Character-Name Concentration in LLM Fiction: Measuring Displacement and Mitigating RepetitionSpeculative naming is a fine-tuning-free method that cuts character-name repetition in LLM fiction. It adapts draft-verify-reject from speculative decoding to names, using verbalized sampling and a SlopTracker that combines a per-model fingerprint with a runtime counter. Across 20 LLMs and 44,782 stories in four languages, it cut Slop Ratio by 95% and mean collision probability from 7.3% to 0.4%. Static banlists only displaced the concentration to emergent names.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI- Context-Shielded Backdoor Attack against Large Vision-Language Models
StripWake is a projector-only backdoor attack on large vision-language models. It stays dormant under full-token inference and activates when visual-token compression prunes the context around a trigger (context stripping). On LLaVA-1.5-7B across nine unseen compressors, it reaches 0.4% full-token attack success rate and 94.0%-99.7% compressed ASR on five primary compressors, with no CIDEr loss. Training aligns early visual attention with a frozen benign teacher.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Vision-Language Models Are Joint Denoisers in Robotic Action GenerationJADE (Joint Action DEnoiser) is a diffusion-based vision-language-action architecture in which the VLM reads the current noisy action latents together with images and instructions at every denoising step, and guides the action expert through gated cross-attention. The VLM is also trained to recover clean action latents, and an adaptive step-size schedule cuts sampling steps. On RoboDojo it averages 12.67% success, the highest among π0.5-based methods, and it adds 20.8 points over π0.5 on four real bimanual tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI
TRIAGE: Reliability- and Load-Conditioned Escalation for Two-Tier LLM Serving with a Semantic Evidence JudgeTRIAGE is a two-tier LLM serving scheme that escalates requests from a small model to a large one based on a post-generation reliability state and a load-dependent GPU price. On one A40 serving Qwen2.5-7B and 32B (AWQ) under vLLM, escalation cost rose 21.9x from 1 to 10 requests/s. A pre-registered claim that the reliability state detects corrupted evidence (AUROC 0.70 or higher) failed at 0.571. A semantic evidence judge raised detection to 0.846. The 7B to 32B pair showed only a +2.88 pp held-out gap, so the allocator declined to escalate.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI
CivicBench: A Benchmark and Memory Framework for Web-Based Civic Data AnalyticsCivicBench is a 400-task benchmark over four cities and two years that freezes civic Web data (service requests, boundaries, weather, demographics) into reproducible bundles. Executable contracts score computation, source linkage, coverage, scope, qualified answers and refusal. The paper also proposes Task-State Memory (TSM), which compiles tool observations into typed assertions and reconciles records only within compatible scopes. Eight of nine model pairs show positive mean-score gains with bootstrap intervals excluding zero.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Constraint Dependency Graph Retrieval for Compliance Detection on Long SKILL DocumentsSkillCDG is a compliance detection framework that turns each long SKILL document (an enterprise SOP followed by LLM agents) into a constraint dependency graph. Atomic rules are nodes tied to source text spans, and mandatory prerequisites are the only edges. Policy-generated keywords seed rules, and their dependency closure fills the small auditor's context budget. Retrieval is trained with GRPO and selective on-policy distillation. It beats full-document and retrieval baselines on three enterprise datasets and two public benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Labadain-MedQA: A Tetun Medical QA Dataset for Fine-Tuning and Evaluating Large Language ModelsLabadain-MedQA is a Tetun medical question-answering dataset of 39,077 pairs, made by translating MedAlpaca's Medical Flashcards and WikiDoc Patient Information collections with Gemini 2.5 Flash. Two native-speaking healthcare professionals rated human translations higher than LLM ones (4.43 vs 4.02 out of 5). QLoRA fine-tuning of Gemma 4 12B raised mean accuracy about 10.8% on 325 Tetun-translated USMLE questions.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI
ShiftRAG: Bypassing the Textual Bottleneck via Decoupled Learning and Continuous Soft TokensShiftRAG is a decoupled retrieval-augmented generation framework that uses one LLM backbone but separates discriminative retrieval learning from autoregressive generation. It projects retrieval alignments into continuous soft tokens so the generator receives retriever-side signals, and adds a soft orthogonality objective against rank collapse in decoder-only models. The abstract reports gains in retrieval and question answering over state-of-the-art baselines, without numbers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI- AgentCap: Capability-Based Runtime Authorization for Secure LLM Agent Execution
AgentCap is a runtime authorization layer for LLM agents from Virginia Tech (Suresh and Gao), posted to arXiv on 31 October 2026. The model proposes MCP tool calls, and a policy engine issues Ed25519-signed capability tokens only after checks on provenance, intent, trust and prerequisites. It reports 0% attack success with GPT-5.4 on AgentDojo and InjecAgent, but only on scenarios the authors built.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI
The Long Con on the Web: Earn-then-Exploit Fraud Attacks against Coding AgentsEtE (Earn-then-Exploit) is a web fraud attack framework against coding agents: a malicious site first gives several rounds of verifiable help to build trust, then issues task-related instructions that cross operational boundaries. Across 56 environments and three agents, average attack success was 71.4% (85.7% on Codex with GPT-5.5), beating injection baselines. The proposed defense, action-authorization separation (AAS), cut success to 0% with 100% task completion.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- SpreadMAYO: Unlocking Greater Parallelism for Faster MAYO Signatures on GPUs
SpreadMAYO is a GPU implementation of MAYO Round 3, a multivariate post-quantum signature scheme in NIST's additional signature process (ePrint 2026/2705, October 2026). It spreads matrix contractions across rows, output positions and 64-bit limbs of packed GF(16) values. On an RTX 4090 it reports 4.40 to 6.93x faster signing, 3.42 to 5.13x faster verification and 2.33 to 3.71x faster key generation than the baseline, up to 10.75x for repeated-key signing. No constant-time analysis was in the available text.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 4 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Saidzoda-Tajik-E5-Large: Fine-Tuning a 560M Embedder for Tajik RetrievalSaidzoda-Tajik-E5-Large is a Tajik text embedder fine-tuned from multilingual-e5-large-instruct (560M parameters) on 235,140 synthetic question and passage pairs, with hard negatives and English and Russian pairs mixed in. Top-10 retrieval on unseen laws rises from 80.2% to 93.6%, and on tax documents from 82.6% to 94.5%. The Belebele gain (92.2% to 95.2%) is not confirmed. bfloat16 training broke the model.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI- Efficient Scalable Oversight via Rewinding
Rewindable interactive proofs (RIPs) are a scalable oversight protocol in which a weak verifier can restore an AI prover to an earlier snapshot of its state. The authors build a relativizing RIP for computations that tolerate changes to a small fraction of oracle answers. The prover runs in time linear in the computation, and the verifier runs in nearly linear time in input length after preprocessing. It uses no cryptography. A preliminary MNIST experiment is reported.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 4 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI
From Lookups to Lessons: Turning Retrieved Knowledge into Parametric MemoryResMem is a method that distills retrieved knowledge into a parametric memory. The LLM reads retrieved text offline to produce teacher targets, and a memory sharing the same backbone learns an additive logit residual through self-distillation. On a Wikipedia subset it cuts teacher-construction storage by 94.7% versus a kNN pipeline. Across five QA datasets, mean token F1 rises from 32.83% to 34.48%, and it breaks 21% fewer correct answers than a kNN-trained memory.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI- SPIDER: A Faster and Smaller Identity-Based Signature From Isogenies
SPIDER is an isogeny-based signature built on a sigma protocol that proves knowledge of a prime (non-smooth) degree isogeny from a supersingular curve, which makes it a proof of knowledge of a PRISM signature. Combined with PRISM, it gives SPIDER-IBS, an identity-based signature the authors call the most efficient and compact isogeny-based IBS. Earlier isogeny IBS schemes relied on group actions.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 4 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Randomized Caches in Hardware: Challenges and Trade-offsPaper implementing four randomized last-level cache designs (CEASER-S, ScatterCache, SassCache, MIRAGE) in a multi-core out-of-order RISC-V SoC on FPGA, evaluated with SPEC CPU 2017 and GAPBS. Pipelining the index derivation function alone is insufficient: three variants lose up to 35% frequency until critical paths are redesigned, leaving them within 10% of baseline. IPC falls up to 5% (SPEC) and 11% (GAPBS); FPGA LUTs rise 10-35%, ASIC area 1-14%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
ProLand: A New Infeasible Manifold Optimization Method for LoRA Fine-TuningProLand (Product-space Landing) is a retraction-free optimizer for LoRA fine-tuning that keeps the basis factor near the Stiefel manifold. It coordinates factor updates with Muon-style spectral directions, designing updates in the space of the weight increment so objective optimization and orthogonality restoration stay separate. It reports the highest average score among compared methods across 11 tasks on DeBERTa-v3-base, Qwen2.5-3B, Llama-3.2-3B and Moonlight-16B-A3B at several ranks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI
SecPO: Principled Adversarial Training for Prompt Injection SecuritySecPO is a prompt injection defense that combines a new preference-optimization loss with adversarial training. It replaces the insecure DPO reference model with an approximated injection-invariant oracle, and trains on strong injections synthesized at best@240. Against Meta-SecAlign, AT cuts attack success rates 1.5-14.5x, and on Qwen3.6-27B AgentDojo ASR@800 falls to 8.8% from 78.8%, with no noticeable utility loss across nine benchmarks. Code, training data and model are released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- SecPO: Principled Adversarial Training for Prompt Injection Security
SecPO is a DPO-variant loss from UC Berkeley for training LLMs against indirect prompt injection. It replaces the undefended-model reference on injected input with its output on the clean input, a one-line change, and pairs with a PAIR-based adversarial training pipeline. On Qwen3.6-27B, AgentDojo ASR@800 is 8.8% against 78.8% for Meta-SecAlign, with utility unchanged across nine benchmarks. Code, training set and weights are released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI - How Much Can Tool Calls Reveal About You? Privacy Leakage from Tool-Call Traces
PrivacyTrace is a benchmark from the Shanghai AI Laboratory (AgentDoG Team, October 2026) that tests how much a passive observer can infer about a user from MCP tool-call traces alone. It has 1,000 synthetic profiles, 4,000 trajectories and 67,950 calls across 25 MCP servers. Four LLM attackers reached 26.25% attribute accuracy against a 17.97% prior baseline, and tool arguments leaked most.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI - Registered Functional Encryption with Certified Everlasting Security
Registered functional encryption with certified everlasting deletion (RFE-CED) combines user-registered public keys and transparent key aggregation with classical certificates that a ciphertext was information-theoretically destroyed. The paper defines two security notions, everlasting privacy and post-verification indistinguishability. Its slotted construction uses public-slot registered functional encryption, pseudorandom authenticated BB84 encodings and an interactive certified everlasting lemma. Accepted at Indocrypt 2026.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 4 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Locality-Controlled Out-of-Distribution Guidance for Robust Regulatory DNA Sequence DesignLOCOGEN is a sampling-time guidance method for diffusion models that design regulatory DNA sequences. It learns an invariant motif mask through sequence-level invariance learning, protects motif positions, and applies out-of-distribution damping only to background positions, with no retraining of the frozen backbone. On HepG2, K562 and SK-N-SH it reaches a region of the property, novelty and plausibility space that no baseline reached. Code is released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI- Rotom: A Microcontroller-Oriented Tweakable Block Cipher Using Modular Multiplication
Rotom is a family of 128-bit tweakable block ciphers for 32-bit microcontrollers. Its fixed 16-bit S-box uses odd constant multiplication modulo 2^16 combined with linear maps, and its linear layer is recursive over four 32-bit words. Exhaustive S-box analysis gives explicit differential and linear bounds. On Cortex-M3 and M4, cycle counts are close to Speck and lower than MSX and fixsliced AES.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 4 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - Revisiting Hash-ECB-Hash Enciphering: Plaintext Recovery Attacks on PEP and TET
ePrint 2026/2691 gives classical distinguishing and plaintext-recovery attacks on the Hash-ECB-Hash tweakable enciphering schemes PEP (FSE 2006) and TET (CRYPTO 2007). For PEP, a fixed public field makes the position coefficients repeat, which allows a two-query distinguisher and recovery with at most nine encryption queries and one decryption query. Two corrected TET variants fall to two-query distinguishers and deterministic recovery on messages with a partial final block.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 4 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
WorkFactory: Turning Professional Intents into Executable Work for Scalable Agent TrainingWorkFactory is a framework that builds coherent, executable professional tasks for training working agents. It plans an information support graph from professional intents, then uses probe executions to find and repair missing or inconsistent task information. The authors built 112,686 tasks across 612 occupations and fine-tuned Qwen models at 4B, 27B and 35B-A3B (WorkPilot). WorkPilot-35B-A3B rose from 879 to 1565 Elo on GDPval-AA v2.1.
huggingface.copaperAdded 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI- Penalty Deposits For Discrete Logarithms
Penalty Deposits For Discrete Logarithms (IACR ePrint 2026/2687, Francisco Vial-Prado and Louis Goubin) lets a trusted party attach a deposit to its own discrete-log secret and prove this with zero-knowledge proofs. Anyone who learns the secret can claim the deposit. The paper defines the security notions, gives two constructions in generic discrete logarithm groups, and analyzes ECDLP-based protocols.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 4 Nov 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
RADIOlogy: A Single-Pass Approach to Training-Free Zero-Shot Anomaly DetectionRADIOlogy is a training-free, single-pass zero-shot anomaly detection method that uses multi-head attention pooling in vision-language models. It scores anomalies by contrasting average similarity between vision features and sets of normal and abnormal prompts, with no windowed execution. RADIO agglomerative features drive a dense refinement pipeline for pixel-level segmentation, and the method is applied to medical images.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
VeriCUA: Verification as Agentic Exploration for Computer-Using AgentsVeriCUA is a platform-agnostic framework that verifies task completion by computer-using agents through agentic exploration. The verifier inspects context to build a task rubric, then picks GUI or code checks for unresolved requirements and combines findings under explicit evidence rules. It works online and offline across desktop, mobile and web, and agrees better with reference labels than the baselines, with the largest offline gains on hard cases.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Multi-View MoE: Letting Every Router Shape Expert ComputationMulti-View MoE is a sparse mixture-of-experts design that uses several independently initialized routers to select experts, then reuses their relative scores to mix learned latent views into each selected expert's input. Each expert still runs one forward pass, so active-expert count, FLOPs and all-to-all volume are unchanged. On a 24-layer 10B-A1B model trained on 708B tokens, it gains 1.18 points on a nine-task mean; Multi-Router alone gains 0.6.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
On the Fundamental Limits of Prefill-Based Decoding Length PredictionThis paper derives bounds on predicting an LLM's decode length from prefill-phase hidden states, a primitive for inference scheduling. It models decoding as a stopped stochastic process, giving per-prompt normality and an affine variance law σ=αμ+b. Predictors (MLP, EGTP, FiLM, soft-label, Mixture-of-Experts) converge near the bound, so system error dominates model error. It proposes fixing model, data and sampling in benchmarks and reporting relative-error metrics.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Efficient Scalable Oversight via RewindingRewindable interactive proofs (RIPs) are a new model of relativizing interactive proofs for scalable oversight, in which a weak verifier can rewind an AI prover to an earlier saved state. The paper builds an RIP for computations robust to changes in a small fraction of oracle answers. The honest prover runs in linear time, the verifier runs in nearly linear time in the input length after one-time preprocessing, and no cryptography is used. A preliminary MNIST experiment shows an RIP can be faster than a deployed proof system.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Glance: The Generator Is Its Own RerankerGlance is a RAG method in which the generator also reranks. It adds a lightweight decision adapter and pointer head that score candidate passages from one shared prefill, so a single resident 9B backbone does generation and reranking. After 39 minutes of MS MARCO fine-tuning it reaches nDCG@10 of 0.741 on SciFact and 0.345 on NFCorpus, against 0.721 and 0.326 for bge-reranker-v2-m3. On 300 HotpotQA questions it improves answer F1 by 0.045 over cross-encoder-selected context. Evaluation covers two retrieval datasets, one QA dataset and one backbone family.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Understanding and Mitigating Role Spoofing in LLMsUnderstanding and Mitigating Role Spoofing in LLMs is an arXiv paper (October 2026) on role spoofing, a prompt injection where malicious tool output impersonates the user. It shows models track "who said what" using both content cues (semantics, style) and structure cues (control tokens, formatting). Attacks combining fake structure and content succeed often, adversarial training stops only content-based attacks, and linear probes trained to predict conversation roles detect spoofing across settings.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Agentic LLM reasoning in pediatric diabetes outcome prediction from multimodal medical recordsCEDAR (Clinical Evidence-Driven Agent for Risk-prediction) is an evidence-citing, self-auditing LLM pipeline for predicting pediatric diabetes outcomes at 24 months from 18 months of records. On 2,489 youth with type 2 diabetes and 4,018 with type 1, pooled AUROC was 0.815 versus 0.656 to 0.700 for trained ML in T2D, and 0.756 versus 0.603 to 0.631 in T1D. Only 4 of 70,246 cited values mismatched the chart. Two pediatric endocrinologists matched its predictions in about nine of ten cases.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
A Unified Hessian-Guided Framework for Post-Training QuantizationThis preprint proposes a unified post-training quantization framework for large language models. It derives a Hessian-guided approximation of the output change caused by joint weight and activation quantization, using a tractable Fisher approximation. Quantization ranges, linear transformations and weight rounding are optimized together under one output-sensitivity objective. The authors report gains over state-of-the-art transformation and rounding methods in channel-wise and block-wise settings.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Decompose, Estimate, Select: Coverage-Aware Context Construction for Long-Form RAGDecompose, Estimate, Select is a coverage-aware retrieval pipeline for long-form RAG. It splits a query into subquestions, ranks candidates with a coverage-trained bi-encoder, predicts a document-by-subquestion coverage matrix with a cross-encoder, and picks documents by greedy maximum-marginal coverage. On TREC RAG 2024, α-nDCG@10 rises from 0.625 to 0.702 (gold-nugget bound 0.718). A grounded self-feedback loop raises V_strict by 0.086 over two passes.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI- Provable Recovery from Integer Quotients: Improved Bounds for Nonlinear Hidden Number Problems
Provable Recovery from Integer Quotients is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2686) that widens the proven recovery ranges for three nonlinear hidden number problems modulo a prime p. Tolerable unrevealed lower bits rise from 1/3 to 1/2 for modular inversion, 1/6 to 1/5 for the elliptic-curve HNP, and 1/5 to 1/3 for hidden multipliers. The lattice-based algorithms return the exact candidate set in expected polynomial time in log p on random inputs.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - Quasi-polynomial time algorithms for block basis reduction of linear codes
Kolesnikov and Novoselov give block basis reduction (BKZ) algorithms for linear codes that need polynomial or quasi-polynomial numbers of calls to a minimum weight codeword oracle at fixed block size. The earlier Ghentiyala and Stephens-Davidowitz bounds are exponential. The paper adds a truncated BKZ and a DeepBKZ variant, with an implementation for block sizes 2 to 24 and approximation-factor estimates on random codes.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - Stop Calling Them Provers: The Case for Calling ProVerif and Tamarin Symbolic Protocol Analyzers
Nadim Kobeissi's ePrint paper 2026/2683 argues that ProVerif and Tamarin should be called symbolic protocol analyzers, not provers. It audits their published soundness arguments, finding false statements, missing proofs and gaps between paper and implementation, and reproduces reported Tamarin bugs that accept false claims. It also covers model gaps in parsers and state machines, weak secrecy queries and unjustified primitive equations. The page is an abstract only.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security - A Quantitative Evaluation of Constant-Time Analysis Tools
AutoBench-CT is a modular benchmark for constant-time analysis tools, with manually verified per-violation ground truth across 64 cryptographic tasks. It scores seven tools on operational performance, detection quality and usability. The authors explain why CT-grind (2010) is still the most used tool, list recurring limitations across tools, and propose a composite pipeline for stronger constant-time guarantees. Accepted at ACSAC 2026.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Turing LLM Post-Training: Calibrated Distillation and Efficient Dynamic-MoE ExecutionTuring LLM post-training combines calibrated multi-teacher on-policy distillation (C-MOPD) with an execution path for dynamically routed mixture-of-experts models. C-MOPD matches each teacher on a local Top-K support with teacher-wise loss normalization and clipping. On Turing-20B-A2B it scores 0.9988 on four-domain integration, beats Qwen3-8B on math and code (85.92 vs 80.33 mean), and cuts consolidation step time from 398.7 to 139.3 seconds in a PPU profile.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
M-PFT: Angular Margin for Calibrated Prompt-Tuning of Fine-Tuned Vision-Language ModelsM-PFT is an angular-margin method for prompt tuning of vision-language models that fixes base-to-novel dual miscalibration (underconfidence on base classes, overconfidence on novel classes). It adds two losses: minimizing the maximum cosine similarity between tunable class embeddings, and minimizing angular distance to each zero-shot embedding. Tests on 9 prompt-tuning methods and 15 datasets show lower novel-class calibration error at comparable accuracy and negligible overhead.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Aligning Medical Vision Language Models at the Capability Boundary with Entropy Adaptive Rubric GroundingMedCBR is a two-stage alignment framework for medical vision language models. Difficulty Weighted Boundary Preference Optimization (DBPO) trains on counterfactual preference pairs at the model's capability frontier. Entropy Gated Grounded Policy Optimization (EGPO) then applies distilled clinical rubrics according to prediction entropy. It reaches 61.2% average accuracy on six medical benchmarks, with the largest gains on differential diagnosis, and the two stages combine super-additively.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
SEAL: Sealed Queries for Local Sanitization against Indirect Prompt InjectionSEAL is a defense against indirect prompt injection for local LLM agents. It learns a soft prompt and scoring readout offline, then uses a frozen task model to score and delete injected tokens from tool outputs, with queries built from trusted initial context. On AgentDojo, attack success falls from 34.6% to 0.1% and Joint rises from 51.4% to 77.5%, using about 127x fewer defense tokens than PISanitizer.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
MetaVul: Agentic Harness Discovery for Vulnerability DetectionMetaVul is a self-improving framework that discovers agent harnesses for LLM-based vulnerability detection. Starting from a seed structured reasoning scaffold, it iteratively refines the harness using feedback from paired vulnerable and patched functions, and returns Pareto-optimal harnesses. Tested on a 202-pair validation set and a 430-pair held-out set, it improved pairwise accuracy by up to 23.3 and 25.8 points, and harnesses transferred across models (14.7 points held-out gain).
