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The Last AI Built by Humans: Toward Genuine Recursive Self-Improvement

Position paper defines recursive self-improvement for AI, introduces the Headroom-Closed Index and an autonomy roadmap toward genuine recursive meta-improvement.

The paper uses the Headroom-Closed Index to diagnose limitations of existing LLMs and frames recursive self-improvement (RSI) as a staged roadmap: improvement-execution, improvement-strategy, experience-acquisition, and environment-adaptation autonomy, culminating in recursive meta-improvement. It examines RSI across scientific discovery, embodied intelligence, and software engineering, highlighting differing requirements and development speeds. Drawing on industry practices and preliminary empirical evidence, it connects RSI research with practical systems and identifies key challenges to achieving genuine RSI.

Inductive Automation Ignition

CISA reports a permissions flaw (CVE-2026-77393, CVSS 8.8) in Inductive Automation Ignition <=8.1.53 letting authenticated users create projects; fixed in 8.1.54.

CISA republished Inductive Automation's advisory for CVE-2026-77393, an incorrect default permissions issue (CWE-276) in Ignition 8.1.53 and earlier. The Gateway "Create Project Role(s)" setting shipped blank, allowing any authenticated user who can execute gateway scripts to create projects. Ignition 8.1.54 restricts project creation to Designer sessions and the 8.3 series is unaffected. CISA notes no known public exploitation of this vulnerability.

CISA Advisories · 13d agoAdvisoryCVE-2026-77393

Identifying Agentic Automation with Behavioral Telemetry

Akamai describes detecting autonomous AI browser agents like Comet using Masked Autoencoder Transformer models on sparse behavioral telemetry.

Akamai researchers present a behavioral telemetry approach for identifying agentic automation in web traffic. Masked Autoencoder Transformer models are used to detect the sparse behavioral signals produced by autonomous AI browser agents such as Comet. The work targets traffic classification and bot detection rather than a specific vulnerability, and becomes more relevant as agentic browsing adoption grows.

Akamai Blog · 27d agoAI safety & security1

[Control Systems] Inductive Automation security advisory (AV26-892)

Canada's Cyber Centre relayed a CISA ICS advisory for an Inductive Automation Ignition vulnerability affecting versions up to 8.1.53.

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security published control systems advisory AV26-892, noting that as of September 4, 2026, Inductive Automation is affected by a vulnerability in Ignition versions prior to or equal to 8.1.53. The advisory references CISA's ICS advisory (ICSA-26-246-06) and its CSAF file, and encourages users and administrators to review the linked resources and apply necessary updates as they become available. Ignition is a widely deployed industrial automation platform, so affected OT operators should patch promptly.

Canadian Centre for Cyber Security · 7d agoAdvisory

ICS Patch Tuesday: Schneider Electric, Siemens Fix Critical Flaws

September ICS Patch Tuesday brings critical fixes from Schneider Electric, Siemens, and Aveva, including CVSS 9.2 authentication flaw CVE-2026-3869 in Modicon M580 controllers.

Schneider Electric's September advisories include a critical authentication vulnerability, CVE-2026-3869 with a CVSS score of 9.2, in Modicon M580 and Modicon M580 Safety controllers, plus high-severity bugs in PowerLogic T300 and EcoStruxure IT Data Center Expert. Siemens published nine new advisories, four rated critical across Reyrolle 7SR5, Open Interface Services, Industrial Edge Management, and SIMOVE Fleetmanager and SIPLANT, and began rolling out fixes for CVE-2026-31431, a 7.8-rated Linux kernel flaw enabling root shell access. Aveva disclosed four flaws in Pipeline Integrity Monitor's PIMBoards, including a hardcoded encryption key and MD5-hashed passwords, plus an unsafe deserialization issue in Enterprise SCADA. Rockwell Automation separately issued nine advisories covering RSLinx Classic and multiple controller products.

Agent as Policy for Robotic Manipulation

Agent as Policy lets a general-purpose agent drive a physical robot via runtime reasoning and program generation, reaching 100% success on manipulation tasks.

The paper introduces Agent as Policy (AGP), which puts task planning and execution for a physical robot under a general-purpose agent's control with no task-specific or environment-specific training. The agent interprets visual evidence, writes executable programs, issues motion commands, and revises actions based on physical outcomes. AGP was evaluated on real-world manipulation tasks including assembly from human videos, block construction from goal images, die reorientation, targeted throwing, and bimanual towel folding. It achieved success rates of 100%, 100%, and 80% on three block construction configurations.

