426 results for “Ant”

Ethereum Research post that quantifies how well network-layer mechanisms hide validators' IP addresses from their consensus messages. Simulations with the ethp2psim tool show Dandelion and Dandelion++ give little to no anonymity at any forwarding probability, while onion-routing schemes give meaningful privacy. Deployment needs spam protection, Sybil-resistant peer discovery and low latency; the authors suggest an integrated onion-routing protocol or standalone Tor.

ethresear.chpaperPublished and added 2 Nov 2026🛡️ Security

The paper treats a benchmark as an empirical measure over item difficulty and formalizes two failure modes: measure mismatch (benchmark difficulty distribution differs from the intended one) and coverage gaps (uncovered difficulty regions that hide localized training progress). It proposes two diagnostic metrics with theoretical guarantees and analyzes 25 popular benchmarks across 7 domains using estimated item difficulties. It also introduces BenchFill, a difficulty-targeted item rewriting algorithm that reduces local coverage gaps.

huggingface.copaperAdded 31 Oct 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

This preprint proposes a unified post-training quantization framework for large language models. It derives a Hessian-guided approximation of the output change caused by joint weight and activation quantization, using a tractable Fisher approximation. Quantization ranges, linear transformations and weight rounding are optimized together under one output-sensitivity objective. The authors report gains over state-of-the-art transformation and rounding methods in channel-wise and block-wise settings.

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

MAServeBench is a benchmark that treats multi-agent collaboration as a configurable dimension of LLM serving workloads. Its composable stages model how agents coordinate and exchange context in documented multi-agent workflows, and Hierarchical Semantic Traces record operations and dependencies for reproducible comparisons. Task-linked measurements tie workloads to GPU/NPU behavior, showing serving efficiency does not always mean timely task completion. Code is released.

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

A five-task benchmark tests multimodal LLM color judgment against CIE colorimetric ground truth: AWB pair judgment, skin-tone bias direction, CCT estimation, Delta E 2000 pair ordering, and color naming under changing illuminants. Eight endpoints were tested. On ColorChecker-24 stimuli, closed frontier models reach CCT MAE of 715-1056 K versus 1358-2133 K for open-weight models, and a non-ColorChecker control shows this gap is partly template-dependent.

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

Kolesnikov and Novoselov give block basis reduction (BKZ) algorithms for linear codes that need polynomial or quasi-polynomial numbers of calls to a minimum weight codeword oracle at fixed block size. The earlier Ghentiyala and Stephens-Davidowitz bounds are exponential. The paper adds a truncated BKZ and a DeepBKZ variant, with an implementation for block sizes 2 to 24 and approximation-factor estimates on random codes.

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

AutoBench-CT is a modular benchmark for constant-time analysis tools, with manually verified per-violation ground truth across 64 cryptographic tasks. It scores seven tools on operational performance, detection quality and usability. The authors explain why CT-grind (2010) is still the most used tool, list recurring limitations across tools, and propose a composite pipeline for stronger constant-time guarantees. Accepted at ACSAC 2026.

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

DICE is a blockchain-powered federated learning (BCFL) algorithm for customizing large pretrained models among untrusted Web3 participants. It combines dynamic progressive learning and model slice verification, so hardware-limited participants can train part of the model, with a tree-structured committee consensus protocol and an efficiency-driven incentive scheme to scale to more data holders. Experiments cover vision and language models.

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

PrivacyEvalClaw is a tool-augmented deliberative agent that audits privacy leakage in LLM jailbreak responses. The paper is by Krishna Kanth Nakka and co-authors, and it was accepted to AACL-IJCNLP 2026 (arXiv 2610.36711, cs.CR). The tweet gives only the title, authors and venue, so the method and results are not described.

x.compaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

PrivacyEvalClaw is a tool-augmented deliberative agent for auditing privacy leakage in LLM responses produced under jailbreak prompts. By Krishna Kanth Nakka and five co-authors, the paper is on arXiv (cs.CR) and accepted to AACL-IJCNLP 2026. The fetched post gives only the title, authors and venue, so method details and results are not available here.

x.compaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI

QbD-VLA is a mixed-precision post-training quantization method for vision-language-action models. It uses task success from short closed-loop evaluations to assign weight and activation bit widths, accounting for interactions between components. On four VLA models across all four LIBERO suites it holds task performance at about 4-bit weights and under 6-bit activations. The gain on SIMPLER is small. On a Franka Research 3 arm, X-VLA shows no detected loss, but π0.5 fails.

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

Secure Transaction Verification and Authorization (STVA) is a draft Standards Track ERC (created October 2026) by @MATOBOYCRYPTO65. It proposes structured human-readable metadata and semantic intent for transactions and UserOperations, an independent simulation and verification interface, and scoped, revocable capability tokens for privileged operations. It targets blind signing and frontend supply-chain attacks, citing the February 2025 Bybit Safe multisig theft. The page gives only the abstract, motivation and core concepts.

ethresear.chpaperPublished and added 28 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

AgentAnchor is a session-keyed behavioral watermark for attributing LLM agent trajectory logs to an owner. It derives per-step keys from a secret key, a fresh public session ID and semantic observation states, and embeds parity evidence through a KL-bounded exponential tilt. The paper formalizes learned cross-session forgery, and a trusted verifier checks disputed logs using wrong-key calibration and abstention.

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

AgentAnchor is a session-keyed behavioral watermark that lets an agent owner prove ownership of a trajectory log. Each step key comes from a secret key, a fresh public session identifier and semantic states of recent observations. Parity evidence is embedded through a KL-bounded exponential tilt of action choices. A trusted verifier checks disputed logs without rerunning the agent, using wrong-key calibration and abstention. The paper also formulates a learned cross-session forgery threat.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 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

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

Know, then Draw is a learning paradigm for visual generation that uses autoregressive pretraining to acquire semantic knowledge and diffusion post-training for high-fidelity rendering. Controlled comparisons find autoregression the stronger pretraining objective, and semantic quality matters more than AR-only generation quality. This motivates a purely semantic tokenizer trained with language supervision only. A 3B text-to-image model trained in 6,600 H100 GPU-hours scores 86 on GenEval and 87 on DPG-Bench.

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

VideoLVR is a method that lets video multimodal LLMs build latent visual evidence from local regions at relevant moments and reason over it interleaved with text tokens. A visual token prediction objective, defined over a vocabulary derived from the input video, supervises the latents. It extends to reinforcement learning with sampled visual tokens as actions and final-answer rewards, and improves fine-grained video benchmarks without much context growth.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 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

Tessera is a training-free evidence delivery layer for web retrieval-augmented generation. It rebuilds retrieved pages' HTML into fine-grained evidence units, each completed with page title, section path and table headers, then packs the relevant units into the reader context at the same token budget. Tracing evidence over full English Wikipedia shows chunking loses table and infobox content. Tessera adds 5 to 6 accuracy points on three QA benchmarks and carries over to agentic search.

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

DCKV is a differentiable codec for the prompt KV cache of hybrid language models, which keep a KV cache only in their few full-attention layers. Transform, quantizer and entropy models (conditioned on prompt tokens and already decoded neighbouring positions) are trained end to end against a frozen model. On Qwen3.5-2B it stores a token in over 55 times fewer bytes than bf16 with at most 1.8 points lost on three long-context benchmarks, and over 100 times fewer with at most 3.6 points lost.

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

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

AlgOssa is a decentralized secure aggregation protocol built on Ossa, a generic committee-aided, single-server construction for one-shot clients (following OPA and Willow, CRYPTO 2025). Ossa realizes secure aggregation with non-selective abort against a malicious server. AlgOssa adds Algorand-style sortition to rotate leaders and committees, bounds the chance of an honest server, and gives eventual delivery. Classical and post-quantum routes are evaluated.

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

Poly2MsgLeaks is a profiled chosen-ciphertext power-analysis attack on the SMAUG-T (TiMER parameter set) post-quantum KEM that recovers the full 512-coefficient PKE secret from six traces on an STM32F415. It recovers 999 of 1,000 unseen secrets and proves an incorrect key is released with probability at most 2^-2095.6. Single-write message assembly and a two-share masked P2M resisted the evaluated six-execution attack.

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

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

"Cheap AI-Assisted Reverse Engineering and What It Will Do" is an October 2026 arXiv paper (Computers and Society) arguing that generative AI strains the law of reverse engineering. AI systems can identify hardware components, extract firmware, decompile object code and clone apps, which removes the cost barrier that laws rely on. The authors map these practices onto trade secret, copyright, anti-circumvention, computer misuse and contract law, and sketch possible legal responses with their trade-offs.

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

ZMAC+ is a tweakable-block-cipher MAC (List and Nandi, ToSC 2017) with claimed beyond-birthday-bound security. This ePrint paper (2026/2647) shows a tag-swap attack: for two-block tags, a distinguisher and a fresh-message forgery with constant success probability using O(2^{n/2}) queries in the ideal-TBC model. It also corrects a counting error in the published Lemma 4 and proposes a repaired variant with an adaptive PRF bound of order q^2/2^{n+min(n,t)}.

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

An empirical study of security concerns in the OpenClaw AI personal assistant framework, using 25K+ posts from 13 subreddits (162 security-relevant) and 358 security-tagged GitHub issues (180 retained). It maps 521 CWE instances across 59 weakness types, concentrated in access control, sensitive-data exposure, injection and unsafe execution. It extracts 543 practitioner mitigations into seven strategies and reconstructs a sensitive-data exposure path with dummy secrets.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 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

Subexponential Algorithms for LWE via Rejection Sampling on Superlattices is an ePrint paper by Ligeng Fan, Changpeng Shao, Hongbo Li and Dingkang Wang. It extends the Ducas, Engelberts and Loyer superlattice framework to give a provable classical search-LWE algorithm for prime q in [n^2, 2n^2], using m=4n samples and time and space exp(O(n/ln ln n)). A second variant runs in 2^((1/2+o(1))n/ln R) for general parameters. It resolves a gap left by Kirchner and Fouque.

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

SentryBench is a benchmark for tool-using LLM agents in public-safety deployments. It scores attack success, over-refusal (missing a real emergency) and over-reaction (unwarranted action) on a cost-sensitive frontier, using real emergency-call transcripts, disaster messages and injection payloads. Across 840 episodes on three frontier models and three defenses, refuse-more caution pushed over-refusal to 100 percent on two models, while a trust-gating wrapper gave the lowest harm.

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

Anis Bkakria's ePrint 2026/2638 gives polynomial-time decision attacks on Known-Covariance Ring-LWE (KCov-RLWE), the assumption Micciancio and Suhl introduced for simulation-secure threshold encryption. The public sample and covariance hint form a bordered Gram matrix whose determinant leaks a residual that differs between real and uniform samples. The attacks cover broad prime-modulus families at ring rank one and transfer to composite moduli with an odd prime divisor. Power-of-two moduli are not covered, and the paper does not break the full threshold-encryption scheme.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

SymLift is a compile-free vulnerability detection framework for context-incomplete code fragments. A fine-tuned LLM lifts control-flow, data-flow, memory and resource relations into a constrained LLVM-like IR. A parser turns the IR into facts, and Datalog rules derive findings with derivation traces. On Juliet function-level fragments Clang compilation success falls to 12.00%, while SymLift's completion rate drops only 1.17 points. SymLift-Qwen-7B reaches Target-F1 94.41% on FormAI and 91.66% micro-F1 on MegaVul.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

SymLift is a compile-free vulnerability detection framework for code fragments that lack project context. A fine-tuned LLM reconstructs control-flow, data-flow, memory and resource relations as a constrained LLVM-like IR, and a deterministic parser turns it into facts for Datalog rules that give findings with derivation traces. SymLift-Qwen-7B reaches 94.41% Target-F1 on FormAI and 91.66% micro-averaged Target-F1 on MegaVul.

