Alignment faking (AF) occurs when an LLM strategically complies with training objectives to avoid value modification, reverting to prior preferences once monitoring is lifted. Current detection methods focus on conversational settings and rely primarily on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) analysis, which provides a reliable signal when strategic reasoning surfaces, but cannot distinguish deception from capability failures if traces are absent or unfaithful. We formalize AF as a composite behavioural event and detect it through observable tool selection, where the LLM selects the safe tool when unmonitored, but switches to the unsafe tool under monitoring that rewards helpfulness over safety, while its reasoning still acknowledges the safe choice. We release a dataset of 108 enterprise IT scenarios spanning Security, Privacy, and Integrity domains under Corruption and Sabotage pressures. Evaluating six frontier LLMs across five independent runs, we find mean AF detection rates between 3.5% and 23.7%, with vulnerability profiles varying by domain and pressure type. These results suggest that susceptibility reflects training methodology rather than capability alone.

The growth of agentic AI has drawn significant attention to function calling Large Language Models (LLMs), which are designed to extend the capabilities of AI-powered system by invoking external functions. Injection and jailbreaking attacks have been extensively explored to showcase the vulnerabilities of LLMs to user prompt manipulation. The expanded capabilities of agentic models introduce further vulnerabilities via their function calling interface. Recent work in LLM security showed that function calling can be abused, leading to data tampering and theft, causing disruptive behavior such as endless loops, or causing LLMs to produce harmful content in the style of jailbreaking attacks. This paper introduces a novel function hijacking attack (FHA) that manipulates the tool selection process of agentic models to force the invocation of a specific, attacker-chosen function. While existing attacks focus on semantic preference of the model for function-calling tasks, we show that FHA is largely agnostic to the context semantics and robust to the function sets, making it applicable across diverse domains. We further demonstrate that FHA can be trained to produce universal adversarial functions, enabling a single attacked function to hijack tool selection across multiple queries and payload configurations. We conducted experiments on 5 different models, including instructed and reasoning variants, reaching 70% to 100% ASR over the established BFCL dataset. Our findings further demonstrate the need for strong guardrails and security modules for agentic systems.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents provide powerful automation capabilities, but they also create a substantially broader attack surface than traditional applications due to their tight integration with non-deterministic models and third-party services. While current deployments primarily rely on cloud-hosted services, emerging designs increasingly execute agents directly on edge devices to reduce latency and enhance user privacy. However, securely hosting such complex agent pipelines on edge devices remains challenging. These deployments must protect proprietary assets (e.g., system prompts and model weights) and sensitive runtime state on heterogeneous platforms that are vulnerable to software attacks and potentially controlled by malicious users. To address these challenges, we present AgenTEE, a system for deploying confidential agent pipelines on edge devices. AgenTEE places the agent runtime, inference engine, and third-party applications into independently attested confidential virtual machines (cVMs) and mediates their interaction through explicit, verifiable communication channels. Built on Arm Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA), a recent extension to Arm platforms, AgenTEE enforces strong system-level isolation of sensitive assets and runtime state. Our evaluation shows that such multi-cVMs system is practical, achieving near-native performance with less than 5.15% runtime overhead compared to commodity OS multi-process deployments.

AI-generated image detectors suffer significant performance degradation under real-world image corruptions such as JPEG compression, Gaussian blur, and resolution downsampling. We observe that state-of-the-art methods, including B-Free, treat degradation robustness as a byproduct of data augmentation rather than an explicit training objective. In this work, we propose Degradation-Consistent Paired Training (DCPT), a simple yet effective training strategy that explicitly enforces robustness through paired consistency constraints. For each training image, we construct a clean view and a degraded view, then impose two constraints: a feature consistency loss that minimizes the cosine distance between clean and degraded representations, and a prediction consistency loss based on symmetric KL divergence that aligns output distributions across views. DCPT adds zero additional parameters and zero inference overhead. Experiments on the Synthbuster benchmark (9 generators, 8 degradation conditions) demonstrate that DCPT improves the degraded-condition average accuracy by 9.1 percentage points compared to an identical baseline without paired training, while sacrificing only 0.9% clean accuracy. The improvement is most pronounced under JPEG compression (+15.7% to +17.9%). Ablation further reveals that adding architectural components leads to overfitting on limited training data, confirming that training objective improvement is more effective than architectural augmentation for degradation robustness.

