Daily Papers

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide potentials for uncovering structured, human-interpretable representations in Large Language Models (LLMs), making them a crucial tool for transparent and controllable AI systems. We systematically analyze SAE for interpretable feature extraction from LLMs in safety-critical classification tasks. Our framework evaluates (1) model-layer selection and scaling properties, (2) SAE architectural configurations, including width and pooling strategies, and (3) the effect of binarizing continuous SAE activations. SAE-derived features achieve macro F1 > 0.8, outperforming hidden-state and BoW baselines while demonstrating cross-model transfer from Gemma 2 2B to 9B-IT models. These features generalize in a zero-shot manner to cross-lingual toxicity detection and visual classification tasks. Our analysis highlights the significant impact of pooling strategies and binarization thresholds, showing that binarization offers an efficient alternative to traditional feature selection while maintaining or improving performance. These findings establish new best practices for SAE-based interpretability and enable scalable, transparent deployment of LLMs in real-world applications. Full repo: https://github.com/shan23chen/MOSAIC.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed as powerful tools for several natural language processing (NLP) applications. Recent works show that modern LLMs can generate self-explanations (SEs), which elicit their intermediate reasoning steps for explaining their behavior. Self-explanations have seen widespread adoption owing to their conversational and plausible nature. However, there is little to no understanding of their faithfulness. In this work, we discuss the dichotomy between faithfulness and plausibility in SEs generated by LLMs. We argue that while LLMs are adept at generating plausible explanations -- seemingly logical and coherent to human users -- these explanations do not necessarily align with the reasoning processes of the LLMs, raising concerns about their faithfulness. We highlight that the current trend towards increasing the plausibility of explanations, primarily driven by the demand for user-friendly interfaces, may come at the cost of diminishing their faithfulness. We assert that the faithfulness of explanations is critical in LLMs employed for high-stakes decision-making. Moreover, we urge the community to identify the faithfulness requirements of real-world applications and ensure explanations meet those needs. Finally, we propose some directions for future work, emphasizing the need for novel methodologies and frameworks that can enhance the faithfulness of self-explanations without compromising their plausibility, essential for the transparent deployment of LLMs in diverse high-stakes domains.

Agentic AI systems, built on large language models (LLMs) and deployed in multi-agent configurations, are redefining intelligent autonomy, collaboration and decision-making across enterprise and societal domains. This review presents a structured analysis of Trust, Risk, and Security Management (TRiSM) in the context of LLM-based agentic multi-agent systems (AMAS). We begin by examining the conceptual foundations of agentic AI, its architectural differences from traditional AI agents, and the emerging system designs that enable scalable, tool-using autonomy. The TRiSM in the agentic AI framework is then detailed through four pillars governance, explainability, ModelOps, and privacy/security each contextualized for agentic LLMs. We identify unique threat vectors and introduce a comprehensive risk taxonomy for the agentic AI applications, supported by case studies illustrating real-world vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the paper also surveys trust-building mechanisms, transparency and oversight techniques, and state-of-the-art explainability strategies in distributed LLM agent systems. Additionally, metrics for evaluating trust, interpretability, and human-centered performance are reviewed alongside open benchmarking challenges. Security and privacy are addressed through encryption, adversarial defense, and compliance with evolving AI regulations. The paper concludes with a roadmap for responsible agentic AI, proposing research directions to align emerging multi-agent systems with robust TRiSM principles for safe, accountable, and transparent deployment.

We investigate bias trends in text-to-image generative models over time, focusing on the increasing availability of models through open platforms like Hugging Face. While these platforms democratize AI, they also facilitate the spread of inherently biased models, often shaped by task-specific fine-tuning. Ensuring ethical and transparent AI deployment requires robust evaluation frameworks and quantifiable bias metrics. To this end, we assess bias across three key dimensions: (i) distribution bias, (ii) generative hallucination, and (iii) generative miss-rate. Analyzing over 100 models, we reveal how bias patterns evolve over time and across generative tasks. Our findings indicate that artistic and style-transferred models exhibit significant bias, whereas foundation models, benefiting from broader training distributions, are becoming progressively less biased. By identifying these systemic trends, we contribute a large-scale evaluation corpus to inform bias research and mitigation strategies, fostering more responsible AI development. Keywords: Bias, Ethical AI, Text-to-Image, Generative Models, Open-Source Models

The constitutional framework of alignment aims to align large language models (LLMs) with value-laden principles written in natural language (such as to avoid using biased language). Prior work has focused on parameter fine-tuning techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), to instill these principles. However, these approaches are computationally demanding, require careful engineering and tuning, and often require difficult-to-obtain human annotation data. We propose reflect, an inference-time framework for constitutional alignment that does not require any training or data, providing a plug-and-play approach for aligning an instruction-tuned model to a set of principles. reflect operates entirely in-context, combining a (i) constitution-conditioned base response with post-generation (ii) self-evaluation, (iii)(a) self-critique, and (iii)(b) final revision. reflect's technique of explicit in-context reasoning over principles during post-generation outperforms standard few-shot prompting and provides transparent reasoning traces. Our results demonstrate that reflect significantly improves LLM conformance to diverse and complex principles, including principles quite distinct from those emphasized in the model's original parameter fine-tuning, without sacrificing factual reasoning. reflect is particularly effective at reducing the rate of rare but significant violations of principles, thereby improving safety and robustness in the tail end of the distribution of generations. Finally, we show that reflect naturally generates useful training data for traditional parameter fine-tuning techniques, allowing for efficient scaling and the reduction of inference-time computational overhead in long-term deployment scenarios.

This paper introduces RiskCards, a framework for structured assessment and documentation of risks associated with an application of language models. As with all language, text generated by language models can be harmful, or used to bring about harm. Automating language generation adds both an element of scale and also more subtle or emergent undesirable tendencies to the generated text. Prior work establishes a wide variety of language model harms to many different actors: existing taxonomies identify categories of harms posed by language models; benchmarks establish automated tests of these harms; and documentation standards for models, tasks and datasets encourage transparent reporting. However, there is no risk-centric framework for documenting the complexity of a landscape in which some risks are shared across models and contexts, while others are specific, and where certain conditions may be required for risks to manifest as harms. RiskCards address this methodological gap by providing a generic framework for assessing the use of a given language model in a given scenario. Each RiskCard makes clear the routes for the risk to manifest harm, their placement in harm taxonomies, and example prompt-output pairs. While RiskCards are designed to be open-source, dynamic and participatory, we present a "starter set" of RiskCards taken from a broad literature survey, each of which details a concrete risk presentation. Language model RiskCards initiate a community knowledge base which permits the mapping of risks and harms to a specific model or its application scenario, ultimately contributing to a better, safer and shared understanding of the risk landscape.

Monocular normal estimation for transparent objects is critical for laboratory automation, yet it remains challenging due to complex light refraction and reflection. These optical properties often lead to catastrophic failures in conventional depth and normal sensors, hindering the deployment of embodied AI in scientific environments. We propose TransNormal, a novel framework that adapts pre-trained diffusion priors for single-step normal regression. To handle the lack of texture in transparent surfaces, TransNormal integrates dense visual semantics from DINOv3 via a cross-attention mechanism, providing strong geometric cues. Furthermore, we employ a multi-task learning objective and wavelet-based regularization to ensure the preservation of fine-grained structural details. To support this task, we introduce TransNormal-Synthetic, a physics-based dataset with high-fidelity normal maps for transparent labware. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TransNormal significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods: on the ClearGrasp benchmark, it reduces mean error by 24.4% and improves 11.25° accuracy by 22.8%; on ClearPose, it achieves a 15.2% reduction in mean error. The code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://longxiang-ai.github.io/TransNormal.

As research and industry moves towards large-scale models capable of numerous downstream tasks, the complexity of understanding multi-modal datasets that give nuance to models rapidly increases. A clear and thorough understanding of a dataset's origins, development, intent, ethical considerations and evolution becomes a necessary step for the responsible and informed deployment of models, especially those in people-facing contexts and high-risk domains. However, the burden of this understanding often falls on the intelligibility, conciseness, and comprehensiveness of the documentation. It requires consistency and comparability across the documentation of all datasets involved, and as such documentation must be treated as a user-centric product in and of itself. In this paper, we propose Data Cards for fostering transparent, purposeful and human-centered documentation of datasets within the practical contexts of industry and research. Data Cards are structured summaries of essential facts about various aspects of ML datasets needed by stakeholders across a dataset's lifecycle for responsible AI development. These summaries provide explanations of processes and rationales that shape the data and consequently the models, such as upstream sources, data collection and annotation methods; training and evaluation methods, intended use; or decisions affecting model performance. We also present frameworks that ground Data Cards in real-world utility and human-centricity. Using two case studies, we report on desirable characteristics that support adoption across domains, organizational structures, and audience groups. Finally, we present lessons learned from deploying over 20 Data Cards.

"Bigger the better" has been the predominant trend in recent Large Language Models (LLMs) development. However, LLMs do not suit well for scenarios that require on-device processing, energy efficiency, low memory footprint, and response efficiency. These requisites are crucial for privacy, security, and sustainable deployment. This paper explores the "less is more" paradigm by addressing the challenge of designing accurate yet efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) for resource constrained devices. Our primary contribution is the introduction of an accurate and fully transparent open-source 0.5 billion (0.5B) parameter SLM, named MobiLlama, catering to the specific needs of resource-constrained computing with an emphasis on enhanced performance with reduced resource demands. MobiLlama is a SLM design that initiates from a larger model and applies a careful parameter sharing scheme to reduce both the pre-training and the deployment cost. Our work strives to not only bridge the gap in open-source SLMs but also ensures full transparency, where complete training data pipeline, training code, model weights, and over 300 checkpoints along with evaluation codes is available at : https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/MobiLlama.

Financial AI holds great promise for transforming modern finance, with the potential to support a wide range of tasks such as market forecasting, portfolio management, quantitative trading, and automated analysis. However, existing platforms remain limited in task coverage, lack robust multimodal data integration, and offer insufficient support for the training and deployment of large language models (LLMs). In response to these limitations, we present FinWorld, an all-in-one open-source platform that provides end-to-end support for the entire financial AI workflow, from data acquisition to experimentation and deployment. FinWorld distinguishes itself through native integration of heterogeneous financial data, unified support for diverse AI paradigms, and advanced agent automation, enabling seamless development and deployment. Leveraging data from 2 representative markets, 4 stock pools, and over 800 million financial data points, we conduct comprehensive experiments on 4 key financial AI tasks. These experiments systematically evaluate deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms, with particular emphasis on RL-based finetuning for LLMs and LLM Agents. The empirical results demonstrate that FinWorld significantly enhances reproducibility, supports transparent benchmarking, and streamlines deployment, thereby providing a strong foundation for future research and real-world applications. Code is available at Github~https://github.com/DVampire/FinWorld.

While large language models show promise in medical applications, achieving expert-level clinical reasoning remains challenging due to the need for both accurate answers and transparent reasoning processes. To address this challenge, we introduce Fleming-R1, a model designed for verifiable medical reasoning through three complementary innovations. First, our Reasoning-Oriented Data Strategy (RODS) combines curated medical QA datasets with knowledge-graph-guided synthesis to improve coverage of underrepresented diseases, drugs, and multi-hop reasoning chains. Second, we employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) cold start to distill high-quality reasoning trajectories from teacher models, establishing robust inference priors. Third, we implement a two-stage Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) framework using Group Relative Policy Optimization, which consolidates core reasoning skills while targeting persistent failure modes through adaptive hard-sample mining. Across diverse medical benchmarks, Fleming-R1 delivers substantial parameter-efficient improvements: the 7B variant surpasses much larger baselines, while the 32B model achieves near-parity with GPT-4o and consistently outperforms strong open-source alternatives. These results demonstrate that structured data design, reasoning-oriented initialization, and verifiable reinforcement learning can advance clinical reasoning beyond simple accuracy optimization. We release Fleming-R1 publicly to promote transparent, reproducible, and auditable progress in medical AI, enabling safer deployment in high-stakes clinical environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, have revolutionized natural language processing research and demonstrated potential in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, the expensive training and deployment of LLMs present challenges to transparent and open academic research. To address these issues, this project open-sources the Chinese LLaMA and Alpaca large models, emphasizing instruction fine-tuning. We expand the original LLaMA's Chinese vocabulary by adding 20K Chinese tokens, increasing encoding efficiency and enhancing basic semantic understanding. By incorporating secondary pre-training using Chinese data and fine-tuning with Chinese instruction data, we substantially improve the models' comprehension and execution of instructions. Our pilot study serves as a foundation for researchers adapting LLaMA and Alpaca models to other languages. Resources are made publicly available through GitHub, fostering open research in the Chinese NLP community and beyond. GitHub repository: https://github.com/ymcui/Chinese-LLaMA-Alpaca

Real-world AI software engineering demands coding agents that can reason over massive repositories, maintain durable memory across and within long sessions, and robustly coordinate complex toolchains at test time. Existing open-source coding agents provide transparency but frequently fall short when pushed to these industrial-scale workloads, while proprietary coding agents offer strong practical performance but limited extensibility, interpretability, and controllability. We present the Confucius Code Agent (CCA), an open-sourced AI software engineer that can operate at an industrial scale. CCA is built atop the Confucius SDK, an open-sourced agent development platform designed around three complementary perspectives: Agent Experience (AX), User Experience (UX), and Developer Experience (DX). The SDK introduces a unified orchestrator with hierarchical working memory for long-context reasoning, a persistent note-taking system for cross-session continual learning, and a modular extension module for robust tool use. Moreover, a meta-agent automates the synthesis, evaluation, and refinement of agent configurations through a build-test-improve loop, enabling rapid agent development on new tasks, environments, and tool stacks. Instantiated on Confucius SDK with these mechanisms, CCA delivers strong performance on real-world software engineering tasks. On SWE-Bench-Pro, CCA achieves a state-of-the-art Resolve@1 performance of 54.3%, substantially improving over prior coding agents. Together, the Confucius SDK and CCA provide a transparent, extensible, and reproducible foundation for AI agents, bridge gaps between research prototypes and production-grade systems, and support agent development and deployment at industrial scale.

Specialized clinical AI assistants are rapidly entering medical practice, often framed as safer or more reliable than general-purpose large language models (LLMs). Yet, unlike frontier models, these clinical tools are rarely subjected to independent, quantitative evaluation, creating a critical evidence gap despite their growing influence on diagnosis, triage, and guideline interpretation. We assessed two widely deployed clinical AI systems (OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI) against three state-of-the-art generalist LLMs (GPT-5, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Sonnet 4.5) using a 1,000-item mini-benchmark combining MedQA (medical knowledge) and HealthBench (clinician-alignment) tasks. Generalist models consistently outperformed clinical tools, with GPT-5 achieving the highest scores, while OpenEvidence and UpToDate demonstrated deficits in completeness, communication quality, context awareness, and systems-based safety reasoning. These findings reveal that tools marketed for clinical decision support may often lag behind frontier LLMs, underscoring the urgent need for transparent, independent evaluation before deployment in patient-facing workflows.

We introduce the Granite Embedding R2 models, a comprehensive family of high-performance English encoder-based embedding models engineered for enterprise-scale dense retrieval applications. Building upon our first-generation release, these models deliver substantial improvements, including 16x expanded context length (8,192 tokens), state-of-the-art performance across diverse retrieval domains - text, code, long-document search, multi-turn conversational, and tabular data - and measurable speed advantages of 19-44\% over leading competitors while maintaining superior accuracy. Our release encompasses both bi-encoder and cross-encoder architectures, featuring a highly effective 22-layer retriever model and its efficient 12-layer counterpart, alongside a high-quality reranker model, all trained exclusively on enterprise-appropriate data with comprehensive governance oversight. The models demonstrate exceptional versatility across standard benchmarks, IBM-developed evaluation suites, and real-world enterprise use cases, establishing new performance standards for open-source embedding models. In an era where retrieval speed and accuracy are paramount for competitive advantage, the Granite R2 models deliver a compelling combination of cutting-edge performance, enterprise-ready licensing, and transparent data provenance that organizations require for mission-critical deployments. All models are publicly available under the Apache 2.0 license at https://huggingface.co/collections/ibm-granite, enabling unrestricted research and commercial use.

