423 results for “Base”

VeriCUA is a platform-agnostic framework that verifies task completion by computer-using agents through agentic exploration. The verifier inspects context to build a task rubric, then picks GUI or code checks for unresolved requirements and combines findings under explicit evidence rules. It works online and offline across desktop, mobile and web, and agrees better with reference labels than the baselines, with the largest offline gains on hard cases.

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

This paper derives bounds on predicting an LLM's decode length from prefill-phase hidden states, a primitive for inference scheduling. It models decoding as a stopped stochastic process, giving per-prompt normality and an affine variance law σ=αμ+b. Predictors (MLP, EGTP, FiLM, soft-label, Mixture-of-Experts) converge near the bound, so system error dominates model error. It proposes fixing model, data and sampling in benchmarks and reporting relative-error metrics.

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

On-policy state training is a method for training chain embedding retrievers for multi-hop RAG on the states the encoder itself reaches, including those built on its own wrong retrievals. Each state is labeled with the earliest missing gold passage, other missing gold passages are masked, and updates are contrastive and mixed with teacher-forced states. It retrieves complete evidence more often than teacher-forced training and graph-based systems, and transfers to harder long-chain HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA variants the authors built.

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

Understanding and Mitigating Role Spoofing in LLMs is an arXiv paper (October 2026) on role spoofing, a prompt injection where malicious tool output impersonates the user. It shows models track "who said what" using both content cues (semantics, style) and structure cues (control tokens, formatting). Attacks combining fake structure and content succeed often, adversarial training stops only content-based attacks, and linear probes trained to predict conversation roles detect spoofing across settings.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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

Cryptanalysis of VTBSAE, a verifier-based PAKE protocol for the Industrial Internet of Things, showing it fails to resist client impersonation after server compromise. The authors propose E-VTBSAEv1, which binds the client point E1 to fresh server randomness, and prove AKE security and forward secrecy in the random-oracle model under CDH. Raspberry Pi 4B tests show runtime comparable to VTBSAE with the same communication and storage overhead.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

HO-ASPA (Higher-Order Adjusted Spearman Coefficient Analysis) is a rank-based, non-profiling side-channel distinguisher. The paper derives its optimal form against two-share Boolean masking and inner product masking under Hamming weight and LSB leakage. It finds no significant gap between higher and lower orders for HO-ASPA, unlike HO-CPA, and reports that it beats Kruskal-Wallis-based attacks in simulated and real-world experiments.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Paper studying whether self-evolution weakens personal agents' robustness to indirect prompt injection (IPI). A two-phase method has the user ask the agent to follow tasks in external content, then tests with a third-party injected task the user did not authorize. Against the non-evolving base agent, attack success rose 14.0 to 48.8 points under skill evolution and 3.0 to 39.3 points under reinforcement learning. Code is released.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Log-To-Leak is an arXiv paper (cs.CR, cs.AI) by Yuepeng Hu, Chongyu Fan, Sirat Samyoun and Jian Du on prompt injection attacks against tool-using LLM agents through the Model Context Protocol. The title points to a logging-based data leakage channel. The fetched page holds only the title, authors and arXiv link, with no abstract, so the method and results are not visible here.

x.compaperAdded 29 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Beyond the Event Horizon of Keccak extends a 2011 observation that a path in the Keccak sponge from a zero-capacity state back to one yields infinite second-preimage families. Three theorems cover loops from any capacity value x, k-block loops and cycles, and Joux-style multicollisions with search cost independent of k. Verified examples run on Keccak-f[200] and Keccak-f[1600] with c=32; it also proposes bridge-based protocols.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 28 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper replicates Chen et al.'s study of LLM-based smart contract vulnerability detection, first on GPT-4 and then on Mixture-of-Experts, RNN-like and State Space Models. The exact replication confirms the high-recall, low-precision pattern on GPT-4. The differentiated replication finds the pattern does not transfer uniformly: GPT-4 and Gemma-3 behave alike despite a roughly 100x parameter gap, while two MoE models diverge.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv paper (October 2026) replicates Chen et al.'s study of LLM-based smart contract vulnerability detection. It confirms the high-recall, low-precision pattern on GPT-4, then tests Mixture-of-Experts and RNN-like models plus a preliminary State Space Model run. Gemma-3 matches GPT-4's profile despite far fewer parameters, while two Mixture-of-Experts models diverge, so architecture family alone does not predict detection behavior.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

JevAct is a runtime verification framework that intercepts selected LLM agent actions before execution and returns feedback for bounded revision. It compiles domain policies into executable state checks and structured questions scored by a prefill-only decision model, giving probability-based judgments without generation. Tested on eleven agents with tau^2-bench Airline and Telecom and BFCL, it gained consistently on Telecom and BFCL and was mixed on Airline.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

CALM is a conflict-aware lifecycle memory governance framework for long-horizon language agents. It turns records into evidence-grounded memory cells, updates their validity and lifecycle states from support, conflict and dependency signals, and admits evidence at query time through training-free or learned gating based on temporal applicability. It beats baselines on LongMemEval-S and LoCoMo with Qwen and GPT backbones, and keeping superseded records helps earlier-state reasoning.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper measures job-based doubt in LLM fact-checkers: judging a claim false more often when the poster has a lower-status job. It compares base and post-trained checkpoints of six model families on fact-checked claims with randomised poster profiles. Only the open Tülu-3 recipe (OLMo-2 32B, Tülu-3 70B) creates the effect, under one percentage point but reliable. In OLMo-2 32B the flip comes from one residual-stream direction and appears at supervised fine-tuning, confirmed on 400 new claims. None of seven commercial models doubts lower-status posters more.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The paper studies detection and temporal localization of fraudulent inducements (prompts to follow, join chat groups, click links) in internet finance short videos. It compares OCR+LLM, OCR+MLLM and a zero-shot MLLM, and builds a dataset of 2,419 videos (66.49 hours, 3,194 events, four categories). OCR+MLLM reaches mIoU 26.52 versus 14.49 for keyframe OCR+LLM, with 67.0 percent macro recall, using a recall-weighted F2 localization reward.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

LLMON (LLM Object Notation) is a framework that separates instructions from data and requires explicit identifier-based execution. The authors post-train Granite-4.1 3B and 8B base models with SFT then RL on a 4.6B-token structured corpus covering general, RAG and tool-calling data, with distractor variants. Attack success rates on indirect prompt-injection benchmarks fall from 53-100% to 0.02-5.6%, and general capability is preserved. Attention-based metrics diagnose failures per transformer layer.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

LLMON (LLM Object Notation) is a framework that separates executable instructions from passive data and requires explicit identifier-based execution. The paper post-trains Granite-4.1 3B and 8B base models on a 4.6B-token corpus of general, RAG and tool-calling data with distractor variants, using SFT then RL. Attack success rates on indirect prompt-injection benchmarks fall from 53-100% to 0.02-5.6%, with general capabilities preserved. It also adds attention-based per-layer diagnostics.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper proposes an fMLLR-based compensation mechanism that cuts the fine-tuning data needed in transfer learning for speech emotion recognition under train-test acoustic mismatch. An autoencoder reduces trainable parameters, and an affine transform in the encoder latent space models rotations and shifts. In a human-robot interaction task, mean CCC rose 16.8% with 12.9% of the training set and 14.4% with 50%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

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

VulnLens is a framework for binary C/C++ function-level vulnerability detection. A label-blind LLM Explainer describes each function from seven fixed perspectives (data flow, memory access, object lifetime, arithmetic and type behavior, control flow, shared state, external-resource access). A supervised Detector fuses code and explanations by cross-attention. It reaches 75.5% accuracy and 77.2% F1 on a 526-function PrimeVul test set, and 66.4% accuracy on SecVulEval without retraining.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Locating Sycophancy Across Training Stages in Open Language Models measures sycophancy in 13 open checkpoints from 5 lineages, from base model through supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization to release. It finds two behaviors with different origins: deference to a claim in the prompt exists in every base model, while capitulation under user objection is largely absent from base models and present in every post-trained checkpoint. Post-trained models often drop firmly held answers as readily as loosely held ones when the objection names an alternative.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This ePrint paper models oscillator-based TRNG phase noise, both white and flicker, as fractional Brownian motion. It proves a quasi-renewal property that gives closed-form worst-case min-entropy and sampling requirements, and extends spectral and Allan-variance analysis so noise parameters come from a single timing trace. FPGA and ASIC experiments show flicker noise accounts for over 99% of uncertainty at a 0.99 min-entropy target, allowing a bitrate two to three orders of magnitude higher.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Heads of Security (HoS) is a prompt injection defense that enforces instruction-data separation with learned per-head attention gates, redistributing attention between trusted and untrusted tokens. Evaluated on Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct and GPT-OSS-20B against SecAlign++ and ASIDE. The black-box RL-Hammer attack reaches 97% ASR on GPT-OSS-20B and 85% on SecAlign but 10% on HoS. The white-box Claudini attack needs 3 times more FLOPs on HoS. HoS keeps base-model utility in few-shot settings, where SecAlign and ASIDE degrade.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Heads of Security (HoS) is a prompt injection defense that trains a small set of per-head attention gates to shift attention between trusted and untrusted tokens, separating instructions from data. Tested on Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct and GPT-OSS-20B, the black-box RL-Hammer attack reaches 10% ASR on HoS versus 97% on base GPT-OSS-20B and 85% on SecAlign. HoS keeps base utility in few-shot settings, where SecAlign and ASIDE degrade.

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

SynthAPI is a pipeline that generates synthetic tool-use environments with explicit control over diversity of tools, tasks and underlying databases. Across 458,752 tasks and 849 trained models of four sizes, the authors fit a scaling law predicting downstream agent generalization. At larger data budgets, scaling tool and database diversity beats adding more tasks, and higher complexity helps more. Agents trained this way beat prior synthetic-data baselines on four benchmarks.

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

Metacognitive Decoding is a lightweight plug-in controller for diffusion language model backbones. It learns when to finalize tokens and how far generation should extend, and is trained on agent trajectories to balance correctness against generation cost. Across five benchmarks it cuts inference FLOPs by 20.6% on average versus the most efficient baseline, with competitive task accuracy. The abstract names no specific benchmarks or backbones.

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

This paper studies how multimodal LLMs refuse questions that an image cannot answer, using the MoHoBench benchmark on three MLLMs. It varies the meaning and placement of refusal instructions, compares supervised and preference-based post-training, and intervenes on a refusal-related activation direction. Instructions change refusal at the sample level in ways aggregate rates hide. Post-training raises refusal most but can mix refusal with attempted answers. Activation intervention gives smaller, transferable changes.

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

Preprint on using nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center quantum sensing for electromagnetic side-channel analysis of ICs. The authors build an NV-based RF spectrometer with 1.1 GHz real-time bandwidth and adjustable center frequency, which reads the spectrum in the time domain without Fourier transforms or frequency sweeps. They use it on RSA decryption emanations and for leakage detection on a software Number Theoretic Transform running on a Cortex-M4 microcontroller.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

OpenGray is a benchmark that adds tasks with known correct decisions to the OpenKBP-Opt head-and-neck dataset, including two overlap contradictions with provably incompatible dose goals and a feasible control. Four planning systems, from a rule-based script to a full LLM agent, were tested on 30 patients with Terra and Ministral 3 8B. Decision accuracy reached 95.4% and 92.1%, yet only 50% and 25% of overlap contradictions were escalated. SAGE logs of 39 radiosurgery runs showed an agent that lacked an action for stopping.

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

p-DCIM is a 28 nm SRAM digital compute-in-memory macro (0.16 mm2, 0.41 mW) that works as an Ising machine for RAG evidence selection. Selection is cast as a QUBO problem, and the same MAC datapath computes embedding similarities and annealing steps. Replacing LLM reranking with it gives a selection-energy estimate over six orders of magnitude lower and cuts total energy per query by 67%, with comparable token-level F1 on the evaluated examples.

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

AxisQ is a post-training quantization framework for camouflaged object detection (COD) that allocates activation bits by feature depth. It uses the channel domain for shallow features and the local-frequency domain for deep features, under a fixed per-layer average bit budget. It adds a boundary-aware Hessian approximation for reconstruction. On CAMO at W2A2, weighted F-measure improves 12.7% for CFRN and 33.3% for CamoFormer-P over the strongest baselines.