Recent Deepfake Video Detection (DFD) studies have demonstrated that pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP exhibit strong generalization capabilities in detecting artifacts across different identities. However, existing approaches focus on leveraging visual features only, overlooking their most distinctive strength -- the rich vision-language semantics embedded in the latent space. We propose VLAForge, a novel DFD framework that unleashes the potential of such cross-modal semantics to enhance model's discriminability in deepfake detection. This work i) enhances the visual perception of VLM through a ForgePerceiver, which acts as an independent learner to capture diverse, subtle forgery cues both granularly and holistically, while preserving the pretrained Vision-Language Alignment (VLA) knowledge, and ii) provides a complementary discriminative cue -- Identity-Aware VLA score, derived by coupling cross-modal semantics with the forgery cues learned by ForgePerceiver. Notably, the VLA score is augmented by an identity prior-informed text prompting to capture authenticity cues tailored to each identity, thereby enabling more discriminative cross-modal semantics. Comprehensive experiments on video DFD benchmarks, including classical face-swapping forgeries and recent full-face generation forgeries, demonstrate that our VLAForge substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods at both frame and video levels. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/VLAForge.

LLM agents like Claude Code can not only write code but also be used for autonomous AI research and engineering \citep{rank2026posttrainbench, novikov2025alphaevolve}. We show that an \emph{autoresearch}-style pipeline \citep{karpathy2026autoresearch} powered by Claude Code discovers novel white-box adversarial attack \textit{algorithms} that \textbf{significantly outperform all existing (30+) methods} in jailbreaking and prompt injection evaluations. Starting from existing attack implementations, such as GCG~\citep{zou2023universal}, the agent iterates to produce new algorithms achieving up to 40\% attack success rate on CBRN queries against GPT-OSS-Safeguard-20B, compared to $\leq$10\% for existing algorithms (\Cref{fig:teaser}, left). The discovered algorithms generalize: attacks optimized on surrogate models transfer directly to held-out models, achieving \textbf{100\% ASR against Meta-SecAlign-70B} \citep{chen2025secalign} versus 56\% for the best baseline (\Cref{fig:teaser}, middle). Extending the findings of~\cite{carlini2025autoadvexbench}, our results are an early demonstration that incremental safety and security research can be automated using LLM agents. White-box adversarial red-teaming is particularly well-suited for this: existing methods provide strong starting points, and the optimization objective yields dense, quantitative feedback. We release all discovered attacks alongside baseline implementations and evaluation code at https://github.com/romovpa/claudini.

Deploying trustworthy artificial intelligence on edge robotics imposes a difficult trade-off between high-assurance robustness and energy sustainability. Traditional defense mechanisms against adversarial attacks typically incur significant computational overhead, threatening the viability of power-constrained platforms in environments such as cislunar space. This paper quantifies the energy cost of assurance in event-driven neuromorphic systems. We benchmark the Hierarchical Temporal Defense (HTD) framework on the BrainChip Akida AKD1000 processor against a suite of adversarial temporal attacks. We demonstrate that unlike traditional deep learning defenses which often degrade efficiency significantly with increased robustness, the event-driven nature of the proposed architecture achieves a superior trade-off. The system reduces gradient-based adversarial success rates from 82.1% to 18.7% and temporal jitter success rates from 75.8% to 25.1%, while maintaining an energy consumption of approximately 45 microjoules per inference. We report a counter-intuitive reduction in dynamic power consumption in the fully defended configuration, attributed to volatility-gated plasticity mechanisms that induce higher network sparsity. These results provide empirical evidence that neuromorphic sparsity enables sustainable and high-assurance edge autonomy.

