Your Benchmark Is an Empirical Measure Over DifficultyThe paper treats a benchmark as an empirical measure over item difficulty and formalizes two failure modes: measure mismatch (benchmark difficulty distribution differs from the intended one) and coverage gaps (uncovered difficulty regions that hide localized training progress). It proposes two diagnostic metrics with theoretical guarantees and analyzes 25 popular benchmarks across 7 domains using estimated item difficulties. It also introduces BenchFill, a difficulty-targeted item rewriting algorithm that reduces local coverage gaps.
huggingface.copaperAdded 31 Oct 2026π§ AI
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 2026π§ AI
When LLM Architectures Meet Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection: a Replication StudyThis paper replicates Chen et al.'s study of LLM-based smart contract vulnerability detection, first on GPT-4 and then on Mixture-of-Experts, RNN-like and State Space Models. The exact replication confirms the high-recall, low-precision pattern on GPT-4. The differentiated replication finds the pattern does not transfer uniformly: GPT-4 and Gemma-3 behave alike despite a roughly 100x parameter gap, while two MoE models diverge.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026π§ AI
Benchmarking decision models against generative large language models on medical multiple-choice questionsThis preprint benchmarks 13 decision models against 15 generative LLM configurations, including different reasoning settings, on 1,273 text-only four-option MedQA questions. Accuracy ran 67.71% to 89.08% for decision models and 78.32% to 96.86% for generative configurations. Decision models were cheaper and faster, but answers with probability of at least 0.90 still had error rates of 1.71% to 12.77%, and probability repeatability varied across three runs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026π§ AI
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 2026π§ 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 2026π§ AI
Know, then Draw: A New Learning Paradigm for Visual GenerationKnow, then Draw is a learning paradigm for visual generation that uses autoregressive pretraining to acquire semantic knowledge and diffusion post-training for high-fidelity rendering. Controlled comparisons find autoregression the stronger pretraining objective, and semantic quality matters more than AR-only generation quality. This motivates a purely semantic tokenizer trained with language supervision only. A 3B text-to-image model trained in 6,600 H100 GPU-hours scores 86 on GenEval and 87 on DPG-Bench.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π§ AI
Perceiving and Predicting Dynamic Sports: Spatiotemporal Intelligence in Vision Models for Egocentric Tennis VideoThis paper presents an annotated egocentric tennis dataset (egocentric video synced with five allocentric views, global positions, contact times, stroke types) and evaluates image encoders, video encoders and vision-language models on seven prediction tasks. Best models reach 0.14 m player and 0.54 m ball localization error and 0.14 s contact-time error. Depth input helps 3D ball localization, and longer histories do not help forecasting. A conditional diffusion model generates whole-body tennis motion in real time.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π§ 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 2026π§ 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 2026π§ AI
DCKV: Learned Transform Coding of the Prompt KV Cache in Hybrid Language ModelsDCKV is a differentiable codec for the prompt KV cache of hybrid language models, which keep a KV cache only in their few full-attention layers. Transform, quantizer and entropy models (conditioned on prompt tokens and already decoded neighbouring positions) are trained end to end against a frozen model. On Qwen3.5-2B it stores a token in over 55 times fewer bytes than bf16 with at most 1.8 points lost on three long-context benchmarks, and over 100 times fewer with at most 3.6 points lost.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026π§ AI
Analyzing Compiler-induced Constant-time Violations with Compiler at ScaleCTGREP is a compiler-based framework that applies differential analysis across the whole Clang/LLVM compilation chain to find where, how and under which configurations compiler optimizations break constant-time cryptographic code. Applied to seven libraries, three Clang versions, six targets and thousands of configurations, it led to 48 cases fixed with developers. It also identified seven new problematic LLVM passes and bypassed existing compiler-flag mitigations.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Decision Attacks on Known-Covariance Ring-LWE via Public Gram DeterminantsAnis Bkakria's ePrint 2026/2638 gives polynomial-time decision attacks on Known-Covariance Ring-LWE (KCov-RLWE), the assumption Micciancio and Suhl introduced for simulation-secure threshold encryption. The public sample and covariance hint form a bordered Gram matrix whose determinant leaks a residual that differs between real and uniform samples. The attacks cover broad prime-modulus families at ring rank one and transfer to composite moduli with an odd prime divisor. Power-of-two moduli are not covered, and the paper does not break the full threshold-encryption scheme.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Sliding Networks: A Family of Residual Structures Preserving Feature Learning and Feature DiversitySliding Networks is a family of residual network structures with a joint width and depth scaling recipe that keeps both locally maximal feature learning and feature diversity in the residual stream. The key quantity is the ratio N_flat/(N_sharp L) tending to a constant alpha, and Half Copy correlated initialization can relax the shape constraints. Residual-MLP experiments support an SDE limit, but language-model experiments show performance differences under regrouping at fixed parameter count.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026π§ AI