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

Your Wish Is My Commit is a controlled study of over-compliant refactoring in Codex and Claude Code, run across five models, 50 algorithmic tasks and 10 object-oriented tasks. Over 3,000 turns of repeated "refactor further" prompts, no model stopped on its own: each rewrote up to 31x the original codebase before first stopping and resumed edits after declaring the task complete. The paper defines six behavioral signals for detecting over-compliance.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🧠 AI

CTGREP is a compiler-based framework that applies differential analysis across the whole Clang/LLVM compilation chain to find where, how and under which configurations compiler optimizations break constant-time cryptographic code. Applied to seven libraries, three Clang versions, six targets and thousands of configurations, it led to 48 cases fixed with developers. It also identified seven new problematic LLVM passes and bypassed existing compiler-flag mitigations.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

REVA (REal-time Vulnerability Analysis) is an LLM-based vulnerability detector that screens each new function in one forward pass. It feeds the model a pre-computed module threat model, lightweight static analysis findings and call-graph data, then reads the model's internal representations with a trained probe. On PrimeVul's held-out test set with GLM-5.3-Flash it reaches 60.0% accuracy in about one second per function, matching the agentic VulTriage (59.2%) while over 250 times faster.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Cryptology ePrint 2026/2642 presents a plaintext-recovery attack on the DBDH and CBDH variants of the Datta, Komargodski and Waters multi-authority ABE for NC1 (Journal of Cryptology, 2023). It needs one corrupt authority and two users, and succeeds with probability one in the static model. The flaw is an invalid extension of the Rouselakis-Waters LSSS matrix-normalization lemma. The paper also attacks two Datta-Pal (PKC 2023) attribute-based inner-product schemes and proves repaired versions secure in the random oracle model.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

SynTrace is a single-round compiler that adds accountability to linear private information retrieval (PIR). The client mixes the retrieval query with m audit queries, so audit syndromes identify up to d deviating servers among t colluding ones before reconstruction. The paper proves perfect query privacy and zero false identification within the threshold. For Shamir-based PIR it needs k=t+d+1 servers. For a 32 KiB record from a 1 GiB database it uses 2.25 MiB, against 8.96 MiB for the Eriguchi, Kurosawa and Nuida (TCC 2022) homomorphic-MAC construction.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Open bilingual (Russian and UK English) benchmark of five open pseudonymisation tools and a regex baseline, plus a new engine built on the two strongest tools. On a held-out set of 1,000 synthetic documents per language, the best existing tools leave a whole personal value visible in 61% (Russian) and 58% (UK) of documents. The engine does so in 0.3% and 0.2%. Russian name restoration reaches only 94.6%, below the 99% threshold. Real documents were not tested.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper presents an open benchmark of five existing pseudonymisation tools and a regex baseline on Russian and UK English documents, plus an open engine built on the two strongest tools. On a held-out set of 1,000 synthetic documents per language, the best existing tools leave a whole value visible in 58 to 61% of documents. The engine does so in 0.2 to 0.3%. Russian name restoration reaches only 94.6%, below the 99% threshold. Real documents were not tested.

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

InteractiveWorld is an environment for closed-loop interaction between an AI assistant and a simulated human agent who sees the scene, follows instructions and acts independently. InteractiveBench, built on it, has 120 multi-turn tasks in six categories scored by verifiable, state-based rewards. Across 12 frontier MLLMs, the best model, Claude Fable 5.1, reaches at most 20% on long-horizon Guidance and 25% on Planning tasks.

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

DRILS is an LLM-based agentic framework for requirements change impact analysis. It uses multiple agents to generate candidate impact sets, with an LLM-as-a-judge promoting diversity in selection. It adds RE-RAG, a tuned retrieval technique, and a requirement dependency graph as a knowledge source. On three curated datasets it reaches 87.1% recall, 76.3% precision and 81% F1 at lower cost than baselines. The authors release the datasets.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI

RALE (Representation-Aware Logical Ensemble) is a method for detecting vulnerabilities in C source code with LLMs trained on different code representations: raw source, Abstract Syntax Trees and Control Flow Graphs. The authors show the representations suit different vulnerability classes, and combine the models with explicit logical rules and majority voting. Single-representation models reach up to 73% F1, while the ensemble reaches 78%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

RALE (Representation-Aware Logical Ensemble) is a method for LLM-based vulnerability detection in C code. The authors train LLMs on raw source code, Abstract Syntax Trees and Control Flow Graphs, and find each representation works best for certain vulnerability classes. Combining the models with explicit logical rules and majority voting raises F1 from at most 73% for a single model to 78%, with gains in accuracy, precision and recall.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ZipFusion is a lossless KV cache compression scheme whose attention kernel reads the compressed cache directly and rebuilds the original values in registers with simple bit operations, so no separate decompression pass is needed. It also reassigns the memory freed by compression across layers to hold more KV cache. Built on FlashInfer and integrated with SGLang, it gives about 1.25x decode attention speedup on an H100 and up to 26.3% higher decode throughput at 8K context than uncompressed SGLang. It reaches up to 2.76x the throughput of the best lossless KV compression baseline.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Extraction meets Distillation is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2628, CSCML 2026) that combines cryptanalytic weight-direction extraction with label-based distillation to reconstruct fully connected neural networks. It adapts a ReLU extraction implementation to Leaky ReLU and proves conditional bounds for direction recovery and sign selection. On CIFAR-10 victims, reconstructed models reach 56.40% and 58.29% agreement. It separates label requests from privileged access and notes that prediction agreement does not identify parameters.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The Exact Bit Security of Hash-Based Signatures is a 2026 IACR ePrint paper that analyses XMSS with 128-bit digests and SLH-DSA-128s in the random oracle model, with proofs formalised in Lean4. Strong unforgeability comes to 127 bits under most accounting modes but only 122 bits if just direct random oracle queries are counted. The authors give matching attacks, and show how resource accounting changes the result.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Provable Security of SHA-256-Based LMS Revisited in the Ideal-Cipher Model is an October 2026 ePrint paper by Chun Guo, Hao Cheng, Bart Preneel and Meiqin Wang. It shows forgery attacks on LMS_SHA256_M32 and LMS_SHA256_M24 that exploit Merkle-Damgård structure, so the Katz and Fluhrer random-oracle bounds do not apply. It proves ideal-cipher-model bounds: about 256 minus log2 of the block count for M32, and a minimum of two terms for M24.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

FORK is a reward for rubric-based reinforcement learning that jointly optimizes recall and a new precision objective. Precision requires each unit of a response to be necessary (rubric-driven necessity credits) and factually correct (a grader). Rubric-coverage rewards otherwise produce verbose, less accurate responses. FORK keeps similar coverage with shorter outputs, raising win rate against the base policy from 10.6% to 68.0% on RubricHub-Medical and from 22.1% to 74.1% on HealthBench.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The paper analyses BARBICAN, a fail-closed prompt-injection gateway for MCP tool mediation, using deletion, substitution, repair and transplant experiments. Its arbitration classifier ran on tokenizer-mangled text for a whole evaluation. Fixing that raised AUC from 0.392 to 0.855 while system recall fell from 80.67% to 80.34%. The band it receives is 96.82% malicious. The authors argue ablation figures need the band's class balance and substitution baselines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper studies experience reuse for LLM agents that optimize ligands in protein pockets by editing and docking. Using the full log of one agent run over CrossDocked2020 test-set pockets, it tests whether keys in an experience base recur on unseen pockets and separate improving from worsening edits. The separation is largely explained by molecule size change, action and round, not the target. The authors conclude a base may better prioritize an agent's own proposals for docking than prescribe what to build.

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

DeepFaune-UK is a fine-tune of the open DeepFaune camera-trap classifier on 28 UK classes, paired with MegaDetector v6. On 20,212 MammalWeb images it reached 88.8% strict accuracy against 56.5% (DeepFaune v1.5.0) and 59.0% (SpeciesNet). Re-applying the recipe to the DINOv3-based classifier gave 90.6%. Fine-tuning on about 150 crops per class matched full-data out-of-distribution accuracy, and a DINOv2 run took about 22 minutes on under 4 GB of GPU memory.

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

NTBench (Near-Target Benchmark) tests LLM and agent robustness to near-target prompt injection, where injected instructions steer a response toward a plausible but incorrect or harmful outcome instead of abandoning the task. It builds reference-guided target-instruction pairs on existing datasets, with human validation, and evaluates seven LLMs on ten language datasets and two agent benchmarks. Attack success rose 9.3 to 35.8 points (incorrect targets) and 1.7 to 17.3 points (harmful targets) over fixed-target baselines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

DRIVE is a per-sample weighting framework for single-stage fine-tuning when the source pre-training data is unavailable. It uses one differentiable objective: Shapley additivity splits each sample's contribution into anti-forgetting and adaptation parts, a covariance-based diversity term reshapes them, and a sample-characteristic prior stabilizes them. The authors prove better stability-plasticity guarantees than existing weighting schemes and report better performance, faster convergence and more robustness.

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

ProfileSim is a profile-driven user simulator for financial marketing outbound calls. It models user profiles (demographics, Big Five traits) and business profiles (intents reverse-engineered from real call logs). The base model is fine-tuned on real voice dialogues, then refined with GRPO using dialogue-level and utterance-level rewards. Against other user generators it scores highest on colloquial naturalness and profile adherence, and lowest agent score on long-tail intents, with shorter utterances at comparable business compliance.

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

MPQ (Message-Passing Quantization) is a post-training quantization method that treats row-wise PTQ as posterior inference over discrete codebooks. It keeps soft posteriors across weight blocks using vector approximate message passing, then refines a hard-decision initialization with exact block coordinate descent. Tested at 2-bit lattice and 3- and 4-bit scalar quantization on Llama, Qwen and Mistral models, it improves perplexity and zero-shot accuracy over GPTQ-style baselines.

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

Mímir is a cryptographic protocol for stateless semantic private search over highly dynamic public databases. It uses homomorphic ciphertext switching, relies on (Ring) Learning with Errors, and needs no offline communication. Against Tiptoe it matches search quality with 84x less per-query communication (0.24 MiB). Against PACMANN it raises quality from 76% to 81% of non-private search, with a 9.54 MiB one-time cost instead of 2.68 GiB, but is 2.1x slower.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

CausalCoT is an inference framework that splits a problem into a directed acyclic graph of atomic sub-questions and evaluates each node in an isolated context holding only its direct causal parents. This removes attention paths to non-parent content, so intermediate steps drive the answer rather than leaking from global context. It keeps benchmark accuracy competitive and raises causal sensitivity of reasoning steps by 12 points on average, up to 21, over the strongest baseline. The graph also allows test-time corrections that propagate downstream.

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

Progress Probes (P^2) trains linear probes on a vision-language-action model's own activations, using demonstrations, to estimate task progress, then flags executions that deviate from expected progress. Tested on the open-source pi0.5 across simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, it matches or beats VLM-based monitors and failure-data-trained methods at failure detection, without an external foundation model.

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

This paper studies reverse sycophancy: whether users bend toward a confident, consistent, wrong LLM. In a within-subjects experiment, 32 participants learned science topics from five GPT-5-mini assistants with 0 to 100% of facts replaced by falsehoods. Scores fell from 7.4 to 2.9 out of 10, planted falsehoods were chosen on 60% of falsified items against 11% of correctly taught ones, and confidence stopped tracking correctness. It introduces a baseline-corrected Human Deference Index.

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

TTR-Compressor is a sequence compression method that treats input tokens as a test-time regression problem. The regression is learned end-to-end by backpropagation, and its coefficients are solved in closed form in the forward pass to give the compressed representation. As a block-wise sparse attention compressor it improves RULER over attention-based compressors by a large margin. As a visual token merger for multimodal LLMs it beats the MLP merger and matches it with 55.6% fewer visual tokens.

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

This empirical study benchmarks recent LLMs against fine-tuned encoder-decoder models on knowledge graph-to-text generation, using reference-based metrics and graph-grounded, reference-free LLM-based evaluation validated against human annotations. Recent LLMs narrow or close the gap on reference-based metrics and do better on graph-grounded ones. Prompted models make fewer contradictions and triple omissions, and fine-tuned models' errors grow faster with graph size.

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

This paper studies evidence-grounded health summarization for menstrual health monitoring. It combines structured evidence conditioning with RAG in a prompt-based constrained generation framework, and scores 4,500 summaries from three LLMs with NLI, atomic factuality metrics and readability measures. Grounding constraints improved uncertainty preservation and generally kept or improved faithfulness against retrieved evidence, while omission effects varied by model. Clinical alignment came with harder reading and more medical terminology.

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

RIFT is a family of selection-based KV cache compression strategies for speculative-decoding draft models. It targets "decode staleness", where prefill-focused selection loses relevance as output grows, by balancing prefill information with recent generated tokens, refreshing the selection adaptively, and training drafters with sparse attention masks. Qwen3.5-4B drafting for Qwen3.5-122B keeps over 98% of full-cache acceptance length at 32K input, 4K output and an 8K KV budget.

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

This IACR ePrint paper (2026/2597) systematically compares ring-oscillator-based additive noise generators, a hiding countermeasure against side-channel attacks. Experiments show many existing designs ignore output amplification and the risk of the noise being filtered out, so they lower signal-to-noise ratio too little. The authors give a guideline on inverter chain length, output amplification and frequency randomization, and build a tailored generator for an AES implementation that outperforms prior designs.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

IFC-MCQ is a method that automatically generates multiple-choice benchmarks from Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) building-model files, so answers can be graded by exact option-set match instead of human or LLM review. Its taxonomy has 15 categories and 36 subtypes in four groups, with answer keys from the file and distractors from file values or rules. Two agentic setups, tool-based and code-based retrieval, showed category-specific failures and variation by IFC model and interface.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SIM-UT (Simulation of User Behaviour for Triage) is a multi-turn, simulation-based method for finding failure modes in LLM medical triage chatbots. It was applied to three WhatsApp health chatbots (India, South Africa, Kenya) across 5,000+ multilingual simulated turns, comparing MedGemma with ChatGPT and Claude. The main finding is de-escalation risk: agents that first flagged emergencies agreed with users who minimised symptoms, such as vaginal bleeding in pregnancy.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SBFS-FT (symmetry-based few-shot fine-tuning) adapts the MatterSim 1M universal machine-learned interatomic potential with low-rank adaptation on a small set of compounds sharing one crystal symmetry. Tested on half-Heusler (space group 216), space group 225 and spinel (227) datasets, it cut lattice thermal conductivity error 2-3 times versus the base model. It matched per-compound fine-tuning while taking 5-7 times less compute for 100 compounds.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🧠 AI

MPIDetector is a detection framework for multi-modal prompt injection that uses few-shot in-context learning so an LLM can reason about the semantic intent of text and image inputs, without fine-tuning. The authors built a benchmark of eight textual and seven visual attack categories plus benign sets. They report up to 90.91% accuracy on text, 99.28% on images, and up to 99.80% detection on 500 obfuscated WebInject web-agent injections, beating baselines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

