Yang, Yu
AutoRedTeamer: Autonomous Red Teaming with Lifelong Attack Integration
Zhou, Andy, Wu, Kevin, Pinto, Francesco, Chen, Zhaorun, Zeng, Yi, Yang, Yu, Yang, Shuang, Koyejo, Sanmi, Zou, James, Li, Bo
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, security and safety evaluation are crucial. While current red teaming approaches have made strides in assessing LLM vulnerabilities, they often rely heavily on human input and lack comprehensive coverage of emerging attack vectors. This paper introduces AutoRedTeamer, a novel framework for fully automated, end-to-end red teaming against LLMs. AutoRedTeamer combines a multi-agent architecture with a memory-guided attack selection mechanism to enable continuous discovery and integration of new attack vectors. The dual-agent framework consists of a red teaming agent that can operate from high-level risk categories alone to generate and execute test cases and a strategy proposer agent that autonomously discovers and implements new attacks by analyzing recent research. This modular design allows AutoRedTeamer to adapt to emerging threats while maintaining strong performance on existing attack vectors. We demonstrate AutoRedTeamer's effectiveness across diverse evaluation settings, achieving 20% higher attack success rates on HarmBench against Llama-3.1-70B while reducing computational costs by 46% compared to existing approaches. AutoRedTeamer also matches the diversity of human-curated benchmarks in generating test cases, providing a comprehensive, scalable, and continuously evolving framework for evaluating the security of AI systems.
DuoGuard: A Two-Player RL-Driven Framework for Multilingual LLM Guardrails
Deng, Yihe, Yang, Yu, Zhang, Junkai, Wang, Wei, Li, Bo
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has increased the need for guardrail models to ensure responsible use, particularly in detecting unsafe and illegal content. While substantial safety data exist in English, multilingual guardrail modeling remains underexplored due to the scarcity of open-source safety data in other languages. To address this gap, we propose a novel two-player Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, where a generator and a guardrail model co-evolve adversarially to produce high-quality synthetic data for multilingual guardrail training. We theoretically formalize this interaction as a two-player game, proving convergence to a Nash equilibrium. Empirical evaluations show that our model \ours outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving nearly 10% improvement over LlamaGuard3 (8B) on English benchmarks while being 4.5x faster at inference with a significantly smaller model (0.5B). We achieve substantial advancements in multilingual safety tasks, particularly in addressing the imbalance for lower-resource languages in a collected real dataset. Ablation studies emphasize the critical role of synthetic data generation in bridging the imbalance in open-source data between English and other languages. These findings establish a scalable and efficient approach to synthetic data generation, paving the way for improved multilingual guardrail models to enhance LLM safety. Code, model, and data will be open-sourced at https://github.com/yihedeng9/DuoGuard.
Near-Optimal Online Learning for Multi-Agent Submodular Coordination: Tight Approximation and Communication Efficiency
Zhang, Qixin, Wan, Zongqi, Yang, Yu, Shen, Li, Tao, Dacheng
Coordinating multiple agents to collaboratively maximize submodular functions in unpredictable environments is a critical task with numerous applications in machine learning, robot planning and control. The existing approaches, such as the OSG algorithm, are often hindered by their poor approximation guarantees and the rigid requirement for a fully connected communication graph. To address these challenges, we firstly present a $\textbf{MA-OSMA}$ algorithm, which employs the multi-linear extension to transfer the discrete submodular maximization problem into a continuous optimization, thereby allowing us to reduce the strict dependence on a complete graph through consensus techniques. Moreover, $\textbf{MA-OSMA}$ leverages a novel surrogate gradient to avoid sub-optimal stationary points. To eliminate the computationally intensive projection operations in $\textbf{MA-OSMA}$, we also introduce a projection-free $\textbf{MA-OSEA}$ algorithm, which effectively utilizes the KL divergence by mixing a uniform distribution. Theoretically, we confirm that both algorithms achieve a regret bound of $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{\frac{C_{T}T}{1-\beta}})$ against a $(\frac{1-e^{-c}}{c})$-approximation to the best comparator in hindsight, where $C_{T}$ is the deviation of maximizer sequence, $\beta$ is the spectral gap of the network and $c$ is the joint curvature of submodular objectives. This result significantly improves the $(\frac{1}{1+c})$-approximation provided by the state-of-the-art OSG algorithm. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms through simulation-based multi-target tracking.
Data-Efficient Model for Psychological Resilience Prediction based on Neurological Data
Zhang, Zhi, Liu, Yan, Gao, Mengxia, Yang, Yu, Cao, Jiannong, Hou, Wai Kai, Li, Shirley, Yau, Sonata, Wing, Yun Kwok, Lee, Tatia M. C.