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming deeply embedded in human communication and decision-making, yet they inherit the ambiguity, bias, and lack of direct access to truth inherent in language itself. While their outputs are fluent, emotionally resonant, and coherent, they are generated through statistical prediction rather than grounded reasoning. This creates the risk of hallucination, responses that sound convincing but lack factual validity. Building on Geoffrey Hinton's observation that AI mirrors human intuition rather than reasoning, this paper argues that LLMs operationalize System 1 cognition at scale: fast, associative, and persuasive, but without reflection or falsification. To address this, we introduce the Rose-Frame, a three-dimensional framework for diagnosing cognitive and epistemic drift in human-AI interaction. The three axes are: (i) Map vs. Territory, which distinguishes representations of reality (epistemology) from reality itself (ontology); (ii) Intuition vs. Reason, drawing on dual-process theory to separate fast, emotional judgments from slow, reflective thinking; and (iii) Conflict vs. Confirmation, which examines whether ideas are critically tested through disagreement or simply reinforced through mutual validation. Each dimension captures a distinct failure mode, and their combination amplifies misalignment. Rose-Frame does not attempt to fix LLMs with more data or rules. Instead, it offers a reflective tool that makes both the model's limitations and the user's assumptions visible, enabling more transparent and critically aware AI deployment. It reframes alignment as cognitive governance: intuition, whether human or artificial, must remain governed by human reason. Only by embedding reflective, falsifiable oversight can we align machine fluency with human understanding.

Higher Degree by Research (HDR) candidates increasingly depend on cloud-provisioned virtual machines and local GPU hardware for their computational experiments, yet a persistent and under-addressed gap exists between having compute resources and using them productively. Cloud and infrastructure teams can provision virtual machines, but the path from a raw VM to a reproducible, GPU-ready research environment remains a significant barrier for researchers who are domain experts, not systems engineers. We identify this gap as a missing adapter layer between cloud provisioning and interactive research work. We present a lightweight, open-source solution built on k3s and Coder that implements this adapter layer and is already in active use in our research workspace environment. Our CI/CD pipeline connects GitHub directly to the local cluster, deploying research projects in under five minutes. We define a concrete metrics framework for evaluating this layer -- covering deployment latency, environment reproducibility, onboarding friction, and resource utilisation -- and establish baselines against which improvements can be measured.

Catalyzed by the popularity of blockchain technology, there has recently been a renewed interest in the design, implementation and evaluation of decentralized systems. Most of these systems are intended to be deployed at scale and in heterogeneous environments with real users and unpredictable workloads. Nevertheless, most research in this field evaluates such systems in controlled environments that poorly reflect the complex conditions of real-world environments. In this work, we argue that deployment is crucial to understanding decentralized mechanisms in a real-world environment and an enabler to building more robust and sustainable systems. We highlight the merits of deployment by comparing this approach with other experimental setups and show how our lab applied a deployment-first methodology. We then outline how we use Tribler, our peer-to-peer file-sharing application, to deploy and monitor decentralized mechanisms at scale. We illustrate the application of our methodology by describing a deployment trial in experimental tokenomics. Finally, we summarize four lessons learned from multiple deployment trials where we applied our methodology.

Generative AI release decisions determine whether system components are made available, but release does not address many other elements that change how users and stakeholders are able to engage with a system. Beyond release, access to system components informs potential risks and benefits. Access refers to practical needs, infrastructurally, technically, and societally, in order to use available components in some way. We deconstruct access along three axes: resourcing, technical usability, and utility. Within each category, a set of variables per system component clarify tradeoffs. For example, resourcing requires access to computing infrastructure to serve model weights. We also compare the accessibility of four high performance language models, two open-weight and two closed-weight, showing similar considerations for all based instead on access variables. Access variables set the foundation for being able to scale or increase access to users; we examine the scale of access and how scale affects ability to manage and intervene on risks. This framework better encompasses the landscape and risk-benefit tradeoffs of system releases to inform system release decisions, research, and policy.

Training capable software engineering (SWE) agents demands large-scale, executable, and verifiable environments that provide dynamic feedback loops for iterative code editing, test execution, and solution refinement. However, existing open-source datasets remain limited in scale and repository diversity, while industrial solutions are opaque with unreleased infrastructure, creating a prohibitive barrier for most academic research groups. We present OpenSWE, the largest fully transparent framework for SWE agent training in Python, comprising 45,320 executable Docker environments spanning over 12.8k repositories, with all Dockerfiles, evaluation scripts, and infrastructure fully open-sourced for reproducibility. OpenSWE is built through a multi-agent synthesis pipeline deployed across a 64-node distributed cluster, automating repository exploration, Dockerfile construction, evaluation script generation, and iterative test analysis. Beyond scale, we propose a quality-centric filtering pipeline that characterizes the inherent difficulty of each environment, filtering out instances that are either unsolvable or insufficiently challenging and retaining only those that maximize learning efficiency. With 891K spent on environment construction and an additional 576K on trajectory sampling and difficulty-aware curation, the entire project represents a total investment of approximately $1.47 million, yielding about 13,000 curated trajectories from roughly 9,000 quality guaranteed environments. Extensive experiments validate OpenSWE's effectiveness: OpenSWE-32B and OpenSWE-72B achieve 62.4% and 66.0% on SWE-bench Verified, establishing SOTA among Qwen2.5 series. Moreover, SWE-focused training yields substantial out-of-domain improvements, including up to 12 points on mathematical reasoning and 5 points on science benchmarks, without degrading factual recall.

Privacy policies are supposed to provide notice. But what if substantive information appears only where users skip it? We identify a structural pattern we call jurisdiction-siloed disclosure: information about data practices appearing in specific, actionable form only within regional compliance sections labeled "California Residents" or "EU/UK Users," while general sections use vague or qualified language for the same practices. Our audit of 123 major companies identifies 282 potential instances across 77 companies (62.6% of this purposive sample). A conservative estimate restricted to practice categories validated against OPP-115 human annotations finds 138 instances across 54 companies (44%); post-2018 categories central to our findings await independent validation. If users skip jurisdiction-labeled sections as information foraging theory predicts, users outside regulated jurisdictions would receive less specific information about practices affecting them--a transparency failure operating through document architecture rather than omission. We propose universal substantive disclosure: practices affecting all users should appear in the main policy body, with regional sections containing only procedural rights information. This standard finds support in analogous disclosure regimes (securities, truth-in-lending, nutritional labeling) where material information must reach all affected parties. Regulators could operationalize this through the FTC's "clear and conspicuous" standard and GDPR transparency principles. This work is hypothesis-generating: we establish that the structural pattern exists and ground the transparency concern in behavioral theory, but direct measurement of jurisdiction-specific section skipping remains the critical validation priority. We release our methodology and annotated dataset to enable replication.

Despite increasing discussions on open-source Artificial Intelligence (AI), existing research lacks a discussion on the transparency and accessibility of state-of-the-art (SoTA) Large Language Models (LLMs). The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has recently released its first formal definition of open-source software. This definition, when combined with standard dictionary definitions and the sparse published literature, provide an initial framework to support broader accessibility to AI models such as LLMs, but more work is essential to capture the unique dynamics of openness in AI. In addition, concerns about open-washing, where models claim openness but lack full transparency, has been raised, which limits the reproducibility, bias mitigation, and domain adaptation of these models. In this context, our study critically analyzes SoTA LLMs from the last five years, including ChatGPT, DeepSeek, LLaMA, and others, to assess their adherence to transparency standards and the implications of partial openness. Specifically, we examine transparency and accessibility from two perspectives: open-source vs. open-weight models. Our findings reveal that while some models are labeled as open-source, this does not necessarily mean they are fully open-sourced. Even in the best cases, open-source models often do not report model training data, and code as well as key metrics, such as weight accessibility, and carbon emissions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that systematically examines the transparency and accessibility of over 100 different SoTA LLMs through the dual lens of open-source and open-weight models. The findings open avenues for further research and call for responsible and sustainable AI practices to ensure greater transparency, accountability, and ethical deployment of these models.(DeepSeek transparency, ChatGPT accessibility, open source, DeepSeek open source)

Cloud infrastructure is managed through a mix of interfaces -- traditionally, cloud consoles, command-line interfaces (CLI), and SDKs are the tools of choice. Recently, Infrastructure-as-Code/IaC frameworks (e.g., Terraform) have quickly gained popularity. Unlike conventional tools, IaC~frameworks encode the infrastructure in a "source-of-truth" configuration. They are capable of automatically carrying out modifications to the cloud -- deploying, updating, or destroying resources -- to bring the actual infrastructure into alignment with the IaC configuration. However, when IaC is used alongside consoles, CLIs, or SDKs, it loses visibility into external changes, causing infrastructure drift, where the configuration becomes outdated, and later IaC operations may undo valid updates or trigger errors. We present NSync, an automated system for IaC reconciliation that propagates out-of-band changes back into the IaC program. Our key insight is that infrastructure changes eventually all occur via cloud API invocations -- the lowest layer for cloud management operations. NSync gleans insights from API traces to detect drift (i.e., non-IaC changes) and reconcile it (i.e., update the IaC configuration to capture the changes). It employs an agentic architecture that leverages LLMs to infer high-level intents from noisy API sequences, synthesize targeted IaC updates using specialized tools, and continually improve through a self-evolving knowledge base of past reconciliations. We further introduce a novel evaluation pipeline for injecting realistic drifts into cloud infrastructure and assessing reconciliation performance. Experiments across five real-world Terraform projects and 372 drift scenarios show that NSync outperforms the baseline both in terms of accuracy (from 0.71 to 0.97 pass@3) and token efficiency (1.47times improvement).

Foundation models have rapidly permeated society, catalyzing a wave of generative AI applications spanning enterprise and consumer-facing contexts. While the societal impact of foundation models is growing, transparency is on the decline, mirroring the opacity that has plagued past digital technologies (e.g. social media). Reversing this trend is essential: transparency is a vital precondition for public accountability, scientific innovation, and effective governance. To assess the transparency of the foundation model ecosystem and help improve transparency over time, we introduce the Foundation Model Transparency Index. The Foundation Model Transparency Index specifies 100 fine-grained indicators that comprehensively codify transparency for foundation models, spanning the upstream resources used to build a foundation model (e.g data, labor, compute), details about the model itself (e.g. size, capabilities, risks), and the downstream use (e.g. distribution channels, usage policies, affected geographies). We score 10 major foundation model developers (e.g. OpenAI, Google, Meta) against the 100 indicators to assess their transparency. To facilitate and standardize assessment, we score developers in relation to their practices for their flagship foundation model (e.g. GPT-4 for OpenAI, PaLM 2 for Google, Llama 2 for Meta). We present 10 top-level findings about the foundation model ecosystem: for example, no developer currently discloses significant information about the downstream impact of its flagship model, such as the number of users, affected market sectors, or how users can seek redress for harm. Overall, the Foundation Model Transparency Index establishes the level of transparency today to drive progress on foundation model governance via industry standards and regulatory intervention.

As AI technology advances, it is driving innovation across industries, increasing the demand for scalable AI project deployment. However, deployment remains a critical challenge due to complex environment configurations, dependency conflicts, cross-platform adaptation, and debugging difficulties, which hinder automation and adoption. This paper introduces AI2Agent, an end-to-end framework that automates AI project deployment through guideline-driven execution, self-adaptive debugging, and case \& solution accumulation. AI2Agent dynamically analyzes deployment challenges, learns from past cases, and iteratively refines its approach, significantly reducing human intervention. To evaluate its effectiveness, we conducted experiments on 30 AI deployment cases, covering TTS, text-to-image generation, image editing, and other AI applications. Results show that AI2Agent significantly reduces deployment time and improves success rates. The code and demo video are now publicly accessible.

We present Apertus, a fully open suite of large language models (LLMs) designed to address two systemic shortcomings in today's open model ecosystem: data compliance and multilingual representation. Unlike many prior models that release weights without reproducible data pipelines or regard for content-owner rights, Apertus models are pretrained exclusively on openly available data, retroactively respecting robots.txt exclusions and filtering for non-permissive, toxic, and personally identifiable content. To mitigate risks of memorization, we adopt the Goldfish objective during pretraining, strongly suppressing verbatim recall of data while retaining downstream task performance. The Apertus models also expand multilingual coverage, training on 15T tokens from over 1800 languages, with ~40% of pretraining data allocated to non-English content. Released at 8B and 70B scales, Apertus approaches state-of-the-art results among fully open models on multilingual benchmarks, rivalling or surpassing open-weight counterparts. Beyond model weights, we release all scientific artifacts from our development cycle with a permissive license, including data preparation scripts, checkpoints, evaluation suites, and training code, enabling transparent audit and extension.

Containerization, driven by Docker, has transformed application development and deployment by enhancing efficiency and scalability. However, the rapid adoption of container technologies introduces significant security challenges that require careful management. This paper investigates key areas of container security, including runtime protection, network safeguards, configuration best practices, supply chain security, and comprehensive monitoring and logging solutions. We identify common vulnerabilities within these domains and provide actionable recommendations to address and mitigate these risks. By integrating security throughout the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), organizations can reinforce their security posture, creating a resilient and reliable containerized application infrastructure that withstands evolving threats.

In LLM/VLM agents, prompt privacy risk propagates beyond a single model call because raw user content can flow into retrieval queries, memory writes, tool calls, and logs. Existing de-identification pipelines address document boundaries but not this cross-stage propagation. We propose BodhiPromptShield, a policy-aware framework that detects sensitive spans, routes them via typed placeholders, semantic abstraction, or secure symbolic mapping, and delays restoration to authorized boundaries. Relative to enterprise redaction, this adds explicit propagation-aware mediation and restoration timing as a security variable. Under controlled evaluation on the Controlled Prompt-Privacy Benchmark (CPPB), stage-wise propagation suppresses from 10.7\% to 7.1\% across retrieval, memory, and tool stages; PER reaches 9.3\% with 0.94 AC and 0.92 TSR, outperforming generic de-identification. These are controlled systems results on CPPB rather than formal privacy guarantees or public-benchmark transfer claims. The project repository is available at https://github.com/mabo1215/BodhiPromptShield.git.

OpenClaw-like agents offer substantial productivity benefits, yet they are insecure by default because they combine untrusted inputs, autonomous action, extensibility, and privileged system access within a single execution loop. We use OpenClaw as an exemplar of a broader class of agents that interact with interfaces, manipulate files, invoke tools, and install extensions in real operating environments. Consequently, their security should be treated as a software engineering problem rather than as a product-specific concern. To address these architectural vulnerabilities, we propose a blueprint for defensible design. We present a risk taxonomy, secure engineering principles, and a practical research agenda to institutionalize safety in agent construction. Our goal is to transition the community focus from isolated vulnerability patching toward systematic defensive engineering and robust deployment practices.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled researchers to focus on practical repository-level tasks in software engineering domain. In this work, we consider a cornerstone task for automating work with software repositories-environment setup, i.e., a task of configuring a repository-specific development environment on a system. Existing studies on environment setup introduce innovative agentic strategies, but their evaluation is often based on small datasets that may not capture the full range of configuration challenges encountered in practice. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive environment setup benchmark EnvBench. It encompasses 329 Python and 665 JVM-based (Java, Kotlin) repositories, with a focus on repositories that present genuine configuration challenges, excluding projects that can be fully configured by simple deterministic scripts. To enable further benchmark extension and usage for model tuning, we implement two automatic metrics: a static analysis check for missing imports in Python and a compilation check for JVM languages. We demonstrate the applicability of our benchmark by evaluating three environment setup approaches, including a simple zero-shot baseline and two agentic workflows, that we test with two powerful LLM backbones, GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best approach manages to successfully configure 6.69% repositories for Python and 29.47% repositories for JVM, suggesting that EnvBench remains challenging for current approaches. Our benchmark suite is publicly available at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/EnvBench. The dataset and experiment trajectories are available at https://jb.gg/envbench.

