Storm surge forecasting plays a crucial role in coastal disaster preparedness, yet existing machine learning approaches often suffer from limited spatial resolution, reliance on coastal station data, and poor generalization. Moreover, many prior models operate directly on unstructured spatial data, making them incompatible with modern deep learning architectures. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that projects unstructured water elevation fields onto structured Red Green Blue (RGB)-encoded image representations, enabling the application of Convolutional Long Short Term Memory (ConvLSTM) networks for end-to-end spatiotemporal surge forecasting. Our model further integrates ground-truth wind fields as dynamic conditioning signals and topo-bathymetry as a static input, capturing physically meaningful drivers of surge evolution. Evaluated on a large-scale dataset of synthetic storms in the Gulf of Mexico, our method demonstrates robust 48-hour forecasting performance across multiple regions along the Texas coast and exhibits strong spatial extensibility to other coastal areas. By combining structured representation, physically grounded forcings, and scalable deep learning, this study advances the frontier of storm surge forecasting in usability, adaptability, and interpretability.

Current research on the \textit{Decompose-Then-Verify} paradigm for evaluating the factuality of long-form text typically treats decomposition and verification in isolation, overlooking their interactions and potential misalignment. We find that existing decomposition policies, typically hand-crafted demonstrations, do not align well with downstream verifiers in terms of atomicity -- a novel metric quantifying information density -- leading to suboptimal verification results. We formulate finding the optimal decomposition policy for optimal verification as a bilevel optimization problem. To approximate a solution for this strongly NP-hard problem, we propose dynamic decomposition, a reinforcement learning framework that leverages verifier feedback to learn a policy for dynamically decomposing claims to verifier-preferred atomicity. Experimental results show that dynamic decomposition outperforms existing decomposition policies, improving verification confidence by 0.07 and accuracy by 0.12 (on a 0-1 scale) on average across varying verifiers, datasets, and atomcities of input claims.

Information removal or suppression in large language models (LLMs) is a desired functionality, useful in AI regulation, legal compliance, safety, and privacy. LLM unlearning methods aim to remove information on demand from LLMs. Current LLM unlearning methods struggle to balance the unlearning efficacy and utility due to the competing nature of these objectives. Keeping the unlearning process computationally feasible without assuming access to the model weights is an overlooked area. We present the first agentic LLM unlearning (ALU) method, a multi-agent, retrain-free, model-agnostic approach to LLM unlearning that achieves effective unlearning while preserving the utility. Our ALU framework unlearns by involving multiple LLM agents, each designed for a specific step in the unlearning process, without the need to update model weights for any of the agents in the framework. Users can easily request any set of unlearning instances in any sequence, and ALU seamlessly adapts in real time. This is facilitated without requiring any changes in the underlying LLM model. Through extensive experiments on established benchmarks (TOFU, WMDP, WPU) and jailbreaking techniques (many shot, target masking, other languages), we demonstrate that ALU consistently stands out as the most robust LLM unlearning framework among current state-of-the-art methods while incurring a low constant-time cost. We further highlight ALU's superior performance compared to existing methods when evaluated at scale. Specifically, ALU is assessed on up to 1000 unlearning targets, exceeding the evaluation scope of all previously proposed LLM unlearning methods.

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) utilizing instruction-following data, such as LLaVA, have achieved great progress in the industry. A major limitation in these models is that visual tokens consume a substantial portion of the maximum token limit in large language models (LLMs), leading to increased computational demands and decreased performance when prompts include multiple images or videos. Industry solutions often mitigate this issue by increasing computational power, but this approach is less feasible in academic environments with limited resources. In this study, we propose Dynamic Feature Map Reduction (DFMR) based on LLaVA-1.5 to address the challenge of visual token overload. DFMR dynamically compresses the visual tokens, freeing up token capacity. Our experimental results demonstrate that integrating DFMR into LLaVA-1.5 significantly improves the performance of LLaVA in varied visual token lengths, offering a promising solution for extending LLaVA to handle multi-image and video scenarios in resource-constrained academic environments and it can also be applied in industry settings for data augmentation to help mitigate the scarcity of open-domain image-text pair datasets in the continued pretraining stage.

Generative AI (GenAI), which aims to synthesize realistic and diverse data samples from latent variables or other data modalities, has achieved remarkable results in various domains, such as natural language, images, audio, and graphs. However, they also pose challenges and risks to data privacy, security, and ethics. Machine unlearning is the process of removing or weakening the influence of specific data samples or features from a trained model, without affecting its performance on other data or tasks. While machine unlearning has shown significant efficacy in traditional machine learning tasks, it is still unclear if it could help GenAI become safer and aligned with human desire. To this end, this position paper provides an in-depth discussion of the machine unlearning approaches for GenAI. Firstly, we formulate the problem of machine unlearning tasks on GenAI and introduce the background. Subsequently, we systematically examine the limitations of machine unlearning on GenAI models by focusing on the two representative branches: LLMs and image generative (diffusion) models. Finally, we provide our prospects mainly from three aspects: benchmark, evaluation metrics, and utility-unlearning trade-off, and conscientiously advocate for the future development of this field.