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

Falko Strenzke's ePrint 2026/2635 presents a multi-target second-preimage attack on message hashing in HSS/LMS and XMSS with SHA-256 and SHA-256/192. It herds chaining states from many collected signatures into one state, defeating the key and leaf-index prefix. With 2^64 signatures, SHA-256 cost falls from 2^256 to about 2^166 (2^156 at maximal message length). SHAKE256 parameter sets are unaffected.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

A stage-aware visual attribution framework for Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) that explains a robot's action choices. It identifies "instruction-stage insensitivity", where existing explainers give similar outputs across navigation stages. The method builds action-conditioned temporal instruction-visual attributions, aggregates relevant historical evidence by stage, and applies an instruction-guided spatial filter. It improves attribution quality across several VLN policies and benchmarks, helps diagnose failure cases, and was tested on a Unitree G1 robot.

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

This paper presents a pipeline that uses persona-conditioned vision language models to surface interpretive ambiguity in visualizations. Topic-relevant personas elicit candidate takeaways, and a Target-Pattern-Scope framework lets LLM judges label statement pairs as Compatible, Disjoint or Opposing, which are summarized in an ambiguity profile. The authors benchmark VLMs on chart comprehension per chart type, check labeling against human annotations, and run case studies on public visualizations and a redesign.

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

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

Sliding Networks is a family of residual network structures with a joint width and depth scaling recipe that keeps both locally maximal feature learning and feature diversity in the residual stream. The key quantity is the ratio N_flat/(N_sharp L) tending to a constant alpha, and Half Copy correlated initialization can relax the shape constraints. Residual-MLP experiments support an SDE limit, but language-model experiments show performance differences under regrouping at fixed parameter count.

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

VeilDNS is a DNS-native protocol that uses a post-quantum KEM and AEAD to encrypt DNS questions and answers and authenticate the resolver in one UDP exchange on port 53, preserving the DNS wire format. It has stateless and stateful modes plus optional forward secrecy from the second query. Against ML-DSA-authenticated DoT/DoH/DoQ it reports up to 3.5x higher cold-session throughput and 13.7x fewer bytes; Tamarin proves query confidentiality, response authentication and forward secrecy.

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

RAQ-MLA (Role-Aware Quantization for Multi-Head Latent Attention Caches) is a training-free method for quantizing the MLA KV cache. It fits a separate invertible transform to the compressed latent (tuned for attention-weighted value error) and to the positional key (tuned for score perturbation). It reaches about 2.5 bits per element, a 6.5x gain in theoretical KV-cache capacity, with near-lossless reasoning and coding results on four MLA models.

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

This paper builds a controlled French surface-variant benchmark with seven task types and 4,200 original-low-high triplets (12,600 inputs), covering missing apostrophes and diacritics and keyboard typos. Six models from two LLM families lose accuracy and show worse Brier score and NLL as perturbation grows. Keyboard typos hurt most. Calibration temperatures fitted on original inputs transfer to variants, and combining them with input restoration improves reliability further.

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

BARBICAN is a fail-closed prompt-injection gateway for MCP tool mediation. This paper shows its arbitration classifier ran on tokenizer-mangled text for a whole evaluation. Fixing it raised AUC from 0.392 to 0.855 while system recall fell from 80.67% to 80.34%. The routed band is 96.82% malicious, so deletion ablations mislead without substitution experiments and class-balance reporting.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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

GordieHowe is a language, certifying compiler and zero-knowledge proof system for building anonymous credentials on standardized signatures (ECDSA, RSA, ML-DSA). It proves an ECDSA-signed mobile driving license presentation in 64.8 ms with a 276 KiB proof, 10.1x faster than Google's Longfellow, and an ML-DSA-44 signature in 87.3 ms with at least 116 bits of quantum security. Compiler output and security theorems are checked in Lean. It introduces series-parallel IOPs and extends the BCS transformation in the QROM.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Rentaro Shiba and Tetsu Iwata prove a tight multi-key security bound for the FX construction (the DESX generalization) in the quantum ideal cipher model. Security holds up to about 2^((n+κ)/3) total classical and quantum oracle queries against fully adaptive adversaries, for any number of keyed instances μ≥1. This improves their ToSC 2026 bound and matches the offline Simon's algorithm attack in the exponent.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 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

Learning with Quantization and Worst Case Lattice Problems is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2613) by Ziwei Hong and Zhongqiu Fang. It proves that search and decision learning with quantization (LWQ) with public dither is as hard as quantum GapSVP and SIVP on arbitrary lattices, using the randomized polar lattice quantizer of Lyu et al. It also shows that a complete reduction for interval uniform error LWE (MAMBA Frost) and hardness at concrete MAMBA parameters are not established.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

SOMA (Sharpness-aware Orthogonalized Momentum Algorithm) combines sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) with the Muon optimizer for LLM training. It avoids SAM's extra gradient computation by using stale, purely stochastic gradient noise as the adversarial perturbation. The authors prove sample complexity does not depend on perturbation direction, study robustness to heavy-tailed gradient noise, and test SOMA against post-training quantization degradation and catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning.

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

MART-GRPO is a variant of group-relative policy optimization for vision-language-action (VLA) reinforcement learning. It uses a LoRA-fine-tuned VLM to find the last visible error without recovery in a failed rollout video, keeps failure feedback up to that point, and drops it afterward. Martingale stopping conditions show this preserves the expected GRPO gradient and can reduce covariance. With OpenVLA-OFT on RoboTwin 2.0, it raises success rates over full-trajectory GRPO across multiple tasks.

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

BiLoCo is a post-training quantization method for FP4 LLMs that adds low-rank corrections whose left and right factors are stored as binary ±1 sign vectors instead of BF16. This uses 16x less storage per rank-one component and lets the correction run on CUDA cores alongside the FP4 tensor-core GEMM. On 4B to 72B LLMs it matches or improves memory-matched SVDQuant. A fused B300 kernel is at most 11% slower than FP4-only GEMM at batch size 1 for ranks up to 512.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 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

Sentiment-Injected Sentence Embeddings (SISE) addresses a finding across eleven frozen text encoders (2021 to 2026): linear probes recover sentence polarity at up to 91.3% accuracy, but cosine similarity separates polarity by only 0.003-0.064. A small supervised-contrastive head (0.13M-0.69M parameters) trained on CPU raises retrieval MAP by up to 26 points, but the 128-d head loses 38-41 STS-B Spearman points. The paper also releases the Attribute Alignment Gap diagnostic.

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

This paper measures how hints such as "[Source] thinks the answer is (X)" shift LLM answers on MMLU questions, varying the source between a professor, a friend and a dog across Qwen, Gemma and SmolLM models. The shift fits an exponential tilt: a roughly constant mean change in the hinted answer's log-odds, with susceptibility largely shared across sources. The shift persists when the source is declared inaccurate or the prompt warns against trusting it. Synthetic experiments show how KL-regularized reward training could produce this pattern.

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

This paper presents an offline evaluation harness for a production merchant-facing conversational agent. It stays reproducible when live backend data changes and can be regenerated when it goes stale. Used as the fitness function for GEPA prompt optimization under a correctness gate against reward hacking, it shrinks the full prompt surface by 3.5-7.6% without losing held-out correctness, across three subject-model families.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

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

EpiSEM-Bench is an executable benchmark of 300 matched unsafe/safe task pairs across six domains. It tests whether tool-using LLM agents take prohibited actions when a tool response omits a safety-relevant fact, even though the request is benign and all returned statements are true. It finds large variation across ten models, and recovery access cuts unsafe execution for all ten.

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

BeNice! is a post-training method for looped language models that broadcasts the final recurrence's KV-cache into the first recurrence, so one cache can serve all recurrences. It follows a first stage that uses stochastic depth in pretraining to induce contractive residual dynamics. It matches standard finetuning's unshared validation perplexity and composes with multi-latent attention, Kimi delta attention and fp8, mxfp8 and nvfp4 cache quantization. In simulated low-memory long-context inference it raises cache hit rates by up to 31.4% and throughput by up to 23.6%, and cuts p90 time-to-first-token by up to 83.6%.

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

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

This October 2026 arXiv paper evaluates four LLM inference optimization families on Apple Silicon: KV-cache pruning, speculative decoding, ported GPU kernels and post-training quantization. Tests run on four Apple machines with a single-request decode workload, plus matched RTX 4090 runs. KV-cache pruning reaches 1.75x throughput on Apple, all tested speculative decoding methods reduce throughput, and ported kernels give up to 1.20x.

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

Efficient Laconic Oblivious Transfer with Malicious Security is an ePrint paper (2026/2593, ASIACRYPT 2026 revision) giving the first maliciously secure laconic OT that uses its primitives only as black boxes. It adds equivocal vector commitments and maliciously secure witness encryption to the commitment-plus-witness-encryption paradigm. Security is proven in the UC model against malicious senders and in the context model against malicious receivers. Instantiations use LWE and bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumptions in the standard model.

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

Paper on prompt injection delivered through forensic evidence, where the seized device's contents are attacker-controlled and the examiner must read them. It extends the anti-forensic model to cover manipulation of the reasoning layer and gives a taxonomy (objective, technique, payload location, concealment). Three proof-of-concept attacks on an LLM-assisted analysis pipeline change a reported conclusion, write attacker-chosen content to the analyst workstation, and trigger outbound network traffic. Mitigations are proposed.

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

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

PQCD-TLS is a post-quantum TLS handshake that binds confirmation codes into chained key derivation, so a faulty signature or KEM verification step causes a key mismatch and handshake failure. The authors build confirmation-code frameworks for ML-DSA and Falcon signatures and for ML-KEM, HQC and DAWN, with unpredictability proofs. Across 48 configurations, handshake latency overhead stays below 1%.

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

Paper (arXiv, 21 October 2026) on structural false negatives in LLM vulnerability discovery harnesses. Starting from Knostic's OpenAnt and raptor, then 10 more open-source harnesses, the authors map 13 points where code selection, filtering, and finding storage or merging drop vulnerabilities. One file was dropped by six harnesses before the model saw it, five without notice. It covers attacker evasion, content-steered verdicts, prompt injection, and design principles and tests.

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

Rounded Gaussians are Discrete Gaussians is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2583) by Corentin Jeudy. It shows that setting the rounded Gaussian parameter to sigma = s - 1/(24s) gives a distribution within Rényi divergence 1 + O(1/s^8) of a discrete Gaussian of parameter s. Lattice schemes can then use the simple, constant-time-friendly, low-memory rounded sampler while analyzing security against an ideal discrete Gaussian.

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

SoK on design-level backdoors in block ciphers. It places four published designs (Rijmen and Preneel, Paterson, Bannier and Filiol, Peyrin and Wang) in one taxonomy and gives a sound algorithm that recovers a partition trapdoor from S-box tables. It attacks KG-DES, BEA-1 and LowMC-M: KG-DES key recovery takes minutes, and the LowMC-M MALICIOUS backdoor yields the key from 35 to 409 queries. Trapdoors hidden in linear layers leave no trace, so the authors recommend deriving constants verifiably from a public seed.

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

Table-free constant-work BCH decoding by algebraic index elimination is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2580) that replaces the table scans in Walters and Sinha Roy's constant-work BCH decoder with fixed circuits over public addresses. It proves correctness through radius t and trace regularity, removes 5.2 and 7.2 KiB of tables, and runs 35.7 to 82.4 times faster on an i7-13700. Ordinary C masks compiled to received-word-dependent branches under Apple Clang 21, so the authors use a compiler-opaque primitive and run timing screens on four platforms.

