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BountyBench: Dollar Impact of AIAgent Attackers and Defenders on Real-World Cybersecurity Systems

Neural Information Processing Systems

AI agents have the potential to significantly alter the cybersecurity landscape. Here, we introduce the first framework to capture offensive and defensive cybercapabilities in evolving real-world systems. Instantiating this framework with BountyBench, we set up 25 systems with complex, real-world codebases. To capture the vulnerability lifecycle, we define three task types: Detect (detecting a new vulnerability), Exploit (exploiting a specific vulnerability), and Patch (patching a specific vulnerability). For Detect, we construct a new success indicator, which is general across vulnerability types and provides localized evaluation. We manually set up the environment for each system, including installing packages, setting up server(s), and hydrating database(s). We add 40 bug bounties, which are vulnerabilities with monetary awards of $10-$30,485, covering 9 of the OWASP Top 10 Risks. To modulate task difficulty, we devise a new strategy based on information to guide detection, interpolating from identifying a zero day to exploiting a specific vulnerability. We evaluate 10 agents: Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI with o3-high and o4-mini, and custom agents with o3-high, GPT-4.1,


Quantitative convergence of trained single layer neural networks to Gaussian processes

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we study the quantitative convergence of shallow neural networks trained via gradient descent to their associated Gaussian processes in the infinitewidth limit. While previous work has established qualitative convergence under broad settings, precise, finite-width estimates remain limited, particularly during training. We provide explicit upper bounds on the quadratic Wasserstein distance between the network output and its Gaussian approximation at any training time t 0, demonstrating polynomial decay with network width. Our results quantify how architectural parameters, such as width and input dimension, influence convergence, and how training dynamics affect the approximation error.


Convergence of Actor-Critic Methods with Multi-Layer Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

The early theory of actor-critic methods considered convergence using linear function approximators for the policy and value functions. Recent work has established convergence using neural network approximators with a single hidden layer. In this work we are taking the natural next step and establish convergence using deep neural networks with an arbitrary number of hidden layers, thus closing a gap between theory and practice. We show that actor-critic updates projected on a ball around the initial condition will converge to a neighborhood where the average of the squared gradients is O(1/ m)+O(ϵ), with mbeing the width of the neural network and ϵthe approximation quality of the best critic neural network over the projected set.


Manifold Generalization Provably Proceeds Memorization in Diffusion Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Diffusion models often generate novel samples even when the learned score is only \emph{coarse} -- a phenomenon not accounted for by the standard view of diffusion training as density estimation. In this paper, we show that, under the \emph{manifold hypothesis}, this behavior can instead be explained by coarse scores capturing the \emph{geometry} of the data while discarding the fine-scale distributional structure of the population measure~$μ_{\scriptscriptstyle\mathrm{data}}$. Concretely, whereas estimating the full data distribution $μ_{\scriptscriptstyle\mathrm{data}}$ supported on a $k$-dimensional manifold is known to require the classical minimax rate $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(N^{-1/k})$, we prove that diffusion models trained with coarse scores can exploit the \emph{regularity of the manifold support} and attain a near-parametric rate toward a \emph{different} target distribution. This target distribution has density uniformly comparable to that of~$μ_{\scriptscriptstyle\mathrm{data}}$ throughout any $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\bigl(N^{-β/(4k)}\bigr)$-neighborhood of the manifold, where $β$ denotes the manifold regularity. Our guarantees therefore depend only on the smoothness of the underlying support, and are especially favorable when the data density itself is irregular, for instance non-differentiable. In particular, when the manifold is sufficiently smooth, we obtain that \emph{generalization} -- formalized as the ability to generate novel, high-fidelity samples -- occurs at a statistical rate strictly faster than that required to estimate the full population distribution~$μ_{\scriptscriptstyle\mathrm{data}}$.


Thompson Sampling For Combinatorial Bandits: Polynomial Regret and Mismatched Sampling Paradox

Neural Information Processing Systems

We further show the mismatched sampling paradox: A learner who knows the rewards distributions and samples from the correct posterior distribution can perform exponentially worse than a learner who does not know the rewards and simply samples from a well-chosen Gaussian posterior.





WhenCombinatorialThompsonSamplingmeets ApproximationRegret

Neural Information Processing Systems

At each round t N, the agent must select one arm from a fixed set ofn arms, denoted by [n], {1,...,n}, using apolicy, based on the feedback from the previous rounds.


Convergence of Actor-Critic Methods with Multi-Layer Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

The early theory of actor-critic methods considered convergence using linear function approximators for the policy and value functions. Recent work has established convergence using neural network approximators with a single hidden layer. In this work we are taking the natural next step and establish convergence using deep neural networks with an arbitrary number of hidden layers, thus closing a gap between theory and practice. We show that actor-critic updates projected on a ball around the initial condition will converge to a neighborhood where the average of the squared gradients is O (1 / m) + O (ϵ), with m being the width of the neural network and ϵ the approximation quality of the best critic neural network over the projected set.