Industry
Mind the Gap! Pathways Towards Unifying AI Safety and Ethics Research
While much research in artificial intelligence (AI) has focused on scaling capabilities, the accelerating pace of development makes countervailing work on producing harmless, "aligned" systems increasingly urgent. Yet research on alignment has diverged along two largely parallel tracks: safety--centered on scaled intelligence, deceptive or scheming behaviors, and existential risk--and ethics--focused on present harms, the reproduction of social bias, and flaws in production pipelines. Although both communities warn of insufficient investment in alignment, they disagree on what alignment means or ought to mean. As a result, their efforts have evolved in relative isolation, shaped by distinct methodologies, institutional homes, and disciplinary genealogies. We present a large-scale, quantitative study showing the structural split between AI safety and AI ethics. Using a bibliometric and co-authorship network analysis of 6,442 papers from twelve major ML and NLP conferences (2020-2025), we find that over 80% of collaborations occur within either the safety or ethics communities, and cross-field connectivity is highly concentrated: roughly 5% of papers account for more than 85% of bridging links. Removing a small number of these brokers sharply increases segregation, indicating that cross-disciplinary exchange depends on a handful of actors rather than broad, distributed collaboration. These results show that the safety-ethics divide is not only conceptual but institutional, with implications for research agendas, policy, and venues. We argue that integrating technical safety work with normative ethics--via shared benchmarks, cross-institutional venues, and mixed-method methodologies--is essential for building AI systems that are both robust and just.
LibIQ: Toward Real-Time Spectrum Classification in O-RAN dApps
Olimpieri, Filippo, Giustini, Noemi, Lacava, Andrea, D'Oro, Salvatore, Melodia, Tommaso, Cuomo, Francesca
The O-RAN architecture is transforming cellular networks by adopting RAN softwarization and disaggregation concepts to enable data-driven monitoring and control of the network. Such management is enabled by RICs, which facilitate near-real-time and non-real-time network control through xApps and rApps. However, they face limitations, including latency overhead in data exchange between the RAN and RIC, restricting real-time monitoring, and the inability to access user plain data due to privacy and security constraints, hindering use cases like beamforming and spectrum classification. In this paper, we leverage the dApps concept to enable real-time RF spectrum classification with LibIQ, a novel library for RF signals that facilitates efficient spectrum monitoring and signal classification by providing functionalities to read I/Q samples as time-series, create datasets and visualize time-series data through plots and spectrograms. Thanks to LibIQ, I/Q samples can be efficiently processed to detect external RF signals, which are subsequently classified using a CNN inside the library. To achieve accurate spectrum analysis, we created an extensive dataset of time-series-based I/Q samples, representing distinct signal types captured using a custom dApp running on a 5G deployment over the Colosseum network emulator and an OTA testbed. We evaluate our model by deploying LibIQ in heterogeneous scenarios with varying center frequencies, time windows, and external RF signals. In real-time analysis, the model classifies the processed I/Q samples, achieving an average accuracy of approximately 97.8% in identifying signal types across all scenarios. We pledge to release both LibIQ and the dataset created as a publicly available framework upon acceptance.
PaTAS: A Framework for Trust Propagation in Neural Networks Using Subjective Logic
Ouattara, Koffi Ismael, Krontiris, Ioannis, Dimitrakos, Theo, Eisermann, Dennis, Labiod, Houda, Kargl, Frank
Trustworthiness has become a key requirement for the deployment of artificial intelligence systems in safety-critical applications. Conventional evaluation metrics, such as accuracy and precision, fail to appropriately capture uncertainty or the reliability of model predictions, particularly under adversarial or degraded conditions. This paper introduces the Parallel Trust Assessment System (PaTAS), a framework for modeling and propagating trust in neural networks using Subjective Logic (SL). PaTAS operates in parallel with standard neural computation through Trust Nodes and Trust Functions that propagate input, parameter, and activation trust across the network. The framework defines a Parameter Trust Update mechanism to refine parameter reliability during training and an Inference-Path Trust Assessment (IPTA) method to compute instance-specific trust at inference. Experiments on real-world and adversarial datasets demonstrate that PaTAS produces interpretable, symmetric, and convergent trust estimates that complement accuracy and expose reliability gaps in poisoned, biased, or uncertain data scenarios. The results show that PaTAS effectively distinguishes between benign and adversarial inputs and identifies cases where model confidence diverges from actual reliability. By enabling transparent and quantifiable trust reasoning within neural architectures, PaTAS provides a foundation for evaluating model reliability across the AI lifecycle.
