Industry
From Model to Breach: Towards Actionable LLM-Generated Vulnerabilities Reporting
Vallez, Cyril, Sternfeld, Alexander, Kucharavy, Andrei, Dolamic, Ljiljana
As the role of Large Language Models (LLM)-based coding assistants in software development becomes more critical, so does the role of the bugs they generate in the overall cybersecurity landscape. While a number of LLM code security benchmarks have been proposed alongside approaches to improve the security of generated code, it remains unclear to what extent they have impacted widely used coding LLMs. Here, we show that even the latest open-weight models are vulnerable in the earliest reported vulnerability scenarios in a realistic use setting, suggesting that the safety-functionality trade-off has until now prevented effective patching of vulnerabilities. To help address this issue, we introduce a new severity metric that reflects the risk posed by an LLM-generated vulnerability, accounting for vulnerability severity, generation chance, and the formulation of the prompt that induces vulnerable code generation - Prompt Exposure (PE). To encourage the mitigation of the most serious and prevalent vulnerabilities, we use PE to define the Model Exposure (ME) score, which indicates the severity and prevalence of vulnerabilities a model generates.
Modeling Clinical Uncertainty in Radiology Reports: from Explicit Uncertainty Markers to Implicit Reasoning Pathways
Rabaey, Paloma, Moon, Jong Hak, Lee, Jung-Oh, Kim, Min Gwan, Yoon, Hangyul, Demeester, Thomas, Choi, Edward
Radiology reports are invaluable for clinical decision-making and hold great potential for automated analysis when structured into machine-readable formats. These reports often contain uncertainty, which we categorize into two distinct types: (i) Explicit uncertainty reflects doubt about the presence or absence of findings, conveyed through hedging phrases. These vary in meaning depending on the context, making rule-based systems insufficient to quantify the level of uncertainty for specific findings; (ii) Implicit uncertainty arises when radiologists omit parts of their reasoning, recording only key findings or diagnoses. Here, it is often unclear whether omitted findings are truly absent or simply unmentioned for brevity. We address these challenges with a two-part framework. We quantify explicit uncertainty by creating an expert-validated, LLM-based reference ranking of common hedging phrases, and mapping each finding to a probability value based on this reference. In addition, we model implicit uncertainty through an expansion framework that systematically adds characteristic sub-findings derived from expert-defined diagnostic pathways for 14 common diagnoses. Using these methods, we release Lunguage++, an expanded, uncertainty-aware version of the Lunguage benchmark of fine-grained structured radiology reports. This enriched resource enables uncertainty-aware image classification, faithful diagnostic reasoning, and new investigations into the clinical impact of diagnostic uncertainty.
RAGalyst: Automated Human-Aligned Agentic Evaluation for Domain-Specific RAG
Gao, Joshua, Pham, Quoc Huy, Varghese, Subin, Saurav, Silwal, Hoskere, Vedhus
Abstract--Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a critical technique for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) in factual evidence, yet evaluating RAG systems in specialized, safety-critical domains remains a significant challenge. Existing evaluation frameworks often rely on heuristic-based metrics that fail to capture domain-specific nuances and other works utilize LLM-as-a-Judge approaches that lack validated alignment with human judgment. This paper introduces RAGalyst, an automated, human-aligned agentic framework designed for the rigorous evaluation of domain-specific RAG systems. RAGalyst features an agentic pipeline that generates high-quality, synthetic question-answering (QA) datasets from source documents, incorporating an agentic filtering step to ensure data fidelity. The framework refines two key LLM-as-a-Judge metrics--Answer Correctness and Answerability--using prompt optimization to achieve a strong correlation with human annotations. Applying this framework to evaluate various RAG components across three distinct domains (military operations, cybersecurity, and bridge engineering), we find that performance is highly context-dependent. No single embedding model, LLM, or hyperparam-eter configuration proves universally optimal. Additionally, we provide an analysis on the most common low Answer Correctness reasons in RAG. These findings highlight the necessity of a systematic evaluation framework like RAGalyst, which empowers practitioners to uncover domain-specific trade-offs and make informed design choices for building reliable and effective RAG systems. RAGalyst is available on our Github. Although modern Large Language Models (LLMs) are great synthesizers of information, they still suffer from hallucinations [1], [2], which refers to the generation of content that appears plausible but is factually incorrect or unsupported by evidence. Mitigating hallucinations is especially important in safety-critical applications (e.g., military operations, cybersecurity, and bridge engineering) where inaccurate information can lead to serious consequences and undermine trust in artificial intelligence (AI) systems [3], [4]. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been widely adopted to mitigate hallucinations by grounding responses in provided context [5], [6]. A key advantage of RAG is its ability to provide models with dynamic, inference-time access to private and domain-relevant documents [5], [7].
