Phishing is a cybercrime in which individuals are deceived into revealing personal information, often resulting in financial loss. These attacks commonly occur through fraudulent messages, misleading advertisements, and compromised legitimate websites. This study proposes a Quantile Regression Deep Q-Network (QR-DQN) approach that integrates RoBERTa semantic embeddings with handcrafted lexical features to enhance phishing detection while accounting for uncertainties. Unlike traditional DQN methods that estimate single scalar Q-values, QR-DQN leverages quantile regression to model the distribution of returns, improving stability and generalization on unseen phishing data. A diverse dataset of 105,000 URLs was curated from PhishTank, OpenPhish, Cloudflare, and other sources, and the model was evaluated using an 80/20 train-test split. The QR-DQN framework achieved a test accuracy of 99.86%, precision of 99.75%, recall of 99.96%, and F1-score of 99.85%, demonstrating high effectiveness. Compared to standard DQN with lexical features, the hybrid QR-DQN with lexical and semantic features reduced the generalization gap from 1.66% to 0.04%, indicating significant improvement in robustness. Five-fold cross-validation confirmed model reliability, yielding a mean accuracy of 99.90% with a standard deviation of 0.04%. These results suggest that the proposed hybrid approach effectively identifies phishing threats, adapts to evolving attack strategies, and generalizes well to unseen data.

Large language models (LLMs) present a dual challenge for forensic linguistics. They serve as powerful analytical tools enabling scalable corpus analysis and embedding-based authorship attribution, while simultaneously destabilising foundational assumptions about idiolect through style mimicry, authorship obfuscation, and the proliferation of synthetic texts. Recent stylometric research indicates that LLMs can approximate surface stylistic features yet exhibit detectable differences from human writers, a tension with significant forensic implications. However, current AI-text detection techniques, whether classifier-based, stylometric, or watermarking approaches, face substantial limitations: high false positive rates for non-native English writers and vulnerability to adversarial strategies such as homoglyph substitution. These uncertainties raise concerns under legal admissibility standards, particularly the Daubert and Kumho Tire frameworks. The article concludes that forensic linguistics requires methodological reconfiguration to remain scientifically credible and legally admissible. Proposed adaptations include hybrid human-AI workflows, explainable detection paradigms beyond binary classification, and validation regimes measuring error and bias across diverse populations. The discipline's core insight, i.e., that language reveals information about its producer, remains valid but must accommodate increasingly complex chains of human and machine authorship.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant potential in surgical video understanding. With improved zero-shot performance and more effective human-machine interaction, they provide a strong foundation for advancing surgical education and assistance. However, existing research and datasets primarily focus on understanding surgical procedures and workflows, while paying limited attention to the critical role of anatomical comprehension. In clinical practice, surgeons rely heavily on precise anatomical understanding to interpret, review, and learn from surgical videos. To fill this gap, we introduce the Neurosurgical Anatomy Benchmark (NeuroABench), the first multimodal benchmark explicitly created to evaluate anatomical understanding in the neurosurgical domain. NeuroABench consists of 9 hours of annotated neurosurgical videos covering 89 distinct procedures and is developed using a novel multimodal annotation pipeline with multiple review cycles. The benchmark evaluates the identification of 68 clinical anatomical structures, providing a rigorous and standardized framework for assessing model performance. Experiments on over 10 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal significant limitations, with the best-performing model achieving only 40.87% accuracy in anatomical identification tasks. To further evaluate the benchmark, we extract a subset of the dataset and conduct an informative test with four neurosurgical trainees. The results show that the best-performing student achieves 56% accuracy, with the lowest scores of 28% and an average score of 46.5%. While the best MLLM performs comparably to the lowest-scoring student, it still lags significantly behind the group's average performance. This comparison underscores both the progress of MLLMs in anatomical understanding and the substantial gap that remains in achieving human-level performance.

We introduce the Parent-Guided Semantic Reward Model (PGSRM), a lightweight reward framework for reinforcement learning (RL) of transformer language models. PGSRM replaces binary correctness signals, human preference data, and trained reward models with a simple signal: cosine similarity between a parent model's reference output embedding and a child model's generated output for the same input. This yields a dense, semantically meaningful reward with no human annotation or additional model training. We apply PGSRM on five language tasks and find that it produces smoother reward improvement and more stable PPO dynamics than a binary reward baseline, suggesting that embedding-based semantic rewards are a practical alternative to RLHF-style reward modeling for parent-guided alignment in smaller transformer models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving into autonomous agents capable of interacting with the external world, significantly expanding their capabilities through standardized interaction protocols. However, this paradigm revives the classic cybersecurity challenges of agency and authorization in a novel and volatile context. As decision-making shifts from deterministic code logic to probabilistic inference driven by natural language, traditional security mechanisms designed for deterministic behavior fail. It is fundamentally challenging to establish trust for unpredictable AI agents and to enforce the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) when instructions are ambiguous. Despite the escalating threat landscape, the academic community's understanding of this emerging domain remains fragmented, lacking a systematic framework to analyze its root causes. This paper provides a unifying formal lens for agent-interaction security. We observed that most security threats in this domain stem from a fundamental mismatch between trust evaluation and authorization policies. We introduce a novel risk analysis model centered on this trust-authorization gap. Using this model as a unifying lens, we survey and classify the implementation paths of existing, often seemingly isolated, attacks and defenses. This new framework not only unifies the field but also allows us to identify critical research gaps. Finally, we leverage our analysis to suggest a systematic research direction toward building robust, trusted agents and dynamic authorization mechanisms.

