Password security plays a crucial role in cybersecurity, yet traditional password strength meters, which rely on static rules like character - type requirements, often fail . Such methods are easily bypassed by common password patterns (e.g., 'P@ssw0rd1!'), giving users a false sense of security . To address this, we implement and evaluate a password strength scoring system by comparing four machine learning models: Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Logistic Regression with a dataset of over 660,000 real - world passwords. Our primary contribution is a novel hybrid feature engineering approach that captures nuanced vulnerabilities missed by standard metrics . We introduce features like leetspeak - normalized Shannon entropy to assess true randomness, pattern detection for keyboard walks and sequences, and character - level TF - IDF n - grams to identify frequently reused substrings from breached password datasets. Crucially, the interpretability of the Random Forest model allows for feature importance analysis, providing a clear pathway to developing security tools that offer specific, actionable feedback to users. This study bridges the gap betwee n predictive accuracy and practical usability, resulting in a high - performance scoring system that not only reduces password - based vulnerabilities but also empowers users to make more informed security decisions. Keywords - Password Security, Machine Learning, Rule - Based Attack, Brute - Force Attack, Dictionary Attack, Cybersecurity. 1. P asswords remain a cornerstone of online security, serving as the primary means of authentication for countless systems and applications . However, this reliance is a critical vulnerability; according to a report by Google Cloud, a staggering 86% of breaches involve stolen credentials, posing a significant threat to both user data and system security .[1] M any users choose weak, easily guessable passwords, which pose a serious threat to both user data and system security . Attackers frequently exploit this vulnerability in large - scale attacks, compromising user privacy and enabling financial fraud . Most traditional password strength scoring tools rely on static rules, such as requiring a mix of lowercase, uppercase, digits, and special characters (LUDS), which fail to adapt to evolving attack patterns .

Refusal refers to the functional behavior enabling safety-aligned language models to reject harmful or unethical prompts. Following the growing scientific interest in mechanistic interpretability, recent work encoded refusal behavior as a single direction in the model's latent space; e.g., computed as the difference between the centroids of harmful and harmless prompt representations. However, emerging evidence suggests that concepts in LLMs often appear to be encoded as a low-dimensional manifold embedded in the high-dimensional latent space. Motivated by these findings, we propose a novel method leveraging Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) to extract multiple refusal directions. To this end, we first prove that SOMs generalize the prior work's difference-in-means technique. We then train SOMs on harmful prompt representations to identify multiple neurons. By subtracting the centroid of harmless representations from each neuron, we derive a set of multiple directions expressing the refusal concept. We validate our method on an extensive experimental setup, demonstrating that ablating multiple directions from models' internals outperforms not only the single-direction baseline but also specialized jailbreak algorithms, leading to an effective suppression of refusal. Finally, we conclude by analyzing the mechanistic implications of our approach.

Understanding human attitudes, preferences, and behaviors through social surveys is essential for academic research and policymaking. Y et traditional surveys face persistent challenges, including fixed-question formats, high costs, limited adaptability, and difficulties ensuring cross-cultural equivalence. While recent studies explore large language models (LLMs) to simulate survey responses, most are limited to structured questions, overlook the entire survey process, and risks under-representing marginalized groups due to training data biases. We introduce AlignSurvey, the first benchmark that systematically replicates and evaluates the full social survey pipeline using LLMs. It defines four tasks aligned with key survey stages: social role modeling, semi-structured interview modeling, attitude stance modeling and survey response modeling. It also provides task-specific evaluation metrics to assess alignment fidelity, consistency, and fairness at both individual and group levels, with a focus on demographic diversity. To support AlignSurvey, we construct a multi-tiered dataset architecture: (i) the Social Foundation Corpus, a cross-national resource with 44K+ interview dialogues and 400K+ structured survey records; and (ii) a suite of Entire-Pipeline Survey Datasets, including the expert-annotated AlignSurvey-Expert (ASE) and two nationally representative surveys for cross-cultural evaluation. We release the SurveyLM family, obtained through two-stage fine-tuning of open-source LLMs, and offer reference models for evaluating domain-specific alignment. All datasets, models, and tools are available at github and huggingface to support transparent and socially responsible research.

Addressing climate change effectively requires more than cataloguing the number of policies in place; it calls for tools that can reveal their thematic priorities and their tangible impacts on development outcomes. Existing assessments often rely on qualitative descriptions or composite indices, which can mask crucial differences between key domains such as mitigation, adaptation, disaster risk management, and loss and damage. To bridge this gap, we develop a quantitative indicator of climate policy orientation by applying a multilingual transformer-based language model to official national policy documents, achieving a classification accuracy of 0.90 (F1-score). Linking these indicators with World Bank development data in panel regressions reveals that mitigation policies are associated with higher GDP and GNI; disaster risk management correlates with greater GNI and debt but reduced foreign direct investment; adaptation and loss and damage show limited measurable effects. This integrated NLP-econometric framework enables comparable, theme-specific analysis of climate governance, offering a scalable method to monitor progress, evaluate trade-offs, and align policy emphasis with development goals.

