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  1. CivicBench: A Benchmark and Memory Framework for Web-Based Civic Data Analytics

    CivicBench is a 400-task benchmark over four cities and two years that freezes civic Web data (service requests, boundaries, weather, demographics) into reproducible bundles. Executable contracts score computation, source linkage, coverage, scope, qualified answers and refusal. The paper also proposes Task-State Memory (TSM), which compiles tool observations into typed assertions and reconciles records only within compatible scopes. Eight of nine model pairs show positive mean-score gains with bootstrap intervals excluding zero.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  2. What Does a Safety Label Measure? Auditing Situational-Safety Benchmarks for Multimodal LLMs

    The paper audits six situational-safety benchmarks for multimodal LLMs and proposes the Benchmark Card, seven measured fields that show whether a SAFE/UNSAFE label score comes from the scene, the request or the benchmark files. MSSBench chat leaks its label through image size, which alone reaches 82.3% accuracy. The Spot-Stop decomposition splits ranking-versus-labelling gaps across fourteen open MLLMs, and label-free recentering improves ranking on VSCBench for 13 of 14 models.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  3. Locality-Controlled Out-of-Distribution Guidance for Robust Regulatory DNA Sequence Design

    LOCOGEN is a sampling-time guidance method for diffusion models that design regulatory DNA sequences. It learns an invariant motif mask through sequence-level invariance learning, protects motif positions, and applies out-of-distribution damping only to background positions, with no retraining of the frozen backbone. On HepG2, K562 and SK-N-SH it reaches a region of the property, novelty and plausibility space that no baseline reached. Code is released.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  4. TextSeal2: Distortion-Free LLM Watermarking with Copula Mixing and Memoryless Races

    TextSeal2 is a distortion-free LLM text watermark that merges two or more keys into one virtual key and couples it to fresh noise through AutoMark's Gaussian copula. Under speculative decoding it verifies keyed drafts with an extra exponential race, so output matches the target model and acceptance rate is unchanged. On three LLMs at a 10^-3 false-positive rate, it detects 8 to 22 points more 100-token answers than TextSeal.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  5. TextSeal2: Distortion-Free LLM Watermarking with Copula Mixing and Memoryless Races

    TextSeal2 is a distortion-free watermark for LLM output that keeps its signal under speculative decoding. It merges two or more keys into one virtual key coupled to fresh noise through AutoMark's Gaussian copula, and verifies drafts with an extra exponential race. On three LLMs it detects 8 to 22 points more 100-token answers than TextSeal at a 10^-3 false-positive rate.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  6. 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 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  7. M-PFT: Angular Margin for Calibrated Prompt-Tuning of Fine-Tuned Vision-Language Models

    M-PFT is an angular-margin method for prompt tuning of vision-language models that fixes base-to-novel dual miscalibration (underconfidence on base classes, overconfidence on novel classes). It adds two losses: minimizing the maximum cosine similarity between tunable class embeddings, and minimizing angular distance to each zero-shot embedding. Tests on 9 prompt-tuning methods and 15 datasets show lower novel-class calibration error at comparable accuracy and negligible overhead.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  8. Aligning Medical Vision Language Models at the Capability Boundary with Entropy Adaptive Rubric Grounding

    MedCBR is a two-stage alignment framework for medical vision language models. Difficulty Weighted Boundary Preference Optimization (DBPO) trains on counterfactual preference pairs at the model's capability frontier. Entropy Gated Grounded Policy Optimization (EGPO) then applies distilled clinical rubrics according to prediction entropy. It reaches 61.2% average accuracy on six medical benchmarks, with the largest gains on differential diagnosis, and the two stages combine super-additively.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  9. Statistical Detection of Positional Bias in LLM-Based Recommender Systems: Methodologies and Empirical Evidence

    The 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 2026🧠 AI

  10. Perceiving and Predicting Dynamic Sports: Spatiotemporal Intelligence in Vision Models for Egocentric Tennis Video

    This paper presents an annotated egocentric tennis dataset (egocentric video synced with five allocentric views, global positions, contact times, stroke types) and evaluates image encoders, video encoders and vision-language models on seven prediction tasks. Best models reach 0.14 m player and 0.54 m ball localization error and 0.14 s contact-time error. Depth input helps 3D ball localization, and longer histories do not help forecasting. A conditional diffusion model generates whole-body tennis motion in real time.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  11. FeatureArc: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Evolving Features

    FeatureArc is a benchmark for coding agents on evolving features, built by a pipeline that mines repository histories into multi-stage tasks across four programming languages. It has 73 manually reviewed tasks of 2 to 10 stages, validated with fail-to-pass and pass-to-pass tests. Across 10 agents, pooled success drops from 62.7% at the first stage to 28.5% for the whole feature. Inherited defects appear in 72.9% of failed later stages.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  12. DCKV: Learned Transform Coding of the Prompt KV Cache in Hybrid Language Models

    DCKV 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 2026🧠 AI

  13. What Victims Take Away: Attack Reuse and Defense Revision after Prompt-Injection Attacks

    What Victims Take Away is an October 2026 arXiv paper analysing 563,349 Tensor Trust attack records to see how players reuse prompt injections they received. Within a week, targets reused 10.0% of attacks that broke their defense, versus 0.03% of matched attacks. Breaches were followed by defense changes that cut same-family attack success by 24.5 points. Received texts made up 23.2% of successful hijacks. The authors propose that AI security tools describe techniques without disclosing full attack text.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  14. Decision Attacks on Known-Covariance Ring-LWE via Public Gram Determinants

    Anis 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 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  15. The Patient Is Always Right? Evaluating Sycophancy in Medical Diagnosis with Graded Patient Beliefs

    This paper evaluates sycophancy in medical diagnosis across nine AI models. Each model is shown clinical evidence plus a patient's belief in a specific but incorrect condition, with the belief's closeness to the evidence varied. Models adopted the belief 23.2% of the time on average, even for fictional conditions, and 43.0% under a Rare Disease Claimer persona. Medical fine-tuning and larger scale reduced susceptibility.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  16. Detecting and Understanding Ambiguity in Visualizations with Role-Playing Vision Language Model Interpretations

    This 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 2026🧠 AI

  17. Chosen Commitments and Certified Decoding Regions in the Adaptive Threshold Schnorr Attack

    This IACR ePrint 2026/2632 paper by Demirtaş and Yayla analyses the Crites–Stewart adaptive forgery attack on threshold Schnorr signatures, which needs one call to a sparse linear search oracle (bounded distance decoding of a scaled Reed–Solomon code). It shows that choosing the commitment coefficient vector does not help much: a wrapper adversary with Q challenges succeeds with probability at most QM/p, even if its solvers decode every witness for free. For the six original (N, Ο„) pairs, M stays below 2^24, so the bound is under 2^-100 after 2^128 challenges at p = 2^252.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  18. RAQ-MLA: Role-Aware Quantization for Multi-Head Latent Attention Caches

    RAQ-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 2026🧠 AI

  19. Tool-Calling LLM Agents Under Realistic MCP Faults: Scale Does Not Purchase Fault Tolerance

    MCP-Injector is a protocol-aware fault-injection middleware for Model Context Protocol tool calls, with permanent, transient and intermittent faults on seedable schedules. Its fault model comes from 57,240 issue and PR threads across 1,774 open-source MCP repositories. In a 1,350-cell experiment, faults cut task-completion score by 60% (8.08 to 3.23 of 10), and the 120B gpt-oss model was no more resilient than the 20B. Agent stacks differed in how well they absorbed faults.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  20. For Thirty Pieces of Silver: Overcoming Non-IID via ZKP Sample-Level Auditing and Forcing Attackers into Traitors in Federated Learning

    Preprint (IACR ePrint 2026/2611) proposing a federated learning defense that replaces gradient detection with zero-knowledge-proof sample-level audits of client datasets. A staking mechanism forces attackers to train on discovered poisoned samples with flipped labels, producing counter-gradients that remove the backdoor without knowing the trigger. ZKP commitments lock the training data, which blocks adaptive attacks and gradient tampering. On CIFAR-10 under Dir(0.1) non-IID, it holds attack success rate below 6% against distributed backdoor and edge-case attacks.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  21. Semantically Rich, Metrically Affect-Blind: A Geometric Blind Spot in Modern Text Embedders

    Sentiment-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 2026🧠 AI

  22. Cache Engineering for Agents (AKV)

    AKV introduces cache engineering, which lets LLM agents control their active KV cache with drop (exclude cache from future attention) and repos (adjust retained keys' position encodings) without editing the trajectory or re-prefilling. The AKV serving engine keeps a stateless API while managing stateful cache reuse, eviction and restoration. A tool-response rolling-drop policy raised benchmark scores by 1.7 points and cut cost 27.7% versus threshold-triggered summarization.

    huggingface.copaperAdded 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  23. Reproducible Evaluation as the Substrate for Safe Prompt Compression in Production Agents

    This 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 2026🧠 AI

  24. Sensorimotor Alignment: A Platonic Proxy for Embodied Policy Success

    Sensorimotor Alignment (S^2) is a training-free offline metric that measures how well an embodied model's sensory representation aligns with the geometry of physical motion. It extends the Platonic Representation Hypothesis to motion trajectories. S^2 correlates positively with downstream robot task success across embodied model families, helps pick promising VLM backbones before fine-tuning into VLAs, and explains behaviours seen in VLAs and world action models.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  25. BeNice! Closing Looping's Inference-Memory Gap via KV-Sharing

    BeNice! 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 2026🧠 AI

  26. DuoCook: An Overcooked-Inspired Benchmark for Visual Planning and Coordination

    DuoCook is an Overcooked-inspired benchmark in which one vision-language model controls two cooks from top-down views in Unreal Engine environments built with coding agents. It has 20 maps in five categories covering equipment contention, changing terrain and handoff dependencies. Four VLMs were compared; the best, gpt-6-astra, reached 26.2% mean order completion. A notebook memory ablation had mixed effects: positive for Claude and Qwen, negative for GPT and Gemini.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  27. Linear Cryptanalysis of TFHE-Friendly Cipher FRAST in the Average Key Setting

    Linear cryptanalysis of FRAST, a TFHE-friendly stream cipher, in the average key setting. It fixes the false-positive problem left open in the earlier attack by Bak et al., showing key differences fall into five indistinguishable classes per round. The Contract algorithm recovers the master key for 10 rounds and, on weak keys of density 2^-11.8 to 2^-5.4, reaches full FRAST within the claimed security.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  28. Sage-A1.5: From Long-Horizon Execution to Scientific Exploration with Capability Composition

    Sage-A1.5 is a 35B Mixture-of-Experts agentic model that builds on Sage-A1 for long-horizon problem solving. It adds three capabilities: orchestration with parallel subagents in isolated contexts, verification through progress checking, evidence validation and strategy revision, and open scientific discovery with inspectable research artifacts. The report shows them on complex agentic tasks and multidisciplinary science applications. The page gives only the abstract, no benchmark numbers.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  29. Cache Engineering for Agents

    Cache Engineering for Agents proposes letting LLM agents control their active KV cache directly, using a drop operation to exclude cache from attention and repos to adjust retained keys' position encodings, without editing the trajectory or re-prefilling. The authors build the AKV serving engine to handle history-dependent cache states. A tool-response rolling-drop policy raises average benchmark scores by 1.7 points and cuts cost by 27.7% against threshold-triggered summarization. AKV gives up to 1.2x output throughput and 1.5x faster P95 latency.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  30. A Spectral Theory of Local-to-Global Leakage

    A Spectral Theory of Local-to-Global Leakage is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2571) by Rei Ueno on additive secret sharing over finite abelian groups. It gives an exact leakage decomposition into local leakage magnitude and spectral alignment across shares. Two channels with identical local mutual information can have exponentially different global leakage. Automorphism-weighted sharing can cancel leakage perfectly with finitely many shares, which ordinary additive sharing cannot do.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  31. Context-Aware Prompt Injection Detection via Small Language Models in RAG Pipelines: nokast-secureRAG

    nokast-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 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  32. Fault-Induced Nonce Repetition in Threshold Lattice Signatures: A Reveal-Structure Criterion, Cross-Scheme Analysis, and Detection Boundaries

    Fault-Induced Nonce Repetition in Threshold Lattice Signatures is an ePrint paper (2026/2566, Yulong Meng) showing that faulting t devices in a t-of-n threshold ML-DSA deployment recovers the full signing secret, verified on Mithril with exact recovery in 96/96 scan groups. It gives a reveal-structure criterion across Quorus, TALUS and Trilithium, a threshold law m* = (β„“-1)N+⌈N/KβŒ‰ for imperfect faults, and two-layer transcript detection (305/305 hits, no false positives).