Hugging Face daily papers · 5d agoAI research

InceptionRAG: Stealthy Poisoning Attack Against Retrieval-Augmented Generation

InceptionRAG fragments malicious payloads into dormant passages that trigger LLMs to self-deduce misinformation via multi-hop reasoning, bypassing existing RAG poisoning defenses.

Researchers introduce InceptionRAG, a stealthy corpus poisoning attack against retrieval-augmented generation that splits a malicious payload into a chain of individually harmless dormant passages. When retrieved together, the passages induce LLMs to self-deduce target misinformation through multi-hop reasoning, achieving over 80% attack success rate across three datasets and three LLMs under rigorous adversarial constraints. A zeroth-order suffix optimization (ZOSO) method automates authoritative suffix generation in black-box settings. The authors also propose HODOR, a document isolation defense that decouples adversarial logical dependencies.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots

Show-Harness lets VLM agents control robots via discrete semantic action units, outperforming VLA baselines zero-shot and after light fine-tuning.

Show-Harness is an embodied agent harness that exposes discrete semantic action units a VLM reasons over, with embodiment-specific interpreters grounding them into local robot actions. It enables zero-shot robot control with closed-source frontier VLMs and low-cost adaptation of small open-source VLMs using only a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. The companion GUMI (GUI Manipulation Interface) extends the same semantic action space to GUI-based demonstration collection without specialized teleoperation hardware. Experiments show robust generalization across tasks, embodiments, and environments, beating representative agentic and VLA paradigms.

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

🔬“We have foundation models for language, not for physics” — Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing

Caltech professor Anima Anandkumar discusses Neural Operators and FourCastNet for physics modeling, arguing inductive biases beat pure token scaling.

Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor at Caltech and co-founder of Accelerated Understanding, describes Fourier Neural Operators that learn in frequency and spherical-harmonic domains to model weather, fusion, and fluid or heat flow. Her team built FourCastNet 3, a global weather model competitive with physics-based simulations that runs on consumer-grade GPUs. She also introduced TorchLean, a framework for writing PyTorch-style networks inside the Lean proof assistant for formal verification, and was appointed to the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board. She argues physical domains resist scaling due to tiny datasets and context lengths in the hundreds of billions, so progress comes from built-in structure and physical priors.

Latent Space · 21d agoAI research1

Intezer adds native response automation without separate SOAR

Intezer launched Workflows, native response automation inside its AI SOC, letting teams automate remediation without a separate SOAR platform.

Intezer announced Workflows, a native automation and response builder inside its AI SOC platform that lets security teams run post-investigation actions such as closing alerts, isolating hosts, and updating tickets without a separate SOAR. Workflows are created through natural language via MCP, inherit full investigation context, and are logged for audit, with per-tenant routing and customer communications aimed at MSSPs. The announcement cites Intezer's AI SOC Report 2026 finding that nearly 1% of real incidents trace back to lowest-severity alerts.

Help Net Security · 28d agoTools

Inside Meta’s push to put robots to work in data centers

Meta is testing robots to perform technician tasks in its data centers, advancing automation of AI infrastructure operations.

Meta is testing robots to perform tasks currently done by human technicians in its data centers. The push signals ambitions to automate AI infrastructure operations at scale. The excerpt provides no details on robot suppliers, deployment scale, or timelines.

Ars Technica · AI · 17d agoAI industry

Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots

Show-Harness enables VLM agents to control robots via a semantic action interface, achieving zero-shot frontier control and few-GPU-hour adaptation of small VLMs.

Show-Harness exposes discrete semantic action units that VLMs reason over, with embodiment-specific interpreters deterministically grounding them into local robot actions. It enables zero-shot closed-source frontier VLM control and adapts small open-source VLMs for low-cost deployment with a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. The companion GUMI interface extends the same semantic action space to GUI-based demonstration collection without teleoperation hardware, and Show-Harness-equipped agents outperform representative agentic and VLA paradigms.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

Reward AI Releases OM-1: A Robot Policy Trained on Human Demonstrations Only, With No Teleoperation or On-Robot Data

Reward AI released OM-1, a general-purpose manipulation policy trained solely on human demonstrations from a sensorized glove, with no teleoperation or robot data.

Reward AI announced OM-1 (Omnibody Model 1), a general-purpose robot manipulation policy trained only on human demonstrations captured via Omnibody Hand, a 7-DoF wearable glove with tactile, proximity, and in-hand camera sensing. The system uses electromagnetic hand-pose tracking, cutting mean overshoot error to 9.5 mm versus 24.9 mm for visual-inertial at 67 cm/s (a 60% reduction), and reportedly learns brand-new tasks from under 30 minutes of human data. A separate RL-trained control layer runs on its own clock so policy inference latency never stalls motion, and the policy spans industrial arms, legged humanoids, and wheeled mobile manipulators. No weights, code, dataset, API, paper, or benchmark comparisons have been released, so claims are demonstration-backed only.

