Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive domains including healthcare, legal services, and confidential communications, where privacy is paramount. This paper introduces Whisper Leak, a side-channel attack that infers user prompt topics from encrypted LLM traffic by analyzing packet size and timing patterns in streaming responses. Despite TLS encryption protecting content, these metadata patterns leak sufficient information to enable topic classification. We demonstrate the attack across 28 popular LLMs from major providers, achieving near-perfect classification (often >98% AUPRC) and high precision even at extreme class imbalance (10,000:1 noise-to-target ratio). For many models, we achieve 100% precision in identifying sensitive topics like "money laundering" while recovering 5-20% of target conversations. This industry-wide vulnerability poses significant risks for users under network surveillance by ISPs, governments, or local adversaries. We evaluate three mitigation strategies - random padding, token batching, and packet injection - finding that while each reduces attack effectiveness, none provides complete protection. Through responsible disclosure, we have collaborated with providers to implement initial countermeasures. Our findings underscore the need for LLM providers to address metadata leakage as AI systems handle increasingly sensitive information.

With the rapid advancement of natural language processing (NLP) technologies, the demand for high-quality Chinese document question-answering datasets is steadily growing. To address this issue, we present the Chinese Multi-Document Question Answering Dataset(ChiMDQA), specifically designed for downstream business scenarios across prevalent domains including academic, education, finance, law, medical treatment, and news. ChiMDQA encompasses long-form documents from six distinct fields, consisting of 6,068 rigorously curated, high-quality question-answer (QA) pairs further classified into ten fine-grained categories. Through meticulous document screening and a systematic question-design methodology, the dataset guarantees both diversity and high quality, rendering it applicable to various NLP tasks such as document comprehension, knowledge extraction, and intelligent QA systems. Additionally, this paper offers a comprehensive overview of the dataset's design objectives, construction methodologies, and fine-grained evaluation system, supplying a substantial foundation for future research and practical applications in Chinese QA. The code and data are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Foxit-CHiMDQA/.

This paper presents the innovative design and successful deployment of a pioneering autonomous unmanned aerial system developed for executing the world's largest mural painted by a drone. Addressing the dual challenges of maintaining artistic precision and operational reliability under adverse outdoor conditions such as wind and direct sunlight, our work introduces a robust system capable of navigating and painting outdoors with unprecedented accuracy. Key to our approach is a novel navigation system that combines an infrared (IR) motion capture camera and LiDAR technology, enabling precise location tracking tailored specifically for largescale artistic applications. We employ a unique control architecture that uses different regulation in tangential and normal directions relative to the planned path, enabling precise trajectory tracking and stable line rendering. We also present algorithms for trajectory planning and path optimization, allowing for complex curve drawing and area filling. The system includes a custom-designed paint spraying mechanism, specifically engineered to function effectively amidst the turbulent airflow generated by the drone's propellers, which also protects the drone's critical components from paint-related damage, ensuring longevity and consistent performance. Experimental results demonstrate the system's robustness and precision in varied conditions, showcasing its potential for autonomous large-scale art creation and expanding the functional applications of robotics in creative fields.

To foster trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the European Union, the AI Act requires providers to mark and detect the outputs of their general-purpose models. The Article 50 and Recital 133 call for marking methods that are ''sufficiently reliable, interoperable, effective and robust''. Yet, the rapidly evolving and heterogeneous landscape of watermarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) makes it difficult to determine how these four standards can be translated into concrete and measurable evaluations. Our paper addresses this challenge, anchoring the normativity of European requirements in the multiplicity of watermarking techniques. Introducing clear and distinct concepts on LLM watermarking, our contribution is threefold. (1) Watermarking Categorisation: We propose an accessible taxonomy of watermarking methods according to the stage of the LLM lifecycle at which they are applied - before, during, or after training, and during next-token distribution or sampling. (2) Watermarking Evaluation: We interpret the EU AI Act's requirements by mapping each criterion with state-of-the-art evaluations on robustness and detectability of the watermark, and of quality of the LLM. Since interoperability remains largely untheorised in LLM watermarking research, we propose three normative dimensions to frame its assessment. (3) Watermarking Comparison: We compare current watermarking methods for LLMs against the operationalised European criteria and show that no approach yet satisfies all four standards. Encouraged by emerging empirical tests, we recommend further research into watermarking directly embedded within the low-level architecture of LLMs.