SHAKEing SLH-DSA with Non-profiled SCAs is an eShard ePrint paper (2026/2584) on correlation power analysis of SLH-DSA-SHAKE, the NIST-standardised hash-based signature scheme. It analyses PRF inputs and selection functions, then combines subtrace averaging, partial-then-total CPA and an efficient exhaustive search to recover the full secret seed, enabling universal forgery. On a 32-bit microcontroller the attack needs about 280 to 559 signatures, and the search finishes within 45 minutes on 72 cores.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Active and Passive Attacks against TPM 2.0-based Full Disk Encryption is an ePrint paper by Freud, Hein and Klein (BSI). It shows SPI bus sniffing and interception against discrete TPMs on a mini PC and a notebook, plus a prototype UEFI firmware attack in QEMU that affects firmware TPMs. The attacks break BitLocker and all current Linux FDE implementations, including those using TPM parameter encryption.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This ePrint paper presents an optimized HAETAE implementation, a lattice-based post-quantum signature scheme, for Cortex-M4, Cortex-M3, MSP430 and AVR. It keeps polynomials in 16 bits, shares buffers between objects with disjoint lifetimes, and replays Gaussian samples instead of regenerating them. On an ATmega2560, HAETAE-2 key generation, signing and verification run in 8,070 B of SRAM. Stack use drops up to 34% and signing is 1.18-2.51x faster than Low-Stack HAETAE.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Broadcast and Trace from Lattices is a 2026 ePrint preprint by Jeffrey Champion. It builds collusion-resistant broadcast and trace with public tracing from attribute-based encryption with succinct ciphertexts and lockable obfuscation, both known from decomposed LWE. Ciphertexts are sqrt(N)·poly(λ, log N) in size, with poly(λ, log N) keys. It is the first such scheme based on a simple, instance-independent lattice assumption.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

DISCO is a distributed, fully oblivious database system that combines hardware enclaves (TEEs) with oblivious primitives to hide access patterns from side-channel and leakage-abuse attacks. New distributed frameworks and communication optimizations let it run in parallel across servers. It reports 88x speedup over Jodes and 180x over SODA on non-foreign-key joins with 2^25 elements, and the first terabyte-scale results.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper studies 2-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) of six dense and mixture-of-experts models from 3.8B to 32B parameters. It finds the quantization representation matters most: vector codebooks give usable models where scalar PTQ falls to chance. Calibration and recovery data must be chosen jointly. The recipe uses about 2.3 effective bits per weight, keeps 89 to 97% of full-precision QA accuracy, and needs 1.4 to 30x less compute than the strongest QAT baseline.

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

Membership Inference in Privacy-Preserving Vector Search is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2570) that attacks backend-compatible protections for embedding databases using one snapshot and known plaintexts. It breaks the Scale-and-Perturb scheme of Fuchsbauer et al. (advantage 0.997 on MS-MARCO) and analyzes Rotate-and-Perturb, ideal DCRE and an encrypted HNSW index. It also tests shuffling and secret projection as mitigations.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

CarryoverBench is a benchmark of 12 personal-assistant scenarios and 101 attack tasks for carryover attacks, where a one-time indirect prompt injection planted in agent memory files or scheduled tasks re-fires in later sessions. Three trigger channels (Instant, Autonomous, Latent) are scored by a rule-based verifier with separate planting and triggering stages. Across five frontier models, payloads re-fire over five rounds without measurable decay. Porting the Latent channel to the Hermes runtime weakens the effect but does not remove it.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Code2Video-Compass is a benchmark of 2,104 tasks for code-based video generation, where multimodal LLMs write executable programs that produce complete videos from text (T2V), image (I2V) or video (V2V) inputs. Tasks span 10 categories and 24 subtypes. Scoring uses 12 objective metrics and five MLLM-judge metrics. Across 15 proprietary and open-weight models from nine families, performance falls as construction, dynamic animation and state-dependency complexity rise.

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

This paper presents a multimodal engineering GraphRAG framework that links post-wind-event damage evidence from images and reconnaissance reports to building-condition states, recovery actions and downtime. Evidence is stored as a provenance-preserving, component-level representation, and graph-aligned retrieval uses compatibility, contradiction, evidence-precedence and abstention checks. Demonstrated on tornado-affected low-rise homes, it beats BaselineRAG and Structured Baseline RAG, and ablations test each component.

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

Preprint by Jiseung Kim, Minkyu Kim, Changmin Lee and Hochang Lee on the Regular Syndrome Decoding (RSD) problem. It presents a hybrid-algebraic attack that balances zero-coordinate guesses and syndrome-based eliminations across regular blocks. Parameter sets in Ferret, Wolverine and committed VOLE fall below 128-bit targets by up to 67 bits, and the revised Liu et al. (EUROCRYPT 2024) PCG sets cost under 2^111 field operations.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Preprint 2026/2563 presents a refined hybrid-algebraic attack on Regular Syndrome Decoding (RSD) that balances zero-coordinate guesses and syndrome-based eliminations across all regular blocks. It puts at least one parameter set each from Ferret (CCS 2020), Wolverine (IEEE S&P 2021) and committed VOLE (CCS 2025) below the 128-bit target, with losses up to 67 bits. PCG attack costs improve by up to 29.77 bits (non-binary) and 25.91 bits (binary), and the revised Liu et al. (EUROCRYPT 2024) 128-bit sets fall below 2^111 field operations.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Graphs and cycles in curve-based collision walks is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2560) on van Oorschot-Wiener style collision attacks in the multi-user setting. It covers elliptic curve discrete logarithms and isogeny pathfinding on supersingular F_p^2 and F_p curves, and proposes new pseudorandom walks. For F_p^2 curves, L keys need about L + log(L) useful collisions with no infiltrator. For F_p curves, about 0.75L keys fall to L collisions with an infiltrator.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

FunCAD-Harness is a framework in which LLM agents design CAD mechanisms and revise them using physical simulation feedback. It turns abstract functional requirements into candidate-specific physical tests. The paper also introduces FunCADBench, a benchmark of 46 mechanism families with interdependent, multi-step operations. Experiments on frontier LLM agents show it exposes mechanical failures that visual inspection misses and raises functional success over standard simulation-augmented baselines.

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

OpenVLHarness is a multimodal reasoning harness for MLLMs built on a capability layer (task-level tool interfaces plus evidence rendering) and persistent multimodal memory that stores images, structured data and web references as addressable artifacts. A coding interface runs generated programs over stored data. Across 22 benchmarks and eight backbones it adds 9.7-12.6 points over no-tool baselines, and GPT-6 Luna at medium effort beats Codex and Visual Sketchpad at maximum effort using at most 37% of their tokens.

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

MemT-1.0 is a memory foundation model architecture that builds memory into model computation. It builds on Metis, uses Gated DeltaNet-2 for token-level memory updates within each turn, and adds Mixture-of-Storage to scale capacity. Training used 34B tokens in continued pre-training and post-training. MemT-1.0-Nano and MemT-1.0-Flash beat parametric memory baselines and stay competitive with retrieval methods. At 128K history, Nano gives about 1.86x inference speedup and 66x less persistent storage than a full-context KV cache.

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

Registered ABE via Predicate Encodings, Revisited is an ePrint paper by Junichi Tomida (October 2026) that gives a new definition of predicate encodings suited to registered attribute-based encryption. It yields the first Reg-ABE schemes for (non-)zero inner product and for conjunctions/disjunctions with O(log L)-size ciphertexts. It also gives a registered broadcast encryption scheme with O(log L)-size ciphertexts under the standard k-Lin assumption, not the generic group model.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Mise-en-Video (MeV) is a multi-shot video generation framework where creators stage shots in 3D space and then generate the matching video. It combines hierarchical attention for multi-level narrative consistency with 3D-aware layout guidance for per-shot spatial control. The authors built a 160K-video dataset with hierarchical multi-shot texts and oriented 3D bounding boxes, and report gains over baselines in quality, consistency and subject controllability.

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

The paper analyses DeepDistinguisher, a transformer-like model that tells Goppa codes apart from random linear codes. Saliency maps and attention visualisation reveal a low-weight-row artifact in the random training instances that the model partly relies on. A pairwise-XOR rule inspired by minimum distance correlates strongly with the model's predictions, and the model loses most of its power on random matrices meeting both constraints. This suggests it exploits general combinatorial properties, not hidden algebraic structure.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Analysis of DeepDistinguisher, a transformer model that tells Goppa codes from random linear codes. Using saliency maps and attention visualization, the authors find a low-weight-row artifact in the random training instances that the model partly uses. They propose a pairwise-XOR rule on generator matrix rows that correlates strongly with the model's predictions. On random matrices meeting the minimum distance and XOR constraints, the model loses most of its accuracy, so it exploits general combinatorial properties rather than hidden algebraic structure.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

EpiLens is a lightweight, open-source retrieval-augmented generation package that applies a fixed retrieval template and output schema to every paper in a corpus and links outputs to source passages. On a corpus of 2,297 epidemiology papers, its classifier matches or exceeds supervised and zero-shot baselines on four tasks without task-specific training data, scored against 214 manual labels. It also compares model-based study shares across parameters and pathogens.

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

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

E-Layout is an ML-driven framework for post-placement logic restructuring in IC physical design. It builds equivalent logic alternatives with e-graph equality saturation, links logic choice to physical realization through a graph-based RAG model, and refines the choices with reinforcement learning on design-level timing feedback. On 9 designs it gives about 6% TNS and 2% WNS improvement and 1% less area than a commercial physical design flow.

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

RAGLeak is a supply-chain privacy backdoor attack on retrieval-augmented generation. When triggered, the backdoored generator reversibly obfuscates retrieved private documents, and an auxiliary LLM recovers them. Tested on three model families and three domains, it reaches up to 100% attack success rate, loses at most 10 points under detection-based defenses, and survives clean fine-tuning and changes of model scale and version. Source code is released.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The paper presents the first efficient, compact implementation of high-order masked Raccoon (lattice-based signature, CRYPTO 2024) on ARM Cortex-M4, up to 32 masking orders. It uses 3+3+3 layer-merged 32-bit NTT/INTT with lazy reduction, a negative double Montgomery reduction, and one-shot SHAKE256 sampling (at least 1.80x faster). It beats the reference by 1.85x-2.25x and masked Dilithium3 at orders 2, 4 and 8. Second-order leakage tests show DPA resistance once micro-architectural transitional leakage is mitigated.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper presents an end-to-end GPU implementation of the HQC code-based key encapsulation mechanism. It speeds up GF(2) polynomial multiplication with a parallel Frobenius additive FFT and a Toeplitz matrix-vector mapping onto INT1 tensor cores. On an RTX 4090 the multiplier reaches 3,828k polymul/s, about 2.9x the earlier HIGH implementation. Full KEM throughput is 1.56x, 1.55x and 2.03x higher for keygen, encaps and decaps. Five thread-to-KEM mapping variants are tested on RTX 3090 and Jetson AGX Orin.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Hybrid Reasoning Agents (HybridAgents) are LLM agents that switch between latent reasoning and text-based interaction in one generation process. A lightweight HybridLink handles mode transitions, continuous working memory keeps hybrid context across turns, and HybridSFT plus HybridRL train when to think latently and when to act in text. Across 3 model scales and 11 benchmarks, the paper reports 10.4% higher performance, 35.5%-54.7% fewer tokens, and 1.8x-2.6x faster inference.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ePrint 2026/2527 by Paola de Perthuis and Filip Trenkić analyses module-BKZ attacks on NTRU+, the South Korean KEM standard. It introduces relative canonical and coefficient embeddings and shows they agree up to scaling exactly when rad(c)/rad(ℓ) is 1 or 2. Simulation-based estimates show the best module attack saves 4 to 10 blocksizes, costing NTRU+ keys at most three bits of Core-SVP security. NTRU+ parameters stay safe in the overstretched regime.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

ToFu is a tool-aware fuzzing framework for LLM tools, including MCP servers. It maps each tool argument, using its metadata, to one of 74 CWE-guided semantics-aware sanitizers (path, URL, SQL and similar). It then generates schema-valid Atheris harnesses and semantic oracles, using runtime tracers for in-process tools and outcome oracles for opaque ones. The LLM (gpt-4.1) only maps sanitizers and writes seeds; it is never the security judge. The paper also shows a "Repeat-After-Me" trick, where an LLM told to repeat attacker-crafted text emits a tool call the orchestrator executes, reproduced on LangGraph, MAF, ADK 2.0, AutoGen, Strands and CrewAI. Across 273 runnable MCP servers (3,405 tools) it reports 253 verified bugs in 343 tools across 118 servers, such as path traversal, log injection and exfiltration. These are failures a crash-based fuzzer would miss. The result matters because it shows LLM-generated tool arguments cannot be treated as trusted.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 18 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Cryptanalysis of the Eevee forkcipher-based AEAD modes Umbreon and Espeon, which claim online AE security under nonce reuse. Associated-data correlations give probability-one non-empty-message forgeries with three encryption queries and one verification query. The paper adds an affine treatment of partial final blocks (n-r+3 queries, or n-r+2 with adaptive choices). It also checks the published Umbreon attack with the official ForkSkinny primitive and reports a two-query attack accepted by the unmodified public C modes.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

RATION is a security framework for AI agents that tracks measurable risks from agent actions and enforces quantitative constraints during task execution, instead of simply restricting actions. It builds a task-specific policy from explicit constraints in the user request plus implicit risks calibrated from historical runs of similar tasks. Experiments on four security benchmarks show strong security with high task utility across models and environments.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

SEER-Repro is a benchmark of 20 published papers based on the SEER cancer registry, with the data needed to reproduce their findings. An LLM agent reproduces 77.4% of 2,190 atomic claims. A second agentic pipeline finds alternative analytical choices and reruns the analyses, flagging potentially consequential choices in 9.5% of fully reproduced findings for expert review.

