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Aug 14

ROSA-Tuning: Enhancing Long-Context Modeling via Suffix Matching

Long-context capability and computational efficiency are among the central challenges facing today's large language models. Existing efficient attention methods reduce computational complexity, but they typically suffer from a limited coverage of the model state. This paper proposes ROSA-Tuning, a retrieval-and-recall mechanism for enhancing the long-context modeling ability of pretrained models. Beyond the standard attention mechanism, ROSA-Tuning leverages in parallel a CPU-based ROSA (RWKV Online Suffix Automaton) retrieval module, which efficiently locates historical positions in long contexts that are relevant to the current query, and injects the retrieved information into the model state in a trainable manner; subsequent weighted fusion can then be handled by range-restricted attention. To enable end-to-end training, we employ the binary discretization strategy and the counterfactual gradient algorithm, and further optimize overall execution efficiency via an asynchronous CPU-GPU pipeline. Systematic evaluations on Qwen3-Base-1.7B show that ROSA-Tuning substantially restores the long-context modeling ability of windowed-attention models, achieving performance close to and in some cases matching global attention on benchmarks such as LongBench, while maintaining computational efficiency and GPU memory usage that are nearly comparable to windowed-attention methods, offering a new technical path for efficient long-context processing. The example code can be found at https://github.com/zyaaa-ux/ROSA-Tuning.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 3

DREAMSTATE: Diffusing States and Parameters for Recurrent Large Language Models

Modern Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), such as RWKV, are distinguished by their powerful short-range modeling capabilities and efficient fixed-size states, which constitute a core advantage over standard Transformers. However, there is a significant lack of research into their internal state as an editable knowledge representation. To fill this gap, we first explore the representational properties of the RWKV state by proposing the DREAMSTATE framework. This framework utilizes a conditional Diffusion Transformer (DiT) to directly model the probability manifold of the state, enabling its generation and editing. The structural nature of this representation is validated through t-SNE visualizations and controlled generation experiments. After successfully uncovering and modeling the state's representational potential, we further propose a novel hybrid architecture that combines the local advantages of RNNs with global context adaptability. This architecture features a parallel DiT that processes a variable-length global context to dynamically generate and adjust the core recurrent module's WKV parameters, transforming the fixed recurrence mechanism into a context-aware dynamic function. Experiments demonstrate that this hybrid model can be trained stably via a multi-objective loss, validating its design feasibility. Our work not only opens a new research direction for RNN state representation but also provides a concrete architectural reference for future model design. The code is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/2dgx41s/DreamState.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 26

PrefixGuard: From LLM-Agent Traces to Online Failure-Warning Monitors

Large language model (LLM) agents now execute long, tool-using tasks where final outcome checks can arrive too late for intervention. Online warning requires lightweight prefix monitors over heterogeneous traces, but hand-authored event schemas are brittle and deployment-time LLM judging is costly. We introduce PrefixGuard, a trace-to-monitor framework with an offline StepView induction step followed by supervised monitor training. StepView induces deterministic typed-step adapters from raw trace samples, and the monitor learns an event abstraction and prefix-risk scorer from terminal outcomes. Across WebArena, τ^2-Bench, SkillsBench, and TerminalBench, the strongest PrefixGuard monitors reach 0.900/0.710/0.533/0.557 AUPRC. Using the strongest backend within each representation, they improve over raw-text controls by an average of +0.137 AUPRC. LLM judges remain substantially weaker under the same prefix-warning protocol. We also derive an observability ceiling on score-based area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) that separates monitor error from failures lacking evidence in the observed prefix. For finite-state audit, post-hoc deterministic finite automaton (DFA) extraction remains compact on WebArena and τ^2-Bench (29 and 20 states) but expands to 151 and 187 states on SkillsBench and TerminalBench. Finally, first-alert diagnostics show that strong ranking does not imply deployment utility: WebArena ranks well yet fails to support low-false-alarm alerts, whereas τ^2-Bench and TerminalBench retain more actionable early alerts. Together, these results position PrefixGuard as a practical monitor-synthesis recipe with explicit diagnostics for when prefix warnings translate into actionable interventions.

State Tuning: State-based Test-Time Scaling on RWKV-7

Test-time scaling has emerged as a prominent research direction in machine learning, enabling models to enhance their expressive capabilities during inference.Transformers, renowned for striking a delicate balance between efficiency and expressiveness, have benefited from test-time scaling techniques that leverage an expanding key-value (KV) cache to significantly improve performance.In this paper, we introduce a novel state-based approach to test-time scaling, which we term state tuning, tailored to the RNN-based RWKV-7 model.By exploiting the unique strengths of RWKV-7, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the target task without altering the model's pre-trained weights. Our approach centers on three key innovations. First, we develop an observer framework that allows a smaller model to replicate and learn the state dynamics of the RWKV-7 model. Second, we employ a kernel method to dynamically upscale the state size, enhancing the model's capacity to capture intricate patterns. Third, we integrate Decorrelated Backpropagation (DBP) to optimize the upscaled state matrix, thereby improving convergence and expressivity. By tuning only the state matrix, we demonstrate that a smaller model can outperform larger models on the given task. This method preserves the efficiency of the original RWKV-7 architecture while harnessing the power of test-time scaling to deliver superior results. Our findings underscore the potential of state tuning as an effective strategy for advancing model performance in resource-constrained settings. Our code is https://github.com/TorchRWKV/flash-linear-attention.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 7, 2025

SuffixDecoding: Extreme Speculative Decoding for Emerging AI Applications

Speculative decoding is widely adopted to reduce latency in large language model (LLM) inference by leveraging smaller draft models capable of handling diverse user tasks. However, emerging AI applications, such as LLM-based agents, present unique workload characteristics: instead of diverse independent requests, agentic frameworks typically submit repetitive inference requests, such as multi-agent pipelines performing similar subtasks or self-refinement loops iteratively enhancing outputs. These workloads result in long and highly predictable sequences, which current speculative decoding methods do not effectively exploit. To address this gap, we introduce SuffixDecoding, a novel method that utilizes efficient suffix trees to cache long token sequences from prompts and previous outputs. By adaptively speculating more tokens when acceptance likelihood is high and fewer when it is low, SuffixDecoding effectively exploits opportunities for longer speculations while conserving computation when those opportunities are limited. Evaluations on agentic benchmarks, including SWE-Bench and Text-to-SQL, demonstrate that SuffixDecoding achieves speedups of up to 5.3times, outperforming state-of-the-art methods -- 2.8times faster than model-based approaches like EAGLE-2/3 and 1.9times faster than model-free approaches such as Token Recycling. SuffixDecoding is open-sourced at https://github.com/snowflakedb/ArcticInference

