Ed Li

Sajana Weerawardhena, Paul Kassianik, Blaine Nelson et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success across many domains, yet their integration into cybersecurity applications remains limited due to a lack of general-purpose cybersecurity data, representational complexity, and safety and regulatory concerns. To address this gap, we previously introduced Foundation-Sec-8B, a cybersecurity-focused LLM suitable for fine-tuning on downstream tasks. That model, however, was not designed for chat-style interactions or instruction-following. In this report, we release Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct: a model specifically trained for general-purpose cybersecurity dialogue. Built on Foundation-Sec-8B, it combines domain-specific knowledge with instruction-following, conversational capabilities, and alignment with human preferences to produce high-quality, relevant responses. Comprehensive evaluations show that Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct outperforms Llama 3.1-8B-Instruct on a range of cybersecurity tasks while matching its instruction-following performance. It is also competitive with GPT-4o-mini on cyber threat intelligence and instruction-following tasks. We envision Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct becoming an indispensable assistant in the daily workflows of cybersecurity professionals. We release the model publicly at https://huggingface.co/fdtn-ai/Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct.

Ed Li, Junyu Ren, Xintian Pan et al.

The automation of scientific discovery represents a critical milestone in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. However, existing agentic systems for science suffer from two fundamental limitations: rigid, pre-programmed workflows that cannot adapt to intermediate findings, and inadequate context management that hinders long-horizon research. We present \texttt{freephdlabor}, an open-source multiagent framework featuring \textit{fully dynamic workflows} determined by real-time agent reasoning and a \coloremph{\textit{modular architecture}} enabling seamless customization -- users can modify, add, or remove agents to address domain-specific requirements. The framework provides comprehensive infrastructure including \textit{automatic context compaction}, \textit{workspace-based communication} to prevent information degradation, \textit{memory persistence} across sessions, and \textit{non-blocking human intervention} mechanisms. These features collectively transform automated research from isolated, single-run attempts into \textit{continual research programs} that build systematically on prior explorations and incorporate human feedback. By providing both the architectural principles and practical implementation for building customizable co-scientist systems, this work aims to facilitate broader adoption of automated research across scientific domains, enabling practitioners to deploy interactive multiagent systems that autonomously conduct end-to-end research -- from ideation through experimentation to publication-ready manuscripts.

Zhuoran Yang, Ed Li, Jianliang He et al.

We present Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning, the first open-source native reasoning model for cybersecurity. Built upon our previously released Foundation-Sec-8B base model (derived from Llama-3.1-8B-Base), the model is trained through a two-stage process combining supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR). Our training leverages proprietary reasoning data spanning cybersecurity analysis, instruction-following, and mathematical reasoning. Evaluation across 10 cybersecurity benchmarks and 10 general-purpose benchmarks demonstrates performance competitive with significantly larger models on cybersecurity tasks while maintaining strong general capabilities. The model shows effective generalization on multi-hop reasoning tasks and strong safety performance when deployed with appropriate system prompts and guardrails. This work demonstrates that domain-specialized reasoning models can achieve strong performance on specialized tasks while maintaining broad general capabilities. We release the model publicly at https://huggingface.co/fdtn-ai/Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning.

Hantao Zhang, Jingyang Liu, Ed Li

We study sketch-to-diagram generation: converting rough hand sketches into precise, compositional diagrams. Diffusion models excel at photorealism but struggle with the spatial precision, alignment, and symbolic structure required for flowcharts. We introduce See it. Say it. Sorted., a training-free agentic system that couples a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce editable Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) programs. The system runs an iterative loop in which a Critic VLM proposes a small set of qualitative, relational edits; multiple candidate LLMs synthesize SVG updates with diverse strategies (conservative->aggressive, alternative, focused); and a Judge VLM selects the best candidate, ensuring stable improvement. This design prioritizes qualitative reasoning over brittle numerical estimates, preserves global constraints (e.g., alignment, connectivity), and naturally supports human-in-the-loop corrections. On 10 sketches derived from flowcharts in published papers, our method more faithfully reconstructs layout and structure than two frontier closed-source image generation LLMs (GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5-Pro), accurately composing primitives (e.g., multi-headed arrows) without inserting unwanted text. Because outputs are programmatic SVGs, the approach is readily extensible to presentation tools (e.g., PowerPoint) via APIs and can be specialized with improved prompts and task-specific tools. The codebase is open-sourced at https://github.com/hantaoZhangrichard/see_it_say_it_sorted.git.

Ed Li, Junyu Ren, Cat Yan

While multiagent systems have shown promise for tackling complex tasks via specialization, finetuning multiple agents simultaneously faces two key challenges: (1) credit assignment across agents, and (2) sample efficiency of expensive multiagent rollouts. In this work, we propose finetuning multiagent systems with per-action process rewards from AI feedback (MAPPA) to address both. Through assigning credit to individual agent actions rather than only at task completion, MAPPA enables fine-grained supervision without ground truth labels while extracting maximal training signal from each rollout. We demonstrate our approach on competition math problems and tool-augmented data analysis tasks. On unseen math problems, MAPPA achieves +5.0--17.5pp on AIME and +7.8--17.2pp on AMC. For data analysis tasks, our method improves success rate by +16.7pp while quality metrics improve by up to 47%, validating that per-action supervision can lead to improvements across different multiagent systems on various domains. By addressing these challenges, our work takes a first step toward scaling multiagent systems for complex, long-horizon tasks with minimal human supervision.