are exponential. The paper adds a truncated BKZ and a DeepBKZ variant, with an implementation for block sizes 2 to 24 and approximation-factor estimates on random codes.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security - A Quantitative Evaluation of Constant-Time Analysis Tools
AutoBench-CT is a modular benchmark for constant-time analysis tools, with manually verified per-violation ground truth across 64 cryptographic tasks. It scores seven tools on operational performance, detection quality and usability. The authors explain why CT-grind (2010) is still the most used tool, list recurring limitations across tools, and propose a composite pipeline for stronger constant-time guarantees. Accepted at ACSAC 2026.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security - Optimality and Efficiency of Higher-Order Rank-Based Side-Channel Attacks against Inner Product Masking Schemes
HO-ASPA (Higher-Order Adjusted Spearman Coefficient Analysis) is a rank-based, non-profiling side-channel distinguisher. The paper derives its optimal form against two-share Boolean masking and inner product masking under Hamming weight and LSB leakage. It finds no significant gap between higher and lower orders for HO-ASPA, unlike HO-CPA, and reports that it beats Kruskal-Wallis-based attacks in simulated and real-world experiments.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
DICE: Decentralized Incentive-driven Federated Learning for Efficient & Scalable Customization of Pretrained Models in Web3DICE is a blockchain-powered federated learning (BCFL) algorithm for customizing large pretrained models among untrusted Web3 participants. It combines dynamic progressive learning and model slice verification, so hardware-limited participants can train part of the model, with a tree-structured committee consensus protocol and an efficiency-driven incentive scheme to scale to more data holders. Experiments cover vision and language models.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π§ AI- Cryptography and Security Papers (@FSFG) on X
PrivacyEvalClaw is a tool-augmented deliberative agent that audits privacy leakage in LLM jailbreak responses. The paper is by Krishna Kanth Nakka and co-authors, and it was accepted to AACL-IJCNLP 2026 (arXiv 2610.36711, cs.CR). The tweet gives only the title, authors and venue, so the method and results are not described.
x.compaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security - Cryptography and Security Papers (@FSFG) on X
PrivacyEvalClaw is a tool-augmented deliberative agent for auditing privacy leakage in LLM responses produced under jailbreak prompts. By Krishna Kanth Nakka and five co-authors, the paper is on arXiv (cs.CR) and accepted to AACL-IJCNLP 2026. The fetched post gives only the title, authors and venue, so method details and results are not available here.
x.compaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026π§ AI
Quantize by Doing: Task-Guided Mixed-Precision Quantization of Vision-Language-Action ModelsQbD-VLA is a mixed-precision post-training quantization method for vision-language-action models. It uses task success from short closed-loop evaluations to assign weight and activation bit widths, accounting for interactions between components. On four VLA models across all four LIBERO suites it holds task performance at about 4-bit weights and under 6-bit activations. The gain on SIMPLER is small. On a Franka Research 3 arm, X-VLA shows no detected loss, but Ο0.5 fails.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026π§ AI
Secure Transaction Verification and Authorization (STVA)Secure Transaction Verification and Authorization (STVA) is a draft Standards Track ERC (created October 2026) by @MATOBOYCRYPTO65. It proposes structured human-readable metadata and semantic intent for transactions and UserOperations, an independent simulation and verification interface, and scoped, revocable capability tokens for privileged operations. It targets blind signing and frontend supply-chain attacks, citing the February 2025 Bybit Safe multisig theft. The page gives only the abstract, motivation and core concepts.
ethresear.chpaperPublished and added 28 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Session-Bound Behavioral Watermarking for Autonomous LLM AgentsAgentAnchor is a session-keyed behavioral watermark for attributing LLM agent trajectory logs to an owner. It derives per-step keys from a secret key, a fresh public session ID and semantic observation states, and embeds parity evidence through a KL-bounded exponential tilt. The paper formalizes learned cross-session forgery, and a trusted verifier checks disputed logs using wrong-key calibration and abstention.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Session-Bound Behavioral Watermarking for Autonomous LLM AgentsAgentAnchor is a session-keyed behavioral watermark that lets an agent owner prove ownership of a trajectory log. Each step key comes from a secret key, a fresh public session identifier and semantic states of recent observations. Parity evidence is embedded through a KL-bounded exponential tilt of action choices. A trusted verifier checks disputed logs without rerunning the agent, using wrong-key calibration and abstention. The paper also formulates a learned cross-session forgery threat.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026π§ AI
Post-Training Large Language Models with LLMONLLMON (LLM Object Notation) is a framework that separates instructions from data and requires explicit identifier-based execution. The authors post-train Granite-4.1 3B and 8B base models with SFT then RL on a 4.6B-token structured corpus covering general, RAG and tool-calling data, with distractor variants. Attack success rates on indirect prompt-injection benchmarks fall from 53-100% to 0.02-5.6%, and general capability is preserved. Attention-based metrics diagnose failures per transformer layer.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Post-Training Large Language Models with LLMONLLMON (LLM Object Notation) is a framework that separates executable instructions from passive data and requires explicit identifier-based execution. The paper post-trains Granite-4.1 3B and 8B base models on a 4.6B-token corpus of general, RAG and tool-calling data with distractor variants, using SFT then RL. Attack success rates on indirect prompt-injection benchmarks fall from 53-100% to 0.02-5.6%, with general capabilities preserved. It also adds attention-based per-layer diagnostics.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026π§ AI
Statistical Detection of Positional Bias in LLM-Based Recommender Systems: Methodologies and Empirical EvidenceThe paper proposes POB-ICM (contingency matrix with Chi-square independence testing) and POB-UNBP (a uniformity null model under permutation-based evaluation) to detect positional bias in top-1, single-turn LLM recommenders. On a RAG product-recommendation testbed with 2000 queries and 20 permutations each (40,000 instances), both methods reject positional independence in all evaluated models. Three metrics quantify the effect, and the bias persists across candidate-set size and temperature. Code is public.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π§ AI
Know, then Draw: A New Learning Paradigm for Visual GenerationKnow, then Draw is a learning paradigm for visual generation that uses autoregressive pretraining to acquire semantic knowledge and diffusion post-training for high-fidelity rendering. Controlled comparisons find autoregression the stronger pretraining objective, and semantic quality matters more than AR-only generation quality. This motivates a purely semantic tokenizer trained with language supervision only. A 3B text-to-image model trained in 6,600 H100 GPU-hours scores 86 on GenEval and 87 on DPG-Bench.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π§ AI
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
Towards Quantum Sensing for Side-Channel AnalysisPreprint on using nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center quantum sensing for electromagnetic side-channel analysis of ICs. The authors build an NV-based RF spectrometer with 1.1 GHz real-time bandwidth and adjustable center frequency, which reads the spectrum in the time domain without Fourier transforms or frequency sweeps. They use it on RSA decryption emanations and for leakage detection on a software Number Theoretic Transform running on a Cortex-M4 microcontroller.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Tessera: Structure-Completed Evidence Units for Web Retrieval-Augmented GenerationTessera is a training-free evidence delivery layer for web retrieval-augmented generation. It rebuilds retrieved pages' HTML into fine-grained evidence units, each completed with page title, section path and table headers, then packs the relevant units into the reader context at the same token budget. Tracing evidence over full English Wikipedia shows chunking loses table and infobox content. Tessera adds 5 to 6 accuracy points on three QA benchmarks and carries over to agentic search.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π§ AI
DCKV: Learned Transform Coding of the Prompt KV Cache in Hybrid Language ModelsDCKV is a differentiable codec for the prompt KV cache of hybrid language models, which keep a KV cache only in their few full-attention layers. Transform, quantizer and entropy models (conditioned on prompt tokens and already decoded neighbouring positions) are trained end to end against a frozen model. On Qwen3.5-2B it stores a token in over 55 times fewer bytes than bf16 with at most 1.8 points lost on three long-context benchmarks, and over 100 times fewer with at most 3.6 points lost.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π§ AI
AxisQ: Depth-Adaptive Channel--Frequency Quantization for Camouflaged Object DetectionAxisQ is a post-training quantization framework for camouflaged object detection (COD) that allocates activation bits by feature depth. It uses the channel domain for shallow features and the local-frequency domain for deep features, under a fixed per-layer average bit budget. It adds a boundary-aware Hessian approximation for reconstruction. On CAMO at W2A2, weighted F-measure improves 12.7% for CFRN and 33.3% for CamoFormer-P over the strongest baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π§ AI
Alg\{Ossa\}: Decentralized Secure Aggregation with Rotating Committees and Eventual DeliveryAlgOssa is a decentralized secure aggregation protocol built on Ossa, a generic committee-aided, single-server construction for one-shot clients (following OPA and Willow, CRYPTO 2025). Ossa realizes secure aggregation with non-selective abort against a malicious server. AlgOssa adds Algorand-style sortition to rotate leaders and committees, bounds the chance of an honest server, and gives eventual delivery. Classical and post-quantum routes are evaluated.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Poly2MsgLeaks: Certified Key Recovery from Polynomial-to-Message LeakagePoly2MsgLeaks is a profiled chosen-ciphertext power-analysis attack on the SMAUG-T (TiMER parameter set) post-quantum KEM that recovers the full 512-coefficient PKE secret from six traces on an STM32F415. It recovers 999 of 1,000 unseen secrets and proves an incorrect key is released with probability at most 2^-2095.6. Single-write message assembly and a two-share masked P2M resisted the evaluated six-execution attack.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Your Wish Is My Commit: Over-Compliant Refactoring in AI Coding AgentsYour Wish Is My Commit is a controlled study of over-compliant refactoring in Codex and Claude Code, run across five models, 50 algorithmic tasks and 10 object-oriented tasks. Over 3,000 turns of repeated "refactor further" prompts, no model stopped on its own: each rewrote up to 31x the original codebase before first stopping and resumed edits after declaring the task complete. The paper defines six behavioral signals for detecting over-compliance.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026π§ AI
