Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Han Fang

Publications and source records attributed to Han Fang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Right Tool, Wrong Parameters: Defending LLM Agents Against Parameter Poisoning

Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) poses a critical threat to LLM agents. Existing defenses largely focus on whether an injection induces a new tool invocation or unintended action. In this paper, we study a different attack surface, parameter poisoning, where the attacker preserves the intended action but manipulates one or more tool arguments, such as a recipient or other task-critical value. Such attacks are difficult to detect because no new action is introduced, while parameter changes themselves are often legitimate parts of the user's request. Our key insight is that the legitimacy of a parameter change should be determined by the trust of the information flow that produces it under the user query. The query induces a task-specific trust hierarchy over available information fields: some are trusted to determine particular parameters, while others should have little or no influence. Based on this insight, we propose AuthorityFlow, a three-stage parameter-level defense. First, it interprets the user query to construct a task-specific trust hierarchy over the information fields available to the agent. Second, for each tool argument, it traces the information flow that produces its current value and attributes the value to its supporting field. Finally, it accepts the value only when that field is trusted to determine the parameter under the current task, allowing high-trust changes while flagging low-trust influence as potential parameter poisoning. We further introduce FactAuthBench for evaluating parameter poisoning in LLM agents. Without defense, the attack success rate reaches 93.06%. AuthorityFlow reduces it to 9.03%, while retaining 82.64% benign task utility compared with 90.28% without defense. Our results show that effective IPI defense requires reasoning not only about what action an agent takes, but also about which information is trusted to determine its parameters.

cs.CR↗

OneDemo: Unified Policy Learning and Data Generation from a Single Demonstration

Learning robot policies from demonstrations is often limited by the cost of collecting diverse, high-quality expert data. While an appealing alternative is to expand a single successful demonstration into a diverse set of successful trajectories, existing augmentation methods typically rely on manually designed transformation rules or complex trajectory planning, requiring substantial task-specific engineering and human effort. We introduce OneDemo, a reinforcement learning framework that learns to edit a single successful demonstration for new task configurations. We formulate demonstration editing as a structured reinforcement learning problem, in which an editor learns, from sparse task-success rewards, both when to transition between object-centric trajectory segments and how to geometrically adapt each segment. The learned editor serves both as a task policy and as a reusable demonstration generator. Across 15 Meta-World tasks, OneDemo reaches a 92.7% success rate within 53.7k environment interactions on average. Across 9 DexMimicGen tasks, it generates successful demonstrations with a 98.4% average success rate, and BC-RNN policies trained on the generated data achieve 99.6% average success at matched dataset scale. These results show that learning to edit a single successful demonstration provides a structured and effective basis for both policy learning and scalable demonstration generation.

cs.RO↗

SpanGuard: Decoupling Instruction Localization from Authorization for Lightweight IPI Defense

LLM-based guardrails are effective against indirect prompt injection (IPI), but their performance depends heavily on model capability: as the guardrail model becomes smaller or weaker, detection degrades substantially. This raises a natural question: can we retain strong IPI defense while relying only on a small LLM? To understand why, we revisit what an LLM guardrail actually does. Detecting IPI requires simultaneously locating potentially injected instructions within heterogeneous tool outputs and judging whether they are authorized by the user's request. We find that the difficulty for small models arises largely from satisfying both requirements jointly, rather than from either subproblem alone. This suggests a different path to lightweight defense: explicitly decoupling localization from decision-making. In particular, localization needs no strong language-model reasoning, since injected instructions are often semantically discontinuous with their surrounding content and can be partitioned into local regions via lightweight unsupervised segmentation. Once the observation is partitioned this way, the remaining authorization check becomes a localized judgment that a small LLM can handle. Building on this insight, we design a lightweight IPI guardrail that performs attack-agnostic localization followed by block-level authorization judgment with a small language model. By separating where to look from what to decide, our approach substantially reduces the capability required of the guardrail model while preserving strong defense performance. Empirically, our guardrail achieves a 0.32% attack success rate with negligible loss in benign utility while remaining effective with substantially smaller models. These results show that strong IPI defense need not rely on strong LLMs when localization and decision-making are explicitly decoupled.

