Standard supervised training for deepfake detection treats all samples with uniform importance, which can be suboptimal for learning robust and generalizable features. In this work, we propose a novel Tutor-Student Reinforcement Learning (TSRL) framework to dynamically optimize the training curriculum. Our method models the training process as a Markov Decision Process where a ``Tutor'' agent learns to guide a ``Student'' (the deepfake detector). The Tutor, implemented as a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent, observes a rich state representation for each training sample, encapsulating not only its visual features but also its historical learning dynamics, such as EMA loss and forgetting counts. Based on this state, the Tutor takes an action by assigning a continuous weight (0-1) to the sample's loss, thereby dynamically re-weighting the training batch. The Tutor is rewarded based on the Student's immediate performance change, specifically rewarding transitions from incorrect to correct predictions. This strategy encourages the Tutor to learn a curriculum that prioritizes high-value samples, such as hard-but-learnable examples, leading to a more efficient and effective training process. We demonstrate that this adaptive curriculum improves the Student's generalization capabilities against unseen manipulation techniques compared to traditional training methods. Code is available at https://github.com/wannac1/TSRL.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become core cognitive components in modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems, combining internal knowledge with external context to perform complex tasks. However, LLMs typically treat all accessible data indiscriminately, lacking inherent awareness of knowledge ownership and access boundaries. This deficiency heightens risks of sensitive data leakage and adversarial manipulation, potentially enabling unauthorized system access and severe security crises. Existing protection strategies rely on rigid, uniform defense that prevent dynamic authorization. Structural isolation methods faces scalability bottlenecks, while prompt guidance methods struggle with fine-grained permissions distinctions. Here, we propose the Chain-of-Authorization (CoA) framework, a secure training and reasoning paradigm that internalizes authorization logic into LLMs' core capabilities. Unlike passive external defneses, CoA restructures the model's information flow: it embeds permission context at input and requires generating explicit authorization reasoning trajectory that includes resource review, identity resolution, and decision-making stages before final response. Through supervised fine-tuning on data covering various authorization status, CoA integrates policy execution with task responses, making authorization a causal prerequisite for substantive responses. Extensive evaluations show that CoA not only maintains comparable utility in authorized scenarios but also overcomes the cognitive confusion when permissions mismatches. It exhibits high rejection rates against various unauthorized and adversarial access. This mechanism leverages LLMs' reasoning capability to perform dynamic authorization, using natural language understanding as a proactive security mechanism for deploying reliable LLMs in modern AI systems.

Autonomous LLM-based agents increasingly operate as long-running processes forming densely interconnected multi-agent ecosystems, whose security properties remain largely unexplored. In particular, OpenClaw, an open-source platform with over 40{,}000 active instances, has stood out recently with its persistent configurations, tool-execution privileges, and cross-platform messaging capabilities. In this work, we present ClawWorm, the first self-replicating worm attack against a production-scale agent framework, achieving a fully autonomous infection cycle initiated by a single message: the worm first hijacks the victim's core configuration to establish persistent presence across session restarts, then executes an arbitrary payload upon each reboot, and finally propagates itself to every newly encountered peer without further attacker intervention. We evaluate the attack on a controlled testbed across three distinct infection vectors and three payload types, demonstrating high success rates in end-to-end infection, sustained multi-hop propagation, and payload independence from the worm mechanism. We analyse the architectural root causes underlying these vulnerabilities and propose defence strategies targeting each identified trust boundary. Code and samples will be released upon completion of responsible disclosure.

Diffusion-based image-to-video (I2V) models increasingly exhibit world-model-like properties by implicitly capturing temporal dynamics. However, existing studies have mainly focused on visual quality and controllability, and the robustness of the state transition learned by the model remains understudied. To fill this gap, we are the first to analyze the vulnerability of I2V models, find that temporal control mechanisms constitute a new attack surface, and reveal the challenge of modeling them uniformly under different attack settings. Based on this, we propose a trajectory-control attack, called CtrlAttack, to interfere with state evolution during the generation process. Specifically, we represent the perturbation as a low-dimensional velocity field and construct a continuous displacement field via temporal integration, thereby affecting the model's state transitions while maintaining temporal consistency; meanwhile, we map the perturbation to the observation space, making the method applicable to both white-box and black-box attack settings. Experimental results show that even under low-dimensional and strongly regularized perturbation constraints, our method can still significantly disrupt temporal consistency by increasing the attack success rate (ASR) to over 90% in the white-box setting and over 80% in the black-box setting, while keeping the variation of the FID and FVD within 6 and 130, respectively, thus revealing the potential security risk of I2V models at the level of state dynamics.