Analyzing Compiler-induced Constant-time Violations with Compiler at ScaleCTGREP is a compiler-based framework that applies differential analysis across the whole Clang/LLVM compilation chain to find where, how and under which configurations compiler optimizations break constant-time cryptographic code. Applied to seven libraries, three Clang versions, six targets and thousands of configurations, it led to 48 cases fixed with developers. It also identified seven new problematic LLVM passes and bypassed existing compiler-flag mitigations.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Cheap AI-Assisted Reverse Engineering and What It Will Do"Cheap AI-Assisted Reverse Engineering and What It Will Do" is an October 2026 arXiv paper (Computers and Society) arguing that generative AI strains the law of reverse engineering. AI systems can identify hardware components, extract firmware, decompile object code and clone apps, which removes the cost barrier that laws rely on. The authors map these practices onto trade secret, copyright, anti-circumvention, computer misuse and contract law, and sketch possible legal responses with their trade-offs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Revisiting ZMAC+: Birthday-Bound Attacks and a Beyond-Birthday-Bound RepairZMAC+ is a tweakable-block-cipher MAC (List and Nandi, ToSC 2017) with claimed beyond-birthday-bound security. This ePrint paper (2026/2647) shows a tag-swap attack: for two-block tags, a distinguisher and a fresh-message forgery with constant success probability using O(2^{n/2}) queries in the ideal-TBC model. It also corrects a counting error in the published Lemma 4 and proposes a repaired variant with an adaptive PRF bound of order q^2/2^{n+min(n,t)}.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Then there is prompt injection, a malicious email, ...: The Wild Wide West of OpenClaw Agentic System SecurityAn empirical study of security concerns in the OpenClaw AI personal assistant framework, using 25K+ posts from 13 subreddits (162 security-relevant) and 358 security-tagged GitHub issues (180 retained). It maps 521 CWE instances across 59 weakness types, concentrated in access control, sensitive-data exposure, injection and unsafe execution. It extracts 543 practitioner mitigations into seven strategies and reconstructs a sensitive-data exposure path with dummy secrets.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Cryptanalysis and Repair of "Decentralized Multi-authority ABE for NC$^1$ from BDH"Cryptology ePrint 2026/2642 presents a plaintext-recovery attack on the DBDH and CBDH variants of the Datta, Komargodski and Waters multi-authority ABE for NC1 (Journal of Cryptology, 2023). It needs one corrupt authority and two users, and succeeds with probability one in the static model. The flaw is an invalid extension of the Rouselakis-Waters LSSS matrix-normalization lemma. The paper also attacks two Datta-Pal (PKC 2023) attribute-based inner-product schemes and proves repaired versions secure in the random oracle model.
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
SentryBench: A Cost-Sensitive Benchmark for Adversarial Robustness of Tool-Using LLM Agents in Public-Safety DeploymentsSentryBench is a benchmark for tool-using LLM agents in public-safety deployments. It scores attack success, over-refusal (missing a real emergency) and over-reaction (unwarranted action) on a cost-sensitive frontier, using real emergency-call transcripts, disaster messages and injection payloads. Across 840 episodes on three frontier models and three defenses, refuse-more caution pushed over-refusal to 100 percent on two models, while a trust-gating wrapper gave the lowest harm.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026π§ AI
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
SymLift: Neural Semantic Lifting for Compile-Free Vulnerability Detection in Context-Incomplete Code FragmentsSymLift is a compile-free vulnerability detection framework for context-incomplete code fragments. A fine-tuned LLM lifts control-flow, data-flow, memory and resource relations into a constrained LLVM-like IR. A parser turns the IR into facts, and Datalog rules derive findings with derivation traces. On Juliet function-level fragments Clang compilation success falls to 12.00%, while SymLift's completion rate drops only 1.17 points. SymLift-Qwen-7B reaches Target-F1 94.41% on FormAI and 91.66% micro-F1 on MegaVul.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
SymLift: Neural Semantic Lifting for Compile-Free Vulnerability Detection in Context-Incomplete Code FragmentsSymLift is a compile-free vulnerability detection framework for code fragments that lack project context. A fine-tuned LLM reconstructs control-flow, data-flow, memory and resource relations as a constrained LLVM-like IR, and a deterministic parser turns it into facts for Datalog rules that give findings with derivation traces. SymLift-Qwen-7B reaches 94.41% Target-F1 on FormAI and 91.66% micro-averaged Target-F1 on MegaVul.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026π§ AI
A KelseyβKohno Attack Variant against SHA-2 Message Digests in HSS/LMS and XMSSFalko Strenzke's ePrint 2026/2635 presents a multi-target second-preimage attack on message hashing in HSS/LMS and XMSS with SHA-256 and SHA-256/192. It herds chaining states from many collected signatures into one state, defeating the key and leaf-index prefix. With 2^64 signatures, SHA-256 cost falls from 2^256 to about 2^166 (2^156 at maximal message length). SHAKE256 parameter sets are unaffected.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Explaining Navigation Decisions: Stage-Aware Visual Attribution for Vision-Language NavigationA stage-aware visual attribution framework for Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) that explains a robot's action choices. It identifies "instruction-stage insensitivity", where existing explainers give similar outputs across navigation stages. The method builds action-conditioned temporal instruction-visual attributions, aggregates relevant historical evidence by stage, and applies an instruction-guided spatial filter. It improves attribution quality across several VLN policies and benchmarks, helps diagnose failure cases, and was tested on a Unitree G1 robot.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026π§ AI
Detecting and Understanding Ambiguity in Visualizations with Role-Playing Vision Language Model InterpretationsThis paper presents a pipeline that uses persona-conditioned vision language models to surface interpretive ambiguity in visualizations. Topic-relevant personas elicit candidate takeaways, and a Target-Pattern-Scope framework lets LLM judges label statement pairs as Compatible, Disjoint or Opposing, which are summarized in an ambiguity profile. The authors benchmark VLMs on chart comprehension per chart type, check labeling against human annotations, and run case studies on public visualizations and a redesign.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026π§ AI
InteractiveWorld: A Verifiable Human-Centric Environment for Building Better Interactive MLLM AssistantsInteractiveWorld is an environment for closed-loop interaction between an AI assistant and a simulated human agent who sees the scene, follows instructions and acts independently. InteractiveBench, built on it, has 120 multi-turn tasks in six categories scored by verifiable, state-based rewards. Across 12 frontier MLLMs, the best model, Claude Fable 5.1, reaches at most 20% on long-horizon Guidance and 25% on Planning tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026π§ AI
Sliding Networks: A Family of Residual Structures Preserving Feature Learning and Feature DiversitySliding Networks is a family of residual network structures with a joint width and depth scaling recipe that keeps both locally maximal feature learning and feature diversity in the residual stream. The key quantity is the ratio N_flat/(N_sharp L) tending to a constant alpha, and Half Copy correlated initialization can relax the shape constraints. Residual-MLP experiments support an SDE limit, but language-model experiments show performance differences under regrouping at fixed parameter count.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026π§ AI
VeilDNS: Post-Quantum DNS Privacy from the First UDP PacketVeilDNS is a DNS-native protocol that uses a post-quantum KEM and AEAD to encrypt DNS questions and answers and authenticate the resolver in one UDP exchange on port 53, preserving the DNS wire format. It has stateless and stateful modes plus optional forward secrecy from the second query. Against ML-DSA-authenticated DoT/DoH/DoQ it reports up to 3.5x higher cold-session throughput and 13.7x fewer bytes; Tamarin proves query confidentiality, response authentication and forward secrecy.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
RAQ-MLA: Role-Aware Quantization for Multi-Head Latent Attention CachesRAQ-MLA (Role-Aware Quantization for Multi-Head Latent Attention Caches) is a training-free method for quantizing the MLA KV cache. It fits a separate invertible transform to the compressed latent (tuned for attention-weighted value error) and to the positional key (tuned for score perturbation). It reaches about 2.5 bits per element, a 6.5x gain in theoretical KV-cache capacity, with near-lossless reasoning and coding results on four MLA models.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026π§ AI
Small Edits, Shifting Decisions: Benchmarking LLM Accuracy and Reliability on French Input VariantsThis paper builds a controlled French surface-variant benchmark with seven task types and 4,200 original-low-high triplets (12,600 inputs), covering missing apostrophes and diacritics and keyboard typos. Six models from two LLM families lose accuracy and show worse Brier score and NLL as perturbation grows. Keyboard typos hurt most. Calibration temperatures fitted on original inputs transfer to variants, and combining them with input restoration improves reliability further.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026π§ AI
Deletion, Substitution, Repair and Transplant: Component Attribution in BARBICAN, a Layered Prompt-Injection Gateway for MCPBARBICAN is a fail-closed prompt-injection gateway for MCP tool mediation. This paper shows its arbitration classifier ran on tokenizer-mangled text for a whole evaluation. Fixing it raised AUC from 0.392 to 0.855 while system recall fell from 80.67% to 80.34%. The routed band is 96.82% malicious, so deletion ablations mislead without substitution experiments and class-balance reporting.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Deletion, Substitution, Repair and Transplant: Component Attribution in BARBICAN, a Layered Prompt-Injection Gateway for MCPThe paper analyses BARBICAN, a fail-closed prompt-injection gateway for MCP tool mediation, using deletion, substitution, repair and transplant experiments. Its arbitration classifier ran on tokenizer-mangled text for a whole evaluation. Fixing that raised AUC from 0.392 to 0.855 while system recall fell from 80.67% to 80.34%. The band it receives is 96.82% malicious. The authors argue ablation figures need the band's class balance and substitution baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
