Zhijian Zhou

Zhijian Zhou, Xunye Tian, Jiacheng Zhang et al.

Statistical adversarial detection (SAD) treats detection as a two-sample test. Given a reference set of clean examples (CEs) and a batch of queries, potentially containing an unknown mixture of CEs and adversarial examples (AEs), SAD decides whether the query distribution drifts away from the CE distribution while controlling the false-alarm rate. Existing SAD-based methods mainly use maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) to measure the distributional discrepancy. However, MMD's distributional properties limit its ability to capture characteristic uncertainty patterns of AEs that are crucial for detection: AEs typically exhibit abnormal feature spread (i.e., global uncertainty) and instability under perturbations (i.e., local uncertainty). To close the gap, we propose Uncertainty-aware Statistical Adversarial Detection (USAD), which explicitly captures these uncertainty patterns with two new statistics: (1) Variance Discrepancy (VD), which measures the difference in feature spread between AEs and CEs to capture global uncertainty differences. (2) Perturbation-based Covariance Discrepancy (PCD), which compares feature covariance under Gaussian perturbations to capture local uncertainty differences. By aggregating VD and PCD, USAD achieves superior detection performances over baseline methods against various adversarial attacks, highlighting the importance of considering characteristic behaviors of AEs for effective SAD. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/USAD.

Xuan Zhang, Zhijian Zhou, Lingfeng Qiao et al.

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capability in sequential decision-making, yet they remains fundamentally reactive in long-horizon tasks. Unlike humans who employ "what-if" reasoning to evaluate potential plans before commitment, standard agents lack an internal world model to simulate future outcomes. Therefore, we propose to internalize future-aware planning by training a single autoregressive model to verbalize both a prospective state rollout and a plan-conditioned success estimate-a textual analogue of the Q-value. Crucially, we identify a format-capability gap: simply fine-tuning agents on look-ahead traces during post-training leads to superficial mimicry of foresight without genuine predictive grounding. To bridge this gap, we introduce a three-stage training paradigm: (i) World Model Agentic Mid-Training (WM-AMT) to inject latent predictive capabilities into the policy; (ii) Format-Eliciting SFT (FE-SFT) to structure this injected capability; and (iii) Foresight-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (FC-RL) to refine the calibration and utility of the generated simulations. Evaluated on search and mathematical reasoning tasks, our approach consistently outperforms other training baselines. Our results demonstrate that effective internal world modeling in LLM agents requires a capability-first training pipeline to achieve grounded and calibrated foresight.