cs.CR↗

ClockMark: Adaptive and Host-Dependent Watermarking for Large Language Models

Large language model (LLM) watermarking operates on the next-token distribution that evolves during generation. In streaming generation, each sampled token becomes part of the text and affects subsequent distributions. Embedding therefore proceeds with a changing host, unlike classical watermarking, which adapts embedding to an existing host signal. To accommodate this difference, we formulate a novel embedding framework for LLM watermarking based on two principles. We first argue that embedding should be adaptive, retaining the state of previous sampling decisions to better guide subsequent choices. We further argue that embedding should be host-dependent, using the current LLM distribution to constrain both token selection and state updates. Guided by these principles and the two requirements of distribution preservation and robustness to text editing, we propose ClockMark. It combines adaptive and host-dependent embedding with message spreading, embedding the full payload in each watermarked token. Theoretically, we prove that ClockMark preserves the original LLM sequence distribution, thereby maintaining generation quality. Empirically, extensive experiments against 12 baselines demonstrate improved robustness to text editing, with gains of up to 16.08 percentage points in bit accuracy over the strongest tested baseline.

cs.LG↗

ReferFlow: Beyond Final-Target Localization for Complex Referring Expressions

Multimodal Large Language Models have made significant progress in referring expression comprehension (REC), yet most REC benchmarks still focus on final-target localization. Complex queries often involve intermediate visual references with different dependencies on prior grounding, but final-only evaluation leaves this process unexamined. To address this gap, we formulate trajectory-level REC, in which models receive an ordered sequence of grounding steps constructed from a single complex query and localize the target regions associated with each step. We instantiate this setting in ReferFlow-Bench, which characterizes structured region transitions through four trajectory types, namely Refinement, Shift, Reset, and Mixture. Experiments show that current models struggle to consistently ground intermediate visual references across successive steps. We further propose ReferFlow, which decouples interleaved text-latent trajectory generation from coordinate decoding. Specifically, Stateful Region Latent Reasoning represents each target region as an object-indexed state composed of continuous latents, with explicit visual and spatial supervision to preserve region information for subsequent grounding. Trajectory-Aware Parallel Decoding then recovers all coordinate blocks in parallel through four geometry-constrained refinement rounds, with each block conditioned on its corresponding trajectory prefix, thereby reducing within-box sequential dependencies and eliminating cross-box autoregression. We further apply Grounding-Aware GRPO to promote consistent grounding across steps and learn adaptive trajectory generation from complex REC queries. ReferFlow achieves leading performance on general REC benchmarks and ReferFlow-Bench.

cs.CV↗

RESTA: Time-Scaling Augmentation for Data-Efficient Robot Imitation Learning

Robot manipulation policies trained through imitation learning commonly rely on costly demonstrations recorded in one task direction and at one temporal resolution. We propose Reversal and Stride-based Trajectory Augmentation (RESTA), which exploits time-scaling data augmentation to improve data efficiency through trajectory reversal and temporal resampling. Trajectory-reversal augmentation reverses and relabels demonstrations between paired tasks with opposite objectives, reusing recorded rollouts without additional environment interaction. Because contact-rich manipulation is not exactly reversible, we treat reversal as an approximate paired-task prior rather than a physical symmetry. Temporal-stride augmentation varies observation and action sampling strides and conditions the policy on the resulting offsets, enabling fixed or randomized temporal schedules. Experiments across 16 paired bimanual manipulation tasks show that trajectory reversal is particularly effective in the low-data regime and that temporal-stride augmentation improves success under randomized temporal schedules. With 25 and 50 independently collected demonstrations per task, RESTA achieves 78.4% and 85.2% average success, respectively, matching or exceeding baselines trained with twice as many demonstrations (77.3% and 85.4%). These results show that RESTA can improve data efficiency in robot imitation learning.