The high cost of ownership of AI compute infrastructure and challenges of robust serving of large language models (LLMs) has led to a surge in managed Model-as-a-service deployments. Even when enterprises choose on-premises deployments, the compute infrastructure is typically shared across many teams in order to maximize the return on investment. In both scenarios the deployed models operate only on plaintext data, and so enterprise data owners must allow their data to appear in plaintext on a shared or multi-tenant compute infrastructure. This results in data owners with private or sensitive data being hesitant or restricted in what data they use with these types of deployments. In this work we introduce the Stained Glass Transform, a learned, stochastic, and sequence dependent transformation of the word embeddings of an LLM which information theoretically provides privacy to the input of the LLM while preserving the utility of model. We theoretically connect a particular class of Stained Glass Transforms to the theory of mutual information of Gaussian Mixture Models. We then calculate a-postiori privacy estimates, based on mutual information, and verify the privacy and utility of instances of transformed embeddings through token level metrics of privacy and standard LLM performance benchmarks.

Large language models (LLMs) have facilitated a wide range of applications with distinct service-level objectives (SLOs), from latency-sensitive online tasks like interactive chatbots to throughput-oriented offline workloads like document summarization. The existing deployment model, which dedicates machines to each workload, simplifies SLO management but often leads to poor resource utilization. This paper introduces HyGen, an interference-aware LLM serving system that enables efficient co-location of online and offline workloads while preserving latency requirements. HyGen incorporates two key innovations: (1) performance control mechanisms, including a latency predictor to estimate batch execution time and an SLO-aware profiler to quantify latency interference, and (2) SLO-aware offline scheduling policies that maximize serving throughput and prevent starvation, without compromising online serving latency. Our evaluation on production workloads shows that HyGen achieves up to 3.87x overall throughput and 5.84x offline throughput gains over online and hybrid serving baselines, respectively, while strictly satisfying latency SLOs.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have undergone a significant transformation, marked by a rapid rise in both their popularity and capabilities. Leading this evolution are proprietary LLMs like GPT-4 and GPT-o1, which have captured widespread attention in the AI community due to their remarkable performance and versatility. Simultaneously, open-source LLMs, such as LLaMA and Mistral, have made great contributions to the ever-increasing popularity of LLMs due to the ease to customize and deploy the models across diverse applications. Although open-source LLMs present unprecedented opportunities for innovation and research, the commercialization of LLMs has raised concerns about transparency, reproducibility, and safety. Many open-source LLMs fail to meet fundamental transparency requirements by withholding essential components like training code and data, and some use restrictive licenses whilst claiming to be "open-source," which may hinder further innovations on LLMs. To mitigate this issue, we introduce Moxin 7B, a fully open-source LLM developed in accordance with the Model Openness Framework (MOF), a ranked classification system that evaluates AI models based on model completeness and openness, adhering to principles of open science, open source, open data, and open access. Our model achieves the highest MOF classification level of "open science" through the comprehensive release of pre-training code and configurations, training and fine-tuning datasets, and intermediate and final checkpoints. Experiments show that our model achieves superior performance in zero-shot evaluation compared with popular 7B models and performs competitively in few-shot evaluation.

The increasing deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) across enterprise and mission-critical domains has underscored the urgent need for robust guardrailing systems that ensure safety, reliability, and compliance. Existing solutions often struggle with real-time oversight, multi-modal data handling, and explainability -- limitations that hinder their adoption in regulated environments. Existing guardrails largely operate in isolation, focused on text alone making them inadequate for multi-modal, production-scale environments. We introduce Protect, natively multi-modal guardrailing model designed to operate seamlessly across text, image, and audio inputs, designed for enterprise-grade deployment. Protect integrates fine-tuned, category-specific adapters trained via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on an extensive, multi-modal dataset covering four safety dimensions: toxicity, sexism, data privacy, and prompt injection. Our teacher-assisted annotation pipeline leverages reasoning and explanation traces to generate high-fidelity, context-aware labels across modalities. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across all safety dimensions, surpassing existing open and proprietary models such as WildGuard, LlamaGuard-4, and GPT-4.1. Protect establishes a strong foundation for trustworthy, auditable, and production-ready safety systems capable of operating across text, image, and audio modalities.

Large language models have made significant progress in complex but easy-to-verify problems, yet they still struggle with discovering the unknown. In this paper, we present AlphaResearch, an autonomous research agent designed to discover new algorithms on open-ended problems. To synergize the feasibility and innovation of the discovery process, we construct a novel dual research environment by combining the execution-based verify and simulated real-world peer review environment. AlphaResearch discovers new algorithm by iteratively running the following steps: (1) propose new ideas (2) verify the ideas in the dual research environment (3) optimize the research proposals for better performance. To promote a transparent evaluation process, we construct AlphaResearchComp, a new evaluation benchmark that includes an eight open-ended algorithmic problems competition, with each problem carefully curated and verified through executable pipelines, objective metrics, and reproducibility checks. AlphaResearch gets a 2/8 win rate in head-to-head comparison with human researchers, demonstrate the possibility of accelerating algorithm discovery with LLMs. Notably, the algorithm discovered by AlphaResearch on the ``packing circles'' problem achieves the best-of-known performance, surpassing the results of human researchers and strong baselines from recent work (e.g., AlphaEvolve). Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the remaining challenges of the 6/8 failure cases, providing valuable insights for future research.

LLM based agents are increasingly deployed in high stakes settings where they process external data sources such as emails, documents, and code repositories. This creates exposure to indirect prompt injection attacks, where adversarial instructions embedded in external content manipulate agent behavior without user awareness. A critical but underexplored dimension of this threat is concealment: since users tend to observe only an agent's final response, an attack can conceal its existence by presenting no clue of compromise in the final user facing response while successfully executing harmful actions. This leaves users unaware of the manipulation and likely to accept harmful outcomes as legitimate. We present findings from a large scale public red teaming competition evaluating this dual objective across three agent settings: tool calling, coding, and computer use. The competition attracted 464 participants who submitted 272000 attack attempts against 13 frontier models, yielding 8648 successful attacks across 41 scenarios. All models proved vulnerable, with attack success rates ranging from 0.5% (Claude Opus 4.5) to 8.5% (Gemini 2.5 Pro). We identify universal attack strategies that transfer across 21 of 41 behaviors and multiple model families, suggesting fundamental weaknesses in instruction following architectures. Capability and robustness showed weak correlation, with Gemini 2.5 Pro exhibiting both high capability and high vulnerability. To address benchmark saturation and obsoleteness, we will endeavor to deliver quarterly updates through continued red teaming competitions. We open source the competition environment for use in evaluations, along with 95 successful attacks against Qwen that did not transfer to any closed source model. We share model-specific attack data with respective frontier labs and the full dataset with the UK AISI and US CAISI to support robustness research.

As large language models (LLMs) diversify across modalities, capabilities, and cost profiles, the problem of intelligent request routing -- selecting the right model for each query at inference time -- has become a critical systems challenge. We present vLLM Semantic Router, a signal-driven decision routing framework for Mixture-of-Modality (MoM) model deployments. The central innovation is composable signal orchestration: the system extracts heterogeneous signal types from each request -- from sub-millisecond heuristic features (keyword patterns, language detection, context length, role-based authorization) to neural classifiers (domain, embedding similarity, factual grounding, modality) -- and composes them through configurable Boolean decision rules into deployment-specific routing policies. Different deployment scenarios -- multi-cloud enterprise, privacy-regulated, cost-optimized, latency-sensitive -- are expressed as different signal-decision configurations over the same architecture, without code changes. Matched decisions drive semantic model routing: over a dozen of selection algorithms analyze request characteristics to find the best model cost-effectively, while per-decision plugin chains enforce privacy and safety constraints (jailbreak detection, PII filtering, hallucination detection via the three-stage HaluGate pipeline). The system provides OpenAI API support for stateful multi-turn conversations, multi-endpoint and multi-provider routing across heterogeneous backends (vLLM, OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, Bedrock, Gemini, Vertex AI), and a pluggable authorization factory supporting multiple auth providers. Deployed in production as an Envoy external processor, the architecture demonstrates that composable signal orchestration enables a single routing framework to serve diverse deployment scenarios with differentiated cost, privacy, and safety policies.

Many works have recently proposed the use of Large Language Model (LLM) based agents for performing `repository level' tasks, loosely defined as a set of tasks whose scopes are greater than a single file. This has led to speculation that the orchestration of these repository-level tasks could lead to software engineering agents capable of performing almost independently of human intervention. However, of the suite of tasks that would need to be performed by this autonomous software engineering agent, we argue that one important task is missing, which is to fulfil project level dependency by installing other repositories. To investigate the feasibility of this repository level installation task, we introduce a benchmark of of repository installation tasks curated from 40 open source Python projects, which includes a ground truth installation process for each target repository. Further, we propose Installamatic, an agent which aims to perform and verify the installation of a given repository by searching for relevant instructions from documentation in the repository. Empirical experiments reveal that that 55% of the studied repositories can be automatically installed by our agent at least one out of ten times. Through further analysis, we identify the common causes for our agent's inability to install a repository, discuss the challenges faced in the design and implementation of such an agent and consider the implications that such an agent could have for developers.

LLM app (tool) ecosystems are rapidly evolving to support sophisticated use cases that often require extensive user data collection. Given that LLM apps are developed by third parties and anecdotal evidence indicating inconsistent enforcement of policies by LLM platforms, sharing user data with these apps presents significant privacy risks. In this paper, we aim to bring transparency in data practices of LLM app ecosystems. We examine OpenAI's GPT app ecosystem as a case study. We propose an LLM-based framework to analyze the natural language specifications of GPT Actions (custom tools) and assess their data collection practices. Our analysis reveals that Actions collect excessive data across 24 categories and 145 data types, with third-party Actions collecting 6.03% more data on average. We find that several Actions violate OpenAI's policies by collecting sensitive information, such as passwords, which is explicitly prohibited by OpenAI. Lastly, we develop an LLM-based privacy policy analysis framework to automatically check the consistency of data collection by Actions with disclosures in their privacy policies. Our measurements indicate that the disclosures for most of the collected data types are omitted, with only 5.8% of Actions clearly disclosing their data collection practices.

Large language models trained on source code can support a variety of software development tasks, such as code recommendation and program repair. Large amounts of data for training such models benefit the models' performance. However, the size of the data and models results in long training times and high energy consumption. While publishing source code allows for replicability, users need to repeat the expensive training process if models are not shared. The main goal of the study is to investigate if publications that trained language models for software engineering (SE) tasks share source code and trained artifacts. The second goal is to analyze the transparency on training energy usage. We perform a snowballing-based literature search to find publications on language models for source code, and analyze their reusability from a sustainability standpoint. From 494 unique publications, we identified 293 relevant publications that use language models to address code-related tasks. Among them, 27% (79 out of 293) make artifacts available for reuse. This can be in the form of tools or IDE plugins designed for specific tasks or task-agnostic models that can be fine-tuned for a variety of downstream tasks. Moreover, we collect insights on the hardware used for model training, as well as training time, which together determine the energy consumption of the development process. We find that there are deficiencies in the sharing of information and artifacts for current studies on source code models for software engineering tasks, with 40% of the surveyed papers not sharing source code or trained artifacts. We recommend the sharing of source code as well as trained artifacts, to enable sustainable reproducibility. Moreover, comprehensive information on training times and hardware configurations should be shared for transparency on a model's carbon footprint.

Cloud computing transforms the way information technology (IT) is consumed and managed, promising improved cost efficiencies, accelerated innovation, faster time-to-market, and the ability to scale applications on demand (Leighton, 2009). According to Gartner, while the hype grew exponentially during 2008 and continued since, it is clear that there is a major shift towards the cloud computing model and that the benefits may be substantial (Gartner Hype-Cycle, 2012). However, as the shape of the cloud computing is emerging and developing rapidly both conceptually and in reality, the legal/contractual, economic, service quality, interoperability, security and privacy issues still pose significant challenges. In this chapter, we describe various service and deployment models of cloud computing and identify major challenges. In particular, we discuss three critical challenges: regulatory, security and privacy issues in cloud computing. Some solutions to mitigate these challenges are also proposed along with a brief presentation on the future trends in cloud computing deployment.

The AI development community is increasingly making use of hosting intermediaries such as Hugging Face provide easy access to user-uploaded models and training data. These model marketplaces lower technical deployment barriers for hundreds of thousands of users, yet can be used in numerous potentially harmful and illegal ways. In this article, we explain ways in which AI systems, which can both `contain' content and be open-ended tools, present one of the trickiest platform governance challenges seen to date. We provide case studies of several incidents across three illustrative platforms -- Hugging Face, GitHub and Civitai -- to examine how model marketplaces moderate models. Building on this analysis, we outline important (and yet nevertheless limited) practices that industry has been developing to respond to moderation demands: licensing, access and use restrictions, automated content moderation, and open policy development. While the policy challenge at hand is a considerable one, we conclude with some ideas as to how platforms could better mobilize resources to act as a careful, fair, and proportionate regulatory access point.

Incident management (IM) is central to the reliability of large-scale cloud systems. Yet manual IM, where on-call engineers examine metrics, logs, and traces is labor-intensive and error-prone in the face of massive and heterogeneous observability data. Existing automated IM approaches often struggle to generalize across systems, provide limited interpretability, and incur high deployment costs, which hinders adoption in practice. In this paper, we present OpsAgent, a lightweight, self-evolving multi-agent system for IM that employs a training-free data processor to convert heterogeneous observability data into structured textual descriptions, along with a multi-agent collaboration framework that makes diagnostic inference transparent and auditable. To support continual capability growth, OpsAgent also introduces a dual self-evolution mechanism that integrates internal model updates with external experience accumulation, thereby closing the deployment loop. Comprehensive experiments on the OPENRCA benchmark demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and show that OpsAgent is generalizable, interpretable, cost-efficient, and self-evolving, making it a practically deployable and sustainable solution for long-term operation in real-world cloud systems.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, it is prudent to assess whether safety measures remain effective even if LLMs intentionally try to bypass them. Previous work introduced control evaluations, an adversarial framework for testing deployment strategies of untrusted models (i.e., models which might be trying to bypass safety measures). While prior work treats a single failure as unacceptable, we perform control evaluations in a "distributed threat setting" -- a setting where no single action is catastrophic and no single action provides overwhelming evidence of misalignment. We approach this problem with a two-level deployment framework that uses an adaptive macro-protocol to choose between micro-protocols. Micro-protocols operate on a single task, using a less capable, but extensively tested (trusted) model to harness and monitor the untrusted model. Meanwhile, the macro-protocol maintains an adaptive credence on the untrusted model's alignment based on its past actions, using it to pick between safer and riskier micro-protocols. We evaluate our method in a code generation testbed where a red team attempts to generate subtly backdoored code with an LLM whose deployment is safeguarded by a blue team. We plot Pareto frontiers of safety (# of non-backdoored solutions) and usefulness (# of correct solutions). At a given level of usefulness, our adaptive deployment strategy reduces the number of backdoors by 80% compared to non-adaptive baselines.

We present RepoST, a scalable method to construct environments that provide execution feedback for repository-level code generation for both training and evaluation. Unlike existing works that aim to build entire repositories for execution, which is challenging for both human and LLMs, we provide execution feedback with sandbox testing, which isolates a given target function and its dependencies to a separate script for testing. Sandbox testing reduces the complexity of external dependencies and enables constructing environments at a large scale. We use our method to construct RepoST-Train, a large-scale train set with 7,415 functions from 832 repositories. Training with the execution feedback provided by RepoST-Train leads to a performance gain of 5.5% Pass@1 on HumanEval and 3.5% Pass@1 on RepoEval. We also build an evaluation dataset, RepoST-Eval, and benchmark 12 code generation models.

