arXiv AI

Find Before You Fine-Tune: A Diagnostic Study of Small LLMs for Cybersecurity QA

arXiv:2607. 18725v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly fine-tuned for critical-domain Question-Answering (QA), yet choosing which small model to adapt, before paying the cost of adaptation, remains difficult.

arXiv AI

Jul 2

Toward Cybersecurity-Expert Small Language Models

arXiv:2510. 14113v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are transforming everyday applications, yet deployment in cybersecurity lags due to a lack of high-quality, domain-specific models and training datasets.

By Matan Levi, Daniel Ohayon, Ariel Blobstein, Ravid Sagi, Ian Molloy, Yair Allouche

llms benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 6

CTIConnect: A Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented LLMs over Heterogeneous Cyber Threat Intelligence

arXiv:2510. 11974v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is foundational to modern cybersecurity, enabling organizations to proactively defend against evolving threats.

By Yutong Cheng, Yang Liu, Changze Li, Dawn Song, Peng Gao

llms rag benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 26

Inherited Circuits, Learned Semantics: How Fine-Tuning Creates Evasion Vulnerabilities Invisible to Standard Evaluation

arXiv:2606. 27091v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs fine-tuned for security classification are usually evaluated on held-out examples from the same distribution as their training data.

By Ryan Fetterman

llms fine-tuning benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 2

On the Limits of LLM Adaptability: Impact of Model-Internalized Priors on Annotation Task Performance

arXiv:2606. 00467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for zero-shot annotation and LLM-as-a-judge tasks, yet their reliability hinges on how model-internalized priors interact with user-provided instructions.

By Etienne Casanova, Rafal Kocielnik, R. Michael Alvarez

llms rag safety

arXiv AI

Jul 23

Small, Free, and Effective: Orchestrating Open-Weight Small Language Models to Outperform Single LLM for Malware Analysis

arXiv:2607. 20216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Malware analysis demands rapid interpretation of complex detonation reports spanning filesystem, network, and process behaviours.

By Adel ElZemity, Shujun Li, Budi Arief

llms agents benchmarks safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 17

Evaluating Open-Source LLMs for Multi-Label ATT&CK Technique Classification on CTI Reports

arXiv:2606. 18166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifying Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) using MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) is essential for proactive defense, but historically required extensive human effort.

By Ahmed Ryan, Saad Sakib Noor, Md Erfan, Shaswata Mitra, Sudip Mittal, Md Rayhanur Rahman

llms benchmarks safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Aug 4

Efficiency vs. Alignment: Investigating Safety and Fairness Risks in Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of LLMs

arXiv:2511. 00382v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Organizations increasingly adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) from public repositories such as HuggingFace to downstream tasks.

By Mina Taraghi, Yann Pequignot, Amin Nikanjam, Mohamed Amine Merzouk, Foutse Khomh

llms fine-tuning safety

arXiv AI

Jul 8

Beyond Refusal: A Same-Lineage Study of Aligned and Abliterated LLMs for Vulnerability Analysis

arXiv:2607. 05842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-assisted software security operates at a difficult boundary: the vulnerability-analysis terminology needed for legitimate code review, triage, and repair can closely resemble terminology associated with misuse.

By Mingchen Li, Meikang Qiu, Zifan Peng, Heng Fan, Song Fu, Junhua Ding, Yunhe Feng

llms safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 2

Dialectics of Alignment: Harnessing Unsafe Knowledge for Dynamic Safety Routing

arXiv:2606. 00686v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prevailing paradigm in large language model (LLM) alignment operates via erasure, filtering unsafe data or training models to strictly refuse harmful prompts.

By Maryam Hashemzadeh, Jerry Huang, Minseon Kim, Marc-Alexandre C\^ot\'e, Sarath Chandar

llms fine-tuning benchmarks safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Jul 31

Cybersecurity Detection Classification with Reasoning-enabled Language Models

arXiv:2607. 28460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A major issue in Security Operations Centers (SOCs) is alert fatigue, as the number of detections reported is more than staff can triage in a given day.

By Amol Khanna, Manu Nandan, Cristian Viorel Popa, Joan Pujol-Roig, Diana Bolocan, Laura Vasilie, Alexandru Apostu, Chase Helwig, Mihaela Gaman, Michael Brautbar, Edward Raff, Chase Midler, Sven Krasser

llms reinforcement-learning

arXiv AI

Jun 3

FORGE: Multi-Agent Graduated Exploitation and Detection Engineering

arXiv:2606. 03453v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vulnerability disclosure volumes now far exceed organizational assessment capacity, yet three adjacent research communities (proof-of-concept generation, vulnerability prioritization, and detection rule engineering) operate largely in isolation.

By Farooq Shaikh

llms agents

arXiv AI

Jul 3

Less Data, More Security: Advancing Cybersecurity LLMs Specialization via Resource-Efficient Domain-Adaptive Continuous Pre-training with Minimal Tokens

arXiv:2507. 02964v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The increasing scale of AI workloads demands High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure and training methodologies that are both scalable and sustainable.

By Salahuddin Salahuddin, Ahmed Hussain, Jussi L\"opp\"onen, Toni Jutila

llms fine-tuning benchmarks

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