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Towards Resilient Safety-driven Unlearning for Diffusion Models against Downstream Fine-tuning
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have achieved impressive image generation quality and are increasingly fine-tuned for personalized applications. However, these models often inherit unsafe behaviors from toxic pretraining data, raising growing safety concerns. While recent safety-driven unlearning methods have made promising progress in suppressing model toxicity, they are found to be fragile to downstream fine-tuning, as we reveal that state-of-the-art methods largely fail to retain their effectiveness even when fine-tuned on entirely benign datasets. To mitigate this problem, in this paper, we propose ResAlign, a safety-driven unlearning framework with enhanced resilience against downstream fine-tuning. By modeling downstream fine-tuning as an implicit optimization problem with a Moreau envelope-based reformulation, ResAlign enables efficient gradient estimation to minimize the recovery of harmful behaviors. Additionally, a meta-learning strategy is proposed to simulate a diverse distribution of fine-tuning scenarios to improve generalization. Extensive experiments across a wide range of datasets, fine-tuning methods, and configurations demonstrate that ResAlign consistently outperforms prior unlearning approaches in retaining safety, while effectively preserving benign generation capability. Our code and pretrained models are publicly available here. . Disclaimer: This paper includes AI-generated images containing partially nude human figures and other sensitive content, shown only for research purposes.
RTV-Bench: Benchmarking MLLM Continuous Perception, Understanding and Reasoning through Real-Time Video
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in perception, understanding, and reasoning, yet existing benchmarks fall short in evaluating these abilities under continuous and dynamic real-world video streams. Such settings require models to maintain coherent understanding and reasoning as visual scenes evolve over time. We introduce RTV-Bench, a fine-grained benchmark for real-time video analysis with MLLMs. It is built upon three key principles: multi-timestamp question answering, hierarchical question structures spanning perception and reasoning, and multi-dimensional evaluation of continuous perception, understanding, and reasoning. RTV-Bench comprises 552 diverse videos and 4,608 carefully curated QA pairs covering a wide range of dynamic scenarios. We evaluate a broad range of state-of-the-art MLLMs, including proprietary, open-source offline, and open-source real-time models. Our results show that realtime models generally outperform offline counterparts but still lag behind leading proprietary systems. While scaling model capacity generally yields performance gains, simply increasing the density of sampled input frames does not consistently translate into improved results. These observations suggest inherent limitations in current architectures when handling long-horizon video streams, underscoring the need for models explicitly designed for streaming video processing and analysis.
Continuity and Isolation Lead to Doubts or Dilemmas in Large Language Models
Understanding how Transformers work and how they process information is key to the theoretical and empirical advancement of these machines. In this work, we demonstrate the existence of two phenomena in Transformers, namely isolation and continuity. Both of these phenomena hinder Transformers to learn even simple pattern sequences. Isolation expresses that any learnable sequence must be isolated from another learnable sequence, and hence some sequences cannot be learned by a single Transformer at the same time. Continuity entails that an attractor basin forms around a learned sequence, such that any sequence falling in that basin will collapse towards the learned sequence. Here, we mathematically prove these phenomena emerge in all Transformers that use compact positional encoding, and design rigorous experiments, demonstrating that the theoretical limitations we shed light on occur on the practical scale.
Rigor in AI: Doing Rigorous AIWork Requires a Broader, Responsible AI-Informed Conception of Rigor
In AI research and practice, rigor remains largely understood in terms of methodological rigor--such as whether mathematical, statistical, or computational methods are correctly applied. We argue that this narrow conception of rigor has contributed to the concerns raised by the responsible AI community, including overblown claims about the capabilities of AI systems. Our position is that a broader conception of what rigorous AI research and practice should entail is needed. We believe such a conception--in addition to a more expansive understanding of (1) methodological rigor--should include aspects related to (2) what background knowledge informs what to work on (epistemic rigor); (3) how disciplinary, community, or personal norms, standards, or beliefs influence the work (normative rigor); (4) how clearly articulated the theoretical constructs under use are (conceptual rigor); (5) what is reported and how (reporting rigor); and (6) how well-supported the inferences from existing evidence are (interpretative rigor). In doing so, we also provide useful language and a framework for much-needed dialogue about the AI community's work by researchers, policymakers, journalists, and other stakeholders.
GeoRanker: Distance-Aware Ranking for Worldwide Image Geolocalization
Worldwide image geolocalization--the task of predicting GPS coordinates from images taken anywhere on Earth--poses a fundamental challenge due to the vast diversity in visual content across regions. While recent approaches adopt a twostage pipeline of retrieving candidates and selecting the best match, they typically rely on simplistic similarity heuristics and point-wise supervision, failing to model spatial relationships among candidates. In this paper, we propose GeoRanker, a distance-aware ranking framework that leverages large vision-language models to jointly encode query-candidate interactions and predict geographic proximity. In addition, we introduce a multi-order distance loss that ranks both absolute and relative distances, enabling the model to reason over structured spatial relationships. To support this, we curate GeoRanking, the first dataset explicitly designed for geographic ranking tasks with multimodal candidate information. GeoRanker achieves state-of-the-art results on two well-established benchmarks (IM2GPS3K and YFCC4K), significantly outperforming current best methods. We also release our code, checkpoint, and dataset online2 for ease of reproduction.
