We are interested in the construction of software that can act as scientific assistants to domain specialists. It is expected that such assistants will be needed to accelerate the identification of ways to address complex problems requiring urgent solutions. In this paper, our focus is not on a specific scientific problem, but on the software-engineering of such 'science accelerators'. Recent developments in 'No Code' techniques would seem to suggest that scientist can simply hypothesise solutions simply by conversing with a large language model (LLM). However, for complex scientific problems, this seems unlikely given the current state of LLM technology. What does appear feasible is that a software engineer can use LLMs to rapidly construct programs for use by a domain-specialist, including the specialist's requirements expressed in natural language. We propose the design of an interactive form of 'structured' inductive programming in which a software-engineer and an LLM collaboratively construct an 'assistant' for a scientific data analysis. The paper describes a simple implementation called iStrucInd that adapts a '2-way Intelligibility' protocol to implement the interaction between the software engineer and the LLM. We test the tool on two different non-trivial scientific data analysis tasks. Specifically, we compare the system constructed by iStrucInd against systems constructed manually and by Low Code/No Code methods along dimensions of: (a) program performance; (b) program quality; and (c) programming effort. The results show iStrucInd allows a software engineer to develop better programs faster suggesting interactive structured induction can play a useful role in the rapid construction of scientific assistants.

We introduce Cosmos-Transfer1, a conditional world generation model that can generate world simulations based on multiple spatial control inputs of various modalities such as segmentation, depth, and edge. In the design, the spatial conditional scheme is adaptive and customizable. It allows weighting different conditional inputs differently at different spatial locations. This enables highly controllable world generation and finds use in various world-to-world transfer use cases, including Sim2Real. We conduct extensive evaluations to analyze the proposed model and demonstrate its applications for Physical AI, including robotics Sim2Real and autonomous vehicle data enrichment. We further demonstrate an inference scaling strategy to achieve real-time world generation with an NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and interaction. Given the extensive applications of MLLMs, the associated safety issues have become increasingly critical. Due to the effectiveness of preference optimization in aligning MLLMs with human preferences, there is an urgent need for safety-related preference data for MLLMs. To address this, we construct the MMSafe-PO preference dataset towards harmless multimodal assistants, featuring multimodal instructions, the conversational format, and ranked paired responses from human feedback. We also identify two insightful observations: modality co-defense and modality cheating, which illustrate that MLLMs possess a certain level of inherent defense while still presenting unique safety challenges. Based on these observations, we propose the Blind Preference Optimization (BPO) approach. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmarks show that BPO effectively enhances the safety capabilities of MLLMs. Notably, BPO significantly improves the safety rate of the base MLLM by 45.0%, outperforming the DPO approach. Additionally, applying BPO to the MMSafe-PO dataset greatly reduces the base MLLM's unsafe rate on other safety benchmarks (14.5% on MM-SafetyBench and 82.9% on HarmEval, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of both the dataset and the approach. We release code and data at https://lu-yang666.github.io/MMsafe-PO-Web/.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown promising performance in vision-language understanding and reasoning tasks. However, their visual understanding behaviors remain underexplored. A fundamental question arises: to what extent do LVLMs rely on visual input, and which image regions contribute to their responses? It is non-trivial to interpret the free-form generation of LVLMs due to their complicated visual architecture (e.g., multiple encoders and multi-resolution) and variable-length outputs. In this paper, we extend existing heatmap visualization methods (e.g., iGOS++) to support LVLMs for open-ended visual question answering. We propose a method to select visually relevant tokens that reflect the relevance between generated answers and input image. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art LVLMs on benchmarks designed to require visual information to answer. Our findings offer several insights into LVLM behavior, including the relationship between focus region and answer correctness, differences in visual attention across architectures, and the impact of LLM scale on visual understanding. The code and data are available at https://github.com/bytedance/LVLM_Interpretation.

Recent LLM-based agent frameworks have demonstrated impressive capabilities in task delegation and workflow orchestration, but face significant challenges in maintaining context awareness and ensuring planning consistency. This paper presents SagaLLM, a structured multi-agent framework that addresses four fundamental limitations in current LLM approaches: inadequate self-validation, context narrowing, lacking transaction properties, and insufficient inter-agent coordination. By implementing specialized context management agents and validation protocols, SagaLLM preserves critical constraints and state information throughout complex planning processes, enabling robust and consistent decision-making even during disruptions. We evaluate our approach using selected problems from the REALM benchmark, focusing on sequential and reactive planning scenarios that challenge both context retention and adaptive reasoning. Our experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs, Claude 3.7, DeepSeek R1, GPT-4o, and GPT-o1, demonstrate that while these models exhibit impressive reasoning capabilities, they struggle with maintaining global constraint awareness during complex planning tasks, particularly when adapting to unexpected changes. In contrast, the distributed cognitive architecture of SagaLLM shows significant improvements in planning consistency, constraint enforcement, and adaptation to disruptions in various scenarios.

