Wei Lu

Long P. Hoang, Hai V. Le, Shaoyang Xu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content. In this work, we reveal that this advanced safety awareness inadvertently introduces a fatal vulnerability. We introduce Posterior Attack, a single-query jailbreak that bypasses guardrails by prompting the model to generate the exact harmful response its internal classifier would normally flag as unsafe. Through extensive empirical evaluation across 30 open-source LLMs (up to 35B parameters in size) and frontier models (e.g., GPT-5, Claude 4.6), we observe a striking phenomenon: models with superior safety-judgment capabilities are disproportionately more susceptible to this exploitation. To explain this, we formalize the Safety Paradox, analytically showing that monotonic improvements in safety alignment naturally amplify posterior vulnerability. Finally, we establish a causal link via reinforcement learning interventions, exemplifying that artificially degrading a model's safety judgment immunizes it against the attack, whereas enhancing judgment exacerbates the vulnerability. Our findings highlight potential flaws in current alignment paradigms, indicating that defense mechanisms may require further structural refinement.

Wenhang Shi, Yiren Chen, Shuqing Bian et al.

While prompt engineering is instrumental in maximizing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference, the role of prompts during training remains critically underexplored. Prevailing fine-tuning paradigms typically treat training prompts as mere surface forms, assuming that semantically equivalent instructions yield identical learning outcomes. However, we reveal that this equivalence is deceptive: while paraphrased prompts often lead to comparable in-task performance, they induce drastically different cross-task impacts regarding catastrophic forgetting and generalization. Crucially, these impacts are positively correlated across tasks, indicating the existence of superior prompts that consistently yield better performance. Furthermore, we discover that these superior prompts can be robustly identified by task loss prior to learning. Leveraging these insights, we introduce State-Adaptive Prompt Optimization (SAPO), a lightweight yet effective training strategy that shifts task formulation from a static input to a dynamic, state-adaptive variable. Comprehensive experiments on diverse benchmarks confirm its effectiveness, which significantly mitigates forgetting while improving generalization, achieving substantial performance gains over state-of-the-art methods. These results provide insights into how training prompts shape learning dynamics and offer a practical recipe for robust fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/Eric8932/SAPO.

Wenhang Shi, Jinhao Dong, Yiren Chen et al.

General agentic intelligence hinges on the ability to interact with diverse real-world tools to complete complex tasks, a capability fundamentally tied to the quality of interaction data. To bypass the prohibitive costs of human annotation, prevailing paradigms depend entirely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to scale the synthesis of agentic environments and tasks. However, such unconstrained generation often degenerates into biased random sampling of LLMs' internal priors, failing to capture the diversity and difficulty of real-world domains or construct high-fidelity, long-horizon tasks. In this work, we introduce Grounded Agentic Interaction Synthesis (GAIS), a framework that automates the scalable construction of diverse environments and complex tasks via a two-phase grounding mechanism. Specifically, we construct protocol-anchored environments derived from real-world Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to ensure functional diversity and difficulty. Subsequently, we employ structure-guided planning to navigate these environments, actively enforcing logical dependencies and adversarial policies to generate complex tasks. Experiments on BFCL, $τ^2$-Bench, and ACEBench demonstrate that GAIS-synthesized data significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, enabling base models to match or even surpass their official instruction-tuned counterparts. Furthermore, GAIS exhibits superior data efficiency and scalability, achieving exceptional capabilities with significantly less data while maintaining continuous growth where baselines stagnate. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Eric8932/GAIS.

Wei Lu, Qilong Zhai

This paper aims to employ the weak Galerkin method to solve a class of nonlinear eigenvalue problems. We proved the weak Galerkin scheme produces lower bound for the energy. Moreover, by the post-processing technique, we obtain lower bound for the ground state eigenvalue. Finally, numerical experiments are provided to validate the theoretical analysis.

Guoxiu He, Zhikai Xue, Zhuoren Jiang et al.

The potential impact of a paper is often quantified by how many citations it will receive. However, most commonly used models may underestimate the influence of newly published papers over time, and fail to encapsulate this dynamics of citation network into the graph. In this study, we construct hierarchical and heterogeneous graphs for target papers with an annual perspective. The constructed graphs can record the annual dynamics of target papers' scientific context information. Then, a novel graph neural network, Hierarchical and Heterogeneous Contrastive Graph Learning Model (H2CGL), is proposed to incorporate heterogeneity and dynamics of the citation network. H2CGL separately aggregates the heterogeneous information for each year and prioritizes the highly-cited papers and relationships among references, citations, and the target paper. It then employs a weighted GIN to capture dynamics between heterogeneous subgraphs over years. Moreover, it leverages contrastive learning to make the graph representations more sensitive to potential citations. Particularly, co-cited or co-citing papers of the target paper with large citation gap are taken as hard negative samples, while randomly dropping low-cited papers could generate positive samples. Extensive experimental results on two scholarly datasets demonstrate that the proposed H2CGL significantly outperforms a series of baseline approaches for both previously and freshly published papers. Additional analyses highlight the significance of the proposed modules. Our codes and settings have been released on Github (https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/H2CGL)

Zhanming Jie, Jierui Li, Wei Lu · bytedance, salesforce

Solving math word problems requires deductive reasoning over the quantities in the text. Various recent research efforts mostly relied on sequence-to-sequence or sequence-to-tree models to generate mathematical expressions without explicitly performing relational reasoning between quantities in the given context. While empirically effective, such approaches typically do not provide explanations for the generated expressions. In this work, we view the task as a complex relation extraction problem, proposing a novel approach that presents explainable deductive reasoning steps to iteratively construct target expressions, where each step involves a primitive operation over two quantities defining their relation. Through extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, we show that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing strong baselines. We further demonstrate that the deductive procedure not only presents more explainable steps but also enables us to make more accurate predictions on questions that require more complex reasoning.

