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CARES: Comprehensive Evaluation of Safety and Adversarial Robustness in Medical LLMs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in medical contexts, raising critical concerns about safety, alignment, and susceptibility to adversarial manipulation. While prior benchmarks assess model refusal capabilities for harmful prompts, they often lack clinical specificity, graded harmfulness levels, and coverage of jailbreak-style attacks. We introduce CARES (Clinical Adversarial Robustness and Evaluation of Safety), a benchmark for evaluating LLM safety in healthcare. CARES includes over 18,000 prompts spanning eight medical safety principles, four harm levels, and four prompting styles: direct, indirect, obfuscated, and role-play, to simulate both malicious and benign use cases.


Lifelong Safety Alignment for Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

LLMs have made impressive progress, but their growing capabilities also expose them to highly flexible jailbreaking attacks designed to bypass safety alignment. While many existing defenses focus on known types of attacks, it is more critical to prepare LLMs for unseen attacks that may arise during deployment. To address this, we propose a lifelong safety alignment framework that enables LLMs to continuously adapt to new and evolving jailbreaking strategies. Our framework introduces a competitive setup between two components: a Meta-Attacker, trained to actively discover novel jailbreaking strategies, and a Defender, trained to resist them. To effectively warm up the Meta-Attacker, we first leverage the GPT-4o API to extract key insights from a large collection of jailbreak-related research papers. Through iterative training, the first iteration Meta-Attacker achieves a 73% attack success rate (ASR) on RR [80] and a 57% transfer ASR on LAT [53] using only single-turn attacks. Meanwhile, the Defender progressively improves its robustness and ultimately reduces the Meta-Attacker's success rate to just 7%, enabling safer and more reliable deployment of LLMs in open-ended environments.


Unveiling Extraneous Sampling Bias with Data Missing-Not-At-Random

Neural Information Processing Systems

Selection bias poses a widely recognized challenge for unbiased evaluation and learning in many industrial scenarios. For example, in recommender systems, it arises from the users' selective interactions with items. Recently, doubly robust and its variants have been widely studied to achieve debiased learning of prediction models, however, all of them consider a simple exact matching scenario, i.e., the units (such as user-item pairs in a recommender system) are the same between the training and test sets. In practice, there may be limited or even no overlap in units between the training and test. In this paper, we consider a more practical scenario: the joint distribution of the feature and rating is the same in the training and test sets. Theoretical analysis shows that the previous DR estimator is biased even if the imputed errors and learned propensities are correct in this scenario. In addition, we propose a novel super-population doubly robust estimator (SuperDR), which can achieve a more accurate estimation and desirable generalization error bound compared to the existing DR estimators, and extend the joint learning algorithm for training the prediction and imputation models. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, including a large-scale industrial dataset, to show the effectiveness of our method.


Complexity Scaling Laws for Neural Models using Combinatorial Optimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent work on neural scaling laws demonstrates that model performance scales predictably with compute budget, model size, and dataset size. In this work, we develop scaling laws based on problem complexity. We analyze two fundamental complexity measures: solution space size and representation space size. Using the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) as a case study, we show that combinatorial optimization promotes smooth cost trends, and therefore meaningful scaling laws can be obtained even in the absence of an interpretable loss. We then show that suboptimality grows predictably for fixed-size models when scaling the number of TSP nodes or spatial dimensions, independent of whether the model was trained with reinforcement learning or supervised fine-tuning on a static dataset. We conclude with an analogy to problem complexity scaling in local search, showing that a much simpler gradient descent of the cost landscape produces similar trends.1


Britain goes crazy for unhomogenised milk: Demand for the trendy drink has surged by 34% - as middle-class shoppers flock to stock up

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Trump says algae-infested Reflecting Pool must be EMPTIED for repairs as knife-wielding'vandals' tear hole in facade and destroy $16 million renovation Angelina Jolie's son Pax, 22, surfaces in LA after bombshell revelation about his relationship to Brad Pitt Mortifying truth about Clavicular's'botched' nose job: Infertile influencer's'trans' admission to friends... as insider reveals what's said behind closed doors - and twisted secrets that'll leave fans floored Inside America's new fattest town: Burgers are the size of your head, gyms lie empty and custom mobility scooters carry 800lb loads... as we investigate why Ozempic just DOESN'T work Call me cynical, but the real reason Gruesome Twosome Harry and Meghan are returning to the UK is just so obvious... and highly humiliating: MAUREEN CALLAHAN New York Knicks fan caught in'disgusting' act during team's NBA championship parade celebrations Keir Starmer'will announce as early as Monday that he is quitting as Prime Minister' after spending weekend locked in tense talks about his future with his wife Victoria at Chequers I lost 50lb without jabs using this easy but overlooked method. But I still felt dowdy - until I discovered these expert anti-ageing fashion and beauty tips. No one can see the real reason Jelly Roll divorced Bunnie XO. Former Olympian seen in handcuffs as Trump threatens'years in jail' and more arrests after vandals SABOTAGE Reflecting Pool with'corrosive and destructive chemicals' Giorgia Meloni rips'senseless' attacks from Trump as Italian Prime Minister refuses to back down amid G7 feud Stingy fast food giant named America's favorite restaurant AGAIN... and experts think they know why TV star mom, 46, who appeared on'quitting everything to change your life' show died in fire at luxury Caribbean beach resort that sent 1,700 tourists running for their lives Wyndham Clark's stunning girlfriend pays tribute to polarizing golfer as he stands on the brink of US Open glory Blake Lively runs errands in frumpy outfit after reconciling with ex-BFF Taylor Swift... miles away from reported'bachelorette party' Forget almond, soy, or oat - Britain has gone crazy for unhomogenised milk. New figures released by Waitrose have revealed how sales of the trendy drink have soared by 34 per cent over the last year.