The foundational pretraining phase determines a model's capability ceiling, as post-training struggles to overcome capability foundations established during pretraining, yet it remains critically under-explored. This stems from a structural paradox: organizations with computational resources operate under commercial pressures that inhibit transparent disclosure, while academic institutions possess research freedom but lack pretraining-scale computational resources. daVinci-LLM occupies this unexplored intersection, combining industrial-scale resources with full research freedom to advance the science of pretraining. We adopt a fully-open paradigm that treats openness as scientific methodology, releasing complete data processing pipelines, full training processes, and systematic exploration results. Recognizing that the field lacks systematic methodology for data processing, we employ the Data Darwinism framework, a principled L0-L9 taxonomy from filtering to synthesis. We train a 3B-parameter model from random initialization across 8T tokens using a two-stage adaptive curriculum that progressively shifts from foundational capabilities to reasoning-intensive enhancement. Through 200+ controlled ablations, we establish that: processing depth systematically enhances capabilities, establishing it as a critical dimension alongside volume scaling; different domains exhibit distinct saturation dynamics, necessitating adaptive strategies from proportion adjustments to format shifts; compositional balance enables targeted intensification while preventing performance collapse; how evaluation protocol choices shape our understanding of pretraining progress. By releasing the complete exploration process, we enable the community to build upon our findings and systematic methodologies to form accumulative scientific knowledge in pretraining.

This paper presents a novel method of executable steganography using the alpha transparency layer of ICO image files to embed and deliver self-decompressing JavaScript payloads within web browsers. By targeting the least significant bit (LSB) of non-transparent alpha layer image values, the proposed method successfully conceals compressed JavaScript code inside a favicon image without affecting visual fidelity. Global web traffic loads 294 billion favicons daily and consume 0.9 petabytes of network bandwidth. A proof-of-concept implementation demonstrates that a 64x64 ICO image can embed up to 512 bytes uncompressed, or 0.8 kilobyte when using lightweight two-fold compression. On page load, a browser fetches the favicon as part of standard behavior, allowing an embedded loader script to extract and execute the payload entirely in memory using native JavaScript APIs and canvas pixel access. This creates a two-stage covert channel requiring no additional network or user requests. Testing across multiple browsers in both desktop and mobile environments confirms successful and silent execution of the embedded script. We evaluate the threat model, relate it to polymorphic phishing attacks that evade favicon-based detection, and analyze evasion of content security policies and antivirus scanners. We map nine example MITRE ATT&CK Framework objectives to single line JavaScript to execute arbitrarily in ICO files. Existing steganalysis and sanitization defenses are discussed, highlighting limitations in detecting or neutralizing alpha-channel exploits. The results demonstrate a stealthy and reusable attack surface that blurs traditional boundaries between static images and executable content. Because modern browsers report silent errors when developers specifically fail to load ICO files, this attack surface offers an interesting example of required web behaviors that in turn compromise security.

The rapid rise of open-weight and open-source foundation models is intensifying the obligation and reshaping the opportunity to make AI systems safe. This paper reports outcomes from the Columbia Convening on AI Openness and Safety (San Francisco, 19 Nov 2024) and its six-week preparatory programme involving more than forty-five researchers, engineers, and policy leaders from academia, industry, civil society, and government. Using a participatory, solutions-oriented process, the working groups produced (i) a research agenda at the intersection of safety and open source AI; (ii) a mapping of existing and needed technical interventions and open source tools to safely and responsibly deploy open foundation models across the AI development workflow; and (iii) a mapping of the content safety filter ecosystem with a proposed roadmap for future research and development. We find that openness -- understood as transparent weights, interoperable tooling, and public governance -- can enhance safety by enabling independent scrutiny, decentralized mitigation, and culturally plural oversight. However, significant gaps persist: scarce multimodal and multilingual benchmarks, limited defenses against prompt-injection and compositional attacks in agentic systems, and insufficient participatory mechanisms for communities most affected by AI harms. The paper concludes with a roadmap of five priority research directions, emphasizing participatory inputs, future-proof content filters, ecosystem-wide safety infrastructure, rigorous agentic safeguards, and expanded harm taxonomies. These recommendations informed the February 2025 French AI Action Summit and lay groundwork for an open, plural, and accountable AI safety discipline.

As increasingly powerful generative AI systems are developed, the release method greatly varies. We propose a framework to assess six levels of access to generative AI systems: fully closed; gradual or staged access; hosted access; cloud-based or API access; downloadable access; and fully open. Each level, from fully closed to fully open, can be viewed as an option along a gradient. We outline key considerations across this gradient: release methods come with tradeoffs, especially around the tension between concentrating power and mitigating risks. Diverse and multidisciplinary perspectives are needed to examine and mitigate risk in generative AI systems from conception to deployment. We show trends in generative system release over time, noting closedness among large companies for powerful systems and openness among organizations founded on principles of openness. We also enumerate safety controls and guardrails for generative systems and necessary investments to improve future releases.

We present Springdrift, a persistent runtime for long-lived LLM agents. The system integrates an auditable execution substrate (append-only memory, supervised processes, git-backed recovery), a case-based reasoning memory layer with hybrid retrieval (evaluated against a dense cosine baseline), a deterministic normative calculus for safety gating with auditable axiom trails, and continuous ambient self-perception via a structured self-state representation (the sensorium) injected each cycle without tool calls. These properties support behaviours difficult to achieve in session-bounded systems: cross-session task continuity, cross-channel context maintenance, end-to-end forensic reconstruction of decisions, and self-diagnostic behaviour. We report on a single-instance deployment over 23 days (19 operating days), during which the agent diagnosed its own infrastructure bugs, classified failure modes, identified an architectural vulnerability, and maintained context across email and web channels -- without explicit instruction. We introduce the term Artificial Retainer for this category: a non-human system with persistent memory, defined authority, domain-specific autonomy, and forensic accountability in an ongoing relationship with a specific principal -- distinguished from software assistants and autonomous agents, drawing on professional retainer relationships and the bounded autonomy of trained working animals. This is a technical report on a systems design and deployment case study, not a benchmark-driven evaluation. Evidence is from a single instance with a single operator, presented as illustration of what these architectural properties can support in practice. Implemented in approximately Gleam on Erlang/OTP. Code, artefacts, and redacted operational logs will be available at https://github.com/seamus-brady/springdrift upon publication.

Confidential computing on GPUs, like NVIDIA H100, mitigates the security risks of outsourced Large Language Models (LLMs) by implementing strong isolation and data encryption. Nonetheless, this encryption incurs a significant performance overhead, reaching up to 52.8 percent and 88.2 percent throughput drop when serving OPT-30B and OPT-66B, respectively. To address this challenge, we introduce PipeLLM, a user-transparent runtime system. PipeLLM removes the overhead by overlapping the encryption and GPU computation through pipelining - an idea inspired by the CPU instruction pipelining - thereby effectively concealing the latency increase caused by encryption. The primary technical challenge is that, unlike CPUs, the encryption module lacks prior knowledge of the specific data needing encryption until it is requested by the GPUs. To this end, we propose speculative pipelined encryption to predict the data requiring encryption by analyzing the serving patterns of LLMs. Further, we have developed an efficient, low-cost pipeline relinquishing approach for instances of incorrect predictions. Our experiments on NVIDIA H100 GPU show that compared with vanilla systems without confidential computing (e.g., vLLM, PEFT, and FlexGen), PipeLLM incurs modest overhead (less than 19.6 percent in throughput) across various LLM sizes, from 13B to 175B.

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) accessed via black-box APIs introduces a significant trust challenge: users pay for services based on advertised model capabilities (e.g., size, performance), but providers may covertly substitute the specified model with a cheaper, lower-quality alternative to reduce operational costs. This lack of transparency undermines fairness, erodes trust, and complicates reliable benchmarking. Detecting such substitutions is difficult due to the black-box nature, typically limiting interaction to input-output queries. This paper formalizes the problem of model substitution detection in LLM APIs. We systematically evaluate existing verification techniques, including output-based statistical tests, benchmark evaluations, and log probability analysis, under various realistic attack scenarios like model quantization, randomized substitution, and benchmark evasion. Our findings reveal the limitations of methods relying solely on text outputs, especially against subtle or adaptive attacks. While log probability analysis offers stronger guarantees when available, its accessibility is often limited. We conclude by discussing the potential of hardware-based solutions like Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) as a pathway towards provable model integrity, highlighting the trade-offs between security, performance, and provider adoption. Code is available at https://github.com/sunblaze-ucb/llm-api-audit

We introduce SWE-Bench Pro, a substantially more challenging benchmark that builds upon the best practices of SWE-BENCH [25], but is explicitly designed to capture realistic, complex, enterprise-level problems beyond the scope of SWE-BENCH. SWE-BENCH PRO contains 1,865 problems sourced from a diverse set of 41 actively maintained repositories spanning business applications, B2B services, and developer tools. The benchmark is partitioned into a public set with open access to problems sourced from 11 repositories, a held-out set of 12 repositories and a commercial set of 18 proprietary repositories where we have formal partnership agreements with early-stage startups. Problems in the held-out and the commercial set are not publicly accessible, but we release results on the commercial set. Our benchmark features long-horizon tasks that may require hours to days for a professional software engineer to complete, often involving patches across multiple files and substantial code modifications. All tasks are human-verified and augmented with sufficient context to ensure resolvability. In our evaluation of widely used coding models, under a unified scaffold, we observe that their performance on SWE-Bench PRO remains below 25% (Pass@1), with GPT-5 achieving the highest score to date at 23.3%. To better understand these limitations, we cluster the failure modes observed in the collected agent trajectories for a clearer characterization of the error patterns exhibited by current models. Overall, SWE-BENCH PRO provides a contamination-resistant testbed that more faithfully captures the complexity and diversity of real-world software development, advancing the pursuit of truly autonomous software engineering agents at a professional level.

Rising concern for the societal implications of artificial intelligence systems has inspired a wave of academic and journalistic literature in which deployed systems are audited for harm by investigators from outside the organizations deploying the algorithms. However, it remains challenging for practitioners to identify the harmful repercussions of their own systems prior to deployment, and, once deployed, emergent issues can become difficult or impossible to trace back to their source. In this paper, we introduce a framework for algorithmic auditing that supports artificial intelligence system development end-to-end, to be applied throughout the internal organization development lifecycle. Each stage of the audit yields a set of documents that together form an overall audit report, drawing on an organization's values or principles to assess the fit of decisions made throughout the process. The proposed auditing framework is intended to contribute to closing the accountability gap in the development and deployment of large-scale artificial intelligence systems by embedding a robust process to ensure audit integrity.

This paper presents LLM-empowered workflow to support Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) software development, covering the aspects of security-aware system topology design, as well as event-driven decision-making code analysis. For code analysis we adopt event chains model which provides formal foundations to systematic validation of functional safety, taking into account the semantic validity of messages exchanged between key components, including both CAN and Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS). Analysis of security aspects for topology relies on synergy with Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach and Object Constraint Language (OCL) rules. Both locally deployable and proprietary solution are taken into account for evaluation within Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS)-related scenarios.

Search agents connect LLMs to the Internet, enabling access to broader and more up-to-date information. However, unreliable search results may also pose safety threats to end users, establishing a new threat surface. In this work, we conduct two in-the-wild experiments to demonstrate both the prevalence of low-quality search results and their potential to misguide agent behaviors. To counter this threat, we introduce an automated red-teaming framework that is systematic, scalable, and cost-efficient, enabling lightweight and harmless safety assessments of search agents. Building on this framework, we construct the SafeSearch benchmark, which includes 300 test cases covering five categories of risks (e.g., misinformation and indirect prompt injection). Using this benchmark, we evaluate three representative search agent scaffolds, covering search workflow, tool-calling, and deep research, across 7 proprietary and 8 open-source backend LLMs. Our results reveal substantial vulnerabilities of LLM-based search agents: when exposed to unreliable websites, the highest ASR reached 90.5% for GPT-4.1-mini under a search workflow setting. Moreover, our analysis highlights the limited effectiveness of common defense practices, such as reminder prompting. This emphasizes the value of our framework in promoting transparency for safer agent development. Our codebase and test cases are publicly available: https://github.com/jianshuod/SafeSearch.

Background: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) deployment in academic medical settings raises copyright compliance concerns. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute implemented GPT4DFCI, an internal generative AI tool utilizing OpenAI models, that is approved for enterprise use in research and operations. Given (1) the exceptionally broad adoption of the tool in our organization, (2) our research mission, and (3) the shared responsibility model required to benefit from Customer Copyright Commitment in Azure OpenAI Service products, we deemed rigorous copyright compliance testing necessary. Case Description: We conducted a structured red teaming exercise in Nov. 2024, with 42 participants from academic, industry, and government institutions. Four teams attempted to extract copyrighted content from GPT4DFCI across four domains: literary works, news articles, scientific publications, and access-restricted clinical notes. Teams successfully extracted verbatim book dedications and near-exact passages through various strategies. News article extraction failed despite jailbreak attempts. Scientific article reproduction yielded only high-level summaries. Clinical note testing revealed appropriate privacy safeguards. Discussion: The successful extraction of literary content indicates potential copyrighted material presence in training data, necessitating inference-time filtering. Differential success rates across content types suggest varying protective mechanisms. The event led to implementation of a copyright-specific meta-prompt in GPT4DFCI; this mitigation has been in production since Jan. 2025. Conclusion: Systematic red teaming revealed specific vulnerabilities in generative AI copyright compliance, leading to concrete mitigation strategies. Academic medical institutions deploying generative AI should implement continuous testing protocols to ensure legal and ethical compliance.

Foundation models are increasingly central to high-stakes AI systems, and governance frameworks now depend on evaluations to assess their risks and capabilities. Although general capability evaluations are widespread, social impact assessments covering bias, fairness, privacy, environmental costs, and labor practices remain uneven across the AI ecosystem. To characterize this landscape, we conduct the first comprehensive analysis of both first-party and third-party social impact evaluation reporting across a wide range of model developers. Our study examines 186 first-party release reports and 183 post-release evaluation sources, and complements this quantitative analysis with interviews of model developers. We find a clear division of evaluation labor: first-party reporting is sparse, often superficial, and has declined over time in key areas such as environmental impact and bias, while third-party evaluators including academic researchers, nonprofits, and independent organizations provide broader and more rigorous coverage of bias, harmful content, and performance disparities. However, this complementarity has limits. Only model developers can authoritatively report on data provenance, content moderation labor, financial costs, and training infrastructure, yet interviews reveal that these disclosures are often deprioritized unless tied to product adoption or regulatory compliance. Our findings indicate that current evaluation practices leave major gaps in assessing AI's societal impacts, highlighting the urgent need for policies that promote developer transparency, strengthen independent evaluation ecosystems, and create shared infrastructure to aggregate and compare third-party evaluations in a consistent and accessible way.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world applications, safeguarding them against unsafe, malicious, or privacy-violating content is critically important. We present OpenGuardrails, the first open-source project to provide both a context-aware safety and manipulation detection model and a deployable platform for comprehensive AI guardrails. OpenGuardrails protects against content-safety risks, model-manipulation attacks (e.g., prompt injection, jailbreaking, code-interpreter abuse, and the generation/execution of malicious code), and data leakage. Content-safety and model-manipulation detection are implemented by a unified large model, while data-leakage identification and redaction are performed by a separate lightweight NER pipeline (e.g., Presidio-style models or regex-based detectors). The system can be deployed as a security gateway or an API-based service, with enterprise-grade, fully private deployment options. OpenGuardrails achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on safety benchmarks, excelling in both prompt and response classification across English, Chinese, and multilingual tasks. All models are released under the Apache 2.0 license for public use.

