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Scientists predict how the world will end - and say Earth may NOT be swallowed by the sun after all
Trump declares that Keir Starmer'failed badly' as UK's Prime Minister as he CRIES while resigning Boston's Scotland-loving residents claim England fans are'ruining the vibe' compared to the Tartan Army'Al Roker is an absolute ****': KENNEDY's Today show insider gives brutal behind-the-scenes verdict on beloved weatherman and names other two-faced NBC hosts 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 Putin'prepares mass call-up' for the Ukraine meat-grinder - as video shows Russian veteran with no legs threatening recruiter with a knife in sign of growing resistance facing desperate Kremlin Secret life of John Travolta's daughter Ella Bleu: New details about'unusual' relationship with her dad revealed by insiders amid fears that aspiring actress is'stuck' Johnny Depp's ex Amber Heard gives rare glimpse of daughter Oonagh, five, after finishing 10k race in Spain Rock band playing at Madison Square Garden when fan, 51, plunged to his death break silence... as investigators probe his final moments Colorado siblings VANISH from home in middle of the night... and police still can't find them a week later Revealed: Emotional handwritten letter Iran's'oppressed' World Cup stars left in SoFi Stadium locker room No one can see the real reason Jelly Roll divorced Bunnie XO. New footage shows tourists fleeing with their bags as fire destroys Dominican Republic resort - and it's revealed Italian celebrity died from carbon monoxide fumes Unseen trove of intimate letters from Nicole Brown Simpson's passionate affair: Her lover reveals jealous OJ's peeping tom compulsion and relentless stalking Map reveals every state's favorite fast food cheeseburger Family-man facade of award-winning children's swim coach is shattered by disturbing teen babysitter claims: Read all the vile texts Fidel Castro's'secret' daughter speaks out to reveal truth about those Justin Trudeau'sibling' rumors: 'Sensitive subject' Kyle Busch's widow posts heartbreaking Father's Day tribute a month on from his shock death at 41: 'Cards were already made' US marks'encouraging progress' in peace talks with Iran after summit was nearly derailed by Trump's fiery threat I'm 52, and after ending my sexless marriage I slept with men in every decade from 30s to 60s. Here's EXACTLY what happened with each of them and the surprising truth about who was best - and worst! For years, it's been believed that the sun will start to expand in around five billion years, swallowing our planet in the process. However, a new study suggests that this might not be the case after all.
See Stonehenge's construction like NEVER before: Incredible visual reveals the vast manpower needed to haul the 25-tonne stones into position 5,000 years ago
Keir Starmer cries as he quits No 10 claiming a deluded list of'achievements' - now Britain awaits its seventh PM in ten years Putin'prepares mass call-up' for the Ukraine meat-grinder - as video shows Russian veteran with no legs threatening recruiter with a knife in sign of growing resistance facing desperate Kremlin'Al Roker is an absolute ****': KENNEDY's Today show insider gives brutal behind-the-scenes verdict on beloved weatherman and names other two-faced NBC hosts No one can see the real reason Jelly Roll divorced Bunnie XO. Boston's Scotland-loving residents claim England fans are'ruining the vibe' compared to the Tartan Army Secret life of John Travolta's daughter Ella Bleu: New details about'unusual' relationship with her dad revealed by insiders amid fears that aspiring actress is'stuck' Johnny Depp's ex Amber Heard gives rare glimpse of daughter Oonagh, five, after finishing 10k race in Spain Colorado siblings VANISH from home in middle of the night... and police ...
PolyJuice Makes It Real: Black-Box, Universal Red Teaming for Synthetic Image Detectors
Synthetic image detectors (SIDs) are a key defense against the risks posed by the growing realism of images from text-to-image (T2I) models. Red teaming improves SID's effectiveness by identifying and exploiting their failure modes via misclassified synthetic images. However, existing red-teaming solutions (i) require white-box access to SIDs, which is infeasible for proprietary state-of-the-art detectors, and (ii) generate image-specific attacks through expensive online optimization. To address these limitations, we propose PolyJuice, the first black-box, imageagnostic red-teaming method for SIDs, based on an observed distribution shift in the T2I latent space between samples correctly and incorrectly classified by the SID. PolyJuice generates attacks by (i) identifying the direction of this shift through a lightweight offline process that only requires black-box access to the SID, and (ii) exploiting this direction by universally steering all generated images towards the SID's failure modes. PolyJuice-steered T2I models are significantly more effective at deceiving SIDs (up to 84%) compared to their unsteered counterparts. We also show that the steering directions can be estimated efficiently at lower resolutions and transferred to higher resolutions using simple interpolation, reducing computational overhead. Finally, tuning SID models on PolyJuice-augmented datasets notably enhances the performance of the detectors (up to 30%).
Nearly Dimension-Independent Convergence of Mean-Field Black-Box Variational Inference
We prove that, given a mean-field location-scale variational family, black-box variational inference (BBVI) with the reparametrization gradient converges at a rate that is nearly independent of any explicit dimension dependence. Specifically, for a d-dimensional strongly log-concave and log-smooth target, the number of iterations for BBVI with a sub-Gaussian family to obtain a solution ฯต-close to the global optimum has an explicit dimension dependence no larger than O(logd). This is a significant improvement over the O(d)dependence of full-rank locationscale families. For heavy-tailed families, we prove a weaker O(d2/k)dependence, where kis the number of finite moments of the family. Additionally, if the Hessian of the target log-density is constant, the complexity is free of any explicit dimension dependence. We also prove that our bound on the gradient variance, which is key to our result, cannot be improved using only spectral bounds on the Hessian of the target log-density.
