Large Language Model
A Taxonomy of Pix Fraud in Brazil: Attack Methodologies, AI-Driven Amplification, and Defensive Strategies
Pizzolato, Glener Lanes, Lopes, Brenda Medeiros, Schepke, Claudio, Kreutz, Diego
This work presents a review of attack methodologies targeting Pix, the instant payment system launched by the Central Bank of Brazil in 2020. The study aims to identify and classify the main types of fraud affecting users and financial institutions, highlighting the evolution and increasing sophistication of these techniques. The methodology combines a structured literature review with exploratory interviews conducted with professionals from the banking sector. The results show that fraud schemes have evolved from purely social engineering approaches to hybrid strategies that integrate human manipulation with technical exploitation. The study concludes that security measures must advance at the same pace as the growing complexity of attack methodologies, with particular emphasis on adaptive defenses and continuous user awareness.
Winning with Less for Low Resource Languages: Advantage of Cross-Lingual English_Persian Argument Mining Model over LLM Augmentation
Jahan, Ali, Ghayoomi, Masood, Hautli-Janisz, Annette
Argument mining is a subfield of natural language processing to identify and extract the argument components, like premises and conclusions, within a text and to recognize the relations between them. It reveals the logical structure of texts to be used in tasks like knowledge extraction. This paper aims at utilizing a cross-lingual approach to argument mining for low-resource languages, by constructing three training scenarios. We examine the models on English, as a high-resource language, and Persian, as a low-resource language. To this end, we evaluate the models based on the English Microtext corpus \citep{PeldszusStede2015}, and its parallel Persian translation. The learning scenarios are as follow: (i) zero-shot transfer, where the model is trained solely with the English data, (ii) English-only training enhanced by synthetic examples generated by Large Language Models (LLMs), and (iii) a cross-lingual model that combines the original English data with manually translated Persian sentences. The zero-shot transfer model attains F1 scores of 50.2\% on the English test set and 50.7\% on the Persian test set. LLM-based augmentation model improves the performance up to 59.2\% on English and 69.3\% on Persian. The cross-lingual model, trained on both languages but evaluated solely on the Persian test set, surpasses the LLM-based variant, by achieving a F1 of 74.8\%. Results indicate that a lightweight cross-lingual blend can outperform considerably the more resource-intensive augmentation pipelines, and it offers a practical pathway for the argument mining task to overcome data resource shortage on low-resource languages.
Evo-Memory: Benchmarking LLM Agent Test-time Learning with Self-Evolving Memory
Wei, Tianxin, Sachdeva, Noveen, Coleman, Benjamin, He, Zhankui, Bei, Yuanchen, Ning, Xuying, Ai, Mengting, Li, Yunzhe, He, Jingrui, Chi, Ed H., Wang, Chi, Chen, Shuo, Pereira, Fernando, Kang, Wang-Cheng, Cheng, Derek Zhiyuan
Statefulness is essential for large language model (LLM) agents to perform long-term planning and problem-solving. This makes memory a critical component, yet its management and evolution remain largely underexplored. Existing evaluations mostly focus on static conversational settings, where memory is passively retrieved from dialogue to answer queries, overlooking the dynamic ability to accumulate and reuse experience across evolving task streams. In real-world environments such as interactive problem assistants or embodied agents, LLMs are required to handle continuous task streams, yet often fail to learn from accumulated interactions, losing valuable contextual insights, a limitation that calls for test-time evolution, where LLMs retrieve, integrate, and update memory continuously during deployment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Evo-Memory, a comprehensive streaming benchmark and framework for evaluating self-evolving memory in LLM agents. Evo-Memory structures datasets into sequential task streams, requiring LLMs to search, adapt, and evolve memory after each interaction. We unify and implement over ten representative memory modules and evaluate them across 10 diverse multi-turn goal-oriented and single-turn reasoning and QA datasets. To better benchmark experience reuse, we provide a baseline method, ExpRAG, for retrieving and utilizing prior experience, and further propose ReMem, an action-think-memory refine pipeline that tightly integrates reasoning, task actions, and memory updates to achieve continual improvement.
Unsupervised Memorability Modeling from Tip-of-the-Tongue Retrieval Queries
Bhattacharyya, Sree, Singla, Yaman Kumar, Yarram, Sudhir, Singh, Somesh Kumar, S, Harini I, Wang, James Z.