Serverless computing is an emerging cloud paradigm with serverless functions at its core. While serverless environments enable software developers to focus on developing applications without the need to actively manage the underlying runtime infrastructure, they open the door to a wide variety of security threats that can be challenging to mitigate with existing methods. Existing security solutions do not apply to all serverless architectures, since they require significant modifications to the serverless infrastructure or rely on third-party services for the collection of more detailed data. In this paper, we present an extendable serverless security threat detection model that leverages cloud providers' native monitoring tools to detect anomalous behavior in serverless applications. Our model aims to detect compromised serverless functions by identifying post-exploitation abnormal behavior related to different types of attacks on serverless functions, and therefore, it is a last line of defense. Our approach is not tied to any specific serverless application, is agnostic to the type of threats, and is adaptable through model adjustments. To evaluate our model's performance, we developed a serverless cybersecurity testbed in an AWS cloud environment, which includes two different serverless applications and simulates a variety of attack scenarios that cover the main security threats faced by serverless functions. Our evaluation demonstrates our model's ability to detect all implemented attacks while maintaining a negligible false alarm rate.

With the advent of 6G, Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architectures are evolving to support intelligent, adaptive, and automated network orchestration. This paper proposes a novel Edge AI and Network Service Orchestration framework that leverages Large Language Model (LLM) agents deployed as O-RAN rApps. The proposed LLM-agent-powered system enables interactive and intuitive orchestration by translating the user's use case description into deployable AI services and corresponding network configurations. The LLM agent automates multiple tasks, including AI model selection from repositories (e.g., Hugging Face), service deployment, network adaptation, and real-time monitoring via xApps. We implement a prototype using open-source O-RAN projects (OpenAirInterface and FlexRIC) to demonstrate the feasibility and functionality of our framework. Our demonstration showcases the end-to-end flow of AI service orchestration, from user interaction to network adaptation, ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) compliance. This work highlights the potential of integrating LLM-driven automation into 6G O-RAN ecosystems, paving the way for more accessible and efficient edge AI ecosystems.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines are central to modern software delivery, yet their static workflows often introduce inefficiencies as systems scale. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL) based approach to dynamically optimize CI/CD pipeline workflows. The pipeline is modeled as a Markov Decision Process, and an RL agent is trained to make runtime decisions such as selecting full, partial, or no test execution in order to maximize throughput while minimizing testing overhead. A configurable CI/CD simulation environment is developed to evaluate the approach across build, test, and deploy stages. Experimental results show that the RL optimized pipeline achieves up to a 30 percent improvement in throughput and approximately a 25 percent reduction in test execution time compared to static baselines, while maintaining a defect miss rate below 5 percent. The agent learns to selectively skip or abbreviate tests for low risk commits, accelerating feedback cycles without significantly increasing failure risk. These results demonstrate the potential of reinforcement learning to enable adaptive and intelligent DevOps workflows, providing a practical pathway toward more efficient, resilient, and sustainable CI/CD automation.

The widespread deployment of LLMs across enterprise services has created a critical security blind spot. Organizations operate multiple LLM services handling billions of queries daily, yet regulatory compliance boundaries prevent these services from sharing threat intelligence about prompt injection attacks, the top security risk for LLMs. When an attack is detected in one service, the same threat may persist undetected in others for months, as privacy regulations prohibit sharing user prompts across compliance boundaries. We present BinaryShield, the first privacy-preserving threat intelligence system that enables secure sharing of attack fingerprints across compliance boundaries. BinaryShield transforms suspicious prompts through a unique pipeline combining PII redaction, semantic embedding, binary quantization, and randomized response mechanism to potentially generate non-invertible fingerprints that preserve attack patterns while providing privacy. Our evaluations demonstrate that BinaryShield achieves an F1-score of 0.94, significantly outperforming SimHash (0.77), the privacy-preserving baseline, while achieving 64x storage reduction and 38x faster similarity search compared to dense embeddings.

Progress in software-engineering agents is increasingly constrained by the scarcity of executable, scalable, and realistic data for training and evaluation. This scarcity stems from three fundamental challenges in existing pipelines: environments are brittle and difficult to reproduce across languages; synthesizing realistic, system-level bugs at scale is computationally expensive; and existing data predominantly consists of short-horizon repairs, failing to capture long-horizon competencies like architectural consistency. We introduce SWE-Hub, an end-to-end system that operationalizes the data factory abstraction by unifying environment automation, scalable synthesis, and diverse task generation into a coherent production stack. At its foundation, the Env Agent establishes a shared execution substrate by automatically converting raw repository snapshots into reproducible, multi-language container environments with standardized interfaces. Built upon this substrate, SWE-Scale engine addresses the need for high-throughput generation, combining cross-language code analysis with cluster-scale validation to synthesize massive volumes of localized bug-fix instances. Bug Agent generates high-fidelity repair tasks by synthesizing system-level regressions involving cross-module dependencies, paired with user-like issue reports that describe observable symptoms rather than root causes. Finally, SWE-Architect expands the task scope from repair to creation by translating natural-language requirements into repository-scale build-a-repo tasks. By integrating these components, SWE-Hub establishes a unified production pipeline capable of continuously delivering executable tasks across the entire software engineering lifecycle.

Ensuring the safety of LLM-generated content is essential for real-world deployment. Most existing guardrail models formulate moderation as a fixed binary classification task, implicitly assuming a fixed definition of harmfulness. In practice, enforcement strictness - how conservatively harmfulness is defined and enforced - varies across platforms and evolves over time, making binary moderators brittle under shifting requirements. We first introduce FlexBench, a strictness-adaptive LLM moderation benchmark that enables controlled evaluation under multiple strictness regimes. Experiments on FlexBench reveal substantial cross-strictness inconsistency in existing moderators: models that perform well under one regime can degrade substantially under others, limiting their practical usability. To address this, we propose FlexGuard, an LLM-based moderator that outputs a calibrated continuous risk score reflecting risk severity and supports strictness-specific decisions via thresholding. We train FlexGuard via risk-alignment optimization to improve score-severity consistency and provide practical threshold selection strategies to adapt to target strictness at deployment. Experiments on FlexBench and public benchmarks demonstrate that FlexGuard achieves higher moderation accuracy and substantially improved robustness under varying strictness. We release the source code and data to support reproducibility.

Scaling up executable code data is significant for improving language models' software engineering capability. The intricate nature of the process makes it labor-intensive, time-consuming and expert-knowledge-dependent to build a large number of executable code repositories, limiting the scalability of existing work based on running tests. The primary bottleneck lies in the automated building of test environments for different repositories, which is an essential yet underexplored task. To mitigate the gap, we introduce Repo2Run, the first LLM-based agent aiming at automating the building of executable test environments for any repositories at scale. Specifically, given a code repository, Repo2Run iteratively builds the Docker image, runs unit tests based on the feedback of the building, and synthesizes the Dockerfile until the entire pipeline is executed successfully. The resulting Dockerfile can then be used to create Docker container environments for running code and tests. We created a benchmark containing 420 Python repositories with unit tests for evaluation. The results illustrate that Repo2Run achieves an 86.0% success rate, outperforming SWE-agent by 77.0%. The resources of Repo2Run are available at https://github.com/bytedance/Repo2Run.

Security is becoming a pivotal point in cloud platforms. Several divisions, such as business organisations, health care, government, etc., have experienced cyber-attacks on their infrastructures. This research focuses on security issues within Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines in a cloud platform as a reaction to recent cyber breaches. This research proposes a blockchain-based solution to enhance CI/CD pipeline security. This research aims to develop a framework that leverages blockchain's distributed ledger technology and tamper-resistant features to improve CI/CD pipeline security. The goal is to emphasise secure software deployment by integrating threat modelling frameworks and adherence to coding standards. It also aims to employ tools to automate security testing to detect publicly disclosed vulnerabilities and flaws, such as an outdated version of Java Spring Framework, a JavaScript library from an unverified source, or a database library that allows SQL injection attacks in the deployed software through the framework.

Generative AI (GAI) offers unprecedented opportunities for research and innovation, but its commercialization has raised concerns about transparency, reproducibility, and safety. Many open GAI models lack the necessary components for full understanding and reproducibility, and some use restrictive licenses whilst claiming to be ``open-source''. To address these concerns, we propose the Model Openness Framework (MOF), a ranked classification system that rates machine learning models based on their completeness and openness, following principles of open science, open source, open data, and open access. The MOF requires specific components of the model development lifecycle to be included and released under appropriate open licenses. This framework aims to prevent misrepresentation of models claiming to be open, guide researchers and developers in providing all model components under permissive licenses, and help individuals and organizations identify models that can be safely adopted without restrictions. By promoting transparency and reproducibility, the MOF combats ``openwashing'' practices and establishes completeness and openness as primary criteria alongside the core tenets of responsible AI. Wide adoption of the MOF will foster a more open AI ecosystem, benefiting research, innovation, and adoption of state-of-the-art models.

Large language model (LLM)-powered agents are increasingly used to plan and execute scientific workflows, yet most research cyberinfrastructure (CI) exposes heterogeneous APIs and implements security models that present barriers for use by agents. We report on our experience using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a unifying interface that makes research capabilities discoverable, invokable, and composable. Our approach is pragmatic: we implement thin MCP servers over mature services, including Globus Transfer, Compute, and Search; status APIs exposed by computing facilities; Octopus event fabric; and domain-specific tools such as Garden and Galaxy. We use case studies in computational chemistry, bioinformatics, quantum chemistry, and filesystem monitoring to illustrate how this MCP-oriented architecture can be used in practice. We distill lessons learned and outline open challenges in evaluation and trust for agent-led science.

Due to the proliferation of short-form content and the rapid adoption of AI, opportunities for deep, reflective thinking have significantly diminished, undermining users' critical thinking and reducing engagement with the reasoning behind AI-generated outputs. To address this issue, we propose an Interactive Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Framework that enhances human-centered explainability and responsible AI usage by making the model's inference process transparent, modular, and user-editable. The framework decomposes reasoning into clearly defined blocks that users can inspect, modify, and re-execute, encouraging active cognitive engagement rather than passive consumption. It further integrates a lightweight edit-adaptation mechanism inspired by preference learning, allowing the system to align with diverse cognitive styles and user intentions. Ethical transparency is ensured through explicit metadata disclosure, built-in bias checkpoint functionality, and privacy-preserving safeguards. This work outlines the design principles and architecture necessary to promote critical engagement, responsible interaction, and inclusive adaptation in AI systems aimed at addressing complex societal challenges.

Agents are now used widely in the process of software development, but building production-ready software engineering agents is a complex task. Deploying software agents effectively requires flexibility in implementation and experimentation, reliable and secure execution, and interfaces for users to interact with agents. In this paper, we present the OpenHands Software Agent SDK, a toolkit for implementing software development agents that satisfy these desiderata. This toolkit is a complete architectural redesign of the agent components of the popular OpenHands framework for software development agents, which has 64k+ GitHub stars. To achieve flexibility, we design a simple interface for implementing agents that requires only a few lines of code in the default case, but is easily extensible to more complex, full-featured agents with features such as custom tools, memory management, and more. For security and reliability, it delivers seamless local-to-remote execution portability, integrated REST/WebSocket services. For interaction with human users, it can connect directly to a variety of interfaces, such as visual workspaces (VS Code, VNC, browser), command-line interfaces, and APIs. Compared with existing SDKs from OpenAI, Claude, and Google, OpenHands uniquely integrates native sandboxed execution, lifecycle control, model-agnostic multi-LLM routing, and built-in security analysis. Empirical results on SWE-Bench Verified and GAIA benchmarks demonstrate strong performance. Put together, these elements allow the OpenHands Software Agent SDK to provide a practical foundation for prototyping, unlocking new classes of custom applications, and reliably deploying agents at scale.

Foundation models are trained on increasingly immense and opaque datasets. Even while these models are now key in AI system building, it can be difficult to answer the straightforward question: has the model already encountered a given example during training? We therefore propose a widespread adoption of Data Portraits: artifacts that record training data and allow for downstream inspection. First we outline the properties of such an artifact and discuss how existing solutions can be used to increase transparency. We then propose and implement a solution based on data sketching, stressing fast and space efficient querying. Using our tools, we document a popular language modeling corpus (The Pile) and a recently released code modeling dataset (The Stack). We show that our solution enables answering questions about test set leakage and model plagiarism. Our tool is lightweight and fast, costing only 3% of the dataset size in overhead. We release a live interface of our tools at https://dataportraits.org/ and call on dataset and model creators to release Data Portraits as a complement to current documentation practices.

While current Computer Use Agent (CUA) benchmarks measure task completion effectively, they provide limited assessment of enterprise deployment readiness, emphasizing functional correctness over the operational reliability required for production systems. We present UI-CUBE (UiPath Computer Use BEnchmark), a systematic benchmark comprising 226 tasks across two difficulty tiers designed to expose fundamental architectural limitations in current CUAs. Our evaluation covers simple UI interactions (136 tasks) and complex workflows including copy-paste tasks (50 tasks) and enterprise application scenarios (40 tasks), with systematic interface variation coverage, multi-resolution testing and automated validation of task success through the application state. Evaluation of five state-of-the-art models reveals a sharp capability cliff rather than gradual performance degradation. Simple UI interactions achieve 67-85% success rates (compared to 97.9% human performance), but complex workflows drop precipitously to 9-19%. Human evaluators with no prior application experience achieve only 61.2% on complex tasks despite near-perfect performance on simple tasks, establishing realistic performance ceilings. This discontinuous performance pattern -- where agents achieve 68-87% of human performance on simple tasks but only 15-32% on complex workflows -- indicates fundamental architectural limitations in memory management, hierarchical planning, and state coordination rather than incremental capability gaps addressable through better training or prompting. UI-CUBE functions as an enterprise-readiness diagnostic, revealing that while current CUAs can manipulate individual interface elements, they cannot yet function as reliable workflow automation tools. These findings provide architectural insights essential for developing production-ready CUAs capable of managing complex, multi-step enterprise processes.

Drawing on 1,178 safety and reliability papers from 9,439 generative AI papers (January 2020 - March 2025), we compare research outputs of leading AI companies (Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI) and AI universities (CMU, MIT, NYU, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and University of Washington). We find that corporate AI research increasingly concentrates on pre-deployment areas -- model alignment and testing & evaluation -- while attention to deployment-stage issues such as model bias has waned. Significant research gaps exist in high-risk deployment domains, including healthcare, finance, misinformation, persuasive and addictive features, hallucinations, and copyright. Without improved observability into deployed AI, growing corporate concentration could deepen knowledge deficits. We recommend expanding external researcher access to deployment data and systematic observability of in-market AI behaviors.

We explore the feasibility of deploying Bitcoin as the shared monetary standard between Earth and Mars, accounting for physical constraints of interplanetary communication. We introduce a novel primitive, Proof-of-Transit Timestamping (PoTT), to provide cryptographic, tamper-evident audit trails for Bitcoin data across high-latency, intermittently-connected links. Leveraging Delay/Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) and optical low-Earth-orbit (LEO) mesh constellations, we propose an architecture for header-first replication, long-horizon Lightning channels with planetary watchtowers, and secure settlement through federated sidechains or blind-merge-mined (BMM) commit chains. We formalize PoTT, analyze its security model, and show how it measurably improves reliability and accountability without altering Bitcoin consensus or its monetary base. Near-term deployments favor strong federations for local settlement; longer-term, blind-merge-mined commit chains (if adopted) provide an alternative. The Earth L1 monetary base remains unchanged, while Mars can operate a pegged commit chain or strong federation with 1:1 pegged assets for local block production. For transparency, if both time-beacon regimes are simultaneously compromised, PoTT-M2 (and PoTT generally) reduces to administrative assertions rather than cryptographic time-anchoring.