cs.RO↗

Discovering Undisclosed Concepts in LoRA Adapters for Diffusion-Based AIGC Models

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has made diffusion model personalization affordable and widely shareable, but it also creates moderation risks when harmful or problematic content is not faithfully disclosed. Hence, it is desired to develop a mechanism that, given a LoRA adapter, discovers the concept it was trained to generate, so as to support downstream investigation. We characterize the target concept through the conditioning input that most clearly exposes what the LoRA has learned. Such an input should induce coherent LoRA outputs that are distinctive from those of the base model and strongly align with the learned LoRA subspace. We therefore formulate concept discovery as searching for the conditioning input that jointly maximizes output coherence, LoRA-induced distinctiveness, and subspace alignment. Even with a clear objective, however, optimizing it over an open-ended input space is prohibitively expensive, since reliable evaluation of coherence and distinctiveness requires repeated diffusion rendering. Crucially, we observe that an input need not be rendered to determine whether it is promising. Its alignment with the learned LoRA subspace provides a lightweight signal for localizing promising candidates before visual verification. Based on this insight, we develop a two-stage framework for text-to-image LoRAs. Subspace-Guided Evolutionary Search (SGES) uses render-free subspace alignment to explore candidate prompts and retain a compact shortlist, while Paired Visual Identification (PVI) renders only these candidates and compares the LoRA and base-model outputs to identify those exhibiting coherent and distinctive generation behavior. This design enables efficient and reliable discovery of previously unknown concepts encoded in LoRA adapters.

cs.AI↗

ProxyEraseAgent: Blind Watermark Removal in the Wild

Invisible image watermark removal has received growing attention. Despite substantial progress, existing attacks face a tension between practicality and specificity. Attacks exploiting detector outputs, decoder responses, or paired images can be tailored to the watermark decision boundary, but require information rarely available in realistic scenarios. Conversely, attacks based on compression, geometric distortion, or reconstruction are easily deployed from a single watermarked image, but remain largely open-loop: they apply generic transformations without knowing if the image is moving toward watermark failure. Thus, the key challenge in single-image blind watermark removal is not merely how to transform the image, but how to obtain a useful removal direction without accessing the hidden decoder. To bridge this gap, we propose ProxyEraseAgent, an agent-driven framework recovering attack specificity through proxy decoder responses. Publicly available watermarking schemes provide a natural knowledge base of candidate decoders, where some are informative for a given unknown image. Our insight is that a decoder producing a strong calibrated response to the query image likely shares a nearby decoding boundary with the hidden target mechanism. ProxyEraseAgent ranks these decoders by calibrated response strength and uses the top ones as proxy boundary estimators. Their responses then guide a progressive search over heterogeneous removal operations (e.g., geometric distortion, JPEG compression, image reconstruction, and gradient perturbation) under perceptual-quality constraints. Experiments across 11 watermarking systems show ProxyEraseAgent achieves a 94.8% attack success rate, demonstrating the effectiveness of response-guided proxy retrieval and feedback-driven sequential planning for blind watermark removal.

cs.CR↗

MeSD: Multi-Evidence Self-Distillation for VideoLLM

While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards provides reliable outcome supervision for VideoLLMs, sequence-level rewards offer limited token-level guidance. On-policy self-distillation addresses this limitation by conditioning a self-teacher on privileged information to provide dense token-level supervision. However, aggregating heterogeneous evidence within a single teacher context obscures cross-evidence agreement and conflict. A further challenge lies in determining whether teacher guidance should refine reward-based updates or provide corrective supervision for failed trajectories. To address these issues, we propose MeSD, a multi-evidence self-distillation framework for VideoLLMs. MeSD constructs three evidence-conditioned teachers with shared parameters, using the ground-truth answer as a common semantic context while separately incorporating temporal and spatial evidence. Given the same student-generated prefixes, MeSD evaluates evidence-specific preferences relative to the Answer Teacher and fuses teacher-common preferences with gated teacher-specific residuals. Furthermore, MeSD introduces Verification-Guided Optimization to classify trajectories as Success, Failure, or Indeterminate. For Success and Indeterminate trajectories, MeSD refines token-level advantage magnitudes while preserving reward-derived signs. For verified failure trajectories that contain the required evidence, MeSD applies failure-conditioned distillation, using reverse-KL correction toward the fused distribution. Experiments on multiple video benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains over reinforcement learning and self-distillation baselines.

