Beijing Key Laboratory of Digital Media, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China
Abstract:Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on long-term memory to support complex task execution, user personalization, and domain adaptation. Meanwhile, emerging access-control mechanisms for LLM agents are being explored to block policy-violating requests and prevent misuse. We reveal a novel attack surface arising from agent memory operations: prohibited content that would trigger access control can be fragmented across interactions, stored in long-term memory in benign-appearing form, and later reconstructed through memory retrieval without appearing explicitly in the final user query. We propose FragFuse, the first attack that enables unprivileged users to bypass agent access control by exploiting this temporal channel introduced by long-term memory. FragFuse operates in three stages: (1) identifying rejection-responsive fragments via black-box adaptive querying with fragment masking; (2) injecting these fragments into memory using marker carrier queries; and (3) retrieving and fusing the stored fragments through a follow-up attack query. Although FragFuse can be instantiated manually for individual agents, we further develop a surrogate-based optimization scheme that tunes fusion instructions and marker designs, enabling automated attack generation without violating the attacker's threat-model assumptions. We evaluate FragFuse across four representative agent settings and task domains, covering three state-of-the-art agent access-control mechanisms. FragFuse achieves an average bypass success rate of 86.3% and an average end-to-end harmful task success rate of 41.1% across all settings, with only 4.4% average task-success degradation compared with configurations without access control. We also show that alternative defenses, including state-of-the-art prompt-injection detectors and perplexity detectors, do not effectively address this attack.
Abstract:Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences. This makes them vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, in which seemingly benign content embeds adversarial instructions that manipulate agent behaviour. Existing security benchmarks adopt an \textit{attack-centric} perspective, focusing on the technical feasibility of injections while overlooking the nuanced distribution of resulting harms. In practice, however, prompt-injection risk is victim-dependent: a single exploit can produce asymmetric consequences for different stakeholders, and the same attack pattern may exhibit substantially different effectiveness depending on whom it targets. To capture these properties, we introduce \textbf{\sysname}, a \textit{stakeholder-centric} benchmark to systematically categorize and attribute harm in real-world web agent systems. It distinguishes between affected entities (e.g., user, seller, platform), decomposes the attacks into concrete objectives, and evaluates each case with complementary outcome- and process-level metrics. Our results reveal substantial and heterogeneous vulnerabilities: not a single attack objective is reliably resisted by current agents, and failures distribute across qualitatively distinct modes ranging from \emph{stealthy parasitism} (attack succeeds without disrupting the user's delegated task) to \emph{misaligned disruption} (task disrupted without attack success) and \emph{compounded failure} (both adversarial objective and task integrity simultaneously violated). These patterns are missed by conventional evaluation, highlighting the need for stakeholder-aware assessment of LLM-based agents in real-world deployments. Benchmark is available at https://github.com/StakeBench/SBC.
Abstract:Invariant learning can fail even when the invariant structure is statistically identifiable. We show a conditional computational barrier: under a black-box samplable supervised sparse recovery primitive motivated by average-case sparse-recovery reductions, there exist \emph{samplable} multi-environment instances with a one-dimensional predictive invariant subspace ($k=1$) that are learnable with polynomial samples by exhaustive search, while any polynomial-time constant-accuracy recovery algorithm would contradict the primitive. We further quantify environment diversity by a separation parameter $γ$, which controls identifiability and the curvature of invariance objectives. Under sufficient diversity and local Gaussian regularity, the minimax risk is $\mathbb{E}[\dist(\hat{V},V_{\mathrm{inv}})^2]=Θ(k(d-k)/(n|\mathcal{E}|))$, and under label-induced shifts a phase transition occurs at $n^*\propto k(d-k)/(|\mathcal{E}|γ^2)$ with refined estimation error scaling proportional to $1/γ^2$. Synthetic and real datasets illustrate the predicted gaps and transitions and motivate simple diversity diagnostics.
