Category: News

Efficient IoT Intrusion Detection with an Improved Attention-Based CNN-BiLSTM Architecturecs.AI updates on arXiv.org arXiv:2503.19339v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The ever-increasing security vulnerabilities in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems require improved threat detection approaches. This paper presents a compact and efficient approach to detect botnet attacks by employing an integrated approach that consists of traffic pattern analysis, temporal support learning, and focused feature extraction. The proposed attention-based model benefits from a hybrid CNN-BiLSTM architecture and achieves 99% classification accuracy in detecting botnet attacks utilizing the N-BaIoT dataset, while maintaining high precision and recall across various scenarios. The proposed model’s performance is further validated by key parameters, such as Mathews Correlation Coefficient and Cohen’s kappa Correlation Coefficient. The close-to-ideal results for these parameters demonstrate the proposed model’s ability to detect botnet attacks accurately and efficiently in practical settings and on unseen data. The proposed model proved to be a powerful defense mechanism for IoT networks to face emerging security challenges.

 arXiv:2503.19339v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The ever-increasing security vulnerabilities in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems require improved threat detection approaches. This paper presents a compact and efficient approach to detect botnet attacks by employing an integrated approach that consists of traffic pattern analysis, temporal support learning, and focused feature extraction. The proposed attention-based model benefits from a hybrid CNN-BiLSTM architecture and achieves 99% classification accuracy in detecting botnet attacks utilizing the N-BaIoT dataset, while maintaining high precision and recall across various scenarios. The proposed model’s performance is further validated by key parameters, such as Mathews Correlation Coefficient and Cohen’s kappa Correlation Coefficient. The close-to-ideal results for these parameters demonstrate the proposed model’s ability to detect botnet attacks accurately and efficiently in practical settings and on unseen data. The proposed model proved to be a powerful defense mechanism for IoT networks to face emerging security challenges. Read More  

Is Your LLM Really Mastering the Concept? A Multi-Agent Benchmarkcs.AI updates on arXiv.org arXiv:2505.17512v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Concepts serve as fundamental abstractions that support human reasoning and categorization. However, it remains unclear whether large language models truly capture such conceptual structures or primarily rely on surface-level pattern memorization. Existing benchmarks are largely static and fact oriented, which limits their ability to probe fine-grained semantic understanding and makes them vulnerable to data leakage and overfitting. To address this limitation, we introduce CK-Arena, a dynamic benchmark for conceptual knowledge evaluation based on a multi agent social deduction game, namely the Undercover game. In this setting, LLM based agents are assigned subtly different concept words and must describe, distinguish, and infer conceptual properties from others’ statements. Model performance is evaluated through both game level outcomes and the semantic quality of generated descriptions. Furthermore, CK-Arena leverages the interaction process to automatically construct high quality question answering data for fine grained diagnostic analysis. Experimental results show that conceptual understanding varies substantially across models and categories, and is not strictly aligned with overall model capability. The data and code are available at the project homepage: https://ck-arena.site.

 arXiv:2505.17512v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Concepts serve as fundamental abstractions that support human reasoning and categorization. However, it remains unclear whether large language models truly capture such conceptual structures or primarily rely on surface-level pattern memorization. Existing benchmarks are largely static and fact oriented, which limits their ability to probe fine-grained semantic understanding and makes them vulnerable to data leakage and overfitting. To address this limitation, we introduce CK-Arena, a dynamic benchmark for conceptual knowledge evaluation based on a multi agent social deduction game, namely the Undercover game. In this setting, LLM based agents are assigned subtly different concept words and must describe, distinguish, and infer conceptual properties from others’ statements. Model performance is evaluated through both game level outcomes and the semantic quality of generated descriptions. Furthermore, CK-Arena leverages the interaction process to automatically construct high quality question answering data for fine grained diagnostic analysis. Experimental results show that conceptual understanding varies substantially across models and categories, and is not strictly aligned with overall model capability. The data and code are available at the project homepage: https://ck-arena.site. Read More  

Meta Context Engineering via Agentic Skill Evolutioncs.AI updates on arXiv.org arXiv:2601.21557v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The operational efficacy of large language models relies heavily on their inference-time context. This has established Context Engineering (CE) as a formal discipline for optimizing these inputs. Current CE methods rely on manually crafted harnesses, such as rigid generation-reflection workflows and predefined context schemas. They impose structural biases and restrict context optimization to a narrow, intuition-bound design space. To address this, we introduce Meta Context Engineering (MCE), a bi-level framework that supersedes static CE heuristics by co-evolving CE skills and context artifacts. In MCE iterations, a meta-level agent refines engineering skills via agentic crossover, a deliberative search over the history of skills, their executions, and evaluations. A base-level agent executes these skills, learns from training rollouts, and optimizes context as flexible files and code. We evaluate MCE across five disparate domains under offline and online settings. MCE demonstrates consistent performance gains, achieving 5.6–53.8% relative improvement over state-of-the-art agentic CE methods (mean of 16.9%), while maintaining superior context adaptability, transferability, and efficiency in both context usage and training.

