论文检索

General Machine Learning · Representation Learning

Soyeon Hong, Jinchan Kim, Jaegook You, Seungtaek Choi, Suha Kwak, Hyunsouk Cho

Expanding multimodal representations to novel modalities is constrained by reliance on large-scale paired datasets (e.g., text–image, text–audio, text–3D, text–molecule), which are costly and often infeasible in domains requiring expert annotation such as medical imaging and molecular analysis. We introduce TextME, the first text-only modality expansion framework, to the best of our knowledge, projecting diverse modalities into LLM embedding space as a unified anchor. Our approach exploits the geometric structure of pretrained contrastive encoders to enable zero-shot cross-modal transfer using only text descriptions, without paired supervision. We empirically validate that such consistent modality gaps exist across image, video, audio, 3D, X-ray, and molecular domains, demonstrating that text-only training can preserve substantial performance of pretrained encoders. Moreover, our framework enables emergent cross-modal retrieval between modality pairs not explicitly aligned during training (e.g., audio-to-image, 3D-to-image). These results establish text-only training as a practical alternative to paired supervision for modality expansion.

Social Aspects · Security

Zhengxian Huang, Wenjun Zhu, Haoxuan Qiu, Xiaoyu Ji, Wenyuan Xu

By integrating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation, particularly by improving generalization and interpretability. However, the security of CoT-based reasoning mechanisms remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we show that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning introduces a novel attack vector for targeted control hijacking—for example, causing a robot to mistakenly deliver a knife to a person instead of an apple—without modifying the user’s instruction. We first provide empirical evidence that CoT strongly governs action generation, even when it is semantically misaligned with the input instructions. Building on this observation, we propose **TRAP**, the first targeted adversarial attack framework for CoT-reasoning VLA models. **TRAP** uses an adversarial patch (e.g., a coaster placed on the table) to corrupt intermediate CoT reasoning and hijack the VLA’s output. By optimizing the CoT adversarial loss, **TRAP** induces specific and adversary-defined behaviors. Extensive evaluations across 3 mainstreaming VLA architectures and 3 CoT reasoning paradigms validate the effectiveness of **TRAP**. Notably, we implemented the patch by printing it on paper in a real-world setting. Our findings highlight the urgent need to secure CoT reasoning in VLA systems.

Applications · Chemistry, Physics, and Earth Sciences

Ye Liu, Shouyi Liu, Ding Wang, Huiyu Yang, Ruizhe DENG, Qian Li, Yuxiao Hu, Jianghang gu, Yongzheng Liu, Quanshi Zhang 等

High-fidelity vehicle aerodynamics analysis is bottlenecked by costly CFD simulations. Neural surrogates accelerate prediction but lack inverse design capabilities, while existing generative optimization methods suffer from unstable convergence and frequent engineering constraint violations. We present UniDrag, a unified framework bridging multi-field aerodynamic prediction with robust differentiable shape optimization. Given a vehicle geometry, UniDrag predicts surface pressure, volume flow fields, drag coefficient $C_d$, and a streamwise build-up profile localizing drag contributions. Our architecture combines enhanced Physics-Sliced Attention (ePSA), Gated Expert Routing, and Modality-Protected Learning to prevent negative transfer across output modalities. At deployment, the frozen surrogate enables gradient-based optimization via Free-Form Deformation with engineering constraints. We introduce Expectation-over-Transformation to prevent adversarial exploitation of surrogate fragility. We curate a large-scale dataset of 15,000 vehicle geometries spanning four body types with GPU-accelerated LBM simulations. On this benchmark, UniDrag achieves $C_d$ prediction $R^2$ of 0.937 (+7.6\% over baselines) and 13.7\% mean CFD-verified drag reduction with 100\% success rate and only 21.3~mm average displacement (0.46\% vehicle length).

