Technology
Bits Leaked per Query: Information-Theoretic Bounds for Adversarial Attacks on LLMs
Adversarial attacks by malicious users that threaten the safety of large language models (LLMs) can be viewed as attempts to infer a target property $T$ that is unknown when an instruction is issued, and becomes knowable only after the model's reply is observed. Examples of target properties $T$ include the binary flag that triggers an LLM's harmful response or rejection, and the degree to which information deleted by unlearning can be restored, both elicited via adversarial instructions. The LLM reveals an \emph{observable signal} $Z$ that potentially leaks hints for attacking through a response containing answer tokens, thinking process tokens, or logits. Yet the scale of information leaked remains anecdotal, leaving auditors without principled guidance and defenders blind to the transparency--risk trade-off. We fill this gap with an information-theoretic framework that computes how much information can be safely disclosed, and enables auditors to gauge how close their methods come to the fundamental limit. Treating the mutual information $I(Z;T)$ between the observation $Z$ and the target property $T$ as the leaked bits per query, we show that achieving error $\varepsilon$ requires at least $\log(1/\varepsilon)/I(Z;T)$ queries, scaling linearly with the inverse leak rate and only logarithmically with the desired accuracy. Thus, even a modest increase in disclosure collapses the attack cost from quadratic to logarithmic in terms of the desired accuracy. Experiments on seven LLMs across system-prompt leakage, jailbreak, and relearning attacks corroborate the theory: exposing answer tokens alone requires about a thousand queries; adding logits cuts this to about a hundred; and revealing the full thinking process trims it to a few dozen. Our results provide the first principled yardstick for balancing transparency and security when deploying LLMs.
RealMath: A Continuous Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models on Research-Level Mathematics
Existing benchmarks for evaluating mathematical reasoning in large language models (LLMs) rely primarily on competition problems, formal proofs, or artificially challenging questions---failing to capture the nature of mathematics encountered in actual research environments. We introduce \textsc{RealMath}, a novel benchmark derived directly from research papers and mathematical forums that assesses LLMs' abilities on authentic mathematical tasks. Our approach addresses three critical challenges: sourcing diverse research-level content, enabling reliable automated evaluation through verifiable statements, and designing a continually refreshable dataset to mitigate contamination risks. Experimental results across multiple LLMs reveal surprising capabilities in handling research mathematics compared to competition problems, suggesting current models may already serve as valuable assistants for working mathematicians despite limitations on highly challenging problems.
ToF-IP: Time-of-Flight Enhanced Sparse Inertial Poser for Real-time Human Motion Capture
Sparse inertial measurement units (IMUs) provide a portable, low-cost solution for human motion tracking but struggle with error accumulation from drift and sensor noise when estimating joint position through time-based linear acceleration integration (i.e., indirect measurement). To address this, we propose ToF-IP, a novel 3D full-body pose estimation system that integrates Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors with sparse IMUs. The distinct advantage of our approach is that ToF sensors provide direct distance measurements, effectively mitigating error accumulation without relying on indirect time-based integration. From a hardware perspective, we maintain the portability of existing solutions by attaching ToF sensors to selected IMUs with a negligible volume increase of just 3\%. On the software side, we introduce two novel techniques to enhance multi-sensor integration: (i) a Node-Centric Data Integration strategy that leverages a Transformer encoder to explicitly model both intra-node and inter-node data integration by treating each sensing node as a token; and (ii) a Dynamic Spatial Positional Encoding scheme that encodes the continuously changing spatial positions of wearable nodes as motion-conditioned functions, enabling the model to better capture human body dynamics in the embedding space.Additionally, we contribute a 208-minute human motion dataset from 10 participants, including synchronized IMU-ToF measurements and ground-truth from optical tracking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches such as PNP, achieving superior accuracy in tracking complex and slow motions like Tai Chi, which remains challenging for inertial-only methods.
Security Challenges in AI Agent Deployment: Insights from a Large Scale Public Competition
AI agents are rapidly being deployed across diverse industries, but can they adhere to deployment policies under attacks? We organized a one-month red teaming challenge---the largest of its kind to date---involving expert red teamers attempting to elicit policy violations from AI agents powered by $22$ frontier LLMs. Our challenge collected $1.8$ million prompt injection attacks, resulting in over $60,000$ documented successful policy violations, revealing critical vulnerabilities. Utilizing this extensive data, we construct a challenging AI agent red teaming benchmark, currently achieving near $100\%$ attack success rates across all tested agents and associated policies. Our further analysis reveals high transferability and universality of successful attacks, underscoring the scale and criticality of existing AI agent vulnerabilities. We also observe minimal correlation between agent robustness and factors such as model capability, size, or inference compute budget, highlighting the necessity of substantial improvements in defense. We hope our benchmark and insights drive further research toward more secure and reliable AI agents.