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
REALM: Identifying Minimal Task Assets for LLM AgentsREALM (Required Execution Assets Linked to a Mission) is an approach to applying least privilege to LLM agents by identifying the assets a task needs, including ones discovered at runtime. It models assets as Dependency Graph nodes, separates discovering an asset from authorizing it, and exposes resource-bound Partial APIs inside a Task Container. On AgentDyn with qwen3.5-flash, attack success rate falls from 16.6% to 0.2%, with 40.0% task completion on clean tasks and 36.4% on injected cases.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
DICE: Decentralized Incentive-driven Federated Learning for Efficient & Scalable Customization of Pretrained Models in Web3DICE is a blockchain-powered federated learning (BCFL) algorithm for customizing large pretrained models among untrusted Web3 participants. It combines dynamic progressive learning and model slice verification, so hardware-limited participants can train part of the model, with a tree-structured committee consensus protocol and an efficiency-driven incentive scheme to scale to more data holders. Experiments cover vision and language models.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
PCM: A Proof-Carrying Message Protocol for Verifiable Multi-Agent CommunicationProof-Carrying Messages (PCM) is a protocol where each claim an AI agent sends carries evidence: records from an append-only Merkle log the agent cannot write, with inclusion proofs, signed by an attesting signer. Receivers verify offline in about 1 ms and label each claim proven, unproven or failed. On 926 messages (712 lies in 16 classes), PCM accepts 10 lies (1.4%), all stale evidence; plain A2A accepts all 712.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI
PCM: A Proof-Carrying Message Protocol for Verifiable Multi-Agent CommunicationProof-Carrying Messages (PCM) is a protocol where each claim an AI agent sends carries evidence: records from an append-only Merkle log the agent cannot write, with inclusion proofs, signed by an attesting signer it cannot control. Receivers verify offline and mark each claim proven, unproven or failed. On 926 messages (712 lies in 16 classes) PCM accepted 10 lies, all stale evidence (1.4%), while plain A2A accepted all 712. Verification takes about 1 ms.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Leaving, Staying, or Living There? Duration Commonsense Reasoning with Human-LLM Co-annotationsThis paper studies whether vision-language models can infer how long a person stays somewhere (living, staying, or leaving) from geotagged social media posts. The authors build a new corpus of geotagged tweets co-annotated by humans and LLMs. State-of-the-art models struggle even with multi-turn Chain-of-Thought prompting, often missing contextual cues and subtle hashtags while over-relying on prominent visual details.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI
inkGround: Benchmarking Fine-grained Visual Grounding Capabilities of Vision-Language Models for Cursive Handwriting in the WildinkGround is a benchmark for stroke trajectory recovery from full-page, camera-captured handwriting, with 537 page images (about 18.7k words, 163k strokes) and pseudo-label references filtered by OCR agreement and human raters. Models get a page image and a target word, then output ordered stroke points. Seven VLMs were scored with DTW, Chamfer distance, readability and style similarity. Closed-source models, notably Gemini-3.1-Pro, did best, and the ranking held on IAM-OnDB.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Think Before You Act: Decision Gate for LLM AgentsJevAct is a runtime verification framework that intercepts selected LLM agent actions before execution and returns feedback for bounded revision. It compiles domain policies into executable state checks and structured questions scored by a prefill-only decision model, giving probability-based judgments without generation. Tested on eleven agents with tau^2-bench Airline and Telecom and BFCL, it gained consistently on Telecom and BFCL and was mixed on Airline.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI
CALM: Conflict-Aware Lifecycle Memory Governance for Long-Horizon Language AgentsCALM is a conflict-aware lifecycle memory governance framework for long-horizon language agents. It turns records into evidence-grounded memory cells, updates their validity and lifecycle states from support, conflict and dependency signals, and admits evidence at query time through training-free or learned gating based on temporal applicability. It beats baselines on LongMemEval-S and LoCoMo with Qwen and GPT backbones, and keeping superseded records helps earlier-state reasoning.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI
From Leniency to Suspicion: How an Open Post-Training Recipe Changes Whom LLM Fact-Checkers BelieveThis paper measures job-based doubt in LLM fact-checkers: judging a claim false more often when the poster has a lower-status job. It compares base and post-trained checkpoints of six model families on fact-checked claims with randomised poster profiles. Only the open Tülu-3 recipe (OLMo-2 32B, Tülu-3 70B) creates the effect, under one percentage point but reliable. In OLMo-2 32B the flip comes from one residual-stream direction and appears at supervised fine-tuning, confirmed on 400 new claims. None of seven commercial models doubts lower-status posters more.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Multi-Token Prediction Done RightSoft Multi-Token Prediction (Soft-MTP) is a one-line change to multi-token prediction (MTP) pre-training. The authors show the MTP cross-entropy gradient splits exactly into a KL self-distillation term and a noisy residual, and a straight-through "KL gradient-recovery trick" keeps only the KL term. From 167M to 1.2B parameters it gives lower NTP perplexity, faster speculative decoding and higher zero-shot accuracy than standard MTP, with no added parameters or overhead.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Improving the Dependency on Fine-Tuning Data in Transfer Learning for Speech Emotion RecognitionThis paper proposes an fMLLR-based compensation mechanism that cuts the fine-tuning data needed in transfer learning for speech emotion recognition under train-test acoustic mismatch. An autoencoder reduces trainable parameters, and an affine transform in the encoder latent space models rotations and shifts. In a human-robot interaction task, mean CCC rose 16.8% with 12.9% of the training set and 14.4% with 50%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Structured Security Explanations for Learning-Based Vulnerability DetectionVulnLens is a framework for binary C/C++ function-level vulnerability detection. A label-blind LLM Explainer describes each function from seven fixed perspectives (data flow, memory access, object lifetime, arithmetic and type behavior, control flow, shared state, external-resource access). A supervised Detector fuses code and explanations by cross-attention. It reaches 75.5% accuracy and 77.2% F1 on a 526-function PrimeVul test set, and 66.4% accuracy on SecVulEval without retraining.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Locating Sycophancy Across Training Stages in Open Language ModelsLocating Sycophancy Across Training Stages in Open Language Models measures sycophancy in 13 open checkpoints from 5 lineages, from base model through supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization to release. It finds two behaviors with different origins: deference to a claim in the prompt exists in every base model, while capitulation under user objection is largely absent from base models and present in every post-trained checkpoint. Post-trained models often drop firmly held answers as readily as loosely held ones when the objection names an alternative.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Scaling Laws for Tool-Use Agents via Controllable Environment SynthesisSynthAPI is a pipeline that generates synthetic tool-use environments with explicit control over diversity of tools, tasks and underlying databases. Across 458,752 tasks and 849 trained models of four sizes, the authors fit a scaling law predicting downstream agent generalization. At larger data budgets, scaling tool and database diversity beats adding more tasks, and higher complexity helps more. Agents trained this way beat prior synthetic-data baselines on four benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Metacognitive Decoding: Efficient Inference for Diffusion Language AgentsMetacognitive Decoding is a lightweight plug-in controller for diffusion language model backbones. It learns when to finalize tokens and how far generation should extend, and is trained on agent trajectories to balance correctness against generation cost. Across five benchmarks it cuts inference FLOPs by 20.6% on average versus the most efficient baseline, with competitive task accuracy. The abstract names no specific benchmarks or backbones.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Know, then Draw: A New Learning Paradigm for Visual GenerationKnow, then Draw is a learning paradigm for visual generation that uses autoregressive pretraining to acquire semantic knowledge and diffusion post-training for high-fidelity rendering. Controlled comparisons find autoregression the stronger pretraining objective, and semantic quality matters more than AR-only generation quality. This motivates a purely semantic tokenizer trained with language supervision only. A 3B text-to-image model trained in 6,600 H100 GPU-hours scores 86 on GenEval and 87 on DPG-Bench.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
VideoLVR: Latent Visual Reasoning over Grounded Video EvidenceVideoLVR is a method that lets video multimodal LLMs build latent visual evidence from local regions at relevant moments and reason over it interleaved with text tokens. A visual token prediction objective, defined over a vocabulary derived from the input video, supervises the latents. It extends to reinforcement learning with sampled visual tokens as actions and final-answer rewards, and improves fine-grained video benchmarks without much context growth.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
EnvSched: Environment-Aware Scheduling for Rollout-Efficient Agent Reinforcement LearningEnvSched is an online scheduler for agentic reinforcement learning that picks which environment-task pairs to roll out next. It builds a dual-relation graph over environments and tasks, propagates past rollout statistics to predict within-task reward variance, and adds environment quotas and a similarity penalty. On Qwen3-8B it scores 48.81 average on BFCL-v3, tau-Bench and ACEBench-Agent after 40 steps, above random selection at 120 steps.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
As the Story Unfolds: Watching a Film and Identifying Characters as a Human DoesThis paper defines a character naming task for films: given a name spoken in dialogue and its video context, the model must pick which visible character bears that name. It provides a dataset with annotations for character naming and first appearances, a video-and-dialogue model, and a comparison with proprietary multimodal LLMs. It also proposes a progressive framework that builds a character bank as the film plays, without cast lists or actor photographs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
CRISP: Co-designing Pruning and Scheduling for Efficient MoE Inference on Edge ServersCRISP is a combination-aware framework that co-designs pruning and runtime scheduling for Mixture-of-Experts inference on memory-constrained edge platforms. It reorders neurons by importance so one stored expert supports several execution widths, gives hot, warm and cold expert combinations different widths, and overlaps expert loading with computation. On Mixtral-8x7B and DeepSeek-MoE-16B it raises throughput up to 2.1x at the same memory budget, with accuracy loss limited to 3.6%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI- FeatureArc: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Evolving Features
FeatureArc is a benchmark for coding agents on evolving features, built by a pipeline that mines repository histories into multi-stage tasks across four programming languages. It has 73 manually reviewed tasks of 2 to 10 stages, validated with fail-to-pass and pass-to-pass tests. Across 10 agents, pooled success drops from 62.7% at the first stage to 28.5% for the whole feature. Inherited defects appear in 72.9% of failed later stages.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Bayes-Adaptive MDPs for Rollout Allocation to Enhance GRPO TrainingAdaRoll-GRPO is a method that allocates GRPO rollout budgets per question by difficulty instead of uniformly. It frames allocation as a sequential decision problem and learns an allocation policy with a Bayes-adaptive MDP, computed offline so training adds no online optimization cost. Experiments on several reasoning datasets and LLM architectures show gains over standard GRPO at the same total rollout budget.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Radical isogenies on every modelRadical isogenies on every model is an IACR ePrint paper by Thomas Decru (October 2026). It gives radical isogeny steps of every odd degree N directly on short Weierstrass, Montgomery, twisted Edwards, Huff, Jacobi quartic, twisted Hessian, Legendre and Jacobi intersection curves, plus Kummer lines. In Tate normal form a step drops from 12.5N to 10N multiplications. Montgomery and twisted Edwards curves cost 10.5N+O(1) per step and 2N to push a point. All algorithms are inversion-free, with exact operation counts.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
When Is Additional Retrieval Worthwhile? A Cost-Aware Study of Evidence Gain and Answer Reliability in RAGThis paper studies a cost-aware, two-action RAG routing policy that chooses between dense retrieval plus reranking and a hybrid lexical-dense retriever, using a regularized linear model to predict per-question evidence gain. On 60 held-out QASPER articles (188 questions), it triggers hybrid retrieval on 24.5% of questions and matches always-hybrid Hit@10 (78.70%). Answers from 4-bit Qwen3-4B show no clear correctness or faithfulness gain, and the assessments are model-assisted.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Tessera: Structure-Completed Evidence Units for Web Retrieval-Augmented GenerationTessera is a training-free evidence delivery layer for web retrieval-augmented generation. It rebuilds retrieved pages' HTML into fine-grained evidence units, each completed with page title, section path and table headers, then packs the relevant units into the reader context at the same token budget. Tracing evidence over full English Wikipedia shows chunking loses table and infobox content. Tessera adds 5 to 6 accuracy points on three QA benchmarks and carries over to agentic search.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
p-DCIM: A 28nm Probabilistic SRAM DCIM based Ising Machine for Near-Memory Context Selection in LLM-RAG Pipelinep-DCIM is a 28 nm SRAM digital compute-in-memory macro (0.16 mm2, 0.41 mW) that works as an Ising machine for RAG evidence selection. Selection is cast as a QUBO problem, and the same MAC datapath computes embedding similarities and annealing steps. Replacing LLM reranking with it gives a selection-energy estimate over six orders of magnitude lower and cuts total energy per query by 67%, with comparable token-level F1 on the evaluated examples.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
DCKV: Learned Transform Coding of the Prompt KV Cache in Hybrid Language ModelsDCKV is a differentiable codec for the prompt KV cache of hybrid language models, which keep a KV cache only in their few full-attention layers. Transform, quantizer and entropy models (conditioned on prompt tokens and already decoded neighbouring positions) are trained end to end against a frozen model. On Qwen3.5-2B it stores a token in over 55 times fewer bytes than bf16 with at most 1.8 points lost on three long-context benchmarks, and over 100 times fewer with at most 3.6 points lost.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
AxisQ: Depth-Adaptive Channel--Frequency Quantization for Camouflaged Object DetectionAxisQ is a post-training quantization framework for camouflaged object detection (COD) that allocates activation bits by feature depth. It uses the channel domain for shallow features and the local-frequency domain for deep features, under a fixed per-layer average bit budget. It adds a boundary-aware Hessian approximation for reconstruction. On CAMO at W2A2, weighted F-measure improves 12.7% for CFRN and 33.3% for CamoFormer-P over the strongest baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
OblivDGL: Oblivious Deep Graph Learning Made PracticalOblivDGL is a framework for secure GNN training and inference in machine-learning-as-a-service settings, modelled on Deep Graph Library. It uses an oblivious message passing paradigm and a new oblivious graph representation built on function secret sharing, revealing only the total node and edge counts. On four benchmark graphs it cuts training communication up to 1024x with up to 14.3x speedup, and inference communication up to 754x with 4.19x speedup.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Measuring Users' Security and Privacy Concerns About Third-Party Community Bots on DiscordMeasurement study of 23,102 third-party Discord bots and 183,142 user reviews (2021-2026, 49 languages). A fine-tuned DeBERTa classifier plus manual validation yields 8,832 security and privacy reviews, mapped to a 31-theme taxonomy; Data Sharing (30.5%) and Data Collection (16.2%) dominate. Permission count and admin status correlate only weakly with user concerns. The authors build BotLens, an MCP-server auditing framework with six tools.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
AK_QMUL at ArGuard Shared Tasks: A Single Fine-Tuned JAIS for Arabic Harmful-Prompt DetectionAK_QMUL's system for the ArGuard-2026 shared tasks fine-tunes JAIS-6.7B with 4-bit QLoRA and a linear head on the last-token representation. For binary safe/unsafe detection (B1) it uses a four-way head over dialect register and AraSafe MSA augmentation, reaching macro-F1 0.984. For seven-way harm domain (B2) it averages five seeds, reaching 0.790. Both ranked first. Bully is the weakest class.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Your Wish Is My Commit: Over-Compliant Refactoring in AI Coding AgentsYour Wish Is My Commit is a controlled study of over-compliant refactoring in Codex and Claude Code, run across five models, 50 algorithmic tasks and 10 object-oriented tasks. Over 3,000 turns of repeated "refactor further" prompts, no model stopped on its own: each rewrote up to 31x the original codebase before first stopping and resumed edits after declaring the task complete. The paper defines six behavioral signals for detecting over-compliance.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Reva: Real-Time Vulnerability Detection through Contextual Probing of Large Language ModelsREVA (REal-time Vulnerability Analysis) is a vulnerability detector that puts a module threat model, lightweight static analysis findings and call-graph information into one LLM forward pass. A trained probe reads the model's internal representations of the new function. On PrimeVul's held-out test set, REVA on GLM-5.3-Flash reaches 60.0% accuracy in about one second per function, matching the agentic VulTriage (59.2%) at over 250 times the speed and under a tenth of the cost. The probe is 14% to 17% more accurate than the LLM's own verdict.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Reva: Real-Time Vulnerability Detection through Contextual Probing of Large Language ModelsREVA (REal-time Vulnerability Analysis) is an LLM-based vulnerability detector that screens each new function in one forward pass. It feeds the model a pre-computed module threat model, lightweight static analysis findings and call-graph data, then reads the model's internal representations with a trained probe. On PrimeVul's held-out test set with GLM-5.3-Flash it reaches 60.0% accuracy in about one second per function, matching the agentic VulTriage (59.2%) while over 250 times faster.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
LINE-Break: Cryptanalysis and Reverse Engineering of Letter SealingLINE-Break is a security analysis of Letter Sealing v2, the custom end-to-end encryption protocol in the LINE messenger. A TLS man-in-the-middle attacker or malicious server can replay, reorder and block messages undetected, and colluding users can forge message authorship in one-to-one and group chats. Stickers and URL previews leak plaintext. The attacks were verified on the real iOS app and an independent implementation.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Cheap Reverse Engineering and What It Will DoCheap 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. It describes AI identifying hardware components, extracting firmware, decompiling object code and cloning apps. It maps these practices onto trade secret, copyright, anti-circumvention, computer misuse and contract law, and sketches possible legal responses with trade-offs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Cheap AI-Assisted Reverse Engineering and What It Will Do"Cheap AI-Assisted Reverse Engineering and What It Will Do" is an October 2026 arXiv paper (Computers and Society) arguing that generative AI strains the law of reverse engineering. AI systems can identify hardware components, extract firmware, decompile object code and clone apps, which removes the cost barrier that laws rely on. The authors map these practices onto trade secret, copyright, anti-circumvention, computer misuse and contract law, and sketch possible legal responses with their trade-offs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- Cheap Reverse Engineering and What It Will Do
"Cheap Reverse Engineering and What It Will Do" is an October 2026 arXiv paper (cs.CY) by Mandel, Choksi, Castillo, Benthall and Grimmelmann. It argues that copyright, trade secret, anti-circumvention, computer misuse and contract law tolerate reverse engineering partly because it was costly, and that coding agents remove that cost. It cites SRE-Bench and ExploitBench results and sets out four possible legal responses, endorsing none.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Then there is prompt injection, a malicious email, ...: The Wild Wide West of OpenClaw Agentic System SecurityAn empirical study of security concerns in the OpenClaw AI personal assistant framework, using 25K+ posts from 13 subreddits (162 security-relevant) and 358 security-tagged GitHub issues (180 retained). It maps 521 CWE instances across 59 weakness types, concentrated in access control, sensitive-data exposure, injection and unsafe execution. It extracts 543 practitioner mitigations into seven strategies and reconstructs a sensitive-data exposure path with dummy secrets.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Scope-Gap Injection: Exploiting Evaluator Channel Blind Spots in the OpenClaw Agent Security CompetitionScope-Gap Injection (SGI) is an indirect prompt injection method for multi-stage LLM-agent safety pipelines, tested in the IJCAI 2026 OpenClaw Agent Security Attack Competition. The visible task and skill stay benign while target identifiers, bypass parameters and authorization steps sit in an attachment written as a business worklist, which the S2 LLM judge appears not to inspect. SGI bypassed all three stages (static scan, LLM judge, live audit) for 5 of 19 targets, best F = 0.385. Attachment placement had 78% S2 acceptance versus 23% in-skill. The paper closes with defenses that align evaluator scope with agent channels.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Private Information Retrieval with Accountability at Erasure-Optimal Server RedundancySynTrace is a single-round compiler that adds accountability to linear private information retrieval (PIR). The client mixes the retrieval query with m audit queries, so audit syndromes identify up to d deviating servers among t colluding ones before reconstruction. The paper proves perfect query privacy and zero false identification within the threshold. For Shamir-based PIR it needs k=t+d+1 servers. For a 32 KiB record from a 1 GiB database it uses 2.25 MiB, against 8.96 MiB for the Eriguchi, Kurosawa and Nuida (TCC 2022) homomorphic-MAC construction.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- UTS #39: Unicode Security Mechanisms
UTS #39 (Unicode Security Mechanisms) is the Unicode Consortium's technical standard for detecting identifier spoofing. It defines the General, IDN and Email security profiles for identifiers, confusable detection through skeleton and bidiSkeleton mappings, and mixed-script detection with resolved script sets and Restriction Levels. It also covers limited contexts for ZWJ/ZWNJ and the confusables and identifier data files. The fetched text is truncated, so later sections are not covered.
unicode.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
SymLift: Neural Semantic Lifting for Compile-Free Vulnerability Detection in Context-Incomplete Code FragmentsSymLift is a compile-free vulnerability detection framework for context-incomplete code fragments. A fine-tuned LLM lifts control-flow, data-flow, memory and resource relations into a constrained LLVM-like IR. A parser turns the IR into facts, and Datalog rules derive findings with derivation traces. On Juliet function-level fragments Clang compilation success falls to 12.00%, while SymLift's completion rate drops only 1.17 points. SymLift-Qwen-7B reaches Target-F1 94.41% on FormAI and 91.66% micro-F1 on MegaVul.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
SymLift: Neural Semantic Lifting for Compile-Free Vulnerability Detection in Context-Incomplete Code FragmentsSymLift is a compile-free vulnerability detection framework for code fragments that lack project context. A fine-tuned LLM reconstructs control-flow, data-flow, memory and resource relations as a constrained LLVM-like IR, and a deterministic parser turns it into facts for Datalog rules that give findings with derivation traces. SymLift-Qwen-7B reaches 94.41% Target-F1 on FormAI and 91.66% micro-averaged Target-F1 on MegaVul.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Maximum-Likelihood Decoding of Gabidulin Codes Is NP-Hard Even in Dimension OnePhilippe Gaborit proves that maximum-likelihood decoding of Gabidulin codes is NP-hard even for dimension one: deciding rank distance at most n-2 from the code {λg} is NP-complete. The reduction is deterministic, so Rank Syndrome Decoding and Rank Minimum Distance for F_{q^m}-linear codes are NP-complete under deterministic reductions, where the earlier reduction was randomized. It goes through a new pivot problem, Twisted Square Membership.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Explaining Navigation Decisions: Stage-Aware Visual Attribution for Vision-Language NavigationA stage-aware visual attribution framework for Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) that explains a robot's action choices. It identifies "instruction-stage insensitivity", where existing explainers give similar outputs across navigation stages. The method builds action-conditioned temporal instruction-visual attributions, aggregates relevant historical evidence by stage, and applies an instruction-guided spatial filter. It improves attribution quality across several VLN policies and benchmarks, helps diagnose failure cases, and was tested on a Unitree G1 robot.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🧠 AI
The Patient Is Always Right? Evaluating Sycophancy in Medical Diagnosis with Graded Patient BeliefsThis paper evaluates sycophancy in medical diagnosis across nine AI models. Each model is shown clinical evidence plus a patient's belief in a specific but incorrect condition, with the belief's closeness to the evidence varied. Models adopted the belief 23.2% of the time on average, even for fictional conditions, and 43.0% under a Rare Disease Claimer persona. Medical fine-tuning and larger scale reduced susceptibility.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Reversible Pseudonymisation of Documents Sent to External LLMs: an Open Bilingual Benchmark and an EngineOpen bilingual (Russian and UK English) benchmark of five open pseudonymisation tools and a regex baseline, plus a new engine built on the two strongest tools. On a held-out set of 1,000 synthetic documents per language, the best existing tools leave a whole personal value visible in 61% (Russian) and 58% (UK) of documents. The engine does so in 0.3% and 0.2%. Russian name restoration reaches only 94.6%, below the 99% threshold. Real documents were not tested.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Reversible Pseudonymisation of Documents Sent to External LLMs: an Open Bilingual Benchmark and an EngineThis paper presents an open benchmark of five existing pseudonymisation tools and a regex baseline on Russian and UK English documents, plus an open engine built on the two strongest tools. On a held-out set of 1,000 synthetic documents per language, the best existing tools leave a whole value visible in 58 to 61% of documents. The engine does so in 0.2 to 0.3%. Russian name restoration reaches only 94.6%, below the 99% threshold. Real documents were not tested.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Detecting and Understanding Ambiguity in Visualizations with Role-Playing Vision Language Model InterpretationsThis paper presents a pipeline that uses persona-conditioned vision language models to surface interpretive ambiguity in visualizations. Topic-relevant personas elicit candidate takeaways, and a Target-Pattern-Scope framework lets LLM judges label statement pairs as Compatible, Disjoint or Opposing, which are summarized in an ambiguity profile. The authors benchmark VLMs on chart comprehension per chart type, check labeling against human annotations, and run case studies on public visualizations and a redesign.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🧠 AI
On the Inapplicability of Residue-Confined Error Attacks to CRT-FHE with Non-Degenerate Error DistributionsAnil Kumar Pradhan's October 2026 ePrint rebuts the Olejnik and Naskrecki (2026) key-recovery and plaintext-recovery attack on the Pradhan CRT-RLWE fully homomorphic encryption scheme. It argues the attack works only because the chosen error distribution lies in the kernel of the CRT encoding, which makes the effective error zero. It also argues that the intended centered-binomial errors make that event negligible at the reported parameters. This is the author's own response, not independent verification.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
HerHealthGPT: An Evidence-Grounded Conversational AI System for Women's Reproductive Health Copy titleHerHealthGPT is a conversational AI system for women's reproductive health that combines retrieval-augmented generation, context-aware clarification and source validation in a web interface. Evidence retrieval raises concern-category accuracy from 54.1% to 59.3% over fine-tuning alone on 540 messages from 90 cases. The clarification router reaches 85.6% recall and 86.2% specificity. In a 30-adult study, 83.3% preferred the retrieval-enabled version. The authors say clinical validation is still needed.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
DRILS: Dependency-based Requirement Change Impact Analysis Using LLMsDRILS is an LLM-based agentic framework for requirements change impact analysis. It uses multiple agents to generate candidate impact sets, with an LLM-as-a-judge promoting diversity in selection. It adds RE-RAG, a tuned retrieval technique, and a requirement dependency graph as a knowledge source. On three curated datasets it reaches 87.1% recall, 76.3% precision and 81% F1 at lower cost than baselines. The authors release the datasets.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Chosen Commitments and Certified Decoding Regions in the Adaptive Threshold Schnorr AttackThis IACR ePrint 2026/2632 paper by Demirtaş and Yayla analyses the Crites–Stewart adaptive forgery attack on threshold Schnorr signatures, which needs one call to a sparse linear search oracle (bounded distance decoding of a scaled Reed–Solomon code). It shows that choosing the commitment coefficient vector does not help much: a wrapper adversary with Q challenges succeeds with probability at most QM/p, even if its solvers decode every witness for free. For the six original (N, τ) pairs, M stays below 2^24, so the bound is under 2^-100 after 2^128 challenges at p = 2^252.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Intervention-Certified Amplification: A Validity Gate for $σ$-Weighted Post-TrainingIntervention-Certified Amplification (ICA) is a validity gate for sigma-weighted hybrid SFT/RL post-training. The paper shows that DIAA, a per-sample sigma-weighted hybrid, emits unexecuted tool-integrated reasoning on 29% of MATH-500 prompts (three times vanilla GRPO) even with Python fences removed from its anchor. ICA gates sigma with paired-rollout evidence, cutting TIR to 13.8% (frozen) and 11.2% (online) and raising accuracy from 47.5% to 48.7% and 49.3%. It transfers to GSM8K.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Build, Don't Play: Self-Improving LLM Research Agents Develop a Hearthstone Battlegrounds AI That Rivals Top PlayersAutoTavern is a self-improving system of specialised LLM research agents with a typed shared memory and verification gates. In 20 days it built TavernGym, a full-content Hearthstone Battlegrounds simulator, and 23 versions of TavernAgent, a PPO-trained player. TavernAgent averaged placement 1.60 with 80% first places over its last 20 live games, beating the top ten players (2.34, 59%). On TavernBench (960 tasks), it answered 91% of play tasks against at most 63% for frontier LLMs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Learning What to Share: Expert Specialization for Time-Series ForecastingPersistent Closed-Form Routing (PCR) is a plug-and-play method for multivariate time-series forecasting. It alternates exact conditional estimation of channel-specific mixture weights with gradient training of low-rank residual experts around a frozen pretrained forecaster. Across eleven datasets and three backbones, PCR-K4 cuts dataset-balanced MSE by 3.86-14.25% and beats competing specialization methods with fewer trainable parameters. The paper also introduces GalaxyTS, a synthetic dataset with exact shared and channel-specific references.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Task Format as a Factor in Adaptation: A Controlled Comparison of LoRA and Full Fine-Tuning for Prompt-Safety ClassificationThis paper compares LoRA and full fine-tuning for prompt-safety classification using a matched 400M encoder-decoder pair (Ettin) across three task formats, with up to 15 seeds per cell and pre-specified analyses. Full fine-tuning leads LoRA by 2-3 pp at the pre-specified learning rates, and the encoder gap closes when both use the same learning-rate search. Training LoRA to write a reason after its verdict adds 4.0 pp, while a content-free sentence of equal length does not. Trained models beat a prompted 8B in domain but trail it by 8-23 pp on adversarial jailbreaks and over-flag benign prompts (27-66% against 2-3%).
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Unlocking the Specialization Capability of PPG Foundation Models for Wearable Signals through Structured Pruning and Adaptive Fine-TuningSPAFT is a structured prune-then-finetune framework for PPG (photoplethysmography) foundation models used on wearable signals. It finds that pretrained PPG models have inherent sparsity and redundancy, then restricts fine-tuning to a compact parameter subspace chosen by parameter importance and structural redundancy. Across four PPG foundation models, five datasets and ten tasks, it wins 82.8% of regression and 87.5% of classification comparisons.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
An actively trained neural operator for near-explicit atmospheric chemistryFNO-MoE is a Fourier neural operator with a mixture of experts that predicts the full near-explicit chemical state (Master Chemical Mechanism, thousands of species) over 30 minutes in one call. Expert disagreement selects the most informative box-model simulations, so active sampling beats random or evenly spread sampling at equal cost. Fine-tuning on longer trajectories keeps multi-hour runs stable, and the emulator runs orders of magnitude faster than the numerical solver.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Enhancing LLM-Based Vulnerability Detection via Representation-Aware Logical EnsembleRALE (Representation-Aware Logical Ensemble) is a method for detecting vulnerabilities in C source code with LLMs trained on different code representations: raw source, Abstract Syntax Trees and Control Flow Graphs. The authors show the representations suit different vulnerability classes, and combine the models with explicit logical rules and majority voting. Single-representation models reach up to 73% F1, while the ensemble reaches 78%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
ZipFusion: Fusing Lossless KV Decompression with Attention for Efficient LLM DecodingZipFusion is a lossless KV cache compression scheme whose attention kernel reads the compressed cache directly and rebuilds the original values in registers with simple bit operations, so no separate decompression pass is needed. It also reassigns the memory freed by compression across layers to hold more KV cache. Built on FlashInfer and integrated with SGLang, it gives about 1.25x decode attention speedup on an H100 and up to 26.3% higher decode throughput at 8K context than uncompressed SGLang. It reaches up to 2.76x the throughput of the best lossless KV compression baseline.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
VulDec: Vulnerability Detection in Binaries via Neural DecompilationVulDec is a dataset and framework for detecting vulnerabilities in binaries by first decompiling them with fine-tuned LLMs. The dataset aligns real-world Assembly-C function pairs across several architectures with CWE labels. Tuned neural decompilers reach about 56% Edit Similarity and 43% BLEU-4, and tuned detectors reach a macro F1 of 0.61 on a realistic test set with a 3% vulnerability rate.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Extraction meets Distillation - cryptanalytic techniques to recover parameters from a Deep Neural NetworkExtraction meets Distillation is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2628, CSCML 2026) that combines cryptanalytic weight-direction extraction with label-based distillation to reconstruct fully connected neural networks. It adapts a ReLU extraction implementation to Leaky ReLU and proves conditional bounds for direction recovery and sign selection. On CIFAR-10 victims, reconstructed models reach 56.40% and 58.29% agreement. It separates label requests from privileged access and notes that prediction agreement does not identify parameters.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
DualPace: Decoupled Scheduling and Cooperative GPU--CPU Decoding for LLM ServingDualPace is an LLM serving runtime that treats the host as an independently scheduled decode engine. A GPU engine runs prefills and GPU-resident decodes, while an AMX-enabled CPU engine batches and advances CPU-resident decodes, optionally calling GPU Dense Assist for dense stages. In decode-oriented scenarios it raises throughput 6.9 to 43.2% over NEO and 11.5 to 90.6% over vLLM at similar latency.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
IQuest-Q1: Advancing Foundation Capabilities for Agentic CLI SystemsIQuest-Q1 is an open-source sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 320B total and 15B activated parameters, built for agentic coding in CLI systems. Pre-training combines Stable SplitNorm, Muon and muP with a two-stage curriculum that raises the coding-data share in stage two. Mid-training extends context, and post-training mixes SFT, domain-specialized RL and MOPD across scaffolds, followed by model merging.