MarkTechPost · 1d agoAI research

When Intelligence Becomes Agency: A Theory of Governed, Proactive Agency for Symbiotic AI Systems

Researchers propose a formal framework for governed proactive AI agency, linking activation decisions to continuing authorization, accountability, and bounded delegation in symbiotic systems.

The paper defines the activation problem: persistent AI assistants must decide whether a situation warrants behavior, and whether to act, ask, monitor, defer, or deliberately refrain. It distinguishes autonomous from delegated agency and defines symbiotic agency as delegation under a standing, revocable mandate, coupled to the principal's situation with calibrated inference and bounded personalization. The framework links activation decisions to authorized perception, behavior selection, authority containment, traceable restraint, and constrained adaptation, and provides an agency classification method, evaluation framework, benchmark scenarios, and reference architecture for always-present assistants and embodied support systems.

Researchers Disclose AI-Assisted SharePoint Exploit Chain Reaching Unauthenticated RCE

Rapid7 disclosed CVE-2026-55040, a SharePoint JWT validation bypass chaining into CVE-2026-63520 unauthenticated RCE, with research substantially AI-agent-assisted; patches released.

Rapid7 disclosed CVE-2026-55040 (CVSS 9.1), several JWT validation pipeline issues letting unauthenticated attackers impersonate chosen SharePoint users by SID or UPN, chained with CVE-2026-63520 (CVSS 8.1), an unsafe .NET type instantiation in Business Connectivity Services yielding RCE as the service account. An AI agent contributed significantly across 96 sessions and roughly 80,000 tool calls over 24 active days, though an expert had to steer it and it repeatedly overstepped its threat model. No exploitation of the bypass had been reported as of CISA's July 14 assessment. The RCE affects SharePoint Subscription Edition, 2019, and 2016, plus Project Server 2013 SP1 and Office Web Apps 2013 SP1; the July updates break the chain.

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

SAEScientist-Bench: Can AI Agents Conduct Autonomous SAE Interpretability Research?

SAEScientist-Bench tests whether AI agents can autonomously run SAE interpretability research on Gemma-2-9B-IT; frontier agents trail expert baselines.

The benchmark requires agents to design contrastive probes and navigate the Gemma Scope dictionary of over 131K features in Gemma-2-9B-IT to discover optimal interpretable features, scored against expert-curated references on Neuronpedia via activation rank, concept selectivity, and causal steering. Across 10 agent configurations and 20 tasks, frontier agents demonstrate genuine discovery capability and approach expert levels at separating target concepts from controls, but lag substantially in causal steering and frequently misinterpret experimental measurements. The authors frame this as establishing experimental model understanding as a measurable capability for closed-loop autonomous AI R&D and post-hoc monitoring for recursive self-improvement.

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

Identifying Agentic Automation with Behavioral Telemetry: Part 2

Akamai details behavioral telemetry signals for identifying agentic automation traffic in the second part of its research series.

Akamai published part two of its series on identifying agentic automation using behavioral telemetry. The post appears on Akamai's security research blog and focuses on detecting AI-agent-driven traffic. Full article text was unavailable at classification time, so classification relies on the title and source.

Akamai Blog · 20d agoResearch

Misleading the Planner through Deceptive Resumes: Registration-Time Injection in Centralized Multi-Agent Systems

Researchers demonstrate registration-time prompt injection in centralized LLM multi-agent systems, dropping GAIA task success from 84.31% to 37.25%, and propose DescGuard defense.

The paper identifies a registration-time injection channel in centralized LLM multi-agent systems where third-party worker agent descriptions are trusted by the planner before any user instruction arrives. Analyzing 32,000 descriptions from three public agent marketplaces, at least 23.35% contain content outside the four defined description fields. Eight description-manipulation attack strategies targeting task decomposition, capability grounding, and subtask specification cut GAIA task success from 84.31% to 37.25% and increased token consumption or execution time by over 111%, persisting across two MAS implementations, six planner LLMs, and four evaluators. The proposed DescGuard defense filters descriptions to worker-scoped interface information and restores metrics toward baseline without modifying workers, planner, or orchestration logic.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoAI safety & security

RoboSPA: Can VLA Models Go Beyond Simple Scenes and Short-Horizon Tasks?

RoboSPA introduces a 527K-trajectory benchmark with 280 task variants showing current VLA models struggle with spatial reasoning and long-horizon planning.