Decoding Emergent Big Five Traits in Large Language Models: Temperature-Dependent Expression and Architectural Clustering
Zacharopoulos, Christos-Nikolaos, Kyriakoglou, Revekka
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become integral to human-centered applications, understanding their personality-like behaviors is increasingly important for responsible development and deployment. This paper systematically evaluates six LLMs, applying the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2) framework, to assess trait expressions under varying sampling temperatures. We find significant differences across four of the five personality dimensions, with Neuroticism and Extraversion susceptible to temperature adjustments. Further, hierarchical clustering reveals distinct model clusters, suggesting that architectural features may predispose certain models toward stable trait profiles. Taken together, these results offer new insights into the emergence of personality-like patterns in LLMs and provide a new perspective on model tuning, selection, and the ethical governance of AI systems. We share the data and code for this analysis here: https://osf.io/bsvzc/?view_only=6672219bede24b4e875097426dc3fac1
Q3R: Quadratic Reweighted Rank Regularizer for Effective Low-Rank Training
Ghosh, Ipsita, Nguyen, Ethan, Kรผmmerle, Christian
Parameter-efficient training, based on low-rank optimization, has become a highly successful tool for fine-tuning large deep-learning models. However, these methods fail at low-rank pre-training tasks where maintaining the low-rank structure and the objective remains a challenging task. We propose the Quadratic Reweighted Rank Regularizer dubbed Q3R, which leads to a novel low-rank inducing training strategy inspired by the iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) framework. Q3R is based on a quadratic regularizer term which majorizes a smoothed log determinant serving as rank surrogate objective. Unlike other low-rank training techniques, Q3R is able to train weight matrices with prescribed, low target ranks of models that achieve comparable predictive performance as dense models, with small computational overhead, while remaining fully compatible with existing architectures. For example, we demonstrated one experiment where we are able to truncate $60\%$ and $80\%$ of the parameters of a ViT-Tiny model with $~1.3\%$ and $~4\%$ accuracy drop in CIFAR-10 performance respectively. The efficacy of Q3R is confirmed on Transformers across both image and language tasks, including for low-rank fine-tuning.
Promoting Sustainable Web Agents: Benchmarking and Estimating Energy Consumption through Empirical and Theoretical Analysis
Krupp, Lars, Geiรler, Daniel, Banwari, Vishal, Lukowicz, Paul, Karolus, Jakob
Web agents, like OpenAI's Operator and Google's Project Mariner, are powerful agentic systems pushing the boundaries of Large Language Models (LLM). They can autonomously interact with the internet at the user's behest, such as navigating websites, filling search masks, and comparing price lists. Though web agent research is thriving, induced sustainability issues remain largely unexplored. To highlight the urgency of this issue, we provide an initial exploration of the energy and $CO_2$ cost associated with web agents from both a theoretical -via estimation- and an empirical perspective -by benchmarking. Our results show how different philosophies in web agent creation can severely impact the associated expended energy, and that more energy consumed does not necessarily equate to better results. We highlight a lack of transparency regarding disclosing model parameters and processes used for some web agents as a limiting factor when estimating energy consumption. Our work contributes towards a change in thinking of how we evaluate web agents, advocating for dedicated metrics measuring energy consumption in benchmarks.