cs.CV↗

Secure D2D Coded Caching under Radius-Limited Connectivity via Lifting

Secure device-to-device (D2D) caching requires users to generate delivery signals from their own caches and to recover their requested files without learning the other files. We construct schemes that meet both requirements when communication is limited to nearby users. The network consists of $K$ users on a cycle, a library of $N$ independent files, and a reception radius $r$. Delivery uses one round of noiseless orthogonal local broadcasts, with no server transmission. Each user's cache has capacity $M$ file units. An outer secret-sharing code assigns file shares to senders, and a secure local caching scheme at each sender delivers the requested shares. The cache budget includes the sender's library representation, random state, and delivery keys. We prove that each receiver's cache and all audible broadcasts jointly reveal no information about nonrequested files, despite the dependence between the outer shares. The converse counts transmissions crossing a contiguous user block and uses secrecy to remove one user's observation from the entropy bound. Let $h=2r$ and $K\ge h+1$. The private coded caching (PCC) instantiation attains the minimum peak sum load $K/h$ for every $M\ge Nh$ when $N>1$. For $N\ge K$, its memory-sharing envelope is within a factor $15$ of the optimum throughout $M\in[N/h+2,Nh]$. We also apply lifting without secrecy constraints, achieving the optimal load on $M\in[hN/(h+1),N]$ and a factor-$9/2$ guarantee on $M\in[N/(h+1),N]$ when $N\ge K$.

cs.IT↗

Secure Multi-Access Coded Caching: A Lifting Approach

We construct secure cyclic multi-access coded caching schemes by re-encoding the caches of a secure single-access scheme and reusing its multicast message unchanged. For a library of $N$ files, each of $K$ users reads $L<K$ consecutive shared caches and must recover its requested file while learning no information about the other files. Starting from a parent scheme with a cyclic representation of its cached symbols, the transformation lets each access window recover the corresponding parent-cache symbols and, conditioned on them, learn nothing about the remaining symbols. A deterministic Pascal-window encoder handles symbols whose consecutive appearances span at least $L$ users. A randomized complement-dual encoder handles shorter spans. Over a suitable finite field, these encoders attain the exact minimum per-block storage for every input length in the block-separable, parent-preserving class. Applying the transformation to two secure single-access schemes gives an achievable memory-rate family for $N,K\ge2$ and $1\le L<K$, including the exact rate-one cache size $(N-1)(K-1)/L$. Using converse bounds for arbitrary secure multi-access schemes, we prove approximation guarantees for the achievable family and give a proof of the exact $L=K-1$ tradeoff.

cs.IT↗

Order-Optimal Coded Caching With File and Demand Privacy

We study coded caching with joint file and demand privacy: each user recovers its requested file while learning nothing about the remaining files and the other users' requests jointly. Let $N$ and $K$ be the numbers of files and users, and let $M$ and $R$ denote the cache memory and delivery rate, both normalized by the file size. For every $N,K\ge2$ and every feasible cache size, we give a scheme whose worst-case delivery rate is at most $9/2$ times the optimum. To reduce the memory used for file shares, the scheme secret-shares $N-1$ differences relative to a reference file. Cached masks supply the correction needed to recover the requested file from its difference. For each integer $t\in\{0,\ldots,K-1\}$, the scheme achieves $M=1+(N-1)t/(K-t)$ and $R=K/(t+1)$. To lower-bound the delivery rate, we compare the joint cache entropy of user groups under alternative demand vectors, using one fixed user's privacy constraint. Two choices of groups determine the optimal delivery rate up to constants at the scale $\min\{K,1+(N-1)/(M-1)\}$ for $M>1$. At $M=1$, the exact optimum is $K$. A complementary bound on joint broadcast entropy gives the minimum memory for unit delivery rate, $1+(N-1)(K-1)$, and the exact tradeoff on an interval ending at that memory. All schemes and bounds apply to repeated as well as distinct requests.