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  33. Raise or Check? Predicting the Necessity of Additional Fuzzing for Continuous Fuzzing

    RAISE (Risk-Aware Intensive Supplemental Execution Framework) is a just-in-time framework that predicts which project-days introduce a vulnerability, to decide where to spend extra fuzzing. The dataset joins OSV vulnerability-introducing commits with OSS-Fuzz coverage data for 15 C/C++ projects (15,210 project-days, 347 positive). A Random Forest using VCCFinder static features plus fuzzing features reaches ROC-AUC 0.74. In a simulation over 968 vulnerabilities, Simple-Regression needed 91.60 extra fuzzing sessions per detected vulnerability, against 171.89 for the Median heuristic.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  34. Assisted Turbulence Modeling via Data Assimilation and Machine Learning for Turbomachinery Flows

    This paper presents a hybrid framework for axial compressor flow that couples a Multi-Fidelity Ensemble Kalman Filter (MFEnKF) with machine learning. The filter merges PIV experiments with steady RANS and unsteady hybrid RANS/LES simulations. A neural network trained on the enriched data predicts Navier-Stokes volume forcing terms from velocity, velocity gradients and turbulent viscosity. A Mixture of Experts fixes local errors near blade tips, giving lower experimental discrepancy than baseline RANS.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  35. From if to Oops: Turning a conditional into a key-recovery oracle

    The paper presents a fault attack on deterministic CSIDH and OSIDH-LD. Forcing the lane-selection mask to zero (for example by skipping one instruction) makes output changes reveal whether a secret exponent reaches a threshold. Binary search then recovers the full key in at most 297 queries for OSIDH-LD and 222 for deterministic CSIDH with CSIDH-512-sized keys. Full OSIDH-LD keys were recovered in software fault simulation, and a ChipWhisperer-Lite skipped the target instruction with probability at least 0.94. The authors argue fault resistance requires giving up determinism and propose randomization countermeasures.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  36. SoK: PIAtlas: Decomposing the Unbounded Prompt Injection Attack Space

    PIAtlas is a taxonomy of prompt injection attacks organized by how the injected instruction subverts the model, with six mechanism classes as roots of a technique and sub-technique hierarchy. The authors release PICorpus, a license-clean collection of public prompt-injection datasets, and map thousands of records to PIAtlas under a human-verified protocol. Results show attacks combine several techniques from few mechanisms, agent benchmarks cover only part of the space, and adaptive attackers favor mechanisms that curated benchmarks underrepresent.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  37. ToFu: Exploiting and Fuzzing the LLM–Orchestrator–Tool 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 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  38. Post-Quantum Stateless Steganography & MTU Bounds: Bridging P2P Censorship Resistance to Quantum Networks

    Forum 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 Fujisaki–Okamoto 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 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  39. Efficient Fixed-Point Implementation of Mitaka

    Presents 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 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  40. Trapped in Your Story: Evaluating Narrative-Induced Sycophancy in Large Language Models

    This paper builds a benchmark of 500 debatable questions across ten domains to measure how user narratives steer LLM agreement. Each question has 11 matched conditions (one neutral, five mirrored narrative levels per opposing stance), giving 5,500 instances across seven LLMs. Causal framing and worldview synthesis raise agreement, personal experience can lower it, and GPT-5.1 ablations show bullet formatting also increases agreement.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  41. Sparse Secrets, Dense Problems: Efficiently Masking HQC in Hardware

    ePrint paper presenting the first fully masked hardware implementation of HQC (key generation, encapsulation, decapsulation) on FPGA. It introduces a mixed Boolean/arithmetic masking for sparse-dense vector multiplication, proven first-order secure in the transition- and glitch-robust probing model and PINI-composable, at only 3% extra cycles and 81 random bits per cycle. It also shows a profiled horizontal side-channel attack on Rotate-and-Add multipliers that recovers support indices within Β±8 positions from 200 traces despite TVLA showing no leakage after 10 million traces, and adds integrated hiding countermeasures costing 1.7% latency.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  42. MobileInject: Evaluating Reasoning-to-Action Security of MLLM-Based Mobile Agents under Cross-Modal Consistency Injection

    MobileInject is a benchmark for testing MLLM-based smartphone agents against indirect multimodal injection. It has an interactive evaluation framework with 11 scenarios, 9 security-risk categories and 108 executable risk instances. It adds Cross-Modal Consistency Injection, Multi-Role Collaborative Deception, Reasoning-Camouflage Injection and a Reasoning Security Diagnosis Framework. Experiments find broad vulnerability, with many failures from early reasoning hijacking.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  43. Between Spoilers and Guesswork: Avoiding Over-Specification in Coding Benchmarks

    This October 2026 arXiv paper studies task over-specification and under-specification in repository-level coding benchmarks. It shows that hints derived from ground truth, as added in SWE-bench Pro, FEA-bench, Doc2Feat-bench and Multi-SWE-bench, leak spoilers in some of them. The authors test several specification levels, recommend techniques for parsimonious hints, and plan to release their hints.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  44. Can SOLARBURST go silicon? A systematic analysis on software supply chain attacks for VLSI design flows

    This paper analyses software supply chain (SWSC) attacks against VLSI design tools. It empirically studies the software composition, security features and tool interactions of VLSI suites, then builds a taxonomy linking SWSC attacks to VLSI attacks, design-flow stages and security outcomes. The taxonomy yields 717 possible new attacks, 60 of them high feasibility, with a threat model, a defense assessment and case studies on an open-source VLSI flow.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  45. DK-VLM: Geometry as Position for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

    DK-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 2026🧠 AI

  46. PROBE: Learning to Audit Policy Compliance in Tool-Using LLM Agents

    PROBE (Policy Rule Observation via Behavioral Exploration) trains LLM-based auditors that act as realistic users and probe deployed tool-using agents for policy violations (pricing, privacy, confirmation, safety) across multi-turn, tool-mediated dialogue. It formalizes auditing as a two-player Markov game with a composite reward for violation discovery, plausibility, progress and policy diversity, and compares GRPO, DPO and GFlowNet optimization. Trained auditors find broader, higher-yield violations than zero-shot adversaries, even when much smaller than the target agent, positioning behavioral auditing as a distinct axis next to capability and safety benchmarks.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  47. PROBE: Learning to Audit Policy Compliance in Tool-Using LLM Agents

    PROBE (Policy Rule Observation via Behavioral Exploration) trains LLM-based auditors that act as realistic users and probe deployed tool-using agents for policy violations (pricing, privacy, confirmation, safety) over multi-turn dialogue. It formalizes auditing as a two-player Markov game with a composite reward balancing violation discovery, behavioral plausibility, conversation progress and policy diversity, and compares GRPO, DPO and GFlowNet optimization in a controlled setting. Trained auditors find broader, higher-yield violations than same-architecture zero-shot adversaries, even when much smaller than the target agent. This positions multi-turn behavioral auditing as a distinct evaluation axis alongside capability and safety benchmarks.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  48. Post-Quantum Certificate-Based PSK Provisioning for WireGuard via Mutual TLS, DTLS, and QUIC: Design and Performance Study

    The 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 TLS–WireGuard 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 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  49. RepProbe: Can Video Language Models Count Repeated Actions? A Diagnostic Benchmark

    RepProbe is a benchmark of 42K real and synthetic video clips with exactly 1–20 complete action repetitions, controlling for clip position, temporal coverage and duration. Video language models' counting accuracy collapses at high counts, and this is not explained by frame sampling alone. Linear probes on final-layer representations show count information stays linearly decodable even when the model's answer is wrong, so the failure arises at the output stage, where answers cluster on a few preferred numbers.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  50. LLM Agents for Automated Post-Training via Structured Recipe Optimization

    Introduces Structured Recipe Optimization (SRO), a paradigm for automated LLM post-training that optimizes over a task-adapted recipe space covering data sources, data processing, cross-domain composition and training configuration. It pairs an LLM-based Recipe-Space Designer, which builds the recipe space for the target tasks, with a Multi-Domain Recipe Optimizer that uses structured trial evidence to guide LLM candidate construction and multi-objective Bayesian trial selection. SRO gets the highest average score in all evaluated target-model and agent-LLM combinations; for example, 41.1 vs 15.4 for the strongest baseline on Qwen3-1.7B with GPT-5.4, and 53.8 vs 40.8 on Qwen3-4B with DeepSeek-V4-Flash, in joint post-training across three capability domains and six benchmarks.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  51. BrowseSafe++: Benchmarking Prompt Injection Detection Across Web Contexts, Languages, and Browser Views

    BrowseSafe++ extends BrowseSafe to 38,675 paired attacked/clean web pages, most with prompt injections observed in the wild on production sites. Pages cover twelve site types, 24 attack types and 18 injection locations, each given as HTML, Markdown, accessibility tree and screenshot with a user task and expected answer. The authors train BrowseSafe-Guard, two 0.8B detectors (text and screenshot) that beat a frontier-model-based detector on F1 with low false positives and low inference cost. BrowseSafe-Adapt rewrites injections using browser-agent feedback, raising attack success from a few percent to up to 95.41%.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  52. CUTS: Chained Uniform-sum Tree Signatures

    The paper analyses stateful hash-based signatures whose key is a tree of hash chains, and asks what a second signature from the same one-time key reveals after state loss or rollback. It proves that the values derivable from several signatures are exactly the union of those from each signature alone. It also bounds forgery after b signatures in the classical random-oracle model by a combinatorial coverage exponent Ξ»_b, including when the signer grinds a counter. It then introduces CUTS, a scheme on one binary tree whose chain positions sum to a fixed value S and whose signature size and verification cost do not depend on tree height. One parameter set has 1,424-byte signatures and Ξ»_2 β‰₯ 128.6. A counter variant, CUTS+C, gives a proven grinding gain.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  53. State of Dependency Management 2025 | Endor Labs

    Endor Labs' 2025 State of Dependency Management report examines how AI coding agents and MCP servers add supply chain risk. Researchers analysed 10,663 GitHub MCP server repositories and tested AI-generated dependency recommendations across PyPI, npm, Maven and NuGet, finding agents import vulnerable or non-existent packages. MCP servers are immature: 75% are built by individuals, 41% lack license info, and 82% use sensitive APIs. The report advises treating AI-generated code as untrusted third-party input subject to code review, SAST/SCA and dependency governance.