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024

AdvPrompter: Fast Adaptive Adversarial Prompting for LLMs

While recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable successes, they are vulnerable to certain jailbreaking attacks that lead to generation of inappropriate or harmful content. Manual red-teaming requires finding adversarial prompts that cause such jailbreaking, e.g. by appending a suffix to a given instruction, which is inefficient and time-consuming. On the other hand, automatic adversarial prompt generation often leads to semantically meaningless attacks that can easily be detected by perplexity-based filters, may require gradient information from the TargetLLM, or do not scale well due to time-consuming discrete optimization processes over the token space. In this paper, we present a novel method that uses another LLM, called the AdvPrompter, to generate human-readable adversarial prompts in seconds, sim800times faster than existing optimization-based approaches. We train the AdvPrompter using a novel algorithm that does not require access to the gradients of the TargetLLM. This process alternates between two steps: (1) generating high-quality target adversarial suffixes by optimizing the AdvPrompter predictions, and (2) low-rank fine-tuning of the AdvPrompter with the generated adversarial suffixes. The trained AdvPrompter generates suffixes that veil the input instruction without changing its meaning, such that the TargetLLM is lured to give a harmful response. Experimental results on popular open source TargetLLMs show state-of-the-art results on the AdvBench dataset, that also transfer to closed-source black-box LLM APIs. Further, we demonstrate that by fine-tuning on a synthetic dataset generated by AdvPrompter, LLMs can be made more robust against jailbreaking attacks while maintaining performance, i.e. high MMLU scores.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 21, 2024 1

Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models

Because "out-of-the-box" large language models are capable of generating a great deal of objectionable content, recent work has focused on aligning these models in an attempt to prevent undesirable generation. While there has been some success at circumventing these measures -- so-called "jailbreaks" against LLMs -- these attacks have required significant human ingenuity and are brittle in practice. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective attack method that causes aligned language models to generate objectionable behaviors. Specifically, our approach finds a suffix that, when attached to a wide range of queries for an LLM to produce objectionable content, aims to maximize the probability that the model produces an affirmative response (rather than refusing to answer). However, instead of relying on manual engineering, our approach automatically produces these adversarial suffixes by a combination of greedy and gradient-based search techniques, and also improves over past automatic prompt generation methods. Surprisingly, we find that the adversarial prompts generated by our approach are quite transferable, including to black-box, publicly released LLMs. Specifically, we train an adversarial attack suffix on multiple prompts (i.e., queries asking for many different types of objectionable content), as well as multiple models (in our case, Vicuna-7B and 13B). When doing so, the resulting attack suffix is able to induce objectionable content in the public interfaces to ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude, as well as open source LLMs such as LLaMA-2-Chat, Pythia, Falcon, and others. In total, this work significantly advances the state-of-the-art in adversarial attacks against aligned language models, raising important questions about how such systems can be prevented from producing objectionable information. Code is available at github.com/llm-attacks/llm-attacks.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 27, 2023 1

A Triadic Suffix Tokenization Scheme for Numerical Reasoning

Standard subword tokenization methods fragment numbers inconsistently, causing large language models (LLMs) to lose positional and decimal structure - a primary driver of errors in arithmetic and scientific reasoning. We introduce Triadic Suffix Tokenization (TST), a deterministic scheme that partitions digits into three-digit triads and annotates each triad with an explicit magnitude marker. Critically, the scheme defines a fixed, one-to-one mapping between suffixes and orders of magnitude for the integer part (thousands, millions, billions, etc.) and a parallel system of replicated markers for fractional depth (tenths, thousandths, millionths, etc.). Unlike approaches that rely on positional inference, this method provides a consistent gradient signal, which should ensure stable convergence. Two implementation variants are proposed: (1) a vocabulary-based approach that adds at most 10,000 fixed tokens to an existing vocabulary, covering 33 orders of magnitude (10^{-15} to 10^{18}); and (2) a suffix-marker approach that uses a small set of special tokens to denote magnitude dynamically. Both variants preserve exact digits while making order-of-magnitude relationships transparent at the token level. The framework is inherently scalable, allowing for linear vocabulary expansion to accommodate arbitrary precision and range. TST is architecture-agnostic and can be integrated as a drop-in preprocessing step. Experimental validation is deferred to future work.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 12 1

Lina-Speech: Gated Linear Attention is a Fast and Parameter-Efficient Learner for text-to-speech synthesis

Neural codec language models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, leveraging scalable architectures like autoregressive transformers and large-scale speech datasets. By framing voice cloning as a prompt continuation task, these models excel at cloning voices from short audio samples. However, this approach is limited in its ability to handle numerous or lengthy speech excerpts, since the concatenation of source and target speech must fall within the maximum context length which is determined during training. In this work, we introduce Lina-Speech, a model that replaces traditional self-attention mechanisms with emerging recurrent architectures like Gated Linear Attention (GLA). Building on the success of initial-state tuning on RWKV, we extend this technique to voice cloning, enabling the use of multiple speech samples and full utilization of the context window in synthesis. This approach is fast, easy to deploy, and achieves performance comparable to fine-tuned baselines when the dataset size ranges from 3 to 15 minutes. Notably, Lina-Speech matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models, including some with a parameter count up to four times higher or trained in an end-to-end style. We release our code and checkpoints. Audio samples are available at https://theodorblackbird.github.io/blog/demo_lina/.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 30, 2024

Restore-RWKV: Efficient and Effective Medical Image Restoration with RWKV

Transformers have revolutionized medical image restoration, but the quadratic complexity still poses limitations for their application to high-resolution medical images. The recent advent of the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) model in the natural language processing field has attracted much attention due to its ability to process long sequences efficiently. To leverage its advanced design, we propose Restore-RWKV, the first RWKV-based model for medical image restoration. Since the original RWKV model is designed for 1D sequences, we make two necessary modifications for modeling spatial relations in 2D medical images. First, we present a recurrent WKV (Re-WKV) attention mechanism that captures global dependencies with linear computational complexity. Re-WKV incorporates bidirectional attention as basic for a global receptive field and recurrent attention to effectively model 2D dependencies from various scan directions. Second, we develop an omnidirectional token shift (Omni-Shift) layer that enhances local dependencies by shifting tokens from all directions and across a wide context range. These adaptations make the proposed Restore-RWKV an efficient and effective model for medical image restoration. Even a lightweight variant of Restore-RWKV, with only 1.16 million parameters, achieves comparable or even superior results compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the resulting Restore-RWKV achieves SOTA performance across a range of medical image restoration tasks, including PET image synthesis, CT image denoising, MRI image super-resolution, and all-in-one medical image restoration. Code is available at: https://github.com/Yaziwel/Restore-RWKV.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 14, 2024

