Boundary Point Jailbreaking of Black-Box LLMs

Frontier LLMs are safeguarded against attempts to extract harmful information via adversarial prompts known as "jailbreaks". Recently, defenders have developed classifier-based systems that have survived thousands of hours of human red teaming. We introduce Boundary Point Jailbreaking (BPJ), a new class of automated jailbreak attacks that evade the strongest industry-deployed safeguards. Unlike previous attacks that rely on white/grey-box assumptions (such as classifier scores or gradients) or libraries of existing jailbreaks, BPJ is fully black-box and uses only a single bit of information per query: whether or not the classifier flags the interaction. To achieve this, BPJ addresses the core difficulty in optimising attacks against robust real-world defences: evaluating whether a proposed modification to an attack is an improvement. Instead of directly trying to learn an attack for a target harmful string, BPJ converts the string into a curriculum of intermediate attack targets and then actively selects evaluation points that best detect small changes in attack strength ("boundary points"). We believe BPJ is the first fully automated attack algorithm that succeeds in developing universal jailbreaks against Constitutional Classifiers, as well as the first automated attack algorithm that succeeds against GPT-5's input classifier without relying on human attack seeds. BPJ is difficult to defend against in individual interactions but incurs many flags during optimisation, suggesting that effective defence requires supplementing single-interaction methods with batch-level monitoring.

Voice-Driven Semantic Perception for UAV-Assisted Emergency Networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted networks are increasingly foreseen as a promising approach for emergency response, providing rapid, flexible, and resilient communications in environments where terrestrial infrastructure is degraded or unavailable. In such scenarios, voice radio communications remain essential for first responders due to their robustness; however, their unstructured nature prevents direct integration with automated UAV-assisted network management. This paper proposes SIREN, an AI-driven framework that enables voice-driven perception for UAV-assisted networks. By integrating Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with Large Language Model (LLM)-based semantic extraction and Natural Language Processing (NLP) validation, SIREN converts emergency voice traffic into structured, machine-readable information, including responding units, location references, emergency severity, and Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. SIREN is evaluated using synthetic emergency scenarios with controlled variations in language, speaker count, background noise, and message complexity. The results demonstrate robust transcription and reliable semantic extraction across diverse operating conditions, while highlighting speaker diarization and geographic ambiguity as the main limiting factors. These findings establish the feasibility of voice-driven situational awareness for UAV-assisted networks and show a practical foundation for human-in-the-loop decision support and adaptive network management in emergency response operations.

On the Rate-Distortion-Complexity Tradeoff for Semantic Communication

Semantic communication is a novel communication paradigm that focuses on conveying the user's intended meaning rather than the bit-wise transmission of source signals. One of the key challenges is to effectively represent and extract the semantic meaning of any given source signals. While deep learning (DL)-based solutions have shown promising results in extracting implicit semantic information from a wide range of sources, existing work often overlooks the high computational complexity inherent in both model training and inference for the DL-based encoder and decoder. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a rate-distortion-complexity (RDC) framework which extends the classical rate-distortion theory by incorporating the constraints on semantic distance, including both the traditional bit-wise distortion metric and statistical difference-based divergence metric, and complexity measure, adopted from the theory of minimum description length and information bottleneck. We derive the closed-form theoretical results of the minimum achievable rate under given constraints on semantic distance and complexity for both Gaussian and binary semantic sources. Our theoretical results show a fundamental three-way tradeoff among achievable rate, semantic distance, and model complexity. Extensive experiments on real-world image and video datasets validate this tradeoff and further demonstrate that our information-theoretic complexity measure effectively correlates with practical computational costs, guiding efficient system design in resource-constrained scenarios.

Named Entity Recognition for Payment Data Using NLP

Named Entity Recognition (NER) has emerged as a critical component in automating financial transaction processing, particularly in extracting structured information from unstructured payment data. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art NER algorithms specifically designed for payment data extraction, including Conditional Random Fields (CRF), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory with CRF (BiLSTM-CRF), and transformer-based models such as BERT and FinBERT. We conduct extensive experiments on a dataset of 50,000 annotated payment transactions across multiple payment formats including SWIFT MT103, ISO 20022, and domestic payment systems. Our experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuned BERT models achieve an F1-score of 94.2% for entity extraction, outperforming traditional CRF-based approaches by 12.8 percentage points. Furthermore, we introduce PaymentBERT, a novel hybrid architecture combining domain-specific financial embeddings with contextual representations, achieving state-of-the-art performance with 95.7% F1-score while maintaining real-time processing capabilities. We provide detailed analysis of cross-format generalization, ablation studies, and deployment considerations. This research provides practical insights for financial institutions implementing automated sanctions screening, anti-money laundering (AML) compliance, and payment processing systems.

Improving LLM-based Recommendation with Self-Hard Negatives from Intermediate Layers

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in recommender systems, where supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is commonly used for adaptation. Subsequent studies further introduce preference learning to incorporate negative samples into the training process. However, existing methods rely on sequence-level, offline-generated negatives, making them less discriminative and informative when adapting LLMs to recommendation tasks with large negative item spaces. To address these challenges, we propose ILRec, a novel preference fine-tuning framework for LLM-based recommendation, leveraging self-hard negative signals extracted from intermediate layers to improve preference learning. Specifically, we identify self-hard negative tokens from intermediate layers as fine-grained negative supervision that dynamically reflects the model's preference learning process. To effectively integrate these signals into training, we design a two-stage framework comprising cross-layer preference optimization and cross-layer preference distillation, enabling the model to jointly discriminate informative negatives and enhance the quality of negative signals from intermediate layers. In addition, we introduce a lightweight collaborative filtering model to assign token-level rewards for negative signals, mitigating the risk of over-penalizing false negatives. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate ILRec's effectiveness in enhancing the performance of LLM-based recommender systems.