Long P. Hoang, Yiran Zhao, Wei Lu et al.

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has established cross-lingual versatility as a defining feature of modern systems. However, fine-tuning these models frequently induces negative interference across languages. To address this, we reformulate multilingual fine-tuning as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem. Specifically, we introduce Bucket-Level MOO, a scalable distributed framework that applies gradient-based MOO algorithms locally on parameter buckets. This enables conflict-aware updates without the prohibitive communication overhead of reconstructing full gradient vectors. Theoretically, we prove this localized resolution natively enforces Refined Pareto Stationarity, a strictly tighter necessary condition for Pareto optimality. Empirically, Bucket-Level MOO mitigates interference by driving LLMs to construct distinct language-specific dimensions, improving representational separability. Extensive experiments across four base LLMs demonstrate that our method significantly improves both seen and unseen multilingual performance over standard fine-tuning paradigms.

Wei Sun, Xiongkuo Min, Wei Lu et al.

Quality assessment for User Generated Content (UGC) videos plays an important role in ensuring the viewing experience of end-users. Previous UGC video quality assessment (VQA) studies either use the image recognition model or the image quality assessment (IQA) models to extract frame-level features of UGC videos for quality regression, which are regarded as the sub-optimal solutions because of the domain shifts between these tasks and the UGC VQA task. In this paper, we propose a very simple but effective UGC VQA model, which tries to address this problem by training an end-to-end spatial feature extraction network to directly learn the quality-aware spatial feature representation from raw pixels of the video frames. We also extract the motion features to measure the temporal-related distortions that the spatial features cannot model. The proposed model utilizes very sparse frames to extract spatial features and dense frames (i.e. the video chunk) with a very low spatial resolution to extract motion features, which thereby has low computational complexity. With the better quality-aware features, we only use the simple multilayer perception layer (MLP) network to regress them into the chunk-level quality scores, and then the temporal average pooling strategy is adopted to obtain the video-level quality score. We further introduce a multi-scale quality fusion strategy to solve the problem of VQA across different spatial resolutions, where the multi-scale weights are obtained from the contrast sensitivity function of the human visual system. The experimental results show that the proposed model achieves the best performance on five popular UGC VQA databases, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model. The code will be publicly available.

Wei Lu, David L. Kaplan, Markus J. Buehler

Spider silks are remarkable materials characterized by superb mechanical properties such as strength, extensibility and lightweightedness. Yet, to date, limited models are available to fully explore sequence-property relationships for analysis and design. Here we propose a custom generative large-language model to enable design of novel spider silk protein sequences to meet complex combinations of target mechanical properties. The model, pretrained on a large set of protein sequences, is fine-tuned on ~1,000 major ampullate spidroin (MaSp) sequences for which associated fiber-level mechanical properties exist, to yield an end-to-end forward and inverse generative strategy. Performance is assessed through: (1), a novelty analysis and protein type classification for generated spidroin sequences through BLAST searches, (2) property evaluation and comparison with similar sequences, (3) comparison of molecular structures, as well as, and (4) a detailed sequence motif analyses. We generate silk sequences with property combinations that do not exist in nature, and develop a deep understanding the mechanistic roles of sequence patterns in achieving overarching key mechanical properties (elastic modulus, strength, toughness, failure strain). The model provides an efficient approach to expand the silkome dataset, facilitating further sequence-structure analyses of silks, and establishes a foundation for synthetic silk design and optimization.

Yu Fan, Zicheng Zhang, Wei Sun et al.

Point cloud is one of the most widely used digital formats of 3D models, the visual quality of which is quite sensitive to distortions such as downsampling, noise, and compression. To tackle the challenge of point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) in scenarios where reference is not available, we propose a no-reference quality assessment metric for colored point cloud based on captured video sequences. Specifically, three video sequences are obtained by rotating the camera around the point cloud through three specific orbits. The video sequences not only contain the static views but also include the multi-frame temporal information, which greatly helps understand the human perception of the point clouds. Then we modify the ResNet3D as the feature extraction model to learn the correlation between the capture videos and corresponding subjective quality scores. The experimental results show that our method outperforms most of the state-of-the-art full-reference and no-reference PCQA metrics, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Zicheng Zhang, Wei Wu, Wei Sun et al.

User-generated content (UGC) live videos are often bothered by various distortions during capture procedures and thus exhibit diverse visual qualities. Such source videos are further compressed and transcoded by media server providers before being distributed to end-users. Because of the flourishing of UGC live videos, effective video quality assessment (VQA) tools are needed to monitor and perceptually optimize live streaming videos in the distributing process. In this paper, we address \textbf{UGC Live VQA} problems by constructing a first-of-a-kind subjective UGC Live VQA database and developing an effective evaluation tool. Concretely, 418 source UGC videos are collected in real live streaming scenarios and 3,762 compressed ones at different bit rates are generated for the subsequent subjective VQA experiments. Based on the built database, we develop a \underline{M}ulti-\underline{D}imensional \underline{VQA} (\textbf{MD-VQA}) evaluator to measure the visual quality of UGC live videos from semantic, distortion, and motion aspects respectively. Extensive experimental results show that MD-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance on both our UGC Live VQA database and existing compressed UGC VQA databases.

