Lichen Xu

Yihe Fan, Changyi Li, Lichen Xu et al.

LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks, but most existing systems rely on fixed, human-designed scaffolds that struggle to adapt across diverse targets and failure modes. We introduce \textsc{CyberEvolver}, a self-evolving cybersecurity agent framework that iteratively revises its own scaffold based on experience from failed execution attempts. Self-evolution in cybersecurity is challenging because the space of possible scaffold changes is largely unstructured, execution feedback is sparse and often obscured by the environment, and low-diversity updates can cause errors to compound over repeated iterations. \textsc{CyberEvolver} addresses these challenges with a four-layer evolvable agent architecture that decomposes scaffold optimization into structured components, a trace-to-diagnosis mechanism that converts noisy execution logs into actionable revision signals, and a population-based beam search strategy that preserves diverse agent variants during evolution. We evaluate \textsc{CyberEvolver} on CTF challenges, vulnerability exploitation, and penetration-testing tasks using four open-source LLMs. Across these settings, \textsc{CyberEvolver} improves the seed agent's success rate by $13.6$\,\% on average, and outperforms six human-designed cybersecurity agents as well as two self-improvement methods adapted from other domains. These results suggest that scaffold self-evolution is a promising direction for building adaptive LLM agents for security testing.

Sensen Wu, Yifan Chen, Guantao Pu et al.

Short-term ocean forecast skill depends strongly on the three-dimensional ocean structure of the upper ocean, which governs stratification, subsurface heat storage, and the response of the ocean to atmospheric forcing. However, AI ocean forecasting models often fail to preserve this vertical structure, resulting in over-smoothed subsurface features and weak physical consistency under strong forcing. Here, we present AxiomOcean, a global AI ocean forecasting model that explicitly represents vertical hierarchy and cross-layer dependence within the water column. By combining a fully three-dimensional encoder-backbone-decoder architecture with surface atmospheric forcing, AxiomOcean jointly predicts upper-ocean temperature, salinity, and three-dimensional currents at global 1/12° resolution down to 643 m depth. In 10-day forecasts, AxiomOcean outperforms an advanced AI comparison model across variables and lead times, reducing day-1 RMSE by approximately 20 to 35% while maintaining higher anomaly correlation. The gain is not achieved through excessive smoothing: AxiomOcean better preserves eddy kinetic energy, temperature and salinity variance. Its advantage also extends through the water column and remains evident across the equatorial Pacific, Kuroshio Extension, and Southern Ocean, yielding a more realistic reconstruction of upper-ocean heat content. These results show that explicitly preserving upper-ocean three-dimensional structure can improve both forecast accuracy and physical fidelity in AI ocean prediction.