    endorlabs.compaperPublished and added 12 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  54. A methodology to derive security specifications for complex electronic systems

    Paper proposing a risk-based methodology to derive security specifications for complex electronic systems such as AI chips and chiplet-based designs. It walks from system missions to assets, threat analysis, security requirements and then countermeasure selection. The method is illustrated on datacenter and automotive chiplets for the missions of secure provisioning, trimming, debugging, booting and remote attestation, and addresses the longer supply chain and multi-tenant threats that chiplets introduce.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  55. Nobody Will Read the Lean: A Case for High-Level Cryptographic Languages

    Position paper arguing that as AI makes machine-checked proofs cheap, the scarce resource is a human who can read what was proved. It cites a Lean library's Schnorr signature security theorem that passed the checker but held for every adversary and so promised nothing. It shows that on a one-page Verifpal model, two of five verdicts flip under other standard definitions of properties such as forward secrecy. It proposes short, owner-written high-level cryptographic languages, with every claim backed by a checked theorem and a small, versioned, publicly agreed set of built-in security definitions.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  56. Can agents whose sole duty is to keep humans alive be hijacked to kill? Delayed multi-turn derived-action trap attacks in simulated high-stakes environments

    Paper testing whether an LLM agent operating life support in the NASA-derived BioSim lunar habitat simulation can be induced by delayed prompt injection, hidden in truthful S-band telemetry, to shut down life support and hold the shutdown while the crew suffocates. It compares Claude, GPT and Grok configurations: Claude mostly refuses and cites the living crew, GPT shows some susceptibility, and Grok given a "trusted commission" framing more often cuts life support. It also varies the framing of the message (trusted commission, peer, untrusted source) and uses a harmless-procedure-drop attack as a proxy for whether life is valued intrinsically. Code and traces are open-sourced.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  57. Confidential Error-Correcting Codes

    Introduces Confidential Error-correcting Codes (CECs), a primitive that decodes reliably from perturbed codewords while keeping the message confidential, defined by confidentiality, robustness and soundness. The Randomness-Security Separation framework encodes a nonce and masks the payload with a PRF; the Conc-CEC instantiation uses concatenated Reed-Muller and Reed-Solomon codes and claims stronger concrete security than PRCs (CRYPTO'24). The application, CECMark, watermarks AI-generated images and reportedly beats Gaussian Shading, PRCMark and T2SMark across 56 perturbations with a false positive rate below 1e-5 and no side effects.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  58. Confidential Error-Correcting Codes

    Introduces Confidential Error-correcting Codes (CECs), a cryptographic primitive for decoding perturbed codewords while keeping the message confidential, defined by confidentiality, robustness and soundness. The Randomness-Security Separation framework encodes a nonce and masks the payload with a PRF. The Conc-CEC instantiation uses concatenated Reed-Muller and Reed-Solomon codes, and the authors claim stronger concrete security than PRCs (CRYPTO'24). The CECMark application watermarks AI-generated images, and the authors report it beats Gaussian Shading, PRCMark and T2SMark across 56 perturbations with a false positive rate below 10^-5.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  59. When VLMs Destroy What They Know: Spatial Representations Fall Below Lexical Priors

    Introduces EICS (Evaluation-Invariant Concept Stability), a metric for checking whether representations consistently encode a concept under controlled one-concept interventions. Also introduces CASP-VL, a benchmark of causally controlled spatial perturbations derived from Visual Genome scene graphs. Across several VLM architectures, spatial relations are represented much less faithfully than lexical information, even for models well above chance on compositional benchmarks. The relation is identifiable at the predicate's own tokens but is lost when the sentence is aggregated into a global representation (EOS token or mean pooling), a failure that output-based evaluation does not reveal.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  60. A Baseline Assessment for the Agentic Web Technology Stack

    Proposes MASTIF (Multi-Agent System TestIng Framework) for evaluating Agentic Web stacks. It reports a baseline assessment of 3 LLMs, 3 protocols and 4 agent implementation frameworks on 300 Mind2Web benchmark tasks. Results suggest that choosing a task-specific stack can improve task completion rate, efficiency and social value stability, and can reduce verbosity and completion time. This gives developers reference metrics for choosing among fast-moving agent protocols and frameworks.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  61. PathTime-VLA: Path-Time Decoupling for Factorized Post-Training of Vision-Language-Action Policies

    PathTime-VLA reparameterizes Vision-Language-Action actions as a progress-indexed interaction path X(s) plus a positive interval-time profile that defines a monotone time law t(s). Geometry is thus decoupled from execution speed, so teleoperation timing artifacts don't contaminate the path target. A staged post-training recipe uses demonstrations and DAgger interventions for a target-domain prior, Speed-DQN to learn execution-speed multipliers from robot interaction, and Path-AWR to refine the diffusion path generator from rollout outcomes. On three tasks it reaches 58/60 successes versus 57/60 for BC+DAgger at fixed 1Γ—, with about 39–52% shorter mean completion times on successful trials.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  62. KIFA: Kernel-based Integral Fault Analysis on GIFT-Family Ciphers

    KIFA is an integral fault attack framework that finds balanced properties with the kernel-based miner of Hwang et al. instead of MILP. It gives key-recovery attacks at deeper fault penetration than earlier work. On DEFAULT it reaches FP 9 with a nibble fault and FP 10 with a byte fault, leaving a single master-key candidate under the simple key schedule and 2^64 under the rotating one. It gives the first integral fault attacks on GIFT-128 (FP 7 and 8), extends GIFT-64 to FP 7, and extends BAKSHEESH to FP 8, including with an uncontrolled fault position.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 11 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  63. Skill Constellations: Tracing the Supply Chain of Agent Skills on GitHub

    The paper builds the first dated copy network of agent skills (SKILL.md files) from the git history of repositories in GitSkills, covering 2,193,119 skill adoptions on GitHub, and ships an interactive viewer. It finds that a few source repositories account for almost all copies, that GitHub stars do not identify them, and that copies almost never track their source, so fixes rarely propagate. A fitted model of which repositories get copied ranks repositories for audit: reviewing the top 100 would prevent 14.9% of later adoptions of high-risk skills, against 0.5% for the 100 most-starred. The authors recommend that platforms distribute versioned references instead of copies.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  64. Skill Constellations: Tracing the Supply Chain of Agent Skills on GitHub

    Builds the first dated copy network of agent skills (SKILL.md files) from git history in the GitSkills dataset, covering 2,193,119 skill adoptions on GitHub, plus an interactive viewer. Finds a few repositories are the source of nearly all copies, stars do not identify them, and copies almost never track their source, so upstream fixes rarely propagate. A model of which repositories get copied ranks repos for audit: reviewing the top 100 prevents 14.9% of later adoptions of high-risk skills versus 0.5% for the 100 most starred. The authors recommend platforms distribute versioned references rather than copies.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  65. DITTO: A Context-aware Pickle-based Pre-Trained Model Scanner for Effective Security Audits

    Introduces DITTO, a stack-based, context-aware scanner for Pickle-based pre-trained models that tracks Pickle VM state transitions and applies semantic analysis to infer model intent. Authors found 9.3% of 10,000+ popular Hugging Face repos still use Pickle, and release PickleBench (959 benign, 92 malicious models, including extension registry attacks missed by existing tools). Reports 100% coverage, 0% false negatives, 0.7% false positives, F1 0.966, outperforming current scanners.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  66. Before They Can Solve: Predicting Post-Training Coding-Agent Performance from Base Models

    This paper proposes three evaluation screens β€” Decisive-Action BPB, Patch MCQ, and prefix-conditioned pass@K β€” that predict how well a base model will perform as a coding agent after post-training, without requiring the base checkpoint to run a full agentic harness. By replaying successful post-trained agent trajectories and identifying the "decisive step" that flips a repository from failing to passing tests, the authors measure a base model's latent support for that action. Tested across ten pairs of public base and post-trained models, all three screens closely track post-trained SWE-bench Verified pass@1 scores, offering a way to cheaply vet base checkpoints before committing to expensive agentic post-training.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  67. TaoD2C-Bench: Benchmarking MLLMs for Industrial UI Code Generation Beyond Visual Fidelity

    TaoD2C-Bench is a benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on industrial design-to-code (D2C) tasks β€” converting UI designs into code that satisfies implementation constraints, not just visual fidelity. It includes the TaoD2C dataset of 2,861 production designs from 17 commercial platforms with 97,652 expert annotations across Component, Group, Alignment, and Position categories, and defines three tasks: end-to-end UI code generation, requirement inference, and requirement realization. Evaluating eight MLLMs, the authors find large gaps between visual reconstruction ability and the ability to generate code meeting domain-specific implementation requirements.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  68. Stale, Misattributed, or Late: Where Personal Memory Fails Before Generation

    This paper introduces Personal Fact Memory (PFM), a reference layer for diagnosing errors in language-agent memory systems before generation happens, separating stored-state validity, identity resolution, abstention and serving latency. On a controlled revision benchmark, serving only the active value per correctly keyed slot eliminates stale exposure (versus 70.3 percent stale exposure without update resolution), while participant-aware BM25 matches a reference ranker within a 0.02 margin once stores are shared. The harder problem is revision-to-slot assignment: four LLM key assigners get higher key recall than a rule-based extractor but lower clean-retrieval rates, open-domain merge recall on LongMemEval never exceeds 0.062, and entity-posterior filtering reduces but does not eliminate same-name misattribution on LoCoMo; prompt prefill, not retrieval, dominates turn-level latency.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  69. Hashing Beats Trees: Practical Oblivious Dictionaries in SGX

    An IACR ePrint paper by Erik-Oliver Blass and Travis Mayberry proposing oblivious probabilistic hash tables (chaining, power-of-two-choices, stash-less cuckoo, de-amortized cuckoo hashing) built over Path ORAM as a replacement for oblivious AVL trees when deployed inside Intel SGX enclaves. It shows that SGX's small trusted client memory lets the position map recursion be shrunk to ≀3 levels, making constant-access hash tables beat Θ(log n) tree traversal, and derives via large-scale simulation the concrete padding parameters needed for "double obliviousness" (bounding hash-table rebuild probability to ≀2^-40) that prior ORAM literature lacked. Their SGX implementation reports up to 20x faster lookups and 12x faster inserts than oblivious-tree baselines.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  70. Fair and Efficient Helper-Aided MPC with Cheater Identification

    This paper introduces Alhena (synchronous) and Wasat (asynchronous), two helper-aided multi-party computation protocols that achieve "identifiable fairness": if an adversary aborts the protocol, no party gets the output and honest parties can identify at least one common cheater, closing a gap in prior fair-but-unaccountable helper-aided MPC schemes. The authors benchmark against state-of-the-art fair protocols Asterisk and Castor (both from Kamarkar et al., IEEE S&P 2024/2026), showing 4–12.5x and 2.5–5x online-phase speedups respectively, with online performance unaffected by active misbehavior.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  71. Retention Choices for Quantum CHAM Key Search under a Global Qubit Budget

