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 Large Language Model


Preference-Aware Memory Update for Long-Term LLM Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

One of the key factors influencing the reasoning capabilities of LLM-based agents is their ability to leverage long-term memory. Integrating long-term memory mechanisms allows agents to make informed decisions grounded in historical interactions. While recent advances have significantly improved the storage and retrieval components, by encoding memory into dense vectors for similarity search or organizing memory as structured knowledge graphs most existing approaches fall short in memory updating. In particular, they lack mechanisms for dynamically refining preference memory representations in response to evolving user behaviors and contexts. To address this gap, we propose a Preference-Aware Memory Update Mechanism (PAMU) that enables dynamic and personalized memory refinement. By integrating sliding window averages (SW) with exponential moving averages (EMA), PAMU constructs a fused preference-aware representation that captures both short-term fluctuations and long-term user tendencies. We conduct experiments on five task scenarios of the LoCoMo dataset, and the results show that our mechanism can significantly improve the output quality of LLM in five baselines, validating its effectiveness in long-term conversations.


Group-Adaptive Adversarial Learning for Robust Fake News Detection Against Malicious Comments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The spread of fake news online distorts public judgment and erodes trust in social media platforms. Although recent fake news detection (FND) models perform well in standard settings, they remain vulnerable to adversarial comments-authored by real users or by large language models (LLMs)-that subtly shift model decisions. In view of this, we first present a comprehensive evaluation of comment attacks to existing fake news detectors and then introduce a group-adaptive adversarial training strategy to improve the robustness of FND models. To be specific, our approach comprises three steps: (1) dividing adversarial comments into three psychologically grounded categories: perceptual, cognitive, and societal; (2) generating diverse, category-specific attacks via LLMs to enhance adversarial training; and (3) applying a Dirichlet-based adaptive sampling mechanism (InfoDirichlet Adjusting Mechanism) that dynamically adjusts the learning focus across different comment categories during training. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method maintains strong detection accuracy while substantially increasing robustness to a wide range of adversarial comment perturbations.


VisualDAN: Exposing Vulnerabilities in VLMs with Visual-Driven DAN Commands

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have garnered significant attention for their remarkable ability to interpret and generate multimodal content. However, securing these models against jailbreak attacks continues to be a substantial challenge. Unlike text-only models, VLMs integrate additional modalities, introducing novel vulnerabilities such as image hijacking, which can manipulate the model into producing inappropriate or harmful responses. Drawing inspiration from text-based jailbreaks like the "Do Anything Now" (DAN) command, this work introduces VisualDAN, a single adversarial image embedded with DAN-style commands. Specifically, we prepend harmful corpora with affirmative prefixes (e.g., "Sure, I can provide the guidance you need") to trick the model into responding positively to malicious queries. The adversarial image is then trained on these DAN-inspired harmful texts and transformed into the text domain to elicit malicious outputs. Extensive experiments on models such as MiniGPT-4, MiniGPT-v2, InstructBLIP, and LLaVA reveal that VisualDAN effectively bypasses the safeguards of aligned VLMs, forcing them to execute a broad range of harmful instructions that severely violate ethical standards. Our results further demonstrate that even a small amount of toxic content can significantly amplify harmful outputs once the model's defenses are compromised. These findings highlight the urgent need for robust defenses against image-based attacks and offer critical insights for future research into the alignment and security of VLMs.


Kelp: A Streaming Safeguard for Large Models via Latent Dynamics-Guided Risk Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large models (LMs) are powerful content generators, yet their open-ended nature can also introduce potential risks, such as generating harmful or biased content. Existing guardrails mostly perform post-hoc detection that may expose unsafe content before it is caught, and the latency constraints further push them toward lightweight models, limiting detection accuracy. In this work, we propose Kelp, a novel plug-in framework that enables streaming risk detection within the LM generation pipeline. Kelp leverages intermediate LM hidden states through a Streaming Latent Dynamics Head (SLD), which models the temporal evolution of risk across the generated sequence for more accurate real-time risk detection. To ensure reliable streaming moderation in real applications, we introduce an Anchored Temporal Consistency (ATC) loss to enforce monotonic harm predictions by embedding a benign-then-harmful temporal prior. Besides, for a rigorous evaluation of streaming guardrails, we also present StreamGuardBench-a model-grounded benchmark featuring on-the-fly responses from each protected model, reflecting real-world streaming scenarios in both text and vision-language tasks. Across diverse models and datasets, Kelp consistently outperforms state-of-the-art post-hoc guardrails and prior plug-in probes (15.61% higher average F1), while using only 20M parameters and adding less than 0.5 ms of per-token latency.


CREST-Search: Comprehensive Red-teaming for Evaluating Safety Threats in Large Language Models Powered by Web Search

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at tasks such as dialogue, summarization, and question answering, yet they struggle to adapt to specialized domains and evolving facts. To overcome this, web search has been integrated into LLMs, allowing real-time access to online content. However, this connection magnifies safety risks, as adversarial prompts combined with untrusted sources can cause severe vulnerabilities. We investigate red teaming for LLMs with web search and present CREST-Search, a framework that systematically exposes risks in such systems. Unlike existing methods for standalone LLMs, CREST-Search addresses the complex workflow of search-enabled models by generating adversarial queries with in-context learning and refining them through iterative feedback. We further construct WebSearch-Harm, a search-specific dataset to fine-tune LLMs into efficient red-teaming agents. Experiments show that CREST-Search effectively bypasses safety filters and reveals vulnerabilities in modern web-augmented LLMs, underscoring the need for specialized defenses to ensure trustworthy deployment.