Training-Free Acceleration for Document Parsing Vision-Language Model with Hierarchical Speculative Decoding

Document parsing is a fundamental task in multimodal understanding, supporting a wide range of downstream applications such as information extraction and intelligent document analysis. Benefiting from strong semantic modeling and robust generalization, VLM-based end-to-end approaches have emerged as the mainstream paradigm in recent years. However, these models often suffer from substantial inference latency, as they must auto-regressively generate long token sequences when processing long-form documents. In this work, motivated by the extremely long outputs and complex layout structures commonly found in document parsing, we propose a training-free and highly efficient acceleration method. Inspired by speculative decoding, we employ a lightweight document parsing pipeline as a draft model to predict batches of future tokens, while the more accurate VLM verifies these draft predictions in parallel. Moreover, we further exploit the layout-structured nature of documents by partitioning each page into independent regions, enabling parallel decoding of each region using the same draft-verify strategy. The final predictions are then assembled according to the natural reading order. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: on the general-purpose OmniDocBench, our method provides a 2.42x lossless acceleration for the dots.ocr model, and achieves up to 4.89x acceleration on long-document parsing tasks. We will release our code to facilitate reproducibility and future research.

Foundation Model-Driven Semantic Change Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery

Remote sensing (RS) change detection methods can extract critical information on surface dynamics and are an essential means for humans to understand changes in the earth's surface and environment. Among these methods, semantic change detection (SCD) can more effectively interpret the multi-class information contained in bi-temporal RS imagery, providing semantic-level predictions that support dynamic change monitoring. However, due to the limited semantic understanding capability of the model and the inherent complexity of the SCD tasks, existing SCD methods face significant challenges in both performance and paradigm complexity. In this paper, we propose PerASCD, a SCD method driven by RS foundation model PerA, designed to enhance the multi-scale semantic understanding and overall performance. We introduce a modular Cascaded Gated Decoder (CG-Decoder) that simplifies complex SCD decoding pipelines while promoting effective multi-level feature interaction and fusion. In addition, we propose a Soft Semantic Consistency Loss (SSCLoss) to mitigate the numerical instability commonly encountered during SCD training. We further explore the applicability of multiple existing RS foundation models on the SCD task when equipped with the proposed decoder. Experimental results demonstrate that our decoder not only effectively simplifies the paradigm of SCD, but also achieves seamless adaptation across various vision encoders. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on two public benchmark datasets, validating its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/SathShen/PerASCD.git.

DMAP: A Distribution Map for Text

Large Language Models (LLMs) are a powerful tool for statistical text analysis, with derived sequences of next-token probability distributions offering a wealth of information. Extracting this signal typically relies on metrics such as perplexity, which do not adequately account for context; how one should interpret a given next-token probability is dependent on the number of reasonable choices encoded by the shape of the conditional distribution. In this work, we present DMAP, a mathematically grounded method that maps a text, via a language model, to a set of samples in the unit interval that jointly encode rank and probability information. This representation enables efficient, model-agnostic analysis and supports a range of applications. We illustrate its utility through three case studies: (i) validation of generation parameters to ensure data integrity, (ii) examining the role of probability curvature in machine-generated text detection, and (iii) a forensic analysis revealing statistical fingerprints left in downstream models that have been subject to post-training on synthetic data. Our results demonstrate that DMAP offers a unified statistical view of text that is simple to compute on consumer hardware, widely applicable, and provides a foundation for further research into text analysis with LLMs.

Criteria-first, semantics-later: reproducible structure discovery in image-based sciences

Across the natural and life sciences, images have become a primary measurement modality, yet the dominant analytic paradigm remains semantics-first. Structure is recovered by predicting or enforcing domain-specific labels. This paradigm fails systematically under the conditions that make image-based science most valuable, including open-ended scientific discovery, cross-sensor and cross-site comparability, and long-term monitoring in which domain ontologies and associated label sets drift culturally, institutionally, and ecologically. A deductive inversion is proposed in the form of criteria-first and semantics-later. A unified framework for criteria-first structure discovery is introduced. It separates criterion-defined, semantics-free structure extraction from downstream semantic mapping into domain ontologies or vocabularies and provides a domain-general scaffold for reproducible analysis across image-based sciences. Reproducible science requires that the first analytic layer perform criterion-driven, semantics-free structure discovery, yielding stable partitions, structural fields, or hierarchies defined by explicit optimality criteria rather than local domain ontologies. Semantics is not discarded; it is relocated downstream as an explicit mapping from the discovered structural product to a domain ontology or vocabulary, enabling plural interpretations and explicit crosswalks without rewriting upstream extraction. Grounded in cybernetics, observation-as-distinction, and information theory's separation of information from meaning, the argument is supported by cross-domain evidence showing that criteria-first components recur whenever labels do not scale. Finally, consequences are outlined for validation beyond class accuracy and for treating structural products as FAIR, AI-ready digital objects for long-term monitoring and digital twins.

TEGRA: Text Encoding With Graph and Retrieval Augmentation for Misinformation Detection

Misinformation detection is a critical task that can benefit significantly from the integration of external knowledge, much like manual fact-checking. In this work, we propose a novel method for representing textual documents that facilitates the incorporation of information from a knowledge base. Our approach, Text Encoding with Graph (TEG), processes documents by extracting structured information in the form of a graph and encoding both the text and the graph for classification purposes. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that this hybrid representation enhances misinformation detection performance compared to using language models alone. Furthermore, we introduce TEGRA, an extension of our framework that integrates domain-specific knowledge, further enhancing classification accuracy in most cases.