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Beyond Leakage and Complexity: Towards Realistic and Efficient Information Cascade Prediction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Information cascade popularity prediction is a key problem in analyzing content diffusion in social networks. However, current related works suffer from three critical limitations: (1) temporal leakage in current evaluation--random cascade-based splits allow models to access future information, yielding unrealistic results; (2) feature-poor datasets that lack downstream conversion signals (e.g., likes, comments, or purchases), which limits more practical applications; (3) computational inefficiency of complex graph-based methods that require days of training for marginal gains. We systematically address these challenges from three perspectives: task setup, dataset construction, and model design. First, we propose a time-ordered splitting strategy that chronologically partitions data into consecutive windows, ensuring models are evaluated on genuine forecasting tasks without future information leakage. Second, we introduce Taoke, a large-scale e-commerce cascade dataset featuring rich promoter/product attributes and ground-truth purchase conversions--capturing the complete diffusion lifecycle from promotion to monetization. Third, we develop CasTemp, a lightweight framework that efficiently models cascade dynamics through temporal walks, Jaccard-based neighbor selection for inter-cascade dependencies, and GRU-based encoding with time-aware attention. Under leak-free evaluation, CasTemp achieves state-of-the-art performance across four datasets with orders-of-magnitude speedup. Notably, it excels at predicting second-stage popularity conversions--a practical task critical for real-world applications.


Energy-Efficient Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Perception and Robust Decision

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--Autonomous driving is an emerging technology that is expected to bring significant social, economic, and environmental benefits. However, these benefits come with rising energy consumption by computation engines, limiting the driving range of vehicles, especially electric ones. Perception computing is typically the most power-intensive component, as it relies on large-scale deep learning models to extract environmental features. Recently, numerous studies have employed model compression techniques, such as sparsification, quantization, and distillation, to reduce computational consumption. However, these methods often result in either a substantial model size or a significant drop in perception accuracy compared to high-computation models. T o address these challenges, we propose an energy-efficient autonomous driving framework, called EneAD, which includes an adaptive perception and a robust decision module. In the adaptive perception module, a perception optimization strategy is designed from the perspective of data management and tuning. Firstly, we manage multiple perception models with different computational consumption and adjust the execution framerate dynamically. Then, we define them as knobs and design a transferable tuning method based on Bayesian optimization to identify promising knob values that achieve low computation while maintaining desired accuracy. T o adaptively switch the knob values in various traffic scenarios, a lightweight classification model is proposed to distinguish the perception difficulty in different scenarios. In the robust decision module, we propose a decision model based on reinforcement learning and design a regularization term to enhance driving stability in the face of perturbed perception results. EneAD can reduce perception consumption by 1.9 to 3.5 and thus improve driving range by 3.9% to 8.5%. Autonomous driving has gained broad attention from the public during the last few years [1], [2]. With intelligence, the autonomous vehicle can have a more comprehensive perception of the surrounding traffic environment and make more reasonable driving decisions compared to human drivers. As a result, it is expected to bring society a large number of benefits, including improved mobility and a significant reduction in collisions. For example, the computing platform using the Nvidia AGX Orin SoC [4] has a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 800W . These power demands can also increase the thermal demands on a vehicle's climate-control system.


Iti-Validator: A Guardrail Framework for Validating and Correcting LLM-Generated Itineraries

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled them to generate complex, multi-step plans and itineraries. However, these generated plans often lack temporal and spatial consistency, particularly in scenarios involving physical travel constraints. This research aims to study the temporal performance of different LLMs and presents a validation framework that evaluates and improves the temporal consistency of LLM-generated travel itineraries. The system employs multiple state-of-the-art LLMs to generate travel plans and validates them against real-world flight duration constraints using the AeroDataBox API. This work contributes to the understanding of LLM capabilities in handling complex temporal reasoning tasks like itinerary generation and provides a framework to rectify any temporal inconsistencies like overlapping journeys or unrealistic transit times in the itineraries generated by LLMs before the itinerary is given to the user. Our experiments reveal that while current LLMs frequently produce temporally inconsistent itineraries, these can be systematically and reliably corrected using our framework, enabling their practical deployment in large-scale travel planning.