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

PQ-Vault is a custody design for unmodified Ethereum against quantum key recovery. It combines a quantum-safe vault contract, a proof-of-stake sidechain with compact certificates, and an optimistic dispute protocol. The paper proves that compact certificates with classically chosen parameters fall from 128 to about 60 bits against quantum attackers, and bounds a seed-update stake-steering attack. For 65,536 validators a certificate is 0.8 MB and verifies in about 20 ms, and the vault accepts a checkpoint for about 420,000 gas.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 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

Paper on memory injection, where prompt injection persists across sessions through the long-term memory of LLM-as-a-service platforms. It presents a general threat model and shows all NIST attack goals are achievable on ChatGPT Instant 5.3, Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Gemini 3 Flash. Vectors include personal memories, projects, skills, organization instructions and MCP resources. On Claude, shared memory lets an attacker compromise multiple users in an organization and exfiltrate prompts. Nearly half of the derived mitigations are unimplemented.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

DAR-MGSM (Dialectal Arabic Multilingual Grade School Math) is a manually curated benchmark for mathematical reasoning in Dialectal Arabic. It covers five major Arabic dialects plus Modern Standard Arabic, in a translated-only version and a translated and culturally localized version. Eleven Arabic-centric and multilingual LLMs were tested: accuracy generally drops on the localized version, and a mechanistic interpretability analysis shows the two variants induce distinct internal reasoning trajectories.

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

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

nokast-secureRAG is a roughly 0.5B-parameter small language model that works as a semantic firewall between retrieval and generation in local RAG systems. It classifies each query and context pair as safe, suspicious or malicious. It reaches 0.994 recall at a 0.026 false-positive rate in-distribution, beating Llama Guard 3 1B and Prompt-Guard-86M (0.900 recall, 0.690 FPR). Recall on PoisonedRAG falls to near zero, and single-request latency is 293-404 ms.

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

Systematic evaluation of fault attacks on ML-DSA (FIPS 204) rejection sampling and of proposed countermeasures. It proves the "third rejection test" of patent WO2025261784A1 re-verifies what check 2 already guarantees, and shows that 30,000 fault injections never detect a skipped z-norm check. The author fully recovers s1 against a third-check-protected implementation under randomized signing. Third check and sign-then-verify are complementary; overhead is 0.04–0.05% on x86-64 and 0.83% on Cortex-M4 for the third check.

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

FN-DSA on Arm Cortex-M55 is an ePrint paper presenting the first FN-DSA (NIST post-quantum signature) implementation on this core that reproduces the reference known-answer tests and runs in constant time. It uses the native FP64 FPU for signing and Helium (MVE) for NTT, key-generation FFT and Keccak, with SLOTHY rescheduling. Key generation, signing and verification are up to 1.23x, 1.93x and 1.30x faster than the reference, and four-signature batch verification up to 1.75x.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Benchmark of the three NIST post-quantum standards, FIPS 203 (ML-KEM), FIPS 204 (ML-DSA) and FIPS 205 (SLH-DSA), measuring speed and energy for key generation, signing and verification. Tests ran on Raspberry Pi 1, Zero and 4 and on laptop hardware, using OpenSSL 3.5 and a FNIRSI FNB58 USB power meter. ML-KEM and ML-DSA match classical elliptic-curve cryptography, while SLH-DSA signing on 32-bit devices cost up to 243% more energy than on 64-bit.

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

Castryck, Dina, Kutas and Lorenzon study the Shimura class group action on superspecial principally polarized abelian varieties with a CM orientation, as a post-quantum commutative group action for key exchange. They give tools to represent CM orientations through higher-dimensional isogenies and to compute the action in the restricted effective group action model. These rely on a CM version of Kani's lemma and a trick that often halves the ambient dimension. The paper also gives a method for finding oriented superspecial abelian surfaces and analyses obstructions to transitivity.

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

Cost-Coupled Gittins (CC-Gittins) is a multi-objective extension of cost-aware Gittins search that recommends Pareto-optimal model-to-role assignments for LLM agentic workflows. It exploits the coupling between evaluation and deployment cost, alternating between seeking higher quality and lower cost. On eight quality-cost matrices (two to five roles, up to 1,681 assignments), it recovers a substantial share of the true Pareto frontier at about 10% of exhaustive-evaluation cost, and most of it by 30%. Latency is tested as a third objective.

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

The paper traces sycophancy across 741 checkpoints from 30 open model lineages, from early pretraining to released models. It plants initial verdicts on moral scenarios and measures how far models follow a user's opinion or drop their answer under pressure. The behaviour usually exists before post-training, but which questions a released model yields on is set mainly during post-training. For Tülu-3 8B, its own preference-stage checkpoint removes 85% of remaining prediction error, a sibling model only 19%.

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

WSR-Tune is a fine-tuning framework that reparameterizes LLM weight matrices with a safety-conditioned basis, so safety-relevant information concentrates in a small set of directions. Those safety-critical directions are frozen, and the remaining complementary directions are updated for the downstream task. The authors report a better trade-off between downstream performance and safety retention. The page gives no benchmark names or numbers.

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

A Note on the Security of ECDSA with Presignatures or Biased Nonces (Couteau and Makriyannis, ePrint 2026/2545) examines alternative ECDSA modes built for faster distributed signing. It shows that the security of some variants used in deployed libraries is equivalent, in the generic group and random oracle model, to the average-case hardness of k-SUM. It also proves fine-grained lower bounds on generic group attacks against modes analyzed by Groth and Shoup (Eurocrypt 2022).

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

SpanGuard is an indirect prompt injection (IPI) guardrail that splits detection into two steps. Lightweight unsupervised segmentation first locates candidate instruction blocks in tool outputs, then a small LLM judges whether each block is authorized by the user's request. The authors report a 0.32% attack success rate with negligible benign utility loss, and the guardrail still works with substantially smaller models.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 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

"How employment is changing at Anthropic" is an October 2026 technical report by Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory. It uses internal employment, agent telemetry, output, survey, calendar and hiring data plus 17 interviews. Junior technical hiring fell from 27% to 9%, agent hours reached six times employee hours by August 2026, and adopters' output rose. Employees increasingly do meta-work managing agents.

anthropic.compaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This ePrint paper (2026/2525, October 2026) by Brendan Funk and Jiafeng Xie presents the first hardware accelerator for FAEST, an MPC-in-the-head post-quantum signature in NIST's Round 3 additional-signature process. It analyses FAEST's compute-heavy operations, builds them into hardware blocks, and adds an L1-EM-fast variant. The authors report at least 98% lower equivalent area-delay product than the recent complete SDitH design at the same security level.

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

ToFu is a tool-aware fuzzing framework that derives semantic security checks for LLM tools (mainly MCP servers) from their metadata and a corpus of 74 CWE-guided sanitizers. It generates schema-valid Atheris harnesses, uses runtime tracers and outcome oracles to catch bugs that don't crash, and uses an LLM only to map sanitizers and seed inputs, never as the judge. It also describes a "Repeat-After-Me" attack, in which the LLM is told to repeat attacker-written text that the orchestrator then dispatches as a tool call. It was reproduced on LangGraph, MAF, ADK, AutoGen, Strands and CrewAI. On 273 MCP servers it reports 253 verified bugs across 343 tools in 118 repositories, including path traversal, log injection, exfiltration and command bypass.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 18 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The One-Pixel of Reasoning introduces the one-relation attack (ORA), which finds a critical implicit warrant linking evidence to a conclusion and inserts one source-grounded sentence that qualifies it, steering an LLM agent to a wrong belief. Across eighteen models on biomedical inference and vulnerability detection, best-of-10 attacks flip initially correct answers 54.9% of the time for proprietary models and 80.0% for open-weight models. Attacks transfer without victim feedback, can pass source-support checks, and multi-agent debate raises team error from 50.0% to 59.5%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 17 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Forum announcement of a Zenodo preprint on post-quantum migration for censorship-resistant P2P steganographic tunnels. It argues that ML-KEM's prime modulus (q=3329) makes naive bit-packed ciphertexts statistically distinguishable from uniform noise, which gives a cheap passive DPI distinguisher. It also argues that composite PQ 0-RTT envelopes over 4.4 KB force fragmentation, which requires stateful reassembly before AEAD verification and reopens memory-exhaustion DoS in eBPF/XDP filters. Proposed fixes are algebraic uniformization (LWR lattices or inverse rejection sampling), sub-MTU hybrid or pure-PQ envelopes (Falcon-512, signcryption), and Fujisaki–Okamoto implicit rejection for constant-time silent drops. Aimed at Ethereum validator, libp2p and RPC transports facing harvest-now-decrypt-later threats.

ethereum-magicians.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Determines, to first order in 1/p with an explicit error bound, the proportion of superspecial principally polarized abelian surfaces over F_p-bar (p ≡ 3 mod 4) that are optimally (N,N)-split. The expected number of optimal splittings is exactly 5N·J_2(N)(p-1)/(p²+1), so the split proportion is about 5N·J_2(N)/p. This gives the stationary target density of the splitting-detection attack on the dimension-two superspecial isogeny problem, which was previously known only from experiments or a one-sided bound. The proofs use Siegel's mass formula and genus averages over refined Humbert invariants, and every formula was checked by exact computation at twelve primes.

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

Presents a fixed-point C implementation of the Mitaka signing algorithm, a simpler, parallelizable Falcon (FN-DSA) variant. It replaces MitakaZ's wide integral Gram root decomposition with a fixed-point square Cholesky decomposition, which cuts the cost of integer Gaussian sampling, and proves bounds on intermediate values and representation errors without empirical assumptions. Signing averages 361 kcycles (Mitaka-512) and 707 kcycles (Mitaka-1024) on AVX2, and 4.0 and 7.8 Mcycles on an STM32F411 Cortex-M4F. This makes floating-point-free lattice signatures practical on constrained devices.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 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

This paper shows that training-free relaxed (lossy) verification in speculative decoding causes length inflation: completions get longer, mostly through extended reasoning traces, which offsets gains in accepted tokens per round. Across twelve target-drafter pairs, relaxed rules accept 1.34x as many tokens per round but produce 1.54x longer completions. Rules that cut verifier rounds usually lose substantial accuracy, so the authors argue completion length and verifier rounds must be reported.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 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

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

ThetreStageAI is a retrieval-augmented framework for structured Bengali theatre production planning. It keeps separate scene, actor-blocking and lighting views, embeds Bengali text with BGE-M3, indexes it in view-specific Qdrant collections, and has Gemini generate schema-constrained JSON, with validation and at most one repair attempt. The authors build a synthetic dataset of 500 records (1,500 retrieval documents) and compare single-combined retrieval with multi-view retrieval. Code and data are public.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 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

Presents a language- and leakage-model-agnostic framework for provably secure compilation of probabilistic side-channel countermeasures. It uses a deterministic leakage-preservation relation that implies preservation of d-NI, d-SNI and cryptographic constant-time without probabilistic proof obligations. The authors prove in Rocq that a model of the Jasmin compiler's core pipeline and several optimizing passes preserve security in the value-probing model with glitches. They also add source-level annotations to harden against transition leakage and release libmasking, an arbitrary-order masked gadget library in Jasmin that compiles to ARM and RISC-V, with C bindings and hardware benchmarks.

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

ConQUESTA is a post-training pruning framework for quantum neural networks that combines task saliency with compiler cost, screens candidate entanglers, and searches whole pruning masks under an accuracy constraint. Each mask is transpiled across several coupling topologies. At 55% pruning on 4-, 6- and 8-qubit QNNs it cuts resources by 61.6% (Breast Cancer), 72.0% (Digits01) and 82.2% (Iris), and fixed-mask recovery raises feasible runs from 16/24 to 22/24.

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

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

ePrint paper presenting safeRNSgcd, which computes the single Bézout coefficient needed at the deepest level of Falcon's NTRU solver while keeping large integers in a residue number system. Centered explicit CRT recovers the exact low bits needed by SafeGCD batches using single-word fixed-point arithmetic. A C implementation integrated into ntrugen reduces inversion and private-key basis-generation cost on a Raspberry Pi 5 and two x86-64 CPUs, versus the original ntrugen and a variant that skips the unused coefficient.

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

Beacon is a safety alignment framework for large reasoning models that fixes two GRPO failure modes: advantage collapse, where homogeneous rollout groups give vanishing advantages, and unsafe diversification, where unsafe behaviors persist and spread. It combines Safety Signal Recovery (advantage-guided trajectory filtering plus safe reference supervision) with Safety-Utility Decoupled Alignment (category-aware rewards, benign-only KL anchoring). Tested on four Qwen3 and DeepSeek-R1-Distill variants across eight benchmarks, it cuts average safety error by up to 32.83 percentage points with low over-refusal.

