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Scaling Automatic Research Agents via World Models

WMRL replaces environment execution with a world model in RL, accelerating research-agent post-training 3-4x and letting 4B/9B agents beat 48B/120B open-weight agents.

The paper identifies that environment execution dominates RL training cost for automatic research agents because each execution occupies an exclusive sandbox while generation batches efficiently. World Model RL (WMRL) substitutes a learned world model for execution, with Online Debiasing and Inverse-Variance Denoising to handle reward bias and noise, and the paper proves both improve convergence guarantees. WMRL accelerates training 3-4x across tasks and outperforms standard RL baselines; post-trained 4B and 9B agents beat 48B and 120B open-weight agents on held-out benchmarks. WMRL also transfers to post-training embodied VLA policies.

Hugging Face daily papers · 19d agoAI research1

Plug 'n' Pray: Agentic LLM-based Detection of Potential Log File Exposures in Third-Party Content Management System Plugins

Agentic LLM analysis validates 79 log file exposures across 62 of the 300 most-installed WordPress plugins, covering 250M+ active installations.

Researchers built an agentic LLM-based framework combining static and dynamic analysis to automatically detect insecure log files created by WordPress plugins. Scanning the 300 most-installed plugins, which account for roughly 75% of all active installations in the official ecosystem, it produced 81 findings with 79 manually reproduced across 62 plugins. Insufficiently secured log files can disclose credentials and personal data and have led to website compromises. The authors derive a taxonomy of log path and protection patterns and best practices, finding multi-layered protection often absent.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

MetroLLM-Bench: Evaluating Language Models as Transit Kiosk Runtimes

MetroLLM-Bench is a 955-case benchmark testing language models as transit kiosk tool-calling runtimes across six real metro systems.

The benchmark covers 37-414-station metro systems and eleven task categories including routing, fare calculation, disruptions, accessibility, and adversarial input, with 14 deterministic and 8 semantic scoring components. Of 26 models from six vendors, a PEFT-tuned 4B Qwen 3.5 student scored 91.3 on Tier 1, exceeding GPT-5.6 (90.6/90.0), while Muse Glimmer 30B led the composite ranking. A deterministic rule-based baseline reached 84.6, and PEFT gains over base models shrank from +7.03 points at 2B to -0.91 at 27B.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Expert-Space Exploration in MoE Reinforcement Learning

ESRL explores MoE expert-routing space during RL, lifting Qwen3-30B-A3B Pass@1 by 3.2 points over GRPO at no extra cost.

ESRL (Expert-Space Exploration Reinforcement Learning) is an architecture-aware framework that treats expert routing in Mixture-of-Experts models as an additional source of rollout diversity. It preserves high-confidence experts as anchors, restricts stochastic routing to a plausible candidate pool, adapts perturbation strength to router entropy, and replays recorded expert paths during policy optimization. ESRL achieves the best performance across top-K, top-1, and shared-expert routing backbones on mathematics, science, and code tasks; on Qwen3-30B-A3B it improves average Pass@1 and Pass@8 over GRPO by 3.2 and 4.5 percentage points respectively, without additional sampling or compute.

llm 0.34

Version 0.34 of Simon Willison's llm CLI adds response-duration metrics to log output, plus bug fixes and faster log querying.

The open-source llm command-line tool for interacting with large language models released version 0.34. The headline change adds response duration in milliseconds and human-readable form to llm logs --usage Markdown output, plus a new duration_ms field in llm logs --short. The release includes several contributed bug fixes and a significant performance improvement to llm logs, alongside the related llm-openrouter 0.7.1 release.

Simon Willison · 14d agoAI tools & infra1

MInTRL: Off-policy Intervention can boost On-policy RL

MInTRL injects sparse judge corrections into on-policy RL rollouts, expanding exploration beyond on-policy sampling while preserving learnability on math and code benchmarks.

