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FlowBalance: Verifier-Grounded Self-Improvement from On-Policy Reasoning Experience

FlowBalance is a verifier-grounded self-improvement method that beats FlowRL on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B math reasoning while improving training stability.

FlowBalance calibrates dense self-guidance scores with verifier-derived group advantages: guidance is retained on positive-advantage trajectories, reversed on negative-advantage trajectories, and disabled when rollout groups show no outcome preference. The method exponentially reweights a reference policy via trajectory balance, with guarantees including within-group contrast preservation and a minimum-change reverse-KL characterization. On mathematical reasoning it outperforms FlowRL on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B, trains faster and more stably, avoids direct OPSD's response-length collapse, and shows higher correct-strategy diversity on AIME24.

Hugging Face daily papers · 13d agoAI research

PhysStream: Streaming Physics-Grounded Video Generation with Structured Scene Memory and Fine-Grained Motion Control

PhysStream autoregressive video model enables physics-grounded mid-generation motion control, cutting trajectory error 12% and FVMD 33% versus strongest baselines.

PhysStream is an autoregressive image-to-video model that incorporates structured scene memory—positional maps and object tracking maps derived online from previously generated frames—and supports fine-grained motion control via sparse velocity-increment signals encoding physical quantities. Training proceeds in two stages: a bidirectional model finetuned with motion-control conditioning, then a causal autoregressive model with scene memory. It reduces motion distribution distance (FVMD) by 33% and trajectory error by 12% over the strongest baselines, and human evaluators prefer it in over 85% of in-the-wild comparisons.

FreeFlow: A Bias-free Hierarchical Transformer for Optical Flow Estimation

FreeFlow is a bias-free hierarchical transformer achieving state-of-the-art optical flow results on Sintel, KITTI-2015, and Spring benchmarks.

FreeFlow replaces task-specific inductive biases like correlation volumes and iterative warping with a single feed-forward encoder-decoder combining window, shifted-window, and reduced-resolution global attention. It reaches 0.68/1.48 EPE on Sintel Clean/Final, 3.23 Fl-all on KITTI-2015, and 3.192 1px on Spring. The architecture scales consistently from small to large variants and remains memory efficient at 1080p inference.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

Model-Aware Schedules Improve Generation via Fiberwise Optimal Transport

Researchers introduce model-aware diffusion schedules via fiberwise optimal transport, cutting flow-matching FID on CIFAR-10 by 38.6% at 16 function evaluations.

The paper proposes constructing diffusion and flow-matching sampling schedules from a fiberwise prediction risk defined via optimal transport, combined with coefficient-path kinetic action, yielding a closed-form time allocation. Across DDPM and flow-matching experiments spanning targets, datasets, and architectures, the schedules beat model-agnostic baselines, including a 38.6% relative FID reduction for flow matching on CIFAR-10 at 16 function evaluations. Normalized fiberwise-risk profiles from independently trained models align closely, suggesting empirical universality, and a frozen analytic allocation template retains most of the gains.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

Embedded Graph Flows for Categorical Graph Generation

Researchers propose Embedded Graph Flows, a generative model with learned categorical embeddings that beats DiGress and GruM on molecular graph benchmarks.

Embedded Graph Flows (EGF) learns continuous embeddings for node and unordered-edge categories and transports Gaussian noise toward these endpoints using a permutation-equivariant graph transformer. On QM9 it achieves the best result on all four reported metrics, with a Fréchet ChemNet Distance of 0.150 versus 0.717 for DiGress and 0.812 for GruM. On ZINC250k it retains the lowest NSPDK MMD, indicating close agreement with local substructures of reference molecules. Code is released on GitHub.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research1

Likelihood-free inference with nuisance parameters through normalizing flows

Researchers decompose normalizing flows to derive near-pivotal statistics for likelihood-free inference with nuisance parameters, recovering the t-test and beating Welch limits.

A new paper decomposes neural-network normalizing flows to uncover pivotal statistics in the presence of nuisance parameters using only a sample generator from the distribution of interest. The statistic is near-pivotal in the sense of minimum average KL-divergence of its p-values and can incorporate prior knowledge of group invariances such as translation and scale. Experiments show it recovers the one-sample t-test almost exactly, outperforms the Welch test on worst-case size over a constrained variance-ratio range, and delivers higher power and much faster runtime than profile likelihood-ratio techniques on small-to-moderate samples.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research

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.

