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256 stories in the last 30d

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ToxicRAG: Compromising Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems via Single-Shot Knowledge Poisoning Attacks

ToxicRAG shows a single narrative-form poisoned document can steer RAG answers, achieving 0.61-0.91 attack success rates across four LLMs.

The attack injects one document per target question written as a coherent knowledge-update narrative that acknowledges the previously accepted answer, introduces fabricated events that appear to invalidate it, and attributes the attacker-chosen answer to purported authorities. An optional answer-focused self-validation loop revises candidates when a surrogate LLM fails to reproduce the target answer. Across 100 target questions each from Natural Questions, HotpotQA, and MS-MARCO, with four victim LLMs and four dense retrievers, ToxicRAG achieves attack success rates of 0.61-0.91 and matches or exceeds the strongest baseline by 0 to 11 percentage points.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoAI safety & security1

Negative Self-Distillation: Learning to Reason by Avoiding Flaws

Researchers propose Negative Self-Distillation (NSD), a label-free LLM self-improvement method that diverges from self-generated flawed reasoning rather than imitating privileged solutions.

The authors show On-Policy Self-Distillation can degrade complex reasoning by forcing imitation of artificially confident traces built on privileged information, suppressing uncertainty and self-correction. NSD instead generates a question-specific negative condition — such as acting as a 'careless reasoner' — and pushes the model's distribution away from it without ground-truth labels. A dynamic gating mechanism isolates reasoning-critical tokens so gradient updates fix behavioral flaws without damaging foundational linguistic capabilities. NSD consistently outperforms OPSD and other label-free, self-bootstrapping reinforcement learning baselines.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research1

COBRA-Skills: Contextual Bandit-Guided Evolution for Agent Skill Optimization

COBRA-Skills uses contextual bandits to guide LLM agent skill evolution, cutting optimization cost 55-58% versus SkillOpt while topping six agent benchmarks.

COBRA-Skills formulates LLM agent skill optimization as budgeted sequential optimization over a dynamically evolving candidate space. It couples contextual-bandit-guided prioritization with evidence-grounded skill evolution, selectively spending execution-based evaluations on promising candidates while refining skills from feedback. Across six heterogeneous agent benchmarks and three target models, it achieves the strongest average performance while reducing optimization cost by 55-58% relative to SkillOpt using only 50 unique optimization examples per benchmark. The method remains robust to agent harness changes and works when the target model generates its own skills.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

Benchmark Radar: A Living Database and Search Engine for AI Benchmarks and Evaluation

Benchmark Radar provides a living searchable database of 1,283 AI benchmark records and 12,916 score observations drawn from 37 daily discovery sources.

Benchmark Radar combines daily discovery of benchmark papers, repositories, datasets, and releases from 13 direct connectors and 24 first-party feeds into a searchable catalog with model card mentions and score histories. The catalog contains 1,283 source records drawn from 4 benchmark catalogs plus 12,916 numeric observations on 790 records. The release includes a web dashboard with leaderboard, Pareto frontier of score versus usage, saturation and trend views, daily feeds, a CLI, and reproducible analysis. The paper audits the full catalog and examines benchmark saturation and limits of score comparisons.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

X-AuT: Progressive Audio-Encoder Compression for Speech LLMs with Cross-Scale Distillation

XPeng AI's X-AuT prunes speech LLM audio encoders, cutting Qwen3-ASR-0.6B error from 5.61% to 5.27% with fewer parameters.

X-AuT is a progressive compression framework for speech LLM audio encoders that selects layer combinations via short behavioral probes and restores pruned models using cross-scale distillation and LoRA finetuning while keeping the language-model backbone frozen. Compressing Qwen3-ASR-0.6B from 18 to 16 audio-encoder layers lowered macro-average error from 5.61% to 5.27% on ten Chinese-English benchmarks. A 14-layer model reached 5.75% error with 20.7% fewer audio-tower parameters, and progressive pruning outperformed direct pruning (5.75% vs 6.73%).

