Spiking Neural Networks Are Harder to Steal: A Benchmark Study of Model Stealing Attacks

3 días 18 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36298v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models deployed behind query interfaces expose more than their predictions, because an adversary can use those predictions to rebuild the model itself. Model stealing attacks (MSAs) exploit this exposure by training a surrogate model that replicates the decision behavior of a target through black-box queries alone, without access to its parameters or training data. These attacks are well characterized for conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs), yet spiking neural networks (SNNs) process information in a fundamentally different way. SNNs communicate through sparse, discrete spikes, and their outputs depend on membrane potentials that evolve over time rather than on a static mapping from input to output. This temporal mode of computation suggests that the decision behavior of an SNN may be harder to reconstruct from its responses. This work tests that possibility by benchmarking four representative MSAs, namely the Papernot, Tram\`er, T-RND, and color perturbation attacks, against SNNs and their ANN counterparts on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10. Across every attack and dataset, SNNs prove consistently more difficult to steal. Surrogates of SNNs achieve 10% to 20% lower agreement with the target model and 15% to 25% lower adversarial transferability than surrogates of ANNs. We attribute this resistance to the way SNNs compute, as their spike-based and time-dependent dynamics yield decision boundaries that ANN-based surrogates struggle to approximate, even under large query budgets. These findings extend the known resilience of SNNs beyond attacks on training data to the replication of model functionality, strengthening the case for neuromorphic architectures in security-sensitive applications.
Ayana Moshruba, Maryam Parsa

A Smart Instant Book Filter Model based on Dual-Objective Optimization

3 días 18 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hospitality service in online marketplaces has become increasingly popular over the past few years, not only because it helps people easily rent short-term lodging but also because it empowers travelers to connect with locals and feel belonging. A typical pattern of these industries is a central platform mediating the economic interactions between guests and hosts, where a successful booking experience is the key to user satisfaction. However, one of the biggest challenges is the possible delay of response and chance of rejection when guests try to book a request-to-book listing. Previously, we enabled the instant book feature to allow hosts to instantly accept qualified guests and guests to confirm bookings immediately. Yet the symptom has not been alleviated given mixed request-to-book and instant book listing supply in search results. One possible solution is to promote all instant book listings in search results; however, booking rate will be damaged due to some improperly promoted low quality listings. In this paper, we present a novel smart instant book filter system that applies the instant book filter intelligently and shifts request-to-book to instant book without hurting booking rate. Compared with traditional two-sided markets research that targets finding strategies to maximize a single overall social welfare goal, our proposed system aims to maximize the instant book rate with the constraint that booking rate should not decrease, forming a dual-objective optimization problem. We show A/B testing results for our system exposed to global users, demonstrating that our model performs better than previous human-expert-tuned models in terms of both instant book rate and overall booking rate. We also achieved improved metrics such as the host instant book adoption rate. The proposed system has been deployed to production and is serving millions of users every day.
Yi Hou, Li Fan, Huizhong Duan

BehaveRec: When Does Long-Term Behavioral History Help Sequential Recommendation? A Study with Session, History, and Community Signals

3 días 18 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sequential recommendation models typically predict a user's next action from recent session interactions, which limits personalization when short-term signals are weak or ambiguous. Rather than assuming that incorporating longer-term history and community signals is universally beneficial, we study when it actually helps. We propose BehaveRec, a three-signal framework combining a causal session transformer, a bidirectional User History Encoder over a 90-day window, and a GraphSAGE module over a user-user graph built from behavioral embedding similarity rather than item co-occurrence; a learned gate blends the three signals per user. On an industrial dataset of 137M sequences from 12.6M users, BehaveRec improves R@5 by +3.2% over SASRec, with a larger-capacity SASRec baseline (more parameters than BehaveRec) still trailing by +2.5%, ruling out capacity as the explanation. More importantly, a user-level stratification by history length reveals a clear dose-response relationship: BehaveRec's advantage is negligible below roughly 10 interactions and grows monotonically with history richness, reaching +0.017 R@5 for users with 101+ events. This pattern is corroborated across one industrial and three public datasets spanning history-rich to history-sparse regimes, where session-only models remain preferable. These headline results, and the resulting deployment threshold, are established for category-level intent prediction; a preliminary, single-run check on the full item-level vocabulary yields a directionally mixed result and is scoped as an open question rather than a claim. We use these results to derive a practical deployment rule -- roughly 20 interactions per user -- for when long-term history and behavioral-graph signals are worth their added complexity. Despite this added complexity, BehaveRec remains lightweight: it uses 5.67M parameters and trains on a single GPU in under two days.
Aysenur Inan, Reza Yousefi Maragheh, Jayesh Uddhav Kudase, Selene Xu, Kaushiki Nag, Jianpeng Xu, Sushant Kumar

MARQ: A Modular, LLM-Agnostic Requirement Quality Assessor Infused with Systems Engineering Knowledge

