Building generative models for relational databases (RDBs) is important for many applications, such as privacy-preserving data release and augmenting real datasets. However, most prior works either focus on single-table generation or adapt singletable models to the multi-table setting by relying on autoregressive factorizations and sequential generation. These approaches limit parallelism, restrict flexibility in downstream applications, and compound errors due to commonly made conditional independence assumptions. In this paper, we propose a fundamentally different approach: jointly modeling all tables in an RDB without imposing any table order. By using a natural graph representation of RDBs, we propose the Graph-Conditional Relational Diffusion Model (GRDM), which leverages a graph neural network to jointly denoise row attributes and capture complex inter-table dependencies. Extensive experiments on six real-world RDBs demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms autoregressive baselines in modeling multi-hop inter-table correlations and achieves state-of-the-art performance on single-table fidelity metrics.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown that generative pretraining can distill vast world knowledge into compact token representations. While LLMs encapsulate extensive world knowledge, they remain limited in modeling the behavioral knowledge contained within user interaction histories. User behavior forms a distinct modality, where each action--defined by multi-dimensional attributes such as time, context, and transaction type--constitutes a behavioral token. Modeling these high-cardinality, sparse, and irregular sequences is challenging, and discriminative models often falter under limited supervision. To bridge this gap, we extend generative pretraining to user behavior, learning transferable representations from unlabeled behavioral data analogous to how LLMs learn from text.

Conventional video outpainting methods primarily focus on maintaining coherent textures and visual consistency across frames. However, they often fail at handling dynamic scenes due to the complex motion of objects or camera movement, leading to temporal incoherence and visible flickering artifacts across frames. This is primarily because they lack instance-aware modeling to accurately separate and track individual object motions throughout the video. In this paper, we propose a novel video outpainting framework that explicitly takes shadow-object pairs into consideration to enhance the temporal and spatial consistency of instances, even when they are temporarily invisible. Specifically, we first track the shadow-object pairs across frames and predict the instances in the scene to unveil the spatial regions of invisible instances. Then, these prediction results are fed to guide the instance-aware optical flow completion to unveil the temporal motion of invisible instances. Next, these spatiotemporal guidances of instances are used to guide the video outpainting process. Finally, a video-aware discriminator is implemented to enhance alignment among dynamic shadows and the extended semantics in the scene. Comprehensive experiments underscore the superiority of our approach, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods in widely recognized benchmarks.

Recent work has shown that scene text recognition (STR) models are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Different from non-sequential vision tasks, the output sequence of STR models contains rich information. However, existing adversarial attacks against STR models can only lead to a few incorrect characters in the predicted text. These attack results still carry partial information about the original prediction and could be easily corrected by an external dictionary or a language model. Therefore, we propose the Multi-Population Coevolution Search (MPCS) method to attack each character in the image. We first decompose the global optimization objective into sub-objectives to solve the attack pixel concentration problem existing in previous attack methods. While this distributed optimization paradigm brings a new joint perturbation shift problem, we propose a novel coevolution energy function to solve it. Experiments on recent STR models show the superiority of our method.

Eye gaze offers valuable cues about attention, short-term intent, and future actions, making it a powerful signal for modeling egocentric behavior. In this work, we propose a gaze-regularized framework that enhances VLMs for two key egocentric understanding tasks: fine-grained future event prediction and current activity understanding. Unlike prior approaches that rely solely on visual inputs or use gaze as an auxiliary input signal, our method uses gaze only during training. We introduce a gaze-regularized attention mechanism that aligns model focus with human visual gaze. This design is flexible and modular, allowing it to generalize across multiple VLM architectures that utilize attention. Experimental results show that our approach improves semantic prediction scores by up to 11% for future event prediction and around 7% for current activity understanding, compared to the corresponding baseline models trained without gaze regularization.

Post-training of large language models is essential for adapting pre-trained language models (PLMs) to align with human preferences and downstream tasks. While PLMs typically exhibit well-calibrated confidence, post-trained language models (PoLMs) often suffer from over-confidence, assigning high confidence to both correct and incorrect outputs, which can undermine reliability in critical applications. A major obstacle in calibrating PoLMs is the scarcity of labeled data for individual downstream tasks. To address this, we propose Disagreement-Aware Confidence Alignment (DACA), a novel unsupervised method to optimize the parameters (e.g., temperature τ) in post-hoc confidence calibration. Our method is motivated by the under-confidence issue caused by prediction disagreement between the PLM and PoLM while aligning their confidence via temperature scaling.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Claude has significantly increased the presence of AI-generated text in digital communication. This trend has heightened the need for reliable detection methods to distinguish between human-authored and machine-generated content.

Two narratives about machine learning ecosystems grew out of the recent algorithmic fairness discourse. In one, dubbed monoculture, algorithmic ecosystems tend toward homogeneity akin to a single model making all decisions. Individuals then face the risk of systematic exclusion with no recourse. In the other, model multiplicity, many models solve the same task with similar accuracy, causing excessive variation in individual outcomes. Both narratives are compelling, yet, seemingly at odds: model multiplicity can't materialize in a strict monoculture.

Faces synthesized by diffusion models (DMs) with high-quality and controllable attributes pose a significant challenge for Deepfake detection. Most state-of-the-art detectors only yield a binary decision, incapable of forgery localization, attribution of forgery methods, and providing analysis on the cause of forgeries. In this work, we integrate Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) within DMbased face forensics, and propose a fine-grained analysis triad framework called VLForgery, that can 1) predict falsified facial images; 2) locate the falsified face regions subjected to partial synthesis; and 3) attribute the synthesis with specific generators. To achieve the above goals, we introduce VLF (Visual Language Forensics), a novel and diverse synthesis face dataset designed to facilitate rich interactions between'Visual' and'Language' modalities in MLLMs. Additionally, we propose an extrinsic knowledge-guided description method, termed EkCot, which leverages knowledge from the image generation pipeline to enable MLLMs to quickly capture image content. Furthermore, we introduce a low-level vision comparison pipeline designed to identify differential features between real and fake that MLLMs can inherently understand. These features are then incorporated into EkCot, enhancing its ability to analyze forgeries in a structured manner, following the sequence of detection, localization, and attribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VLForgery outperforms other state-of-the-art forensic approaches in detection accuracy, with additional potential for falsified region localization and attribution analysis.

We provide the first proof of convergence for normalized error feedback algorithms across a wide range of machine learning problems. Despite their popularity and efficiency in training deep neural networks, traditional analyses of error feedback algorithms rely on the smoothness assumption that does not capture the properties of objective functions in these problems. Rather, these problems have recently been shown to satisfy generalized smoothness assumptions, and the theoretical understanding of error feedback algorithms under these assumptions remains largely unexplored. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, all existing analyses under generalized smoothness either i) focus on single-node settings or ii) make unrealistically strong assumptions for distributed settings, such as requiring data heterogeneity, and almost surely bounded stochastic gradient noise variance. In this paper, we propose distributed error feedback algorithms that utilize normalization to achieve the O(1/ K)convergence rate for nonconvex problems under generalized smoothness. Our analyses apply for distributed settings without data heterogeneity conditions, and enable stepsize tuning that is independent of problem parameters. Additionally, we provide strong convergence guarantees of normalized error feedback algorithms for stochastic settings. Finally, we show that due to their larger allowable stepsizes, our new normalized error feedback algorithms outperform their non-normalized counterparts on various tasks, including the minimization of polynomial functions, logistic regression, and ResNet-20 training.