Generate, Evaluate, Iterate: Synthetic Data for Human-in-the-Loop Refinement of LLM Judges
Do, Hyo Jin, Ashktorab, Zahra, Gajcin, Jasmina, Miehling, Erik, Cooper, Martรญn Santillรกn, Pan, Qian, Daly, Elizabeth M., Geyer, Werner
The LLM-as-a-judge paradigm enables flexible, user-defined evaluation, but its effectiveness is often limited by the scarcity of diverse, representative data for refining criteria. We present a tool that integrates synthetic data generation into the LLM-as-a-judge workflow, empowering users to create tailored and challenging test cases with configurable domains, personas, lengths, and desired outcomes, including borderline cases. The tool also supports AI-assisted inline editing of existing test cases. To enhance transparency and interpretability, it reveals the prompts and explanations behind each generation. In a user study (N=24), 83% of participants preferred the tool over manually creating or selecting test cases, as it allowed them to rapidly generate diverse synthetic data without additional workload. The generated synthetic data proved as effective as hand-crafted data for both refining evaluation criteria and aligning with human preferences. These findings highlight synthetic data as a promising alternative, particularly in contexts where efficiency and scalability are critical.
Probabilistic Textual Time Series Depression Detection
Schmidt, Fabian, Ravan, Seyedehmoniba, Vlassov, Vladimir
Accurate and interpretable predictions of depression severity are essential for clinical decision support, yet existing models often lack uncertainty estimates and temporal modeling. We propose PTTSD, a Probabilistic Textual Time Series Depression Detection framework that predicts PHQ-8 scores from utterance-level clinical interviews while modeling uncertainty over time. PTTSD includes sequence-to-sequence and sequence-to-one variants, both combining bidirectional LSTMs, self-attention, and residual connections with Gaussian or Student-t output heads trained via negative log-likelihood. Evaluated on E-DAIC and DAIC-WOZ, PTTSD achieves state-of-the-art performance among text-only systems (e.g., MAE = 3.85 on E-DAIC, 3.55 on DAIC) and produces well-calibrated prediction intervals. Ablations confirm the value of attention and probabilistic modeling, while comparisons with MentalBERT establish generality. A three-part calibration analysis and qualitative case studies further highlight the interpretability and clinical relevance of uncertainty-aware forecasting.
Fraud-Proof Revenue Division on Subscription Platforms
Ghosh, Abheek, Neoh, Tzeh Yuan, Teh, Nicholas, Tyrovolas, Giannis
We study a model of subscription-based platforms where users pay a fixed fee for unlimited access to content, and creators receive a share of the revenue. Existing approaches to detecting fraud predominantly rely on machine learning methods, engaging in an ongoing arms race with bad actors. We explore revenue division mechanisms that inherently disincentivize manipulation. We formalize three types of manipulation-resistance axioms and examine which existing rules satisfy these. We show that a mechanism widely used by streaming platforms, not only fails to prevent fraud, but also makes detecting manipulation computationally intractable. We also introduce a novel rule, ScaledUserProp, that satisfies all three manipulation-resistance axioms. Finally, experiments with both real-world and synthetic streaming data support ScaledUserProp as a fairer alternative compared to existing rules.
Beyond Shortest Path: Agentic Vehicular Routing with Semantic Context
Braun, Carnot, Jarczewski, Rafael O., Talasso, Gabriel U., Villas, Leandro A., de Souza, Allan M.
Traditional vehicle routing systems efficiently optimize singular metrics like time or distance, and when considering multiple metrics, they need more processes to optimize . However, they lack the capability to interpret and integrate the complex, semantic, and dynamic contexts of human drivers, such as multi-step tasks, situational constraints, or urgent needs. This paper introduces and evaluates PAVe (Personalized Agentic Vehicular Routing), a hybrid agentic assistant designed to augment classical pathfinding algorithms with contextual reasoning. Our approach employs a Large Language Model (LLM) agent that operates on a candidate set of routes generated by a multi-objective (time, CO2) Dijkstra algorithm. The agent evaluates these options against user-provided tasks, preferences, and avoidance rules by leveraging a pre-processed geospatial cache of urban Points of Interest (POIs). In a benchmark of realistic urban scenarios, PAVe successfully used complex user intent into appropriate route modifications, achieving over 88% accuracy in its initial route selections with a local model. We conclude that combining classical routing algorithms with an LLM-based semantic reasoning layer is a robust and effective approach for creating personalized, adaptive, and scalable solutions for urban mobility optimization.