One of the principal challenges in building VLM-powered GUI agents is visual grounding--localizing the appropriate screen region for action execution based on both the visual content and the textual plans. Most existing work formulates this as a text-based coordinate generation task. However, these approaches suffer from several limitations: weak spatial-semantic alignment due to lack of explicit spatial supervision; inability to handle ambiguous supervision targets, as singlepoint predictions penalize valid variations; and a mismatch between the dense nature of screen coordinates and the coarse, patch-level granularity of visual features extracted by models like Vision Transformers. In this paper, we propose GUI-Actor, a VLM-based method for coordinate-free GUI grounding. At its core, GUI-Actorintroduces an attention-based action head that learns to align a dedicated token with all relevant visual patch tokens, enabling the model to propose one or more action regions in a single forward pass. In line with this, we further design a grounding verifier to evaluate and select the most plausible action region from the candidates proposed for action execution. Extensive experiments show that GUI-Actoroutperforms prior state-of-the-art methods on multiple GUI action grounding benchmarks, with improved generalization to unseen screen resolutions and layouts. Notably, GUI-Actor-7B achieves scores of 40.7 with Qwen2-VL and 44.6 with Qwen2.5-VL as backbones, outperforming UI-TARS72B (38.1) on ScreenSpot-Pro, with significantly fewer parameters and training data. Furthermore, by incorporating the verifier, we find that fine-tuning only the newly introduced action head ( 100M parameters for 7B model) while keeping the VLM backbone frozen is sufficient to achieve performance comparable to previous state-of-the-art models, highlighting that GUI-Actor can endow the underlying VLM with effective grounding capabilities without compromising its general-purpose strengths.

Large language models are increasingly used as judges (LLM-as-a-judge) to evaluate model outputs at scale, but their assessments often diverge systematically from human judgments.

Recent advances in deep learning optimization have unveiled two intriguing phenomena under large learning rates: Edge of Stability (EoS) and Progressive Sharpening (PS), challenging classical Gradient Descent (GD) analyses.

Large language models (LLMs) have facilitated a wide range of applications with distinct service-level objectives (SLOs), from latency-sensitive online tasks like interactive chatbots to throughput-oriented offline workloads like data synthesis. The existing deployment model, which dedicates machines to each workload, simplifies SLO management but often leads to poor resource utilization. This paper introduces HyGen, an interference-aware LLM serving system that enables efficient co-location of online and offline workloads while preserving SLOs. HyGen incorporates two key innovations: (1) performance control mechanisms, including a latency predictor to estimate batch execution time and an SLO-aware profiler to quantify latency interference, and (2) SLO-aware offline scheduling policies that maximize serving throughput and prevent starvation. Our evaluation on production workloads shows that HyGen achieves up to 3.9-5.8

One persistent challenge in LLM research is the development of attention mechanisms that are able to generalise from training on shorter contexts to inference on longer contexts. We propose two conditions that we expect all effective longcontext attention mechanisms to have: scale-invariant total attention, and scaleinvariant attention sparsity. Under a Gaussian assumption, we show that a simple position-dependent transformation of the attention logits is sufficient for these conditions to hold. Experimentally we find that the resulting scale-invariant attention scheme gives considerable benefits in terms of validation loss when zero-shot generalising from training on short contexts to validation on longer contexts, and is effective at long-context retrieval.

Although recent methods have made progress toward unified solutions, their reliance on post hoc processing introduces considerable application inconvenience and compromises forensic reliability.

Understanding how knowledge is distributed across the layers of generative models is crucial for improving interpretability, controllability, and adaptation. While prior work has explored knowledge localization in UNet-based architectures, Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based models remain underexplored in this context. In this paper, we propose a model-and knowledge-agnostic method to localize where specific types of knowledge are encoded within the DiT blocks. We evaluate our method on state-of-the-art DiT-based models, including PixArt-α, FLUX, and SANA, across six diverse knowledge categories. We show that the identified blocks are both interpretable and causally linked to the expression of knowledge in generated outputs. Building on these insights, we apply our localization framework to two key applications: model personalization and knowledge unlearning. In both settings, our localized fine-tuning approach enables efficient and targeted updates, reducing computational cost, improving task-specific performance, and better preserving general model behavior with minimal interference to unrelated or surrounding content. Overall, our findings offer new insights into the internal structure of DiTs and introduce a practical pathway for more interpretable, efficient, and controllable model editing. 1

Sample-wise learning curves plot performance versus training set size. They are useful for studying scaling laws and speeding up hyperparameter tuning and model selection. Learning curves are often assumed to be well-behaved: monotone (i.e.

ALimitations777 As described in Sections 4 and 6, users would tailor attacks to image clusters. In the case of beige778 box, we outright provided these clusters by disclosing which image indices corresponded to which779 general watermark type. For the black-box track, several winning teams clustered images into groups780 by artifact varieties and did so by hand. For the latter, this was made possible because (1) our data set781 was relatively small, enabling this type of manual data labeling, and (2) they were made aware that782 the dataset contained mixtures of several watermarks. A database owner who uses only one type of783 watermark will unlikely produce such variation in artifacts.784 Additionally, we use the watermark models and setting provided in the original papers and do not785 calibrate the strength of watermarks.

AI-generated images have become pervasive, raising critical concerns around content authenticity, intellectual property, and the spread of misinformation. Invisible watermarks offer a promising solution for identifying AI-generated images, preserving content provenance without degrading visual quality. However, their real-world robustness remains uncertain due to the lack of standardized evaluation protocols and large-scale stress testing. To bridge this gap, we organized "Erasing the Invisible," a NeurIPS 2024 competition and newly established benchmark designed to systematically stress testing the resilience of watermarking techniques. The competition introduced two attack tracks--Black-box and Beige-box--that simulate practical scenarios with varying levels of attacker knowledge on watermarks, providing a comprehensive assessment of watermark robustness.