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 Qingdao


Aligning Gradient and Hessian for Neural Signed Distance Function

Neural Information Processing Systems

Our motivation is grounded in a fundamental observation: aligning the gradient and the Hessian of the SDF provides a more efficient mechanism to govern gradient directions.


Certified Unlearning in Decentralized Federated Learning

Wu, Hengliang, Tao, Youming, Zhou, Anhao, Chen, Shuzhen, Dressler, Falko, Yu, Dongxiao

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Driven by the right to be forgotten (RTBF), machine unlearning has become an essential requirement for privacy-preserving machine learning. However, its realization in decentralized federated learning (DFL) remains largely unexplored. In DFL, clients exchange local updates only with neighbors, causing model information to propagate and mix across the network. As a result, when a client requests data deletion, its influence is implicitly embedded throughout the system, making removal difficult without centralized coordination. We propose a novel certified unlearning framework for DFL based on Newton-style updates. Our approach first quantifies how a client's data influence propagates during training. Leveraging curvature information of the loss with respect to the target data, we then construct corrective updates using Newton-style approximations. To ensure scalability, we approximate second-order information via Fisher information matrices. The resulting updates are perturbed with calibrated noise and broadcast through the network to eliminate residual influence across clients. We theoretically prove that our approach satisfies the formal definition of certified unlearning, ensuring that the unlearned model is difficult to distinguish from a retrained model without the deleted data. We also establish utility bounds showing that the unlearned model remains close to retraining from scratch. Extensive experiments across diverse decentralized settings demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework.



TP-RAG: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Agents for Spatiotemporal-Aware Travel Planning

Ni, Hang, Liu, Fan, Ma, Xinyu, Su, Lixin, Wang, Shuaiqiang, Yin, Dawei, Xiong, Hui, Liu, Hao

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating travel planning, yet they often fall short in addressing nuanced spatiotemporal rationality. While existing benchmarks focus on basic plan validity, they neglect critical aspects such as route efficiency, POI appeal, and real-time adaptability. This paper introduces TP-RAG, the first benchmark tailored for retrieval-augmented, spatiotemporal-aware travel planning. Our dataset includes 2,348 real-world travel queries, 85,575 fine-grain annotated POIs, and 18,784 high-quality travel trajectory references sourced from online tourist documents, enabling dynamic and context-aware planning. Through extensive experiments, we reveal that integrating reference trajectories significantly improves spatial efficiency and POI rationality of the travel plan, while challenges persist in universality and robustness due to conflicting references and noisy data. To address these issues, we propose EvoRAG, an evolutionary framework that potently synergizes diverse retrieved trajectories with LLMs' intrinsic reasoning. EvoRAG achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving spatiotemporal compliance and reducing commonsense violation compared to ground-up and retrieval-augmented baselines. Our work underscores the potential of hybridizing Web knowledge with LLM-driven optimization, paving the way for more reliable and adaptive travel planning agents.


Cognitive Trust in HRI: "Pay Attention to Me and I'll Trust You Even if You are Wrong"

Manor, Adi, Cohen, Dan, Keidar, Ziv, Parush, Avi, Erel, Hadas

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Cognitive trust and the belief that a robot is capable of accurately performing tasks, are recognized as central factors in fostering high-quality human-robot interactions. It is well established that performance factors such as the robot's competence and its reliability shape cognitive trust. Recent studies suggest that affective factors, such as robotic attentiveness, also play a role in building cognitive trust. This work explores the interplay between these two factors that shape cognitive trust. Specifically, we evaluated whether different combinations of robotic competence and attentiveness introduce a compensatory mechanism, where one factor compensates for the lack of the other. In the experiment, participants performed a search task with a robotic dog in a 2x2 experimental design that included two factors: competence (high or low) and attentiveness (high or low). The results revealed that high attentiveness can compensate for low competence. Participants who collaborated with a highly attentive robot that performed poorly reported trust levels comparable to those working with a highly competent robot. When the robot did not demonstrate attentiveness, low competence resulted in a substantial decrease in cognitive trust. The findings indicate that building cognitive trust in human-robot interaction may be more complex than previously believed, involving emotional processes that are typically overlooked. We highlight an affective compensatory mechanism that adds a layer to consider alongside traditional competence-based models of cognitive trust.


