AI is transforming scientific research by revealing new ways to understand complex physical systems, but its impact remains constrained by the lack of large, high-quality domain-specific datasets. A rich, largely untapped resource lies in non-Hermitian quantum physics, where the energy spectra of crystals form intricate geometries on the complex plane -- termed as Hamiltonian spectral graphs. Despite their significance as fingerprints for electronic behavior, their systematic study has been intractable due to the reliance on manual extraction. To unlock this potential, we introduce Poly2Graph: a high-performance, open-source pipeline that automates the mapping of 1-D crystal Hamiltonians to spectral graphs. Using this tool, we present HSG-12M: a dataset containing 11.6 million static and 5.1 million dynamic Hamiltonian spectral graphs across 1401 characteristic-polynomial classes, distilled from 177 TB of spectral potential data. Crucially, HSG-12M is the first large-scale dataset of spatial multigraphs -- graphs embedded in a metric space where multiple geometrically distinct trajectories between two nodes are retained as separate edges. This simultaneously addresses a critical gap, as existing graph benchmarks overwhelmingly assume simple, non-spatial edges, discarding vital geometric information. Benchmarks with popular GNNs expose new challenges in learning spatial multi-edges at scale. Beyond its practical utility, we show that spectral graphs serve as universal topological fingerprints of polynomials, vectors, and matrices, forging a new algebra-to-graph link. HSG-12M lays the groundwork for data-driven scientific discovery in condensed matter physics, new opportunities in geometry-aware graph learning and beyond.

Neural rendering has advanced significantly in 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis, and integrating physics into these frameworks opens new applications such as physically accurate digital twins for robotics and XR. However, the inverse problem of estimating physical parameters from visual observations remains challenging. Existing physics-aware neural rendering methods typically require dense multi-view videos, making them impractical for scalable, real-world deployment. Under sparse-view settings, the sequential optimization strategies employed by current approaches suffer from severe error accumulation: inaccuracies in initial 3D reconstruction propagate to subsequent stages, degrading physical state and material parameter estimates. On the other hand, simultaneous optimization of all parameters fails due to the highly non-convex and often non-differentiable nature of the problem. We propose ProJo4D, a progressive joint optimization framework that gradually expands the set of jointly optimized parameters. This design enables physics-informed gradients to refine geometry while avoiding the instability of direct joint optimization over all parameters. Evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ProJo4D substantially outperforms prior work in 4D future state prediction and physical parameter estimation, achieving up to 10x improvement in geometric accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. Please visit the project webpage: https://daniel03c1.github.io/ProJo4D/

Learning meaningful abstract models of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is crucial for improving generalization from limited data. In this work, we show how geometric priors can be imposed on the low-dimensional representation manifold of a learned transition model. We incorporate known symmetric structures via appropriate choices of the latent space and the associated group actions, which encode prior knowledge about invariances in the environment. In addition, our framework allows the embedding of additional unstructured information alongside these symmetries. We show experimentally that this leads to better predictions of the latent transition model than fully unstructured approaches, as well as better learning on downstream RL tasks, in environments with rotational and translational features, including in first-person views of 3D environments. Additionally, our experiments show that this leads to simpler and more disentangled representations. The full code is available on GitHub to ensure reproducibility.

Visual Semantic Navigation (VSN) is a fundamental problem in robotics, where an agent must navigate toward a target object in an unknown environment, mainly using visual information. Most state-of-the-art VSN models are trained in simulation environments, where rendered scenes of the real world are used, at best. These approaches typically rely on raw RGB data from the virtual scenes, which limits their ability to generalize to real-world environments due to domain adaptation issues. To tackle this problem, in this work, we propose SEMNAV, a novel approach that leverages semantic segmentation as the main visual input representation of the environment to enhance the agent's perception and decision-making capabilities. By explicitly incorporating this type of high-level semantic information, our model learns robust navigation policies that improve generalization across unseen environments, both in simulated and real world settings. We also introduce the SEMNAV dataset, a newly curated dataset designed for training semantic segmentation-aware navigation models like SEMNAV. Our approach is evaluated extensively in both simulated environments and with real-world robotic platforms. Experimental results demonstrate that SEMNAV outperforms existing state-of-the-art VSN models, achieving higher success rates in the Habitat 2.0 simulation environment, using the HM3D dataset. Furthermore, our real-world experiments highlight the effectiveness of semantic segmentation in mitigating the sim-to-real gap, making our model a promising solution for practical VSN-based robotic applications. The code and datasets are accessible at https://github.com/gramuah/semnav