Faster and Smaller Anonymous Credentials from Standardized SignaturesGordieHowe is a language, certifying compiler and zero-knowledge proof system for building anonymous credentials on standardized signatures (ECDSA, RSA, ML-DSA). It proves an ECDSA-signed mobile driving license presentation in 64.8 ms with a 276 KiB proof, 10.1x faster than Google's Longfellow, and an ML-DSA-44 signature in 87.3 ms with at least 116 bits of quantum security. Compiler output and security theorems are checked in Lean. It introduces series-parallel IOPs and extends the BCS transformation in the QROM.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Tight Post-Quantum Multi-Key Security of the FX ConstructionRentaro Shiba and Tetsu Iwata prove a tight multi-key security bound for the FX construction (the DESX generalization) in the quantum ideal cipher model. Security holds up to about 2^((n+ΞΊ)/3) total classical and quantum oracle queries against fully adaptive adversaries, for any number of keyed instances ΞΌβ₯1. This improves their ToSC 2026 bound and matches the offline Simon's algorithm attack in the exponent.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
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
Learning with Quantization and Worst Case Lattice ProblemsLearning with Quantization and Worst Case Lattice Problems is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2613) by Ziwei Hong and Zhongqiu Fang. It proves that search and decision learning with quantization (LWQ) with public dither is as hard as quantum GapSVP and SIVP on arbitrary lattices, using the randomized polar lattice quantizer of Lyu et al. It also shows that a complete reduction for interval uniform error LWE (MAMBA Frost) and hardness at concrete MAMBA parameters are not established.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
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
When to Stop Penalizing Actions? Martingale GRPO for VLA Reinforcement LearningMART-GRPO is a variant of group-relative policy optimization for vision-language-action (VLA) reinforcement learning. It uses a LoRA-fine-tuned VLM to find the last visible error without recovery in a failed rollout video, keeps failure feedback up to that point, and drops it afterward. Martingale stopping conditions show this preserves the expected GRPO gradient and can reduce covariance. With OpenVLA-OFT on RoboTwin 2.0, it raises success rates over full-trajectory GRPO across multiple tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
BiLoCo: Binary Low-Rank Corrections for Post-Training QuantizationBiLoCo is a post-training quantization method for FP4 LLMs that adds low-rank corrections whose left and right factors are stored as binary Β±1 sign vectors instead of BF16. This uses 16x less storage per rank-one component and lets the correction run on CUDA cores alongside the FP4 tensor-core GEMM. On 4B to 72B LLMs it matches or improves memory-matched SVDQuant. A fused B300 kernel is at most 11% slower than FP4-only GEMM at batch size 1 for ranks up to 512.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
MPQ: A Message-Passing View of Post-Training QuantizationMPQ (Message-Passing Quantization) is a post-training quantization method that treats row-wise PTQ as posterior inference over discrete codebooks. It keeps soft posteriors across weight blocks using vector approximate message passing, then refines a hard-decision initialization with exact block coordinate descent. Tested at 2-bit lattice and 3- and 4-bit scalar quantization on Llama, Qwen and Mistral models, it improves perplexity and zero-shot accuracy over GPTQ-style baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
Semantically Rich, Metrically Affect-Blind: A Geometric Blind Spot in Modern Text EmbeddersSentiment-Injected Sentence Embeddings (SISE) addresses a finding across eleven frozen text encoders (2021 to 2026): linear probes recover sentence polarity at up to 91.3% accuracy, but cosine similarity separates polarity by only 0.003-0.064. A small supervised-contrastive head (0.13M-0.69M parameters) trained on CPU raises retrieval MAP by up to 26 points, but the 128-d head loses 38-41 STS-B Spearman points. The paper also releases the Attribute Alignment Gap diagnostic.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
How Much Do You Trust A Dog? Quantifying Hint-Following in Reasoning Language ModelsThis paper measures how hints such as "[Source] thinks the answer is (X)" shift LLM answers on MMLU questions, varying the source between a professor, a friend and a dog across Qwen, Gemma and SmolLM models. The shift fits an exponential tilt: a roughly constant mean change in the hinted answer's log-odds, with susceptibility largely shared across sources. The shift persists when the source is declared inaccurate or the prompt warns against trusting it. Synthetic experiments show how KL-regularized reward training could produce this pattern.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
Reproducible Evaluation as the Substrate for Safe Prompt Compression in Production AgentsThis paper presents an offline evaluation harness for a production merchant-facing conversational agent. It stays reproducible when live backend data changes and can be regenerated when it goes stale. Used as the fitness function for GEPA prompt optimization under a correctness gate against reward hacking, it shrinks the full prompt surface by 3.5-7.6% without losing held-out correctness, across three subject-model families.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ AI
MΓmir: A Stateless Private Search EngineMΓmir is a cryptographic protocol for stateless semantic private search over highly dynamic public databases. It uses homomorphic ciphertext switching, relies on (Ring) Learning with Errors, and needs no offline communication. Against Tiptoe it matches search quality with 84x less per-query communication (0.24 MiB). Against PACMANN it raises quality from 76% to 81% of non-private search, with a 9.54 MiB one-time cost instead of 2.68 GiB, but is 2.1x slower.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
EpiSEM-Bench: Evaluating Safety and Evidence Recovery in LLM Agents under Missing EvidenceEpiSEM-Bench is an executable benchmark of 300 matched unsafe/safe task pairs across six domains. It tests whether tool-using LLM agents take prohibited actions when a tool response omits a safety-relevant fact, even though the request is benign and all returned statements are true. It finds large variation across ten models, and recovery access cuts unsafe execution for all ten.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ AI
BeNice! Closing Looping's Inference-Memory Gap via KV-SharingBeNice! is a post-training method for looped language models that broadcasts the final recurrence's KV-cache into the first recurrence, so one cache can serve all recurrences. It follows a first stage that uses stochastic depth in pretraining to induce contractive residual dynamics. It matches standard finetuning's unshared validation perplexity and composes with multi-latent attention, Kimi delta attention and fp8, mxfp8 and nvfp4 cache quantization. In simulated low-memory long-context inference it raises cache hit rates by up to 31.4% and throughput by up to 23.6%, and cuts p90 time-to-first-token by up to 83.6%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ AI
Who Is Sycophantic to Whom? Confident LLMs, Human Deference, and the Collapse of Trust CalibrationThis paper studies reverse sycophancy: whether users bend toward a confident, consistent, wrong LLM. In a within-subjects experiment, 32 participants learned science topics from five GPT-5-mini assistants with 0 to 100% of facts replaced by falsehoods. Scores fell from 7.4 to 2.9 out of 10, planted falsehoods were chosen on 60% of falsified items against 11% of correctly taught ones, and confidence stopped tracking correctness. It introduces a baseline-corrected Human Deference Index.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ AI
Evaluating the Applicability of LLM Inference Optimizations on Apple SiliconThis October 2026 arXiv paper evaluates four LLM inference optimization families on Apple Silicon: KV-cache pruning, speculative decoding, ported GPU kernels and post-training quantization. Tests run on four Apple machines with a single-request decode workload, plus matched RTX 4090 runs. KV-cache pruning reaches 1.75x throughput on Apple, all tested speculative decoding methods reduce throughput, and ported kernels give up to 1.20x.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ AI
Efficient Laconic Oblivious Transfer with Malicious SecurityEfficient Laconic Oblivious Transfer with Malicious Security is an ePrint paper (2026/2593, ASIACRYPT 2026 revision) giving the first maliciously secure laconic OT that uses its primitives only as black boxes. It adds equivocal vector commitments and maliciously secure witness encryption to the commitment-plus-witness-encryption paradigm. Security is proven in the UC model against malicious senders and in the context model against malicious receivers. Instantiations use LWE and bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumptions in the standard model.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Prompt Injection Through Forensic Evidence: A Taxonomy and Proof of Concept of Anti-Forensic Attacks on LLM-Assisted Digital InvestigationsPaper on prompt injection delivered through forensic evidence, where the seized device's contents are attacker-controlled and the examiner must read them. It extends the anti-forensic model to cover manipulation of the reasoning layer and gives a taxonomy (objective, technique, payload location, concealment). Three proof-of-concept attacks on an LLM-assisted analysis pipeline change a reported conclusion, write attacker-chosen content to the analyst workstation, and trigger outbound network traffic. Mitigations are proposed.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
MPIDetector: Detecting Multi-modal Prompt Injection via LLM-based ReasoningMPIDetector is a detection framework for multi-modal prompt injection that uses few-shot in-context learning so an LLM can reason about the semantic intent of text and image inputs, without fine-tuning. The authors built a benchmark of eight textual and seven visual attack categories plus benign sets. They report up to 90.91% accuracy on text, 99.28% on images, and up to 99.80% detection on 500 obfuscated WebInject web-agent injections, beating baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Verifiable Post-Quantum TLS Handshake: Recognizing Implementation Errors of Cryptographic Verification StepsPQCD-TLS is a post-quantum TLS handshake that binds confirmation codes into chained key derivation, so a faulty signature or KEM verification step causes a key mismatch and handshake failure. The authors build confirmation-code frameworks for ML-DSA and Falcon signatures and for ML-KEM, HQC and DAWN, with unpredictability proofs. Across 48 configurations, handshake latency overhead stays below 1%.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Where AI Vulnerability Discovery Harnesses Go Quiet: Structural False Negatives and Hidden VulnerabilitiesPaper (arXiv, 21 October 2026) on structural false negatives in LLM vulnerability discovery harnesses. Starting from Knostic's OpenAnt and raptor, then 10 more open-source harnesses, the authors map 13 points where code selection, filtering, and finding storage or merging drop vulnerabilities. One file was dropped by six harnesses before the model saw it, five without notice. It covers attacker evasion, content-steered verdicts, prompt injection, and design principles and tests.