Detecting the anomalies of web applications, important infrastructures for running modern companies and governments, is crucial for providing reliable web services. Many modern web applications operate on web APIs (e.g., RESTful, SOAP, and WebSockets), their exposure invites intended attacks or unintended illegal visits, causing abnormal system behaviors. However, such anomalies can share very similar logs with normal logs, missing crucial information (which could be in database) for log discrimination. Further, log instances can be also noisy, which can further mislead the state-of-the-art log learning solutions to learn spurious correlation, resulting superficial models and rules for anomaly detection. In this work, we propose MINES which infers explainable API invariants for anomaly detection from the schema level instead of detailed raw log instances, which can (1) significantly discriminate noise in logs to identify precise normalities and (2) detect abnormal behaviors beyond the instrumented logs. Technically, MINES (1) converts API signatures into table schema to enhance the original database shema; and (2) infers the potential database constraints on the enhanced database schema to capture the potential relationships between APIs and database tables. MINES uses LLM for extracting potential relationship based on two given table structures; and use normal log instances to reject and accept LLM-generated invariants. Finally, MINES translates the inferred constraints into invariants to generate Python code for verifying the runtime logs. We extensively evaluate MINES on web-tamper attacks on the benchmarks of TrainTicket, NiceFish, Gitea, Mastodon, and NextCloud against baselines such as LogRobust, LogFormer, and WebNorm. The results show that MINES achieves high recall for the anomalies while introducing almost zero false positives, indicating a new state-of-the-art.

Researchers struggle to efficiently locate and manage relevant literature within the exponentially growing body of scientific publications. We present \textsc{WisPaper}, an intelligent academic retrieval and literature management platform that addresses this challenge through three integrated capabilities: (1) \textit{Scholar Search}, featuring both quick keyword-based and deep agentic search modes for efficient paper discovery; (2) \textit{Library}, a customizable knowledge base for systematic literature organization; and (3) \textit{AI Feeds}, an intelligent recommendation system that automatically delivers relevant new publications based on user interests. Unlike existing academic tools, \textsc{WisPaper} provides a closed-loop workflow that seamlessly connects literature discovery, management, and continuous tracking of research frontiers. Our multilingual and multidisciplinary system significantly reduces the time researchers from diverse backgrounds spend on paper screening and management, enabling them to focus on their core research activities. The platform is publicly accessible and serves researchers across academia and industry.

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate user opinions has received growing attention. Yet LLMs, especially trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), are known to exhibit biases toward dominant viewpoints, raising concerns about their ability to represent users from diverse demographic and cultural backgrounds. In this work, we examine the extent to which LLMs can simulate human responses to cross-domain survey questions through direct prompting and chain-of-thought prompting. We further propose a claim diversification method CLAIMSIM, which elicits viewpoints from LLM parametric knowledge as contextual input. Experiments on the survey question answering task indicate that, while CLAIMSIM produces more diverse responses, both approaches struggle to accurately simulate users. Further analysis reveals two key limitations: (1) LLMs tend to maintain fixed viewpoints across varying demographic features, and generate single-perspective claims; and (2) when presented with conflicting claims, LLMs struggle to reason over nuanced differences among demographic features, limiting their ability to adapt responses to specific user profiles.

Although persona prompting in large language models appears to trigger different styles of generated text, it is unclear whether these translate into measurable behavioral differences, much less whether they affect decision-making in an adversarial strategic environment that we provide as open-source. We investigate the impact of persona prompting on strategic performance in PERIL, a world-domination board game. Specifically, we compare the effectiveness of persona-derived heuristic strategies to those chosen manually. Our findings reveal that certain personas associated with strategic thinking improve game performance, but only when a mediator is used to translate personas into heuristic values. We introduce this mediator as a structured translation process, inspired by exploratory factor analysis, that maps LLM-generated inventory responses into heuristics. Results indicate our method enhances heuristic reliability and face validity compared to directly inferred heuristics, allowing us to better study the effect of persona types on decision making. These insights advance our understanding of how persona prompting influences LLM-based decision-making and propose a heuristic generation method that applies psychometric principles to LLMs.

Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) have achieved remarkable video understanding capabilities, yet face critical efficiency bottlenecks due to quadratic computational growth with lengthy visual token sequences of long videos. While existing keyframe sampling methods can improve temporal modeling efficiency, additional computational cost is introduced before feature encoding, and the binary frame selection paradigm is found suboptimal. Therefore, in this work, we propose Dynamic Token compression via LLM-guided Keyframe prior (DyToK), a training-free paradigm that enables dynamic token compression by harnessing VLLMs' inherent attention mechanisms. Our analysis reveals that VLLM attention layers naturally encoding query-conditioned keyframe priors, by which DyToK dynamically adjusts per-frame token retention ratios, prioritizing semantically rich frames while suppressing redundancies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DyToK achieves state-of-the-art efficiency-accuracy tradeoffs. DyToK shows plug-and-play compatibility with existing compression methods, such as VisionZip and FastV, attaining 4.3x faster inference while preserving accuracy across multiple VLLMs, such as LLaVA-OneVision and Qwen2.5-VL. Code is available at https://github.com/yu-lin-li/DyToK .