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in finite discounted MDPs with recursive entropic risk measures (ERM), where the risk parameter $β\neq 0$ controls the agent's risk attitude: $β>0$ for risk-averse and $β<0$ for risk-seeking behavior. A generative model of the MDP is assumed to be available. Our focus is on the sample complexities of learning the optimal state-action value function (value learning) and an optimal policy (policy learning) under recursive ERM. We introduce a model-based algorithm, called Model-Based ERM $Q$-Value Iteration (MB-RS-QVI), and derive PAC-type bounds on its sample complexity for both value and policy learning. Both PAC bounds scale exponentially with $|β|/(1-γ)$, where $γ$ is the discount factor. We also establish corresponding lower bounds for both value and policy learning, showing that exponential dependence on $|β|/(1-γ)$ is unavoidable in the worst case. The bounds are tight in the number of states and actions ($S$ and $A$), providing the first rigorous sample complexity guarantees for recursive ERM across both risk-averse and risk-seeking regimes.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced performance on 2D visual tasks. However, improving their spatial intelligence remains a challenge. Existing 3D MLLMs always rely on additional 3D or 2.5D data to incorporate spatial awareness, restricting their utility in scenarios with only 2D inputs, such as images or videos. In this paper, we present Spatial-MLLM, a novel framework for visual-based spatial reasoning from purely 2D observations. Unlike conventional video MLLMs which rely on CLIP-based visual encoders optimized for semantic understanding, our key insight is to unleash the strong structure prior from the feed-forward visual geometry foundation model. Specifically, we propose a dual-encoder architecture: a pretrained 2D visual encoder to extract semantic features, and a 3D spatial encoder-initialized from the backbone of the visual geometry model-to extract 3D structure features. A connector then integrates both features into unified visual tokens for enhanced spatial understanding. Furthermore, we propose a space-aware frame sampling strategy at inference time, which selects the spatially informative frames of a video sequence, ensuring that even under limited token length, the model focuses on frames critical for spatial reasoning. Beyond architecture improvements, we construct a training dataset from multiple sources and train the model on it using supervised fine-tuning and GRPO. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that Spatial-MLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of visual-based spatial understanding and reasoning tasks. Project page: https://diankun-wu.github.io/Spatial-MLLM/.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have emerged as a key approach in achieving artificial general intelligence. In particular, vision-language MLLMs have been developed to generate not only text but also visual outputs from multimodal inputs. This advancement requires efficient image tokens that LLMs can process effectively both in input and output. However, existing image tokenization methods for MLLMs typically capture only global abstract concepts or uniformly segmented image patches, restricting MLLMs' capability to effectively understand or generate detailed visual content, particularly at the object level. To address this limitation, we propose an object-centric visual tokenizer based on Slot Attention specifically for MLLMs. In particular, based on the Q-Former encoder, diffusion decoder, and residual vector quantization, our proposed discretized slot tokens can encode local visual details while maintaining high-level semantics, and also align with textual data to be integrated seamlessly within a unified next-token prediction framework of LLMs. The resulting Slot-MLLM demonstrates significant performance improvements over baselines with previous visual tokenizers across various vision-language tasks that entail local detailed comprehension and generation. Notably, this work is the first demonstration of the feasibility of object-centric slot attention performed with MLLMs and in-the-wild natural images.

