Risk

Momentum

17 papers in the last four weeks, up 55% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Jul 6Week of Sep 21

Latest papers 129

Jan 22, 2026cs.AI

Deja Vu in Plots: Leveraging Cross-Session Evidence with Retrieval-Augmented LLMs for Live Streaming Risk Assessment

The rise of live streaming has transformed online interaction, enabling massive real-time engagement but also exposing platforms to complex risks such as scams and coordinated malicious behaviors. Detecting these risks is challenging because harmful actions often accumulate gradually and recur across seemingly unrelated streams. To address this, we propose CS-VAR (Cross-Session Evidence-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Detector) for live streaming risk assessment. In CS-VAR, a lightweight, domain-specific model performs fast session-level risk inference, guided during training by a Large Language Model (LLM) that reasons over retrieved cross-session behavioral evidence and transfers its local-to-global insights to the small model. This design enables the small model to recognize recurring patterns across streams, perform structured risk assessment, and maintain efficiency for real-time deployment. Extensive offline experiments on large-scale industrial datasets, combined with online validation, demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CS-VAR. Furthermore, CS-VAR provides interpretable, localized signals that effectively empower real-world moderation for live streaming.
Jan 18, 2026cs.CR

AgenTRIM: Tool Risk Mitigation for Agentic AI

AI agents are autonomous systems that combine LLMs with external tools to solve complex tasks. While such tools extend capability, improper tool permissions introduce security risks such as indirect prompt injection and tool misuse. We characterize these failures as unbalanced tool-driven agency. Agents may retain unnecessary permissions (excessive agency) or fail to invoke required tools (insufficient agency), amplifying the attack surface and reducing performance. We introduce AgenTRIM, a framework for detecting and mitigating tool-driven agency risks without altering an agent's internal reasoning. AgenTRIM addresses these risks through complementary offline and online phases. Offline, AgenTRIM reconstructs and verifies the agent's tool interface from code and execution traces. At runtime, it enforces per-step least-privilege tool access through adaptive filtering and status-aware validation of tool calls. Evaluating on the AgentDojo benchmark, AgenTRIM substantially reduces attack success while maintaining high task performance. Additional experiments show robustness to description-based attacks and effective enforcement of explicit safety policies. Together, these results show that AgenTRIM provides a practical, capability-preserving approach to safer tool use in LLM-based agents.
Aug 4, 2025cs.CR

Data Security in Large Language Models: Risks, Defense, and Directions

Large Language Models (LLMs), now a foundation in advancing natural language processing, power applications such as text generation, machine translation, and conversational systems. Despite their transformative potential, these models inherently rely on massive amounts of training data, often collected from diverse and uncurated sources, which exposes them to serious data security risks. Harmful or malicious data can compromise model behavior, leading to toxic outputs or hallucinations, while also creating vulnerabilities to data-driven attacks such as prompt injection and data poisoning. As LLMs continue to be integrated into critical real-world systems, understanding and addressing these data-centric security risks is imperative to safeguard user trust and system reliability. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of the main data security risks facing LLMs and reviews current defense strategies, including adversarial training, data cleaning, output guardrails, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), data augmentation, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)/agent defenses. Additionally, we categorize and analyze relevant datasets used for assessing robustness and security across different domains, providing guidance for future research. Finally, we highlight key research directions that focus on data provenance and traceability, verifiable machine forgetting, secure model updates, standardized evaluation framework, explainability-driven security analysis, and effective governance frameworks, aiming to promote the safe and responsible development of LLM technology. This work seeks to inform researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, driving progress toward data security in LLMs.
Aug 3, 2025cs.LG

GlaBoost: A Multimodal Structured Framework for Glaucoma Risk Stratification

Early and accurate glaucoma detection is critical to prevent irreversible vision loss, yet existing AI methods often rely on unimodal inputs and lack interpretability. We present GlaBoost, a multimodal gradient boosting framework that unifies three complementary signals for glaucoma risk prediction: fundus image embeddings from a pretrained convolutional encoder,free-text neuroretinal rim assessments encoded by a transformer-based language model, and structured ophthalmic biomarkers. These modalities are fused into a single representation and classified by an enhanced XGBoost model.On two real-world annotated datasets, GlaBoost consistently outperforms unimodal and generic multimodal baselines. Feature importance analysis highlights the cup-to-disc ratio, rim thinning, and the ISNT rule as the dominant predictors, yielding clinically consistent and interpretable decisions. GlaBoost offers a transparent and scalable foundation for multimodal decision support in ophthalmology.
Jul 24, 2023stat.ML

A Differentially Private Weighted Empirical Risk Minimization Procedure and its Application to Outcome Weighted Learning

Data used to train predictive models via empirical risk minimization (ERM) often contain sensitive personal information. While differential privacy (DP) provides mathematically provable bounds to protect such data, previous work has focused almost exclusively on unweighted ERM. We consider weighted ERM (wERM) -- an important generalization where individual contributions to the objective function vary. We propose the first DP algorithm for general wERM with formal privacy guarantees and derive both its empirical and population excess risk bounds. Crucially, this general wERM framework provides a pathway for deriving privacy-preserving learning methods for individualized treatment rules, including the popular outcome-weighted learning (OWL) approach. We evaluate DP-wERM applied to OWL in simulated and real data experiments. Our empirical results demonstrate that training OWL models via wERM provides strong DP guarantees while maintaining robust performance, proving the method is practical for sensitive, real-world data.
Feb 17, 2022math.ST

