Consider a service system in which individuals are served by facilities at different locations within a geographical region. For example, the facilities could represent schools, polling places, or commercial fulfillment centers. The geographical partitioning problem (Carlsson & Devulapalli 2013) divides the region into non-overlapping districts, such that all individuals residing in the same district are served by the same facility. The goal is to choose a partition that optimizes some measure of social welfare, most commonly the average travel cost per individual (Carlsson et al. 2016). We formulate and study a novel variant of this problem where the population is heterogeneous, consisting of multiple demographic groups, each with a different spatial distribution throughout the region. Again we optimize the expected cost, but now we also impose a new group fairness condition: each subpopulation can be neither over-nor under-represented at any facility. In other words, the districts are designed in such a way that the proportion of the population belonging to a particular group in any district must match that group's incidence in the entire population. This condition is also known as "demographic parity" in the literature (Dwork et al. 2012).

Progress in computer use agents (CUAs) has been constrained by the absence of large and high-quality datasets that capture how humans interact with a computer. While LLMs have thrived on abundant textual data, no comparable corpus exists for CUA trajectories. To address these gaps, we introduce FaraGen, a novel synthetic data generation system for multi-step web tasks. FaraGen can propose diverse tasks from frequently used websites, generate multiple solution attempts, and filter successful trajectories using multiple verifiers. It achieves high throughput, yield, and diversity for multi-step web tasks, producing verified trajectories at approximately $1 each. We use this data to train Fara-7B, a native CUA model that perceives the computer using only screenshots, executes actions via predicted coordinates, and is small enough to run on-device. We find that Fara-7B outperforms other CUA models of comparable size on benchmarks like WebVoyager, Online-Mind2Web, and WebTailBench -- our novel benchmark that better captures under-represented web tasks in pre-existing benchmarks. Furthermore, Fara-7B is competitive with much larger frontier models, illustrating key benefits of scalable data generation systems in advancing small efficient agentic models. We are making Fara-7B open-weight on Microsoft Foundry and HuggingFace, and we are releasing WebTailBench.

The ever-increasing number of Android devices and the accelerated evolution of malware, reaching over 35 million samples by 2024, highlight the critical importance of effective detection methods. Attackers are now using Artificial Intelligence to create sophisticated malware variations that can easily evade traditional detection techniques. Although machine learning has shown promise in malware classification, its success relies heavily on the availability of up-to-date, high-quality datasets. The scarcity and high cost of obtaining and labeling real malware samples presents significant challenges in developing robust detection models. In this paper, we propose MalSynGen, a Malware Synthetic Data Generation methodology that uses a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) to generate synthetic tabular data. This data preserves the statistical properties of real-world data and improves the performance of Android malware classifiers. We evaluated the effectiveness of this approach using various datasets and metrics that assess the fidelity of the generated data, its utility in classification, and the computational efficiency of the process. Our experiments demonstrate that MalSynGen can generalize across different datasets, providing a viable solution to address the issues of obsolescence and low quality data in malware detection. With approximately 3 billion Android devices in operation worldwide [1], the mobile cybersecurity landscape faces formidable challenges. In 2024 alone, Kaspersky reported over 33.3 million cyberattacks targeting smartphone users globally, encompassing diverse forms of malware and unwanted software [2]. Adding to this problem, attackers are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to rapidly generate new malware variants by exploiting patterns learned from existing malware [3].

