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Ziyang Li

Publications and source records attributed to Ziyang Li.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Graph Evidence Is Not Enough: Diagnosing Native Decoder Use in Graph-Augmented LLMs

Graph-augmented large language models often assume that graph evidence produced by external computation and placed in the input can be used by the native decoder. We test this assumption with HopQA, a deliberately bounded diagnostic that asks for the shortest-hop distance between two query nodes. Because the answer is a small integer and the target is purely topological, failure cannot be dismissed as open-ended generation or ambiguous evaluation. Yet existing graph-augmented baselines still fail on this setting, showing that providing graph evidence is not the same as making it usable. We introduce an intervention triangle with three matched conditions: readable graph evidence, shuffled graph evidence, and no-graph input. This separates evidence inclusion, structural readability, and decoder-usable topology. Guided by this diagnosis, we present S$^2$GE as an instance showing that diagnosis-driven interface design can improve native decoder usability. S$^2$GE uses query-aware sampling, endpoint and proximity-based ordering, and structure-preserving alignment. Across DBLP, Biomedical, GoodReads, and PubMed, S$^2$GE achieves strict exact-match scores of $36.5\%$, $57.8\%$, $76.6\%$, and $52.0\%$, improving over the strongest native-generation baseline by $53.5$ points on average. The interventions further reveal harmful-shuffle, shuffle-robust, and no-graph-saturated regimes.

cs.CL

Same Request, Different Boundary: Evaluating Cybersecurity Assistance across Conversational Contexts

Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve complex problems, but their misuse in high-risk domains can lead to severe consequences. Model providers therefore restrict assistance for potentially harmful requests. Refusing all cybersecurity requests would therefore harm legitimate users. Providers need a mechanism to block malicious use without denying legitimate assistance to defenders. Existing cybersecurity-specific datasets evaluate this mechanism, but none considers the conversational context of a request. We introduce 3R-Bench (Refusal, Repetition, and Revision), a benchmark of 150 real-world cybersecurity requests augmented with two adversarial conversational settings, and evaluate eight LLMs on it. Prior assistant behavior strongly changes responses to an unchanged request: among 376 available pairs from a 400-pair panel, compliance rises from 62.0% after refused history to 85.1% after accepted history. The opposite pattern appears under dialogue decomposition. In comparison, compliance falls from 501/800 direct responses to 172/800 after dialogue; among 738 pairs returning model-authored text in both conditions, the decrease is 45.1 points. Failure feedback recovers only a small fraction of this loss.

cs.AI

SoK: When Safe Agents Fail Together: The Security of Multi Agent LLM Systems

Safe agents can fail together. Multi-agent LLM systems (MAS) move information, state, decisions, and authority across principal boundaries, creating failures that local checks may miss. Without an execution-level view, a multi-agent setting can easily be mistaken for evidence of a genuinely multi-agent security effect. We thus systematize MAS security through an execution-centered analysis of 197 works, covering six interaction interfaces, four adversary positions, seven system-level risks, and eight recurring attack paths. We introduce an A-I-R framework that organizes attacks by adversary position, interaction interface, and resulting system-level risk, unifying otherwise fragmented attack mechanisms across MAS. We organize defenses through a five-part contract covering path target, observation, intervention, trust boundary, and recovery, and identify path closure and recovery as key challenges. We audit 44 evaluation and benchmark works and identify open challenges in isolating interaction effects, designing comparable and diagnostic metrics, supporting reuse across MAS designs, and evaluating open-system operation. Together, these findings motivate an interaction-aware view of MAS security: trace attacks end to end, test whether defenses close those paths, and evaluate system-level effects with appropriate counterfactuals.

cs.CR