Graph-Smoothed Bayesian Black-Box Shift Estimator and Its Information Geometry
Label shift adaptation aims to recover target class priors when the labelled source distribution P and the unlabelled target distribution Qshare P(X | Y) = Q(X | Y) but P(Y) = Q(Y). Classical black-box shift estimators invert an empirical confusion matrix of a frozen classifier, producing a brittle point estimate that ignores sampling noise and similarity among classes.
InFlux: ABenchmark for Self-Calibration of Dynamic Intrinsics of Video Cameras
Accurately tracking camera intrinsics is crucial for achieving 3D understanding from 2D video. However, most 3D algorithms assume that camera intrinsics stay constant throughout a video, which is often not true for many real-world in-the-wild videos. A major obstacle in this field is a lack of dynamic camera intrinsics benchmarks-existing benchmarks typically offer limited diversity in scene content and intrinsics variation, and none provide per-frame intrinsic changes for consecutive video frames. In this paper, we present Intrinsics in Flux (InFlux), a real-world benchmark that provides per-frame ground truth intrinsics annotations for videos with dynamic intrinsics. Compared to prior benchmarks, InFlux captures a wider range of intrinsic variations and scene diversity, featuring 143K+ annotated frames from 386 high-resolution indoor and outdoor videos with dynamic camera intrinsics. To ensure accurate per-frame intrinsics, we build a comprehensive lookup table of calibration experiments and extend the Kalibr toolbox to improve its accuracy and robustness. Using our benchmark, we evaluate existing baseline methods for predicting camera intrinsics and find that most struggle to achieve accurate predictions on videos with dynamic intrinsics. For the dataset, code, videos, and submission, please visit https://influx.cs.princeton.edu/.
PRESTO: Preimage-Informed Instruction Optimization for Prompting Black-Box LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, due to their strong instruction-following capabilities. This has led to increasing interest in optimizing instructions for black-box LLMs, whose internal parameters are inaccessible but widely used due to their strong performance. To optimize instructions for black-box LLMs, recent methods employ white-box LLMs to generate candidate instructions from optimized soft prompts. However, white-box LLMs often map different soft prompts to the same instruction, leading to redundant queries. While previous studies regarded this many-to-one mapping as a structure that hinders optimization efficiency, we reinterpret it as a useful prior knowledge that can accelerate the optimization.
Unlabeled Data Improves Fine-Grained Image Zero-shot Classification with Multimodal LLMs
Despite Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) showing promising results on general zero-shot image classification tasks, fine-grained image classification remains challenging. It demands precise attention to subtle visual details to distinguish between visually similar subcategories--details that MLLMs may easily overlook without explicit guidance. To address this, we introduce AutoSEP, an iterative self-supervised prompt learning framework designed to enhance MLLM fine-grained classification capabilities in a fully unsupervised manner. Our core idea is to leverage unlabeled data to learn a description prompt that guides MLLMs in identifying crucial discriminative features within an image, and boosts classification accuracy. We developed an automatic self-enhancing prompt learning framework called AutoSEP to iteratively improve the description prompt using unlabeled data, based on instance-level classification scoring function. AutoSEP only requires black-box access to MLLMs, eliminating the need for any training or fine-tuning. We evaluate our approach on multiple fine-grained classification datasets. It consistently outperforms other unsupervised baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of our self-supervised optimization framework. Notably, AutoSEP in average improves 13% over standard zero-shot classification and 3% over the best-performing baselines.
Best-of-NJailbreaking
We introduce Best-of-N (BoN) Jailbreaking, a simple black-box algorithm that jailbreaks frontier AI systems across modalities. BoNJailbreaking works by repeatedly sampling variations of a prompt with a combination of augmentations--such as random shuffling or capitalization for textual prompts--until a harmful response is elicited. We find that BoNJailbreaking achieves high attack success rates (ASRs) on closed-source language models, such as 89% on GPT-4o and 78% on Claude 3.5 Sonnet when sampling 10,000 augmented prompts. Further, it is similarly effective at circumventing state-of-the-art open-source defenses like circuit breakers and reasoning models like o1. BoNalso seamlessly extends to other modalities: it jailbreaks vision language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4o and audio language models (ALMs) like Gemini 1.5 Pro, using modality-specific augmentations. BoNreliably improves when we sample more augmented prompts. Across all modalities, ASR, as a function of the number of samples (N), empirically follows power-law-like behavior for many orders of magnitude. BoNJailbreaking can also be composed with other black-box algorithms for even more effective attacks--combining BoNwith an optimized prefix attack achieves up to a 35% increase in ASR. Overall, our work indicates that, despite their capability, language models are sensitive to seemingly innocuous changes to inputs, which attackers can exploit across modalities.
SeCon-RAG: ATwo-Stage Semantic Filtering and Conflict-Free Framework for Trustworthy RAG
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems enhance large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge but are vulnerable to corpus poisoning and contamination attacks, which can compromise output integrity. Existing defenses often apply aggressive filtering, leading to unnecessary loss of valuable information and reduced reliability in generation. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage semantic filtering and conflict-free framework for trustworthy RAG. In the first stage, we perform a joint filter with semantic and cluster-based filtering which is guided by the Entity-intent-relation extractor (EIRE). EIRE extracts entities, latent objectives, and entity relations from both the user query and filtered documents, scores their semantic relevance, and selectively adds valuable documents into the clean retrieval database. In the second stage, we proposed an EIRE-guided conflict-aware filtering module, which analyzes semantic consistency between the query, candidate answers, and retrieved knowledge before final answer generation, filtering out internal and external contradictions that could mislead the model. Through this two-stage process, SeCon-RAG effectively preserves useful knowledge while mitigating conflict contamination, achieving significant improvements in both generation robustness and output trustworthiness. Extensive experiments across various LLMs and datasets demonstrate that the proposed SeCon-RAG markedly outperforms state-of-the-art defense methods.