Yang Luo, Shiyu Wang, Zhemeng Yu et al.

The surging demand for cloud computing resources, driven by the rapid growth of sophisticated large-scale models and data centers, underscores the critical importance of efficient and adaptive resource allocation. As major tech enterprises deploy massive infrastructures with thousands of GPUs, existing cloud platforms still struggle with low resource utilization due to key challenges: capturing hierarchical indicator structures, modeling non-Gaussian distributions, and decision-making under uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose HRAMONY, an adaptive Hierarchical Attention-based Resource Modeling and Decision-Making System. HARMONY combines hierarchical multi-indicator distribution forecasting and uncertainty-aware Bayesian decision-making. It introduces a novel hierarchical attention mechanism that comprehensively models complex inter-indicator dependencies, enabling accurate predictions that can adapt to evolving environment states. By transforming Gaussian projections into adaptive non-Gaussian distributions via Normalizing Flows. Crucially, HARMONY leverages the full predictive distributions in an adaptive Bayesian process, proactively incorporating uncertainties to optimize resource allocation while robustly meeting SLA constraints under varying conditions. Extensive evaluations across four large-scale cloud datasets demonstrate HARMONY's state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming nine established methods. A month-long real-world deployment validated HARMONY's substantial practical impact, realizing over 35,000 GPU hours in savings and translating to $100K+ in cost reduction, showcasing its remarkable economic value through adaptive, uncertainty-aware scaling. Our code is available at https://github.com/Floating-LY/HARMONY1.

Wei Lu, Wei Sun, Xiongkuo Min et al.

The 4K content can deliver a more immersive visual experience to consumers due to the huge improvement of spatial resolution. However, existing blind image quality assessment (BIQA) methods are not suitable for the original and upscaled 4K contents due to the expanded resolution and specific distortions. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based BIQA model for 4K content, which on one hand can recognize true and pseudo 4K content and on the other hand can evaluate their perceptual visual quality. Considering the characteristic that high spatial resolution can represent more abundant high-frequency information, we first propose a Grey-level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) based texture complexity measure to select three representative image patches from a 4K image, which can reduce the computational complexity and is proven to be very effective for the overall quality prediction through experiments. Then we extract different kinds of visual features from the intermediate layers of the convolutional neural network (CNN) and integrate them into the quality-aware feature representation. Finally, two multilayer perception (MLP) networks are utilized to map the quality-aware features into the class probability and the quality score for each patch respectively. The overall quality index is obtained through the average pooling of patch results. The proposed model is trained through the multi-task learning manner and we introduce an uncertainty principle to balance the losses of the classification and regression tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms all compared BIQA metrics on four 4K content quality assessment databases.

Xinyu Wang, Jiong Cai, Yong Jiang et al.

Multi-modal named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE) aim to leverage relevant image information to improve the performance of NER and RE. Most existing efforts largely focused on directly extracting potentially useful information from images (such as pixel-level features, identified objects, and associated captions). However, such extraction processes may not be knowledge aware, resulting in information that may not be highly relevant. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-modal Retrieval based framework (MoRe). MoRe contains a text retrieval module and an image-based retrieval module, which retrieve related knowledge of the input text and image in the knowledge corpus respectively. Next, the retrieval results are sent to the textual and visual models respectively for predictions. Finally, a Mixture of Experts (MoE) module combines the predictions from the two models to make the final decision. Our experiments show that both our textual model and visual model can achieve state-of-the-art performance on four multi-modal NER datasets and one multi-modal RE dataset. With MoE, the model performance can be further improved and our analysis demonstrates the benefits of integrating both textual and visual cues for such tasks.

Chih-Yu Chang, Qiyuan Chen, Tianhan Gao et al.

Discovering optimal designs through sequential data collection is essential in many real-world applications. While Bayesian Optimization (BO) has achieved remarkable success in this setting, growing attention has recently turned to context-specific optimal design, formalized as Contextual Bayesian Optimization (CBO). Unlike BO, CBO is inherently more challenging as it must approximate an entire mapping from the context space to its corresponding optimal design, requiring simultaneous exploration across contexts and exploitation within each. In many modern applications, such tasks arise across multiple potentially heterogeneous but related clients, where collaboration can significantly improve learning efficiency. We propose CCBO, Collaborative Contextual Bayesian Optimization, a unified framework enabling multiple clients to jointly perform CBO with controllable contexts, supporting both online collaboration and offline initialization from peers' historical beliefs, with an optional privacy-preserving communication mechanism. We establish sublinear regret guarantees and demonstrate, through extensive simulations and a real-world hot rolling application, that CCBO achieves substantial improvements over existing approaches even under client heterogeneity. The code to reproduce the results can be found at https://github.com/cchihyu/Collaborative-Contextual-Bayesian-Optimization

Jiawei Liu, Yangyang Kang, Di Tang et al.

