Unified multimodal large language models (U-MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in end-to-end visual understanding and generation tasks. However, compared to generation-only systems (e.g., Stable Diffusion), the unified architecture of U-MLLMs introduces new risks of propagating demographic stereotypes. In this paper, we benchmark several state-of-the-art U-MLLMs and show that they exhibit significant gender and race biases in the generated outputs. To diagnose the source of these biases, we propose a locate-then-fix framework: we first audit the vision and language components -- using techniques such as linear probing and controlled generation -- and find that the language model appears to be a primary origin of the observed generative bias. Moreover, we observe a ``partial alignment'' phenomenon, where the U-MLLMs exhibit less bias in understanding tasks yet produce substantially biased images. To address this, we introduce a novel \emph{balanced preference loss} that enforces uniform generation probabilities across demographics by leveraging a synthetically balanced dataset. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly reduces demographic bias while preserving semantic fidelity and image quality. Our findings underscore the need for targeted debiasing strategies in unified multimodal systems and introduce a practical approach to mitigate biases.

Evolutionary multi-view classification (EMVC) methods have gained wide recognition due to their adaptive mechanisms. Fitness evaluation (FE), which aims to calculate the classification performance of each individual in the population and provide reliable performance ranking for subsequent operations, is a core step in such methods. Its accuracy directly determines the correctness of the evolutionary direction. That is, when FE fails to correctly reflect the superiority-inferiority relationship among individuals, it will lead to confusion in individual performance ranking, which in turn misleads the evolutionary direction and results in trapping into local optima. This paper is the first to identify the aforementioned issue in the field of EMVC and call it as fitness evaluation bias (FEB). FEB may be caused by a variety of factors, and this paper approaches the issue from the perspective of view information content: existing methods generally adopt joint training strategies, which restrict the exploration of key information in views with low information content. This makes it difficult for multi-view model (MVM) to achieve optimal performance during convergence, which in turn leads to FE failing to accurately reflect individual performance rankings and ultimately triggering FEB. To address this issue, we propose an evolutionary multi-view classification via eliminating individual fitness bias (EFB-EMVC) method, which alleviates the FEB issue by introducing evolutionary navigators for each MVM, thereby providing more accurate individual ranking. Experimental results fully verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in alleviating the FEB problem, and the EMVC method equipped with this strategy exhibits more superior performance compared with the original EMVC method.

Out-of-town trip recommendation aims to generate a sequence of Points of Interest (POIs) for users traveling from their hometowns to previously unvisited regions based on personalized itineraries, e.g., origin, destination, and trip duration. Modeling the complex user preferences--which often exhibit a two-fold nature of static and dynamic interests--is critical for effective recommendations. However, the sparsity of out-of-town check-in data presents significant challenges in capturing such user preferences.

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation assigns every pixel a label drawn from an open-ended, text-defined space. Vision-language models such as CLIP excel at zero-shot recognition, yet their image-level pre-training hinders dense prediction. Current approaches either fine-tune CLIP--at high computational cost--or adopt training-free attention refinements that favor local smoothness while overlooking global semantics. In this paper, we present OPMapper, a lightweight, plug-and-play module that injects both local compactness and global connectivity into attention maps of CLIP. It combines Context-aware Attention Injection, which embeds spatial and semantic correlations, and Semantic Attention Alignment, which iteratively aligns the enriched weights with textual prompts. By jointly modeling token dependencies and leveraging textual guidance, OPMapper enhances visual understanding. OPMapper is highly flexible and can be seamlessly integrated into both training-based and training-free paradigms with minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness, yielding significant improvements across 8 open-vocabulary segmentation benchmarks.

This position paper argues that setting the privacy budget in differential privacy should not be viewed as an important limitation of differential privacy compared to alternative methods for privacy-preserving machine learning. The so-called problem of interpreting the privacy budget is often presented as a major hindrance to the wider adoption of differential privacy in real-world deployments and is sometimes used to promote alternative mitigation techniques for data protection. We believe this misleads decision-makers into choosing unsafe methods. We argue that the difficulty in interpreting privacy budgets does not stem from the definition of differential privacy itself, but from the intrinsic difficulty of estimating privacy risks in context, a challenge that any rigorous method for privacy risk assessment face. Moreover, we claim that any sound method for estimating privacy risks should, given the current state of research, be expressible within the differential privacy framework or justify why it cannot.