OASIS: One-Shot Federated Graph Learning via Wasserstein Assisted Knowledge Integration
Federated Graph Learning (FGL) offers a promising framework for collaboratively training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) while preserving data privacy. In resource-constrained environments, One-shot Federated Learning (OFL) emerges as an effective solution by limiting communication to a single round. Current OFL approaches employing generative models have attracted considerable attention; however, they face unresolved challenges: these methods are primarily designed for traditional image data and fail to capture the fine-grained structural information of local graph data. Consequently, they struggle to integrate the intricate correlations necessary and transfer subtle structural insights from each client to the global model.
miniF2F-Lean Revisited: Reviewing Limitations and Charting a Path Forward
We perform a thorough analysis of the formal and informal statements in the miniF2F benchmark from the perspective of an AI system that is tasked to participate in a math Olympiad consisting of the problems in miniF2F. In such setting, the model has to read and comprehend the problems in natural language, formalize them in Lean language, then proceed with proving the problems, and it will get credit for each problem if the formal proof corresponds to the original informal statement presented to the model. Our evaluation results reveal that the best accuracy of such pipeline can be about 36% using the SoTA models in the literature, considerably lower than the individual SoTA accuracies, 97% and 69% reported in the autoformalization and theorem proving literature. Analyzing the failure modes, we trace back a considerable portion of this drop to discrepancies between the formal and informal statements for more than half of the problems in miniF2F. We proceed with correcting all the errors, discrepancies and simplifications in formal and informal statements, and present the with fully verified formal and informal statements and proofs. Evaluating the full theorem proving pipeline on leads to the best accuracy of 70%, a significant improvement from the 40% on the original miniF2F, yet indicating considerable misalignment between the autoformalization models and theorem provers. Our deep analysis suggests that a higher quality benchmark can help the community better evaluate progress in the field of formal reasoning and also better diagnose the failure and success modes of autoformalization and theorem proving models.
Reasoning by Superposition: A Theoretical Perspective on Chain of Continuous Thought
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in many applications, including challenging reasoning problems via chain-of-thought (CoT) techniques that generate ``thinking tokens'' before answering the questions. While existing theoretical works demonstrate that CoT with discrete tokens boosts the capability of LLMs, recent work on continuous CoT lacks a theoretical understanding of why it outperforms discrete counterparts in various reasoning tasks, such as directed graph reachability, a fundamental graph reasoning problem that includes many practical domain applications as special cases.
Jasmine: Harnessing Diffusion Prior for Self-supervised Depth Estimation
In this paper, we propose \textbf{Jasmine}, the first Stable Diffusion (SD)-based self-supervised framework for monocular depth estimation, which effectively harnesses SD's visual priors to enhance the sharpness and generalization of unsupervised prediction. Previous SD-based methods are all supervised since adapting diffusion models for dense prediction requires high-precision supervision. In contrast, self-supervised reprojection suffers from inherent challenges (\textit{e.g.}, occlusions, texture-less regions, illumination variance), and the predictions exhibit blurs and artifacts that severely compromise SD's latent priors. To resolve this, we construct a novel surrogate task of mix-batch image reconstruction. Without any additional supervision, it preserves the detail priors of SD models by reconstructing the images themselves while preventing depth estimation from degradation. Furthermore, to address the inherent misalignment between SD's scale and shift invariant estimation and self-supervised scale-invariant depth estimation, we build the Scale-Shift GRU. It not only bridges this distribution gap but also isolates the fine-grained texture of SD output against the interference of reprojection loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Jasmine achieves SoTA performance on the KITTI benchmark and exhibits superior zero-shot generalization across multiple datasets.
REMI: Reconstructing Episodic Memory During Internally Driven Path Planning
Grid cells fire in triangular grid patterns, while place cells fire at specific locations and respond to contextual cues. How do these interacting systems support not only spatial encoding but also internally driven path planning, such as navigating to locations recalled from cues? Here, we propose a system-level theory of MEC-HC wiring that explains how grid and place cell patterns could be connected to enable cue-triggered goal retrieval, path planning, and reconstruction of sensory experience along planned routes. We suggest that place cells autoassociate sensory inputs with grid cell patterns, allowing sensory cues to trigger recall of goal-location grid patterns. We show analytically that grid-based planning permits shortcuts through unvisited locations and generalizes local transitions to long-range paths. During planning, intermediate grid states trigger place cell pattern completion, reconstructing sensory experiences along the route. Using a single-layer RNN modeling the HC-MEC loop with a planning subnetwork, we demonstrate these effects in both biologically grounded navigation simulations using RatatouGym and visually realistic navigation tasks using Habitat Sim.