When the World Lies: Backdoor Attacks on Latent World Models for Downstream Control

A poisoned world-model checkpoint hijacks downstream controllers without an explicit trigger rule, passing clean-data evaluation while steering 100% of triggered actions.

Researchers show that a released pretrained world-model checkpoint acts as a supply-chain backdoor for downstream control. The poisoned model routes trigger-bearing observations into a chosen latent region and reshapes dynamics so the victim's own Dreamer-style actor training or MPC/CEM planning re-discovers attacker-targeted actions. The attack hijacks 100% of triggered steps in the strongest settings while retaining roughly 75% clean-task success and passing standard clean-data diagnostics. Moderate clean fine-tuning fails to remove the backdoor without substantially degrading clean control.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoAI safety & security

Critical Langflow Vulnerability Exploited as Attacks on AI Platform Rise

Attacks exploiting CVE-2026-0768, a critical vulnerability in the Langflow low-code AI platform, are rising amid growing adversary attention this year.

CVE-2026-0768 is a critical vulnerability in Langflow, a low-code AI development platform, with exploitation attacks now rising. Dark Reading notes the platform has drawn increasing adversary attention in 2026. Organizations running exposed Langflow instances face elevated risk and should patch promptly and review instances for compromise.

Dark Reading · 14d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-07681

thttpd v2.26 Stack-Based Buffer Overflow in thttpd redirect CGI Program

The redirect CGI program shipped with thttpd v2.26 has a stack buffer overflow that unauthenticated attackers can trigger for crashes or possible code execution.

A stack-based buffer overflow exists in the redirect CGI program distributed with thttpd v2.26. Unsafe string concatenation when constructing redirect URLs from attacker-controlled CGI environment variables causes the overflow. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can trigger it via a crafted HTTP request, crashing the CGI process and causing denial of service. In environments lacking modern exploit mitigations, code execution may also be possible.

Full Disclosure · 12d agoVulnerability

When Does Scale-Invariant Optimization Become Unstable? An Exact Schedule Law with Weight Decay

Researchers derive an exact law linking learning-rate schedules and weight decay in normalized networks, pinpointing when scale-invariant optimization destabilizes.

The paper shows that normalization makes large parts of neural networks scale-invariant, creating a hidden feedback loop where learning-rate schedules and weight decay interact through the parameter norm to control the effective optimizer step. An exact discrete-time law with a single scalar quantity separates contraction- and expansion-dominated effective learning-rate regimes, and the balance point is intrinsically unstable, so constant learning rate with weight decay produces recurrent behavior instead of a stable equilibrium. A unified homogeneous-optimizer framework explains why adaptive methods stabilize more weakly under normalization. The law is validated with high precision on MLPs, CNNs, and GPT-2 across MNIST, CIFAR, WikiText, and OpenWebText, with code released on GitHub.

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

U.S. CISA adds a MLflow flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

CISA added actively exploited MLflow SSRF flaw CVE-2026-64849 (CVSS 9.3) to its KEV catalog; attackers are stealing cloud credentials from exposed instances.

CISA added CVE-2026-64849, a critical unauthenticated server-side request forgery in MLflow, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The flaw affects MLflow versions before 3.15.0 and allows unauthenticated attackers to reach internal services including cloud metadata endpoints, exposing temporary cloud credentials. watchTowr observed in-the-wild exploitation exfiltrating credentials and secrets, plus widespread scanning of exposed MLflow instances within hours of the CVE's assignment on August 17, 2026. MLflow is an open-source platform for managing the machine learning and AI development lifecycle with over 60 million monthly downloads.

Security Affairs · 27d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-64849

[dos] Nmap 7.99 - Extension Header Integer Underflow

A proof-of-concept denial-of-service exploit for Nmap 7.99 leverages an integer underflow in extension header parsing to crash the scanner.

Exploit-DB lists a denial-of-service proof of concept targeting Nmap version 7.99. The flaw is an integer underflow when handling extension headers, which can crash the scanner. No exploitation in the wild or patch details are mentioned in the listing.

Exploit-DB · Aug 17, 2026Exploit / PoC1

[webapps] Langflow 1.8.4 - Path Traversal to Remote Code Execution

A path traversal to remote code execution exploit for Langflow 1.8.4, a popular LLM application builder, was published on Exploit-DB.

