A Comparative Evaluation of Teacher-Guided Reinforcement Learning Techniques for Autonomous Cyber Operations

Autonomous Cyber Operations (ACO) rely on Reinforcement Learning (RL) to train agents to make effective decisions in the cybersecurity domain. However, existing ACO applications require agents to learn from scratch, leading to slow convergence and poor early-stage performance. While teacher-guided techniques have demonstrated promise in other domains, they have not yet been applied to ACO. In this study, we implement four distinct teacher-guided techniques in the simulated CybORG environment and conduct a comparative evaluation. Our results demonstrate that teacher integration can significantly improve training efficiency in terms of early policy performance and convergence speed, highlighting its potential benefits for autonomous cybersecurity.

Never Come Up Empty: Adaptive HyDE Retrieval for Improving LLM Developer Support

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in assisting developers with code-related questions; however, LLMs carry the risk of generating unreliable answers. To address this, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been proposed to reduce the unreliability (i.e., hallucinations) of LLMs. However, designing effective pipelines remains challenging due to numerous design choices. In this paper, we construct a retrieval corpus of over 3 million Java and Python related Stack Overflow posts with accepted answers, and explore various RAG pipeline designs to answer developer questions, evaluating their effectiveness in generating accurate and reliable responses. More specifically, we (1) design and evaluate 7 different RAG pipelines and 63 pipeline variants to answer questions that have historically similar matches, and (2) address new questions without any close prior matches by automatically lowering the similarity threshold during retrieval, thereby increasing the chance of finding partially relevant context and improving coverage for unseen cases. We find that implementing a RAG pipeline combining hypothetical-documentation-embedding (HyDE) with the full-answer context performs best in retrieving and answering similarcontent for Stack Overflow questions. Finally, we apply our optimal RAG pipeline to 4 open-source LLMs and compare the results to their zero-shot performance. Our findings show that RAG with our optimal RAG pipeline consistently outperforms zero-shot baselines across models, achieving higher scores for helpfulness, correctness, and detail with LLM-as-a-judge. These findings demonstrate that our optimal RAG pipelines robustly enhance answer quality for a wide range of developer queries including both previously seen and novel questions across different LLMs

NeoBERT: A Next-Generation BERT

Recent innovations in architecture, pre-training, and fine-tuning have led to the remarkable in-context learning and reasoning abilities of large auto-regressive language models such as LLaMA and DeepSeek. In contrast, encoders like BERT and RoBERTa have not seen the same level of progress despite being foundational for many downstream NLP applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce NeoBERT, a next-generation encoder that redefines the capabilities of bidirectional models by integrating state-of-the-art advancements in architecture, modern data, and optimized pre-training methodologies. NeoBERT is designed for seamless adoption: it serves as a plug-and-play replacement for existing base models, relies on an optimal depth-to-width ratio, and leverages an extended context length of 4,096 tokens. Despite its compact 250M parameter footprint, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the massive MTEB benchmark, outperforming BERT large, RoBERTa large, NomicBERT, and ModernBERT under identical fine-tuning conditions. In addition, we rigorously evaluate the impact of each modification on GLUE and design a uniform fine-tuning and evaluation framework for MTEB. We release all code, data, checkpoints, and training scripts to accelerate research and real-world adoption.