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Haihua Shen

Publications and source records attributed to Haihua Shen.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

ContainmentBench: Trace-Based Evaluation of Post-Exposure Containment in Tool-Using LLM Agents

Tool-using large language model (LLM) agents read untrusted content, maintain memory, delegate tasks, and invoke tools with external side effects. Terminal attack-success or policy-violation rates do not show what happens between exposure and commit or whether a defense also suppresses authorized actions. We introduce ContainmentBench, a sandboxed benchmark comprising a 504-scenario specification dataset, a shared rollout-trace schema, and stage-scoped metrics for endpoint violations, logged propagation, and explicitly authorized taint-exposed proposals that commit. The main Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct study evaluates seven policy conditions and five seeds, yielding a 17,640-record trace corpus. Across 600 matched active-tainted rollout pairs, no committed policy violation was observed under either taint-only or intent-ledger enforcement. Their execution records nevertheless differed: 441 pairs (73.5%) had different values in a shared 12-field trace summary that includes commit-related diagnostics, and the mean authorized proposal-commit score was 0.164 under taint-only enforcement and 0.857 under intent-ledger enforcement, compared with 0.923 under tool-boundary enforcement. Logged-propagation rankings changed with stage selection and normalization. In a limited set of custom AgentDojo-native workflows, committed violations were observed without defense and were not observed under either evaluated defense. A separate 6,048-rollout Mistral/common-JSON model-interface configuration retained the v1-to-v2 proposal-commit improvement, but committed violations were observed under intent-ledger v2. Equal terminal outcomes do not imply equal containment. The evaluation uses synthetic workflows. The intended intent-ledger mechanism assumes schema-aligned authorization metadata; one public-status task family violates this assumption and is analyzed separately.

cs.CR↗

From Refusal Geometry to Safety Geometry: Harmfulness--Refusal Coupling under Dynamic Adversarial Fine-Tuning

Safety alignment requires language models to refuse harmful requests without losing the ability to answer benign ones. Existing robustness evaluations, however, do not reveal whether a model has learned to recognize harmfulness, to activate a refusal policy, or to couple these two processes. We study this question with a dual safety-geometry protocol that measures harmfulness carriers, refusal carriers, and their coupling across aligned instruction-tuned anchors and matched Mistral-7B-v0.1 SFT/R2D2 training trajectories. The aligned anchors validate the protocol: refusal-side interventions reopen attack success more strongly than harmfulness-only interventions, while harmfulness and refusal carriers remain nearly orthogonal. Along the Mistral trajectory, R2D2 exhibits a high-coupling early phase with strong fixed-source robustness, saturated safe-prompt refusal, and collapsed benign utility. Later checkpoints move to a lower-coupling regime with partial utility recovery and reopened attack success. SFT provides an important contrast: it also reaches low coupling, but remains substantially less robust, showing that low coupling alone is not a safety guarantee. All-anchor diagnostics and sparse GCG/AutoDAN transfer experiments further show that H/R coupling is informative in the R2D2 regime, whereas SFT transfer is better summarized by drift or behavior-state measures. Causal sweeps support fixed-protocol sensitivity relative to matched unit-direction controls, but do not establish independent harmfulness and refusal pathways. These results frame harmfulness--refusal coupling as an operational diagnostic for safety-geometry dynamics under adversarial fine-tuning.

cs.CR↗

Dynamic Adversarial Fine-Tuning Reorganizes Refusal Geometry

Safety-aligned language models must refuse harmful requests without broad over-refusal, but it remains unclear how dynamic adversarial fine-tuning changes refusal-control carriers: Kullback--Leibler (KL)-constrained directions or small subspaces that causally modulate refusal without large safe-prompt distribution shifts. We study a 7B backbone under supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Robust Refusal Dynamic Defense (R2D2), aligning HarmBench, StrongREJECT, and XSTest evaluations with five-anchor geometry measurements, causal interventions, and sparse adaptive stress tests. R2D2 drives fixed-source HarmBench attack success to zero at early checkpoints; however, these checkpoints also exhibit maximal XSTest refusal and fail a benign-utility audit. Later checkpoints partially recover utility-facing behavior while reopening attack success, with adaptive GCG attack success rate rising to 0.415 at step 250 and 0.613 at step 500. Internally, R2D2 preserves a late-layer admissible refusal-control carrier through step 100 and then relocates the best admissible carrier to an early layer; SFT relocates earlier yet remains less robust. Effective rank stays near 1.24, and SFT shows larger principal-angle drift, arguing against both dimensional expansion and drift magnitude as sufficient explanations. Causal interventions support a low-dimensional but utility-coupled carrier. These results support a geometry-reorganization account of R2D2 along a robustness--utility frontier, without establishing adaptive robustness.