cs.IT↗

LEAP: Making Privileged Geometry Supervision Effective for Visuomotor Learning

Privileged 3D supervision uses additional geometric information during training to guide RGB-based visuomotor policy learning, without requiring geometric inputs at deployment. However, low reconstruction error does not ensure that visual representations capture geometry useful for control. We identify three limitations that weaken this supervision: proprioceptive shortcuts, dominant-view reliance, and reconstruction objectives dominated by task-irrelevant geometry. To address these limitations, we propose Latent Encoding with Aligned Privileged Geometry (LEAP). Our framework uses an auxiliary decoder to reconstruct point clouds within the manipulation workspace from visual features alone, while retaining proprioception for action prediction. Alongside full reconstruction, we introduce wrist-view dropout and partial reconstruction targets matched to the retained wrist, encouraging the encoder to capture complementary local geometry. The auxiliary decoder is removed at inference, leaving only RGB observations and robot state as policy inputs. Extensive experiments on RoboTwin, ManiSkill, and real-world tasks demonstrate consistent and substantial improvements over Diffusion Policy and ACT, with only a small increase in parameter count and no reduction in inference speed.

cs.RO↗

LoRo-Mark:Provably Lossless and Robust Agent Watermarking

As LLM agents are increasingly deployed as commercial services, protecting proprietary orchestration logic and tool-use policies is important. We consider agent repackaging: an adversary integrates a protected agent into its own application via API and presents it under its own identity. It may modify parts of execution to obscure the source. The owner typically has only black-box access to the repackaged service, so black-box ownership verification is essential. Agent watermarking embeds ownership evidence into agent behavior for later verification. An effective watermark should satisfy two requirements: losslessness, preserving original functionality, and robustness, keeping ownership evidence recoverable after partial modification of execution. Existing methods often embed signals into behavior selection or execution trajectories, intervene in normal decisions, and offer limited robustness to behavior modification. We propose LoRo-Mark, a provably lossless and robust agent watermarking mechanism. For losslessness, it isolates watermarking into a cryptographically authenticated forensic branch that remains inactive during normal execution and is activated only by owner-authorized requests. By reducing unauthorized branch activation to standard MAC security, LoRo-Mark formally guarantees performance preservation. For robustness, it redundantly distributes ownership information across forensic behavior sequences, enabling reliable recovery under partial behavior substitution and sequence truncation. Experiments across multiple LLM agents show zero degradation on normal tasks and reliable ownership verification under sequence modifications.

cs.CR↗

Radiomap Blind Prediction under Incomplete Observation: Error Characterization and Correctable Propagation-Prior Learning

Radiomap blind prediction aims to infer radiomaps from observable representations of the propagation environment and base station configuration without field measurements. In practice, the observable representations are inherently incomplete. Thus, the target radiomap is not fully determined by the inputs when generalizing to unseen configurations or environments. Under incomplete observation, we establish a population-level theory of deterministic radiomap blind prediction that identifies the conditional mean as its optimal target and separates prediction error into reducible predictor approximation and irreducible uncertainty caused by missing physical information. The framework further characterizes the train-test risk gap and the uncertainty reduction enabled by observation enrichment. Building on it, we reveal the dual role of propagation priors: they provide physically grounded guidance, yet their implementable forms may bias the attainable predictor. This motivates RadioDecomp, which treats a prior-guided predictor as a correctable base and learns its remaining predictable discrepancy through residual refinement. To evaluate RadioDecomp across distinct propagation-prior designs, we instantiate it with a feature-guided monolithic base and a LoS-Shadow structured base, yielding RadioFR and RadioLSR, respectively. Across random, cross-configuration, and cross-environment settings, experiments confirm the benefit of propagation-related representations and show that both instantiations improve upon their respective bases. Further controlled studies on base capacity, training-support coverage, and observation coarsening corroborate the proposed analysis.