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

SpikeQ is a spike-guided post-training quantization framework for spiking neural networks on neuromorphic chips. It picks each weight level by simulating downstream neurons to minimize spike errors, and uses a reset-aware grid for pre-fire membrane potentials. With 4-bit weights and potentials, models stay within 2.59 points of full precision, with 7.8 to 7.9 times smaller memory and 6.4 to 6.9 times less energy.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 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

Many Biases, One Circuit is a October 2026 arXiv paper that traces attention heads behind cue-following (for example "I think the answer is B") through two post-training pipelines. Four cue types share a few heads already present in pretrained models. About 200 generic assistant examples activate them in chat format, and the final RL stage strengthens cue effects. Swapping attention patterns of six middle layers between Tulu-3-8B and OLMo-2-7B checkpoints moves cue effects most of the way.

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

R^2ECAP (Reused Reasoning-Cache Poisoning) is a black-box attack that plants poisoned reasoning traces through a chat interface, exploiting LLM systems that reuse KV caches of reasoning. A preceding trace steers the model, and the retained trace keeps residual adversarial influence in its cache after the preceding trace is discarded. On three open-weight LLMs and three datasets it reaches up to 79% ASR, beats the white-box HijackKV in 8 of 9 settings, and reaches 46% ASR in a reasoning-trace retrieval system. Only 1% of retained responses are flagged by a popular prompt injection detector.

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

The paper proposes a traceable and aggregatable tagged witness signature (TA-TWS) and builds SwiftAuth on it, a conditional privacy-preserving anonymous authentication framework for UAVs and other dynamic terminals. Issuers can create authorization components while users are offline. Several credentials compress into one constant-size proof, verifiers can batch-verify across users, and a regulatory trapdoor lets authorities trace misbehaving users. TA-TWS is proven unforgeable and witness-hiding, and benchmarks with the MIRACL Core library on constrained devices and Aliyun servers show it is practical.

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

DK-VLM adds Dual-Kernel Attention to a vision-language model. A semantic kernel keeps the pretrained attention and positional encoding. A separate geometric kernel uses estimated 3D points and camera poses to modulate attention through point displacements and relative view transformations, and a learned gate fuses the two outputs. Geometry therefore enters attention as position, not as fused 3D reconstruction features. The paper also adds Reference-Frame Composition (RC) supervision, which gives stepwise turn and heading targets derived from verified single-step annotations, to train multi-step spatial reasoning as the observer moves. DK-VLM-8B reports the highest average score across six spatial benchmarks among the compared methods, with 74.33 on VSI-Bench and 58.28 on ReVSI-32, and it preserves general video understanding.

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

Studies "filesystem capability laundering" in MCP servers: client approval of a tool call grants the server process broad host filesystem access, so attacker-steered arguments can reach sensitive files outside the tool's declared contract. The authors build MCP-FSD, which infers per-tool least-privilege boundaries, plants credential fixtures outside them, and tests exploitability and sandbox containment by paired dynamic execution. Of 21,097 servers from nine registries, 16.4% of 4,806 triaged servers have filesystem capabilities despite non-filesystem classifications. Dynamic validation confirmed 150 vulnerable instances, and disclosure produced 13 advisories, including two CVEs in Anthropic's Git MCP Server.

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

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

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

GhostFaceMPC is presented as the first end-to-end face recognition system that runs both the deep CNN feature extractor and the matching step under secure multi-party computation. Raw images and biometric embeddings are never exposed at any stage, from feature extraction through storage to matching. The authors contribute an MPC-friendly quantization of the GhostFaceNet model and circuit optimizations that make this practical, and they release code on GitHub. It is relevant as an example of making CNN inference feasible under cryptographic constraints.

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

GhostFaceMPC is presented as the first end-to-end face recognition system that runs a deep CNN feature extractor (GhostFaceNet) and the matching step under secure multi-party computation. Raw images and biometric embeddings are never exposed during extraction, storage or matching. The authors contribute an MPC-friendly quantization of GhostFaceNet and circuit optimizations that make the approach practical, and they release code at crypto-unict/GhostFaceMPC.

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

Proposes SCOPED (Skill-Decoupled On-Policy Expert Distillation), which trains capability-specific RL experts for vision-language models. It extracts explicit skills from them through reward-guided reflection. During on-policy distillation the skills guide expert supervision but are hidden from the unified student, so the student internalizes the procedural knowledge and needs no explicit skills at inference. Across eight multimodal benchmarks it beats the backbone and mixed-capability RL. Analyses show cross-capability gradient interference in joint RL, and that skill augmentation gives more consistent expert trajectories, more attention to task-relevant visual evidence, and better preservation of expertise.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 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

Presents a modular, fully onboard UAV navigation pipeline that closes the "human-aware safety gap" of geometry-only planners. A shared BLIP encoder drives captioning and text-conditioned segmentation, which is fused with depth for 3D obstacle localization. Qwen-2.5-0.5B, stabilized with RAG and grammar-constrained JSON decoding, infers per-category risk once per class and caches the verdict. Perception runs at 10 Hz on a Jetson Orin NX, and fallback LLM queries take about 0.8 s off the control path. In Gazebo it gives roughly 3x fewer collisions than a geometric planner and raises semantics-aware landing success from 34% to 96%. The 224-pixel encoder input limits small-object perception at range.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 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

GACC-Bench is a benchmark for Goal-Adaptive Context Compression, testing how well LLMs retain goal-relevant information when compressing a source context under a length budget before downstream questions are known. It has 500 goals and 2,571 human-reviewed questions over 281 document and agent-trace contexts from seven collections; a fixed reader answers the withheld questions from the compressed context. Ten LLM compressors show large gaps to full-context performance, especially in answering every question tied to a goal. Target-goal conditioning improves accuracy over goal-agnostic compression, while mismatched goals hurt it.

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

Introduces P^3IBench, a benchmark for proactive video understanding in real-life streaming scenarios, covering three capabilities: daily perception, risk prediction and intervention. It evaluates 12 open-source and proprietary video-language models (streaming and adapted non-streaming) and finds they struggle to make well-calibrated decisions about when to respond. The authors also build extra proactive training data and train P^3I-Assistant-4B, which improves several tasks unevenly, showing that proactive assistance needs response timing and restraint as well as visual understanding.

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

T-EVOLVE extends the lattice-commitment e-voting protocol EVOLVE to threshold tallying. Votes are Shamir-shared, so any t of n authorities can finish the tally. Privacy holds against t-1 colluding authorities and verifiability holds even if all of them collude. The voter proves her committed shares form a Reed-Solomon codeword whose value at zero is a valid vote. Complaints about ciphertexts that do not decrypt are publicly verifiable, using an LWE-instantiable encryption scheme with publicly verifiable opening. Privacy, verifiability, individual verifiability and robustness are proven in the classical random oracle model, and the verifiability reduction is not tight. In a C implementation, a yes/no ballot for four authorities takes 109 KB, and an authority aggregates 10^4 ballots in about three minutes on one core.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 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

ePrint paper presenting an NVIDIA GPU implementation of FAEST (a post-quantum signature scheme built on VOLE-in-the-Head and QuickSilver), covering key generation and OWFProve/OWFVerify for standard and EM constructions in s and f variants. Profiling shows field multiplication takes about 82% of FAEST-128f signing time once AES is hardware-accelerated. Using PTX clmad carry-less multiplication plus Karatsuba, it reaches up to 26.6x kernel throughput and about 2.9-3.1x full 256-bit OWFProve throughput over the software-multiplication build on an RTX A5000.

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

Survey-style paper introducing hardware-software leakage contracts, an ISA-level security abstraction that characterizes microarchitectural side-channel leakage (caches, speculative execution). It lets programmers and compilers produce code provably resistant to side-channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown without reasoning about the microarchitecture, and gives hardware designers a specification to avoid undocumented side channels. It reviews recent contributions and open challenges.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Proposes a cost model and metric for an adversary who collects side-channel traces classically and finishes the key search on a quantum computer. Shows any quantum algorithm needs Omega(sqrt(r)) cipher evaluations for key rank r, and that the quadratic advantage holds only up to a rank bound set by the NIST MAXDEPTH budget (about 2^58.6 for AES-128 at D=2^40). Defines a quantum-aware key rank computable from existing rank estimators, with simulated-leakage experiments showing a depth-limited quantum adversary is worth about 22 traces at SNR 0.125.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 16 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 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

Presents a modular device-binding protocol for post-quantum anonymous credentials. The phone Secure Element signs a verifier challenge with an unmodified FIPS 204 ML-DSA interface, and the user proves knowledge of that signature in zero knowledge at each presentation. Using ML-DSA's structure avoids the cost of generic NIZK systems such as Longfellow. The most efficient variants assume weak-MLWR for unlinkability, and that assumption can be dropped at some efficiency cost. The protocol works with different anonymous credential schemes, and a proof-of-concept implementation is included. This matters for planned EU age-verification and Google Wallet/mDL rollouts, which need protection against credential sharing.

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

Paper that links linear, integral, differential-linear and restricted differential distinguishers through two-way conversions with explicit divisibility guarantees and data complexity. It gives automated MILP/SAT models (Walsh and ultrametric representations, exact mix-basis models) and a black-box FWHT histogram search for zeros and finite divisibility. It improves Beyne–Verbauwhede divisibility bounds in 674 SIMON cases (e.g. 2^5 to 2^11 on 9-round SIMON32) and PRESENT. It also gives first higher-divisibility proofs for 8-round SPECK and BEANIE, new bounds for GIFT-64 and Ascon, and new properties on RC5, ChiLow-32, KeeLoq and KATAN32.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 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

MiniDog is a framework for training a text-to-image flow-matching diffusion transformer from scratch on four RTX 3090 GPUs, with 55 minutes of pretraining and 15 minutes of fine-tuning. It pretrains on 26k ImageNet dog images that were captioned, then fine-tunes on 2k FLUX.1-schnell generated images. Image and text features are precomputed and cached. The model is a 22M-parameter transformer with the E2E-INVAE semantic latent space, a small Qwen text encoder and in-context conditioning, and training is accelerated with iREPA and an EUPE perception encoder. The repo evaluates with FID, HPSv2, PickScore and VAE reconstruction metrics. It lowers the barrier to hands-on diffusion training research.

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

SP$^2$ec (Single-Peak SPeculative decoding) is a training-free bandit algorithm that adapts the draft configuration of self-speculative decoding per prompt for vision-language models. It relies on the single-peak throughput pattern seen in SWIFT, KnapSpec, SpecVLM and the authors' cosSim method. It minimizes a new wall-time regret measure and has theoretical guarantees of near-optimal configuration with negligible exploration cost. On Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and LLaVA-NeXT-Mistral-7B it improves over the original self-speculative methods by up to 11% on visual and textual tasks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 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

ProAS (Progress-Aware Advantage Shaping) is a plug-and-play framework for multi-turn agentic RL that fixes the uniform credit assignment problem in critic-free algorithms like GRPO, where trajectory-level advantages are broadcast to every action. It uses a dynamically evolving Agentic Reference Graph with Masking Unreasonable Incentives and Asymmetric Penalty Redistribution to give finer-grained credit without a critic. On Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B-Instruct it reports success rates up to 91.9%/94.3% on ALFWorld and 66.7%/70.8% on WebShop, with up to 2.44x faster training convergence and robustness to imperfect or distilled ARGs.

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

Technical report for Kwai Summary Attention V2 (KSA V2), which extends summary-token attention architectures that compress distant context into one learnable summary token per chunk. Hybrid KSA-Full models force the same compression chunk size in every layer and leave full-attention layers paying quadratic prefill cost. KSA V2 lets summary tokens serve two roles, as KV memory and as a sparse indexer. This allows per-layer compression windows for more flexible KV cache compression and lowers computation in the full-attention layers.