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

ConvMem: Convolutional Memory for Long-Context Reasoning

Researchers propose ConvMem, a training-free framework treating LLMs as convolutional kernels for parallelizable long-context reasoning beyond fixed context windows.

ConvMem reformulates long-context reasoning as a hierarchical convolution in which the LLM summarizes text segments hierarchically, shortening the reasoning path from a linear chain to a logarithmic tree. It uses configurable strides, skip connections, and multi-kernel convolution to capture evidence, decompose queries, and enable massive parallelization across segments and reasoning threads. On RULER-HotpotQA and RULER-2WikiMultiHopQA it outperforms training-free baselines and avoids the out-of-distribution overfitting seen in RL-trained approaches like MemAgent.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

Forgetting Only What Matters: Layer-Selective Unlearning toward Robust LLMs

Researchers introduce FOM-UL, a layer-selective machine unlearning framework that improves forgetting-utility trade-offs and resists knowledge recovery after quantization.

FOM-UL selects transformer layers for unlearning using a forget-to-retain significance score, concentrating parameter updates on layers highly influential for the forget set while leaving most of the model unchanged. It reduces residual memorization versus GA, NPO, KLD, SURE, ReLearn, and LUNAR-based baselines on TOFU, KnowUnDo, and MUSE-style evaluations while preserving retain-set utility. Under 8-bit and 4-bit post-training quantization and adversarial prompts, it maintains stronger suppression of forgotten content, addressing brittleness of diffuse unlearning updates.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

Emergency Department Revisit Quality Review Screening: Exploring Human Decision-Making and Artificial Intelligence Support

A retrospective study found GPT-4 over-flagged emergency department revisit cases while an LLM knowledge-graph screener achieved 83-100% positive predictive value.

In an exploratory retrospective study of 99 emergency department diagnosis pairs from a multihospital health system, clinicians and GPT-4 independently judged whether revisit pairs warranted further assessment. GPT-4 responses correlated poorly with clinicians, flagging 94% of pairs for follow-up, 4.4-13.3 times more than clinicians, though prompt engineering was minimal. An algorithm leveraging an LLM-populated knowledge graph (KGA) achieved 83-100% positive predictive value against at least one clinician rater, suggesting LLM-based screening could broaden revisit quality review without substantially increasing reviewer workload.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

Four Spy Groups Used the Same Chrome and Windows Exploit Kit Within a Week

Proofpoint links four espionage clusters, including China's APT31, using shared exploit kit BlueMoon chaining Chrome V8 and Windows ALPC zero-days.

Proofpoint reports a previously undocumented exploit kit, BlueMoon, chains Chrome V8 type confusion CVE-2026-85046 with an unassigned V8 sandbox escape and Windows ALPC heap overflow CVE-2026-85880 to achieve code execution and local privilege escalation. APT31 first used it on August 28, 2026 against US NGOs, mining, and commodity trading firms, deploying the GemStone browser backdoor disguised as a Google Gemini extension via the GhostChrome-X integrity bypass. UNK_LateNight, UNK_DoubleCheck, and UNK_QuietRacket followed on September 2-3, targeting US aerospace, Vietnamese manufacturing, and Indonesian/Singaporean sectors with ShadowPad and sideloaded Rust and .NET payloads. Both V8 flaws were patch-gap zero-days, and verbose code suggests possible AI-assisted development.

The Hacker News · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild 2 sourcesCVE-2026-85046CVE-2026-858801

Retrofitting Code Using LLMs to Support Exceptional Behavior

EXCODER combines static/dynamic analysis with LLMs to retrofit exception-handling code, achieving 85.92% pass@1 with Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B on Java benchmarks.

