Yu Cheng
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2026
Auto-Stega: An Agent-Driven System for Lifelong Strategy Evolution in LLM-Based Text Steganography
Jiuan Zhou | Yu Cheng | Yuan Xie | Zhaoxia Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jiuan Zhou | Yu Cheng | Yuan Xie | Zhaoxia Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
With the rapid progress of LLMs, high quality generative text has become widely available as a cover for text steganography. However, prevailing methods rely on hand-crafted or pre-specified strategies and struggle to balance efficiency, imperceptibility, and security, particularly at high embedding rates. Accordingly, we propose Auto-Stega, an agent-driven self-evolving framework that is the first to realize self-evolving steganographic strategies by automatically discovering, composing, and adapting strategies at inference time; the framework operates as a closed loop of generating, evaluating, summarizing, and updating that continually curates a structured strategy library and adapts across corpora, styles, and task constraints. A decoding LLM recovers the information under the shared strategy. To handle high embedding rates, we introduce PC-DNTE, a plug-and-play algorithm that maintains alignment with the base model’s conditional distribution at high embedding rates, preserving imperceptibility while enhancing security. Experimental results demonstrate that at higher embedding rates Auto-Stega achieves superior performance with gains of 42.2% in perplexity and 1.6% in anti-steganalysis performance over SOTA methods.
TAME: A Trustworthy Test-Time Evolution of Agent Memory with Systematic Benchmarking
Yu Cheng | Yongkang Hu | Jiuan Zhou | Yushuo Zhang | Yihang Chen | Huichi Zhou | Mingang Chen | Zhizhong Zhang | Kun Shao | Yuan Xie | Zhaoxia Yin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yu Cheng | Yongkang Hu | Jiuan Zhou | Yushuo Zhang | Yihang Chen | Huichi Zhou | Mingang Chen | Zhizhong Zhang | Kun Shao | Yuan Xie | Zhaoxia Yin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Test-time evolution of agent memory represents a pivotal paradigm for advancing AGI, as it strengthens complex reasoning through experience accumulation without requiring parameter updates. However, even during benign task evolution, agent safety alignment remains vulnerable—a phenomenon known as Agent Memory Misevolution. To evaluate this phenomenon, we construct the Trust-Memevo benchmark and find that agents exhibit an overall decline in trustworthiness across multiple tasks during benign task evolution. To address this issue, we propose TAME, a trust-aware memory evolution framework in which a shared memory bank is jointly governed by an Executor and an Evaluator. The Executor retrieves and applies transferable experiences to support task solving, while the Evaluator assesses the contribution of each utilized experience to the outcome and produces trust-aware feedback to guide subsequent memory use. This executor–evaluator loop enables memory to be selectively reinforced, cautiously reused, and continuously expanded over time. Experiments show that TAME mitigates memory misevolution while achieving strong task performance. In particular, on the GPT-5.2 AIME benchmark, TAME improves accuracy by 14.6 percentage points over the strongest existing method and maintains competitive trustworthiness.