arxiv.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
SoK: Design-Level Backdoors in Block Ciphers Constructions, Detection, and Key RecoverySoK on design-level backdoors in block ciphers. It places four published designs (Rijmen and Preneel, Paterson, Bannier and Filiol, Peyrin and Wang) in one taxonomy and gives a sound algorithm that recovers a partition trapdoor from S-box tables. It attacks KG-DES, BEA-1 and LowMC-M: KG-DES key recovery takes minutes, and the LowMC-M MALICIOUS backdoor yields the key from 35 to 409 queries. Trapdoors hidden in linear layers leave no trace, so the authors recommend deriving constants verifiably from a public seed.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Table-Free Constant-Work BCH Decoding by Algebraic Index EliminationTable-free constant-work BCH decoding by algebraic index elimination is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2580) that replaces the table scans in Walters and Sinha Roy's constant-work BCH decoder with fixed circuits over public addresses. It proves correctness through radius t and trace regularity, removes 5.2 and 7.2 KiB of tables, and runs 35.7 to 82.4 times faster on an i7-13700. Ordinary C masks compiled to received-word-dependent branches under Apple Clang 21, so the authors use a compiler-opaque primitive and run timing screens on four platforms.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
PQ-Vault: Provably Quantum-Safe Asset Custody for Unmodified EthereumPQ-Vault is a custody design for unmodified Ethereum against quantum key recovery. It combines a quantum-safe vault contract, a proof-of-stake sidechain with compact certificates, and an optimistic dispute protocol. The paper proves that compact certificates with classically chosen parameters fall from 128 to about 60 bits against quantum attackers, and bounds a seed-update stake-steering attack. For 65,536 validators a certificate is 0.8 MB and verifies in about 20 ms, and the vault accepts a checkpoint for about 420,000 gas.
arxiv.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
Combining Long-Term Memory and LLMs Comes at a High Cost: From Prompt Injection to Persistent CompromisePaper on memory injection, where prompt injection persists across sessions through the long-term memory of LLM-as-a-service platforms. It presents a general threat model and shows all NIST attack goals are achievable on ChatGPT Instant 5.3, Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Gemini 3 Flash. Vectors include personal memories, projects, skills, organization instructions and MCP resources. On Claude, shared memory lets an attacker compromise multiple users in an organization and exfiltrate prompts. Nearly half of the derived mitigations are unimplemented.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Benchmarking Arabic Dialects for Math ProblemsDAR-MGSM (Dialectal Arabic Multilingual Grade School Math) is a manually curated benchmark for mathematical reasoning in Dialectal Arabic. It covers five major Arabic dialects plus Modern Standard Arabic, in a translated-only version and a translated and culturally localized version. Eleven Arabic-centric and multilingual LLMs were tested: accuracy generally drops on the localized version, and a mechanistic interpretability analysis shows the two variants induce distinct internal reasoning trajectories.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π§ AI
Beyond 4 bits: Data-Centric Post-training Quantization and RecoveryThis paper studies 2-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) of six dense and mixture-of-experts models from 3.8B to 32B parameters. It finds the quantization representation matters most: vector codebooks give usable models where scalar PTQ falls to chance. Calibration and recovery data must be chosen jointly. The recipe uses about 2.3 effective bits per weight, keeps 89 to 97% of full-precision QA accuracy, and needs 1.4 to 30x less compute than the strongest QAT baseline.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π§ AI
Membership Inference in Privacy-Preserving Vector SearchMembership Inference in Privacy-Preserving Vector Search is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2570) that attacks backend-compatible protections for embedding databases using one snapshot and known plaintexts. It breaks the Scale-and-Perturb scheme of Fuchsbauer et al. (advantage 0.997 on MS-MARCO) and analyzes Rotate-and-Perturb, ideal DCRE and an encrypted HNSW index. It also tests shuffling and secret projection as mitigations.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
After the Attacker Leaves: Benchmarking Carryover Attacks on LLM AgentsCarryoverBench is a benchmark of 12 personal-assistant scenarios and 101 attack tasks for carryover attacks, where a one-time indirect prompt injection planted in agent memory files or scheduled tasks re-fires in later sessions. Three trigger channels (Instant, Autonomous, Latent) are scored by a rule-based verifier with separate planting and triggering stages. Across five frontier models, payloads re-fire over five rounds without measurable decay. Porting the Latent channel to the Hermes runtime weakens the effect but does not remove it.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Context-Aware Prompt Injection Detection via Small Language Models in RAG Pipelines: nokast-secureRAGnokast-secureRAG is a roughly 0.5B-parameter small language model that works as a semantic firewall between retrieval and generation in local RAG systems. It classifies each query and context pair as safe, suspicious or malicious. It reaches 0.994 recall at a 0.026 false-positive rate in-distribution, beating Llama Guard 3 1B and Prompt-Guard-86M (0.900 recall, 0.690 FPR). Recall on PoisonedRAG falls to near zero, and single-request latency is 293-404 ms.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
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
FN-DSA on Arm Cortex-M55: Revisiting a Floating-Point Lattice Signature with Native FP64 and HeliumFN-DSA on Arm Cortex-M55 is an ePrint paper presenting the first FN-DSA (NIST post-quantum signature) implementation on this core that reproduces the reference known-answer tests and runs in constant time. It uses the native FP64 FPU for signing and Helium (MVE) for NTT, key-generation FFT and Keccak, with SLOTHY rescheduling. Key generation, signing and verification are up to 1.23x, 1.93x and 1.30x faster than the reference, and four-signature batch verification up to 1.75x.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 20 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Energy Consumption of Post-Quantum Cryptography on Constrained and General-Purpose ArchitecturesBenchmark of the three NIST post-quantum standards, FIPS 203 (ML-KEM), FIPS 204 (ML-DSA) and FIPS 205 (SLH-DSA), measuring speed and energy for key generation, signing and verification. Tests ran on Raspberry Pi 1, Zero and 4 and on laptop hardware, using OpenSSL 3.5 and a FNIRSI FNB58 USB power meter. ML-KEM and ML-DSA match classical elliptic-curve cryptography, while SLH-DSA signing on 32-bit devices cost up to 243% more energy than on 64-bit.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Post-quantum commutative group actions from oriented superspecial abelian varietiesCastryck, Dina, Kutas and Lorenzon study the Shimura class group action on superspecial principally polarized abelian varieties with a CM orientation, as a post-quantum commutative group action for key exchange. They give tools to represent CM orientations through higher-dimensional isogenies and to compute the action in the restricted effective group action model. These rely on a CM version of Kani's lemma and a trick that often halves the ambient dimension. The paper also gives a method for finding oriented superspecial abelian surfaces and analyses obstructions to transitivity.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Which Model for Which Role? Cost-Efficient Pareto Recommendation for LLM Agentic WorkflowsCost-Coupled Gittins (CC-Gittins) is a multi-objective extension of cost-aware Gittins search that recommends Pareto-optimal model-to-role assignments for LLM agentic workflows. It exploits the coupling between evaluation and deployment cost, alternating between seeking higher quality and lower cost. On eight quality-cost matrices (two to five roles, up to 1,681 assignments), it recovers a substantial share of the true Pareto frontier at about 10% of exhaustive-evaluation cost, and most of it by 30%. Latency is tested as a third objective.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π§ AI
The Development of Sycophancy in Language Models: Tracing Vulnerabilities from Pretraining to Post-TrainingThe paper traces sycophancy across 741 checkpoints from 30 open model lineages, from early pretraining to released models. It plants initial verdicts on moral scenarios and measures how far models follow a user's opinion or drop their answer under pressure. The behaviour usually exists before post-training, but which questions a released model yields on is set mainly during post-training. For TΓΌlu-3 8B, its own preference-stage checkpoint removes 85% of remaining prediction error, a sibling model only 19%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π§ AI
Rethinking LLM Fine-Tuning via Weight Space Reparameterization: Preserving Safety during Downstream AdaptationWSR-Tune is a fine-tuning framework that reparameterizes LLM weight matrices with a safety-conditioned basis, so safety-relevant information concentrates in a small set of directions. Those safety-critical directions are frozen, and the remaining complementary directions are updated for the downstream task. The authors report a better trade-off between downstream performance and safety retention. The page gives no benchmark names or numbers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π§ AI
A Note on the Security of ECDSA with Presignatures or Biased NoncesA Note on the Security of ECDSA with Presignatures or Biased Nonces (Couteau and Makriyannis, ePrint 2026/2545) examines alternative ECDSA modes built for faster distributed signing. It shows that the security of some variants used in deployed libraries is equivalent, in the generic group and random oracle model, to the average-case hardness of k-SUM. It also proves fine-grained lower bounds on generic group attacks against modes analyzed by Groth and Shoup (Eurocrypt 2022).
