Silicon Valley's Elite Financial Advisers Say This Era of Wealth Is Different The rich are getting richer. Here's what wealth advisers are telling their tech clients right now. If anyone in tech has already started their Hot IPO Summer, it's Silicon Valley's elite wealth advisers. Two private wealth managers who work with high-net-worth techies told me they've seen an uptick in activity from their client base, some of whom are expecting a big liquidity event this year. We're talking, of course, about the employees and early investors at SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic who are coming into mind-boggling riches.

The growing use of generative models in daily life calls for efficient mechanisms to control their generation, to e.g., produce safe content or provide users with tools to explore style changes. Ideally, such mechanisms should require low volume of unpaired data (i.e., without explicit preference), and should be cheap, both at train and inference time, while preserving output quality. Recent research has shown that such mechanisms can be obtained by intervening exclusively on model activations, with the goal of correcting distributional differences between activations seen when using prompts from a source vs. a target set (e.g., toxic and non-toxic sentences). While cheap, these fast methods are inherently crude: their maps are tuned locally, not accounting for their impact on downstream layers, resulting in interventions that cause unintended shifts when used out-of-sample. We propose in this work linear end-to-end activation steering (LinEAS), an approach trained with a global loss that accounts simultaneously for all layer-wise distributional shifts. In addition to being more robust, the loss used to train LinEAS can be regularized with sparsifying norms, which can automatically carry out neuron selection. LinEAS only requires a handful of unpaired samples to be effective, and beats similar baselines on toxicity mitigation in language models, becoming competitive with oracle-dependent methods that have access to strong supervision. LinEAS is modality-agnostic and we empirically find that it outperforms existing activation steering methods at mitigating and including new concepts at the output of single-step text-to-image generation models.

Visual encoders have become fundamental components in modern computer vision pipelines. However, ensuring robustness against adversarial perturbations remains a critical challenge. Recent efforts have explored both supervised and unsupervised adversarial fine-tuning strategies. We identify two key limitations in these approaches: (i) they often suffer from instability, especially during the early stages of fine-tuning, resulting in suboptimal convergence and degraded performance on clean data, and (ii) they exhibit a suboptimal trade-off between robustness and clean data accuracy, hindering the simultaneous optimization of both objectives. To overcome these challenges, we propose Lagrangian-Optimized Robust Embeddings (LORE), a novel unsupervised adversarial fine-tuning framework.

The advancements in generative models and the real-world attack of machinegenerated text(MGT) create a demand for more robust detection methods. The existing MGT detection methods for adversarial environments primarily consist of manually designed statistical-based methods and fine-tuned classifier-based approaches. Statistical-based methods extract intrinsic features but suffer from rigid decision boundaries vulnerable to adaptive attacks, while fine-tuned classifiers achieve outstanding performance at the cost of overfitting to superficial textual feature. We argue that the key to detection in current adversarial environments lies in how to extract intrinsic invariant features and ensure that the classifier possesses dynamic adaptability. In that case, we propose OSTAR, a novel MGT detection framework designed for adversarial environments which composed of a statistical enhanced classifier and a Multi-Faceted Contrastive Learning(MFCL).

Video generation has achieved significant advances through rectified flow techniques, but issues like unsmooth motion and misalignment between videos and prompts persist. In this work, we develop a systematic pipeline that harnesses human feedback to mitigate these problems and refine the video generation model. Specifically, we begin by constructing a large-scale human preference dataset focused on modern video generation models, incorporating pairwise annotations across multi-dimensions. We then introduce VideoReward, a multi-dimensional video reward model, and examine how annotations and various design choices impact its rewarding efficacy. From a unified reinforcement learning perspective aimed at maximizing reward with KL regularization, we introduce three alignment algorithms for flow-based models. These include two training-time strategies: direct preference optimization for flow (Flow-DPO) and reward weighted regression for flow (Flow-RWR), and an inference-time technique, Flow-NRG, which applies reward guidance directly to noisy videos. Experimental results indicate that VideoReward significantly outperforms existing reward models, and Flow-DPO demonstrates superior performance compared to both Flow-RWR and supervised fine-tuning methods. Additionally, Flow-NRG lets users assign custom weights to multiple objectives during inference, meeting personalized video quality needs.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward function that does not distinguish between people. We argue that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for disagreement, like in the training of large language models. We formalise and analyse the problem of learning a reward model that can be specialised to a user. Using the principle of empirical risk minimisation, we derive a probably approximately correct (PAC) bound showing the dependency of the approximation error on the number of training examples, as usual, and also on the number of human raters who provided feedback on them. Based on our theoretical findings, we discuss how to best collect pairwise preference data and argue that adaptive reward models should be beneficial when there is considerable disagreement among users.

Deep model merging represents an emerging research direction that combines multiple fine-tuned models to harness their specialized capabilities across different tasks and domains. Current model merging techniques focus on merging all available models simultaneously, with weight interpolation-based methods being the predominant approach. However, these conventional approaches are not well-suited for scenarios where models become available sequentially, and they often suffer from high memory requirements and potential interference between tasks. In this study, we propose a training-free projection-based continual merging method that processes models sequentially through orthogonal projections of weight matrices and adaptive scaling mechanisms. Our method operates by projecting new parameter updates onto subspaces orthogonal to existing merged parameter updates while using an adaptive scaling mechanism to maintain stable parameter distances, enabling efficient sequential integration of task-specific knowledge. Our approach maintains constant memory complexity to the number of models, minimizes interference between tasks through orthogonal projections, and retains the performance of previously merged models through adaptive task vector scaling. Extensive experiments on CLIP-ViT models demonstrate that our method achieves a 5-8% average accuracy improvement while maintaining robust performance in different task orderings. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/tanganke/opcm/.

We use a resampler-based embedding predictor [30], denoted as Plat each layer l, to output predictions.

The increasing societal integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentbased AI demands a new civic competency: adversarial reasoning. This position paper argues that K-12 AI education must move beyond passive literacy to actively equip students with skills in responsible adversarial prompting and ethical system "hacking." Such capabilities are essential for citizens to critically probe AI systems, understand their inherent limitations, identify manipulative patterns, and hold them accountable. We posit that cultivating a generation skilled in "red-teaming" AI is vital for maintaining transparency, preventing undue influence, and fostering a democratic engagement with these transformative technologies.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. ChatGPT forgets things in long threads. An AI chatbot can only remember so much. This prompt hands off the essentials of your conversation to a fresh chat thread. The most simple explanation I've heard for how an AI remembers things goes like this: Imagine a long, narrow table, and then imagine that you begin placing dominos on one end, slowly sliding them toward the opposite end as you add more.