In this study, we evaluated the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly OpenAI's GPT-4, in detecting software vulnerabilities, comparing their performance against traditional static code analyzers like Snyk and Fortify. Our analysis covered numerous repositories, including those from NASA and the Department of Defense. GPT-4 identified approximately four times the vulnerabilities than its counterparts. Furthermore, it provided viable fixes for each vulnerability, demonstrating a low rate of false positives. Our tests encompassed 129 code samples across eight programming languages, revealing the highest vulnerabilities in PHP and JavaScript. GPT-4's code corrections led to a 90% reduction in vulnerabilities, requiring only an 11% increase in code lines. A critical insight was LLMs' ability to self-audit, suggesting fixes for their identified vulnerabilities and underscoring their precision. Future research should explore system-level vulnerabilities and integrate multiple static code analyzers for a holistic perspective on LLMs' potential.

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is critical for delivering reliable, secure, and efficient software products. The Software Quality Assurance Process aims to provide assurance that work products and processes comply with predefined provisions and plans. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) present new opportunities to enhance existing SQA processes by automating tasks like requirement analysis, code review, test generation, and compliance checks. Simultaneously, established standards such as ISO/IEC 12207, ISO/IEC 25010, ISO/IEC 5055, ISO 9001/ISO/IEC 90003, CMMI, and TMM provide structured frameworks for ensuring robust quality practices. This paper surveys the intersection of LLM-based SQA methods and these recognized standards, highlighting how AI-driven solutions can augment traditional approaches while maintaining compliance and process maturity. We first review the foundational software quality standards and the technical fundamentals of LLMs in software engineering. Next, we explore various LLM-based SQA applications, including requirement validation, defect detection, test generation, and documentation maintenance. We then map these applications to key software quality frameworks, illustrating how LLMs can address specific requirements and metrics within each standard. Empirical case studies and open-source initiatives demonstrate the practical viability of these methods. At the same time, discussions on challenges (e.g., data privacy, model bias, explainability) underscore the need for deliberate governance and auditing. Finally, we propose future directions encompassing adaptive learning, privacy-focused deployments, multimodal analysis, and evolving standards for AI-driven software quality.

Autonomous agent systems increasingly trigger real-world side effects: deploying infrastructure, modifying databases, moving money, and executing workflows. Yet most agent stacks provide no mandatory execution checkpoint where organizations can deterministically permit, deny, or defer an action before it changes reality. This paper introduces Faramesh, a protocol-agnostic execution control plane that enforces execution-time authorization for agent-driven actions via a non-bypassable Action Authorization Boundary (AAB). Faramesh canonicalizes agent intent into a Canonical Action Representation (CAR), evaluates actions deterministically against policy and state, and issues a decision artifact (PERMIT/DEFER/DENY) that executors must validate prior to execution. The system is designed to be framework- and model-agnostic, supports multi-agent and multi-tenant deployments, and remains independent of transport protocols (e.g., MCP). Faramesh further provides decision-centric, append-only provenance logging keyed by canonical action hashes, enabling auditability, verification, and deterministic replay without re-running agent reasoning. We show how these primitives yield enforceable, predictable governance for autonomous execution while avoiding hidden coupling to orchestration layers or observability-only approaches.

We report an exploratory red-teaming study of autonomous language-model-powered agents deployed in a live laboratory environment with persistent memory, email accounts, Discord access, file systems, and shell execution. Over a two-week period, twenty AI researchers interacted with the agents under benign and adversarial conditions. Focusing on failures emerging from the integration of language models with autonomy, tool use, and multi-party communication, we document eleven representative case studies. Observed behaviors include unauthorized compliance with non-owners, disclosure of sensitive information, execution of destructive system-level actions, denial-of-service conditions, uncontrolled resource consumption, identity spoofing vulnerabilities, cross-agent propagation of unsafe practices, and partial system takeover. In several cases, agents reported task completion while the underlying system state contradicted those reports. We also report on some of the failed attempts. Our findings establish the existence of security-, privacy-, and governance-relevant vulnerabilities in realistic deployment settings. These behaviors raise unresolved questions regarding accountability, delegated authority, and responsibility for downstream harms, and warrant urgent attention from legal scholars, policymakers, and researchers across disciplines. This report serves as an initial empirical contribution to that broader conversation.

The rapid development of interactive and autonomous AI systems signals our entry into the agentic era. Training and evaluating agents on complex agentic tasks such as software engineering and computer use requires not only efficient model computation but also sophisticated infrastructure capable of coordinating vast agent-environment interactions. However, no open-source infrastructure can effectively support large-scale training and evaluation on such complex agentic tasks. To address this challenge, we present MegaFlow, a large-scale distributed orchestration system that enables efficient scheduling, resource allocation, and fine-grained task management for agent-environment workloads. MegaFlow abstracts agent training infrastructure into three independent services (Model Service, Agent Service, and Environment Service) that interact through unified interfaces, enabling independent scaling and flexible resource allocation across diverse agent-environment configurations. In our agent training deployments, MegaFlow successfully orchestrates tens of thousands of concurrent agent tasks while maintaining high system stability and achieving efficient resource utilization. By enabling such large-scale agent training, MegaFlow addresses a critical infrastructure gap in the emerging agentic AI landscape.

The rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) brings about tremendous opportunities for innovation but also looming risks for individuals and society at large. We have reached a pivotal moment for ensuring that LLMs and LLM-infused applications are developed and deployed responsibly. However, a central pillar of responsible AI -- transparency -- is largely missing from the current discourse around LLMs. It is paramount to pursue new approaches to provide transparency for LLMs, and years of research at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction (HCI) highlight that we must do so with a human-centered perspective: Transparency is fundamentally about supporting appropriate human understanding, and this understanding is sought by different stakeholders with different goals in different contexts. In this new era of LLMs, we must develop and design approaches to transparency by considering the needs of stakeholders in the emerging LLM ecosystem, the novel types of LLM-infused applications being built, and the new usage patterns and challenges around LLMs, all while building on lessons learned about how people process, interact with, and make use of information. We reflect on the unique challenges that arise in providing transparency for LLMs, along with lessons learned from HCI and responsible AI research that has taken a human-centered perspective on AI transparency. We then lay out four common approaches that the community has taken to achieve transparency -- model reporting, publishing evaluation results, providing explanations, and communicating uncertainty -- and call out open questions around how these approaches may or may not be applied to LLMs. We hope this provides a starting point for discussion and a useful roadmap for future research.

Environment setup-the process of configuring the system to work with a specific software project-represents a persistent challenge in Software Engineering (SE). Automated environment setup methods could assist developers by providing fully configured environments for arbitrary repositories without manual effort. This also helps SE researchers to scale execution-based benchmarks. However, recent studies reveal that even state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve limited success in automating this task. To address this limitation, we tune a specialized model for environment setup. We combine supervised fine-tuning for generating correct Bash scripts and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to adapt it to the task of environment setup. On EnvBench-Python, our method enables Qwen3-8B (a model runnable on consumer hardware) to perform on par with larger models-Qwen3-32B and GPT-4o. The training code and model checkpoints are available online: https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/PIPer.

In rapid release development processes, patches that fix critical issues, or implement high-value features are often promoted directly from the development channel to a stabilization channel, potentially skipping one or more stabilization channels. This practice is called patch uplift. Patch uplift is risky, because patches that are rushed through the stabilization phase can end up introducing regressions in the code. This paper examines patch uplift operations at Mozilla, with the aim to identify the characteristics of uplifted patches that introduce regressions. Through statistical and manual analyses, we quantitatively and qualitatively investigate the reasons behind patch uplift decisions and the characteristics of uplifted patches that introduced regressions. Additionally, we interviewed three Mozilla release managers to understand organizational factors that affect patch uplift decisions and outcomes. Results show that most patches are uplifted because of a wrong functionality or a crash. Uplifted patches that lead to faults tend to have larger patch size, and most of the faults are due to semantic or memory errors in the patches. Also, release managers are more inclined to accept patch uplift requests that concern certain specific components, and-or that are submitted by certain specific developers.

Recent years have witnessed a rapid development of mobile GUI agents powered by large language models (LLMs), which can autonomously execute diverse device-control tasks based on natural language instructions. The increasing accuracy of these agents on standard benchmarks has raised expectations for large-scale real-world deployment, and there are already several commercial agents released and used by early adopters. However, are we really ready for GUI agents integrated into our daily devices as system building blocks? We argue that an important pre-deployment validation is missing to examine whether the agents can maintain their performance under real-world threats. Specifically, unlike existing common benchmarks that are based on simple static app contents (they have to do so to ensure environment consistency between different tests), real-world apps are filled with contents from untrustworthy third parties, such as advertisement emails, user-generated posts and medias, etc. ... To this end, we introduce a scalable app content instrumentation framework to enable flexible and targeted content modifications within existing applications. Leveraging this framework, we create a test suite comprising both a dynamic task execution environment and a static dataset of challenging GUI states. The dynamic environment encompasses 122 reproducible tasks, and the static dataset consists of over 3,000 scenarios constructed from commercial apps. We perform experiments on both open-source and commercial GUI agents. Our findings reveal that all examined agents can be significantly degraded due to third-party contents, with an average misleading rate of 42.0% and 36.1% in dynamic and static environments respectively. The framework and benchmark has been released at https://agenthazard.github.io.

The open radio access network (O-RAN), with its disaggregated and open architecture, is poised to meet the demands of the next generation of wireless communication. However, to unlock the full potentials of O-RAN, real-time network modeling and optimization are essential. A promising solution for such requirement is the use of network digital twin (NDT). NDT provides a comprehensive view of a network, covering both physical and logical components, including infrastructure, protocols, and algorithms. NDT, as a real-time virtual representation of O-RAN facilitates a variety of operations, such as emulations, test, optimization, monitoring, and analysis of a new configuration in a risk-free environment, without requiring them to be implemented in real network. Such capability enables the vendors and network operators for a faster adoption of new solutions with frequent updates, while ensuring the resiliency of the existing services via planning ahead under various "what-if" scenarios. In this paper, we first describe what exactly NDT means in the context of O-RAN, as well as its key enablers. We then describe the NDT application within the O-RAN in both prior and post-deployment. Finally, we provide two practical uses cases, namely network energy efficiency and traffic steering, where the NDT can be leveraged effectively.

Large language models (LLMs) extended as systems, such as ChatGPT, have begun supporting third-party applications. These LLM apps leverage the de facto natural language-based automated execution paradigm of LLMs: that is, apps and their interactions are defined in natural language, provided access to user data, and allowed to freely interact with each other and the system. These LLM app ecosystems resemble the settings of earlier computing platforms, where there was insufficient isolation between apps and the system. Because third-party apps may not be trustworthy, and exacerbated by the imprecision of natural language interfaces, the current designs pose security and privacy risks for users. In this paper, we evaluate whether these issues can be addressed through execution isolation and what that isolation might look like in the context of LLM-based systems, where there are arbitrary natural language-based interactions between system components, between LLM and apps, and between apps. To that end, we propose IsolateGPT, a design architecture that demonstrates the feasibility of execution isolation and provides a blueprint for implementing isolation, in LLM-based systems. We evaluate IsolateGPT against a number of attacks and demonstrate that it protects against many security, privacy, and safety issues that exist in non-isolated LLM-based systems, without any loss of functionality. The performance overhead incurred by IsolateGPT to improve security is under 30% for three-quarters of tested queries.

This paper presents a critical examination of current approaches to replicating OpenAI's O1 model capabilities, with particular focus on the widespread but often undisclosed use of knowledge distillation techniques. While our previous work explored the fundamental technical path to O1 replication, this study reveals how simple distillation from O1's API, combined with supervised fine-tuning, can achieve superior performance on complex mathematical reasoning tasks. Through extensive experiments, we show that a base model fine-tuned on simply tens of thousands of samples O1-distilled long-thought chains outperforms O1-preview on the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) with minimal technical complexity. Moreover, our investigation extends beyond mathematical reasoning to explore the generalization capabilities of O1-distilled models across diverse tasks: hallucination, safety and open-domain QA. Notably, despite training only on mathematical problem-solving data, our models demonstrated strong generalization to open-ended QA tasks and became significantly less susceptible to sycophancy after fine-tuning. We deliberately make this finding public to promote transparency in AI research and to challenge the current trend of obscured technical claims in the field. Our work includes: (1) A detailed technical exposition of the distillation process and its effectiveness, (2) A comprehensive benchmark framework for evaluating and categorizing O1 replication attempts based on their technical transparency and reproducibility, (3) A critical discussion of the limitations and potential risks of over-relying on distillation approaches, our analysis culminates in a crucial bitter lesson: while the pursuit of more capable AI systems is important, the development of researchers grounded in first-principles thinking is paramount.

Large language models (LLMs) mark a key shift in natural language processing (NLP), having advanced text generation, translation, and domain-specific reasoning. Closed-source models like GPT-4, powered by proprietary datasets and extensive computational resources, lead with state-of-the-art performance today. However, they face criticism for their "black box" nature and for limiting accessibility in a manner that hinders reproducibility and equitable AI development. By contrast, open-source initiatives like LLaMA and BLOOM prioritize democratization through community-driven development and computational efficiency. These models have significantly reduced performance gaps, particularly in linguistic diversity and domain-specific applications, while providing accessible tools for global researchers and developers. Notably, both paradigms rely on foundational architectural innovations, such as the Transformer framework by Vaswani et al. (2017). Closed-source models excel by scaling effectively, while open-source models adapt to real-world applications in underrepresented languages and domains. Techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and instruction-tuning datasets enable open-source models to achieve competitive results despite limited resources. To be sure, the tension between closed-source and open-source approaches underscores a broader debate on transparency versus proprietary control in AI. Ethical considerations further highlight this divide. Closed-source systems restrict external scrutiny, while open-source models promote reproducibility and collaboration but lack standardized auditing documentation frameworks to mitigate biases. Hybrid approaches that leverage the strengths of both paradigms are likely to shape the future of LLM innovation, ensuring accessibility, competitive technical performance, and ethical deployment.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act as autonomous agents, using tools to execute code, read and write files, and access networks, creating novel security risks. To mitigate these risks, agents are commonly deployed and evaluated in isolated "sandbox" environments, often implemented using Docker/OCI containers. We introduce SANDBOXESCAPEBENCH, an open benchmark that safely measures an LLM's capacity to break out of these sandboxes. The benchmark is implemented as an Inspect AI Capture the Flag (CTF) evaluation utilising a nested sandbox architecture with the outer layer containing the flag and no known vulnerabilities. Following a threat model of a motivated adversarial agent with shell access inside a container, SANDBOXESCAPEBENCH covers a spectrum of sandboxescape mechanisms spanning misconfiguration, privilege allocation mistakes, kernel flaws, and runtime/orchestration weaknesses. We find that, when vulnerabilities are added, LLMs are able to identify and exploit them, showing that use of evaluation like SANDBOXESCAPEBENCH is needed to ensure sandboxing continues to provide the encapsulation needed for highly-capable models.

Financial institutions deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) for reconciliations, regulatory reporting, and client communications, but nondeterministic outputs (output drift) undermine auditability and trust. We quantify drift across five model architectures (7B-120B parameters) on regulated financial tasks, revealing a stark inverse relationship: smaller models (Granite-3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B) achieve 100% output consistency at T=0.0, while GPT-OSS-120B exhibits only 12.5% consistency (95% CI: 3.5-36.0%) regardless of configuration (p<0.0001, Fisher's exact test). This finding challenges conventional assumptions that larger models are universally superior for production deployment. Our contributions include: (i) a finance-calibrated deterministic test harness combining greedy decoding (T=0.0), fixed seeds, and SEC 10-K structure-aware retrieval ordering; (ii) task-specific invariant checking for RAG, JSON, and SQL outputs using finance-calibrated materiality thresholds (plus or minus 5%) and SEC citation validation; (iii) a three-tier model classification system enabling risk-appropriate deployment decisions; and (iv) an audit-ready attestation system with dual-provider validation. We evaluated five models (Qwen2.5-7B via Ollama, Granite-3-8B via IBM watsonx.ai, Llama-3.3-70B, Mistral-Medium-2505, and GPT-OSS-120B) across three regulated financial tasks. Across 480 runs (n=16 per condition), structured tasks (SQL) remain stable even at T=0.2, while RAG tasks show drift (25-75%), revealing task-dependent sensitivity. Cross-provider validation confirms deterministic behavior transfers between local and cloud deployments. We map our framework to Financial Stability Board (FSB), Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) requirements, demonstrating practical pathways for compliance-ready AI deployments.

