We introduce squared families, which are families of probability densities obtained by squaring a linear transformation of a statistic. Squared families are singular, however their singularity can easily be handled so that they form regular models. After handling the singularity, squared families possess many convenient properties. Their Fisher information is a conformal transformation of the Hessian metric induced from a Bregman generator. The Bregman generator is the normalising constant, and yields a statistical divergence on the family. The normalising constant admits a helpful parameter-integral factorisation, meaning that only one parameter-independent integral needs to be computed for all normalising constants in the family, unlike in exponential families. Finally, the squared family kernel is the only integral that needs to be computed for the Fisher information, statistical divergence and normalising constant. We then describe how squared families are special in the broader class of $g$-families, which are obtained by applying a sufficiently regular function $g$ to a linear transformation of a statistic. After removing special singularities, positively homogeneous families and exponential families are the only $g$-families for which the Fisher information is a conformal transformation of the Hessian metric, where the generator depends on the parameter only through the normalising constant. Even-order monomial families also admit parameter-integral factorisations, unlike exponential families. We study parameter estimation and density estimation in squared families, in the well-specified and misspecified settings. We use a universal approximation property to show that squared families can learn sufficiently well-behaved target densities at a rate of $\mathcal{O}(N^{-1/2})+C n^{-1/4}$, where $N$ is the number of datapoints, $n$ is the number of parameters, and $C$ is some constant.

The continuous development of foundational models for video generation is evolving into various applications, with subject-consistent video generation still in the exploratory stage. We refer to this as Subject-to-Video, which extracts subject elements from reference images and generates subject-consistent video through textual instructions. We believe that the essence of subject-to-video lies in balancing the dual-modal prompts of text and image, thereby deeply and simultaneously aligning both text and visual content. To this end, we propose Phantom, a unified video generation framework for both single and multi-subject references. Building on existing text-to-video and image-to-video architectures, we redesign the joint text-image injection model and drive it to learn cross-modal alignment via text-image-video triplet data. In particular, we emphasize subject consistency in human generation, covering existing ID-preserving video generation while offering enhanced advantages. The project homepage is here https://phantom-video.github.io/Phantom/.