Stop DDoS Attacking the Research Community with AI-Generated Survey Papers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Survey papers are foundational to the scholarly progress of research communities, offering structured overviews that guide both novices and experts across disciplines. However, the recent surge of AI-generated surveys, especially enabled by large language models (LLMs), has transformed this traditionally labor-intensive genre into a low-effort, high-volume output. While such automation lowers entry barriers, it also introduces a critical threat: the phenomenon we term the "survey paper DDoS attack" to the research community. This refers to the unchecked proliferation of superficially comprehensive but often redundant, low-quality, or even hallucinated survey manuscripts, which floods preprint platforms, overwhelms researchers, and erodes trust in the scientific record. In this position paper, we argue that we must stop uploading massive amounts of AI-generated survey papers (i.e., survey paper DDoS attack) to the research community, by instituting strong norms for AI-assisted review writing. We call for restoring expert oversight and transparency in AI usage and, moreover, developing new infrastructures such as Dynamic Live Surveys, community-maintained, version-controlled repositories that blend automated updates with human curation. Through quantitative trend analysis, quality audits, and cultural impact discussion, we show that safeguarding the integrity of surveys is no longer optional but imperative to the research community.


Using LLMs to Directly Guess Conditional Expectations Can Improve Efficiency in Causal Estimation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose a simple yet effective use of LLM-powered AI tools to improve causal estimation. In double machine learning, the accuracy of causal estimates of the effect of a treatment on an outcome in the presence of a high-dimensional confounder depends on the performance of estimators of conditional expectation functions. We show that predictions made by generative models trained on historical data can be used to improve the performance of these estimators relative to approaches that solely rely on adjusting for embeddings extracted from these models. We argue that the historical knowledge and reasoning capacities associated with these generative models can help overcome curse-of-dimensionality problems in causal inference problems. We consider a case study using a small dataset of online jewelry auctions, and demonstrate that inclusion of LLM-generated guesses as predictors can improve efficiency in estimation.


Fortifying LLM-Based Code Generation with Graph-Based Reasoning on Secure Coding Practices

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The code generation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the field of software development. However, this advancement also presents significant security challenges, as LLM-generated code often contains vulnerabilities. One direction of research strengthens LLMs by injecting or refining security knowledge through curated datasets, model tuning, or static analyzers. While effective in certain settings, these methods can be resource-intensive, less adaptable to zero-day vulnerabilities, and often inapplicable to proprietary models. To address these challenges, we introduce GRASP, which explores a new direction that focuses on structured reasoning over Secure Coding Practices(SCPs) rather than additional training or external feedback. GRASP comprises two key ideas: (1) an SCP graph that organizes SCPs into a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) capturing dependencies and relationships, and (2) a graph-based reasoning process that systematically guides LLMs through relevant SCPs for code generation. This design enables interpretable, model-agnostic, and scalable security improvements, particularly for previously unseen vulnerabilities. Our evaluation shows that GRASP consistently achieves Security Rates (SR) exceeding 80% across multiple LLMs, and delivers up to 88% improvements over baselines on zero-day vulnerabilities.


Leveraging LLMs to Streamline the Review of Public Funding Applications

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Every year, the European Union and its member states allocate millions of euros to fund various development initiatives. However, the increasing number of applications received for these programs often creates significant bottlenecks in evaluation processes, due to limited human capacity. In this work, we detail the real-world deployment of AI-assisted evaluation within the pipeline of two government initiatives: (i) corporate applications aimed at international business expansion, and (ii) citizen reimbursement claims for investments in energy-efficient home improvements. While these two cases involve distinct evaluation procedures, our findings confirm that AI effectively enhanced processing efficiency and reduced workload across both types of applications. Specifically, in the citizen reimbursement claims initiative, our solution increased reviewer productivity by 20.1%, while keeping a negligible false-positive rate based on our test set observations. These improvements resulted in an overall reduction of more than 2 months in the total evaluation time, illustrating the impact of AI-driven automation in large-scale evaluation workflows.


Table Question Answering in the Era of Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Evaluation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Table Question Answering (TQA) aims to answer natural language questions about tabular data, often accompanied by additional contexts such as text passages. The task spans diverse settings, varying in table representation, question/answer complexity, modality involved, and domain. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to substantial progress in TQA, the field still lacks a systematic organization and understanding of task formulations, core challenges, and methodological trends, particularly in light of emerging research directions such as reinforcement learning. This survey addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive and structured overview of TQA research with a focus on LLM-based methods. We provide a comprehensive categorization of existing benchmarks and task setups. We group current modeling strategies according to the challenges they target, and analyze their strengths and limitations. Furthermore, we highlight underexplored but timely topics that have not been systematically covered in prior research. By unifying disparate research threads and identifying open problems, our survey offers a consolidated foundation for the TQA community, enabling a deeper understanding of the state of the art and guiding future developments in this rapidly evolving area.