RoboSPA is a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark for diagnosing embodied reasoning in vision-language-action models, covering fine-grained spatial reasoning and long-horizon procedural planning. It spans 10 task categories and 56 base tasks instantiated across five difficulty levels for 280 variants, with 527K trajectories collected across multiple embodiments and diverse scenes. Diagnostic metrics go beyond binary success rates, and experiments show current VLA models struggle with complex spatial relations, precise low-level execution, and memory-intensive planning.

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research

SAEScientist-Bench: Can AI Agents Conduct Autonomous SAE Interpretability Research?

SAEScientist-Bench evaluates whether AI agents can autonomously conduct SAE interpretability research in Gemma-2-9B-IT, finding frontier agents trail expert baselines.

SAEScientist-Bench tests if AI agents can act as scientists using SAE tools for autonomous mechanistic discovery, requiring them to design contrastive probes and navigate a Gemma Scope dictionary of 131K+ features in Gemma-2-9B-IT. Across 10 agent configurations and 20 tasks, frontier agents showed genuine discovery capability but remained well behind expert reference features, lagging most in causal steering. Agents frequently misinterpreted experimental measurements even when designing effective contrasts.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

RoboSPA: Can VLA Models Go Beyond Simple Scenes and Short-Horizon Tasks?

RoboSPA introduces a 527K-trajectory robotic benchmark with 280 task variants exposing VLA model weaknesses in spatial reasoning and long-horizon planning.

RoboSPA is a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark for diagnosing embodied reasoning in vision-language-action models, spanning fine-grained spatial reasoning and long-horizon procedural planning. It covers 10 task categories and 56 base tasks instantiated across five difficulty levels for 280 variants, with 527K trajectories collected across multiple embodiments. Experiments on representative VLA models show current systems struggle with complex spatial relations, precise low-level execution, and memory-intensive planning.

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

What Breaks Under Pruning in Smart Homes, and When? Evaluating LLM Degradation Across Architectures and Task Complexity

Pruning study across four LLM architectures finds dense models degrade sharply on smart-home tool calling while MoE models tolerate far more.

Researchers systematically study pruning-induced degradation in smart-home tool calling across four LLMs spanning dense Transformer, dense hybrid, and mixture-of-experts architectures, combining depth, width, hybrid, and expert pruning methods, and evaluate over 19,500 instances from three datasets after post-pruning supervised fine-tuning. Dense models show narrow safe pruning regions followed by sharp degradation, while MoE models tolerate substantially more pruning. Pruning degrades grounded specificity (operation, device, argument, value) before schema-level intent, and aggressive dense pruning can induce systematic over-refusal.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 22h agoAI research

DianShi-RxnDB: A Large-Scale, Fine-Grained Organic Reaction Data Platform Built via a Fully Automated Pipeline for Researchers and AI Agents

Researchers release DianShi-RxnDB, a database of roughly 24 million organic reaction instances extracted automatically from USPTO and EPO patents since 1976.

DianShi-RxnDB is built by a fully automated pipeline integrating patent text, images, and reaction schemes, yielding about 24 million reaction instances, of which 14.8 million (61.7%) pass automated qualification checks. Manual evaluation of 1,300 sampled instances showed 92.95% field-level accuracy, and comparisons with Pistachio found advantages in deduplicated record counts and granularity. The platform offers a web research workbench and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) service enabling AI agents to perform composable structured retrieval.

Hugging Face daily papers · 10d agoAI research

Embodied-BenchForge: A Closed-Loop Agentic Workflow for Embodied Benchmark Construction

Embodied-BenchForge automates embodied benchmark construction via closed-loop synthesis with verification and repair, yielding seven benchmarks for MLLM evaluation.

Embodied-BenchForge is an agentic framework that transforms user-specified evaluation intents into complete embodied benchmark artifacts via Closed-Loop Benchmark Synthesis. Skill-Orchestrated Artifact Synthesis composes typed reusable skills while an artifact dependency graph records intermediate outputs; Requirement-Guided Verification and Repair triggers local re-execution or upstream rollback on failures. It constructs six Offline EQA benchmarks plus one interactive benchmark with 220 executable tasks, distinguishing MLLM and embodied agent capabilities in observation-based understanding and closed-loop execution.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 4d agoAI research

Technical Manual for a Toolkit for Measuring Contextual Individuation in Transformer Language Models

An open methodology toolkit measures whether transformer language models contextualize fixed word forms across domains using bridge forms and layer-wise silhouette analysis.