Recommender systems (RS) serve as a fundamental tool for navigating the vast expanse of online information, with deep learning advancements playing an increasingly important role in improving ranking accuracy. Among these, graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at extracting higher-order structural information, while large language models (LLMs) are designed to process and comprehend natural language, making both approaches highly effective and widely adopted. Recent research has focused on graph foundation models (GFMs), which integrate the strengths of GNNs and LLMs to model complex RS problems more efficiently by leveraging the graph-based structure of user-item relationships alongside textual understanding. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of GFM-based RS technologies by introducing a clear taxonomy of current approaches, diving into methodological details, and highlighting key challenges and future directions. By synthesizing recent advancements, we aim to offer valuable insights into the evolving landscape of GFM-based recommender systems.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential for tasks such as question answering and content generation. However, their increasing impact on public opinion and information dissemination has made them a critical focus for security research due to inherent vulnerabilities. Previous studies have predominantly addressed attacks targeting factual or single-query manipulations. In this paper, we address a more practical scenario: topic-oriented adversarial opinion manipulation attacks on RAG models, where LLMs are required to reason and synthesize multiple perspectives, rendering them particularly susceptible to systematic knowledge poisoning. Specifically, we propose Topic-FlipRAG, a two-stage manipulation attack pipeline that strategically crafts adversarial perturbations to influence opinions across related queries. This approach combines traditional adversarial ranking attack techniques and leverages the extensive internal relevant knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs to execute semantic-level perturbations. Experiments show that the proposed attacks effectively shift the opinion of the model's outputs on specific topics, significantly impacting user information perception. Current mitigation methods cannot effectively defend against such attacks, highlighting the necessity for enhanced safeguards for RAG systems, and offering crucial insights for LLM security research.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such as GPT4o, have shown strong capabilities in visual reasoning and explanation generation. However, despite these strengths, they face significant challenges in the increasingly critical task of Image Forgery Detection and Localization (IFDL). Moreover, existing IFDL methods are typically limited to the learning of low-level semantic-agnostic clues and merely provide a single outcome judgment. To tackle these issues, we propose ForgeryGPT, a novel framework that advances the IFDL task by capturing high-order forensics knowledge correlations of forged images from diverse linguistic feature spaces, while enabling explainable generation and interactive dialogue through a newly customized Large Language Model (LLM) architecture. Specifically, ForgeryGPT enhances traditional LLMs by integrating the Mask-Aware Forgery Extractor, which enables the excavating of precise forgery mask information from input images and facilitating pixel-level understanding of tampering artifacts. The Mask-Aware Forgery Extractor consists of a Forgery Localization Expert (FL-Expert) and a Mask Encoder, where the FL-Expert is augmented with an Object-agnostic Forgery Prompt and a Vocabulary-enhanced Vision Encoder, allowing for effectively capturing of multi-scale fine-grained forgery details. To enhance its performance, we implement a three-stage training strategy, supported by our designed Mask-Text Alignment and IFDL Task-Specific Instruction Tuning datasets, which align vision-language modalities and improve forgery detection and instruction-following capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods optimize large language models (LLMs) by modifying or introducing a small number of parameters to enhance alignment with downstream tasks. However, they can result in catastrophic forgetting, where LLMs prioritize new knowledge at the expense of comprehensive world knowledge. A promising approach to mitigate this issue is to recall prior memories based on the original knowledge. To this end, we propose a model-agnostic PEFT framework, IMSM, which Interweaves Memories of a Siamese Large Language Model. Specifically, our siamese LLM is equipped with an existing PEFT method. Given an incoming query, it generates two distinct memories based on the pre-trained and fine-tuned parameters. IMSM then incorporates an interweaving mechanism that regulates the contributions of both original and enhanced memories when generating the next token. This framework is theoretically applicable to all open-source LLMs and existing PEFT methods. We conduct extensive experiments across various benchmark datasets, evaluating the performance of popular open-source LLMs using the proposed IMSM, in comparison to both classical and leading PEFT methods. Our findings indicate that IMSM maintains comparable time and space efficiency to backbone PEFT methods while significantly improving performance and effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

Video generation technologies are developing rapidly and have broad potential applications. Among these technologies, camera control is crucial for generating professional-quality videos that accurately meet user expectations. However, existing camera control methods still suffer from several limitations, including control precision and the neglect of the control for subject motion dynamics. In this work, we propose I2VControl-Camera, a novel camera control method that significantly enhances controllability while providing adjustability over the strength of subject motion. To improve control precision, we employ point trajectory in the camera coordinate system instead of only extrinsic matrix information as our control signal. To accurately control and adjust the strength of subject motion, we explicitly model the higher-order components of the video trajectory expansion, not merely the linear terms, and design an operator that effectively represents the motion strength. We use an adapter architecture that is independent of the base model structure. Experiments on static and dynamic scenes show that our framework outperformances previous methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. The project page is: https://wanquanf.github.io/I2VControlCamera .

-- T o track tumors during surgery, information from preoperative CT scans is used to determine their position. However, as the surgeon operates, the tumor may be deformed which presents a major hurdle for accurately resecting the tumor, and can lead to surgical inaccuracy, increased operation time, and excessive margins. This issue is particularly pronounced in robot-assisted partial nephrectomy (RAPN), where the kidney undergoes significant deformations during operation. T oward addressing this, we introduce a occupancy network-based method for the localization of tumors within kidney phantoms undergoing deformations at interactive speeds. We validate our method by introducing a 3D hydrogel kidney phantom embedded with exophytic and endophytic renal tumors. It closely mimics real tissue mechanics to simulate kidney deformation during in vivo surgery, providing excellent contrast and clear delineation of tumor margins to enable automatic threshold-based segmentation. Our findings indicate that the proposed method can localize tumors in moderately deforming kidneys with a margin of 6mm to 10mm, while providing essential volumetric 3D information at over 60Hz. This capability directly enables downstream tasks such as robotic resection. Kidney cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer in the US, with over 65,000 new patients being diagnosed every year, leading to over 15,000 deaths [1]. The standard treatment for localized small renal masses has shifted from radical nephrectomy (complete kidney removal) toward the more minimally invasive approach of partial nephrectomy (removal of the tumor, retaining partial kidney function). One of the main challenges during tumor removal is ensuring the resection of adequate tumor margins. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication.