We introduce HyperCap, the first large-scale hyperspectral captioning dataset designed to enhance model performance and effectiveness in remote sensing applications. Unlike traditional hyperspectral imaging (HSI) benchmarks, HyperCap integrates spectral data with pixel-wise textual annotations, enabling deeper semantic understanding. This dataset enhances model performance in tasks like classification and feature extraction, providing a valuable resource for advanced remote sensing applications. HyperCap is constructed from four benchmark datasets and annotated through a hybrid approach combining automated and manual methods to ensure accuracy and consistency. Empirical evaluations using state-of-the-art encoders and diverse fusion techniques demonstrate significant improvements in classification performance. These results underscore the potential of vision-language learning in HSI and position HyperCap as a foundational dataset for future research in the field. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/arya-domain/HyperCap.

Effective information searching is essential for enhancing the reasoning and generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Recent research has explored using reinforcement learning (RL) to improve LLMs' search capabilities by interacting with live search engines in real-world environments. While these approaches show promising results, they face two major challenges: (1) Uncontrolled Document Quality: The quality of documents returned by search engines is often unpredictable, introducing noise and instability into the training process. (2) Prohibitively High API Costs: RL training requires frequent rollouts, potentially involving hundreds of thousands of search requests, which incur substantial API expenses and severely constrain scalability. To address these challenges, we introduce ZeroSearch, a novel RL framework that incentivizes the capabilities of LLMs to use a real search engine with simulated searches during training. Our approach begins with lightweight supervised fine-tuning to transform the LLM into a retrieval module capable of generating both useful and noisy documents in response to a query. During RL training, we employ a curriculum-based rollout strategy that incrementally degrades the quality of generated documents, progressively eliciting the model's reasoning ability by exposing it to increasingly challenging retrieval scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ZeroSearch effectively incentivizes the search capabilities of LLMs using a 3B LLM as the retrieval module. Remarkably, a 7B retrieval module achieves comparable performance to the real search engine, while a 14B retrieval module even surpasses it. Furthermore, it generalizes well across both base and instruction-tuned models of various parameter sizes and is compatible with a wide range of RL algorithms.

This paper introduces the Compliant Explicit Reference Governor (CERG), a modular reference management system that enables robots to interact physically with their environment under provable guarantees. The CERG is an intermediate layer that can be placed between a high-level planner and a low-level controller: it enforces operational constraints and enables smooth transitions between free-motion and contact operations. The CERG ensures safety by limiting the total energy available to the robotic arm at the time of contact. In the absence of contact, however, the CERG does not penalize the system performance. Simulation and hardware experiments validate the CERG on increasingly complex systems.

Understanding human behaviour, neuroscience and psychology using concepts from the domain of AI is increasing in popularity. Given the massive integration of AI technologies into our daily lives, AI-related concepts are being used to compare AI systems with human behaviour, brain functions, and cognitive abilities like language acquisition. But scientists and philosophers are also increasingly tempted to take the AI-framing of the human conceptual domain as a literal one. This paper investigates the epistemic and practical success of these 'AI-framings': What does it mean to apply the conceptual constellation of AI to the human conceptual domain? We consider and compare two possible answers: either these examples are conceptual metaphors, or they are attempts at conceptual engineering. Firstly, we argue that when viewed as conceptual metaphors, the AI-framed descriptions risk committing the ''map-territory fallacy''. Secondly, we argue the comparisons also contain a misleading 'double metaphor' because of the metaphorical connection between human psychology and computation at the conceptual foundation of computation. But we also argue that there is a possible semantic catch to the AI-framing, which is captured by the conceptual engineering view. This is that the AI-framings point towards avenues for forms of conceptual engineering. If the challenges of conceptual ethics and reductionism are overcome, some AI-framings might enrich our epistemic and practical lives. So, at its worst - as implicit conceptual metaphor - the AI-framing leads us completely astray; at its best, it prompts us to reflect anew on how the boundaries of our current concepts serve us and how they could be improved.