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
SpanGuard: Decoupling Instruction Localization from Authorization for Lightweight IPI DefenseSpanGuard is an indirect prompt injection (IPI) guardrail that splits detection into two steps. Lightweight unsupervised segmentation first locates candidate instruction blocks in tool outputs, then a small LLM judges whether each block is authorized by the user's request. The authors report a 0.32% attack success rate with negligible benign utility loss, and the guardrail still works with substantially smaller models.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Optimizing HQC with Enhanced Parallel Binary Polynomial Multiplication on GPUsThis paper presents an end-to-end GPU implementation of the HQC code-based key encapsulation mechanism. It speeds up GF(2) polynomial multiplication with a parallel Frobenius additive FFT and a Toeplitz matrix-vector mapping onto INT1 tensor cores. On an RTX 4090 the multiplier reaches 3,828k polymul/s, about 2.9x the earlier HIGH implementation. Full KEM throughput is 1.56x, 1.55x and 2.03x higher for keygen, encaps and decaps. Five thread-to-KEM mapping variants are tested on RTX 3090 and Jetson AGX Orin.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
How employment is changing at Anthropic"How employment is changing at Anthropic" is an October 2026 technical report by Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory. It uses internal employment, agent telemetry, output, survey, calendar and hiring data plus 17 interviews. Junior technical hiring fell from 27% to 9%, agent hours reached six times employee hours by August 2026, and adopters' output rose. Employees increasingly do meta-work managing agents.
anthropic.compaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026π§ AI
Enjoy FAEST on Hardware: Efficient and Novel Hardware Acceleration of Emerging Post-Quantum Digital Signature Scheme FAESTThis ePrint paper (2026/2525, October 2026) by Brendan Funk and Jiafeng Xie presents the first hardware accelerator for FAEST, an MPC-in-the-head post-quantum signature in NIST's Round 3 additional-signature process. It analyses FAEST's compute-heavy operations, builds them into hardware blocks, and adds an L1-EM-fast variant. The authors report at least 98% lower equivalent area-delay product than the recent complete SDitH design at the same security level.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security- ToFu: Exploiting and Fuzzing the LLMβOrchestratorβTool Trust Boundary
ToFu is a tool-aware fuzzing framework for LLM tools, including MCP servers. It maps each tool argument, using its metadata, to one of 74 CWE-guided semantics-aware sanitizers (path, URL, SQL and similar). It then generates schema-valid Atheris harnesses and semantic oracles, using runtime tracers for in-process tools and outcome oracles for opaque ones. The LLM (gpt-4.1) only maps sanitizers and writes seeds; it is never the security judge. The paper also shows a "Repeat-After-Me" trick, where an LLM told to repeat attacker-crafted text emits a tool call the orchestrator executes, reproduced on LangGraph, MAF, ADK 2.0, AutoGen, Strands and CrewAI. Across 273 runnable MCP servers (3,405 tools) it reports 253 verified bugs in 343 tools across 118 servers, such as path traversal, log injection and exfiltration. These are failures a crash-based fuzzer would miss. The result matters because it shows LLM-generated tool arguments cannot be treated as trusted.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 18 Oct 2026π§ AI - ToFu: Exploiting and Fuzzing the LLMβOrchestratorβTool Trust Boundary
ToFu is a tool-aware fuzzing framework that derives semantic security checks for LLM tools (mainly MCP servers) from their metadata and a corpus of 74 CWE-guided sanitizers. It generates schema-valid Atheris harnesses, uses runtime tracers and outcome oracles to catch bugs that don't crash, and uses an LLM only to map sanitizers and seed inputs, never as the judge. It also describes a "Repeat-After-Me" attack, in which the LLM is told to repeat attacker-written text that the orchestrator then dispatches as a tool call. It was reproduced on LangGraph, MAF, ADK, AutoGen, Strands and CrewAI. On 273 MCP servers it reports 253 verified bugs across 343 tools in 118 repositories, including path traversal, log injection, exfiltration and command bypass.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 18 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
The One-Pixel of Reasoning: One Truthful Relation Is Enough to Mislead LLM AgentsThe One-Pixel of Reasoning introduces the one-relation attack (ORA), which finds a critical implicit warrant linking evidence to a conclusion and inserts one source-grounded sentence that qualifies it, steering an LLM agent to a wrong belief. Across eighteen models on biomedical inference and vulnerability detection, best-of-10 attacks flip initially correct answers 54.9% of the time for proprietary models and 80.0% for open-weight models. Attacks transfer without victim feedback, can pass source-support checks, and multi-agent debate raises team error from 50.0% to 59.5%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 17 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
Superspecial points on Humbert surfaces and the probability of (N,N)-splittingDetermines, to first order in 1/p with an explicit error bound, the proportion of superspecial principally polarized abelian surfaces over F_p-bar (p β‘ 3 mod 4) that are optimally (N,N)-split. The expected number of optimal splittings is exactly 5NΒ·J_2(N)(p-1)/(pΒ²+1), so the split proportion is about 5NΒ·J_2(N)/p. This gives the stationary target density of the splitting-detection attack on the dimension-two superspecial isogeny problem, which was previously known only from experiments or a one-sided bound. The proofs use Siegel's mass formula and genus averages over refined Humbert invariants, and every formula was checked by exact computation at twelve primes.