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 2026π‘οΈ Security
Tool-Calling LLM Agents Under Realistic MCP Faults: Scale Does Not Purchase Fault ToleranceMCP-Injector is a protocol-aware fault-injection middleware for Model Context Protocol tool calls, with permanent, transient and intermittent faults on seedable schedules. Its fault model comes from 57,240 issue and PR threads across 1,774 open-source MCP repositories. In a 1,350-cell experiment, faults cut task-completion score by 60% (8.08 to 3.23 of 10), and the 120B gpt-oss model was no more resilient than the 20B. Agent stacks differed in how well they absorbed faults.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
DRIVE: Fine-tuning via Data Contribution- and Diversity-aware Weighting with Prior RegularizationDRIVE is a per-sample weighting framework for single-stage fine-tuning when the source pre-training data is unavailable. It uses one differentiable objective: Shapley additivity splits each sample's contribution into anti-forgetting and adaptation parts, a covariance-based diversity term reshapes them, and a sample-characteristic prior stabilizes them. The authors prove better stability-plasticity guarantees than existing weighting schemes and report better performance, faster convergence and more robustness.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026π§ AI
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 2026π‘οΈ Security
The Geometry of Metaphor: Probing and Steering Metaphor Representations in Large Language ModelsThe Geometry of Metaphor is an October 2026 arXiv preprint that uses mechanistic interpretability to find causal subspaces for metaphor in LLMs of different architectures and sizes. The authors steer output on classification tasks across parts of speech. They also steer generation tasks, showing the metaphoricity of model output can be controlled. The abstract gives no model names or metrics.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ 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 2026π§ 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 2026π‘οΈ 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 2026π§ AI
Efficient Laconic Oblivious Transfer with Malicious SecurityEfficient Laconic Oblivious Transfer with Malicious Security is an ePrint paper (2026/2593, ASIACRYPT 2026 revision) giving the first maliciously secure laconic OT that uses its primitives only as black boxes. It adds equivocal vector commitments and maliciously secure witness encryption to the commitment-plus-witness-encryption paradigm. Security is proven in the UC model against malicious senders and in the context model against malicious receivers. Instantiations use LWE and bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumptions in the standard model.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Disentangling Robustness and Sycophancy in Multilingual LLMsThe SC-matrix is an evaluation framework for multilingual LLM sycophancy. It crosses a model's competence (correct answer with no pressure) with its sycophancy (keeping that answer under pressure), so agreeing with a false premise can be told apart from not knowing the answer in that language. Results: equal aggregate sycophancy rates hide different failure mixes, high competence does not always protect, and reasoning-oriented mitigations beat directive ones.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026π§ AI
Modeling Modular Multiplication for Monomial Prediction and Impossible Differentials, with Application to MSXThis ePrint paper gives the first exact bit-level models of modular multiplication z=(xΒ·y) mod 2^n. One model is for monomial prediction under 3SDP-woU, the other for impossible differential search. Applied to the MSX lightweight cipher, it yields a 7-round integral distinguisher (2^96 data) for MSX-128, key recoveries on 8 and 9 of 18 rounds at about 2^228 operations, and 1,984 seven-round impossible differentials. Both models are implemented in CLAASP.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
UniWALM: Unified World Action Language Model for Embodied Robot ControlUniWALM is a unified world-action-language model that learns video, action and language in one mixture-of-transformers backbone with per-modality diffusion heads that co-denoise together. Generated subtask and textual memory are fed back on the next step, so no external planner or memory bank is needed. It adds Flow Matching with Correction (FMC) for recovery from perturbed actions. It reaches 34.5% on the memory-dependent RMBench subset, above Mem-0's 28.5%, and lifts real-world Find-the-Item success from 11.1% to 61.1%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π§ 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 2026π§ AI