Neural text ranking models have witnessed significant advancement and are increasingly being deployed in practice. Unfortunately, they also inherit adversarial vulnerabilities of general neural models, which have been detected but remain underexplored by prior studies. Moreover, the inherit adversarial vulnerabilities might be leveraged by blackhat SEO to defeat better-protected search engines. In this study, we propose an imitation adversarial attack on black-box neural passage ranking models. We first show that the target passage ranking model can be transparentized and imitated by enumerating critical queries/candidates and then train a ranking imitation model. Leveraging the ranking imitation model, we can elaborately manipulate the ranking results and transfer the manipulation attack to the target ranking model. For this purpose, we propose an innovative gradient-based attack method, empowered by the pairwise objective function, to generate adversarial triggers, which causes premeditated disorderliness with very few tokens. To equip the trigger camouflages, we add the next sentence prediction loss and the language model fluency constraint to the objective function. Experimental results on passage ranking demonstrate the effectiveness of the ranking imitation attack model and adversarial triggers against various SOTA neural ranking models. Furthermore, various mitigation analyses and human evaluation show the effectiveness of camouflages when facing potential mitigation approaches. To motivate other scholars to further investigate this novel and important problem, we make the experiment data and code publicly available.

Zicheng Zhang, Yingjie Zhou, Wei Sun et al.

In recent years, large amounts of effort have been put into pushing forward the real-world application of dynamic digital human (DDH). However, most current quality assessment research focuses on evaluating static 3D models and usually ignores motion distortions. Therefore, in this paper, we construct a large-scale dynamic digital human quality assessment (DDH-QA) database with diverse motion content as well as multiple distortions to comprehensively study the perceptual quality of DDHs. Both model-based distortion (noise, compression) and motion-based distortion (binding error, motion unnaturalness) are taken into consideration. Ten types of common motion are employed to drive the DDHs and a total of 800 DDHs are generated in the end. Afterward, we render the video sequences of the distorted DDHs as the evaluation media and carry out a well-controlled subjective experiment. Then a benchmark experiment is conducted with the state-of-the-art video quality assessment (VQA) methods and the experimental results show that existing VQA methods are limited in assessing the perceptual loss of DDHs.

Zicheng Zhang, Wei Sun, Yingjie Zhou et al.

Currently, great numbers of efforts have been put into improving the effectiveness of 3D model quality assessment (3DQA) methods. However, little attention has been paid to the computational costs and inference time, which is also important for practical applications. Unlike 2D media, 3D models are represented by more complicated and irregular digital formats, such as point cloud and mesh. Thus it is normally difficult to perform an efficient module to extract quality-aware features of 3D models. In this paper, we address this problem from the aspect of projection-based 3DQA and develop a no-reference (NR) \underline{E}fficient and \underline{E}ffective \underline{P}rojection-based \underline{3D} Model \underline{Q}uality \underline{A}ssessment (\textbf{EEP-3DQA}) method. The input projection images of EEP-3DQA are randomly sampled from the six perpendicular viewpoints of the 3D model and are further spatially downsampled by the grid-mini patch sampling strategy. Further, the lightweight Swin-Transformer tiny is utilized as the backbone to extract the quality-aware features. Finally, the proposed EEP-3DQA and EEP-3DQA-t (tiny version) achieve the best performance than the existing state-of-the-art NR-3DQA methods and even outperforms most full-reference (FR) 3DQA methods on the point cloud and mesh quality assessment databases while consuming less inference time than the compared 3DQA methods.

Zicheng Zhang, Wei Sun, Xiongkuo Min et al.

To support the application scenarios where high-resolution (HR) images are urgently needed, various single image super-resolution (SISR) algorithms are developed. However, SISR is an ill-posed inverse problem, which may bring artifacts like texture shift, blur, etc. to the reconstructed images, thus it is necessary to evaluate the quality of super-resolution images (SRIs). Note that most existing image quality assessment (IQA) methods were developed for synthetically distorted images, which may not work for SRIs since their distortions are more diverse and complicated. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a no-reference deep-learning image quality assessment method based on frequency maps because the artifacts caused by SISR algorithms are quite sensitive to frequency information. Specifically, we first obtain the high-frequency map (HM) and low-frequency map (LM) of SRI by using Sobel operator and piecewise smooth image approximation. Then, a two-stream network is employed to extract the quality-aware features of both frequency maps. Finally, the features are regressed into a single quality value using fully connected layers. The experimental results show that our method outperforms all compared IQA models on the selected three super-resolution quality assessment (SRQA) databases.

Haoran Li, Yiran Liu, Xingxing Zhang et al.

Instruction tuning of open-source large language models (LLMs) like LLaMA, using direct outputs from more powerful LLMs such as Instruct-GPT and GPT-4, has proven to be a cost-effective way to align model behaviors with human preferences. However, the instruction-tuned model has only seen one response per instruction, lacking the knowledge of potentially better responses. In this paper, we propose finetuning an instruction-tuned LLM using our novel \textit{probabilistic ranking} and \textit{contextual ranking} approaches to increase the likelihood of generating better responses. Probabilistic ranking enables the instruction-tuned model to inherit the relative rankings of high-quality and low-quality responses from the teacher LLM. On the other hand, learning with contextual ranking allows the model to refine its own response distribution using the contextual understanding ability of stronger LLMs. Furthermore, we apply probabilistic ranking and contextual ranking sequentially to the instruction-tuned LLM. The resulting model, which we call \textbf{Tuna}, consistently improves the performance on Super Natural Instructions (119 test tasks), LMentry (25 test tasks), Vicuna QA, and can even obtain better results than several strong reinforcement learning baselines. Our code and data are available at \url{ https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps}.

Feifei Sang, Wei Lu, Hongruixuan Chen et al.

