Open-weight large language models face a low-cost white-box threat from representation engineering attacks. Attackers can estimate refusal directions and search for projection-matrix edits that suppress safety alignment while preserving general capabilities, within minutes on a single GPU and without gradient-based training. We propose Bait-and-Recover, a weight-level defense that places a bait adapter where attackers read activations and a paired recovery adapter at the subsequent layer. Trained via gradient routing, this decouples the observation path from the behavior path. By actively poisoning the residual signal used for measurement, Bait-and-Recover disrupts the attacker's edit search, while the recovery layer restores clean downstream computation. Across four open-weight models, our defense raises the minimum refusal rate against white-box edit searches from 16.25% to 71.75% under a strict behavior-preservation budget (KL<= 0.10), with negligible impact on general benchmarks. By invalidating the core measurement assumption of these attacks, observation-path poisoning offers a practical complement to behavior-level safety training.
Tian Gao, Zhi-Hui Xie, Yu-Hao Wu et al.· 0 citations
As agents move from research prototypes to deployed tools, their capability increasingly depends on model-external execution infrastructure, commonly termed the agent harness. Changing this harness while holding model weights fixed can substantially alter task performance. Current agent evaluations typically report downstream performance under a chosen harness, leaving a model's ability to develop the harness itself comparatively underexplored. We introduce HarnessDev, a benchmark that shifts the unit of evaluation from task outputs to runnable infrastructure. HarnessDev covers two stages. In Creation, the agent starts from a minimal seed and a small number of cases, then builds a complete execution system. In Evolution, it starts from its own created harness and iteratively revises it using downstream execution feedback, with the goal of improving benchmark performance. We then evaluate each constructed harness on capability (task success on held-out benchmarks) and efficiency (execution-token cost). The reported Creation results cover six creator LLMs, four domains, and five downstream benchmarks totaling 2,207 unique downstream instances, with hidden evaluation tasks withheld from development. We find that generated harnesses remain substantially behind mature human-engineered references on code and on search and research, while matching or exceeding the selected references on writing and machine-learning experimentation, with large variation in execution cost. Evolution produces some performance gains, but they are unstable and transfer only partially to held-out tasks. Experiments with a fixed runtime model further show that the gains depend strongly on the model executing the harness, indicating limited transfer across models.
Yu-Hao Wu, Jingyuan Zhang, Jia-Jun Shi et al.· 1 citation
This work introduces ASPIRE, a benchmark for vague-goal-driven self-evolution and shows that vague goals redirect search effort toward goal interpretation, and evaluates the resulting systems on a hidden, expert-authored set of 520 items spanning six goals.
Yu-Hao Wu, Jingyuan Zhang, Jia-Jun Shi et al.· 0 citations
These findings show that recognizing successful actions is insufficient; agents must also transform feedback into executable and transferable policies, and provide a unified framework for diagnosing this process and identifying the bottlenecks that prevent agents from translating interaction experience into reliable self-improvement.
Jia-Jun Shi, Siyang Tao, Yu-Hao Wu et al.· 0 citations
DABO is proposed, a calibration-aware binary offloading method for collaborative large–small model inference that maintains competitive end-to-end accuracy while processing an average of 83.72% of requests at the edge.
Chen Zhu, Yi-Ming Su, Chenwenjie Mao et al.· IEEE Access· 0 citations
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