eprint.iacr.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
RATION: Towards Quantitative Risk-Based Access Control for AI AgentsRATION is a security framework for AI agents that tracks measurable risks from agent actions and enforces quantitative constraints during task execution, instead of simply restricting actions. It builds a task-specific policy from explicit constraints in the user request plus implicit risks calibrated from historical runs of similar tasks. Experiments on four security benchmarks show strong security with high task utility across models and environments.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Acceptance Is Not Speed: Length Inflation in Training-Free Lossy Speculative DecodingThis paper shows that training-free relaxed (lossy) verification in speculative decoding causes length inflation: completions get longer, mostly through extended reasoning traces, which offsets gains in accepted tokens per round. Across twelve target-drafter pairs, relaxed rules accept 1.34x as many tokens per round but produce 1.54x longer completions. Rules that cut verifier rounds usually lose substantial accuracy, so the authors argue completion length and verifier rounds must be reported.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ AI
FuTransformer: FP8 prefill and INT4 decode for Llama-style inference on HopperFuTransformer is a CUDA implementation of a Llama-style Transformer block for NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. It uses FP8 prefill with fused GEMM epilogues and INT4 weights plus an INT4 KV-cache copy for decode, with a block-diagonal Hadamard transform to cut cache quantization error. On one H100, prefill is up to 1.48x faster than compiled PyTorch FP8, and INT4 decode is 1.3-2.4x faster than the faster PyTorch baseline. Llama-3.1-8B decode takes 2.8 ms per step at batch one, versus 8.1 ms for compiled transformers. WikiText-2 perplexity rises from 6.24 to 7.23 with round-to-nearest INT4 weights, or 6.99 with GPTQ.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ AI
GLOBE: Evolving Structured Agentic Memory for E-commerce Product Optimization in Generative SearchGLOBE is an agentic framework that optimizes e-commerce product listings for generative search by storing strategies in an evolving handbook of explicit, field-scoped behaviors. An Editor applies behaviors and gets rank-based feedback, a Reflector turns it into updates, a Moderator removes redundant proposals, and a Curator commits changes. Harmful behaviors are deactivated. Structured behaviors beat monolithic prompt optimization and transfer to unseen product categories.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ AI
FedRAPP: Federated Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models with Reliability-Aware Prompt PersonalizationFedRAPP is a personalized aggregation framework for Source-Free Federated Test-Time Prompt Tuning (SF-FTTPT), where clients adapt CLIP soft prompts on unlabeled, non-IID test streams without source data. It combines reliability-aware client assessment, a server-side exponential moving-average prompt memory and similarity-guided peer aggregation. Across nine CLIP benchmark datasets and ImageNet variants it beats standard federated aggregation baselines while keeping prompt-only efficiency.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ AI
FlexPart: Text-Controlled Semantics-Aware 3D Part Segmentation at Flexible GranularityFlexPart is a framework for text-controlled 3D mesh segmentation that assigns discrete part IDs to mesh faces through a view-independent part-identity field. It uses a control prompt of part names with location and shape clauses, trained on a VLM-built multi-granularity dataset. On FlexPartBench it raises average mIoU by 22% over the strongest baseline, and by 15% with planner-completed prompts.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ AI
ThetreStageAI: Multi-View Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Structured Bengali Theatre Production PlanningThetreStageAI is a retrieval-augmented framework for structured Bengali theatre production planning. It keeps separate scene, actor-blocking and lighting views, embeds Bengali text with BGE-M3, indexes it in view-specific Qdrant collections, and has Gemini generate schema-constrained JSON, with validation and at most one repair attempt. The authors build a synthetic dataset of 500 records (1,500 retrieval documents) and compare single-combined retrieval with multi-view retrieval. Code and data are public.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ AI
I Want to Ride My BIKE: Customizing Bit-Flipping Decoders for Ephemeral Key KEMsePrint paper presenting the first optimized implementation of the BF-max bit-flipping decoder for the code-based KEM BIKE, combined with other decoders to trade off decoding failure rate, runtime, public-key and ciphertext size in ephemeral-key settings. It cuts public-key and ciphertext sizes by 7.8% versus LeanBIKE at similar speed and DFR, and gives a combined size 22% below BIKE and 2.79x below HQC. It shows BIKE can fit constrained protocols such as IKEv2, which matters for practical post-quantum migration.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Secure Compilation of Probabilistic Side-Channel CountermeasuresPresents a language- and leakage-model-agnostic framework for provably secure compilation of probabilistic side-channel countermeasures. It uses a deterministic leakage-preservation relation that implies preservation of d-NI, d-SNI and cryptographic constant-time without probabilistic proof obligations. The authors prove in Rocq that a model of the Jasmin compiler's core pipeline and several optimizing passes preserve security in the value-probing model with glitches. They also add source-level annotations to harden against transition leakage and release libmasking, an arbitrary-order masked gadget library in Jasmin that compiles to ARM and RISC-V, with C bindings and hardware benchmarks.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
ConQUESTA: Topology-Aware Post-Training Structural Pruning of Quantum Neural NetworksConQUESTA is a post-training pruning framework for quantum neural networks that combines task saliency with compiler cost, screens candidate entanglers, and searches whole pruning masks under an accuracy constraint. Each mask is transpiled across several coupling topologies. At 55% pruning on 4-, 6- and 8-qubit QNNs it cuts resources by 61.6% (Breast Cancer), 72.0% (Digits01) and 82.2% (Iris), and fixed-mask recovery raises feasible runs from 16/24 to 22/24.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ AI
Power Analysis on SQIsign via Ideal Reconstruction from Quaternion LeakagesePrint paper identifying five side-channel vulnerabilities in the signing procedure of Round-3 SQIsign, the isogeny-based signature scheme in NIST's additional post-quantum signature process. It gives polynomial-time algebraic algorithms that recover the secret key from leaked quaternion/ideal intermediate values, including cases where only partial bits leak. It also demonstrates power analysis on the SQIsign source code to extract the needed leakage, which earlier work on Round-1 or toy parameters did not do.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
safeRNSgcd: Accelerating Falcon key generation with RNS in SafeGCDePrint paper presenting safeRNSgcd, which computes the single BΓ©zout coefficient needed at the deepest level of Falcon's NTRU solver while keeping large integers in a residue number system. Centered explicit CRT recovers the exact low bits needed by SafeGCD batches using single-word fixed-point arithmetic. A C implementation integrated into ntrugen reduces inversion and private-key basis-generation cost on a Raspberry Pi 5 and two x86-64 CPUs, versus the original ntrugen and a variant that skips the unused coefficient.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Rethinking GRPO for Large Reasoning Model Safety AlignmentBeacon is a safety alignment framework for large reasoning models that fixes two GRPO failure modes: advantage collapse, where homogeneous rollout groups give vanishing advantages, and unsafe diversification, where unsafe behaviors persist and spread. It combines Safety Signal Recovery (advantage-guided trajectory filtering plus safe reference supervision) with Safety-Utility Decoupled Alignment (category-aware rewards, benign-only KL anchoring). Tested on four Qwen3 and DeepSeek-R1-Distill variants across eight benchmarks, it cuts average safety error by up to 32.83 percentage points with low over-refusal.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ AI
SpikeQ: Spike-Guided Post-Training Quantization for Spiking Neural NetworksSpikeQ is a spike-guided post-training quantization framework for spiking neural networks on neuromorphic chips. It picks each weight level by simulating downstream neurons to minimize spike errors, and uses a reset-aware grid for pre-fire membrane potentials. With 4-bit weights and potentials, models stay within 2.59 points of full precision, with 7.8 to 7.9 times smaller memory and 6.4 to 6.9 times less energy.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ AI
MUB: An Identity-Masked Benchmark for Music Understanding in Multimodal Language ModelsMUB (Music Understanding Benchmark) is a set of 500 identity-masked recordings with existing annotations for tempo, key, time signature and structural intervals. It covers all 24 keys, tempos of 47 to 180 BPM and 4,676 intervals, and strips titles, artists and platform IDs from inputs. Baselines reach 53.6% tempo accuracy (DSP) and 98.4% time-signature accuracy (constant 4/4). No multimodal LLM has been tested yet, and rights clearance is unresolved.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ AI
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
Stealthy Poisoning Attacks via Reused KV Cache of ReasoningR^2ECAP (Reused Reasoning-Cache Poisoning) is a black-box attack that plants poisoned reasoning traces through a chat interface, exploiting LLM systems that reuse KV caches of reasoning. A preceding trace steers the model, and the retained trace keeps residual adversarial influence in its cache after the preceding trace is discarded. On three open-weight LLMs and three datasets it reaches up to 79% ASR, beats the white-box HijackKV in 8 of 9 settings, and reaches 46% ASR in a reasoning-trace retrieval system. Only 1% of retained responses are flagged by a popular prompt injection detector.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
SwiftAuth: Conditional Privacy-Preserving UAV Authentication with Multi-Source Credential Aggregation and Non-Interactive AuthorizationThe paper proposes a traceable and aggregatable tagged witness signature (TA-TWS) and builds SwiftAuth on it, a conditional privacy-preserving anonymous authentication framework for UAVs and other dynamic terminals. Issuers can create authorization components while users are offline. Several credentials compress into one constant-size proof, verifiers can batch-verify across users, and a regulatory trapdoor lets authorities trace misbehaving users. TA-TWS is proven unforgeable and witness-hiding, and benchmarks with the MIRACL Core library on constrained devices and Aliyun servers show it is practical.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Perceive, Predict, and Plan: a Unified World Action Model for Egocentric Dexterous ManipulationP^3-WAM is a unified world action model for egocentric dexterous manipulation with three modes: Perceive (reconstruct articulated hand motion and camera trajectories from video), Predict (generate visual futures under prescribed actions) and Plan (jointly generate action trajectories and their anticipated visual outcomes from an initial image, a language instruction and an optional visual goal). It adds a compact structured 3D action representation to a pretrained video diffusion transformer through a mixture-of-transformers design with shared base weights, modality-specific adaptation and bidirectional visual-action attention. Randomized modality visibility lets video and 3D actions act as either context or target. Unified training beats single-mode training and outperforms specialized baselines on 3D hand reconstruction and action-conditioned video prediction across four datasets, and gives better instruction adherence than video-generation baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
DK-VLM: Geometry as Position for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language ModelsDK-VLM adds Dual-Kernel Attention to a vision-language model. A semantic kernel keeps the pretrained attention and positional encoding. A separate geometric kernel uses estimated 3D points and camera poses to modulate attention through point displacements and relative view transformations, and a learned gate fuses the two outputs. Geometry therefore enters attention as position, not as fused 3D reconstruction features. The paper also adds Reference-Frame Composition (RC) supervision, which gives stepwise turn and heading targets derived from verified single-step annotations, to train multi-step spatial reasoning as the observer moves. DK-VLM-8B reports the highest average score across six spatial benchmarks among the compared methods, with 74.33 on VSI-Bench and 58.28 on ReVSI-32, and it preserves general video understanding.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
My Credentials, Please: Detecting Filesystem Capability Laundering in MCP Servers at ScaleStudies "filesystem capability laundering" in MCP servers: client approval of a tool call grants the server process broad host filesystem access, so attacker-steered arguments can reach sensitive files outside the tool's declared contract. The authors build MCP-FSD, which infers per-tool least-privilege boundaries, plants credential fixtures outside them, and tests exploitability and sandbox containment by paired dynamic execution. Of 21,097 servers from nine registries, 16.4% of 4,806 triaged servers have filesystem capabilities despite non-filesystem classifications. Dynamic validation confirmed 150 vulnerable instances, and disclosure produced 13 advisories, including two CVEs in Anthropic's Git MCP Server.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Private Retrieval Augmented Generation via Random ProjectionProposes protecting the retrieval datastore in RAG systems by applying the same random projection to datastore embeddings and query embeddings. This provably preserves query-item semantic similarity while substantially mitigating data extraction attacks. Across multiple RAG architectures and datasets it beats prior differential-privacy-based methods on retrieval and generation quality, with comparable empirical privacy under strong attacks, making it a practical baseline for privacy-preserving RAG.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
Private Retrieval Augmented Generation via Random ProjectionProposes applying the same random projection to both datastore embeddings and query embeddings in RAG systems. The authors claim this provably preserves query-to-item semantic similarity while substantially mitigating datastore data-extraction attacks. Across several RAG architectures and datasets it reportedly beats prior differential-privacy-based defenses on retrieval and generation quality, with comparable empirical privacy under strong attack models. It is presented as a lightweight baseline for privacy-preserving RAG.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Librarian Agents: Training LLMs to Curate Long-Context Workspaces that Anticipate Future QueriesIntroduces Librarian Agents, where a builder agent turns raw unstructured documents into a hierarchical filesystem of synthetic files and reference links, forming a workspace for a downstream answering agent. Workspace construction is cast as a Markov decision process and the builder policy is trained with reinforcement learning to maximize downstream answering accuracy. It beats the strongest retrieval and precomputation baselines by 33 points on BrowseComp-Plus, amortizes construction cost over repeated queries, and generalizes zero-shot to BRIGHT with a 31-point average gain.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
X-RIC: An Agentic RAN-Intelligent Controller Benchmark for Enhancing Reinforcement LearningX-RIC (eXplainable RIC) is a framework that adds agentic reasoning to the O-RAN Near-RT RAN Intelligent Controller. It combines reactive reinforcement learning with automated behavioral cloning from domain heuristics, a transformer-based Telecom Language Model for contextual abstraction and interpretability, and closed-loop co-adaptation for continuous policy refinement. The paper also introduces BARX, a benchmark for agentic RAN control that measures latency, compliance and determinism. On SLA-aware network slicing, in simulation and on an O-RAN-compliant testbed, it reports 89% lower operational cost with SLA compliance kept, 75% faster convergence, 50% fewer training steps and 46% lower variance.