eess.SP↗

Proof-of-Authorship for Diffusion-based AI Generated Content

Recent advancements in AI-generated content (AIGC) have introduced new challenges in intellectual property protection and the authentication of generated objects. We focus on scenarios in which an author seeks to assert authorship of an object generated using latent diffusion models (LDMs), in the presence of adversaries who attempt to falsely claim authorship of objects they did not create. While proof-of-ownership has been studied in the context of multimedia content through techniques such as time-stamping and watermarking, these approaches face notable limitations. In contrast to traditional content creation sources (e.g., cameras), the LDM generation process offers greater control to the author. Specifically, the random seed used during generation can be deliberately chosen. By binding the seed to the author's identity using cryptographic functions, the author can assert to be the creator of the object. We refer to this stronger guarantee as proof-of-authorship, since only the creator of the object can legitimately claim the object. This contrasts with proof-of-ownership via time-stamping or watermarking, where any entity could potentially claim ownership of an object by being the first to timestamp or embed the watermark. We propose a proof-of-authorship framework involving a probabilistic adjudicator who quantifies the probability that a claim is false. Furthermore, unlike prior approaches, the proposed framework does not involve any secret. We explore various attack scenarios and analyze design choices using Stable Diffusion 2.1 and XL as representative case studies.

cs.CR↗

Misleading the Planner through Deceptive Resumes: Registration-Time Injection in Centralized Multi-Agent Systems

A centralized LLM-based multi-agent system (MAS) extends its functionality by registering new worker agents, whose descriptions are read by the planner to decide how a task is decomposed, which worker executes each subtask, and what each subtask requires. Third-party descriptions are authored outside the system but trusted by the planner, creating a registration-time injection channel. The payload is planted before any user instruction arrives, targets the planner and propagates through the generated plan to benign workers, taking effect even when the crafted worker is never assigned a subtask or invoked. We define four worker-description fields: functionality, input specification, output specification, and usage constraints. Among 32,000 descriptions from three public agent marketplaces, most omit input specifications and usage constraints, while at least 23.35% contain content outside these fields. We construct eight description-manipulation attack strategies targeting task decomposition, capability grounding, and subtask specification, and evaluate them on GAIA. In the most severe cases, a single manipulated description reduces task success from 84.31% to 37.25%, or increases token consumption or execution time by over 111%, while the user objective remains unchanged and workers faithfully execute the resulting plan. These effects persist across two MAS implementations, six planner LLMs, four LLM evaluators, and the real-world descriptions from three marketplaces. We further propose DescGuard, a registration-time defense that retains only worker-scoped interface information before descriptions reach the planner. DescGuard restores the targeted planning metrics and downstream performance toward their baseline levels without modifying worker implementations, the planner, or the orchestration logic, and composes with existing isolation, permission-control, and runtime mechanisms.

cs.CR↗

Rethinking Radiomap Blind Prediction with Limited Environment and Configuration Representations

Radiomap blind prediction infers radiomaps from observable representations of the propagation environment and base station (BS) configuration without field measurements. These representations are inherently incomplete and cannot uniquely determine the target radiomap. Under squared loss, we identify the conditional-mean radiomap as the population-optimal deterministic target and decompose domain risk into target-approximation error and irreducible uncertainty. The train-test risk gap motivates propagation priors as cross-domain guidance, although their partial or simplified forms may bias the attainable predictor. We therefore propose RadioDecomp, which treats a prior-guided predictor as a correctable base and uses deterministic residual refinement to learn its remaining predictable discrepancy. We instantiate RadioDecomp as RadioLSR (LoS-Shadow-Residual). Experiments under cross-configuration and cross-environment settings show that RadioLSR is especially effective for cross-configuration generalization and provides overall gains over a controlled monolithic counterpart under cross-environment generalization.

eess.SP↗