Exploit-DB lists a proof-of-concept exploit chaining path traversal to remote code execution in Langflow 1.8.4, an open-source tool used to build LLM applications and agents. The chain allows an attacker to write arbitrary files outside the intended directory and achieve code execution on the host. The provided text does not include a CVE identifier or reports of exploitation in the wild, but RCE in a widely deployed AI tooling product is notable for defenders.

Exploit-DB · 16d agoExploit / PoC1

Context Engineering Inside the Harness: 4 Mechanisms That Beat Context Overflow and Goal Loss on Long-Horizon Tasks

Survey of four harness mechanisms—context budgeting, compaction, todo-state, and memory—that keep long-horizon LLM agents on task across 200+ tool calls.

The article details how agent harnesses, not larger context windows, solve context overflow and goal loss on long-horizon tasks, citing Chroma's Context Rot report showing 18 LLMs (GPT-4.1, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, Qwen3) degrade on long inputs. Concrete implementations include LangChain Deep Agents offloading tool responses over 20,000 tokens to the filesystem and truncating old tool calls at 85% window usage, and Claude Code capping auto memory at 25KB while re-reading the 5 most recently modified files after compaction. OpenAI's Responses API now offers server-side compaction via context_management with a standalone /responses/compact endpoint, which Codex uses for long-running coding tasks. Manus reports a roughly 100:1 input-to-output token ratio per ~50-tool-call task, motivating todo.md state recitation to prevent goal drift.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoAI research1

HybridFLow: SDN-Orchestrated Client Partitioning for Hybrid Federated Learning

HybridFLow uses SDN topology visibility to partition federated-learning clients into sync/async groups, reaching 80% accuracy 33-40% faster than SmartFLow.

HybridFLow is a closed-loop, SDN-driven orchestration framework for hybrid federated learning that integrates network-layer intelligence into cross-silo training. It leverages the SDN controller's global topology view to generate calibrated per-client communication-time estimates, partitioning clients into synchronous and asynchronous groups while balancing round latency and update staleness, with measured times fed back after each round. Across multiple network topologies it reaches 80% target accuracy 33-40% faster than SmartFLow and cuts average round duration by 30-40 seconds, while FedAsync fails to reach target accuracy under non-IID data.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research

graphql-go/graphql <= 0.8.1: quadratic CPU-exhaustion DoS via OverlappingFieldsCanBeMergedRule

Unauthenticated quadratic CPU-exhaustion DoS disclosed in graphql-go/graphql up to v0.8.1 via OverlappingFieldsCanBeMergedRule; no fixed version exists.

Evgenios Gkritsis publicly disclosed an algorithmic-complexity denial-of-service flaw in github.com/graphql-go/graphql affecting all released versions up to and including v0.8.1. The defect is triggered via the OverlappingFieldsCanBeMergedRule validation, is unauthenticated and network-reachable, and causes quadratic CPU exhaustion. No fixed version exists; the disclosure was public because the project has no private security-reporting channel or SECURITY.md.

oss-security · 1d agoVulnerability

Heap overflow in kernel driver due to missing size validation

Fortinet fixes a CVSS 7.3 heap overflow in the FortiClient Windows kernel driver enabling code execution via crafted DNS responses.

Fortinet PSIRT advisory FG-IR-26-156, revised 2026-08-12, describes a heap-based buffer overflow (CWE-120, buffer copy without checking input size) in the FortiClient Windows kernel driver, scored CVSSv3 7.3. An unauthenticated attacker positioned to alter or craft DNS responses for a targeted host could execute arbitrary code via malicious packets. No CVE identifier or exploitation status is provided in the advisory text, so administrators should check the full bulletin for affected versions and fixed releases.

Fortinet PSIRT · Aug 12, 2026Advisory

A Princeton Researcher Proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) that Carries Decoder State across Every Token, Fixing 96 Blocks per Token with Unbounded Temporal Depth

Princeton researcher Yifan Zhang proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer, carrying full decoder state across every token for unbounded temporal depth.

Yifan Zhang's technical report defines the Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT), pairing a causal encoder with a recurrent decoder whose final output and layerwise sliding-window attention cache carry into every subsequent token with no prompt-response boundary reset. The reference configuration ties 48 encoder and 48 decoder layers, executing 96 logical blocks per token while the state path grows to 48t blocks after t tokens at fixed per-token compute. The report details RL replay contracts that rebuild all states under current parameters and exact prefix snapshots for multi-turn serving, but explicitly reports no measured efficiency, reasoning quality, or scaling results.

