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AI models' written reasoning steps correspond to distinct internal patterns, a new study finds

KAIST and Naver AI Lab researchers show LLM reasoning steps like extraction and computation map to distinct activation patterns, strongest in middle layers.

Researchers at KAIST and Naver AI Lab defined eight recurring reasoning operations, including extraction, decomposition, formula recall, deduction, and computation, and showed they correspond to separable activation patterns in Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen3-8B, and Gemma4-31B on math tasks, with GPT-5 labeling solution segments. The separation peaks in middle layers, holds even when a computation step produces a wrong answer, and goes beyond surface-level token choice. Findings replicated on Llama-3-8B, and classifiers trained on Qwen3-8B transferred to GPQA-Diamond and MATH-500. The authors note that using internal states for error detection or mid-generation steering remains future work.

The Decoder · 4d agoAI research2

Access Control as Verified Parse Constraints

Researchers verify a class of EverParse validators that correctly enforce access-control policies, deploying a machine-checked enforcement gate on seL4.

The paper targets enforcement-code bugs in commercial security gateways by proving that forward-only, backtrack-free EverParse validators are verified recognizers for a bounded finite-state class that includes access-control decision functions with fixed-offset fields and bounded disjunction. Encoding a bounded policy language into a fixed-size byte buffer allows an SMT solver to verify the enforcement code once, covering all byte values, policies, requests, and sessions. Editing rule content over a fixed endpoint set requires no new proof, while adding endpoints reruns the toolchain. A deployment on the seL4 microkernel ensures every request passes through the gate and unverified components cannot corrupt the enforcement chain.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch1

Sound Debloating of Redundant Checks in Zero-Knowledge Machine-Learning Circuits

Automated framework soundly removes up to 48.7% of redundant constraints in ezkl and zkml ZK-ML circuits, cutting prover time by up to 72.8%.

The framework uses whole-circuit abstract interpretation and a provenance graph to verify that each removed redundant check (range proofs, sign lookups, bit decompositions) remains entailed by the rest of the circuit, provably preserving soundness. It was evaluated on MLP, CNN, RNN, and transformer circuits generated by ezkl and zkml, with up to 25.3 million constraints. It removes up to 48.7% of constraints and reduces prover time by up to 72.8% without weakening security. Under-constrained circuits in deployed ZK systems have previously enabled attackers to forge transactions and bypass verification.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch1

ENCP: Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction for Vision-and-Language Navigation

ENCP calibrates conformal prediction per navigation episode, giving step-level coverage guarantees for vision-language navigation agents despite within-episode dependence.

Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction (ENCP) rescales a nonconformity score by a VLN policy's residual confidence and calibrates one maximum score per episode, preserving step-level coverage of at least 1−α despite dependence among steps within an episode. Across four VLN policies and three nonconformity scores on R2R and REVERIE, ENCP meets all reported empirical step-coverage targets in seen-to-unseen evaluation. The model-agnostic uncertainty estimates can signal when an agent should defer to a stronger predictor or human assistance.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

Do AI Coding Assistants Check Before They Install? A Pre-Registered Demand-Side Audit of Trust Signals in the Research Software Supply Chain

Pre-registered audit finds AI coding assistants verified provenance signals in only 9 of 1,920 trials before installing research software packages.

The study tested whether AI coding assistants check machine-readable trust signals such as SBOMs, signed releases, and provenance attestations before installing six open-source research software projects spanning HPC and quantum computing. Three models under two operating modes produced 1,920 registered trials scored from container logs. Provenance signals were opened in only 9 of 1,920 trials (0.5%) and zero of 384 control trials, with no trial running a verification command. The authors conclude publishing signals is insufficient and verification must be built into the program running the assistant.

Understanding the Usability of Cryptographic Verification Tools

Survey of Tamarin and ProVerif users reveals usability barriers: debugging non-termination, model validation, and opaque proof failures hinder cryptographic protocol verification.

