Law
OPENS2V-NEXUS: ADetailed Benchmark and Million-Scale Dataset for Subject-to-Video Generation
Subject-to-Video (S2V) generation aims to create videos that faithfully incorporate reference content, providing enhanced flexibility in the production of videos. To establish the infrastructure for S2V generation, we propose OPENS2V-NEXUS, consisting of (i) OpenS2V-Eval, a fine-grained benchmark, and (ii) OpenS2V-5M, a million-scale dataset. In contrast to existing S2V benchmarks inherited from VBench [38] that focus on global and coarse-grained assessment of generated videos, OpenS2V-Eval focuses on the model's ability to generate subject-consistent videos with natural subject appearance and identity fidelity. For these purposes, OpenS2V-Eval introduces 180 prompts from seven major categories of S2V, which incorporate both real and synthetic test data. Furthermore, to accurately align human preferences with S2V benchmarks, we propose three automatic metrics, NexusScore, NaturalScore, and GmeScore, to separately quantify subject consistency, naturalness, and text relevance in generated videos. Building on this, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 18 representative S2V models, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses across different content. Moreover, we create the first open-source large-scale S2V generation dataset OpenS2V-5M, which consists of five million high-quality 720P subject-text-video triples. Specifically, we ensure subject-information diversity in our dataset by (1) segmenting subjects and building pairing information via cross-video associations and (2) prompting GPT-Image on raw frames to synthesize multi-view representations. Through OPENS2V-NEXUS, we deliver a robust infrastructure to accelerate future S2V generation research.
Pin the Tail on the Model: Blindfolded Repair of User-Flagged Failures in Text-to-Image Services
Diffusion models are increasingly deployed in real-world text-to-image services. These models, however, encode implicit assumptions about the world based on webscraped image-caption pairs used during training. Over time, such assumptions may become outdated, incorrect, or socially biased-leading to failures where the generated images misalign with users' expectations or evolving societal norms. Identifying and fixing such failures is challenging and, thus, a valuable asset for service providers, as failures often emerge post-deployment and demand specialized expertise and resources to resolve them. In this work, we introduce SURE, the first end-to-end framework that SecUrely REpairs failures flagged by users of diffusionbased services. SURE enables the service provider to securely collaborate with an external third-party specialized in model repairing (i.e., Model Repair Institute) without compromising the confidentiality of user feedback, the service provider's proprietary model, or the Model Repair Institute's proprietary repairing knowledge. To achieve the best possible efficiency, we propose a co-design of a model editing algorithm with a customized two-party cryptographic protocol. Our experiments show that SURE is highly practical: SURE securely and effectively repairs all 32 layers of Stable Diffusion v1.4 in under 17 seconds (four orders of magnitude more efficient than a general baseline). Our results demonstrate that practical, secure model repair is attainable for large-scale, modern diffusion services.
Small Batch Size Training for Language Models: When Vanilla SGDWorks, and Why Gradient Accumulation Is Wasteful
Conventional wisdom dictates that small batch sizes make language model pretraining and fine-tuning unstable, motivating gradient accumulation, which trades off the number of optimizer steps for a proportional increase in batch size. While it is common to decrease the learning rate for smaller batch sizes, other hyperparameters are often held fixed. In this work, we revisit small batch sizes all the way down to batch size one, and we propose a rule for scaling Adam hyperparameters to small batch sizes. In particular, rather than holding the decay rate of the second moment fixed across batch sizes, we propose to hold its half-life fixed in terms of tokens. We find that small batch sizes (1) train stably, (2) are consistently more robust to hyperparameter choices, (3) achieve equal or better per-FLOP performance than larger batch sizes, and (4) notably enable stable language model training with vanilla SGD, even without momentum, despite storing no optimizer state. Building on these results, we provide practical recommendations for selecting a batch size and setting optimizer hyperparameters. We further recommend against gradient accumulation unless training on multiple devices with multiple model replicas. Finally, we show that a small batch size combined with an optimizer with a small state size can provide the performance benefits of full fine-tuning while maintaining a similar memory footprint to LoRA.
WearVQA: AVisual Question Answering Benchmark for Wearables in Egocentric Authentic Real-world scenarios
We introduce WearVQA, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the Visual Question Answering (VQA) capabilities of multi-modal AI assistant on wearable devices like smart glasses. Unlike prior benchmarks that focus on highquality, third-person imagery, WearVQA reflects the unique challenges of egocentric interaction--where visual inputs may be occluded, poorly lit, unzoomed, or blurry, and questions are grounded in realistic wearable use cases. The benchmark comprises 2,520 carefully curated image-question-answer triplets, spanning 7 diverse image domains including both text-centric and general scenes, 10 cognitive task types ranging from basic recognition to various forms of reasoning, and 6 common wearables-specific image quality issues. All questions are designed to be answerable using only the visual input and common senses. WearVQA is paired with a rigorous LLM-as-a-judge evaluation framework with 96% labeling accuracy. Open-source and proprietary multi-modal LLMs achieved a QA accuracy as low as 24-52% on WearVQA, with substantial drops on lower-quality images and reasoning-heavy tasks.
