Genre
Rethinking Verification for Generation From Generation to Testing
Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved notable success in code-generation benchmarks such as HumanEval and LiveCodeBench. However, a detailed examination reveals that these evaluation suites often comprise only a limited number of homogeneous test cases, resulting in subtle faults going undetected. This not only artificially inflates measured performance but also compromises accurate reward estimation in reinforcement learning frameworks utilizing verifiable rewards (RLVR). To address these critical shortcomings, we systematically investigate the test-case generation (TCG) task by proposing multi-dimensional metrics designed to rigorously quantify test-suite thoroughness. Furthermore, we introduce a human-LLM collaborative method (SAGA), leveraging human programming expertise with LLM reasoning capability, aimed at significantly enhancing both the coverage and the quality of generated test cases.
Vision Transformers with Self-Distilled Registers
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have emerged as the dominant architecture for visual processing tasks, demonstrating excellent scalability with increased training data and model size. However, recent work has identified the emergence of artifact tokens in ViTs that are incongruous with local semantics. These anomalous tokens degrade ViT performance in tasks that require fine-grained localization or structural coherence. An effective mitigation of this issue is the addition of register tokens to ViTs, which implicitly "absorb" the artifact term during training. Given the availability of existing large-scale pre-trained ViTs, in this paper we seek to add register tokens to existing models without retraining the models from scratch, which is infeasible considering their size. Specifically, we propose Post Hoc Registers (PH-Reg), an efficient self-distillation method that integrates registers into an existing ViT without requiring additional labeled data and full retraining.
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In this paper, we reveal that most current efficient multimodal fine-tuning methods are hindered by a key limitation: they are directly borrowed from LLMs, often neglecting the intrinsic differences of multimodal scenarios and even affecting the full utilization of all modalities. Inspired by our empirical observation, we argue that unimodal adaptation and cross-modal adaptation are two essential parts for the effective fine-tuning of MLLMs. From this perspective, we propose Multimodal low-rank Adaptation (MokA), a multimodal-aware efficient fine-tuning strategy that takes multimodal characteristics into consideration.
Video-SafetyBench: ABenchmark for Safety Evaluation of Video LVLMs 1,2 3 2 1 Xuannan 1 Liu
The increasing deployment of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) raises safety concerns under potential malicious inputs. However, existing multimodal safety evaluations primarily focus on model vulnerabilities exposed by static image inputs, ignoring the temporal dynamics of video that may induce distinct safety risks. To bridge this gap, we introduce Video-SafetyBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the safety of LVLMs under video-text attacks.
World Models as Reference Trajectories for Rapid Motor Adaptation
Learned control policies often fail when deployed in real-world environments with changing dynamics. When system dynamics shift unexpectedly, performance degrades until models are retrained on new data. We introduce Reflexive World Models (RWM), a dual control framework that uses world model predictions as implicit reference trajectories for rapid adaptation.
Dynamic Configuration for Cutting Plane Separators via Reinforcement Learning on Incremental Graph
Cutting planes (cuts) are essential for solving mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problems, as they tighten the feasible solution space and accelerate the solving process. Modern MILP solvers offer diverse cutting plane separators to generate cuts, enabling users to leverage their potential complementary strengths to tackle problems with different structures. Recent machine learning approaches learn to configure separators based on problem-specific features, selecting effective separators and deactivating ineffective ones to save unnecessary computing time. However, they ignore the dynamics of separator efficacy at different stages of cut generation and struggle to adapt the configurations for the evolving problems after multiple rounds of cut generation. To address this challenge, we propose a novel dynamic separator configuration (DynSep) method that models separator configuration in different rounds as a reinforcement learning task, making decisions based on an incremental triplet graph updated by iteratively added cuts. Specifically, we tokenize the incremental subgraphs and utilize a decoder-only Transformer as our policy to autoregressively predict when to halt separation and which separators to activate at each round. Evaluated on synthetic and large-scale real-world MILP problems, DynSep speeds up average solving time by 64% on easy and medium datasets, and reduces primal-dual gap integral within the given time limit by 16% on hard datasets. Moreover, experiments demonstrate that DynSep well generalizes to MILP instances of significantly larger sizes than those seen during training.
Venus-MAXWELL: Efficient Learning of Protein-Mutation Stability Landscapes using Protein Language Models
In-silico prediction of protein mutant stability, measured by the difference in Gibbs free energy change ( G), is fundamental for protein engineering. Current sequence-to-label methods typically employ the two-stage pipeline: (i) encoding mutant sequences using neural networks (e.g., transformers), followed by (ii) the G regression from the latent representations. Although these methods have demonstrated promising performance, their dependence on specialized neural network encoders significantly increases the complexity. Additionally, the requirement to individually compute latent representations for each mutant site negatively impacts computational efficiency and poses the risk of overfitting. This work proposes the Venus-MAXWELL framework, which reformulates mutation G prediction as a sequence-to-landscape task. In Venus-MAXWELL, mutations of a protein and their corresponding Gvalues are organized into a landscape matrix, allowing our framework to learn the G landscape of a protein with a single forward and backward pass during training. Besides, to facilitate future works, we also curated a large-scale G dataset with strict controls on data leakage and redundancy to ensure robust evaluation. Venus-MAXWELL is compatible with multiple protein language models and enables these models for accurate and efficient G prediction. For example, when integrated with the ESM-IF, Venus-MAXWELL achieves higher accuracy than ThermoMPNN with 10 faster in inference speed (despite having 50 more parameters than ThermoMPNN).
Enhanced Cyclic Coordinate Descent Methods for Elastic Net Penalized Linear Models
We present a novel enhanced cyclic coordinate descent (ECCD) framework for solving generalized linear models with elastic net constraints that reduces training time in comparison to existing state-of-the-art methods. We redesign the CD method by performing a Taylor expansion around the current iterate to avoid nonlinear operations arising in the gradient computation. By introducing this approximation we are able to unroll the vector recurrences occurring in the CD method and reformulate the resulting computations into more efficient batched computations. We show empirically that the recurrence can be unrolled by a tunable integer parameter, s, such that s > 1 yields performance improvements without affecting convergence, whereas s= 1 yields the original CD method. A key advantage of ECCD is that it avoids the convergence delay and numerical instability exhibited by block coordinate descent. Finally, we implement our proposed method in C++ using Eigen to accelerate linear algebra computations. Comparison of our method against existing state-of-the-art solvers show consistent performance improvements of 3 in average for regularization path variant on diverse benchmark datasets. Our implementation is available at https://github.
GenIR: Generative Visual Feedback for Mental Image Retrieval
Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong performance on text-to-image retrieval benchmarks. However, bridging this success to real-world applications remains a challenge. In practice, human search behavior is rarely a one-shot action. Instead, it is often a multi-round process guided by clues in mind. That is, a mental image ranging from vague recollections to vivid mental representations of the target image.
On the Robustness of Verbal Confidence of LLMs in Adversarial Attacks
Robust verbal confidence generated by large language models (LLMs) is crucial for the deployment of LLMs to help ensure transparency, trust, and safety in many applications, including those involving human-AI interactions. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study on the robustness of verbal confidence under adversarial attacks. We introduce attack frameworks targeting verbal confidence scores through both perturbation and jailbreak-based methods, and demonstrate that these attacks can significantly impair verbal confidence estimates and lead to frequent answer changes. We examine a variety of prompting strategies, model sizes, and application domains, revealing that current verbal confidence is vulnerable and that commonly used defence techniques are largely ineffective or counterproductive. Our findings underscore the need to design robust mechanisms for confidence expression in LLMs, as even subtle semantic-preserving modifications can lead to misleading confidence in responses.