The paper presents an exploratory human-centered survey of researchers, graduate students, and practitioners with hands-on experience using Tamarin, ProVerif, and related cryptographic protocol verification tools. Findings reveal usability barriers across the verification workflow, including difficulties debugging non-termination and performance issues plus the lack of systematic methods for validating formal models against real protocols. When proofs fail without concrete attacks, users commonly simplify models, add helper lemmas, and revisit modeling abstractions. Participants called for actionable diagnostics, clearer explanations of results, visualization, and automation for recurring proof tasks.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

You've Got a BUD in Me: Authenticated Reads from Per-Block Write Logs

Researchers propose BUD, per-block write-log digests enabling blockchain validators to serve historical membership and exclusion proofs far cheaper than state-wide tries.

The paper introduces Block Update Digests (BUD), which authenticate each block's write log with predecessor pointers, plus a SuperBUD and exponential hierarchy to turn long unchanged intervals into short proofs. Soundness against adversarial provers and up to f Byzantine validators is proven under archive, attestation, and committee evidence assumptions. Benchmarks show a 50x state-size increase raises the base-BUD path only 1.24x versus 3.1x for in-memory and 69.5x for disk-backed Merkle Patricia tries, with read payloads below 800 bytes and p99 warm verification at 146 microseconds.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

StepAudio 3 Realtime Technical Report

StepAudio 3 Realtime debuts an audio-language model with Think-While-Speaking reasoning, delivering full-duplex voice dialogue with top benchmark results.

StepAudio 3 Realtime is an audio-language foundation model built around a continuous listen-converse-think-act loop for real-time spoken interaction. Think-While-Speaking runs private reasoning in parallel with speech, reaching a 73.0 macro average on StepAudioChat in reasoning mode. The model reports 90.6 on MMSU, 98.9 overall on the Artificial Analysis Full-Duplex Bench, and 56.0% macro task success on tau-Voice. An integrated Voice Agent handles asynchronous tool execution without disrupting dialogue flow.

Hugging Face daily papers · 5d agoAI research

Beyond Solver Verdicts: Generative Reward Models for Autoformalization

Researchers introduce Generative Verification (GenV), a generative reward model achieving 0.961 AUROC in detecting unfaithful autoformalization that preserves solver verdicts.

The paper formalizes Verdict-Preserving-Unfaithfulness (VPU), a failure mode in neurosymbolic autoformalization where an incorrect encoding executes successfully and matches the expected solver verdict, and proves verdict-only verification is bounded to chance-level detection. The proposed Generative Verification (GenV) distills an offline Z3-equivalence oracle into a reference-free, continuous reference-equivalence score within the language model's vocabulary space. The oracle-mined verifier (GenV+HN) achieves 0.961 AUROC, generalizes zero-shot across unseen translators and formal styles, and yields an 11.3-point downstream accuracy gain in agentic test-time compute allocation. Mechanistic analysis with decision-projected logit lenses and sparse autoencoders shows the generative readout extracts precise spatial error coordinates without explicit localization training.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research1

Hackers Can Hide Malicious AI Commands Inside Normal English to Bypass Security Filters

Check Point's PuzzleMask technique hides malicious prompts in ordinary English that fast gatekeeper models miss but high-reasoning downstream models execute.

Check Point researchers disclosed PuzzleMask, a technique concealing policy-breaking instructions in natural-language prose without encodings or invisible characters. Fast screening models classified all 23 crafted wrappers as safe, while a high-reasoning model recovered and acted on the hidden instruction in 17 of 18 tests (94.4%). The gap stems from capability imbalance between gatekeeper and target models, with defenses including paraphrasing untrusted input, stricter self-referential wording rules, and output/tool-call monitoring.

Cyber Security News · 5d agoAI safety & security1

Register Tokens for Bounded-State Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models

Register tokens let diffusion language models like LLaDA and Dream carry reasoning state across cleared chunks, gaining up to 19.5 points on code.