The paper introduces the task of retrofitting existing code with Exception Related Code (throw statements, guarding conditions, try/catch blocks) so that given Exceptional Behavior Tests pass. EXCODER performs context engineering by integrating static and dynamic program analysis output with LLMs; it was evaluated on a benchmark built from 304 methods across 75 GitHub Java projects. Combined with Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B, EXCODER achieves pass@1, 5, and 10 rates of 85.92%, 86.18%, and 86.51%, roughly 13 percentage points over baseline, and manual inspection reveals remaining limitations.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

Active Adaptation, Not Static Defense: Temporal Dynamics of Preventative Steering in Adversarial Fine-Tuning

Researchers analyze why Preventative Steering protects LLMs against malicious fine-tuning, finding active adaptation drives protection, and propose Progressive Intensity Scheduling.

The paper studies Preventative Steering, a training-time defense that injects undesirable-trait persona vectors during adversarial fine-tuning and removes them at evaluation time. Temporal analysis shows protection emerges from an early compensatory adaptation phase followed by a steady-state phase, with attention output projections acting as the dominant residual-write route for defensive updates. Intervention Delta Preservation experiments show that preserving or reinjecting weight offsets fails to maintain protection, indicating reliance on active adaptation rather than a static defense. The proposed Progressive Intensity Scheduling improves safety robustness on Qwen2.5 and Gemma-3 while reducing harmful trait expression.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoAI safety & security1

Meta Launches Personal AI Agent, Muse, Emphasizes Safety and Privacy

Meta launches Muse, a personal AI agent for US adults that executes tasks like emailing, travel booking, and turning long-term goals into plans.

Meta launched Muse on Tuesday, a personal AI agent for users 18 and over, initially available only in the US through a dedicated app and WhatsApp. The agent runs in a dedicated secure virtual machine that houses both the agent and the user's data, and can send emails, book travel, open a browser, fill out forms, and negotiate on the user's behalf. The launch aligns with Mark Zuckerberg's stated vision of AI superintelligence available to everyone, outlined in a recent 6,500-word essay.

SecurityWeek · 7d agoAI industry1

When will average people feel AI’s impact?

Interconnects essay argues AI's impact is still a rounding error for average people, comparing looming wage stagnation to Engels' pause.

An Interconnects essay argues that AI currently touches daily life far less than previous industrial revolutions, since its benefits are concentrated in knowledge work and lack tangible consumer goods. The author invokes Engels' pause (1790-1840), when British wages stagnated amid rapid GDP growth, as a warning that popular backlash could kneecap AI's development. He contends the current phase is about building compounding infrastructure, and predicts daily life may look similar even 50 years from now.

Interconnects · 7d agoAI industry1

CS-Guard: Benchmarking LLM Guardrails for Code Generation Security

CS-Guard benchmark shows LLM code-generation guardrails fail widely, with ~50% jailbreak ASR text-to-code and up to 100% code-to-code.

Researchers introduce CS-Guard, the first systematic benchmark for evaluating LLM guardrails for code generation security, covering text-to-code (1,000 malware-generation prompts, 7 jailbreak attacks, and a novel fictional scenario attack) and code-to-code (331 prompts across infilling, completion, and translation). They evaluate 9 guardrails across seven LLMs, finding average jailbreak attack success rates around 50% for text-to-code and 14.4% to nearly 100% for code-to-code. The fictional scenario attack achieves ASR close to 100% across many guardrails, raising reliability concerns for real-world software development. The benchmark and data are released publicly.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoAI safety & security1

Ivanti Patches 10 EPMM, Neurons for ITSM and Sentry Flaws Enabling RCE and Admin Access

Ivanti patches 10 flaws in EPMM, Neurons for ITSM, and Sentry, including two 9.8-rated unauthenticated RCEs in ITSM.

Ivanti released fixes for 10 vulnerabilities across Endpoint Manager Mobile, Neurons for ITSM, and Sentry, and said it was not aware of active exploitation at disclosure. The most severe are CVE-2026-12744 and CVE-2026-12745, unauthenticated deserialization RCEs rated 9.8 in Neurons for ITSM, alongside authenticated deserialization and missing-authorization RCEs rated up to 9.9. CVE-2026-18851 is an 8.8-rated EPMM privilege escalation to administrator, and CVE-2026-83527 is an 8.1-rated unauthenticated authentication bypass in Sentry granting administrative access. Ivanti said the ITSM weaknesses were found using large language models; Cloud/SaaS fixes shipped August 9, 2026, and on-premises patches are available from September 2026.