While formal robustness verification has seen significant success in image classification, scaling these guarantees to object detection remains notoriously difficult due to complex non-linear coordinate transformations and Intersection-over-Union (IoU) metrics. We introduce IoUCert, a novel formal verification framework designed specifically to overcome these bottlenecks in foundational anchor-based object detection architectures. Focusing on the object localisation component in single-object settings, we propose a coordinate transformation that enables our algorithm to circumvent precision-degrading relaxations of non-linear box prediction functions. This allows us to optimise bounds directly with respect to the anchor box offsets which enables a novel Interval Bound Propagation method that derives optimal IoU bounds. We demonstrate that our method enables, for the first time, the robustness verification of realistic, anchor-based models including SSD, YOLOv2, and YOLOv3 variants against various input perturbations.

This work introduces a verification framework that provides both sound and complete guarantees for data poisoning attacks during neural network training. We formulate adversarial data manipulation, model training, and test-time evaluation in a single mixed-integer quadratic programming (MIQCP) problem. Finding the global optimum of the proposed formulation provably yields worst-case poisoning attacks, while simultaneously bounding the effectiveness of all possible attacks on the given training pipeline. Our framework encodes both the gradient-based training dynamics and model evaluation at test time, enabling the first exact certification of training-time robustness. Experimental evaluation on small models confirms that our approach delivers a complete characterization of robustness against data poisoning.

Understanding the reliability of natural language generation is critical for deploying foundation models in security-sensitive domains. While certified poisoning defenses provide provable robustness bounds for classification tasks, they are fundamentally ill-equipped for autoregressive generation: they cannot handle sequential predictions or the exponentially large output space of language models. To establish a framework for certified natural language generation, we formalize two security properties: stability (robustness to any change in generation) and validity (robustness to targeted, harmful changes in generation). We introduce Targeted Partition Aggregation (TPA), the first algorithm to certify validity/targeted attacks by computing the minimum poisoning budget needed to induce a specific harmful class, token, or phrase. Further, we extend TPA to provide tighter guarantees for multi-turn generations using mixed integer linear programming (MILP). Empirically, we demonstrate TPA's effectiveness across diverse settings including: certifying validity of agent tool-calling when adversaries modify up to 0.5% of the dataset and certifying 8-token stability horizons in preference-based alignment. Though inference-time latency remains an open challenge, our contributions enable certified deployment of language models in security-critical applications.

Text guided diffusion models are used by millions of users, but can be easily exploited to produce harmful content. Concept unlearning methods aim at reducing the models' likelihood of generating harmful content. Traditionally, this has been tackled at an individual concept level, with only a handful of recent works considering more realistic concept combinations. However, state of the art methods depend on full finetuning, which is computationally expensive. Concept localisation methods can facilitate selective finetuning, but existing techniques are static, resulting in suboptimal utility. In order to tackle these challenges, we propose TRUST (Targeted Robust Selective fine Tuning), a novel approach for dynamically estimating target concept neurons and unlearning them through selective finetuning, empowered by a Hessian based regularization. We show experimentally, against a number of SOTA baselines, that TRUST is robust against adversarial prompts, preserves generation quality to a significant degree, and is also significantly faster than the SOTA. Our method achieves unlearning of not only individual concepts but also combinations of concepts and conditional concepts, without any specific regularization.

Fine-tuned LLMs can covertly encode prompt secrets into outputs via steganographic channels. Prior work demonstrated this threat but relied on trivially recoverable encodings. We formalize payload recoverability via classifier accuracy and show previous schemes achieve 100\% recoverability. In response, we introduce low-recoverability steganography, replacing arbitrary mappings with embedding-space-derived ones. For Llama-8B (LoRA) and Ministral-8B (LoRA) trained on TrojanStego prompts, exact secret recovery rises from 17$\rightarrow$30\% (+78\%) and 24$\rightarrow$43\% (+80\%) respectively, while on Llama-70B (LoRA) trained on Wiki prompts, it climbs from 9$\rightarrow$19\% (+123\%), all while reducing payload recoverability. We then discuss detection. We argue that detecting fine-tuning-based steganographic attacks requires approaches beyond traditional steganalysis. Standard approaches measure distributional shift, which is an expected side-effect of fine-tuning. Instead, we propose a mechanistic interpretability approach: linear probes trained on later-layer activations detect the secret with up to 33\% higher accuracy in fine-tuned models compared to base models, even for low-recoverability schemes. This suggests that malicious fine-tuning leaves actionable internal signatures amenable to interpretability-based defenses.