Researchers propose register tokens: dedicated fixed-position tokens whose continuous hidden states are trained to carry reasoning progress across generation chunks in masked diffusion language models. After decoding and clearing a chunk, the model continues from the prompt and the carried register state instead of retaining earlier text. On LLaDA and Dream, registers outperform discrete-text carry on every benchmark, with gains up to 8.5 points on math and 19.5 points on code. Registers are especially effective for bounded code generation and can be further refined with reinforcement learning on long-horizon reasoning tasks.

Hugging Face daily papers · 3d agoAI research

Fresh-Challenge VDF Attestations for Model-Relative Response Latency

Fresh-Challenge VDF Attestations bind verifiable delay functions to unpredictable public challenges, yielding succinct evidence of model-relative response latency.

The paper specifies FCLA, a protocol composition that binds a VDF to an unpredictable public challenge, a message, and independently auditable release/receipt records. Under explicit assumptions about VDF sequentiality and a calibrated bound on an adversary's sequential evaluation rate, an accepted transcript is inconsistent with post-challenge generation. A benchmark of the public reference implementation confirms the expected evaluation-versus-verification separation on one documented machine. The contribution is a protocol design analysis, not a new VDF construction.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch

Cross-Model Agreement as a Deployment-Time Reliability Signal for Automatic Polyp Segmentation

Referee-Based Quality Estimation flags unreliable polyp segmentations at inference without ground truth, reaching ROC-AUC 0.960 with SegFormer-B0 referees.

RBQE measures agreement between a primary segmentation model and an independently trained referee on a 1,223-image external benchmark drawn from four public datasets. A cross-architecture SegFormer-B0 referee achieves the strongest signal (ROC-AUC 0.960), beating a Test-Time Augmentation baseline by 0.055 ROC-AUC under an identical protocol. Excluding trivially separable empty-mask cases, ROC-AUC falls to 0.876 (SegFormer-B0) and 0.783 (same-architecture control), but RBQE's margin over baselines widens. Progressive rejection of low-agreement predictions increases mean Dice of retained outputs, supporting selective prediction at the cost of one extra forward pass.

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

Efficient Branch-and-Bound Testing and Verification of zkVMs

ZEBRA verifies zkVM constraint systems via branch-and-bound cardinality counting, finding 11 zero-day bugs across five real-world zkVMs and running 51.5x faster than SMT verification.

ZEBRA reduces zkVM correctness to a solution-set cardinality problem requiring that each constraint system admit exactly one valid execution trace, eliminating redundancies like null-row padding and non-deterministic permutations before counting. It lifts analysis from finite-field witnesses to an integer interval lattice, exploiting that constraints across 5 real-world zkVMs use only 14.0% of theoretical connectivity capacity on average, enabling tight interval propagation. A parallel branch-and-bound search produces concrete counterexamples or certifies absence of violations within a bounded region. ZEBRA discovers 11 zero-day bugs (6 independently confirmed, 3 fixed), is 51.5x faster than SMT-based verification, and verifies 16.5 percentage points more instances.

arXiv cs.CR · 3d agoResearch

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

PuzzleMask: Abusing Plain Prose as a Covert AI Attack Vector

Check Point details PuzzleMask, a plain-prose technique that bypasses LLM gatekeeper policy checks, letting hidden payloads reach target models unreviewed.

Check Point Research describes PuzzleMask, a prompt-crafting technique that hides policy-violating payloads inside plain-English prose wrappers, bypassing quick LLM-based policy checks without emojis, Base64, or invisible formatting. The researchers tested 23 automated prompts against gatekeepers including GPT-4o-mini, GPT-OSS-Safeguard 20b, Claude 3 Haiku, and Llama Guard 3, and all were classified as safe despite policies that flagged the plain versions. When submitted to GPT-5 in thinking-high mode with a Python interpreter, the target model extracted and acted on the payload in over 90% of trials. The technique is not itself a jailbreak but can carry a jailbreak prompt as payload; mitigations include input paraphrasing, hardened gatekeeper policies, and output monitoring.