UniGist: Towards General and Hardware-aligned Sequence-level Long Context Compression

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models are increasingly capable of handling long-context inputs, but the memory overhead of key-value (KV) cache remains a major bottleneck for general-purpose deployment. While various compression strategies have been explored, sequence-level compression, which drops the full KV caches for certain tokens, is particularly challenging as it can lead to the loss of important contextual information. To address this, we introduce UniGist, a sequence-level long-context compression framework that efficiently preserves context information by replacing raw tokens with special compression tokens (gists) in a fine-grained manner. We adopt a chunk-free training strategy and design an efficient kernel with a gist shift trick, enabling optimized GPU training. Our scheme also supports flexible inference by allowing the actual removal of compressed tokens, resulting in realtime memory savings. Experiments across multiple long-context tasks demonstrate that UniGist significantly improves compression quality, with especially strong performance in detail-recalling tasks and long-range dependency modeling.


AdaMSS: Adaptive Multi-Subspace Approach for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we propose AdaMSS, an adaptive multi-subspace approach for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large models. Unlike traditional parameterefficient fine-tuning methods that operate within a large single subspace of the network weights, AdaMSS leverages subspace segmentation to obtain multiple smaller subspaces and adaptively reduces the number of trainable parameters during training, ultimately updating only those associated with a small subset of subspaces most relevant to the target downstream task. By using the lowest-rank representation, AdaMSS achieves more compact expressiveness and finer tuning of the model parameters. Theoretical analyses demonstrate that AdaMSS has better generalization guarantee than LoRA, PiSSA, and other single-subspace low-rankbased methods. Extensive experiments across image classification, natural language understanding, and natural language generation tasks show that AdaMSS achieves comparable performance to full fine-tuning and outperforms other parameterefficient fine-tuning methods in most cases, all while requiring fewer trainable parameters. Notably, on the ViT-Large model, AdaMSS achieves 4.7% higher average accuracy than LoRA across seven tasks, using just 15.4% of the trainable parameters. On RoBERTa-Large, AdaMSS outperforms PiSSA by 7% in average accuracy across six tasks while reducing the number of trainable parameters by approximately 94.4%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaMSS in parameter-efficient fine-tuning. The code for AdaMSS is available at https: //github.com/jzheng20/AdaMSS.


Towards Identifiability of Hierarchical Temporal Causal Representation Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Modeling hierarchical latent dynamics behind time series data is critical for capturing temporal dependencies across multiple levels of abstraction in real-world tasks. However, existing temporal causal representation learning methods fail to capture such dynamics, as they fail to recover the joint distribution of hierarchical latent variables from single-timestep observed variables. Interestingly, we find that the joint distribution of hierarchical latent variables can be uniquely determined using three conditionally independent observations. Building on this insight, we propose a Causally Hierarchical Latent Dynamic (CHiLD) identification framework. Our approach first employs temporal contextual observed variables to identify the joint distribution of multi-layer latent variables. Sequentially, we exploit the natural sparsity of the hierarchical structure among latent variables to identify latent variables within each layer. Guided by the theoretical results, we develop a time series generative model grounded in variational inference. This model incorporates a contextual encoder to reconstruct multi-layer latent variables and normalize flowbased hierarchical prior networks to impose the independent noise condition of hierarchical latent dynamics. Empirical evaluations on both synthetic and realworld datasets validate our theoretical claims and demonstrate the effectiveness of CHiLD in modeling hierarchical latent dynamics.


Stab-SGD: Noise-Adaptivity in Smooth Optimization with Stability Ratios

Neural Information Processing Systems

In the context of smooth stochastic optimization with first order methods, we introduce the stability ratio of gradient estimates, as a measure of local relative noise level, from zero for pure noise to one for negligible noise. We show that a schedulefree variant (Stab-SGD) of stochastic gradient descent obtained by just shrinking the learning rate by the stability ratio achieves real adaptivity to noise levels (i.e.


TaiwanVQA: Benchmarking and Enhancing Cultural Understanding in Vision-Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vision-language models (VLMs) often struggle with culturally specific content -- a challenge largely overlooked by existing benchmarks that focus on dominant languages and globalized datasets. We introduce TAIWANVQA, a VQA benchmark designed for Taiwanese culture to evaluate recognition and reasoning in regional contexts. TAIWANVQA contains 2,736 images and 5,472 manually curated questions covering topics such as traditional foods, public signs, festivals, and landmarks. The official benchmark set includes 1,000 images and 2,000 questions for systematic assessment, with the remainder of the data used as training material. Evaluations on state-of-the-art VLMs reveal strong visual recognition but notable weaknesses in cultural reasoning.