Norwegian crown princess's son found guilty of two counts of rape
Norwegian crown princess's son found guilty of two counts of rape Marius Borg Hรธiby, the 29-year-old son of Norway's Crown Princess Mette-Marit, has been found guilty of two counts of rape and given four years in prison. The three judges in courtroom 250 at Oslo District Court cleared him of two other counts of rape, but found him guilty of many of the other offences of which he had been accused. Hรธiby was not in court for the verdict, but joined the session via video link. Prosecutors had called for Hรธiby to be given seven years and seven months in prison. His defence lawyers had called for a lesser term of 18 months and can appeal against the verdict.
CyIN: Cyclic Informative Latent Space for Bridging Complete and Incomplete Multimodal Learning
Multimodal machine learning, mimicking the human brain's ability to integrate various modalities has seen rapid growth. Most previous multimodal models are trained on perfectly paired multimodal input to reach optimal performance. In real-world deployments, however, the presence of modality is highly variable and unpredictable, causing the pre-trained models in suffering significant performance drops and fail to remain robust with dynamic missing modalities circumstances. In this paper, we present a novel Cyclic INformative Learning framework (CyIN) to bridge the gap between complete and incomplete multimodal learning. Specifically, we firstly build an informative latent space by adopting token-and label-level Information Bottleneck (IB) cyclically among various modalities. Capturing task-related features with variational approximation, the informative bottleneck latents are purified for more efficient cross-modal interaction and multimodal fusion. Moreover, to supplement the missing information caused by incomplete multimodal input, we propose cross-modal cyclic translation by reconstruct the missing modalities with the remained ones through forward and reverse propagation process. With the help of the extracted and reconstructed informative latents, CyIN succeeds in jointly optimizing complete and incomplete multimodal learning in one unified model. Extensive experiments on 4 multimodal datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method in both complete and diverse incomplete scenarios.
Measuring what Matters: Construct Validity in Large Language Model Benchmarks
Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is crucial for both assessing their capabilities and identifying safety or robustness issues prior to deployment. Reliably measuring abstract and complex phenomena such as'safety' and'robustness' requires strong construct validity, that is, having measures that represent what matters to the phenomenon. With a team of 29 expert reviewers, we conduct a systematic review of 445 LLM benchmarks from leading conferences in natural language processing and machine learning. Across the reviewed articles, we find patterns related to the measured phenomena, tasks, and scoring metrics which undermine the validity of the resulting claims. To address these shortcomings, we provide eight key recommendations and detailed actionable guidance to researchers and practitioners in developing LLM benchmarks.
19206a6ed5ed0aaeed440448dfc5cf7e-Paper-Conference.pdf
LLM-agent systems often decompose high-level objectives into subtask dependency graphs, assuming that each subtask's output is reliable and conditionally independent of others given its parent responses. However, this assumption frequently breaks during execution, as ground-truth responses are inaccessible, leading to inter-agent misalignment--failures caused by inconsistencies and coordination breakdowns among agents [1]. To address this, we propose SEQCV, a dynamic framework for reliable execution under violated conditional independence. SEQCV executes subtasks sequentially, each conditioned on all prior verified responses, and performs consistency checks immediately after agents generate short token sequences. At each checkpoint, a token sequence is accepted only if it represents shared knowledge consistently supported across diverse LLM models; otherwise, it is discarded, triggering recursive subtask decomposition for finer-grained reasoning. Despite its sequential nature, SEQCV avoids repeated corrections on the same misalignment and achieves higher effective throughput than parallel pipelines. Across multiple reasoning and coordination tasks, SEQCV improves accuracy by up to 30% over existing LLM-agent systems.
Additive Models Explained: AComputational Complexity Approach
Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) are commonly considered interpretable within the ML community, as their structure makes the relationship between inputs and outputs relatively understandable. Therefore, it may seem natural to hypothesize that obtaining meaningful explanations for GAMs could be performed efficiently and would not be computationally infeasible. In this work, we challenge this hypothesis by analyzing the computational complexity of generating different explanations for various forms of GAMs across multiple contexts. Our analysis reveals a surprisingly diverse landscape of both positive and negative complexity outcomes. Particularly, under standard complexity assumptions such as P =NP, we establish several key findings: (i) in stark contrast to many other common ML models, the complexity of generating explanations for GAMs is heavily influenced by the structure of the input space; (ii) the complexity of explaining GAMs varies significantly with the types of component models used -- but interestingly, these differences only emerge under specific input domain settings; (iii) significant complexity distinctions appear for obtaining explanations in regression tasks versus classification tasks in GAMs; and (iv) expressing complex models like neural networks additively (e.g., as neural additive models) can make them easier to explain, though interestingly, this benefit appears only for certain explanation methods and input domains. Collectively, these results shed light on the feasibility of computing diverse explanations for GAMs, offering a rigorous theoretical picture of the conditions under which such computations are possible or provably hard.