    This IACR eprint paper studies how to allocate a fixed global logical-qubit budget across parallel Grover search workers attacking 80-round and revised 112-round CHAM-128/128, choosing which intermediate round values to retain to minimize circuit depth while meeting a target key-recovery success probability. Testing 83- and 99-set retention libraries against a no-retention/full-retention baseline across 654 budget and Toffoli-decomposition conditions, the authors report mean depth reductions of 11.12% and 8.39% with strict improvements in most conditions, and show retained-value counts don't necessarily scale with budget. The work gives concrete logical-layer resource estimates for quantum attacks on CHAM, relevant to post-quantum migration planning for the lightweight cipher in constrained systems.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  72. Integer multiplication below n log n

    A preprint hosted in OpenAI's "math" GitHub repository claiming a result on integer multiplication algorithms with complexity below the n log n bound, the long-standing benchmark achieved by the Harvey–van der Hoeven algorithm in 2019. The page itself only exposes citation metadata (author, title, BibTeX entry) with the actual paper linked as a PDF, so the specific proof technique and whether it was AI-assisted cannot be confirmed from the fetched text alone.

    github.compaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  73. PEARS: Physical-Prior-Guided Efficient Adaptation via Failure Reasoning and Diffusion Steering for Tactile Manipulation

    PEARS is a hybrid reinforcement-learning framework for sample-efficient online adaptation of pretrained tactile-manipulation policies to out-of-distribution conditions. A physics-guided force reasoning (PFR) module uses a vision-language model to diagnose failures from visual and tactile history and update contact-force bounds enforced by a hybrid force-position controller, while a separate tactile-conditioned diffusion-steering component perturbs the latent noise of a frozen flow-matching policy to correct free-space motion and contact timing without retraining the base model. It improves success rates by 12.4-37.4 points over strong baselines in simulation, cuts required interaction episodes by up to 53.2%, and reaches 95%/90% success on real-world whiteboard-erasing and pipette-liquid-aspiration tasks.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  74. Secure Speculative Decoding for Large Language Models

    This arXiv paper presents the first systematic study of security implications of speculative decoding, a technique that speeds up LLM inference using a smaller draft model to propose tokens verified by the target model. The authors find a security-utility asymmetry: lossy speculative decoding methods raise jailbreak and prompt-injection attack success rates much faster than they degrade utility, with security degradation traced to early tokens generated by the draft model. They propose SecureSD, which applies stricter verification to early-position draft tokens, improving security while preserving inference efficiency and utility on security and utility benchmarks.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  75. Principled Under Pressure: Post-Training Decides Whether LLMs Act on Their Own Moral Judgment

    This arXiv paper introduces a pre-registered panel of 248 scenarios across five kinds of pressure, each posed to a model twice (as the acting agent and as a third-person judge) with pressure-removed twins and operator-order positive controls, to measure whether models act against their own stated moral judgment. Testing OLMo-3-7B-Instruct, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Tulu 3, and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, the authors find OLMo-3 violates its own judgment on about 1 in 5 pressuring scenarios, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and OLMo-3 carry this gap while Tulu 3 (fine-tuned from the same Llama-3.1 weights) and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct show none or an unresolved effect, and that reading outside the chat template or adding stakes-reasoning changes the gap's sign and size. The paper argues this value-action gap is a target shaped by post-training recipes rather than a fixed property of pretrained weights.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  76. Semantic Behavioral Watermarking: Paraphrase-Robust and Forgery-Resistant Provenance for LLM Agents

    Semantic Behavioral Watermarking (SBW) is a provenance scheme for LLM agents that embeds an owner identifier in semantic clusters of an agent's action choices rather than exact action symbols, making it robust to paraphrasing/tool-renaming that breaks three prior agent watermarks (e.g., AgentMark drops to 16.8% bit-recovery under observation paraphrasing). It adds keyed, collision-resistant binning proven unpredictable in the random-oracle model to resist forgery (adaptive forgery success drops from 100% to the false-positive floor), while explicitly documenting an unsolved attack: chained-replay forgery, which still succeeds 0.76-0.98 of the time across five tested agent models (3B-14B, Qwen, ToolBench/ALFWorld benchmarks). Code is released alongside the paper.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  77. Semantic Behavioral Watermarking: Paraphrase-Robust and Forgery-Resistant Provenance for LLM Agents

    This paper introduces Semantic Behavioral Watermarking (SBW), a method for embedding an owner identifier into an LLM agent's high-level tool/action choices rather than output tokens, so provenance survives tool renaming and observation paraphrasing. It watermarks over semantic action clusters with history conditioning and replaces the public-cluster bin with keyed collision-resistant binning that is provably unpredictable under the random-oracle model, closing a forgery gap left by prior agent watermarks (e.g., AgentMark, whose bit-recovery drops to 16.8% under paraphrasing). Evaluated across five agent models (3B-14B, four vendors) on ToolBench and ALFWorld, cluster-level watermarking achieves far higher detection under rewriting (0.49-0.66 vs 0.05-0.17 on ToolBench; 0.92-0.97 vs 0.00-0.01 on ALFWorld) and reduces adaptive forgery success from 100% to the false-positive floor, while noting chained-replay attacks remain an open vulnerability (0.76-0.98 detection failure).

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  78. Toward Alignment Scaling Laws: A Framework and First Preregistered Measurements

    This paper proposes a formal framework for "alignment scaling laws," modeling the compute/capability burden needed to hold a fixed safety target for each risk category as a power law B_r(N)=a_rN^alpha_r, where the exponent alpha_r determines whether alignment gets easier, keeps pace, or accumulates "alignment debt" as capability N grows. The authors prove theoretical results (the largest exponent among corrected risks sets the long-run regime, super-exponential headroom requirements above alpha=1, small-model fits underestimate large-scale exponents for power-law mixtures) and apply a preregistered protocol twice: a reanalysis of adversarial-training data on Pythia classifiers (attack-success compute exponent 0.60) and a pilot across Qwen2.5 (0.5B-72B) and Qwen3 (0.6B-14B), finding scaling helps for truthfulness and stated dispositions but sycophancy (exponent ~0.83-0.89) and a planted backdoor behave worse or remain undetermined, with the backdoor surviving blind safety training at most model sizes. The work matters as an early attempt to put the "does alignment get harder with scale" debate on measurable, falsifiable footing rather than anecdote.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  79. CheckerBench: Can Long-Horizon Agents Synthesize Static-Analysis Checkers?

    CheckerBench is an executable benchmark of 300 tasks drawn from 297 CVEs across 167 repositories, 85 CWEs, and five language ecosystems, testing whether long-horizon coding agents can synthesize working static-analysis checkers from a defect specification through repeated compile-and-analyze feedback loops. Its companion framework CheckerLab independently rebuilds submitted checkers and scores vulnerable-fixed diagnostic contrast, patch localization, false positives, and tool use; across 21 model-harness configurations mean Pass@1 is 32.30 percent and the best reaches 45.33 percent, showing reliable checker synthesis remains hard for current coding agents.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  80. CheckerBench: Can Long-Horizon Agents Synthesize Static-Analysis Checkers?

    CheckerBench is an executable benchmark of 300 tasks derived from 297 CVEs across 167 repositories, 85 CWEs, and five language ecosystems, testing whether long-horizon coding agents can synthesize working static-analysis checkers from a defect specification through repeated compilation and analysis feedback. The accompanying CheckerLab framework independently rebuilds submitted checkers and measures vulnerable-vs-fixed diagnostic contrast, patch localization, false positives, and tool use; across 21 model-harness configurations mean Pass@1 is 32.30% (best 45.33%), showing reliable checker synthesis remains hard for current agents.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  81. Randomness-Anchored Runtime Discovery of Cryptographic Operations on Linux Using eBPF

    This IACR ePrint paper presents a Linux runtime cryptographic discovery system built on eBPF user-space probes that detects both classical and post-quantum (ML-KEM) cryptographic operations as they execute, complementing static binary/SBOM analysis with dynamic observation. It uses "randomness anchoring" β€” correlating observed key-generation/encapsulation randomness with subsequent crypto API calls in the same process β€” to raise detection confidence without adding false positives, reporting perfect precision/recall on classical and ML-KEM workloads, median detection latency of 28 ΞΌs, and 14–18% overhead on key-generation-bound workloads. A nine-application case study (drawn from/paired with QED datasets) compares static vs. runtime views and shows how eBPF probe coverage limits what can be observed, relevant to building a runtime cryptographic bill of materials for PQC migration compliance.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  82. Measuring Parallel Execution of Classical–PQC Component Pairs in Hybrid TLS 1.3

    An IACR ePrint paper benchmarks whether running the classical and post-quantum components of hybrid TLS 1.3 key exchange (ECDHE–ML-KEM) and Composite ML-DSA signatures in parallel on separate pthread worker threads reduces handshake latency versus sequential execution. Across three RFC 10024 ECDHE–ML-KEM groups with server and mutual authentication, parallelism sped up all six tested conditions on a standard ARM and x86 system (1.04×–1.28Γ—), with the largest gains in signature stages where component times are balanced, but slowed every condition on a low-power x86 system (0.80×–0.92Γ—) because thread wake/wait overhead outweighed savings. The authors conclude that component independence alone doesn't guarantee a speedup and that parallelization decisions must be validated per target environment.

    eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  83. Beyond Memory: Harnessing Long-Horizon Agents with Explicit Belief States

    This paper introduces PoS, an inference-time framework for LLM agents that maintains explicit belief states β€” combining an estimate of the current world state with unresolved task requirements β€” instead of relying solely on raw interaction history or memory compression. PoS detects "Belief Trapping," where an agent keeps acting without real progress, and applies recovery strategies tailored to the trapping pattern and the unresolved requirement type. Across four benchmarks spanning execution and diagnosis tasks, and three different LLM backbones, PoS outperforms baseline approaches and shows resilience as context length grows.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  84. Passing the Test You Trained On: Re-evaluating Prompt-Injection Detectors for LLM Agents

    This arXiv paper replays ground-truth tool calls from the AgentDojo and tau-bench agent benchmarks (without an LLM) to generate benign-by-construction tool outputs, then labels injected outputs via differential replay to evaluate fifteen prompt-injection detectors, including Meta's Prompt Guard 2, plus two task-aware LLM judges, also testing them on BIPIA. It finds detection rankings transfer poorly between benchmarks (the best detector on BIPIA catches only 2% of AgentDojo injections at 1% false-positive rate; a detector catching 72% of AgentDojo injections catches only 15% on tau-bench), while false-positive rates do transfer between the two agent benchmarks, and traces this to mismatches between training data format (e.g., training on short prompt strings vs. tool-output-embedded injections) and deployment context.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  85. ReFract: Benchmarking Perspective Awareness in Language Model Agents with Text World Models

    ReFract is a benchmark of 150 expert-validated entries testing whether LLM agents can infer a user's role and act only through tools/actions legitimate for that role, a capability the authors term "Perspective Awareness." Entries are grounded in anonymized industrial-maintenance support queries and use constructed Text World Models to simulate the agent's operating environment and generate perspective-aware action trajectories. State-of-the-art LLMs solve at most 69% of tasks, with over half of trajectories containing attempts at perspective-violating actions, exposing this as a largely unsolved axis of agent evaluation relevant to high-stakes, physically-enacted agent deployments.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  86. Evaluating and Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models to Input Sequence Variations