3 días 18 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36234v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Requirements engineering (RE) is foundational to systems engineering (SE), as requirement defects can propagate downstream and adversely affect development outcomes. Although large language models (LLMs) are promising for requirement quality assessment, prior work shows that off-the-shelf models miss a large share of expert-identified defects, perform unevenly across quality criteria, and vary across executions. This study investigates whether infusing expert-derived SE knowledge can improve LLM-based requirement quality evaluation beyond off-the-shelf capability. We present MARQ, a modular, LLM-agnostic prototype that supplements LLMs with a criterion-specific knowledge stack operationalizing INCOSE requirement quality criteria and evaluated against off-the-shelf baselines on an expert-labeled NASA requirement set using Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and the open-weight Gemma 3 12B, with 100 executions per model. MARQ achieves median F1 scores of 0.80 for Claude Opus 5, 0.62 for GPT-5.6 Sol, and 0.53 for Gemma 3 12B, compared with off-the-shelf baselines of 0.55, 0.52, and 0.18, respectively. However, the nature of these gains is model-dependent. Claude Opus 5 improves defect detection and false-alarm control; GPT-5.6 Sol gains detection and better execution-level consistency at the cost of more false alarms; and Gemma 3 12B reaches the performance of off-the-shelf proprietary models, although it remains highly variable. Criterion-level analysis shows gains concentrated in Correctness and Conformance, trade-offs between misses and false alarms within individual criteria, and model-dependent responses across several criteria. These findings position SE knowledge infusion as a promising model-agnostic pathway for strengthening trustworthy LLM-based RE support while underscoring the need for criterion-specific interventions and human-in-the-loop review.
Jannatul Shefa, Alejandro Salado, Paul Wach, Taylan G. Topcu

Skill Dreaming: Evolving Repository Skills through Pull Request Streams

3 días 18 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on reusable skills for complex software engineering tasks, making skill libraries essential for repository development and maintenance. However, repository-specific skills must evolve with changing code structures, implementation conventions, and maintenance requirements. Pull requests (PRs) provide a natural source of such knowledge by recording how repositories evolve through implementation and review. Meanwhile, new PRs must follow repository-specific implementation patterns, modify related components consistently, and ensure that existing tests continue to pass while adding coverage for new functionality. This creates a mutually reinforcing cycle: PRs provide knowledge for updating skills, while these skills improve future PRs, maintain repositories, and support further skill evolution. To enable this co-evolution of PRs, repositories, and skills, we propose Skill Dreaming, a framework that learns from PR streams to guide continuous repository development and maintenance. Given a repository and its PR history, Skill Dreaming builds a repository-specific skill library by extracting executable knowledge from validated PRs and continuously refines the skills as new PR information becomes available. These skills guide coding agents not only in implementing requested features but also in maintaining associated tests, documentation, compatibility, and repository conventions. By integrating PR analysis, skill management, code execution, and continuous integration, Skill Dreaming provides an end-to-end workflow for applying learned skills to repository changes and incorporating subsequent PR outcomes into future skill updates.
Xinyuan Song, Hasibul Haque, Jay Somasundaram, Ryan Turner, Bowen Zhu, Liang Zhao

Learning Human Sports Motion Feasibility via Quantile Regression on Tracking Data

3 días 18 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36183v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study time-to-arrival (TTA) in sports: the shortest plausible time a player needs to reach an arbitrary location on the pitch given their current kinematic state, estimated as the lower envelope of observed locomotion times. Rather than modeling space ownership through position density estimation or closed-form physics-based models, we cast TTA as a conditional quantile regression problem, estimating the lower quantile of locomotion time so the model learns a player's lower-envelope arrival time. We train the model on optical tracking data from all 64 matches of the PFF FC FIFA World Cup 2022 dataset, and evaluate a lightweight multilayer perceptron against six player-motion models from the literature, re-expressed as TTA predictors, and a learned reachable- hull baseline. Across our evaluation metrics, the MLP consistently outperforms every physics-based baseline. To probe the generality of the learned locomotion model, we further evaluate it on basketball tracking data and a single-game NFL tracking dataset, analyzing the transferability of player motion dynamics across sports. Our project is available at https://github.com/mguti97/TTA-Quantile.
Marc Guti\'errez-P\'erez, Antonio Agudo