Check Point Researchupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

A*-Thought-V2: Efficient Latent Reasoning via Geometric Dynamics of LLM

A*-Thought-V2 compresses redundant chain-of-thought steps into latent tokens guided by hidden-state geometry, improving accuracy up to 2.6% while halving response length.

A*-Thought-V2 models chain-of-thought as a hidden-state trajectory projected into a 3D PCA space and compresses steps whose transitions deviate from the question-to-solution direction into continuous latent tokens, keeping aligned steps explicit. Training uses stepwise embedding forcing and label forcing with soft multi-modal vocabulary supervision. On Qwen3.5-9B and Qwen3.6-27B across six in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks it improves average accuracy by up to 2.6%, cuts response length by up to half, and raises Accuracy per Computation Unit 2.29x while reducing preprocessing and training time by 94.6% and up to 80.3%.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

E2A-Bench: Benchmarking Evidence-to-Action Reliability in Financial Chart Reasoning

E2A-Bench, a 969-query financial chart reasoning benchmark, finds VLMs fail evidence-to-action consistency, with fine-tuning amplifying BUY:SELL bias 4-6x.

E2A-Bench is a 969-query benchmark built from 323 HS300 constituents across three input modalities with deterministic OHLCV-derived evidence anchors, evaluating grounding, reasoning-action consistency, evidence-confidence calibration, and directional coverage via UCR, RCI, ECI, and NDR metrics. Testing 20 VLMs showed the lowest-hallucination model ranked near the bottom on coverage with only 6.4% directional coverage, and oracle-aided verification reduced unsupported claims but could collapse coverage. Financial fine-tuning amplified the BUY:SELL ratio by factors of 4.21 to 4.68 across base-fine-tuned pairs.

Hugging Face daily papers · 4d agoAI research

The Model Proposes, the Code Disposes: A Pre-Registered Ablation of a Verifier-and-Acceptance Stage in an LLM-Orchestrated Offensive-Security Agent

Pre-registered ablation finds a model verifier stage in an LLM offensive-security agent suppresses findings; removing it eliminated suppression with precision tradeoff.

The paper evaluates a verifier-and-acceptance stage in an LLM-orchestrated offensive-security agent via a pre-registered 20-run confirmatory ablation and a 2x2 factorial study with 40 runs on vulnerable lab targets. Removing the stage eliminated pre-report suppression (median 2 vs 0 findings, p = 0.00003) but reduced model-blinded shipped precision (0.471 vs 0.353, p = 0.0087). Suppression was attributed to the model verifier rather than deterministic acceptance rules, and an instrumented canary recorded zero external contacts in all 60 runs. The full design retained 93.8% of model-adjudicated true candidates but failed its pre-registered non-inferiority floor of 0.90.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

The Router Within: Eliciting Native Skill Routing from a Frozen LLM

Gavel reads skill-routing signals from a frozen LLM's forward passes with two linear maps, beating retrieval pipelines by up to 21.9 points.

Gavel (Glance And Verdict) shows a frozen agent LLM already contains skill-routing signals in its forward passes, read out via two trained linear maps without loading skill text into context. A glance step scores the full library using mid-layer states and per-skill banks built in one forward pass; a verdict step fuses the model's own likelihood and yes/no judgment as a product of experts. Trained once, it transfers zero-shot to three public benchmarks and SkillTraj (372 simulated agent trajectories); on Qwen3-32B it beats progressive disclosure and retrieve-and-rerank pipelines adding 1.2B-16B external parameters by up to 13.4 points (21.9 mid-rollout).

The Verifiable Action Card: Trustworthy Human-in-the-Loop Control for Secure Autonomous Agentsnew

Verifiable Action Card architecture blocks indirect prompt injection in agentic browsers, cutting attack success from 68-100% to 0%.