Building extraction from optical Remote Sensing (RS) imagery suffers from performance degradation under real-world hazy and low-light conditions. However, existing optical methods and benchmarks focus primarily on ideal clear-weather conditions. While SAR offers all-weather sensing, its side-looking geometry causes geometric distortions. To address these challenges, we introduce HaLoBuilding, the first optical benchmark specifically designed for building extraction under hazy and low-light conditions. By leveraging a same-scene multitemporal pairing strategy, we ensure pixel-level label alignment and high fidelity even under extreme degradation. Building upon this benchmark, we propose HaLoBuild-Net, a novel end-to-end framework for building extraction in adverse RS scenarios. At its core, we develop a Spatial-Frequency Focus Module (SFFM) to effectively mitigate meteorological interference on building features by coupling large receptive field attention with frequency-aware channel reweighting guided by stable low-frequency anchors. Additionally, a Global Multi-scale Guidance Module (GMGM) provides global semantic constraints to anchor building topologies, while a Mutual-Guided Fusion Module (MGFM) implements bidirectional semantic-spatial calibration to suppress shallow noise and sharpen weather-induced blurred boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HaLoBuild-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and conventional cascaded restoration-segmentation paradigms on the HaLoBuilding dataset, while maintaining robust generalization on WHU, INRIA, and LoveDA datasets. The source code and datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/AeroVILab-AHU/HaLoBuilding.

Sicong Leng, Yang Zhou, Mohammed Haroon Dupty et al.

We consider the task of generating designs directly from natural language descriptions, and consider floor plan generation as the initial research area. Language conditional generative models have recently been very successful in generating high-quality artistic images. However, designs must satisfy different constraints that are not present in generating artistic images, particularly spatial and relational constraints. We make multiple contributions to initiate research on this task. First, we introduce a novel dataset, \textit{Tell2Design} (T2D), which contains more than $80k$ floor plan designs associated with natural language instructions. Second, we propose a Sequence-to-Sequence model that can serve as a strong baseline for future research. Third, we benchmark this task with several text-conditional image generation models. We conclude by conducting human evaluations on the generated samples and providing an analysis of human performance. We hope our contributions will propel the research on language-guided design generation forward.

Jiale Han, Shuai Zhao, Bo Cheng et al.

Using prompts to explore the knowledge contained within pre-trained language models for downstream tasks has now become an active topic. Current prompt tuning methods mostly convert the downstream tasks to masked language modeling problems by adding cloze-style phrases and mapping all labels to verbalizations with fixed length, which has proven effective for tasks with simple label spaces. However, when applied to relation classification exhibiting complex label spaces, vanilla prompt tuning methods may struggle with label verbalizations with arbitrary lengths due to rigid prompt restrictions. Inspired by the text infilling task for pre-training generative models that can flexibly predict missing spans, we propose a novel generative prompt tuning method to reformulate relation classification as an infilling problem, which frees our approach from limitations of current prompt based approaches and thus fully exploits rich semantics of entity and relation types. In addition, we design entity-guided decoding and discriminative relation scoring to generate and align relations effectively and efficiently during inference. Extensive experiments under fully supervised settings and low-resource settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Peiyuan Zhang, Wei Lu

Few-shot relation extraction aims to learn to identify the relation between two entities based on very limited training examples. Recent efforts found that textual labels (i.e., relation names and relation descriptions) could be extremely useful for learning class representations, which will benefit the few-shot learning task. However, what is the best way to leverage such label information in the learning process is an important research question. Existing works largely assume such textual labels are always present during both learning and prediction. In this work, we argue that such approaches may not always lead to optimal results. Instead, we present a novel approach called label prompt dropout, which randomly removes label descriptions in the learning process. Our experiments show that our approach is able to lead to improved class representations, yielding significantly better results on the few-shot relation extraction task.

Yuyang Gong, Miaokun Chen, Jiawei Liu et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are widely deployed and increasingly influential, but their reliance on external corpora exposes new security risks from poisoned retrieval content. Existing RAG attacks are largely focusing on individual queries or narrow topic-local query sets, which limits their practical reach and offers limited camouflage in real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce discourse-level opinion manipulation, a new threat model in which coordinated influence across a semantic query network induces opinion shifts over a holistic, multi-topic query space. We formalize this threat in a black-box setting and propose DiscourseFlip, an agentic, graph-guided attack that dynamically allocates a limited poisoning budget to maximize discourse-level opinion deviation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiscourseFlip consistently induces targeted opinion shifts across the contextualized query network and significantly outperforms existing baselines in terms of coverage and effectiveness. User studies further confirm that DiscourseFlip is effective while remaining well camouflaged from user detection. Moreover, systematic analyses show that existing mitigation strategies are ineffective against discourse-level manipulation, underscoring the urgent need for more robust and adaptive defenses to address discourse-level vulnerabilities.

Xinyu Wang, Yongliang Shen, Jiong Cai et al.

The MultiCoNER shared task aims at detecting semantically ambiguous and complex named entities in short and low-context settings for multiple languages. The lack of contexts makes the recognition of ambiguous named entities challenging. To alleviate this issue, our team DAMO-NLP proposes a knowledge-based system, where we build a multilingual knowledge base based on Wikipedia to provide related context information to the named entity recognition (NER) model. Given an input sentence, our system effectively retrieves related contexts from the knowledge base. The original input sentences are then augmented with such context information, allowing significantly better contextualized token representations to be captured. Our system wins 10 out of 13 tracks in the MultiCoNER shared task.

