arXiv:2605. 10834v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI pentesting agents are increasingly credible as offensive security systems, but current benchmarks still provide limited guidance on which will perform best in real-world targets.
By Pedro Conde, Henrique Branquinho, Valerio Mazzone, Bruno Mendes, Andr\'e Baptista, Nuno Moniz
On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a key paradigm in LLM post-training, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood. We present a systematic study examining the role, pathologies, and regulations of OPD.
What happens to an LLM agent's tool choice when the reliable tool silently changes within an ongoing session? We borrow set-shifting from cognitive psychology to study how well agents adapt to hidden reliability shifts.
Alignment faking is dangerous because a model can appear compliant under monitoring while preserving behavior it would reveal when unmonitored. When no scratchpad is visible, behavior alone cannot distinguish strategic from genuine compliance.
The evaluation of mathematical reasoning in large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on high-resource languages like English. This has created a significant barrier to the equitable development and deployment of AI in linguistically diverse regions such as Bangladesh, where over 230 million people speak Bengali.
Muon has recently emerged as a strong optimizer for large-scale deep learning, where it reshapes gradient updates through approximate orthogonalization and has been reported to outperform Adam and AdamW in large language model training. Its empirical success has motivated a growing body of theoretical work that interprets Muon as steepest descent under the spectral norm.
Automatic speech recognition is dominated by autoregressive decoders that emit one token at a time. We ask whether a discrete diffusion language model can transcribe speech instead, refining a whole transcript in parallel over a small number of denoising steps.
Aligned language models routinely misreport under non-evidential incentive pressure: they agree with a confident user or overstate certainty even when their internal belief is unchanged. We cast this as a failure of internal incentive-compatibility (IC) and present a method for learning and certifying counterfactual report mediators that hold a model's reports to a causal contract: invariant to forbidden influences (pressure, prestige, restyling) and responsive to licensed ones (genuine evidence).
As large language models (LLMs) grow more capable, they are increasingly deployed in context-rich settings where task inputs are often accompanied by long, partially irrelevant context. In a controlled setting, we find that state-of-the-art models often appear robust to task-irrelevant context at the aggregate level: prepending it to benchmark questions causes little change in overall accuracy.
Transformer language models are increasingly used as software components, yet biased outputs remain difficult to localize and repair inside the model. Existing fairness testing and repair methods largely operate at the input-output or retraining level, while recent work suggests that bias-related behavior can concentrate in a small set of attention heads.
Rubric-based evaluation is a promising approach for assessing open-ended outputs from LLM-based research agents, particularly in paper reproduction, where direct paper-to-repository comparison is prone to hallucination. However, constructing paper-specific rubrics requires substantial expert effort, limiting the scalability of benchmarks such as PaperBench.
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces. We ask whether CoT requires continued access to image tokens, or whether it mainly operates over visual information already made available earlier in the forward pass.
When a language model must pick one answer from a large space of equally valid options, which does it pick -- and how often is it the same answer every other model picks? Asked to "pick a word -- any word," 44 models chose "serendipity" 41% of the time.
Self-evolving agent systems improve by creating, revising, and retiring their own skills, but every such loop rests on a hidden assumption: a reliable evaluation metric already exists. In many real applications it does not.
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly improved the performance of multimodal emotion recognition (MER) and enabled interpretable description generation by jointly modeling video, audio, and language, etc. However, these performance improvements are often accompanied by an increase in model parameter size (e.
Cross-image comparative reasoning remains challenging for vision-language models (VLMs), especially when correct prediction requires fine-grained attribute grounding and globally consistent reasoning. We present CoRe, a unified framework for this problem.
Quantum circuit optimization for fault-tolerant computing requires exact functional equivalence while minimizing expensive non-Clifford resources such as T gates. We study this problem using a compact 44.
I measured the actual GPU electricity for eight local models on one RTX 3090 — and the cheapest wasn't the smallest, nor the priciest the biggest. The post How Much Does It Actually Cost to Run a Local LLM?
By Arsen Apostolov
How to stop parsing JSON by hand and start trusting your model's output The post Pydantic + OpenAI: The Cleanest Way to Get Structured Outputs from LLMs appeared first on Towards Data Science .
By Maria Mouschoutzi
Generative modeling of longitudinal Electronic Health Records is increasingly important for privacy-preserving research, yet standard autoregressive models tend to underrepresent the co-occurrence structure of tail events (i. e.