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

Short paper analysing the HM-QCT hybrid quantum–computational time-lock QKD protocol (Mazzoncini et al., 2025). It spells out the two "harvest now, decrypt later" strategies (quantum memory and classical memory) and shows each is excluded by exactly one of the two assumptions: short-term encryption and low-fidelity quantum storage. It then proposes HM-PRF, which replaces the short-term encryption with a locally evaluated pseudorandom function, so security needs only one-way functions rather than a predicted lasting gap in quantum memory technology.

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

Introduces Sauron, an evidence-first agentic verifier that checks rubric criteria for long-horizon agent tasks by investigating both environment state and execution trace, and trusts a claim (including an agent's self-reported success) only after validating it against its source. Bounded queries and joint investigation of related criteria cut context use, and each verdict carries an auditable evidence receipt. On 2,586 human-labeled criteria from 100 personal-assistant episodes it has the best F1 of five verifiers across eight backbones (0.96 vs 0.92 for Gandalf with GPT-5.6 Sol, at 23% lower cost). It detects 97% of injected failures across 13 fault families, including reward-hacking simulations, with 2% false flags on clean controls, and leads on the TRAIL agent-error benchmark. It matters because unreliable rubric verdicts used as RL rewards can reinforce bad behavior.

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

The paper builds explicit ReLU neural-network realizations of Camellia-128/192/256 from exact Boolean gates, S-box selectors and bit permutations, and reports known-answer-test agreement for Camellia-128. It shows that whitening and round-key quantities leaked from internal activations determine the master key through public key-schedule identities. Under a synthetic internal-oracle model, symmetric real-valued perturbations recover subkey bits with 128 queries (Camellia-128) or 256 (Camellia-256). Camellia-192 is handled by deterministic key-schedule inversion from direct access to round keys. All 3,000 trials (1,000 keys per variant) recovered the key exactly. The authors state this is not a plaintext/ciphertext-only attack on standard Camellia.

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

Marcel Keller's ePrint compares the two fully secure MPC sorting approaches, Quicksort (Araki et al., CCS'21) and radix sort (Asharov et al., CCS'22). The comparison covers a range of parameters, for both honest- and dishonest-majority settings. The paper then extends the sparse matrix multiplication of Damie et al. (CODASPY'26), which avoids oblivious RAM, so the output comes out in the same format as the inputs. That makes repeated multiplication of graph adjacency matrices possible, which the paper uses to find cycles and scatter-gather patterns associated with money laundering. The result is privacy-preserving anti-money-laundering detection.

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

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team tests whether small open-weight models (≤30B) can autonomously replicate across commodity IoT devices. They ran Gemma4-26B-A4B over 15 off-brand Android TV boxes at 0.39 tok/s with pipeline parallelism. A Qwen3.5-9B-class model set up inference on 8 of 9 hardware types, and only GLM-5.2 completed end-to-end worm replication in an 8-node redroid ADB network, spreading to 8/8 nodes in 4 of 5 trials and 7/8 in the other. It also estimates spread using the Kimwolf botnet's size (~133k replicas, about 40 H100s of compute), shows notes inherited between generations improve Qwen3.5-9B's setup success (45% to 61–84%), and projects small models reaching the capability floor by end of 2026. It closes with defensive points: drive R0 below 1, and harden IoT devices.

anthropic.compaperPublished and added 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

Endor Labs' 2024 report on open-source dependency management and vulnerability prioritization. It reports that under 9.5% of vulnerabilities are reachable at function level, and that combining reachability with EPSS cuts noise by about 98%. It also finds Python phantom dependencies (up to 60% of dependencies and 85% of vulnerabilities for some tenants), 18% of npm OSV entries lacking CVE aliases, 69% of advisories published after the fix release (median 25 days), and 47% of advisories with no code-level info. For Java, 24% of fixes need a major version bump and 95% of upgrades carry breaking changes. Written by a vendor, so the prioritization conclusions favor its product.

endorlabs.compaperPublished and added 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The paper proves that some properties of UOV (Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar) public-key ideals and varieties hold generically. These include equidimensionality of the UOV varieties and radicality of the public key ideals. This justifies the regularity assumptions used in algebraic cryptanalysis of UOV and its variants. The authors also review earlier multivariate schemes that were broken because they were non-generic, and give one counter-example whose non-genericity looks hard to exploit.

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

StableJudge is a defense framework against score-hijacking prompt injection in LLM-as-a-Judge pipelines (e.g. paper review, recommendation). A compact 0.13B "Sentry" model localizes injected spans and sanitizes them before the judge scores the content, trained on adversarially evolving attacks, and deterministic fine-grained scores are derived from the judge's output distribution. It improves score recovery under attack on held-out scientific abstracts and out-of-distribution attack variants while preserving general performance, decoupling safety from judge model scale. Code and data are promised but not yet released.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

ePrint paper presenting share-optimal, direct, uniform, first-order threshold implementations (TIs) with no fresh randomness. It shows every bijective 4-bit permutation of algebraic degree t admits a TI with t+1 shares, and introduces the first infinite families of cryptographically nontrivial power permutations with optimal TIs. The results disprove several earlier conjectures and give new glitch-resistant masking options for lightweight cipher S-boxes.

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

Mori and Emura give a generic transformation, a variant of the CHK transformation, that upgrades a public-key authenticated encryption with keyword search (PAEKS) scheme to one secure against chosen-ciphertext and trapdoor attacks (CCTA). It works because the PAEKS receiver names the sender when generating a trapdoor, so keywords can serve as tags. Applied to Li-Boyen generic PAEKS instantiations, it yields the first fully CCTA-secure PAEKS schemes from pairings and from lattices. Verification keys embedded in ciphertexts and trapdoors also let sender-receiver matching use hash tables, so search cost no longer depends on the number of senders.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 11 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 proposes a generic encrypt-then-MAC transformation for building CCA-secure KEMs. The PKE ciphertext is authenticated by a MAC keyed from the PKE plaintext, so decapsulation no longer needs the Fujisaki-Okamoto re-encryption step. It proves IND-CCA security in the random oracle model from OW-PCA, and IND-qCCA security from a new OW-qPCA notion. It presents ML-KEM-EtM and McElieceEtM (Classic McEliece), and benchmarks ML-KEM-EtM with Poly1305, GMAC, CMAC and KMAC256. The result is a substantially lower decapsulation cycle count for a small cost in encapsulation cycles and ciphertext size.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 11 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Introduces Policy-Constrained Diffusion Agents (CoDA), which enforces task-dependent security policies inside the denoising process of diffusion language models. At each step, token distributions are projected onto a policy-compliant set, so constraints hold throughout generation instead of relying on detecting injected instructions. Evaluated across several dLLM families under static and adaptive prompt-injection attacks, it reports substantially lower attack success rates with competitive task utility and practical inference overhead.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

ePrint paper presenting a vectorized implementation of the MQOM v2.1 post-quantum signature scheme (a NIST additional-signature candidate). It uses a transpose-enabled paired-matrix trick to cut wasted SIMD work and memory traffic. It benchmarks key generation, signing, verification and memory on Arm NEON, x86 AVX2 and AVX-512, with peak dynamic memory down by up to 39.43%. Supplementary experiments check how the matrix-layout optimization carries over to the Round-3 MQOM v3 code. Useful for practitioners assessing the deployment cost of post-quantum signatures.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

ePrint paper that defines a security model for censorship resistance in anonymous credential systems, where a malicious issuer uses information gathered at issuance to selectively deny credentials. It gives a round-optimal construction built on blind signatures with selective disclosure at presentation. It also presents CRACS, an instantiation for the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW). CRACS keeps selective disclosure and adds unlinkability between issuance and presentation. It confines the advanced cryptography to issuance, so secure elements, credential formats, signature schemes and verifiers stay unchanged and deployment can be incremental.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

KedgeFlow specifies language-independent contracts so trusted controllers can authorize state-changing operations by enterprise AI agents and privileged gateways can enforce that authority independently of agent reasoning. It combines evidence-backed policy checks, signed permission for an exact action, a single-use shared allowance, target-side conditions and retained outcome records, with two conditional properties (at most one claim per allowance; every dispatch linked to a grant and claim) that hold even if the agent is compromised. A reference implementation exposes the path via MCP; evaluation on a three-member etcd cluster gave exactly one successful claim for each of 82 allowances across 6,560 concurrent attempts, and one committed effect in a 32-call gateway race. The authors report limits: permissive policy still authorized an undesirable effect, and distributed reservations, production access routes, crash recovery and real-target exactly-once effects remain untested.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🧠 AI

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

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

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

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Presents an EM side-channel attack on LLaMA-3.2-1B-Instruct running on a Raspberry Pi 5, showing passive physical measurements leak generated tokens and user prompts. Three attacks: a profiling attack (97.2% accuracy over 50 medical/privacy keywords), a hidden-state reconstruction attack predicting tokens from the 128k vocabulary (94.3% on profiled classes; 67% of unseen words ranked in top 100), and a hidden-state inversion attack reconstructing prompts semantically. Shows that local edge inference does not guarantee confidentiality of tokens and inputs.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 16 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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

Presents the first fixed-point FN-DSA (Falcon) signer for microcontrollers, using 32.64 arithmetic in constant-time Cortex-M4 assembly for Falcon-512 and Falcon-1024. Techniques that keep reciprocals, inverse square roots and small constants wide and round once at the consumer restore the precision lost by naive fixed-point. Measured precision supports about 2^99.7 (Falcon-512) and 2^96.7 (Falcon-1024) signing queries per key, against about 2^61.5 and 2^58.7 for double precision and the 2^64 target. The signer needs about 45% fewer cycles than double-precision emulation, at the cost of signing RAM rising from 59n to 83n bytes. The paper also shows which implementation choices lift double-precision c-fn-dsa above 2^64, derives Falcon-1024 key-generation bounds (72.3% of keys accepted vs 8.5% with the Falcon-512 values), and gives recommendations for the fixed-point FN-DSA NIST plans.

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

ReplaySSM represents state-space model state as a periodically updated checkpoint plus a buffer of recent SSM inputs, separating output computation from checkpoint updates. This avoids state writes on most decoding steps (roughly halving dominant state memory traffic), makes speculative-decoding rollback a buffer-pointer operation, and lets a low-precision checkpoint serve outputs while a higher-precision one drives recurrent updates. Implemented in vLLM for Mamba-2 and Gated DeltaNet, it gives 1.20–1.47x decoding speedup at batch size 256 across four hybrid models and about 1.8x the throughput of vLLM speculative decoding on two 120B-class models.

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

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

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

SmartSalesBench is a multi-turn conversational benchmark that tests LLM sales agents against psychologically grounded, resistant buyer personas over conversations of up to twenty turns. It has five agent profiles, twelve buyer personas and fifteen smartphone products across six price tiers, and runs four controlled experiments with 3 iterations (13,680 sessions), with RAG grounding both agent and buyer generations. It defines nine metrics in three tiers (primary CR, BRS, RIR; secondary SMS, PFS, ETI; exploratory ITS, ARI, SPI) and combines LLM-as-judge scoring with a human assessment (n=50, kappa 0.71, Pearson r 0.81 with BRS). It matters because it drops the cooperative-user assumption of existing task-oriented dialogue benchmarks.

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

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

ePrint preprint extending the Ducas–Engelberts–Loyer provable subexponential Gaussian sampler (built on Wagner's generalized birthday algorithm) to module matrices over power-of-two cyclotomic rings. It gives provable 2^{O(n/lnln n)}-time algorithms for Module-SIS and for decision and search Module-LWE using only the k+ℓ ring samples provided, plus sample-preserving scalar search-LWE and narrow Module-LWE variants. Separate heuristic estimates suggest these Wagner-style attacks do not reach the NIST security targets of ML-KEM and ML-DSA.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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 reimplements Q-FLAIR, which grows a quantum feature-map circuit gate by gate until the training loss stops improving. It runs the method on 784-pixel MNIST 3-vs-5 classification at five training-set sizes (N = 2000 to 10000), then fine-tunes each circuit to count Caro et al.'s active gates K. It finds no predictable link between training-set size and the circuit size Q-FLAIR converges to, and seed variance is nearly as large as any trend. The Caro et al. generalization bound holds in 14 of 15 runs, but the gap correlates only weakly with the bound (r = 0.12), so K explains little of the variation. This is a useful negative result for anyone hoping to jointly optimize circuit depth and data size.