The scale and complexity of modern cloud infrastructure have made Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) essential for managing deployments. While large Language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to generate IaC configurations from natural language, user requests are often underspecified. Unlike traditional code generation, IaC configurations cannot be executed cheaply or iteratively repaired, forcing the LLMs into an almost one-shot regime. We observe that ambiguity in IaC exhibits a tractable compositional structure: configurations decompose into three hierarchical axes (resources, topology, attributes) where higher-level decisions constrain lower-level ones. We propose a training-free, disagreement-driven framework that generates diverse candidate specifications, identifies structural disagreements across these axes, ranks them by informativeness, and produces targeted clarification questions that progressively narrow the configuration space. We introduce Ambig-IaC, a benchmark of 300 validated IaC tasks with ambiguous prompts, and an evaluation framework based on graph edit distance and embedding similarity. Our method outperforms the strongest baseline, achieving relative improvements of +18.4\% and +25.4\% on structure and attribute evaluations, respectively.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of 5G technology, the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure for the deployment of 5G services has become increasingly common. Using a service-based architecture, critical 5G components, such as the Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF), Session Management Function (SMF), and User Plane Function (UPF), now run as containerized pods on Kubernetes clusters. Although this approach improves scalability, flexibility, and resilience, it also introduces new security challenges, particularly to ensure the integrity and trustworthiness of these components. Current 5G security specifications (for example, 3GPP TS 33.501) focus on communication security and assume that network functions remain trustworthy after authentication, consequently lacking mechanisms to continuously validate the integrity of NVFs at runtime. To close this gap, and to align with Zero Trust principles of 'never trust, always verify', we present a TPM 2.0-based continuous remote attestation solution for core 5G components deployed on Kubernetes. Our approach uses the Linux Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to provide hardware-based runtime validation. We integrate the open-source Keylime framework with a custom IMA template that isolates pod-level measurements, allowing per-pod integrity verification. A prototype on a k3s cluster (consisting of 1 master, 2 worker nodes) was implemented to attest to core functions, including AMF, SMF and UPF. The experimental results show that the system detects unauthorized modifications in real time, labels each pod's trust state, and generates detailed audit logs. This work provides hardware-based continuous attestation for cloud native and edge deployments, strengthening the resilience of 5G as critical infrastructure in multi-vendor and mission-critical scenarios of 5G.

Automated red teaming holds substantial promise for uncovering and mitigating the risks associated with the malicious use of large language models (LLMs), yet the field lacks a standardized evaluation framework to rigorously assess new methods. To address this issue, we introduce HarmBench, a standardized evaluation framework for automated red teaming. We identify several desirable properties previously unaccounted for in red teaming evaluations and systematically design HarmBench to meet these criteria. Using HarmBench, we conduct a large-scale comparison of 18 red teaming methods and 33 target LLMs and defenses, yielding novel insights. We also introduce a highly efficient adversarial training method that greatly enhances LLM robustness across a wide range of attacks, demonstrating how HarmBench enables codevelopment of attacks and defenses. We open source HarmBench at https://github.com/centerforaisafety/HarmBench.

The widespread distribution of Large Language Models (LLMs) through public platforms like Hugging Face introduces significant security challenges. While these platforms perform basic security scans, they often fail to detect subtle manipulations within the embedding layer. This work identifies a novel class of deployment phase attacks that exploit this vulnerability by injecting imperceptible perturbations directly into the embedding layer outputs without modifying model weights or input text. These perturbations, though statistically benign, systematically bypass safety alignment mechanisms and induce harmful behaviors during inference. We propose Search based Embedding Poisoning(SEP), a practical, model agnostic framework that introduces carefully optimized perturbations into embeddings associated with high risk tokens. SEP leverages a predictable linear transition in model responses, from refusal to harmful output to semantic deviation to identify a narrow perturbation window that evades alignment safeguards. Evaluated across six aligned LLMs, SEP achieves an average attack success rate of 96.43% while preserving benign task performance and evading conventional detection mechanisms. Our findings reveal a critical oversight in deployment security and emphasize the urgent need for embedding level integrity checks in future LLM defense strategies.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into healthcare promises to transform medical diagnostics, research, and patient care. Yet, the progression of medical LLMs faces obstacles such as complex training requirements, rigorous evaluation demands, and the dominance of proprietary models that restrict academic exploration. Transparent, comprehensive access to LLM resources is essential for advancing the field, fostering reproducibility, and encouraging innovation in healthcare AI. We present Hippocrates, an open-source LLM framework specifically developed for the medical domain. In stark contrast to previous efforts, it offers unrestricted access to its training datasets, codebase, checkpoints, and evaluation protocols. This open approach is designed to stimulate collaborative research, allowing the community to build upon, refine, and rigorously evaluate medical LLMs within a transparent ecosystem. Also, we introduce Hippo, a family of 7B models tailored for the medical domain, fine-tuned from Mistral and LLaMA2 through continual pre-training, instruction tuning, and reinforcement learning from human and AI feedback. Our models outperform existing open medical LLMs models by a large-margin, even surpassing models with 70B parameters. Through Hippocrates, we aspire to unlock the full potential of LLMs not just to advance medical knowledge and patient care but also to democratize the benefits of AI research in healthcare, making them available across the globe.

Tool-augmented LLM agents introduce security risks that extend beyond user-input filtering, including indirect prompt injection through fetched content, unsafe tool execution, credential leakage, and tampering with local control files. We present OpenClaw PRISM, a zero-fork runtime security layer for OpenClaw-based agent gateways. PRISM combines an in-process plugin with optional sidecar services and distributes enforcement across ten lifecycle hooks spanning message ingress, prompt construction, tool execution, tool-result persistence, outbound messaging, sub-agent spawning, and gateway startup. Rather than introducing a novel detection model, PRISM integrates a hybrid heuristic-plus-LLM scanning pipeline, conversation- and session-scoped risk accumulation with TTL-based decay, policy-enforced controls over tools, paths, private networks, domain tiers, and outbound secret patterns, and a tamper-evident audit and operations plane with integrity verification and hot-reloadable policy management. We outline an evaluation methodology and benchmark pipeline for measuring security effectiveness, false positives, layer contribution, runtime overhead, and operational recoverability in an agent-runtime setting, and we report current preliminary benchmark results on curated same-slice experiments and operational microbenchmarks. The system targets deployable runtime defense for real agent gateways rather than benchmark-only detection.

Generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) with remarkable performance in various tasks and also extend their power to multimodal domains. Despite their success, large GPT models like GPT-4 face inherent limitations such as considerable size, high computational requirements, complex deployment processes, and closed development loops. These constraints restrict their widespread adoption and raise concerns regarding their responsible development and usage. The need for user-friendly, relatively small, and open-sourced alternative GPT models arises from the desire to overcome these limitations while retaining high performance. In this survey paper, we provide an examination of alternative open-sourced models of large GPTs, focusing on user-friendly and relatively small models that facilitate easier deployment and accessibility. Through this extensive survey, we aim to equip researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts with a thorough understanding of user-friendly and relatively small open-sourced models of large GPTs, their current state, challenges, and future research directions, inspiring the development of more efficient, accessible, and versatile GPT models that cater to the broader scientific community and advance the field of general artificial intelligence. The source contents are continuously updating in https://github.com/GPT-Alternatives/gpt_alternatives.

Data sharding, a technique for partitioning and distributing data among multiple servers or nodes, offers enhancements in the scalability, performance, and fault tolerance of extensive distributed systems. Nonetheless, this strategy introduces novel challenges, including load balancing among shards, management of node failures and data loss, and adaptation to evolving data and workload patterns. This paper proposes an innovative approach to tackle these challenges by empowering self-healing nodes with adaptive data sharding. Leveraging concepts such as self-replication, fractal regeneration, sentient data sharding, and symbiotic node clusters, our approach establishes a dynamic and resilient data sharding scheme capable of addressing diverse scenarios and meeting varied requirements. Implementation and evaluation of our approach involve a prototype system simulating a large-scale distributed database across various data sharding scenarios. Comparative analyses against existing data sharding techniques highlight the superior scalability, performance, fault tolerance, and adaptability of our approach. Additionally, the paper delves into potential applications and limitations, providing insights into the future research directions that can further advance this innovative approach.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in empirical software engineering (ESE) to automate or assist annotation tasks such as labeling commits, issues, and qualitative artifacts. Yet the reliability and reproducibility of such annotations remain underexplored. Existing studies often lack standardized measures for reliability, calibration, and drift, and frequently omit essential configuration details. We argue that LLM-based annotation should be treated as a measurement process rather than a purely automated activity. In this position paper, we outline the Operationalization for LLM-based Annotation Framework (OLAF), a conceptual framework that organizes key constructs: reliability, calibration, drift, consensus, aggregation, and transparency. The paper aims to motivate methodological discussion and future empirical work toward more transparent and reproducible LLM-based annotation in software engineering research.

Reproducibility is central to research credibility, yet large-scale reanalysis of empricial data remains costly because replication packages vary widely in structure, software environment, and documentation. We develop and evaluate an agentic AI workflow that addresses this execution bottleneck while preserving scientific rigor. The system separates scientific reasoning from computational execution: researchers design fixed diagnostic templates, and the workflow automates the acquisition, harmonization, and execution of replication materials using pre-specified, version-controlled code. A structured knowledge layer records resolved failure patterns, enabling adaptation across heterogeneous studies while keeping each pipeline version transparent and stable. We evaluate this workflow on 92 instrumental variable (IV) studies, including 67 with manually verified reproducible 2SLS estimates and 25 newly published IV studies under identical criteria. For each paper, we analyze up to three two-stage least squares (2SLS) specifications, totaling 215. Across the 92 papers, the system achieves 87% end-to-end success overall. Conditional on accessible data and code, reproducibility is 100% at both the paper and specification levels. The framework substantially lowers the cost of executing established empirical protocols and can be adapted in empirical settings where analytic templates and norms of transparency are well established.

The continuous delivery of modern software requires the execution of many automated pipeline jobs. These jobs ensure the frequent release of new software versions while detecting code problems at an early stage. For TELUS, our industrial partner in the telecommunications field, reliable job execution is crucial to minimize wasted time and streamline Continuous Deployment (CD). In this context, flaky job failures are one of the main issues hindering CD. Prior studies proposed techniques based on machine learning to automate the detection of flaky jobs. While valuable, these solutions are insufficient to address the waste associated with the diagnosis of flaky failures, which remain largely unexplored due to the wide range of underlying causes. This study examines 4,511 flaky job failures at TELUS to identify the different categories of flaky failures that we prioritize based on Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) measures. We identified 46 flaky failure categories that we analyzed using clustering and RFM measures to determine 14 priority categories for future automated diagnosis and repair research. Our findings also provide valuable insights into the evolution and impact of these categories. The identification and prioritization of flaky failure categories using RFM analysis introduce a novel approach that can be used in other contexts.

Computer-use agents (CUAs) promise to automate complex tasks across operating systems (OS) and the web, but remain vulnerable to indirect prompt injection. Current evaluations of this threat either lack support realistic but controlled environments or ignore hybrid web-OS attack scenarios involving both interfaces. To address this, we propose RedTeamCUA, an adversarial testing framework featuring a novel hybrid sandbox that integrates a VM-based OS environment with Docker-based web platforms. Our sandbox supports key features tailored for red teaming, such as flexible adversarial scenario configuration, and a setting that decouples adversarial evaluation from navigational limitations of CUAs by initializing tests directly at the point of an adversarial injection. Using RedTeamCUA, we develop RTC-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with 864 examples that investigate realistic, hybrid web-OS attack scenarios and fundamental security vulnerabilities. Benchmarking current frontier CUAs identifies significant vulnerabilities: Claude 3.7 Sonnet | CUA demonstrates an ASR of 42.9%, while Operator, the most secure CUA evaluated, still exhibits an ASR of 7.6%. Notably, CUAs often attempt to execute adversarial tasks with an Attempt Rate as high as 92.5%, although failing to complete them due to capability limitations. Nevertheless, we observe concerning ASRs of up to 50% in realistic end-to-end settings, with the recently released frontier Claude 4 Opus | CUA showing an alarming ASR of 48%, demonstrating that indirect prompt injection presents tangible risks for even advanced CUAs despite their capabilities and safeguards. Overall, RedTeamCUA provides an essential framework for advancing realistic, controlled, and systematic analysis of CUA vulnerabilities, highlighting the urgent need for robust defenses to indirect prompt injection prior to real-world deployment.

AI-powered development platforms are making software creation accessible to a broader audience, but this democratization has triggered a scalability crisis in security auditing. With studies showing that up to 40% of AI-generated code contains vulnerabilities, the pace of development now vastly outstrips the capacity for thorough security assessment. We present MAPTA, a multi-agent system for autonomous web application security assessment that combines large language model orchestration with tool-grounded execution and end-to-end exploit validation. On the 104-challenge XBOW benchmark, MAPTA achieves 76.9% overall success with perfect performance on SSRF and misconfiguration vulnerabilities, 83% success on broken authorization, and strong results on injection attacks including server-side template injection (85%) and SQL injection (83%). Cross-site scripting (57%) and blind SQL injection (0%) remain challenging. Our comprehensive cost analysis across all challenges totals 21.38 with a median cost of 0.073 for successful attempts versus 0.357 for failures. Success correlates strongly with resource efficiency, enabling practical early-stopping thresholds at approximately 40 tool calls or 0.30 per challenge. MAPTA's real-world findings are impactful given both the popularity of the respective scanned GitHub repositories (8K-70K stars) and MAPTA's low average operating cost of $3.67 per open-source assessment: MAPTA discovered critical vulnerabilities including RCEs, command injections, secret exposure, and arbitrary file write vulnerabilities. Findings are responsibly disclosed, 10 findings are under CVE review.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software engineering has revolutionized code generation, enabling unprecedented productivity through promptware and autonomous AI agents. However, this transformation introduces significant risks, including insecure code generation, hallucinated outputs, irreversible actions, and a lack of transparency and accountability. Incidents like the Replit database deletion underscore the urgent need for robust safety and governance mechanisms. This paper comprehensively analyzes the inherent challenges of LLM-assisted code generation, such as vulnerability inheritance, overtrust, misinterpretation, and the absence of standardized validation and rollback protocols. To address these, we propose the SAFE-AI Framework, a holistic approach emphasizing Safety, Auditability, Feedback, and Explainability. The framework integrates guardrails, sandboxing, runtime verification, risk-aware logging, human-in-the-loop systems, and explainable AI techniques to mitigate risks while fostering trust and compliance. We introduce a novel taxonomy of AI behaviors categorizing suggestive, generative, autonomous, and destructive actions to guide risk assessment and oversight. Additionally, we identify open problems, including the lack of standardized benchmarks for code specific hallucinations and autonomy levels, and propose future research directions for hybrid verification, semantic guardrails, and proactive governance tools. Through detailed comparisons of autonomy control, prompt engineering, explainability, and governance frameworks, this paper provides a roadmap for responsible AI integration in software engineering, aligning with emerging regulations like the EU AI Act and Canada's AIDA to ensure safe, transparent, and accountable AI-driven development.