Psychological resilience, defined as the ability to rebound from adversity, is crucial for mental health. Compared with traditional resilience assessments through self-reported questionnaires, resilience assessments based on neurological data offer more objective results with biological markers, hence significantly enhancing credibility. This paper proposes a novel data-efficient model to address the scarcity of neurological data. We employ Neuro Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks as the structure of the prediction model. In the training stage, a new trait-informed multimodal representation algorithm with a smart chunk technique is proposed to learn the shared latent space with limited data. In the test stage, a new noise-informed inference algorithm is proposed to address the low signal-to-noise ratio of the neurological data. The proposed model not only shows impressive performance on both public datasets and self-constructed datasets but also provides some valuable psychological hypotheses for future research.
Pre-train and Fine-tune: Recommenders as Large Models
Jiang, Zhenhao, Chen, Chenghao, Feng, Hao, Yang, Yu, Liu, Jin, Zhang, Jie, Jia, Jia, Hu, Ning
In reality, users have different interests in different periods, regions, scenes, etc. Such changes in interest are so drastic that they are difficult to be captured by recommenders. Existing multi-domain learning can alleviate this problem. However, the structure of the industrial recommendation system is complex, the amount of data is huge, and the training cost is extremely high, so it is difficult to modify the structure of the industrial recommender and re-train it. To fill this gap, we consider recommenders as large pre-trained models and fine-tune them. We first propose the theory of the information bottleneck for fine-tuning and present an explanation for the fine-tuning technique in recommenders. To tailor for recommendation, we design an information-aware adaptive kernel (IAK) technique to fine-tune the pre-trained recommender. Specifically, we define fine-tuning as two phases: knowledge compression and knowledge matching and let the training stage of IAK explicitly approximate these two phases. Our proposed approach designed from the essence of fine-tuning is well interpretable. Extensive online and offline experiments show the superiority of our proposed method. Besides, we also share unique and important lessons we learned when deploying the method in a large-scale online platform. We also present the potential issues of fine-tuning techniques in recommendation systems and the corresponding solutions. The recommender with IAK technique has been deployed on the homepage of a billion-scale online food platform for several months and has yielded considerable profits in our business.
Collaborative Imputation of Urban Time Series through Cross-city Meta-learning
Nie, Tong, Ma, Wei, Sun, Jian, Yang, Yu, Cao, Jiannong
Urban time series, such as mobility flows, energy consumption, and pollution records, encapsulate complex urban dynamics and structures. However, data collection in each city is impeded by technical challenges such as budget limitations and sensor failures, necessitating effective data imputation techniques that can enhance data quality and reliability. Existing imputation models, categorized into learning-based and analytics-based paradigms, grapple with the trade-off between capacity and generalizability. Collaborative learning to reconstruct data across multiple cities holds the promise of breaking this trade-off. Nevertheless, urban data's inherent irregularity and heterogeneity issues exacerbate challenges of knowledge sharing and collaboration across cities. To address these limitations, we propose a novel collaborative imputation paradigm leveraging meta-learned implicit neural representations (INRs). INRs offer a continuous mapping from domain coordinates to target values, integrating the strengths of both paradigms. By imposing embedding theory, we first employ continuous parameterization to handle irregularity and reconstruct the dynamical system. We then introduce a cross-city collaborative learning scheme through model-agnostic meta learning, incorporating hierarchical modulation and normalization techniques to accommodate multiscale representations and reduce variance in response to heterogeneity. Extensive experiments on a diverse urban dataset from 20 global cities demonstrate our model's superior imputation performance and generalizability, underscoring the effectiveness of collaborative imputation in resource-constrained settings.
Mixture of Knowledge Minigraph Agents for Literature Review Generation
Zhang, Zhi, Liu, Yan, Zhong, Sheng-hua, Chen, Gong, Yang, Yu, Cao, Jiannong
Literature reviews play a crucial role in scientific research for understanding the current state of research, identifying gaps, and guiding future studies on specific topics. However, the process of conducting a comprehensive literature review is yet time-consuming. This paper proposes a novel framework, collaborative knowledge minigraph agents (CKMAs), to automate scholarly literature reviews. A novel prompt-based algorithm, the knowledge minigraph construction agent (KMCA), is designed to identify relations between concepts from academic literature and automatically constructs knowledge minigraphs. By leveraging the capabilities of large language models on constructed knowledge minigraphs, the multiple path summarization agent (MPSA) efficiently organizes concepts and relations from different viewpoints to generate literature review paragraphs. We evaluate CKMAs on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method, further revealing promising applications of LLMs in scientific research.