Abstract:Hierarchical multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly being deployed in high-stakes workflows across domains such as finance and software engineering. In these systems, safety and security are inherently distributed across role-specialized agents, significantly expanding the attack surface, particularly under coordinated adversarial behaviors such as privilege escalation and cross-agent collusion. Existing red-teaming approaches for MAS remain limited: they rely on heuristic selection of target agents and perturb isolated message streams, leaving critical questions unanswered as which agents are most responsible for system safety, and how compromised agents can coordinate to bypass defenses. We propose MAStrike, a closed-loop framework for collusive red-teaming in hierarchical MAS. We propose the first agent-level Shapley value analysis for MAS, quantifying each agent's marginal contribution to system robustness under task-specific distributions. GGuided by this attribution, MAStrike identifies vulnerable agent coalitions and generates coordinated, role-aware adversarial manipulations. These attacks are iteratively refined through structured causal diagnosis, attributing failure cases to uncompromised agents that block adversarial attempts. We further build a comprehensive MAS red-teaming benchmark and controllable environments spanning diverse hierarchical topologies and domains, including finance, software engineering, and CRM. Extensive experiments across MAS built on multiple frontier models show that MAStrike substantially outperforms heuristic baselines. Our analysis further uncovers non-trivial Shapley value distributions and higher-order interaction structures among agents, revealing critical vulnerabilities and coordination patterns that are overlooked by prior single-agent or template-based methods.
Abstract:Accurate computational prediction of T cell receptor (TCR) antigen specificity would transform the study of T cell biology and enable scalable immune engineering, yet existing models lack sufficient sensitivity and specificity for broad applications. A major limitation is the absence of rigorously defined, unseen benchmark datasets that allow unbiased evaluation of model performance and generalizability. Here, we describe two complementary classes of datasets that meet this criterion and argue that they provide both a robust framework for model assessment and a foundation for next-generation TCR-antigen prediction algorithm development.
Abstract:We quantify the energy floor -- the minimum achievable cost given action space constraints -- for Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) HVAC control on the sbsim calibrated building simulator. Through minimum-action experiments, we directly measure this floor at USD 35.51/day, dominated by continuous electrical loads (USD 35.44, 99.8%) with negligible gas consumption. The standard SAC baseline, initialized with schedule-policy replay buffer transitions, converges to USD 37.18/day, 4.7% above the floor. We identify buffer initialization as the dominant source of sub-optimality in this scenario: training from an empty buffer reduces cost to USD 35.57/day, eliminating 96% of the gap. Expanding the supply water temperature range by 10 K yields negligible additional savings (USD 0.03/day), and further expansion triggers physical constraint violations. We additionally uncover a discount factor coupling (gamma_eff = 0.891) shrinking the effective planning horizon from 8.3 h to 46 min -- a benchmark-wide issue warranting audit. Systematic ablation across planning horizon, reward weights, and observation enrichment confirms all pre-filled-buffer configurations cluster within 0.7% (USD 37.18--USD 37.42), demonstrating that equipment minimum power -- not algorithmic design -- imposes the binding constraint.
Abstract:Drug-information question answering is a high-stakes setting where hallucinated facts can mislead clinical decision-making and the provenance of each cited fact matters as much as the fact itself. We present DrugClaw, a multi-agent retrieval-augmented system that queries a registry of drug and pharmacovigilance skills via a reflection-driven state-machine workflow and returns answers grounded in primary regulatory or peer-reviewed records. We also contribute DrugAudit, a 3,772-item authority-aware benchmark with an evaluation panel that scores upstream-of-gold source match, token-level semantic snippet overlap, and citation faithfulness under a dual-judge LLM-as-judge protocol with inter-judge kappa = 0.88 (almost-perfect). Across DrugAudit plus drug-related subsets of MedQA (751) and PubMedQA (512), DrugClaw is top-1 on every column of the headline table: composite Evidence Index under both judges, judge-mediated answer correctness, primary-source rate (0.918, +10.1 pp over next-best), faithfulness (0.887, +5.9 pp), MedQA (0.920), and PubMedQA (0.693).
