Deep Learning
Keep It on a Leash: Controllable Pseudo-label Generation Towards Realistic Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning
Current long-tailed semi-supervised learning methods assume that labeled data exhibit a long-tailed distribution, and unlabeled data adhere to a typical predefined distribution (i.e., long-tailed, uniform, or inverse long-tailed). However, the distribution of the unlabeled data is generally unknown and may follow an arbitrary distribution. To tackle this challenge, we propose a Controllable Pseudo-label Generation (CPG) framework, expanding the labeled dataset with the progressively identified reliable pseudo-labels from the unlabeled dataset and training the model on the updated labeled dataset with a known distribution, making it unaffected by the unlabeled data distribution. Specifically, CPG operates through a controllable self-reinforcing optimization cycle: (i) at each training step, our dynamic controllable filtering mechanism selectively incorporates reliable pseudo-labels from the unlabeled dataset into the labeled dataset, ensuring that the updated labeled dataset follows a known distribution; (ii) we then construct a Bayes-optimal classifier using logit adjustment based on the updated labeled data distribution; (iii) this improved classifier subsequently helps identify more reliable pseudo-labels in the next training step. We further theoretically prove that this optimization cycle can significantly reduce the generalization error under some conditions. Additionally, we propose a class-aware adaptive augmentation module to further improve the representation of minority classes, and an auxiliary branch to maximize data utilization by leveraging all labeled and unlabeled samples. Comprehensive evaluations on various commonly used benchmark datasets show that CPG achieves consistent improvements, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by up to 15.97% in accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/yaxinhou/CPG.
Improving Energy Natural Gradient Descent through Woodbury, Momentum, and Randomization
Natural gradient methods significantly accelerate the training of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), but are often prohibitively costly. We introduce a suite of techniques to improve the accuracy and efficiency of energy natural gradient descent (ENGD) for PINNs. First, we leverage the Woodbury formula to dramatically reduce the computational complexity of ENGD. Second, we adapt the Subsampled Projected-Increment Natural Gradient Descent algorithm from the variational Monte Carlo literature to accelerate the convergence. Third, we explore the use of randomized algorithms to further reduce the computational cost in the case of large batch sizes. We find that randomization accelerates progress in the early stages of training for low-dimensional problems, and we identify key barriers to attaining acceleration in other scenarios. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that our methods outperform previous approaches, achieving the same L2 error as the original ENGD up to 75 faster.
Achieving balanced alignment of large language models (LLMs) in terms of Help-Harmless O fulness,ptimHonestyizat,iandon Harmlessness H(3Heoptimization)lpful Opconstitutestimizaatcornerstoneion
Existing methods like data mixture strategies face limitations, including heavy reliance on expert knowledge and conflicting optimization signals. While model merging offers parameter-level conflict-resolution strategies through integrating specialized models' parameters, its potential for 3H optimization remains underexplored. This paper systematically compares the effectiveness of model merging and data mixture methods in constructing 3H-aligned LLMs for the first time, revealing previously overlooked collaborative and conflict relationships among the 3H dimensions and discussing the advantages and drawbacks of Mdata mixture (data-level) and model merging (parameter-level) methods in mitiodgating the conflict for balanced 3H optimization.
MLLM-ISU: The First-Ever Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models based Intrusion Scene Understanding
Vision-based intrusion detection has multiple applications in practical scenarios, e.g., autonomous driving, intelligent monitoring, and security. Previous works mainly focus on improving the intrusion detection performance, without a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the intrusion scene. To fill this gap, we explore a novel task called Multimodal Large Language Models based Intrusion Scene Understanding (MLLM-ISU) and report a comprehensive benchmark for the task.