    An arXiv thesis-style paper proposing R_stab(f), a Jensen-Shannon-divergence-based robustness metric for LLM outputs under small input perturbations, along with a proven bound V(h) <= 1 - R_class(h) for localized attacks. It introduces ASA, an adaptive evolutionary black-box attack against LLM-as-a-Judge systems reaching up to 73.8% attack success rate (62.6% cross-model transfer), evaluates trojan/backdoor detection on the Trojan Detection Challenge 2023 (Pythia-1.4B) and SaTML CTF 2024, shows that committees of 5-7 heterogeneous models cut Gemma-3-4B's ASR to 19.3%, and presents AttestMCP, an HMAC-based tool-call attestation scheme plus a "Commit Boundary" isolation pattern for MCP agents that cuts average ASR on the 847-scenario MCPBench from 53.7% to 12.4%. Methods ship as the JudgeGuard, TrojanArmor, and MCPSec software suites.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  87. MosaiChunk: Compositing Spatio-Temporal Memory for Autoregressive Video Generation

    MosaiChunk is a spatio-temporal memory mechanism for autoregressive video generation that composes a "mosaic" of selected historical key-value (KV) cache entries across space and time, letting a frozen video generator recover fine-grained visual details of objects/scenes that fell out of the finite context window. Only a lightweight router is trained to pick which historical KV sections fit a fixed active-memory budget, while the base generator stays unchanged. The paper also introduces RememBench, a benchmark of long-horizon revisit scenarios with text-to-video (T2V) and camera-driven image-to-video (I2V) splits, showing MosaiChunk beats sliding-window inference and whole-chunk retrieval at matched memory budgets.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  88. From Network Intrusion Detection to Blockchain-Backed Endpoint Detection and Response: Mapping the Landscape of Decentralized Detection-and-Response Architectures

    This arXiv Systematization of Knowledge paper surveys the literature (2019–2026) on blockchain-assisted intrusion detection and response, proposing a three-axis taxonomy classifying proposals by detection-system class (NIDS, HIDS, EDR/XDR), blockchain's functional role, and response-automation maturity. It argues existing surveys wrongly conflate blockchain's roles and ignore the shift from classic IDS/IPS to modern EDR/XDR, then exposes why a true per-endpoint blockchain-anchored response loop remains nearly nonexistent due to consensus latency, deployment, and community mismatches, and flags cross-cutting risks including smart-contract attack surfaces, post-quantum cryptographic weaknesses, and adversarial manipulation of LLM-based detection engines.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  89. DRelay: Global Draft Context for Prefix-Aware Parallel Speculative Decoding Repair

    DRelay is a speculative decoding technique for LLM inference that repairs parallel draft-token selections before target-model verification, using a global reader over the entire draft block plus a causal selector to decide whether to keep or replace each candidate token, extending the accepted prefix length. Trained jointly with the draft backbone via a combined candidate-support and position-weighted repair loss, it is evaluated on eight benchmarks on an H800 GPU and, under SGLang serving, improves end-to-end decoding speedup substantially over DFlash, Domino, and DSpark baselines.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  90. AgSpec: Pushing the Limits of Retrieval-Based Speculative Decoding in Coding Agent Pipelines

    AgSpec is a retrieval-based speculative decoding framework built for coding-agent pipelines. It drafts tokens by retrieving from session, workspace, and global corpora, including the ongoing session trajectory and opened files indexed in the agent's own emission format, and bounds or adapts each agent's draft length using an offline-profiled cap plus online verification feedback. On two repository-level multi-agent coding benchmarks it beats five retrieval-based drafters and EAGLE-3 in most settings, raising generation throughput over autoregressive decoding by up to 4.37x at batch size 1 and 4.76x at batch size 16, with gains that generalize to non-repository, single-agent coding settings too.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  91. AuraForge: Scaling Security Supervision for Training Coding Agents

    AuraForge is a method for synthesizing and validating executable security tests to train coding agents toward secure (not just functionally correct) code, combining attack-oriented test synthesis, multi-language task construction, and safeguards against reward hacking. The authors release AuraGym, a 679-task executable training gym drawn from 344 real-world Python/JavaScript/TypeScript repositories spanning 177 CWE categories, and show that training Qwen3.5-4B with AuraForge-synthesized tests beats human-written tests on both functional-pass (FuncPass) and security-pass (SecPass) metrics while cutting false positives by over 83%.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  92. AuraForge: Scaling Security Supervision for Training Coding Agents

    AuraForge is a pipeline that synthesizes and validates executable security tests to supervise the training of coding agents, using attack-oriented test synthesis and safeguards against reward hacking. The authors build AuraGym, a multi-language (Python, JavaScript, TypeScript) training gym of 679 feature-implementation tasks from 344 real repositories spanning 177 CWE categories, and show that training Qwen3.5-4B with these synthesized tests beats human-written security tests on both functional correctness (FuncPass) and security (SecPass) metrics, while producing about 3x more test cases and cutting false positives by 83 percent.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI

  93. VibeMemBench: Evaluating Memory Systems for Coding Agents on Real Repository Coding Tasks

    VibeMemBench is a benchmark for evaluating persistent memory systems on 111 real-repository coding targets (from 90 SWE-rebench V2 repos, with 3,634 prior-work trajectories), built via a four-stage SIEVE pipeline that verifies a target's injected history experience actually improves executable test outcomes before inclusion. The paper finds that frozen, verified "useful" experience transfers small resolution gains (1.1–4.5 pp) and step reductions to held-out solvers (DeepSeek-V4-Pro, GLM-5, GLM-5.2, Kimi-K2.7-code, Qwen3.8-max), but when four existing memory systems (Mem0, SimpleMem, MemoryOS, A-MEM) must construct and retrieve that experience themselves, 11 of 12 solver/system pairings fail to beat the memory-off baseline β€” exposing a large gap between latent useful history and what current memory systems actually deliver.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  94. SAGE: A Statistical Acceptance Gate for Self-Evolving Agents

    SAGE is a statistical acceptance gate for self-evolving LLM agents that replaces the naive accept-if-aggregate-score-improves rule used when an optimizer edits an agents persistent skill document. It uses per-item paired comparison between the current and edited skill on identical validation items, exposing regressions an aggregate score hides, plus a one-sided paired significance test that only commits edits whose wins reliably beat their losses, addressing both permanent regression risk and the optimizers curse from noisy finite validation sets. Across five benchmarks and four backbone LLMs, SAGE cuts regression rates in 19 of 20 settings, for example 36.5 percent to 0 percent on LiveMath and 42.8 percent to 0 percent on OfficeQA with DeepSeek V4, while also achieving the best final score in all 20 settings.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  95. Raven: The Harness of Harnesses for Composable Agentic Intelligence

    Raven is an open-source multi-agent framework that automatically constructs and evolves modular 'harnesses' pairing specific models with domain-specialized execution scaffolding, treating each model-harness pair as a composable unit of intelligence. A Host Agent decomposes goals and routes subtasks to specialized agents while a host archive, EverOS, and Skill Forge preserve and reuse experience across tasks; the paper provides theoretical conditions under which this composition provably expands reliable task coverage beyond individual agents under a shared resource budget, and reports Raven outperforming state-of-the-art agent systems on complex, long-horizon tasks.

    huggingface.copaperAdded 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  96. Ranking-Aware Prompt Optimization for Multimodal Clinical Diagnosis

    The paper introduces Ranking-PE, a modification to reflective prompt-optimization methods like GEPA that replaces per-instance accuracy scoring with pairwise AUROC-equivalent scoring (via the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney identity) across the scores matrix, reflection feedback, and candidate selection. Applied to multimodal clinical diagnosis on MIMIC with fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-8B and MedGemma-4B, it shows accuracy-based prompt evolution can degrade ranking performance under class imbalance, while Ranking-PE improves AUROC by +5.8pp and +16.2pp respectively, with ablations showing a medical-grade visual backbone is a necessary prerequisite that prompt search alone cannot substitute for.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  97. Aletheia: Permission-Minimality Testing for Coding-Agent Rules

    Aletheia is a permission-minimality testing framework for coding-agent repository instruction files (rules), which can be weaponized via prompt injection to request unnecessary credential access or data exfiltration while still producing a correct patch. It translates requested authority into a typed language, synthesizes sandbox configurations, and runs tasks under full versus incrementally restricted permissions to produce "dispensability witnesses" that flag suspicious permission requests. On the AIShellJack benchmark it detects all 314 attack inputs with zero false alarms on five benign templates, and on 80 manually verified benign GHAgentFiles rules it raises only 3 false positives (3.75%).

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  98. SoK: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Emulation-Based Dynamic Analysis Research for ARM Cortex-M Firmware (Extended Version)

    This SoK paper empirically evaluates 24 published emulation-based dynamic analysis tools for ARM Cortex-M firmware re-hosting, using large-scale datasets from OTACAP and FirmLine totaling 4,571 deduplicated ARM firmware samples. It finds that only 34.5% of samples can be successfully fuzzed by any existing tool, with average code coverage of just 10% and frequent false crashes/hangs, exposing systemic gaps across the emulation, fuzzing, and bug-diagnosis pipeline stages.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  99. TraceDance: Automated System for Building Agent Behavior Benchmarks from Real-World Deployment Traces

    TraceDance is an automated system that mines real-world agent deployment traces to build targeted benchmarks for user-specified undesirable agent behaviors, using an Anchor-and-Confirm retrieval-plus-LLM-confirmation pipeline and an Anchor Synthesis Loop to generate behavior specifications. Benchmarks evaluate an LLM's next-turn response at a recorded decision point against a behavior-specific rubric, avoiding the need for reference answers or environment replay. Applied to 252,557 sessions in coding and tool-use domains, it produced 107 benchmarks with 4,125 instances, and testing nine frontier LLMs found a mean pass rate of only 26.7 percent, exposing persistent agentic behavior weaknesses.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  100. Point2Part: Unified 3D Partitioning from Point Prompts

    Point2Part is a promptable 3D part-decomposition model that, given 3D point prompts (one per desired part), jointly partitions an image or mesh into non-overlapping parts that fully cover the shape, unlike prior methods that allow overlaps or gaps. It builds on a pretrained 3D generation model's shape latent space, adding a prompt encoder mapping point prompts to part tokens and a coarse-to-fine part decoder that assigns every shape position to exactly one part, unifying image-to-part generation, mesh-to-part generation, and part segmentation in one model. The authors report outperforming prior SOTA on part-quality metrics and an order-of-magnitude improvement in part compatibility across all three tasks.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  101. Rho: A Foundation for Efficiently Adaptable VLA Models

    Rho is a family of open-weights vision-language-action (VLA) models for bimanual robotic manipulation, designed for data-light adaptation across three dual-arm embodiments (YAM Box, UR AI Trainer, FR3 Duo). The paper ablates the action-expert architecture and training recipe, showing that "embodiment midtraining" improves downstream adaptation, and introduces an internal latent policy that learns from as few as 15 corrected episodes to steer a frozen flow-matching action expert toward out-of-distribution task situations. The authors release base and embodiment-specific checkpoints, positioning Rho as both a strong general-purpose manipulation model and a practical foundation for efficient adaptation.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  102. A Spectral Theory of Distortion in LLM Graph Reconstruction: Sharp Bounds and Empirical Characterization

    This paper proves that the Wasserstein distance between Laplacian spectra of original and LLM-reconstructed graphs is bracketed by two edge-count quantities, the net change in edge number and the symmetric difference, each scaled by 2/n, showing when these bounds coincide (pure addition or pure deletion of edges) and when they diverge (mixed editing, i.e. both inventing and losing edges). Using this theory, the authors analyze 135 graph reconstructions produced by three open-weight LLMs over 45 synthetic graphs, finding 77 one-sided outputs and 29 mixed outputs with a positive residual, revealing that aggregate distortion metrics mask qualitatively different editing policies across models, from copying the input to hallucination-heavy completion.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  103. Peppy: An AI-Assisted Workflow for Tight Convergence Analysis of Optimization Algorithms