Knowledge-based Vision Question Answering (KB-VQA) systems address complex visual-grounded questions with knowledge retrieved from external knowledge bases. The tasks of knowledge retrieval and answer generation tasks both necessitate precise multimodal understanding of question context and external knowledge. However, existing methods treat these two stages as separate modules with limited interaction during training, which hinders bi-directional parametric knowledge sharing, ultimately leading to suboptimal performance. To fully exploit the cross-task synergy in KB-VQA, we propose a unified retrieval-augmented VQA framework with collaborative parametric knowledge calibration. The proposed framework can effectively adapt general multimodal pre-trained models for fine-grained, knowledge-intensive tasks while enabling the retriever and generator to collaboratively enhance and share their parametric knowledge during both training and inference. To enhance fine-grained understanding of questions and external documents, we also integrate late interaction mechanism into the proposed training framework. Additionally, we introduce a reflective-answering mechanism that allows the model to explicitly evaluate and refine its knowledge boundary. Our approach achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art models, delivering a significant 4.7\% improvement in answering accuracy, and brings an average 7.5\% boost in base MLLMs' VQA performance.

To develop a trustworthy AI system, which aim to identify the input regions that most influence the models decisions. The primary task of existing attribution methods lies in efficiently and accurately identifying the relationships among input-prediction interactions. Particularly when the input data is discrete, such as images, analyzing the relationship between inputs and outputs poses a significant challenge due to the combinatorial explosion. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient black-box attribution mechanism, LiMA (Less input is More faithful for Attribution), which reformulates the attribution of important regions as an optimization problem for submodular subset selection. First, to accurately assess interactions, we design a submodular function that quantifies subset importance and effectively captures their impact on decision outcomes. Then, efficiently ranking input sub-regions by their importance for attribution, we improve optimization efficiency through a novel bidirectional greedy search algorithm. LiMA identifies both the most and least important samples while ensuring an optimal attribution boundary that minimizes errors. Extensive experiments on eight foundation models demonstrate that our method provides faithful interpretations with fewer regions and exhibits strong generalization, shows an average improvement of 36.3% in Insertion and 39.6% in Deletion. Our method also outperforms the naive greedy search in attribution efficiency, being 1.6 times faster. Furthermore, when explaining the reasons behind model prediction errors, the average highest confidence achieved by our method is, on average, 86.1% higher than that of state-of-the-art attribution algorithms. The code is available at https://github.com/RuoyuChen10/LIMA.

As language model (LM) outputs get more and more natural, it is becoming more difficult than ever to evaluate their quality. Simultaneously, increasing LMs' "thinking" time through scaling test-time compute has proven an effective technique to solve challenging problems in domains such as math and code. This raises a natural question: can an LM's evaluation capability also be improved by spending more test-time compute? To answer this, we investigate employing reasoning models-LMs that natively generate long chain-of-thought reasoning-as evaluators. Specifically, we examine methods to leverage more test-time compute by (1) using reasoning models, and (2) prompting these models to evaluate not only the response as a whole (i.e., outcome evaluation) but also assess each step in the response separately (i.e., process evaluation). In experiments, we observe that the evaluator's performance improves monotonically when generating more reasoning tokens, similar to the trends observed in LM-based generation. Furthermore, we use these more accurate evaluators to rerank multiple generations, and demonstrate that spending more compute at evaluation time can be as effective as using more compute at generation time in improving an LM's problem-solving capability.

Time series frequently manifest distribution shifts, diverse latent features, and non-stationary learning dynamics, particularly in open and evolving environments. These characteristics pose significant challenges for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. While substantial progress has been made, a systematic synthesis of advancements remains lacking. To address this gap, we present the first comprehensive review of OOD generalization methodologies for time series, organized to delineate the field's evolutionary trajectory and contemporary research landscape. We organize our analysis across three foundational dimensions: data distribution, representation learning, and OOD evaluation. For each dimension, we present several popular algorithms in detail. Furthermore, we highlight key application scenarios, emphasizing their real-world impact. Finally, we identify persistent challenges and propose future research directions. A detailed summary of the methods reviewed for the generalization of OOD in time series can be accessed at https://tsood-generalization.com.