A Spectral Theory of Local-to-Global LeakageA Spectral Theory of Local-to-Global Leakage is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2571) by Rei Ueno on additive secret sharing over finite abelian groups. It gives an exact leakage decomposition into local leakage magnitude and spectral alignment across shares. Two channels with identical local mutual information can have exponentially different global leakage. Automorphism-weighted sharing can cancel leakage perfectly with finitely many shares, which ordinary additive sharing cannot do.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Same Simulation, Different Evidence: Where Retrieved Tool Output Costs LLM Agents AccuracyThis paper studies how keeping long tool output out of the context window, and reading it through a section index instead, costs LLM agents accuracy. Using the PHREEQC geochemistry simulator on 158 execution-verified multiple-choice items and 11,007 logged calls, GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.2 lose 11.3 and 7.9 points, while Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 show no detectable cost. The authors name the failure evidence substitution: agents skip the report and misround from their own output files.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π§ AI
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 2026π§ AI
SHADE: Shrinkage via Halted Alpha-stable Denoising for Heavy-Tailed Probabilistic Time Series ForecastingSHADE is an alpha-stable LΓ©vy diffusion forecaster that stops denoising at a nonzero depth, so the leftover stable kernel shrinks the predictive distribution instead of leaving it overconfident. It offers a scale-calibrated halt and a context-amortized halt that needs no noise labels. Median CRPS improves 21.7% on synthetic data with alpha at or below 1.3, with tail calibration gains on cryptocurrency and foreign-exchange series.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π§ AI
A Key-Recovery Attack on the GTLN Knapsack Cryptosystem via Continued FractionsThis ePrint paper (2026/2543) gives a key-recovery attack on the GTLN knapsack public-key cryptosystem of GΓ³mez-Torrecillas, Lobillo and Navarro. Continued fractions recover small-denominator ratios of public-key differences, and gcd computations then yield private-key integers, the modulus and the shift, using only the public key. The Python implementation recovered the full private key in all 2,400 trials across 24 recommended parameter sets, each in under 0.05 seconds.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Off-Key: Inconsistent MAC Keys Compromise Privacy in SPDZ-Family MPCOff-Key is a privacy attack on SPDZ-family maliciously secure MPC protocols that exploits inconsistent MAC keys. Depending on the MAC check protocol, a corrupted party recovers a shared secret from one authentication check or tests guesses through selective failure. The authors show it in MP-SPDZ, SCALE-MAMBA and FANNG-MPC, where a corrupted party can use different keys across batches, threads or runs, and describe the preprocessing state that enforces key consistency.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 19 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
On the possibilities and limitations of LLM-based multi-agent systems for multi-criteria decision-making in healthcare operations managementThis paper proposes a framework for auditing LLM-agent-generated stakeholder preferences before they are used as weights in multi-objective optimization for healthcare operations. Experiments on outpatient appointment scheduling and emergency department configurations show that explicit ratings vary by role and clinic conditions, deliberation can erase role differences, and pairwise choices depend largely on option order. Robust weighted-sum models often select different schedules than average weights.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026π§ 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 2026π§ AI
Velox: Spatial Memory Makes World Models EfficientVelox is a training-free attention router for chunked video-diffusion world models. It uses camera frustum slabs with depth intervals from streaming geometry to pick which historical token blocks to attend to, instead of letting the KV cache grow with rollout length. Frustum overlap softly modulates each layer's model-derived block importance, and uncovered regions keep the model's own routing. The fixed block granularity suits FlashAttention-style tiled execution, and slab construction runs asynchronously with denoising on the same H200. At chunk 48 it speeds up attention 4.36Γ and denoising 2.43Γ, and on the 158-case WBench navigation split it stays within 0.15 average points of dense LingBot-Fast-Cam.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π§ 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 2026π§ AI
Private Retrieval Augmented Generation via Random ProjectionProposes applying the same random projection to both datastore embeddings and query embeddings in RAG systems. The authors claim this provably preserves query-to-item semantic similarity while substantially mitigating datastore data-extraction attacks. Across several RAG architectures and datasets it reportedly beats prior differential-privacy-based defenses on retrieval and generation quality, with comparable empirical privacy under strong attack models. It is presented as a lightweight baseline for privacy-preserving RAG.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
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,β 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 2026π§ AI
