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Are Time-Series Foundation Models Deployment-Ready? A Systematic Study of Adversarial Robustness Across Domains

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) are rapidly transitioning from research prototypes to core components of critical decision-making systems, driven by their impressive zero-shot forecasting capabilities. However, as their deployment surges, a critical blind spot remains: their fragility under adversarial attacks. This lack of scrutiny poses severe risks, particularly as TSFMs enter high-stakes environments vulnerable to manipulation. We present a systematic, diagnostic study arguing that for TSFMs, robustness is not merely a secondary metric but a prerequisite for trustworthy deployment comparable to accuracy. Our evaluation framework, explicitly tailored to the unique constraints of time series, incorporates normalized, sparsity-aware perturbation budgets and unified scale-invariant metrics across white-box and black-box settings. Across six representative TSFMs, we demonstrate that current architectures are alarmingly brittle: even small perturbations can reliably steer forecasts toward specific failure modes, such as trend flips and malicious drifts. We uncover TSFM-specific vulnerability patterns, including horizon-proximal brittleness, increased susceptibility with longer context windows, and weak cross-model transfer that points to model-specific failure modes rather than generic distortions. Finally, we show that simple adversarial fine-tuning offers a cost-effective path to substantial robustness gains, even with out-of-domain data. This work bridges the gap between TSFM capabilities and safety constraints, offering essential guidance for hardening the next generation of forecasting systems.


BEDI: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Embodied Agents on UAVs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the rapid advancement of low-altitude remote sensing and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Embodied Agents based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have shown significant potential in autonomous tasks. However, current evaluation methods for UAV-Embodied Agents (UAV-EAs) remain constrained by the lack of standardized benchmarks, diverse testing scenarios and open system interfaces. To address these challenges, we propose BEDI (Benchmark for Embodied Drone Intelligence), a systematic and standardized benchmark designed for evaluating UAV-EAs. Specifically, we introduce a novel Dynamic Chain-of-Embodied-Task paradigm based on the perception-decision-action loop, which decomposes complex UAV tasks into standardized, measurable subtasks. Building on this paradigm, we design a unified evaluation framework encompassing six core sub-skills: semantic perception, spatial perception, motion control, tool utilization, task planning and action generation. Furthermore, we develop a hybrid testing platform that incorporates a wide range of both virtual and real-world scenarios, enabling a comprehensive evaluation of UAV-EAs across diverse contexts. The platform also offers open and standardized interfaces, allowing researchers to customize tasks and extend scenarios, thereby enhancing flexibility and scalability in the evaluation process. Finally, through empirical evaluations of several state-of-the-art (SOTA) VLMs, we reveal their limitations in embodied UAV tasks, underscoring the critical role of the BEDI benchmark in advancing embodied intelligence research and model optimization. By filling the gap in systematic and standardized evaluation within this field, BEDI facilitates objective model comparison and lays a robust foundation for future development in this field. Our benchmark is now publicly available at https://github.com/lostwolves/BEDI.


Is PRM Necessary? Problem-Solving RL Implicitly Induces PRM Capability in LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The development of reasoning capabilities represents a critical frontier in large language models (LLMs) research, where reinforcement learning (RL) and process reward models (PRMs) have emerged as predominant methodological frameworks. Contrary to conventional wisdom, empirical evidence from DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates that pure RL training focused on mathematical problem-solving can progressively enhance reasoning abilities without PRM integration, challenging the perceived necessity of process supervision. In this study, we conduct a systematic investigation of the relationship between RL training and PRM capabilities. Our findings demonstrate that problem-solving proficiency and process supervision capabilities represent complementary dimensions of reasoning that co-evolve synergistically during pure RL training. In particular, current PRMs underperform simple baselines like majority voting when applied to state-of-the-art models such as DeepSeek-R1 and QwQ-32B. To address this limitation, we propose Self-PRM, an introspective framework in which models autonomously evaluate and rerank their generated solutions through self-reward mechanisms. Although Self-PRM consistently improves the accuracy of the benchmark (particularly with larger sample sizes), analysis exposes persistent challenges: The approach exhibits low precision (<10\%) on difficult problems, frequently misclassifying flawed solutions as valid. These analyses underscore the need for continued RL scaling to improve reward alignment and introspective accuracy. Overall, our findings suggest that PRM may not be essential for enhancing complex reasoning, as pure RL not only improves problem-solving skills but also inherently fosters robust PRM capabilities. We hope these findings provide actionable insights for building more reliable and self-aware complex reasoning models.