Researchers propose VAC, a browser-architecture defense that reconstructs approval prompts from the ground-truth pending action and trusted intent provenance, rendering them out-of-band in trusted browser chrome. On a 24-scenario benchmark covering confused-deputy attacks, dialog forging, and indirect prompt injection, attack success fell from 68-100% to 0% across evaluated LLMs, with 78% legitimate-task completion and a 0% false-block rate. Approval is bound to the exact action re-verified at dispatch.

arXiv cs.CR · 18h agoAI safety & security

Echo: Learning-based Matching Decompilation using Trusted Back Translationnew

Researchers introduce Echo, a matching decompiler using trusted back-translation that roughly doubles exact-match rates and outperforms GPT-5.6 and Codex on Mirai.

Echo performs matching decompilation by using compilation as trusted feedback for iterative search: a domain-specific model generates candidate code and compilation configurations, which are recompiled, compared at assembly level, and repaired via rule-based rewriting, neural refinement, and reasoning-based refinement. On function-level benchmarks, Echo produces 2.43x more exact matches than the strongest baseline and the highest structural similarity to ground truth. On the Mirai malware binary, it matches 2.75x and 7.4x as many functions as GPT-5.6 and Codex, respectively.

arXiv cs.CR · 14h agoResearch

MIT creates method to force AI to comply with safety rules

MIT researchers published HardFlow, a method enforcing hard safety constraints on flow-matching generative models' final outputs without retraining.

MIT researchers led by Zeyang Li and Navid Azizan developed HardFlow, a trajectory-optimization method that enforces strict, non-negotiable constraints on flow-matching generative models by checking rule satisfaction only at the final generation step. Published in IEEE TPAMI, it outperformed six rival projection and guidance methods on four simulated benchmarks including D3IL robotic manipulation, Maze2D, physical process control, and image editing. All results are simulation-only, with no independent reproduction yet reported.

Scaling Verification of Cryptographic Software with Aeneas, Rust, and Lean

Microsoft SymCrypt implementations of SHA-3 and ML-KEM verified in Lean via Aeneas-extracted Rust models, with AI agents writing proofs.

The paper develops a methodology for verifying production Rust cryptographic code by using Aeneas to extract pure models into Lean, avoiding low-level pointer and aliasing reasoning. Applied to Microsoft's SymCrypt, it verifies SHA-3 and ML-KEM implementations ported from C to Rust and extends SymCrypt with FrodoKEM, ML-DSA, and HPKE. A 237 KLOC Lean development establishes safety, panic-freedom, and functional correctness of 16.7 KLOC of Rust supporting post-quantum cipher suites on x86-64 and ARM. AI agents autonomously write formal proofs verified by the Lean kernel, and evaluation shows verified Rust meets SymCrypt's performance and portability requirements.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch1

TRACE: Trajectory-robust Admission with Evidence Ordering for Efficient GUI Agents

TRACE, a training-free visual token pruning framework, cuts GUI agent inference latency and memory while keeping trajectory-wide visual evidence reusable.

TRACE is a training-free framework for trajectory-robust admission and coverage-aware evidence ordering that prunes high-resolution screenshot tokens accumulated in GUI agent trajectories. It ranks visual evidence using a query-independent layout-derived interaction prior combined with instruction relevance and feature novelty, and reserves part of the budget for native tokens distributed across the screen to repair spatial coverage. A monotone KV contraction incrementally compresses retired frames into compact session state, avoiding repeated visual encoding or pruning. Experiments across six GUI benchmarks and diverse models verify effectiveness under tight budgets, with source code to be released.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Securing quantum error correction against misleading advice from AI agentsnew

Researchers design calibration-based certified checks that let quantum error-correction systems safely reject harmful recovery updates proposed by compromised AI advisers.

