The claim that the AI community, or society at large, should'democratize AI' has attracted considerable critical attention and controversy. Two core problems have arisen and remain unsolved: conceptual disagreement persists about what democratizing AI means; normative disagreement persists over whether democratizing AI is ethically and politically desirable. We identify eight common AI democratization traps: democratization-skeptical arguments that seem plausible at first glance, but turn out to be misconceptions. We develop arguments about how to resist each trap. We conclude that, while AI democratization may well have drawbacks, we should be cautious about dismissing AI democratization prematurely and for the wrong reasons. We offer a constructive roadmap for developing alternative conceptual and normative approaches to democratizing AI that successfully avoid the traps.

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) enables user-specific customization but introduces important safety risks: even a few harmful examples can compromise safety alignment. A common mitigation strategy is to update the model more strongly on examples deemed safe, while downweighting or excluding those flagged as unsafe. However, because safety context can shift within a single example, updating the model equally on both harmful and harmless parts of a response is suboptimal -- an atomic treatment we term static safety shaping. In contrast, we propose dynamic safety shaping (DSS), a dynamic shaping framework that uses fine-grained safety signals to reinforce learning from safe segments of a response while suppressing unsafe content. To enable such fine-grained control during finetuning, we introduce a key insight: guardrail models, traditionally used for filtering, can be repurposed to evaluate partial responses, tracking how safety risk evolves throughout the response, segment by segment. This leads to the Safety Trajectory Assessment of Response (STAR), a token-level signal that enables shaping to operate dynamically over the training sequence. Building on this, we present DSS, a DSS method guided by STAR scores that robustly mitigates finetuning risks and delivers substantial safety improvements across diverse threats, datasets, and model families, all without compromising capability on intended tasks. We encourage future safety research to build on dynamic shaping principles for stronger mitigation against evolving finetuning risks.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Alberto Carvalho, who resigned Sunday as LAUSD superintendent, addresses students at an elementary school in 2023. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Alberto Carvalho resigned Sunday night.

Text-to-Image (T2I) models have achieved remarkable success in generating visual content from text inputs.

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The rapid extension of context windows in large vision-language models has given rise to long-context vision-language models (LCVLMs), which are capable of handling hundreds of images with interleaved text tokens in a single forward pass. In this work, we introduce MMLONGBENCH, the first benchmark covering a diverse set of long-context vision-language tasks, to evaluate LCVLMs effectively and thoroughly. MMLONGBENCH is composed of 13,331 examples spanning five different categories of downstream tasks, such as Visual RAG and Many-Shot ICL. It also provides broad coverage of image types, including various natural and synthetic images. To assess the robustness of the models to different input lengths, all examples are delivered at five standardized input lengths (8K-128K tokens) via a cross-modal tokenization scheme that combines vision patches and text tokens. Through a thorough benchmarking of 46 closed-source and open-source LCVLMs, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the current models' vision-language longcontext ability. Our results show that: i) performance on a single task is a weak proxy for overall long-context capability; ii) both closed-source and open-source models face challenges in long-context vision-language tasks, indicating substantial room for future improvement; iii) models with stronger reasoning ability tend to exhibit better long-context performance. By offering wide task coverage, various image types, and rigorous length control, MMLONGBENCH1 provides the missing foundation for diagnosing and advancing the next generation of LCVLMs.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) pretrained on large-scale multimodal data have shown promising capabilities in Video Anomaly Detection (VAD). However, their ability to reason about abnormal events based on scene semantics remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate LVLMs' behavior in VAD from a visual-textual co-occurrence perspective, focusing on whether their decisions are driven by statistical shortcuts between visual instances and textual phrases. By analyzing visual-textual co-occurrence in pretraining data and conducting experiments under different data settings, we reveal a hallucination phenomenon: LVLMs tend to rely on co-occurrence patterns between visual instances and textual phrases associated with either normality or abnormality, leading to incorrect predictions when these high-frequency objects appear in semantically mismatched contexts. To address this issue, we propose VAD-DPO, a direct preference optimization method supervised with counter-example pairs. By constructing visually similar but semantically contrasting video clips, VAD-DPO encourages the model to align its predictions with the semantics of scene rather than relying on co-occurrence patterns. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of VAD-DPO in enhancing both anomaly detection and reasoning performance, particularly in scene-dependent scenarios.

Recent advances in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have showcased strong reasoning abilities across multiple modalities, achieving significant breakthroughs in various real-world applications. Despite this great success, the safety guardrail of LVLMs may not cover the unforeseen domains introduced by the visual modality. Existing studies primarily focus on eliciting LVLMs to generate harmful responses via carefully crafted image-based jailbreaks designed to bypass alignment defenses. In this study, we reveal that a safe image can be exploited to achieve the same jailbreak consequence when combined with additional safe images and prompts. This stems from two fundamental properties of LVLMs: universal reasoning capabilities and safety snowball effect. Building on these insights, we propose Safety Snowball Agent (SSA), a novel agent-based framework leveraging agents' autonomous and tool-using abilities to jailbreak LVLMs. SSAoperates through two principal stages: (1) initial response generation, where tools generate or retrieve jailbreak images based on potential harmful intents, and (2) harmful snowballing, where refined subsequent prompts induce progressively harmful outputs. Our experiments demonstrate that SSAcan use nearly any image to induce LVLMs to produce unsafe content, achieving high success jailbreaking rates against the latest LVLMs. Unlike prior works that exploit alignment flaws, SSAleverages the inherent properties of LVLMs, presenting a profound challenge for enforcing safety in generative multimodal systems.

Can ChatGPT Be a Criminal Accomplice? With swiftly circumvented filters and no discernment, LLMs deliver "expertise" even when they shouldn't. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed.

Evaluating natural language generation (NLG) systems remains a core challenge of natural language processing (NLP), further complicated by the rise of large language models (LLMs) that aim to be general-purpose. Recently, large language models as judges (LLJs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional metrics, but their validity remains underexplored. This position paper argues that the current enthusiasm around LLJs may be premature, as their adoption has outpaced rigorous scrutiny of their reliability and validity as evaluators. Drawing on measurement theory from the social sciences, we identify and critically assess four core assumptions underlying the use of LLJs: their ability to act as proxies for human judgment, their capabilities as evaluators, their scalability, and their cost-effectiveness. We examine how each of these assumptions may be challenged by the inherent limitations of LLMs, LLJs, or current practices in NLG evaluation. To ground our analysis, we explore three applications of LLJs: text summarization, data annotation, and safety alignment. Finally, we highlight the need for more responsible evaluation practices in LLJs evaluation, to ensure that their growing role in the field supports, rather than undermines, progress in NLG.