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Autonomous Research for Open-Ended Problems: A Case Study on Telecom Ticket Retrieval

Case study shows autonomous LLM research reaches 90% of SOTA on telecom ticket retrieval in 10 weeks versus 10 months human work.

The paper explores adapting autonomous research to open-ended, industry-grade ML problems through a telecom ticket retrieval case study with commercial and open-source agents. Autonomous research reached 90% of state-of-the-art performance (0.34 vs. 0.38 Recall@1) in 10 weeks versus 10 months of human work, at up to $200 per Cursor campaign. The authors find agents excel at narrow hyperparameter optimization but lack human-like intuition, recommending human-agent collaboration.

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

Differentially Private EEG Feature Anonymization: A Privacy-Utility Case Study in Clinical Neurophysiology

Case study applies Gaussian and Laplace differential privacy to clinical EEG features, quantifying privacy-utility trade-offs across three deployment scenarios.

Researchers evaluate subject-level differential privacy for EEG-derived feature representations using Gaussian and Laplace perturbations across client-side, centralized server-side, and decentralized local training scenarios. Utility is assessed with statistical measures and a downstream machine-learning check on clinical neurophysiology data. Results show DP can be integrated into EEG workflows, but mechanism choice, privacy parameters, and sensitivity calibration strongly influence data utility, particularly on small and imbalanced clinical datasets. The study highlights the privacy-utility trade-off in protecting biomedical signals against re-identification and inference risks.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch

Jackrong/Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-GGUF — new model trending #26 on Hugging Face

Community fine-tune Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash, built on Qwen3.8-27B, cuts agent reasoning latency with 12.8% faster decoding and 80.7% MTP acceptance.

Jackrong released Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash, a fine-tune of Qwen3.8-27B optimized for long-running agent workloads, reporting 12.8% faster decoding and 80.7% multi-token-prediction acceptance. Training used roughly 1.5 million teacher-scored SFT examples filtered to the top 10%, followed by reinforcement training with NVIDIA NeMo-RL and GSPO. The author notes an explicit trade-off: MMLU-Pro mixed-set scores are lower than the base model, and a known bug can produce incorrect Python indentation. Author-provided benchmarks have not been independently verified.

Hugging Face trending models · 11d agoModel release1

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 · 22d agoIndustry

Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 (1999)

Seminal 1999 USENIX study finds most novice users cannot correctly sign and encrypt email with PGP 5.0 in 90 minutes.

Whitten and Tygar's USENIX Security Symposium paper evaluates whether cryptography novices can use PGP 5.0 effectively, using cognitive walkthrough analysis and a laboratory user test. The majority of test participants failed to successfully sign and encrypt a message within 90 minutes, despite PGP 5.0 having a well-regarded graphical interface. The authors argue that security requires usability standards beyond those of general consumer software and propose domain-specific UI design principles for security. The paper is a foundational reference in usable security research.

Lobsters · security · 7d agoResearch

Countering misuse of AI: September 2026 / Anthropic

Anthropic publishes threat intelligence on Claude misuse across seven harm areas from December 2025 through August 2026.

Anthropic's Threat Intelligence team details disrupted operations using Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus across cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams, biological misuse, weapons development, and distillation. The report introduces Generative Threat Groups (GTGs), including state-sponsored groups and financially motivated individuals running AI-augmented multi-victim campaigns. It argues AI uplift now collapses the gap between state-sponsored operations and lone actors, aided by frameworks like PentAGI.

Lobsters · securityupdated · 3d agofirst · 4d agoAI safety & security 13 sources1

Multi-Task Learning for Sparsely-Labeled Time Series: A Case Study on Cold-Hardiness Modeling

Multi-task RNN architectures pooling sparse cultivar data improve grape cold-hardiness and budbreak prediction over single-task and scientific baselines.

Researchers apply recurrent neural networks to daily grape cold-hardiness prediction from weather time series, where per-cultivar labels are temporally sparse and limited. They design multiple multi-task learning architectures that treat cultivars as tasks and evaluate them in both MTL and transfer learning settings. Certain architectures consistently outperform single-task learning and state-of-the-art scientific models, and a single MTL model jointly learning cold hardiness and budbreak improves accuracy on both tasks.

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

Don't Trust the Super-App: A Case Study of Russia's Max

Researchers show super-apps like Russia's Max can silently capture mini-app UI, storage, network traffic, and authentication, enabling untraceable user impersonation.