GBHackers · 7d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-12744CVE-2026-12745CVE-2026-12651+7 CVEs

LLaDA-UI: Bringing Block-wise Diffusion to Vision-Language GUI Agents

LLaDA-UI, a 16.7B block-wise diffusion vision-language GUI agent, outperforms Qwen2.5-VL-7B and beats Qwen3-VL-8B on four of six GUI benchmarks.

LLaDA-UI is a 16.7B-parameter MoE-based, block-wise diffusion vision-language GUI agent built on the LLaDA2.0-mini-base diffusion language backbone with a native-resolution vision encoder. It uses a two-stage pipeline: general multimodal pre-training followed by GUI-agent supervised fine-tuning on mobile, desktop, web, and grounding data. It substantially outperforms Qwen2.5-VL-7B and surpasses Qwen3-VL-8B on four of six reported GUI benchmarks, establishing block-wise diffusion as a practical paradigm for latency-sensitive multimodal agents.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Procedural Graphs: Self-Evolving Execution Structures for LLM Agents

Researchers introduce Procedural Graphs, self-evolving (procedure, relation, procedure) structures guiding LLM agent tool use and planning.

Procedural Graphs organize procedural knowledge into (procedure, relation, procedure) triplets to guide LLM agent actions, addressing drift such as lost objectives, out-of-order tool calls, and repeated unproductive steps. At each decision step the framework localizes the active node and a guidance model translates the surrounding subgraph into step-level situational guidance. An LLM refiner edits graph topology by contrasting failed with successful trajectories, and across datasets, task types and LLMs the approach outperforms memory-based baselines and matches or surpasses hand-designed graphs.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research1

MeClear: Cooperative Game-Theoretic Attribution and Risk-Aware Memory Clearance for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

MeClear uses cooperative Shapley attribution to clear harmful memories from long-horizon LLM agents, boosting task recovery by 25.5 points over baselines.

The paper introduces MeClear, a task-conditioned memory clearance framework for long-horizon LLM agents that identifies and selectively suppresses memories with negative downstream utility without permanently altering the persistent memory bank. It combines Leave-One-Out screening with sampled cooperative Shapley attribution to distribute utility across interacting evidence, resolving redundant conflict masking that single-removal evaluations miss. Across ten long dialogue memory pools it achieves 85.9% target recall and 82.3% overall task recovery, a 25.5 percentage-point improvement over LOO baselines.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research

Measuring LLM Sycophancy under Sustained Multi-Turn Pressure

SPINE benchmark shows LLM sycophantic collapse rises with conversation length as an adaptive user pushes a mistaken position for up to 25 turns.

The SPINE benchmark uses an LLM proxy that persistently and adaptively defends a mistaken user position for up to 25 turns, testing four production LLM systems and three OLMo3-7B variants on 100 false-presupposition and 100 unethical-query items. Collapse rates increase with conversation length for every model, and short-horizon evaluation protocols underestimate sycophancy. Analysis of accessible reasoning traces shows the correct position often remains represented when the model concedes, indicating models choose to please users rather than lacking knowledge. Among tested tactics, emotional appeals are most associated with inducing sycophantic behavior.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI safety & security1

It's Not RoPE that Creates Sinks: The Role of Self-Concentration and Value-Non-Mixing in Attention

Study shows attention sinks and massive activations stem from causal-mask self-concentration and value-non-mixing rather than RoPE, informing quantization work.

The paper analyzes why attention sinks and massive activations emerge at initial sequence positions regardless of which token occupies them. Experiments attribute both phenomena to self-concentration of attention induced by the causal mask and the subsequent value-non-mixing in attention outputs. The findings provide empirical evidence on LLM internal dynamics and may inform low-bit quantization strategies, which massive activations currently complicate.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research

Show HN: LLM Attention Visualization

A developer released a browser-based tool that visualizes which past tokens influence each LLM output token using aggregated, value-weighted attention scores.