Wei Lu, Wei Sun, Wenhan Zhu et al.

The intelligent video surveillance system (IVSS) can automatically analyze the content of the surveillance image (SI) and reduce the burden of the manual labour. However, the SIs may suffer quality degradations in the procedure of acquisition, compression, and transmission, which makes IVSS hard to understand the content of SIs. In this paper, we first conduct an example experiment (i.e. the face detection task) to demonstrate that the quality of the SIs has a crucial impact on the performance of the IVSS, and then propose a saliency-based deep neural network for the blind quality assessment of the SIs, which helps IVSS to filter the low-quality SIs and improve the detection and recognition performance. Specifically, we first compute the saliency map of the SI to select the most salient local region since the salient regions usually contain rich semantic information for machine vision and thus have a great impact on the overall quality of the SIs. Next, the convolutional neural network (CNN) is adopted to extract quality-aware features for the whole image and local region, which are then mapped into the global and local quality scores through the fully connected (FC) network respectively. Finally, the overall quality score is computed as the weighted sum of the global and local quality scores. Experimental results on the SI quality database (SIQD) show that the proposed method outperforms all compared state-of-the-art BIQA methods.

Tianduo Wang, Wei Lu

Mathematical reasoning is regarded as a necessary ability for Language Models (LMs). Recent works demonstrate large LMs' impressive performance in solving math problems. The success is attributed to their Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning abilities, i.e., the ability to decompose complex questions into step-by-step reasoning chains, but such ability seems only to emerge from models with abundant parameters. This work investigates how to incorporate relatively small LMs with the capabilities of multi-step reasoning. We propose to inject such abilities by continually pre-training LMs on a synthetic dataset MsAT which is composed of Multi-step Arithmetic Tasks. Our experiments on four math word problem datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method in enhancing LMs' math reasoning abilities.

Ye Wang, Wei Lu, Zhihui You et al.

Change detection in optical remote sensing imagery is susceptible to illumination fluctuations, seasonal changes, and variations in surface land-cover materials. Relying solely on RGB imagery often produces pseudo-changes and leads to semantic ambiguity in features. Incorporating near-infrared (NIR) information provides heterogeneous physical cues that are complementary to visible light, thereby enhancing the discriminability of building materials and tiny structures while improving detection accuracy. However, existing multi-modal datasets generally lack high-resolution and accurately registered bi-temporal imagery, and current methods often fail to fully exploit the inherent heterogeneity between these modalities. To address these issues, we introduce the Large-scale Small-change Multi-modal Dataset (LSMD), a bi-temporal RGB-NIR building change detection benchmark dataset targeting small changes in realistic scenarios, providing a rigorous testing platform for evaluating multi-modal change detection methods in complex environments. Based on LSMD, we further propose the Multi-modal Spectral Complementarity Network (MSCNet) to achieve effective cross-modal feature fusion. MSCNet comprises three key components: the Neighborhood Context Enhancement Module (NCEM) to strengthen local spatial details, the Cross-modal Alignment and Interaction Module (CAIM) to enable deep interaction between RGB and NIR features, and the Saliency-aware Multisource Refinement Module (SMRM) to progressively refine fused features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSCNet effectively leverages multi-modal information and consistently outperforms existing methods under multiple input configurations, validating its efficacy for fine-grained building change detection. The source code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/AeroVILab-AHU/LSMD

Yongqiang Ma, Jiawei Liu, Fan Yi et al.

Recent neural language models have taken a significant step forward in producing remarkably controllable, fluent, and grammatical text. Although studies have found that AI-generated text is not distinguishable from human-written text for crowd-sourcing workers, there still exist errors in AI-generated text which are even subtler and harder to spot. We primarily focus on the scenario in which scientific AI writing assistant is deeply involved. First, we construct a feature description framework to distinguish between AI-generated text and human-written text from syntax, semantics, and pragmatics based on the human evaluation. Then we utilize the features, i.e., writing style, coherence, consistency, and argument logistics, from the proposed framework to analyze two types of content. Finally, we adopt several publicly available methods to investigate the gap of between AI-generated scientific text and human-written scientific text by AI-generated scientific text detection models. The results suggest that while AI has the potential to generate scientific content that is as accurate as human-written content, there is still a gap in terms of depth and overall quality. The AI-generated scientific content is more likely to contain errors in factual issues. We find that there exists a "writing style" gap between AI-generated scientific text and human-written scientific text. Based on the analysis result, we summarize a series of model-agnostic and distribution-agnostic features for detection tasks in other domains. Findings in this paper contribute to guiding the optimization of AI models to produce high-quality content and addressing related ethical and security concerns.

Wei Lu, Nic A. Lee, Markus J. Buehler

Spider webs are incredible biological structures, comprising thin but strong silk filament and arranged into complex hierarchical architectures with striking mechanical properties (e.g., lightweight but high strength, achieving diverse mechanical responses). While simple 2D orb webs can easily be mimicked, the modeling and synthesis of 3D-based web structures remain challenging, partly due to the rich set of design features. Here we provide a detailed analysis of the heterogenous graph structures of spider webs, and use deep learning as a way to model and then synthesize artificial, bio-inspired 3D web structures. The generative AI models are conditioned based on key geometric parameters (including average edge length, number of nodes, average node degree, and others). To identify graph construction principles, we use inductive representation sampling of large experimentally determined spider web graphs, to yield a dataset that is used to train three conditional generative models: 1) An analog diffusion model inspired by nonequilibrium thermodynamics, with sparse neighbor representation, 2) a discrete diffusion model with full neighbor representation, and 3) an autoregressive transformer architecture with full neighbor representation. All three models are scalable, produce complex, de novo bio-inspired spider web mimics, and successfully construct graphs that meet the design objectives. We further propose algorithm that assembles web samples produced by the generative models into larger-scale structures based on a series of geometric design targets, including helical and parametric shapes, mimicking, and extending natural design principles towards integration with diverging engineering objectives. Several webs are manufactured using 3D printing and tested to assess mechanical properties.