Visual content memorability has intrigued the scientific community for decades, with applications ranging widely, from understanding nuanced aspects of human memory to enhancing content design. A significant challenge in progressing the field lies in the expensive process of collecting memorability annotations from humans. This limits the diversity and scalability of datasets for modeling visual content memorability. Most existing datasets are limited to collecting aggregate memorability scores for visual content, not capturing the nuanced memorability signals present in natural, open-ended recall descriptions. In this work, we introduce the first large-scale unsupervised dataset designed explicitly for modeling visual memorability signals, containing over 82,000 videos, accompanied by descriptive recall data. We leverage tip-of-the-tongue (ToT) retrieval queries from online platforms such as Reddit. We demonstrate that our unsupervised dataset provides rich signals for two memorability-related tasks: recall generation and ToT retrieval. Large vision-language models fine-tuned on our dataset outperform state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o in generating open-ended memorability descriptions for visual content. We also employ a contrastive training strategy to create the first model capable of performing multimodal ToT retrieval. Our dataset and models present a novel direction, facilitating progress in visual content memorability research.
Length-MAX Tokenizer for Language Models
We introduce a new tokenizer for language models that minimizes the average tokens per character, thereby reducing the number of tokens needed to represent text during training and to generate text during inference. Our method, which we refer to as the Length-MAX tokenizer, obtains its vocabulary by casting a length-weighted objective maximization as a graph partitioning problem and developing a greedy approximation algorithm. On FineWeb and diverse domains, it yields 14--18\% fewer tokens than Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) across vocabulary sizes from 10K to 50K, and the reduction is 13.0\% when the size is 64K. Training GPT-2 models at 124M, 355M, and 1.3B parameters from scratch with five runs each shows 18.5\%, 17.2\%, and 18.5\% fewer steps, respectively, to reach a fixed validation loss, and 13.7\%, 12.7\%, and 13.7\% lower inference latency, together with a 16\% throughput gain at 124M, while consistently improving on downstream tasks including reducing LAMBADA perplexity by 11.7\% and enhancing HellaSwag accuracy by 4.3\%. Moreover, the Length-MAX tokenizer achieves 99.62\% vocabulary coverage and the out-of-vocabulary rate remains low at 0.12\% on test sets. These results demonstrate that optimizing for average token length, rather than frequency alone, offers an effective approach to more efficient language modeling without sacrificing -- and often improving -- downstream performance. The tokenizer is compatible with production systems and reduces embedding and KV-cache memory by 18\% at inference.
OVAL-Grasp: Open-Vocabulary Affordance Localization for Task Oriented Grasping
Tong, Edmond, Balaji, Advaith, Opipari, Anthony, Lewis, Stanley, Zeng, Zhen, Jenkins, Odest Chadwicke
To manipulate objects in novel, unstructured environments, robots need task-oriented grasps that target object parts based on the given task. Geometry-based methods often struggle with visually defined parts, occlusions, and unseen objects. We introduce OVAL-Grasp, a zero-shot open-vocabulary approach to task-oriented, affordance based grasping that uses large-language models (LLM) and vision-language models (VLM) to allow a robot to grasp objects at the correct part according to a given task. Given an RGB image and a task, OVAL-Grasp identifies parts to grasp or avoid with an LLM, segments them with a VLM, and generates a 2D heatmap of actionable regions on the object. During our evaluations, we found that our method outperformed two task oriented grasping baselines on experiments with 20 household objects with 3 unique tasks for each. OVAL-Grasp successfully identifies and segments the correct object part 95% of the time and grasps the correct actionable area 78.3% of the time in real-world experiments with the Fetch mobile manipulator. Additionally, OVAL-Grasp finds correct object parts under partial occlusions, demonstrating a part selection success rate of 80% in cluttered scenes. We also demonstrate OVAL-Grasp's efficacy in scenarios that rely on visual features for part selection, and show the benefit of a modular design through our ablation experiments. Our project webpage is available at https://ekjt.github.io/OVAL-Grasp/.