Regression models are widely used in industrial processes, engineering and in natural and physical sciences, yet their robustness to poisoning has received less attention. When it has, studies often assume unrealistic threat models and are thus less useful in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel optimal stealthy attack formulation that considers different degrees of detectability and show that it bypasses state-of-the-art defenses. We further propose a new methodology based on normalization of objectives to evaluate different trade-offs between effectiveness and detectability. Finally, we develop a novel defense (BayesClean) against stealthy attacks. BayesClean improves on previous defenses when attacks are stealthy and the number of poisoning points is significant.

Frontier language model agents can exhibit misaligned behaviors, including deception, exploiting reward hacks, and pursuing hidden objectives. To control potentially misaligned agents, we can use LLMs themselves to monitor for misbehavior. In this paper, we study how information access affects LLM monitor performance. While one might expect that monitors perform better when they have access to more of the monitored agents' reasoning and actions, we find that contemporary systems often perform better with less information, a phenomenon we call the less-is-more effect for automated oversight. We demonstrate this phenomenon, and analyze the conditions under which it occurs, in three evaluation environments where agents must conduct sabotage while evading monitors. Leveraging this effect, we introduce extract-and-evaluate (EaE) monitoring -- a new hierarchical approach where one monitor isolates relevant excerpts from the monitored agent's trajectory and another monitor scores these excerpts. In BigCodeBench-Sabotage with a GPT-4.1-mini monitor, EaE improves sabotage detection rates by 16.8 percentage points over the next-best approach. In other settings, EaE either outperforms or is competitive with baselines. In addition, we find that agents unaware of being monitored can be caught much more easily and that monitors scoring longer reasoning traces gain more from information filtering. Lastly, we conduct a cost-performance analysis and find that Gemini and Claude models with monitoring techniques that involve information filtering occupy much of the Pareto frontier.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on sensitive datasets carries a substantial risk of unintended memorization and leakage of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which can violate privacy regulations and compromise individual safety. In this work, we systematically investigate a critical and underexplored vulnerability: the exposure of PII that appears only in model inputs, not in training targets. Using both synthetic and real-world datasets, we design controlled extraction probes to quantify unintended PII memorization and study how factors such as language, PII frequency, task type, and model size influence memorization behavior. We further benchmark four privacy-preserving approaches including differential privacy, machine unlearning, regularization, and preference alignment, evaluating their trade-offs between privacy and task performance. Our results show that post-training methods generally provide more consistent privacy-utility trade-offs, while differential privacy achieves strong reduction in leakage in specific settings, although it can introduce training instability. These findings highlight the persistent challenge of memorization in fine-tuned LLMs and emphasize the need for robust, scalable privacy-preserving techniques.

Annotating medical data for training AI models is often costly and limited due to the shortage of specialists with relevant clinical expertise. This challenge is further compounded by privacy and ethical concerns associated with sensitive patient information. As a result, well-trained medical segmentation models on private datasets constitute valuable intellectual property requiring robust protection mechanisms. Existing model protection techniques primarily focus on classification and generative tasks, while segmentation models-crucial to medical image analysis-remain largely underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel, stealthy, and harmless method, StealthMark, for verifying the ownership of medical segmentation models under black-box conditions. Our approach subtly modulates model uncertainty without altering the final segmentation outputs, thereby preserving the model's performance. To enable ownership verification, we incorporate model-agnostic explanation methods, e.g. LIME, to extract feature attributions from the model outputs. Under specific triggering conditions, these explanations reveal a distinct and verifiable watermark. We further design the watermark as a QR code to facilitate robust and recognizable ownership claims. We conducted extensive experiments across four medical imaging datasets and five mainstream segmentation models. The results demonstrate the effectiveness, stealthiness, and harmlessness of our method on the original model's segmentation performance. For example, when applied to the SAM model, StealthMark consistently achieved ASR above 95% across various datasets while maintaining less than a 1% drop in Dice and AUC scores, significantly outperforming backdoor-based watermarking methods and highlighting its strong potential for practical deployment. Our implementation code is made available at: https://github.com/Qinkaiyu/StealthMark.

