SeClaw: Spec-Driven Security Task Synthesis for Evaluating Autonomous Agents

Autonomous LLM agents increasingly operate in stateful environments where they access tools, files, memory, and external services. While such capabilities enable complex real-world workflows, they also introduce security risks that are difficult to capture with existing evaluations. Current agent security benchmarks often rely on manually curated tasks, provide limited coverage of emerging threats, and focus primarily on final outcomes rather than the execution processes that lead to unsafe behavior. We introduce SeClaw, a framework that combines specification-driven security task synthesis with execution-based security evaluation for Autonomous agents. Spec-driven security task synthesis enables scalable and controllable construction of security tasks from structured risk specifications, while SeClaw docker provides a standardized testbed for evaluating agent behavior under diverse safety-risk scenarios. The benchmark covers risks arising from resources, user tasks, environments, and intrinsic agent behaviors, and supports trajectory-aware assessment of unsafe actions beyond final responses. By bridging systematic task synthesis and reproducible security evaluation, SeClaw provides a practical foundation for measuring, diagnosing, and comparing security failures in autonomous LLM agents. The code is available at https://github.com/seclaw-eval/seclaw-eval.

Early Diagnosis of Wasted Computation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems via Failure-Aware Observability

Tool-using multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems spend computation through model tokens, tool calls, retries, and code execution before producing an answer. When a run fails, final-answer evaluation reveals the endpoint but usually not the point at which the trajectory stopped making recoverable progress. This paper introduces a failure-aware observability framework for diagnosing wasted computation in multi-agent LLM traces. The framework maps recurring failure modes to online trace signals, including tool reliability, execution recovery, orchestration loops, evidence availability, information change, and budget pressure. We instantiate the framework in a three- agent question-answering system and evaluate it on 165 GAIA validation traces under identical execution caps. Operational failures remain common: 22/53 level-1 runs, 33/86 level-2 runs, and 12/26 level-3 runs fail to produce a usable final answer. The traces expose different mechanisms behind these outcomes, including insufficient evidence, repeated-action loops, max-step termination, tool-failure streaks, and execution calls that succeed without useful output. Mean token use rises from 8,152 tokens at level 1 to 16,389 tokens at level 3, while evidence availability and sentence-level support diverge. A cached 10-trace LLM-judge grounding audit shows that cheap online signals and deeper semantic metrics capture complementary layers of failure. The results position failure-aware observability as a diagnostic layer between raw execution logs and final-answer accuracy.

Differentially Private Preference Data Synthesis for Large Language Model Alignment

Preference alignment is a crucial post-training step for large language models (LLMs) to ensure their outputs align with human values. However, post-training on real human preference data raises privacy concerns, as these datasets often contain sensitive user prompts and human judgments. To address this, we propose DPPrefSyn, a novel algorithm for generating differentially private (DP) synthetic preference data to enable privacy-preserving preference alignment. DPPrefSyn is a principled framework grounded in the Bradley-Terry preference model and the intrinsic geometric structure of pairwise human preference data. It first learns an underlying preference model from private data with formal differential privacy guarantees, and then leverages the learned model together with public prompts to synthesize high-quality preference data. It exploits the shared linear structure of per-cluster reward models to effectively capture heterogeneous human preferences in private datasets, and leverages DP Principal Component Analysis (DP-PCA) to improve learning accuracy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DPPrefSyn achieves competitive alignment performance under strong DP guarantees. These findings highlight the potential of synthetic preference data as a practical alternative for privacy-preserving preference alignment across a broad range of applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to generate DP synthetic preference data for LLM alignment. Our code is available at https://github.com/gfengyu/Differentially-Private-Preference-Data-Synthesis.

Hera: Learning Long-Horizon Coordination for Device-Cloud Collaborative LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents excel at solving complex long-horizon tasks through autonomous interaction with environments. However, their real-world deployment faces a fundamental device--cloud dilemma: on-device models are efficient but often brittle, while cloud models are stronger but costly in computation. State-of-the-art LLM device--cloud routers usually make coarse task-level decisions, which cannot adapt to the changing difficulty of multi-step agent interactions. To address this issue, we present Hera, a step-level device--cloud LLM agent coordinator for long-horizon tasks achieving a strong performance--cost Pareto frontier. Hera adopts a novel two-stage training paradigm: (1) imitation learning for cold-start, followed by (2) reinforcement learning that jointly optimizes task success and cloud usage efficiency. The first stage casts step-level routing as a supervised classification problem: the device agent is replayed on cloud trajectories, with each state labeled by the agreement between device and cloud actions. In the second stage, we perform cost-aware reinforcement learning by grouping identical states across trajectories and updating Hera with labels favoring higher expected return and fewer future cloud calls. We evaluate Hera on ALFWorld, WebShop, and AppWorld, where it consistently outperforms prior methods, achieving 92.5% of the cloud-only success rate with cloud use in only 46.3% of steps.