The paper challenges the assumption that super-apps are trusted intermediaries, citing WeChat's passive cross-mini-app tracking, Russia's Max's entanglement with state prosecution of online speech, and Iran's Bale operating during a prolonged internet shutdown. Using Max as a case study, the authors demonstrate that a super-app can capture mini-app UI, read and write mini-app local storage, inject arbitrary JavaScript into mini-app runtimes, mediate network traffic, and control authentication context, enabling silent user impersonation without trace. They argue these capabilities are inherent to the super-app architecture and call for mobile OS and app store interventions to close the blind spot.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch1

Autoencoder Is All You Need: Profiling and Detecting Malicious DNS Traffic

Palo Alto Unit 42 details an autoencoder-based method that profiles DNS traffic to detect C2 and malicious domains, blocking ~374,000 malicious DNS requests daily.

Unit 42 built an RNN-based autoencoder that compresses DNS traffic time series into fixed-dimensional 'DNS profiles' for each domain and device. Downstream classification, clustering, and anomaly detection modules flag suspicious domains, capturing 170 emerging suspicious domains in May 2024. Signatures block roughly 374,000 malicious DNS requests daily and run in the Advanced DNS Security service, with detections shared to Advanced URL Filtering. Case studies link DNS traffic patterns to C2 beaconing, dynamic DNS abuse, and DNS tunneling for data exfiltration.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearch

CISA Updates Insider Threat Guide With New Mitigation Advice

CISA updated its Insider Threat Mitigation Guide on September 9 with new case studies and guidance on hybrid work, AI and employee separations.

CISA published a revision of its Insider Threat Mitigation Guide, first issued in 2020, adding case studies, statistics and guidance for security, HR and leadership audiences. New material covers hybrid and remote work changes to physical and digital access, AI used to manipulate or deceive, access control, visitor screening and adverse employee separations. The agency framed the update around growing insider threat impact on critical infrastructure and pointed to preparedness resources for organizations without existing programs.

Infosecurity Magazine · 5d agoAdvisory

TLD Tracker: Exploring Newly Released Top

Unit 42 tracked 19 newly released top-level domains and found large-scale phishing, unwanted program distribution, and cybersquatting tied to TLD launch dates.

Researchers analyzed 19 new generic TLDs, including .zip, .bot, .ing, and .meme, released or approaching general availability over roughly 18 months. Data from passive DNS, registry zone files, newly registered domain feeds, and the Tranco top-1M list showed phishing campaigns, potentially unwanted program distribution, and domain squatting on these TLDs. Abuse correlated with each TLD's rollout phases, indicating attackers monitor general availability dates to register and weaponize domains. The IANA root database now lists over 1,000 generic TLDs.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearch

Recent Trends in Internet Threats: Common Industries Impersonated in Phishing Attacks, Web Skimmer Analysis and More

Unit 42 analyzed 67 million malicious URLs and domains in H2 2022, a 52% increase, highlighting phishing impersonation and web skimmer trends.

Unit 42 observed more than 67 million unique malicious URLs, domains and IPs between July and December 2022, a 52% increase over the first half of the year. Malicious JavaScript detections grew 99.3%, with over 4 million malicious JS samples hosted on 4.8 million URLs. Over 85% of hosting infrastructure was concentrated in eight countries, led by the United States, Brazil and China. The report also analyzes industries spoofed in phishing pages and includes a web skimmer case study on a Tranco top 1 million website.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearch

Trends in Web Threats in CY Q2 2022: Malicious JavaScript Downloaders Are Evolving

Unit 42 detected 751,000 landing URL incidents in Q2 2022 and documented malicious JavaScript downloaders evolving to evade detection.

Unit 42 detected 751,331 landing URL incidents (253,644 unique) and 1,744,629 malicious host URL incidents (256,844 unique) from April through June 2022. Total landing URL incidents rose compared with Q1 2022, and unique host URL incidents grew 42%, indicating attackers deploying more variants. The report includes a case study of a JavaScript downloader campaign demonstrating new evasion techniques. Personal sites, blogs, and business sites were the top apparently benign entry points.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearch

ATV Big Air Tour turned 3 days of work into 3 hours with ChatGPT

OpenAI case study says ATV Big Air Tour used ChatGPT Work to cut marketing and merchandising tasks from days to hours.