Temporal Forgery Localization (TFL) aims to precisely identify manipulated segments in video and audio, offering strong interpretability for security and forensics. While recent State Space Models (SSMs) show promise in precise temporal reasoning, their use in TFL is hindered by ambiguous boundaries, sparse forgeries, and limited long-range modeling. We propose DeformTrace, which enhances SSMs with deformable dynamics and relay mechanisms to address these challenges. Specifically, Deformable Self-SSM (DS-SSM) introduces dynamic receptive fields into SSMs for precise temporal localization. To further enhance its capacity for temporal reasoning and mitigate long-range decay, a Relay Token Mechanism is integrated into DS-SSM. Besides, Deformable Cross-SSM (DC-SSM) partitions the global state space into query-specific subspaces, reducing non-forgery information accumulation and boosting sensitivity to sparse forgeries. These components are integrated into a hybrid architecture that combines the global modeling of Transformers with the efficiency of SSMs. Extensive experiments show that DeformTrace achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters, faster inference, and stronger robustness.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools and retrieval systems to autonomously complete complex tasks. However, this design exposes agents to indirect prompt injection (IPI), where attacker-controlled context embedded in tool outputs or retrieved content silently steers agent actions away from user intent. Unlike prompt-based attacks, IPI unfolds over multi-turn trajectories, making malicious control difficult to disentangle from legitimate task execution. Existing inference-time defenses primarily rely on heuristic detection and conservative blocking of high-risk actions, which can prematurely terminate workflows or broadly suppress tool usage under ambiguous multi-turn scenarios. We propose AgentSentry, a novel inference-time detection and mitigation framework for tool-augmented LLM agents. To the best of our knowledge, AgentSentry is the first inference-time defense to model multi-turn IPI as a temporal causal takeover. It localizes takeover points via controlled counterfactual re-executions at tool-return boundaries and enables safe continuation through causally guided context purification that removes attack-induced deviations while preserving task-relevant evidence. We evaluate AgentSentry on the \textsc{AgentDojo} benchmark across four task suites, three IPI attack families, and multiple black-box LLMs. AgentSentry eliminates successful attacks and maintains strong utility under attack, achieving an average Utility Under Attack (UA) of 74.55 %, improving UA by 20.8 to 33.6 percentage points over the strongest baselines without degrading benign performance.

Adversarial transferability refers to the capacity of adversarial examples generated on the surrogate model to deceive alternate, unexposed victim models. This property eliminates the need for direct access to the victim model during an attack, thereby raising considerable security concerns in practical applications and attracting substantial research attention recently. In this work, we discern a lack of a standardized framework and criteria for evaluating transfer-based attacks, leading to potentially biased assessments of existing approaches. To rectify this gap, we have conducted an exhaustive review of hundreds of related works, organizing various transfer-based attacks into six distinct categories. Subsequently, we propose a comprehensive framework designed to serve as a benchmark for evaluating these attacks. In addition, we delineate common strategies that enhance adversarial transferability and highlight prevalent issues that could lead to unfair comparisons. Finally, we provide a brief review of transfer-based attacks beyond image classification.

Rapid advances in AI-generated image (AIGI) technology enable highly realistic synthesis, threatening public information integrity and security. Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating texture-level artifact features alongside semantic features into multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can enhance their AIGI detection capability. However, our preliminary analyses reveal that artifact features exhibit high intra-feature similarity, leading to an almost uniform attention map after the softmax operation. This phenomenon causes attention dilution, thereby hindering effective fusion between semantic and artifact features. To overcome this limitation, we propose a lightweight fusion adapter, TranX-Adapter, which integrates a Task-aware Optimal-Transport Fusion that leverages the Jensen-Shannon divergence between artifact and semantic prediction probabilities as a cost matrix to transfer artifact information into semantic features, and an X-Fusion that employs cross-attention to transfer semantic information into artifact features. Experiments on standard AIGI detection benchmarks upon several advanced MLLMs, show that our TranX-Adapter brings consistent and significant improvements (up to +6% accuracy).