Generative models have rapidly evolved to generate realistic outputs. However, their synthetic outputs increasingly challenge the clear distinction between natural and AI-generated content, necessitating robust watermarking techniques. Watermarks are typically expected to preserve the integrity of the target image, withstand removal attempts, and prevent unauthorized replication onto unrelated images. To address this need, recent methods embed persistent watermarks into images produced by diffusion models using the initial noise. Yet, to do so, they either distort the distribution of generated images or rely on searching through a long dictionary of used keys for detection. In this paper, we propose a novel watermarking method that embeds semantic information about the generated image directly into the watermark, enabling a distortion-free watermark that can be verified without requiring a database of key patterns. Instead, the key pattern can be inferred from the semantic embedding of the image using locality-sensitive hashing. Furthermore, conditioning the watermark detection on the original image content improves robustness against forgery attacks. To demonstrate that, we consider two largely overlooked attack strategies: (i) an attacker extracting the initial noise and generating a novel image with the same pattern; (ii) an attacker inserting an unrelated (potentially harmful) object into a watermarked image, possibly while preserving the watermark. We empirically validate our method's increased robustness to these attacks. Taken together, our results suggest that content-aware watermarks can mitigate risks arising from image-generative models.

Domain shift remains a persistent challenge in deep-learning-based computer vision, often requiring extensive model modifications or large labeled datasets to address. Inspired by human visual perception, which adjusts input quality through corrective lenses rather than over-training the brain, we propose Lens, a novel camera sensor control method that enhances model performance by capturing high-quality images from the model's perspective rather than relying on traditional human-centric sensor control. Lens is lightweight and adapts sensor parameters to specific models and scenes in real-time. At its core, Lens utilizes VisiT, a training-free, model-specific quality indicator that evaluates individual unlabeled samples at test time using confidence scores without additional adaptation costs. To validate Lens, we introduce ImageNet-ES Diverse, a new benchmark dataset capturing natural perturbations from varying sensor and lighting conditions. Extensive experiments on both ImageNet-ES and our new ImageNet-ES Diverse show that Lens significantly improves model accuracy across various baseline schemes for sensor control and model modification while maintaining low latency in image captures. Lens effectively compensates for large model size differences and integrates synergistically with model improvement techniques. Our code and dataset are available at github.com/Edw2n/Lens.git.

In Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection (OSAD), the existing methods typically generate pseudo anomalies to compensate for the scarcity of observed anomaly samples, while overlooking critical priors of normal samples, leading to less effective discriminative boundaries. To address this issue, we propose a Distribution Prototype Diffusion Learning (DPDL) method aimed at enclosing normal samples within a compact and discriminative distribution space. Specifically, we construct multiple learnable Gaussian prototypes to create a latent representation space for abundant and diverse normal samples and learn a Schrödinger bridge to facilitate a diffusive transition toward these prototypes for normal samples while steering anomaly samples away. Moreover, to enhance inter-sample separation, we design a dispersion feature learning way in hyperspherical space, which benefits the identification of out-of-distribution anomalies. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed DPDL, achieving state-of-the-art performance on 9 public datasets.

Visual-Spatial Systems has become increasingly essential in concrete crack inspection. However, existing methods often lacks adaptability to diverse scenarios, exhibits limited robustness in image-based approaches, and struggles with curved or complex geometries. To address these limitations, an innovative framework for two-dimensional (2D) crack detection, three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction, and 3D automatic crack measurement was proposed by integrating computer vision technologies and multi-modal Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in this study. Firstly, building on a base DeepLabv3+ segmentation model, and incorporating specific refinements utilizing foundation model Segment Anything Model (SAM), we developed a crack segmentation method with strong generalization across unfamiliar scenarios, enabling the generation of precise 2D crack masks. To enhance the accuracy and robustness of 3D reconstruction, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) point clouds were utilized together with image data and segmentation masks. By leveraging both image- and LiDAR-SLAM, we developed a multi-frame and multi-modal fusion framework that produces dense, colorized point clouds, effectively capturing crack semantics at a 3D real-world scale. Furthermore, the crack geometric attributions were measured automatically and directly within 3D dense point cloud space, surpassing the limitations of conventional 2D image-based measurements. This advancement makes the method suitable for structural components with curved and complex 3D geometries. Experimental results across various concrete structures highlight the significant improvements and unique advantages of the proposed method, demonstrating its effectiveness, accuracy, and robustness in real-world applications.