Don't Pick a Winner: Knowledge Conflicts Need a Prior, Not a Rule

3 días 18 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A retrieval-augmented language model answers from two sources, the retrieved context and its own knowledge, and the two disagree whenever the context is incomplete or wrong. Existing methods settle the disagreement with a rule fixed at design time: follow the context, amplify it in proportion to how far it moves the model, or trust the model's memory. Each rule is confidently wrong in some deployment. In a decision-theoretic model of two sources, the score of any fixed rule is linear in the share of reliable contexts while the best attainable score is convex, so every fixed rule is beaten wherever it is not exactly optimal; and a symmetric divergence between the two sources, the signal adaptive decoding uses, carries no information about which one is right. Resolving a conflict therefore needs two inputs that no existing method keeps: evidence about each source separately, and a prior on how often the context is right. We test these claims on GRACE, a benchmark that intervenes on the knowledge-graph context of a fixed question, so that what the model knows, what the context says and what is true are measured separately. There, every baseline from four families is strong on right contexts or on wrong ones, never on both. We then build the two inputs: the model states its knowledge as notes, a small policy voices each note with a calibrated confidence, a reader answers in two voices, and a selector commits or abstains under a prior $\pi$ applied as an exact prior shift. With $\pi$ set to the true share of right contexts, the system is above the best baseline at every mixture of GRACE contexts, by up to 26 points. Its overall score is 45.3 and 35.0 (Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, Llama-3.1-8B), against 29.4 and 27.5 for the best baseline. On preregistered ClashEval it beats same-backbone CK-PLUG and TCR by 12 and 26 points. Where the model lacks the knowledge, the gains vanish, as the theory predicts.
Minh Pham Van, Cong Tran

From Structural Feedback to Prompt Policies: Learning Faithful Text-to-Image Prompt Editors

3 días 18 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prompt optimization should improve the image a user receives without changing the scene the user requested. Yet stylistic rewriting can weaken object attributes and relations even when global text--image similarity remains high. We propose StruPO, a structure-aware prompt editor that uses a calibrated scene graph as a shared representation for policy conditioning and image-grounded supervision. The graph exposes what should be preserved, while deletion, reordering, and insertion provide a token-aligned way to modify the prompt. This turns structural feedback from an external critique into a training signal for a reusable editing policy. Learning from that signal requires handling both uncertain grounding and stochastic image generation. StruPO retains grounding confidence through smooth reward shaping and averages multiple images for each edit before computing group-relative advantages. Experiments span three disjoint 2K-prompt test sets and four frozen generation backbones, with comparisons to learned prompt optimizers, iterative structural feedback, diffusion-model fine-tuning, and inference-time attention control. StruPO improves the faithfulness--aesthetics trade-off, with consistent gains in relational fidelity. Independent automatic evaluators and a 15-annotator study provide complementary evidence, and human preference margins increase with relation complexity. Controlled ablations connect these gains to graph conditioning, local editing, and image-grounded learning. The resulting policy produces reusable optimized text in one pass after graph calibration, without an iterative critique--rewrite loop.
Wentao Ye, Yali Ye, Zhiqing Xiao, Ru Peng, Xinpeng Ti, Liyao Li, Zhanming Shen, Peng Lu, Jie Zhang, Haobo Wang

Why and How to Do Science When AI Is Better at It: A Framework Grounded in Human Understanding and Direction

3 días 18 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI begins to match or exceed human researchers at core scientific tasks, two questions become pressing: \emph{why} should humans keep doing science, and \emph{how} should they use AI when they do? This paper argues that the second can be answered only by answering the first. It holds that one indispensable aim of science is \emph{durable, collective human understanding of the world, pursued in service of human ends and values}. From this principle it derives a two-part test for when a research task can be delegated to AI. The first part, \emph{human understanding}, requires that the scientific community remain able to explain, defend and contest the resulting claims, and retain the skills to do so. The second, \emph{human direction}, requires that judgments about which questions matter and what findings mean stay with accountable humans. Applying the test to each phase of research in the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) yields recommendations that fields can tailor to their questions and methods. The framework differs from existing guidance in three ways. It rests on an account of what science is for rather than on integrity norms. It holds even if AI outperforms human researchers, rather than depending on AI's current limitations. And it judges each use of AI by its effects on human understanding and direction rather than by the type of tool, across every phase of research, including peer review and the training of new researchers. It closes with the reforms needed to keep science aimed at human understanding and direction.
Hoda Heidari, Aydin Mohseni

CohortFlow: A Steerable Clinical Cohort Curation Agent with Localized Semantic Correction

3 días 18 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language model agents for clinical cohort curation should accommodate evolving eligibility criteria without repeatedly processing unchanged requirements. We introduce CohortFlow, a steerable agent that represents natural language corrections as localized updates to a structured cohort specification and reconciles them with a persistent execution graph. Explicitly recorded semantic dependencies enable affected computations to be selectively invalidated while preserving valid prior results. On 100 scenarios derived from clinical-trial eligibility criteria, comprising 126 correction turns, localized steering achieves 77.0% requirement micro-F1 versus 76.4% for full regeneration using the same 8B model, a small numerical advantage that is not statistically significant ($p=0.493$). It reduces mean correction latency by 64.8% after completion and 44.3% during execution, with 38.1% fewer model calls. In a separate proof-of-concept evaluation over MIMIC, all 13 cohort states execute successfully, while correction trajectories demonstrate selective preservation of unaffected computations and recomputation of changed or dependent nodes. Together, these results show that localized semantic steering can substantially reduce correction latency and model calls while maintaining strong requirement-level accuracy.
Neil Chen, Adrian Serapio, Hanxue Gu, Evan Lee, Kang Wang, Yang Yang