arXiv AI

Echelon: Auditable Aggregate-Only Language-Model Adaptation Across Privacy Boundaries

arXiv:2606. 02958v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-organization language-model adaptation increasingly faces hard governance constraints: in many deployments, device-level model state-parameters, activations, optimizer state, and per-device updates-cannot be exported outside an administrative boundary.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

Stale Does Not Mean Unsafe: Guard Precision for Tool-Using LLM Agents under Infrastructure State Races

The paper investigates how tool‑using language‑model agents can safely commit changes to infrastructure when external state may change between read and commit. By distinguishing invalidating races from predicate‑preserving and irrelevant ones, the authors evaluate three commit‑time guard granularities—global epoch, read‑set version, and semantic commit predicate—using a deterministic simulator and three quantized model families. The study finds that only the complete predicate guard consistently eliminates unsafe commits, while freshness‑based guards block a large proportion of benign races and model‑side signals fail to replace precise semantic enforcement.

By Zihao Zheng, Jiayu Long, Baichuan Li, Junyi Yao
arXiv AI
Aug 19

PACE: Policy-Attested Contract Execution for Safe AI Agents in Decentralized Finance

The paper introduces PACE (Policy‑Attested Contract Execution), a framework that sits between large‑language‑model (LLM) based autonomous AI agents and on‑chain DeFi operations. PACE defines typed transaction intents, a deterministic policy verifier, and signed Policy Decision Records (PDRs) that cryptographically bind an approved intent, policy, and simulation report to the exact on‑chain execution bytes, providing replay and expiration protection. In evaluations across 40 tasks and six baselines, PACE achieves zero unsafe executions and zero false positives, outperforming unguarded agents by a large margin.

By Rabimba Karanjai (Larry), Yang Lu (Larry), Richard Williamson (Larry), Hemanth Hm (Larry), Prakhar Mehrotra (Larry), Lei Xu (Larry), Weidong (Larry), Shi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 24

Thermo-FL: Thermal-Aware Robust Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models for Edge AI

Thermo-FL is a thermal‑aware federated LoRA fine‑tuning framework that adapts local adapter training and sparse update transmission based on device temperature. It introduces TERRA, a robust aggregation pipeline that uses norm filtering, mask‑aware directional validation, adaptive clipping, and mask‑aware aggregation to defend against Byzantine and communication‑layer adversaries. Experiments on a large‑scale emulator and a Jetson testbed show Thermo-FL improves robustness under adversarial sparse aggregation, stabilizes device temperature, reduces upload size, and preserves utility on GSM8K and BoolQ tasks.

By Shiva Shrestha, Kazi Shaharair Sharif, Zongxing Xie, Jiajing Huang, Anhao Xiang, Honghui Xu
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Confidently Wrong, Silently So: Auditing Undetectable Failures of a Deployed On-Device Language Model

The paper audits a developer‑accessible on‑device language model, revealing that it can confidently produce incorrect answers while refusing benign prompts, a phenomenon termed task‑asymmetric miscalibration. The model’s confident outputs are surface‑indistinguishable, with classifiers based on user‑visible features failing to separate correct from wrong responses. The authors propose a model‑agnostic audit protocol, a surface‑indistinguishability test, and a black‑box consistency wrapper that improves reliability without requiring model access.

By Shashwat Pandey, Satwik Pandey, Suresh Raghu
arXiv AI
Sep 17

PentestChain: A Cost-Aware, MCP-Orchestrated Framework for Automated Penetration Testing with Free-Tier LLMs

PentestChain is a ten‑phase automated penetration testing framework that uses a cost‑aware AI cascade, starting with a local 7B‑parameter Ollama model (qwen2.5‑7b) and then free‑tier OpenRouter and Cerebras models, with a rule‑based fallback. It exposes the entire pipeline through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that includes eleven tools. The authors evaluate the framework using standard testbeds (AutoPenBench, Cybench subset, PentestGPT 182‑sub‑task benchmark) and report that the local model keeps paid‑API cost at zero while detecting 26 services and enriching 34 CVEs on legacy targets.

By Rushabh Vipulkumar Patel, Dipo Dunsin, Mohammed Almaiah, Mohamed Chahine Ghanem
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Phionyx: A Deterministic AI Runtime Architecture with Structured State Management and Pre-Response Governance

arXiv:2607. 18246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Phionyx, a deterministic AI runtime architecture derived from the broader Echoism interaction framework that introduces a governance-first approach to AI engineering: treating large language model (LLM) outputs as noisy sensor measurements rather than direct decisions.

By Ali Toygar Abak