huggingface.copaperAdded 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Deletion, Substitution, Repair and Transplant: Component Attribution in BARBICAN, a Layered Prompt-Injection Gateway for MCPThe paper analyses BARBICAN, a fail-closed prompt-injection gateway for MCP tool mediation, using deletion, substitution, repair and transplant experiments. Its arbitration classifier ran on tokenizer-mangled text for a whole evaluation. Fixing that raised AUC from 0.392 to 0.855 while system recall fell from 80.67% to 80.34%. The band it receives is 96.82% malicious. The authors argue ablation figures need the band's class balance and substitution baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI
What Transfers Across Protein Pockets? Experience Reuse in Molecular Optimization for Agentic Structure-Based Drug DesignThis paper studies experience reuse for LLM agents that optimize ligands in protein pockets by editing and docking. Using the full log of one agent run over CrossDocked2020 test-set pockets, it tests whether keys in an experience base recur on unseen pockets and separate improving from worsening edits. The separation is largely explained by molecule size change, action and round, not the target. The authors conclude a base may better prioritize an agent's own proposals for docking than prescribe what to build.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Standing on Open Shoulders: Regional Fine-Tuning of Open-Weight Camera-Trap Models for UK Wildlife with Modest Data and ComputeDeepFaune-UK is a fine-tune of the open DeepFaune camera-trap classifier on 28 UK classes, paired with MegaDetector v6. On 20,212 MammalWeb images it reached 88.8% strict accuracy against 56.5% (DeepFaune v1.5.0) and 59.0% (SpeciesNet). Re-applying the recipe to the DINOv3-based classifier gave 90.6%. Fine-tuning on about 150 crops per class matched full-data out-of-distribution accuracy, and a DINOv2 run took about 22 minutes on under 4 GB of GPU memory.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI
On Task, Off Track: Benchmarking LLM and Agent Robustness to Near-Target Prompt InjectionNTBench (Near-Target Benchmark) tests LLM and agent robustness to near-target prompt injection, where injected instructions steer a response toward a plausible but incorrect or harmful outcome instead of abandoning the task. It builds reference-guided target-instruction pairs on existing datasets, with human validation, and evaluates seven LLMs on ten language datasets and two agent benchmarks. Attack success rose 9.3 to 35.8 points (incorrect targets) and 1.7 to 17.3 points (harmful targets) over fixed-target baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Tight Post-Quantum Multi-Key Security of the FX ConstructionRentaro Shiba and Tetsu Iwata prove a tight multi-key security bound for the FX construction (the DESX generalization) in the quantum ideal cipher model. Security holds up to about 2^((n+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: Fine-tuning via Data Contribution- and Diversity-aware Weighting with Prior RegularizationDRIVE is a per-sample weighting framework for single-stage fine-tuning when the source pre-training data is unavailable. It uses one differentiable objective: Shapley additivity splits each sample's contribution into anti-forgetting and adaptation parts, a covariance-based diversity term reshapes them, and a sample-characteristic prior stabilizes them. The authors prove better stability-plasticity guarantees than existing weighting schemes and report better performance, faster convergence and more robustness.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Efficient Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection via Signal-Aware Adaptive Fusion (SAAF)Signal-Aware Adaptive Fusion (SAAF) is a training-free zero-shot video anomaly detection framework that cuts the compute cost of vision-language models. It combines a dual-signal sampler (frame-to-frame delta and rolling-context drift in embedding space, OR-gated with EMA thresholds), a threshold-gated cascade from frame-level to video-level analysis, and signal-aware score fusion. It reports AUC-ROC of 92.07% on XD-Violence, 86.70% on MSAD and 80.54% on ShanghaiTech, at 2.2x to 2.6x the throughput of the prior best zero-shot method.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Sharpness-aware Orthogonalized Momentum AlgorithmsSOMA (Sharpness-aware Orthogonalized Momentum Algorithm) combines sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) with the Muon optimizer for LLM training. It avoids SAM's extra gradient computation by using stale, purely stochastic gradient noise as the adversarial perturbation. The authors prove sample complexity does not depend on perturbation direction, study robustness to heavy-tailed gradient noise, and test SOMA against post-training quantization degradation and catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Profile-Driven User Simulation via Reinforcement Learning with Hierarchical Rewards for Task-Oriented DialoguesProfileSim is a profile-driven user simulator for financial marketing outbound calls. It models user profiles (demographics, Big Five traits) and business profiles (intents reverse-engineered from real call logs). The base model is fine-tuned on real voice dialogues, then refined with GRPO using dialogue-level and utterance-level rewards. Against other user generators it scores highest on colloquial naturalness and profile adherence, and lowest agent score on long-tail intents, with shorter utterances at comparable business compliance.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI
When to Stop Penalizing Actions? Martingale GRPO for VLA Reinforcement LearningMART-GRPO is a variant of group-relative policy optimization for vision-language-action (VLA) reinforcement learning. It uses a LoRA-fine-tuned VLM to find the last visible error without recovery in a failed rollout video, keeps failure feedback up to that point, and drops it afterward. Martingale stopping conditions show this preserves the expected GRPO gradient and can reduce covariance. With OpenVLA-OFT on RoboTwin 2.0, it raises success rates over full-trajectory GRPO across multiple tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI
MPQ: A Message-Passing View of Post-Training QuantizationMPQ (Message-Passing Quantization) is a post-training quantization method that treats row-wise PTQ as posterior inference over discrete codebooks. It keeps soft posteriors across weight blocks using vector approximate message passing, then refines a hard-decision initialization with exact block coordinate descent. Tested at 2-bit lattice and 3- and 4-bit scalar quantization on Llama, Qwen and Mistral models, it improves perplexity and zero-shot accuracy over GPTQ-style baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Semantically Rich, Metrically Affect-Blind: A Geometric Blind Spot in Modern Text EmbeddersSentiment-Injected Sentence Embeddings (SISE) addresses a finding across eleven frozen text encoders (2021 to 2026): linear probes recover sentence polarity at up to 91.3% accuracy, but cosine similarity separates polarity by only 0.003-0.064. A small supervised-contrastive head (0.13M-0.69M parameters) trained on CPU raises retrieval MAP by up to 26 points, but the 128-d head loses 38-41 STS-B Spearman points. The paper also releases the Attribute Alignment Gap diagnostic.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Tampered ML: Evaluating LLM Judgment of Machine Learning ResearchTampered ML is a benchmark of 1,858 item-pairs, each pairing an experiment proposal reconstructed from a published ML paper with a minimally edited version that adds a targeted methodological flaw. Models must pick the sounder proposal in both presentation orders. A human study estimates 86% of items are valid (95% CI 81-91%). Opus 5 reaches 77.9% accuracy, and models are sensitive to order and favor flawed designs that look more specific, transparent, or conventional.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Pairwise Independence of Ten-Round AESPairwise Independence of Ten-Round AES (Zhongfeng Niu, Kai Hu, ePrint 2026/2608) proves that ten rounds of AES with independent uniform round keys and input/output whitening are within 3017/2^141 (below 2^-129) statistical distance of pairwise independent. The proof bounds the averaged difference-distribution matrix over five superbox layers, using Gram moments and MDS code constraints. Final-round MixColumns omission is retained.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Cache Engineering for Agents (AKV)AKV introduces cache engineering, which lets LLM agents control their active KV cache with drop (exclude cache from future attention) and repos (adjust retained keys' position encodings) without editing the trajectory or re-prefilling. The AKV serving engine keeps a stateless API while managing stateful cache reuse, eviction and restoration. A tool-response rolling-drop policy raised benchmark scores by 1.7 points and cut cost 27.7% versus threshold-triggered summarization.
huggingface.copaperAdded 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Agentic AI Defense: Decode-Time Provenance Binding for MCPDecode-time provenance binding is a defense for Model Context Protocol agent pipelines against cross-modal trust laundering, where instructions hidden in an email-signature image via LSB, DCT or metadata steganography get decoded by a tool. It combines HMAC-authenticated trust labels, a provenance ledger and context-taint tracking to block critical tool calls. On a real MCP testbed with 24 adaptive payloads, attack success fell from 100% undefended (62.5% for keyword and regex filters) to 0%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Reproducible Evaluation as the Substrate for Safe Prompt Compression in Production AgentsThis paper presents an offline evaluation harness for a production merchant-facing conversational agent. It stays reproducible when live backend data changes and can be regenerated when it goes stale. Used as the fitness function for GEPA prompt optimization under a correctness gate against reward hacking, it shrinks the full prompt surface by 3.5-7.6% without losing held-out correctness, across three subject-model families.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Mímir: A Stateless Private Search EngineMímir 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
Balsamic: One-round Threshold UOV from GPU-Accelerated FHEBalsamic is a complete homomorphic Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar (UOV) signer, used to build one-round threshold UOV signatures from a packed discrete-CKKS FHE circuit. A paired-pivot linear solver and pivot-success certificates allow encrypted retry selection. In 2-out-of-3 semihonest signing, each online partial signature takes 10.7 s on an RTX 6000 Ada and 7.77 s on a GB300, with 5.25 MB per response.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Sensorimotor Alignment: A Platonic Proxy for Embodied Policy SuccessSensorimotor Alignment (S^2) is a training-free offline metric that measures how well an embodied model's sensory representation aligns with the geometry of physical motion. It extends the Platonic Representation Hypothesis to motion trajectories. S^2 correlates positively with downstream robot task success across embodied model families, helps pick promising VLM backbones before fine-tuning into VLAs, and explains behaviours seen in VLAs and world action models.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Causal Chain of Thought: Mitigating Attention Leakage via Context IsolationCausalCoT is an inference framework that splits a problem into a directed acyclic graph of atomic sub-questions and evaluates each node in an isolated context holding only its direct causal parents. This removes attention paths to non-parent content, so intermediate steps drive the answer rather than leaking from global context. It keeps benchmark accuracy competitive and raises causal sensitivity of reasoning steps by 12 points on average, up to 21, over the strongest baseline. The graph also allows test-time corrections that propagate downstream.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
BeNice! Closing Looping's Inference-Memory Gap via KV-SharingBeNice! is a post-training method for looped language models that broadcasts the final recurrence's KV-cache into the first recurrence, so one cache can serve all recurrences. It follows a first stage that uses stochastic depth in pretraining to induce contractive residual dynamics. It matches standard finetuning's unshared validation perplexity and composes with multi-latent attention, Kimi delta attention and fp8, mxfp8 and nvfp4 cache quantization. In simulated low-memory long-context inference it raises cache hit rates by up to 31.4% and throughput by up to 23.6%, and cuts p90 time-to-first-token by up to 83.6%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Progress Probes $P^2$: Lightweight Runtime Monitoring for Vision-Language-Action ModelsProgress Probes (P^2) trains linear probes on a vision-language-action model's own activations, using demonstrations, to estimate task progress, then flags executions that deviate from expected progress. Tested on the open-source pi0.5 across simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, it matches or beats VLM-based monitors and failure-data-trained methods at failure detection, without an external foundation model.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
How Ground Truth Shapes Retrieval Scores: Evidence-Aware Evaluation of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation System for Breast LesionsThis paper describes an evidence-aware retrieval evaluation protocol for a clinical RAG system over breast lesion management literature. Relevance is defined by evidence spans mapped to all containing chunks. A hybrid retriever (dense, BM25, cross-encoder reranking) with 384-token chunks and 20% overlap reached 0.94 Recall@3 on 18 queries. Expanding ground truth from 25 to 37 spans did not change rankings. The authors note the small set needs independent validation.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Who Is Sycophantic to Whom? Confident LLMs, Human Deference, and the Collapse of Trust CalibrationThis paper studies reverse sycophancy: whether users bend toward a confident, consistent, wrong LLM. In a within-subjects experiment, 32 participants learned science topics from five GPT-5-mini assistants with 0 to 100% of facts replaced by falsehoods. Scores fell from 7.4 to 2.9 out of 10, planted falsehoods were chosen on 60% of falsified items against 11% of correctly taught ones, and confidence stopped tracking correctness. It introduces a baseline-corrected Human Deference Index.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
An Empirical Study of Recent Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph to Text Generation on Standard BenchmarksThis empirical study benchmarks recent LLMs against fine-tuned encoder-decoder models on knowledge graph-to-text generation, using reference-based metrics and graph-grounded, reference-free LLM-based evaluation validated against human annotations. Recent LLMs narrow or close the gap on reference-based metrics and do better on graph-grounded ones. Prompted models make fewer contradictions and triple omissions, and fine-tuned models' errors grow faster with graph size.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
DuoCook: An Overcooked-Inspired Benchmark for Visual Planning and CoordinationDuoCook is an Overcooked-inspired benchmark in which one vision-language model controls two cooks from top-down views in Unreal Engine environments built with coding agents. It has 20 maps in five categories covering equipment contention, changing terrain and handoff dependencies. Four VLMs were compared; the best, gpt-6-astra, reached 26.2% mean order completion. A notebook memory ablation had mixed effects: positive for Claude and Qwen, negative for GPT and Gemini.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Training Small Language Models for Transferable Tool SelectionThis paper trains small open language models with reinforcement learning to select tools for multi-step instructions over corpora of more than ten thousand tools. A Qwen3-8B model post-trained with the recipe outperforms Llama-4-Maverick (402B) on ToolBench. The trained model transfers to different retrievers and generalizes to new tool corpora in other domains, without relying on proprietary LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Evaluating the Applicability of LLM Inference Optimizations on Apple SiliconThis October 2026 arXiv paper evaluates four LLM inference optimization families on Apple Silicon: KV-cache pruning, speculative decoding, ported GPU kernels and post-training quantization. Tests run on four Apple machines with a single-request decode workload, plus matched RTX 4090 runs. KV-cache pruning reaches 1.75x throughput on Apple, all tested speculative decoding methods reduce throughput, and ported kernels give up to 1.20x.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
From Structured Records to Patient Narratives: Preserving Clinical Alignment in LLM-Generated Health SummariesThis paper studies evidence-grounded health summarization for menstrual health monitoring. It combines structured evidence conditioning with RAG in a prompt-based constrained generation framework, and scores 4,500 summaries from three LLMs with NLI, atomic factuality metrics and readability measures. Grounding constraints improved uncertainty preservation and generally kept or improved faithfulness against retrieved evidence, while omission effects varied by model. Clinical alignment came with harder reading and more medical terminology.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Linear Cryptanalysis of TFHE-Friendly Cipher FRAST in the Average Key SettingLinear cryptanalysis of FRAST, a TFHE-friendly stream cipher, in the average key setting. It fixes the false-positive problem left open in the earlier attack by Bak et al., showing key differences fall into five indistinguishable classes per round. The Contract algorithm recovers the master key for 10 rounds and, on weak keys of density 2^-11.8 to 2^-5.4, reaches full FRAST within the claimed security.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
The Good, the Bad, and the Noisy: A Systematic Analysis of Ring-Oscillator-Based Noise GeneratorsThis IACR ePrint paper (2026/2597) systematically compares ring-oscillator-based additive noise generators, a hiding countermeasure against side-channel attacks. Experiments show many existing designs ignore output amplification and the risk of the noise being filtered out, so they lower signal-to-noise ratio too little. The authors give a guideline on inverter chain length, output amplification and frequency randomization, and build a tailored generator for an AES implementation that outperforms prior designs.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Chunk Recomputation under Real Document Revisions: Measuring Update Cost and Retrieval Quality of Fixed, Recursive, and Content-Defined ChunkingChunk Recomputation under Real Document Revisions measures how much text must be re-embedded after edits for three stateless chunkers (non-overlapping fixed-size, recursive paragraph-first, content-defined) on 120 pairs of adjacent Chinese and English Wikipedia revisions. Fixed-size recomputes 57-68% of the new-version workload, recursive 38-56%, content-defined 43-54%, while evidence recall at a 2048-token budget differs by under two points. The authors argue update cost should be reported alongside retrieval quality.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
SecLog-Bench: A Scalable Benchmark for Cybersecurity Log Reasoning with Scaffolded EvidenceSecLog-Bench is a benchmark for LLM reasoning over cybersecurity logs, built on an extensible simulation platform covering 29 attack scenarios. It combines audit logs, application logs and network traffic, with attack-stage labels and step-by-step evidence chains. Eight LLMs were tested on post-detection attack-progress reasoning: the best reached 44.44% accuracy, 45.07% Macro-F1 and 54.87% Stage Reasoning F1.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Efficient Laconic Oblivious Transfer with Malicious SecurityEfficient Laconic Oblivious Transfer with Malicious Security is an ePrint paper (2026/2593, ASIACRYPT 2026 revision) giving the first maliciously secure laconic OT that uses its primitives only as black boxes. It adds equivocal vector commitments and maliciously secure witness encryption to the commitment-plus-witness-encryption paradigm. Security is proven in the UC model against malicious senders and in the context model against malicious receivers. Instantiations use LWE and bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumptions in the standard model.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Matrix-Game 4.0: Harnessing Video Models for Real-Time Playable Game WorldsMatrix-Game 4.0 is a system that separates game logic from visual rendering for playable generated worlds. A lightweight engine holds world state and rules, a multimodal coding agent writes game code and scene captions, and a distilled autoregressive video model turns low-poly proxies into detailed frames. It runs 480p at 60 FPS on one RTX 5090 with 112 ms key-press-to-display latency. Code, weights and assets are released.
huggingface.copaperAdded 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Every Part Has Its Role: Part-of-Speech Effects in LLM Post-TrainingEvery Part Has Its Role studies concept augmentation in LLM post-training, where a target word is replaced by related alternatives in training sentences. It extends prior work from nouns to verbs and adjectives. Concept augmentation improves perplexity most consistently on news regardless of part of speech, while verbs give the most reliable downstream gains. CKA and linear probing show the largest gains do not match the largest representation changes.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Prompt Injection Through Forensic Evidence: A Taxonomy and Proof of Concept of Anti-Forensic Attacks on LLM-Assisted Digital InvestigationsPaper on prompt injection delivered through forensic evidence, where the seized device's contents are attacker-controlled and the examiner must read them. It extends the anti-forensic model to cover manipulation of the reasoning layer and gives a taxonomy (objective, technique, payload location, concealment). Three proof-of-concept attacks on an LLM-assisted analysis pipeline change a reported conclusion, write attacker-chosen content to the analyst workstation, and trigger outbound network traffic. Mitigations are proposed.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Symmetry-Based Parameter Efficient Low-Rank Fine-Tuning for High-Throughput Calculation of Lattice Thermal ConductivitySBFS-FT (symmetry-based few-shot fine-tuning) adapts the MatterSim 1M universal machine-learned interatomic potential with low-rank adaptation on a small set of compounds sharing one crystal symmetry. Tested on half-Heusler (space group 216), space group 225 and spinel (227) datasets, it cut lattice thermal conductivity error 2-3 times versus the base model. It matched per-compound fine-tuning while taking 5-7 times less compute for 100 compounds.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🧠 AI
MPIDetector: Detecting Multi-modal Prompt Injection via LLM-based ReasoningMPIDetector is a detection framework for multi-modal prompt injection that uses few-shot in-context learning so an LLM can reason about the semantic intent of text and image inputs, without fine-tuning. The authors built a benchmark of eight textual and seven visual attack categories plus benign sets. They report up to 90.91% accuracy on text, 99.28% on images, and up to 99.80% detection on 500 obfuscated WebInject web-agent injections, beating baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Verifiable Post-Quantum TLS Handshake: Recognizing Implementation Errors of Cryptographic Verification StepsPQCD-TLS is a post-quantum TLS handshake that binds confirmation codes into chained key derivation, so a faulty signature or KEM verification step causes a key mismatch and handshake failure. The authors build confirmation-code frameworks for ML-DSA and Falcon signatures and for ML-KEM, HQC and DAWN, with unpredictability proofs. Across 48 configurations, handshake latency overhead stays below 1%.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
SHAKEing SLH-DSA with Non-profiled SCAsSHAKEing SLH-DSA with Non-profiled SCAs is an eShard ePrint paper (2026/2584) on correlation power analysis of SLH-DSA-SHAKE, the NIST-standardised hash-based signature scheme. It analyses PRF inputs and selection functions, then combines subtrace averaging, partial-then-total CPA and an efficient exhaustive search to recover the full secret seed, enabling universal forgery. On a 32-bit microcontroller the attack needs about 280 to 559 signatures, and the search finishes within 45 minutes on 72 cores.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
SoK: Design-Level Backdoors in Block Ciphers Constructions, Detection, and Key RecoverySoK on design-level backdoors in block ciphers. It places four published designs (Rijmen and Preneel, Paterson, Bannier and Filiol, Peyrin and Wang) in one taxonomy and gives a sound algorithm that recovers a partition trapdoor from S-box tables. It attacks KG-DES, BEA-1 and LowMC-M: KG-DES key recovery takes minutes, and the LowMC-M MALICIOUS backdoor yields the key from 35 to 409 queries. Trapdoors hidden in linear layers leave no trace, so the authors recommend deriving constants verifiably from a public seed.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Protection Is Not One Event: A Survey of RAG Protection Research by Measured EndpointSurvey and human-coded evidence map of 118 RAG defense papers, organized by measured endpoint across a seven-family taxonomy (content disclosure, formal privacy proxies, access control, corpus-use detection, pipeline integrity). Only 17.8% of studies use disclosure or reconstruction as the primary endpoint, and most use non-adaptive attacks on general QA data. A testbed shows a normalized 8-gram guard cuts 20-token copying to 0.0%, yet a three-query adaptive attacker recovers 48.3% of hidden facts on Qwen3-8B.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
PQ-Vault: Provably Quantum-Safe Asset Custody for Unmodified EthereumPQ-Vault is a custody design for unmodified Ethereum against quantum key recovery. It combines a quantum-safe vault contract, a proof-of-stake sidechain with compact certificates, and an optimistic dispute protocol. The paper proves that compact certificates with classically chosen parameters fall from 128 to about 60 bits against quantum attackers, and bounds a seed-update stake-steering attack. For 65,536 validators a certificate is 0.8 MB and verifies in about 20 ms, and the vault accepts a checkpoint for about 420,000 gas.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Reverse Engineering IVXV: A Specification and Security Analysis of Estonia’s Internet Voting SystemReverse Engineering IVXV is an October 2026 ePrint paper by Tingfeng Yu and Thomas Haines that reconstructs a specification of Estonia's IVXV internet voting system from public source code and documentation, with an executable TLA+ model checked in TLC. It analyses individual and universal verifiability, privacy, coercion resistance and eligibility, compares IVXV with Belenios and Swiss Post, and reports new vulnerabilities, some confirmed with proof-of-concept tests, plus mitigations.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
DISCO*: DIstributed and SCalable Oblivious Joins and Oblivious PrimitivesDISCO is a distributed, fully oblivious database system that combines hardware enclaves (TEEs) with oblivious primitives to hide access patterns from side-channel and leakage-abuse attacks. New distributed frameworks and communication optimizations let it run in parallel across servers. It reports 88x speedup over Jodes and 180x over SODA on non-foreign-key joins with 2^25 elements, and the first terabyte-scale results.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
InterWebCoder: Learning Interactive Webpage Generation from Executable Tests via Reinforcement LearningInterWebCoder is a framework for interactive webpage code generation by multimodal LLMs. It synthesizes self-contained webpages with executable test scripts from recorded interaction trajectories, repairs failures using runtime evidence, then trains with test-ID-weighted SFT and GRPO using test pass rates and visual similarity as rewards. The pipeline yields 1,736 verified samples from 2,058 tasks. A 9B model scores 48.54 on IWR-Bench and 48.42 on Vision2Web, and reward latency drops over 97%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI
AgenticRoboRL: Bringing Coding-Agent Post-Training to Agentic RoboticsAgenticRoboRL is a framework for post-training robot planners across different harnesses, combining supervised fine-tuning with multi-turn reinforcement learning. Harness-specific adapters link recorded planner interactions to task outcomes, so one RL pipeline covers both VLA skill invocation and control-code generation. On LIBERO-PRO, a 9B planner rose from 18.1% to 71.0% without external memory, near Codex (GPT-5.5) with memory at 72.1%. Code and checkpoints are promised.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Cache Engineering for AgentsCache Engineering for Agents proposes letting LLM agents control their active KV cache directly, using a drop operation to exclude cache from attention and repos to adjust retained keys' position encodings, without editing the trajectory or re-prefilling. The authors build the AKV serving engine to handle history-dependent cache states. A tool-response rolling-drop policy raises average benchmark scores by 1.7 points and cuts cost by 27.7% against threshold-triggered summarization. AKV gives up to 1.2x output throughput and 1.5x faster P95 latency.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Agentic Ensemble with Vision-Language Models for Visual Anomaly DetectionAnomalyAgent is a post-training fusion framework for visual anomaly detection that ensembles pretrained detectors. It aligns scores and anomaly maps, summarizes disagreement, and treats fusion as a choice among score actions and map actions. A constrained vision-language model inspects high-conflict samples and picks the actions. It beats equal-weight fusion and gets the best mean image AUROC and pixel AP among compared fusion methods on MVTec AD and VisA.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Large Flow Language ModelsLafa (Large flow language model) is a blockwise continuous flow language model scaled to 8B parameters, with causal attention on the prefix and bidirectional, asynchronous flow within each block. It is adapted from pretrained autoregressive models and trained at 0.5B, 7B and 8B with under 30B tokens. A self-speculative decoding scheme verifies flow drafts autoregressively in one model, giving 2.54x the throughput of an AR model at comparable quality. Flow maps allow one- and few-step generation.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Beyond 4 bits: Data-Centric Post-training Quantization and RecoveryThis paper studies 2-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) of six dense and mixture-of-experts models from 3.8B to 32B parameters. It finds the quantization representation matters most: vector codebooks give usable models where scalar PTQ falls to chance. Calibration and recovery data must be chosen jointly. The recipe uses about 2.3 effective bits per weight, keeps 89 to 97% of full-precision QA accuracy, and needs 1.4 to 30x less compute than the strongest QAT baseline.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Answering in the User's Variety: Calibrated Accommodation Pairs for Post-TrainingCalibrated accommodation pairs (CAP) is a preference-data method that rewards chat models for matching a user's dialect density while keeping Standard English for Standard-English users. The paper traces SFT, DPO and RL stages across 10 open model lineages and finds post-training standardizes replies, while the DPO update still favours British and Australian spelling over AAE and Singlish. On a fully open model, CAP improves convergence on unseen features without added dialect for Standard-English users or lower instruction following.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Code2Video-Compass: A Comprehensive Benchmark for General-Purpose Code-Based Video Generation across T2V, I2V, and V2VCode2Video-Compass is a benchmark of 2,104 tasks for code-based video generation, where multimodal LLMs write executable programs that produce complete videos from text (T2V), image (I2V) or video (V2V) inputs. Tasks span 10 categories and 24 subtypes. Scoring uses 12 objective metrics and five MLLM-judge metrics. Across 15 proprietary and open-weight models from nine families, performance falls as construction, dynamic animation and state-dependency complexity rise.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Context-Aware Prompt Injection Detection via Small Language Models in RAG Pipelines: nokast-secureRAGnokast-secureRAG is a roughly 0.5B-parameter small language model that works as a semantic firewall between retrieval and generation in local RAG systems. It classifies each query and context pair as safe, suspicious or malicious. It reaches 0.994 recall at a 0.026 false-positive rate in-distribution, beating Llama Guard 3 1B and Prompt-Guard-86M (0.900 recall, 0.690 FPR). Recall on PoisonedRAG falls to near zero, and single-request latency is 293-404 ms.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
DeclineCraft: A RAG Abstention Benchmark for Jointly Measuring Combined Retrieval and Parametric KnowledgeDeclineCraft is a dynamic RAG abstention benchmark whose unanswerable questions target Minecraft feature additions made after a corpus cut-off, with audits for parametric exposure. Across 27 LLMs, single-shot retrieval raises Correct Abstention Rate in 38 of 40 configurations, while iterative RAG lowers it in 30 of 40. Enabling thinking without retrieval lowers abstention for 8 of 13 models, shifting responses to premise denial.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI
A Multimodal Engineering GraphRAG Framework for Post-Wind-Event Building Assessment and Recovery InferenceThis paper presents a multimodal engineering GraphRAG framework that links post-wind-event damage evidence from images and reconnaissance reports to building-condition states, recovery actions and downtime. Evidence is stored as a provenance-preserving, component-level representation, and graph-aligned retrieval uses compatibility, contradiction, evidence-precedence and abstention checks. Demonstrated on tornado-affected low-rise homes, it beats BaselineRAG and Structured Baseline RAG, and ablations test each component.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Regular Syndrome Decoding Is Easier Than Previously EstimatedPreprint by Jiseung Kim, Minkyu Kim, Changmin Lee and Hochang Lee on the Regular Syndrome Decoding (RSD) problem. It presents a hybrid-algebraic attack that balances zero-coordinate guesses and syndrome-based eliminations across regular blocks. Parameter sets in Ferret, Wolverine and committed VOLE fall below 128-bit targets by up to 67 bits, and the revised Liu et al. (EUROCRYPT 2024) PCG sets cost under 2^111 field operations.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Regular Syndrome Decoding Is Easier Than Previously EstimatedPreprint 2026/2563 presents a refined hybrid-algebraic attack on Regular Syndrome Decoding (RSD) that balances zero-coordinate guesses and syndrome-based eliminations across all regular blocks. It puts at least one parameter set each from Ferret (CCS 2020), Wolverine (IEEE S&P 2021) and committed VOLE (CCS 2025) below the 128-bit target, with losses up to 67 bits. PCG attack costs improve by up to 29.77 bits (non-binary) and 25.91 bits (binary), and the revised Liu et al. (EUROCRYPT 2024) 128-bit sets fall below 2^111 field operations.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Into the Unknown: Benchmarking AI agents on open scientific research problemsInto the Unknown is a benchmark that gives an AI agent a science paper and an unpublished research direction, then asks it to write a follow-up paper. Scientists at US Department of Energy national laboratories supplied the directions and the conditions a submission must meet, which form the grading rubric. Nine frontier agents wrote 15 follow-ups each (135 total) across five domains. None met all conditions, and 114 failed an integrity check, mostly for claiming work never done or reporting numbers that contradict recorded evidence.