Social Aspects · Security

Yixiao Xu, Binxing Fang, Rui Wang, Yinghai Zhou, Yuan Liu, Mohan Li, Zhihong Tian

Triggerable watermarking enables model owners to assert ownership against model extraction attacks. However, most existing approaches require additional training, which limits post-deployment flexibility, and the lack of clear theoretical foundations makes them vulnerable to adaptive attacks. In this paper, we propose Neural Honeytrace, a plug-and-play watermarking framework that operates without retraining. We redefine the watermark transmission mechanism from an information perspective, designing a training-free multi-step transmission strategy that leverages the long-tailed effect of backdoor learning to achieve efficient and robust watermark embedding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Neural Honeytrace reduces the average number of queries required for a worst-case t-test-based ownership verification to as low as 2% of existing methods, while incurring zero training cost.

Deep Learning · Attention Mechanisms

Tobias Schröder, Lester Mackey

We introduce WildCat, a high-accuracy, low-cost approach to compressing the attention mechanism in neural networks. While attention is a staple of modern network architectures, it is also notoriously expensive to deploy due to resource requirements that scale quadratically with the input sequence length $n$. WildCat avoids these quadratic costs by only attending over a small weighted coreset. Crucially, we select the coreset using a fast but spectrally-accurate subsampling algorithm -- randomly pivoted Cholesky -- and weight the elements optimally to minimise reconstruction error. Remarkably, given bounded inputs, WildCat approximates exact attention with super-polynomial $O(n^{-\sqrt{\log(\log(n))}})$ error decay while running in near-linear $O(n^{1+o(1)})$ time. In contrast, prior practical approximations either lack error guarantees or require quadratic runtime to guarantee such high fidelity. We couple this advance with a GPU-optimized PyTorch implementation and a suite of benchmark experiments demonstrating the benefits of WildCat for image generation, image classification, and language model KV cache compression.

Social Aspects · Privacy

Jie Xu, Zihan Wu, Wenbo Pan, Jiao Yin, Yong-Feng Ge, Hua Wang, Cong Wang, Xiaohua Jia

Existing machine unlearning methods primarily focus on removing data influence after training completes, which is effective for many scenarios, but a complementary capability is needed when removal requests arise during ongoing training. We propose LMCleaner, an efficient and certified \emph{online} unlearning framework that can process unlearning requests at any training step without waiting for training completion. Our key insight is that influence propagation can be decomposed into a trust region where linear approximation is accurate, and a residual that concentrates in a low-dimensional subspace and can be efficiently masked by calibrated noise. Building on this insight, we design an influence propagation truncation mechanism that treats mini-batch influence as atomic units, computes influence within a truncation window for efficient removal, and injects subspace-aware noise for certified privacy. Our theoretical analysis proves that the truncation residual decays exponentially with window size and that the unlearned model is $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-indistinguishable from retraining. Experiments demonstrate that LMCleaner achieves over $100\times$ computational savings compared to baselines while maintaining model utility and defending against membership inference attacks.

Deep Learning · Algorithms

Junchao Lin, Zenan Ling, Jingwen Xu, Robert Qiu

Deep Equilibrium Models (DEQs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm in deep learning, offering the ability to model infinite-depth networks with constant memory usage. However, DEQs incur significant inference latency due to the iterative nature of fixed-point solvers. In this work, we introduce the Consistency Deep Equilibrium Model (C-DEQ), a novel framework that leverages consistency distillation to accelerate DEQ inference. We cast the DEQ iterative inference process as evolution along a fixed ODE trajectory toward the equilibrium. Along this trajectory, we train C-DEQs to consistently map intermediate states directly to the fixed point, enabling few-step inference while preserving the performance of the teacher DEQ. At the same time, it facilitates multi-step evaluation to flexibly trade computation for performance gains. Extensive experiments across various domain tasks demonstrate that C-DEQs achieves consistent 2-20$\times$ accuracy improvements over implicit DEQs under the same few-step inference budget.

