Penetration testing is essential for assessing and strengthening system security against real-world threats, yet traditional workflows remain highly manual, expertise-intensive, and difficult to scale. Although recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising opportunities for automation, existing applications rely on simplistic prompting without task decomposition or domain adaptation, resulting in unreliable black-box behavior and limited insight into model capabilities across penetration testing stages. To address this gap, we introduce PentestEval, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs across six decomposed penetration testing stages: Information Collection, Weakness Gathering and Filtering, Attack Decision-Making, Exploit Generation and Revision. PentestEval integrates expert-annotated ground truth with a fully automated evaluation pipeline across 346 tasks covering all stages in 12 realistic vulnerable scenarios. Our stage-level evaluation of 9 widely used LLMs reveals generally weak performance and distinct limitations across the stages of penetration-testing workflow. End-to-end pipelines reach only 31% success rate, and existing LLM-powered systems such as PentestGPT, PentestAgent, and VulnBot exhibit similar limitations, with the evaluated autonomous agents showing particularly low success rates under our benchmark settings. These findings highlight that reliable autonomous penetration testing requires stronger structured reasoning and fine-grained stage-level diagnosis. PentestEval provides the foundational benchmark needed for future research on fine-grained, stage-level evaluation, paving the way toward more reliable LLM-based automation.
Buyin Deng, Kai Luo, Lingxin Huang, Xinqi Liu, Fei Cheng, Hang Zheng, Liming Yin, Kailun Yang
Maintaining consistent target identities and observation histories is essential for mobile robot perception. Panoramic Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) benefits from broad visual coverage but must address coordinate discontinuities at the equirectangular image seam and fluctuations in relative-depth estimates. Such fluctuations can undermine depth-aware association, highlighting the need for temporally consistent depth cues. We propose CylindTrack, a depth-aware cylindrical tracking-by-detection framework that jointly models panoramic topology and temporal depth consistency. Depth-Temporal Trajectory Modeling (DTM) maintains instance depth and its rate of change as filtered trajectory states. Spherical Spatio-Temporal Consistency Learning (SSTC) combines a Temporal Mixer with Spherical Geometry-aware Attention to refine depth-aware representations. A Topology-Aware Cylindrical Motion Model (TCMM) represents horizontal motion in an unwrapped angular state and incorporates periodic overlap, angular consistency, and filtered depth cues into association. Experiments on QuadTrack and JRDB demonstrate improved identity consistency and trajectory continuity, with HOTA scores of 33.67 and 31.12 and IDF1 scores of 40.45 and 34.33, respectively. The framework processes 28.56 and 21.34 frames per second, respectively, on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU under the reported evaluation settings. These results support persistent panoramic multi-object tracking for mobile robot perception. The source code will be released at https://github.com/warriordby/CylindTrack.
Yihua Zhu, Qianying Liu NII, Jiaxin Wang Kyoto University, Fei Cheng Kyoto University, Chaoran Liu NII, Akiko Aizawa National Institute of Informatics, Sadao Kurohashi National Institute of Informatics (NII) and Kyoto University, Hidetoshi Shimodaira Kyoto University and RIKEN
Autoregressive LLMs perform well on relational tasks that require linking entities via relational words (e.g., father/son, friend), but it is unclear whether they learn the logical semantics of such relations (e.g., symmetry and inversion logic) and, if so, whether reversal-type failures arise from missing relational semantics or left-to-right order bias. We propose a controlled Knowledge Graph-based synthetic framework that generates text from symmetric/inverse triples, train GPT-style autoregressive models from scratch, and evaluate memorization, logical inference, and in-context generalization to unseen entities to address these questions. We find a sharp phase transition in which relational semantics emerge with sufficient logic-bearing supervision, even in shallow (2–3 layer) models, and that successful generalization aligns with stable intermediate-layer signals. Finally, order-matched forward/reverse tests and a diffusion baseline indicate that reversal failures are primarily driven by autoregressive order bias rather than deficient inversion semantics.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表