MarkTechPost · 2d agoAI research1

Attackers Exploit MLflow SSRF Flaw to Steal Cloud Credentials and Secrets

Attackers exploit MLflow SSRF CVE-2026-64849 (CVSS 9.3) to steal cloud credentials; CISA added it to KEV; FUXA flaw CVE-2026-25895 is being scanned.

watchTowr observed exploitation of MLflow CVE-2026-64849, an unauthenticated SSRF (CVSS 9.3) affecting versions below 3.15.0, within hours of CVE assignment on August 17, 2026, with attackers abusing model-registry webhooks to reach cloud metadata endpoints and exfiltrate credentials and secrets. CISA added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on August 19, 2026, with a September 2 patch deadline for federal civilian agencies. VulnCheck reported scanning of FUXA CVE-2026-25895 (missing authentication plus path traversal, CVSS 9.5, versions through 1.2.9) beginning August 18; about 60 FUXA instances are exposed and no RCE payloads have been dropped yet.

The Hacker News · 27d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-64849CVE-2026-25895CVE-2026-25939+1 CVEs

Divide, Consult, Conquer: Capability Laundering Through Aligned LLMs

Attack shows unaligned orchestrators can launder capabilities from aligned frontier LLMs via benign subtask consultation, raising Gemma-4-31B CBRN rubric score from 62.3 to 83.1.

The paper introduces capability laundering, where a weaker unaligned model decomposes a harmful task into benign-looking subproblems, queries a stronger aligned model on each, and recombines answers locally, bypassing per-interaction safety evaluations. Evaluation used GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, and Grok-4.3 as consultants to four local orchestrators on CyBench, BountyBench, and CBRN tasks. On CyBench, Gemma-4-31B recovered 8/14 candidate tasks with GPT-5.5 and 7/9 with Opus, while Muse-Glimmer-30B recovered none. Across an eight-step hypothetical bioweapon attack chain, consultation raised Gemma-4-31B's mean rubric score from 62.3 to 83.1, exposing a gap in defenses that only refuse complete harmful tasks.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoAI safety & security

Apple Xcode Integer Underflow Flaw Lets Crafted Archives Leak Memory and Crash Builds

Researchers disclosed an integer underflow in Apple's Mach-O archive parser that lets crafted static libraries crash Xcode builds or leak process memory.

SecureLayer7 disclosed an integer underflow in the mach_o::Archive::Entry::name() function in Apple's open-source dyld project, reported to Apple Product Security on May 23, 2026, with no public patch after more than 90 days. Crafted static archives (.a files) cause the parser's unsigned index to wrap to SIZE_MAX, producing SIGSEGV crashes in the ld-prime linker, out-of-bounds reads that may print adjacent memory to stderr, or SIGABRT in libtool and ranlib. The modern parser is used by ld-prime, the default linker for arm64, arm64e, and x86_64 since Xcode 15, while legacy ld-classic is unaffected. Crafted archives need only be processed, creating supply-chain risk via vendored SDKs, binary dependencies, and CI pipelines.

GBHackers · 5d agoVulnerability1

Learning Multimodal One-step Flow Policy via Value-weighted Optimal Transport

OptiFlow learns one-step multimodal flow policies for offline RL via state-wise entropic optimal transport, avoiding critic overestimation and mode collapse.

The paper introduces OptiFlow, a framework that frames one-step flow policy learning as a structured sample-allocation problem in offline reinforcement learning. It jointly trains a value-aware reference flow policy and a one-step policy, coupling action samples through state-wise entropic optimal transport where critic values set distillation priority and action-distance cost ensures geometrically compatible pairings. By avoiding direct critic maximization, it anchors the policy to high-value dataset-supported modes without out-of-distribution divergence. Code is released on GitHub and the method performs strongly across diverse offline RL benchmarks.

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

The GNU C Library security advisories update for 2026-09-14

glibc advisory GLIBC-SA-2026-0017 discloses a buffer overflow in strfmon/strfmon_l affecting versions 2.38 through 2.44.