General Machine Learning · Clustering

Poojan Shah, Shashwat Agrawal, Ragesh Jaiswal

We study beyond worst case analysis for the $k$-means problem where the goal is to model typical instances of $k$-means arising in practice. Existing theoretical approaches provide guarantees under certain assumptions on the optimal solutions to $k$-means, making them difficult to validate in practice. We propose the manifold hypothesis, where data obtained in ambient dimension $D$ concentrates around a low dimensional manifold of intrinsic dimension $d$, as a reasonable assumption to model real world clustering instances. We identify key geometric properties of datasets which have theoretically predictable scaling laws depending on the quantization exponent $\varepsilon = 2/d$ using techniques from optimum quantization theory. We show how to exploit these regularities to design a fast seeding method called $\operatorname{Qkmeans}$ which provides $O(\rho^{-2} \log k)$ approximate solutions to the $k$-means problem in time $O(nD) + \widetilde{O}(\varepsilon^{1+\rho}\rho^{-1}k^{1+\gamma})$; where the exponent $\gamma = \varepsilon + \rho$ for an input parameter $\rho < 1$. This allows us to obtain new runtime - quality tradeoffs. We perform a large scale empirical study across various domains to validate our theoretical predictions and algorithm performance to bridge theory and practice for beyond worst case data clustering.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Lunjie Zhu, Yushi Huang, Xingtong Ge, Yufei Xue, Zhening Liu, Yumeng Zhang, Zehong Lin, Jun Zhang

Latent diffusion models have enabled high-quality video synthesis, yet their inference remains costly and time-consuming. As diffusion transformers become increasingly efficient, the latency bottleneck inevitably shifts to VAE decoders. To reduce their latency while maintaining quality, we propose a universal acceleration framework for VAE decoders that preserves full alignment with the original latent distribution. Specifically, we propose (1) an *independence-aware channel pruning* method to effectively mitigate severe channel redundancy, and (2) a *stage-wise dominant operator optimization* strategy to address the high inference cost of the widely used causal 3D convolutions in VAE decoders. Based on these innovations, we construct a **Flash-VAED** family. Moreover, we design a *three-phase dynamic distillation* framework that efficiently transfers the capabilities of the original VAE decoder to Flash-VAED. Extensive experiments on Wan and LTX-Video VAE decoders demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines in both quality and speed, achieving approximately a **6$\times$ speedup** while maintaining the reconstruction performance up to **96.9%**. Notably, Flash-VAED accelerates the end-to-end generation pipeline by up to **36%** with negligible quality drops on VBench-2.0.

General Machine Learning · Hardware and Software

Shihao Han, Hao Yang, Xinting Hu, Xiaofeng Mei, Yi Jiang, XIAOJUAN QI

Scaling Diffusion Transformers to generate high-resolution, long videos is constrained by the quadratic cost of self-attention, and existing sparse attention methods degrade under high sparsity. We show empirically that generation quality is determined not by the sparsity ratio itself, but by how well the sparse mask aligns with the tile-wise geometry of full attention. Based on this insight, we propose Veda, a distilled sparse attention framework that formulates tile selection as an explicit reconstruction problem from full attention. Veda integrates statistics-aware tile scoring with head-aware tiling to reduce estimation error and structural mismatch, enabling aggressive sparsity. A hardware-efficient tile-skipping kernel converts theoretical sparsity into practical wall-clock speedups. Experiments on large video diffusion models, including Waver and Wan, demonstrate substantial acceleration without quality degradation. To generate 720P 10-second videos on Waver-T2V-12B, Veda achieves a 5.1× end-to-end speedup and a 10.5× self-attention speedup, reducing attention overhead from 92% to 50%. Notably, the gains increase with sequence length, indicating that Veda scales favorably with spatiotemporal resolution across models.