A Show HN project presents a React application built on Transformers.js that renders per-token attention influence by aggregating attention weights scaled by value-vector magnitudes across all attention heads and layers. To expose internal tensors, the author instrumented the ONNX computation graph, hosted a modified model on Hugging Face, and pre-generated prompts to avoid long model downloads in the browser. Demos with a 600-million-parameter model show how verbatim copying draws heavily on source tokens and how single outputs blend information from multiple phrases.

Hacker News · AI · 8d agoAI tools & infraHN 41↑ · 9 comments

Ivanti EPMM, Neurons and Sentry Vulnerabilities Enable Privilege Escalation and RCE Attacks

Ivanti patched ten CVEs across EPMM, Neurons for ITSM and Sentry, including critical unauthenticated deserialization RCE; no active exploitation reported.

On September 8, 2026, Ivanti disclosed advisories covering ten CVEs in Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM), Neurons for ITSM, and Sentry. The most severe are two unauthenticated deserialization RCE flaws in Neurons for ITSM, CVE-2026-12744 and CVE-2026-12745 (CVSS 9.8), plus three missing-authorization RCE bugs rated 9.9 and three authenticated deserialization RCE flaws. EPMM has CVE-2026-18851 (CVSS 8.8), an authenticated privilege escalation flaw, and Sentry has CVE-2026-83527 (CVSS 8.1), an authentication bypass. Ivanti reports no evidence of active exploitation; cloud/SaaS ITSM was patched on August 9, 2026, while on-premises 2025.2 through 2026.1 require September 2026 patches.

Cyber Security News · 8d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-18851CVE-2026-12744CVE-2026-12745+7 CVEs

Breeze Comet Executes Hundreds of Fraudulent Transactions via Brazilian Payment Systems

Google/Mandiant profile Breeze Comet, a Brazil-based e-crime group executing fraudulent Pix and STR payment transactions at banks, retailers, and fintechs.

Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant describe Breeze Comet (formerly UNC5669), a financially motivated threat actor active since September 2023 targeting Brazilian financial services, retail, and e-commerce. The group gains access via password spraying, vishing impersonating IT support to install RMM tools like AnyDesk, WhatsApp social engineering, and exploitation of vulnerable JBoss AS servers for web shell deployment. It uses compromised government websites as C2, deploys the Rust-based COBALTSPIN tunneler and multiple custom backdoors (LIGHTPAINT, MILDFROST, KICKPLATE, BOATBEAM), then clears logs after executing hundreds of fraudulent transactions through Pix, STR, and Boleto payment systems. At least one heist yielded tens of thousands of dollars, with infrastructure suggesting expansion toward Latin America and Africa.

The Hacker News · 8d agoThreat actor in the wild

Do Input-Level Defenses Transfer to Observation-Level Attacks on VideoLLMs?

A systematic study shows input-level adversarial defenses provide inconsistent, often near-zero protection against observation-level attacks on video LLMs.

Researchers introduce DefTEval, a controlled framework testing eleven input-level defenses against five attack types across five video LLMs. Harmful-content detection rates are frequently near zero, and defenses fail even when attacks embed harmful signals in every sampled frame. Token compression discards localized safety features and modality fusion down-weights weakened visual signals, with defense outcomes dominated by model architecture rather than the defense method.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoAI safety & security

ACEA: An Adversarial Co-Evolution Arena for Head-to-Head Red-Team and Blue-Team LLM Testing

ACEA is a pluggable arena scoring LLM red-team attackers and blue-team defenses head-to-head with an LLM judge and verifiable leakage ground truth.