A Study on the Framework for Evaluating the Ethics and Trustworthiness of Generative AI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study provides an in_depth analysis of the ethical and trustworthiness challenges emerging alongside the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and proposes a comprehensive framework for their systematic evaluation. While generative AI, such as ChatGPT, demonstrates remarkable innovative potential, it simultaneously raises ethical and social concerns, including bias, harmfulness, copyright infringement, privacy violations, and hallucination. Current AI evaluation methodologies, which mainly focus on performance and accuracy, are insufficient to address these multifaceted issues. Thus, this study emphasizes the need for new human_centered criteria that also reflect social impact. To this end, it identifies key dimensions for evaluating the ethics and trustworthiness of generative AI_fairness, transparency, accountability, safety, privacy, accuracy, consistency, robustness, explainability, copyright and intellectual property protection, and source traceability and develops detailed indicators and assessment methodologies for each. Moreover, it provides a comparative analysis of AI ethics policies and guidelines in South Korea, the United States, the European Union, and China, deriving key approaches and implications from each. The proposed framework applies across the AI lifecycle and integrates technical assessments with multidisciplinary perspectives, thereby offering practical means to identify and manage ethical risks in real_world contexts. Ultimately, the study establishes an academic foundation for the responsible advancement of generative AI and delivers actionable insights for policymakers, developers, users, and other stakeholders, supporting the positive societal contributions of AI technologies.


Pentest-R1: Towards Autonomous Penetration Testing Reasoning Optimized via Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--Automating penetration testing is crucial for enhancing cybersecurity, yet current Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant limitations in this domain, including poor error handling, inefficient reasoning, and an inability to perform complex end-to-end tasks autonomously. T o address these challenges, we introduce Pentest-R1, a novel framework designed to optimize LLM reasoning capabilities for this task through a two-stage reinforcement learning pipeline. We first construct a dataset of over 500 real-world, multi-step walkthroughs, which Pentest-R1 leverages for offline reinforcement learning (RL) to instill foundational attack logic. Subsequently, the LLM is fine-tuned via online RL in an interactive Capture The Flag (CTF) environment, where it learns directly from environmental feedback to develop robust error self-correction and adaptive strategies. Our extensive experiments on the Cybench and AutoPenBench benchmarks demonstrate the framework's effectiveness. On AutoPenBench, Pentest-R1 achieves a 24.2% success rate, surpassing most state-of-the-art models and ranking second only to Gemini 2.5 Flash. Ablation studies confirm that the synergy of both training stages is critical to its success.


SMMILE: An Expert-Driven Benchmark for Multimodal Medical In-Context Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) remains underexplored despite significant potential for domains such as medicine. Clinicians routinely encounter diverse, specialized tasks requiring adaptation from limited examples, such as drawing insights from a few relevant prior cases or considering a constrained set of differential diagnoses. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown advances in medical visual question answering (VQA), their ability to learn multimodal tasks from context is largely unknown. We introduce SMMILE, the first expert-driven multimodal ICL benchmark for medical tasks. Eleven medical experts curated problems, each including a multimodal query and multimodal in-context examples as task demonstrations. SMMILE encompasses 111 problems (517 question-image-answer triplets) covering 6 medical specialties and 13 imaging modalities. We further introduce SMMILE++, an augmented variant with 1038 permuted problems. A comprehensive evaluation of 15 MLLMs demonstrates that most models exhibit moderate to poor multimodal ICL ability in medical tasks. In open-ended evaluations, ICL contributes only an 8% average improvement over zero-shot on SMMILE and 9.4% on SMMILE++. We observe a susceptibility for irrelevant in-context examples: even a single noisy or irrelevant example can degrade performance by up to 9.5%. Moreover, we observe that MLLMs are affected by a recency bias, where placing the most relevant example last can lead to substantial performance improvements of up to 71%. Our findings highlight critical limitations and biases in current MLLMs when learning multimodal medical tasks from context. SMMILE is available at https://smmile-benchmark.github.io.


