Author name cluster

Muhammad Shafique

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

4 papers

1 author row

TMLR Journal 2026 Journal Article

KASPER: Kolmogorov Arnold Networks for Stock Prediction and Explainable Regimes

Vidhi Oad
Param Pathak
Nouhaila Innan
Shalini Devendrababu
Muhammad Shafique

Forecasting in financial markets remains a significant challenge due to their nonlinear and regime-dependent dynamics. Traditional deep learning models, such as long short-term memory networks and multilayer perceptrons, often struggle to generalize across shifting market conditions, highlighting the need for a more adaptive and interpretable approach. To address this, we introduce Kolmogorov–Arnold networks for stock prediction and explainable regimes (KASPER), a novel framework that integrates regime detection, sparse spline-based function modeling, and symbolic rule extraction. The framework identifies hidden market conditions using a Gumbel-Softmax-based mechanism, enabling regime-specific forecasting. For each regime, it employs Kolmogorov–Arnold networks (KANs) with sparse spline activations to capture intricate price behaviors while maintaining robustness. Interpretability is achieved through symbolic learning based on Monte Carlo Shapley values, which extracts human-readable rules tailored to each regime. Applied to real-world financial time series from Yahoo Finance, the model achieves an $R^2$ value of 0.89, a Sharpe Ratio of 12.02, and a mean squared error as low as 0.0001, outperforming existing methods. This research establishes a new direction for regime-aware, transparent, and robust forecasting in financial markets.

PDF Details

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

MetaCipher: A Time-Persistent and Universal Multi-Agent Framework for Cipher-Based Jailbreak Attacks for LLMs

Boyuan Chen
Minghao Shao
Abdul Basit
Siddharth Garg
Muhammad Shafique

Large language models (LLMs) face persistent vulnerability to jailbreak attacks despite their increasing capabilities. While developers deploy alignment finetuning and safety guardrails, researchers consistently devise novel attacks that circumvent these defenses. This dynamic mirrors a strategic game of continual evolution. However, two challenges hinder jailbreak development: the high cost of querying top-tier LLMs and the short lifespan of effective attacks due to frequent safety updates. These factors limit cost-efficiency and impact. To address this, we propose MetaCipher, a low-cost, multi-agent jailbreak framework that generalizes across LLMs with varying safety measures. Using reinforcement learning, MetaCipher is modular and adaptive, supporting extensibility to future strategies. Within as few as 10 queries, MetaCipher achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates on recent malicious prompt benchmarks, outperforming prior jailbreak methods. We conduct a large-scale empirical evaluation across diverse victim models, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Towards Effective Offensive Security LLM Agents: Hyperparameter Tuning, LLM as a Judge, and a Lightweight CTF Benchmark

Minghao Shao
Nanda Rani
Kimberly Milner
Haoran Xi
Meet Udeshi
Saksham Aggarwal
Venkata Sai Charan Putrevu
Sandeep K. Shukla

Recent advances in LLM agentic systems have improved the automation of offensive security tasks, particularly for Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges. We systematically investigate the key factors that drive agent success and provide a detailed recipe for building effective LLM-based offensive security agents. First, we present CTFJudge, a framework leveraging LLM as a judge to analyze agent trajectories and provide granular evaluation across CTF solving steps. Second, we propose a novel metric, CTF Competency Index (CCI) for partial correctness, revealing how closely agent solutions align with human-crafted gold standards. Third, we examine how LLM hyperparameters, namely temperature, top-p, and maximum token length, influence agent performance and automated cybersecurity task planning. For rapid evaluation, we present CTFTiny, a curated benchmark of 50 representative CTF challenges across binary exploitation, web, reverse engineering, forensics, and cryptography. Our findings identify optimal multi-agent coordination settings and lay the groundwork for future LLM agent research in cybersecurity.

PDF Details DOI

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

NYU CTF Bench: A Scalable Open-Source Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating LLMs in Offensive Security

Minghao Shao
Sofija Jancheska
Meet Udeshi
Brendan Dolan-Gavitt
Haoran Xi
Kimberly Milner
Boyuan Chen
Max Yin

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being deployed across various domains today. However, their capacity to solve Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges in cybersecurity has not been thoroughly evaluated. To address this, we develop a novel method to assess LLMs in solving CTF challenges by creating a scalable, open-source benchmark database specifically designed for these applications. This database includes metadata for LLM testing and adaptive learning, compiling a diverse range of CTF challenges from popular competitions. Utilizing the advanced function calling capabilities of LLMs, we build a fully automated system with an enhanced workflow and support for external tool calls. Our benchmark dataset and automated framework allow us to evaluate the performance of five LLMs, encompassing both black-box and open-source models. This work lays the foundation for future research into improving the efficiency of LLMs in interactive cybersecurity tasks and automated task planning. By providing a specialized benchmark, our project offers an ideal platform for developing, testing, and refining LLM-based approaches to vulnerability detection and resolution. Evaluating LLMs on these challenges and comparing with human performance yields insights into their potential for AI-driven cybersecurity solutions to perform real-world threat management. We make our benchmark dataset open source to public https: //github. com/NYU-LLM-CTF/NYU CTF Bench along with our playground automated framework https: //github. com/NYU-LLM-CTF/llm ctf automation.

PDF Details DOI