Existing forgery detection methods are often limited to uni-modal or bi-modal settings, failing to handle the interleaved text, images, and videos prevalent in real-world misinformation. To bridge this gap, this paper targets to develop a unified framework for omnibus vision-language forgery detection and grounding. In this unified setting, the {interplay} between diverse modalities and the dual requirements of simultaneous detection and localization pose a critical ``difficulty bias`` problem: the simpler veracity classification task tends to dominate the gradients, leading to suboptimal performance in fine-grained grounding during multi-task optimization. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{OmniVL-Guard}, a balanced reinforcement learning framework for omnibus vision-language forgery detection and grounding. Particularly, OmniVL-Guard comprises two core designs: Self-Evolving CoT Generatio and Adaptive Reward Scaling Policy Optimization (ARSPO). {Self-Evolving CoT Generation} synthesizes high-quality reasoning paths, effectively overcoming the cold-start challenge. Building upon this, {Adaptive Reward Scaling Policy Optimization (ARSPO)} dynamically modulates reward scales and task weights, ensuring a balanced joint optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniVL-Guard significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and exhibits zero-shot robust generalization across out-of-domain scenarios.

Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into the detection process can enhance a model's ability to detect synthetic images. However, excessively lengthy reasoning incurs substantial resource overhead, including token consumption and latency, which is particularly redundant when handling obviously generated forgeries. To address this issue, we propose Fake-HR1, a large-scale hybrid-reasoning model that, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to adaptively determine whether reasoning is necessary based on the characteristics of the generative detection task. To achieve this, we design a two-stage training framework: we first perform Hybrid Fine-Tuning (HFT) for cold-start initialization, followed by online reinforcement learning with Hybrid-Reasoning Grouped Policy Optimization (HGRPO) to implicitly learn when to select an appropriate reasoning mode. Experimental results show that Fake-HR1 adaptively performs reasoning across different types of queries, surpassing existing LLMs in both reasoning ability and generative detection performance, while significantly improving response efficiency.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) employ reasoning to address complex tasks. Such explicit reasoning requires extended context lengths, resulting in substantially higher resource consumption. Prior work has shown that adversarially crafted inputs can trigger redundant reasoning processes, exposing LRMs to resource-exhaustion vulnerabilities. However, the reasoning process itself, especially its reflective component, has received limited attention, even though it can lead to over-reflection and consume excessive computing power. In this paper, we introduce Recursive Entropy to quantify the risk of resource consumption in reflection, thereby revealing the safety issues inherent in inference itself. Based on Recursive Entropy, we introduce RECUR, a resource exhaustion attack via Recursive Entropy guided Counterfactual Utilization and Reflection. It constructs counterfactual questions to verify the inherent flaws and risks of LRMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under benign inference, recursive entropy exhibits a pronounced decreasing trend. RECUR disrupts this trend, increasing the output length by up to 11x and decreasing throughput by 90%. Our work provides a new perspective on robust reasoning.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in security-sensitive applications, yet remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks. However, existing backdoor defenses are difficult to operationalize for Backdoor Defense-as-a-Service (BDaaS), as they require unrealistic side information (e.g., downstream clean data, known triggers/targets, or task domain specifics), and lack reusable, scalable purification across diverse backdoored models. In this paper, we present PROTOPURIFY, a backdoor purification framework via parameter edits under minimal assumptions. PROTOPURIFY first builds a backdoor vector pool from clean and backdoored model pairs, aggregates vectors into candidate prototypes, and selects the most aligned candidate for the target model via similarity matching. PROTOPURIFY then identifies a boundary layer through layer-wise prototype alignment and performs targeted purification by suppressing prototype-aligned components in the affected layers, achieving fine-grained mitigation with minimal impact on benign utility. Designed as a BDaaS-ready primitive, PROTOPURIFY supports reusability, customizability, interpretability, and runtime efficiency. Experiments across various LLMs on both classification and generation tasks show that PROTOPURIFY consistently outperforms 6 representative defenses against 6 diverse attacks, including single-trigger, multi-trigger, and triggerless backdoor settings. PROTOPURIFY reduces ASR to below 10%, and even as low as 1.6% in some cases, while incurring less than a 3% drop in clean utility. PROTOPURIFY further demonstrates robustness against adaptive backdoor variants and stability on non-backdoored models.