Deep Learning · Self-Supervised Learning

Maofeng Tang, Hairong Qi

Vision Transformers increasingly incorporate extra tokens beyond patch tokens—from class tokens for aggregation to register tokens for artifact mitigation. While effective for their intended purposes, these tokens typically lack semantic structure. We ask a more ambitious question: Can we design regularization constraints that transform extra tokens into disentangled representations, enabling them to decompose images into semantic parts (e.g., heads, bodies, legs) without explicit supervision? We propose XTRA, an intuitive yet powerful framework that augments Vision Transformers with dedicated ``factor tokens'' and enforces disentanglement via a novel Minimum Volume Constraint (MVC). A multi-stage aggregation process further enforces these factor tokens into semantically pure components, preventing token collapse that often occurs when training with MVC alone. On ImageNet-1K, XTRA achieves superior disentanglement (8.4× improvement in SEPIN@1 over DINOv2) while simultaneously improving representation quality: KNN accuracy improves by 5.8\% and linear-probe accuracy by 2.3\%.

Applications · Social Sciences

Yanhui Sun, Wu Liu, Haifeng Ming, Xinru Wang, Hantao Yao, Yongdong Zhang

The intelligent verdict is essential for handling voluminous demands of E-commerce dispute. Unlike the legal dispute, it necessitates identifying pivotal clues from redundant multimodal evidence chains, relying on informal transaction rules for dispute verdicts. The complex ``clues-dispute" causal logic and flexible verdict rules render existing methods inadequate. Motivated by this, we propose a pioneering task, **E-commerce Dispute Verdict** (EDV), and introduce **VerdictBench**, the first Multimodal Disputes Verdicts Benchmark for E-commerce, to facilitate the intelligent verdicts. Building upon this, we propose **CyberJurors**, a framework that integrates an Individual Verdict Chain-of-Thought (IV-CoT) and Jury Consensus Verdict (JCV) to clarify the dispute logic and regulate the fair verdict process. *For the individual juror*, IV-CoT decomposes the EDV task into a structured reasoning, enabling fine-grained clues perception and explicit causal logic between clues and dispute. *For the collective jury*, JCV simulates multi-round discussion and voting among jurors guided by Verdict Precedents, effectively mitigating individual biases. Extensive experiments on VerdictBench demonstrate that CyberJurors significantly improves verdict accuracy, fairness, and interpretability, outperforming existing MLLMs by up to 9.48\% in accuracy.

Social Aspects · Security

Zihan Zhou, Yang Zhou, Jianghai Yu, Lingjuan Lyu, Longwei Wang, KC Santosh, Ruoming Jin, Dejing Dou

Recent work shows that even safety aligned large language models (LLM) can be pushed into unsafe behavior by carefully crafted jailbreak prompts. Existing jailbreaking attack methods often rely on disfluent or incoherent prompts, which limit their success and make them easy to detect. We introduce SJA, a structured jailbreak attack built around two ideas. First, inspired by the logic of Spilsbury puzzle, SJA decomposes a harmful query into a sequence of harmless sub-questions and reconstructs the original answer by combining the sub-question responses. Second, by leveraging the theory of Hamiltonian dynamics on hyperbolic space, we propose a hyperbolic Hamiltonian dynamics-based sub-question generation framework that effectively captures the structural and temporal dependencies. We provide a theoretical analysis of how each sub-question evolves along the trajectory and show that the hyperbolic Hamiltonian system effectively captures the underlying semantic structure. Finally, we propose a hyperbolic narrative fusion mechanism built on fractional embedding and Möbius fusion. This mechanism integrates coherent narratives into sub-questions while preserving geometric consistency and improving stealth performance. We theoretically validate that the combination of the generated harmless sub-questions, guided by the stealthy narrative, can effectively preserve the contextual semantics of the original harmful question.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Yangbo Wei, Zhen Huang, Ronghao Xu, Hong Wang, WEI XING

