Handing Wang

Yuchen Li, Handing Wang, Bing Xue et al.

In the high-cost simulation-driven design domain, translating ambiguous design requirements into a mathematical optimization formulation is a bottleneck for optimizing product performance. This process is time-consuming and heavily reliant on expert knowledge. While large language models (LLMs) offer potential for automating this task, existing approaches either suffer from poor formalization that fails to accurately align with the design intent or rely on solver feedback for data filtering, which is unavailable due to the high simulation costs. To address this challenge, we propose APF, a framework for solver-independent, automated problem formulation via LLMs designed to automatically convert engineers' natural language requirements into executable optimization models. The core of this framework is an innovative pipeline for automatically generating high-quality data, which overcomes the difficulty of constructing suitable fine-tuning datasets in the absence of high-cost solver feedback with the help of data generation and test instance annotation. The generated high-quality dataset is used to perform supervised fine-tuning on LLMs, significantly enhancing their ability to generate accurate and executable optimization problem formulations. Experimental results on antenna design demonstrate that APF significantly outperforms the existing methods in both the accuracy of requirement formalization and the quality of resulting radiation efficiency curves in meeting the design goals.

Haoran Gu, Handing Wang, Yi Mei et al.

The widespread deployment of large language models (LLMs) has raised growing concerns about their misuse risks and associated safety issues. While prior studies have examined the safety of LLMs in general usage, code generation, and agent-based applications, their vulnerabilities in automated algorithm design remain underexplored. To fill this gap, this study investigates this overlooked safety vulnerability, with a particular focus on intelligent optimization algorithm design, given its prevalent use in complex decision-making scenarios. We introduce MalOptBench, a benchmark consisting of 60 malicious optimization algorithm requests, and propose MOBjailbreak, a jailbreak method tailored for this scenario. Through extensive evaluation of 13 mainstream LLMs including the latest GPT-5 and DeepSeek-V3.1, we reveal that most models remain highly susceptible to such attacks, with an average attack success rate of 83.59% and an average harmfulness score of 4.28 out of 5 on original harmful prompts, and near-complete failure under MOBjailbreak. Furthermore, we assess state-of-the-art plug-and-play defenses that can be applied to closed-source models, and find that they are only marginally effective against MOBjailbreak and prone to exaggerated safety behaviors. These findings highlight the urgent need for stronger alignment techniques to safeguard LLMs against misuse in algorithm design.

Kai Wu, Yujian Betterest Li, Jian Lou et al.

In the realm of daily services, the deployment of deep neural networks underscores the paramount importance of their reliability. However, the vulnerability of these networks to adversarial attacks, primarily evasion-based, poses a concerning threat to their functionality. Common methods for enhancing robustness involve heavy adversarial training or leveraging learned knowledge from clean data, both necessitating substantial computational resources. This inherent time-intensive nature severely limits the agility of large foundational models to swiftly counter adversarial perturbations. To address this challenge, this paper focuses on the Rapid Plug-in Defender (RaPiD) problem, aiming to rapidly counter adversarial perturbations without altering the deployed model. Drawing inspiration from the generalization and the universal computation ability of pre-trained transformer models, we propose a novel method termed CeTaD (Considering Pre-trained Transformers as Defenders) for RaPiD, optimized for efficient computation. CeTaD strategically fine-tunes the normalization layer parameters within the defender using a limited set of clean and adversarial examples. Our evaluation centers on assessing CeTaD's effectiveness, transferability, and the impact of different components in scenarios involving one-shot adversarial examples. The proposed method is capable of rapidly adapting to various attacks and different application scenarios without altering the target model and clean training data. We also explore the influence of varying training data conditions on CeTaD's performance. Notably, CeTaD exhibits adaptability across differentiable service models and proves the potential of continuous learning.