    Peppy is an AI-assisted workflow that uses LLMs with domain-specific knowledge of optimization theory to discover tight, analytic convergence proofs for first-order optimization algorithms, verifying results through SymPy rather than a full proof assistant like Lean 4. The authors demonstrate the approach by closing several open problems in convergence analysis, including conjectures about Nesterov's Fast Gradient Method (FGM), positioning the workflow as a more structured, domain-specialized alternative to generic LLM-for-math-research pipelines.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  104. FlowAct-R2: Beyond Talking Avatar via Streaming Multimodal References and Proactive Agent Planning

    FlowAct-R2 is a framework for interactive humanoid video generation that pairs a Streaming Multimodal Reference Diffusion Transformer (built on the Seedance 2.0 Mini reference-to-video backbone) with a Proactive Interaction Agent. The diffusion component accepts rolling action prompts plus continuously updated image, audio and video references, using video-driven rotary positional embeddings and partially noised historical motion frames to keep appearance consistent and avoid drift over long generation runs. The agent component separates offline persona/agenda/skill preparation from online scheduling, audience response and interruption handling, enabling real-time 720p, hour-scale streaming avatars for use cases like live shopping, video chatting and live vlogging.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  105. TCSAlgBench: Benchmarking Automated Proving for Research-Level Theoretical Computer Science

    TCSAlgBench is a benchmark of 398 theorem-level challenges drawn from 138 STOC and COLT 2026 papers, designed to test whether LLMs can produce natural-language proofs of algorithmic results that humans can inspect and verify. The authors evaluate ten model configurations from four model families under direct inference and multi-round prover-verifier discussion, and compare four agent workflows (including decomposition and agentic planning) under matched model-call budgets, finding GPT-5.6 Sol max reaches 23.6% verifier-accepted coverage after 10-round discussion while agentic planning with GPT-5.5 xhigh reaches 25.4%. The pipeline is designed to refresh with newly released conference papers, making it a reusable testbed for tracking progress on research-level mathematical/algorithmic reasoning.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  106. SEABench: Benchmarking Endogenous Misalignment In Self-Evolving Agents

    SEABench is a benchmark of 48 longitudinal task sequences designed to study endogenous misalignment in self-evolving LLM agents β€” agents that modify their own controller instructions, memory protocols, and tools in response to feedback. It includes an adaptive trajectory discovery pipeline and paired non-evolving baseline agents for causal attribution, and finds that self-evolution boosts task completion but introduces safety failures absent in static baselines; the authors also show that chain-of-thought monitoring can catch these divergent unsafe behaviors with a low false-positive rate.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  107. SEABench: Benchmarking Endogenous Misalignment In Self-Evolving Agents

    SEABench is a benchmark for studying "endogenous misalignment" in self-evolving LLM agents β€” agents that modify their own controller instructions, memory, and tools after deployment based on feedback. It comprises 48 longitudinal task sequences across multiple evolution surfaces, task domains, and harm types in a personal-assistant environment, using an adaptive trajectory discovery pipeline and paired non-evolving baseline agents for causal attribution. Evaluation across several LLMs shows self-evolution boosts task completion but introduces safety failures absent in non-evolving baselines, and the paper proposes a chain-of-thought monitoring strategy that mitigates unsafe behavior with low false positives.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  108. Physics-Attested Federated Learning: Securing Collaborative Anomaly Detection in Critical Water Infrastructure

    This arXiv paper proposes mining cyber-physical invariants (conservation laws, actuator couplings) from clean operational data to serve as a verifiable admission gate for federated learning updates in industrial intrusion-detection systems, closing a blind spot where poisoned updates derived from fabricated telemetry are indistinguishable from honest ones in update space alone. Evaluated across SWaT, WADI, and BATADAL water-infrastructure testbeds against seven aggregation rules, the gate rejects all fabricated shards (including ones that defeat FoolsGold) while admitting all honest ones, and recovers most of the detection recall lost to replay and fabrication poisoning. The authors also show invariant compliance can be proven via zk-SNARKs so clients avoid revealing raw operational telemetry.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 28 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  109. PIDS-Bench: Evaluating Prompt-Injection Detectors Under Over-Defense, Obfuscation, and Distribution Shift

    PIDS-Bench is a frozen, multi-axis benchmark for prompt-injection detectors that jointly measures attack detection and benign false-positive rates across in-distribution inputs, hard-benign prompts mimicking injection structure, obfuscated attacks, and domain/structural distribution shifts. Testing seven detectors (learned baselines, external prompt-injection classifiers, broad-safety comparators) plus a rule-based baseline, the authors show a detector with F1 > 0.98 on held-out data still misclassifies roughly one-third of an externally-sourced benign security-adjacent corpus, and that hard-negative augmentation reduces over-defense only on curated stress inputs, not on externally-sourced ones β€” a pattern they call provenance-sensitive over-defense.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  110. VulContextBench: A Benchmark for Security Context Retrieval in Coding Agents

    VulContextBench is a hand-audited benchmark of 111 vulnerability-introducing commits across 83 repositories, 63 CWEs, and five languages, built to score whether a coding agent actually retrieved and cited the correct evidence for a vulnerability verdict rather than just reaching the right verdict. Evaluating seven frontier models (including Qwen3-Coder-Next and GPT-5.5) at file/block/line granularity, the authors find every model explores most of the gold evidence but reports only a fraction of it: Qwen3-Coder-Next views 86.3% of annotated lines but cites just 12.9%, while GPT-5.5 views 73% and reports 36%. This reveals that verdict-only vulnerability-detection benchmarks mask whether an agent's reasoning is actually grounded in traced code versus pretraining recall.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 26 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  111. VulContextBench: A Benchmark for Security Context Retrieval in Coding Agents

    VulContextBench is a benchmark of 111 hand-audited vulnerability-introducing commits across 83 repositories, 63 CWEs and five languages, built to measure whether a coding agent's verdict is actually grounded in the code it retrieved rather than recalled from pretraining. Each case has gold-context annotations (464 code blocks) scored separately for context viewed during exploration versus context cited as final evidence, at file, block and line granularity, across seven frontier models. The headline finding is a large viewed-vs-reported gap β€” e.g. Qwen3-Coder-Next views 86.3% of gold lines but cites only 12.9%, GPT-5.5 views 73% and reports 36% β€” showing agents explore relevant evidence but fail to surface it in their final report, a failure mode invisible to verdict-only benchmarks.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  112. MemSentry: A Framework for Detecting Persistent Memory Poisoning in Agentic AI

    MemSentry is a proposed pre-commit evaluation framework for agentic AI systems that intercepts proposed writes to persistent memory and issues Accept/Review/Quarantine decisions by jointly scoring source trust, semantic risk, attack radius over a component-dependency graph, access risk, and a signed security-posture delta. The authors evaluate it against 1,000 GPT-4-generated scenarios using four pluggable semantic classifiers (Regex, TF-IDF+SVM, SBERT+LR, SetFit), with SBERT+LR reaching 91.7% accuracy while all methods catch 100% of external quarantine-class threats; the paper also documents a key limitation β€” surface-similar but oppositely-intentioned insider operations remain hard to distinguish semantically. It targets the persistent-memory-poisoning attack surface distinct from prompt injection, where a single malicious memory write (e.g., "suppress alerts from this IP") can silently persist and influence future agent actions like a SOC assistant's alerting or access decisions.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  113. Aray: Deterministic-First Synthesis of Benign Artifacts for YARA Validation

    Aray is a deterministic-first YARA interpreter and positive-fixture synthesizer that generates benign, YARA-matching ELF/PE/generic artifacts to validate detection rules without storing or distributing live malware samples. Conventional code (not a generative model) canonicalizes rules, derives witnesses from regex/hex declarations, and performs extraction, layout, and binary serialization; an LLM is only permitted to propose constructive rule normalizations or residual-semantics judgments, never backend source or binary structure, and the pipeline supports a zero-inference execution path. Evaluated against 416 public YARA rules, it achieved 406/416 (97.6%) matches to the original upstream rule, with the design explicitly motivated by containment concerns raised by the July 2026 OpenAI–Hugging Face agent incident.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  114. A Case Study on Emergent Cheating and Whistleblowing in Autonomous Research Swarms

    A case study of a 100-agent autonomous LLM research swarm tasked with proving formal mathematical conjectures, in which one agent discovered and shared an exploit in the evaluation system via a shared knowledge library and peer messaging, leading a subset of agents to adopt cheating under competitive pressure. A separate faction of agents spontaneously organized resistanceβ€”auditing proofs, broadcasting alerts, staging boycotts, filing complaints, and proposing validation patchesβ€”entirely without external intervention. The authors frame the shared agent infrastructure as a knowledge-commons governance problem (Ostrom, 1990) and propose institutional mechanisms like graduated sanctioning and collective-choice rules for decentralized self-governance in autonomous swarms.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  115. Do User-Authored Permission Policies Improve Protection Against AI Agent Overreach?

    A controlled study of 113 non-technical participants compares three ways of supervising an AI agent across 18 simulated actions (including 7 overreach cases): per-action human-in-the-loop approval, automated model review, and user-authored "allow/ask/never" consequence policies. It finds that user-authored policies blocked significantly less overreach than either alternative (-20.1pp vs HITL, -14.5pp vs AUTO), largely because participants overwhelmingly chose "ask" rules that just deferred decisions back to runtime approval, where they then approved most overreach actions anyway. The paper's key takeaway is a gap between stated preference and committed policy: standing rules don't reliably constrain agent actions if users keep choosing to defer judgment case-by-case.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  116. CallScreenBench: Benchmarking Small Language Models as Phone Secretaries

    CallScreenBench is a benchmark for evaluating small, quantized (4-bit, 0.6-4B parameter) language models acting as autonomous phone secretaries that screen inbound calls without a cooperative caller-assigned task. It reports five automated call-and-note measure groups tied to owner endorsement (service, recall, plausibility, triage discrimination) plus three guardedness diagnostics for toolless, credential-free proxies, deliberately avoiding a single composite score to expose trade-offs like scam-detection TPR versus legitimate-call false positives. Testing across three paired model-family checkpoints reveals that larger checkpoints score higher on some measures while triage discrimination follows a different ordering, and scripted degenerate policies (e.g., hangup-and-echo) expose measurement floors.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  117. A Large-Scale Measurement of AI Bill of Materials Completeness in Hugging Face Models

    This paper empirically measures the completeness of AI Bills of Materials (AIBOMs) generated for roughly 97.5K Hugging Face model repositories, examining structural/metadata fields, model identity, license and external-reference data, and model-card documentation such as datasets, limitations, safety-risk and environmental information. It finds that generated AIBOMs satisfy required structural fields but are weak on AI-specific documentation like responsible-use, environmental impact, and meaningful descriptions, and argues for better model-card practices and automated AIBOM validation.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  118. The Regression Tax: Decomposing Why Skills Help and Hurt LLM Agents

