Fortifying the Agentic Web: A Unified Zero-Trust Architecture Against Logic-layer Threats

This paper presents a Unified Security Architecture that fortifies the Agentic Web through a Zero-Trust IAM framework. This architecture is built on a foundation of rich, verifiable agent identities using Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs), with discovery managed by a protocol-agnostic Agent Name Service (ANS). Security is operationalized through a multi-layered Trust Fabric which introduces significant innovations, including Trust-Adaptive Runtime Environments (TARE), Causal Chain Auditing, and Dynamic Identity with Behavioral Attestation. By explicitly linking the LPCI threat to these enhanced architectural countermeasures within a formal security model, we propose a comprehensive and forward-looking blueprint for a secure, resilient, and trustworthy agentic ecosystem. Our formal analysis demonstrates that the proposed architecture provides provable security guarantees against LPCI attacks with bounded probability of success.

FedMM-X: A Trustworthy and Interpretable Framework for Federated Multi-Modal Learning in Dynamic Environments

As artificial intelligence systems increasingly operate in Real-world environments, the integration of multi-modal data sources such as vision, language, and audio presents both unprecedented opportunities and critical challenges for achieving trustworthy intelligence. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that unifies federated learning with explainable multi-modal reasoning to ensure trustworthiness in decentralized, dynamic settings. Our approach, called FedMM-X (Federated Multi-Modal Explainable Intelligence), leverages cross-modal consistency checks, client-level interpretability mechanisms, and dynamic trust calibration to address challenges posed by data heterogeneity, modality imbalance, and out-of-distribution generalization. Through rigorous evaluation across federated multi-modal benchmarks involving vision-language tasks, we demonstrate improved performance in both accuracy and interpretability while reducing vulnerabilities to adversarial and spurious correlations. Further, we introduce a novel trust score aggregation method to quantify global model reliability under dynamic client participation. Our findings pave the way toward developing robust, interpretable, and socially responsible AI systems in Real-world environments.

CPTQuant -- A Novel Mixed Precision Post-Training Quantization Techniques for Large Language Models

Large language models have transformed the comprehension and generation of natural language tasks, but they come with substantial memory and computational requirements. Quantization techniques have emerged as a promising avenue for addressing these challenges while preserving accuracy and making energy efficient. We propose CPTQuant, a comprehensive strategy that introduces correlation-based (CMPQ), pruning-based (PMPQ), and Taylor decomposition-based (TDMPQ) mixed precision techniques. CMPQ adapts the precision level based on canonical correlation analysis of different layers. PMPQ optimizes precision layer-wise based on their sensitivity to sparsity. TDMPQ modifies precision using Taylor decomposition to assess each layer's sensitivity to input perturbation. These strategies allocate higher precision to more sensitive layers while diminishing precision to robust layers. CPTQuant assesses the performance across BERT, OPT-125M, OPT-350M, OPT-1.3B, and OPT-2.7B. We demonstrate up to 4x compression and a 2x-fold increase in efficiency with minimal accuracy drop compared to Hugging Face FP16. PMPQ stands out for achieving a considerably higher model compression. Sensitivity analyses across various LLMs show that the initial and final 30% of layers exhibit higher sensitivities than the remaining layers. PMPQ demonstrates an 11% higher compression ratio than other methods for classification tasks, while TDMPQ achieves a 30% greater compression ratio for language modeling tasks.