Gaurav Srivastava


2026

Multimodal foundation models that integrate audio, vision, and language achieve strong performance on reasoning and generation tasks, yet their robustness to adversarial manipulation remains poorly understood. We study a realistic and underexplored threat model: **untargeted, audio-only adversarial attacks** on trimodal audio–video–language models. We analyze six complementary attack objectives that target different stages of multimodal processing, including audio encoder representations, cross-modal attention, hidden states, and output likelihoods. Across four state-of-the-art models and multiple benchmarks, we show that audio-only perturbations can induce severe multimodal failures, achieving up to **96% attack success rate.** We further show that attacks can be successful at low perceptual distortions (LPIPS ≤ 0.08, SI-SNR ≥ 0 dB) and benefit more from extended optimization than increased data scale. We evaluate the feasibility of these attacks under physically realistic conditions by incorporating room impulse response (RIR) modeling, showing that audio-only perturbations remain effective under environmental transformations and thus highlight the practical risk of single-modality attacks in real-world multimodal systems. Transferability across models and encoders remains limited, while speech recognition systems such as Whisper primarily respond to perturbation magnitude, achieving **>97% attack success** under severe distortion. These results expose a previously overlooked single-modality attack surface in multimodal systems and motivate defenses that enforce cross-modal consistency. Our project website is available at https://aafiya-h.github.io/soundbreak/.
We demonstrate Hindsight, a working memory system for AI agents that organizes long-term memory into four logical networks and exposes three core operations. The world, experience, observation, and opinion networks separate objective facts from subjective beliefs, giving developers visibility into what an agent knows versus what it believes. The retain, recall, and reflect operations handle ingestion, retrieval, and reasoning respectively, with a parallel pipeline that combines vector search, keyword matching, graph traversal, and temporal filtering, backed by PostgreSQL with pgvector. Unlike existing systems such as MemGPT, Zep, and Mem0, Hindsight is the only one that jointly provides fact-belief separation, temporal entity graphs, evolving opinions with confidence scores, and configurable behavioral profiles. On LongMemEval and LoCoMo, Hindsight with a 20B open-source model reaches 83.6% and 83.2% accuracy, outperforming full-context GPT-4o and all prior memory systems; with Gemini-3 Pro, LongMemEval accuracy reaches 91.4%. Our interactive demo lets users build memory graphs through multi-session conversations, inspect how memories are classified, and watch opinions form and change. The system is **open-source under the MIT license**, available as a Python package (pip install hindsight-all) and Docker image, with **13.3K GitHub stars** and 763 forks to date, and in production use at Fortune 500 enterprises. Video demo: https://youtu.be/4M2wS-yEmVA.

2025

Large language models (LLMs) have improved significantly in their reasoning through extensive training on massive datasets. However, relying solely on additional data for improvement is becoming increasingly impractical, highlighting the need for models to autonomously enhance their reasoning without external supervision. In this paper, we propose Debate, Train, Evolve (DTE), a novel ground truth-free training framework that uses multi-agent debate traces to evolve a single language model. We also introduce a new prompting strategy Reflect-Critique-Refine, to improve debate quality by explicitly instructing agents to critique and refine their reasoning. Extensive evaluations on seven reasoning benchmarks with six open-weight models show that our DTE framework achieve substantial improvements, with an average accuracy gain of 8.92% on the challenging GSM-PLUS dataset. Furthermore, we observe strong cross-domain generalization, with an average accuracy gain of 5.8% on all other benchmarks, suggesting that our method captures general reasoning capabilities. Our framework code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/ctrl-gaurav/Debate-Train-Evolve.
Reasoning has long been viewed as an emergent property of large language models (LLMs). However, recent studies challenge this assumption, showing that small language models (SLMs) can also achieve competitive reasoning performance. This paper introduces ThinkSLM, the first extensive benchmark to systematically evaluate and study the reasoning abilities of SLMs trained from scratch or derived from LLMs through quantization, pruning, and distillation. We first establish a reliable evaluation criterion comparing available methods and LLM judges against our human evaluations. Then we present a study evaluating 72 diverse SLMs from six major model families across 17 reasoning benchmarks. We repeat all our experiments three times to ensure a robust assessment. Our findings show that: 1) reasoning ability in SLMs is strongly influenced by training methods and data quality rather than solely model scale; 2) quantization preserves reasoning capability, while pruning significantly disrupts it; 3) larger models consistently exhibit higher robustness against adversarial perturbations and intermediate reasoning, but certain smaller models closely match or exceed the larger models’ performance. Our findings challenge the assumption that scaling is the only way to achieve strong reasoning. Instead, we foresee a future where SLMs with strong reasoning capabilities can be developed through structured training or post-training compression. Our ThinkSLM Leaderboard is publicly available at: https://ctrl-gaurav.github.io/thinkslm.github.io/.