Abstract:Current vision-language models (VLMs) typically stitch together separate image encoders and language decoders via multi-stage alignment, a modular framework that inevitably fragments pixel-level signals across frames and scatters early pixel-word interactions. In parallel, native VLMs, despite impressive performance on single images, remain largely unexplored in multi-image, video understanding, and spatial intelligence. Hence, we introduce NEO-ov, a native foundation model that learns cross-frame and pixel-word correspondence end-to-end, without any external encoders, auxiliary adapters, or post-hoc fusion. By eliminating module boundaries entirely, NEO-ov enables fine-grained and unified spatiotemporal modeling to emerge natively inside the model. Notably, NEO-ov largely narrows the gap to modular counterparts while excelling at fine-grained visual perception, validating that native "one-vision" architectures are not only feasible but competitive at scale. Beyond empirical performance, we unveil systematic architectural analyses and detailed training recipes to facilitate subsequent native multimodal modeling. Our code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/NEO.
Abstract:Generating a game is not the same as making one that can be played. Despite advances in code generation, existing approaches treat game generation as one-shot translation from prompt to artifact, leaving interaction-level failures undetected. We argue that evaluating and improving game generation requires a player, and study two roles for graphical user interface (GUI) agents in this process: (1) as an objective evaluator, for which we introduce PlaytestArena, a new evaluation environment that pairs 200 browser-based game generation tasks across eight genres with rubrics of expected in-play behaviors, adjudicated by a GUI agent that loads each build in a browser and plays it; and (2) as a subjective playtester, for which we propose Play2Code, where a game agent and a GUI agent operate in a sustained loop with shared memory, turning game generation into a dialogue between coding and playing. Our experiments show that even frontier models struggle to generate playable games directly, while Play2Code achieves a 66.8\% rubric pass-rate, improving over single-pass and agentic-coding baselines by 37.1 and 14.6 points respectively. Further analysis shows that GUI playtester feedback is more traceable than a human report, yet idiosyncratic in ways reminiscent of human testers, establishing game playtesting as a critical testbed for interactive code generation. Our project website is available at https://continual-game-generation.vercel.app/.
Abstract:We introduce LLaVA-OneVision-2 (LLaVA-OV-2), the most capable vision-language model in the LLaVA-OneVision series to date, achieving superior performance across a broad range of multimodal benchmarks. The model builds on a native OneVision-Encoder and incorporates Windowed Attention for efficient local computation while maintaining native resolution. Its key advance is codec-stream tokenization: it treats compressed video as a continuous bit-cost stream, where bit-cost dynamics determine adaptive temporal groups, and motion-residual cues select salient spatial evidence into compact visual canvases. This allocation concentrates a limited token budget on event-bearing content, enabling more stable long-video token compression than fixed groups of pictures. A shared 3D RoPE further places codec canvases, sampled frames, and images in a unified spatiotemporal coordinate system. Furthermore, we build the LLaVA-OV-2 data and training stack around large-scale open supervision: approximately 8M re-captioned video samples for pretraining, a 4M-sample spatial corpus for fine-tuning. We also introduce JumpScore, a temporal-localization benchmark targeting fine-grained grounding in high-frequency, densely repeated motion, a regime underrepresented by existing video evaluations. A standout capability of LLaVA-OV-2 is its unified perception across video understanding, temporal grounding, spatial grounding, and manipulation-trace reasoning. On JumpScore, LLaVA-OneVision-2-8B reaches 74.9 JumpScore mAP, surpassing Qwen3-VL-8B (30.1) by +44.8 points; under matched visual-token budgets on the same benchmark, codec-stream inputs improve temporal grounding over frame sampling by +9.7 points. Across standard benchmarks, LLaVA-OneVision-2-8B further outperforms Qwen3-VL-8B by +4.3 average points on video tasks, +5.3 on spatial tasks, and +15.6 average J&F on tracking tasks.