Effective data selection is critical for efficient training of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper introduces Influence Distillation, a novel, mathematically-justified framework for data selection that employs second-order information to optimally weight training samples. By distilling each sample's influence on a target distribution, our method assigns model-specific weights that are used to select training data for LLM fine-tuning, guiding it toward strong performance on the target domain. We derive these optimal weights for both Gradient Descent and Adam optimizers. To ensure scalability and reduce computational cost, we propose a $\textit{landmark-based approximation}$: influence is precisely computed for a small subset of landmark samples and then efficiently propagated to all other samples to determine their weights.

Recently, pre-trained state space models have shown great potential for video classification, which sequentially compresses visual tokens in videos with linear complexity, thereby improving the processing efficiency of video data while maintaining high performance. To apply powerful pre-trained models to downstream tasks, prompt learning is proposed to achieve efficient downstream task adaptation with only a small number of fine-tuned parameters. However, the sequentially compressed visual prompt tokens fail to capture the spatial and temporal contextual information in the video, thus limiting the effective propagation of spatial information within a video frame and temporal information between frames in the state compression model and the extraction of discriminative information. To tackle the above issue, we proposed a State Space Prompting (SSP) method for video understanding, which combines intra-frame and inter-frame prompts to aggregate and propagate key spatiotemporal information in the video. Specifically, an Intra-Frame Gathering (IFG) module is designed to aggregate spatial key information within each frame. Besides, an Inter-Frame Spreading (IFS) module is designed to spread discriminative spatio-temporal information across different frames.

Designing incentives for a multi-agent system to induce a desirable Nash equilibrium is both a crucial and challenging problem appearing in many decision-making domains, especially for a large number of agents $N$. Under the exchangeability assumption, we formalize this incentive design (ID) problem as a parameterized mean-field game (PMFG), aiming to reduce complexity via an infinite-population limit. We first show that when dynamics and rewards are Lipschitz, the finite-$N$ ID objective is approximated by the PMFG at rate $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}})$. Moreover, beyond the Lipschitz-continuous setting, we prove the same $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}})$ decay for the important special case of sequential auctions, despite discontinuities in dynamics, through a tailored auction-specific analysis. Built on our novel approximation results, we further introduce our Adjoint Mean-Field Incentive Design (AMID) algorithm, which uses explicit differentiation of iterated equilibrium operators to compute gradients efficiently. By uniting approximation bounds with optimization guarantees, AMID delivers a powerful, scalable algorithmic tool for many-agent (large $N$) ID. Across diverse auction settings, the proposed AMID method substantially increases revenue over first-price formats and outperforms existing benchmark methods.

Spatial reasoning is a key capability in the field of artificial intelligence, especially crucial in areas such as robotics, computer vision, and natural language understanding. However, evaluating the ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in complex spatial reasoning still faces challenges, particularly in scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning and precise mathematical constraints. This paper introduces ORIGAMISPACE, a new dataset and benchmark designed to evaluate the multi-step spatial reasoning ability and the capacity to handle mathematical constraints of MLLMs through origami tasks. The dataset contains 350 data instances, each comprising a strictly formatted crease pattern (CP diagram), the Compiled Flat Pattern, the complete Folding Process, and the final Folded Shape Image. We propose four evaluation tasks: Pattern Prediction, Multi-step Spatial Reasoning, Spatial Relationship Prediction, and End-to-End CP Code Generation. For the CP code generation task, we design an interactive environment and explore the possibility of using reinforcement learning methods to train MLLMs. Through experiments on existing MLLMs, we initially reveal the strengths and weaknesses of these models in handling complex spatial reasoning tasks.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive video content understanding capabilities but struggle with fine-grained motion comprehension. To comprehensively assess the motion understanding ability of existing MLLMs, we introduce FAVOR-Bench, which comprises 1,776 videos from both ego-centric and third-person perspectives and enables assessment through both close-ended and open-ended tasks.