FairTP: A Prolonged Fairness Framework for Traffic Prediction
Xia, Jiangnan, Yang, Yu, Shen, Jiaxing, Wang, Senzhang, Cao, Jiannong
Traffic prediction is pivotal in intelligent transportation systems. Existing works mainly focus on improving the overall accuracy, overlooking a crucial problem of whether prediction results will lead to biased decisions by transportation authorities. In practice, the uneven deployment of traffic sensors in different urban areas produces imbalanced data, making the traffic prediction model fail in some areas and leading to unfair regional decision-making that eventually severely affects equity and quality of residents' life. Additionally, existing fairness machine learning models fail to preserve fair traffic prediction for a prolonged time. Although they can achieve fairness at certain time points, such static fairness will be broken as the traffic conditions change. To fill this research gap, we investigate prolonged fair traffic prediction, introduce two novel fairness definitions tailored to dynamic traffic scenarios, and propose a prolonged fairness traffic prediction framework, namely FairTP . We argue that fairness in traffic scenarios changes dynamically over time and across areas. Each traffic sensor or city area has state that alternates between "sacrifice" and "benefit" based on its prediction accuracy (high accuracy indicates "benefit" state). Prolonged fairness is achieved when the overall states of sensors similar within a given period.Accordingly, we first define region-based static fairness and sensor-based dynamic fairness. Next, we designed a state identification module in FairTP to discriminate between states of "sacrifice" or "benefit" to enable prolonged fairness-aware traffic predictions. Lastly, a state-guided balanced sampling strategy is designed to select training examples to promote prediction fairness further, mitigating the performance disparities among regions with imbalanced traffic sensors. Extensive experiments in two real-world datasets show that FairTP significantly improves prediction fairness without causing much accuracy degradation. Introduction Traffic prediction is crucial to transportation planning, infrastructure management and optimizing resource allocation and service provision (Miao et al. 2022, 2024, 2025; Xia* These authors contributed equally. However, existing models generally only focus on prediction accuracy, but overlook the key social impacts of traffic forecasting.
WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learning
Qi, Zehan, Liu, Xiao, Iong, Iat Long, Lai, Hanyu, Sun, Xueqiao, Zhao, Wenyi, Yang, Yu, Yang, Xinyue, Sun, Jiadai, Yao, Shuntian, Zhang, Tianjie, Xu, Wei, Tang, Jie, Dong, Yuxiao
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential as autonomous agents, particularly in web-based tasks. However, existing LLM web agents heavily rely on expensive proprietary LLM APIs, while open LLMs lack the necessary decision-making capabilities. This paper introduces WebRL, a self-evolving online curriculum reinforcement learning framework designed to train high-performance web agents using open LLMs. WebRL addresses three key challenges in building LLM web agents, including the scarcity of training tasks, sparse feedback signals, and policy distribution drift in online learning. Specifically, WebRL incorporates 1) a self-evolving curriculum that generates new tasks from unsuccessful attempts, 2) a robust outcome-supervised reward model (ORM), and 3) adaptive reinforcement learning strategies to ensure consistent improvements. We apply WebRL to transform open Llama-3.1 and GLM-4 models into proficient web agents. On WebArena-Lite, WebRL improves the success rate of Llama-3.1-8B from 4.8% to 42.4%, and from 6.1% to 43% for GLM-4-9B. These open models significantly surpass the performance of GPT-4-Turbo (17.6%) and GPT-4o (13.9%) and outperform previous state-of-the-art web agents trained on open LLMs (AutoWebGLM, 18.2%). Our findings demonstrate WebRL's effectiveness in bridging the gap between open and proprietary LLM-based web agents, paving the way for more accessible and powerful autonomous web interaction systems.
AddrLLM: Address Rewriting via Large Language Model on Nationwide Logistics Data
Yang, Qinchen, Hong, Zhiqing, Cao, Dongjiang, Wang, Haotian, Xie, Zejun, He, Tian, Liu, Yunhuai, Yang, Yu, Zhang, Desheng
Textual description of a physical location, commonly known as an address, plays an important role in location-based services(LBS) such as on-demand delivery and navigation. However, the prevalence of abnormal addresses, those containing inaccuracies that fail to pinpoint a location, have led to significant costs. Address rewriting has emerged as a solution to rectify these abnormal addresses. Despite the critical need, existing address rewriting methods are limited, typically tailored to correct specific error types, or frequently require retraining to process new address data effectively. In this study, we introduce AddrLLM, an innovative framework for address rewriting that is built upon a retrieval augmented large language model. AddrLLM overcomes aforementioned limitations through a meticulously designed Supervised Fine-Tuning module, an Address-centric Retrieval Augmented Generation module and a Bias-free Objective Alignment module. To the best of our knowledge, this study pioneers the application of LLM-based address rewriting approach to solve the issue of abnormal addresses. Through comprehensive offline testing with real-world data on a national scale and subsequent online deployment, AddrLLM has demonstrated superior performance in integration with existing logistics system. It has significantly decreased the rate of parcel re-routing by approximately 43\%, underscoring its exceptional efficacy in real-world applications.