OpenAI published a customer story describing how ATV Big Air Tour uses ChatGPT Work to accelerate marketing, merchandising, and related business workflows. The organization reportedly turned merchandise photos into an inventory website in 15 minutes, compressing three days of work into three hours.

OpenAI News · 13d agoAI industry

How RingCentral builds AI-native work from engineering to ops

OpenAI's case study describes RingCentral using ChatGPT Work and Codex to accelerate AI product development and centralize operational intelligence across engineering and operations.

OpenAI published a customer story on RingCentral's adoption of ChatGPT Work and Codex. RingCentral reportedly uses the tools to speed up AI product development and centralize operational intelligence across engineering and operations. The post is promotional rather than technical and describes no security incidents.

OpenAI News · Aug 12, 2026AI industry

ScienceBuddy: Recursive-in-Recursive Self-Improvement for Interactive Scientific Agents

ScienceBuddy released: interactive scientific agent workspace coupling harness evolution with model reinforcement learning for continual self-improvement across four scientific task families.

ScienceBuddy is an interactive scientific research workspace that turns researcher requests, feedback, and execution evidence into tasks and evaluation rubrics for continual learning. Its recursive-in-recursive self-improvement paradigm couples harness evolution with the model fixed (inner recursion) and model reinforcement learning under the improved harness (outer recursion). Case studies span four scientific task families covering researcher interaction, harness refinement, and model learning. The system is released as a research product at science-buddy.io.

Hugging Face daily papersupdated · 13h agofirst · 1d agoAI research 2 sources

The Year in Web Threats: Web Skimmers Take Advantage of Cloud Hosting and More

Unit 42 analyzed 2.24 million web threat incidents, finding web skimmers increasingly hosted on cloud infrastructure to steal payment card data.

Palo Alto Unit 42 analyzed 2,241,354 web threat incidents and 831,550 unique URLs detected via Advanced URL Filtering between October 2020 and September 2021. Threat activity peaked from October 2020 to January 2021, coinciding with the holiday shopping season, with most malicious domains geolocated to the United States, Russia, and Germany. Web skimmers ranked third among the top five threat classes and showed the most code diversity, making detection harder. Researchers observed more web skimmer families being hosted on cloud platforms to steal payment data and PII.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearch

Trends in Web Threats: Attackers Were More Active During Holiday Season

Unit 42 tracked 533,000 malicious landing URL incidents from October-December 2021, showing web threats peaked during the holiday shopping season.

Unit 42 detected 533,452 malicious landing URL incidents (120,753 unique) and 2,906,875 malicious host URL incidents (165,255 unique) from October through December 2021. Threat activity peaked in November, likely tied to Black Friday in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. Most malicious domains appeared to originate in the United States, followed by Russia and Germany. Personal sites, blogs, business sites, and shopping sites were the most common apparently benign entry points for attacks.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearch

Corrupt Plans, Clean Traces: Evading Chain-of-Thought Monitoring with Plan Injection

Plan injection plants benign-sounding harmful reasoning that steers LLM actors to adversarial actions while evading chain-of-thought monitors.

Researchers show that injecting harmful but benign-sounding plans into an actor model's context causes it to perform adversarial actions while its reasoning passes chain-of-thought monitors, achieving 25-33% monitor evasion rates across benchmarks and scaling to larger models like DeepSeek-R1. Actor models paraphrase injected plans as their own reasoning without attribution. Giving the monitor access to the injected plan dropped detection by up to 50% on the Bio-Math task, with extra thinking tokens spent rationalizing rather than flagging the plan.

Benign Loss Landscapes Can Coexist with Worst-Case Hardness

Theory paper shows tree tensor networks contain worst-case hard targets yet benign loss landscapes, with difficulty arising from degenerate saddles.

The paper studies tree tensor networks (TTNs), which generalize deep linear networks and Tucker decompositions and embed arbitrary read-once Boolean formulas. It proves that every local minimum that is minimum-norm is global for every realizable target, so bad local minima do not distinguish typical from worst-case problems. Instead, learning difficulty arises from high-order degenerate saddle points caused by rank-deficiency, illustrated via a parity function case study, linking landscape geometry to computational hardness.

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

Continue, Adapt, or Yield: In-Turn Adaptation to Overlapping Speech in Full-Duplex Agents

Duplex Cue evaluation shows PersonaPlex full-duplex agents adapt in-turn to listener contributions in only 34.8% of collaborative cases versus 68.2% for humans.