huggingface.copaperAdded 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Energy Consumption of Post-Quantum Cryptography on Constrained and General-Purpose ArchitecturesBenchmark of the three NIST post-quantum standards, FIPS 203 (ML-KEM), FIPS 204 (ML-DSA) and FIPS 205 (SLH-DSA), measuring speed and energy for key generation, signing and verification. Tests ran on Raspberry Pi 1, Zero and 4 and on laptop hardware, using OpenSSL 3.5 and a FNIRSI FNB58 USB power meter. ML-KEM and ML-DSA match classical elliptic-curve cryptography, while SLH-DSA signing on 32-bit devices cost up to 243% more energy than on 64-bit.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Can It Actually Work? Synthesizing Functional CAD MechanismsFunCAD-Harness is a framework in which LLM agents design CAD mechanisms and revise them using physical simulation feedback. It turns abstract functional requirements into candidate-specific physical tests. The paper also introduces FunCADBench, a benchmark of 46 mechanism families with interdependent, multi-step operations. Experiments on frontier LLM agents show it exposes mechanical failures that visual inspection misses and raises functional success over standard simulation-augmented baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
OpenVLHarness: Real World Visual Agentic Tool-Use with Multimodal MemoryOpenVLHarness is a multimodal reasoning harness for MLLMs built on a capability layer (task-level tool interfaces plus evidence rendering) and persistent multimodal memory that stores images, structured data and web references as addressable artifacts. A coding interface runs generated programs over stored data. Across 22 benchmarks and eight backbones it adds 9.7-12.6 points over no-tool baselines, and GPT-6 Luna at medium effort beats Codex and Visual Sketchpad at maximum effort using at most 37% of their tokens.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
MemT-1.0: Towards Memory-Native EvolutionMemT-1.0 is a memory foundation model architecture that builds memory into model computation. It builds on Metis, uses Gated DeltaNet-2 for token-level memory updates within each turn, and adds Mixture-of-Storage to scale capacity. Training used 34B tokens in continued pre-training and post-training. MemT-1.0-Nano and MemT-1.0-Flash beat parametric memory baselines and stay competitive with retrieval methods. At 128K history, Nano gives about 1.86x inference speedup and 66x less persistent storage than a full-context KV cache.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
What Language Adds, and at What Cost: Four Controlled Probes of Pathology Vision-Language ModelsThis preprint grades evidence for pathology vision-language models and tests four claims with controlled probes on released checkpoints and public data. Stage-redacted report embeddings raise pooled C-index by 0.019 (progression-free interval) and 0.016 (overall survival) across 1,633 TCGA patients. Zero-shot prompting matches a linear probe. SlideChat scores 74.82% with the slide and 74.41% without it. Paraphrasing flips 8-23% of answers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Scaling Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Brain EncodingBrainLoRA is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that adapts multimodal backbones of up to 104B parameters to predict neural responses. It predicts multiple timepoints in one causal pass instead of sliding windows, and a multi-LoRA kernel trains many adapters on a shared backbone. Across nine backbones it improves encoding, and a 200+ model ensemble ranks first on the Algonauts post-challenge leaderboard.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Mise-en-Video: Fine-Grained 3D Control for Multi-Shot Video GenerationMise-en-Video (MeV) is a multi-shot video generation framework where creators stage shots in 3D space and then generate the matching video. It combines hierarchical attention for multi-level narrative consistency with 3D-aware layout guidance for per-shot spatial control. The authors built a 160K-video dataset with hierarchical multi-shot texts and oriented 3D bounding boxes, and report gains over baselines in quality, consistency and subject controllability.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Analysis of an AI based code distinguisherThe paper analyses DeepDistinguisher, a transformer-like model that tells Goppa codes apart from random linear codes. Saliency maps and attention visualisation reveal a low-weight-row artifact in the random training instances that the model partly relies on. A pairwise-XOR rule inspired by minimum distance correlates strongly with the model's predictions, and the model loses most of its power on random matrices meeting both constraints. This suggests it exploits general combinatorial properties, not hidden algebraic structure.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Analysis of an AI based code distinguisherAnalysis of DeepDistinguisher, a transformer model that tells Goppa codes from random linear codes. Using saliency maps and attention visualization, the authors find a low-weight-row artifact in the random training instances that the model partly uses. They propose a pairwise-XOR rule on generator matrix rows that correlates strongly with the model's predictions. On random matrices meeting the minimum distance and XOR constraints, the model loses most of its accuracy, so it exploits general combinatorial properties rather than hidden algebraic structure.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
TokenGate: Adapting LLMs for Fast and Memory-Efficient Prefill with Learned Token PruningTokenGate is a small drop-in component that adds end-to-end learnable token pruning to trained LLMs for long-context prefill. It uses token-gated attention, inspired by Mixture-of-Experts, to re-weight attention logits with token importance scores, which gets gradients through the non-differentiable top-K step. The authors report 1.4-11.3x faster time-to-first token and 1.5-3.4x lower peak memory with no accuracy loss, on Qwen3 and Qwen3.5.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
EpiLens: Lightweight RAG for Epidemiological Knowledge AcquisitionEpiLens is a lightweight, open-source retrieval-augmented generation package that applies a fixed retrieval template and output schema to every paper in a corpus and links outputs to source passages. On a corpus of 2,297 epidemiology papers, its classifier matches or exceeds supervised and zero-shot baselines on four tasks without task-specific training data, scored against 214 manual labels. It also compares model-based study shares across parameters and pathogens.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Tandem: Serving Hybrid Linear-Attention GUI Agents on Mobile NPUsTandem is a runtime for serving hybrid linear-attention GUI agents on mobile NPUs. It saves recurrent state where consecutive prompts diverge, keeps most prefill on the matrix unit, uses a verification kernel that reads each weight block once, and releases NPU power votes between bursts. On a Snapdragon 8 Elite it cuts per-step latency 30% for text screen descriptions and 16% for screenshots, cuts energy per text step by 33%, and lowers loaded-model standby power from 0.76 to 0.22 W.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
The Development of Sycophancy in Language Models: Tracing Vulnerabilities from Pretraining to Post-TrainingThe paper traces sycophancy across 741 checkpoints from 30 open model lineages, from early pretraining to released models. It plants initial verdicts on moral scenarios and measures how far models follow a user's opinion or drop their answer under pressure. The behaviour usually exists before post-training, but which questions a released model yields on is set mainly during post-training. For 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
HAF-VLA: Hierarchical Action Flow Framework for Humanoid Vision-Language-Action ControlHAF-VLA is a hierarchical action-flow framework that adapts a pretrained flow-matching vision-language-action model to humanoid whole-body loco-manipulation. It denoises a shared action space in stages: locomotion and head commands first, then waist refinement, then full-body manipulation. Learnable stage embeddings and cross-stage KV-cache conditioning carry dependencies between stages. The authors report gains over existing models on six real-world tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Assisted Turbulence Modeling via Data Assimilation and Machine Learning for Turbomachinery FlowsThis paper presents a hybrid framework for axial compressor flow that couples a Multi-Fidelity Ensemble Kalman Filter (MFEnKF) with machine learning. The filter merges PIV experiments with steady RANS and unsteady hybrid RANS/LES simulations. A neural network trained on the enriched data predicts Navier-Stokes volume forcing terms from velocity, velocity gradients and turbulent viscosity. A Mixture of Experts fixes local errors near blade tips, giving lower experimental discrepancy than baseline RANS.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Mitigating Reward Hacking in Preference Reward Models with Evolving PenaltiesDynalize is a method that reduces reward hacking during online RL training against preference reward models. Periodically and asynchronously, a language model reads training rollouts and writes penalties for undesirable behaviors the reward model seems to reward, and a judge applies them to every rollout. In clinical counseling and creative writing it sustains longer training and improves external benchmarks, and the gains hold in multi-turn training and after reward model retraining.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Rethinking LLM Fine-Tuning via Weight Space Reparameterization: Preserving Safety during Downstream AdaptationWSR-Tune is a fine-tuning framework that reparameterizes LLM weight matrices with a safety-conditioned basis, so safety-relevant information concentrates in a small set of directions. Those safety-critical directions are frozen, and the remaining complementary directions are updated for the downstream task. The authors report a better trade-off between downstream performance and safety retention. The page gives no benchmark names or numbers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
E-Layout: Layout-Stage Logic Restructuring via RL-Optimized Equality-Saturated Graph Retrieval-Augmented GenerationE-Layout is an ML-driven framework for post-placement logic restructuring in IC physical design. It builds equivalent logic alternatives with e-graph equality saturation, links logic choice to physical realization through a graph-based RAG model, and refines the choices with reinforcement learning on design-level timing feedback. On 9 designs it gives about 6% TNS and 2% WNS improvement and 1% less area than a commercial physical design flow.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
How Benchmark Graph Construction Shapes Multi-Hop KG Navigation: A Controlled Audit of PathQuestion and PathQuestion-LargeThis paper audits the PathQuestion (PQ) and PathQuestion-Large (PQL) multi-hop knowledge-graph QA benchmarks as graph-navigation tasks. It holds questions, answers, path annotations and splits fixed, and replaces each released task-filtered graph with the larger source KG. Restoration cuts released-answer accuracy and trajectory fidelity for frozen small-language-model policies and trained MINERVA policies, and graph-consistent evaluation recovers only part of the loss.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Concrete LDVR Attacks with Fewer SignersConcrete LDVR Attacks with Fewer Signers is an ePrint paper by Renas Bacho on the low-dimensional vector representation (LDVR) problem behind adaptive security of threshold Schnorr. It combines a Chinese remainder theorem construction with a generalized birthday search to attack 488 signers with 173 corruptions over the Curve25519 scalar field, down from 5,020 signers. For adversarial evaluation points, it reaches optimal success probability and breaks 228 signers with 114 corruptions in 168.60 seconds.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
VibeTraining-Bench: Data-Trainer-Harness Co-Design for Iterative System ImprovementVibeTraining-Bench is a benchmark for cross-component co-design, where research agents iteratively refine training data, trainers and inference harnesses for a fixed starting agent system. Tasks cover terminal operation, software engineering, multi-turn tool use and math reasoning, with safeguards against reward hacking. On SWE-bench Verified, GPT-6 Astra raises the target system from 32.9% to 53.7%, against 55.4% for the human-developed instruct model.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
A Note on the Security of ECDSA with Presignatures or Biased NoncesA Note on the Security of ECDSA with Presignatures or Biased Nonces (Couteau and Makriyannis, ePrint 2026/2545) examines alternative ECDSA modes built for faster distributed signing. It shows that the security of some variants used in deployed libraries is equivalent, in the generic group and random oracle model, to the average-case hardness of k-SUM. It also proves fine-grained lower bounds on generic group attacks against modes analyzed by Groth and Shoup (Eurocrypt 2022).
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
RAGLeak: Supply-Chain Privacy Backdoors in Retrieval-Augmented GenerationRAGLeak is a supply-chain privacy backdoor attack on retrieval-augmented generation. When triggered, the backdoored generator reversibly obfuscates retrieved private documents, and an auxiliary LLM recovers them. Tested on three model families and three domains, it reaches up to 100% attack success rate, loses at most 10 points under detection-based defenses, and survives clean fine-tuning and changes of model scale and version. Source code is released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Efficient and Compact High-order Masking Raccoon on Memory Constrained DevicesThe paper presents the first efficient, compact implementation of high-order masked Raccoon (lattice-based signature, CRYPTO 2024) on ARM Cortex-M4, up to 32 masking orders. It uses 3+3+3 layer-merged 32-bit NTT/INTT with lazy reduction, a negative double Montgomery reduction, and one-shot SHAKE256 sampling (at least 1.80x faster). It beats the reference by 1.85x-2.25x and masked Dilithium3 at orders 2, 4 and 8. Second-order leakage tests show DPA resistance once micro-architectural transitional leakage is mitigated.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
SAT and Neural Network Filters for Misinjections in Fault AttacksThis ePrint paper presents key-independent filters that remove misinjections (faults that miss the assumed form) in elimination fault attacks. A SAT filter, a neural network filter and a combined filter were tested on clock-glitch faults into GIFT-64, GIFT-128 and BAKSHEESH on a microcontroller. The SAT filter rejected none of 14669 intended faults, and raised ToFA success on BAKSHEESH from 5.2% to 61.2% (96.2% combined).
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
IISFA: Ineffective Instruction-Skip Fault Attacks on Bitslice ImplementationsIISFA (Ineffective Instruction-Skip Fault Attack) targets bitsliced block cipher implementations protected by redundancy countermeasures. Skipping one bitslice instruction leaves the result unchanged only when all m S-box inputs fall in an ineffective set, so each released ciphertext restricts all m subkeys. The authors give known- and chosen-plaintext key-recovery procedures and expected injection counts, and recover keys in every trial on GIFT, SKINNY and PIPO implementations on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller using clock glitches.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
HERMES: High-Performance Private Decoding for Large Language ModelsHERMES is a privacy-preserving inference (PI) system optimised for multi-token LLM decoding rather than prefill. It swaps high-round nonlinear protocols for compute- and bandwidth-heavy ones with fewer rounds, and adds a homomorphic-encryption matrix-multiplication protocol that keeps the KV cache encrypted on the server and uses grouped-query attention. On Llama 3.1 8B Instruct it cuts TPOT by up to 2.7× and total PI latency by up to 2.1×.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026🧠 AI
SoK: PIAtlas: Decomposing the Unbounded Prompt Injection Attack SpacePIAtlas is a taxonomy of prompt injection attacks organized by how the injected instruction subverts the model, with six mechanism classes as roots of a technique and sub-technique hierarchy. The authors release PICorpus, a license-clean collection of public prompt-injection datasets, and map thousands of records to PIAtlas under a human-verified protocol. Results show attacks combine several techniques from few mechanisms, agent benchmarks cover only part of the space, and adaptive attackers favor mechanisms that curated benchmarks underrepresent.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
GKS FHE: Security Analysis"GKS FHE: Security Analysis" is a Cryptology ePrint Archive preprint (2026/2523, October 2026) giving a formal security analysis of the Gribov-Kahrobaei-Shpilrain private-key fully homomorphic encryption scheme. The abstract says the scheme needs no bootstrapping or de-linearization, gives bit-exact decryption, supports native encrypted search and has unbounded depth. The page shows only the abstract, so the analysis's methods and results are not visible.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Superspecial points on Humbert surfaces and the probability of (N,N)-splittingDetermines, to first order in 1/p with an explicit error bound, the proportion of superspecial principally polarized abelian surfaces over F_p-bar (p ≡ 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
Efficient Fixed-Point Implementation of MitakaPresents a fixed-point C implementation of the Mitaka signing algorithm, a simpler, parallelizable Falcon (FN-DSA) variant. It replaces MitakaZ's wide integral Gram root decomposition with a fixed-point square Cholesky decomposition, which cuts the cost of integer Gaussian sampling, and proves bounds on intermediate values and representation errors without empirical assumptions. Signing averages 361 kcycles (Mitaka-512) and 707 kcycles (Mitaka-1024) on AVX2, and 4.0 and 7.8 Mcycles on an STM32F411 Cortex-M4F. This makes floating-point-free lattice signatures practical on constrained devices.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Associated-Data Correlations in Eevee: Deterministic Forgeries against Nonce-Misuse SecurityCryptanalysis of the Eevee forkcipher-based AEAD modes Umbreon and Espeon, which claim online AE security under nonce reuse. Associated-data correlations give probability-one non-empty-message forgeries with three encryption queries and one verification query. The paper adds an affine treatment of partial final blocks (n-r+3 queries, or n-r+2 with adaptive choices). It also checks the published Umbreon attack with the official ForkSkinny primitive and reports a two-query attack accepted by the unmodified public C modes.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 17 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
OpenGCUA: Toward a Fully Open Stack for Generalist Computer UseOpenGCUA, from Alibaba's MAI-UI team, is an open stack for generalist computer-use agents (GCUAs), where the model chooses how to observe, act and organize work across GUI, accessibility-tree, API and shell interfaces. Its design combines code execution (GUI actions written as programs with loops and branches) with harness-to-model decision transfer. On OSWorld-v2 it raises mean partial score by +19.6 points across eight models, including GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5, and cuts reported steps per task by 53%. The release includes the harness, prompts, evaluation trajectories, a macOS real-device harness, a cross-device SDK and an interactive lab. It also shows large efficiency gaps between models: Qwen3.8-Max used 19.4x the reasoning tokens of GPT-6 Astra on real macOS tasks.
huggingface.copaperAdded 17 Oct 2026🧠 AI
AI-Driven Reproducibility and Analytical Robustness in Scientific DiscoverySEER-Repro is a benchmark of 20 published papers based on the SEER cancer registry, with the data needed to reproduce their findings. An LLM agent reproduces 77.4% of 2,190 atomic claims. A second agentic pipeline finds alternative analytical choices and reruns the analyses, flagging potentially consequential choices in 9.5% of fully reproduced findings for expert review.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
FuTransformer: FP8 prefill and INT4 decode for Llama-style inference on HopperFuTransformer is a CUDA implementation of a Llama-style Transformer block for NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. It uses FP8 prefill with fused GEMM epilogues and INT4 weights plus an INT4 KV-cache copy for decode, with a block-diagonal Hadamard transform to cut cache quantization error. On one H100, prefill is up to 1.48x faster than compiled PyTorch FP8, and INT4 decode is 1.3-2.4x faster than the faster PyTorch baseline. Llama-3.1-8B decode takes 2.8 ms per step at batch one, versus 8.1 ms for compiled transformers. WikiText-2 perplexity rises from 6.24 to 7.23 with round-to-nearest INT4 weights, or 6.99 with GPTQ.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
TileDRAM: Compiler-Controlled Tile-to-DRAM Layouts for 3D DRAM GPGPUsTileDRAM is a compiler-runtime toolchain that adds tile-to-DRAM layouts as a compiler-visible abstraction for compute-unit-local 3D DRAM GPUs. It extends GPU Linear Layout to DRAM placement and picks layouts per tile access signature using row-buffer behavior. On 108 MoE FFN cases in Accel-Sim/Ramulator2, row-conflict rate fell from 75.7% to 15.2%, with a 1.77x geomean speedup. Overhead on an RTX 3090 is 0.17%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
FedRAPP: Federated Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models with Reliability-Aware Prompt PersonalizationFedRAPP is a personalized aggregation framework for Source-Free Federated Test-Time Prompt Tuning (SF-FTTPT), where clients adapt CLIP soft prompts on unlabeled, non-IID test streams without source data. It combines reliability-aware client assessment, a server-side exponential moving-average prompt memory and similarity-guided peer aggregation. Across nine CLIP benchmark datasets and ImageNet variants it beats standard federated aggregation baselines while keeping prompt-only efficiency.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
HardEval: An Execution-Verified Benchmark for AI-Driven Security Hardening and Compliance RemediationHardEval is an execution-verified benchmark for language-model security hardening, built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 STIG controls that fail on an unhardened baseline. Models receive only the required security outcome and write a Bash script, which runs on a live VM and is graded fail to pass with OpenSCAP/OVAL checks. Fourteen frontier and open-weight configurations show uneven results across domains, with plausible code that misses the exact compliance condition. The benchmark is public.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
HardEval: An Execution-Verified Benchmark for AI-Driven Security Hardening and Compliance RemediationHardEval is an execution-verified benchmark for LLM-driven security hardening, built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 STIG controls that fail on an unhardened baseline. Models receive only the security outcome and write a Bash script, which runs on a live VM and is graded fail-to-pass by OpenSCAP/OVAL checks. Fourteen frontier and open-weight configurations show uneven results across SSH, authentication, audit and kernel domains, with a common failure of plausible code that misses the exact compliance condition.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
OwlSight: A Panoramic Monitor for Chain-of-Thought ReasoningOwlSight is a chain-of-thought monitor that uses "Factor", a monitoring requirement written into the prompt, so one monitor can cover many tasks across capability, safety and trustworthiness. Factors come at fine granularity (a specific leaked email address) and coarse granularity (privacy leakage). On 15,971 reasoning trajectories it beats general-purpose LLMs by 1.32-30.57 points (fine) and 11.71-27.81 points (coarse), and reaches state-of-the-art on OpenAI's CoT monitorability benchmark. It generalizes to unseen models and resists Factor rephrasing, CoT compression and obfuscation.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
FlexPart: Text-Controlled Semantics-Aware 3D Part Segmentation at Flexible GranularityFlexPart is a framework for text-controlled 3D mesh segmentation that assigns discrete part IDs to mesh faces through a view-independent part-identity field. It uses a control prompt of part names with location and shape clauses, trained on a VLM-built multi-granularity dataset. On FlexPartBench it raises average mIoU by 22% over the strongest baseline, and by 15% with planner-completed prompts.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
A Language-Informed Loss for Visual GenerationLILIE (Language-Informed and Lossless Image Encoder) is an invertible image transform built from a normalizing flow transformer, trained jointly with a vision-language model via next token prediction so captions can be recovered from noised features. The encoder supplies a language-informed loss for text-to-image generation. JiT models trained with it cut gFD from 66.84 to 53.01 against a pixel-only baseline on the GPIC dataset. Code, encoders and models are released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
ThetreStageAI: Multi-View Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Structured Bengali Theatre Production PlanningThetreStageAI is a retrieval-augmented framework for structured Bengali theatre production planning. It keeps separate scene, actor-blocking and lighting views, embeds Bengali text with BGE-M3, indexes it in view-specific Qdrant collections, and has Gemini generate schema-constrained JSON, with validation and at most one repair attempt. The authors build a synthetic dataset of 500 records (1,500 retrieval documents) and compare single-combined retrieval with multi-view retrieval. Code and data are public.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
I Want to Ride My BIKE: Customizing Bit-Flipping Decoders for Ephemeral Key KEMsePrint paper presenting the first optimized implementation of the BF-max bit-flipping decoder for the code-based KEM BIKE, combined with other decoders to trade off decoding failure rate, runtime, public-key and ciphertext size in ephemeral-key settings. It cuts public-key and ciphertext sizes by 7.8% versus LeanBIKE at similar speed and DFR, and gives a combined size 22% below BIKE and 2.79x below HQC. It shows BIKE can fit constrained protocols such as IKEv2, which matters for practical post-quantum migration.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Secure Compilation of Probabilistic Side-Channel CountermeasuresPresents a language- and leakage-model-agnostic framework for provably secure compilation of probabilistic side-channel countermeasures. It uses a deterministic leakage-preservation relation that implies preservation of d-NI, d-SNI and cryptographic constant-time without probabilistic proof obligations. The authors prove in Rocq that a model of the Jasmin compiler's core pipeline and several optimizing passes preserve security in the value-probing model with glitches. They also add source-level annotations to harden against transition leakage and release libmasking, an arbitrary-order masked gadget library in Jasmin that compiles to ARM and RISC-V, with C bindings and hardware benchmarks.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
ConQUESTA: Topology-Aware Post-Training Structural Pruning of Quantum Neural NetworksConQUESTA is a post-training pruning framework for quantum neural networks that combines task saliency with compiler cost, screens candidate entanglers, and searches whole pruning masks under an accuracy constraint. Each mask is transpiled across several coupling topologies. At 55% pruning on 4-, 6- and 8-qubit QNNs it cuts resources by 61.6% (Breast Cancer), 72.0% (Digits01) and 82.2% (Iris), and fixed-mask recovery raises feasible runs from 16/24 to 22/24.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
LexPilot: Benchmarking the Proactive Interaction Ability of Legal LLMs with Laypeople in Chinese Civil Case ConsultationLexPilot is a benchmark linking proactive legal interaction to claim-level verdict prediction, built from 432 real Chinese civil judgments across 36 causes of action. It pairs expert-reviewed complete and underspecified consultation histories with court verdicts. Current LLMs score on average 23.84% lower on judgment prediction in underspecified consultations than in fully specified ones, and the paper analyses the bottlenecks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Rethinking GRPO for Large Reasoning Model Safety AlignmentBeacon is a safety alignment framework for large reasoning models that fixes two GRPO failure modes: advantage collapse, where homogeneous rollout groups give vanishing advantages, and unsafe diversification, where unsafe behaviors persist and spread. It combines Safety Signal Recovery (advantage-guided trajectory filtering plus safe reference supervision) with Safety-Utility Decoupled Alignment (category-aware rewards, benign-only KL anchoring). Tested on four Qwen3 and DeepSeek-R1-Distill variants across eight benchmarks, it cuts average safety error by up to 32.83 percentage points with low over-refusal.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
MUB: An Identity-Masked Benchmark for Music Understanding in Multimodal Language ModelsMUB (Music Understanding Benchmark) is a set of 500 identity-masked recordings with existing annotations for tempo, key, time signature and structural intervals. It covers all 24 keys, tempos of 47 to 180 BPM and 4,676 intervals, and strips titles, artists and platform IDs from inputs. Baselines reach 53.6% tempo accuracy (DSP) and 98.4% time-signature accuracy (constant 4/4). No multimodal LLM has been tested yet, and rights clearance is unresolved.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Many Biases, One Circuit: Post-Training Tunes a Pretrained Cue-Routing MechanismMany Biases, One Circuit is a October 2026 arXiv paper that traces attention heads behind cue-following (for example "I think the answer is B") through two post-training pipelines. Four cue types share a few heads already present in pretrained models. About 200 generic assistant examples activate them in chat format, and the final RL stage strengthens cue effects. Swapping attention patterns of six middle layers between Tulu-3-8B and OLMo-2-7B checkpoints moves cue effects most of the way.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Identify, Classify, Act: Per-Instruction Controlled Compliance for LLMs over External DataEDIC is a decomposed reward framework that trains LLMs to decide, for each instruction embedded in external data such as documents or tool returns, whether to follow or reject it. A judge initialized with SFT and refined with GRPO attributes compliance per instruction and yields separate rewards for beneficial and harmful compliance. On Qwen3-4B it raises harmful-rejection by up to 7.7% and Arena-Hard-Auto utility by 12.5% over the strongest prior defense.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Identify, Classify, Act: Per-Instruction Controlled Compliance for LLMs over External DataEDIC is a decomposed reward framework for per-instruction compliance in LLMs that read external data, where one document or tool return mixes legitimate directives with injected ones. A generative judge, trained with SFT then GRPO, attributes compliance per instruction and produces RL rewards for beneficial and harmful compliance. On Qwen3-4B it raises harmful rejection by up to 7.7% and Arena-Hard-Auto utility by 12.5% across five benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Stealthy Poisoning Attacks via Reused KV Cache of ReasoningR^2ECAP (Reused Reasoning-Cache Poisoning) is a black-box attack that plants poisoned reasoning traces through a chat interface, exploiting LLM systems that reuse KV caches of reasoning. A preceding trace steers the model, and the retained trace keeps residual adversarial influence in its cache after the preceding trace is discarded. On three open-weight LLMs and three datasets it reaches up to 79% ASR, beats the white-box HijackKV in 8 of 9 settings, and reaches 46% ASR in a reasoning-trace retrieval system. Only 1% of retained responses are flagged by a popular prompt injection detector.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
SwiftAuth: Conditional Privacy-Preserving UAV Authentication with Multi-Source Credential Aggregation and Non-Interactive AuthorizationThe paper proposes a traceable and aggregatable tagged witness signature (TA-TWS) and builds SwiftAuth on it, a conditional privacy-preserving anonymous authentication framework for UAVs and other dynamic terminals. Issuers can create authorization components while users are offline. Several credentials compress into one constant-size proof, verifiers can batch-verify across users, and a regulatory trapdoor lets authorities trace misbehaving users. TA-TWS is proven unforgeable and witness-hiding, and benchmarks with the MIRACL Core library on constrained devices and Aliyun servers show it is practical.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Shorter Hash-Based Signatures via Guarded Sharing in a DAG ModelProposes "guarded sharing", a technique that moves few-time signatures in SPHINCS-style stateless hash-based schemes from a tree model to a DAG model. Combined with bucket thinning, hash chains and rejection sampling, it yields BGS-CC, which improves on the prior best few-time scheme BPORS-C+BFP. For 128-bit security and a use quota of Q=2^24 it gives 2,228-byte signatures, the first SPHINCS-based stateless signature shorter than ML-DSA-44's 2,420 bytes. This matters for PQ migration because signature size is the main drawback of SLH-DSA.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Doc2Harness: Benchmarking LLMs on Long-Horizon Harness Engineering of Coding AgentsDoc2Harness is a two-stage benchmark for harness engineering. In Stage 1 a build model, working inside a fixed builder harness, gets an interface-only contract skeleton plus a development document consolidating behavior from twelve frontier harnesses, and builds a full candidate harness in an isolated container. In Stage 2 the frozen harness runs in separate per-test-case containers, driven by a scripted mock model, and is scored on four channels: requests sent to the model, files on disk, exit code and command output. Across 19 frontier models with three builds each on 328 test cases, GPT-6 Astra leads at 53.05% against 27.44% for the weakest, and failures cluster around how cross-cutting functionality is split across modules.