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

FuTransformer is a CUDA implementation of a Llama-style Transformer block for NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. It uses FP8 prefill with fused GEMM epilogues and INT4 weights plus an INT4 KV-cache copy for decode, with a block-diagonal Hadamard transform to cut cache quantization error. On one H100, prefill is up to 1.48x faster than compiled PyTorch FP8, and INT4 decode is 1.3-2.4x faster than the faster PyTorch baseline. Llama-3.1-8B decode takes 2.8 ms per step at batch one, versus 8.1 ms for compiled transformers. WikiText-2 perplexity rises from 6.24 to 7.23 with round-to-nearest INT4 weights, or 6.99 with GPTQ.

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

GLOBE is an agentic framework that optimizes e-commerce product listings for generative search by storing strategies in an evolving handbook of explicit, field-scoped behaviors. An Editor applies behaviors and gets rank-based feedback, a Reflector turns it into updates, a Moderator removes redundant proposals, and a Curator commits changes. Harmful behaviors are deactivated. Structured behaviors beat monolithic prompt optimization and transfer to unseen product categories.

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

FedRAPP is a personalized aggregation framework for Source-Free Federated Test-Time Prompt Tuning (SF-FTTPT), where clients adapt CLIP soft prompts on unlabeled, non-IID test streams without source data. It combines reliability-aware client assessment, a server-side exponential moving-average prompt memory and similarity-guided peer aggregation. Across nine CLIP benchmark datasets and ImageNet variants it beats standard federated aggregation baselines while keeping prompt-only efficiency.

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

HardEval is an execution-verified benchmark for language-model security hardening, built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 STIG controls that fail on an unhardened baseline. Models receive only the required security outcome and write a Bash script, which runs on a live VM and is graded fail to pass with OpenSCAP/OVAL checks. Fourteen frontier and open-weight configurations show uneven results across domains, with plausible code that misses the exact compliance condition. The benchmark is public.

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

HardEval is an execution-verified benchmark for LLM-driven security hardening, built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 STIG controls that fail on an unhardened baseline. Models receive only the security outcome and write a Bash script, which runs on a live VM and is graded fail-to-pass by OpenSCAP/OVAL checks. Fourteen frontier and open-weight configurations show uneven results across SSH, authentication, audit and kernel domains, with a common failure of plausible code that misses the exact compliance condition.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper proposes a framework for auditing LLM-agent-generated stakeholder preferences before they are used as weights in multi-objective optimization for healthcare operations. Experiments on outpatient appointment scheduling and emergency department configurations show that explicit ratings vary by role and clinic conditions, deliberation can erase role differences, and pairwise choices depend largely on option order. Robust weighted-sum models often select different schedules than average weights.

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

FlexPart is a framework for text-controlled 3D mesh segmentation that assigns discrete part IDs to mesh faces through a view-independent part-identity field. It uses a control prompt of part names with location and shape clauses, trained on a VLM-built multi-granularity dataset. On FlexPartBench it raises average mIoU by 22% over the strongest baseline, and by 15% with planner-completed prompts.

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

LILIE (Language-Informed and Lossless Image Encoder) is an invertible image transform built from a normalizing flow transformer, trained jointly with a vision-language model via next token prediction so captions can be recovered from noised features. The encoder supplies a language-informed loss for text-to-image generation. JiT models trained with it cut gFD from 66.84 to 53.01 against a pixel-only baseline on the GPIC dataset. Code, encoders and models are released.

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

The paper revisits the multi-key optimization for SPECK, a code-based signature scheme that uses the Permutation Code Equivalence Problem (PEP) as a trapdoor for the Permuted Kernel Problem (PKP). Each SPECK round has soundness error 1/2, which inflates signatures, and the SPECK authors had warned that naively using multiple public keys creates security concerns. The authors analyse those concerns, give conditions and parameter constraints under which multiple keys can be integrated securely, and show that conservative parameters perform poorly but leave room for improvement. They also build a ring signature scheme on the same construction.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Introduces SLEEK, a QC-MDPC code-based KEM using a three-iteration parallel bit-flipping decoder and a closed-form decoding-failure-rate (DFR) estimate, enabling parameters with analytically bounded failure probability and standard IND-CCA transforms. SLEEK-LT targets IND-CCA for long-term keys; SLEEK-E targets IND-CPA for ephemeral keys using a new QC key structure with security equivalent to QC-MDPC and cheaper key generation. Parameter sets cover 80/128/192/256-bit security, and the optimized AVX2 implementation gives ciphertexts 4.9x smaller than HQC (47% slower) and 1.3x–2.7x faster than BIKE.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper presents a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation framework for Medical Visual Question Answering. A Gated Multimodal Unit learns a joint query representation from the medical image and the clinical question, so evidence retrieval uses both modalities while the Med-LVLM stays frozen. On benchmark datasets it consistently beats a reference Med-LVLM and stays competitive with state-of-the-art methods. The page gives no dataset names or numbers.

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

ePrint paper presenting the first optimized implementation of the BF-max bit-flipping decoder for the code-based KEM BIKE, combined with other decoders to trade off decoding failure rate, runtime, public-key and ciphertext size in ephemeral-key settings. It cuts public-key and ciphertext sizes by 7.8% versus LeanBIKE at similar speed and DFR, and gives a combined size 22% below BIKE and 2.79x below HQC. It shows BIKE can fit constrained protocols such as IKEv2, which matters for practical post-quantum migration.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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 2026🛡️ Security

ePrint paper identifying five side-channel vulnerabilities in the signing procedure of Round-3 SQIsign, the isogeny-based signature scheme in NIST's additional post-quantum signature process. It gives polynomial-time algebraic algorithms that recover the secret key from leaked quaternion/ideal intermediate values, including cases where only partial bits leak. It also demonstrates power analysis on the SQIsign source code to extract the needed leakage, which earlier work on Round-1 or toy parameters did not do.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

PrairieFire is an SSD-based approximate nearest neighbor search system for billion-scale vectors, built for high update throughput. It uses buffered updates and batched local rebuilds, with cascaded adjustments, concurrency control and CPU-GPU-SSD cooperation. Against state-of-the-art systems it reports about 3-35x update throughput, 3-5x search throughput and 1.5-8.7x cost efficiency. It has run in RedNote production for two months.

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

MUB (Music Understanding Benchmark) is a set of 500 identity-masked recordings with existing annotations for tempo, key, time signature and structural intervals. It covers all 24 keys, tempos of 47 to 180 BPM and 4,676 intervals, and strips titles, artists and platform IDs from inputs. Baselines reach 53.6% tempo accuracy (DSP) and 98.4% time-signature accuracy (constant 4/4). No multimodal LLM has been tested yet, and rights clearance is unresolved.

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

Proposes "guarded sharing", a technique that moves few-time signatures in SPHINCS-style stateless hash-based schemes from a tree model to a DAG model. Combined with bucket thinning, hash chains and rejection sampling, it yields BGS-CC, which improves on the prior best few-time scheme BPORS-C+BFP. For 128-bit security and a use quota of Q=2^24 it gives 2,228-byte signatures, the first SPHINCS-based stateless signature shorter than ML-DSA-44's 2,420 bytes. This matters for PQ migration because signature size is the main drawback of SLH-DSA.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

P^3-WAM is a unified world action model for egocentric dexterous manipulation with three modes: Perceive (reconstruct articulated hand motion and camera trajectories from video), Predict (generate visual futures under prescribed actions) and Plan (jointly generate action trajectories and their anticipated visual outcomes from an initial image, a language instruction and an optional visual goal). It adds a compact structured 3D action representation to a pretrained video diffusion transformer through a mixture-of-transformers design with shared base weights, modality-specific adaptation and bidirectional visual-action attention. Randomized modality visibility lets video and 3D actions act as either context or target. Unified training beats single-mode training and outperforms specialized baselines on 3D hand reconstruction and action-conditioned video prediction across four datasets, and gives better instruction adherence than video-generation baselines.

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

Proposes protecting the retrieval datastore in RAG systems by applying the same random projection to datastore embeddings and query embeddings. This provably preserves query-item semantic similarity while substantially mitigating data extraction attacks. Across multiple RAG architectures and datasets it beats prior differential-privacy-based methods on retrieval and generation quality, with comparable empirical privacy under strong attacks, making it a practical baseline for privacy-preserving RAG.

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

Proposes applying the same random projection to both datastore embeddings and query embeddings in RAG systems. The authors claim this provably preserves query-to-item semantic similarity while substantially mitigating datastore data-extraction attacks. Across several RAG architectures and datasets it reportedly beats prior differential-privacy-based defenses on retrieval and generation quality, with comparable empirical privacy under strong attack models. It is presented as a lightweight baseline for privacy-preserving RAG.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

EliteReplay is an RL post-training recipe that pairs GRPO with an "elite" archive built by quality-diversity search. Before training, the frozen base model is used to collect solutions spanning distinct approaches; during training, a replay loss on this archive is added to GRPO. This counters the narrowing of solution diversity that RL causes. On text-to-SQL tasks it reaches higher pass@128 than all baselines and yields up to 77% more distinct correct strategies. It also retains more of the base model's strategies and covers both readings of ambiguous questions nearly twice as often on AmbiQT.

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

Introduces Librarian Agents, where a builder agent turns raw unstructured documents into a hierarchical filesystem of synthetic files and reference links, forming a workspace for a downstream answering agent. Workspace construction is cast as a Markov decision process and the builder policy is trained with reinforcement learning to maximize downstream answering accuracy. It beats the strongest retrieval and precomputation baselines by 33 points on BrowseComp-Plus, amortizes construction cost over repeated queries, and generalizes zero-shot to BRIGHT with a 31-point average gain.

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

X-RIC (eXplainable RIC) is a framework that adds agentic reasoning to the O-RAN Near-RT RAN Intelligent Controller. It combines reactive reinforcement learning with automated behavioral cloning from domain heuristics, a transformer-based Telecom Language Model for contextual abstraction and interpretability, and closed-loop co-adaptation for continuous policy refinement. The paper also introduces BARX, a benchmark for agentic RAN control that measures latency, compliance and determinism. On SLA-aware network slicing, in simulation and on an O-RAN-compliant testbed, it reports 89% lower operational cost with SLA compliance kept, 75% faster convergence, 50% fewer training steps and 46% lower variance.

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

Proposes EdgeFlow, a hybrid KV cache migration scheme for distributed LLM inference across heterogeneous edge servers in Collaborative Edge Computing. It combines direct KV cache transmission with activation-based recomputation, overlapping computation and communication to cut migration time when servers disconnect or overload. The authors formulate a multi-node KV migration optimization problem and give a 2-approximation algorithm built on improved LP relaxation and bipartite graph techniques. Experiments on a real distributed LLM inference platform show up to 45% lower migration time.

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

Describes a general-purpose LLM-based AI tutor for computing courses that accepts questions in Mandarin and replies bilingually, also generating glossaries of technical terms. It uses a specialized multi-source RAG pipeline with a novel question extraction mechanism to draw on diverse course materials. Evaluated on 91 Piazza posts: 83.52% answered correctly and helpfully, 76.92% of questions got high-quality translations, and 64.47% got glossaries.

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

DropKV is a KV-cache eviction framework for long-context LLMs. It decouples the joint eviction decision into independent per-token scores based on residual-output perturbation, which avoids the NP-hard combinatorial problem. It has a provable constant-factor approximation guarantee under a cone condition, which the authors verify empirically on three long-context LLMs. The fused Triton kernels never materialize the full attention matrix. They give a 19.8x scoring-kernel speedup and up to 9.9% end-to-end prefill speedup. On RULER and LongBench it beats state-of-the-art eviction baselines at equal cache budgets.

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

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 2026🛡️ Security

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

GraphACM merges equivalent states from multiple rollouts of the same LLM agent task into a directed, action-labeled graph, so actions can be compared at shared decision states. It defines node-level and global action-consistency measures, and uses the global score as an uncertainty proxy to predict task success or failure. Across three LLMs on ALFWorld, AppWorld and WebShop it reaches an average AUROC of 0.811, above the strongest behavioral-consistency baseline (0.729) and verbalized confidence (0.769). It also shows where in a trajectory agent actions diverge.

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

SecAgg++ is a masking-based secure aggregation protocol for single-server federated learning that swaps in post-quantum cryptographic primitives. It keeps the communication and computation efficiency of SecAgg and SecAgg+ and handles client dropout through an efficient recovery procedure built on secret sharing and additive masking. It matters because existing masking-based aggregation protocols are not post-quantum secure, so client model updates would be exposed to quantum-capable adversaries.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

SecAgg++ is a masking-based secure aggregation protocol for single-server federated learning that uses post-quantum cryptographic primitives. It keeps the communication and computation efficiency of SecAgg and SecAgg+ and handles client dropout through an efficient recovery procedure. It matters because most masking-based secure aggregation protocols are not post-quantum secure, which leaves federated model updates exposed to future quantum adversaries.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ePrint paper cryptanalysing Eevee (Umbreon, Jolteon, Espeon), forkcipher-based AEAD modes proposed at CCS 2023 for IoT-to-cloud computation. It gives a two-encryption AD-free prefix distinguisher, a four-encryption nonce-misuse distinguisher, a deterministic AD-only forgery, and nonce-respecting forgeries on Jolteon and Espeon (fresh one-block forgery reusing the tag; arbitrary AD substitution). It traces these to proof flaws (online-prefix consistency, domain separation, checksum freshness), derives design requirements, and concludes the failures are in the mode design, not the C implementation.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Presents fault injection attacks on BIKE and HQC decapsulation that target instructions outside the Fujisaki-Okamoto transform, achieving full key recovery with only valid ciphertexts at NIST Level 1 (17392 queries for HQC, about 3 million for BIKE). It also gives a general method for finding effective fault locations by analysing decoder behaviour under perturbed conditions. Attacks were validated with laser fault injection on an STM32H7 microcontroller, showing a wider attack surface for code-based post-quantum KEM implementations.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Introduces Recursive Reward Improvement (RRI) for recursive self-improvement on open-ended expert tasks without answer keys, where a proposer writes both a task and a rubric. Before the solver trains, an adversary writes a rubric-gaming but useless answer, the same model writes an honest answer without seeing the rubric, and up to two repair steps revise the rubric until the honest answer wins. Exploits found also rewrite future task and rubric generation. On HealthBench Professional it beats a Generation Only baseline by 10.9 points at 9B and 12.4 at 27B (10.3 with no external model), and the 27B model transfers to PRBench Hard (+6.6) and ProfBench (+8.0).