Biomedical multimodal assistants have the potential to unify radiology, pathology, and clinical-text reasoning, yet a critical deployment gap remains: top-performing systems are either closed-source or computationally prohibitive, precluding the on-premises deployment required for patient privacy and PHI compliance. We introduce MEDGPT-OSS, an open-weight, 20B-parameter generalist vision-language model designed to facilitate open research in clinical AI. Rather than relying on architectural complexity, MEDGPT-OSS pairs the GPT-oss language backbone with a visual front-end via a optimized, three-stage training curriculum. By progressively domain-adapting these modules through rigorous data curation and long-context multimodal alignment, we demonstrate that a 20B model can bridge the capacity gap. It successfully outperforms larger open medical models on out-of-distribution (OOD) multimodal reasoning and complex text-only clinical tasks. By unifying diverse modalities under a single instruction-following interface, MEDGPT-OSS maintains a parameter-efficient footprint fully compatible with commodity GPUs. We release the complete training recipe, open-weight checkpoints, and a rigorous evaluation harness to serve as a verifiable foundation for privacy-preserving, institution-specific clinical AI research.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models challenge serving infrastructures with dynamic, sparse expert utilization, causing instability on conventional systems designed for dense architectures. We propose EaaS, a novel serving system to enable efficient, scalable, and robust MoE deployment. Our system disaggregates MoE modules into independent, stateless services. This design enables fine-grained resource scaling and provides inherent fault tolerance by decoupling compute units. The architecture is powered by a high-performance, CPU-free peer-to-peer communication library that ensures minimal overhead and high throughput. Experiments confirm EaaS's scalability and efficiency, achieving performance comparable to monolithic systems while providing robust fault tolerance and strong scalability. EaaS incurs less than a 2% throughput reduction under simulated hardware failures that would otherwise halt monolithic architectures. It further saves up to 37.5% of computing resources through dynamic fine-grained adaptation to serving traffic, demonstrating strong resilience for large-scale MoE deployment in production.

The exploration and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) is thriving. To reduce deployment costs, continuous batching has become an essential feature in current service frameworks. The effectiveness of continuous batching relies on an accurate estimate of the memory requirements of requests. However, due to the diversity in request output lengths, existing frameworks tend to adopt aggressive or conservative schedulers, which often result in significant overestimation or underestimation of memory consumption. Consequently, they suffer from harmful request evictions or prolonged queuing times, failing to achieve satisfactory throughput under strict Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantees (a.k.a. goodput), across various LLM application scenarios with differing input-output length distributions. To address this issue, we propose a novel Past-Future scheduler that precisely estimates the peak memory resources required by the running batch via considering the historical distribution of request output lengths and calculating memory occupancy at each future time point. It adapts to applications with all types of input-output length distributions, balancing the trade-off between request queuing and harmful evictions, thereby consistently achieving better goodput. Furthermore, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheduler, we developed a high-performance LLM serving framework, LightLLM, that implements the Past-Future scheduler. Compared to existing aggressive or conservative schedulers, LightLLM demonstrates superior goodput, achieving up to 2-3times higher goodput than other schedulers under heavy loads. LightLLM is open source to boost the research in such direction (https://github.com/ModelTC/lightllm).

Physical adversarial attacks against deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently gained increasing attention. The current mainstream physical attacks use printed adversarial patches or camouflage to alter the appearance of the target object. However, these approaches generate conspicuous adversarial patterns that show poor stealthiness. Another physical deployable attack is the optical attack, featuring stealthiness while exhibiting weakly in the daytime with sunlight. In this paper, we propose a novel Reflected Light Attack (RFLA), featuring effective and stealthy in both the digital and physical world, which is implemented by placing the color transparent plastic sheet and a paper cut of a specific shape in front of the mirror to create different colored geometries on the target object. To achieve these goals, we devise a general framework based on the circle to model the reflected light on the target object. Specifically, we optimize a circle (composed of a coordinate and radius) to carry various geometrical shapes determined by the optimized angle. The fill color of the geometry shape and its corresponding transparency are also optimized. We extensively evaluate the effectiveness of RFLA on different datasets and models. Experiment results suggest that the proposed method achieves over 99% success rate on different datasets and models in the digital world. Additionally, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in different physical environments by using sunlight or a flashlight.

Even though demonstrating extraordinary capabilities in code generation and software issue resolving, AI agents' capabilities in the full software DevOps cycle are still unknown. Different from pure code generation, handling the DevOps cycle in real-world software, including developing, deploying, and managing, requires analyzing large-scale projects, understanding dynamic program behaviors, leveraging domain-specific tools, and making sequential decisions. However, existing benchmarks focus on isolated problems and lack environments and tool interfaces for DevOps. We introduce DevOps-Gym, the first end-to-end benchmark for evaluating AI agents across core DevOps workflows: build and configuration, monitoring, issue resolving, and test generation. DevOps-Gym includes 700+ real-world tasks collected from 30+ projects in Java and Go. We develop a semi-automated data collection mechanism with rigorous and non-trivial expert efforts in ensuring the task coverage and quality. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models and agents reveals fundamental limitations: they struggle with issue resolving and test generation in Java and Go, and remain unable to handle new tasks such as monitoring and build and configuration. These results highlight the need for essential research in automating the full DevOps cycle with AI agents.

The rapid scaling of AI has spurred a growing emphasis on ethical considerations in both development and practice. This has led to the formulation of increasingly sophisticated model auditing and reporting requirements, as well as governance frameworks to mitigate potential risks to individuals and society. At this critical juncture, we review the practical challenges of promoting responsible AI and transparency in informal sectors like OSS that support vital infrastructure and see widespread use. We focus on how model performance evaluation may inform or inhibit probing of model limitations, biases, and other risks. Our controlled analysis of 7903 Hugging Face projects found that risk documentation is strongly associated with evaluation practices. Yet, submissions (N=789) from the platform's most popular competitive leaderboard showed less accountability among high performers. Our findings can inform AI providers and legal scholars in designing interventions and policies that preserve open-source innovation while incentivizing ethical uptake.

Large language models are redefining software engineering by implementing AI-powered techniques throughout the whole software development process, including requirement gathering, software architecture, code generation, testing, and deployment. However, it is still difficult to develop a cohesive platform that consistently produces the best outcomes across all stages. The objective of this study is to develop a unified platform that utilizes multiple artificial intelligence agents to automate the process of transforming user requirements into well-organized deliverables. These deliverables include user stories, prioritization, and UML sequence diagrams, along with the modular approach to APIs, unit tests, and end-to-end tests. Additionally, the platform will organize tasks, perform security and compliance, and suggest design patterns and improvements for non-functional requirements. We allow users to control and manage each phase according to their preferences. In addition, the platform provides security and compliance checks following European standards and proposes design optimizations. We use multiple models, such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama3 to enable to generation of modular code as per user choice. The research also highlights the limitations and future research discussions to overall improve the software development life cycle. The source code for our uniform platform is hosted on GitHub, enabling additional experimentation and supporting both research and practical uses. \end

Large-scale distributed training in production datacenters constitutes a challenging workload bottlenecked by network communication. In response, both major industry players (e.g., Ultra Ethernet Consortium) and parts of academia have surprisingly, and almost unanimously, agreed that packet spraying is necessary to improve the performance of large-scale distributed training workloads. In this paper, we challenge this prevailing belief and pose the question: How close can a singlepath transport approach an optimal multipath transport? We demonstrate that singlepath transport (from a NIC's perspective) is sufficient and can perform nearly as well as an ideal multipath transport with packet spraying, particularly in the context of distributed training in leaf-spine topologies. Our assertion is based on four key observations about workloads driven by collective communication patterns: (i) flows within a collective start almost simultaneously, (ii) flow sizes are nearly equal, (iii) the completion time of a collective is more crucial than individual flow completion times, and (iv) flows can be split upon arrival. We analytically prove that singlepath transport, using minimal flow splitting (at the application layer), is equivalent to an ideal multipath transport with packet spraying in terms of maximum congestion. Our preliminary evaluations support our claims. This paper suggests an alternative agenda for developing next-generation transport protocols tailored for large-scale distributed training.

Agentic AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, and executing actions present fundamentally distinct governance challenges compared to traditional AI models. Unlike conventional AI, these systems exhibit emergent and unexpected behaviors during runtime, introducing novel agent-related risks that cannot be fully anticipated through pre-deployment governance alone. To address this critical gap, we introduce MI9, the first fully integrated runtime governance framework designed specifically for safety and alignment of agentic AI systems. MI9 introduces real-time controls through six integrated components: agency-risk index, agent-semantic telemetry capture, continuous authorization monitoring, Finite-State-Machine (FSM)-based conformance engines, goal-conditioned drift detection, and graduated containment strategies. Operating transparently across heterogeneous agent architectures, MI9 enables the systematic, safe, and responsible deployment of agentic systems in production environments where conventional governance approaches fall short, providing the foundational infrastructure for safe agentic AI deployment at scale. Detailed analysis through a diverse set of scenarios demonstrates MI9's systematic coverage of governance challenges that existing approaches fail to address, establishing the technical foundation for comprehensive agentic AI oversight.

Large Language Models, particularly decoder-only generative models such as GPT, are increasingly used to automate Software Engineering tasks. These models are primarily guided through natural language prompts, making prompt engineering a critical factor in system performance and behavior. Despite their growing role in SE research, prompt-related decisions are rarely documented in a systematic or transparent manner, hindering reproducibility and comparability across studies. To address this gap, we conducted a two-phase empirical study. First, we analyzed nearly 300 papers published at the top-3 SE conferences since 2022 to assess how prompt design, testing, and optimization are currently reported. Second, we surveyed 105 program committee members from these conferences to capture their expectations for prompt reporting in LLM-driven research. Based on the findings, we derived a structured guideline that distinguishes essential, desirable, and exceptional reporting elements. Our results reveal significant misalignment between current practices and reviewer expectations, particularly regarding version disclosure, prompt justification, and threats to validity. We present our guideline as a step toward improving transparency, reproducibility, and methodological rigor in LLM-based SE research.

AI agents are actively running in production across diverse industries, yet little is publicly known about which technical approaches enable successful real-world deployments. We present the first large-scale systematic study of AI agents in production, surveying 306 practitioners and conducting 20 in-depth case studies via interviews across 26 domains. We investigate why organizations build agents, how they build them, how they evaluate them, and what the top development challenges are. We find that production agents are typically built using simple, controllable approaches: 68% execute at most 10 steps before requiring human intervention, 70% rely on prompting off-the-shelf models instead of weight tuning, and 74% depend primarily on human evaluation. Reliability remains the top development challenge, driven by difficulties in ensuring and evaluating agent correctness. Despite these challenges, simple yet effective methods already enable agents to deliver impact across diverse industries. Our study documents the current state of practice and bridges the gap between research and deployment by providing researchers visibility into production challenges while offering practitioners proven patterns from successful deployments.

Over the years, adversarial attempts against critical services have become more effective and sophisticated in launching low-profile attacks. This trend has always been concerning. However, an even more alarming trend is the increasing difficulty of collecting relevant evidence about these attacks and the involved threat actors in the early stages before significant damage is done. This issue puts defenders at a significant disadvantage, as it becomes exceedingly difficult to understand the attack details and formulate an appropriate response. Developing robust forensics tools to collect evidence about modern threats has never been easy. One main challenge is to provide a robust trade-off between achieving sufficient visibility while leaving minimal detectable artifacts. This paper will introduce LASE, an open-source Low-Artifact Forensics Engine to perform threat analysis and forensics in Windows operating system. LASE augments current analysis tools by providing detailed, system-wide monitoring capabilities while minimizing detectable artifacts. We designed multiple deployment scenarios, showing LASE's potential in evidence gathering and threat reasoning in a real-world setting. By making LASE and its execution trace data available to the broader research community, this work encourages further exploration in the field by reducing the engineering costs for threat analysis and building a longitudinal behavioral analysis catalog for diverse security domains.

The rapid growth of submissions to top-tier Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) conferences has prompted many venues to transition from closed to open review platforms. Some have fully embraced open peer reviews, allowing public visibility throughout the process, while others adopt hybrid approaches, such as releasing reviews only after final decisions or keeping reviews private despite using open peer review systems. In this work, we analyze the strengths and limitations of these models, highlighting the growing community interest in transparent peer review. To support this discussion, we examine insights from Paper Copilot, a website launched two years ago to aggregate and analyze AI / ML conference data while engaging a global audience. The site has attracted over 200,000 early-career researchers, particularly those aged 18-34 from 177 countries, many of whom are actively engaged in the peer review process. Drawing on our findings, this position paper advocates for a more transparent, open, and well-regulated peer review aiming to foster greater community involvement and propel advancements in the field.

This paper releases and analyzes a month-long trace of 85 billion user requests and 11.9 million cold starts from Huawei's serverless cloud platform. Our analysis spans workloads from five data centers. We focus on cold starts and provide a comprehensive examination of the underlying factors influencing the number and duration of cold starts. These factors include trigger types, request synchronicity, runtime languages, and function resource allocations. We investigate components of cold starts, including pod allocation time, code and dependency deployment time, and scheduling delays, and examine their relationships with runtime languages, trigger types, and resource allocation. We introduce pod utility ratio to measure the pod's useful lifetime relative to its cold start time, giving a more complete picture of cold starts, and see that some pods with long cold start times have longer useful lifetimes. Our findings reveal the complexity and multifaceted origins of the number, duration, and characteristics of cold starts, driven by differences in trigger types, runtime languages, and function resource allocations. For example, cold starts in Region 1 take up to 7 seconds, dominated by dependency deployment time and scheduling. In Region 2, cold starts take up to 3 seconds and are dominated by pod allocation time. Based on this, we identify opportunities to reduce the number and duration of cold starts using strategies for multi-region scheduling. Finally, we suggest directions for future research to address these challenges and enhance the performance of serverless cloud platforms. Our datasets and code are available here https://github.com/sir-lab/data-release

Serverless computing has emerged as a compelling new paradigm of cloud computing models in recent years. It promises the user services at large scale and low cost while eliminating the need for infrastructure management. On cloud provider side, flexible resource management is required to meet fluctuating demand. It can be enabled through automated provisioning and deprovisioning of resources. A common approach among both commercial and open source serverless computing platforms is workload-based auto-scaling, where a designated algorithm scales instances according to the number of incoming requests. In the recently evolving serverless framework Knative a request-based policy is proposed, where the algorithm scales resources by a configured maximum number of requests that can be processed in parallel per instance, the so-called concurrency. As we show in a baseline experiment, this predefined concurrency level can strongly influence the performance of a serverless application. However, identifying the concurrency configuration that yields the highest possible quality of service is a challenging task due to various factors, e.g. varying workload and complex infrastructure characteristics, influencing throughput and latency. While there has been considerable research into intelligent techniques for optimizing auto-scaling for virtual machine provisioning, this topic has not yet been discussed in the area of serverless computing. For this reason, we investigate the applicability of a reinforcement learning approach, which has been proven on dynamic virtual machine provisioning, to request-based auto-scaling in a serverless framework. Our results show that within a limited number of iterations our proposed model learns an effective scaling policy per workload, improving the performance compared to the default auto-scaling configuration.

An important function of collaborative network intrusion detection is to analyze the network logs of the collaborators for joint IP addresses. However, sharing IP addresses in plain is sensitive and may be even subject to privacy legislation as it is personally identifiable information. In this paper, we present the privacy-preserving collection of IP addresses. We propose a single collector, over-threshold private set intersection protocol. In this protocol N participants identify the IP addresses that appear in at least t participant's sets without revealing any information about other IP addresses. Using a novel hashing scheme, we reduce the computational complexity of the previous state-of-the-art solution from O(M(N M/t)^{2t}) to O(t^2MN{t}), where M denotes the dataset size. This reduction makes it practically feasible to apply our protocol to real network logs. We test our protocol using joint networks logs of multiple institutions. Additionally, we present two deployment options: a collusion-safe deployment, which provides stronger security guarantees at the cost of increased communication overhead, and a non-interactive deployment, which assumes a non-colluding collector but offers significantly lower communication costs and applicable to many use cases of collaborative network intrusion detection similar to ours.