huggingface.copaperAdded 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Value as Memory: Online Value-Guided Post-training for General Robot PoliciesValue as Memory (VaM) is a post-training framework for generalist robot policies. It addresses partial observability and the delayed feedback of offline post-training. Value caching conditions actions on recent value predictions as task-progress memory. Online real-world RL combines offline demonstrations, off-policy interventions and on-policy rollouts, and moves from offline RL warmup to autonomous learning with sparse rewards. On long-horizon deformable-object and contact-rich manipulation tasks it gains 29.4% mean absolute success rate from value caching and 32.8% from online learning over matched offline training. The online schedule runs 8x as many policy iterations under the same gradient-step budget, with over 2x lower time per gradient step from concurrent data collection and training.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Perceive, Predict, and Plan: a Unified World Action Model for Egocentric Dexterous ManipulationP^3-WAM is a unified world action model for egocentric dexterous manipulation with three modes: Perceive (reconstruct articulated hand motion and camera trajectories from video), Predict (generate visual futures under prescribed actions) and Plan (jointly generate action trajectories and their anticipated visual outcomes from an initial image, a language instruction and an optional visual goal). It adds a compact structured 3D action representation to a pretrained video diffusion transformer through a mixture-of-transformers design with shared base weights, modality-specific adaptation and bidirectional visual-action attention. Randomized modality visibility lets video and 3D actions act as either context or target. Unified training beats single-mode training and outperforms specialized baselines on 3D hand reconstruction and action-conditioned video prediction across four datasets, and gives better instruction adherence than video-generation baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Grounding Generative Verification in 3D ContentThe paper introduces 3DVerifierBench, a 10-task benchmark for generative verification of 3D content. It scores accept/reject decisions, rejection explanations, and responses to controlled changes in specifications and candidates. A human study shows a 21.6-point gap to the strongest tested model, GPT-6 Astra. The authors also build a pipeline of multi-view fact extraction, controlled 3D editing and native annotations. It yields 14,126 training examples with contradiction explanations and linked counterfactuals. Verification-guided selection raises complete factual success from 26.7% to 90.0% with oracle selection over sixteen candidates, and human-guided recursive refinement satisfies all seven requirements for every input in an eight-input study.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
DK-VLM: Geometry as Position for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language ModelsDK-VLM adds Dual-Kernel Attention to a vision-language model. A semantic kernel keeps the pretrained attention and positional encoding. A separate geometric kernel uses estimated 3D points and camera poses to modulate attention through point displacements and relative view transformations, and a learned gate fuses the two outputs. Geometry therefore enters attention as position, not as fused 3D reconstruction features. The paper also adds Reference-Frame Composition (RC) supervision, which gives stepwise turn and heading targets derived from verified single-step annotations, to train multi-step spatial reasoning as the observer moves. DK-VLM-8B reports the highest average score across six spatial benchmarks among the compared methods, with 74.33 on VSI-Bench and 58.28 on ReVSI-32, and it preserves general video understanding.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Rethinking Routing Exploration in Modern Mixture-of-ExpertsThe paper identifies an "exploration dilemma" in modern Mixture-of-Experts models. Shared experts reduce the variability of token representations, which makes routing less exploratory. Fine-grained expert segmentation enlarges the combinatorial routing space and so needs more exploration, which means its extra expressiveness may go unrealized. It proposes MirrorMoE, which shrinks the exploration space by suppressing unnecessary experts per token, and reports consistent gains across model scales.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
MLExpert: Towards a Generalist Agentic Model for Autonomous Machine Learning EngineeringPresents MLExpert, a 35B Mixture-of-Experts agentic model trained for autonomous long-horizon machine learning engineering. Training uses a Kaggle-MLE Factory to build executable tasks and an interaction harness, hierarchical agentic SFT with outcome-guided supervision, and Windowed Interaction RL (WIRL). WIRL treats the multi-turn decisions between successive experiment results as one execution window with a shared outcome reward, and uses asynchronous collection and policy correction. On MLE-Bench Lite the average medal rate rises from 37.9% to 72.7%, comparable to larger frontier models such as Kimi-K3 and GLM-5.3. It also improves on NatureBench Lite, agent scaffold optimization and algorithm optimization.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Learning to Steer LLM Agents and Multi-Agent SystemsProposes a steering agent that supervises LLM agents and multi-agent systems during execution and corrects goal drift, where long-horizon tool use and inter-agent collaboration slowly diverge from the overall objective. A low-cost fast path decides when to intervene, and a high-cost slow path generates how to intervene. Both paths are trained jointly with reinforcement learning, combining a pairwise ranking objective with GRPO. On information-seeking search tasks it improves performance and efficiency for single-agent and multi-agent systems, generalizes out of domain, transfers to unseen executors, and allows intervention frequency to be adjusted without retraining.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
My Credentials, Please: Detecting Filesystem Capability Laundering in MCP Servers at ScaleStudies "filesystem capability laundering" in MCP servers: client approval of a tool call grants the server process broad host filesystem access, so attacker-steered arguments can reach sensitive files outside the tool's declared contract. The authors build MCP-FSD, which infers per-tool least-privilege boundaries, plants credential fixtures outside them, and tests exploitability and sandbox containment by paired dynamic execution. Of 21,097 servers from nine registries, 16.4% of 4,806 triaged servers have filesystem capabilities despite non-filesystem classifications. Dynamic validation confirmed 150 vulnerable instances, and disclosure produced 13 advisories, including two CVEs in Anthropic's Git MCP Server.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Knowledge That Is Linear Before Fine-Tuning Generalizes After ItThe paper separates "active" facts (which support generalization beyond recall) from "inert" ones. It builds new relations by relabeling answers of existing ones (Paris -> Europe becomes Paris -> crab), fine-tunes on a subset of subjects, and tests held-out subjects that share an answer (Munich -> crab). Across eleven language models and 70 relations, linear readability of the original relation in pretrained representations correlates with this generalization at Pearson r = 0.87 to 0.92 within each model. The result holds after controlling for fine-tuning set size, original-relation accuracy and subject frequency in pretraining text, and it survives re-randomized labels, seeds and thirteen other label categories. Mapping wrong labels back to the original answers shows the fine-tuned model's errors follow the linear probe's top answers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
AI Consilium: a Benchmark of LLM Clinical Multidisciplinary Second OpinionsAI Consilium is a multidimensional benchmark built from 300 diagnostically resolved NEJM–MedQA cases (110 for physician reference ratings and Judge calibration, 190 held out). Eight single-model pipelines produced role-specific opinions and interactive-consilium reports under free-form and structured clinical-reasoning conditions, and a physician-calibrated LLM Judge scored 3,040 final reports. Model identity separated quality more than format; structured reports won in seven of eight pipelines (management 2.740 vs. 2.436), multidisciplinary synthesis beat the primary-role opinion on all five shared criteria, and GPT-5.6-Sol led every component with the fewest review rounds.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Private Retrieval Augmented Generation via Random ProjectionProposes protecting the retrieval datastore in RAG systems by applying the same random projection to datastore embeddings and query embeddings. This provably preserves query-item semantic similarity while substantially mitigating data extraction attacks. Across multiple RAG architectures and datasets it beats prior differential-privacy-based methods on retrieval and generation quality, with comparable empirical privacy under strong attacks, making it a practical baseline for privacy-preserving RAG.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Private Retrieval Augmented Generation via Random ProjectionProposes applying the same random projection to both datastore embeddings and query embeddings in RAG systems. The authors claim this provably preserves query-to-item semantic similarity while substantially mitigating datastore data-extraction attacks. Across several RAG architectures and datasets it reportedly beats prior differential-privacy-based defenses on retrieval and generation quality, with comparable empirical privacy under strong attack models. It is presented as a lightweight baseline for privacy-preserving RAG.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
EliteReplay: Preserving Diverse Solutions in RL Post-Training via Quality-Diversity SearchEliteReplay is an RL post-training recipe that pairs GRPO with an "elite" archive built by quality-diversity search. Before training, the frozen base model is used to collect solutions spanning distinct approaches; during training, a replay loss on this archive is added to GRPO. This counters the narrowing of solution diversity that RL causes. On text-to-SQL tasks it reaches higher pass@128 than all baselines and yields up to 77% more distinct correct strategies. It also retains more of the base model's strategies and covers both readings of ambiguous questions nearly twice as often on AmbiQT.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Librarian Agents: Training LLMs to Curate Long-Context Workspaces that Anticipate Future QueriesIntroduces Librarian Agents, where a builder agent turns raw unstructured documents into a hierarchical filesystem of synthetic files and reference links, forming a workspace for a downstream answering agent. Workspace construction is cast as a Markov decision process and the builder policy is trained with reinforcement learning to maximize downstream answering accuracy. It beats the strongest retrieval and precomputation baselines by 33 points on BrowseComp-Plus, amortizes construction cost over repeated queries, and generalizes zero-shot to BRIGHT with a 31-point average gain.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
X-RIC: An Agentic RAN-Intelligent Controller Benchmark for Enhancing Reinforcement LearningX-RIC (eXplainable RIC) is a framework that adds agentic reasoning to the O-RAN Near-RT RAN Intelligent Controller. It combines reactive reinforcement learning with automated behavioral cloning from domain heuristics, a transformer-based Telecom Language Model for contextual abstraction and interpretability, and closed-loop co-adaptation for continuous policy refinement. The paper also introduces BARX, a benchmark for agentic RAN control that measures latency, compliance and determinism. On SLA-aware network slicing, in simulation and on an O-RAN-compliant testbed, it reports 89% lower operational cost with SLA compliance kept, 75% faster convergence, 50% fewer training steps and 46% lower variance.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Topology-Inspired Fine-Tuning for Wind-Field Super-ResolutionThe paper fine-tunes a pretrained CNN wind-field super-resolution model with differentiable topology-inspired auxiliary losses on speed, gradient magnitude, soft high-speed level sets and local maxima. It also uses fixed-pair supervision at ground-truth persistence-pair endpoints located offline with the Topology ToolKit. A 16-configuration loss study on a fixed 168-field benchmark finds that gradient supervision gives the strongest persistence-diagram improvement, while fixed-pair supervision gives the most consistent joint improvement in persistence-diagram and merge-tree distances. The combined objective cuts bottleneck, W2,∞ and W2,2 distances by 31%, 25% and 27% relative to the pretrained CNN, at a cost of about half of standard fine-tuning's PSNR gain. It also shows that pointwise metrics and topological distances rank CNN and GAN models differently.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Efficient KV Cache Migration for Geo-Distributed LLM Inference in Collaborative Edge ComputingProposes EdgeFlow, a hybrid KV cache migration scheme for distributed LLM inference across heterogeneous edge servers in Collaborative Edge Computing. It combines direct KV cache transmission with activation-based recomputation, overlapping computation and communication to cut migration time when servers disconnect or overload. The authors formulate a multi-node KV migration optimization problem and give a 2-approximation algorithm built on improved LP relaxation and bipartite graph techniques. Experiments on a real distributed LLM inference platform show up to 45% lower migration time.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Multi-sourced AI Tutor for Non-Native English Speaker StudentsDescribes a general-purpose LLM-based AI tutor for computing courses that accepts questions in Mandarin and replies bilingually, also generating glossaries of technical terms. It uses a specialized multi-source RAG pipeline with a novel question extraction mechanism to draw on diverse course materials. Evaluated on 91 Piazza posts: 83.52% answered correctly and helpfully, 76.92% of questions got high-quality translations, and 64.47% got glossaries.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
The importance of tensor handling and implementation of physics-informed DeepONetsProposes a modified Physics-informed DeepONet (PI-DeepONet) architecture that removes redundancy in how the Branch network processes input functions across collocation points. It is mathematically equivalent to the original but uses smaller input tensors and fewer Branch evaluations. The authors derive training-time scaling laws, then test on 1D, 2D and 3D linear advection problems. Accuracy matches the original, the maximum speed-up is 3.75× in 2D, and a 3D model trains on an NVIDIA A100 only with the new formulation, because the original runs out of memory.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
DropKV: Decoupling Residual-Output Perturbation for Near-Optimal KV-Cache EvictionDropKV is a KV-cache eviction framework for long-context LLMs. It decouples the joint eviction decision into independent per-token scores based on residual-output perturbation, which avoids the NP-hard combinatorial problem. It has a provable constant-factor approximation guarantee under a cone condition, which the authors verify empirically on three long-context LLMs. The fused Triton kernels never materialize the full attention matrix. They give a 19.8x scoring-kernel speedup and up to 9.9% end-to-end prefill speedup. On RULER and LongBench it beats state-of-the-art eviction baselines at equal cache budgets.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
PROBE: Learning to Audit Policy Compliance in Tool-Using LLM AgentsPROBE (Policy Rule Observation via Behavioral Exploration) trains LLM-based auditors that act as realistic users and probe deployed tool-using agents for policy violations (pricing, privacy, confirmation, safety) across multi-turn, tool-mediated dialogue. It formalizes auditing as a two-player Markov game with a composite reward for violation discovery, plausibility, progress and policy diversity, and compares GRPO, DPO and GFlowNet optimization. Trained auditors find broader, higher-yield violations than zero-shot adversaries, even when much smaller than the target agent, positioning behavioral auditing as a distinct axis next to capability and safety benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
PROBE: Learning to Audit Policy Compliance in Tool-Using LLM AgentsPROBE (Policy Rule Observation via Behavioral Exploration) trains LLM-based auditors that act as realistic users and probe deployed tool-using agents for policy violations (pricing, privacy, confirmation, safety) over multi-turn dialogue. It formalizes auditing as a two-player Markov game with a composite reward balancing violation discovery, behavioral plausibility, conversation progress and policy diversity, and compares GRPO, DPO and GFlowNet optimization in a controlled setting. Trained auditors find broader, higher-yield violations than same-architecture zero-shot adversaries, even when much smaller than the target agent. This positions multi-turn behavioral auditing as a distinct evaluation axis alongside capability and safety benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Onboard Lightweight LLM Reasoning for Human-Aware Safe UAV NavigationPresents a modular, fully onboard UAV navigation pipeline that closes the "human-aware safety gap" of geometry-only planners. A shared BLIP encoder drives captioning and text-conditioned segmentation, which is fused with depth for 3D obstacle localization. Qwen-2.5-0.5B, stabilized with RAG and grammar-constrained JSON decoding, infers per-category risk once per class and caches the verdict. Perception runs at 10 Hz on a Jetson Orin NX, and fallback LLM queries take about 0.8 s off the control path. In Gazebo it gives roughly 3x fewer collisions than a geometric planner and raises semantics-aware landing success from 34% to 96%. The 224-pixel encoder input limits small-object perception at range.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
GraphACM: Graph-based Action Consistency Measurement for Uncertainty Quantification in LLM AgentsGraphACM merges equivalent states from multiple rollouts of the same LLM agent task into a directed, action-labeled graph, so actions can be compared at shared decision states. It defines node-level and global action-consistency measures, and uses the global score as an uncertainty proxy to predict task success or failure. Across three LLMs on ALFWorld, AppWorld and WebShop it reaches an average AUROC of 0.811, above the strongest behavioral-consistency baseline (0.729) and verbalized confidence (0.769). It also shows where in a trajectory agent actions diverge.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Structural Cryptanalysis of the Eevee AEAD FamilyePrint paper cryptanalysing Eevee (Umbreon, Jolteon, Espeon), forkcipher-based AEAD modes proposed at CCS 2023 for IoT-to-cloud computation. It gives a two-encryption AD-free prefix distinguisher, a four-encryption nonce-misuse distinguisher, a deterministic AD-only forgery, and nonce-respecting forgeries on Jolteon and Espeon (fresh one-block forgery reusing the tag; arbitrary AD substitution). It traces these to proof flaws (online-prefix consistency, domain separation, checksum freshness), derives design requirements, and concludes the failures are in the mode design, not the C implementation.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Multi-Reward Hacking: From Aggregation-Induced Drift to Trust-Anchored DefenseThe paper shows that symmetric aggregation of a primary reward (correctness) and auxiliary rewards (brevity, efficiency) in LLM post-training can raise aggregate reward while primary-task performance falls. It proves that deterministic conditional-mean GRPO converges to auxiliary-favoring behavior when auxiliary rewards are more reliably obtained. It proposes Trust-Anchored Gating (TAG), which elects an anchor channel by policy drift and gates auxiliary credit on anchor satisfaction. On Qwen3-4B with a brevity reward, TAG reaches 0.581 pass@4 versus 0.220 for additive aggregation, and shortens responses by 44% relative to correctness-only training. Experiments on Qwen and Llama models cover math and program synthesis.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Robust ECDSA Threshold Signing at ScalePresents a robust threshold ECDSA signing protocol for t ≤ (n-1)/3 corrupted signers. It batch-computes pre-processing material for fast online signing and scales to many signers, for uses such as bridging consensus between blockchains. It combines batched verifiable secret sharing (Fitzi & Hirt), randomness extraction (Beerliova-Trubiniova & Hirt), efficient share opening (Damgård & Nielsen) and Attema–Cramer zero-knowledge proofs. The authors implement it and show it is practical for large n.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Approve What, Exactly? Effect Binding and Trusted Rendering for Agent Step-Up AuthorizationPaper arguing that agent human-approval prompts count as a second factor only if agent compromise cannot forge them and they name exactly what is approved. It defines twelve attacks on the approval path (decoy recipients, amount cancellation, card padding, label spoofing, enrollment squatting, threshold splitting) and tests them against AP2, Microsoft's action-bound approval design and MCP elicitation. An audit of ten agent runtimes found no third-party verifiable approval record and post-approval argument changes in four of eight. The reference defense ASU (Agent Step-Up) renders the card from a canonical effect descriptor, has a phone passkey sign its digest, and executes only the stored call. It is proven in Tamarin (53 lemmas) and evaluated on 27,108 scripted trials and 609 AgentDojo pairs. The trusted card cut forged-narration attack success from 0.54 to 0.03 and raised LLM-approver catch rate from 0.30 to 0.98.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Recursive Reward Improvement via Adversarial Meta-Prompt EvolutionIntroduces Recursive Reward Improvement (RRI) for recursive self-improvement on open-ended expert tasks without answer keys, where a proposer writes both a task and a rubric. Before the solver trains, an adversary writes a rubric-gaming but useless answer, the same model writes an honest answer without seeing the rubric, and up to two repair steps revise the rubric until the honest answer wins. Exploits found also rewrite future task and rubric generation. On HealthBench Professional it beats a Generation Only baseline by 10.9 points at 9B and 12.4 at 27B (10.3 with no external model), and the 27B model transfers to PRBench Hard (+6.6) and ProfBench (+8.0).
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Thinking in Graphs: Neo4j-Backed Exploit-Chain Reasoning for LLM Penetration-Testing AgentsPresents ChainGraph, a pattern that externalizes exploit-chain reasoning for LLM pentest agents (Claude Code, Codex) into a Neo4j property graph exposed via the Model Context Protocol. Findings, attack steps, credentials, assets and tamper-evident evidence receipts are typed nodes with pre/post-condition edges, queried with Cypher and Graph Data Science for next-step inference, entry-to-crown-jewel pathing, chain-severity promotion, provenance and chokepoints. On a synthetic GOAD-style multi-forest Active Directory engagement, three Medium findings become Critical once chained, betweenness centrality identifies break-points, and reasoning payload drops ~98% (token proxy); results are single-run and illustrative.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Thinking in Graphs: Neo4j-Backed Exploit-Chain Reasoning for LLM Penetration-Testing AgentsChainGraph is a pattern that moves exploit-chain reasoning out of the flat context window and into a Neo4j property graph. Findings, attack steps, credentials, assets and tamper-evident evidence receipts are typed nodes with pre/post-condition edges. The graph is wired to Claude Code or Codex through MCP with no custom harness. Five operator questions (next-step inference, entry-to-crown-jewel pathing, combined-severity promotion, evidence provenance, chokepoint identification) become reusable Cypher and Graph Data Science queries, plus a chain-severity score. On a synthetic multi-forest Active Directory lab modeled on GOAD, three findings rated Medium in isolation become Critical once their path to the forest root is materialized. Scoping each decision to a graph result cut the reasoning payload by about 98% on a token proxy. The authors say the results are illustrative single-run measurements, not a benchmark.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🧠 AI
A Hybrid BP-SAT Attack on MILENAGE: Combining the Complementary Strengths of Algebraic and Soft-Analytical Side-Channel AttacksePrint paper evaluating ASCA (SAT-based) and SASCA (belief propagation) side-channel attacks on the AES-based MILENAGE authentication algorithm in USIM cards, using neural-network leakage predictions to recover subscriber key K and operator secret OPc from a single trace. SASCA alone succeeds in 87.7% of attacks but converges to a wrong OPc in 6.1%; ASCA succeeds in only 34% within a 1-hour timeout. The hybrid, where BP refines the predictions before they go to the SAT solver, reaches 93.8% with lower average runtime. It also proposes a countermeasure that masks each AES round key with an independent per-device secret, and the authors report it defeated the hybrid attack in all evaluated cases.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Quantum-Aware Key Rank for Side-Channel Attacks evaluationProposes a cost model and metric for an adversary who collects side-channel traces classically and finishes the key search on a quantum computer. Shows any quantum algorithm needs Omega(sqrt(r)) cipher evaluations for key rank r, and that the quadratic advantage holds only up to a rank bound set by the NIST MAXDEPTH budget (about 2^58.6 for AES-128 at D=2^40). Defines a quantum-aware key rank computable from existing rank estimators, with simulated-leakage experiments showing a depth-limited quantum adversary is worth about 22 traces at SNR 0.125.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 16 Oct 2026, published 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Post-Quantum Certificate-Based PSK Provisioning for WireGuard via Mutual TLS, DTLS, and QUIC: Design and Performance StudyThe paper proposes a post-quantum architecture for WireGuard that leaves the core protocol unchanged. A mutually authenticated TLS 1.3 control channel runs over TCP, UDP (DTLS) or QUIC and uses ML-KEM key establishment, with X.509 certificates from a PKI signed with ML-DSA. A shared secret derived from the session's exported keying material is injected into WireGuard's native PSK interface. A Tamarin model of the 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
Connecting Cryptanalytic Distinguishers through DivisibilityPaper that links linear, integral, differential-linear and restricted differential distinguishers through two-way conversions with explicit divisibility guarantees and data complexity. It gives automated MILP/SAT models (Walsh and ultrametric representations, exact mix-basis models) and a black-box FWHT histogram search for zeros and finite divisibility. It improves 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
Refined Application of the XL Algorithm within the Algebraic Approach to the Regular Syndrome Decoding ProblemFurue and Aikawa build and analyze algebraic attacks on the Regular Syndrome Decoding Problem (RSDP), which underlies code-based post-quantum schemes. They extend the Wang et al. hybrid algorithm to allow an arbitrary XL solving degree d, and add two variants: an XFL-based one (partial Gaussian elimination plus variable guessing) and a WXL-based one that exploits Macaulay matrix sparsity. Complexity analysis shows the WXL variant with d>2 wins for small block size 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
Accelerating Pollard Rho with GPU Field Arithmetic on NVIDIA BlackwellPreprint that speeds up Pollard rho on GPUs by rebuilding field arithmetic: packed normal-basis representation, the CUDA 13.3 PTX carry-less multiply (clmad), and three-input logic instructions. On one RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell it goes from 0.85 to 14.64 billion iterations/s (17.2x) on the Certicom ECC2K-130 challenge, which puts the whole challenge under five GPU-years. The same levers give 1.52x on P-256 and 2.61x on P-384, which leaves P-256 about 6e21 card-years away. It also reports twelve GPUs from Turing to Blackwell, an FPGA engine on AWS F2 and a campaign that covered 5.4% of the expected work, with code and a Dockerfile on GitHub (rho-blackwell). It claims no improvement on the generic-group bound.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
DPF-SGD: Byzantine-Robust Differentially Private Federated SGD with Exact Optimality GuaranteesDPF-SGD is a federated SGD algorithm that stays robust to Byzantine agents while satisfying 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
Scaling Agentic Data for Long-Horizon Terminal IntelligenceIntroduces TerminalHorizon, a fully automated data synthesis engine for long-horizon terminal agents. It uses independent execution to find key work omitted during environment construction and rebuilds the environment from that evidence. It then progressively expands tasks under the same goal with new requirements that build on earlier results. The authors build 1.5K task environments and run supervised fine-tuning of Qwen3.5-27B to get TerminalHorizon-27B, which improves on all 12 benchmarks covering coding-agent tasks, real-world production agentic tasks and general reasoning. Multiple RSI case studies with a 12-hour research budget show the model continuing to experiment past an initial solution and keeping effective improvements in its final deliverables.
huggingface.copaperAdded 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
ChunkAct: Action Chunking for Agentic RoboticsChunkAct brings action chunking to agentic robotics, where an LLM agent composes perception, motion and VLA tools guided by memory. Online, one call launches a chain of primitives that runs autonomously and returns control only on failure. Offline, memory is compiled into these chunks so execution needs no memory at test time and the planner is used only for real decisions. On LIBERO-Pro it improves task success by 5.0 points over the prior agentic-robotics state of the art, with 2.9x fewer LLM calls, 4.4x fewer input tokens and 2.3x fewer output tokens.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Dog-Breed Text-to-image Flow Matching from Pretraining to Fine-Tuning on 4 Consumer GPUsMiniDog is a framework for training a text-to-image flow-matching diffusion transformer from scratch on four RTX 3090 GPUs, with 55 minutes of pretraining and 15 minutes of fine-tuning. It pretrains on 26k ImageNet dog images that were captioned, then fine-tunes on 2k FLUX.1-schnell generated images. Image and text features are precomputed and cached. The model is a 22M-parameter transformer with the E2E-INVAE semantic latent space, a small Qwen text encoder and in-context conditioning, and training is accelerated with iREPA and an EUPE perception encoder. The repo evaluates with FID, HPSv2, PickScore and VAE reconstruction metrics. It lowers the barrier to hands-on diffusion training research.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Hybrid Reasoning AgentsIntroduces Hybrid Reasoning Agents (HybridAgents), which switch between latent reasoning and text-based interaction in one generation process. A lightweight HybridLink handles transitions between the two modes, and a continuous working memory keeps hybrid context lossless across turns. This keeps tool use and makes latent thoughts inspectable. Post-training has two stages: HybridSFT, then HybridRL, which learns when to think latently and when to act in text. Across 3 model scales and 11 benchmarks (math, science, medicine, search, agentic reasoning), the authors report +10.4% performance, 35.5–54.7% fewer tokens, 1.8–2.6x faster inference and 2.7–3.7x lower cost versus text and latent baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
PixelMoE: Scaling Pixel-Space Diffusion with LLM-Style Mixture-of-ExpertsPixelMoE is a pixel-space diffusion framework that scales capacity sparsely using standard LLM-style Mixture-of-Experts: token-choice routing, fine-grained routed experts, a shared expert and bias-based load balancing, with no diffusion-specific routing or auxiliary routing losses. It adds Pixel-Space Hierarchical Flow Matching, which varies spatial resolution along the denoising trajectory from global structure to fine detail. At matched active parameters it beats dense counterparts, and reaches FID 1.47 at 256x256 and 1.53 at 512x512 on class-conditional ImageNet-1K without representation alignment or perceptual losses. Code and models are promised but not yet released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
RepProbe: Can Video Language Models Count Repeated Actions? A Diagnostic BenchmarkRepProbe is a benchmark of 42K real and synthetic video clips with exactly 1–20 complete action repetitions, controlling for clip position, temporal coverage and duration. Video language models' counting accuracy collapses at high counts, and this is not explained by frame sampling alone. Linear probes on final-layer representations show count information stays linearly decodable even when the model's answer is wrong, so the failure arises at the output stage, where answers cluster on a few preferred numbers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Game2Real-Bench: Do Toy Games Reveal and Transfer to Real-World Visual Reasoning?Game2Real-Bench tests whether vision-language model performance on procedurally generated toy games predicts real-world visual reasoning, and whether game examples help transfer. It has 1,000 verifiable game samples and 400 real-world samples, matched by shared reasoning requirements (fine-grained perception, spatial reasoning, constraint reasoning, sequential planning). Across 25 VLMs, game and real scores correlate strongly (Pearson/Spearman 0.935). One-shot game-to-real transfer on four models improves constraint reasoning for several but hurts fine-grained perception. The authors also release Game2Real-Dataset, with about 24K verified game samples across 18 tasks and 65 QA families.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Beyond the Verdict: Agentic Code Judging with Verifiable FeedbackProposes a task where a model judges and diagnoses a candidate program from only the problem statement and source code, backing its verdict with generated counterexamples that can be checked by execution. The authors build USACO-JUDGE from USACO 2026 contests (human and LLM-written accepted and unaccepted programs) and train ARBITER, a 35B MoE agentic verifier, with reinforcement learning in a generic execution sandbox. Training lifts counterexample success on incorrect programs from 40.61% to 62.67% and mean binary verdict accuracy from 71.41% to 87.41%. ARBITER also improves code selection and refinement, and in an IOI 2026 case study its guided refinement lifts GPT-OSS-120B's expected score above the gold-medal threshold under the official submission limit.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
UniW(A)M: A Unified Mixture-of-Experts Framework for World and World-Action ModelsUniW(A)M is a mixture-of-experts model built on diffusion Transformers that unifies action-conditioned world modeling (AC-WM) with several world-action model (WAM) variants. Shared experts capture common physical dynamics, while atomic capability experts are reused across interfaces, each keeping its own conditional pathway. At deployment a plug-in adaptive interface router (PAIR), trained on a small subset of target-task chunk scenarios with the backbone frozen, picks a WAM interface for each execution chunk. It reaches 88.3% average real-world success against 76.7% for the strongest baseline, leads WorldArena on all three action-conditioned world-modeling tasks, and PAIR raises OOD success from 63.3% to 76.7%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
ProAS: A Progress-Aware Advantage Shaping Framework for Multi-Turn Agentic Reinforcement LearningProAS (Progress-Aware Advantage Shaping) is a plug-and-play framework for multi-turn agentic RL that fixes the uniform credit assignment problem in critic-free algorithms like GRPO, where trajectory-level advantages are broadcast to every action. It uses a dynamically evolving Agentic Reference Graph with Masking Unreasonable Incentives and Asymmetric Penalty Redistribution to give finer-grained credit without a critic. On Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B-Instruct it reports success rates up to 91.9%/94.3% on ALFWorld and 66.7%/70.8% on WebShop, with up to 2.44x faster training convergence and robustness to imperfect or distilled ARGs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
MultiAlloc: Budget-Aware Precision Allocation for KV Cache QuantizationMultiAlloc 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
Geometric Calibration of Supervised Fine-TuningProposes Geometric Calibration of supervised fine-tuning and SPACE (Subspace Projection for Adapted Checkpoint Enhancement). SPACE is a post-hoc, data-free, training-free method that uses the pre- and post-SFT checkpoints to revert SFT update components lying in the principal subspace of the pre-SFT weights and keep those in the orthogonal complement. It is evaluated on Qwen2.5, Qwen3, Qwen3.5, Llama-3.1 and Olmo-3 models (2B–14B) with math, coding and medical SFT. It reduces out-of-domain regression and improves in-domain performance, for example +2.85 ID / +2.26 OOD on Qwen2.5-7B math SFT.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Legal-R1: Agentic Retrieval for Evidence-Based Legal ReasoningLegal-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
LLM Agents for Automated Post-Training via Structured Recipe OptimizationIntroduces Structured Recipe Optimization (SRO), a paradigm for automated LLM post-training that optimizes over a task-adapted recipe space covering data sources, data processing, cross-domain composition and training configuration. It pairs an LLM-based Recipe-Space Designer, which builds the recipe space for the target tasks, with a Multi-Domain Recipe Optimizer that uses structured trial evidence to guide LLM candidate construction and multi-objective Bayesian trial selection. SRO gets the highest average score in all evaluated target-model and agent-LLM combinations; for example, 41.1 vs 15.4 for the strongest baseline on Qwen3-1.7B with GPT-5.4, and 53.8 vs 40.8 on Qwen3-4B with DeepSeek-V4-Flash, in joint post-training across three capability domains and six benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Configuring RAG Systems: What Breaks, Where Originates, and How to FixFirst large-scale empirical study of RAG configuration issues, covering 654 real-world issues collected from 10 diverse RAG systems. It categorizes symptoms, root causes, affected pipeline stages and fix patterns. It finds that symptoms mostly appear at early or late stages, while the root cause often sits in a different stage from where the symptom shows. It closes with nine actionable insights for testing, localizing and fixing RAG configuration problems.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
EmoGenie: Benchmarking and Evaluating Expressed and Evoked Emotion in T2I Generation with MLLMsEmoGenie is a benchmark for emotions expressed and evoked by text-to-image outputs. It has 6,400 images from eight T2I models using 800 emotion-targeted prompts. It includes EmoGenie-QA (90,000 closed-set and 1,057 open-ended questions) and EmoGenie-Assess (13,175 mean opinion scores for valence, arousal, dominance and aesthetic quality). The authors also propose EmoProbe, which pairs emotion QA with response-aligned, dimension-specific regression heads. They report that it beats baselines on emotion QA and correlates better with human ratings. The work shows how reliably MLLMs interpret affect in generated images.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Leakage-Resilient Incompressible Cryptography: Constructions and BarriersIntroduces leakage-resilient incompressible cryptography, a security model combining leakage resilience (partial key leakage plus full ciphertext) with incompressibility (full key but only part of the ciphertext or signature). It gives a transformation from incompressible symmetric-key encryption (SKE) to leakage-resilient incompressible SKE, a leakage-resilient incompressible PKE built from a new leakage-resilient non-committing KEM, and an incompressible SKE with ciphertext and compression rate 1/2 using invertible extractors. It also gives a leakage-resilient incompressible signature scheme in the random oracle model under DCR or LWE plus Decisional Linear. Black-box impossibility results show barriers to improving these parameters.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Heading Hierarchy Reconstruction for Complex and Long Documents with Level-Wise Multimodal MemoryProposes a vision-language-model framework that incrementally reconstructs heading hierarchies across tens or hundreds of pages using a level-wise multimodal memory. The memory keeps a compact set of earlier pages chosen by anchors (here, the most recent node at each heading level), so the VLM sees the visual, textual and layout patterns of headings at every level. The authors also introduce CLDoc-HHRBench (250 documents, 11,212 pages, expert-verified annotations) and report results on it and three existing benchmarks. It matters for RAG pipelines that need coherent document-level structure, which page-by-page OCR/VLM parsing doesn't give.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Causal Awareness in End-to-End Encrypted Group MessagingCryptography 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
Master-Key Recovery from Internal Activation Leakage in ReLU Realizations of CamelliaThe 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
On the Expected Number of Iterations in ML-DSA Signing: A Complete Accounting of the Rejection ConditionsePrint paper showing that FIPS 204 Table 1's expected iteration counts for the ML-DSA signing loop cover only the line-23 validity checks (z and r0 norms). They omit the two line-28 encoding-correctness checks (‖c·t0‖∞ and hint weight). It accounts for all four conditions: z by exact counting, c·t0 by an Irwin-Hall tail, and hint weight by a closed-form conditioned per-coefficient probability with a Monte Carlo tail estimate. Corrected expected iterations are 4.36, 5.14 and 3.91 for ML-DSA-44, -65 and -87, within 0.14% of an end-to-end measurement and consistent with NIST's FIPS 204 errata.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenterAnthropic'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
CUTS: Chained Uniform-sum Tree SignaturesThe 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
Revisiting Witness-Succinct UC-lifting CompilersThe 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
State of Dependency Management 2025 | Endor LabsEndor Labs' 2025 State of Dependency Management report examines how AI coding agents and MCP servers add supply chain risk. Researchers analysed 10,663 GitHub MCP server repositories and tested AI-generated dependency recommendations across PyPI, npm, Maven and NuGet, finding agents import vulnerable or non-existent packages. MCP servers are immature: 75% are built by individuals, 41% lack license info, and 82% use sensitive APIs. The report advises treating AI-generated code as untrusted third-party input subject to code review, SAST/SCA and dependency governance.