Information-Dense Reasoning for Efficient and Auditable Security Alert Triage

Zhao, Guangze, Zhang, Yongzheng, Tian, Changbo, Xie, Dan, Liu, Hongri, Wang, Bailing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--Security Operations Centers face massive, heterogeneous alert streams under minute-level service windows, creating the Alert Triage Latency Paradox: verbose reasoning chains ensure accuracy and compliance but incur prohibitive latency and token costs, while minimal chains sacrifice transparency and auditability. Existing solutions fail: signature systems are brittle, anomaly methods lack actionability, and fully cloud-hosted LLMs raise latency, cost, and privacy concerns. We propose AIDR, a hybrid cloud-edge framework that addresses this trade-off through constrained information-density optimization. The core innovation is gradient-based compression of reasoning chains to retain only decision-critical steps--minimal evidence sufficient to justify predictions while respecting token and latency budgets. We demonstrate that this approach preserves decision-relevant information while minimizing complexity. We construct compact datasets by distilling alerts into 3-5 high-information bullets (68% token reduction), train domain-specialized experts via LoRA, and deploy a cloud-edge architecture: a cloud LLM routes alerts to on-premises experts generating SOAR-ready JSON. Experiments demonstrate AIDR achieves higher accuracy and 40.6% latency reduction versus Chain-of-Thought, with robustness to data corruption and out-of-distribution generalization, enabling auditable and efficient SOC triage with full data residency compliance.


Iwin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Interleaved Windows

Huo, Simin, Li, Ning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--We introduce Iwin Transformer, a novel position-embedding-free hierarchical vision transformer, which can be fine-tuned directly from low to high resolution, through the collaboration of innovative interleaved window attention and depthwise separable convolution. This approach uses attention to connect distant tokens and applies convolution to link neighboring tokens, enabling global information exchange within a single module, overcoming Swin Transformer's limitation of requiring two consecutive blocks to approximate global attention. Extensive experiments on visual benchmarks demonstrate that Iwin Transformer exhibits strong competitiveness in tasks such as image classification (87.4 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K), semantic segmentation and video action recognition. We also validate the effectiveness of the core component in Iwin as a standalone module that can seamlessly replace the self-attention module in class-conditional image generation. The concepts and methods introduced by the Iwin Transformer have the potential to inspire future research, like Iwin 3D Attention in video generation. ISION Transformers (ViTs) [1] have have fundamentally transformed computer vision by borrowing the transformer architecture from natural language models [2]. Unlike Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) [3], which rely on local receptive fields to capture image features, ViTs leverage self-attention mechanisms to get global dependencies, demonstrating remarkable performance on vision tasks. To tackle the challenge of quadratic complexity in Vision Transformers (ViTs) and enhance their efficiency while maintaining performance, various approaches have been proposed. Hierarchical Designs such as PVT [4] and Twins [5] utilize multi-scale feature pyramids to progressively reduce spatial dimensions. Hybrid CNN-Transformer Architectures like Con-ViT [6] and CoAtNet [7] combine convolutional operations with self-attention to leverage the strengths of both paradigms. Efficient Token Fusion strategies such as TokenLearner [8] dynamically aggregate tokens to reduce sequence length, while Sparse Attention Patterns exemplified by Reformer [9] utilize locality-sensitive hashing to attend only to relevant tokens. Additionally, efficient implementations like Performer [10] approximate attention through kernel methods to achieve linear complexity.