Transferable adversarial attacks on point clouds remain challenging, as existing methods often rely on model-specific gradients or heuristics that limit generalization to unseen architectures. In this paper, we rethink adversarial transferability from a compact subspace perspective and propose CoSA, a transferable attack framework that operates within a shared low-dimensional semantic space. Specifically, each point cloud is represented as a compact combination of class-specific prototypes that capture shared semantic structure, while adversarial perturbations are optimized within a low-rank subspace to induce coherent and architecture-agnostic variations. This design suppresses model-dependent noise and constrains perturbations to semantically meaningful directions, thereby improving cross-model transferability without relying on surrogate-specific artifacts. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and network architectures demonstrate that CoSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art transferable attacks, while maintaining competitive imperceptibility and robustness under common defense strategies. Codes will be made public upon paper acceptance.

Speech editing achieves semantic inversion by performing fine-grained segment-level manipulation on original utterances, while preserving global perceptual naturalness. Existing detection studies mainly focus on manually edited speech with explicit splicing artifacts, and therefore struggle to cope with emerging end-to-end neural speech editing techniques that generate seamless acoustic transitions. To address this challenge, we first construct a large-scale bilingual dataset, AiEdit, which leverages large language models to drive precise semantic tampering logic and employs multiple advanced neural speech editing methods for data synthesis, thereby filling the gap of high-quality speech editing datasets. Building upon this foundation, we propose PELM (Prior-Enhanced Audio Large Language Model), the first large-model framework that unifies speech editing detection and content localization by formulating them as an audio question answering task. To mitigate the inherent forgery bias and semantic-priority bias observed in existing audio large models, PELM incorporates word-level probability priors to provide explicit acoustic cues, and further designs a centroid-aggregation-based acoustic consistency perception loss to explicitly enforce the modeling of subtle local distribution anomalies. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PELM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both the HumanEdit and AiEdit datasets, achieving equal error rates (EER) of 0.57\% and 9.28\% (localization), respectively.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world intelligent systems for perception and reasoning in open physical environments. While LVLMs are known to be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, existing methods either require access to input channels or depend on knowledge of user queries, assumptions that rarely hold in practical deployments. We propose the first Physical Prompt Injection Attack (PPIA), a black-box, query-agnostic attack that embeds malicious typographic instructions into physical objects perceivable by the LVLM. PPIA requires no access to the model, its inputs, or internal pipeline, and operates solely through visual observation. It combines offline selection of highly recognizable and semantically effective visual prompts with strategic environment-aware placement guided by spatiotemporal attention, ensuring that the injected prompts are both perceivable and influential on model behavior. We evaluate PPIA across 10 state-of-the-art LVLMs in both simulated and real-world settings on tasks including visual question answering, planning, and navigation, PPIA achieves attack success rates up to 98%, with strong robustness under varying physical conditions such as distance, viewpoint, and illumination. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/2023cghacker/Physical-Prompt-Injection-Attack.

Text-to-image (T2I) models have raised increasing safety concerns due to their capacity to generate NSFW and other banned objects. To mitigate these risks, safety filters and concept removal techniques have been introduced to block inappropriate prompts or erase sensitive concepts from the models. However, all the existing defense methods are not well prepared to handle diverse adversarial prompts. In this work, we introduce MacPrompt, a novel black-box and cross-lingual attack that reveals previously overlooked vulnerabilities in T2I safety mechanisms. Unlike existing attacks that rely on synonym substitution or prompt obfuscation, MacPrompt constructs macaronic adversarial prompts by performing cross-lingual character-level recombination of harmful terms, enabling fine-grained control over both semantics and appearance. By leveraging this design, MacPrompt crafts prompts with high semantic similarity to the original harmful inputs (up to 0.96) while bypassing major safety filters (up to 100%). More critically, it achieves attack success rates as high as 92% for sex-related content and 90% for violence, effectively breaking even state-of-the-art concept removal defenses. These results underscore the pressing need to reassess the robustness of existing T2I safety mechanisms against linguistically diverse and fine-grained adversarial strategies.

