Abstract
The practice of fine-tuning AI agents on data from their own
interactions--such as web browsing or tool use--, while being a strong general
recipe for improving agentic capabilities, also introduces a critical security
vulnerability within the AI supply chain. In this work, we show that
adversaries can easily poison the data collection pipeline to embed
hard-to-detect backdoors that are triggerred by specific target phrases, such
that when the agent encounters these triggers, it performs an unsafe or
malicious action. We formalize and validate three realistic threat models
targeting different layers of the supply chain: 1) direct poisoning of
fine-tuning data, where an attacker controls a fraction of the training traces;
2) environmental poisoning, where malicious instructions are injected into
webpages scraped or tools called while creating training data; and 3) supply
chain poisoning, where a pre-backdoored base model is fine-tuned on clean data
to improve its agentic capabilities. Our results are stark: by poisoning as few
as 2% of the collected traces, an attacker can embed a backdoor causing an
agent to leak confidential user information with over 80% success when a
specific trigger is present. This vulnerability holds across all three threat
models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that prominent safeguards, including two
guardrail models and one weight-based defense, fail to detect or prevent the
malicious behavior. These findings highlight an urgent threat to agentic AI
development and underscore the critical need for rigorous security vetting of
data collection processes and end-to-end model supply chains.
Wayne State University
Abstract
This paper presents a practical architecture for after-sales demand
forecasting and monitoring that unifies a revenue- and cluster-aware ensemble
of statistical, machine-learning, and deep-learning models with a role-driven
analytics layer for scorecards and trend diagnostics. The framework ingests
exogenous signals (installed base, pricing, macro indicators, life cycle,
seasonality) and treats COVID-19 as a distinct regime, producing country-part
forecasts with calibrated intervals. A Pareto-aware segmentation forecasts
high-revenue items individually and pools the long tail via clusters, while
horizon-aware ensembling aligns weights with business-relevant losses (e.g.,
WMAPE). Beyond forecasts, a performance scorecard delivers decision-focused
insights: accuracy within tolerance thresholds by revenue share and count, bias
decomposition (over- vs under-forecast), geographic and product-family
hotspots, and ranked root causes tied to high-impact part-country pairs. A
trend module tracks trajectories of MAPE/WMAPE and bias across recent months,
flags entities that are improving or deteriorating, detects change points
aligned with known regimes, and attributes movements to lifecycle and seasonal
factors. LLMs are embedded in the analytics layer to generate role-aware
narratives and enforce reporting contracts. They standardize business
definitions, automate quality checks and reconciliations, and translate
quantitative results into concise, explainable summaries for planners and
executives. The system exposes a reproducible workflow -- request
specification, model execution, database-backed artifacts, and AI-generated
narratives -- so planners can move from "How accurate are we now?" to "Where is
accuracy heading and which levers should we pull?", closing the loop between
forecasting, monitoring, and inventory decisions across more than 90 countries
and about 6,000 parts.