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OS-HARM: ABenchmark for Measuring Safety of Computer Use Agents

Neural Information Processing Systems

Computer use agents are LLM-based agents that can directly interact with a graphical user interface, by processing screenshots or accessibility trees. While these systems are gaining popularity, their safety has been largely overlooked, despite the fact that evaluating and understanding their potential for harmful behavior is essential for widespread adoption. To address this gap, we introduce OS-HARM, a new benchmark for measuring safety of computer use agents. OS-HARM is built on top of the OSWorld environment (Xie et al., 2024) and aims to test models across three categories of harm: deliberate user misuse, prompt injection attacks, and model misbehavior.


PointMAC: Meta-Learned Adaptation for Robust Test-Time Point Cloud Completion

Neural Information Processing Systems

Point cloud completion is essential for robust 3D perception in safety-critical applications such as robotics and augmented reality. However, existing models perform static inference and rely heavily on inductive biases learned during training, limiting their ability to adapt to novel structural patterns and sensor-induced distortions at test time. To address this limitation, we propose PointMAC, a meta-learned framework for robust test-time adaptation in point cloud completion. It enables sample-specific refinement without requiring additional supervision. Our method optimizes the completion model under two self-supervised auxiliary objectives that simulate structural and sensor-level incompleteness.


RepGuard: Adaptive Feature Decoupling for Robust Backdoor Defense in Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to large language models (LLMs) by embedding malicious triggers that manipulate model behavior. However, existing defenses primarily rely on prior knowledge of backdoor triggers or targets and offer only superficial mitigation strategies, thus struggling to fundamentally address the inherent reliance on unreliable features. To address these limitations, we propose a novel defense strategy, RepGuard, that strengthens LLM resilience by adaptively separating abnormal features from useful semantic representations, rendering the defense agnostic to specific trigger patterns. Specifically, we first introduce a dual-perspective feature localization strategy that integrates local consistency and sample-wise deviation metrics to identify suspicious backdoor patterns. Based on this identification, an adaptive mask generation mechanism is applied to isolate backdoor-targeted shortcut features by decomposing hidden representations into independent spaces, while preserving task-relevant semantics.


Resolution of Simpson's paradox via the common cause principle

Neural Information Processing Systems

Simpson's paradox poses a challenge in probabilistic inference and decisionmaking. Our study revisits the paradox by re-estimating its frequency with an unbiased data generation process and reaffirms that it is not an artifact of deficient data collection. Thus, it can lead to incorrect recommendations in fields as diverse as statistics, psychology, and artificial intelligence. We show that the paradox can be resolved by assuming a minimal -- though not necessarily observed -- common cause (or screening) variable for the involved random variables. In our approach, conditioning on this minimal common cause establishes the correct association between events, which coincides with the conditioning (i.e., fine-grained) option of the original Simpson paradox. This resolution applies to both discrete cases of binary variables and continuous settings modeled by Gaussian variables. For a non-minimal common cause, the resolution of the paradox is possible, but detailed knowledge of the common cause is required. Our findings extend traditional understandings of the paradox and offer practical guidance for resolving apparent contradictions in probabilistic inference, ultimately enhancing decision-making processes. This point is illustrated by several examples.



SORTeDRashomon Sets of Sparse Decision Trees: Anytime Enumeration

Neural Information Processing Systems

Sparse decision tree learning provides accurate and interpretable predictive models that are ideal for high-stakes applications by finding the single most accurate tree within a (soft) size limit. Rather than relying on a single "best" tree, Rashomon sets--trees with similar performance but varying structures--can be used to enhance variable importance analysis, enrich explanations, and enable users to choose simpler trees or those that satisfy stakeholder preferences (e.g., fairness) without hard-coding such criteria into the objective function. However, because finding the optimal tree is NP-hard, enumerating the Rashomon set is inherently challenging. Therefore, we introduce SORTD, a novel framework that improves scalability and enumerates trees in the Rashomon set in order of the objective value, thus offering anytime behavior. Our experiments show that SORTD reduces runtime by up to two orders of magnitude compared with the state of the art. Moreover, SORTD can compute Rashomon sets for any separable and totally ordered objective and supports post-evaluating the set using other separable (and partially ordered) objectives. Together, these advances make exploring Rashomon sets more practical in real-world applications.


'Dangerous' AI Models Are Coming No Matter What

WIRED

'Dangerous' AI Models Are Coming No Matter What The US government crackdown on Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 hides a glaring truth: AI models with advanced hacking capabilities will soon be the norm. Late last week, Anthropic took its new Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models offline following a United States government export-control directive barring "any foreign national" from using the services. The company has been in talks with the White House since Friday but has yet to secure an agreement that would allow it to reinstate the offerings. Since Mythos debuted in April, Anthropic has claimed--and warned--that the model has advanced capabilities for not only finding software vulnerabilities to help defenders patch them, but also figuring out ways to exploit them that could be used by bad actors. Anthropic itself noted this double edged sword in its launch of Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. "A great deal of advanced usage of AI models is dual use: the same queries that are beneficial in the hands of cybersecurity professionals and biology researchers could be dangerous if available to malicious actors," the company wrote in a blog post last week.


Assume You Will Be Hacked

The Atlantic - Technology

AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we've never seen before. Late last month, I began to consider withdrawing some money from my savings account to buy gold. It's the first time I've ever thought about panic-buying. For all of the firewalls and two-factor-authentication codes, the safety of the internet is starting to falter. Hackers are gaining the upper hand over organizations around the world--hospitals, energy grids, government agencies, and, yes, banks.


Embodied Cognition Augmented End2End Autonomous Driving

Neural Information Processing Systems

In recent years, vision-based end-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a new paradigm. However, popular end-to-end approaches typically rely on visual feature extraction networks trained under label supervision. This limited supervision framework restricts the generality and applicability of driving models. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm termed E3AD, which advocates for comparative learning between visual feature extraction networks and the general EEG large model, in order to learn latent human driving cognition for enhancing end-to-end planning. In this work, we collected a cognitive dataset for the mentioned contrastive learning process. Subsequently, we investigated the methods and potential mechanisms for enhancing end-to-end planning with human driving cognition, using popular driving models as baselines on publicly available autonomous driving datasets. Both open-loop and closed-loop tests are conducted for a comprehensive evaluation of planning performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the E3AD paradigm significantly enhances the end-to-end planning performance of baseline models.


LARGO: Latent Adversarial Reflection through Gradient Optimization for Jailbreaking LLMs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Efficient red-teaming method to uncover vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial. While recent attacks often use LLMs as optimizers, the discrete language space make gradient-based methods struggle. We introduce LARGO (Latent Adversarial Reflection through Gradient Optimization), a novel latent self-reflection attack that reasserts the power of gradient-based optimization for generating fluent jailbreaking prompts. By operating within the LLM's continuous latent space, LARGO first optimizes an adversarial latent vector and then recursively call the same LLM to decode the latent into natural language. This methodology yields a fast, effective, and transferable attack that produces fluent and stealthy prompts.