We present Ax-Prover, a multi-agent system for automated theorem proving in Lean that can solve problems across diverse scientific domains and operate either autonomously or collaboratively with human experts. To achieve this, Ax-Prover approaches scientific problem solving through formal proof generation, a process that demands both creative reasoning and strict syntactic rigor. Ax-Prover meets this challenge by equipping Large Language Models (LLMs), which provide knowledge and reasoning, with Lean tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which ensure formal correctness. To evaluate its performance as an autonomous prover, we benchmark our approach against frontier LLMs and specialized prover models on two public math benchmarks and on two Lean benchmarks we introduce in the fields of abstract algebra and quantum theory. On public datasets, Ax-Prover is competitive with state-of-the-art provers, while it largely outperforms them on the new benchmarks. This shows that, unlike specialized systems that struggle to generalize, our tool-based agentic theorem prover approach offers a generalizable methodology for formal verification across diverse scientific domains. Furthermore, we demonstrate Ax-Prover's assistant capabilities in a practical use case, showing how it enabled an expert mathematician to formalize the proof of a complex cryptography theorem.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to automate or augment penetration testing, but their effectiveness and reliability across attack phases remain unclear. We present a comprehensive evaluation of multiple LLM-based agents, from single-agent to modular designs, across realistic penetration testing scenarios, measuring empirical performance and recurring failure patterns. We also isolate the impact of five core functional capabilities via targeted augmentations: Global Context Memory (GCM), Inter-Agent Messaging (IAM), Context-Conditioned Invocation (CCI), Adaptive Planning (AP), and Real-Time Monitoring (RTM). These interventions support, respectively: (i) context coherence and retention, (ii) inter-component coordination and state management, (iii) tool use accuracy and selective execution, (iv) multi-step strategic planning, error detection, and recovery, and (v) real-time dynamic responsiveness. Our results show that while some architectures natively exhibit subsets of these properties, targeted augmentations substantially improve modular agent performance, especially in complex, multi-step, and real-time penetration testing tasks.

A common challenge with supervised machine learning (ML) in high energy physics (HEP) is the reliance on simulations for labeled data, which can often mismodel the underlying collision or detector response. To help mitigate this problem of domain shift, we propose RINO (Renormalization Group Invariance with No Labels), a self-supervised learning approach that can instead pretrain models directly on collision data, learning embeddings invariant to renormalization group flow scales. In this work, we pretrain a transformer-based model on jets originating from quantum chromodynamic (QCD) interactions from the JetClass dataset, emulating real QCD-dominated experimental data, and then finetune on the JetNet dataset -- emulating simulations -- for the task of identifying jets originating from top quark decays. RINO demonstrates improved generalization from the JetNet training data to JetClass data compared to supervised training on JetNet from scratch, demonstrating the potential for RINO pretraining on real collision data followed by fine-tuning on small, high-quality MC datasets, to improve the robustness of ML models in HEP.

Automated visual inspection in medical-device manufacturing faces unique challenges, including extremely low defect rates, limited annotated data, hardware restrictions on production lines, and the need for validated, explainable artificial-intelligence systems. This paper presents two attention-guided autoencoder architectures that address these constraints through complementary anomaly-detection strategies. The first employs a multi-scale structural-similarity (4-MS-SSIM) index for inline inspection, enabling interpretable, real-time defect detection on constrained hardware. The second applies a Mahalanobis-distance analysis of randomly reduced latent features for efficient feature-space monitoring and lifecycle verification. Both approaches share a lightweight backbone optimised for high-resolution imagery for typical manufacturing conditions. Evaluations on the Surface Seal Image (SSI) dataset-representing sterile-barrier packaging inspection-demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform reference baselines, including MOCCA, CPCAE, and RAG-PaDiM, under realistic industrial constraints. Cross-domain validation on the MVTec-Zipper benchmark confirms comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art anomaly-detection methods. The dual-mode framework integrates inline anomaly detection and supervisory monitoring, advancing explainable AI architectures toward greater reliability, observability, and lifecycle monitoring in safety-critical manufacturing environments. To facilitate reproducibility, the source code developed for the experiments has been released in the project repository, while the datasets were obtained from publicly available sources.

Several multilingual benchmark datasets have been developed in a semi-automatic manner in the recent past to measure progress and understand the state-of-the-art in the multilingual capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM). However, there is not a lot of attention paid to the quality of the datasets themselves, despite the existence of previous work in identifying errors in even fully human-annotated test sets. In this paper, we manually analyze recent multilingual evaluation sets in two languages - French and Telugu, identifying several errors in the datasets during the process. We compare the performance difference across several LLMs with the original and revised versions of the datasets and identify large differences (almost 10% in some cases) in both languages. Based on these results, we argue that test sets should not be considered immutable and should be revisited, checked for correctness, and potentially versioned. We end with some recommendations for both the dataset creators as well as consumers on addressing the dataset quality issues.

Incremental flow-based denoising models have reshaped generative modelling, but their empirical advantage still lacks a rigorous approximation-theoretic foundation. We show that incremental generation is necessary and sufficient for universal flow-based generation on the largest natural class of self-maps of $[0,1]^d$ compatible with denoising pipelines, namely the orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of $[0,1]^d$. All our guarantees are uniform on the underlying maps and hence imply approximation both samplewise and in distribution. Using a new topological-dynamical argument, we first prove an impossibility theorem: the class of all single-step autonomous flows, independently of the architecture, width, depth, or Lipschitz activation of the underlying neural network, is meagre and therefore not universal in the space of orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of $[0,1]^d$. By exploiting algebraic properties of autonomous flows, we conversely show that every orientation-preserving Lipschitz homeomorphism on $[0,1]^d$ can be approximated at rate $\mathcal{O}(n^{-1/d})$ by a composition of at most $K_d$ such flows, where $K_d$ depends only on the dimension. Under additional smoothness assumptions, the approximation rate can be made dimension-free, and $K_d$ can be chosen uniformly over the class being approximated. Finally, by linearly lifting the domain into one higher dimension, we obtain structured universal approximation results for continuous functions and for probability measures on $[0,1]^d$, the latter realized as pushforwards of empirical measures with vanishing $1$-Wasserstein error.