Self-supervised Dynamic Heterogeneous Degradation Modeling for Unified Zero-Shot Image Restoration

Zero-shot image restoration provides a flexible way to handle diverse degradations without task-specific training. However, existing methods typically rely on stacked layers or pre-trained features to enhance degradation expression, while overlooking physically consistent priors. The insufficient degradation prompts impose the heavy training burden and high sampling costs during zero-shot diffusion. Moreover, the fixed inference trajectory often collapses to suboptimal solutions under complex corruptions. We observe that heterogeneous degradations can be reparameterized into a minimal set of physically coherent parameters for compact representation. Based on this insight, we first propose a unified physical zero-shot image restoration (UP-ZeroIR) framework that explicitly models heterogeneous degradations into a homogeneous all-in-one distribution. The distribution can be optimized directly in the latent space, enabling principled solution exploration and effective prompt adaptation. Besides, we introduce a dynamic quality-refinement strategy that adaptively adjusts the diffusion trajectory for robust globally optimal convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across both single and mixed degradations. Our code is available at https://github.com/yangjinglyy/UP-ZeroIR

Efficient Multi-objective Prompt Optimization via Pure-exploration Bandits

Prompt engineering has become central to eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). At its core lies prompt selection -- efficiently identifying the most effective prompts. However, most prior investigations overlook a key challenge: the inherently multi-faceted nature of prompt performance, which cannot be captured by a single metric. To fill this gap, we study the multi-objective prompt selection problem under two practical settings: Pareto prompt set recovery and best feasible prompt identification. Casting the problem into the pure-exploration bandits framework, we adapt provably efficient algorithms from multi-objective bandits and further introduce a novel design for best feasible arm identification in structured bandits, with theoretical guarantees on the identification error in the linear case. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs show that the bandit-based approaches yield significant improvements over baselines, establishing a principled and efficient framework for multi-objective prompt optimization.

Enhancing Multilingual Counterfactual Generation through Alignment-as-Preference Optimization

Self-generated counterfactual explanations (SCEs) are minimally modified inputs (minimality) generated by large language models (LLMs) that flip their own predictions (validity), offering a causally grounded approach to unraveling black-box LLM behavior. Yet extending them beyond English remains challenging: existing methods struggle to produce valid SCEs in non-dominant languages, and a persistent trade-off between validity and minimality undermines explanation quality. We introduce Macro, a preference alignment framework that applies Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to multilingual SCE generation, using a composite scoring function to construct preference pairs that effectively translate the trade-off into measurable preference signals. Experiments across four LLMs and seven typologically diverse languages show that Macro improves validity by 12.55\% on average over the chain-of-thought baseline without degrading minimality, while avoiding the severe minimality violations of the translation-based baseline. Compared to supervised fine-tuning, Macro achieves superior performance on both metrics, confirming that explicit preference optimization is essential for balancing this trade-off. Further analyses reveal that Macro increases cross-lingual perturbation alignment and mitigates common generation errors. Our results highlight preference optimization as a promising direction for enhancing multilingual model explanations.

Architecture Matters More Than Scale: A Comparative Study of Retrieval and Memory Augmentation for Financial QA Under SME Compute Constraints

The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) is transforming financial analytics by enabling natural language interfaces for reporting, decision support, and automated reasoning. However, limited empirical understanding exists regarding how different LLM-based reasoning architectures perform across realistic financial workflows, particularly under the cost, accuracy, and compliance constraints faced by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs typically operate within severe infrastructure constraints, lacking cloud GPU budgets, dedicated AI teams, and API-scale inference capacity, making architectural efficiency a first-class concern. To ensure practical relevance, we introduce an explicit SME-constrained evaluation setting in which all experiments are conducted using a locally hosted 8B-parameter instruction-tuned model without cloud-scale infrastructure. This design isolates the impact of architectural choices within a realistic deployment environment. We systematically compare four reasoning architectures: baseline LLM, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), structured long-term memory, and memory-augmented conversational reasoning across both FinQA and ConvFinQA benchmarks. Results reveal a consistent architectural inversion: structured memory improves precision in deterministic, operand-explicit tasks, while retrieval-based approaches outperform memory-centric methods in conversational, reference-implicit settings. Based on these findings, we propose a hybrid deployment framework that dynamically selects reasoning strategies to balance numerical accuracy, auditability, and infrastructure efficiency, providing a practical pathway for financial AI adoption in resource-constrained environments.

NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Restoration in the Wild with Generative Models: Datasets, Methods and Results

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Restoration in the Wild with Generative Models. This challenge utilizes a new short-form UGC (S-UGC) video restoration benchmark, termed KwaiVIR, which is contributed by USTC and Kuaishou Technology. It contains both synthetically distorted videos and real-world short-form UGC videos in the wild. For this edition, the released data include 200 synthetic training videos, 48 wild training videos, 11 validation videos, and 20 testing videos. The primary goal of this challenge is to establish a strong and practical benchmark for restoring short-form UGC videos under complex real-world degradations, especially in the emerging paradigm of generative-model-based S-UGC video restoration. This challenge has two tracks: (i) the primary track is a subjective track, where the evaluation is based on a user study; (ii) the second track is an objective track. These two tracks enable a comprehensive assessment of restoration quality. In total, 95 teams have registered for this competition. And 12 teams submitted valid final solutions and fact sheets for the testing phase. The submitted methods achieved strong performance on the KwaiVIR benchmark, demonstrating encouraging progress in short-form UGC video restoration in the wild.

SL-FAC: A Communication-Efficient Split Learning Framework with Frequency-Aware Compression

The growing complexity of neural networks hinders the deployment of distributed machine learning on resource-constrained devices. Split learning (SL) offers a promising solution by partitioning the large model and offloading the primary training workload from edge devices to an edge server. However, the increasing number of participating devices and model complexity leads to significant communication overhead from the transmission of smashed data (e.g., activations and gradients), which constitutes a critical bottleneck for SL. To tackle this challenge, we propose SL-FAC, a communication-efficient SL framework comprising two key components: adaptive frequency decomposition (AFD) and frequency-based quantization compression (FQC). AFD first transforms the smashed data into the frequency domain and decomposes it into spectral components with distinct information. FQC then applies customized quantization bit widths to each component based on its spectral energy distribution. This collaborative approach enables SL-FAC to achieve significant communication reduction while strategically preserving the information most crucial for model convergence. Extensive experiments confirm the superior performance of SL-FAC for improving the training efficiency.