The paper introduces Duplex Cue, an evaluation of in-turn adaptation in full-duplex voice agents that separates listener intent (backchannel, collaboration, interruption) from speaker behavior (continue, adapt, yield). Using 208 scorable pairs from 300 human-confirmed cues in unscripted English conversations, it compares recorded human responses with PersonaPlex continuations generated while replaying listener audio. Humans adapt within the turn in 68.2% of collaborative pairs versus 34.8% for PersonaPlex, which otherwise continues unchanged (42.4%) or yields (22.7%).

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

Triage & Response Bottlenecks Eating into MSSP Margins: How to Remove the Friction

ANY.RUN says manual triage bottlenecks erode MSSP margins and promotes its Threat Intelligence Lookup and sandbox to cut Tier 1 workload by up to 20%.

Vendor blog post from ANY.RUN describes recurring MSSP triage and response bottlenecks: manual alert validation, unnecessary Tier 2 escalations, manual handoffs, outdated threat data, and disconnected tools. It cites a healthcare MSSP case study where the Tier 1 closure rate rose from 20% to 70% and false escalations dropped 34% after adopting its tools. The piece claims ANY.RUN can reduce Tier 1 workload by up to 20%, letting MSSPs absorb more clients without proportional headcount growth.

ANY.RUN · 13d agoIndustry

1Password's AI patching benchmark is misleading

Trail of Bits reanalysis says 1Password's 26% AI clean-fix rate is misleading; 86% of eligible patches blocked exploits.

Trail of Bits critiques 1Password's FLAWED AI patching benchmark, arguing its 26% clean-fix headline mixes trials where agents were instructed to apply wrong fixes (22% of data) with trials that prohibited compiling or testing (36%). Restricting to reasonable conditions, 2,634 of 3,067 patches (86%) blocked the supplied exploit. Trail of Bits also reports 12.5% of 2,265 developer first fixes failed in its own 2024-2026 assessments, and released post-patch-validation and review-walkthrough agent skills.

Lobsters · security · 10h agoResearch

MarkSec: Capability-Aware Evaluation of Adversarial Attacks Against LLM Watermarks

MarkSec unifies evaluation of stealing, scrubbing, and spoofing attacks against LLM watermarks with quality-constrained success metrics under shared reporting protocols.

MarkSec is a framework unifying analysis of stealing, scrubbing, and spoofing attacks against LLM watermarks under shared detector calibration, metric definitions, and reporting protocols. It introduces a quality-constrained attack success metric that jointly assesses attack effectiveness and text quality. Experiments across representative watermark families, attacks, LLMs, and datasets show that attacks strongest by watermark removal alone can fall behind general rewriting when success requires acceptable text quality, and stealing-based scrubbers often underperform the best general-scrubbing baselines.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled pure-autoregressive testbed shows task-specific validation losses rank image tokenizers differently, with I2T loss the most consistent signal.

Researchers built a controlled pure-autoregressive testbed and tracked task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They find losses should be analyzed per task because they exhibit distinct scaling behavior and rank tokenizers differently, and that the loss-performance relationship depends on the predicted token space. I2T loss, computed over a shared text vocabulary, correlates consistently with both generation and visual understanding performance after supervised finetuning. Case studies revisit the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size as tokenizer design axes.

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

Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled autoregressive testbed shows validation losses must be analyzed per task, and image tokenizer choice affects joint multimodal text modeling.

Researchers built a pure-autoregressive testbed to study image tokenizers as the 'visual language' of unified multimodal models, tracking task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They found that losses exhibit distinct scaling behavior per task and rank tokenizers differently, and that I2T loss over a shared text vocabulary gives a more consistent loss–performance signal than T2I loss. Better reconstruction does not necessarily yield lower task-specific losses or stronger downstream performance, and tokenizer choice can affect text modeling under joint optimization. Case studies examine the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size design axes.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research1

Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

Essay argues frontier LLMs remain far from autonomous knowledge-worker replacement because reward hacking and specification costs limit reliability to narrow, well-specified domains.

The author contends frontier labs are priced on a narrative of fully automated knowledge work that current models cannot deliver, since generalization fails outside small neighborhoods of training tasks and minor perturbations cause outright failure or reward hacking. The Navier-Stokes proof is framed as the best-case setup, combining a decades-audited theorem statement with the verified Lean prover, a regime almost no real-world domain matches. Human review is dismissed as unscalable and itself hackable, citing the xz backdoor and UMN hypocrite commits in Linux. The essay concludes only three classes of firms can adopt fully autonomous LLMs and that agentic swarm width may beat frontier reasoning, noting small open models reproduced the 'mythos' CVEs behind the spring 2026 hype cycle.