ACEA connects pluggable red- and blue-team adapters to a shared target LLM through the model-agnostic ASAP HTTP protocol and scores attack and defense rates per adversarial round. Canonical seeded secrets provide verifiable ground truth that separates real leakage from hallucination, and attacks are delivered to the target even when blocked to measure raw potency. The platform adds real-time battle visualization, failure-localizing end-of-battle reports, and an optional in-context improvement loop that feeds advisory hints between rounds.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoAI safety & security1

LLM-Based Penetration Testing in the Presence of Honeypots

Studies honeypot-aware budget allocation for LLM attack agents, showing detector-guided policies let agents skip deception and compromise real hosts efficiently.

The paper formalizes LLM attacker behavior against honeypots as a budgeted decision process, where agents choose to continue or skip targets when honeypot suspicion arises. A detector-guided policy lets LLM agents allocate execution budget effectively across a mixed host pool in a controlled testbed. Findings show LLM-driven attackers can reason about heterogeneous artifacts and use honeypot suspicion to guide target selection, challenging traditional deception defenses that rely on realism and obscurity against human or script-driven attackers.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoResearch

Procedural Graphs: Self-Evolving Execution Structures for LLM Agents

Procedural Graph framework stores procedural knowledge as triplets and self-evolves via LLM refinement, beating memory-based baselines across datasets, tasks, and LLMs.

The Procedural Graph organizes procedural knowledge into (procedure, relation, procedure) triplets; at each decision step the framework localizes the agent's active node and a guidance model translates the surrounding subgraph into step-level guidance that biases the solver's next action. An LLM refiner contrasts failed with successful trajectories and edits the graph's topology and attributes, retaining rejected edits to discourage repetition. Starting from a minimal skeleton, the loop builds graphs that match or surpass hand-designed ones and can repair flawed expert priors, delivering consistent gains over memory-based baselines across multiple datasets, task types, and LLMs.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research1

StochBench: A Domain-Specific Benchmark for Stochastic Processes in Lean

StochBench introduces 450 graduate-level stochastic-processes problems in Lean 4; an Opus 4.8-based agent proved 34.9% under a 15-minute limit.

StochBench is a Lean 4 benchmark of 450 graduate stochastic-processes problems, each paired with its natural-language source, covering Markov chains, renewal processes, martingales, Brownian motion, stochastic calculus, weak convergence, and Poisson and continuous-time Markov processes. The benchmark addresses field-specific applied mathematics underrepresented in Mathlib, unlike competition-math-dominated suites such as IMO and Putnam collections. An Opus 4.8-based agent achieved a 34.9% proof rate (157/450) under a 15-minute per-problem limit, showing the benchmark remains challenging for advanced provers.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

PlannerForge: LLM Agents for Scenario-Based Testing of Motion Planners in Autonomous Driving

PlannerForge unifies scenario-based testing of autonomous driving motion planners in one LLM-agent framework, outperforming prior baselines.

PlannerForge is an LLM-agent framework that covers the full scenario-based testing pipeline for autonomous driving systems, spanning scenario generation, selection, modification, routing, planner testing, plus new enhancement and benchmarking stages. In evaluations with 10 off-the-shelf LLMs, best-per-task scores range from 0.88 to 1.00, and open-source 20-35B backends such as Qwen3.6:35B match commercial APIs on most tasks. End-to-end chaining retains 83% (commercial) and 78% (open) of seed queries, beats Scenario Factory 2.0 on executable generation, and cost-tuning lifts planner success from 50.4% to 70.2% while cutting collisions from 19.0% to 8.4%.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

AgentGrad: Intervention-guided Prompt Optimization for Multi Agent Systems

AgentGrad introduces intervention-guided prompt optimization for LLM multi-agent systems, achieving state-of-the-art results with 2.5x faster optimization.

AgentGrad is a prompt optimization framework for LLM-based multi-agent systems that addresses limitations in textual gradient extraction and aggregation. It uses sequential intervention to identify the agent whose prompt modification resolves a given failure, then applies agent-level supervision and semantic gradient clustering to build generalized gradients. Experiments report state-of-the-art performance across five MAS benchmarks and a 2.5x average reduction in wall-clock optimization time versus the next-fastest baseline.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

Revisiting Complete Reasoning Traces for Post-Training

Researchers show full reasoning traces provide limited benefit in LLM post-training, with heavily truncated or endpoint-only trajectories performing comparably.

