Self-evolving mechanisms let vision-language model (VLM) agents continually adapt through evolving memory, but they also allow malicious behavior to emerge only after deployment. We introduce a new attack surface, the self-evolving backdoor, whose payload stays dormant in the initial agent and is progressively activated as the agent evolves. Unlike conventional backdoors, which can be exposed by testing triggered inputs on a static model, our attack requires both a visual trigger and a sufficiently evolved memory state; static scanning with clean memory thus yields near-zero attack success and may deem the agent benign. We realize this through memory-aware backdoor training, which couples trigger activation with the agent's evolving memory while preserving benign behavior unless the trigger co-occurs with payload-related memory. Across three VLM backbones, four agent pipelines, and recency-, semantic-, and reward-based memory evolution, the attack preserves normal functionality and stays nearly inactive before evolution (0.5% attack success rate), yet exceeds 95% attack success within 100 interactions, revealing a stealthy threat unique to self-evolving agents.
The results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.
Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· Information and Software Tec...· 394 citations· ⚡54
The possibility of inferring high-dimensional data inference in a model that consists of a prior and an auxiliary differentiable constraint given some additional information is considered, thereby allowing a range of potential applications in adapting models to new domains and tasks.
Alexandros Graikos, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, N. Jojic et al.· Neural Information Processin...· 316 citations· ⚡15
It is proved that any global minimizer of the trajectory balance objective can define a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution, and empirically demonstrate the benefits of the trajectories balance objective for GFlowNet convergence, diversity of generated samples, and robustness to long action sequenc...
Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Moksh Jain, Emmanuel Bengio et al.· Neural Information Processin...· 302 citations· ⚡60
GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations...
Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al.· arXiv.org· 216 citations· ⚡17
An algorithm is proposed which leverages disentangled semantic factors to generate adversarial perturbation by altering controlled semantic attributes to fool the learner towards various "adversarial" targets.
Haonan Qiu, Chaowei Xiao, Lei Yang et al.· arXiv.org· 208 citations· ⚡17
This work proposes a HALO that directly maximizes the utility of generations instead of maximizing the log-likelihood of preferences, and suggests that the best loss depends on the inductive biases most appropriate for a given setting, an oft-overlooked consideration.
Machine-learning networks can learn without detailed instructions from a designer. Those that do may offer insight into how the brain reorganizes itself during learning.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduSep 29, 2026
Professor Sherry Turkle’s new book, “Artificial Intimacy,” offers a withering critique of chatbots and the antisocial dynamics she believes they encourage.