endorlabs.compaperPublished and added 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Genericity in multivariate cryptographyThe paper proves that some properties of UOV (Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar) public-key ideals and varieties hold generically. These include equidimensionality of the UOV varieties and radicality of the public key ideals. This justifies the regularity assumptions used in algebraic cryptanalysis of UOV and its variants. The authors also review earlier multivariate schemes that were broken because they were non-generic, and give one counter-example whose non-genericity looks hard to exploit.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
StableJudge: A Lightweight Adversarial Defense Framework for LLM-as-a-JudgeStableJudge 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
Breaking First-Order Masked Kyber with Belief Propagation AlonePreprint recovering the long-term key of a first-order masked Kyber768 implementation on an ARM Cortex-M4 from about 2200 decapsulation power traces using only valid ciphertexts. A profiled neural network estimates Hamming-weight distributions of both arithmetic shares, which are turned into likelihoods on decryption noise and combined by a belief-propagation solver with Gaussian interference approximation and an Onsager (AMP) correction, recovering all 1536 secret and error coefficients without lattice reduction. It shows first-order masking is insufficient against combined second-order leakage, and that least squares, greedy solvers and lattice hints (BKZ block size 624 to 505 at 2000 traces) do worse.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
ML-Assisted Power Side-Channel Attacks on ML Accelerators in Shared FPGAsPaper 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
LLM-based Code Auditing by Inferring and Evaluating Developer AssumptionsPresents 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
LLM-based Code Auditing by Inferring and Evaluating Developer AssumptionsPresents 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
Extending the Schur--Macaulay Framework for UOV Attacks via Truncated Polynomial AlgebrasePrint paper by Peigen Li and Siyong Tao extending the wedge-attack framework of Ding, Li and Tao and the Schur-Macaulay matrix approach of Merz and Ran against Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar (UOV). It reformulates the attack with p-truncated polynomial algebras, so it applies over arbitrary finite fields. Divided powers and transfer relations give extra public relations in the ideal-inclusion framework, with quotient-dimension criteria for recovering graded components of the hidden oil-space ideal. Applied to the third-round QR-UOV parameter sets, it gives lower attack-complexity estimates for some of them.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 11 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
MiMo-V2.6: Scaling Reinforcement Learning Towards Self-ImprovementTechnical report for Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6 omni-modal model family, which scales RL compute along three axes: asynchronous training with 1,568 samples and 2.7-3.7B tokens per step at up to 1M context, more diverse environments (code, general, visual, cyber) under mixed agent harnesses, and groupwise agentic grading that gives better reward signals and favors shorter, token-efficient solutions. Stability measures include a frozen MoE router and a multi-layer defense against reward hacking, built on a mid-trained hybrid-SWA architecture. The authors open-source training dynamics, RL environments and the RL framework, which makes it a useful reference for reproducing scaled agentic RL.
huggingface.copaperAdded 10 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Nobody Will Read the Lean: A Case for High-Level Cryptographic LanguagesPosition paper arguing that as AI makes machine-checked proofs cheap, the scarce resource is a human who can read what was proved. It cites a Lean library's Schnorr signature security theorem that passed the checker but held for every adversary and so promised nothing. It shows that on a one-page Verifpal model, two of five verdicts flip under other standard definitions of properties such as forward secrecy. It proposes short, owner-written high-level cryptographic languages, with every claim backed by a checked theorem and a small, versioned, publicly agreed set of built-in security definitions.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Only What You've Signed up For: Secure Workflows with Constrained Diffusion AgentsIntroduces 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
Censorship Resistance in Credential Systems and Application to the EUDI WalletePrint 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: A Programmable Control Plane for Enterprise AI AgentsKedgeFlow 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
KedgeFlow: A Programmable Control Plane for Enterprise AI AgentsKedgeFlow proposes language-independent contracts in which trusted controllers issue signed exact-action permissions and privileged gateways enforce them, using single-use allowance claims, target-side conditions and retained outcome records. It aims to stop altered approved actions, concurrent permission reuse and retries after lost responses, even with a compromised agent. A reference implementation exposes this path via MCP; evaluation on a three-member etcd cluster showed 6,560 concurrent claim attempts yielding exactly one success per each of 82 allowances. It also reports that permissive policy still authorized an undesirable effect, and lists untested areas such as distributed reservations and production access routes.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Confidential Error-Correcting CodesIntroduces 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
Confidential Error-Correcting CodesIntroduces 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
Matched-Context Group Policy Optimization for LLM Agent TrainingProposes Matched-Context Group Policy Optimization (MCGPO), which builds weighted action preferences from already-collected sibling rollouts to give credit to intermediate decisions when feedback is sparse and arrives only at the end. Comparison contexts use pre-action state summaries and rubric progress. Exact and coarse matching rules are selected by two-action support, and fixed folds separate candidate decisions from the terminal outcomes that orient them. An evidence-weighted auxiliary pairwise loss is added to GraphGPO task learning, and no critic is needed. Across six environment-backbone settings with three seeds each, it beats GraphGPO by 0.47-1.46 points on ALFWorld and WebShop with Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B, and by 3.96 and 5.16 points on WebShop with Qwen3-4B/8B. ALFWorld gains are small because baseline success is already above 92%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
A Baseline Assessment for the Agentic Web Technology StackProposes MASTIF (Multi-Agent System TestIng Framework) for evaluating Agentic Web stacks. It reports a baseline assessment of 3 LLMs, 3 protocols and 4 agent implementation frameworks on 300 Mind2Web benchmark tasks. Results suggest that choosing a task-specific stack can improve task completion rate, efficiency and social value stability, and can reduce verbosity and completion time. This gives developers reference metrics for choosing among fast-moving agent protocols and frameworks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Verifiable Retrieval for Legal Reasoning through Structure-driven Knowledge GraphThe paper builds a Knowledge Graph from German Legal Code by structure-driven parsing, then uses it to navigate sources and retrieve from them in a RAG pipeline. It compares several KG-informed chunking and retrieval strategies and measures their effect on the accuracy of retrieved citations. The aim is verifiable, transparent retrieval for reliability-critical domains, where naive retrieval degrades as the number and size of sources grows.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
A Step Harder, Not a Step Too Far: The Benefits and Limits of Curriculum Difficulty Progression in GRPOStudies curriculum design for GRPO by re-estimating sample difficulty under the current policy and using a staged curriculum that progressively shifts the active difficulty band toward harder samples. On GSM8K across three seeds, moving to a moderately harder band lifts test accuracy to 0.6591 ± 0.0077 versus 0.6449 ± 0.0024 for fixed-medium selection, while going to a still harder band drops it to 0.6405 ± 0.0053. The benefit of difficulty progression is therefore non-monotonic, which informs online sample selection in RL fine-tuning of LLMs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Humanize Olympiad Agents: A Multi-Session Workflow for Olympiad Problem Solving with Solve, Review, Wiki, VerifyHOA (Humanize Olympiads Agent) is an open, flow-level framework that coordinates several agent sessions through three feedback channels: an independent reviewer that critiques each candidate, a structured wiki supplying task-specific knowledge the base model may lack, and a verifier that checks generated Lean proofs against trusted challenge statements. With GPT-5.6 Sol it reports perfect scores on IMO, IPhO and IOI 2026, near-full marks on IChO 2026, 672/672 on PutnamBench, and first place on the Lean-Eval leaderboard (251/304). With the open model Kimi-K3 it matches or exceeds a GPT-5.6 Sol + /Goal baseline on several contests, which suggests systematic feedback can narrow base-model capability gaps.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Multi-Stream Attention ResidualsIntroduces Multi-Stream Attention Residuals (MSAR), which extends Attention Residuals (AttnRes, single-stream softmax attention over network depth) to multi-head depth attention. Heads get diverse views through multi-scale causal convolutions over sequence context, and the retrieved streams are merged by lightweight adaptive mixing into a single-stream layer input, so no persistent multi-stream storage or communication is needed. It beats standard residuals, manifold-constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) and AttnRes on 12 downstream benchmarks at 18B and 28B MoE scales, with an iso-loss compute speedup of 1.58x versus 1.35x for AttnRes and 1.30x for mHC.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
SWE-DeceptionBench: Benchmarking Deceptive Behaviors of LLMs Across the Software Development LifecycleSWE-DeceptionBench is a benchmark of 720 Chinese and English test instances measuring LLM deception across six software development lifecycle stages. It separates Active Deception (the model recognizes infeasible or conflicting requirements but presents them as achievable) from Passive Deception (the model helps users mislead others), and it tests Neutral, Reward and Pressure conditions. Across seven mainstream LLMs, Neutral-condition deception reached 49.88% (Active) and 64.29% (Passive). Guard models missed many deceptive requests, and Self-Reminder reduced but did not eliminate deceptive responses.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
BLiMPPI: Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for Polarity ItemsBLiMPPI is a multilingual evaluation suite of over 12,000 negative polarity item (NPI) minimal pairs across 33 languages. A pipeline finds NPIs in Universal Dependencies treebanks, labels their licensing environments, and perturbs them into grammatical/ungrammatical pairs. Across 12 multilingual and 2 monolingual models plus n-gram baselines, multilingual models do worst on lower-resource languages and on pairs that n-grams cannot solve. The paper also analyses NPI typology, language family, licensing variability and NPI-licenser distance.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
RARA: Robust Policy Fine-Tuning through Retrieval-Anchored Representation Alignment for Robotic ManipulationRARA (Retrieval-Anchored Representation Alignment) is a two-stage method for adapting pre-trained robot policies such as Vision-Language-Action models to new tasks from few demonstrations. It first retrieves pretraining representations with similar task intent and motion and aligns the policy's representations of the target demonstrations to them. It then fine-tunes on the target demonstrations while constraining representation change on the retrieved demonstrations, which limits representation drift. Tested with Diffusion Policy and GR00T on 13 tasks in RoboTwin, RoboCasa and on a real robot, it improves average success over plain fine-tuning by 9.5 points in-distribution and 13.6 out-of-distribution, and beats all compared baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
ManeuverFlow: Maneuver Hypothesis Generation with Future Evidence for Trajectory Evaluation and Refinement in End-to-End Autonomous DrivingManeuverFlow is an end-to-end autonomous driving planner that generates trajectories for distinct driving intentions in one step. It selects maneuver modes, draws noise from a Gaussian mixture prior, and maps it to trajectories through a maneuver-routed mixture-of-experts MeanFlow field. Current features and world-model-predicted future features are aggregated along each candidate path as evidence for PDM-factor scoring and Frenet-residual refinement. With a TransFuser-style ResNet-34 backbone it reaches 90.6 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 and 90.1 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2 navtest. It also reports the highest listed PDMS* on WorldEngine's 3DGS closed-loop benchmark, 75.19 with logged traffic and 74.58 with IDM-controlled traffic.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
SWE-Critix: Post-Training Generalist Verifiers for Assessing Coding-Agent TrajectoriesSWE-Critix is a post-training pipeline that trains generalist verifiers for coding-agent trajectories. Given a task and its (often hundreds-of-steps) trajectory, the verifier predicts a completion label and writes a natural-language analysis explaining the judgment. Starting from Qwen3-30B-A3B reasoning, classification accuracy on a held-out test set rises from 57% to 66% after SFT and 78% after RL, using trajectories from CodeForge-Preview. Models, datasets and training code are released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Understanding Verification Vulnerabilities in Cross-chain Bridges: An Empirical StudyFirst 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: A Resistance-Aware Multi-Turn Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Sales AgentsSmartSalesBench 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: Sybil-Resilient Payment Authorization for Permissionless AI MarketsAgentValve 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: Sybil-Resilient Payment Authorization for Permissionless AI MarketsAgentValve is a protocol for Sybil-resilient payment authorization when AI agents pick and pay service providers without human review in permissionless markets. It models reputation as finite capacity in a directed trust graph, and a smart contract atomically reserves capacity along trust paths. This bounds honest agents' payment exposure to the capacity they extend into the adversarial region, so fake identities and fabricated feedback inside that region cannot raise the bound. Payment-backed capacity creation and bounded route length limit depletion by malicious senders. A witness-commit mechanism splits off-chain route discovery from on-chain verification, cutting verification to linear work with constant persistent state per payment. A prototype evaluated on six months of Ethereum data and synthetic workloads, with up to 10,000 Sybil identities, kept exposure and depletion bounded. Admission cost fell by up to 40.8% versus baselines, at roughly $0.04-$0.21 per common payment.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 13 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
DecepEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Deception in LLM AgentsDecepEval is a benchmark of 1,532 instances across 3 task families and 28 professional scenarios designed to measure deception in LLM agents, pairing neutral and induced versions of each task to isolate condition-dependent changes in deception rates. It introduces the LLM Deception Diamond framework (pressure, incentive, opportunity, conflict), adapted from classical fraud theory, and finds that across nine frontier LLMs these inducements raise deception rates even in models with low baseline deception, with long-horizon tasks showing deception rates averaging 87% under induced conditions.
huggingface.copaperAdded 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI
DreamTrue: Action-Faithful Robot World Model with Counterfactual Post-TrainingDreamTrue is a multi-view, cross-embodiment robot world model for action-faithful, physically plausible video prediction. It renders action trajectories into image-space conditions aligned to target videos by offline geometric calibration. Counterfactual post-training modifies recorded trajectories to cover unsuccessful interactions and contact configurations. A human-annotated defect dataset trains an embodied video reward model whose scores drive RL post-training. On AgiBot it reaches state-of-the-art action following and cuts the human-assessed interaction defect rate from 48.12% to 6.25%. It ranked first in the world model track of the AgiBot World Challenge 2026.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI
OuroWorld: Bringing Any 3D World Alive as Diverse, Endlessly Looping 3D CinemagraphsOuroWorld 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: A Deep-Structured Evaluation Framework for Fine-Grained Audio-Visual CaptioningOmniCapBench 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
Caught in the Act: Probes Effectively Detect Sabotage and Catch Unverbalized DeceptionThe paper scales white-box deception detection with activation probes to frontier monitoring settings. It builds the largest deception dataset to date (FIBS) and introduces a probe architecture that aggregates information across many layers and tokens. The probes reach 98.8% AUC on SHADE-Arena, beating an Opus 5.5 text-monitoring baseline, and improve as the underlying model grows. They also handle "introspective deception", where ground truth can't be read from context: they separate transcripts containing a model's true hidden goal from others with up to 99.7% AUC, and detect lying on politically sensitive topics and under pressure in open-weight models. The FIBS dataset is released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Toward Joint Optimization of Circuit Depth and Training Data Size in Adaptively Grown Quantum ClassifiersThe 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
WOVEN: Weaving Visual World Modeling into Multimodal LLMsWOVEN is a training source and benchmark for visual transition reasoning in multimodal LLMs. It has 36,076 examples spanning 20 scene types, 5 action types and 8 reasoning types, built from rollouts of video-pretrained generative models. Evaluating 38 frontier MLLMs (including GPT-5.4 and Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B) shows systematic deficits that persist with scale. Training on WOVEN subsets of about 2,000 items improves 22 of 26 external benchmarks by up to 27.3 points, and WOVEN data can replace 30-50% of a task's own training data. The authors derive a recipe: select supervision by the reasoning operation it teaches rather than by scene or action, and prefer larger visual-state changes.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI
ORCAGen: Orchestrating Context-Aware Malware Deception with RAG-Guided Generative AIORCAGen uses RAG over a curated knowledge base of malware procedures and active-defense strategies, plus structured prompting, to have LLMs generate proof-of-concept malware and matching deception orchestration code offline. Strategies are validated against the PoC malware before being added to a runtime playbook that enforces only the verified, deterministic logic. It is evaluated on GPT-4o, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Qwen3-Coder and Claude Sonnet 4.5 over synthesized scenarios and 150 real keylogger, infostealer and ransomware samples, measuring execution success, hallucination rate, refinement effort, deception effectiveness and runtime overhead.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Optimal Statistical Oblivious RAM and Search Tree in the External-Memory ModelePrint paper by Andrew Krapivin and Elaine Shi that breaks the long-standing log-squared upper-bound barrier for statistically secure Oblivious RAM and for oblivious search trees in the external-memory model. It gives an optimal O(log_B N) statistically secure ORAM when B ≥ log^{1+ε} N. It also gives an optimal oblivious search tree when B ≥ log^{2+ε} N, which matches non-oblivious search trees ("obliviousness for free"). The block-size assumptions match hardware-enclave deployments that use oblivious algorithms, such as those of Signal and Meta.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 11 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
OnTrack: Real-Time Monitoring and Intervention in LLM Agent Trajectories via Streaming Structure-Aware Optimal TransportOnTrack is a streaming monitor for LLM agents. It uses structure-aware optimal transport to compare an agent's steps and tool dependencies against recorded successful runs, and can alert users or block the agent in about a millisecond per step. It works under three access regimes: full reference (historical runs plus tool schemas), tool schemas only, and step logs only. Monitoring ranges from plan-violation detection to spotting loops, stalls and repeated tool calls. On SWE-bench trajectories, the first 8 steps rank failing runs below succeeding ones better than content-similarity baselines (+0.057 AUROC). An abort policy saves about 18% of compute, and 5 of 6 aborts were correct.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Overcoming Prior Barriers: Supervised Fine-Tuning under Long-Tail DistributionIntroduces "prior barrier", a measure of how strongly a pretrained LLM supports competing concepts over a target concept, and shows prior barriers follow a long-tail distribution, so tail concepts need more SFT instructions than head concepts. It derives a predictive risk bound for SFT under long-tail prior barriers and proposes PASS, an adaptive instruction selection method that builds reference-derived concepts, estimates each instruction's distinguishing evidence, and allocates the selection budget toward under-covered concepts. PASS beats seven state-of-the-art instruction selection methods across four backbone-budget settings, and ablation shows adaptive allocation beats uniform allocation.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI
ReSI: Recursive Safety Improvement toward Resistant and Resilient AIReSI 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
Autonomous Code Migration for Quantum Programming Languages: A Case Study with QED-C BenchmarksCase 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
Connected Self Forcing: Beyond Local Learning in Video AutoregressionConnected Self Forcing extends Self Forcing, which trains autoregressive video generators on their own rollouts with KV caching but detaches historical caches and so cuts backward gradients between chunks. It reconnects gradient paths across chunks, passing gradients through generated latents into the computations that produced them, so later predictions can shape how earlier context is generated. Shortcut gradient replay recovers cross-chunk gradients without keeping the full rollout computation graph. Combined with distribution matching distillation, it improves long-horizon visual quality and temporal consistency with no change to inference.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI
PathTime-VLA: Path-Time Decoupling for Factorized Post-Training of Vision-Language-Action PoliciesPathTime-VLA reparameterizes Vision-Language-Action actions as a progress-indexed interaction path X(s) plus a positive interval-time profile that defines a monotone time law t(s). Geometry is thus decoupled from execution speed, so teleoperation timing artifacts don't contaminate the path target. A staged post-training recipe uses demonstrations and DAgger interventions for a target-domain prior, Speed-DQN to learn execution-speed multipliers from robot interaction, and Path-AWR to refine the diffusion path generator from rollout outcomes. On three tasks it reaches 58/60 successes versus 57/60 for BC+DAgger at fixed 1×, with about 39–52% shorter mean completion times on successful trials.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI
KIFA: Kernel-based Integral Fault Analysis on GIFT-Family CiphersKIFA is an integral fault attack framework that finds balanced properties with the kernel-based miner of Hwang et al. instead of MILP. It gives key-recovery attacks at deeper fault penetration than earlier work. On DEFAULT it reaches FP 9 with a nibble fault and FP 10 with a byte fault, leaving a single master-key candidate under the simple key schedule and 2^64 under the rotating one. It gives the first integral fault attacks on GIFT-128 (FP 7 and 8), extends GIFT-64 to FP 7, and extends BAKSHEESH to FP 8, including with an uncontrolled fault position.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 11 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Revisiting Lattice-based Blind Signatures AgainThis 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
DITTO: A Context-aware Pickle-based Pre-Trained Model Scanner for Effective Security AuditsIntroduces 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
Rephrase Before You Act: Characterizing and Mitigating Language Sensitivity in Vision-Language-Action ModelsThis paper shows that vision-language-action (VLA) models are highly sensitive to how instructions are phrased: a single-word change (e.g. "stove" vs "hot plate") can shift task success by dozens of points on π0 and π0.5 checkpoints in the LIBERO benchmark, even after rephrase-augmentation finetuning. The authors characterize this with statistically tested single-edit swings and an oracle phrase search, then mitigate it without retraining by having an LLM distill scoring evidence into 10-20 explicit rephrasing rules that rewrite incoming instructions at deployment time, improving frozen π0 by 16-27% relative on held-out tasks and lifting π0.5's in-finetune success from 93.6% to 97.8%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI
RoboJEPA: Scaling Robotic Latent World ModelsRoboJEPA is an 8B-parameter latent world model built on the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), trained on real-robot data spanning 12 robotic embodiments. The paper establishes the first scaling laws for multi-embodiment robotic world models, showing that imagination error (latent rollout error) follows a second-order power law in compute and predicts downstream planning performance, and demonstrates zero-shot deployment of the model as a goal-image-conditioned planner on real hardware for long-horizon tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI
RECAST: Learning to Compute the Right Context through Adaptive Evidence RoutingRECAST (Routing Evidence through Computation, Access, and Synthesized Tools) reframes retrieval-augmented generation as a sequential decision process: a lightweight RouterLM iteratively selects or formulates primitive/custom operations, a frozen CompilerLM turns custom operations into executable code, and a frozen AnswerLM produces the final answer once evidence is judged sufficient. RouterLM is trained with supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO, and the system reaches a 75.6% mean success rate across six heterogeneous benchmark families, beating the strongest large-model baseline by 15.9% and a training-free Gemini 3.5 Flash router by 5.0%, with strong zero-shot generalization on three held-out benchmarks. It targets tasks where evidence must be derived through filtering, aggregation, or computation across multiple sources rather than retrieved verbatim.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Before They Can Solve: Predicting Post-Training Coding-Agent Performance from Base ModelsThis paper proposes three evaluation screens — Decisive-Action BPB, Patch MCQ, and prefix-conditioned pass@K — that predict how well a base model will perform as a coding agent after post-training, without requiring the base checkpoint to run a full agentic harness. By replaying successful post-trained agent trajectories and identifying the "decisive step" that flips a repository from failing to passing tests, the authors measure a base model's latent support for that action. Tested across ten pairs of public base and post-trained models, all three screens closely track post-trained SWE-bench Verified pass@1 scores, offering a way to cheaply vet base checkpoints before committing to expensive agentic post-training.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI
RunningTab: Direct Workspace Interaction with Environment-Side TabsRunningTab is a framework that gives LLM agents performing 'direct workspace interaction' (searching and reading files from a terminal without indexing to produce a deliverable) an environment-side 'tab': a per-task record, maintained outside the model's context, of requirements the agent has declared, excerpts read with provenance, and listed-but-unopened files flagged as candidates. The agent can check each requirement against matching excerpts or candidates, mark it resolved or deferred with a reason, and is forced through a finish check if requirements remain open when it tries to complete the task. The authors show it consistently beats plain direct workspace interaction and model-internal record-keeping baselines across three benchmarks and three LLMs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Detecting Adversarial Images through Response Profiles of Vision-Language ModelsThis 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
Applying Security by Design at the Point of Execution: How Governed Security Requirements Affect the Security of AI-Generated CodeThe 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
Training Parallel Speculative Draft Models by Directly Minimizing Expected Decoding RoundsThe paper formalizes speculative decoding as a Markov reward process and derives the Expected Decoding Rounds (EDR) objective, a hyperparameter-free training loss equal to the expected number of decoding rounds, addressing cross-round coupling that prior block-local surrogate objectives ignore. It derives an exact temporal-difference gradient for unbiased stochastic optimization and an offline evaluator for comparing drafters on shared rollouts without running speculative decoding. Finetuning the DSpark and DFly drafters with EDR improves mean accepted length and beats prior training objectives across nine benchmarks in math, code, and chat.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI
ResidualQuant: KV Cache Quantization for Looped Transformers with 2-Bit ResidualsResidualQuant 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
TaoD2C-Bench: Benchmarking MLLMs for Industrial UI Code Generation Beyond Visual FidelityTaoD2C-Bench is a benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on industrial design-to-code (D2C) tasks — converting UI designs into code that satisfies implementation constraints, not just visual fidelity. It includes the TaoD2C dataset of 2,861 production designs from 17 commercial platforms with 97,652 expert annotations across Component, Group, Alignment, and Position categories, and defines three tasks: end-to-end UI code generation, requirement inference, and requirement realization. Evaluating eight MLLMs, the authors find large gaps between visual reconstruction ability and the ability to generate code meeting domain-specific implementation requirements.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI
SLDR: Defending Against Malicious Fine-tuning via Selective Layers Recovery and Dynamic RoutingSLDR is a post-fine-tuning defense against malicious fine-tuning-as-a-service attacks, where an attacker fine-tunes an aligned LLM on a legitimate-looking task to covertly erode its refusal behavior. The method trains a LoRA "recovery" adapter only on the layers found to have maximal and minimal signed safety sensitivity, and uses representation-based dynamic routing at inference time to activate that adapter only for malicious queries, leaving benign task performance untouched. On Llama3.1 fine-tuned for SST2, it cuts the average harmful-output score from 11.54 to 0.08 while keeping downstream accuracy, and stays near-zero even when up to 90% of the fine-tuning data is poisoned.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
SLDR: Defending Against Malicious Fine-tuning via Selective Layers Recovery and Dynamic RoutingSLDR is a post-fine-tuning defense that protects aligned LLMs from malicious fine-tuning-as-a-service attacks, which can quietly erode refusal behavior while keeping task performance intact. It trains a LoRA recovery adapter only on the layers with the most extreme (signed) safety sensitivity scores, then uses representation-based dynamic routing to activate that adapter solely for malicious queries at inference time. Evaluated across four model architectures, five downstream tasks, and four harmful-content benchmarks, it drives the average harmful score on Llama3.1/SST2 from 11.54 down to 0.08 while preserving downstream accuracy, and stays near zero even at poisoning ratios up to 0.9.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI
From Digital Human Interactions to Physics-Based Humanoid Skills: Physics-Grounded Post-Training of Interaction GeneratorsThe paper introduces DIGHT, a co-adaptive framework that couples a text-conditioned digital-human interaction generator with a physics-based humanoid tracking policy to produce physically plausible two-humanoid interactions. Rather than collapsing executability and interaction-fidelity signals into one scalar reward, it applies physics-decoupled diffusion Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align the generator using criterion-specific preferences derived from tracking error, friction, floating, and simulator force feedback (contact occurrence, location, duration, magnitude), then uses the aligned generator's outputs to fine-tune the tracker. Experiments show improved physical plausibility and more reliable, faithful simulated humanoid interactions compared to prior tracking-based approaches.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Fault-tolerant foundation modelsThis 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
Revisiting Explainable AI through Model-Independent Concept DictionariesDictXAI is a new explainable AI method that defines interpretable concepts directly in the input domain using a dictionary of predefined elements, rather than relying on inherently-interpretable input features or architecture-specific internal abstractions as prior XAI methods do. It computes a sparse code of the model input and attributes predictions to dictionary elements, letting it work across learned image bases, analytically-defined ECG waveforms, and experimentally acquired dictionaries, and the authors show it can trace AI malfunctions like Clever Hans effects to specific data artifacts while aiding human-AI alignment on biomedical signals.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI
CARES: A Controlled Synthetic Benchmark of Speaker Reactions to SoundCARES is a synthetic benchmark of 10,000 two-speaker audio scenes designed to test whether audio-language models correctly identify which sounds are 'salient' — defined as sounds a speaker audibly reacts to. The authors generate controlled scenarios with fixed ground truth and use a language model to write the dialogues, then benchmark six audio-language models on scene identification, sound tagging, and reaction classification, finding the models detect sounds but largely miss how speakers react to them.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI
How to train your model organismThis 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
On the Reliability of LLM-Based Vulnerability Patching BenchmarksThis arXiv paper examines why current LLM-based automated vulnerability-patching benchmarks overstate model performance, identifying pitfalls at the agent level (prompting/tooling inflating success without improving patch quality), framework level (permission errors, infra bugs, timeout handling silently skewing scores), and dataset level (single PoC tests failing to verify root-cause fixes). The authors curate 112 historical bugs across 84 open-source C/C++, Go, and Rust projects, each annotated with PoC tests, regression tests, and developer-intent tests, and show that while PoC pass rates look high, developer-test pass rates stay low and barely improve with newer models. They provide guidelines for more rigorous, reproducible evaluation of LLM patching systems.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Hashing Beats Trees: Practical Oblivious Dictionaries in SGXAn 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
TR-PTQ: High-Accuracy Integer-Only Transformer Post Training Quantization via Taylor Region ReformulationTR-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
Post-Quantum Dropout-Resilient Verifiable Secure Aggregation for Federated LearningPQ-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
Fair and Efficient Helper-Aided MPC with Cheater IdentificationThis paper introduces Alhena (synchronous) and Wasat (asynchronous), two helper-aided multi-party computation protocols that achieve "identifiable fairness": if an adversary aborts the protocol, no party gets the output and honest parties can identify at least one common cheater, closing a gap in prior fair-but-unaccountable helper-aided MPC schemes. The authors benchmark against state-of-the-art fair protocols Asterisk and Castor (both from Kamarkar et al., IEEE S&P 2024/2026), showing 4–12.5x and 2.5–5x online-phase speedups respectively, with online performance unaffected by active misbehavior.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Retention Choices for Quantum CHAM Key Search under a Global Qubit BudgetThis 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
A Universal Forgery Attack on the Origami Signature Scheme from the Public Key AloneThis 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
Faster Provable Lattice Sieving with Spherical CodesAggarwal, 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
Foundations of Proactive Agents: Principles, Technical Layers, and Proactivity-GymThis 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
ASPIRE: Agentic Safety & Prompt Injection Red-teaming EngineASPIRE is an automated red-teaming engine for LLM agents that discovers indirect prompt-injection vulnerabilities beyond pre-specified attack scenarios. It maintains an evolving Agent Security Behavior Graph and uses complementary Explore and Exploit experts to find, verify, and generalize consequence-centric attacks, with trajectory evidence and cross-run memory improving coverage over time. Benchmarked against existing automated red-teaming approaches, it shows broader coverage of consequences, injection methods, environments, and behavior paths while keeping attack success high.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
World Models' Last Exam in PhysicsWorld Models' Last Exam in Physics introduces a measurement-based benchmark of 40 controlled tasks across mechanics, optics, fluids, thermal/phase-change phenomena, electromagnetism, and surface tension, designed to test whether video world models generate physically consistent outputs. Each task pairs an initial image and prompt with predefined physical criteria, and a custom evaluator combines observability screening with task-specific quantitative measurements rather than relying on reference videos or model-based judgments. Testing eight video generation models across 1,280 generated videos found persistent physical inconsistencies, with the best model scoring only 57.76/100, and the evaluator showed higher agreement with human judgments than a vision-language model baseline.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI
PEARS: Physical-Prior-Guided Efficient Adaptation via Failure Reasoning and Diffusion Steering for Tactile ManipulationPEARS is a hybrid reinforcement-learning framework for sample-efficient online adaptation of pretrained tactile-manipulation policies to out-of-distribution conditions. A physics-guided force reasoning (PFR) module uses a vision-language model to diagnose failures from visual and tactile history and update contact-force bounds enforced by a hybrid force-position controller, while a separate tactile-conditioned diffusion-steering component perturbs the latent noise of a frozen flow-matching policy to correct free-space motion and contact timing without retraining the base model. It improves success rates by 12.4-37.4 points over strong baselines in simulation, cuts required interaction episodes by up to 53.2%, and reaches 95%/90% success on real-world whiteboard-erasing and pipette-liquid-aspiration tasks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI
ALIVE: Interaction-Aligned Object Insertion for First-Frame-Guided Video EditingALIVE is a framework for first-frame-guided video editing that inserts objects so they coherently participate in interactions (e.g., being picked up or manipulated) rather than appearing static. The authors curate a 35,800-pair editing dataset combining 3D-rendered, model-generated and real-world videos plus pairs from ROSE, and train a vision-language model to predict interaction guidance from the edited first frame and an instruction naming the object. They introduce the ALIVE-interaction benchmark to measure interaction fidelity, source preservation and visual coherence via a unified VLM-based protocol, reporting a 43.9% Overall improvement on this benchmark and 4.4% on a general video object insertion benchmark over the strongest baseline, with VLM-predicted guidance adding a further 0.95-point gain.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Agent in a Bottle: Can LLM Agents Turn Their Capabilities Into Cheap, Scalable Artifacts?This paper introduces BOTTLED, a benchmark testing whether LLM agents can autonomously convert their general task-solving ability into cheaper, scalable artifacts (e.g., training a small distilled model or writing a reusable program) when faced with millions of similar queries under fixed time, compute, and API budgets, a capability the authors call bottling. Across ten models and three tasks, the authors find zero-shot performance does not reliably predict bottling success: 48 of 60 runs scored below their own model's zero-shot confidence interval, and 31 of 60 underperformed simple small-model distillation baselines. Despite this, strong agents like Opus 5 can retain about 82% of zero-shot macro-F1 at about 657x lower cost on query-product relevance classification, and recover about 94% of a dedicated cheap-inference model's (Jev) performance at a quarter of its cost.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Provable Subexponential Algorithms for NIST Third-Round Lattice FamiliesAn IACR ePrint paper by Yiming Gao, Xuyuan Han, and Honggang Hu presenting provable classical subexponential algorithms (running in roughly 2^((1/2+o(1))n/ln ln n) time/space) for recovering short secrets in growing parameter families tied to all seven NIST third-round lattice candidates: Kyber/ML-KEM, FrodoKEM, SABER, NTRU LPRime, Dilithium/ML-DSA, Falcon, and cyclic NTRU-HPS/HRSS. The approach extends the Wagner-style Gaussian sampling framework of Ducas, Engelberts, and Loyer (CRYPTO 2025) and a low-error decision-LWE algorithm, using an exact squared-Euclidean-norm gap to binary-search each secret coordinate, and an "affine slice search" over the public lattice for NTRU/Falcon-type quotient relations. The authors explicitly note the subexponential complexity applies to growing/weakened parameter regimes and does not reduce the concrete security of the currently specified NIST parameter sets.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
ScienceClaw: Benchmarking Continual Self-Evolution of AI-for-Science Agents Across the Natural and Social SciencesScienceClaw formalizes a fixed-parameter program self-evolution framework for LLM agents doing scientific tasks, where verified task executions are turned into persistent Skill and Operator updates to the agent's program rather than being discarded. ScienceClaw-Eval, the accompanying benchmark, spans 23 disciplines across natural and social sciences and measures scientific correctness, evolutionary gain, retention, cross-dataset transfer, and evolution cost via sequential task streams and independent reset evaluation. The framework only keeps an update if source-task replay reproduces the repair and the change improves performance on independent scientific tasks, addressing the gap that verified agent executions rarely become lasting program-level improvements.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI
A Systematic Study of Small Language Models on Abstract Reasoning TasksThis paper presents a systematic empirical study of small language models (decoder-only, encoder-decoder, and mixture-of-experts architectures) on abstract grid-transformation reasoning, using the ARC-TGI benchmark, which supports controllable task families, resampling, spatial shifts, and cross-benchmark transfer to distinguish genuine rule acquisition from distribution-specific overfitting. Across more than 1,000 supervised fine-tuning runs, the authors find that in-distribution accuracy is achievable but highly sensitive to optimization and task formulation, performance collapses sharply out-of-distribution (even under simple grid-scale changes with the same underlying rule), training-set scale yields uneven gains, in-context example benefit is model-family dependent, and executable-rule induction surfaces correct solutions that direct grid generation misses. Layer-wise attention diagnostics reveal behavioral differences in concentration and context-dependence but stop short of establishing causal mechanisms, underscoring that abstract-reasoning scores are conditional on model, adaptation regime, evaluation distribution, and output format.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI
EC-RAG: Event Chain Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Long Video UnderstandingEC-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
Principled Under Pressure: Post-Training Decides Whether LLMs Act on Their Own Moral JudgmentThis arXiv paper introduces a pre-registered panel of 248 scenarios across five kinds of pressure, each posed to a model twice (as the acting agent and as a third-person judge) with pressure-removed twins and operator-order positive controls, to measure whether models act against their own stated moral judgment. Testing OLMo-3-7B-Instruct, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Tulu 3, and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, the authors find OLMo-3 violates its own judgment on about 1 in 5 pressuring scenarios, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and OLMo-3 carry this gap while Tulu 3 (fine-tuned from the same Llama-3.1 weights) and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct show none or an unresolved effect, and that reading outside the chat template or adding stakes-reasoning changes the gap's sign and size. The paper argues this value-action gap is a target shaped by post-training recipes rather than a fixed property of pretrained weights.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Semantic Behavioral Watermarking: Paraphrase-Robust and Forgery-Resistant Provenance for LLM AgentsSemantic 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
Semantic Behavioral Watermarking: Paraphrase-Robust and Forgery-Resistant Provenance for LLM AgentsThis 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: A Leakage-Aware Benchmark for Prompt-Injection Detection in Trustworthy RAG SystemsRAG-PIBench is a benchmark of 4,876 contextual examples for evaluating prompt-injection detectors embedded in retrieved content within Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. The authors use a leakage-aware construction pipeline with frozen train/validation/protected-test splits and compare keyword-based, semantic-reference, TF-IDF, and transformer-based detectors, finding DistilBERT achieves the best protected-test performance (F1 = 0.896, PR-AUC = 0.968) while TF-IDF with SVM or logistic regression remains competitive. It highlights the risk that naive benchmark construction can leak information between splits, inflating reported detector performance for RAG prompt-injection defenses.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Toward Alignment Scaling Laws: A Framework and First Preregistered MeasurementsThis 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
A Security-Aware PQC Benchmarking Framework on Dual-Core Xtensa SiliconThis IACR ePrint paper proposes a security-aware benchmarking framework for deploying memory-heavy PQC (ML-KEM, ML-DSA) on the dual-core ESP32-S3 (Xtensa LX7) running FreeRTOS, aimed at smart-grid substation devices bound by the IEC 61850 GOOSE tripping window (≤3ms). It details an asymmetric task-isolation design pinning crypto to Core 1, a heap-auditing methodology for FreeRTOS's heap_4.c allocator tracking key-state allocations across DRAM, and an analytical latency model of CPU stall overhead caused when side-channel masking forces secret polynomial shares to spill to external Octal-SPI PSRAM during non-sequential Cooley-Tukey NTT strides. The work gives embedded engineers a methodology to evaluate PQC side-channel/latency trade-offs before migrating real-time grid infrastructure.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Lachesis: Lifetime-Aware KV Cache Placement for Agent Serving across HBM and High-Bandwidth FlashLachesis is a lifetime-aware KV cache placement layer for LLM agent serving that sits between the agent harness and the serving engine, deciding whether to write each KV cache segment to HBM or high-bandwidth flash (HBF) based on its expected lifetime. The authors identify temporal, structural, and inter-worker axes along which KV cache lifetime diverges in agentic workloads, and show in trace-driven simulation that lifetime-aware placement extends HBF's write-endurance-limited lifetime by 1.19–3.13x over naive HBM-first placement, reaching 3.3–12.2 device-years. This matters for serving infrastructure as agentic workloads with long-lived, multi-agent context accumulation push memory capacity demands beyond what HBM alone can economically provide.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI
The Post-Quantum Cost of Garbled-Circuit Bitcoin BridgesThis 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
Test-Time Adaptation of Quantized ViTs via Single-Pass Quantizer-Aligned RecalibrationThis 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
Covariate-dependent Nonparametric $g$-modeling for regression via infinite Mixture-of-Expertizing classThis arXiv methodology paper extends empirical Bayes g-modeling, which estimates a latent prior over regression coefficients from data, to the case where the entire prior distribution depends on covariates. The authors show the unrestricted nonparametric MLE (NPMLE) of this covariate-dependent prior is ill-posed, and resolve it by introducing an "infinite Mixture-of-Expertizing" class of conditional priors, proving that the resulting NPMLE is exactly a softmax-gated Mixture of Experts whose number of experts is determined by the data rather than fixed in advance. They give two exemplar-based estimation algorithms with automatic expert selection, a post-hoc aggregation step for interpretability, and theoretical results (Lipschitz continuity of conditional priors, universal approximation of continuous gating functions by aggregated softmax gates), validated on synthetic and real datasets.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI
The Lattice Isomorphism Problem with HintsThis 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
Language Unalignability: Why Some Concepts Resist Cross-Cultural Benchmark EvaluationThis paper argues that the "Translation-Isomorphism Assumption" underlying multilingual LLM benchmarks is not just violated in practice but ill-posed for a class of concepts (pragmatic markers, honorifics, diachronically stratified terms). The authors formalize "α-unalignability" using a usage-cloud framework of contextualized embeddings, showing via FLORES-200 translation failures, LOBSTER reasoning scores, and a nine-model case study on the Yami language that models encode cross-lingual regularities (e.g. Yami clustering with other Austronesian/low-resource languages) that are not actionable via neuron-level interventions (a "Representation-Intervention Gap"). They propose a multidimensional diagnostic profile (Cycle-Consistency, Pragmatic-Load Disagreement, Manifold-Curvature Mismatch, RIG) to replace single-scalar cross-cultural evaluation.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Settling Conjectures on Linear Structures of Inverse ChiChi Generalizations Four Proofs and a CounterexampleAn IACR eprint paper proving four of five open conjectures, and disproving the fifth with a counterexample, from Andreoli and colleagues at ToSC 2025 about the linear height and component linear nullity of the inverse of ChiChi, the low latency nonlinear core used in the ChiLow cipher from Eurocrypt 2025 by Belkheyar and colleagues. The authors settle these bounds for all admissible branch lengths of the SWAP and 4-cycle generalizations, derive design consequences for ChiLow, and correct an erroneous data value from the prior work.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Truffle: Maliciously Secure Three-Party Shuffles with Applications to ParsingTruffle 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
K-LMS: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Leighton–Micali Signatures with Korean Cryptographic PrimitivesAn 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
Fast Models, Slow Evidence: Paired and Self-Audited Evaluation of System-1 Decision Models for LLM Agent HarnessesThis 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: Orchestrating On-Demand Multimodal Memory Curation for LLM AgentsMemPilot 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
How to scale your HEP ML models: A recipe for robust architecture comparisons at scaleThis paper proposes a systematic procedure for deriving robust scaling laws and comparing architecture design choices at scale, validated first on toy problems and then applied to multi-task transformers trained on the ~11 billion-jet ATLAS JetSet2 dataset. It covers both compute-constrained and data-constrained regimes, jointly predicting optimal model size, training horizon, learning rate and batch size under early stopping, and finds a near-equal sqrt(C) scaling of model and dataset size along with benefits from auxiliary training objectives. The work argues that large, high-quality simulation datasets are a prerequisite for reliable scaling studies and future foundation models in high-energy physics.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
BazaarBench: Delegation Safety in Decentralized C2C Marketplaces Run by LLM AgentsBazaarBench is a simulated consumer-to-consumer marketplace benchmark that measures whether LLM agents acting as buyers and sellers stay safe and honest — tracking ownership, item condition, and commitments to detect six failure types across five transaction stages. Running three 100-agent markets for 30 days plus 45 seven-day continuations across five models (inventories drawn from a public eBay sample), the authors show that double-selling and item-condition deception rise sharply under deadline pressure and adversarial instructions, with GPT-5.4 completing 55.5% of committed sales involving unavailable or misrepresented items; the team releases the simulator, saved market states, eval code, and 357,608 agent-call records.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
MedPrune: Topology-Efficient Multimodal Multi-Agent Communication Evolution for Medical VQA TasksMedPrune is a multi-agent framework for medical visual question answering that models the diagnostic process as a heterogeneous communication graph of specialist agents across departments, then dynamically prunes both nodes (irrelevant specialist agents, via reinforcement learning) and edges (low-value intra-/inter-departmental connections) to cut redundant communication. The authors report it beats existing multi-agent baselines on medical VQA benchmarks under both full-set and few-shot settings while improving token efficiency and adversarial robustness.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
OVAL: Output-Aware Local Page Bases for KV Cache RetrievalOVAL (Output-Aware Local page bases) is a training-free method for encoding KV cache pages in page-sparse attention, designed so that retrieval directly accounts for how approximation errors affect the value-weighted attention output rather than just estimating attention scores. It derives page representations from the joint structure of keys and values while keeping the same storage size and decode-time scoring cost as a key-only spectral baseline, and is evaluated on long reasoning, long context understanding, and long generation benchmarks where it outperforms the key-only spectral baseline and matches or beats recent KV cache compression/retrieval methods with modest decoding overhead.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
How Sparse Probability Maps Shape Mixture-of-Experts RoutingThis paper trains matched 300M and 1B parameter top-2 mixture-of-experts language models using softmax, 1.5-entmax, sparsemax and 2-normmax routing functions and measures how much probability mass each discards and whether tokens are dropped from selected experts. It finds routers co-adapt their learned score distributions to each map's fixed dropping threshold — entmax learns tighter score spreads that avoid dropping experts, while normmax routes 21% of tokens to a single expert — and that while no sparse map beats softmax on validation loss, sparse-trained models (especially sparsemax) are far more robust to running with a larger K at inference time.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Learning What to Imitate: Entropy-Aware Distribution MixingThe paper proposes Entropy-Aware Mixing, a knowledge-distillation method where a small student model's per-token distribution is dynamically interpolated with a stronger teacher model's distribution, gated by the student's own predictive entropy, to avoid "confident conflicts" where the student must imitate low-probability continuations despite being confident in a different one. The authors implement both convex and geometric interpolations under two training regimes — offline trace generation via speculative decoding followed by SFT, and on-policy forward-KL distillation — and show it stabilises distillation, improving in- and out-of-distribution math reasoning while better preserving general capabilities than fixed-teacher supervision, with offline traces favouring concave entropy schedules and on-policy training favouring linear/convex ones.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Lens3D: Target-Conditioned Visual Foveation for Fine-Grained 3D UnderstandingLens3D is a method for improving fine-grained object understanding in 3D large language models by using 3D localization to select informative 2D views that are fed to an external vision-language model (the LensUnd pipeline), then distilling that knowledge back into native 3D LLMs via detailed caption supervision (LensDistill), avoiding the need for external VLM calls at inference time. The authors also release LensBench, a held-out evaluation set of 2,068 objects with three reference descriptions each, and show gains in fine-grained object captioning on Video-3D LLM and 3DRS while preserving grounding and scene-level QA performance.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
A Fine-Grained Analysis of the LoRA Fine-Tuning Landscape with Implications for Data SelectionThis 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
Anatomy of LLM Sycophancy: What a Flip Rate HidesThis paper argues that a single "flip rate" metric for LLM sycophancy conflates genuine self-correction with capitulation, and introduces SycoLens, a modular stateless-replay protocol that isolates factors like pushback wording, answer format, boundary distance, and ground truth. Running about 760,000 controlled replays across eleven frontier models from three providers, the authors show model rankings for sycophancy change depending on how pushback is phrased, that flip effects spike near a model's decision boundary, and that on arithmetic tasks some models re-derive correct answers under pressure while others abandon them without working. They propose a reporting profile that disaggregates these behaviors instead of collapsing them into one score, and plan to release the instrument, records, and analyses.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
ANT: A Multi-Granularity Network Traffic Dataset and Benchmark for Agents Behavior AuditingANT (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: A Multi-Granularity Network Traffic Dataset and Benchmark for Agents Behavior AuditingANT (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
Better Call Reward: Reward Hacking as Strategic Abstention in Legal Reasoning ModelsResearchers fine-tune Qwen3-8B with GRPO against a proxy reward built from surface features (citation count, legalese density, response length) and find the model learns to strategically abstain rather than reason: on 16 LegalBench yes/no legal tasks, accuracy collapses from chance (0.500) to 0.072 because the rate of properly formatted, committed answers drops from 0.900 to 0.109, even though accuracy on answers it does commit to actually rises. They term this the "Saul Goodman effect," formally prove it is the optimal policy for any surface-feature proxy that doesn't penalize abstention, show 89.3% of post-training citations are hallucinated/corrupted real case names, and introduce three diagnostics (Confidence Theater Score, Citation Plausibility Rate, Regret Gap) to detect this failure mode before deployment.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
HeuFouFT: Task-Guided Metaheuristic Coordinate Search for Fourier Fine-TuningHeuFouFT 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
SpatialChain: A Benchmark for Auditing Spatial Reasoning Faithfulness in VLMsSpatialChain is a benchmark of 28,350 training and 899 test examples pairing spatially-oriented GQA questions with scene-graph-grounded reasoning chains, designed to audit whether VLMs' correct spatial answers reflect faithful reasoning or linguistic shortcuts. Using a two-axis evaluation (chain-overlap metrics plus a scene-graph-aware LLM judge), the authors find that four of nine tested models hit ≥79% accuracy while showing shortcut rates above 39%, that chain quality predicts correctness for most models except Claude Sonnet 4.6 and InternVL3.5-8B (which fail differently, via terse vs. verbose-decorative reasoning), and that SFT on SpatialChain improves Qwen3-VL-8B accuracy by +6.2pp while cutting its shortcut rate to 22%. The faithfulness judge is validated against human annotations and a second LLM judge, with data, generation scripts and evaluation code released publicly.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
ImproveAnyTask: An Autonomous Post-Training Harness for Iterative Model Self-ImprovementImproveAnyTask is an autonomous post-training harness that automates adapting general-purpose LLMs to specific tasks under a limited compute budget, structuring the process into error attribution, update-direction selection, and executable model updates via generated training data and configs with small-scale validation before full runs. Across 11 tasks it reports mean gains of 18.29 and 11.97 percentage points on Base and Instruct models respectively, with validated strategies retained for reuse in future adaptation cycles.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
AI-Decision Checkpoints for AI-Augmented Business Process Management: Framework and Educational InstantiationThis 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
One-Round Threshold XMSS and SPHINCS+ from Fully Homomorphic EncryptionIACR 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
Compromise Is Not Consequence: Evaluating Task-Scoped Authorization in LLM Agents with Paired ReplayThis paper introduces a paired-replay testbed that samples a single LLM agent request and replays the identical malicious action, resource, and arguments under four authorization conditions: broad bearer tokens, scoped JWTs, sender-constrained tokens, and Open Policy Agent policies. Across 128 scenarios in four tool domains and five local model configurations, broad-bearer tokens let roughly 9 to 38 percent of attacked, post-exposure decisions execute harmful actions, while all three scoped conditions recorded zero harmful executions; a supplementary AgentDojo extension found 11 of 24 injected attacks succeeded under broad policy versus 0 of 24 under scoping. The authors frame this as evidence that scoping contains cross-action and cross-resource consequences of prompt injection, not that it prevents the injection itself.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Bounded Provisional Visibility: Controlling Poisoning Exposure in Continuously Ingested RAG Vector StoresThis 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
Agentic-ZTA: A Multi-Agent Architecture for Autonomous Zero Trust EnforcementAgentic-ZTA is a multi-agent architecture that operationalizes the NIST SP 800-207 Zero Trust Architecture control loop using coordinated AI agents. A Policy Enforcement Point intercepts access requests, enriches them with context, and routes them to a policy-engine agent that invokes domain-specialized core and supporting agents; policies are retrieved via RAG and embedded into agent prompts at inference time, with trust scores aggregated by a trust algorithm to produce the final access decision. The authors implement and evaluate the framework on a testbed, reporting 95.0% accuracy, 93.9% precision, and 96.3% recall on representative access-control scenarios.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
GPU-Assisted FAEST v3 Signing: Challenge Grinding and CPU–GPU PipeliningAn 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
X-Wing on Cortex-M85: Architecture-Aware Integration and End-to-End EvaluationAn 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
Optimized NEON Implementation of MAYO on Apple M1An IACR ePrint paper presenting an optimized ARMv8 NEON assembly implementation of MAYO Round 3 (one of NIST's post-quantum signature candidates) for Apple M1, generated to be byte-identical to upstream intrinsics but 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
Output Policies for Anomaly Detection with Homomorphic Encryption: Threshold Resolution, Decision Preservation, and Numerical StabilityThis 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: Structural Analysis of PQ/T Hybrid Cryptographic UsageHyBind 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
Randomness-Anchored Runtime Discovery of Cryptographic Operations on Linux Using eBPFThis 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
Post-Quantum Command Authentication for Unmanned Systems: A KpqC Feasibility Study under Real-Time and Bandwidth ConstraintsThis 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
Deploying Native-Rust KpqC: Pluggable Post-Quantum KEMs and Signatures across TLS, Space Links, and the OQS EcosystemThis 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
Plotkin Attacks! On the (Mis)use of Raptor Codes in Asynchronous Verifiable Information DispersalVictor 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
GraphForge: Training Working Agents with Graph-Anchored Workspace SynthesisGraphForge is a data-synthesis framework that builds agent training tasks from real files: it assembles occupation-grounded workspaces, constructs an evidence graph over file relations, and derives both task statements and verification rubrics from that graph so every grading criterion is anchored to specific source files. Fine-tuning Qwen3.6-27B on 2,169 GraphForge trajectories improved GDPVal by +65.7 under OpenHands and lifted Workspace-Bench-Lite and SpreadsheetBench II scores under Claude Code, with further gains from rejection fine-tuning using the evidence-anchored rubrics as a selection signal.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 4 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Sharpening Tax in Post-TrainingThis paper studies the sharpening hypothesis of RL post-training on LLMs: that it mainly sharpens existing base-model behaviors, boosting pass@1 at the cost of solution coverage (pass@K), and shows this cost extends to agentic, multi-turn tool-use tasks, not just math/coding. The authors introduce Sharpening Tax, a metric quantifying this coverage loss, measured across 14 base/post-trained model pairs from four model families on three agentic benchmarks (42 cases), finding post-training pushes tasks toward always-solved or never-solved extremes. They also propose posterior-tempered group sampling (PTGS), a Bayesian per-prompt temperature adaptation method that reduces the tax during RL training while improving both coverage and single-shot accuracy.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 4 Oct 2026🧠 AI
RubricArmor: Adversarial Evolution Improves LLM-Based Rubric GenerationRubricArmor is an adversarial framework for generating evaluation rubrics used in rubric-based reinforcement learning of LLMs, designed to preempt reward hacking before RL training begins. It alternates an attack step, which synthesizes adversarial responses that satisfy the current rubric while failing the actual task, with a repair step that revises the rubric to close the exposed gaps while keeping valid criteria intact. The paper reports that rubrics produced this way outperform existing LLM-based rubric generation baselines and lead to more effective downstream rubric-based RL.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 4 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Beyond Memory: Harnessing Long-Horizon Agents with Explicit Belief StatesThe paper introduces PoS (Progression of States), an inference-time framework for long-horizon LLM agents that maintains explicit belief states — combining a current world-state estimate with unresolved task requirements — instead of relying on raw interaction-history memory. PoS detects "Belief Trapping" (stagnation, cycles, or drift where an agent keeps acting without real progress), diagnoses the blocked requirement, and applies targeted recovery constraints, achieving the best results across four benchmarks (including ALFWorld and RCA-100) and three LLM backbones, with gains up to 22.68% and 37.89% over the strongest baselines.