Zero-Shot Stance Detection (ZSSD) identifies the attitude of the post toward unseen targets. Existing research using contrastive, meta-learning, or data augmentation suffers from generalizability issues or lack of coherence between text and target. Recent works leveraging large language models (LLMs) for ZSSD focus either on improving unseen target-specific knowledge or generating explanations for stance analysis. However, most of these works are limited by their over-reliance on explicit reasoning, provide coarse explanations that lack nuance, and do not explicitly model the reasoning process, making it difficult to interpret the model's predictions. To address these issues, in our study, we develop a novel interpretable ZSSD framework, IRIS. We provide an interpretable understanding of the attitude of the input towards the target implicitly based on sequences within the text (implicit rationales) and explicitly based on linguistic measures (explicit rationales). IRIS considers stance detection as an information retrieval ranking task, understanding the relevance of implicit rationales for different stances to guide the model towards correct predictions without requiring the ground-truth of rationales, thus providing inherent interpretability. In addition, explicit rationales based on communicative features help decode the emotional and cognitive dimensions of stance, offering an interpretable understanding of the author's attitude towards the given target. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets of VAST, EZ-STANCE, P-Stance, and RFD using 50%, 30%, and even 10% training data prove the generalizability of our model, benefiting from the proposed architecture and interpretable design.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), particularly freelancers and early-stage businesses, face unique financial management challenges due to limited resources, small customer bases, and constrained data availability. This paper presents the development and deployment of an integrated financial prediction system that combines accounts receivable prediction and cash flow forecasting specifically designed for SME operational constraints. Our system addresses the gap between enterprise-focused financial tools and the practical needs of freelancers and small businesses. The solution integrates two key components: a binary classification model for predicting invoice payment delays, and a multi-module cash flow forecasting model that handles incomplete and limited historical data. A prototype system has been implemented and deployed as a web application with integration into Cluee's platform, a startup providing financial management tools for freelancers, demonstrating practical feasibility for real-world SME financial management.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across benchmarks--from knowledge quizzes and math reasoning to web-agent tasks--but these tests occur in static settings, lacking real dynamics and uncertainty. Consequently, they evaluate isolated reasoning or problem-solving rather than decision-making under uncertainty. To address this, we introduce LiveTradeBench, a live trading environment for evaluating LLM agents in realistic and evolving markets. LiveTradeBench follows three design principles: (i) Live data streaming of market prices and news, eliminating dependence on offline backtesting and preventing information leakage while capturing real-time uncertainty; (ii) a portfolio-management abstraction that extends control from single-asset actions to multi-asset allocation, integrating risk management and cross-asset reasoning; and (iii) multi-market evaluation across structurally distinct environments--U.S. stocks and Polymarket prediction markets--differing in volatility, liquidity, and information flow. At each step, an agent observes prices, news, and its portfolio, then outputs percentage allocations that balance risk and return. Using LiveTradeBench, we run 50-day live evaluations of 21 LLMs across families. Results show that (1) high LMArena scores do not imply superior trading outcomes; (2) models display distinct portfolio styles reflecting risk appetite and reasoning dynamics; and (3) some LLMs effectively leverage live signals to adapt decisions. These findings expose a gap between static evaluation and real-world competence, motivating benchmarks that test sequential decision making and consistency under live uncertainty.

We consider the problem of searching for an intruder in a geometric domain by utilizing multiple search robots. The domain is a simply connected orthogonal polygon with edges parallel to the cartesian coordinate axes. Each robot has a limited sensing capability. We study the problem for both static and mobile intruders. It turns out that the problem of finding an intruder is NP-hard, even for a stationary intruder. Given this intractability, we turn our attention towards developing efficient and robust algorithms, namely methods based on space-filling curves, random search, and cooperative random search. Moreover, for each proposed algorithm, we evaluate the trade-off between the number of search robots and the time required for the robots to complete the search process while considering the geometric properties of the connected orthogonal search area.

CLAX is a JAX-based library that implements classic click models using modern gradient-based optimization. While neural click models have emerged over the past decade, complex click models based on probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) have not systematically adopted gradient-based optimization, preventing practitioners from leveraging modern deep learning frameworks while preserving the interpretability of classic models. CLAX addresses this gap by replacing EM-based optimization with direct gradient-based optimization in a numerically stable manner. The framework's modular design enables the integration of any component, from embeddings and deep networks to custom modules, into classic click models for end-to-end optimization. We demonstrate CLAX's efficiency by running experiments on the full Baidu-ULTR dataset comprising over a billion user sessions in $\approx$ 2 hours on a single GPU, orders of magnitude faster than traditional EM approaches. CLAX implements ten classic click models, serving both industry practitioners seeking to understand user behavior and improve ranking performance at scale and researchers developing new click models. CLAX is available at: https://github.com/philipphager/clax

We evaluate how visualizations can influence the judgment of MLLMs about the presence or absence of bridges in a network. We show that the inclusion of visualization improves confidence over a structured text-based input that could theoretically be helpful for answering the question. On the other hand, we observe that standard visualization techniques create a strong bias towards accepting or refuting the presence of a bridge -- independently of whether or not a bridge actually exists in the network. While our results indicate that the inclusion of visualization techniques can effectively influence the MLLM's judgment without compromising its self-reported confidence, they also imply that practitioners must be careful of allowing users to include visualizations in generative AI applications so as to avoid undesired hallucinations.