Evaluating the robustness of adversarial defenses in malware detection systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning is a key tool for Android malware detection, effectively identifying malicious patterns in apps. However, ML-based detectors are vulnerable to evasion attacks, where small, crafted changes bypass detection. Despite progress in adversarial defenses, the lack of comprehensive evaluation frameworks in binary-constrained domains limits understanding of their robustness. We introduce two key contributions. First, Prioritized Binary Rounding, a technique to convert continuous perturbations into binary feature spaces while preserving high attack success and low perturbation size. Second, the sigma-binary attack, a novel adversarial method for binary domains, designed to achieve attack goals with minimal feature changes. Experiments on the Malscan dataset show that sigma-binary outperforms existing attacks and exposes key vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art defenses. Defenses equipped with adversary detectors, such as KDE, DLA, DNN+, and ICNN, exhibit significant brittleness, with attack success rates exceeding 90% using fewer than 10 feature modifications and reaching 100% with just 20. Adversarially trained defenses, including AT-rFGSM-k, AT-MaxMA, improves robustness under small budgets but remains vulnerable to unrestricted perturbations, with attack success rates of 99.45% and 96.62%, respectively. Although PAD-SMA demonstrates strong robustness against state-of-the-art gradient-based adversarial attacks by maintaining an attack success rate below 16.55%, the sigma-binary attack significantly outperforms these methods, achieving a 94.56% success rate under unrestricted perturbations. These findings highlight the critical need for precise method like sigma-binary to expose hidden vulnerabilities in existing defenses and support the development of more resilient malware detection systems.


Quantum RNNs and LSTMs Through Entangling and Disentangling Power of Unitary Transformations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we present a framework for modeling quantum recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and their enhanced version, long short-term memory (LSTM) networks using the core ideas presented by Linden et al. (2009), where the entangling and disentangling power of unitary transformations is investigated. In particular, we interpret entangling and disentangling power as information retention and forgetting mechanisms in LSTMs. Thus, entanglement emerges as a key component of the optimization (training) process. We believe that, by leveraging prior knowledge of the entangling power of unitaries, the proposed quantum-classical framework can guide the design of better-parameterized quantum circuits for various real-world applications.


LOG-Nav: Efficient Layout-Aware Object-Goal Navigation with Hierarchical Planning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce LOG-Nav, an efficient layout-aware object-goal navigation approach designed for complex multi-room indoor environments. By planning hierarchically leveraging a global topologigal map with layout information and local imperative approach with detailed scene representation memory, LOG-Nav achieves both efficient and effective navigation. The process is managed by an LLM-powered agent, ensuring seamless effective planning and navigation, without the need for human interaction, complex rewards, or costly training. Our experimental results on the MP3D benchmark achieves 85\% object navigation success rate (SR) and 79\% success rate weighted by path length (SPL) (over 40\% point improvement in SR and 60\% improvement in SPL compared to exsisting methods). Furthermore, we validate the robustness of our approach through virtual agent and real-world robotic deployment, showcasing its capability in practical scenarios.