Neural ranking models have achieved remarkable progress and are now widely deployed in real-world applications such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, like other neural architectures, they remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulations: subtle character-, word-, or phrase-level perturbations can poison retrieval results and artificially promote targeted candidates, undermining the integrity of search engines and downstream systems. Existing defenses either rely on heuristics with poor generalization or on certified methods that assume overly strong adversarial knowledge, limiting their practical use. To address these challenges, we propose RobustMask, a novel defense that combines the context-prediction capability of pretrained language models with a randomized masking-based smoothing mechanism. Our approach strengthens neural ranking models against adversarial perturbations at the character, word, and phrase levels. Leveraging both the pairwise comparison ability of ranking models and probabilistic statistical analysis, we provide a theoretical proof of RobustMask's certified top-K robustness. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that RobustMask successfully certifies over 20% of candidate documents within the top-10 ranking positions against adversarial perturbations affecting up to 30% of their content. These results highlight the effectiveness of RobustMask in enhancing the adversarial robustness of neural ranking models, marking a significant step toward providing stronger security guarantees for real-world retrieval systems.

On-device machine learning (ML) introduces new security concerns about model privacy. Storing valuable trained ML models on user devices exposes them to potential extraction by adversaries. The current mainstream solution for on-device model protection is storing the weights and conducting inference within Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). However, due to limited trusted memory that cannot accommodate the whole model, most existing approaches employ a partitioning strategy, dividing a model into multiple slices that are loaded into the TEE sequentially. This frequent interaction between untrusted and trusted worlds dramatically increases inference latency, sometimes by orders of magnitude. In this paper, we propose Amulet, a fast TEE-shielded on-device inference framework for ML model protection. Amulet incorporates a suite of obfuscation methods specifically designed for common neural network architectures. After obfuscation by the TEE, the entire transformed model can be securely stored in untrusted memory, allowing the inference process to execute directly in untrusted memory with GPU acceleration. For each inference request, only two rounds of minimal-overhead interaction between untrusted and trusted memory are required to process input samples and output results. We also provide theoretical proof from an information-theoretic perspective that the obfuscated model does not leak information about the original weights. We comprehensively evaluated Amulet using diverse model architectures ranging from ResNet-18 to GPT-2. Our approach incurs inference latency only 2.8-4.8x that of unprotected models with negligible accuracy loss, achieving an 8-9x speedup over baseline methods that execute inference entirely within TEEs, and performing approximately 2.2x faster than the state-of-the-art obfuscation-based method.

Existing methods for deepfake detection aim to develop generalizable detectors. Although "generalizable" is the ultimate target once and for all, with limited training forgeries and domains, it appears idealistic to expect generalization that covers entirely unseen variations, especially given the diversity of real-world deepfakes. Therefore, introducing large-scale multi-domain data for training can be feasible and important for real-world applications. However, within such a multi-domain scenario, the differences between multiple domains, rather than the subtle real/fake distinctions, dominate the feature space. As a result, despite detectors being able to relatively separate real and fake within each domain (i.e., high AUC), they struggle with single-image real/fake judgments in domain-unspecified conditions (i.e., low ACC). In this paper, we first define a new research paradigm named Multi-In-Domain Face Forgery Detection (MID-FFD), which includes sufficient volumes of real-fake domains for training. Then, the detector should provide definitive real-fake judgments to the domain-unspecified inputs, which simulate the frame-by-frame independent detection scenario in the real world. Meanwhile, to address the domain-dominant issue, we propose a model-agnostic framework termed DevDet (Developer for Detector) to amplify real/fake differences and make them dominant in the feature space. DevDet consists of a Face Forgery Developer (FFDev) and a Dose-Adaptive detector Fine-Tuning strategy (DAFT). Experiments demonstrate our superiority in predicting real-fake under the MID-FFD scenario while maintaining original generalization ability to unseen data.

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MASs) have reshaped the digital landscape with their emergent coordination and problem-solving capabilities. However, current security evaluations of MASs are still confined to limited attack scenarios, leaving their security issues unclear and likely underestimated. To fill this gap, we propose TOMA, a topology-aware multi-hop attack scheme targeting MASs. By optimizing the propagation of contamination within the MAS topology and controlling the multi-hop diffusion of adversarial payloads originating from the environment, TOMA unveils new and effective attack vectors without requiring privileged access or direct agent manipulation. Experiments demonstrate attack success rates ranging from 40% to 78% across three state-of-the-art MAS architectures: \textsc{Magentic-One}, \textsc{LangManus}, and \textsc{OWL}, and five representative topologies, revealing intrinsic MAS vulnerabilities that may be overlooked by existing research. Inspired by these findings, we propose a conceptual defense framework based on topology trust, and prototype experiments show its effectiveness in blocking 94.8% of adaptive and composite attacks.