Text-driven human motion synthesis has showcased its potential for revolutionizing motion design in the movie and game industry. Existing methods often rely on 3D motion capture data, which requires special setups, resulting in high costs for data acquisition, ultimately limiting the diversity and scope of human motion. In contrast, 2D human videos offer a vast and accessible source of motion data, covering a wider range of styles and activities. In this paper, we explore the use of 2D human motion extracted from videos as an alternative data source to improve text-driven 3D motion generation. Our approach introduces a novel framework that disentangles local joint motion from global movements, enabling efficient learning of local motion priors from 2D data. We first train a single-view 2D local motion generator on a large dataset of text-2D motion pairs. Then we fine-tune the generator with 3D data, transforming it into a multi-view generator that predicts view-consistent local joint motion and root dynamics. Evaluations on the well-acknowledged dataset and novel text prompts demonstrate that our method can efficiently utilize 2D data, supporting a wider range of realistic 3D human motion generation. Our code is publicly available at https://zju3dv.github.io/Motion-2-to-3/.

With the maturity of depth sensors in various 3D safety-critical applications, 3D point cloud models have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Almost all existing 3D attackers simply follow the white-box or black-box setting to iteratively update coordinate perturbations based on back-propagated or estimated gradients. However, these methods are hard to deploy in real-world scenarios (no model details are provided) as they severely rely on parameters or output logits of victim models. To this end, we propose point cloud attacks from a more practical setting, i.e., hard-label black-box attack, in which attackers can only access the prediction label of 3D input. We introduce a novel 3D attack method based on a new spectrum-aware decision boundary algorithm to generate high-quality adversarial samples. In particular, we first construct a class-aware model decision boundary, by developing a learnable spectrum-fusion strategy to adaptively fuse point clouds of different classes in the spectral domain, aiming to craft their intermediate samples without distorting the original geometry. Then, we devise an iterative coordinate-spectrum optimization method with curvature-aware boundary search to move the intermediate sample along the decision boundary for generating adversarial point clouds with trivial perturbations. Experiments demonstrate that our attack competitively outperforms existing white/black-box attackers in terms of attack performance and adversary quality.

Selective parameter activation provided by Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) models have made them a popular choice in modern foundational models. However, MoEs face a fundamental tension when employed for serving. Batching, critical for performance in serving, forces the activation of all experts, thereby negating MoEs' benefits and exacerbating memory bandwidth bottlenecks. Existing work on efficient MoE inference are unable to resolve this tension even with extensive workload-specific tuning. We present LYNX, a system that enables efficient MoE inference in a workload-agnostic fashion. LYNX leverages a key property of MoE training: load-balancing losses introduce batch-level expert activation skews and redundancy, which it exploits by remapping low-affinity token-to-expert assignments within each batch using a novel AffinityBinning technique that reduces the total experts invoked. Our evaluation of LYNX on four state-of-the-art model families across nine benchmarks shows that it achieves up to 1.30x improvement in throughput while maintaining accuracy loss of less than 1% points across tasks. Further, LYNX is complementary to existing techniques where it additionally boosts their performance by up to 1.38x.

