Deep Learning
BlockScan: Detecting Anomalies in Blockchain Transactions
We propose BlockScan, a customized Transformer for anomaly detection in blockchain transactions. Unlike existing methods that rely on rule-based systems or directly apply off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs), BlockScan introduces a series of customized designs to effectively model the unique data structure of blockchain transactions. First, a blockchain transaction is multi-modal, containing blockchain-specific tokens, texts, and numbers. We design a novel modularized tokenizer to handle these multi-modal inputs, balancing the information across different modalities. Second, we design a customized masked language modeling mechanism for pretraining the Transformer architecture, incorporating RoPE embedding and FlashAttention for handling longer sequences. Finally, we design a novel anomaly detection method based on the model outputs.
Cypher-RI: Reinforcement Learning for Integrating Schema Selection into Cypher Generation
The increasing utilization of graph databases across various fields stems from their capacity to represent intricate interconnections. Nonetheless, exploiting the full capabilities of graph databases continues to be a significant hurdle, largely because of the inherent difficulty in translating natural language into Cypher. Recognizing the critical role of schema selection in database query generation and drawing inspiration from recent progress in reasoning-augmented approaches trained through reinforcement learning to enhance inference capabilities and generalization, we introduce Cypher-RI, a specialized framework for the Text-to-Cypher task.
EvolvedGRPO: Unlocking Reasoning in LVLMs via Progressive Instruction Evolution
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) methods such as Grouped Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) have strengthened the reasoning capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, due to the inherent entanglement between visual and textual modalities, applying GRPO to LVLMs often leads to reward convergence across different responses to the same sample as training progresses, hindering effective gradient updates and causing the enhancement of chain-of-thought reasoning to stagnate or even collapse. To address this issue, we propose a progressive instruction evolution framework, EvolvedGRPO, to gradually generate more complex questions via editing instructions in an adversarial way, progressively aligned with the model's evolving capabilities. Specifically, we design two instruction editing strategies across modalities, incorporating incrementally increasing editing instructions and RL-based adversarial data augmentation to improve the effectiveness of model training. To address GRPO's limitations on overly difficult problems, we first train on basic subproblem versions of complex multi-modal questions in both the visual and textual modalities, progressively increasing difficulty to enable prefix-style process rewards, effectively combining the strengths of both process rewards and group-wise relative rewards. Finally, EvolvedGRPO achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source RL models on multi-modal reasoning tasks, even approaching the closed-source GPT-4o in reasoning capabilities, and demonstrates better performance on unseen LVLM general benchmarks.
VideoTitans: Scalable Video Prediction with Integrated Short-and Long-term Memory
Accurate video forecasting enables autonomous vehicles to anticipate hazards, robotics and surveillance systems to predict human intent, and environmental models to issue timely warnings for extreme weather events. However, existing methods remain limited: transformers rely on global attention with quadratic complexity, making them impractical for high-resolution, long-horizon video prediction, while convolutional and recurrent networks suffer from short-range receptive fields and vanishing gradients, losing key information over extended sequences. To overcome these challenges, we introduce VideoTitans, the first architecture to adapt the gradient-driven Titans memory--originally designed for language modelling to video prediction. VideoTitans integrates three core ideas: (i) a sliding-window attention core that scales linearly with sequence length and spatial resolution, (ii) an episodic memory that dynamically retains only informative tokens based on a gradient-based surprise signal, and (iii) a small set of persistent tokens encoding task-specific priors that stabilize training and enhance generalization.
Gated Attention for Large Language Models: Non-linearity, Sparsity, and Attention-Sink-Free
Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs [1] and Highway Networks [2] to recent state space models [3], linear attention [4], and also softmax attention [5, 6]. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of gating. In this work, we conduct comprehensive experiments to systematically investigate gating-augmented softmax attention variants. Specifically, we perform a comprehensive comparison over 30 variants of 15BMixture-of-Experts (MoE) models and 1.7B dense models trained on a 3.5 trillion token dataset. Our central finding is that a simple modification--applying an head-specific sigmoid gate after the Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA)--consistently improves performance. This modification also enhances training stability, tolerates larger learning rates, and improves scaling properties. By comparing various gating positions and computational variants, we attribute this effectiveness to two key factors: (1) introducing non-linearity upon the low-rank mapping in the softmax attention, and (2) applying query-dependent sparse gating scores to modulate the SDPA output. Notably, we find this sparse gating mechanism mitigates'massive activation' [7], 'attention sink' [8], and enhances long-context extrapolation performance, and we also release related codes and models to facilitate future research. Furthermore, the most effective SDPA output gating is used in the Qwen3-Next models.