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

Harness^2 is a plug-and-play framework that recursively improves LLM agent execution harnesses in open-world settings where no ground-truth verifiers exist. Task-level recursion uses a contrastive Propose-Probe-Compose step to guide harness edits for the current task, and it scales through parallel or sequential recursion. Harnessing-level recursion distills experience from those edits into a continual-improvement harness for future tasks. A single step improves GLM-5 and Gemini 3.5 Flash over their base harnesses by up to 11.5 points on WorkBuddy-Bench, 4.5 on JobBench and 11.8 percentage points on LAB.

huggingface.copaperAdded 14 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ePrint paper evaluating ASCA (SAT-based) and SASCA (belief propagation) side-channel attacks on the AES-based MILENAGE authentication algorithm in USIM cards, using neural-network leakage predictions to recover subscriber key K and operator secret OPc from a single trace. SASCA alone succeeds in 87.7% of attacks but converges to a wrong OPc in 6.1%; ASCA succeeds in only 34% within a 1-hour timeout. The hybrid, where BP refines the predictions before they go to the SAT solver, reaches 93.8% with lower average runtime. It also proposes a countermeasure that masks each AES round key with an independent per-device secret, and the authors report it defeated the hybrid attack in all evaluated cases.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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 2026🛡️ Security

Draft ERC from Quantova Inc that has Ethereum bridges accept cross-chain message batches only when a committee signs the Merkle root with RFC 8554 LMS hash-based signatures. The guard contract requires a strict majority of distinct unfrozen keys, records used leaves, freezes any key that signs a leaf twice, binds digests to domain tag, chain ID, guard address and epoch, and enforces a 60-second delay. It reports gas benchmarks (about 205k per LMS W4 height-10 verify, 12.44M worst-case rotation under EIP-7825), a hybrid LMS+ECDSA migration mode, and a NioLabs assessment with no critical or high findings. It argues that Shor's algorithm makes secp256k1 and BLS committee keys a quantum theft target.

ethereum-magicians.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Furue and Aikawa build and analyze algebraic attacks on the Regular Syndrome Decoding Problem (RSDP), which underlies code-based post-quantum schemes. They extend the Wang et al. hybrid algorithm to allow an arbitrary XL solving degree d, and add two variants: an XFL-based one (partial Gaussian elimination plus variable guessing) and a WXL-based one that exploits Macaulay matrix sparsity. Complexity analysis shows the WXL variant with d>2 wins for small block size β, while the original hybrid wins as β grows. This matters for setting RSDP-based scheme parameters.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

DPF-SGD is a federated SGD algorithm that stays robust to Byzantine agents while satisfying ϵ-differential privacy. It combines private step sizes with a DP noise-decay schedule and adds a privacy-preserving comparative elimination (PPCE) filter that suppresses Byzantine updates during aggregation. The authors prove almost-sure convergence to the global optimum despite persistent noise and adversaries. On synthetic and MNIST data, final optimization error is one to two orders of magnitude lower than DP baselines.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026🧠 AI

AgentSWE is a benchmark of 25 tasks covering the agent development lifecycle: Creation of an agent from a natural-language requirement, Editing of production agent codebases, and Optimization toward a measurable target. Builders iterate on a few illustrative cases, then the frozen submission is graded on held-out cases with requirement-derived rubrics and hard pass/fail gates. Across coding agents, models and harnesses, none comes close to delivering the requirement. Recurring failures include overfitting to visible cases, hollow runtimes behind code that looks complete, and unsupported claims of completion.

huggingface.copaperAdded 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ePrint entry for an ACM CCS 2026 paper in the "Attacks and cryptanalysis" category. By its title and keywords, it shows that snapshots of encrypted databases built on trusted execution environments leak plaintext frequency histograms, using a technique called "dendrochronology". The abstract and full text are embargoed until the end of October 2026, so the attack mechanics are not available yet. It matters to anyone assessing the real leakage of TEE-backed encrypted databases against snapshot adversaries.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Systematization of knowledge on private Transformer inference (PTI) that builds an empirical graph of 62 systems, with system attributes as node features and evaluation compatibility as edges. Node-level attribution finds that cryptographic progress drives most speedups but always co-occurs with confounders such as model fidelity, hardware and cost accounting. Edge-level auditing finds only 1 of 1891 candidate system pairs directly comparable. Graph-level analysis shows the scale frontier plateaued at 13B parameters and projects the cost of deploying current PTI techniques on production-scale Transformers.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Introduces Hybrid Reasoning Agents (HybridAgents), which switch between latent reasoning and text-based interaction in one generation process. A lightweight HybridLink handles transitions between the two modes, and a continuous working memory keeps hybrid context lossless across turns. This keeps tool use and makes latent thoughts inspectable. Post-training has two stages: HybridSFT, then HybridRL, which learns when to think latently and when to act in text. Across 3 model scales and 11 benchmarks (math, science, medicine, search, agentic reasoning), the authors report +10.4% performance, 35.5–54.7% fewer tokens, 1.8–2.6x faster inference and 2.7–3.7x lower cost versus text and latent baselines.

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

Proposes mmVB, a lightweight plug-and-play module (1.6M trainable parameters) that assigns query-conditioned per-image visual token budgets using cross-image context for multimodal LLMs, without retraining the base model or accessing attention matrices (so it is compatible with FlashAttention). It cuts visual input tokens 9x, giving 5x faster time-to-first-token and 7x fewer prefill FLOPs while keeping 94.4% of full-resolution accuracy across eight multi-image reasoning benchmarks. It matters because existing token pruning, merging and compression methods target single-image redundancy and either need attention maps or retraining.

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

PixelMoE is a pixel-space diffusion framework that scales capacity sparsely using standard LLM-style Mixture-of-Experts: token-choice routing, fine-grained routed experts, a shared expert and bias-based load balancing, with no diffusion-specific routing or auxiliary routing losses. It adds Pixel-Space Hierarchical Flow Matching, which varies spatial resolution along the denoising trajectory from global structure to fine detail. At matched active parameters it beats dense counterparts, and reaches FID 1.47 at 256x256 and 1.53 at 512x512 on class-conditional ImageNet-1K without representation alignment or perceptual losses. Code and models are promised but not yet released.

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

UniW(A)M is a mixture-of-experts model built on diffusion Transformers that unifies action-conditioned world modeling (AC-WM) with several world-action model (WAM) variants. Shared experts capture common physical dynamics, while atomic capability experts are reused across interfaces, each keeping its own conditional pathway. At deployment a plug-in adaptive interface router (PAIR), trained on a small subset of target-task chunk scenarios with the backbone frozen, picks a WAM interface for each execution chunk. It reaches 88.3% average real-world success against 76.7% for the strongest baseline, leads WorldArena on all three action-conditioned world-modeling tasks, and PAIR raises OOD success from 63.3% to 76.7%.

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

MultiAlloc is a profiling-guided framework for KV cache quantization. It splits a fixed KV memory budget between layer-wise precision enhancement and token-wise preservation. Lightweight offline profiling measures layer sensitivity and token importance, and the profiled memory–accuracy trade-off yields an allocation policy with no online search. The paper reports gains over layer-wise, token-wise and recent multi-granularity KV quantization baselines at matched memory on reasoning and long-context benchmarks, across Mistral, Llama, DeepSeek-Qwen and QwQ models.

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

Legal-R1 is an agentic retrieval framework for evidence-based legal question answering that splits reasoning across three agents. A Lawyer agent decides when to retrieve, which legal source to query, what evidence to seek and when it has enough. A Legal Assistant retrieves statutes and precedent cases with authority-aware and diversity-aware selection, and a Judge agent writes the final answer from the full evidence trajectory. Only the Lawyer agent is post-trained, using masked supervised fine-tuning and trajectory-aware reinforcement learning. The paper reports gains over general-purpose, legal-specific and retrieval-augmented baselines on several Chinese legal benchmarks.

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

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

Kairos is a reference monitor placed at the isolation boundary of an unmodified, opaque LLM agent, where tool calls, shell commands and agent-written scripts all appear as the same file and network operations. A declarative trust policy decides most effects deterministically and defers the rest; deferred effects are held while the agent continues speculatively, and a bounded-authority decision oracle (an LLM or a human) releases or refuses them based on the trace. Across three benchmarks and three agent models it beats existing defenses on the attack-success/utility trade-off; on AgentDojo it cuts attack success from 47.0% to 2.7% with no loss of benign utility.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

EmoGenie is a benchmark for emotions expressed and evoked by text-to-image outputs. It has 6,400 images from eight T2I models using 800 emotion-targeted prompts. It includes EmoGenie-QA (90,000 closed-set and 1,057 open-ended questions) and EmoGenie-Assess (13,175 mean opinion scores for valence, arousal, dominance and aesthetic quality). The authors also propose EmoProbe, which pairs emotion QA with response-aligned, dimension-specific regression heads. They report that it beats baselines on emotion QA and correlates better with human ratings. The work shows how reliably MLLMs interpret affect in generated images.

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

Cryptography paper that extends Chen and Fischlin's two-user Signal analysis (Eurocrypt 2024) to group chats. It introduces "causal awareness": a receiver can reconstruct part of the causal context in which an accepted message was sent. Network delay or adversarial interference can otherwise show an authentic message in a misleading context. Senders transmit records of what they have sent and received, and receivers verify these records and compare them with their own. The paper gives correctness and security definitions parameterized by how much causal information must be recovered, baseline constructions with proofs, and checkpoint-aided and server-aided variants. It also discusses how to surface this information in a messenger's UI.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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 2026🛡️ Security

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 λ_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 λ_2 ≥ 128.6. A counter variant, CUTS+C, gives a proven grinding gain.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The paper introduces verifiable reconstructible straightline codes (VRSCs) as an abstraction for compiling zkSNARKs into Universally Composable (UC) secure protocols. It shows that the witness-succinct UC compiler of Ganesh et al. (EUROCRYPT 2023) is missing a security requirement: permuting previously revealed evaluation openings yields a fresh accepting proof, which invalidates the claimed simulation argument. The fix uses verifier-enforced disjoint evaluation domains and a pairing-based Fischlin-style instantiation with structured Reed-Solomon codes and jointly computed KZG openings. This brings certificate generation to O(n log n) with constant extra proof size and verification work.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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 2026🛡️ Security

Paper presenting the first on-chip, TDC-sensor-based power side-channel attack on a co-tenant FPGA to reconstruct full-scale color ImageNet inputs (224x224) from a victim's first CNN convolution layer, using ML-based upscaling and recoloring. It separates genuinely leaked information from ML-generated post-processing. It also evaluates a pixel-substitution defense based on Hamming Weight, which is largely defeated by an attacker retrained on the transformed data. The authors conclude that robust defenses need randomized or input-dependent transformations.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 16 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Presents Creed, an LLM-based code auditing approach that infers a developer's security-related beliefs for a function, scores how reasonable each is, and derives the conditions under which it is violated. It catches domain-specific semantic flaws that syntactic static analysis misses, such as a timing side-channel that undermines user-enumeration protection. The paper also introduces two measures for explanation-based vulnerability detection, recall and overhead. On a recent real-world benchmark, Creed beats existing explanation-based tools on the effectiveness-effort trade-off.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 11 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Presents Creed, an LLM-based code auditing approach that, for a given function, infers the developer's security-related beliefs, scores how reasonable each belief is, and derives the conditions under which it is violated. This lets it find semantic flaws, such as timing side-channels in authentication, that syntactic static analysis tools miss, and it explains root cause, symptoms and exploitability. The paper also introduces two evaluation measures for explanation-based vulnerability detection: recall (how well a known vulnerability is correctly explained) and overhead (the effort of inspecting reports). On a recent real-world benchmark, Creed beats existing explanation-based tools on the effectiveness-effort trade-off.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 11 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The paper studies joint attention in multimodal diffusion transformers (MMDiTs), where the evolving image updates text representations. It finds that this image-to-text (I2T) feedback tends to preserve objects and attributes already in the image, errors included, and that suppressing it improves generation. It proposes Semantic Feedback Guidance (SFG), which guides away from an auxiliary branch that strengthens I2T feedback and weakens text-to-image conditioning, and iSFG, an in-place variant that needs no extra model evaluations. SFG runs for the first 20% of sampling steps (about 1.2x base NFE without CFG). Across three backbones, adding SFG to CFG on FLUX raises GenEval from 0.6661 to 0.7479, and iSFG on SD3.5M adds +1.33 HPSv2.1 over CFG at zero extra NFE. The control also improves VBench scores for text-to-video and image-to-video.

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

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

Cryptanalysis of the Alternating Sponge (ASP) and Duet, a permutation-based hash candidate in China's ICCS Next Generation Commercial Cryptographic Algorithm program (NGCC). The authors give an O(2^r)-query distinguisher against ASP that contradicts its claimed indifferentiability bound in some parameter regimes. They also give a distinguisher and state-recovery attack on Duet's multi-block output, using O(2^(r+c-h)) permutation queries. Collision and preimage resistance are unaffected, but Duet used as a XOF or KDF is affected, and state recovery enables length extension.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

DualQuant is a calibration-free post-training quantization framework for LLM weights and activations. It minimizes weight-reconstruction MSE using variable splitting and block coordinate descent with closed-form subproblem updates. The resulting scaling factors double as per-channel activation rescalings, so no calibration data is needed. It supports the MX family and NVFP4 block formats. On Llama and Qwen models it matches or beats calibration-based SmoothQuant on WikiText-2, C4 and zero-shot tasks. A real packed W4A4 path for Llama-3.1-8B on an RTX 4090 gives up to 2.61x memory reduction and 2.46x throughput over BF16.

