However, the interpretability of the alignment component remains uninvestigated due to the difficulty in mapping the semantics of multi-modal representations into a unified concept set. To address this problem, we propose VL-SAE, a sparse autoencoder that encodes vision-language representations into its hidden activations. Each neuron in its hidden layer correlates to a concept represented by semantically similar images and texts, thereby interpreting these representations with a unified concept set. To establish the neuron-concept correlation, we encourage semantically similar representations to exhibit consistent neuron activations during self-supervised training. First, to measure the semantic similarity of multi-modal representations, we perform their alignment in an explicit form based on cosine similarity. Second, we construct the VL-SAE with a distance-based encoder and two modality-specific decoders to ensure the activation consistency of semantically similar representations. Experiments across multiple VLMs (e.g., CLIP, LLaVA) demonstrate the superior capability of VL-SAE in interpreting and enhancing the vision-language alignment. For interpretation, the alignment between vision and language representations can be understood by comparing their semantics with concepts. For enhancement, the alignment can be strengthened by aligning vision-language representations at the concept level, contributing to performance improvements in downstream tasks, including zero-shot image classification and hallucination elimination.

AVROBUSTBENCH comprises four audio-visual benchmark datasets, AUDIOSET-2C, VGGSOUND-2C, KINETICS-2C, and EPICKITCHENS-2C, each incorporating 75 bimodal audio-visual corruptions that are co-occurring and correlated. Through extensive evaluations, we observe that state-of-the-art supervised and severity self-supervised increases.

In this paper, we study differentially private mechanisms for functions whose outputs lie in a Euclidean Jordan algebra. Euclidean Jordan algebras capture many important mathematical structures and form the foundation of linear programming, second-order cone programming, and semidefinite programming. Our main contribution is a generic Gaussian mechanism for such functions, with sensitivity measured in ℓ2, ℓ1, and ℓ norms. Notably, this framework includes the important case where the function outputs are symmetric matrices, and sensitivity is measured in the Frobenius, nuclear, or spectral norm. We further derive private algorithms for solving symmetric cone programs under various settings, using a combination of the multiplicative weights update method and our generic Gaussian mechanism. As an application, we present differentially private algorithms for semidefinite programming, resolving a major open question posed by [Hsu, Roth, Roughgarden, and Ullman, ICALP 2014].

With the rapid advancement of generative models, general-purpose generation has gained increasing attention as a promising approach to unify diverse tasks across modalities within a single system. Despite this progress, existing opensource frameworks often remain fragile and struggle to support complex real-world applications due to the lack of structured workflow planning and execution-level feedback. To address these limitations, we present ComfyMind, a collaborative AI system designed to enable robust and scalable general-purpose generation, built on the ComfyUI platform.

Why the Reflecting Pool Is Full of Algae After Trump's Renovation Warm weather has fueled a bloom that US National Park Service workers are trying to kill using everything from hydrogen peroxide to nanobubbles ahead of July 4 celebrations. On Wednesday morning, workers poured hydrogen peroxide into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC. The treatment is the latest attempt by the Interior Department to control an algae bloom that has turned the pool bright green, despite President Donald Trump's costly renovation to make it "American flag blue" in time for the nation's 250th anniversary . Hot temperatures and climate change are among the risk factors that could be driving the outbreak. The Trump administration spent more than $14 million to update the pool ahead of celebrations across the US capital .

Computer use agents are LLM-based agents that can directly interact with a graphical user interface, by processing screenshots or accessibility trees. While these systems are gaining popularity, their safety has been largely overlooked, despite the fact that evaluating and understanding their potential for harmful behavior is essential for widespread adoption. To address this gap, we introduce OS-HARM, a new benchmark for measuring safety of computer use agents. OS-HARM is built on top of the OSWorld environment (Xie et al., 2024) and aims to test models across three categories of harm: deliberate user misuse, prompt injection attacks, and model misbehavior.

Point cloud completion is essential for robust 3D perception in safety-critical applications such as robotics and augmented reality. However, existing models perform static inference and rely heavily on inductive biases learned during training, limiting their ability to adapt to novel structural patterns and sensor-induced distortions at test time. To address this limitation, we propose PointMAC, a meta-learned framework for robust test-time adaptation in point cloud completion. It enables sample-specific refinement without requiring additional supervision. Our method optimizes the completion model under two self-supervised auxiliary objectives that simulate structural and sensor-level incompleteness.

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to large language models (LLMs) by embedding malicious triggers that manipulate model behavior. However, existing defenses primarily rely on prior knowledge of backdoor triggers or targets and offer only superficial mitigation strategies, thus struggling to fundamentally address the inherent reliance on unreliable features. To address these limitations, we propose a novel defense strategy, RepGuard, that strengthens LLM resilience by adaptively separating abnormal features from useful semantic representations, rendering the defense agnostic to specific trigger patterns. Specifically, we first introduce a dual-perspective feature localization strategy that integrates local consistency and sample-wise deviation metrics to identify suspicious backdoor patterns. Based on this identification, an adaptive mask generation mechanism is applied to isolate backdoor-targeted shortcut features by decomposing hidden representations into independent spaces, while preserving task-relevant semantics.

Simpson's paradox poses a challenge in probabilistic inference and decisionmaking. Our study revisits the paradox by re-estimating its frequency with an unbiased data generation process and reaffirms that it is not an artifact of deficient data collection. Thus, it can lead to incorrect recommendations in fields as diverse as statistics, psychology, and artificial intelligence. We show that the paradox can be resolved by assuming a minimal -- though not necessarily observed -- common cause (or screening) variable for the involved random variables. In our approach, conditioning on this minimal common cause establishes the correct association between events, which coincides with the conditioning (i.e., fine-grained) option of the original Simpson paradox. This resolution applies to both discrete cases of binary variables and continuous settings modeled by Gaussian variables. For a non-minimal common cause, the resolution of the paradox is possible, but detailed knowledge of the common cause is required. Our findings extend traditional understandings of the paradox and offer practical guidance for resolving apparent contradictions in probabilistic inference, ultimately enhancing decision-making processes. This point is illustrated by several examples.

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to continuously learn new categories while retaining the knowledge of old ones.