Instruction tuning is a supervised fine-tuning approach that significantly improves the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow human instructions. We propose SelfCodeAlign, the first fully transparent and permissive pipeline for self-aligning code LLMs without extensive human annotations or distillation. SelfCodeAlign employs the same base model for inference throughout the data generation process. It first extracts diverse coding concepts from high-quality seed snippets to generate new tasks. It then samples multiple responses per task, pairs each with test cases, and validates them in a sandbox environment. Finally, passing examples are selected for instruction tuning. In our primary experiments, we use SelfCodeAlign with CodeQwen1.5-7B to generate a dataset of 74k instruction-response pairs. Finetuning on this dataset leads to a model that achieves a 67.1 pass@1 on HumanEval+, surpassing CodeLlama-70B-Instruct despite being ten times smaller. Across all benchmarks, this finetuned model consistently outperforms the original version trained with OctoPack, the previous state-of-the-art method for instruction tuning without human annotations or distillation. Additionally, we show that SelfCodeAlign is effective across LLMs of various sizes, from 3B to 33B, and that the base models can benefit more from alignment with their own data distribution. We further validate each component's effectiveness in our pipeline, showing that SelfCodeAlign outperforms both direct distillation from GPT-4o and leading GPT-3.5-based distillation methods, such as OSS-Instruct and Evol-Instruct. SelfCodeAlign has also led to the creation of StarCoder2-Instruct, the first fully transparent, permissively licensed, and self-aligned code LLM that achieves state-of-the-art coding performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable coding capabilities. However, assessing code generation based on well-formed properties and aligning it with developer preferences remains challenging. In this paper, we explore two key questions under the new challenge of code preference learning: (i) How do we train models to predict meaningful preferences for code? and (ii) How do human and LLM preferences align with verifiable code properties and developer code tastes? Furthermore, we discover the prohibitive costs and limitations of human-based code preference: despite spending 23.4 person-minutes on each task, 15.1 40.3% of tasks remain unsolved. Compared to model-based preference, human preference tends to be more accurate under the objective of code correctness, while being sub-optimal for non-functional objectives. Large Language Models (LLMs) for code (Chen et al., 2021; GitHub, 2023; Amazon Web Services, 2023) have become instrumental in modern software development. Code LLMs assist developers in various scenarios, from suggesting code completions and generating functional code based on user instructions to proposing complex code changes to resolve bug reports and feature requests. Instruction-tuned LLMs (Luo et al., 2024; Wei et al., 2024) are increasingly adept at generating functional code based on natural language instructions. However, evaluating the quality of LLM-generated code remains challenging, particularly regarding code correctness, efficiency, security, adherence to best practices, and alignment with developer preferences. Effectively and efficiently assessing LLM-generated code against these properties is crucial for both evaluation (Liu et al., 2023b) and preference optimization for code LLMs (Weyssow et al., 2024). Nevertheless, the subject of learning code preferences has been largely under-explored, motivating us to study code preferences systematically and train code preference models with new data and modeling methods. Following the established format in LLM-as-a-judge (Chiang et al., 2024), we define the code preference task as follows: Given a user query, a pair of two candidate code responses, and optionally a preference criterion, code preference is demonstrated by choosing one response over the other. Work done during a research internship at AWS AI Labs. Code execution: Code preference in another way can be confidently determined by execution statuses (Liu et al., 2023a). However, applying code execution to arbitrary programs poses challenges due to (i) setup complexity, (ii) code incompleteness, and (iii) execution overhead.