Quantum Feature Space of a Qubit Coupled to an Arbitrary Bath

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Qubit control protocols have traditionally leveraged a characterisation of the qubit-bath coupling via its power spectral density. Previous work proposed the inference of noise operators that characterise the influence of a classical bath using a grey-box approach that combines deep neural networks with physics-encoded layers. This overall structure is complex and poses challenges in scaling and real-time operations. Here, we show that no expensive neural networks are needed and that this noise operator description admits an efficient parameterisation. We refer to the resulting parameter space as the \textit{quantum feature space} of the qubit dynamics resulting from the coupled bath. We show that the Euclidean distance defined over the quantum feature space provides an effective method for classifying noise processes in the presence of a given set of controls. Using the quantum feature space as the input space for a simple machine learning algorithm (random forest, in this case), we demonstrate that it can effectively classify the stationarity and the broad class of noise processes perturbing a qubit. Finally, we explore how control pulse parameters map to the quantum feature space.


Repetition Makes Perfect: Recurrent Graph Neural Networks Match Message-Passing Limit

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We precisely characterize the expressivity of computable Recurrent Graph Neural Networks (recurrent GNNs). We prove that recurrent GNNs with finite-precision parameters, sum aggregation, and ReLU activation, can compute any graph algorithm that respects the natural message-passing invariance induced by the Color Refinement (or Weisfeiler-Leman) algorithm. While it is well known that the expressive power of GNNs is limited by this invariance [Morris et al., AAAI 2019; Xu et al., ICLR 2019], we establish that recurrent GNNs can actually match this limit. This is in contrast to non-recurrent GNNs, which have the power of Weisfeiler-Leman only in a very weak, "non-uniform", sense where each graph size requires a different GNN to compute with. Our construction introduces only a polynomial overhead in both time and space. Furthermore, we show that by incorporating random initialization, for connected graphs recurrent GNNs can express all graph algorithms. In particular, any polynomial-time graph algorithm can be emulated on connected graphs in polynomial time by a recurrent GNN with random initialization.


OSVBench: Benchmarking LLMs on Specification Generation Tasks for Operating System Verification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce OSVBench, a new benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) on the task of generating complete formal specifications for verifying the functional correctness of operating system kernels. This benchmark is built upon a real-world operating system kernel, Hyperkernel, and consists of 245 complex specification generation tasks in total, each of which is a long-context task of about 20k-30k tokens. The benchmark formulates the specification generation task as a program synthesis problem confined to a domain for specifying states and transitions. This formulation is provided to LLMs through a programming model. The LLMs must be able to understand the programming model and verification assumptions before delineating the correct search space for syntax and semantics and generating formal specifications. Guided by the operating system's high-level functional description, the LLMs are asked to generate a specification that fully describes all correct states and transitions for a potentially buggy code implementation of the operating system. Experimental results with 12 state-of-the-art LLMs indicate limited performance of existing LLMs on the specification generation task for operating system verification. Significant disparities in their performance highlight differences in their ability to handle long-context code generation tasks. The code are available at https://github.com/lishangyu-hkust/OSVBench


Process Reward Models That Think

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Step-by-step verifiers -- also known as process reward models (PRMs) -- are a key ingredient for test-time scaling. PRMs require step-level supervision, making them expensive to train. This work aims to build data-efficient PRMs as verbalized step-wise reward models that verify every step in the solution by generating a verification chain-of-thought (CoT). We propose ThinkPRM, a long CoT verifier fine-tuned on orders of magnitude fewer process labels than those required by discriminative PRMs. Our approach capitalizes on the inherent reasoning abilities of long CoT models, and outperforms LLM-as-a-Judge and discriminative verifiers -- using only 1% of the process labels in PRM800K -- across several challenging benchmarks. Specifically, ThinkPRM beats the baselines on ProcessBench, MATH-500, and AIME '24 under best-of-N selection and reward-guided search. In an out-of-domain evaluation on a subset of GPQA-Diamond and LiveCodeBench, our PRM surpasses discriminative verifiers trained on the full PRM800K by 8% and 4.5%, respectively. Lastly, under the same token budget, ThinkPRM scales up verification compute more effectively compared to LLM-as-a-Judge, outperforming it by 7.2% on a subset of ProcessBench. Our work highlights the value of generative, long CoT PRMs that can scale test-time compute for verification while requiring minimal supervision for training. Our code, data, and models are released at https://github.com/mukhal/thinkprm.