Nowhere Man: Device Binding for Post-Quantum Anonymous CredentialsPresents a modular device-binding protocol for post-quantum anonymous credentials. The phone Secure Element signs a verifier challenge with an unmodified FIPS 204 ML-DSA interface, and the user proves knowledge of that signature in zero knowledge at each presentation. Using ML-DSA's structure avoids the cost of generic NIZK systems such as Longfellow. The most efficient variants assume weak-MLWR for unlinkability, and that assumption can be dropped at some efficiency cost. The protocol works with different anonymous credential schemes, and a proof-of-concept implementation is included. This matters for planned EU age-verification and Google Wallet/mDL rollouts, which need protection against credential sharing.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Connecting Cryptanalytic Distinguishers through DivisibilityPaper that links linear, integral, differential-linear and restricted differential distinguishers through two-way conversions with explicit divisibility guarantees and data complexity. It gives automated MILP/SAT models (Walsh and ultrametric representations, exact mix-basis models) and a black-box FWHT histogram search for zeros and finite divisibility. It improves BeyneβVerbauwhede divisibility bounds in 674 SIMON cases (e.g. 2^5 to 2^11 on 9-round SIMON32) and PRESENT. It also gives first higher-divisibility proofs for 8-round SPECK and BEANIE, new bounds for GIFT-64 and Ascon, and new properties on RC5, ChiLow-32, KeeLoq and KATAN32.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
DPF-SGD: Byzantine-Robust Differentially Private Federated SGD with Exact Optimality GuaranteesDPF-SGD is a federated SGD algorithm that stays robust to Byzantine agents while satisfying Ο΅-differential privacy. It combines private step sizes with a DP noise-decay schedule and adds a privacy-preserving comparative elimination (PPCE) filter that suppresses Byzantine updates during aggregation. The authors prove almost-sure convergence to the global optimum despite persistent noise and adversaries. On synthetic and MNIST data, final optimization error is one to two orders of magnitude lower than DP baselines.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026π§ AI
Dog-Breed Text-to-image Flow Matching from Pretraining to Fine-Tuning on 4 Consumer GPUsMiniDog is a framework for training a text-to-image flow-matching diffusion transformer from scratch on four RTX 3090 GPUs, with 55 minutes of pretraining and 15 minutes of fine-tuning. It pretrains on 26k ImageNet dog images that were captioned, then fine-tunes on 2k FLUX.1-schnell generated images. Image and text features are precomputed and cached. The model is a 22M-parameter transformer with the E2E-INVAE semantic latent space, a small Qwen text encoder and in-context conditioning, and training is accelerated with iREPA and an EUPE perception encoder. The repo evaluates with FID, HPSv2, PickScore and VAE reconstruction metrics. It lowers the barrier to hands-on diffusion training research.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
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 2026π§ AI
UniW(A)M: A Unified Mixture-of-Experts Framework for World and World-Action ModelsUniW(A)M is a mixture-of-experts model built on diffusion Transformers that unifies action-conditioned world modeling (AC-WM) with several world-action model (WAM) variants. Shared experts capture common physical dynamics, while atomic capability experts are reused across interfaces, each keeping its own conditional pathway. At deployment a plug-in adaptive interface router (PAIR), trained on a small subset of target-task chunk scenarios with the backbone frozen, picks a WAM interface for each execution chunk. It reaches 88.3% average real-world success against 76.7% for the strongest baseline, leads WorldArena on all three action-conditioned world-modeling tasks, and PAIR raises OOD success from 63.3% to 76.7%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026π§ AI
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 2026π§ AI
Staggered Instruction-Fetch Duplication: A Lightweight Processor-Level Countermeasure Against Fault InjectionProposes Staggered Instruction-Fetch Duplication (SIFD), a processor-level fault-injection countermeasure that fetches each instruction twice in consecutive cycles while fetching two different instructions per cycle, so inconsistent fetches are detected without full processor duplication, compiler support or crypto hardware. Implemented on a custom RV32I core on an Artix-7 FPGA, it costs 15.0% more slices and 16.3% more execution time. Attack success falls from 0.86% to below 0.01% under clock fault injection and from 0.32% to 0.13% under EMFI, with 73.18% of CFI and 11.44% of EMFI attempts detected.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026π‘οΈ 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 2026π‘οΈ Security
TokenRouter: Efficient Serving System for Token-Level LLM RoutingTokenRouter is a serving system for token-level routed LLM inference, where different tokens of one request are routed across different models. It uses request-centric programming with model-centric execution: developers write routing logic per request while the runtime launches a subserver per LLM and dispatches requests asynchronously. Each subserver uses a delayed-batching scheduler whose hyperparameters come from a mathematical throughput model, fixing step desynchronization and batch admission delays and giving 2.01-64.15x higher decoding throughput than existing systems.