Minimal Intervention Reinforcement Learning periodically has a judge-intervention policy replace erroneous suffixes of the current policy's output with short corrections, then returns control, keeping trajectories largely on-policy. Training uses a sequence-level advantage-regression objective that removes the need for importance sampling. Across math and code benchmarks it consistently beats standard on-policy and off-policy baselines, remains effective with self-intervention, and performs best at moderate intervention intensity.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

Litelm: LiteLLM Without the Bloat

New open-source project Litelm launched on GitHub as a leaner alternative to the LiteLLM multi-provider LLM gateway.

Litelm is a community-published GitHub project positioned as a stripped-down alternative to LiteLLM, a widely used gateway/SDK for routing requests to multiple LLM providers. The post drew modest attention on Hacker News with 45 points and 17 comments. The listing provides no further technical details, benchmarks, or feature specifics.

Large Language Models for HVAC Operations in Building Energy Systems: A Critical Review of Methods, Applications, and Deployment Readiness

Systematic review of 66 studies finds LLMs for HVAC operations are mostly research-stage, with no ready-now deployment and only four pilot-level studies.

A critical review of 66 peer-reviewed studies from 2023 to March 2026 examines LLMs for HVAC operations in building energy systems. Only four studies reach pilot-level evidence, none reports sustained operational deployment, and 63 of 66 are research-only. Conventional ML, MPC, and RL remain dominant for high-frequency control and short-horizon forecasting, and the evidence supports LLMs primarily as semantic and workflow layers rather than autonomous controllers.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d agoAI research

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

Competence-Gated Pooling of Language Models and Priors for Event Forecasting

Paper proposes a competence gate pooling language model forecasts with external priors, improving Brier score from 0.0771 to 0.0732 across 2,357 binary questions.

The paper defines a language model's relative competence as its marginal value beyond an available external forecast, and derives conditions under Brier loss where model disagreement improves that forecast. A competence gate estimates domain-level source weights from resolved outcomes, shrinks uncertain estimates toward a global weight, and recalibrates the pooled forecast. Across 2,357 resolved binary questions and five language models, it improves the external baseline from 0.0771 to 0.0732 Brier and beats global forecast combinations, though it defers to the market on ForecastBench. Across four Qwen models, verbal confidence failed to identify when the model outperformed the external forecast, while outcome-estimated competence supported better abstention.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

LLM Agents as Computational Typologists

AUTOTYPOLOGIST is an LLM agent that performs evidence-grounded linguistic typology analysis over 25 open-source reference grammars.

The agent retrieves relevant grammar sections, analyzes interlinear glossed text (IGT), and iteratively reasons over typological hypotheses in a ReAct-style workflow. It was evaluated on typological feature coding against expert annotations and hypothesis testing against universals using 25 open-source reference grammars. Results suggest LLM agents can support scalable, inspectable crosslinguistic analysis but still require expert validation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research1

TempCloze: Can Video-LLMs Identify the Missing Middle?

TempCloze benchmark tests Video-LLMs' temporal reasoning with 1,521 videos, finding temporal alignment is the primary failure mode across 31 models.

TempCloze is a video cloze benchmark in which models must identify the true missing middle clip given the beginning and ending clips, using 1,521 carefully filtered videos from seven sources, mostly long-take and egocentric footage. Distractors are constructed along three dimensions: Semantic, Alignment and Progression, with shared scenes and objects to reduce appearance cues. Evaluation of 10 proprietary and 21 open-source Video-LLMs found Alignment is the primary bottleneck, with models often recognizing plausible semantics and local event progression but struggling with temporal alignment.

Hugging Face daily papers · 16d agoAI research

Memory as Plans: World-Action Modeling with Memory-Grounded Planning

Researchers introduce MaP-WAM, decomposing memory-dependent robot manipulation into memory-grounded planning and plan-conditioned execution, achieving 83.3% on RMBench and 78% on real robots.