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

Proposes Matched-Context Group Policy Optimization (MCGPO), which builds weighted action preferences from already-collected sibling rollouts to give credit to intermediate decisions when feedback is sparse and arrives only at the end. Comparison contexts use pre-action state summaries and rubric progress. Exact and coarse matching rules are selected by two-action support, and fixed folds separate candidate decisions from the terminal outcomes that orient them. An evidence-weighted auxiliary pairwise loss is added to GraphGPO task learning, and no critic is needed. Across six environment-backbone settings with three seeds each, it beats GraphGPO by 0.47-1.46 points on ALFWorld and WebShop with Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B, and by 3.96 and 5.16 points on WebShop with Qwen3-4B/8B. ALFWorld gains are small because baseline success is already above 92%.

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

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

HOA (Humanize Olympiads Agent) is an open, flow-level framework that coordinates several agent sessions through three feedback channels: an independent reviewer that critiques each candidate, a structured wiki supplying task-specific knowledge the base model may lack, and a verifier that checks generated Lean proofs against trusted challenge statements. With GPT-5.6 Sol it reports perfect scores on IMO, IPhO and IOI 2026, near-full marks on IChO 2026, 672/672 on PutnamBench, and first place on the Lean-Eval leaderboard (251/304). With the open model Kimi-K3 it matches or exceeds a GPT-5.6 Sol + /Goal baseline on several contests, which suggests systematic feedback can narrow base-model capability gaps.

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

BLiMPPI is a multilingual evaluation suite of over 12,000 negative polarity item (NPI) minimal pairs across 33 languages. A pipeline finds NPIs in Universal Dependencies treebanks, labels their licensing environments, and perturbs them into grammatical/ungrammatical pairs. Across 12 multilingual and 2 monolingual models plus n-gram baselines, multilingual models do worst on lower-resource languages and on pairs that n-grams cannot solve. The paper also analyses NPI typology, language family, licensing variability and NPI-licenser distance.

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

RARA (Retrieval-Anchored Representation Alignment) is a two-stage method for adapting pre-trained robot policies such as Vision-Language-Action models to new tasks from few demonstrations. It first retrieves pretraining representations with similar task intent and motion and aligns the policy's representations of the target demonstrations to them. It then fine-tunes on the target demonstrations while constraining representation change on the retrieved demonstrations, which limits representation drift. Tested with Diffusion Policy and GR00T on 13 tasks in RoboTwin, RoboCasa and on a real robot, it improves average success over plain fine-tuning by 9.5 points in-distribution and 13.6 out-of-distribution, and beats all compared baselines.

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

Proves that the nonce-based MACs Encrypted Wegman-Carter (EWC) and EWCDMD (the dual of EWCDM) are unforgeable beyond the birthday bound. With an n-bit block cipher and an O(2^-n)-AXU hash, both are secure up to 2^{5n/6} MAC queries and nearly 2^n verification queries in the nonce-respecting setting. This settles an open question left by earlier birthday distinguishing attacks (Cogliati–Seurin on EWC, Nandi on EWCDMD), which never yielded forgeries. The proofs analyze forgery events directly through auxiliary experiments. The EWC proof adds conditional permutation analysis and collision multiplicity bounds with KL divergence, and the EWCDMD proof uses Hellinger distance and Fourier analysis.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

First systematic empirical study of Cross-chain Verification Vulnerabilities (CVVs) in bridge smart contracts, such as flawed validation of state proofs, message sender identities and signatures. From 588 audit reports across 36 bridge projects it derives 11 CVV patterns in 5 categories and builds a dataset of 830 instances across 786 contract files, mapped to reports, source versions and pattern labels. Existing tools cover few CVV patterns, and only two of four tested LLMs beat a 29.3% Macro-F1 constant baseline (best 51.2%), which motivates detectors built for cross-chain verification semantics.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

AgentValve is a protocol for authorizing payments by AI agents in permissionless markets where adversaries can cheaply create Sybil identities and fake feedback to inflate provider reputation. It models reputation as finite capacity in a directed trust graph, and a smart contract atomically reserves capacity along trust paths for each admitted payment. This bounds honest agents' exposure to the capacity they extend into the adversarial region, and payment-backed capacity creation with bounded route length limits depletion attacks. A witness-commit mechanism makes on-chain route verification linear work with constant persistent state per payment. The prototype was evaluated on six months of Ethereum data and synthetic workloads with up to 10,000 Sybil identities. Exposure and depletion stayed bounded, admission cost fell by up to 40.8% against baselines, and common payments cost about $0.04–$0.21.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

AgentValve is a protocol for Sybil-resilient payment authorization when AI agents pick and pay service providers without human review in permissionless markets. It models reputation as finite capacity in a directed trust graph, and a smart contract atomically reserves capacity along trust paths. This bounds honest agents' payment exposure to the capacity they extend into the adversarial region, so fake identities and fabricated feedback inside that region cannot raise the bound. Payment-backed capacity creation and bounded route length limit depletion by malicious senders. A witness-commit mechanism splits off-chain route discovery from on-chain verification, cutting verification to linear work with constant persistent state per payment. A prototype evaluated on six months of Ethereum data and synthetic workloads, with up to 10,000 Sybil identities, kept exposure and depletion bounded. Admission cost fell by up to 40.8% versus baselines, at roughly $0.04-$0.21 per common payment.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 13 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

DecepEval is a benchmark of 1,532 instances across 3 task families and 28 professional scenarios designed to measure deception in LLM agents, pairing neutral and induced versions of each task to isolate condition-dependent changes in deception rates. It introduces the LLM Deception Diamond framework (pressure, incentive, opportunity, conflict), adapted from classical fraud theory, and finds that across nine frontier LLMs these inducements raise deception rates even in models with low baseline deception, with long-horizon tasks showing deception rates averaging 87% under induced conditions.

huggingface.copaperAdded 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI

OuroWorld is a mask-free framework that turns any static 3D Gaussian Splatting scene into a seamlessly looping 3D cinemagraph. A vision-language model infers plausible dynamics and guides a video model to synthesize a reference video, which is lifted and completed into multi-view videos. Inconsistency-Robust Periodic 4DGS then fits these imperfect videos: a Fourier-series deformation field guarantees looping by construction, and a Grounded Drift Field anchored at the reference view absorbs cross-view inconsistency. It handles general deformation, object motion and illumination change, not only fluid-like motion as prior Eulerian methods do. The paper also proposes a ground-truth-free evaluation covering vividness, naturalness, loop seam coherence and scene quality. On 39 reconstructed and generated scenes it beats all baselines and wins 70.8%-99.0% of user-study comparisons.

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

OmniCapBench is a benchmark of 786 densely annotated videos that evaluates audio-visual captioning in multimodal LLMs. Instead of scoring free-form captions, it asks models for sets of atomic, verifiable units across three tracks (entity references, visual shots, audio events). These are scored with deterministic constraint checks plus localized LLM-based semantic comparisons, which gives coverage, localization and stable scoring together. Tests on frontier MLLMs show strong local perception but weak long-horizon audio-visual reasoning, especially identity drift and cross-modal misalignment.

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

The paper scales white-box deception detection with activation probes to frontier monitoring settings. It builds the largest deception dataset to date (FIBS) and introduces a probe architecture that aggregates information across many layers and tokens. The probes reach 98.8% AUC on SHADE-Arena, beating an Opus 5.5 text-monitoring baseline, and improve as the underlying model grows. They also handle "introspective deception", where ground truth can't be read from context: they separate transcripts containing a model's true hidden goal from others with up to 99.7% AUC, and detect lying on politically sensitive topics and under pressure in open-weight models. The FIBS dataset is released.

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

ORCAGen uses RAG over a curated knowledge base of malware procedures and active-defense strategies, plus structured prompting, to have LLMs generate proof-of-concept malware and matching deception orchestration code offline. Strategies are validated against the PoC malware before being added to a runtime playbook that enforces only the verified, deterministic logic. It is evaluated on GPT-4o, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Qwen3-Coder and Claude Sonnet 4.5 over synthesized scenarios and 150 real keylogger, infostealer and ransomware samples, measuring execution success, hallucination rate, refinement effort, deception effectiveness and runtime overhead.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

OnTrack is a streaming monitor for LLM agents. It uses structure-aware optimal transport to compare an agent's steps and tool dependencies against recorded successful runs, and can alert users or block the agent in about a millisecond per step. It works under three access regimes: full reference (historical runs plus tool schemas), tool schemas only, and step logs only. Monitoring ranges from plan-violation detection to spotting loops, stalls and repeated tool calls. On SWE-bench trajectories, the first 8 steps rank failing runs below succeeding ones better than content-similarity baselines (+0.057 AUROC). An abort policy saves about 18% of compute, and 5 of 6 aborts were correct.

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

ReSI is a recursive safety improvement framework. Each round runs diverse red-teaming methods against the current target model, develops training recipes for the vulnerabilities found, and promotes the update with the largest safety gain among those passing a Pareto gate on capability retention. Across four dense and mixture-of-experts models it cuts mean X-Teaming multi-turn jailbreak attack success from 86.01% to 31.45%, versus 56.69% for the best frontier model evaluated (GPT-5.6-Luna). It also beats alignment baselines on nearly all safety evaluations while largely preserving general capability. It frames the goals as resistance to known threats and resilience to unforeseen ones, following R²AI.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Introduces AgenticBBO-Bench, a benchmark for LLM-agent black-box optimization across synthetic functions, hyperparameter optimization, database tuning, chip design and molecular design under a unified finite-budget protocol. Agentic BBO beats direct LLM methods in all five domains and the best numerical optimizers in four. Ablations show extra numerical tools don't consistently help, task semantics help more than specific priors, and numerical optimizers can absorb gains from agent-found trajectories. A five-task frontier challenge evaluates seven LLMs under the Codex agent harness, with GPT-6 Astra and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on the performance-cost Pareto frontier.

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

Paper measuring prefix-based training-data extraction in instruction-tuned open-weight LLMs under an empty prompt versus retrieved contexts of varying relevance (RAG), using paired item-level suffix scoring across three models. It finds extractable memorization has a context-robust core and a context-sensitive boundary: context suppresses some exposures but also enables new ones missed by prefix-only evaluation. This qualifies the claim that RAG reduces memorization risk and matters for threat-modeling deployed LLM systems.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The paper measures whether retrieved context, as in RAG, reduces LLM memorization. It does this with paired item-level probabilistic suffix extraction: each prefix-suffix pair is scored under an empty prompt and under retrieved contexts of varying relevance, across three open-weight instruction-tuned models. Extractable memorization splits into a context-robust core and a context-sensitive boundary. Context suppresses some marginal exposures but also enables new ones that prefix-only evaluation misses, which qualifies the claim that RAG lowers memorization risk.

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

Introduces Learnable Trust-Boundary Delimiters (LTBD), a defense against prompt injection that uses a few learnable delimiters to mark trusted user instructions versus untrusted external data, without changing LLM parameters. It reports 0.00% ASR on AlpacaFarm and 0.11-0.19% on TaskTracker, outperforming inference-time defenses and rivaling training-based ones with negligible overhead. It also holds up against adaptive attacks where the adversary knows the defense.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The paper proves, under GRH, a worst-case to average-case reduction inside any special genus of Hermitian lattices of fixed rank r≥2 over cyclotomic fields. It covers (H)SVP, HCVP, (Δ)BDD, DSP and DGS, at a poly(d)·det^{O_r(1)/d} loss in the approximation factor. The reduction is a random walk on the Kneser p-neighbour graph, and its fast mixing comes from spectral bounds on Hecke operators. It also gives a direct, tight security proof for a minimal Lattice Isomorphism Problem (LIP) based KEM. The proof rests on two assumptions: the KEM's lattice is indistinguishable from a random lattice of its genus, and ΔBDD is hard on that genus. This removes the need for the ad-hoc qΛ⊕(q+1)Λ lattice and the tightness loss from the dense sublattice.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 11 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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 2026🛡️ Security

This IACR eprint paper by Cong, Smart, Tanguy and Walter (Zama) shows how to eliminate Zero-Knowledge Proofs-of-Knowledge from the FHE-based malicious-secure MPC protocol of Smart (IMA, 2023), simplifying and modularizing its security proof. It introduces a formal security notion for "encrypted PRF" functionality within FHE schemes and proves the Deo et al. (CCS 2025) construction secure under this model, yielding a more practical and efficient MPC-from-FHE protocol.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This IACR ePrint paper by Yi-Fu Lai and Yu Yu breaks the blindness property of a lattice-based blind signature scheme presented at Crypto 2020, which uses a linear hash function framework instantiated over lattices. The authors first identify an overlooked bug in the scheme's original blindness security proof, then construct a concrete attack under an honest-key, honest-but-curious signer model by exploiting correlations between leaves of the scheme's tree structure, and discuss how the construction can be repaired.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

BRANCH is a bypass methodology for guardrail systems built from multiple scanners (prompt injection/jailbreak detectors). It uses a branching tree search that applies adversarial perturbations to individual scanners and selects techniques based on overall improvement across all scanners, decoupling bypass evaluation from attack signal optimization. It reports 100% attack success across 6 guardrail systems in 120 scenarios with 72% fewer queries and 4.5x lower wallclock time than established techniques, and transfers to 29 unseen guardrails, including 8 commercial black-box ones.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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 2026🛡️ Security

RECAST (Routing Evidence through Computation, Access, and Synthesized Tools) reframes retrieval-augmented generation as a sequential decision process: a lightweight RouterLM iteratively selects or formulates primitive/custom operations, a frozen CompilerLM turns custom operations into executable code, and a frozen AnswerLM produces the final answer once evidence is judged sufficient. RouterLM is trained with supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO, and the system reaches a 75.6% mean success rate across six heterogeneous benchmark families, beating the strongest large-model baseline by 15.9% and a training-free Gemini 3.5 Flash router by 5.0%, with strong zero-shot generalization on three held-out benchmarks. It targets tasks where evidence must be derived through filtering, aggregation, or computation across multiple sources rather than retrieved verbatim.