VADTree: Explainable Training-Free Video Anomaly Detection via Hierarchical Granularity-Aware Tree
Video anomaly detection (VAD) focuses on identifying anomalies in videos. Supervised methods demand substantial in-domain training data and fail to deliver clear explanations for anomalies. In contrast, training-free methods leverage the knowledge reserves and language interactivity of large pre-trained models to detect anomalies. However, the current fixed-length temporal window sampling approaches struggle to accurately capture anomalies with varying temporal spans. Therefore, we propose VADTree that utilizes a Hierarchical Granularityaware Tree (HGTree) structure for flexible sampling in VAD.
Monthly Model Creations
Public model repositories now contain millions of models, yet most remain undocumented and effectively lost: their capabilities, provenance, and constraints cannot be reliably determined. As a result, the field wastes training time and compute, propagates hidden biases, faces intellectual-property risks, and misses opportunities for model reuse and transfer. In this position paper, we advocate charting the world's model population in a unified structure we call the Model Atlas: a graph that captures models, their attributes, and the weight transformations connecting them. The Model Atlas enables applications in model forensics, meta-ML research, and model discovery, challenging tasks given today's unstructured model repositories. However, because most models lack documentation, large atlas regions remain uncharted. Addressing this gap motivates new machine learning methods that treat models themselves as data and infer properties such as functionality, performance, and lineage directly from their weights. We argue that a scalable path forward is to bypass the unique parameter symmetries that plague model weights. Charting all the world's models will require a community effort, and we hope its broad utility will rally researchers toward this goal.
d6d26053b977f8c589669fd201615119-Paper-Conference.pdf
Large language models (LLMs) are trained on a vast amount of human-written data, but data providers often remain uncredited. In response to this issue, data valuation (or data attribution2), which quantifies the contribution or value of each data to the model output, has been discussed as a potential solution. Nevertheless, applying existing data valuation methods to recent LLMs and their vast training datasets has been largely limited by prohibitive compute and memory costs. In this work, we focus on influence functions, a popular gradient-based data valuation method, and significantly improve its scalability with an efficient gradient projection strategy called LOGRA that leverages the gradient structure in backpropagation. We then provide a theoretical motivation of gradient projection approaches to influence functions to promote trust in the data valuation process. Lastly, we lower the barrier to implementing data valuation systems by introducing LOGIX, a software package that can transform existing training code into data valuation code with minimal effort. In our data valuation experiments, LOGRA achieves competitive accuracy against more expensive baselines while showing up to 6,500 /5 improvements in compute/memory efficiency in influence computations as well as 2 speed-up in gradient statistics logging when applied to Llama3-8B-Instruct and the 1B-token subset of the OpenWebText dataset.
Guiding LLMDecision-Making with Fairness Reward Models
Large language models are increasingly used to support high-stakes decisions, potentially influencing who is granted bail or receives a loan. Naive chain-ofthought sampling can improve average decision accuracy, but has also been shown to amplify unfair bias. To address this challenge and enable the trustworthy use of reasoning models in high-stakes decision-making, we propose a framework for training a generalizable Fairness Reward Model (FRM). Our model assigns a fairness score to LLM reasoning, enabling the system to down-weight biased trajectories and favor equitable ones when aggregating decisions across reasoning chains. We show that a single Fairness Reward Model, trained on weakly supervised, LLM-annotated examples of biased versus unbiased reasoning, transfers across tasks, domains, and model families without additional fine-tuning. When applied to real-world decision-making tasks including recidivism prediction and social media moderation, our approach consistently improves fairness while matching, or even surpassing, baseline accuracy.
Trump's Latest Court Loss Is a Doozy
The president's Justice Department tried to "coerce" a group of top Democrats. A Republican-appointed judge was not amused. This story is adapted from Slate's new and revamped Slatest newsletter. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every day. A federal judge just slapped down an attempt by the Trump administration to intimidate Minnesota Democrats.
HR consultant wins English court case using AI lawyer in apparent legal first
A freelance HR consultant paid Garfield AI about £400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of £7,000. A freelance HR consultant paid Garfield AI about £400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of £7,000. Barrister who was given material produced by Garfield AI says advocacy at trial'remained fundamentally human' An artificial intelligence law firm has won a case in an English court, in what is believed to be the first time a trial has been won using an AI lawyer. A freelance HR consultant, Tamires Camal Taquidir, paid the firm, Garfield AI, about £400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of £7,000. The co-founder of Garfield, Philip Young, called it a "landmark moment" for access to justice and said many small businesses have had to write off debts because the cost of litigation outweighed the money they could hope to win.