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
GhostFaceMPC: Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition with Multi-Party ComputationGhostFaceMPC is presented as the first end-to-end face recognition system that runs a deep CNN feature extractor (GhostFaceNet) and the matching step under secure multi-party computation. Raw images and biometric embeddings are never exposed during extraction, storage or matching. The authors contribute an MPC-friendly quantization of GhostFaceNet and circuit optimizations that make the approach practical, and they release code at crypto-unict/GhostFaceMPC.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Skill-Decoupled On-Policy Expert Distillation for Unified Vision-Language ModelsProposes SCOPED (Skill-Decoupled On-Policy Expert Distillation), which trains capability-specific RL experts for vision-language models. It extracts explicit skills from them through reward-guided reflection. During on-policy distillation the skills guide expert supervision but are hidden from the unified student, so the student internalizes the procedural knowledge and needs no explicit skills at inference. Across eight multimodal benchmarks it beats the backbone and mixed-capability RL. Analyses show cross-capability gradient interference in joint RL, and that skill augmentation gives more consistent expert trajectories, more attention to task-relevant visual evidence, and better preservation of expertise.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
DropKV: Decoupling Residual-Output Perturbation for Near-Optimal KV-Cache EvictionDropKV is a KV-cache eviction framework for long-context LLMs. It decouples the joint eviction decision into independent per-token scores based on residual-output perturbation, which avoids the NP-hard combinatorial problem. It has a provable constant-factor approximation guarantee under a cone condition, which the authors verify empirically on three long-context LLMs. The fused Triton kernels never materialize the full attention matrix. They give a 19.8x scoring-kernel speedup and up to 9.9% end-to-end prefill speedup. On RULER and LongBench it beats state-of-the-art eviction baselines at equal cache budgets.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
Onboard Lightweight LLM Reasoning for Human-Aware Safe UAV NavigationPresents a modular, fully onboard UAV navigation pipeline that closes the "human-aware safety gap" of geometry-only planners. A shared BLIP encoder drives captioning and text-conditioned segmentation, which is fused with depth for 3D obstacle localization. Qwen-2.5-0.5B, stabilized with RAG and grammar-constrained JSON decoding, infers per-category risk once per class and caches the verdict. Perception runs at 10 Hz on a Jetson Orin NX, and fallback LLM queries take about 0.8 s off the control path. In Gazebo it gives roughly 3x fewer collisions than a geometric planner and raises semantics-aware landing success from 34% to 96%. The 224-pixel encoder input limits small-object perception at range.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
GraphACM: Graph-based Action Consistency Measurement for Uncertainty Quantification in LLM AgentsGraphACM merges equivalent states from multiple rollouts of the same LLM agent task into a directed, action-labeled graph, so actions can be compared at shared decision states. It defines node-level and global action-consistency measures, and uses the global score as an uncertainty proxy to predict task success or failure. Across three LLMs on ALFWorld, AppWorld and WebShop it reaches an average AUROC of 0.811, above the strongest behavioral-consistency baseline (0.729) and verbalized confidence (0.769). It also shows where in a trajectory agent actions diverge.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
SecAgg++: A Post-Quantum Privacy Preserving Federated Learning ProtocolSecAgg++ is a masking-based secure aggregation protocol for single-server federated learning that swaps in post-quantum cryptographic primitives. It keeps the communication and computation efficiency of SecAgg and SecAgg+ and handles client dropout through an efficient recovery procedure built on secret sharing and additive masking. It matters because existing masking-based aggregation protocols are not post-quantum secure, so client model updates would be exposed to quantum-capable adversaries.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
SecAgg++: A Post-Quantum Privacy Preserving Federated Learning ProtocolSecAgg++ is a masking-based secure aggregation protocol for single-server federated learning that uses post-quantum cryptographic primitives. It keeps the communication and computation efficiency of SecAgg and SecAgg+ and handles client dropout through an efficient recovery procedure. It matters because most masking-based secure aggregation protocols are not post-quantum secure, which leaves federated model updates exposed to future quantum adversaries.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
GACC-Bench: Benchmarking Goal-Adaptive Context Compression Ability across Large Language ModelsGACC-Bench is a benchmark for Goal-Adaptive Context Compression, testing how well LLMs retain goal-relevant information when compressing a source context under a length budget before downstream questions are known. It has 500 goals and 2,571 human-reviewed questions over 281 document and agent-trace contexts from seven collections; a fixed reader answers the withheld questions from the compressed context. Ten LLM compressors show large gaps to full-context performance, especially in answering every question tied to a goal. Target-goal conditioning improves accuracy over goal-agnostic compression, while mismatched goals hurt it.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
From Perception to Prediction and Intervention: Benchmarking Proactive Video Assistants in Real-Life ScenariosIntroduces P^3IBench, a benchmark for proactive video understanding in real-life streaming scenarios, covering three capabilities: daily perception, risk prediction and intervention. It evaluates 12 open-source and proprietary video-language models (streaming and adapted non-streaming) and finds they struggle to make well-calibrated decisions about when to respond. The authors also build extra proactive training data and train P^3I-Assistant-4B, which improves several tasks unevenly, showing that proactive assistance needs response timing and restraint as well as visual understanding.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ AI
Threshold Post-Quantum E-Voting from Lattice CommitmentsT-EVOLVE extends the lattice-commitment e-voting protocol EVOLVE to threshold tallying. Votes are Shamir-shared, so any t of n authorities can finish the tally. Privacy holds against t-1 colluding authorities and verifiability holds even if all of them collude. The voter proves her committed shares form a Reed-Solomon codeword whose value at zero is a valid vote. Complaints about ciphertexts that do not decrypt are publicly verifiable, using an LWE-instantiable encryption scheme with publicly verifiable opening. Privacy, verifiability, individual verifiability and robustness are proven in the classical random oracle model, and the verifiability reduction is not tight. In a C implementation, a yes/no ballot for four authorities takes 109 KB, and an authority aggregates 10^4 ballots in about three minutes on one core.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Exploring Fault Injection Attacks on HQC and BIKE Beyond Fujisaki-Okamoto VerificationPresents fault injection attacks on BIKE and HQC decapsulation that target instructions outside the Fujisaki-Okamoto transform, achieving full key recovery with only valid ciphertexts at NIST Level 1 (17392 queries for HQC, about 3 million for BIKE). It also gives a general method for finding effective fault locations by analysing decoder behaviour under perturbed conditions. Attacks were validated with laser fault injection on an STM32H7 microcontroller, showing a wider attack surface for code-based post-quantum KEM implementations.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