cs.LG↗

CloudFort: Enhancing Robustness of 3D Point Cloud Classification Against Backdoor Attacks via Spatial Partitioning and Ensemble Prediction

The increasing adoption of 3D point cloud data in various applications, such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, and virtual reality, has brought about significant advancements in object recognition and scene understanding. However, this progress is accompanied by new security challenges, particularly in the form of backdoor attacks. These attacks involve inserting malicious information into the training data of machine learning models, potentially compromising the model's behavior. In this paper, we propose CloudFort, a novel defense mechanism designed to enhance the robustness of 3D point cloud classifiers against backdoor attacks. CloudFort leverages spatial partitioning and ensemble prediction techniques to effectively mitigate the impact of backdoor triggers while preserving the model's performance on clean data. We evaluate the effectiveness of CloudFort through extensive experiments, demonstrating its strong resilience against the Point Cloud Backdoor Attack (PCBA). Our results show that CloudFort significantly enhances the security of 3D point cloud classification models without compromising their accuracy on benign samples. Furthermore, we explore the limitations of CloudFort and discuss potential avenues for future research in the field of 3D point cloud security. The proposed defense mechanism represents a significant step towards ensuring the trustworthiness and reliability of point-cloud-based systems in real-world applications.

cs.CV↗

iEDA: An Open-Source Intelligent Physical Implementation Toolkit and Library

Open-source EDA shows promising potential in unleashing EDA innovation and lowering the cost of chip design. This paper presents an open-source EDA project, iEDA, aiming for building a basic infrastructure for EDA technology evolution and closing the industrial-academic gap in the EDA area. iEDA now covers the whole flow of physical design (including Floorplan, Placement, CTS, Routing, Timing Optimization etc.), and part of the analysis tools (Static Timing Analysis and Power Analysis). To demonstrate the effectiveness of iEDA, we implement and tape out three chips of different scales (from 700k to 1.5M gates) on different process nodes (110nm and 28nm) with iEDA. iEDA is publicly available from the project home page http://ieda.oscc.cc.

cs.AR↗

HTDet: A Clustering Method using Information Entropy for Hardware Trojan Detection

Hardware Trojans (HTs) have drawn more and more attention in both academia and industry because of its significant potential threat. In this paper, we proposed a novel HT detection method using information entropy based clustering, named HTDet. The key insight of HTDet is that the Trojan usually be inserted in the regions with low controllability and low observability in order to maintain high concealment, which will result in that Trojan logics appear extremely low transitions during the simulation. This means that the logical regions with the low transitions will provide us with much more abundant and more important information for HT detection. Therefore, HTDet applies information theory technology and a typical density-based clustering algorithm called Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) to detect all suspicious Trojan logics in circuit under detection (CUD). DBSCAN is an unsupervised learning algorithm, which can improve the applicability of HTDet. Besides, we develop a heuristic test patterns generation method using mutual information to increase the transitions of suspicious Trojan logics. Experimental evaluation with benchmarks demenstrates the effectiveness of HTDet.

cs.IT↗

Extracting Actionability from Machine Learning Models by Sub-optimal Deterministic Planning

A main focus of machine learning research has been improving the generalization accuracy and efficiency of prediction models. Many models such as SVM, random forest, and deep neural nets have been proposed and achieved great success. However, what emerges as missing in many applications is actionability, i.e., the ability to turn prediction results into actions. For example, in applications such as customer relationship management, clinical prediction, and advertisement, the users need not only accurate prediction, but also actionable instructions which can transfer an input to a desirable goal (e.g., higher profit repays, lower morbidity rates, higher ads hit rates). Existing effort in deriving such actionable knowledge is few and limited to simple action models which restricted to only change one attribute for each action. The dilemma is that in many real applications those action models are often more complex and harder to extract an optimal solution. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that achieves actionability by combining learning with planning, two core areas of AI. In particular, we propose a framework to extract actionable knowledge from random forest, one of the most widely used and best off-the-shelf classifiers. We formulate the actionability problem to a sub-optimal action planning (SOAP) problem, which is to find a plan to alter certain features of a given input so that the random forest would yield a desirable output, while minimizing the total costs of actions. Technically, the SOAP problem is formulated in the SAS+ planning formalism, and solved using a Max-SAT based approach. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach on a personal credit dataset and other benchmarks. Our work represents a new application of automated planning on an emerging and challenging machine learning paradigm.

cs.AI↗