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

Theoretical analysis of greedy search on a hierarchy of proximity graphs built from n points on the d-dimensional torus. It gives a deterministic coverage condition guaranteeing a (1+ε)-approximate nearest neighbor for any query. The condition holds w.h.p. for homogeneous Poisson, Hermitian determinantal and bounded-density Cox point processes when d = o(log n / log log n), and the expected hop count is O(exp(½ d log d + O(d)) log n), so logarithmic in fixed dimension. It gives formal grounding for the hierarchical ANN indexes used in RAG and recommendation retrieval.

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

ReSI is a recursive safety improvement framework that automates rounds of safety alignment. Each round applies diverse red-teaming methods to the current target model, develops training recipes to fix the vulnerabilities found, and promotes the update with the largest safety gain among those passing a Pareto gate on capability retention. On four dense and mixture-of-experts models it matches or exceeds frontier models on in-distribution and out-of-distribution safety benchmarks. It cuts mean X-Teaming attack success rate from 86.01% to 31.45%, against 56.69% for the best frontier model (GPT-5.6 Luna), while largely preserving general capabilities.

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

Case study in which Opus, GPT and Gemini coding agents port thirteen QED-C Application-Oriented Benchmark methods from Qiskit to CUDA-Q. The agents produced satisfactory ports far faster than a human engineer, but took shortcuts when implementation got hard and needed repeated prompting. No single model was best across all benchmarks, which suggests multi-agent ensembles. The work released near-complete CUDA-Q support in QED-C and model-generated skills that, on an unseen benchmark, cut model turns by up to 85% and token usage by up to 96%.

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

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

Presents Reverse-Bleichenbacher, a variant of the Bleichenbacher RSA PKCS#1 v1.5 padding-oracle attack that recovers the least significant bytes first and stops once the TLS PreMasterSecret is found. With improved trimmers and coverage-optimized search, median oracle queries against a 2048-bit key drop from 11,428 to 1,801, and 68.3% of runs finish within a 30s timeout under single-server conditions. The authors find 640 vulnerable domains in the Tranco Top 1M (many behind Alibaba Cloud load balancers) and demonstrate MITM malicious update injection leading to remote code execution.

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

TRACE (Train-Rollout Quantization Alignment via Compact GuidancE) is an FP4 quantization framework for reinforcement learning post-training of Mixture-of-Experts language models. It uses rollout-guided quantization-aware training to align training-side FP4 rounding with rollout-side quantization outcomes, reducing the train-rollout discrepancy that limits prior low-precision RL methods, and adds a caching scheme that selectively retains mantissa/scale information from deeper layers to cut communication overhead. Evaluated on four large MoE models across reasoning, coding and long-horizon RL tasks, it matches BF16-rollout RL performance while achieving up to 5.4x rollout speedup with joint FP4 weight/activation and FP4 KV-cache quantization.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

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

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

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

GeoCoTDrive is a vision-language-action (VLA) framework for autonomous driving that introduces an explicit geometric chain-of-thought: it first grounds 2D regions corresponding to decision-critical cues, then retrieves localized 3D geometric priors from a geometric foundation model within those regions, interleaving these features into the autoregressive context to drive trajectory generation. The paper also introduces "planning-relevant grounding," a new region-level grounding supervision task, and the PlanningGrounding dataset to teach VLAs planning-oriented grounding, showing consistent gains in safety-critical planning across multiple end-to-end driving benchmarks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 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

This arXiv paper shows that large language models can be trained to tolerate unreliable, faulty digital hardware, and that their error resilience improves rather than degrades as model size increases. Using modified neural scaling laws derived from 40,000 GPU-hours of training runs on simulated faulty hardware, the authors argue that LLMs learn to compute within "good" error-correcting codes whose relative overhead stays finite regardless of scale, suggesting a path toward running AI inference on low-energy, unreliable hardware for substantial energy savings.

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

This arXiv preprint argues that proofs of AI safety or alignment which consider the agent in isolation are incomplete, because the environment's structure matters just as much. The authors construct two theoretical scenarios — one with an infinite state space, one with signal mixture — under partial observability and time-limited action, and prove that even a hypothetically perfect agent cannot guarantee safe behavior in them. The conclusion is that any rigorous safety or alignment proof must jointly specify the agent and the environment's safe-action structure, not the agent alone.

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

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

TR-PTQ is a post-training quantization method for transformers that identifies learned LayerNorm scale parameters and GELU's compounded approximations (not SoftMax) as the main sources of accuracy loss when quantizing, contrary to common assumptions about numerical precision. It introduces a unified integer-only formulation using shared Taylor Region exponential/logarithm primitives so division and square roots can run entirely in the log-domain with standard integer arithmetic, paired with a calibration-free, outlier-aware LayerNorm optimization, eliminating the need for floating-point hardware for nonlinearities while keeping accuracy degradation under 1.5% across vision and language benchmarks.

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

PQ-DVSA is a verifiable secure aggregation protocol for federated learning that aims to be post-quantum secure, tolerate client dropouts, let clients verify a server's aggregation result, and resist bounded collusion between the server and clients, while also protecting the aggregation weights, not just model updates. The authors report learning performance comparable to exact weighted aggregation and up to 96 percent lower per-client encrypted-submission runtime than SWAS, the closest prior scheme.

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

PQ-DVSA is a verifiable secure aggregation protocol for federated learning that combines post-quantum cryptography, resilience to client dropouts, and verifiability of the server's aggregation result under bounded server-client collusion. It protects both clients' local model updates and their aggregation weights, lets the server reconstruct the aggregate mask for the active client set after dropouts, and lets clients cryptographically check the aggregation result. Experiments show learning accuracy comparable to exact weighted aggregation while cutting per-client encrypted-submission runtime by up to 96% versus SWAS, the closest prior scheme.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

EntroPrefill proposes a Renyi-entropy-guided mechanism for pruning context mid-prefill in retrieval-augmented generation, using sink-isolated regularized head pooling compatible with grouped-query attention to decide which tokens can be safely discarded. It derives a mixture-to-head deletion envelope bounding feasible token removal, a finite-sample observer guarantee valid under adaptive layer selection, and a conditional transformer perturbation bound with explicit Lipschitz constants and a first-token decision-margin corollary, plus a systems-level break-even analysis of KV-transfer payload versus pruning savings. The paper is explicitly theoretical, defining assumptions and formal limits without reporting empirical speedup or accuracy-preservation results.

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

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

This IACR ePrint paper breaks Origami, a multivariate post-quantum signature scheme submitted to the NGCC round-1 public-key call, showing its bilinear construction is effectively a Rainbow-type scheme whose central map leaks through the public verification key in a predictable coordinate order. The authors derive an equivalent secret key from the public key alone, enabling universal forgery at roughly the cost of one signature verification (~0.01s at Origami-128), and demonstrate the attack against the unmodified reference implementation across all four parameter sets and the official test vectors. They also refute Origami's security proof by breaking its inversion assumption in a bilinear independent-coefficient model, and note a separate structural flaw where honest signatures lie in a proper subspace rather than the full space the specification assumes.

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

This arXiv paper introduces a post-training semantic lifting method for 3D Gaussian Splatting that assigns a single target class to Gaussians by accumulating target/non-target evidence across all views, weighted by per-view visibility, then filters with a dual-threshold (β and γβ) scheme that selects high-confidence seeds and extends them via connected components. The authors evaluate by transferring labels from Gaussians to mesh vertices and decompose error into three sources — the 2D detector, the lifting step, and the representation transfer — tuning thresholds on seven Replica scenes and testing on ten held-out ScanNet++ scenes, reaching mean mIoU of 0.93/0.65 (dataset masks/YOLO masks) on validation and 0.80/0.54 on test, a 0.24 mIoU improvement over prior per-view thresholding. The error analysis finds the 2D detector is the dominant remaining error source, informing where future gains in 3D semantic reconstruction should focus.

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

This paper studies robust bandits (formerly "imprecise bandits," Kosoy 2025; Appel and Kosoy 2025), a framework for unrealizable learning in the bandit setting where the true environment may lie outside the learner's hypothesis class. While prior work showed a Θ(√T) regret learner exists for a broad class without computational guarantees, this paper identifies a special case admitting a polynomial-time learner achieving Õ(√T) regret, and proves several natural generalizations of that case are NP-hard — mapping the boundary of computational tractability. The authors frame this as relevant to AI alignment, following Kosoy's argument that efficient learners for unrealizable problems are a prerequisite for solving alignment.

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

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

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

Truffle is a new three-party maliciously secure shuffle protocol for secure multiparty computation (MPC), matching semi-honest round complexity while adding only sublinear communication via a distributed-verifier zero-knowledge proof checking shuffle correctness. Authors Nidhish Bhimrajka, Yashvanth Kondi, Daniel Noble, and Bhavish Raj Gopal implement and benchmark it, applying it to securely parsing secret-shared strings, with further applications to graph analytics, anonymous communication, Distributed ORAM, aggregate statistics, and secure sorting. Published at ACM CCS 2026.

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

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

An IACR ePrint paper showing that the message-only implicit-rejection KEM variant of the Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) transform used by ML-KEM is uninstantiable in general (under LWE plus subexponentially secure iO and puncturable PRFs), meaning no concrete hash function can replace the random oracle while preserving IND-CCA2 security for every injective trapdoor function. The authors instead give sufficient conditions, via a new "distributional injective extractability" property, to achieve standard-model IND-CCA2 security for the hybrid-encryption (not KEM) formulation of FO, with a standard-model instantiation left open. This directly bears on the theoretical foundations underlying ML-KEM's security proof.

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

This IACR ePrint paper benchmarks 20 open-source Gröbner basis implementations against the proprietary Magma system on polynomial systems derived from small-scale AES over GF(2), using Easy/Medium/Hard difficulty tiers with ten instances each. In the Hard setting, msolve and Singular's slimgb completed all runs successfully with mean runtimes of 164s and 269s and peak memory of 3693/4343 MiB respectively, versus Magma's 319s and 16853 MiB, with msolve exploiting ~13.4 CPU cores versus ~1 core for the others. The results quantify when open-source algebraic solvers are practical alternatives to Magma for algebraic cryptanalysis of block ciphers.

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

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

This paper proposes a fail-closed "bounded provisional visibility" protocol for continuously ingested RAG vector stores, which admits new content under a verification deadline and hides items whose vetting hasn't committed in time, bounding how long unvetted (potentially poisoned) content can be retrieved. Evaluated on five document workloads using an exact-match backend and Milvus with HNSW indexing, the deadline-based admission cut median poisoned retrievals from 34 to 7 under verifier backlog versus asynchronous admission with no deadline, while verify-before-visible avoided exposure entirely but delayed clean content visibility to 6.3s versus 3ms for provisional admission. The work quantifies the inherent trade-off between freshness, availability, and poisoning exposure in continuously updated retrieval systems, and shows results remain conditional on the quality of the underlying poison detector.

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

An IACR ePrint paper presenting a GPU-assisted implementation of FAEST v3 signing, a post-quantum signature scheme, focusing on two problems: preserving the correct minimum accepting counter when parallelizing "challenge grinding" across GPU threads, and building a two-slot CPU-GPU pipeline to overlap CPU work with GPU batches for multi-signature throughput. Across the six non-EM FAEST v3 parameter sets, the authors find the CPU-GPU path beats optimized CPU-only signing for single-sign latency in 4 of 6 cases (up to 1.6x speedup for FAEST-192s) and wins throughput in 9 of 18 parameter/batch-size combinations, with GPU correctness validated to match the reference signature output.