FAEST on GPUs: Addressing Field Multiplication as a BottleneckePrint paper presenting an NVIDIA GPU implementation of FAEST (a post-quantum signature scheme built on VOLE-in-the-Head and QuickSilver), covering key generation and OWFProve/OWFVerify for standard and EM constructions in s and f variants. Profiling shows field multiplication takes about 82% of FAEST-128f signing time once AES is hardware-accelerated. Using PTX clmad carry-less multiplication plus Karatsuba, it reaches up to 26.6x kernel throughput and about 2.9-3.1x full 256-bit OWFProve throughput over the software-multiplication build on an RTX A5000.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Foundations of Hardware-Software Leakage ContractsSurvey-style paper introducing hardware-software leakage contracts, an ISA-level security abstraction that characterizes microarchitectural side-channel leakage (caches, speculative execution). It lets programmers and compilers produce code provably resistant to side-channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown without reasoning about the microarchitecture, and gives hardware designers a specification to avoid undocumented side channels. It reviews recent contributions and open challenges.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Quantum-Aware Key Rank for Side-Channel Attacks evaluationProposes a cost model and metric for an adversary who collects side-channel traces classically and finishes the key search on a quantum computer. Shows any quantum algorithm needs Omega(sqrt(r)) cipher evaluations for key rank r, and that the quadratic advantage holds only up to a rank bound set by the NIST MAXDEPTH budget (about 2^58.6 for AES-128 at D=2^40). Defines a quantum-aware key rank computable from existing rank estimators, with simulated-leakage experiments showing a depth-limited quantum adversary is worth about 22 traces at SNR 0.125.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 16 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Post-Quantum Certificate-Based PSK Provisioning for WireGuard via Mutual TLS, DTLS, and QUIC: Design and Performance StudyThe paper proposes a post-quantum architecture for WireGuard that leaves the core protocol unchanged. A mutually authenticated TLS 1.3 control channel runs over TCP, UDP (DTLS) or QUIC and uses ML-KEM key establishment, with X.509 certificates from a PKI signed with ML-DSA. A shared secret derived from the session's exported keying material is injected into WireGuard's native PSK interface. A Tamarin model of the TLSβWireGuard composition layer checks secrecy, binding and provisioning-order properties and identifies the conditions needed for secure deployment. The authors benchmark handshake latency and CPU time for classical, pure-PQ and hybrid key establishment across the three transports, and compare against the Rosenpass PQ WireGuard baseline.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
ERC: Quantum Bridge ShieldDraft ERC from Quantova Inc that has Ethereum bridges accept cross-chain message batches only when a committee signs the Merkle root with RFC 8554 LMS hash-based signatures. The guard contract requires a strict majority of distinct unfrozen keys, records used leaves, freezes any key that signs a leaf twice, binds digests to domain tag, chain ID, guard address and epoch, and enforces a 60-second delay. It reports gas benchmarks (about 205k per LMS W4 height-10 verify, 12.44M worst-case rotation under EIP-7825), a hybrid LMS+ECDSA migration mode, and a NioLabs assessment with no critical or high findings. It argues that Shor's algorithm makes secp256k1 and BLS committee keys a quantum theft target.
ethereum-magicians.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Nowhere Man: Device Binding for Post-Quantum Anonymous CredentialsPresents a modular device-binding protocol for post-quantum anonymous credentials. The phone Secure Element signs a verifier challenge with an unmodified FIPS 204 ML-DSA interface, and the user proves knowledge of that signature in zero knowledge at each presentation. Using ML-DSA's structure avoids the cost of generic NIZK systems such as Longfellow. The most efficient variants assume weak-MLWR for unlinkability, and that assumption can be dropped at some efficiency cost. The protocol works with different anonymous credential schemes, and a proof-of-concept implementation is included. This matters for planned EU age-verification and Google Wallet/mDL rollouts, which need protection against credential sharing.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Connecting Cryptanalytic Distinguishers through DivisibilityPaper that links linear, integral, differential-linear and restricted differential distinguishers through two-way conversions with explicit divisibility guarantees and data complexity. It gives automated MILP/SAT models (Walsh and ultrametric representations, exact mix-basis models) and a black-box FWHT histogram search for zeros and finite divisibility. It improves BeyneβVerbauwhede divisibility bounds in 674 SIMON cases (e.g. 2^5 to 2^11 on 9-round SIMON32) and PRESENT. It also gives first higher-divisibility proofs for 8-round SPECK and BEANIE, new bounds for GIFT-64 and Ascon, and new properties on RC5, ChiLow-32, KeeLoq and KATAN32.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Refined Application of the XL Algorithm within the Algebraic Approach to the Regular Syndrome Decoding ProblemFurue and Aikawa build and analyze algebraic attacks on the Regular Syndrome Decoding Problem (RSDP), which underlies code-based post-quantum schemes. They extend the Wang et al. hybrid algorithm to allow an arbitrary XL solving degree d, and add two variants: an XFL-based one (partial Gaussian elimination plus variable guessing) and a WXL-based one that exploits Macaulay matrix sparsity. Complexity analysis shows the WXL variant with d>2 wins for small block size Ξ², while the original hybrid wins as Ξ² grows. This matters for setting RSDP-based scheme parameters.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
DPF-SGD: Byzantine-Robust Differentially Private Federated SGD with Exact Optimality GuaranteesDPF-SGD is a federated SGD algorithm that stays robust to Byzantine agents while satisfying Ο΅-differential privacy. It combines private step sizes with a DP noise-decay schedule and adds a privacy-preserving comparative elimination (PPCE) filter that suppresses Byzantine updates during aggregation. The authors prove almost-sure convergence to the global optimum despite persistent noise and adversaries. On synthetic and MNIST data, final optimization error is one to two orders of magnitude lower than DP baselines.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026π§ AI
AgentSWE: Can Coding Agents Build the Agent You Actually Want?AgentSWE is a benchmark of 25 tasks covering the agent development lifecycle: Creation of an agent from a natural-language requirement, Editing of production agent codebases, and Optimization toward a measurable target. Builders iterate on a few illustrative cases, then the frozen submission is graded on held-out cases with requirement-derived rubrics and hard pass/fail gates. Across coding agents, models and harnesses, none comes close to delivering the requirement. Recurring failures include overfitting to visible cases, hollow runtimes behind code that looks complete, and unsupported claims of completion.
huggingface.copaperAdded 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
Dog-Breed Text-to-image Flow Matching from Pretraining to Fine-Tuning on 4 Consumer GPUsMiniDog is a framework for training a text-to-image flow-matching diffusion transformer from scratch on four RTX 3090 GPUs, with 55 minutes of pretraining and 15 minutes of fine-tuning. It pretrains on 26k ImageNet dog images that were captioned, then fine-tunes on 2k FLUX.1-schnell generated images. Image and text features are precomputed and cached. The model is a 22M-parameter transformer with the E2E-INVAE semantic latent space, a small Qwen text encoder and in-context conditioning, and training is accelerated with iREPA and an EUPE perception encoder. The repo evaluates with FID, HPSv2, PickScore and VAE reconstruction metrics. It lowers the barrier to hands-on diffusion training research.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
SP$^2$ec: Adaptive Self-Speculative Decoding for Vision-Language ModelsSP$^2$ec (Single-Peak SPeculative decoding) is a training-free bandit algorithm that adapts the draft configuration of self-speculative decoding per prompt for vision-language models. It relies on the single-peak throughput pattern seen in SWIFT, KnapSpec, SpecVLM and the authors' cosSim method. It minimizes a new wall-time regret measure and has theoretical guarantees of near-optimal configuration with negligible exploration cost. On Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and LLaVA-NeXT-Mistral-7B it improves over the original self-speculative methods by up to 11% on visual and textual tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
UniW(A)M: A Unified Mixture-of-Experts Framework for World and World-Action ModelsUniW(A)M is a mixture-of-experts model built on diffusion Transformers that unifies action-conditioned world modeling (AC-WM) with several world-action model (WAM) variants. Shared experts capture common physical dynamics, while atomic capability experts are reused across interfaces, each keeping its own conditional pathway. At deployment a plug-in adaptive interface router (PAIR), trained on a small subset of target-task chunk scenarios with the backbone frozen, picks a WAM interface for each execution chunk. It reaches 88.3% average real-world success against 76.7% for the strongest baseline, leads WorldArena on all three action-conditioned world-modeling tasks, and PAIR raises OOD success from 63.3% to 76.7%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
ProAS: A Progress-Aware Advantage Shaping Framework for Multi-Turn Agentic Reinforcement LearningProAS (Progress-Aware Advantage Shaping) is a plug-and-play framework for multi-turn agentic RL that fixes the uniform credit assignment problem in critic-free algorithms like GRPO, where trajectory-level advantages are broadcast to every action. It uses a dynamically evolving Agentic Reference Graph with Masking Unreasonable Incentives and Asymmetric Penalty Redistribution to give finer-grained credit without a critic. On Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B-Instruct it reports success rates up to 91.9%/94.3% on ALFWorld and 66.7%/70.8% on WebShop, with up to 2.44x faster training convergence and robustness to imperfect or distilled ARGs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
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