It Hears, It Sees too: Multi-Modal LLM for Depression Detection By Integrating Visual Understanding into Audio Language Models
Zhao, Xiangyu, Shen, Yaling, Jiang, Yiwen, Wang, Zimu, Liu, Jiahe, Cheng, Maxmartwell H, Oliveira, Guilherme C, Desimone, Robert, Dwyer, Dominic, Ge, Zongyuan
Depression is one of the most prevalent mental health disorders globally. In recent years, multi-modal data, such as speech, video, and transcripts, has been increasingly used to develop AI-assisted depression assessment systems. Large language models have further advanced this field due to their strong language understanding and generalization capabilities. However, conventional LLMs remain text-centric and cannot process the rich non-verbal cues found in audio and visual modalities, which are critical components in mental health evaluation. While multi-modal LLMs offer a promising direction, few are tailored for psychological applications. In this study, we propose a novel multi-modal LLM framework for depression detection. This fine-grained alignment improves modeling of temporal dynamics across modalities while reducing the need for extensive training data and computational resources. Experiments on the DAIC-WoZ dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms both single-modality approaches and previous multi-modal methods. Moreover, the proposed framework can be extended to incorporate additional physiological signals, paving the way for broader clinical applications beyond mental health. Depression has emerged as a critical concern in the field of mental health, affecting a broad population across various age groups. Particularly, the incidence of depression among adolescents has surged over the past decade, raising significant social and public health concerns (Thapar et al., 2022).
HunyuanOCR Technical Report
Hunyuan Vision Team, null, Lyu, Pengyuan, Wan, Xingyu, Li, Gengluo, Peng, Shangpin, Wang, Weinong, Wu, Liang, Shen, Huawen, Zhou, Yu, Tang, Canhui, Yang, Qi, Peng, Qiming, Luo, Bin, Yang, Hower, Zhang, Xinsong, Zhang, Jinnian, Peng, Houwen, Yang, Hongming, Xie, Senhao, Zhou, Longsha, Pei, Ge, Wu, Binghong, Yan, Rui, Wu, Kan, Yang, Jieneng, Wang, Bochao, Liu, Kai, Zhu, Jianchen, Jiang, Jie, Linus, null, Hu, Han, Zhang, Chengquan
This paper presents HunyuanOCR, a commercial-grade, open-source, and lightweight (1B parameters) Vision-Language Model (VLM) dedicated to OCR tasks. The architecture comprises a Native Vision Transformer (ViT) and a lightweight LLM connected via an MLP adapter. HunyuanOCR demonstrates superior performance, outperforming commercial APIs, traditional pipelines, and larger models (e.g., Qwen3-VL-4B). Specifically, it surpasses current public solutions in perception tasks (Text Spotting, Parsing) and excels in semantic tasks (IE, Text Image Translation), securing first place in the ICDAR 2025 DIMT Challenge (Small Model Track). Furthermore, it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on OCRBench among VLMs with fewer than 3B parameters. HunyuanOCR achieves breakthroughs in three key aspects: 1) Unifying Versatility and Efficiency: We implement comprehensive support for core capabilities including spotting, parsing, IE, VQA, and translation within a lightweight framework. This addresses the limitations of narrow "OCR expert models" and inefficient "General VLMs". 2) Streamlined End-to-End Architecture: Adopting a pure end-to-end paradigm eliminates dependencies on pre-processing modules (e.g., layout analysis). This fundamentally resolves error propagation common in traditional pipelines and simplifies system deployment. 3) Data-Driven and RL Strategies: We confirm the critical role of high-quality data and, for the first time in the industry, demonstrate that Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategies yield significant performance gains in OCR tasks. HunyuanOCR is officially open-sourced on HuggingFace. We also provide a high-performance deployment solution based on vLLM, placing its production efficiency in the top tier. We hope this model will advance frontier research and provide a solid foundation for industrial applications.
Thinking Ahead: Foresight Intelligence in MLLMs and World Models
Gong, Zhantao, Fan, Liaoyuan, Guo, Qing, Xu, Xun, Yang, Xulei, Li, Shijie
In this work, we define Foresight Intelligence as the capability to anticipate and interpret future events-an ability essential for applications such as autonomous driving, yet largely overlooked by existing research. To bridge this gap, we introduce FSU-QA, a new Visual Question-Answering (VQA) dataset specifically designed to elicit and evaluate Foresight Intelligence. Using FSU-QA, we conduct the first comprehensive study of state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) under foresight-oriented tasks, revealing that current models still struggle to reason about future situations. Beyond serving as a benchmark, FSU-QA also enables the assessment of world models by measuring the semantic coherence of their generated predictions, quantified through performance gains when VLMs are augmented with such outputs. Our experiments further demonstrate that FSU-QA can effectively enhance foresight reasoning: even small VLMs fine-tuned on FSU-QA surpass much larger, advanced models by a substantial margin. Together, these findings position FSU-QA as a principled foundation for developing next-generation models capable of truly anticipating and understanding future events.
