The Surface You Test Is Not the Surface That Breaks

Tool-augmented LLM agents are vulnerable to prompt injection: a third party who controls part of the agent's context can plant instructions that the agent then executes as if they came from the user. Current evaluations report a single attack success rate per model on one channel, the tool output and treat that number as the model's vulnerability. But tool descriptions, which the agent reads at every turn before any tool is called, are themselves an injection surface that the attacker can choose instead. We hold the injection payload byte-identical and deliver it through both surfaces across 13 LLMs from six families and four task suites. The same bytes invert in success rate across models: GPT-4.1 is 96 percent vulnerable on tool outputs but only 4 percent on tool descriptions, while GEMINI-3-FLASH shows the mirror pattern at 20 percent and 98 percent. A variance decomposition over 6,830 attempts attributes 0 percent of the variation in attack outcomes to the surface alone, while the model-surface interaction accounts for 16.7 percent. Vulnerability is a property of the pairing, not the channel. The Adaptive Attack Rate, defined as the per-cell maximum over surfaces, exceeds the strongest fixed-surface baseline by +9.1 percentage points on average. Standard prompt-level defenses inherit the same blindspot, reducing tool-output ASR to 10-18 percent while leaving the description channel above 54 percent. Both attack and defense evaluation must report per-surface vulnerability.

PhyDrawGen: Physically Grounded Diagram Generation from Natural Language

Generating physics diagrams from text requires strict adherence to physical laws. While current generative models produce visually plausible outputs, they systematically hallucinate force vectors, ignore conservation laws, and violate geometric constraints. We present PhyDrawGen, a neuro-symbolic pipeline that decouples semantic scene understanding from physical constraint satisfaction. First, a large language model extracts a typed scene graph from the problem text. A deterministic solver then converts this graph into a Planar Straight-Line Graph (PSLG), encoding force balance, optical paths, and field topologies as exact geometric primitives. Finally, a fine-tuned Qwen-VL model implements a visually grounded propose-verify loop to iteratively correct any constraint violations. Evaluated on a benchmark of 1,449 problems spanning mechanics, optics, and electromagnetism, PhyDrawGen significantly outperforms GPT-5-image, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Gemini 3 Pro, demonstrating robust physical accuracy even on unusual-object problems.

Thinking Like a Botanist: Challenging Multimodal Language Models with Intent-Driven Chain-of-Inquiry

Vision evaluations are typically done through multi-step processes. In most contemporary fields, experts analyze images using structured, evidence-based adaptive questioning. In plant pathology, botanists inspect leaf images, identify visual cues, infer diagnostic intent, and probe further with targeted questions that adapt to species, symptoms, and severity. This structured probing is crucial for accurate disease diagnosis and treatment formulation. Yet current vision-language models are evaluated on single-turn question answering. To address this gap, we introduce PlantInquiryVQA, a benchmark for studying multi-step, intent-driven visual reasoning in botanical diagnosis. We formalize a Chain of Inquiry framework modeling diagnostic trajectories as ordered question-answer sequences conditioned on grounded visual cues and explicit epistemic intent. We release a dataset of 24,950 expert-curated plant images and 138,068 question-answer pairs annotated with visual grounding, severity labels, and domain-specific reasoning templates. Evaluations on top-tier Multimodal Large Language Models reveal that while they describe visual symptoms adequately, they struggle with safe clinical reasoning and accurate diagnosis. Importantly, structured question-guided inquiry significantly improves diagnostic correctness, reduces hallucination, and increases reasoning efficiency. We hope PlantInquiryVQA serves as a foundational benchmark in advancing research to train diagnostic agents to reason like expert botanists rather than static classifiers.

PATHWAYS: Evaluating Investigation and Context Discovery in AI Web Agents

We introduce PATHWAYS, a benchmark of 250 multi-step decision tasks that test whether web-based agents can discover and correctly use hidden contextual information. Across both closed and open models, agents typically navigate to relevant pages but retrieve decisive hidden evidence in only a small fraction of cases. When tasks require overturning misleading surface-level signals, performance drops sharply to near chance accuracy. Agents frequently hallucinate investigative reasoning by claiming to rely on evidence they never accessed. Even when correct context is discovered, agents often fail to integrate it into their final decision. Providing more explicit instructions improves context discovery but often reduces overall accuracy, revealing a tradeoff between procedural compliance and effective judgement. Together, these results show that current web agent architectures lack reliable mechanisms for adaptive investigation, evidence integration, and judgement override.

PlantVillageVQA: A Visual Question Answering Dataset for Benchmarking Vision-Language Models in Plant Science

PlantVillageVQA is a large-scale visual question answering (VQA) dataset derived from the widely used PlantVillage image corpus. It was designed to advance the development and evaluation of vision-language models for agricultural decision-making and analysis. The PlantVillageVQA dataset comprises 193,609 high-quality question-answer (QA) pairs grounded over 55,448 images spanning 14 crop species and 38 disease conditions. Questions are organised into 3 levels of cognitive complexity and 9 distinct categories. Each question category was phrased manually following expert guidance and generated via an automated two-stage pipeline: (1) template-based QA synthesis from image metadata and (2) multi-stage linguistic re-engineering. The dataset was iteratively reviewed by domain experts for scientific accuracy and relevancy. The final dataset was evaluated using three state-of-the-art models for quality assessment. Our objective remains to provide a publicly available, standardised and expert-verified database to enhance diagnostic accuracy for plant disease identifications and advance scientific research in the agricultural domain. Our dataset will be open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SyedNazmusSakib/PlantVillageVQA.