The paper shows that opposite coherent X rotations in an odd-distance square toric code yield identical passive syndrome histories, creating ambiguity an AI adviser could exploit to recommend harmful recovery updates. It introduces terminal logical measurements on calibration states plus an independent evaluator that accepts updates only when calibration uncertainty and drift bounds certify improvement. Simulated advice attacks showed calibration-confidence checks reject harmful proposals while retaining most beneficial updates, and the authors derive sufficient limits on calibration age.

arXiv cs.CR · 11h agoAI safety & security

CertiFlash: A Formal Verification Framework for Flash Translation Layers in Computational Solid State Drives

CertiFlash provides machine-checked formal verification of SSD flash translation layers, proving isolation, integrity, and ownership invariants to prevent tenant data leaks.

CertiFlash is an open-source formal verification framework for Flash Translation Layers (FTL) in computational SSDs, mechanized in the Rocq proof assistant. It shows that a faulty FTL can corrupt device state at five surfaces (e.g., leaking data between tenants or dropping integrity tags), demonstrated on a DaisyPlus OpenSSD. Designers prove once that every operation of a general FTL model preserves a global invariant covering mapping, isolation, integrity, ownership, and allocation; new designs need only discharge five hypotheses. Across four case studies, added effort was 27-3,231 lines against a 16,489-line framework.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch1

ActReview: Rebuttal-Guided Training Data and Rubric Rewards for Actionable Peer Review Generation

ActReview post-trains Qwen3-8B-Base on OpenReview rebuttals to generate actionable peer-review feedback with grounded revision suggestions, benchmarked on 1,000 curated instances.

The paper defines Actionable Peer-review Generation as diagnostic claim generation plus revision suggestion generation and introduces ActReview, a rebuttal-guided post-training framework. From OpenReview review-rebuttal threads the authors build ActReview-40K, aligning reviewer weaknesses with author responses grounded in localized paper evidence, and post-train Qwen3-8B-Base with multi-task SFT followed by GRPO using weakness-specific rubric rewards. They also release ActReview-Bench, a human-curated 1,000-instance benchmark, on which ActReview outperforms prior specialized review-generation models on actionability and grounding while remaining competitive with strong prompt-based LLMs. Human evaluation confirms improved revision usefulness but identifies a remaining gap in technical accuracy.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

Safety for Whom? Boundary-Aware Self-Distillation for Controlled LLM Safety Refusal

A self-distillation safety framework tunes narrow-boundary refusals in Qwen3-8B, raising target-domain refusal to 84.75% while cutting over-refusal from 15.20% to 5.20%.

The paper formulates narrow-boundary safety, where deployments need refusals within specific topics rather than whole subjects, and proposes an offline self-generated framework with controlled topic generation, escalating retries, and harmful-benign boundary pairs. On political persuasion with Qwen3-8B, the method raised target-domain refusal from 9.47% to 84.75% and cut the mean unsafe-response rate across three broader benchmarks from 26.26% to 0.14%. Verified target-model responses reduced over-refusal from 15.20% to 5.20%, and boundary-pair data cut comply-side over-refusal on held-out pairs from 32.94% to 4.16%. Results show data composition controls the safety-usability trade-off and alignment should be evaluated on both sides of the refusal boundary.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI safety & security1

OPEN-1B: A Fully Auditable Training Run

Open-1B releases a 1B-parameter model with bitwise-reproducible training, letting independent auditors verify every step of the run on commodity hardware.

The paper introduces a 'fully auditable' tier of model transparency: every training operation is reproducible with bitwise certainty on heterogeneous commodity hardware by imposing definite ordering on GPU kernel reductions, data batch ordering, and collective communication. Because replaying a full run on one machine is infeasible, a collective verification scheme lets many independent auditors certify individual steps covering the whole run. The authors release Open-1B with its full pretraining dataset, every intermediate checkpoint, the training codebase, and an audit harness. This rules out undisclosed data, injected biases, or backdoors that proof-of-learning or proof-of-training-data techniques cannot exclude.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research