Universality of empirical risk minimization

We study a general class of optimization problems with decision variable Θ∈Rp×k\boldsymbolΘ \in \mathbb{R}^{p \times k} and cost function which is the sum of nn terms, each dependent on Θ\boldsymbolΘ through the kk-dimensional projection Θ⊤xi\boldsymbolΘ^\top \boldsymbol{x}_i, where xi\boldsymbol{x}_i, i≤ni \leq n are i.i.d. random vectors. This setting is general enough to include examples of current interest in statistical physics, high-dimensional statistics, and statistical learning theory. We consider the proportional asymptotics n,p→∞n, p \to \infty, with n/p=Θ(1)n/p = Θ(1), and prove that, whenever there exists a minimizer satisfying a suitable generalization of a "delocalization" condition, the minimum value is universal. Namely, (for subgaussian xi\boldsymbol{x}_i) it depends on the distribution of xi\boldsymbol{x}_i only through its asymptotic mean and covariance. This delocalization condition is essentially necessary. Earlier universality results for such problems were limited to strongly convex loss functions. We derive applications of our theory to statistical learning and prove general universality results both for train and (under additional conditions) test error. In particular, we establish universality for vectors xi\boldsymbol{x}_i generated by random 1-layer neural networks (random features models) and first-order Taylor approximations of 2-layer networks (neural tangent models). Finally, we establish that the delocalization property holds for a class of statistical learning problems under a condition that is easy to verify.
Date pendingcs.MA

Emergent Risks in Generative Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems composed of large generative models are rapidly moving from laboratory prototypes to real-world deployments, where they jointly plan, negotiate, and allocate shared resources to solve complex tasks. While such systems promise unprecedented scalability and autonomy, their collective interaction also gives rise to failure modes that cannot be reduced to individual agents. Understanding these emergent risks is therefore critical. Here, we present a pioneer study of such emergent multi-agent risk in workflows that involve competition over shared resources (e.g., computing resources or market share), sequential handoff collaboration (where downstream agents see only predecessor outputs), collective decision aggregation, and others. Across these settings, we observe that such group behaviors arise frequently across repeated trials and a wide range of interaction conditions, rather than as rare or pathological cases. In particular, phenomena such as collusion-like coordination and conformity emerge with non-trivial frequency under realistic resource constraints, communication protocols, and role assignments, mirroring well-known pathologies in human societies despite no explicit instruction. Moreover, these risks cannot be prevented by existing agent-level safeguards alone. These findings expose the dark side of intelligent multi-agent systems: a social intelligence risk where agent collectives, despite no instruction to do so, spontaneously reproduce familiar failure patterns from human societies.
Date pendingcs.LG

Aligning Language Models with Observational Data: Opportunities and Risks from a Causal Perspective

Large language models are being widely used across industries to generate text that contributes directly to key performance metrics, such as medication adherence in patient messaging and conversion rates in content generation. Pretrained models, however, often fall short when it comes to aligning with human preferences or optimizing for business objectives. As a result, fine-tuning with good-quality labeled data is essential to guide models to generate content that achieves better results. Controlled experiments, like A/B tests, can provide such data, but they are often expensive and come with significant engineering, logistical, and ethical challenges. Meanwhile, companies have access to a vast amount of historical (observational) data that remains underutilized. In this work, we study the challenges and opportunities of fine-tuning LLMs using observational data. We show that while observational outcomes can provide valuable supervision, directly fine-tuning models on such data can lead them to learn spurious correlations. We present empirical evidence of this issue using various real-world datasets and propose DeconfoundLM, a method that explicitly removes the effect of known confounders from reward signals. In simulation experiments, DeconfoundLM more accurately recovers causal relationships and mitigates failure modes of methods that assume counterfactual invariance, achieving over 16% higher objective score than ODIN and other baselines, when entangled confounding is present. Please refer to the project page for code and related resources.
Date pendingcs.LG

Longitudinal Risk Prediction in Mammography with Privileged History Distillation

Longitudinal mammography screening has become an important source of information for improving future breast cancer risk prediction. However, the performance of current longitudinal mammography models degrades when prior examinations are unavailable at inference, creating a structured privileged-information setting in which temporal context is available during training but absent at deployment. We propose Single-Exam Mammography risk prediction with privileged History Distillation (SEM-HD), a framework that uses longitudinal history as privileged information available only during training to preserve the predictive benefits of longitudinal modeling while requiring only the current screening examination at deployment. During training, the student relies on the current examination to predict latent representations of prior visits, while horizon-specific teachers provide additional supervision from the observed longitudinal history. Together, latent history prediction and teacher distillation preserve the temporal modeling structure of longitudinal predictors under current-exam-only inference. We validate SEM-HD on three longitudinal mammography cohorts, the CSAW-CC, EMBED, and OMI-DB, using the transformer-based Longitudinal Mammography Risk (LoMaR) and recurrent Visual Memory Recurrent Attention (VMRA) backbones. Under current-exam-only inference, SEM-HD consistently improves long-horizon AUC and pAUC over longitudinal models evaluated without history, particularly in the clinically relevant low false-positive-rate region. It also recovers much of the performance gap with respect to full-history inference across datasets and backbones. Ablations further show that these gains are not reproduced by masking or heuristic history imputation. The strongest performance is achieved by combining patient-specific latent history prediction with distilled temporal risk supervision.