When fact-checking methods based on large language models (LLMs) use external evidence to validate claims, knowledge conflicts often arise. These conflicts typically stem from inconsistencies between the external evidence and LLMs' internal pre-existing knowledge. Such an inconsistency could lead LLMs to draw incorrect answers when validating claims, especially when they are overly confident in their internal incorrect knowledge. Previous works on LLM-based fact-checking have overlooked this issue. This paper, for the first time, proposes a framework (namely KnowFC) to navigate this issue. Our key insight is dividing and adaptively utilizing the knowledge that LLMs know and do not know, thereby avoiding conflicts while enhancing the correctness and efficiency of fact-checking. Specifically, in KnowFC, we propose an adaptive retrieval method, where we train an LLM using a reinforcement learning algorithm coupled with the Dunning-Kruger effect-inspired reward mechanism to identify its knowledge boundaries through confidence calibration, thereby realizing adaptive evidence retrieval. Besides, we propose a reliable and debiased fact verification method, where we organize and construct reasoning graphs using retrieved evidence to verify claims, followed by a causal intervention method using causal mediation analysis to mitigate internal knowledge interference. Experimental results on both FEVEROUS and AVeriTeC datasets show that our method outperforms baseline methods in terms of accuracy and F1 score, while also improving fact-checking efficiency.

Penetration testing (pentesting) assesses cybersecurity through controlled, authorized attacks, but traditional manual methods demand considerable human and time resources. Reinforcement learning (RL), with its agent-environment interaction paradigm, offers a promising approach for autonomous pentesting. Despite remarkable advancements in this field, there is a lack of comprehensive reviews and perspectives on RL-based autonomous pentesting. To address this gap, this paper presents a systematic review of RL-based autonomous pentesting research. We outline the key challenges faced when applying RL in autonomous pentesting and categorize the existing literature into two main areas: attack path planning and autonomous pentesting frameworks, based on the research objectives and hypotheses. Additionally, we offer an in-depth analysis of the latest advancements and limitations in this field, while proposing a perspective on future research directions in the field of RL-based autonomous pentesting. We hope that our work will provide valuable insights for researchers, contributing to the advancement of autonomous pentesting and its practical application in the complex and diverse scenarios of the real world.

Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis is framed as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem, but existing methods struggle with non-stackable data due to inconsistent instance lengths, which degrades performance and efficiency. We propose a Distributed Parallel Gradient Stacking (DPGS) framework with Deep Model-Gradient Compression (DMGC) to address this. DPGS enables lossless MIL data stacking for the first time, while DMGC accelerates distributed training via joint gradient-model compression. Experiments on Camelyon16 and TCGA-Lung datasets demonstrate up to 31× faster training, up to a 99.2% reduction in model communication size at convergence, and up to a 9.3% improvement in accuracy compared to the baseline. To our knowledge, this is the first work to solve non-stackable data in MIL while improving both speed and accuracy.

With the increasing number of vulnerabilities exposed on the Internet, autonomous penetration testing (pentesting) has emerged as a promising research area. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural fit for studying this topic. However, two key challenges limit the applicability of RL-based autonomous pentesting in real-world scenarios: the training environment dilemma—training agents in simulated environments is sample-efficient while ensuring that their realism remains challenging; poor generalization ability—agents’ policies often perform poorly when transferred to unseen scenarios, with even slight changes potentially causing a significant generalization gap. To address both challenges, we propose a generalizable autonomous pentesting framework termed GAP, which aims to achieve efficient policy training in realistic environments and train generalizable agents capable of drawing inferences about other cases from one instance. GAP introduces a real-to-sim-to-real pipeline that enables end-to-end policy learning in unknown real environments while constructing realistic simulations and improves agents’ generalization ability by leveraging domain randomization and meta-RL learning. We are among the first to apply domain randomization in autonomous pentesting and propose a large language model-powered domain randomization method for synthetic environment generation. We further apply meta-RL to improve agents’ generalization ability in unseen environments by leveraging synthetic environments. Combining the two methods effectively bridges the generalization gap and improves agents’ policy adaptation performance. Simulations are conducted on various vulnerable virtual machines, with results showing that GAP can enable policy learning in various realistic environments, achieve zero-shot policy transfer in similar environments, and achieve rapid policy adaptation in dissimilar environments.

Penetration testing (pentesting) assesses cybersecurity through simulated attacks, while the conventional manual-based method is costly, time-consuming, and personnel-constrained. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides an agent-environment interaction learning paradigm, making it a promising way for autonomous pentesting. However, agents’ scalability in large action spaces and policy transferability across scenarios limit the applicability of RL-based autonomous pentesting. To address these challenges, we present a novel autonomous pentesting framework based on reinforcement learning (namely APRIL) to train agents that are scalable and transferable in large action spaces. In APRIL, we construct realistic, bounded, host-level state space via embedding techniques to avoid the complexities of dealing with unbounded network-level information. We employ semantic correlations between pentesting actions as prior knowledge to represent discrete action space into a continuous and semantically meaningful embedding space. Agents are then trained to reason over actions within the action embedding space, where two key methods are applied: an upper-confidence bound-based action refinement method to encourage efficient exploration, and a distance-aware loss to improve learning efficiency and generalization performance. We conduct experiments in simulated scenarios constructed based on virtualized vulnerable environments. The results demonstrate APRIL's scalability in large action spaces and its ability to facilitate policy transfer across diverse scenarios.