Less is More: Data-Efficient Adaptation for Controllable Text-to-Video Generation
Cheng, Shihan, Kulkarni, Nilesh, Hyde, David, Smirnov, Dmitriy
Fine-tuning large-scale text-to-video diffusion models to add new generative controls, such as those over physical camera parameters (e.g., shutter speed or aperture), typically requires vast, high-fidelity datasets that are difficult to acquire. In this work, we propose a data-efficient fine-tuning strategy that learns these controls from sparse, low-quality synthetic data. W e show that not only does fine-tuning on such simple data enable the desired controls, it actually yields superior results to models fine-tuned on pho-torealistic "real" data. Beyond demonstrating these results, we provide a framework that justifies this phenomenon both intuitively and quantitatively.
When Alignment Fails: Multimodal Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models
Yan, Yuping, Xie, Yuhan, Zhang, Yixin, Lyu, Lingjuan, Wang, Handing, Jin, Yaochu
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have recently demonstrated remarkable progress in embodied environments, enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act through unified multimodal understanding. Despite their impressive capabilities, the adversarial robustness of these systems remains largely unexplored, especially under realistic multimodal and black-box conditions. Existing studies mainly focus on single-modality perturbations and overlook the cross-modal misalignment that fundamentally affects embodied reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we introduce VLA-F ool, a comprehensive study of mul-timodal adversarial robustness in embodied VLA models under both white-box and black-box settings. VLA-F ool unifies three levels of multimodal adversarial attacks: (1) textual perturbations through gradient-based and prompt-based manipulations, (2) visual perturbations via patch and noise distortions, and (3) cross-modal misalignment attacks that intentionally disrupt the semantic correspondence between perception and instruction. W e further incorporate a VLA-aware semantic space into linguistic prompts, developing the first automatically crafted and semantically guided prompting framework. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark using a fine-tuned OpenVLA model reveal that even minor multimodal perturbations can cause significant behavioral deviations, demonstrating the fragility of embodied multimodal alignment.
OutSafe-Bench: A Benchmark for Multimodal Offensive Content Detection in Large Language Models
Yan, Yuping, Xie, Yuhan, Li, Yuanshuai, Yu, Yingchao, Lyu, Lingjuan, Jin, Yaochu
Since Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly being integrated into everyday tools and intelligent agents, growing concerns have arisen regarding their possible output of unsafe contents, ranging from toxic language and biased imagery to privacy violations and harmful misinformation. Current safety benchmarks remain highly limited in both modality coverage and performance evaluations, often neglecting the extensive landscape of content safety. In this work, we introduce OutSafe-Bench, the first most comprehensive content safety evaluation test suite designed for the multimodal era. OutSafe-Bench includes a large-scale dataset that spans four modalities, featuring over 18,000 bilingual (Chinese and English) text prompts, 4,500 images, 450 audio clips and 450 videos, all systematically annotated across nine critical content risk categories. In addition to the dataset, we introduce a Multidimensional Cross Risk Score (MCRS), a novel metric designed to model and assess overlapping and correlated content risks across different categories. T o ensure fair and robust evaluation, we propose FairScore, an explainable automated multi-reviewer weighted aggregation framework. FairScore selects top-performing models as adaptive juries, thereby mitigating biases from single-model judgments and enhancing overall evaluation reliability. Our evaluation of nine state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals persistent and substantial safety vulnerabilities, underscoring the pressing need for robust safeguards in MLLMs. W arning: This paper may contain some offensive content in data and model outputs.
SCALE: Upscaled Continual Learning of Large Language Models
Lee, Jin-woo, Choi, Junhwa, Hwang, Bongkyu, Choo, Jinho, Kim, Bogun, Yi, JeongSeon, Lee, Joonseok, Jung, DongYoung, Park, Jaeseon, Park, Kyoungwon, Jung, Suk-hoon
We revisit continual pre-training for large language models and argue that progress now depends more on scaling the right structure than on scaling parameters alone. We introduce SCALE, a width upscaling architecture that inserts lightweight expansion into linear modules while freezing all pre-trained parameters. This preserves the residual and attention topologies and increases capacity without perturbing the base model's original functionality. SCALE is guided by two principles: Persistent Preservation, which maintains the base model's behavior via preservation-oriented initialization and freezing of the pre-trained weights, and Collaborative Adaptation, which selectively trains a subset of expansion components to acquire new knowledge with minimal interference. We instantiate these ideas as SCALE-Preserve (preservation-first), SCALE-Adapt (adaptation-first), and SCALE-Route, an optional routing extension that performs token-level routing between preservation and adaptation heads. On a controlled synthetic biography benchmark, SCALE mitigates the severe forgetting observed with depth expansion while still acquiring new knowledge. In continual pre-training on a Korean corpus, SCALE variants achieve less forgetting on English evaluations and competitive gains on Korean benchmarks, with these variants offering the best overall stability-plasticity trade-off. Accompanying analysis clarifies when preservation provably holds and why the interplay between preservation and adaptation stabilizes optimization compared to standard continual learning setups.