The GNU C Library published security advisories including GLIBC-SA-2026-0017, a buffer overflow in strfmon and strfmon_l. Calling these functions with right-justified width padding conversions can write past the end of the caller-supplied output buffer in glibc 2.38 to 2.44. Exploitation requires an application code path that calls strfmon with attacker-influenced parameters.

oss-security · 1d agoVulnerability 2 sources

Perplexity Details Its GPU Embedding Stack: How Ivy, Tulip and ROSE Serve pplx-embed

Perplexity details its GPU embedding serving stack (Ivy, Tulip, ROSE), which reuses LLM prefill/decode kernels, CUDA graphs, and LazyTensors to cut launch overhead.

Perplexity engineers published a deep dive on the serving infrastructure behind pplx-embed, used across Perplexity Search and its API platform. The stack comprises Ivy (Rust HTTP gateway), Tulip (gRPC scheduling and batching), and ROSE (Runtime-Optimized Serving Engine), which reuses LLM prefill and decode kernels rather than running a separate embedding engine. Optimizations include whole-model CUDA graphs with lazy capture and a LazyTensor abstraction that overlaps CPU batch preparation with in-flight GPU work. Benchmarks are reported against vLLM v0.22.0 in BF16, with FlashAttention 4 generally fastest but FlashInfer 3 winning on Qwen-based models at very long sequence lengths.

MarkTechPost · 10d agoAI tools & infra1

Inside NVIDIA’s cuDNN Graph API: Fusion, Autotuning, and Plan Reuse with cuDNN Frontend

MarkTechPost tutorial walks through NVIDIA's cuDNN Frontend graph API, covering kernel fusion, autotuning, plan reuse, and CUDA graph capture on Colab GPUs.

The tutorial explains how to express GPU computations as operation graphs via the cuDNN Frontend graph API, running the five-step build pipeline of validate, build operation graph, create execution plans, check support, and build plans. It progresses from a single fused convolution with bias and ReLU to autotuning across engine configs, FP8-style epilogues, attention, plan serialization, dynamic shapes, and CUDA graph capture. Each kernel is benchmarked against a PyTorch reference on a single Colab GPU to verify correctness and measure cost. The piece also covers practical setup issues like making libcudnn.so visible to the frontend's dynamic loader.

MarkTechPost · 12h agoAI tools & infra

Privacy Failure in Split-LLM Training, The Returned Gradient Nullifies the Decoys

Researchers show split-LLM training leaks privacy via zero-valued gradients on decoy rows, exposing which activations are real despite passing forward-channel checks.

A systems-security case study of a two-node split-LLM training setup found that the returned output gradient from an Untrusted Cloud Node is exactly zero for decoy rows, revealing which rows are real. Across nine seeds, zero patterns identified real rows in 4,096 of 4,096 frames per run, and an attack on frame contents recovered 0.65 to 1.50 percentage points of extra tokens over a baseline. Both datasets passed forward-channel privacy and quality checks but failed once the returned gradient was included. Row-wise gradient clipping and noise closed the leak for roughly 0.01 nats of held-out cross-entropy, though five unmeasured attack classes remain.

ZDI-26-591: NVIDIA TensorRT ONNX File Parsing Heap-based Buffer Overflow Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

ZDI disclosed a heap-based buffer overflow RCE (CVE-2026-24272, CVSS 7.8) in NVIDIA TensorRT ONNX parsing, requiring user interaction to exploit.

The Zero Day Initiative published advisory ZDI-26-591 covering a heap-based buffer overflow in NVIDIA TensorRT's ONNX file parsing. Successful exploitation allows remote code execution when a user opens a malicious ONNX file or visits a crafted page. ZDI rated the vulnerability CVSS 7.8 and assigned CVE-2026-24272.

Scalability Analysis of Distributed Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Training on High-Performance Computing Systems

An empirical study shows distributed Kolmogorov-Arnold Network training reaches 74.7% parallel efficiency at 8 A100 GPUs, with overheads driven by All-Reduce choices.

The study evaluates data-parallel Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) training on the FinisTerrae III supercomputer using up to 8 NVIDIA A100 GPUs across 4 nodes with PyTorch Distributed Data Parallel. Strong scaling yields 5.97x speedup and 74.7% parallel efficiency at 8 GPUs, comparable to conventional deep learning workloads, while communication overhead ranges from 1.3% to 6.1%, driven mainly by All-Reduce algorithm selection and inter-node latency rather than KAN's edge-wise gradient structure. Weak scaling shows an initial single-to-multi-GPU throughput drop followed by stability, and the parameter-to-memory ratio improves with model size even as training time scales unfavorably. The authors provide GPU topology and model-size deployment guidelines for KAN training.

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