SAGE: An Agentic Explainer Framework for Interpreting SAE Features in Language Models
Han, Jiaojiao, Xu, Wujiang, Jin, Mingyu, Du, Mengnan
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque, posing a significant challenge to their safe and reliable deployment. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for decomposing LLM representations into more interpretable features, but explaining the features captured by SAEs remains a challenging task. In this work, we propose SAGE (SAE AGentic Explainer), an agent-based framework that recasts feature interpretation from a passive, single-pass generation task into an active, explanation-driven process. SAGE implements a rigorous methodology by systematically formulating multiple explanations for each feature, designing targeted experiments to test them, and iteratively refining explanations based on empirical activation feedback. Experiments on features from SAEs of diverse language models demonstrate that SAGE produces explanations with significantly higher generative and predictive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art baselines.an agent-based framework that recasts feature interpretation from a passive, single-pass generation task into an active, explanationdriven process. SAGE implements a rigorous methodology by systematically formulating multiple explanations for each feature, designing targeted experiments to test them, and iteratively refining explanations based on empirical activation feedback. Experiments on features from SAEs of diverse language models demonstrate that SAGE produces explanations with significantly higher generative and predictive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
SPHINX: A Synthetic Environment for Visual Perception and Reasoning
Alam, Md Tanvirul, Aggarwal, Saksham, Chae, Justin Yang, Rastogi, Nidhi
We present Sphinx, a synthetic environment for visual perception and reasoning that targets core cognitive primitives. Sphinx procedurally generates puzzles using motifs, tiles, charts, icons, and geometric primitives, each paired with verifiable ground-truth solutions, enabling both precise evaluation and large-scale dataset construction. The benchmark covers 25 task types spanning symmetry detection, geometric transformations, spatial reasoning, chart interpretation, and sequence prediction. Evaluating recent large vision-language models (LVLMs) shows that even state-of-the-art GPT-5 attains only 51.1% accuracy, well below human performance. Finally, we demonstrate that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) substantially improves model accuracy on these tasks and yields gains on external visual reasoning benchmarks, highlighting its promise for advancing multimodal reasoning.
Memories Retrieved from Many Paths: A Multi-Prefix Framework for Robust Detection of Training Data Leakage in Large Language Models
Dang, Trung Cuong, Mohaisen, David
Large language models, trained on massive corpora, are prone to verbatim memorization of training data, creating significant privacy and copyright risks. While previous works have proposed various definitions for memorization, many exhibit shortcomings in comprehensively capturing this phenomenon, especially in aligned models. To address this, we introduce a novel framework: multi-prefix memorization. Our core insight is that memorized sequences are deeply encoded and thus retrievable via a significantly larger number of distinct prefixes than non-memorized content. We formalize this by defining a sequence as memorized if an external adversarial search can identify a target count of distinct prefixes that elicit it. This framework shifts the focus from single-path extraction to quantifying the robustness of a memory, measured by the diversity of its retrieval paths. Through experiments on open-source and aligned chat models, we demonstrate that our multi-prefix definition reliably distinguishes memorized from non-memorized data, providing a robust and practical tool for auditing data leakage in LLMs.
OpenApps: Simulating Environment Variations to Measure UI-Agent Reliability
Ullrich, Karen, Su, Jingtong, Shi, Claudia, Subramonian, Arjun, Bar, Amir, Evtimov, Ivan, Tsilivis, Nikolaos, Balestriero, Randall, Kempe, Julia, Ibrahim, Mark
Reliability is key to realizing the promise of autonomous UI-Agents, multimodal agents that directly interact with apps in the same manner as humans, as users must be able to trust an agent to complete a given task. Current evaluations rely on fixed environments, often clones of existing apps, which are limited in that they can only shed light on whether or how often an agent can complete a task within a specific environment. When deployed however, agents are likely to encounter variations in app design and content that can affect an agent's ability to complete a task. To address this blind spot of measuring agent reliability across app variations, we develop OpenApps, a light-weight open-source ecosystem with six apps (messenger, calendar, maps, etc.) that are configurable in appearance and content. OpenApps requires just a single CPU to run, enabling easy generation and deployment of thousands of versions of each app. Specifically, we run more than 10,000 independent evaluations to study reliability across seven leading multimodal agents. We find that while standard reliability within a fixed app is relatively stable, reliability can vary drastically when measured across app variations. Task success rates for many agents can fluctuate by more than $50\%$ across app variations. For example, Kimi-VL-3B's average success across all tasks fluctuates from $63\%$ to just $4\%$ across app versions. We also find agent behaviors such as looping or hallucinating actions can differ drastically depending on the environment configuration. These initial findings highlight the importance of measuring reliability along this new dimension of app variations. OpenApps is available at https://facebookresearch.github.io/OpenApps/