Yannis Belkhiter

Yannis Belkhiter, Seshu Tirupathi, Giulio Zizzo et al.

The field of Language Reasoning Models (LRMs) has been very active over the past few years with advances in training and inference techniques enabling LRMs to reason longer, and more accurately. However, a growing body of studies show that LRMs are still inefficient, over-generating verification and reflection steps. To address this challenge, we introduce the Step-Tagging framework, a lightweight sentence-classifier enabling real-time annotation of the type of reasoning steps that an LRM is generating. To monitor reasoning behaviors, we introduced ReasonType: a novel taxonomy of reasoning steps. Building on this framework, we demonstrated that online monitoring of the count of specific steps can produce effective interpretable early stopping criteria of LRM inferences. We evaluate the Step-tagging framework on three open-source reasoning models across standard benchmark datasets: MATH500, GSM8K, AIME and non-mathematical tasks (GPQA and MMLU-Pro). We achieve 20 to 50\% token reduction while maintaining comparable accuracy to standard generation, with largest gains observed on more computation-heavy tasks. This work offers a novel way to increase control over the generation of LRMs, and a new tool to study behaviors of LRMs.

Yannis Belkhiter, Giulio Zizzo, Sergio Maffeis et al.

The growth of agentic AI has drawn significant attention to function calling Large Language Models (LLMs), which are designed to extend the capabilities of AI-powered system by invoking external functions. Injection and jailbreaking attacks have been extensively explored to showcase the vulnerabilities of LLMs to user prompt manipulation. The expanded capabilities of agentic models introduce further vulnerabilities via their function calling interface. Recent work in LLM security showed that function calling can be abused, leading to data tampering and theft, causing disruptive behavior such as endless loops, or causing LLMs to produce harmful content in the style of jailbreaking attacks. This paper introduces a novel function hijacking attack (FHA) that manipulates the tool selection process of agentic models to force the invocation of a specific, attacker-chosen function. While existing attacks focus on semantic preference of the model for function-calling tasks, we show that FHA is largely agnostic to the context semantics and robust to the function sets, making it applicable across diverse domains. We further demonstrate that FHA can be trained to produce universal adversarial functions, enabling a single attacked function to hijack tool selection across multiple queries and payload configurations. We conducted experiments on 5 different models, including instructed and reasoning variants, reaching 70% to 100% ASR over the established BFCL dataset. Our findings further demonstrate the need for strong guardrails and security modules for agentic systems.

Yannis Belkhiter, Seshu Tirupathi, Giulio Zizzo et al.

The field of Language Reasoning Models (LRMs) has been very active over the past few years with advances in training and inference techniques enabling LRMs to reason longer, and more accurately. However, a growing body of studies show that LRMs are still inefficient, over-generating verification and reflection steps. Additionally, the high-level role of each reasoning step and how different step types contribute to the generation of correct answers, is largely underexplored. To address this challenge, we introduce TRACES (Tagging of the Reasoning steps enabling Adaptive Cost-Efficient early-Stopping), a lightweight framework that tags reasoning steps in real-time, and enable adaptive, cost-efficient early stopping of large-language-model inferences. Building on this framework we monitor reasoning behaviors during inferences, and we find that LRMs tend to shift their reasoning behavior after reaching a correct answer. We demonstrate that the monitoring of the specific type of steps can produce effective interpretable early stopping criteria. We evaluate the TRACES framework on three mathematical reasoning benchmarks, namely, MATH500, GSM8K, AIME and two knowledge and reasoning benchmarks, MMLU and GPQA respectively. We achieve 20 to 50% token reduction while maintaining comparable accuracy to standard generation.

Yannis Belkhiter, Giulio Zizzo, Sergio Maffeis

With the introduction of the transformers architecture, LLMs have revolutionized the NLP field with ever more powerful models. Nevertheless, their development came up with several challenges. The exponential growth in computational power and reasoning capabilities of language models has heightened concerns about their security. As models become more powerful, ensuring their safety has become a crucial focus in research. This paper aims to address gaps in the current literature on jailbreaking techniques and the evaluation of LLM vulnerabilities. Our contributions include the creation of a novel dataset designed to assess the harmfulness of model outputs across multiple harm levels, as well as a focus on fine-grained harm-level analysis. Using this framework, we provide a comprehensive benchmark of state-of-the-art jailbreaking attacks, specifically targeting the Vicuna 13B v1.5 model. Additionally, we examine how quantization techniques, such as AWQ and GPTQ, influence the alignment and robustness of models, revealing trade-offs between enhanced robustness with regards to transfer attacks and potential increases in vulnerability on direct ones. This study aims to demonstrate the influence of harmful input queries on the complexity of jailbreaking techniques, as well as to deepen our understanding of LLM vulnerabilities and improve methods for assessing model robustness when confronted with harmful content, particularly in the context of compression strategies.

Yannis Belkhiter, Seshu Tirupathi, Giulio Zizzo et al.

As AI becomes a native component of 6G network control, AI models must adapt to continuously changing conditions, including the introduction of new features and measurements driven by multi-vendor deployments, hardware upgrades, and evolving service requirements. To address this growing need for flexible learning in non-stationary environments, this vision paper highlights Adaptive Random Forests (ARFs) as a reliable solution for dynamic feature adaptation in communication network scenarios. We show that iterative training of ARFs can effectively lead to stable predictions, with accuracy improving over time as more features are added. In addition, we highlight the importance of explainability in AI-driven networks, proposing Drift-Aware Feature Importance (DAFI) as an efficient XAI feature importance (FI) method. DAFI uses a distributional drift detector to signal when to apply computationally intensive FI methods instead of lighter alternatives. Our tests on 3 different datasets indicate that our approach reduces runtime by up to 2 times, while producing more consistent feature importance values. Together, ARFs and DAFI provide a promising framework to build flexible AI methods adapted to 6G network use-cases.

Yannis Belkhiter, Seshu Tirupathi, Giulio Zizzo et al.

The field of AutoML has made remarkable progress in post-hoc model selection, with libraries capable of automatically identifying the most performing models for a given dataset. Nevertheless, these methods often rely on exhaustive hyperparameter searches, where methods automatically train and test different types of models on the target dataset. Contrastingly, pre-hoc prediction emerges as a promising alternative, capable of bypassing exhaustive search through intelligent pre-selection of models. Despite its potential, pre-hoc prediction remains under-explored in the literature. This paper explores the intersection of AutoML and pre-hoc model selection by leveraging traditional models and Large Language Model (LLM) agents to reduce the search space of AutoML libraries. By relying on dataset descriptions and statistical information, we reduce the AutoML search space. Our methodology is applied to the AWS AutoGluon portfolio dataset, a state-of-the-art AutoML benchmark containing 175 tabular classification datasets available on OpenML. The proposed approach offers a shift in AutoML workflows, significantly reducing computational overhead, while still selecting the best model for the given dataset.