Bohdi: Heterogeneous LLM Fusion with Automatic Data Exploration

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Heterogeneous Large Language Model (LLM) fusion integrates the strengths of multiple source LLMs with different architectures into a target LLM with low computational overhead. While promising, existing methods suffer from two major limitations: 1) reliance on real data from limited domain for knowledge fusion, preventing the target LLM from fully acquiring knowledge across diverse domains, and 2) fixed data allocation proportions across domains, failing to dynamically adjust according to the target LLM's varying capabilities across domains, leading to a capability imbalance. To overcome these limitations, we propose Bohdi, a synthetic-data-only heterogeneous LLM fusion framework. Through the organization of knowledge domains into a hierarchical tree structure, Bohdi enables automatic domain exploration and multi-domain data generation through multi-model collaboration, thereby comprehensively extracting knowledge from source LLMs. By formalizing domain expansion and data sampling proportion allocation on the knowledge tree as a Hierarchical Multi-Armed Bandit problem, Bohdi leverages the designed DynaBranches mechanism to adaptively adjust sampling proportions based on the target LLM's performance feedback across domains. Integrated with our proposed Introspection-Rebirth (IR) mechanism, DynaBranches dynamically tracks capability shifts during target LLM's updates via Sliding Window Binomial Likelihood Ratio Testing (SWBLRT), further enhancing its online adaptation capability. Comparative experimental results on a comprehensive suite of benchmarks demonstrate that Bohdi significantly outperforms existing baselines on multiple target LLMs, exhibits higher data efficiency, and virtually eliminates the imbalance in the target LLM's capabilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/gjq100/Bohdi.git.


OS-Harm: A Benchmark for Measuring Safety of Computer Use Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

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 and aims to test models across three categories of harm: deliberate user misuse, prompt injection attacks, and model misbehavior. To cover these cases, we create 150 tasks that span several types of safety violations (harassment, copyright infringement, disinformation, data exfiltration, etc.) and require the agent to interact with a variety of OS applications (email client, code editor, browser, etc.). Moreover, we propose an automated judge to evaluate both accuracy and safety of agents that achieves high agreement with human annotations (0.76 and 0.79 F1 score). We evaluate computer use agents based on a range of frontier models - such as o4-mini, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro - and provide insights into their safety. In particular, all models tend to directly comply with many deliberate misuse queries, are relatively vulnerable to static prompt injections, and occasionally perform unsafe actions. The OS-Harm benchmark is available at https://github.com/tml-epfl/os-harm.


Jailbreak Transferability Emerges from Shared Representations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Jailbreak transferability is the surprising phenomenon when an adversarial attack compromising one model also elicits harmful responses from other models. Despite widespread demonstrations, there is little consensus on why transfer is possible: is it a quirk of safety training, an artifact of model families, or a more fundamental property of representation learning? We present evidence that transferability emerges from shared representations rather than incidental flaws. Across 20 open-weight models and 33 jailbreak attacks, we find two factors that systematically shape transfer: (1) representational similarity under benign prompts, and (2) the strength of the jailbreak on the source model. To move beyond correlation, we show that deliberately increasing similarity through benign only distillation causally increases transfer. Our qualitative analyses reveal systematic transferability patterns across different types of jailbreaks. For example, persona-style jailbreaks transfer far more often than cipher-based prompts, consistent with the idea that natural-language attacks exploit models' shared representation space, whereas cipher-based attacks rely on idiosyncratic quirks that do not generalize. Together, these results reframe jailbreak transfer as a consequence of representation alignment rather than a fragile byproduct of safety training.


Precise In-Parameter Concept Erasure in Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) often acquire knowledge during pretraining that is undesirable in downstream deployments, e.g., sensitive information or copyrighted content. Existing approaches for removing such knowledge rely on fine-tuning, training low-rank adapters or fact-level editing, but these are either too coarse, too shallow, or ineffective. In this work, we propose PISCES (Precise In-parameter Suppression for Concept EraSure), a novel framework for precisely erasing entire concepts from model parameters by directly editing directions that encode them in parameter space. PISCES uses a disentangler model to decompose MLP vectors into interpretable features, identifies those associated with a target concept using automated interpretability techniques, and removes them from model parameters. Experiments on Gemma 2 and Llama 3.1 over various concepts show that PISCES achieves modest gains in efficacy over leading erasure methods, reducing accuracy on the target concept to as low as 7.7%, while dramatically improving erasure specificity (by up to 31%) and robustness (by up to 38%). Overall, these results demonstrate that feature-based in-parameter editing enables a more precise and reliable approach for removing conceptual knowledge in language models.