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5 papers

#01Oct 27, 2026

cs.LG

Heads of Security: Learned Attention Gates Improve Prompt Injection Robustness

Igor Shilov, Xiaoxue Yang, Alexander Panfilov and 6 more

We introduce Heads of Security (HoS), a prompt injection defense that enforces instruction-data separation via a small set of learned per-head attention gates. HoS learns how each head should redistribute attention between trusted and untrusted tokens, enabling models to reason over untrusted content without following injected instructions. We evaluate HoS on Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct and GPT-OSS-20B. We compare it against SecAlign++, a state-of-the-art finetuning-based defense, and ASIDE, a defense that, like ours, builds instruction-data separation into the model architecture. We show that HoS offers greater robustness to adaptive attacks, better performance on standard utility benchmarks, and matches top performance on standard agentic prompt injection benchmarks. More specifically, the black-box RL-Hammer attack reaches 97% ASR against GPT-OSS-20B and 85% against SecAlign, but only 10% against HoS. Claudini, a state-of-the-art white-box attack, strengthened against HoS through autoresearch, requires 3 times more FLOPs to reach the same ASR on HoS as it does on GPT-OSS-20B or SecAlign. HoS preserves base-model utility across standard multiple-choice benchmarks and prompting setups, whereas SecAlign and ASIDE degrade in few-shot settings. On agentic benchmarks with static attacks, HoS and SecAlign perform similarly and substantially improve the security-utility trade-off over the base model. ASIDE struggles with tool use, achieving only 10% utility. These results show that prompt injection robustness can be achieved and improved through targeted attention interventions.

#02Oct 27, 2026

cs.IR

REGER: Modeling inter-item Relations with Semantic IDs for Generative Recommendation

Yuxi Huang, Silin Zhou, Chenhao Wang and 5 more

Personalized recommendation depends on learning semantic and collaborative relations among items from online content and user interactions. Generative recommendation (GR) offers a promising paradigm by autoregressively generating discrete semantic IDs (SIDs) of items. However, randomly initialized SID token embeddings and GR models trained from scratch do not directly inherit the semantic relations inherent in items, while inter-item collaborative relations are learned largely implicitly through token-level attention and next-token supervision. To address this limitation, we propose REGER, a unified framework that explicitly incorporates inter-item relations into semantic pretraining, history encoding, and SID generation. We pretrain the GR model through generative semantic retrieval, enabling it to inherit inter-item semantic similarity by learning to generate semantic neighbors' SIDs. We combine global attention with local attention aligned with SID boundaries to capture historical context and directed transitions between adjacent items. We further develop a theoretical framework for hierarchical preference decomposition over the SID prefix tree, proving an exact factorization of collaborative preference distributions and a weighted decomposition of item-level KL divergence into prefix-conditional KL divergences. Building on this analysis, we distill a discriminative teacher's full conditional distributions over all legal next tokens at ground-truth prefixes along the target SID path, jointly optimizing this objective with cross-entropy. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over existing GR baselines and support the effectiveness of the proposed preference distillation.

#03Oct 27, 2026

cs.LG

LCM-Promo: An LLM-Based Uplift Model for Promotion Allocation

Nesta Midavaine, Floris Fok, Paulo Mendes and 4 more

We present LCM-Promo, an LLM-based uplift model for promotion allocation. LCM-Promo is a task-specific Large Commerce Model (LCM): a finetuned LLM trained on transactional commerce data to predict user intent and promotion response. It learns monotonic promotion-response curves from production logs by interpreting single-token outputs as conversion-threshold probabilities, while conditioning on session context such as day and delivery shift. In a production A/B test on churn reactivation, LCM-Promo increased conversion by 1% and reduced promotion cost by 6% relative to the Segment-EMA production baseline.

#04Oct 27, 2026

cs.CV

Zero-Shot Multimodal Event Spotting in Soccer Broadcasts

Sadia Kamal, Mahmudul Hasan, Tony Braskich

Automatic soccer event spotting supports highlight generation, video indexing, and sports analytics, but existing methods depend on large annotated datasets and soccer-specific training. We present a zero-shot framework that detects, classifies, and temporally localizes events in full-length soccer broadcasts without task-specific parameter training. Each match is segmented into overlapping clips represented by a compact visual storyboard and the aligned commentary transcript, which a general-purpose multimodal model processes jointly. On three manually annotated matches containing 130 events, the best configuration achieves 72.0% F1@5s and outperforms SoccerNet-trained CALF and NetVLAD++ in a cross-dataset setting, while the storyboard representation reduces inference cost by 72% compared with individual frames. We further analyze the effects of model family, input representation, and prompt optimization, and introduce an evidence-grounded excitement-scoring stage that ranks detected events with natural-language explanations for highlight selection.

#05Oct 27, 2026

cs.LG

Gym-Anything-RT: Scaling Real-Time Environments for Vision-Language Agents

Pranjal Aggarwal, Sean Welleck

AI agents have made substantial progress in domains where they have a non-trivial amount of time to deliberate between actions, such as mathematics, software engineering, and performing tasks on desktop applications. It is less clear how such models fare in settings that demand real-time interaction, such as playing a video game or operating a physical device. In these settings, the environment state may evolve as the agent is reasoning, or even as the underlying model is performing a forward pass. To gain insight into the real-time interaction capabilities of vision-language agents, we introduce Gym-Anything-RT. Our key idea is to construct visual minigames that demand a portfolio of capabilities required for interactive real-time settings. Gym-Anything-RT uses an agentic pipeline to automatically generate such environments based on a taxonomy of six capabilities required for real-time interaction, including the ability to perceive the environment and act under an evolving environment state. A key feature of Gym-Anything-RT is that it allows for controlled comparison of real-time interaction capabilities: we can run the same minigame in real time, or pause or slow down the environment to relax the requirement for real-time actions. We use Gym-Anything-RT to construct 100 real-time minigames and evaluate AI agents on them. We find large capability gaps in real-time interaction. For example, GPT-6 Astra (xHigh) achieves a pass rate of only 9.0% on the real-time minigames, which rises to 75.0% when the environment is paused. We also identify intriguing behaviors by the most powerful frontier agents: for instance, when given the ability to write code, these agents write code that bypasses the need to perceive and act in real time. We publicly release Gym-Anything-RT and the generated minigames to spur further research on AI agents in real-time interactive settings.