Frontier large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-5, Claude 4.5, Gemini 3, Llama 4, and DeepSeek-R1, represent a transformative class of AI tools capable of revolutionizing various aspects of healthcare by generating human-like responses across diverse contexts and adapting to novel tasks following human instructions. Their potential application spans a broad range of medical tasks, such as clinical documentation, matching patients to clinical trials, and answering medical questions. In this paper, we propose an actionable guideline to help healthcare professionals more effectively and efficiently utilize LLMs in their work, along with a set of best practices. The overall workflow consists of several main phases, including formulating the task, choosing LLMs, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and model deployment. We start with the discussion of critical considerations in identifying medical tasks that align with the core capabilities of LLMs and selecting models based on the selected task and data, performance requirements, and model interface. We then review the strategies, such as prompt engineering and fine-tuning, to adapt standard LLMs to specialized medical tasks. Deployment considerations, including regulatory compliance, ethical guidelines, and continuous monitoring for fairness and bias, are also discussed. By providing a structured step-by-step methodology, this entry-level tutorial aims to equip healthcare professionals with the tools necessary to effectively integrate LLMs into clinical practice, ensuring that these powerful technologies are applied in a safe, reliable, and impactful manner.

Aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention for their safety, particularly in the context of jailbreak attacks that attempt to bypass guardrails via adversarial prompts. Among existing approaches, the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) attack pioneered automated jailbreaks through discrete token optimization; however, its low sample efficiency limits practical applicability. In particular, GCG requires approximately 256K evaluations per harmful behavior to achieve a satisfactory jailbreak success rate, due to the inherent difficulty of the underlying discrete optimization problem. In this work, we identify three key factors that limit the sample efficiency of GCG: inaccurate gradient-based estimation, inefficient uniform sampling, and repeated evaluation of previously explored suffixes. To address these issues, we propose Faster-GCG, a streamlined variant of GCG that incorporates distance-based regularization for improved estimation, temperature-controlled sampling for more effective exploration, and a visited-suffix marking mechanism to avoid redundant evaluations. Faster-GCG reduced the required evaluations to 32K, achieving up to an $8\times$ improvement in sampling efficiency and a $7\times$ reduction in wall-clock time compared to GCG. Under this reduced budget, Faster-GCG attained an average jailbreak success rate of 78.1\% across five aligned LLMs, and achieved 88.7\% against Qwen3.5-4B, outperforming state-of-the-art white-box jailbreak methods.

In this paper, we introduce TextBoost, an efficient one-shot personalization approach for text-to-image diffusion models. Traditional personalization methods typically involve fine-tuning extensive portions of the model, leading to substantial storage requirements and slow convergence. In contrast, we propose selectively fine-tuning only the text encoder, significantly improving computational and storage efficiency. To preserve the original semantic integrity, we develop a novel causality-preserving adaptation mechanism. Additionally, lightweight adapters are employed to locally refine text embeddings immediately before their interaction with cross-attention layers, greatly enhancing the expressiveness of text embeddings with minimal computational overhead. Empirical evaluations across diverse concepts demonstrate that TextBoost achieves faster convergence and substantially reduces storage demands by minimizing the number of trainable parameters. Furthermore, TextBoost maintains comparable subject fidelity, superior text fidelity, and greater generation diversity compared to existing methods. We show that our proposed method offers an efficient, scalable, and practically applicable solution for high-quality text-to-image personalization, particularly beneficial in resource-constrained environments.

Fine-grained image classification has witnessed significant advancements with the advent of deep learning and computer vision technologies. However, the scarcity of detailed annotations remains a major challenge, especially in scenarios where obtaining high-quality labeled data is costly or time-consuming. To address this limitation, we introduce Precision-Enhanced Pseudo-Labeling(PEPL) approach specifically designed for fine-grained image classification within a semi-supervised learning framework. Our method leverages the abundance of unlabeled data by generating high-quality pseudo-labels that are progressively refined through two key phases: initial pseudo-label generation and semantic-mixed pseudo-label generation. These phases utilize Class Activation Maps (CAMs) to accurately estimate the semantic content and generate refined labels that capture the essential details necessary for fine-grained classification. By focusing on semantic-level information, our approach effectively addresses the limitations of standard data augmentation and image-mixing techniques in preserving critical fine-grained features. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over existing semi-supervised strategies, with notable boosts in accuracy and robustness.