Tao Wang, Zicheng Zhang, Wei Sun et al.

With the development of rendering techniques, computer graphics generated images (CGIs) have been widely used in practical application scenarios such as architecture design, video games, simulators, movies, etc. Different from natural scene images (NSIs), the distortions of CGIs are usually caused by poor rending settings and limited computation resources. What's more, some CGIs may also suffer from compression distortions in transmission systems like cloud gaming and stream media. However, limited work has been put forward to tackle the problem of computer graphics generated images' quality assessment (CG-IQA). Therefore, in this paper, we establish a large-scale subjective CG-IQA database to deal with the challenge of CG-IQA tasks. We collect 25,454 in-the-wild CGIs through previous databases and personal collection. After data cleaning, we carefully select 1,200 CGIs to conduct the subjective experiment. Several popular no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) methods are tested on our database. The experimental results show that the handcrafted-based methods achieve low correlation with subjective judgment and deep learning based methods obtain relatively better performance, which demonstrates that the current NR-IQA models are not suitable for CG-IQA tasks and more effective models are urgently needed.

Tianduo Wang, Wei Lu

Fine-tuning a pre-trained language model via the contrastive learning framework with a large amount of unlabeled sentences or labeled sentence pairs is a common way to obtain high-quality sentence representations. Although the contrastive learning framework has shown its superiority on sentence representation learning over previous methods, the potential of such a framework is under-explored so far due to the simple method it used to construct positive pairs. Motivated by this, we propose a method that makes hard positives from the original training examples. A pivotal ingredient of our approach is the use of prefix that is attached to a pre-trained language model, which allows for differentiable data augmentation during contrastive learning. Our method can be summarized in two steps: supervised prefix-tuning followed by joint contrastive fine-tuning with unlabeled or labeled examples. Our experiments confirm the effectiveness of our data augmentation approach. The proposed method yields significant improvements over existing methods under both semi-supervised and supervised settings. Our experiments under a low labeled data setting also show that our method is more label-efficient than the state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods.

Guangtao Zeng, Wei Lu

Training a good deep learning model requires substantial data and computing resources, which makes the resulting neural model a valuable intellectual property. To prevent the neural network from being undesirably exploited, non-transferable learning has been proposed to reduce the model generalization ability in specific target domains. However, existing approaches require labeled data for the target domain which can be difficult to obtain. Furthermore, they do not have the mechanism to still recover the model's ability to access the target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised non-transferable learning method for the text classification task that does not require annotated target domain data. We further introduce a secret key component in our approach for recovering the access to the target domain, where we design both an explicit and an implicit method for doing so. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Wenhang Shi, Yiren Chen, Zhe Zhao et al.

Catastrophic forgetting remains a critical challenge in the field of continual learning, where neural networks struggle to retain prior knowledge while assimilating new information. Most existing studies emphasize mitigating this issue only when encountering new tasks, overlooking the significance of the pre-task phase. Therefore, we shift the attention to the current task learning stage, presenting a novel framework, C&F (Create and Find Flatness), which builds a flat training space for each task in advance. Specifically, during the learning of the current task, our framework adaptively creates a flat region around the minimum in the loss landscape. Subsequently, it finds the parameters' importance to the current task based on their flatness degrees. When adapting the model to a new task, constraints are applied according to the flatness and a flat space is simultaneously prepared for the impending task. We theoretically demonstrate the consistency between the created and found flatness. In this manner, our framework not only accommodates ample parameter space for learning new tasks but also preserves the preceding knowledge of earlier tasks. Experimental results exhibit C&F's state-of-the-art performance as a standalone continual learning approach and its efficacy as a framework incorporating other methods. Our work is available at https://github.com/Eric8932/Create-and-Find-Flatness.

Jiaxi Li, Wei Lu

Recent advancements in pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated that these models possess some degree of syntactic awareness. To leverage this knowledge, we propose a novel chart-based method for extracting parse trees from masked language models (LMs) without the need to train separate parsers. Our method computes a score for each span based on the distortion of contextual representations resulting from linguistic perturbations. We design a set of perturbations motivated by the linguistic concept of constituency tests, and use these to score each span by aggregating the distortion scores. To produce a parse tree, we use chart parsing to find the tree with the minimum score. Our method consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on English with masked LMs, and also demonstrates superior performance in a multilingual setting, outperforming the state of the art in 6 out of 8 languages. Notably, although our method does not involve parameter updates or extensive hyperparameter search, its performance can even surpass some unsupervised parsing methods that require fine-tuning. Our analysis highlights that the distortion of contextual representation resulting from syntactic perturbation can serve as an effective indicator of constituency across languages.

Wei Lu, Zi-Yang Bo, Fei-Fei Sang et al.