MaP-WAM converts long-term multimodal episodic memory — segment records with language instructions and sparse visual context — into compact plans of next-segment language goals and visual guidance. A World-Action-Progress model jointly predicts action chunks and execution progress, calibrating predictions via plan-observation alignment for adaptive segment transitions and closed-loop context updates. Structured attention keeps the executor context length fixed and enables key-value caching, yielding state-of-the-art 83.3% success on RMBench, 78.0% on real-robot tasks, and roughly constant inference latency as task history grows.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

The Semantic Bottleneck: Leveraging Semantic Representations for Non-Invasive Speech Decoding

Researchers introduced Brain2Semantics2Text, decoding sentence meaning from non-invasive MEG brain recordings via a semantic bottleneck, improving on prior Brain2Text methods.

The paper proposes Brain2Semantics2Text, a non-invasive speech decoding method that maps sentence-level magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses into a semantic embedding space and inverts those embeddings into natural language. Motivated by evidence that high-level semantic representations are distributed across cortex and evolve on slower timescales, the approach targets meaning rather than phonemes or words, avoiding the need for word-level alignment. The authors report improved sentence-level results compared to prior non-invasive Brain2Text methods despite the low signal-to-noise ratio of neural recordings.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research2

Malcious Admin Menu Editor Pro plugin backdoors 1,500 WordPress sites

Compromised Admin Menu Editor Pro update server distributed backdoored plugin versions installing web shells and hidden admin accounts on roughly 1,500 WordPress sites.

A threat actor with root-level access to adminmenueditor.com pushed trojanized Admin Menu Editor Pro versions 2.35 and 2.36 containing includes/wp-user-consent.php, which installed a web shell and created a hidden wp_-prefixed user account. At least 230 customers and roughly 1,500 sites installed the malicious update, with several hundred more downloads possibly affected. Developer Janis Elsts took the site offline after the attacker recompromised the clean 2.36 release; version 2.34 and the free plugin are believed unaffected.

BleepingComputer · 1d agoMalware in the wild1

wp2shell: incident response guide (CVE-2026-63030 + CVE-2026-60137)

Eye Security published forensic IR tooling for wp2shell (CVE-2026-63030/CVE-2026-60137), the unauthenticated WordPress core RCE chain, after WordPress.org forced auto-updates.

wp2shell chains a REST API batch-endpoint route-confusion bug (CVE-2026-63030) with an SQL injection in WP_Query's author__not_in parameter (CVE-2026-60137), giving unauthenticated attackers rogue admin and code execution on default installs. Adam Kues of Searchlight Cyber discovered the flaw, a public PoC exists on GitHub, and WordPress.org forced automatic updates across an estimated 200M+ sites. Eye Security released a compromise-scanner WordPress plugin and browser extension and notes database artifacts (oEmbed cache rows, changesets) are the primary evidence since the attack is log-blind; fixed versions are 6.8.6, 6.9.5, and 7.0.2.

Boost Engagement with Free Passkeys by Wordfence

Wordfence 9 introduces free passkey support, letting WordPress users log in without passwords and reducing authentication friction.

Wordfence announced that version 9 of its WordPress security plugin introduces passkeys. The feature removes the need for users to remember or copy passwords from a manager. Wordfence is offering the passkey capability for free.

Wordfence · 1d agoTools

Modality-Autoregressive World-Action Models

ModAR autoregressively denoises multiple future modalities (point tracks, DINO features, depth) before predicting actions, beating prior world-action models at all data scales.

ModAR is the first world-action model (WAM) to autoregressively denoise multiple future modalities before predicting actions, letting each prediction condition on previously generated modalities. Training from scratch shows WAMs benefit from predicting point tracks, DINO features, and depth maps, while future RGB adds no consistent benefit. ModAR's sequential generation outperforms existing WAM formulations with the highest average success rate at all evaluated data scales. It slightly beats video-model-initialized Flex-π (75% vs 72% success) using roughly 20x fewer training FLOPs and no pretraining, and wins on three real-world bimanual tasks.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research

Discrete Beckmann Transport Models for One-Step Language Modeling and Reasoning

DBTM achieves one-step text generation via a time-independent transport map trained directly from data, removing pretrained teacher distillation.