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

LOCAA is an LLM-based agentic system that automatically tunes lossy scientific data compressors by performing compression-in-the-loop search, using tool-integrated execution, compressor-aware guidance, and persistent memory instead of exhaustive parameter search. Evaluated across three scientific applications and five compressors on fixed-ratio compression and multi-constraint tuning tasks, it cuts evaluation trials by 1.98x–5.03x versus binary search and FRaZ, and persistent memory further reduces trials by 27.9% across repeated timesteps of the same field.

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

This paper proposes three evaluation screens — Decisive-Action BPB, Patch MCQ, and prefix-conditioned pass@K — 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

RunningTab is a framework that gives LLM agents performing 'direct workspace interaction' (searching and reading files from a terminal without indexing to produce a deliverable) an environment-side 'tab': a per-task record, maintained outside the model's context, of requirements the agent has declared, excerpts read with provenance, and listed-but-unopened files flagged as candidates. The agent can check each requirement against matching excerpts or candidates, mark it resolved or deferred with a reason, and is forced through a finish check if requirements remain open when it tries to complete the task. The authors show it consistently beats plain direct workspace interaction and model-internal record-keeping baselines across three benchmarks and three LLMs.

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

This paper introduces a detector for adversarial images targeting frozen vision-language models (VLMs) by building a 'response profile' from how an image interacts with a bank of general semantic prompts — using category-level statistics, inter-prompt relationships, deviation from clean reference distributions, and stability under weak image transforms, then classifying that compact profile with a lightweight model. Evaluated across multiple public datasets, several CLIP-style visual backbones, and gradient-based, optimization-based, automated, and spatial attacks, the method outperforms embedding-geometry baselines, generalizes partially to unseen attacks, and is tested against detector-aware adaptive attacks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Evaluates delivering security requirements from a governed security-by-design knowledge base (SbD-ToE) to a code-generating LLM through an MCP server at generation time. On DualGauge (59 Python tasks) the share passing all security tests rose from 44.1% to 78.0%; on BaxBench (28 backend scenarios) the share of functionally correct solutions with no successful exploit rose from 65% to 86%, matching the authors' Oracle Security Reminder (85%). The joint secure-and-functional metric did not improve significantly, since stricter code failed functional tests that fix unstated values. The study used one model and one generation per task, and it proposes measuring conformance with applicable requirements rather than only detecting known weaknesses.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The preprint tests whether security requirements from a governed security-by-design knowledge base (SbD-ToE), delivered to a code generator through a Model Context Protocol server at generation time, make AI-written code more secure. On DualGauge (59 Python tasks, LLM-judge scoring) the share of tasks passing all security tests rose from 44.1% to 78.0%. On BaxBench (28 backend scenarios with real exploits in containers) the share of functionally correct solutions with no successful exploit rose from 65% to 86%, comparable to the authors' Oracle Security Reminder (85%). The pre-specified joint secure-and-functional metric did not improve significantly, and the stricter code failed functional tests that fix values the task never states. The study used one model and one generation per task. The authors argue that current benchmarks only detect the weaknesses their evaluators were built for, and propose measuring conformance with the requirements that apply.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ResidualQuant is a KV cache quantization method for looped Transformers (models that repeatedly apply shared Transformer blocks across recurrent loops) that exploits the high similarity of KV states across loops by storing the final-loop KV states as a reference and encoding other loops as low-precision residuals, combined with least-squares scaling, rotations, and loop-wise mixed precision. It pushes KV quantization down to INT2 while staying close to BF16 accuracy, cutting theoretical KV storage by 80.7%, beating rotation-based baselines by up to 13% accuracy at equal memory budget, and on an RTX 5090 improving decode throughput up to 2.73x and peak throughput up to 4.15x via larger batch sizes.

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

SLDR is a post-fine-tuning defense against malicious fine-tuning-as-a-service attacks, where an attacker fine-tunes an aligned LLM on a legitimate-looking task to covertly erode its refusal behavior. The method trains a LoRA "recovery" adapter only on the layers found to have maximal and minimal signed safety sensitivity, and uses representation-based dynamic routing at inference time to activate that adapter only for malicious queries, leaving benign task performance untouched. On Llama3.1 fine-tuned for SST2, it cuts the average harmful-output score from 11.54 to 0.08 while keeping downstream accuracy, and stays near-zero even when up to 90% of the fine-tuning data is poisoned.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

SLDR is a post-fine-tuning defense that protects aligned LLMs from malicious fine-tuning-as-a-service attacks, which can quietly erode refusal behavior while keeping task performance intact. It trains a LoRA recovery adapter only on the layers with the most extreme (signed) safety sensitivity scores, then uses representation-based dynamic routing to activate that adapter solely for malicious queries at inference time. Evaluated across four model architectures, five downstream tasks, and four harmful-content benchmarks, it drives the average harmful score on Llama3.1/SST2 from 11.54 down to 0.08 while preserving downstream accuracy, and stays near zero even at poisoning ratios up to 0.9.

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

The paper introduces DIGHT, a co-adaptive framework that couples a text-conditioned digital-human interaction generator with a physics-based humanoid tracking policy to produce physically plausible two-humanoid interactions. Rather than collapsing executability and interaction-fidelity signals into one scalar reward, it applies physics-decoupled diffusion Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align the generator using criterion-specific preferences derived from tracking error, friction, floating, and simulator force feedback (contact occurrence, location, duration, magnitude), then uses the aligned generator's outputs to fine-tune the tracker. Experiments show improved physical plausibility and more reliable, faithful simulated humanoid interactions compared to prior tracking-based approaches.

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

DictXAI is a new explainable AI method that defines interpretable concepts directly in the input domain using a dictionary of predefined elements, rather than relying on inherently-interpretable input features or architecture-specific internal abstractions as prior XAI methods do. It computes a sparse code of the model input and attributes predictions to dictionary elements, letting it work across learned image bases, analytically-defined ECG waveforms, and experimentally acquired dictionaries, and the authors show it can trace AI malfunctions like Clever Hans effects to specific data artifacts while aiding human-AI alignment on biomedical signals.

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

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

This paper argues that training "model organisms" (models deliberately given alignment-relevant behaviors like backdoors, sycophancy, or spurious correlations) to a single behavior-installation objective produces unrealistic test subjects for interpretability research. The authors propose a three-objective validation framework (behavior installation, general-capability preservation, output naturalness) and show chat quality and chain-of-thought naturalness degrade substantially across common training recipes, with these degradations predicting how well interpretability methods such as logit lens recover the installed behavior. They introduce a model-merging-based multi-objective training approach and apply it to a new model-organism suite for demographic bias in clinical reasoning, finding DPO training preserves the base model better than supervised finetuning.

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

This paper runs a mechanism-isolating ablation of four document-structure treatments used in retrieval-augmented generation — structure-aligned chunking, LLM-generated chunk contexts, heading-path metadata, and hierarchical two-stage retrieval — under one protocol with matched chunk sizes and a semantically null placebo (shuffled heading paths) to control for the confound that any prepended text perturbs embeddings. Using a coverage-aware nDCG metric and document-clustered bootstrap with Holm correction across 200 Wikipedia Featured Articles (951 queries) and 1,585 QASPER papers (4,303 questions), it finds that structure-aligned chunking with real heading paths beats both contextualized fixed windows and the placebo, naive hierarchical retrieval hurts performance (traced to first-stage section recall failures), and gold structure beats LLM-induced structure on Wikipedia but not QASPER. Effect sizes are small but statistically significant and consistent across corpora, giving RAG practitioners evidence-based guidance on which structure-aware retrieval tricks actually help versus which are placebo effects.

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

This arXiv paper examines why current LLM-based automated vulnerability-patching benchmarks overstate model performance, identifying pitfalls at the agent level (prompting/tooling inflating success without improving patch quality), framework level (permission errors, infra bugs, timeout handling silently skewing scores), and dataset level (single PoC tests failing to verify root-cause fixes). The authors curate 112 historical bugs across 84 open-source C/C++, Go, and Rust projects, each annotated with PoC tests, regression tests, and developer-intent tests, and show that while PoC pass rates look high, developer-test pass rates stay low and barely improve with newer models. They provide guidelines for more rigorous, reproducible evaluation of LLM patching systems.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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 2026🛡️ Security

Krenn, Lesaignoux, Mir and Spini (AIT Austrian Institute of Technology) propose an "issuer inspection" mechanism for issuer-hiding attribute-based credentials (ABCs): an inspection authority can release time-bound keys that let verifiers locally flag presentations tied to a specific compromised issuer without unmasking other issuers or periods. They formalize the syntax/security model, give a generic construction, and instantiate it concretely using Groth's randomizable structure-preserving signatures, Schnorr-style proofs, and an adapted Gentry anonymous identity-based encryption scheme, showing the overhead stays practical. This addresses the accountability gap introduced when issuer-hiding ABCs conceal which authority issued a credential during verification.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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 2026🛡️ Security

Aggarwal, Morolia, and Stephens-Davidowitz present a new lattice-sieving algorithm for μ-SVP (finding an approximate shortest nonzero vector) that combines fast nearest-neighbor subroutines from heuristic sieving with a perturbation argument that yields a formally proven correctness guarantee. Its running time, roughly 2^0.3066n under a plausible spherical-code-size assumption (and 2^0.6078n using only proven bounds), is far faster than the prior best provable algorithm (2^0.802n, Liu-Wang-Xu-Zheng 2011) and close to the best heuristic rate (~2^0.2925n), narrowing the long-standing gap between proven and heuristic lattice attack runtimes. This matters for setting conservative, defensible hardness estimates and parameter choices in lattice-based post-quantum cryptography.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This arXiv paper proposes foundations for proactive LLM agents organized around three joint principles (3T: Task Capability, Temporal Allocation, Trust) and a five-dimensional design space (task scope, anticipation horizon, activation trigger, processing timing, intervention depth). It introduces PROACTIVITY-GYM, a simulation-based testbed with multi-day scenarios, stateful environments, and persona-conditioned simulated users, and reports evaluations across 23 model-harness configurations plus a 30-participant human study showing sharp trust declines after intervention misalignment and a preference for imperfect sleep-time assistance over interruptive help.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

World Models' Last Exam in Physics introduces a measurement-based benchmark of 40 controlled tasks across mechanics, optics, fluids, thermal/phase-change phenomena, electromagnetism, and surface tension, designed to test whether video world models generate physically consistent outputs. Each task pairs an initial image and prompt with predefined physical criteria, and a custom evaluator combines observability screening with task-specific quantitative measurements rather than relying on reference videos or model-based judgments. Testing eight video generation models across 1,280 generated videos found persistent physical inconsistencies, with the best model scoring only 57.76/100, and the evaluator showed higher agreement with human judgments than a vision-language model baseline.

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

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

ALIVE is a framework for first-frame-guided video editing that inserts objects so they coherently participate in interactions (e.g., being picked up or manipulated) rather than appearing static. The authors curate a 35,800-pair editing dataset combining 3D-rendered, model-generated and real-world videos plus pairs from ROSE, and train a vision-language model to predict interaction guidance from the edited first frame and an instruction naming the object. They introduce the ALIVE-interaction benchmark to measure interaction fidelity, source preservation and visual coherence via a unified VLM-based protocol, reporting a 43.9% Overall improvement on this benchmark and 4.4% on a general video object insertion benchmark over the strongest baseline, with VLM-predicted guidance adding a further 0.95-point gain.

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

This paper introduces BOTTLED, a benchmark testing whether LLM agents can autonomously convert their general task-solving ability into cheaper, scalable artifacts (e.g., training a small distilled model or writing a reusable program) when faced with millions of similar queries under fixed time, compute, and API budgets, a capability the authors call bottling. Across ten models and three tasks, the authors find zero-shot performance does not reliably predict bottling success: 48 of 60 runs scored below their own model's zero-shot confidence interval, and 31 of 60 underperformed simple small-model distillation baselines. Despite this, strong agents like Opus 5 can retain about 82% of zero-shot macro-F1 at about 657x lower cost on query-product relevance classification, and recover about 94% of a dedicated cheap-inference model's (Jev) performance at a quarter of its cost.

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

EC-RAG (Event Chain Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is a training-free framework for long-video question answering that organizes video content into an explicit, temporally ordered "event chain" instead of retrieving isolated frames or snippets. It partitions video into semantically coherent segments, fuses multi-modal signals (speech, text, visual cues) at the event level, and retrieves relevant events from the chain to answer queries, working as a plug-and-play addition to existing large video-language models (LVLMs) without extra training. Evaluated on Video-MME, MLVU, and LongVideoBench, it outperforms frame-level retrieval baselines, showing the value of modeling temporal/event structure for long-video understanding.