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

An IACR ePrint paper proposes PQC migration decision criteria for data held by national and public institutions, derived from South Korea's N2SF (National Network Security Framework) protection requirements and each data object's cryptographic dependencies/operational state. It distinguishes migration actions (payload retention, key rewrapping, re-encryption, communication migration, signature renewal) from execution decisions (allow/defer/deny), requiring consistent completion checks, recoverable registered copies, and current authority. A reference implementation ran 225 policy trials and 9 interruption trials, showing per-stage/completion rechecking prevented unauthorized completions or reads that occurred when reusing initial decisions, and confirmed clean resumption after interruption; institutional approval and production-scale key management remain unvalidated.

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

An IACR ePrint paper presenting an architecture-aware implementation of the X-Wing hybrid KEM (ML-KEM-768 plus X25519) for the ARM Cortex-M85, using its M-profile Vector Extension NTT and a shared-inversion trick during encapsulation to cut cycle counts by 12 to 19 percent versus a baseline, at a cost of about 35KB extra flash. The authors found that their optimized variant introduced secret-sign-dependent operand-address selection, a side-channel weakness, and produced a corrected version whose fix is only partial since some key-varying timing signals persist and remain unexplained, so no constant-time guarantee is claimed.

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

An IACR ePrint paper presenting an optimized ARMv8 NEON assembly implementation of MAYO Round 3 (one of NIST's post-quantum signature candidates) for Apple M1, generated to be byte-identical to upstream intrinsics but 2–2.6x faster for signing and verification across all four parameter sets. The authors also run a constant-time testing campaign with matched null runs and find that while linear-algebra operations are statistically indistinguishable from constant-time nulls, verification (on public data) exhibits a measurable key-fixed timing effect present in both their implementation and the upstream code.

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

This IACR eprint paper studies output policies for CKKS homomorphic-encryption-based anomaly detection, evaluating whether limiting released scores and decisions can hide a private detection threshold without breaking existing decisions. Across 45 plaintext and 45 CKKS experiments on three intrusion-detection datasets and autoencoder scoring models, the authors show thresholds remain estimable, quantization preserves about 99.86 percent of decisions, and a surrogate model trained on only 128 decision-only responses achieves 0.817 mean balanced accuracy at predicting decisions on new inputs, a decision-prediction model-extraction-style attack whose success depends heavily on data-splitting strategy. It argues numerical threshold leakage and decision-prediction leakage are distinct protection goals that output policies for encrypted intrusion detection systems must address separately.

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

HyBind is an intraprocedural Python static-analysis framework that traces cryptographic component secrets through code to determine whether post-quantum/traditional (PQ/T) hybrid key-derivation and signature-verification logic actually requires both algorithms to succeed, rather than silently accepting a result from only one. It uses registered API contracts and function-return/execution-effect checks to distinguish real AND-logic hybrids from presence-based heuristics that wrongly treat joint and single-algorithm contributions as equivalent. The authors validate it on 50 controlled fixtures and 33 programs (15 using native ML-KEM/X25519 and ML-DSA/Ed25519 APIs), showing relaxed checks can misclassify traditional-only results as hybrid.

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

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

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

An IACR eprint paper evaluating all 13-cubed ways to assign 13 post-quantum/traditional signature parameter sets across the Root, Intermediate and Leaf roles of a TLS 1.3 certificate chain, holding the algorithm set fixed and varying only placement. Across 286 three-algorithm groups, median max/min ratios reach 2.085x for TLS handshake latency, 4.310x for certificate body size and 4.551x for path-validation cost purely from role order, with Leaf placement mattering far more than Root/Intermediate swaps. It also shows that looking only at Certificate-message size can misrank candidates such as ML-DSA-65 versus SLH-DSA-SHAKE-192s once the Leaf signature in CertificateVerify and full authentication-path cost are included, arguing PQC certificate-chain design must account for role-specific cost under real network/load conditions.

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

This paper evaluates whether Korean post-quantum crypto candidates (HAETAE, AIMer, SMAUG-T, NTRU+) and NIST PQC standards (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA) can replace classical ECDSA/ECDH in the authentication and key-establishment path of ROS2/DDS-Security for UAV/UGV command channels. The authors build a feasibility envelope mapping each algorithm's key/signature size and handshake latency against real command-link constraints (message rate, MTU, latency deadline, bandwidth), then validate it with authentication-handshake measurements over emulated constrained links on a two-node testbed, producing a classical→NIST→KpqC comparison and per-channel-budget application guidance.

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

This IACR ePrint paper presents a native-Rust, memory-safe implementation of the Korean KpqC competition's standardized post-quantum schemes — KEMs NTRU+ and SMAUG-T, and signatures HAETAE and AIMer — replacing the reference memory-unsafe C code. The authors expose all seven KEM parameter sets and four signature modes through a single pluggable provider demonstrated across three real deployment front-ends: a rustls TLS 1.3 key-exchange group, an OQS/liboqs-compatible C ABI, and an analytical CCSDS/SDLS satellite constrained-link model, showing SMAUG-T variants are smaller/faster than ML-KEM-768 on constrained space links and a memory-optimized NTRU+ build cuts peak stack by up to 25% at negligible latency cost.

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

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

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

An IACR ePrint paper presenting optimized Montgomery multiplication/squaring kernels for RSA-2048 and RSA-3072 CRT private-key operations on ARM Cortex-M0+ and Cortex-M3 microcontrollers, targeting cryptographic tokens that must keep RSA for legacy authentication compatibility. Using 15-bit limbs, wrapped-sum carry recovery (M0+) and doubled half-diagonal buffer limbs (M3), the authors report 12.6–13.1% faster Montgomery operations and ~12.6–12.8% faster warm CRT-RSA cycles on M0+, smaller gains on M3, and a 31.47% cycle advantage over an NTT-based multiplication for 2048-bit operands.

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

Victor Shoup shows that "reconstruct-later" asynchronous verifiable information dispersal (AVID) designs — used by data-availability systems including an early Walrus design/testnet — are insecure when built on the standardized Raptor codes R10 (RFC 5053) and RaptorQ (RFC 6330). Using the Plotkin bound, he proves that a Byzantine disperser can choose a subset of f+1 honest fragments that fails to reconstruct the message, gives randomized polynomial-time algorithms to find such subsets, and implements a working attack that defeats an RFC 6330 RaptorQ decoder on every adversarial subset tested (success for f from 9 to 45). Benchmarks show plain Reed-Solomon coding is an MDS alternative that is often faster and never much slower than R10/RaptorQ, making it the safer practical choice for this design pattern.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 4 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper studies the sharpening hypothesis of RL post-training on LLMs: that it mainly sharpens existing base-model behaviors, boosting pass@1 at the cost of solution coverage (pass@K), and shows this cost extends to agentic, multi-turn tool-use tasks, not just math/coding. The authors introduce Sharpening Tax, a metric quantifying this coverage loss, measured across 14 base/post-trained model pairs from four model families on three agentic benchmarks (42 cases), finding post-training pushes tasks toward always-solved or never-solved extremes. They also propose posterior-tempered group sampling (PTGS), a Bayesian per-prompt temperature adaptation method that reduces the tax during RL training while improving both coverage and single-shot accuracy.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 4 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv paper identifies a new attack surface in proactive personal AI agents: an external content provider who controls only material tied to its own target (e.g. a product or service) can manipulate an otherwise benign agent into recommending that target to the user, without compromising the agent or accessing private user context. The authors formalize the attack via three mechanisms — Target Control, Private Binding, and Prospective Support — and show across three proactive-agent environments and six simulated user models that the full attack raises target authorization rates by up to 77.4 percentage points, with a multi-turn variant that keeps influencing the agent's responses even absent final user authorization.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 4 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

VulValidate is a framework where LLM agents coordinate dynamic-analysis tools to reconstruct vulnerable/fixed code revisions, craft triggering inputs, and compare runtime behavior, producing executable evidence for whether a function-level vulnerability label is actually correct. Applied to all 35,849 "vulnerable" instances in the BigVul, PrimeVul, and DiverseVul datasets, it confirms 57.2%, corrects 19.0% of labels, and leaves 22.3% undecided, yielding a corrected release of 15,890 distinct vulnerable function bodies validated against expert review. Retraining five detectors on the corrected labels changes measured F1 on BigVul and DiverseVul, showing that commit-derived vulnerability labels used across the field are substantially noisy and that agentic, execution-grounded auditing is a viable correction method.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 4 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Herschel is a continuous optimization system for production LLM inference that uses adaptive, on-demand profiling instead of always-on tracing to diagnose serving inefficiencies with low overhead (under 0.5% TTFT, 7% TPOT impact). It attaches to and detaches from running inference processes without engine restarts, reconstructs cross-process operator execution traces to pinpoint inefficiency mechanisms, and has AI agents implement and test candidate engine/kernel fixes under controlled replay of the triggering workload before expert review and deployment. Over six months of production use it collected ~17,000 traces across 120+ model variants and 10+ accelerator types, finding inefficiency patterns in 23% of traces and driving optimizations like restructured synchronization and removal of unused computation.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The World Embedding Benchmark is a new evaluation suite of 8,000 controlled simulation cases across 80 families (fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, dynamics, optics & electromagnetism), each pairing a rendered video with simulation-derived physical annotations. It tests pre-trained omnimodal embedding models on text-video retrieval, physical-property regression, and multiple-choice video-description classification, finding that current embeddings align poorly cross-modally while lightweight probes can still recover physical quantities, and that continual contrastive training improves alignment but hurts regression. The authors also show retrieval-augmented generation using these embeddings with MiniMax-H3 improves the physical fidelity of generated videos.

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

This paper presents an automated pipeline that uses a vision-language model to annotate leaf midlines in rendered orthographic views of maize point-cloud scans, then applies deterministic geometric algorithms and differentiable NURBS fitting to reconstruct editable, organ-level procedural 3D plant models without manual tuning or species-specific segmentation training. Evaluated on 100 field-grown maize plants from the MaizeField3D dataset, it achieves a median whole-plant Chamfer distance of 5.4 mm and recovers 99.4% of curated reference leaves at IoU ≥ 0.5, outperforming an earlier semi-automated pipeline. It demonstrates that VLM annotations can become reliable quantitative measurements when paired with correcting geometric post-processing, enabling scalable generation of 3D plant assets for high-throughput phenotyping and in silico breeding.

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

Persona Guardrail is a production-grade runtime defense framework for customer-facing LLM agents that enforces explicit functional boundaries via synchronous input/output validation against semantic allowlist and blocklist specifications. The authors also introduce PAGE (Persona-Aware Guardrail Evaluation), a benchmark covering benign, adversarial, and out-of-domain user and agent turns; deployed in production, it raises overall accuracy from 85.7% to 95.9% versus a generic LLM-based guardrail, boosts out-of-domain detection from 57.3% to 93.5%, and cuts the false-approved rate from 25.0% to 4.7%, all within latency budget.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

CLIMB is a training-free, inference-time framework for multimodal retrieval-augmented generation that improves knowledge-intensive visual question answering. It first builds a compact, non-redundant evidence pool using an MMR-style objective balancing query relevance and redundancy, then applies an R/E/C critic (relevance, evidence specificity, cross-modal alignment) alongside a confidence estimator that only accepts an answer update when estimated confidence increases, giving a built-in stopping criterion without modifying the underlying retriever or MLLM. Experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek show consistent gains over existing multimodal RAG baselines.

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

Patch-to-Prune (P2P) is a training-free framework that repurposes activation patching from mechanistic interpretability into an inference-time compute bypass for vision-language models, replacing unnecessary visual-token projections in certain decoder layers with fixed neutral proxy vectors while preserving sequence length, token order, and residual pathways. Tested on Qwen2.5-VL and LLaVA family models across seven multimodal benchmarks, P2P at 3 percent tolerance retains about 94 percent of dense accuracy while cutting FLOPs by 55 percent, and reveals that intermediate decoder layers do most of the task-relevant visual integration while early and late layers need little token-specific visual computation.

