TopoEdge: Topology-Grounded Agentic Framework for Edge Networking Code Generation and Repair

TopoEdge is a topology-grounded, edge-deployable framework for end-to-end software-defined networking (SDN) configuration generation and repair, motivated by the brittleness of configuration artefacts under topology variation and by strict operational constraints on latency, privacy, and on-site execution. TopoEdge represents each target topology as a router-level graph and embeds it using a contrastively trained graph neural network (GNN), enabling nearest-neighbour retrieval of a verified reference configuration paired with an executable Python driver (a Topotest/pytest test script that orchestrates the emulated network and checks protocol assertions). The target topology, retrieved reference topology, and reference driver are assembled into a topology-grounded retrieval-augmented generation context (TopoRAG), which grounds a distributed, execution-centric generate--verify--repair loop coordinated by a central controller and realised by three role-specialised agents: (i) a Planning agent that produces a topology-consistent configuration plan and a per-device skeleton; (ii) a Generation agent that materialises executable configuration artefacts, including device configurations and the driver; and (iii) a Verification agent that runs the FRRouting Topotest/pytest harness, compresses failures into a compact trace, and emits localised patch directives for iterative repair.

Devling into Adversarial Transferability on Image Classification: Review, Benchmark, and Evaluation

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.

Reasoning Beyond Chain-of-Thought: A Latent Computational Mode in Large Language Models

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear why it works and whether it is the unique mechanism for triggering reasoning in large language models. In this work, we study this question by directly analyzing and intervening on the internal representations of LLMs with Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), identifying a small set of latent features that are causally associated with LLM reasoning behavior. Across multiple model families and reasoning benchmarks, we find that steering a single reasoning-related latent feature can substantially improve accuracy without explicit CoT prompting. For large models, latent steering achieves performance comparable to standard CoT prompting while producing more efficient outputs. We further observe that this reasoning-oriented internal state is triggered early in generation and can override prompt-level instructions that discourage explicit reasoning. Overall, our results suggest that multi-step reasoning in LLMs is supported by latent internal activations that can be externally activated, while CoT prompting is one effective, but not unique, way of activating this mechanism rather than its necessary cause.

Toward Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Sparse Autoencoders

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves the factuality of large language models (LLMs) by grounding outputs in retrieved evidence, but faithfulness failures, where generations contradict or extend beyond the provided sources, remain a critical challenge. Existing hallucination detection methods for RAG often rely either on large-scale detector training, which requires substantial annotated data, or on querying external LLM judges, which leads to high inference costs. Although some approaches attempt to leverage internal representations of LLMs for hallucination detection, their accuracy remains limited. Motivated by recent advances in mechanistic interpretability, we employ sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to disentangle internal activations, successfully identifying features that are specifically triggered during RAG hallucinations. Building on a systematic pipeline of information-based feature selection and additive feature modeling, we introduce RAGLens, a lightweight hallucination detector that accurately flags unfaithful RAG outputs using LLM internal representations. RAGLens not only achieves superior detection performance compared to existing methods, but also provides interpretable rationales for its decisions, enabling effective post-hoc mitigation of unfaithful RAG. Finally, we justify our design choices and reveal new insights into the distribution of hallucination-related signals within LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/Teddy-XiongGZ/RAGLens.

SAGE: Spuriousness-Aware Guided Prompt Exploration for Mitigating Multimodal Bias

Large vision-language models, such as CLIP, have shown strong zero-shot classification performance by aligning images and text in a shared embedding space. However, CLIP models often develop multimodal spurious biases, which is the undesirable tendency to rely on spurious features. For example, CLIP may infer object types in images based on frequently co-occurring backgrounds rather than the object's core features. This bias significantly impairs the robustness of pre-trained CLIP models on out-of-distribution data, where such cross-modal associations no longer hold. Existing methods for mitigating multimodal spurious bias typically require fine-tuning on downstream data or prior knowledge of the bias, which undermines the out-of-the-box usability of CLIP. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze the impact of multimodal spurious bias in zero-shot classification. Based on this insight, we propose Spuriousness-Aware Guided Exploration (SAGE), a simple and effective method that mitigates spurious bias through guided prompt selection. SAGE requires no training, fine-tuning, or external annotations. It explores a space of prompt templates and selects the prompts that induce the largest semantic separation between classes, thereby improving worst-group robustness. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets and five popular backbone models demonstrate that SAGE consistently improves zero-shot performance and generalization, outperforming previous zero-shot approaches without any external knowledge or model updates.