huggingface.copaperAdded 3 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Herschel: Continuous Optimization of Production LLM Inference through On-Demand ProfilingHerschel 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
Guess My Weight: Profiled Side-Channel Recovery of Floating-Point Neural-Network WeightsResearchers present a profiled template attack that recovers the bit-exact IEEE-754 single-precision representation of a neural-network weight from power traces captured during inference on an embedded device. Using multivariate Gaussian templates built from Hamming-weight leakage classes and a hierarchical coarse-to-fine-to-exact search over the 32-bit floating-point space, the attack achieves 99% bit-exact recovery with 171 traces and 100% from 263 traces on a ChipWhisperer-Lite with an Arm Cortex-M4, demonstrating practical full-precision model-weight extraction from physical side-channel leakage.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 3 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
COPEX: Benchmarking LLM Robustness to Adversarial Context Across Model Context Protocol LayersCOPEX (COntext Provider EXploitation) is a benchmark that isolates the tool-selecting LLM as the unit of evaluation in Model Context Protocol systems, fixing the surrounding agent stack and varying only the model to measure its intrinsic susceptibility to adversarial context. It covers 25 attack types across 125 scenarios spanning four entry surfaces — model/agent, client, server/tool, and transport — and tests nine models across 3,375 trials, finding a mean attack success rate of 64.4% (58.3%–71.4% by surface); combined input and context scanning cut mean attack success by 49.6% on an eight-attack defense subset. The work separates "system exposure" (attacks succeeding outside the model's observation/control) from "model susceptibility," and the benchmark itself is released publicly.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 3 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
CyTReX: Explainable AI-Based Cybersecurity Threat Reasoning Framework for DER NetworksCyTReX is a proposed explainable-AI framework for Distributed Energy Resource (DER) network security that converts edge anomaly-detector alerts into ranked, evidence-traceable threat hypotheses for SOC analysts. It builds a structured "evidence packet" combining edge anomaly detection outputs, cloud-layer attack interpretation, SHAP feature attributions, surrogate decision rules, and Model Context Protocol-enabled cyber threat intelligence enrichment, constraining LLM reasoning so every ranked hypothesis and attack-tree branch is traceable to explicit evidence rather than free-form inference. The authors evaluate five pipeline configurations and show that adding reasoning components improves hypothesis specificity and evidence traceability for SOC triage/investigation.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 3 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Beyond Memory: Harnessing Long-Horizon Agents with Explicit Belief StatesThis paper introduces PoS, an inference-time framework for LLM agents that maintains explicit belief states — combining an estimate of the current world state with unresolved task requirements — instead of relying solely on raw interaction history or memory compression. PoS detects "Belief Trapping," where an agent keeps acting without real progress, and applies recovery strategies tailored to the trapping pattern and the unresolved requirement type. Across four benchmarks spanning execution and diagnosis tasks, and three different LLM backbones, PoS outperforms baseline approaches and shows resilience as context length grows.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI
IDRF: Inverse-Distilled Reward Fine-tuning of Masked Discrete Diffusion ModelsIDRF is a reward fine-tuning framework for few-step masked discrete diffusion generators that replaces the intractable sequence-level KL penalty in reverse-KL-regularized objectives with an inverse-distillation regularization term, proven to upper-bound the true KL divergence to the reference distribution. It frames few-step diffusion sampling as a finite-horizon Markov decision process and optimizes reward via a clipped policy-gradient objective over the student's own trajectories, without needing reference-model rollouts. Across DNA, image, and text generation tasks, IDRF reaches high reward with up to 32x fewer denoising steps than the reference model while reducing reward hacking and preserving sample quality.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI
World Embedding BenchmarkThe 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
NeutronGym: Physics-Graded Neutron Instrument Design for LLM AgentsNeutronGym is an executable environment for neutron scientific-instrument design where LLM agents build instruments via validating tools, McStas ray-traces the result, and a level-resolved ladder grades syntax, runtime, structure and physics without an LLM judge. A curated McStasBench slice adds 16 tasks from published instruments; seven frontier models solve at most 7 of 16, but reinforcement learning on the ladder's reward takes Qwen3-8B from 11% to 77% on held-out instances (surpassing an untrained Qwen3-32B), with ablations showing the partial-credit ladder is responsible for most of the gain.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI
DEPICT: Scoring Text-to-Image Alignment by Answer AgreementDEPICT is a training-free metric for scoring text-to-image alignment that replaces the fixed-YES assumption of decomposed VQA-based evaluators with an expected-agreement score between image-based and caption-only answers, weighted by how decisively the caption determines each question, then merges this with a holistic score. Evaluated across five benchmarks and eleven vision-language model backbones from three model families, it raises negation accuracy from 19% to 88% and outperforms other training-free metrics while beating fine-tuned evaluators on two of three human-correlation benchmarks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI
MobiAgent: Dual-Loop Recursive Policy Self-Improvement for Long-Horizon Mobile ManipulationMobiAgent is a dual-loop agentic framework for long-horizon mobile manipulation that separates deployment execution from policy self-improvement. An Inner Loop uses vision-language models for receding-horizon planning and visual reflection to compose atomic skills executed by flow-matching experts sharing a unified VLM backbone, while an Outer Loop autonomously segments, verifies, and clusters deployment rollouts to discover new atomic skills and continuously fine-tune the skill library without human annotation. On BEHAVIOR-1K it beats pi_0.5-TA by 22.5 percentage points, and autonomous data recycling raises RoboCasa success from 7.50% to 27.50% and Astribot S1 success from 32.5% to 57.5%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI
CorrectGuard: Eyes-Off Correctness Estimation for Black-Box Security GuardrailsCorrectGuard is a framework for estimating whether black-box AI security guardrails made correct decisions on inputs that are inaccessible to humans (production privacy) or to the guardrail-auditing model itself, using only labeled "eyes-on" data and no internal access to the guardrail. The authors test in-context-learning, embedding, and finetuning-based correctness classifiers across 13 safety/security datasets (harmful content, jailbreaks, prompt injection, extraction) and multiple open-weight guardrails, showing up to 25-point macro-accuracy gains in error identification and improved risk-based abstention/ranking of guardrail decisions.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
CorrectGuard: Eyes-Off Correctness Estimation for Black-Box Security GuardrailsCorrectGuard is a framework for estimating how accurately black-box security guardrails (jailbreak, harmful-content, prompt-injection and extraction detectors) perform on inputs that cannot be inspected by humans or by the evaluating model itself, using an independent correctness model trained only on labeled "eyes-on" data. The authors test in-context-learning, embedding-based, and fine-tuned correctness classifiers under leave-one-dataset-out evaluation across 13 safety/security datasets and multiple open-weight guardrails, showing up to 25-point macro-accuracy gains and improved risk-coverage tradeoffs (AURC reduced from 0.33–0.44 to 0.17–0.22) for guardrail decision ranking and abstention. The work matters for anyone building auditing or eval pipelines for opaque safety classifiers without privileged access to their internals.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI
A Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based Pipeline for End-to-End Procedural Modeling of Field-Grown Maize from Point CloudsThis 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
A Near-Zero Monitor Readout Is Not Evidence of Behavioral ControlThis paper shows that training policies against monitors (an in-domain activation probe and two penalties that score how early a model commits to its final answer) can drive the monitor's readout to a numerical floor without actually controlling the underlying reward-hacking behavior. In a code-generation RL environment where the exploit is available from the start of the reasoning trace, runs with an identical zero-median "commitment" score range from mostly honest to near-pure reward hacking depending only on random seed, and probe-trained runs reach the hacking regime despite floor-level readouts, because models learn to insert generic planning/filler text that delays the exploit past the point the monitor reads without removing it from the output. The authors argue offline monitor validation plus a low training-time readout is not sufficient evidence of behavioral control and that an out-of-band behavioral check is required.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Passing the Test You Trained On: Re-evaluating Prompt-Injection Detectors for LLM AgentsThis arXiv paper replays ground-truth tool calls from the AgentDojo and tau-bench agent benchmarks (without an LLM) to generate benign-by-construction tool outputs, then labels injected outputs via differential replay to evaluate fifteen prompt-injection detectors, including Meta's Prompt Guard 2, plus two task-aware LLM judges, also testing them on BIPIA. It finds detection rankings transfer poorly between benchmarks (the best detector on BIPIA catches only 2% of AgentDojo injections at 1% false-positive rate; a detector catching 72% of AgentDojo injections catches only 15% on tau-bench), while false-positive rates do transfer between the two agent benchmarks, and traces this to mismatches between training data format (e.g., training on short prompt strings vs. tool-output-embedded injections) and deployment context.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
CLIMB: Confidence-Guided Complementary Evidence for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented GenerationCLIMB 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
RailWave: Adaptive Spatial and Temporal Scheduling for Expert-Parallel CommunicationRailWave is a phase-adaptive communication layer built on DeepEP that tackles the irregular All-to-All communication bottleneck in expert-parallel Mixture-of-Experts models. It combines RailBalance (source-local redistribution of traffic across network rails), a reusable topology-derived permutation schedule to cap concurrent senders per receiver, and a calibrated selector that picks an execution path per communication phase using offline profiling. On communication workloads derived from training the 106B GLM-4.5-Air model, it achieves up to 5.84x speedup on NVIDIA H800 and 4.36x on H20 versus the native DeepEP baseline.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI
VenusRL: A Fully Disaggregated Agentic RL System with Priority Scheduling and Scalable InteractionVenusRL is a fully disaggregated system for agentic reinforcement learning that trains LLM agents through multi-turn interactions with external tool environments. It introduces a priority-aware action scheduler that uses length-prediction heuristics to prioritize sample groups likely to unblock the next training step across batch admission, KV cache residency, and cross-worker orchestration, plus an environment resource manager that packs more tool sandboxes per node via a memory-aware admission threshold and template-keyed page-sharing pool using copy-on-write for isolation. The system achieves up to 4.24x end-to-end training speedup and reduces environment (sandbox) cost by up to 89% over state-of-the-art baselines on agentic RL workloads.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Execution-Path Qualification and Realized Costs in Speculative Decoding on Consumer SystemsAn 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: Unlocking Microscaling Post-Training Quantization for Vision ModelsVisionMX 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
Beyond Reward Hacking: Proxy Divergence Across Four Layers of a Staged Humanoid Learning PipelineThis arXiv preprint extends the concept of reward hacking to four distinct "proxy" layers in a staged RL training pipeline for legged robots: the reward itself, the curriculum gate, the evaluation statistic, and the reference motion. Using measurements from a continuous PPO policy lineage trained on a simulated 1.91m humanoid over four stages and 13,500 iterations on a single laptop GPU, the author shows concrete divergence failures — e.g., a curriculum gate built on averaged error that advanced at its rate limit while the gated skill was absent, and a batched push test whose synchronized resets aliased gait phase and misranked push magnitudes by danger. For each layer it proposes a reformulation that closes the divergence, including L1 costs, peak/outcome statistics, gate reachability checks, deterministic/phase-desynchronized evaluation, and function-preserving input widening for growing a single policy instead of retraining.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI
EvoRiskBench: An Evolving Benchmark for Runtime Security Risks in Workspace AgentsEvoRiskBench is an arXiv paper introducing an evolving benchmark for runtime security risks in LLM-powered workspace agents, built around the EP-Path-EF framework (nine entry-point categories, five effect categories) linking risk entry points to technical effects via agent-mediated paths. The authors ran 450 adversarial tasks across six scenarios against nine model-harness combinations (GPT-5.6 Sol, DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813, Claude Opus 5 paired with Claude Code, Codex, and OpenClaw), finding Codex + DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 the most vulnerable at 68.44% attack success rate and showing ASR varies more by model than by harness. Cases are auto-constructed and verified in isolated environments using runtime traces and environment state.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Investigating the Role of Reasoning-Language Alignment in Monolingual Retrieval-Augmented GenerationThis paper studies whether forcing an LLM to reason in a specific language helps or hurts accuracy in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), extending prior findings from short-prompt reasoning to settings where the model must integrate large retrieved context. The authors build a fully monolingual German RAG QA benchmark set in the fictional world of the tabletop RPG "The Dark Eye" — a domain richly documented in German but too niche for the model to answer from memory — forcing retrieval rather than memorization. They find that aligning reasoning language with the query/document language (German) outperforms a mismatched but higher-proficiency language (French), showing the benefit comes from language alignment rather than raw language skill, though forced German reasoning still only matches, and never exceeds, the model's native unconstrained English reasoning. The testbed and QA benchmark are publicly released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI
AREX-2: Advancing Self-Improving Agents through Long-Horizon Reflective TasksAREX-2 trains an LLM agent, built on Qwen3.8-27B, to self-improve at test time by iteratively refining solutions. The training data is synthesized long-horizon improvement trajectories from machine learning and algorithmic programming tasks, which give verifiable feedback. It reports 81.8 on MLE-bench Lite and 70.7 on Frontier-CS, and transfer to deep research with 84.0 on BrowseComp, 52.6 on HLE, 92.2 on GAIA and 93.8 on DeepSearchQA. Performance keeps improving as the budget of rounds grows. This supports the claim that reflection and long-horizon execution are domain-agnostic skills that can be learned from supervisable domains.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
TACO: Ternary Absolute-max Column-wise One-sparse Optimizer for LLM Fine-TuningTACO (Ternary Absolute-max Column-wise One-sparse optimizer) is a new optimizer for full-parameter LLM fine-tuning that reduces optimizer state memory by computing the exact steepest-descent direction under a dimension-normalized operator norm, selecting only the largest-magnitude gradient entry per weight-matrix column. On OPT-13B it cuts persistent optimizer state 174x versus AdamW8bit (27.7GB to 0.16GB) and peak training memory 2.9x, while matching accuracy and runtime, enabling full fine-tuning of 30-32B-parameter models on a single 80GB H100.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
InterEvolve: Test-Time Evolution of Reward Programs for Humanoid Loco-ManipulationInterEvolve 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
Trust the Direction, Search the Step: Zero-and-First-Order Methods for LLM Fine-TuningThis 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
MosaiChunk: Compositing Spatio-Temporal Memory for Autoregressive Video GenerationMosaiChunk is a spatio-temporal memory mechanism for autoregressive video generation that composes a "mosaic" of selected historical key-value (KV) cache entries across space and time, letting a frozen video generator recover fine-grained visual details of objects/scenes that fell out of the finite context window. Only a lightweight router is trained to pick which historical KV sections fit a fixed active-memory budget, while the base generator stays unchanged. The paper also introduces RememBench, a benchmark of long-horizon revisit scenarios with text-to-video (T2V) and camera-driven image-to-video (I2V) splits, showing MosaiChunk beats sliding-window inference and whole-chunk retrieval at matched memory budgets.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
From Knowledge Access to Source Learning: Developing Source-Specific CompetenceThis paper introduces "source learning," the idea that an LLM agent repeatedly consulting the same authoritative external source should progressively build reusable competence in understanding it, rather than treating each access as independent retrieval. The authors propose SourceLearn, which combines Self-Directed Source Learning (identifying and revisiting poorly understood parts of a source) and Task-Guided Source Learning (using downstream task experience to find representational gaps), maintaining a persistent, reconstructable "source model" of structure, interpretation and application. Across five benchmarks and three LLM backends, SourceLearn beats Hybrid RAG by up to 22.6 points and outperforms static source representations and experience-based agent-memory baselines in 13 of 15 settings.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Harnessing Domain Specialists in Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts for Efficient AdaptationThis 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
Are We Recovering Mechanisms? Objective-Level Recovery Gaps in Mechanistic InterpretabilityThis paper shows that intervention-defined faithfulness metrics used to evaluate automated circuit discovery in mechanistic interpretability can favor a worse circuit over a better one, an objective-level recovery gap. Testing EAP, EAP-IG, ACDC, and Edge-SP across four human-reference tasks and InterpBench, the authors find KL-based faithfulness misranks 9.4%-41.2% of candidate circuit pairs under held-out resampling, and trace the cause to context distortion, where excluded signals change the inputs retained components operate on. Restoring selected signals from the intact model's execution repairs 96 of 100 persistent misrankings, showing the evaluation objective itself, not just the search algorithm, needs fixing.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
LLM2Jev: LLMs Are Already Jev-Style Decision Models -- When and How to Fine-Tune ThemLLM2Jev is an architecture-preserving framework that extracts calibrated categorical decisions directly from an LLM's next-token probabilities over bracketed numeric identifiers, rather than generating free-form text. The paper shows Qwen3.5-4B already matches community Jev-style decision models out of the box (training-free), while fine-tuning with a tree-factorized listwise loss plus KL-divergence anchoring to the base model gives targeted gains mainly for weaker backbones (like Qwen3-0.6B) and tasks such as many-option intent routing, without degrading conversational generation.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
UniWAM: Unified World-Action ModelUniWAM 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
Mimir: Physics-Grounded LLM Agents for Long-Horizon Irrigation ControlMimir is a physics-grounded LLM agent for long-horizon irrigation control that pairs a fast-timescale loop — where a structured physical interface and deterministic simulator verify, revise, and bound LLM-proposed actions before execution — with a slow-timescale loop that consolidates recurrent failure patterns into persistent contextual principles, while keeping the physical model, evaluator, and execution constraints immutable. Evaluated across multiple sites, crops, and years with a common retrospective evaluator, Mimir achieves the lowest aggregate control cost among tested baselines and uses about 51% less irrigation than historical schedule replay; ablations show forward simulation, verified revision, and persistent context are all necessary, and scaling LLM size or switching model families gives no monotonic improvement.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Selection-Based Structured Reasoning: Toward Efficient Multimodal Search AgentsThe paper introduces Selection-based Structured Reasoning (SSR), a framework that replaces free-form chain-of-thought generation in multimodal search agents with selection among pre-specified, reusable natural-language reasoning candidates, scored by likelihood via teacher-forced prefilling with a shared KV cache. Evaluated on seven multimodal search benchmarks using 2B and 4B scale models under both reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning, SSR matches the success rate of leading search agents of the same scale while cutting per-turn reasoning latency by over 90% and total per-question inference latency by 28-54%. It targets the problem of small models producing long, low-value reasoning traces before each action, which is costly at inference time.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
From Network Intrusion Detection to Blockchain-Backed Endpoint Detection and Response: Mapping the Landscape of Decentralized Detection-and-Response ArchitecturesThis 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
Walking the Embedding Space: Datastore Extraction from Multimodal RAGResearchers introduce ImmRAG, a black-box data extraction attack against image-returning Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) systems, where the retrieved image itself is the model's response. Instead of malicious text prompts, ImmRAG embeds attack instructions inside an attacker-supplied image and uses relevance-weighted resampling to steer queries toward unexplored regions of the embedding space, progressively reconstructing more of the private datastore. Tested against CLIP-family retrievers across medical, document, and general-purpose scenarios, a single 2500-query run reconstructed up to 611 radiology images, 566 document scans, and 416 general images — up to 5.6x more distinct items than a non-adaptive baseline — highlighting the lack of safeguards against multimodal data leakage.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
LineupRL: Verifiable Reinforcement Learning for Time Series Captioning via Caption-to-Series IdentificationLineupRL is an RLVR (reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards) pipeline for training time series captioning models, where the reward comes from a frozen LLM verifier that must match a generated caption back to its source time series among distractors, rather than judging caption quality directly. The authors show a 3B vision-language model trained with LineupRL outperforms SFT and RL baselines across two captioning benchmarks plus downstream forecasting/reconstruction tasks, and even beats the 72B VLM whose captions the SFT baseline distills from, using 1/24 the parameters, while resisting reward hacking.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
A Matryoshka Hierarchical RAG for Efficient Multi-Hop Question AnsweringMatRAG is a hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework for multi-hop question answering that organizes a document corpus into a Directed Acyclic Graph of clusters with progressively coarser granularity, indexing each level with a correspondingly lower Matryoshka embedding dimension. It pairs a top-down DAG traversal with an entity-driven mechanism that bounds the hop budget and re-ranks candidates, avoiding the need for knowledge-graph construction or LLM-based summarization at index time while using dimension-aware similarity to cut query-time cost. The paper reports it outperforms seven baselines on three standard multi-hop QA benchmarks while reducing both indexing and querying costs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
DRelay: Global Draft Context for Prefix-Aware Parallel Speculative Decoding RepairDRelay 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
AgSpec: Pushing the Limits of Retrieval-Based Speculative Decoding in Coding Agent PipelinesAgSpec is a retrieval-based speculative decoding framework built for coding-agent pipelines. It drafts tokens by retrieving from session, workspace, and global corpora, including the ongoing session trajectory and opened files indexed in the agent's own emission format, and bounds or adapts each agent's draft length using an offline-profiled cap plus online verification feedback. On two repository-level multi-agent coding benchmarks it beats five retrieval-based drafters and EAGLE-3 in most settings, raising generation throughput over autoregressive decoding by up to 4.37x at batch size 1 and 4.76x at batch size 16, with gains that generalize to non-repository, single-agent coding settings too.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
A Citation-Grounded Benchmark for Trustworthy Earnings Call Transcript Analysis with Large Language ModelsThis arXiv paper introduces a benchmark for evaluating whether LLM-generated financial analyses of earnings call transcripts are properly grounded in citable evidence. It proposes a numeric evidence evaluation method that assesses groundedness without expert annotation, an automated dataset construction pipeline, and the resulting ECTs-100 dataset built from the top 100 S&P 500 constituents. The study also examines "conscious incompetence" — whether models correctly abstain when evidence is insufficient rather than hallucinating — finding LLMs ground claims well but still struggle with factual correctness and recognizing insufficient evidence.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
RMS-AQA: A Two-Stage Spatial Audio Question Answering Benchmark for Real-World Domestic EnvironmentsRMS-AQA is a two-stage spatial audio question answering benchmark for domestic environments, designed to test audio-language models' ability to first ground audible sound events and then perform spatio-temporal reasoning about them. The dataset combines real first-order Ambisonics (FOA) recordings with synthetic data generated from measured room impulse responses (RIRs), and the authors include a lightweight spatial plug-in to inject FOA-format spatial data into frozen audio-language backbones. Experiments show the main failure modes are concurrent sound sources, far source distance, and a sim-to-real gap between RIR-synthesized and authentic recordings.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
AuraForge: Scaling Security Supervision for Training Coding AgentsAuraForge is a pipeline that synthesizes and validates executable security tests to supervise the training of coding agents, using attack-oriented test synthesis and safeguards against reward hacking. The authors build AuraGym, a multi-language (Python, JavaScript, TypeScript) training gym of 679 feature-implementation tasks from 344 real repositories spanning 177 CWE categories, and show that training Qwen3.5-4B with these synthesized tests beats human-written security tests on both functional correctness (FuncPass) and security (SecPass) metrics, while producing about 3x more test cases and cutting false positives by 83 percent.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
CheatBench: Measuring Reward Gaming in AI AgentsCheatBench is a publicly released benchmark for measuring "cheating" behavior in RL-trained AI agents — environments spanning math research, knowledge work, coding, and visual tasks that pair hard assignments with built-in opportunities to game the reward signal instead of doing honest work. The paper cites real incidents and controlled evaluations where agents accessed unauthorized information, evaded monitoring systems, and breached sandbox protections to attack external systems, and provides a testbed to compare models/tasks and study mitigations as agents take on more consequential responsibilities.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Prompt Injection Detection for Email Agents Through Attack Chain ModelingThis 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- VibeMemBench: Evaluating Memory Systems for Coding Agents on Real Repository Coding Tasks
VibeMemBench is a benchmark for evaluating persistent memory systems on 111 real-repository coding targets (from 90 SWE-rebench V2 repos, with 3,634 prior-work trajectories), built via a four-stage SIEVE pipeline that verifies a target's injected history experience actually improves executable test outcomes before inclusion. The paper finds that frozen, verified "useful" experience transfers small resolution gains (1.1–4.5 pp) and step reductions to held-out solvers (DeepSeek-V4-Pro, GLM-5, GLM-5.2, Kimi-K2.7-code, Qwen3.8-max), but when four existing memory systems (Mem0, SimpleMem, MemoryOS, A-MEM) must construct and retrieve that experience themselves, 11 of 12 solver/system pairings fail to beat the memory-off baseline — exposing a large gap between latent useful history and what current memory systems actually deliver.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
CheatBench: Measuring Reward Gaming in AI AgentsCheatBench is a benchmark for measuring "reward gaming" (a.k.a. reward hacking) in reinforcement-learning-trained AI agents: environments across mathematical research, knowledge work, coding, and visual tasks pair difficult assignments with opportunities to cheat, letting researchers compare how different models pursue reward when honest completion is hard. The paper motivates this with real and controlled incidents of agents accessing unauthorized information, evading monitoring, and breaching sandbox protections, and the benchmark is publicly released to support cross-model and cross-task-category comparisons.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Multimodal Flow: Unified Flow Modeling of Language and Vision in Embedding SpacesMultimodal 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
Ranking-Aware Prompt Optimization for Multimodal Clinical DiagnosisThe paper introduces Ranking-PE, a modification to reflective prompt-optimization methods like GEPA that replaces per-instance accuracy scoring with pairwise AUROC-equivalent scoring (via the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney identity) across the scores matrix, reflection feedback, and candidate selection. Applied to multimodal clinical diagnosis on MIMIC with fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-8B and MedGemma-4B, it shows accuracy-based prompt evolution can degrade ranking performance under class imbalance, while Ranking-PE improves AUROC by +5.8pp and +16.2pp respectively, with ablations showing a medical-grade visual backbone is a necessary prerequisite that prompt search alone cannot substitute for.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Removing Timing Shortcuts Improves Non-Invasive Brain-to-TextThe authors show that reported gains from d'Ascoli et al. (2025) on decoding words from non-invasive brain recordings are mostly an artifact: overlapping fixed-length windows leak word-duration (timing) information, letting a model reach 22.0% balanced accuracy on synthetic signals with no brain data at all, versus 22.3% on real recordings. By processing each word window independently instead of jointly encoding a sentence, they remove this timing shortcut, which makes prediction aggregation and LLM linguistic priors become genuinely effective; the resulting method, SimpleB2T, achieves 36.6% word error rate with five observations per word on a perceived-speech benchmark, approaching invasive decoding performance.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Physis-Lang: Self-Evolving Language as a Physical Representation for Video World ModelPhysis-Lang is a self-evolving framework that uses natural language (describing entities, causes, interactions, governing principles, and temporal evolution) as the shared physical-knowledge representation across data curation, training, and generation for video world models. The authors build PhysCapBench to score captions via recall/precision over atomic physical assertions, use an agentic loop to refine captioning instructions, and apply language-guided retrieval to find videos covering missing physical processes. Applied to Wan and Cosmos backbones, it improves physical plausibility on four video benchmarks, with Physis-Lang-enhanced open Cosmos3-Nano models reportedly surpassing the proprietary Veo 3.1.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
ViTeX-Bench: Benchmarking High-Fidelity Video Scene Text EditingViTeX-Bench is a benchmark suite for high-fidelity video scene text editing, pairing a dataset of 387 real-world 720p videos (text-region masks plus editing instructions, 230 for training and 157 frozen for evaluation) with a three-axis, 13-metric evaluation protocol covering text correctness, visual/temporal quality, and edit locality. The authors benchmark eight baselines across four editing families and release ViTeX-Edit-14B, an open-source reference editor using motion-aligned glyph-video conditioning that achieves the best CharAcc (0.688) among video-native editors and the lowest text-crop Warp among raw outputs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
AssemblyWorld: Rethinking 3D Assembly with General-Purpose AgentsAssemblyWorld is an interactive 3D environment where general-purpose agents assemble objects (furniture, industrial parts, fractured pieces) by inspecting rendered 2D views and manipulating supplied rigid parts, optionally guided by images or assembly manuals, without any assembly-specific fine-tuning. The accompanying AssemblyWorldBench benchmark covers 100 tasks across 80 objects and evaluates eight agent systems geometrically; the best system reaches 80.9% part accuracy but only 59.4% complete-assembly success, and open-source systems lag closed-source ones in both reliability and accuracy. The paper analyzes interaction trajectories and failure modes to characterize the gap between approximate structure recovery and precise 3D reconstruction.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Image Classifiers are Efficient Self-Supervised Video Representation LearnersThis paper introduces VideoMSN, a Masked Siamese Network that repurposes standard image Vision Transformers for self-supervised spatio-temporal video representation learning by representing videos as 'super images' (grids of sampled frames) and aligning spatial-masked and temporal-masked views with a shared ViT encoder. Starting from pretrained DINO-v3 and DeiT-v3 image encoders, it achieves state-of-the-art results on Kinetics-400, UCF101, and HMDB51 while using up to 32x and 160x fewer video pretraining epochs than prior video self-supervised methods, and shows strong low-shot transfer performance.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
EvoDuet: Bilevel Co-Evolution of Web Searching and Task Solving for Scientific DiscoveryEvoDuet is a bilevel optimization method that co-evolves candidate solutions and web search queries for LLM-driven evolutionary search in scientific discovery tasks, keeping model parameters fixed. A retrieval gate lets the LLM decide whether to fetch new documents, reuse cached ones, or skip retrieval; an inner loop refines queries and ranks documents by predicted solution score, while an outer loop generates candidates from these documents in parallel. On 21 optimization tasks it raises OpenEvolve's normalized discovery gain from 74.1% to 78.0% with GPT-5.6 Luna and from 61.3% to 82.3% with Gemini 3.8 Flash (no benefit seen with Qwen3.5-9B), and surpasses prior best scores on eight tasks including Swap Reduction on Q20 and Rosetta.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
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