Modern enterprise systems face escalating cyber threats that are increasingly dynamic, distributed, and multi-stage in nature. Traditional intrusion detection and response systems often rely on static rules and manual workflows, which limit their ability to respond with the speed and precision required in high-stakes environments. To address these challenges, we present the Intrusion Response System Digital Assistant (IRSDA), an agent-based framework designed to deliver autonomous and policy-compliant cyber defense. IRSDA combines Self-Adaptive Autonomic Computing Systems (SA-ACS) with the Knowledge guided Monitor, Analyze, Plan, and Execute (MAPE-K) loop to support real-time, partition-aware decision-making across enterprise infrastructure. IRSDA incorporates a knowledge-driven architecture that integrates contextual information with AI-based reasoning to support system-guided intrusion response. The framework leverages retrieval mechanisms and structured representations to inform decision-making while maintaining alignment with operational policies. We assess the system using a representative real-world microservices application, demonstrating its ability to automate containment, enforce compliance, and provide traceable outputs for security analyst interpretation. This work outlines a modular and agent-driven approach to cyber defense that emphasizes explainability, system-state awareness, and operational control in intrusion response.

Organization's communication is essential for public trust, but the rise of generative AI models has introduced significant challenges by generating persuasive content that can form competing narratives with official messages from government and commercial organizations at speed and scale. This has left agencies in a reactive position, often unaware of how these models construct their persuasive strategies, making it more difficult to sustain communication effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce a large LLM-generated persuasion attack dataset, which includes 134,136 attacks generated by GPT-4, Gemma 2, and Llama 3.1 on agency news. These attacks span 23 persuasive techniques from SemEval 2023 Task 3, directed toward 972 press releases from ten agencies. The generated attacks come in two mediums, press release statements and social media posts, covering both long-form and short-form communication strategies. We analyzed the moral resonance of these persuasion attacks to understand their attack vectors. GPT-4's attacks mainly focus on Care, with Authority and Loyalty also playing a role. Gemma 2 emphasizes Care and Authority, while Llama 3.1 centers on Loyalty and Care. Analyzing LLM-generated persuasive attacks across models will enable proactive defense, allow to create the reputation armor for organizations, and propel the development of both effective and resilient communications in the information ecosystem.

As graph-structured data grow increasingly large, evaluating their robustness under adversarial attacks becomes computationally expensive and difficult to scale. To address this challenge, we propose to compress graphs into compact representations that preserve both topological structure and robustness profile, enabling efficient and reliable evaluation. We propose Cutter, a dual-agent reinforcement learning framework composed of a Vital Detection Agent (VDA) and a Redundancy Detection Agent (RDA), which collaboratively identify structurally vital and redundant nodes for guided compression. Cutter incorporates three key strategies to enhance learning efficiency and compression quality: trajectory-level reward shaping to transform sparse trajectory returns into dense, policy-equivalent learning signals; prototype-based shaping to guide decisions using behavioral patterns from both high- and low-return trajectories; and cross-agent imitation to enable safer and more transferable exploration. Experiments on multiple real-world graphs demonstrate that Cutter generates compressed graphs that retain essential static topological properties and exhibit robustness degradation trends highly consistent with the original graphs under various attack scenarios, thereby significantly improving evaluation efficiency without compromising assessment fidelity.

Cross-platform strategy game automation remains a challenge due to diverse user interfaces and dynamic battlefield environments. Existing Vision--Language Models (VLMs) struggle with generalization across heterogeneous platforms and lack precision in interface understanding and action execution. We introduce Yanyun-3, a VLM-based agent that integrates Qwen2.5-VL for visual reasoning and UI-TARS for interface execution. We propose a novel data organization principle -- combination granularity -- to distinguish intra-sample fusion and inter-sample mixing of multimodal data (static images, multi-image sequences, and videos). The model is fine-tuned using QLoRA on a curated dataset across three strategy game platforms. The optimal strategy (M*V+S) achieves a 12.98x improvement in BLEU-4 score and a 63% reduction in inference time compared to full fusion. Yanyun-3 successfully executes core tasks (e.g., target selection, resource allocation) across platforms without platform-specific tuning. Our findings demonstrate that structured multimodal data organization significantly enhances VLM performance in embodied tasks. Yanyun-3 offers a generalizable framework for GUI automation, with broader implications for robotics and autonomous systems.