ASETF: A Novel Method for Jailbreak Attack on LLMs through Translate Suffix Embeddings

The safety defense methods of Large language models(LLMs) stays limited because the dangerous prompts are manually curated to just few known attack types, which fails to keep pace with emerging varieties. Recent studies found that attaching suffixes to harmful instructions can hack the defense of LLMs and lead to dangerous outputs. However, similar to traditional text adversarial attacks, this approach, while effective, is limited by the challenge of the discrete tokens. This gradient based discrete optimization attack requires over 100,000 LLM calls, and due to the unreadable of adversarial suffixes, it can be relatively easily penetrated by common defense methods such as perplexity filters. To cope with this challenge, in this paper, we proposes an Adversarial Suffix Embedding Translation Framework (ASETF), aimed at transforming continuous adversarial suffix embeddings into coherent and understandable text. This method greatly reduces the computational overhead during the attack process and helps to automatically generate multiple adversarial samples, which can be used as data to strengthen LLMs security defense. Experimental evaluations were conducted on Llama2, Vicuna, and other prominent LLMs, employing harmful directives sourced from the Advbench dataset. The results indicate that our method significantly reduces the computation time of adversarial suffixes and achieves a much better attack success rate to existing techniques, while significantly enhancing the textual fluency of the prompts. In addition, our approach can be generalized into a broader method for generating transferable adversarial suffixes that can successfully attack multiple LLMs, even black-box LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 25, 2024

Exact Regular-Constrained Variable-Order Markov Generation via Sparse Context-State Belief Propagation

Variable-order Markov models generate sequences over a finite alphabet by conditioning each symbol on the longest available suffix of the generated history. Regular constraints, by contrast, describe finite-horizon control requirements by an automaton: fixed positions, forced endings, metrical patterns, and forbidden copied fragments are all special cases. Existing exact methods already handle regular constraints with belief propagation for first-order Markov chains. The contribution here is the variable-order extension: identifying the state space on which the existing BP-regular machinery must be run when the generator is a variable-order/backoff model. A first-order constraint layer can enforce useful support conditions, but it computes future mass after merging histories that a variable-order generator deliberately keeps distinct. We formalize this mismatch and give the sparse construction obtained by replacing the first-order Markov state with the observed context state, then taking the standard product with the regular constraint automaton. For a fixed trained context graph and automaton, inference is linear in the sequence horizon; in general it is polynomial in the number of reachable product edges. This gives the correct variable-order distribution conditioned on regular constraints without expanding to all K-tuples. The same finite-source interface supports reversible data augmentation by inverse count lookup, matching materialized transposition augmentation without storing transformed corpora. We also separate exact BP inference from generation-time backoff policies, such as singleton avoidance, whose stochastic semantics must be made explicit if exactness is claimed.

  • 1 authors
·
May 7

AutoWebWorld: Synthesizing Infinite Verifiable Web Environments via Finite State Machines

The performance of autonomous Web GUI agents heavily relies on the quality and quantity of their training data. However, a fundamental bottleneck persists: collecting interaction trajectories from real-world websites is expensive and difficult to verify. The underlying state transitions are hidden, leading to reliance on inconsistent and costly external verifiers to evaluate step-level correctness. To address this, we propose AutoWebWorld, a novel framework for synthesizing controllable and verifiable web environments by modeling them as Finite State Machines (FSMs) and use coding agents to translate FSMs into interactive websites. Unlike real websites, where state transitions are implicit, AutoWebWorld explicitly defines all states, actions, and transition rules. This enables programmatic verification: action correctness is checked against predefined rules, and task success is confirmed by reaching a goal state in the FSM graph. AutoWebWorld enables a fully automated search-and-verify pipeline, generating over 11,663 verified trajectories from 29 diverse web environments at only $0.04 per trajectory. Training on this synthetic data significantly boosts real-world performance. Our 7B Web GUI agent outperforms all baselines within 15 steps on WebVoyager. Furthermore, we observe a clear scaling law: as the synthetic data volume increases, performance on WebVoyager and Online-Mind2Web consistently improves.

ShortOPD: Recovering Pruned LLMs with Short-to-Long On-Policy Distillation

Structured pruning is a hardware-friendly way to compress LLMs, but it is mostly validated on multiple-choice recognition tasks, while the same compressed checkpoints can collapse on the free-form generation that deployment actually requires. Two observations trace this gap. First, greedy pass@1 nearly vanishes after compression, yet pass@k recovers substantially under repeated sampling: useful generations are demoted, not erased. Second, the recoverable regime fails mainly through suffix repetition. Recovery should therefore train on the compressed model's own on-policy states with dense token-level supervision, which On-Policy Distillation (OPD) provides by reusing the pre-compression model as a frozen teacher. However, long on-policy rollouts spend early recovery budget on low-information repetitive suffixes, delaying loss descent. To mitigate this waste, we propose \shortopd, a short-to-long OPD schedule that detects teacher-confirmed repetitive suffixes, treats the surviving prefix as each rollout's effective length, and allocates future rollout budgets to the effective lengths the policy can currently use. Across math, code, and open-ended generation, \shortopd\ raises the compressed model's score to about 9times its unrecovered value and 1.6--4.4times standard recovery recipes (SFT w/o KD, KD, and SeqKD), and it matches a fixed 8192-token rollout horizon within two points using a quarter of the training time (8.5 vs.\ 35.9 hours) and 71% fewer rollout tokens. We hope this recipe helps move structured pruning beyond marginal gains on perplexity and multiple-choice benchmarks, a step closer to deployment-ready generation quality.