The rapid advancement of conversational agents, particularly chatbots powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), poses a significant risk of social engineering (SE) attacks on social media platforms. SE detection in multi-turn, chat-based interactions is considerably more complex than single-instance detection due to the dynamic nature of these conversations. A critical factor in mitigating this threat is understanding the mechanisms through which SE attacks operate, specifically how attackers exploit vulnerabilities and how victims' personality traits contribute to their susceptibility. In this work, we propose an LLM-agentic framework, SE-VSim, to simulate SE attack mechanisms by generating multi-turn conversations. We model victim agents with varying personality traits to assess how psychological profiles influence susceptibility to manipulation. Using a dataset of over 1000 simulated conversations, we examine attack scenarios in which adversaries, posing as recruiters, funding agencies, and journalists, attempt to extract sensitive information. Based on this analysis, we present a proof of concept, SE-OmniGuard, to offer personalized protection to users by leveraging prior knowledge of the victims personality, evaluating attack strategies, and monitoring information exchanges in conversations to identify potential SE attempts.

Although formal methods are capable of producing reliable software, they have seen minimal adoption in everyday programming. Automatic code generation using large language models is becoming increasingly widespread, but it rarely considers producing strong correctness guarantees. In this study, we explore the ability of LLMs to produce verified code in three verification languages (Dafny, Nagini, and Verus). To do so, we use manually curated datasets derived from the state-of-the-art Python benchmark, HumanEval. We also assess what types of information are sufficient to achieve good-quality results.

Log anomaly detection refers to the task that distinguishes the anomalous log messages from normal log messages. Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) are becoming popular for log anomaly detection because of their superb ability to understand complex and long language patterns. In this paper, we propose LogLLaMA, a novel framework that leverages LLaMA2. LogLLaMA is first finetuned on normal log messages from three large-scale datasets to learn their patterns. After finetuning, the model is capable of generating successive log messages given previous log messages. Our generative model is further trained to identify anomalous log messages using reinforcement learning (RL). The experimental results show that LogLLaMA outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for anomaly detection on BGL, Thunderbird, and HDFS datasets.

LLMs are widely used in software development. However, the code generated by LLMs often contains vulnerabilities. Several secure code generation methods have been proposed to address this issue, but their current evaluation schemes leave several concerns unaddressed. Specifically, most existing studies evaluate security and functional correctness separately, using different datasets. That is, they assess vulnerabilities using security-related code datasets while validating functionality with general code datasets. In addition, prior research primarily relies on a single static analyzer, CodeQL, to detect vulnerabilities in generated code, which limits the scope of security evaluation. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study to systematically assess the improvements introduced by four state-of-the-art secure code generation techniques. Specifically, we apply both security inspection and functionality validation to the same generated code and evaluate these two aspects together. We also employ three popular static analyzers and two LLMs to identify potential vulnerabilities in the generated code. Our study reveals that existing techniques often compromise the functionality of generated code to enhance security. Their overall performance remains limited when evaluating security and functionality together. In fact, many techniques even degrade the performance of the base LLM. Our further inspection reveals that these techniques often either remove vulnerable lines of code entirely or generate ``garbage code'' that is unrelated to the intended task. Moreover, the commonly used static analyzer CodeQL fails to detect several vulnerabilities, further obscuring the actual security improvements achieved by existing techniques. Our study serves as a guideline for a more rigorous and comprehensive evaluation of secure code generation performance in future work.

Linear RNNs with gating recently demonstrated competitive performance compared to Transformers in language modeling. Although their linear compute scaling in sequence length offers theoretical runtime advantages over Transformers, realizing these benefits in practice requires optimized custom kernels, as Transformers rely on the highly efficient Flash Attention kernels. Leveraging the chunkwise-parallel formulation of linear RNNs, Flash Linear Attention (FLA) shows that linear RNN kernels are faster than Flash Attention, by parallelizing over chunks of the input sequence. However, since the chunk size of FLA is limited, many intermediate states must be materialized in GPU memory. This leads to low arithmetic intensity and causes high memory consumption and IO cost, especially for long-context pre-training. In this work, we present Tiled Flash Linear Attention (TFLA), a novel kernel algorithm for linear RNNs, that enables arbitrary large chunk sizes by introducing an additional level of sequence parallelization within each chunk. First, we apply TFLA to the xLSTM with matrix memory, the mLSTM. Second, we propose an mLSTM variant with sigmoid input gate and reduced computation for even faster kernel runtimes at equal language modeling performance. In our speed benchmarks, we show that our new mLSTM kernels based on TFLA outperform highly optimized Flash Attention, Linear Attention and Mamba kernels, setting a new state of the art for efficient long-context sequence modeling primitives.