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

Evaluates vanilla Double Deep Q-Learning (DDQL), K-means-partitioned mixtures of DDQL experts (K=2, 4, 8) and parameter-matched dense networks for order execution on 5-minute BTC/USDT limit order book data from Binance. No learned configuration significantly beats DDQL on implementation shortfall, and all are worse than TWAP and immediate liquidation in this frictionless replay environment. Ablations show annealed exploration alone removes the collapse to wait-until-forced-liquidation policies (12/100 to 0/100), so expert partitioning appears to mask a training-specification flaw rather than add real benefit. The attribution of the failure mode reverses between 30 and 100 seeds, which makes the paper a case for repeated-seed evaluation in RL.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI

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

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

An arXiv preprint that empirically tests speculative decoding on consumer hardware (Intel Arc B570, NVIDIA RTX, Apple M4-class systems), distinguishing between 'execution-path qualification' (whether a speculative predictor's output matches the target model's exact generation trajectory) and the realized latency/cost of running speculation. The authors find that a target-only, draft-free predictor matches greedy output on most repeat-stable prompts but does not guarantee qualification or identify a unique cause of divergence, and that newly qualified RTX serialization and other configurations (358H, M4 Guard) are often slower than target-only decoding once real costs are counted. The paper's conclusion is that these results are diagnostic engineering findings specific to the tested hardware/software paths, not evidence of a portable decoding speedup.

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

VisionMX is a post-training quantization method for vision models using Microscaling (MX) formats, which pair low-precision numeric elements with shared block scales for efficient inference. The paper identifies three error sources in direct MX conversion of vision models—block-scale representation, poor alignment of small convolutional weights with nonuniform element grids, and underuse of signed codes by nonnegative activations—and addresses them via bounded weight rounding and a foldable affine activation correction. It is evaluated across image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and low-light image enhancement, showing improvements over direct conversion and existing post-training quantization baselines, especially for architectures most sensitive to MX conversion.

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

This arXiv SoK paper systematizes the quantum-era risks facing stablecoins, mapping cryptographic dependencies (issuer, custody, upgrade, oracle, bridge keys) to monetary control surfaces and classifying migration options along who can authorize a change, where it occurs, and whether it is hybrid, post-quantum native, or encapsulated. It introduces an "authority-liability gap" concept — the entity able to migrate a cryptographic component is often not the one that bears losses if migration fails — and connects migration choices to redemption, continuity, and intervention requirements under current stablecoin regulation. The paper also flags open problems in threshold authorization, dormant/wrapped supply, and measuring quantum-vulnerable exposure.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

InterEvolve is a test-time evolution method for humanoid loco-manipulation that lets a pretrained controller solve new tasks without retraining. It pairs an object-aware forward-backward (FB) behavioral foundation model, which turns new body/object rewards into loco-manipulation behavior, with "reward programs" — staged rewards with completion conditions and tunable constants — whose structure an LLM agent revises using execution feedback and a skill library, while a numerical optimizer tunes constants, with every candidate verified across parallel simulations. Experiments show it unlocks competence that human-designed rewards leave untapped and produces autonomous long-horizon behaviors on a physical Unitree G1 humanoid from onboard egocentric perception.

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

This paper introduces ZFO (Zero-and-First-Order optimization), a lightweight fine-tuning framework that decouples search direction from step-size selection: a trusted first-order optimizer picks the direction, while two extra zeroth-order function evaluations along that single dimension build a local curvature-aware model to choose the step size, avoiding a full line search. The authors give theoretical guarantees on finite-difference curvature estimates, near-optimal step selection, and convergence to a stationary-point neighborhood, and show empirically that ZFO improves optimization and final performance over fixed-step first-order baselines across several language models and datasets. Code is released publicly, making it a usable technique for practitioners fine-tuning LLMs who want cheaper adaptive step-size control.

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

DuoMind is a distributed hierarchical framework for multi-robot coordination that pairs a per-robot vision-language-action (VLA) model for low-level execution with a vision-language model (VLM) orchestrator for high-level reasoning and inter-agent semantic communication. The authors also introduce RoboPoly, a new benchmark of long-horizon manipulation tasks requiring coordinated, closed-loop execution under distributed control, and show gains on RoboPoly and RoboTwin with ablations confirming the value of hierarchical orchestration and semantic messaging.

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

This arXiv paper studies emergent semantic specialization among experts in multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models and introduces ExpertLens, a data-free method that identifies domain-specialized experts by decoding router weights into vocabulary tokens from pretrained weights alone. Using this to selectively fine-tune only the relevant experts, the authors match or beat full fine-tuning on math, medical, and remote-sensing tasks while updating only 21.7-47.0% of parameters, achieving a 4x training speedup and outperforming LoRA in both performance and efficiency.

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

Where-OPD introduces an on-policy self-distillation method for multimodal LLMs where a teacher model receives textual spatial guidance (object identities and coordinates from procedurally generated synthetic scenes) to locate relevant image regions, while a student learns to reproduce this behavior from just the image and question. The approach is annotation-free and scalable, improving performance on counting, document and chart understanding, and transferring from synthetic training to real-world perception benchmarks (CVBench, V*, ZoomBench, BLINK, HR-Bench, MME-RealWorld) with a 3.23-point average gain.

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

UniWAM is a unified architecture that combines a physical reasoner, a world generator, and an action predictor to jointly learn semantic understanding, visual generation, and action prediction for embodied agents, bridging vision-language-action (VLA) models and world-action models. It uses a data cleaning/annotation pipeline for human egocentric and robot data, represents low-level actions in natural language for VQA/egocentric/robot co-training, and introduces future visual noise augmentation plus history-conditioned flow matching to cut denoising steps while achieving state-of-the-art results on in-distribution performance, robustness, generalization, instruction following, and long-horizon tasks. The paper also reports a log-linear scaling law for unified human-robot co-training.

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

This paper studies whether AI oversight mechanisms based on interactive proofs and debate (used for verifying AI outputs derived from confidential data, e.g. a fitness-for-duty assessment from medical records) can be made zero-knowledge, so a verifier learns nothing beyond correctness. The authors prove a general impossibility result in the random oracle model — no zero-knowledge proofs exist for general oracle-aided computation, and this extends to debate, a canonical scalable-oversight model — but show that if the oracle cryptographically signs its answers, every oracle-aided computation can be verified in zero knowledge with an efficient prover and verifier using only collision-resistant hash functions. The signed-oracle construction also offers a new approach to scalable oversight that avoids relying on an honest debate opponent or on the computation's robustness.

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

This arXiv survey organizes recent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) research into a four-axis taxonomy covering retrieval efficiency, robustness/security, user-driven interactivity, and multi-step reasoning. It formalizes RAG framework components, reviews dense/sparse retrieval, fusion strategies, embedding optimization, and RL-based retrieval policies, and compares Naive, Advanced, and Modular RAG architectural variants alongside evaluation practices and domain applications. The paper closes by outlining open challenges in retrieval quality, reliability, domain adaptation, scalability, and explainability.

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

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

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

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

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

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eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 4 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper proposes an attack-chain-based detection framework for indirect prompt injection in LLM email assistants, combining a text detector, stage-specific verifiers, rule-based risk signals, and user-intent/action consistency checks scored via a logistic decision policy, rather than treating detection as binary malicious-text classification. Evaluated under random splits, temporal and cross-dataset transfer, and ablations across five binary benchmarks, it achieves a mean F1 of 0.406 versus 0.216 for the best of five existing pretrained detectors, and shows random splits overestimate robustness under distribution shift while training on hard benign (attack-resembling) emails reduces false alarms.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

Multimodal Flow (MF-1) is a fully continuous generative model that unifies language and vision modeling by representing both text and images as ordered continuous "hyperchunks" processed through a single shared chunk-causal Flow Matching backbone, avoiding the visual quantization bottleneck of discrete-token unified models and the mismatched objectives of hybrid discrete/continuous approaches. Joint attention handles cross-modal interaction while modality-specific feed-forward networks process each modality, and the model predicts multiple chunks in parallel during training but generates sequentially at inference. Pretrained at 0.6B/1.2B/1.6B scales on 150B tokens, MF-1 scores 82.8 average on GenEval/DPG-Bench and 75.3 on VQAv2/MMBench/POPE, remaining competitive with unified models trained on far more data and outperforming matched hybrid/discrete baselines; code and model are publicly released.

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

This paper proposes Semifactual Credit-Augmented Policy Optimization (SCAPO), a variant of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). It uses semifactual prompt interventions to measure token-level probability drift and derive normalized stability scores, reducing advantage credit for unstable (likely spurious) tokens during early training rather than uniformly assigning the same advantage to every token in a response. On Qwen3-4B-Base and Qwen3-1.7B-Base, SCAPO improves AIME 2024-2026 accuracy over GRPO by 5.63 and 4.17 percentage points respectively, and achieves the best results on most math benchmarks and all out-of-distribution benchmarks tested.

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

This paper proposes A2A-TIBA, an indirect prompt injection attack that abuses agent-to-agent (A2A/ACP) protocols by getting a target LLM agent to deploy a callback program, letting an attacker bypass the agent entirely to issue commands and exfiltrate data. It also introduces GDA Measurement, a red-team testbed that captures raw gateway context to distinguish four outcome classes (semantic refusal, semantic breach, interception, penetration) instead of a single attack-success-rate metric, and ELA-ITL, a three-layer isomorphic attack-defense model splitting defense into envelope packaging, LLM recognition, and agent interception. Testing on 15 agent-frontend x LLM-backend combinations and a 1,000-case dataset shows that labeling malicious-prompt indicators in envelope channels (A2A, tool, memory) significantly improves LLM recognition of injected content.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

This arXiv paper argues that classical program invariants are an effective defense against smart-contract exploits, backed by INVARIANTEVAL, a benchmark of 28 real Ethereum attacks each paired with a human-written invariant that would have blocked it, and PONDEREPLAY, a transaction-replay framework used to validate every invariant across 108,637 historical transactions.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

This paper studies two temporal phenomena in generative model sampling dynamics: a 'speciation window' where a sample commits to a semantic class, and a 'nonlocality window' where local context becomes insufficient for generation. Under a 'common cause' hypothesis — that semantic labels explain correlations between distant tokens — the authors prove the nonlocality window must fall within the speciation window, and identify conditions under which both windows collapse to a single phase-transition point as system size grows, verified analytically in Gaussian mixture models.

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

STEPQuant is a spatial-temporal post-training quantization framework for the fixed-size recurrent states used by Delta-rule linear attention, which become a memory bottleneck under concurrent serving. It allocates bit precision based on error magnitude and memory lifetime (temporal) and fits per key-row/value-column scales based on state distribution and output impact (spatial), achieving near-FP32 accuracy at a 6-bit budget and beating uniform INT8 at 4-bit. Evaluated on Qwen3.8-27B and Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct, and integrated into SGLang with custom GPU kernels, it delivers over 5x recurrent-state compression and up to 68.7% total serving memory reduction.

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

LeapQuant is a training-free quantization method for the fixed-size recurrent state used by linear-attention LLM architectures like Gated DeltaNet and Kimi Delta Attention, aiming to cut the inference bottleneck of repeatedly reading and updating that state. It introduces per-window quantization (re-quantizing the state only once per token window, using high-precision buffered updates in between) plus "Compensator Tokens" that preserve the state's largest outlier values in high precision, with residual smoothing to further reduce error. Across Qwen, Kimi, and GLM model families, it reaches near-FP32 accuracy at 8-bit while delivering 2.05–3.70x kernel-level and 1.47x end-to-end speedups on NVIDIA B200, RTX PRO 6000, and RTX 5090 GPUs.

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

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

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

DMA^2 is a distribution matching distillation (DMD) method tailored to pixel-space (rather than latent) diffusion teachers for text-to-image generation. It introduces DINO-Adv, which removes the heavy fake-score critic from the adversarial gradient path and instead supplies local patch guidance via an external DINOv2 representation, plus AF-Loss, a parameter-free auxiliary semantic distribution-field objective operating in DINOv2 feature space on rolling real/generated supports. The resulting four-step student outperforms its 25-step teacher and other few-step distillers on DPG-Bench, GenEval, VQAScore, and COCO30K.

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