 arXiv:2601.21557v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The operational efficacy of large language models relies heavily on their inference-time context. This has established Context Engineering (CE) as a formal discipline for optimizing these inputs. Current CE methods rely on manually crafted harnesses, such as rigid generation-reflection workflows and predefined context schemas. They impose structural biases and restrict context optimization to a narrow, intuition-bound design space. To address this, we introduce Meta Context Engineering (MCE), a bi-level framework that supersedes static CE heuristics by co-evolving CE skills and context artifacts. In MCE iterations, a meta-level agent refines engineering skills via agentic crossover, a deliberative search over the history of skills, their executions, and evaluations. A base-level agent executes these skills, learns from training rollouts, and optimizes context as flexible files and code. We evaluate MCE across five disparate domains under offline and online settings. MCE demonstrates consistent performance gains, achieving 5.6–53.8% relative improvement over state-of-the-art agentic CE methods (mean of 16.9%), while maintaining superior context adaptability, transferability, and efficiency in both context usage and training. Read More  

Shuffle-R1: Efficient RL framework for Multimodal Large Language Models via Data-centric Dynamic Shufflecs.AI updates on arXiv.org arXiv:2508.05612v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language model (MLLM). However, current RL pipelines often suffer from training inefficiencies caused by two underexplored issues: Advantage Collapsing, where most advantages in a batch concentrate near zero, and Rollout Silencing, where the proportion of rollouts contributing non-zero gradients diminishes over time. These issues lead to suboptimal gradient updates and hinder long-term learning efficiency. To address these issues, we propose Shuffle-R1, a simple yet principled framework that improves RL fine-tuning efficiency by dynamically restructuring trajectory sampling and batch composition. It introduces (1) Pairwise Trajectory Sampling, which selects high-contrast trajectories with large advantages to improve gradient signal quality, and (2) Advantage-based Trajectory Shuffle, which increases exposure of valuable rollouts through informed batch reshuffling. Experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks show that our framework consistently outperforms strong RL baselines with minimal overhead. These results highlight the importance of data-centric adaptations for more efficient RL training in MLLM.

 arXiv:2508.05612v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language model (MLLM). However, current RL pipelines often suffer from training inefficiencies caused by two underexplored issues: Advantage Collapsing, where most advantages in a batch concentrate near zero, and Rollout Silencing, where the proportion of rollouts contributing non-zero gradients diminishes over time. These issues lead to suboptimal gradient updates and hinder long-term learning efficiency. To address these issues, we propose Shuffle-R1, a simple yet principled framework that improves RL fine-tuning efficiency by dynamically restructuring trajectory sampling and batch composition. It introduces (1) Pairwise Trajectory Sampling, which selects high-contrast trajectories with large advantages to improve gradient signal quality, and (2) Advantage-based Trajectory Shuffle, which increases exposure of valuable rollouts through informed batch reshuffling. Experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks show that our framework consistently outperforms strong RL baselines with minimal overhead. These results highlight the importance of data-centric adaptations for more efficient RL training in MLLM. Read More  

Structured Sentiment Analysis as Transition-based Dependency Graph Parsingcs.AI updates on arXiv.org arXiv:2305.05311v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Structured sentiment analysis (SSA) aims to automatically extract people’s opinions from a text in natural language and adequately represent that information in a graph structure. One of the most accurate methods for performing SSA was recently proposed and consists of approaching it as a dependency graph parsing task. Although we can find in the literature how transition-based algorithms excel in different dependency graph parsing tasks in terms of accuracy and efficiency, all proposed attempts to tackle SSA following that approach were based on graph-based models. In this article, we present the first transition-based method to address SSA as dependency graph parsing. Specifically, we design a transition system that processes the input text in a left-to-right pass, incrementally generating the graph structure containing all identified opinions. To effectively implement our final transition-based model, we resort to a Pointer Network architecture as a backbone. From an extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that our model offers the best performance to date in practically all cases among prior dependency-based methods, and surpasses recent task-specific techniques on the most challenging datasets. We additionally include an in-depth analysis and empirically prove that the average-case time complexity of our approach is quadratic in the sentence length, being more efficient than top-performing graph-based parsers.

 arXiv:2305.05311v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Structured sentiment analysis (SSA) aims to automatically extract people’s opinions from a text in natural language and adequately represent that information in a graph structure. One of the most accurate methods for performing SSA was recently proposed and consists of approaching it as a dependency graph parsing task. Although we can find in the literature how transition-based algorithms excel in different dependency graph parsing tasks in terms of accuracy and efficiency, all proposed attempts to tackle SSA following that approach were based on graph-based models. In this article, we present the first transition-based method to address SSA as dependency graph parsing. Specifically, we design a transition system that processes the input text in a left-to-right pass, incrementally generating the graph structure containing all identified opinions. To effectively implement our final transition-based model, we resort to a Pointer Network architecture as a backbone. From an extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that our model offers the best performance to date in practically all cases among prior dependency-based methods, and surpasses recent task-specific techniques on the most challenging datasets. We additionally include an in-depth analysis and empirically prove that the average-case time complexity of our approach is quadratic in the sentence length, being more efficient than top-performing graph-based parsers. Read More