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

RAG-PIBench is a benchmark of 4,876 contextual examples for evaluating prompt-injection detectors embedded in retrieved content within Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. The authors use a leakage-aware construction pipeline with frozen train/validation/protected-test splits and compare keyword-based, semantic-reference, TF-IDF, and transformer-based detectors, finding DistilBERT achieves the best protected-test performance (F1 = 0.896, PR-AUC = 0.968) while TF-IDF with SVM or logistic regression remains competitive. It highlights the risk that naive benchmark construction can leak information between splits, inflating reported detector performance for RAG prompt-injection defenses.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Lachesis is a lifetime-aware KV cache placement layer for LLM agent serving that sits between the agent harness and the serving engine, deciding whether to write each KV cache segment to HBM or high-bandwidth flash (HBF) based on its expected lifetime. The authors identify temporal, structural, and inter-worker axes along which KV cache lifetime diverges in agentic workloads, and show in trace-driven simulation that lifetime-aware placement extends HBF's write-endurance-limited lifetime by 1.19–3.13x over naive HBM-first placement, reaching 3.3–12.2 device-years. This matters for serving infrastructure as agentic workloads with long-lived, multi-agent context accumulation push memory capacity demands beyond what HBM alone can economically provide.

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

This IACR ePrint paper examines the post-quantum security of Bitcoin bridges that rely on off-chain garbled-circuit evaluation of succinct proofs to validate withdrawals, where input labels encoding the proof must be committed on-chain. The authors show current pairing-based proving systems are vulnerable to quantum attacks, and that swapping to post-quantum proving systems shrinks circuit size but drastically inflates proof size, forcing proofs to span multiple Bitcoin blocks and raising on-chain cost. They outline research directions to improve proof efficiency, circuit representation, and label encoding for quantum-resistant bridge designs.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper introduces Quantizer-Aligned Recalibration (QuAR), a single-pass, backprop-free test-time adaptation method for quantized vision transformers that recalibrates activations at frozen quantizers to counter distribution shift without updating model parameters. On ImageNet-C with ViT-B across 3-, 4-, 6- and 8-bit weight/activation precision, QuAR beats the strongest backprop-free baselines by up to 4.00 points while cutting latency 46% and adding only 0.17 MB memory overhead, with gains holding across continual streams, label shift, seven OOD suites, and three other backbones.

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

This arXiv methodology paper extends empirical Bayes g-modeling, which estimates a latent prior over regression coefficients from data, to the case where the entire prior distribution depends on covariates. The authors show the unrestricted nonparametric MLE (NPMLE) of this covariate-dependent prior is ill-posed, and resolve it by introducing an "infinite Mixture-of-Expertizing" class of conditional priors, proving that the resulting NPMLE is exactly a softmax-gated Mixture of Experts whose number of experts is determined by the data rather than fixed in advance. They give two exemplar-based estimation algorithms with automatic expert selection, a post-hoc aggregation step for interpretability, and theoretical results (Lipschitz continuity of conditional priors, universal approximation of continuous gating functions by aggregated softmax gates), validated on synthetic and real datasets.

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

This IACR ePrint paper (published TCHES 2027) presents a new cryptanalysis technique for the Lattice Isomorphism Problem that embeds LIP into a shortest-vector-problem instance on a different lattice than the one used in Hawk's specification, allowing attackers to integrate "hints" — partial information on the secret key obtained via side-channel attacks or other leakage. Using the LeakyLWEEstimator tool, the authors show Hawk signatures themselves leak exploitable information about the secret key, eroding Hawk-1024's security by roughly 11 bits, and apply the framework to resolve an open side-channel problem from TCHES 2024 plus discuss further fault-injection attack paths. Hawk is a lattice-based signature scheme submitted to NIST's second post-quantum signature call, making this a concrete key-recovery cryptanalysis relevant to PQC migration planning.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This IACR ePrint paper proposes and benchmarks a non-interactive Proof of Possession (PoP) for the code-based post-quantum KEM HQC, built using the VOLE-in-the-Head (VOLEitH) zero-knowledge paradigm, to solve the practical problem of issuing KEM-based certificates needed by protocols like KEMTLS. The authors integrate their HQC PoP into the ACME certificate-issuance protocol and compare it against existing PoP schemes for Kyber and FrodoKEM, showing Kyber issues certificates faster but at the cost of protocol or NIST-standard compatibility, while their HQC-based PoP keeps compatibility and achieves smaller proof sizes, which matters under unstable-network conditions due to larger KEM-based CSRs.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

An IACR ePrint paper presenting K-LMS, an experimental variant of the NIST-standardized LMS hash-based post-quantum signature scheme in which the underlying hash is swapped for Korean primitives: the LSH-256 hash function (reference and vectorized) and a Tandem-DM double-block-length construction built from the CHAM, LEA, and ARIA block ciphers. The authors implement a non-invasive backend-swapping bridge over the reference LMS code and benchmark keygen/sign/verify latency, key/signature sizes, memory, and parameter sweeps, finding that hash substitution doesn't change key/signature sizes but that two measurement pitfalls (hash dispatch overhead, and software vs. hardware-accelerated SHA-256 baselines) can shift performance comparisons by an order of magnitude or 6x respectively. They report LSH-256 K-LMS signing on par with SHA-256 LMS in software, and 3.3-3.9x faster than a prior K-XMSS implementation because LMS needs fewer hash calls per Winternitz step than XMSS.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

StOMR is a new "stateful" model for Oblivious Message Retrieval (OMR) — the FHE-based technique letting a recipient scan an untrusted bulletin board for their messages without revealing which ones are theirs, used in anonymous messaging and blockchain privacy. By letting sender and receiver keep lightweight private state (established via a new OMR-KEM key-encapsulation scheme) instead of relying purely on public-key FHE, StOMR shrinks sender-published signals by roughly 550x, 650x, and 178x compared to PerfOMR, SophOMR, and InstantOMR respectively, while matching detector performance; implemented in C++ and published at ACM CCS.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This arXiv paper studies SKILL.md files — the natural-language metadata describing modular AI Agent Skills — as an attack surface, demonstrating semantic supply-chain attacks against real ClawHub skills. Using text-only manipulations, the authors manipulate embedding-based Discovery retrieval (up to 86% pairwise win rate, 80% Top-10 placement), bias agent Selection toward adversarial variants (77.6% average success), and evade Governance blocking verdicts (36.5%-100% evasion), showing that skill metadata is operational text that shapes agent trust rather than passive documentation.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper runs a paired, reproducibility-focused evaluation of two System-1 single-forward-pass decision models, open-weight Laya and hosted Jev, across 11 typed decision points that agent harnesses make constantly: tool selection, RAG relevance gating, prompt-injection detection, and zero-shot model routing, using 7,283 base cases plus 6,640 robustness variants from 18 public sources. Jev beats Laya on 9 of 11 decision points by 10.8-46.0 percentage points, both models fail at zero-shot model routing, and Laya flips 30 percent of answers under option reordering and degrades badly with many or similar candidates. The authors also self-audit their own pipeline, finding and correcting three analysis errors and a design confound, including a reported 23.9 percent cost saving that was actually 4.3 percent, and gate accuracy conflated with end-to-end quality.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

MemPilot is a framework that lets LLM agents curate memory on demand rather than query-agnostically, using a multi-step policy trained via reinforcement learning to choose between retrieving from pre-built memory or delegating query-specific curation of raw multimodal history to heterogeneous LLMs and VLMs. The policy controls evidence amount, curation instructions, model choice, and visual access, and is optimized with objective-wise advantage decoupling and prefix-based marginal utility estimation to balance performance, cost, and latency. Tested across five multimodal agent-memory benchmarks, it achieves broader performance-cost-latency trade-off frontiers than existing trade-off-aware baselines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

MedPrune is a multi-agent framework for medical visual question answering that models the diagnostic process as a heterogeneous communication graph of specialist agents across departments, then dynamically prunes both nodes (irrelevant specialist agents, via reinforcement learning) and edges (low-value intra-/inter-departmental connections) to cut redundant communication. The authors report it beats existing multi-agent baselines on medical VQA benchmarks under both full-set and few-shot settings while improving token efficiency and adversarial robustness.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

OVAL (Output-Aware Local page bases) is a training-free method for encoding KV cache pages in page-sparse attention, designed so that retrieval directly accounts for how approximation errors affect the value-weighted attention output rather than just estimating attention scores. It derives page representations from the joint structure of keys and values while keeping the same storage size and decode-time scoring cost as a key-only spectral baseline, and is evaluated on long reasoning, long context understanding, and long generation benchmarks where it outperforms the key-only spectral baseline and matches or beats recent KV cache compression/retrieval methods with modest decoding overhead.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper develops a sharper theoretical landscape analysis for Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning, introducing LoRA-RIP, a data-dependent restricted-isometry metric that measures how well-conditioned the cross-entropy objective is along LoRA-relevant low-rank directions. The authors prove that sufficient rank over-parameterization (with the required rank set by the LoRA-RIP constant) eliminates spurious local minima, extending prior RIP-based guarantees beyond the classical 1/3 regime, and show this framework also enables principled data selection under a fixed rank budget. Experiments on language and vision tasks support the theory, arguing that adapter rank and data quality are coupled resources that should be chosen jointly.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ANT (Agent Network Traffic) is a dataset and benchmark for auditing LLM agent behavior from network traffic without inspecting private user content, covering 3,114 execution episodes across 20 tasks and five scenarios, with 276,417 bidirectional flows and 40,049 behavior-primitive segments organized into 47 macro groups. The authors benchmark 13 traffic-analysis baselines on three tasks — agent risk identification, scenario recognition, and behavior primitive classification — finding that methods struggle when malicious workflows mimic benign tasks and when scenarios share similar traffic patterns, while primitive classification works better for frequent, distinctive macro groups than for rare or semantically similar ones.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

ANT (Agent Network Traffic) is a dataset and benchmark for auditing LLM agent behavior purely from observed network traffic, without inspecting private user content. It contains 3,114 execution episodes across 20 tasks and five scenarios, with 276,417 bidirectional flows and 40,049 behavior-primitive segments grouped into 47 macro categories, and evaluates 13 traffic-analysis baselines on risk identification, scenario recognition, and behavior-primitive classification. Results show existing methods recover useful but uneven signals, struggling especially when malicious agent workflows resemble benign ones or scenarios share similar traffic patterns.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

HeuFouFT is a task-guided framework for selecting which frequency coordinates to train in Fourier fine-tuning (FourierFT), replacing fixed uniform or Gaussian band-pass coordinate selection with a search driven by downstream task performance. It initializes three metaheuristic optimizers (GA-SA, PSO, Cuckoo Search) from a lightweight block-level probe intensity map, using a Random Forest to filter candidate coordinate sets before proxy fine-tuning. On the E2E benchmark with GPT-2-Medium, all three variants beat random-uniform and Gaussian FourierFT and LoRA, with PSO beating the LoCA baseline on four of five metrics while using 37.6% fewer trainable spectral coefficients and only 15-18% of full fine-tuning FLOPs.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv paper introduces RAISED (Robust Attack Invariance through Self-Distillation), a training framework that defends tool-using LLM agents against indirect prompt injection without the utility degradation seen in prior training-based defenses. The authors show existing defenses cause distributional drift that makes models wrongly refuse legitimate tool-output-guided steps on benign tasks, then fix this by having a model generate its own tool-use scenarios and self-distill to match clean-context behavior on both clean and injected trajectory variants. Results show reduced attack success rate on injected tool responses while preserving performance on agentic and general-purpose benchmarks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

ImproveAnyTask is an autonomous post-training harness that automates adapting general-purpose LLMs to specific tasks under a limited compute budget, structuring the process into error attribution, update-direction selection, and executable model updates via generated training data and configs with small-scale validation before full runs. Across 11 tasks it reports mean gains of 18.29 and 11.97 percentage points on Base and Instruct models respectively, with validated strategies retained for reuse in future adaptation cycles.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper proposes AI-decision checkpoints, explicit moments in business process development where process developers must evaluate whether to adopt, constrain, or reject AI-candidate sub-processes built with LLMs, RAG, or AI agents, based on expected effects on time, cost, quality, flexibility, and legal or organisational constraints. The checkpoints are embedded in a six-module BPM teaching lifecycle covering process modeling, simulation, workflow execution with AI agents, and process mining, piloted via a fictitious customer-onboarding teaching case with formative observations drawn from instructor logs and student artifacts. It addresses a curriculum gap where AI is still treated as a bolt-on rather than a first-class design element in BPM education.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

IACR ePrint paper constructing and implementing the first one-round threshold signing protocol for the hash-based post-quantum signature schemes XMSS and SPHINCS+, producing signatures that verify unmodified against RFC 8391 and FIPS 205. The approach shares the secret key among t-of-n signing parties and evaluates the signing algorithm homomorphically using threshold FHE over discrete CKKS, achieving 3.4ms amortized per hash and 0.69s online threshold XMSS signing.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This IACR eprint paper presents a resource-efficient FPGA hardware architecture for the NIST-selected HQC post-quantum KEM that defends against power-based side-channel attacks by reusing otherwise-idle KECCAK hardware to inject scrambling dynamic power during decoding, adding less than 0.5 percent area overhead compared to masking/shuffling countermeasures. The fully parameterized design supports HQC-128/192/256 and was prototyped on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA (139 MHz, 11,489 LUTs, 6,785 FFs, 4 DSPs), with functional correctness verified via NIST Known Answer Tests and leakage suppression confirmed via Test Vector Leakage Assessment.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

GlimpseDNN is a model-agnostic framework that uses a stochastic leakage model to visualize, layer-by-layer, what physical leakage information a deep neural network extracts during profiled side-channel analysis (SCA) to recover secret keys. The authors (Trevor Yap and Shivam Bhasin, NTU) validate it on simulated traces and public datasets (ASCADf, ASCADr, ASCADf_desync50, ASCADf_desync100), showing it can reveal leakages even in deeper network layers when they are not visible in raw traces, with applications to designing more side-channel-resistant hardware.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security