Generative AI technologies have been deployed in many places, such as (multimodal) large language models and vision generative models. Their remarkable performance should be attributed to massive training data and emergent reasoning abilities. However, the models would memorize and generate sensitive, biased, or dangerous information originated from the training data especially those from web crawl. New machine unlearning (MU) techniques are being developed to reduce or eliminate undesirable knowledge and its effects from the models, because those that were designed for traditional classification tasks could not be applied for Generative AI. We offer a comprehensive survey on many things about MU in Generative AI, such as a new problem formulation, evaluation methods, and a structured discussion on the advantages and limitations of different kinds of MU techniques. It also presents several critical challenges and promising directions in MU research. A curated list of readings can be found: https://github.com/franciscoliu/GenAI-MU-Reading.

We introduce the Concept Bottleneck Large Language Model (CB-LLM), a pioneering approach to creating inherently interpretable Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional black-box LLMs that rely on post-hoc interpretation methods with limited neuron function insights, CB-LLM sets a new standard with its built-in interpretability, scalability, and ability to provide clear, accurate explanations. This innovation not only advances transparency in language models but also enhances their effectiveness. Our unique Automatic Concept Correction (ACC) strategy successfully narrows the performance gap with conventional black-box LLMs, positioning CB-LLM as a model that combines the high accuracy of traditional LLMs with the added benefit of clear interpretability -- a feature markedly absent in existing LLMs.

Machine unlearning is a promising approach to mitigate undesirable memorization of training data in ML models. However, in this work we show that existing approaches for unlearning in LLMs are surprisingly susceptible to a simple set of targeted relearning attacks. With access to only a small and potentially loosely related set of data, we find that we can 'jog' the memory of unlearned models to reverse the effects of unlearning. We formalize this unlearning-relearning pipeline, explore the attack across three popular unlearning benchmarks, and discuss future directions and guidelines that result from our study.

Upon deployment to edge devices, it is often desirable for a model to further learn from streaming data to improve accuracy. However, extracting representative features from such data is challenging because it is typically unlabeled, non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d), and is seen only once. To mitigate this issue, a common strategy is to maintain a small data buffer on the edge device to hold the most representative data for further learning. As most data is either never stored or quickly discarded, identifying the most representative data to avoid significant information loss becomes critical. In this paper, we propose an on-device framework that addresses this issue by condensing incoming data into more informative samples. Specifically, to effectively handle unlabeled incoming data, we propose a pseudo-labeling technique designed for unlabeled on-device learning environments. Additionally, we develop a dataset condensation technique that only requires little computation resources. To counteract the effects of noisy labels during the condensation process, we further utilize a contrastive learning objective to improve the purity of class data within the buffer. Our empirical results indicate substantial improvements over existing methods, particularly when buffer capacity is severely restricted. For instance, with a buffer capacity of just one sample per class, our method achieves an accuracy that outperforms the best existing baseline by 58.4% on the CIFAR-10 dataset.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly boosted the rise of Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs), i.e., specialized AI systems designed to simulate assigned personas. By harnessing multiple advanced abilities of LLMs, including in-context learning, instruction following, and social intelligence, RPLAs achieve a remarkable sense of human likeness and vivid role-playing performance. RPLAs can mimic a wide range of personas, ranging from historical figures and fictional characters to real-life individuals. Consequently, they have catalyzed numerous AI applications, such as emotional companions, interactive video games, personalized assistants and copilots, and digital clones. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the evolution and recent progress in RPLAs integrating with cutting-edge LLM technologies. We categorize personas into three types: 1) Demographic Persona, which leverages statistical stereotypes; 2) Character Persona, focused on well-established figures; and 3) Individualized Persona, customized through ongoing user interactions for personalized services. We begin by presenting a comprehensive overview of current methodologies for RPLAs, followed by the details for each persona type, covering corresponding data sourcing, agent construction, and evaluation. Afterward, we discuss the fundamental risks, existing limitations, and future prospects of RPLAs. Additionally, we provide a brief review of RPLAs in AI applications, which reflects practical user demands that shape and drive RPLA research. Through this work, we aim to establish a clear taxonomy of RPLA research and applications, and facilitate future research in this critical and ever-evolving field, and pave the way for a future where humans and RPLAs coexist in harmony.