How MIT students are helping to prevent cyberattacks
Students from the MIT Cybersecurity Clinic help local governments and other vulnerable organizations defend against digital threats.
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MIT Quantum Initiative launches postdoctoral fellowship program
The Institute welcomes its first cohort of QMIT Fellows this fall to advance interdisciplinary quantum research.
How an MIT research project became a global programming language
With millions of users across the world, Julia has been used to conduct cutting-edge research and to design new drugs, jet engines, heat pumps, and more.
AI helps design new materials that work in the real world
The “CrysVCD” tool developed at MIT could cut the huge amounts of time and money spent on screening out chemically unstable designs.
Paving the way for greener ammonia production
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Related papers
`From Prompt to Perturbation': An Adaptive Framework for Voice-Based Jailbreaks on Audio LLMs
An adaptive jailbreak attack framework for systematic evaluation of both cascaded pipelines and end-to-end large audio-language models under a unified experimental setting that achieves consistently higher attack success rates across diverse audio-based LLM systems.
Jailbreaking in the Haystack
NINJA (short for Needle-in-haystack jailbreak attack), a method that jailbreaks aligned LMs by appending benign, model-generated content to harmful user goals to reveal fundamental vulnerabilities in modern LMs.
Securing Multi-Agent GIS Systems: Risk Evaluation and Prompt Hardening Optimization
Agentic systems are increasingly integrated with geographic information systems (GIS), where multi-agent coordination enables complex conversational and spatial analysis but introduces security risks. This work presents a security-oriented framework for risk identification, evaluation, and mitigation in a multi-agent GIS system while maintaining adaptability to broader agentic architectures. We test the agentic system of a commercial geospatial partner while developing a modular state-machine-based orchestration framework that abstracts agent behavior into reusable components. We evaluate robustness using a red-teaming framework with an adaptive attacker LLM and a deterministic judge that produces binary outcomes with supporting rationales across multi-turn attacks. We further improve resilience with a prompt optimization framework that treats prompts as structured signatures and injects adversarial demonstrations, enabling systematic security improvements without degrading task performance.
Evaluating Structured Information Extraction with Open Models in a High Risk Public Sector Application
The extraction of structured information from unstructured documents represents a critical component of digital transformations in all sectors. While proprietary solutions dominate commercial applications, a rapidly growing ecosystem of open-source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offers accessible alternatives. However, systematic evaluations on realistic, multi-step extraction pipelines remain scarce. Responsible usage of such extraction tools require comprehensive evaluations on realistic tasks, especially as these solutions will be key components of applications in the public sector that the EU AI act categorizes as high risk. To address this gap we present a comprehensive benchmark assessing the end-to-end performance of open-source systems on a complex real-world document processing task classified as high risk: Student applications for an international study program. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation with state-of-the-art OCR engines, LLMs and VLMs. Our results reveal that while VLMs generally outperform OCR+LLM pipelines, even state-of-the-art open-source models struggle to handle such tasks reliably in zero-shot settings. Only 4 of 35 configurations achieved F1 scores above 0.5, with the best OCR+LLM pipeline matching top VLM performance, though most OCR+LLM combinations performed substantially worse. Roughly 75\% of all configurations scored below 0.25. Model scale influences performance, yet the relationship is non-linear: substantially larger models do not guarantee proportionally better results. Input quality, particularly the structural preservation of OCR output, emerges as a critical factor independent of downstream model capability.