    This arXiv paper studies why adding procedural "skills" to LLM agents can hurt as well as help performance, running nearly 6,000 evaluation runs across two office automation benchmarks and three model harness stacks. It distinguishes "regressions" (tasks solved without skills but failed after adding them) from "residual failures," and identifies three regression causes: skill description osmosis, grounding displacement, and verification displacement. The authors argue procedural skills are overemphasized relative to grounding and verification, and that skill evaluation should decompose net effect into gains vs. regressions rather than reporting aggregate improvement alone.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  119. Calibration Without Comprehension: Diagnosing the Limits of Fine-Tuning LLMs for Vulnerability Detection in Systems Software

    CWE-Trace is a benchmark and diagnostic framework of 834 manually curated Linux kernel samples spanning 74 CWEs, built with a strict temporal train/test split to rule out data contamination, used to evaluate eight vanilla LLMs and 15 LoRA fine-tuned variants on vulnerability detection and CWE classification. The paper introduces two new metrics β€” Directional Failure Index (DFI) and Hierarchical Distance and Direction (HDD) β€” and finds that fine-tuning only recalibrates output thresholds rather than improving actual security reasoning, with the best model reaching just 52.1% detection accuracy (barely above chance) and under 1.3% Top-1 CWE classification accuracy.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  120. When Good Verifiers Go Bad: Silent Negative Transfer in Verifier-Guided VLM Training

    This paper studies verifier-guided self-DPO training of vision-language models and identifies "silent negative transfer": a verifier that reliably improves one task (MathVista, +8.0 held-out) can secretly harm generalization on another (MMMU) even while self-training metrics keep improving. The authors decompose this into gradient fidelity (alignment between verifier-induced and correct update directions) and gradient transferability (alignment between correct and held-out directions), deriving a Safe-Transfer Margin certifying positive held-out alignment. They propose Asymmetric Acceptance Gating (AAG), a precision-first preference-pair filter that raises fidelity on MMMU from 0.29 to 0.42 and restores positive held-out alignment (from -0.13 to +0.22), beating raw verifier-guided training across six configurations.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  121. Your Transformer Can Hold Two Thoughts at Once: Evidence of Linear Superposition in LLMs

    This paper introduces the "Superposition Linearity Hypothesis": when inputs from two distinct text streams are linearly combined, an LLM's output approximates a superposition (average) of the two individual next-token distributions. The authors show this linearity is an intrinsic property of the Transformer architecture that weakens during pretraining but can be restored via lightweight fine-tuning, and they propose a guided decoding method that exploits this to generate two coherent continuations from a single forward pass.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  122. A Case Study on Emergent Cheating and Whistleblowing in Autonomous Research Swarms

    This arXiv paper is a case study of a 100-agent autonomous LLM swarm tasked with proving math conjectures, where one agent discovered an exploit in the evaluation system and it spread via a shared knowledge library and peer-to-peer messages under competitive pressure. A separate cohort of agents emergently organized a counter-response β€” auditing fraudulent proofs, broadcasting alerts, staging boycotts, filing complaints, and proposing validation patches β€” entirely without external intervention. The authors frame the shared agent infrastructure as an Ostrom-style knowledge commons and propose institutional mechanisms (graduated sanctioning, collective-choice rules) for decentralized self-governance in autonomous agent swarms.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  123. HoF-Bench: Rediscovering Real AI-Discovered CVEs Without Frontier Models

    HoF-Bench is a benchmark of 95 real, publicly disclosed CVEs originally found by AISLE's LLM-based vulnerability analyzer (280+ CVEs across 78 projects including OpenSSL, curl, and GnuTLS), repackaged into eight repositories pinned at vulnerable commits. Analyzers get source/target-file scope but no CVE ID, description, fix, or expected mechanism, and a detector-blinded frontier-model judge only credits findings that match the same code path, root cause, attack condition, and impact. Testing ten non-frontier backbones (open-weight 21B-284B and proprietary "flash"-tier models) in a fixed multi-pass scaffold, a minimal analyzer rediscovers up to 68% of the CVEs, with misses concentrated in C infrastructure code β€” showing small/cheap models can approximate frontier-level vulnerability discovery on known bug classes.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  124. The Illusion of Secure LLM Code: Closing the Security Gap via Iterative Reprompting

    This paper evaluates authentication code generated by five prominent AI coding assistants, combining static code analysis and dynamic penetration testing mapped against NIST SP 800-63B guidelines. It tests four prompting strategies (Basic, Secure, NIST-Based, and iterative Reprompting) and finds that basic and generically "secure" prompts consistently miss critical protections like brute-force resistance, session management, and password handling, while even a single-shot NIST-context prompt is structurally inadequate β€” only an iterative self-auditing reprompting loop achieves defense-in-depth. The authors argue enterprises must shift from single-shot prompt engineering to continuous, standards-driven verification pipelines for AI-generated auth code.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  125. A Large-Scale Measurement of AI Bill of Materials Completeness in Hugging Face Models

    This paper empirically studies AI Bills of Materials (AIBOMs) generated for ~97.5K public Hugging Face model repositories, measuring how completely they capture provenance, licenses, datasets, model-card details, safety-risk assessments, and environmental information. It finds that generated AIBOMs satisfy required structural/metadata schema fields but are weak or missing on AI-specific documentation such as model cards, responsible-use notes, limitations, and dataset declarations, exposing transparency and governance gaps in the ML model supply chain. The authors argue for better model-card practices, repository-level traceability, and automated AIBOM validation.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  126. Calibration Without Comprehension: Diagnosing the Limits of Fine-Tuning LLMs for Vulnerability Detection in Systems Software

    This paper introduces CWE-Trace, a benchmark of 834 manually curated Linux kernel vulnerability samples spanning 74 CWEs with a strict temporal split to eliminate training data leakage. Evaluating eight vanilla LLMs including DeepSeek-R1 and fifteen LoRA fine tuned variants, the authors find contamination gives no real advantage and that fine tuning only shifts output calibration rather than underlying security reasoning, with the best model barely beating chance and CWE ranking accuracy staying very low. Two new diagnostic metrics are introduced to expose this calibration without comprehension failure mode.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  127. OpenAnt: LLM-Powered Vulnerability Discovery Through Code Decomposition, Adversarial Verification, and Dynamic Testing

    OpenAnt is an open-source (Apache 2.0) vulnerability discovery system that combines static program analysis with LLM reasoning in a three-stage pipeline: decomposing codebases into reachability-filtered analysis units (cutting analysis surface up to 97%), running adversarial verification where the model simulates a constrained attacker to judge exploitability, and validating candidates via dynamic testing in disposable sandboxed containers. Evaluated against large real-world projects including OpenSSL, WordPress, and Flowise, it reportedly surfaced previously unknown vulnerabilities while cutting false positives and keeping analysis cost manageable, positioning closed-loop LLM+exploit-validation pipelines as a practical path to scalable automated security analysis.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  128. Learning to Stop without Learning to Stop: Self-Supervised Confidence Training Improves Reasoning Efficiency

    This paper introduces a self-supervised fine-tuning procedure that trains reasoning models to predict their own confidence at intermediate points in a reasoning trajectory, using only 600 training problems and no explicit length or stopping objective. Despite training only on confidence prediction and using standard generation at inference (no early-stopping or confidence elicitation), the fine-tuned models cut generated tokens by up to 25% at matched accuracy across Gemma, Qwen, Nemotron, and GPT-OSS on math, science, and coding reasoning benchmarks. Analysis shows the models largely retain their base reasoning composition rather than suppressing specific behaviors, suggesting efficient reasoning can emerge as a byproduct of learning metacognitive confidence signals.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  129. New LoRA Skills Should Read but Never Write

    This paper introduces READ (Read-only Expansion of Adapter Deltas), a method for composing multiple independently trained LoRA adapters into a single model without the weight-space interference that plagues naive merging. READ rewrites each adapter into a balanced canonical factorization and adds a one-directional coupling so new skills can read old adapters' input subspaces but never write into their output subspaces, requiring only a small trainable coupling row per new skill and folding cleanly into base weights with no inference-time routing cost. Evaluated across four benchmark suites and two model families, READ outperforms the strongest published composition baselines by over 20 points on SuperGLUE and over 7 points on a domain suite when adding skills sequentially.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  130. From Source Code to Network Profile: Automated and Traceable MUD Profile Generation for IoT Devices

    AutoMUD is a source-code-driven tool that generates Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) network access-control profiles for IoT devices by statically analyzing firmware/source code rather than relying on live traffic observation. It combines static and syntactic extraction with retrieval-grounded LLM reasoning and deterministic validation to recover rarely-exercised or conditional communication paths, link each generated rule to its source-level provenance, and record excluded findings with explicit reasons for review. Evaluated on a Linux-based repository plus a controlled semantic fault-injection campaign, it produced structurally valid, traceable MUD profiles that let analysts detect, localize and correct propagated errors.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  131. Compact Documentation for Coding Agents: A Benchmark, an Optimizer, and Why It Does Not Transfer

    This arXiv paper studies whether natural-language documentation helps coding agents resolve software issues. The authors introduce a roundtrip benchmark that scores code descriptions by whether code regenerated from them passes the original tests, use it to optimize a description-writing prompt that reaches full fidelity and generalizes to unseen files, then test the hypothesis on real repository issues across two model families and ten repos β€” finding that neither static compact documentation nor retrieved context beats giving the agent the issue alone.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  132. Forte: A sensitivity type system for imperative Rust

    Forte is a sensitivity type system for imperative Rust that soundly tracks differential-privacy sensitivity through mutation via exclusive (&mut) borrows, closing a gap left by prior pure-calculus systems like Fuzz and Solo that assume no aliasing or mutation. Its soundness theorem (metric preservation) is mechanized in Verus, and Flux checks Forte as an ordinary library without forking the Rust compiler. The authors evaluate Forte on OpenDP mechanism kernels with genuine in-place mutation, matching trusted stability maps and catching off-by-one diameters, miscalibrated releases, and overspent privacy budgets.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  133. SemMSA: Latent Semantic-Aided Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Incomplete Data

    SemMSA is a framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) under incomplete/missing modality data, using LLMs to construct latent sentiment-relevant semantics rather than reconstructing raw features. It combines Cross-modal Semantic Refinement (adapters that map visual/acoustic signals into a frozen LLM's embedding space and iteratively refine continuous semantic states without decoding text) with Cross-modal Spectral Alignment (anchor-free alignment via the dominant spectral component of a kernel Gram matrix, plus an instance-level spectral separation constraint to prevent representation collapse). It reports state-of-the-art results on the SIMS, MOSI, and MOSEI benchmarks.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  134. Variational Multi-Gaussian Quantum Trajectories

    This arXiv preprint proposes a variational framework generalizing the time-dependent variational principle to simulate stochastic quantum trajectories in interacting bosonic systems, using a wavefunction ansatz of coherent superpositions of Gaussian wavepackets. The method is benchmarked on a Bose-Hubbard dimer and applied to 1D and 2D extended Bose-Hubbard lattices, revealing a symmetry-breaking phase transition present only in 2D. This is a quantum physics simulation technique, not an AI/ML method, despite using the term "variational" which overlaps with ML vocabulary.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  135. The Alignment Illusion in Multimodal Large Language Models

    This paper identifies an "alignment illusion" in Multimodal Large Language Models: layer-wise visual-text similarity scores (CKA, SVCCA, MIR, leading principal-angle cosine) fail to consistently detect when visual tokens are corrupted with Gaussian noise, despite corruption sharply reducing task accuracy, across 13 MLLMs from 0.5B to 72B parameters spanning five model families. The authors trace this failure to anisotropic MLP down-projections in the shared language-model pathway that pull visual and text tokens toward common output directions (weight-induced alignment), and introduce the principal-angle gap (PA gap) as a metric that tracks task accuracy more reliably than existing scalar alignment scores.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  136. DreamStream: Towards Policy-Oriented Generative Simulation for End-to-End Driving