Discrete Beckmann Transport Models (DBTM) build a time-independent flow whose autonomous transport map provably carries any point in ambient space to a fixed point on simplex vertices in a single step. The fixed-point property is characterized by a conservation equation whose residual can be minimized directly from data, eliminating the need for a teacher flow, distillation, and time conditioning. A partial-context interpolant extension turns additional function evaluations into refinement steps rather than ODE integration steps. On language modeling and reasoning tasks, DBTM's one- and few-step generation improves quality and accuracy over discrete diffusion and continuous flow baselines.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 2d agoAI research1

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.

The 2026 PNPL Competition: Word Classification and Efficient Cross-Subject Generalisation in LibriBrain100

The 2026 PNPL competition releases LibriBrain100, a MEG speech dataset with 32 extra subjects, targeting word classification and cross-subject BCI generalization.

The 2025 PNPL competition on non-invasive speech decoding from MEG achieved F1-macro scores of 95.6% for speech detection and 73.6% for phoneme classification, built on LibriBrain's ~50 hours of single-subject data. The 2026 edition extends this with LibriBrain100, adding 32 subjects (~40 minutes each) plus ~80 hours of within-subject data. Two tracks target within-subject word classification at scale and cross-subject generalization with subject-specific fine-tuning shrinking from ~40 to ~20 to ~10 minutes, aiming at clinically feasible non-invasive BCIs for people with profound paralysis.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

WordPress Adds Automated Plugin Reviews to Block High-Risk Updates Before Distribution

WordPress will automatically scan every plugin release and block high-risk updates from distribution using AI analysis plus Jetpack Scan.

WordPress announced automated security reviews for every plugin release during its cooldown period before distribution through the WordPress.org update API, combining AI models with Jetpack Scan into a security score. The system already caught a backdoor committed to a plugin with about 20,000 active installations on July 28, 2026, blocking it within 26 minutes of a Wordfence alert. Flagged patterns include missing capability checks, unsafe $wpdb queries, unserialize() on request data, and obfuscated code.

The Hacker News · 2d agoTools

WordPress Blocks High-Risk Plugin Releases With New AI-Powered Automated Security Review

WordPress.org now runs AI-powered automated security reviews on every plugin release, automatically blocking high-risk updates before distribution to millions of sites.

WordPress launched an automated security review that combines multiple AI models and Jetpack Scan during a six-hour cooldown to score each plugin release; updates above the blocking threshold are automatically held back from the WordPress.org update API. The change follows a July 28 incident where a backdoor added to a plugin with roughly 20,000 active installations was detected during cooldown and never delivered; the Plugins Team removed it 26 minutes after a Wordfence notification. Blocked developers receive an email with findings and are advised to publish a corrected version rather than await manual appeal.

GBHackersupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoTools 7 sources1

MCRL2: Multi-resource Cross-attention-based Representation Learning-augmented Reinforcement Learning for Cloud Microservice Scheduling

MCRL2 augments reinforcement learning with multi-resource cross-attention representations to improve cloud microservice scheduling and load balancing.

MCRL2 combines a multi-resource cross-attention representation learning module (MCRL) with an actor-critic architecture and maximum entropy objective for microservice scheduling. The approach captures interdependencies among nodes, resources, and microservices in data centers. Experiments on real production cluster traces show improvements in load balancing, scheduling success rate, and average completion time versus baselines.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research1

DRG-MAPPO: Hierarchical Dynamic Role-Graph Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Air Combat

DRG-MAPPO combines graph-based relational modeling with dynamic role assignment in multi-agent RL, reaching an 87% win rate in cooperative air combat.