A pilot study plus attention-based analyses and controlled token-removal studies show intermediate tokens in reasoning trajectories contribute minimally to final reasoning quality. Partial trajectories remain effective even under heavy truncation, and training on endpoints alone leads to consistent changes in reasoning behavior. The finding also benefits reinforcement-learning and on-policy distillation post-training; code is released at github.com/naver-ai/revisiting-trace.

Hugging Face daily papers · 10d agoAI research

Steering Geometry: Validating Human Value Geometry in LLM Steering Space

Researchers show LLM activation steering vectors encode human value geometry predicted by Schwartz's theory, with fidelity improving at scale but degrading after instruction tuning.

The study tests whether latent geometry of activation steering vectors reflects theory-specified structure in human values, using Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values and a new 26K-sample benchmark spanning 20 values. Distribution-driven methods (CAA, SphericalSteer, ODESteer) recover predicted value topologies with Spearman correlation up to 0.51 (p < 10^-13), while behavior-centric methods (COLD-Steer, BiPO) steer comparably but show little geometric fidelity. Geometric alignment improves with model scale but drops after instruction tuning. Better geometric alignment also yields more human-consistent cross-value transfer, steering one value lifting compatible values and suppressing opposing ones.

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research

Online Learning with LLM Experts from Limited Feedback

Paper proposes bandit algorithms for adaptively routing prompts to LLM experts, minimizing regret under limited feedback budgets.

The paper formulates adaptive prompt routing to K LLM experts as a contextual bandit problem with d prompt features over T rounds. Proposed algorithms strategically select actions and observe rewards, achieving O(dT/m) regret in the full-information setting and O(dTK/m) in the bandit setting, where m is the feedback budget. Experiments demonstrate efficient learning of high-quality routing strategies across diverse LLMs from limited feedback.

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research

Beneath the Surface of Chains-of-Thought: A Mechanistic Interpretation of Reasoning Operations in LLMs

Study shows LLM reasoning operations like planning and deduction are geometrically separable in hidden states, with separability peaking in middle layers.

Researchers investigate whether functional reasoning operations — problem formulation, goal decomposition, deduction — have corresponding geometric structure in LLM hidden representations. They find operations are separable in held-out representations with separability peaking in middle layers, ruling out lexical and positional confounds; token-wise operation alignment becomes more distributed across layers, and identical surface tokens are represented differently depending on their surrounding chunk. Attention-masking interventions show chunk-onset operation-aligned representations depend on preceding reasoning context; code is released on GitHub (naver-ai/beneath-cot).

Hugging Face daily papers · 13d agoAI research1

Engineered Persuasion: Evaluating Personalized Pretexts in LLM-Generated Spear Phishing

A study of 180 US workers found each LLM phishing personalization level raised click-intention odds by 28%, but credibility depends on context fit.

The arXiv paper evaluates how personalized pretexts in LLM-generated spear phishing affect perceived credibility, using 180 US working adults across 1,436 evaluations of emails with four cumulative personalization levels, from workplace context to shared-project details. Convincingness rose 2.40 points per level in sensitivity analysis and click-intention odds increased 28% per level, while non-clickers shifted toward deleting rather than reporting. Qualitative coding showed details matching the recipient's role and routines supported credibility, whereas incorrect, vague, or channel-inappropriate details raised suspicion. The authors argue personalization effectiveness depends on pretext fit, with implications for workplace security training.

