Technology
AgentDAM: Privacy Leakage Evaluation for Autonomous Web Agents
Autonomous AI agents that can follow instructions and perform complex multi-step tasks have tremendous potential to boost human productivity. However, to perform many of these tasks, the agents need access to personal information from their users, raising the question of whether they are capable of using it appropriately.
WMCopier: Forging Invisible Watermarks on Arbitrary Images
Invisible Image Watermarking is crucial for ensuring content provenance and accountability in generative AI. While Gen-AI providers are increasingly integrating invisible watermarking systems, the robustness of these schemes against forgery attacks remains poorly characterized. This is critical, as forging traceable watermarks onto illicit content leads to false attribution, potentially harming the reputation and legal standing of Gen-AI service providers who are not responsible for the content. In this work, we propose WMCopier, an effective watermark forgery attack that operates without requiring any prior knowledge of or access to the target watermarking algorithm.
Task-Specific Data Selection for Instruction Tuning via Monosemantic Neuronal Activations
Instruction tuning improves the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow diverse human instructions, but achieving strong performance on specific target tasks remains challenging. A critical bottleneck is selecting the most relevant data to maximize task-specific performance. Existing data selection approaches include unstable influence-based methods and more stable distribution alignment methods, the latter of which critically rely on the underlying sample representation. In practice, most distribution alignment methods, from shallow features (e.g., BM25) to neural embeddings (e.g., BGE, LLM2Vec), may fail to capture how the model internally processes samples. To bridge this gap, we adopt a model-centric strategy in which each sample is represented by its neuronal activation pattern in the model, directly reflecting internal computation. However, directly using raw neuron activations leads to spurious similarity between unrelated samples due to neuron polysemanticity, where a single neuron may respond to multiple, unrelated concepts. To address this, we employ sparse autoencoders to disentangle polysemantic activations into sparse, monosemantic representations, and introduce a dedicated similarity metric for this space to better identify task-relevant data. Comprehensive experiments across multiple instruction datasets, models, tasks, and selection ratios show that our approach consistently outperforms existing data selection baselines in both stability and task-specific performance.
Walking the Schrödinger Bridge: A Direct Trajectory for Text-to-3D Generation
Recent advancements in optimization-based text-to-3D generation heavily rely on distilling knowledge from pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models using techniques like Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), which often introduce artifacts such as over-saturation and over-smoothing into the generated 3D assets. In this paper, we address this essential problem by formulating the generation process as learning an optimal, direct transport trajectory between the distribution of the current rendering and the desired target distribution, thereby enabling high-quality generation with smaller Classifier-free Guidance (CFG) values. At first, we theoretically establish SDS as a simplified instance of the Schrödinger Bridge framework. We prove that SDS employs the reverse process of an Schrödinger Bridge, which, under specific conditions (e.g., a Gaussian noise as one end), collapses to SDS's score function of the pre-trained diffusion model. Based upon this, we introduce Trajectory-Centric Distillation (TraCe), a novel text-to-3D generation framework, which reformulates the mathematically trackable framework of Schrödinger Bridge to explicitly construct a diffusion bridge from the current rendering to its text-conditioned, denoised target, and trains a LoRA-adapted model on this trajectory's score dynamics for robust 3D optimization. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that TraCe consistently achieves superior quality and fidelity to state-of-the-art techniques. Our code will be released to the community.
MokA: Multimodal Low-Rank Adaptation for MLLMs
In this paper, we reveal that most current efficient multimodal fine-tuning methods are hindered by a key limitation: they are directly borrowed from LLMs, often neglecting the intrinsic differences of multimodal scenarios and even affecting the full utilization of all modalities. Inspired by our empirical observation, we argue that unimodal adaptation and cross-modal adaptation are two essential parts for the effective fine-tuning of MLLMs. From this perspective, we propose Multimodal Low-rank Adaptation (MokA), a multimodal-aware efficient fine-tuning strategy that takes multimodal characteristics into consideration.
