MemoPhishAgent: Memory-Augmented Multi-Modal LLM Agent for Phishing URL Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Xuan, Liu, Hao, Yuan, Tao, Kafai, Mehran, Habas, Piotr, Zhang, Xiangyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Chen, Xuan
Liu, Hao
Yuan, Tao
Kafai, Mehran
Habas, Piotr
Zhang, Xiangyu
author_facet Chen, Xuan
Liu, Hao
Yuan, Tao
Kafai, Mehran
Habas, Piotr
Zhang, Xiangyu
contents Traditional phishing website detection relies on static heuristics or reference lists, which lag behind rapidly evolving attacks. While recent systems incorporate large language models (LLMs), they are still prompt-based, deterministic pipelines that underutilize reasoning capability. We present MemoPhishAgent (MPA), a memory-augmented multi-modal LLM agent that dynamically orchestrates phishing-specific tools and leverages episodic memories of past reasoning trajectories to guide decisions on recurring and novel threats. On two public datasets, MPA outperforms three state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, improving recall by 13.6%. To better reflect realistic, user-facing phishing detection performance, we further evaluate MPA on a benchmark of real-world suspicious URLs actively crawled from five social media platforms, where it improves recall by 20%. Detailed analysis shows episodic memory contributes up to 27% recall gain without introducing additional computational overhead. The ablation study confirms the necessity of the agent-based approach compared to prompt-based baselines and validates the effectiveness of our tool design. Finally, MPA is deployed in production, processing 60K targeted high-risk URLs weekly, and achieving 91.44% recall, providing proactive protection for millions of customers. Together, our results show that combining multi-modal reasoning with episodic memory yields robust phishing detection in realistic user-exposure settings. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/XuanChen-xc/MemoPhishAgent.git.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_21394
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MemoPhishAgent: Memory-Augmented Multi-Modal LLM Agent for Phishing URL Detection
Chen, Xuan
Liu, Hao
Yuan, Tao
Kafai, Mehran
Habas, Piotr
Zhang, Xiangyu
Cryptography and Security
Traditional phishing website detection relies on static heuristics or reference lists, which lag behind rapidly evolving attacks. While recent systems incorporate large language models (LLMs), they are still prompt-based, deterministic pipelines that underutilize reasoning capability. We present MemoPhishAgent (MPA), a memory-augmented multi-modal LLM agent that dynamically orchestrates phishing-specific tools and leverages episodic memories of past reasoning trajectories to guide decisions on recurring and novel threats. On two public datasets, MPA outperforms three state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, improving recall by 13.6%. To better reflect realistic, user-facing phishing detection performance, we further evaluate MPA on a benchmark of real-world suspicious URLs actively crawled from five social media platforms, where it improves recall by 20%. Detailed analysis shows episodic memory contributes up to 27% recall gain without introducing additional computational overhead. The ablation study confirms the necessity of the agent-based approach compared to prompt-based baselines and validates the effectiveness of our tool design. Finally, MPA is deployed in production, processing 60K targeted high-risk URLs weekly, and achieving 91.44% recall, providing proactive protection for millions of customers. Together, our results show that combining multi-modal reasoning with episodic memory yields robust phishing detection in realistic user-exposure settings. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/XuanChen-xc/MemoPhishAgent.git.
title MemoPhishAgent: Memory-Augmented Multi-Modal LLM Agent for Phishing URL Detection
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21394