We present an approach for estimating the fraction of text in a large corpus which is likely to be substantially modified or produced by a large language model (LLM). Our maximum likelihood model leverages expert-written and AI-generated reference texts to accurately and efficiently examine real-world LLM-use at the corpus level. We apply this approach to a case study of scientific peer review in AI conferences that took place after the release of ChatGPT: ICLR 2024, NeurIPS 2023, CoRL 2023 and EMNLP 2023. Our results suggest that between 6.5% and 16.9% of text submitted as peer reviews to these conferences could have been substantially modified by LLMs, i.e. beyond spell-checking or minor writing updates. The circumstances in which generated text occurs offer insight into user behavior: the estimated fraction of LLM-generated text is higher in reviews which report lower confidence, were submitted close to the deadline, and from reviewers who are less likely to respond to author rebuttals. We also observe corpus-level trends in generated text which may be too subtle to detect at the individual level, and discuss the implications of such trends on peer review. We call for future interdisciplinary work to examine how LLM use is changing our information and knowledge practices.

We introduce a novel strategy to train randomised predictors in federated learning, where each node of the network aims at preserving its privacy by releasing a local predictor but keeping secret its training dataset with respect to the other nodes. We then build a global randomised predictor which inherits the properties of the local private predictors in the sense of a PAC-Bayesian generalisation bound. We consider the synchronous case where all nodes share the same training objective (derived from a generalisation bound), and the heterogenous and homogenous cases where each node may have its own personalised training objective. We show through a series of numerical experiments that our approach achieves a comparable predictive performance to that of the batch approach where all datasets are shared across nodes. Moreover the predictors are supported by numerically nonvacuous generalisation bounds while preserving privacy for each node. We explicitly compute the increment on predictive performance and generalisation bounds for our two federated settings, highlighting the price to pay to preserve privacy.

Traditional randomized A/B experiments assign arms with uniform random (UR) probability, such as 50/50 assignment to two versions of a website to discover whether one version engages users more. To more quickly and automatically use data to benefit users, multi-armed bandit algorithms such as Thompson Sampling (TS) have been advocated. While TS is interpretable and incorporates the randomization key to statistical inference, it can cause biased estimates and increase false positives and false negatives in detecting differences in arm means. We introduce a more Statistically Sensitive algorithm, TS-PostDiff (Posterior Probability of Small Difference), that mixes TS with traditional UR by using an additional adaptive step, where the probability of using UR (vs TS) is proportional to the posterior probability that the difference in arms is small. This allows an experimenter to define what counts as a small difference, below which a traditional UR experiment can obtain informative data for statistical inference at low cost, and above which using more TS to maximize user benefits is key. We evaluate TS-PostDiff against UR, TS, and two other TS variants designed to improve statistical inference. We consider results for the common two-armed experiment across a range of settings inspired by real-world applications. Our results provide insight into when and why TS-PostDiff or alternative approaches provide better tradeoffs between benefiting users (reward) and statistical inference (false positive rate and power). TS-PostDiff's adaptivity helps efficiently reduce false positives and increase statistical power when differences are small, while increasing reward more when differences are large. The work highlights important considerations for future Statistically Sensitive algorithm development that balances reward and statistical analysis in adaptive experimentation.

The task of efficient automatic music classification is of vital importance and forms the basis for various advanced applications of AI in the musical domain. Musical instrument recognition is the task of instrument identification by virtue of its audio. This audio, also termed as the sound vibrations are leveraged by the model to match with the instrument classes. In this paper, we use an artificial neural network (ANN) model that was trained to perform classification on twenty different classes of musical instruments. Here we use use only the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) of the audio data. Our proposed model trains on the full London philharmonic orchestra dataset which contains twenty classes of instruments belonging to the four families viz. woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings. Based on experimental results our model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the same.