Online Reasoning Video Segmentation with Just-in-Time Digital Twins

Reasoning segmentation (RS) aims to identify and segment objects of interest based on implicit text queries. As such, RS is a catalyst for embodied AI agents, enabling them to interpret high-level commands without requiring explicit step-by-step guidance. However, current RS approaches rely heavily on the visual perception capabilities of multimodal large language models (LLMs), leading to several major limitations. First, they struggle with queries that require multiple steps of reasoning or those that involve complex spatial/temporal relationships. Second, they necessitate LLM fine-tuning, which may require frequent updates to maintain compatibility with contemporary LLMs and may increase risks of catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning. Finally, being primarily designed for static images or offline video processing, they scale poorly to online video data. To address these limitations, we propose an agent framework that disentangles perception and reasoning for online video RS without LLM fine-tuning. Our innovation is the introduction of a just-in-time digital twin concept, where -- given an implicit query -- a LLM plans the construction of a low-level scene representation from high-level video using specialist vision models. We refer to this approach to creating a digital twin as "just-in-time" because the LLM planner will anticipate the need for specific information and only request this limited subset instead of always evaluating every specialist model. The LLM then performs reasoning on this digital twin representation to identify target objects. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a new comprehensive video reasoning segmentation benchmark comprising 200 videos with 895 implicit text queries. The benchmark spans three reasoning categories (semantic, spatial, and temporal) with three different reasoning chain complexity.

Operating Room Workflow Analysis via Reasoning Segmentation over Digital Twins

Analyzing operating room (OR) workflows to derive quantitative insights into OR efficiency is important for hospitals to maximize patient care and financial sustainability. Prior work on OR-level workflow analysis has relied on end-to-end deep neural networks. While these approaches work well in constrained settings, they are limited to the conditions specified at development time and do not offer the flexibility necessary to accommodate the OR workflow analysis needs of various OR scenarios (e.g., large academic center vs. rural provider) without data collection, annotation, and retraining. Reasoning segmentation (RS) based on foundation models offers this flexibility by enabling automated analysis of OR workflows from OR video feeds given only an implicit text query related to the objects of interest. Due to the reliance on large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, current RS approaches struggle with reasoning about semantic/spatial relationships and show limited generalization to OR video due to variations in visual characteristics and domain-specific terminology. To address these limitations, we first propose a novel digital twin (DT) representation that preserves both semantic and spatial relationships between the various OR components. Then, building on this foundation, we propose ORDiRS (Operating Room Digital twin representation for Reasoning Segmentation), an LLM-tuning-free RS framework that reformulates RS into a "reason-retrieval-synthesize" paradigm. Finally, we present ORDiRS-Agent, an LLM-based agent that decomposes OR workflow analysis queries into manageable RS sub-queries and generates responses by combining detailed textual explanations with supporting visual evidence from RS. Experimental results on both an in-house and a public OR dataset demonstrate that our ORDiRS achieves a cIoU improvement of 6.12%-9.74% compared to the existing state-of-the-arts.

Boosting the Local Invariance for Better Adversarial Transferability

Transfer-based attacks pose a significant threat to real-world applications by directly targeting victim models with adversarial examples generated on surrogate models. While numerous approaches have been proposed to enhance adversarial transferability, existing works often overlook the intrinsic relationship between adversarial perturbations and input images. In this work, we find that adversarial perturbation often exhibits poor translation invariance for a given clean image and model, which is attributed to local invariance. Through empirical analysis, we demonstrate that there is a positive correlation between the local invariance of adversarial perturbations w.r.t. the input image and their transferability across different models. Based on this finding, we propose a general adversarial transferability boosting technique called Local Invariance Boosting approach (LI-Boost). Extensive experiments on the standard ImageNet dataset demonstrate that LI-Boost could significantly boost various types of transfer-based attacks (e.g., gradient-based, input transformation-based, model-related, advanced objective function, ensemble, etc.) on CNNs, ViTs, and defense mechanisms. Our approach presents a promising direction for future research in improving adversarial transferability across different models.

Towards Distributed Backdoor Attacks with Network Detection in Decentralized Federated Learning

Distributed backdoor attacks (DBA) have shown a higher attack success rate than centralized attacks in centralized federated learning (FL). However, it has not been investigated in the decentralized FL. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate that, while directly applying DBA to decentralized FL, the attack success rate depends on the distribution of attackers in the network architecture. Considering that the attackers can not decide their location, this paper aims to achieve a high attack success rate regardless of the attackers' location distribution. Specifically, we first design a method to detect the network by predicting the distance between any two attackers on the network. Then, based on the distance, we organize the attackers in different clusters. Lastly, we propose an algorithm to \textit{dynamically} embed local patterns decomposed from a global pattern into the different attackers in each cluster. We conduct a thorough empirical investigation and find that our method can, in benchmark datasets, outperform both centralized attacks and naive DBA in different decentralized frameworks.

A Survey of Lottery Ticket Hypothesis

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) states that a dense neural network model contains a highly sparse subnetwork (i.e., winning tickets) that can achieve even better performance than the original model when trained in isolation. While LTH has been proved both empirically and theoretically in many works, there still are some open issues, such as efficiency and scalability, to be addressed. Also, the lack of open-source frameworks and consensual experimental setting poses a challenge to future research on LTH. We, for the first time, examine previous research and studies on LTH from different perspectives. We also discuss issues in existing works and list potential directions for further exploration. This survey aims to provide an in-depth look at the state of LTH and develop a duly maintained platform to conduct experiments and compare with the most updated baselines.