Beneath the Surface: Detecting and Blocking Hidden Malicious Traffic Distribution Systems

Unit 42 built an ML-based detector for malicious traffic distribution systems, finding malicious TDS chains average longer redirections and more URLs than legitimate ones.

Traffic distribution systems redirect victims through chains of intermediate domains to hide final destinations, serving phishing, malvertising, and online gambling operations. Unit 42's topological analysis of redirection graphs found malicious TDS traffic uses longer chains (about 25% exceed four hops vs 10% benign), more URLs (median 126 vs 80), and fewer isolated subgraphs with higher connectivity. These features power an ML detector integrated into Advanced DNS Security and Advanced URL Filtering to identify and block malicious TDS infrastructure in customer traffic.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearch

[AINews] Poolside gets $12B reverse-execuhire to NVIDIA; founders stay for $1B, employees go for $6B, Infraco scaling to 7GW neocloud

NVIDIA struck a $12B deal with AI coding startup Poolside, licensing its Model Factory and hiring 109 of its technical employees.

NVIDIA spent roughly $12B in an unusual reverse-execuhire of Poolside, licensing the company's Model Factory while hiring 109 of its ~115 technical staff; founders retain a $1B stake and employees receive about $6B. Poolside had raced to raise $2B to fund a 40,000 GB300 cluster after missing a six-week funding window, and founders argue frontier-scale training now requires an order of magnitude more compute plus contracted data center space. An infrastructure arm spun out in January 2026 is scaling toward 7GW as a neocloud. The newsletter also recaps OpenAI and Anthropic agent-platform releases.

Latent Space · 26d agoAI industry

Det-LIME: Detector-Aware, Multi-Instance Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations for Automated Marine Mammal Detection

Det-LIME extends LIME to multi-instance object detection explanations, improving attribution for harbor seal aerial surveys.

Det-LIME adapts LIME to object detection by combining per-detection weighting, a proximity kernel emphasizing box-adjacent regions, and IoU-based matching to track instances across perturbations. It was evaluated on aerial drone imagery for harbor seal detection plus a seabird case study, and compared against vanilla LIME, Stabilized LIME, Deterministic LIME, and gradient-based attribution. Using Attribution Ratio and Max Saliency Hit Rate metrics, it consistently improved multi-instance attribution and produced box-aligned explanations useful for debugging and data augmentation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 13h agoAI research

The MAL Simulator: Cyber Operations Simulation based on Attack & Defense Graphs

MAL Simulator grounds attack-defense graph simulations in a CRATE-emulated network, training RL attacker and defender agents where attackers outperform search methods.

The MAL Simulator is a cyber operations simulator built on the Meta Attack Language (MAL), enabling decision-driven attack and defense simulations adaptable to new domains without modifying source code. Case studies trained defensive and offensive agents, grounded in data collected from an emulated network implemented in the CRATE cyber range. The trained attacker policy reached designated targets more efficiently than compared search methods, and the trained defender induced lower costs than a naive heuristic under noisy alerts, though defender performance dropped significantly against an RL attacker.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Automating Attack Graph Construction for Agentic Pentesting. Towards Neuro-Symbolic Vulnerability Hunting

Semi-automated pipeline converts Trivy, Semgrep, Nmap output into MulVAL attack graphs for agentic pentesting, 53.7% mean vulnerability coverage in CyBench.

The paper presents a semi-automated pipeline that parses Trivy, Semgrep, and Nmap findings into MulVAL predicates and uses an LLM-assisted process to build domain-specific Datalog rules linking scanner evidence to attack techniques. MulVAL/XSB then performs symbolic inference to generate structured, auditable attack paths for agentic pentesting. Evaluated on 54 web CTF tasks from CyBench, every task produced at least one goal-reaching graph with 53.7% mean ground-truth vulnerability coverage, 51.9% full coverage, and an 83.9% noise-path rate. Median end-to-end runtime was 24.9 seconds, making the pipeline runtime-practical for agentic workflows.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Due to concerns about malicious applications, GPT2 will not be released (2019)

OpenAI's landmark 2019 GPT-2 post withheld the full 1.5B-parameter model over misuse concerns, releasing only a smaller variant and paper.