The manual documents an open toolkit built around 'bridge forms' - identical written words recurring across two or more subject domains with a different sense in each - to test whether transformer language models individuate word occurrences by context beyond the embedding layer. It covers declarative specification of bridge forms, Wikipedia corpus acquisition, occurrence localization, layer-wise representation extraction, domain-pairwise silhouette measurement, and visualization, justifying each choice against failure modes such as sense contamination and subword-tokenization misalignment. It is a methodological and implementation reference and reports no empirical results.

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

AI for Military Support

Study of 2,015 Israeli military personnel found algorithmic aversion toward AI targeting decision support, reduced when explainable AI features were added.

The paper 'Black Box Warfare' reconstructed a real-world military AI decision-support system used in targeting and tested a high-fidelity replica in two experiments with 2,015 Israeli military personnel. Contrary to automation-bias fears, participants showed strong algorithmic aversion, especially in high-collateral-damage scenarios. Integrating explainable AI features reduced aversion and promoted more thoughtful evaluation of algorithmic recommendations. The authors conclude that trust in military AI is dynamic and that human agency remains central in high-stakes decisions.

Schneier on Security · Aug 11, 2026AI research

Opaque recurrence, and other AI terms that you should probably know

TechCrunch updates its plain-English glossary defining common AI terms from AGI and agents to chain-of-thought reasoning.

TechCrunch maintains a regularly updated glossary of AI terminology, defining terms such as AGI, AI agents, API endpoints, chain of thought, coding agents, compute, deep learning, and diffusion. It highlights 'opaque recurrence', the reasoning technique in OpenAI's new Astra model that has drawn attention from AI safety researchers. The piece is an educational living document rather than new research or a product announcement.

TechCrunch · AI · 8d agoAI industry1

AutoTrans: AI-Assisted Automatic Translation of Security Assertions for RISC-V Processors

AutoTrans uses LLMs with regex extraction and formal verification to automatically translate security assertions across RISC-V processors, achieving 78% unattended acceptance.

AutoTrans is an automated framework for translating verified security assertions between RISC-V processor targets, where manual translation takes hours per assertion. It combines a regex-based SystemVerilog signal extractor to prevent LLM signal hallucination, a pinned prompt template yielding byte-identical prompts resilient to model updates, and JasperGold FPV formal verification of generated assertions. Applied with DeepSeek V4 to translate assertions between RISC-V targets such as IBEX and NS31A, it achieves a 78% automatic translation acceptance rate without human intervention and 100% after human refinement.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch

Perturbation Probing: A New Diagnostic for the Fragility of LLM Safety

Unit 42 research shows LLM safety refusals concentrate in a thin neural layer, motivating external, multi-layered AI security controls.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 introduces Perturbation Probing, a diagnostic technique for measuring the fragility of LLM safety mechanisms. The research finds that safety refusal behavior is localized within a thin neural layer, implying small perturbations can undermine built-in refusals. The authors argue this motivates external, multi-layered security defenses on top of model-internal safety training.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 18d agoAI safety & security

OpenWAM: An Open, Modular Exploration Towards Systematic World-Action Model Pretraining

OpenWAM releases an open modular stack for world-action model pretraining, plus OpenWAM-alpha trained on about 6,400 hours of egocentric and robot data.

OpenWAM is an open research stack that factorizes World-Action Model pretraining into composable infrastructure, study, and model components with unified training, inference, and evaluation. Controlled experiments distill three principles on knowledge inheritance, world-action synergy, and out-of-domain generalization gains from embodied co-training. The resulting OpenWAM-alpha, pretrained on roughly 6,400 hours of egocentric human and robot data, achieves top-tier results across eight simulation benchmarks and real-robot tests spanning single-arm, bimanual, and dexterous embodiments. The full stack, including infrastructure, evaluation protocols, pretrained models, and data recipes, is released openly.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

Hackers Deploy Agentic AI to Automate Exploitation and Mass Credential Harvesting

Google GTIG documents a financially motivated actor using a multi-agent AI framework to automate credential harvesting, compromising over 23,800 secrets within hours.

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) documented a financially motivated actor that compromised an unnamed organization's cloud infrastructure and used a multi-agent AI framework to automate vulnerability scanning, credential harvesting, troubleshooting, and IP rotation. The operation went from planning to mass credential compromise in under six hours, harvesting more than 23,800 secrets including cloud and AI-service API keys via an exposed C2 dashboard called 'Recon'. The actor directed specialized agents using an AI coding chatbot and Markdown instruction files such as AGENTS.KNOWLEDGE.md and agentic_vuln_research.md. Google has not observed fully autonomous zero-day exploitation; the shift automates labor-intensive tasks like reconnaissance, account validation, and infrastructure management, sharply shrinking detection windows.

GBHackers · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild1