Yuting Ning
Author directory2026
SkillHarm: Lifecycle-Aware Skill-Based Attacks via Automated Construction
Yuting Ning | Zhehao Zhang | Yash Kumar Lal | Boyu Gou | Junyi Li | Weitong Ruan | Chentao Ye | Rahul Gupta | Diyi Yang | Yu Su | Huan Sun
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuting Ning | Zhehao Zhang | Yash Kumar Lal | Boyu Gou | Junyi Li | Weitong Ruan | Chentao Ye | Rahul Gupta | Diyi Yang | Yu Su | Huan Sun
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Agent skills occupy a privileged position in the agent workflow, as agents are expected to implicitly follow and execute them, rendering third-party skills a vulnerable attack surface. Existing studies have revealed unsafe agent behaviors induced by skill-based attacks, but they primarily evaluate poisoned skills within a single task execution and enumerate harms through ad hoc risk lists. To bridge these gaps, we introduce SkillHarm, a benchmark for evaluating skill-based attacks across the skill-use lifecycle, paired with a systematic taxonomy of skill-relevant risks. SkillHarm evaluates two attack scenarios: Fixed-Payload Poisoning (FPP), where a fixed poisoned skill package directly compromises any task session that invokes it, and Self-Mutating Poisoning (SMP), where an initially benign execution silently mutates persistent skill content, deferring harm until a subsequent reuse. It further defines 12 risk types based on the agent workflow component targeted by the harm: data pipelines, system environments, and agent autonomy. To instantiate these attacks at scale, we build an automated construction pipeline using coding agents driven by natural-language harnesses. The resulting benchmark contains 879 attack samples across 71 skills. Experiments show that current agents remain vulnerable with attack success rates up to 86.3% in FPP and 69.3% in SMP. Our analysis further reveals a latent risk: many apparent attack failures stem from the agent failing to engage with the poisoned file rather than genuine resistance, and current defenses still fail to reliably mitigate the threat.
2024
In Search of the Long-Tail: Systematic Generation of Long-Tail Inferential Knowledge via Logical Rule Guided Search
Huihan Li | Yuting Ning | Zeyi Liao | Siyuan Wang | Xiang Lorraine Li | Ximing Lu | Wenting Zhao | Faeze Brahman | Yejin Choi | Xiang Ren
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Huihan Li | Yuting Ning | Zeyi Liao | Siyuan Wang | Xiang Lorraine Li | Ximing Lu | Wenting Zhao | Faeze Brahman | Yejin Choi | Xiang Ren
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
To effectively use large language models (LLMs) for real-world queries, it is imperative that they generalize to the long-tail distribution, i.e. rare examples where models exhibit low confidence. In this work, we take the first step towards evaluating LLMs in the long-tail distribution of inferential knowledge. We exemplify long-tail evaluation on the Natural Language Inference task. First, we introduce Logic-Induced-Knowledge-Search (LINK), a systematic long-tail data generation framework, to obtain factually-correct yet long-tail inferential statements. LINK uses variable-wise prompting grounded on symbolic rules to seek low-confidence statements while ensuring factual correctness. We then use LINK to curate Logic-Induced-Long-Tail (LINT), a large-scale long-tail inferential knowledge dataset that contains 108K statements spanning four domains. We evaluate popular LLMs on LINT; we find that state-of-the-art LLMs show significant performance drop (21% relative drop for GPT4) on long-tail data as compared to on head distribution data, and smaller models show even more generalization weakness. These results further underscore the necessity of long-tail evaluation in developing generalizable LLMs.