Video-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Video LVLMs
The increasing deployment of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) raises safety concerns under potential malicious inputs. However, existing multimodal safety evaluations primarily focus on model vulnerabilities exposed by static image inputs, ignoring the temporal dynamics of video that may induce distinct safety risks. To bridge this gap, we introduce Video-SafetyBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the safety of LVLMs under video-text attacks. It comprises 2,264 video-text pairs spanning 48 fine-grained unsafe categories, each pairing a synthesized video with either a harmful query, which contains explicit malice, or a benign query, which appears harmless but triggers harmful behavior when interpreted alongside the video. To generate semantically accurate videos for safety evaluation, we design a controllable pipeline that decomposes video semantics into subject images (what is shown) and motion text (how it moves), which jointly guide the synthesis of query-relevant videos. To effectively evaluate uncertain or borderline harmful outputs, we propose RJScore, a novel LLM-based metric that incorporates the confidence of judge models and human-aligned decision threshold calibration. Extensive experiments show that benign-query video composition achieves average attack success rates of 67.2%, revealing consistent vulnerabilities to video-induced attacks. We believe Video-SafetyBench will catalyze future research into video-based safety evaluation and defense strategies.
World Models as Reference Trajectories for Rapid Motor Adaptation
Learned control policies often fail when deployed in real-world environments with changing dynamics. When system dynamics shift unexpectedly, performance degrades until models are retrained on new data. We introduce Reflexive World Models (RWM), a dual control framework that uses world model predictions as implicit reference trajectories for rapid adaptation.
Normalized Attention Guidance: Universal Negative Guidance for Diffusion Models
Negative guidance -- explicitly suppressing unwanted attributes -- remains a fundamental challenge in diffusion models, particularly in few-step sampling regimes. While Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) works well in standard settings, it fails under aggressive sampling step compression due to divergent predictions between positive and negative branches. We present Normalized Attention Guidance (NAG), an efficient, training-free mechanism that applies extrapolation in attention space with L1-based normalization and refinement. NAG restores effective negative guidance where CFG collapses while maintaining fidelity.
URLs Help, Topics Guide: Understanding Metadata Utility in LLM Training
Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly pretrained on vast corpora of text without utilizing contextual metadata such as source, quality, or topic, leading to a context-free learning paradigm. While recent studies suggest that adding metadata like URL information as context (i.e., auxiliary inputs not used in the loss calculation) can improve training efficiency and downstream performance, they offer limited understanding of which types of metadata are truly effective and under what conditions. In this work, we conduct a systematic evaluation and find that not all metadata types contribute equally.
AdvEDM: Fine-grained Adversarial Attack against VLM-based Embodied Agents
Vision-Language Models (VLMs), with their strong reasoning and planning capabilities, are widely used in embodied decision-making (EDM) tasks in embodied agents, such as autonomous driving and robotic manipulation. Recent research has increasingly explored adversarial attacks on VLMs to reveal their vulnerabilities. However, these attacks either rely on overly strong assumptions, requiring full knowledge of the victim VLM, which is impractical for attacking VLM-based agents, or exhibit limited effectiveness. The latter stems from disrupting most semantic information in the image, which leads to a misalignment between the perception and the task context defined by system prompts. This inconsistency interrupts the VLM's reasoning process, resulting in invalid outputs that fail to affect interactions in the physical world. To this end, we propose a fine-grained adversarial attack framework, AdvEDM, which modifies the VLM's perception of only a few key objects while preserving the semantics of the remaining regions. This attack effectively reduces conflicts with the task context, making VLMs output valid but incorrect decisions and affecting the actions of agents, thus posing a more substantial safety threat in the physical world. We design two variants of based on this framework, AdvEDM-R and AdvEDM-A, which respectively remove the semantics of a specific object from the image and add the semantics of a new object into the image. The experimental results in both general scenarios and EDM tasks demonstrate fine-grained control and excellent attack performance.