AGENTIC-SYSTEMSApril 28, 20261 min read7 views

PhySE: A Psychological Framework for Real-Time AR-LLM Social Engineering Attacks

Researchers have introduced PhySE, a framework that leverages AR glasses and LLMs to execute sophisticated real-time social engineering attacks. By combining psychological strategies with rapid visual profiling, PhySE can manipulate targets during live interactions with high efficiency.

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

Abstract:The emerging threat of AR-LLM-based Social Engineering (AR-LLM-SE) attacks (e.g. SEAR) poses a significant risk to real-world social interactions. In such an attack, a malicious actor uses Augmented Reality (AR) glasses to capture a target visual and vocal data. A Large Language Model (LLM) then analyzes this data to identify the individual and generate a detailed social profile. Subsequently, LLM-powered agents employ social engineering strategies, providing real-time conversation suggestions, to gain the target trust and ultimately execute phishing or other malicious acts. Despite its potential, the practical application of AR-LLM-SE faces two major bottlenecks, (1) Cold-start personalization, Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods introduce critical delays in the earliest turns, slowing initial profile formation and disrupting real-time interaction, (2) Static Attack Strategies, Existing approaches rely on fixed-stage, handcrafted social engineering tactics that lack foundation in established psychological theory. To address these limitations, we propose PhySE, a novel framework with two core innovations, (1) VLM-Based SocialContext Training, To eliminate profiling delays, we efficiently pre-train a Visual Language Model (VLM) with social-context data, enabling rapid, on-the-fly profile generation, (2) Adaptive Psychological Agent, We introduce a psychological LLM that dynamically deploys distinct classes of psychological strategies based on target response, moving beyond static, handcrafted scripts. We evaluated PhySE through an IRB-approved user study with 60 participants, collecting a novel dataset of 360 annotated conversations across diverse social scenarios.

Source: arXiv cs.AI Recent

More in this category

agentic-systems

FindStatBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Combinatorial Code Synthesis

Researchers have introduced FindStatBench, a new execution benchmark containing 2,329 tasks designed to evaluate the combinatorial code synthesis capabilities of large language models.

agentic-systems

Probabilistic Concept-Aware Steering for Trustworthy LLM Inference

Researchers have introduced Probabilistic Concept-Aware Steering (PCS), an inference-time intervention framework for LLMs. PCS provides fine-grained, safety-oriented semantic steering while preserving original task competence.

agentic-systems

MUX: Continuous Reasoning via Multiplexed Tokens

Researchers introduced MUX, a novel latent reasoning method that compresses discrete text-based reasoning steps into continuous multiplexed tokens. By enabling lossless superposition, MUX significantly boosts LLM reasoning efficiency and speed across complex problem-solving tasks.

agentic-systems

S2T-RLHF: Hierarchical Credit Assignment for Stable Preference-Based RLHF

Researchers introduced S2T-RLHF, a hierarchical credit assignment framework that stabilizes preference-based RLHF training by decomposing response-level rewards into sentence and token levels.

agentic-systems

Semantic Cooperative Games for Contribution Attribution in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

Researchers introduce Semantic Cooperative Games (SCG) and the SLIC algorithm to evaluate agent contributions in LLM-based multi-agent systems without re-running models, reducing computational costs by 93.3%.

agentic-systems

ProbSPARQL: Querying Knowledge Graphs with Multi-dimensional, Uncertain Numeric Data

Researchers have introduced ProbSPARQL, an upward-compatible SPARQL extension designed to query multi-dimensional and uncertain numeric measurement data within Knowledge Graphs, providing significant query performance gains for complex industrial applications.