The rapid development of Large Language Models has driven Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) growth, but constructing efficient MAS still requires labor-intensive manual design. Current automation methods often generate templated agents, rely on monolithic optimization, and ignore task complexity gradients. This paper presents Evolutionary MAS (EvoMAS), a biologically inspired framework that addresses these limitations through three interconnected dimensions: (1) dynamic and diverse evolutionary strategies with six biologically inspired operators (3 exploration, 3 exploitation) and adaptive strategy selection; (2) role-level evolution that dynamically optimizes agent specialization and collaboration patterns; and (3) curriculum-guided evolution that partitions tasks by difficulty and evolves sequentially from simple to complex under cross-stage stability constraints. To bridge the inefficiency of pure evolutionary search and the rigidity of manual design, we introduce the Cyber Creator, a meta-control system that combines dynamic rule formulation with reflective updates. Experiments show EvoMAS consistently outperforms existing methods across multiple domains while remaining cost-efficient, with agent roles evolving from homogeneous actors to specialized reasoning ensembles.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Ming Yang, Xin Zheng, Yi Li, YIZHEN ZHENG, Huan Yee Koh, Yanqing Guo, Xiaofeng Cao, Shirui Pan

Multi-objective protein design is essential for meeting the complex demands of synthetic biology. To adapt to shifting multi-functional targets without the prohibitive cost of retraining, test-time scaling has emerged as a flexible, training-free alternative. However, current test-time diffusion methods face critical challenges: i) ineffective learning from interaction history leading to repetitive design errors, ii) over-reliance on successful cases as the reward signal, and iii) difficulties in balancing multi-objective functional trade-offs . To address these limitations, we propose MoMST, a framework for Multi-objective protein design via Memory-aware Self-contrastive learning with Test-time scaling in diffusion models. At test time, we develop a memory bank to extract generalizable reasoning experience from historical iterations. Building on this powerful experience learner, we derive rich residue-level relative preference signals from both successful and failed cases via self-contrastive learning for guiding protein generation. To ensure balance among competing multi-objective functions, we present an inference-time Pareto alignment strategy to resolve objective conflicts. Evaluations on both single-objective and complex multi-objective tasks demonstrate that MoMST exhibits remarkable performance.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Fabian Morelli, Stephan Eckstein

Ensembles of neural networks typically outperform individual networks but incur large computational costs, whereas weight aggregation produces less costly, yet also less accurate, aggregate models. We introduce partial fusion of networks, which interpolates between ensembles and weight aggregation and thus allows for a flexible tradeoff between computational cost and performance. A direct way to achieve this is to extend existing weight aggregation methods based on neuron-level similarity between different networks, where partial fusion then only aggregates weights of neurons which are most similar. We showcase one particular method to jointly identify which neurons are most similar and match them via partial optimal transport. Further, we consider the more general perspective of weight aggregation and partial fusion as generalized pruning of ensemble models, where neurons cannot just be deleted, but also linearly combined. Finally, we show that generalized pruning applied to a single network yields similar benefits as partial fusion by allowing for a tradeoff between isolating, deleting, and linearly combining neurons based on similarity.

Deep Learning · Graph Neural Networks

Ziyu Zheng, Yaming Yang, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao, Xinyan Huang

Multi-domain graph pre-training is a crucial step in constructing foundational graph models with cross-domain generalization capabilities. However, existing methods predominantly rely on jointly training all source domain graphs, resulting in high computational costs. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether all source domain graph data contribute equally to effective transfer. This paper empirically reveals significant data redundancy in multi-domain graph pre-training. Based on this finding, we propose the Multi-domain Graph Pre-training Framework, MDGMIX, which combines boundary-aware subgraph mixing with hierarchical discrimination. By selecting boundary nodes to construct challenging mixed-domain subgraphs, MDGMIX employs coarse-grained domain discrimination and fine-grained domain decomposition losses to decouple shared patterns from domain-specific patterns. During adaptation, MDGMIX employs a lightweight prompt weighting mechanism to transfer source domain knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MDGMIX consistently outperforms strong baselines in few-shot classification tasks while exhibiting superior time and memory efficiency.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Ziqin Wang, Hengyuan Zhao, Qixin Sun, Yilin Li, Kaiyou Song, Xiaolin Hu, Qingpei Guo, Linjiang Huang, Si Liu

