Paper Reading AI Learner

Names Can Hurt: Spotting Slopsquatting Risks Caused by Package Name Hallucinations in Local Coding LLMs

2026-08-24 23:10:49
Akash Raj, Sargam Sahu

Abstract

When a code generating language model fabricates a Python package name, an adversary who has pre-registered that name on PyPI can convert that hallucination into a supply chain compromise. This event has been termed as 'slopsquatting'. We propose a two layer detector to counter this issue. The first layer performs a deterministic PyPI existence check. The second is a Random Forest classifier trained on ten features derived from the package name and its PyPI metadata. An import name reconciler bridges the two, resolving cases such as 'import cv2' versus 'pip install opencv-python' without a security bypass. The detector is embedded in a LangGraph state machine that retries at escalating temperatures and, on repeated failure, routes to a stronger fallback model. Across 300 curated prompts, the pipeline produces hallucination free code on 76% of runs. The primary exhausts its retry budget on 28.7%; intra model retries recover roughly a quarter of those, and cross model fallback recovers a further 16.5% of the remainder. Four findings have been observed. First, half of the flagged hallucinations are packages already registered on PyPI, as low quality lookalikes of well known projects, caught by the classifier rather than the deterministic layer (e.g., pil, faiss, tabula, haystack). Second, hallucination rate scales almost linearly with prompt adversariality, from 0 to 10% on routine coding to 40 to 73% on slopsquat baits. Third, the weaker primary refused 6 of 10 direct baits unaided, suggesting recent instruction tuning provides a baseline defense. Fourth, when primary and fallback share a model family, approximately 84% of primary failures recur on the fallback, motivating cross family pairing. A user study (n = 24) reports mean satisfaction 4.4 out of 5 and 21 of 24 stated adoption intent.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23897

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.23897.pdf


Tags
3D Action Action_Localization Action_Recognition Activity Adversarial Agent Attention Autonomous Bert Boundary_Detection Caption Chat Classification CNN Compressive_Sensing Contour Contrastive_Learning Deep_Learning Denoising Detection Dialog Diffusion Drone Dynamic_Memory_Network Edge_Detection Embedding Embodied Emotion Enhancement Face Face_Detection Face_Recognition Facial_Landmark Few-Shot Gait_Recognition GAN Gaze_Estimation Gesture Gradient_Descent Handwriting Human_Parsing Image_Caption Image_Classification Image_Compression Image_Enhancement Image_Generation Image_Matting Image_Retrieval Inference Inpainting Intelligent_Chip Knowledge Knowledge_Graph Language_Model LLM Matching Medical Memory_Networks Multi_Modal Multi_Task NAS NMT Object_Detection Object_Tracking OCR Ontology Optical_Character Optical_Flow Optimization Person_Re-identification Point_Cloud Portrait_Generation Pose Pose_Estimation Prediction QA Quantitative Quantitative_Finance Quantization Re-identification Recognition Recommendation Reconstruction Regularization Reinforcement_Learning Relation Relation_Extraction Represenation Represenation_Learning Restoration Review RNN Robot Salient Scene_Classification Scene_Generation Scene_Parsing Scene_Text Segmentation Self-Supervised Semantic_Instance_Segmentation Semantic_Segmentation Semi_Global Semi_Supervised Sence_graph Sentiment Sentiment_Classification Sketch SLAM Sparse Speech Speech_Recognition Style_Transfer Summarization Super_Resolution Surveillance Survey Text_Classification Text_Generation Time_Series Tracking Transfer_Learning Transformer Unsupervised Video_Caption Video_Classification Video_Indexing Video_Prediction Video_Retrieval Visual_Relation VQA Weakly_Supervised Zero-Shot