Individual Differential Privacy (iDP) promises users control over their privacy, but this promise can be broken in practice. We reveal a previously overlooked vulnerability in sampling-based iDP mechanisms: while conforming to the iDP guarantees, an individual's privacy risk is not solely governed by their own privacy budget, but critically depends on the privacy choices of all other data contributors. This creates a mismatch between the promise of individual privacy control and the reality of a system where risk is collectively determined. We demonstrate empirically that certain distributions of privacy preferences can unintentionally inflate the privacy risk of individuals, even when their formal guarantees are met. Moreover, this excess risk provides an exploitable attack vector. A central adversary or a set of colluding adversaries can deliberately choose privacy budgets to amplify vulnerabilities of targeted individuals. Most importantly, this attack operates entirely within the guarantees of DP, hiding this excess vulnerability. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates successful attacks against 62% of targeted individuals, substantially increasing their membership inference susceptibility. To mitigate this, we propose $(\varepsilon_i,δ_i,\overlineΔ)$-iDP a privacy contract that uses $Δ$-divergences to provide users with a hard upper bound on their excess vulnerability, while offering flexibility to mechanism design. Our findings expose a fundamental challenge to the current paradigm, demanding a re-evaluation of how iDP systems are designed, audited, communicated, and deployed to make excess risks transparent and controllable.

We present an experimental evaluation that assesses the robustness of four open source LLMs claiming function-calling capabilities against three different attacks, and we measure the effectiveness of eight different defences. Our results show how these models are not safe by default, and how the defences are not yet employable in real-world scenarios.

Consensus mechanisms are the core of any blockchain system. However, the majority of these mechanisms do not target federated learning directly nor do they aid in the aggregation step. This paper introduces Proof of Reasoning (PoR), a novel consensus mechanism specifically designed for federated learning using blockchain, aimed at preserving data privacy, defending against malicious attacks, and enhancing the validation of participating networks. Unlike generic blockchain consensus mechanisms commonly found in the literature, PoR integrates three distinct processes tailored for federated learning. Firstly, a masked autoencoder (MAE) is trained to generate an encoder that functions as a feature map and obfuscates input data, rendering it resistant to human reconstruction and model inversion attacks. Secondly, a downstream classifier is trained at the edge, receiving input from the trained encoder. The downstream network's weights, a single encoded datapoint, the network's output and the ground truth are then added to a block for federated aggregation. Lastly, this data facilitates the aggregation of all participating networks, enabling more complex and verifiable aggregation methods than previously possible. This three-stage process results in more robust networks with significantly reduced computational complexity, maintaining high accuracy by training only the downstream classifier at the edge. PoR scales to large IoT networks with low latency and storage growth, and adapts to evolving data, regulations, and network conditions.

Robustness to malicious attacks is crucial for practical decentralized signal processing and machine learning systems. A typical example of such attacks is label poisoning, meaning that some agents possess corrupted local labels and share models trained on these poisoned data. To defend against malicious attacks, existing works often focus on designing robust aggregators; meanwhile, the weighted mean aggregator is typically considered a simple, vulnerable baseline. This paper analyzes the robustness of decentralized gradient descent under label poisoning attacks, considering both robust and weighted mean aggregators. Theoretical results reveal that the learning errors of robust aggregators depend on the network topology, whereas the performance of weighted mean aggregator is topology-independent. Remarkably, the weighted mean aggregator, although often considered vulnerable, can outperform robust aggregators under sufficient heterogeneity, particularly when: (i) the global contamination rate (i.e., the fraction of poisoned agents for the entire network) is smaller than the local contamination rate (i.e., the maximal fraction of poisoned neighbors for the regular agents); (ii) the network of regular agents is disconnected; or (iii) the network of regular agents is sparse and the local contamination rate is high. Empirical results support our theoretical findings, highlighting the important role of network topology in the robustness to label poisoning attacks.