ByteDance ByteDance
·
Jul 13 2

Simple linear attention language models balance the recall-throughput tradeoff

Recent work has shown that attention-based language models excel at recall, the ability to ground generations in tokens previously seen in context. However, the efficiency of attention-based models is bottle-necked during inference by the KV-cache's aggressive memory consumption. In this work, we explore whether we can improve language model efficiency (e.g. by reducing memory consumption) without compromising on recall. By applying experiments and theory to a broad set of architectures, we identify a key tradeoff between a model's state size and recall ability. We show that efficient alternatives to attention (e.g. H3, Mamba, RWKV) maintain a fixed-size recurrent state, but struggle at recall. We propose BASED a simple architecture combining linear and sliding window attention. By varying BASED window size and linear attention feature dimension, we can dial the state size and traverse the pareto frontier of the recall-memory tradeoff curve, recovering the full quality of attention on one end and the small state size of attention-alternatives on the other. We train language models up to 1.3b parameters and show that BASED matches the strongest sub-quadratic models (e.g. Mamba) in perplexity and outperforms them on real-world recall-intensive tasks by 6.22 accuracy points. Implementations of linear attention are often less efficient than optimized standard attention implementations. To make BASED competitive, we develop IO-aware algorithms that enable 24x higher throughput on language generation than FlashAttention-2, when generating 1024 tokens using 1.3b parameter models. Code for this work is provided at: https://github.com/HazyResearch/based.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 28, 2024 12

MultiFuzz: A Dense Retrieval-based Multi-Agent System for Network Protocol Fuzzing

Traditional protocol fuzzing techniques, such as those employed by AFL-based systems, often lack effectiveness due to a limited semantic understanding of complex protocol grammars and rigid seed mutation strategies. Recent works, such as ChatAFL, have integrated Large Language Models (LLMs) to guide protocol fuzzing and address these limitations, pushing protocol fuzzers to wider exploration of the protocol state space. But ChatAFL still faces issues like unreliable output, LLM hallucinations, and assumptions of LLM knowledge about protocol specifications. This paper introduces MultiFuzz, a novel dense retrieval-based multi-agent system designed to overcome these limitations by integrating semantic-aware context retrieval, specialized agents, and structured tool-assisted reasoning. MultiFuzz utilizes agentic chunks of protocol documentation (RFC Documents) to build embeddings in a vector database for a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline, enabling agents to generate more reliable and structured outputs, enhancing the fuzzer in mutating protocol messages with enhanced state coverage and adherence to syntactic constraints. The framework decomposes the fuzzing process into modular groups of agents that collaborate through chain-of-thought reasoning to dynamically adapt fuzzing strategies based on the retrieved contextual knowledge. Experimental evaluations on the Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) demonstrate that MultiFuzz significantly improves branch coverage and explores deeper protocol states and transitions over state-of-the-art (SOTA) fuzzers such as NSFuzz, AFLNet, and ChatAFL. By combining dense retrieval, agentic coordination, and language model reasoning, MultiFuzz establishes a new paradigm in autonomous protocol fuzzing, offering a scalable and extensible foundation for future research in intelligent agentic-based fuzzing systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025

Self-Improving Pretraining: using post-trained models to pretrain better models

Ensuring safety, factuality and overall quality in the generations of large language models is a critical challenge, especially as these models are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. The prevailing approach to addressing these issues involves collecting expensive, carefully curated datasets and applying multiple stages of fine-tuning and alignment. However, even this complex pipeline cannot guarantee the correction of patterns learned during pretraining. Therefore, addressing these issues during pretraining is crucial, as it shapes a model's core behaviors and prevents unsafe or hallucinated outputs from becoming deeply embedded. To tackle this issue, we introduce a new pretraining method that streams documents and uses reinforcement learning (RL) to improve the next K generated tokens at each step. A strong, post-trained model judges candidate generations -- including model rollouts, the original suffix, and a rewritten suffix -- for quality, safety, and factuality. Early in training, the process relies on the original and rewritten suffixes; as the model improves, RL rewards high-quality rollouts. This approach builds higher quality, safer, and more factual models from the ground up. In experiments, our method gives 36.2% and 18.5% relative improvements over standard pretraining in terms of factuality and safety, and up to 86.3% win rate improvements in overall generation quality.

What's the Magic Word? A Control Theory of LLM Prompting

Prompt engineering is crucial for deploying LLMs but is poorly understood mathematically. We formalize LLM systems as a class of discrete stochastic dynamical systems to explore prompt engineering through the lens of control theory. We investigate the reachable set of output token sequences R_y(mathbf x_0) for which there exists a control input sequence mathbf u for each mathbf y in R_y(mathbf x_0) that steers the LLM to output mathbf y from initial state sequence mathbf x_0. We offer analytic analysis on the limitations on the controllability of self-attention in terms of reachable set, where we prove an upper bound on the reachable set of outputs R_y(mathbf x_0) as a function of the singular values of the parameter matrices. We present complementary empirical analysis on the controllability of a panel of LLMs, including Falcon-7b, Llama-7b, and Falcon-40b. Our results demonstrate a lower bound on the reachable set of outputs R_y(mathbf x_0) w.r.t. initial state sequences mathbf x_0 sampled from the Wikitext dataset. We find that the correct next Wikitext token following sequence mathbf x_0 is reachable over 97% of the time with prompts of kleq 10 tokens. We also establish that the top 75 most likely next tokens, as estimated by the LLM itself, are reachable at least 85% of the time with prompts of kleq 10 tokens. Intriguingly, short prompt sequences can dramatically alter the likelihood of specific outputs, even making the least likely tokens become the most likely ones. This control-centric analysis of LLMs demonstrates the significant and poorly understood role of input sequences in steering output probabilities, offering a foundational perspective for enhancing language model system capabilities.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

R-Bot: An LLM-based Query Rewrite System

Query rewrite is essential for optimizing SQL queries to improve their execution efficiency without changing their results. Traditionally, this task has been tackled through heuristic and learning-based methods, each with its limitations in terms of inferior quality and low robustness. Recent advancements in LLMs offer a new paradigm by leveraging their superior natural language and code comprehension abilities. Despite their potential, directly applying LLMs like GPT-4 has faced challenges due to problems such as hallucinations, where the model might generate inaccurate or irrelevant results. To address this, we propose R-Bot, an LLM-based query rewrite system with a systematic approach. We first design a multi-source rewrite evidence preparation pipeline to generate query rewrite evidences for guiding LLMs to avoid hallucinations. We then propose a hybrid structure-semantics retrieval method that combines structural and semantic analysis to retrieve the most relevant rewrite evidences for effectively answering an online query. We next propose a step-by-step LLM rewrite method that iteratively leverages the retrieved evidences to select and arrange rewrite rules with self-reflection. We conduct comprehensive experiments on real-world datasets and widely used benchmarks, and demonstrate the superior performance of our system, R-Bot, surpassing state-of-the-art query rewrite methods. The R-Bot system has been deployed at Huawei and with real customers, and the results show that the proposed R-Bot system achieves lower query latency.

Tsinghua Tsinghua University
·
Jul 21, 2025

Pentest-R1: Towards Autonomous Penetration Testing Reasoning Optimized via Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning

Automating penetration testing is crucial for enhancing cybersecurity, yet current Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant limitations in this domain, including poor error handling, inefficient reasoning, and an inability to perform complex end-to-end tasks autonomously. To address these challenges, we introduce Pentest-R1, a novel framework designed to optimize LLM reasoning capabilities for this task through a two-stage reinforcement learning pipeline. We first construct a dataset of over 500 real-world, multi-step walkthroughs, which Pentest-R1 leverages for offline reinforcement learning (RL) to instill foundational attack logic. Subsequently, the LLM is fine-tuned via online RL in an interactive Capture The Flag (CTF) environment, where it learns directly from environmental feedback to develop robust error self-correction and adaptive strategies. Our extensive experiments on the Cybench and AutoPenBench benchmarks demonstrate the framework's effectiveness. On AutoPenBench, Pentest-R1 achieves a 24.2\% success rate, surpassing most state-of-the-art models and ranking second only to Gemini 2.5 Flash. On Cybench, it attains a 15.0\% success rate in unguided tasks, establishing a new state-of-the-art for open-source LLMs and matching the performance of top proprietary models. Ablation studies confirm that the synergy of both training stages is critical to its success.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 10, 2025

RouteHijack: Routing-Aware Attack on Mixture-of-Experts LLMs

Safety alignment is critical for the responsible deployment of large language models (LLMs). As Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are increasingly adopted to scale model capacity, understanding their safety robustness becomes essential. Existing adversarial attacks, however, have notable limitations. Prompt-based jailbreaks rely on heuristic search and transfer poorly, model intervention methods require privileged access to internal representations, and optimization-based input attacks remain output-centric and are fundamentally limited to MoE models due to the non-differentiable routing mechanism. In this paper, we present RouteHijack, a routing-aware jailbreak for MoE LLMs. Our key insight is that safety behavior is concentrated in a small subset of experts, creating an opportunity to steer model behavior by influencing routing decisions through input optimization. Building on this observation, RouteHijack first performs response-driven expert localization to identify safety-critical and harmful experts by contrasting activations under safe refusals and harmful completions. It then constructs adversarial suffixes with a routing-aware objective that suppresses safety experts, promotes harmful experts, and prevents early-stage refusal during generation. At inference time, the optimized suffix is appended to a malicious prompt, requiring only input access. Across seven MoE LLMs, RouteHijack achieves a 69.3\% average attack success rate (ASR), outperforming prior optimization-based attack by 3.2times. RouteHijack also transfers zero-shot across five sibling MoE variants, raising average ASR from 27.7\% to 61.2\%, and further generalizes to three MoE-based VLMs, increasing average ASR from 2.47\% to 38.7\%. These findings expose a fundamental vulnerability in sparse expert architectures and highlight the need for defenses beyond output-level alignment.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 30

Mamba or RWKV: Exploring High-Quality and High-Efficiency Segment Anything Model

Transformer-based segmentation methods face the challenge of efficient inference when dealing with high-resolution images. Recently, several linear attention architectures, such as Mamba and RWKV, have attracted much attention as they can process long sequences efficiently. In this work, we focus on designing an efficient segment-anything model by exploring these different architectures. Specifically, we design a mixed backbone that contains convolution and RWKV operation, which achieves the best for both accuracy and efficiency. In addition, we design an efficient decoder to utilize the multiscale tokens to obtain high-quality masks. We denote our method as RWKV-SAM, a simple, effective, fast baseline for SAM-like models. Moreover, we build a benchmark containing various high-quality segmentation datasets and jointly train one efficient yet high-quality segmentation model using this benchmark. Based on the benchmark results, our RWKV-SAM achieves outstanding performance in efficiency and segmentation quality compared to transformers and other linear attention models. For example, compared with the same-scale transformer model, RWKV-SAM achieves more than 2x speedup and can achieve better segmentation performance on various datasets. In addition, RWKV-SAM outperforms recent vision Mamba models with better classification and semantic segmentation results. Code and models will be publicly available.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 27, 2024

KinyaColBERT: A Lexically Grounded Retrieval Model for Low-Resource Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The recent mainstream adoption of large language model (LLM) technology is enabling novel applications in the form of chatbots and virtual assistants across many domains. With the aim of grounding LLMs in trusted domains and avoiding the problem of hallucinations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a viable solution. In order to deploy sustainable RAG systems in low-resource settings, achieving high retrieval accuracy is not only a usability requirement but also a cost-saving strategy. Through empirical evaluations on a Kinyarwanda-language dataset, we find that the most limiting factors in achieving high retrieval accuracy are limited language coverage and inadequate sub-word tokenization in pre-trained language models. We propose a new retriever model, KinyaColBERT, which integrates two key concepts: late word-level interactions between queries and documents, and a morphology-based tokenization coupled with two-tier transformer encoding. This methodology results in lexically grounded contextual embeddings that are both fine-grained and self-contained. Our evaluation results indicate that KinyaColBERT outperforms strong baselines and leading commercial text embedding APIs on a Kinyarwanda agricultural retrieval benchmark. By adopting this retrieval strategy, we believe that practitioners in other low-resource settings can not only achieve reliable RAG systems but also deploy solutions that are more cost-effective.

  • 2 authors
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Jul 3, 2025

SkipDecode: Autoregressive Skip Decoding with Batching and Caching for Efficient LLM Inference

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in various natural language generation tasks. However, they incur high computation cost and latency resulting from the autoregressive token-by-token generation. To address this issue, several approaches have been proposed to reduce computational cost using early-exit strategies. These strategies enable faster text generation using reduced computation without applying the full computation graph to each token. While existing token-level early exit methods show promising results for online inference, they cannot be readily applied for batch inferencing and Key-Value caching. This is because they have to wait until the last token in a batch exits before they can stop computing. This severely limits the practical application of such techniques. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective token-level early exit method, SkipDecode, designed to work seamlessly with batch inferencing and KV caching. It overcomes prior constraints by setting up a singular exit point for every token in a batch at each sequence position. It also guarantees a monotonic decrease in exit points, thereby eliminating the need to recompute KV Caches for preceding tokens. Rather than terminating computation prematurely as in prior works, our approach bypasses lower to middle layers, devoting most of the computational resources to upper layers, allowing later tokens to benefit from the compute expenditure by earlier tokens. Our experimental results show that SkipDecode can obtain 2x to 5x inference speedups with negligible regression across a variety of tasks. This is achieved using OPT models of 1.3 billion and 6.7 billion parameters, all the while being directly compatible with batching and KV caching optimization techniques.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 5, 2023

FS-RWKV: Leveraging Frequency Spatial-Aware RWKV for 3T-to-7T MRI Translation

Ultra-high-field 7T MRI offers enhanced spatial resolution and tissue contrast that enables the detection of subtle pathological changes in neurological disorders. However, the limited availability of 7T scanners restricts widespread clinical adoption due to substantial infrastructure costs and technical demands. Computational approaches for synthesizing 7T-quality images from accessible 3T acquisitions present a viable solution to this accessibility challenge. Existing CNN approaches suffer from limited spatial coverage, while Transformer models demand excessive computational overhead. RWKV architectures offer an efficient alternative for global feature modeling in medical image synthesis, combining linear computational complexity with strong long-range dependency capture. Building on this foundation, we propose Frequency Spatial-RWKV (FS-RWKV), an RWKV-based framework for 3T-to-7T MRI translation. To better address the challenges of anatomical detail preservation and global tissue contrast recovery, FS-RWKV incorporates two key modules: (1) Frequency-Spatial Omnidirectional Shift (FSO-Shift), which performs discrete wavelet decomposition followed by omnidirectional spatial shifting on the low-frequency branch to enhance global contextual representation while preserving high-frequency anatomical details; and (2) Structural Fidelity Enhancement Block (SFEB), a module that adaptively reinforces anatomical structure through frequency-aware feature fusion. Comprehensive experiments on UNC and BNU datasets demonstrate that FS-RWKV consistently outperforms existing CNN-, Transformer-, GAN-, and RWKV-based baselines across both T1w and T2w modalities, achieving superior anatomical fidelity and perceptual quality.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 9, 2025

AutoPSV: Automated Process-Supervised Verifier

In this work, we propose a novel method named Automated Process-Supervised Verifier (\textsc{AutoPSV}) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by automatically annotating the reasoning steps. AutoPSV begins by training a verification model on the correctness of final answers, enabling it to generate automatic process annotations. This verification model assigns a confidence score to each reasoning step, indicating the probability of arriving at the correct final answer from that point onward. We detect relative changes in the verification's confidence scores across reasoning steps to automatically annotate the reasoning process, enabling error detection even in scenarios where ground truth answers are unavailable. This alleviates the need for numerous manual annotations or the high computational costs associated with model-induced annotation approaches. We experimentally validate that the step-level confidence changes learned by the verification model trained on the final answer correctness can effectively identify errors in the reasoning steps. We demonstrate that the verification model, when trained on process annotations generated by AutoPSV, exhibits improved performance in selecting correct answers from multiple LLM-generated outputs. Notably, we achieve substantial improvements across five datasets in mathematics and commonsense reasoning. The source code of AutoPSV is available at https://github.com/rookie-joe/AutoPSV.

  • 7 authors
·
May 26, 2024

Model Tells You Where to Merge: Adaptive KV Cache Merging for LLMs on Long-Context Tasks

How to efficiently serve Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a pressing issue because of their huge computational cost in their autoregressive generation process. To mitigate computational costs, LLMs often employ the KV Cache technique to improve the generation speed. While improving the computational efficiency, the storage requirements of the KV cache are substantial, particularly in long-context scenarios, leading to significant memory consumption. Existing KV cache eviction methods often degrade the performance of LLMs in long-context scenarios due to the information loss introduced by eviction. In this paper, we propose a novel KV cache merging approach, called KVMerger, to achieve adaptive KV cache compression for long-context tasks without significant performance degradation under constrained memory budgets. Our approach is inspired by the intriguing observation that key states exhibit high similarity at the token level within a single sequence. To facilitate merging, we develop an effective yet straightforward merging set identification algorithm to identify suitable KV states for merging. Our merging set identification algorithm stimulates the second observation that KV cache sparsity, from similarity perspective, is independent of the dataset and remains persistent at the model level. Subsequently, we propose a Gaussian kernel weighted merging algorithm to selectively merge all states within each merging set. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of KVMerger for long-context tasks under constrained memory budgets, applying it to models including Llama2-7B-chat and Llama2-13B-chat. Using the LongBench and ZeroScroll benchmarks, we compare our method with other KV cache compression techniques, including H2O and CaM, showing that our method achieves superior performance across tasks with both 50% and 35% KV cache budgets.

  • 4 authors
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Jul 11, 2024

AutoTimes: Autoregressive Time Series Forecasters via Large Language Models

Foundation models of time series have not been fully developed due to the limited availability of time series corpora and the underexploration of scalable pre-training. Based on the similar sequential formulation of time series and natural language, increasing research demonstrates the feasibility of leveraging large language models (LLM) for time series. Nevertheless, the inherent autoregressive property and decoder-only architecture of LLMs have not been fully considered, resulting in insufficient utilization of LLM abilities. To fully revitalize the general-purpose token transition and multi-step generation capability of large language models, we propose AutoTimes to repurpose LLMs as autoregressive time series forecasters, which projects time series into the embedding space of language tokens and autoregressively generates future predictions with arbitrary lengths. Compatible with any decoder-only LLMs, the consequent forecaster exhibits the flexibility of the lookback length and scalability with larger LLMs. Further, we formulate time series as prompts, extending the context for prediction beyond the lookback window, termed in-context forecasting. By introducing LLM-embedded textual timestamps, AutoTimes can utilize chronological information to align multivariate time series. Empirically, AutoTimes achieves state-of-the-art with 0.1% trainable parameters and over 5times training/inference speedup compared to advanced LLM-based forecasters. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/AutoTimes.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 4, 2024

AI Kill Switch for malicious web-based LLM agent

Recently, web-based Large Language Model (LLM) agents autonomously perform increasingly complex tasks, thereby bringing significant convenience. However, they also amplify the risks of malicious misuse cases such as unauthorized collection of personally identifiable information (PII), generation of socially divisive content, and even automated web hacking. To address these threats, we propose an AI Kill Switch technique that can immediately halt the operation of malicious web-based LLM agents. To achieve this, we introduce AutoGuard - the key idea is generating defensive prompts that trigger the safety mechanisms of malicious LLM agents. In particular, generated defense prompts are transparently embedded into the website's DOM so that they remain invisible to human users but can be detected by the crawling process of malicious agents, triggering its internal safety mechanisms to abort malicious actions once read. To evaluate our approach, we constructed a dedicated benchmark consisting of three representative malicious scenarios (PII collection, social rift content generation, and web hacking attempts). Experimental results show that the AutoGuard method achieves over 80% Defense Success Rate (DSR) on malicious agents, including GPT-4o, Claude-3, and Llama3.3-70B-Instruct. It also maintains strong performance, achieving around 90% DSR on GPT-5, GPT-4.1, and Gemini-2.5-Flash when used as the malicious agent, demonstrating robust generalization across models and scenarios. Through this research, we have demonstrated the controllability of web-based LLM agents across various scenarios and models, thereby contributing to the broader effort of AI control and safety.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 25, 2025

OpenClaw-RL: Train Any Agent Simply by Talking

Every agent interaction generates a next-state signal, namely the user reply, tool output, terminal or GUI state change that follows each action, yet no existing agentic RL system recovers it as a live, online learning source. We present OpenClaw-RL, a framework built on a simple observation: next-state signals are universal, and policy can learn from all of them simultaneously. Personal conversations, terminal executions, GUI interactions, SWE tasks, and tool-call traces are not separate training problems. They are all interactions that can be used to train the same policy in the same loop. Next-state signals encode two forms of information: evaluative signals, which indicate how well the action performed and are extracted as scalar rewards via a PRM judge; and directive signals, which indicate how the action should have been different and are recovered through Hindsight-Guided On-Policy Distillation (OPD). We extract textual hints from the next state, construct an enhanced teacher context, and provide token-level directional advantage supervision that is richer than any scalar reward. Due to the asynchronous design, the model serves live requests, the PRM judges ongoing interactions, and the trainer updates the policy at the same time, with zero coordination overhead between them. Applied to personal agents, OpenClaw-RL enables an agent to improve simply by being used, recovering conversational signals from user re-queries, corrections, and explicit feedback. Applied to general agents, the same infrastructure supports scalable RL across terminal, GUI, SWE, and tool-call settings, where we additionally demonstrate the utility of process rewards. Code: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/OpenClaw-RL

RULERS: Locked Rubrics and Evidence-Anchored Scoring for Robust LLM Evaluation

The LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm promises scalable rubric-based evaluation, yet aligning frozen black-box models with human standards remains a challenge due to inherent generation stochasticity. We reframe judge alignment as a criteria transfer problem and isolate three recurrent failure modes: rubric instability caused by prompt sensitivity, unverifiable reasoning that lacks auditable evidence, and scale misalignment with human grading boundaries. To address these issues, we introduce RULERS (Rubric Unification, Locking, and Evidence-anchored Robust Scoring), a compiler-executor framework that transforms natural language rubrics into executable specifications. RULERS operates by compiling criteria into versioned immutable bundles, enforcing structured decoding with deterministic evidence verification, and applying lightweight Wasserstein-based post-hoc calibration, all without updating model parameters. Extensive experiments on essay and summarization benchmarks demonstrate that RULERS significantly outperforms representative baselines in human agreement, maintains strong stability against adversarial rubric perturbations, and enables smaller models to rival larger proprietary judges. Overall, our results suggest that reliable LLM judging requires executable rubrics, verifiable evidence, and calibrated scales rather than prompt phrasing alone. Code is available at https://github.com/LabRAI/Rulers.git.

  • 6 authors
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Jan 12

K-Forcing: Joint Next-K-Token Decoding via Push-Forward Language Modeling

Autoregressive (AR) language modeling is the dominant paradigm for text generation, yet its sequential token-by-token decoding makes inference memory-bound and inefficient. Existing acceleration approaches, such as speculative decoding and diffusion language models, can yield speedups under certain conditions but do not directly address high-load batch serving--the scenario most critical for industrial-scale deployment. We introduce K-Forcing, a push-forward language modeling paradigm for joint next-k-token decoding. K-Forcing distills an existing AR model into a conditional push-forward mapping--one that transforms independent uniform noise variables into a joint sample of multiple future tokens in a single forward pass. This design preserves fixed-length outputs, reuses the AR teacher backbone, and remains compatible with standard AR serving infrastructure. We train this mapping via progressive self-forcing distillation, which gradually expands the prediction window while enabling the student to closely match the sequence distribution of the AR teacher. We evaluate K-Forcing on LM1B and OpenWebText using a standard causal Transformer backbone. When aggressively configured to generate k = 4 tokens per forward pass, K-Forcing delivers approximately 2.4-3.5x speedup across different batch sizes, while incurring modest quality degradation relative to its AR teacher. As inference increasingly dominates the lifetime compute cost of modern LLMs, K-Forcing offers a promising route toward accelerating AR generation under real-world high-load deployment.

  • 7 authors
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Jun 8

StatEval: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Large Language Models in Statistics

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable advances in mathematical and logical reasoning, yet statistics, as a distinct and integrative discipline, remains underexplored in benchmarking efforts. To address this gap, we introduce StatEval, the first comprehensive benchmark dedicated to statistics, spanning both breadth and depth across difficulty levels. StatEval consists of 13,817 foundational problems covering undergraduate and graduate curricula, together with 2374 research-level proof tasks extracted from leading journals. To construct the benchmark, we design a scalable multi-agent pipeline with human-in-the-loop validation that automates large-scale problem extraction, rewriting, and quality control, while ensuring academic rigor. We further propose a robust evaluation framework tailored to both computational and proof-based tasks, enabling fine-grained assessment of reasoning ability. Experimental results reveal that while closed-source models such as GPT5-mini achieve below 57\% on research-level problems, with open-source models performing significantly lower. These findings highlight the unique challenges of statistical reasoning and the limitations of current LLMs. We expect StatEval to serve as a rigorous benchmark for advancing statistical intelligence in large language models. All data and code are available on our web platform: https://stateval.github.io/.

Superposed Decoding: Multiple Generations from a Single Autoregressive Inference Pass

Many applications today provide users with multiple auto-complete drafts as they type, including GitHub's code completion, Gmail's smart compose, and Apple's messaging auto-suggestions. Under the hood, language models support this by running an autoregressive inference pass to provide a draft. Consequently, providing k drafts to the user requires running an expensive language model k times. To alleviate the computation cost of running k inference passes, we propose Superposed Decoding, a new decoding algorithm that generates k drafts at the computation cost of one autoregressive inference pass. We achieve this by feeding a superposition of the most recent token embeddings from the k drafts as input to the next decoding step of the language model. At every inference step we combine the k drafts with the top-k tokens to get k^2 new drafts and cache the k most likely options, using an n-gram interpolation with minimal compute overhead to filter out incoherent generations. Our experiments show that k drafts from Superposed Decoding are at least as coherent and factual as Nucleus Sampling and Greedy Decoding respectively, while being at least 2.44times faster for kge3. In a compute-normalized setting, user evaluations demonstrably favor text generated by Superposed Decoding over Nucleus Sampling. Code and more examples open-sourced at https://github.com/RAIVNLab/SuperposedDecoding.

  • 10 authors
·
May 28, 2024

Protecting Copyrighted Material with Unique Identifiers in Large Language Model Training

A primary concern regarding training large language models (LLMs) is whether they abuse copyrighted online text. With the increasing training data scale and the prevalence of LLMs in daily lives, two problems arise: 1) false positive membership inference results misled by similar examples; 2) membership inference methods are usually too complex for end users to understand and use. To address these issues, we propose an alternative insert-and-detect methodology, advocating that web users and content platforms employ \textit{unique identifiers} for reliable and independent membership inference. Users and platforms can create their identifiers, embed them in copyrighted text, and independently detect them in future LLMs. As an initial demonstration, we introduce \textbf{ghost sentences} and a user-friendly last-k words test, allowing end users to chat with LLMs for membership inference. Ghost sentences consist primarily of unique passphrases of random natural words, which can come with customized elements to bypass possible filter rules. The last-k words test requires a significant repetition time of ghost sentences~(ge10). For cases with fewer repetitions, we designed an extra perplexity test, as LLMs exhibit high perplexity when encountering unnatural passphrases. We also conduct a comprehensive study on the memorization and membership inference of ghost sentences, examining factors such as training data scales, model sizes, repetition times, insertion positions, wordlist of passphrases, alignment, etc. Our study shows the possibility of applying ghost sentences in real scenarios and provides instructions for the potential application.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 23, 2024

OpAgent: Operator Agent for Web Navigation

To fulfill user instructions, autonomous web agents must contend with the inherent complexity and volatile nature of real-world websites. Conventional paradigms predominantly rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) using static datasets. However, these methods suffer from severe distributional shifts, as offline trajectories fail to capture the stochastic state transitions and real-time feedback of unconstrained wide web environments. In this paper, we propose a robust Online Reinforcement Learning WebAgent, designed to optimize its policy through direct, iterative interactions with unconstrained wide websites. Our approach comprises three core innovations: 1) Hierarchical Multi-Task Fine-tuning: We curate a comprehensive mixture of datasets categorized by functional primitives -- Planning, Acting, and Grounding -- establishing a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with strong instruction-following capabilities for Web GUI tasks. 2) Online Agentic RL in the Wild: We develop an online interaction environment and fine-tune the VLM using a specialized RL pipeline. We introduce a Hybrid Reward Mechanism that combines a ground-truth-agnostic WebJudge for holistic outcome assessment with a Rule-based Decision Tree (RDT) for progress reward. This system effectively mitigates the credit assignment challenge in long-horizon navigation. Notably, our RL-enhanced model achieves a 38.1\% success rate (pass@5) on WebArena, outperforming all existing monolithic baselines. 3) Operator Agent: We introduce a modular agentic framework, namely OpAgent, orchestrating a Planner, Grounder, Reflector, and Summarizer. This synergy enables robust error recovery and self-correction, elevating the agent's performance to a new State-of-the-Art (SOTA) success rate of 71.6\%.

  • 15 authors
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Apr 29

The Trojan Knowledge: Bypassing Commercial LLM Guardrails via Harmless Prompt Weaving and Adaptive Tree Search

Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that bypass safety guardrails to elicit harmful outputs. Existing approaches overwhelmingly operate within the prompt-optimization paradigm: whether through traditional algorithmic search or recent agent-based workflows, the resulting prompts typically retain malicious semantic signals that modern guardrails are primed to detect. In contrast, we identify a deeper, largely overlooked vulnerability stemming from the highly interconnected nature of an LLM's internal knowledge. This structure allows harmful objectives to be realized by weaving together sequences of benign sub-queries, each of which individually evades detection. To exploit this loophole, we introduce the Correlated Knowledge Attack Agent (CKA-Agent), a dynamic framework that reframes jailbreaking as an adaptive, tree-structured exploration of the target model's knowledge base. The CKA-Agent issues locally innocuous queries, uses model responses to guide exploration across multiple paths, and ultimately assembles the aggregated information to achieve the original harmful objective. Evaluated across state-of-the-art commercial LLMs (Gemini2.5-Flash/Pro, GPT-oss-120B, Claude-Haiku-4.5), CKA-Agent consistently achieves over 95% success rates even against strong guardrails, underscoring the severity of this vulnerability and the urgent need for defenses against such knowledge-decomposition attacks. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Graph-COM/CKA-Agent.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 1, 2025

Ethicist: Targeted Training Data Extraction Through Loss Smoothed Soft Prompting and Calibrated Confidence Estimation

Large pre-trained language models achieve impressive results across many tasks. However, recent works point out that pre-trained language models may memorize a considerable fraction of their training data, leading to the privacy risk of information leakage. In this paper, we propose a method named Ethicist for targeted training data extraction through loss smoothed soft prompting and calibrated confidence estimation, investigating how to recover the suffix in the training data when given a prefix. To elicit memorization in the attacked model, we tune soft prompt embeddings while keeping the model fixed. We further propose a smoothing loss that smooths the loss distribution of the suffix tokens to make it easier to sample the correct suffix. In order to select the most probable suffix from a collection of sampled suffixes and estimate the prediction confidence, we propose a calibrated confidence estimation method, which normalizes the confidence of the generated suffixes with a local estimation. We show that Ethicist significantly improves the extraction performance on a recently proposed public benchmark. We also investigate several factors influencing the data extraction performance, including decoding strategy, model scale, prefix length, and suffix length. Our code is available at https://github.com/thu-coai/Targeted-Data-Extraction.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 10, 2023

AutoRedTeamer: Autonomous Red Teaming with Lifelong Attack Integration

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, security and safety evaluation are crucial. While current red teaming approaches have made strides in assessing LLM vulnerabilities, they often rely heavily on human input and lack comprehensive coverage of emerging attack vectors. This paper introduces AutoRedTeamer, a novel framework for fully automated, end-to-end red teaming against LLMs. AutoRedTeamer combines a multi-agent architecture with a memory-guided attack selection mechanism to enable continuous discovery and integration of new attack vectors. The dual-agent framework consists of a red teaming agent that can operate from high-level risk categories alone to generate and execute test cases and a strategy proposer agent that autonomously discovers and implements new attacks by analyzing recent research. This modular design allows AutoRedTeamer to adapt to emerging threats while maintaining strong performance on existing attack vectors. We demonstrate AutoRedTeamer's effectiveness across diverse evaluation settings, achieving 20% higher attack success rates on HarmBench against Llama-3.1-70B while reducing computational costs by 46% compared to existing approaches. AutoRedTeamer also matches the diversity of human-curated benchmarks in generating test cases, providing a comprehensive, scalable, and continuously evolving framework for evaluating the security of AI systems.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 19, 2025