903ceb0ed2d5ceec6e2c9b317b6c54a8-Paper-Conference.pdf
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.
One-Step is Enough: Sparse Autoencoders for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
For large language models (LLMs), sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been shown to decompose intermediate representations that often are not interpretable directly into sparse sums of interpretable features, facilitating better control and subsequent analysis. However, similar analysesTextand approaches have been lacking for text-toimage models. We investigate the possibility of using SAEs to learn interpretable features for SDXLTurbo, a few-step text-to-image diffusion model. To this end, SDXL Basewe train SAEs on the updates performed by transformer blocks within SDXL 25 steps Turbo's denoising U-net in its 1-step setting. Interestingly, we find that they generalize to 4-step SDXLTurbo and even to the multi-step SDXL base model (i.e., a different model) without additional training. In addition, we show that their learned features are interpretable, causally influence the generation process, and reveal specialization among the blocks.
SnapMoGen: Human Motion Generation from Expressive Texts
Text-to-motion generation has experienced remarkable progress in recent years. However, current approaches remain limited to synthesizing motion from short or general text prompts, primarily due to dataset constraints. This limitation undermines fine-grained controllability and generalization to unseen prompts. In this paper, we introduce SnapMoGen, a new text-motion dataset featuring highquality motion capture data paired with accurate, expressive textual annotations. The dataset comprises 20K motion clips totaling 44 hours, accompanied by 122K detailed textual descriptions averaging 48 words per description (vs.
From Style to Facts: Mapping the Boundaries of Knowledge Injection with Finetuning
Finetuning provides a scalable and cost-effective means of customizing language models for specific tasks or response styles, with greater reliability than prompting or in-context learning. In contrast, the conventional wisdom is that injecting knowledge via finetuning results in brittle performance and poor generalization. We argue that the dichotomy of "task customization" (e.g., instruction tuning) and "knowledge injection" (e.g., teaching new facts) is a distinction without a difference. We instead identify concrete factors that explain the heterogeneous effectiveness observed with finetuning. To this end, we conduct a large-scale experimental study of finetuning the frontier Gemini v1.5 model family on a spectrum of datasets that are artificially engineered to interpolate between the strengths and failure modes of finetuning. Our findings indicate that question-answer training data formats provide much stronger knowledge generalization than document/articlestyle training data, numerical information can be harder for finetuning to retain than categorical information, and models struggle to apply finetuned knowledge during multi-step reasoning even when trained on similar examples--all factors that render "knowledge injection" to be especially difficult, even after controlling for considerations like data augmentation and information volume. On the other hand, our findings also indicate that it is not fundamentally more difficult to finetune information about a real-world event than information about writing style.
SAFEPATH: Preventing Harmful Reasoning in Chain-of-Thought via Early Alignment
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have become powerful tools for complex problem solving, but their structured reasoning pathways can lead to unsafe outputs when exposed to harmful prompts. Existing safety alignment methods reduce harmful outputs but can degrade reasoning depth, leading to significant trade-offs in complex, multi-step tasks, and remain vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreak attacks. To address this, we introduce SAFEPATH, a lightweight alignment method that fine-tunes LRMs to emit a short, 8-token Safety Primer at the start of their reasoning, in response to harmful prompts, while leaving the rest of the reasoning process unsupervised. Empirical results across multiple benchmarks indicate that SAFEPATH effectively reduces harmful outputs while maintaining reasoning performance. Specifically, SAFEPATH reduces harmful responses by up to 90.0% and blocks 83.3% of jailbreak attempts in the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B model, while requiring 295.9x less compute than Direct Refusal and 314.1x less than SafeChain. We further introduce a zero-shot variant that requires no finetuning. In addition, we provide a comprehensive analysis of how existing methods in LLMs generalize, or fail, when applied to reasoning-centric models, revealing critical gaps and new directions for safer AI. We release model and code at https://ai-isl.github.io/safepath.