OpenAI announced GPT-2, a 1.5-billion-parameter transformer language model trained on 8 million web pages (40GB of text), achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot results including 70.70% on Winograd Schema and 63.24% on LAMBADA. Citing concerns about malicious applications such as scalable synthetic disinformation, OpenAI declined to release the trained model and instead published a smaller model and a technical paper as a 'responsible disclosure' experiment. The post, resurfaced on Hacker News in 2026, also documents failure modes like repetition and world-modeling errors, and discusses policy implications of controllable text generation.

Atria Dawn: The Dawn of Agentic Superintelligence

Atria Dawn Preview, an agentic foundation model trained on verifiable experiences, tops five of 16 research and engineering benchmarks.

Atria Dawn Preview is a foundation agentic language model for scientific research and engineering workflows, trained via a Verifiable Experience Pipeline connecting tool-mediated interactions to executable environments and externally verified outcomes. Across 16 benchmarks spanning research, engineering, and digital work it is competitive with frontier agents and achieves the highest reported score on five of them. The release includes a human-AI collaboration case study analyzing 769 task records from 56 participants, where about one-third of completed AI-assisted tasks were rated infeasible without AI and agents frequently proposed methods and implemented revisions while humans retained final decisions.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoModel release

[AINews] DeepSeek v4.1-Flash: 763B-P8B-D16B novel causal Encoder–Decoder architecture with vision marks the Return of the Whale

DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash, an open-weight 763B-parameter model with a novel causal encoder-decoder architecture, 1M context, vision input, and MIT license.

DeepSeek launched V4.1-Flash, an open-weight MIT-licensed model using a novel causal encoder-decoder architecture with 763B total parameters and asymmetric active parameters: 8B for prefill and 16B for decode. It supports 1M-token context and text+image input, priced at $0.30 per 1M input and $1.20 per 1M output tokens with a 50% off-peak discount. Artificial Analysis scored it 40 on its Intelligence Index, above DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813, and Vals ranked it the #1 open-weight model ahead of Kimi K3. Baseten shipped day-0 support and Ollama began rolling it out to paid subscribers.

Latent Space · 4d agoModel release1

MicroHasTEE: Bare-Metal Haskell for Type-Level Peripheral Ownership on Armv8-M

MicroHasTEE expresses TrustZone secure and non-secure firmware as one typed Haskell program, catching peripheral-ownership inconsistencies at compile time.

MicroHasTEE is a multiparty Haskell framework that models both TrustZone firmware images as participants in a single typed program, using type-level capability ledgers to track peripheral acquisition, configuration, transfer, and finalization. MicroHs compiles the shared program twice to produce separate bare-metal Secure and Non-secure firmware images. The framework rejects inconsistent resource use, post-configuration attribution changes, wrong-domain callbacks, and calls to unregistered Secure services. A door-lock case study on an STM32U5 Nucleo board produced images of 232.7 KiB and 228.4 KiB of flash with roughly 220 KiB of SRAM per domain.

arXiv cs.CR · 4d agoResearch1

We've got one word for it, and it's usually the wrong one

Cisco Talos's Threat Source newsletter critiques 'burnout' terminology, describing four occupational injuries, and flags a UAT-10820 WebDAV stealer campaign at a Ukrainian government organization.

Cisco Talos's Threat Source newsletter argues that 'burnout' is the wrong word for most cybersecurity occupational harm, distinguishing exhaustion, secondary traumatic stress, vicarious trauma, and moral injury based on clinical literature from trauma-exposed professions. The featured disclosure describes a complex WebDAV infection chain found at a Ukrainian government organization, attributed with moderate confidence to the Russian-tracked actor UAT-10820 and assessed as an opportunistic cryptocurrency and credential-stealing operation. The campaign delivers the Amatera stealer alongside ZigCryptoStealer and NetSupport Manager, abusing BNB Smart Chain bulletproof hosting, fake CAPTCHA prompts, a vulnerable driver to kill EDR, and rundll32.exe execution of disguised DLLs with ordinal calls. Weekly headlines also cover a Microsoft Defender 'ShieldCrash' zero-day exploit released after September 2026 Patch Tuesday, a North Korean Linux espionage toolkit backdooring HAProxy, and a multi-hop Google-domain redirect phishing campaign.

Cisco Talosupdated · 4d agofirst · 5d agoIndustry in the wild 4 sources1

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 · 6d agoResearch1