Beyond Model Jailbreak: Systematic Dissection of the "Ten DeadlySins" in Embodied Intelligence

Huang, Yuhang, Li, Junchao, Ma, Boyang, Dai, Xuelong, Xu, Minghui, Xu, Kaidi, Zhang, Yue, Wang, Jianping, Cheng, Xiuzhen

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Embodied AI systems integrate language models with real world sensing, mobility, and cloud connected mobile apps. Yet while model jailbreaks have drawn significant attention, the broader system stack of embodied intelligence remains largely unexplored. In this work, we conduct the first holistic security analysis of the Unitree Go2 platform and uncover ten cross layer vulnerabilities the "Ten Sins of Embodied AI Security." Using BLE sniffing, traffic interception, APK reverse engineering, cloud API testing, and hardware probing, we identify systemic weaknesses across three architectural layers: wireless provisioning, core modules, and external interfaces. These include hard coded keys, predictable handshake tokens, WiFi credential leakage, missing TLS validation, static SSH password, multilingual safety bypass behavior, insecure local relay channels, weak binding logic, and unrestricted firmware access. Together, they allow adversaries to hijack devices, inject arbitrary commands, extract sensitive information, or gain full physical control.Our findings show that securing embodied AI requires far more than aligning the model itself. We conclude with system level lessons learned and recommendations for building embodied platforms that remain robust across their entire software hardware ecosystem.


Curvature-Constrained Vector Field for Motion Planning of Nonholonomic Robots

Qiao, Yike, He, Xiaodong, Zhuo, An, Sun, Zhiyong, Bao, Weimin, Li, Zhongkui

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Vector fields are advantageous in handling nonholonomic motion planning as they provide reference orientation for robots. However, additionally incorporating curvature constraints becomes challenging, due to the interconnection between the design of the curvature-bounded vector field and the tracking controller under underactuation. In this paper, we present a novel framework to co-develop the vector field and the control laws, guiding the nonholonomic robot to the target configuration with curvature-bounded trajectory. First, we formulate the problem by introducing the target positive limit set, which allows the robot to converge to or pass through the target configuration, depending on different dynamics and tasks. Next, we construct a curvature-constrained vector field (CVF) via blending and distributing basic flow fields in workspace and propose the saturated control laws with a dynamic gain, under which the tracking error's magnitude decreases even when saturation occurs. Under the control laws, kinematically constrained nonholonomic robots are guaranteed to track the reference CVF and converge to the target positive limit set with bounded trajectory curvature. Numerical simulations show that the proposed CVF method outperforms other vector-field-based algorithms. Experiments on Ackermann UGVs and semi-physical fixed-wing UAVs demonstrate that the method can be effectively implemented in real-world scenarios.


Closing the Approximation Gap of Partial AUC Optimization: A Tale of Two Formulations

Jiang, Yangbangyan, Xu, Qianqian, Shao, Huiyang, Yang, Zhiyong, Bao, Shilong, Cao, Xiaochun, Huang, Qingming

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As a variant of the Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC), the partial AUC (PAUC) focuses on a specific range of false positive rate (FPR) and/or true positive rate (TPR) in the ROC curve. It is a pivotal evaluation metric in real-world scenarios with both class imbalance and decision constraints. However, selecting instances within these constrained intervals during its calculation is NP-hard, and thus typically requires approximation techniques for practical resolution. Despite the progress made in PAUC optimization over the last few years, most existing methods still suffer from uncontrollable approximation errors or a limited scalability when optimizing the approximate PAUC objectives. In this paper, we close the approximation gap of PAUC optimization by presenting two simple instance-wise minimax reformulations: one with an asymptotically vanishing gap, the other with the unbiasedness at the cost of more variables. Our key idea is to first establish an equivalent instance-wise problem to lower the time complexity, simplify the complicated sample selection procedure by threshold learning, and then apply different smoothing techniques. Equipped with an efficient solver, the resulting algorithms enjoy a linear per-iteration computational complexity w.r.t. the sample size and a convergence rate of $O(ε^{-1/3})$ for typical one-way and two-way PAUCs. Moreover, we provide a tight generalization bound of our minimax reformulations. The result explicitly demonstrates the impact of the TPR/FPR constraints $α$/$β$ on the generalization and exhibits a sharp order of $\tilde{O}(α^{-1}\n_+^{-1} + β^{-1}\n_-^{-1})$. Finally, extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets validate the strength of our proposed methods.