huggingface.copaperAdded 9 Oct 2026π§ AI
Images Talk Back: Guiding MMDiTs by Suppressing Image-to-Text FeedbackThe paper studies joint attention in multimodal diffusion transformers (MMDiTs), where the evolving image updates text representations. It finds that this image-to-text (I2T) feedback tends to preserve objects and attributes already in the image, errors included, and that suppressing it improves generation. It proposes Semantic Feedback Guidance (SFG), which guides away from an auxiliary branch that strengthens I2T feedback and weakens text-to-image conditioning, and iSFG, an in-place variant that needs no extra model evaluations. SFG runs for the first 20% of sampling steps (about 1.2x base NFE without CFG). Across three backbones, adding SFG to CFG on FLUX raises GenEval from 0.6661 to 0.7479, and iSFG on SD3.5M adds +1.33 HPSv2.1 over CFG at zero extra NFE. The control also improves VBench scores for text-to-video and image-to-video.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026π§ AI
Distinguishers for the Squeezing of the Alternating Sponge and DuetCryptanalysis of the Alternating Sponge (ASP) and Duet, a permutation-based hash candidate in China's ICCS Next Generation Commercial Cryptographic Algorithm program (NGCC). The authors give an O(2^r)-query distinguisher against ASP that contradicts its claimed indifferentiability bound in some parameter regimes. They also give a distinguisher and state-recovery attack on Duet's multi-block output, using O(2^(r+c-h)) permutation queries. Collision and preimage resistance are unaffected, but Duet used as a XOF or KDF is affected, and state recovery enables length extension.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
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 Β± 0.0077 versus 0.6449 Β± 0.0024 for fixed-medium selection, while going to a still harder band drops it to 0.6405 Β± 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 2026π§ 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 2026π§ AI
Beyond the Monolithic Interface: A Research Agenda for Plural Conversational AIA narrative review in HCI arguing that the single-voice chatbot interface causes three harms: cognitive offloading, ideological narrowing of user beliefs, and epistemic compression of cultural and value diversity. It proposes multi-persona interfaces, which show several personas to the user at once, as a low-cost fix. The design draws on game design and participatory simulation (magic circle, role differentiation, persona embodiment). It offers a taxonomy for designing such interfaces and calls for empirical studies that link technical pluralistic alignment methods to real human-AI interaction.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026π§ AI
New Constructions of Quadratic and Cubic Permutations Admitting Optimal Threshold ImplementationsePrint paper giving four constructions of optimal threshold implementations (t+1 shares, no fresh randomness) for bijective S-boxes, a masking countermeasure against differential power analysis and glitch leakage in hardware. It shows that Q30^5 admits optimal TIs, gives a matrix criterion for quadratic permutations (yielding new 6-bit classes), and gives a weighted interpolation construction for power permutations that disproves the Piccione et al. 2023 conjecture. It also gives a derivative-uniform framework that proves every 4-bit cubic permutation admits optimal TIs. A companion repo has TIs for 5-bit quadratic permutations, 4-bit cubic permutations, the PRESENT S-box and GF(16) inversion.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 11 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
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 1Γ, with about 39β52% shorter mean completion times on successful trials.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026π§ 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 2026π§ 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 2026π§ 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 2026π§ 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 2026π§ AI
Showing 60 of 115
Show more