Mixture of Experts architectures have recently advanced the scalability and adaptability of Large Language Models for continual multimodal learning. However, extending these models to accommodate sequential tasks remains challenging. As new tasks arrive, naive model expansion leads to rapid parameter growth, while modifying shared routing components often causes catastrophic forgetting, undermining previously learned knowledge. To address these issues, we propose CoPE, a continual learning framework for LLMs that requires no replay data of previous tasks and ensures both parameter efficiency and robust knowledge retention. Our approach introduces the Probe-Guided Knowledge Extension mechanism, which uses probe experts to dynamically determine when and where new experts should be added, enabling adaptive and minimal parameter expansion tailored to task complexity. To support inference without task labels, we further incorporate a Probabilistic Task Locator that dynamically matches inputs to the correct task-specific components. To handle the practical issue that task labels are unknown during inference, we leverage a VAE-based reconstruction strategy to identify the most suitable router by matching input distributions, allowing automatic and accurate expert allocation. This design mitigates routing conflicts and catastrophic forgetting, enabling robust continual learning without explicit task labels. Extensive experiments on the CoIN benchmark, covering eight diverse VQA tasks, demonstrate that CoPE delivers strong continual learning performance with a compact model size, significantly reducing forgetting and parameter overhead compared to prior methods. These results showcase the effectiveness and scalability of our approach for parameter-efficient continual learning in large language models. Our code will be open-sourced soon.

Weichao Zhang, Shuai Zheng, Yeyu Yan, Zhizhe Liu, Zhenfeng Zhu, Yao Zhao

Graph class-incremental learning (GCIL) has emerged to address the challenge of learning from dynamically evolving graphs, which continuously learns new classes over a sequence of tasks while retaining performance on previously seen classes. However, existing GCIL methods assume a closed-set test distribution drawn only from seen tasks. This fundamentally contradicts real-world open-ended scenarios where future unknown classes inevitably emerge. Empirically, we observe that existing GCIL methods falter in such open-set settings due to severe representation drift and generalized overconfidence. To bridge this gap, we investigate the Open-Set GCIL problem and propose \textbf{SAFER} (\underline{S}ubspace-\underline{A}ware \underline{FE}ature \underline{R}eshaping), a novel framework that endows GCIL with intrinsic open-set capabilities under a replay-free constraint. Specifically, \textbf{SAFER} performs subspace-aware feature reshaping with drift-free fingerprints, unifying task routing and open-set rejection into a single energy-based metric. Furthermore, we introduce a geometric space-consistency regularization that explicitly improves intra-class compactness and suppresses cross-task representation drift. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that SAFER outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by margins of up to 5.2\% in accuracy and 31.3\% in open-set AUROC, all while maintaining near-zero forgetting under strict no-replay constraints.

Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Yangbo Wei, Zhen Huang, Shaoqiang Lu, Junhong Qian, Chen Wu, Lei He

In open-ended domains, natural language instructions are often *underspecified*, mapping to multiple valid yet functionally distinct latent intents. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generation, their ability to resolve such *task ambiguity* through interaction is currently hampered by *semantic blindness*—a tendency to squander interaction budgets on distinguishing trivial syntactic variants rather than fundamental intent differences. To address this, we propose *Topological Active Inference (TAI)*, a geometric framework that recasts disambiguation as a process of *intent-manifold contraction*. TAI first leverages *Persistent Homology* to recover the topological skeleton of the solution space, theoretically guaranteeing the separation of semantic signal from syntactic noise. Subsequently, it synthesizes clarifying questions as *separating hyperplanes* designed to efficiently bisect the probability mass of the intent manifold. We introduce *Topological Expected Information Gain (TEIG)* for question selection and prove that maximizing TEIG reduces query complexity from linear $\mathcal{O}(N)$ to logarithmic $\mathcal{O}(\log K)$, where $K$ is the number of latent intents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TAI recovers user intent with significantly fewer turns, achieving state-of-the-art disambiguation efficiency.