SENTINELKILNDB: ALarge-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for OBBBrick Kiln Detection in South Asia Using Satellite Imagery
Air pollution was responsible for 2.6 million deaths across South Asia in 2021 alone, with brick manufacturing contributing significantly to this burden. In particular, the Indo-Gangetic Plain; a densely populated and highly polluted region spanning northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan sees brick kilns contributing 8-14% of ambient air pollution. Traditional monitoring approaches, such as field surveys and manual annotation using tools like Google Earth Pro, are time and labor-intensive. Prior ML-based efforts for automated detection have relied on costly high-resolution commercial imagery and non-public datasets, limiting reproducibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce SENTINELKILNDB, a publicly available, hand-validated benchmark of 62,671 brick kilns spanning three kiln types Fixed Chimney Bull's Trench Kiln (FCBK), Circular FCBK (CFCBK), and Zigzag kilns - annotated with oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) across 2.8 million km2 using free and globally accessible Sentinel-2 imagery. We benchmark state-of-the-art oriented object detection models and evaluate generalization across in-region, out-of-region, and super-resolution settings. SENTINELKILNDB enables rigorous evaluation of geospatial generalization and robustness for low-resolution object detection, and provides a new testbed for ML models addressing real-world environmental and remote sensing challenges at a continental scale. Datasets and code are available in SentinelKilnDB Dataset and SentinelKilnDB Benchmark, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Distilling LLMAgent into Small Models with Retrieval and Code Tools
Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks but remain computationally expensive, limiting their practical deployment. To address this, recent works have focused on distilling reasoning capabilities into smaller language models (sLMs) using chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from teacher LLMs. However, this approach struggles in scenarios requiring rare factual knowledge or precise computation, where sLMs often hallucinate due to limited capability. In this work, we propose Agent Distillation, a framework for transferring not only reasoning capability but full task-solving behavior from LLM-based agents into sLMs with retrieval and code tools. We improve agent distillation along two complementary axes: (1) we introduce a prompting method called first-thought prefix to enhance the quality of teacher-generated trajectories; and (2) we propose a self-consistent action generation for improving test-time robustness of small agents. We evaluate our method on eight reasoning tasks across factual and mathematical domains, covering both in-domain and out-of-domain generalization. Our results show that sLMs as small as 0.5B, 1.5B, 3B parameters can achieve performance competitive with nexttier larger 1.5B, 3B, 7B models fine-tuned using CoT distillation, demonstrating the potential of agent distillation for building practical, tool-using small agents.
RepoMaster: Autonomous Exploration and Understanding of GitHub Repositories for Complex Task Solving
The ultimate goal of code agents is to solve complex tasks autonomously. Although large language models (LLMs) have made substantial progress in code generation, real-world tasks typically demand full-fledged code repositories rather than simple scripts. Building such repositories from scratch remains a major challenge. Fortunately, GitHub hosts a vast, evolving collection of open-source repositories, which developers frequently reuse as modular components for complex tasks. Yet, existing frameworks like OpenHands and SWE-Agent still struggle to effectively leverage these valuable resources.
KScope: AFramework for Characterizing the Knowledge Status of Language Models
Characterizing a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge of a given question is challenging. As a result, prior work has primarily examined LLM behavior under knowledge conflicts, where the model's internal parametric memory contradicts information in the external context. However, this does not fully reflect how well the model knows the answer to the question. In this paper, we first introduce a taxonomy of five knowledge statuses based on the consistency and correctness of LLM knowledge modes. We then propose KScope, a hierarchical framework of statistical tests that progressively refines hypotheses about knowledge modes and characterizes LLM knowledge into one of these five statuses. We apply KScope to nine LLMs across four datasets and systematically establish: (1) Supporting context narrows knowledge gaps across models.
Exploring Semantic-constrained Adversarial Example with Instruction Uncertainty Reduction
Recently, semantically constrained adversarial examples (SemanticAE), which are directly generated from natural language instructions, have become a promising avenue for future research due to their flexible attacking forms, but have not been thoroughly explored yet. To generate SemanticAEs, current methods fall short of satisfactory attacking ability as the key underlying factors of semantic uncertainty in human instructions, such as referring diversity, descriptive incompleteness, and boundary ambiguity, have not been fully investigated. To tackle the issues, this paper develops a multi-dimensional instruction uncertainty reduction (InsUR) framework to generate more satisfactory SemanticAE, i.e., transferable, adaptive, and effective. Specifically, in the dimension of the sampling method, we propose the residual-driven attacking direction stabilization to alleviate the unstable adversarial optimization caused by the diversity of language references. By coarsely predicting the language-guided sampling process, the optimization process will be stabilized by the designed ResAdv-DDIM sampler, therefore releasing the transferable and robust adversarial capability of multi-step diffusion models.