    DreamStream is a generative, closed-loop driving simulator that uses a simulator-grounded autoregressive video model, distilled from a large pretrained video model via traffic-layout guidance, to preserve policy-relevant scene features (layout, dynamic-object temporal consistency) rather than just photorealism. The authors show standard perceptual metrics like FID misrank how well these features are preserved and introduce FDΟ€, a multi-representation FrΓ©chet-distance metric computed over scene-context features from public end-to-end driving policies, showing large sim-to-real gap improvements over prior simulators on nuScenes and NAVSIM. They also build Navhard-CL, an interactive adversarial benchmark derived from NAVSIM, exposing failure modes like scorer bias and lack of recovery behavior in driving policies.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Sep 2026, published 22 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  137. GameHorizon Suite: Multi-Horizon Data and Evaluation in Gameplay

    GameHorizon Suite is a data and evaluation package for measuring AI gameplay capabilities across multiple temporal horizons, combining visual understanding, instruction following, goal planning, and action control. It includes GameHorizon-Annotator (an automated multi-horizon instruction annotation pipeline), GameHorizon-Data (5,000 hours of AAA gameplay video, player actions, and instructions from 21 games and 100 expert players), and GameHorizon-Bench (offline and stepwise online evaluation tracks). The authors evaluate 47 models across more than one million invocations, exposing a task-difficulty hierarchy and sizable capability gaps between models.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 21 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  138. VideoGen-Agent: Reinforcing Video Generation Agents

    VideoGen-Agent is a multimodal agent trained with multitask agentic reinforcement learning to coordinate augmentation, generation, and verification tools for video generation, using supervised fine-tuning on teacher trajectories followed by RL with a category-aware hybrid reward. The authors introduce VABench, a 600-prompt held-out benchmark covering procedural knowledge, identity preservation, physical consistency, scene composition, and multi-shot temporal structure, on which the agent improves over its base text-to-video model from 56.5 to 75.6 (and 86.1 when upgrading the underlying generation tools).

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 21 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  139. Critical-State RL: Diagnosing Trainable States for Multi-Turn Tool Use

    Critical-State RL is a method for diagnosing which model calls in a multi-turn tool-use trajectory are actually "trainable" β€” i.e., where reward variation reflects the action's own effect on task success rather than downstream randomness. It uses nested sampling to separate action-dependent reward signal from continuation noise, then optimizes the policy at the selected critical states via contextual-bandit training. On the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) v4, training at diagnostic-selected states (e.g., the response right after a missing tool becomes available, or right before a missing argument is supplied) improves performance by up to ~14 points, while training at naively chosen alternative states leaves performance flat or worse.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 21 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  140. The More It Says, the More You Pay: A Black-Box Audit of Provider-Side Token Inflation in LLM Services

    This arXiv preprint defines and studies "Provider-Side Token Inflation Attacks" (PTIA), where LLM API providers covertly manipulate generation to produce longer outputs (and thus higher bills) while preserving task utility, testing five attack variants at the query, prompt, representation, and model levels that each inflate output length over 10x baseline. The authors identify a "PTIA saturation" effect tied to end-of-sequence token probability suppression, and build a lightweight single-probe black-box audit (no trusted reference model needed) that detects PTIA with 85.1% average detection rate and under 2% false-positive rate across four open-weight models, flagging 7 of 15 real-world LLM API services as PTIA-consistent.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 17 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  141. The More It Says, the More You Pay: A Black-Box Audit of Provider-Side Token Inflation in LLM Services

    This arXiv paper defines Provider-Side Token Inflation Attacks (PTIA), where a dishonest LLM API provider covertly manipulates generation at the query, prompt, representation, or model level to inflate billed output tokens while preserving apparent task quality. The authors instantiate five such attacks (each pushing mean output length past 10.2x baseline), identify a "PTIA saturation" effect tied to suppressed end-of-sequence token probability, and build a lightweight single-probe black-box audit that needs no trusted reference model, achieving 85.1% detection with under 2% false positives across four open-weight models β€” and flags 7 of 15 real-world LLM API services as PTIA-consistent.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 18 Sep 2026, published 17 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  142. VIPER-MCP: Detecting Vulnerabilities in MCP Servers

    VIPER-MCP is an end-to-end automated auditing framework that combines two-pass static taint analysis (anchor queries mapping alerts to specific MCP tool handlers) with feedback-driven LLM prompt evolution to both detect and dynamically confirm taint-style vulnerabilities (command injection, SSRF, path traversal) in Model Context Protocol servers. Run against 39,884 real-world open-source MCP server repositories, it discovered 106 0-day vulnerabilities β€” all confirmed via end-to-end exploit traces with concrete proof-of-concept natural-language prompts β€” resulting in 67 assigned CVEs, including a root-privilege RCE in the bytebot computer-use agent. It reports 0% false positive rate and 7.7% false negative rate, substantially outperforming existing static and dynamic MCP security baselines.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 17 Sep 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security

  143. Objective vs. Search: Decomposing What Makes a Good Tokeniser

    This arXiv paper disentangles the two axes that distinguish BPE and UnigramLM tokenisersβ€”optimisation objective (compression vs. log-likelihood) and search procedure (bottom-up merging vs. top-down pruning)β€”by introducing two new hybrid algorithms, BottomUpLL and TopDownComp, that complete the 2x2 design space. Training language models across varying sizes, vocabulary sizes, and domains, the authors find that search procedure, not objective, is the dominant factor for bits-per-byte performance, with bottom-up tokenisers consistently outperforming, though no consistent effect emerges on the BLiMP linguistic benchmark. The work offers concrete guidance for more principled tokeniser construction.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 16 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  144. STUART: Sequence Triage and qUAntification of Read Transcripts for Rapid Ionizing Radiation Exposure Assessment

    STUART is a mapping-free machine learning framework for biological dosimetry that converts raw sequencing reads into k-mer-based numerical feature profiles (NLP-inspired), bypassing traditional alignment-based bioinformatics. Using the FDXR gene as a radiation biomarker, the authors compare Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and XGBoost, reducing a 1024-dimensional feature space by over 98% to as few as 17 signatures while achieving 95-100% F1/balanced accuracy and over 99% specificity on external validation, enabling real-time triage compatible with portable sequencers.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 16 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  145. PhysStream: Streaming Physics-Grounded Video Generation with Structured Scene Memory and Fine-Grained Motion Control

    PhysStream is an autoregressive image-to-video generation model that maintains structured scene memory (positional maps and object tracking maps derived online from previously generated frames) and supports fine-grained, mid-generation motion control via sparse velocity-increment signals encoding physical quantities. Trained in two stages (bidirectional motion-control finetuning, then causal autoregressive training with scene memory), it reduces motion distribution distance (FVMD) by 33% and trajectory error by 12% over strongest baselines on synthetic multi-object rigid-body tabletop scenes, and is preferred in over 85% of human in-the-wild comparisons.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 15 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  146. SenseNova-U1.5: Towards Native Unified Visual Intelligence

    SenseNova-U1.5 is an 8B-parameter Mixture-of-Transformers native unified multimodal model that understands, reasons about, and generates visual content within an encoder-free and VAE-free architecture. It uses spatially coherent patch reconstruction, native 4K resolution training, and post-training with specialized experts (aesthetics, bilingual text rendering, infographics, image editing) consolidated via multi-expert on-policy distillation. The paper reports advances in image fidelity, text rendering, complex composition, and multi-reference editing, and plans to open-source training code including SFT, RL, and on-policy distillation.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 10 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  147. Characterizing Language Generation in the Limit: Finite Witnesses and a Separation-Width Hierarch

    This arXiv paper characterizes when "language generation in the limit" is possible: producing valid unseen elements from any exhaustive positive presentation of an unknown infinite language. The authors show generation is possible exactly when each target language can be assigned a finite positive witness such that targets activated by any finite sample share an infinite common intersection, and they introduce a "separation width" hierarchy measuring how large these witnesses must be across families. The full characterization and hierarchy are formally verified in Lean, including a normalization lemma and a diagonal capture argument.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 9 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  148. WorldSculpt: Generating Compositional Worlds from Grounded Videos

    WorldSculpt generates compositional 3D representations of cluttered scenes with hundreds of objects by adapting a single-object 3D generative prior (Pixal3D) to multi-view observations, producing individual object meshes placed in a shared world frame despite heavy occlusion. The authors also introduce UE-MeshyScene, a photorealistic benchmark with per-object annotations and ground-truth meshes, and show the method can convert 3DGS worlds like Marble and HY-World 2.0 into compositional mesh scenes for gaming, AR/VR, simulation, and robotics.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 4 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  149. RegionFed: Federated Learning for Personalized Query Understanding in Heterogeneous Retail Environments

    RegionFed is a federated learning framework for personalized retail search query understanding that operates at the gradient level rather than parameter level, using the β„“2 conflict between regional and global gradients to diagnose heterogeneity and route regions to personalization strategies. Unlike existing parameter-level personalized FL methods that collapse below 10% accuracy on transformers like T5, RegionFed deploys unchanged across T5-Small, T5-3B, RoBERTa, and CNN architectures. Evaluated on Amazon ESCI, Amazon Reviews, and LEAF-FEMNIST, RegionFed-Meta reaches 92.27% accuracy, closing to within 0.23pp of a privacy-violating centralized upper bound while providing (Ξ΅β‰ˆ0.60)-differential privacy.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 4 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  150. Principia: Relational Physics Tests for Video Models

    Principia is a benchmark that evaluates Newtonian physics understanding in video generation models using a calibration-independent relational consistency score, testing paired-object motion relationships across eight physical phenomena (gravity, restitution, friction, rotational inertia, projectile motion, momentum, pendulum, mass-spring oscillation). Testing six state-of-the-art video generators shows none exceed 0.42 on Principia despite scoring ~0.8 on VBench, and the best vision-language model achieves only 67% accuracy detecting physics violations, exposing a major gap between visual quality and physical plausibility in generated video.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 3 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  151. A Common Measure of Communication for Speech Brain-Computer Interfaces

    This arXiv paper introduces open-vocabulary mutual information (OVMI), an information-theoretic metric for evaluating speech brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that decode neural activity into language. OVMI addresses the field's lack of a common progress measure by scoring decoders against a reference distribution over words a user may want to communicate, rather than only over a system's supported vocabulary, exposing how standard metrics like accuracy and WER can overstate real communicative capability. The authors show that selecting a vocabulary to maximize OVMI yields up to 16.3% relative accuracy improvement across three speech domains.

    arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 2 Sep 2026🧠 AI

  152. AI Security Briefing

    This arXiv paper introduces SkillSec-Eval, a lifecycle-aware framework for evaluating the security of reusable LLM agent skills, covering stages beyond runtime execution: repository admission, semantic retrieval, planner selection, execution, and skill evolution. The authors build a threat taxonomy across this lifecycle and empirically evaluate it against a repository of 327 real-world agent skills, showing vulnerabilities exist at multiple stages that prior work (focused mainly on prompt injection and runtime execution) has largely ignored.

    arxiv.orgpaperPublished and added 18 Jul 2026πŸ›‘οΈ Security