The hierarchical framework uses graph attention to extract relational features among allies, enemies, and threats, with a high-level policy assigning tactical roles like leader and supporter. A low-level policy executes discrete maneuver actions conditioned on roles and graph features, plus a target-priority auxiliary task encouraging focus-fire behavior. Experiments report a state-of-the-art 87% win rate, balancing relational modeling, interpretability, and optimization stability.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

When the prompt becomes the payload: A practical pen-testing guide for GenAI, LLM and RAG applications

CSO Online publishes a practical penetration-testing guide for GenAI, LLM, and RAG applications, covering prompt injection, retrieval poisoning, and tenant isolation testing.

The guide frames LLM applications as attack graphs spanning prompts, retrieval layers, vector stores, tools, identities, and downstream APIs, arguing that conventional web testing misses instruction-vs-data channel risks. It builds on OWASP prompt injection guidance (direct vs. indirect injection) and NIST's 2025 adversarial machine-learning taxonomy, noting that RAG and fine-tuning do not remove injection risk. Recommended practices include documenting trust transitions across components, using canaries and synthetic records to avoid test side effects, running multi-turn and obfuscated injection campaigns, and verifying chains from poisoned documents to observable state changes. It also details testing RAG pipelines via controlled document poisoning across metadata, OCR layers, and code comments, plus cross-tenant isolation checks on retrieved document IDs.

CSO Online · 7d agoAI safety & security1

llm 0.35

llm CLI tool version 0.35 adds support for OpenAI's new GPT-6 Astra model exposed as gpt-6-astra.

Simon Willison released llm 0.35, which adds an OpenAI model definition for GPT-6 Astra under the model ID gpt-6-astra. No other release details were provided in the post.

Simon Willison · 8d agoAI tools & infra

Approval Integrity and Recovery in LLM Answer Publication

Study measures approval integrity in Lightcap LLM answer publication, finding the 14B response-act checker accepts 291 of 302 unsupported answers.

The study evaluates exact-content binding, authorization freshness, and checkpoint recovery in Lightcap's publication enforcement using 3,600 assessments over 900 human-annotated RAGTruth responses from three Ministral models. The production 14B response-act checker accepts 291 of 302 unsupported answers versus 41 for a direct-grounding baseline, with supported-answer retention of 95.2% versus 66.9%. A stateful recheck-recovery policy increases exact-match error by 9.23 percentage points relative to initial checkpoints, and controlled evidence-fingerprint changes expose asymmetric freshness enforcement between publication and recovery. A separate BIPIA prompt-injection experiment records zero target insertions among 266 valid editor outputs.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoAI safety & security

Case study: ManageWP Blocks 11.9M+ Threats in 6 Months with Patchstack

Patchstack case study says ManageWP blocked over 11.9M WordPress threats in six months, with top vulnerabilities weaponized in a median of five hours.

ManageWP reports blocking more than 11.9 million threats across managed WordPress sites in six months using Patchstack's vulnerability data and firewalling. The case study stresses that patching alone cannot close the gap, noting attackers weaponize the most-targeted WordPress vulnerabilities with a median of five hours. The piece is primarily vendor marketing aimed at agencies managing many sites.

Patchstack · 23d agoIndustry

CodeTD: Topology of Attention Detects Hallucinations in Code LLMs

CodeTD detects hallucinations in code LLMs before execution by analyzing topological patterns of attention maps, outperforming recent baselines.

CodeTD applies topological data analysis (TDA) to code LLM attention maps to quantify prompt-generation mismatch as a pre-execution correctness signal. Experiments cover HumanEval, MBPP, BigCodeBench, and MultiPL-E across 5 programming languages and 10 code LLMs up to 34B parameters. The method outperforms recent baselines and transfers between coding benchmarks, helping catch code that fails the task or embeds security vulnerabilities.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research1