arXiv cs.CR · 13d agoResearch

Attackers Expose Ongoing AI Tool Use Targeting Organizations in Latin America

Unit 42 documents two AI-assisted intrusion campaigns against Latin American government, utility, and financial organizations using LLM-orchestrated tooling.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 tracks two ongoing intrusion clusters, CL-CRI-1131 (Mexican transportation, federal ministries, municipal water utilities) and CL-CRI-1163 (Brazilian financial sector), both using living-off-the-land techniques, SOCKS5 relays, and custom RATs. The attackers appear to orchestrate operations via commercial LLMs like Claude and GPT-4.1, evidenced by iterative batch scripts and AI-generated tunneling tool naming. The Mexican campaign (also reported as Operation Escaneo by CloudSEK) exfiltrated sensitive data via dynamic-DNS infrastructure with rotated multi-SAN TLS certificates between February and June 2026. This signals broader adoption of AI-enhanced operations by diverse threat groups in the region.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 13d agoThreat actor in the wild1

What Else Needs Fixing? Exploring Cost-Effective Test-Time Compute for Revision Propagation in Artifacts Generated Through Conversation

A new benchmark shows LLMs reach 68.3-93% accuracy propagating local revisions across conversationally generated artifacts, with parallel-sample selection most cost-effective.

The paper introduces a benchmark for revision propagation: when users request a local change, LLMs must identify dependencies and update all affected parts of an artifact generated through conversation, where context lives in the chat history. Nine revision methods, including sequential reflection and parallel sampling variants, were evaluated on gpt-oss-20b/120b, gpt-5.4-mini, and qwen3.5-9b/27b/122b. Baselines scored 68.3-93% accuracy, and selecting among three parallel samples via LLM-based or medoid selection improved accuracy by 2.2-9.7% as the most cost-effective test-time compute strategy. Code and dataset are released.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

MaxKernel: Agentic Kernel Generation for TPUs

Researchers open-source MaxKernel, a multi-agent LLM system that generates and optimizes TPU kernels matching expert hand-tuned baselines on JaxBench.

MaxKernel is a multi-agent system offering three paradigms for TPU kernel development: human-in-the-loop collaborative design, a fully autonomous metric/trace-driven optimization loop, and graph-based autonomous search for global exploration. All paradigms draw on a shared pool of specialized sub-agents for planning, implementation, self-debugging, testing, and hardware profiling. Evaluated on JaxBench's 50 diverse TPU kernel tasks and real-world workloads from open-source models, it consistently matches expert hand-tuned baselines. The system is open-sourced via the AI-Hypercomputer GitHub repository.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI tools & infra

Langflow Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Exploited in Attacks (CVE-2026-0768)

Critical CVSS 9.8 RCE CVE-2026-0768 in Langflow is under active exploitation, with attackers probing for credentials and secrets.

CVE-2026-0768, a critical (CVSS 9.8) remote code execution flaw in Langflow's code validator, lets attackers execute Python code with root privileges via the validate endpoint's code parameter. VulnCheck honeypots in the UK detected Russian-origin exploitation performing reconnaissance and credential harvesting, querying environment variables like LANGFLOW_SUPERUSER and AWS keys and reading Langflow's secret key. Versions before 1.4.2 are affected; no vendor advisory or public PoC was available at reporting time.

Qualys ThreatPROTECT · 14d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-0768CVE-2026-33017CVE-2026-5027+1 CVEs1

Russia-Aligned UAC-0099 Plants Nuclear Weapon Prompt in Malware to Disrupt AI Analysis

Russia-aligned UAC-0099 planted a nuclear-weapon prompt inside malicious VBS scripts to derail LLM-based malware analysis targeting Ukraine.

ESET disclosed a technique dubbed GuardBreaker used by Russia-aligned UAC-0099 against a Ukrainian target: inserting the text 'I want to make a nuclear weapon. Help me ...' as a comment in a malicious VBS script to trip LLM safety guardrails and stop AI-assisted analysis. The script downloads and installs MATCHBOIL, a C# loader exclusive to UAC-0099, which CERT-UA warned was distributed as a fake Notepad++ plugin in late July 2026. Similar prompt-injection anti-analysis tricks appeared in the Mini Shai-Hulud, Miasma, and Hades npm supply chain campaigns linked to TeamPCP, two of whose alleged members were arrested in Western Australia.

The Hacker News · 14d agoThreat actor