Recent advancements in large-scale generative models have enabled the creation of high-quality images and videos, but have also raised significant safety concerns regarding the generation of unsafe content. To mitigate this, concept erasure methods have been developed to remove undesirable concepts from pre-trained models. However, existing methods remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can regenerate the erased content. Moreover, achieving robust erasure often degrades the model's generative quality for safe, unrelated concepts, creating a difficult trade-off between safety and performance. To address this challenge, we introduce Classifier-Guided Concept Erasure (CGCE), an efficient plug-and-play framework that provides robust concept erasure for diverse generative models without altering their original weights. CGCE uses a lightweight classifier operating on text embeddings to first detect and then refine prompts containing undesired concepts. This approach is highly scalable, allowing for multi-concept erasure by aggregating guidance from several classifiers. By modifying only unsafe embeddings at inference time, our method prevents harmful content generation while preserving the model's original quality on benign prompts. Extensive experiments show that CGCE achieves state-of-the-art robustness against a wide range of red-teaming attacks. Our approach also maintains high generative utility, demonstrating a superior balance between safety and performance. We showcase the versatility of CGCE through its successful application to various modern T2I and T2V models, establishing it as a practical and effective solution for safe generative AI.

Large-scale disaster Search And Rescue (SAR) operations are persistently challenged by complex terrain and disrupted communications. While Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms offer a promising solution for tasks like wide-area search and supply delivery, yet their effective coordination places a significant cognitive burden on human operators. The core human-machine collaboration bottleneck lies in the ``intention-to-action gap'', which is an error-prone process of translating a high-level rescue objective into a low-level swarm command under high intensity and pressure. To bridge this gap, this study proposes a novel LLM-CRF system that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to model and augment human-swarm teaming cognition. The proposed framework initially captures the operator's intention through natural and multi-modal interactions with the device via voice or graphical annotations. It then employs the LLM as a cognitive engine to perform intention comprehension, hierarchical task decomposition, and mission planning for the UAV swarm. This closed-loop framework enables the swarm to act as a proactive partner, providing active feedback in real-time while reducing the need for manual monitoring and control, which considerably advances the efficacy of the SAR task. We evaluate the proposed framework in a simulated SAR scenario. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to traditional order and command-based interfaces, the proposed LLM-driven approach reduced task completion time by approximately $64.2\%$ and improved task success rate by $7\%$. It also leads to a considerable reduction in subjective cognitive workload, with NASA-TLX scores dropping by $42.9\%$. This work establishes the potential of LLMs to create more intuitive and effective human-swarm collaborations in high-stakes scenarios.

Group segregation or cohesion can emerge from micro-level communication, and AI-assisted messaging may shape this process. Here, we report a preregistered online experiment (N = 557 across 60 sessions) in which participants discussed controversial political topics over multiple rounds and could freely change groups. Some participants received real-time message suggestions from a large language model (LLM), either personalized to their stance ("individual assistance") or incorporating their group members' perspectives ("relational assistance"). We find that small variations in AI-mediated communication cascade into macro-level differences in group composition. Participants with individual assistance send more messages and show greater stance-based clustering, whereas those with relational assistance use more receptive language and form more heterogeneous ties. Hybrid expressive processes--jointly produced by humans and AI--can reshape collective organization. The patterns of structural division and cohesion depend on how AI incorporates users' interaction context. Understanding how micro-level communication patterns accumulate into macro-level group segregation or cohesion is a central question in social and behavioral science [1-3]. Conversations across differences are often asymmetric: people find it difficult to engage constructively with those who hold opposing views [4, 5], and stereotypes bias perceptions of outgroup members [6]. Online platforms can intensify these dynamics through lowered inhibitions [9], emotion-amplified diffusion [10], and algorithmic or behavioral clustering processes [11-13]. While the forces that produce social division are well theorized and empirically documented, far less is known about the micro-level conversational mechanisms that can instead generate cohesion in ideollogically diverse groups [14-16].