Shadows are prevalent in high-resolution aerospace imagery (ASI). They often cause spectral distortion and information loss, which degrade downstream interpretation tasks. While deep learning methods have advanced natural-image shadow removal, their direct application to ASI faces two primary challenges. First, strictly paired training data are severely lacking. Second, homogeneous shadow assumptions fail to handle the broad penumbra transition zones inherent in aerospace scenes. To address these issues, we propose AeroDeshadow, a unified two-stage framework integrating physics-guided shadow synthesis and penumbra-aware restoration. In the first stage, a Physics-aware Degradation Shadow Synthesis Network (PDSS-Net) explicitly models illumination decay and spatial attenuation. This process constructs AeroDS-Syn, a large-scale paired dataset featuring soft boundary transitions. Constrained by this physical formulation, a Penumbra-aware Cascaded DeShadowing Network (PCDS-Net) then decouples the input into umbra and penumbra components. By restoring these regions progressively, PCDS-Net alleviates boundary artifacts and over-correction. Trained solely on the synthetic AeroDS-Syn, the network generalizes to real-world ASI without requiring paired real annotations. Experimental results indicate that AeroDeshadow achieves state-of-the-art quantitative accuracy and visual fidelity across synthetic and real-world datasets. The datasets and code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/AeroVILab-AHU/AeroDeshadow.

Liyao Jiang, Negar Hassanpour, Mohammad Salameh et al.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating high-quality images given a text prompt. However, ensuring the prompt-image alignment remains a considerable challenge, i.e., generating images that faithfully align with the prompt's semantics. Recent works attempt to improve the faithfulness by optimizing the latent code, which potentially could cause the latent code to go out-of-distribution and thus produce unrealistic images. In this paper, we propose FRAP, a simple, yet effective approach based on adaptively adjusting the per-token prompt weights to improve prompt-image alignment and authenticity of the generated images. We design an online algorithm to adaptively update each token's weight coefficient, which is achieved by minimizing a unified objective function that encourages object presence and the binding of object-modifier pairs. Through extensive evaluations, we show FRAP generates images with significantly higher prompt-image alignment to prompts from complex datasets, while having a lower average latency compared to recent latent code optimization methods, e.g., 4 seconds faster than D&B on the COCO-Subject dataset. Furthermore, through visual comparisons and evaluation of the CLIP-IQA-Real metric, we show that FRAP not only improves prompt-image alignment but also generates more authentic images with realistic appearances. We also explore combining FRAP with prompt rewriting LLM to recover their degraded prompt-image alignment, where we observe improvements in both prompt-image alignment and image quality. We release the code at the following link: https://github.com/LiyaoJiang1998/FRAP/.

Xiaobing Sun, Wei Lu

Although self-attention based models such as Transformers have achieved remarkable successes on natural language processing (NLP) tasks, recent studies reveal that they have limitations on modeling sequential transformations (Hahn, 2020), which may prompt re-examinations of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that demonstrated impressive results on handling sequential data. Despite many prior attempts to interpret RNNs, their internal mechanisms have not been fully understood, and the question on how exactly they capture sequential features remains largely unclear. In this work, we present a study that shows there actually exist some explainable components that reside within the hidden states, which are reminiscent of the classical n-grams features. We evaluated such extracted explainable features from trained RNNs on downstream sentiment analysis tasks and found they could be used to model interesting linguistic phenomena such as negation and intensification. Furthermore, we examined the efficacy of using such n-gram components alone as encoders on tasks such as sentiment analysis and language modeling, revealing they could be playing important roles in contributing to the overall performance of RNNs. We hope our findings could add interpretability to RNN architectures, and also provide inspirations for proposing new architectures for sequential data.

Pujun Zheng, Jiacheng Yao, Jinquan Zheng et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are currently applied to scientific paper evaluation by assigning an absolute score to each paper independently. However, since score scales vary across conferences, time periods, and evaluation criteria, models trained on absolute scores are prone to fitting narrow, context-specific rules rather than developing robust scholarly judgment. To overcome this limitation, we propose shifting paper evaluation from isolated scoring to collaborative ranking. In particular, we design \textbf{C}omparison-\textbf{N}ative framework for \textbf{P}aper \textbf{E}valuation (\textbf{CNPE}), integrating comparison into both data construction and model learning. We first propose a graph-based similarity ranking algorithm to facilitate the sampling of more informative and discriminative paper pairs from a collection. We then enhance relative quality judgment through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with comparison-based rewards. At inference, the model performs pairwise comparisons over sampled paper pairs and aggregates these preference signals into a global relative quality ranking. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves an average relative improvement of \textbf{21.8\%} over the strong baseline DeepReview-14B, while exhibiting robust generalization to five previously unseen datasets. \href{https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/ComparisonReview}{Code}.

Zhikai Xue, Guoxiu He, Zhuoren Jiang et al.

The scientific impact of academic papers is influenced by intricate factors such as dynamic popularity and inherent contribution. Existing models typically rely on static graphs for citation count estimation, failing to differentiate among its sources. In contrast, we propose distinguishing effects derived from various factors and predicting citation increments as estimated potential impacts within the dynamic context. In this research, we introduce a novel model, DPPDCC, which Disentangles the Potential impacts of Papers into Diffusion, Conformity, and Contribution values. It encodes temporal and structural features within dynamic heterogeneous graphs derived from the citation networks and applies various auxiliary tasks for disentanglement. By emphasizing comparative and co-cited/citing information and aggregating snapshots evolutionarily, DPPDCC captures knowledge flow within the citation network. Afterwards, popularity is outlined by contrasting augmented graphs to extract the essence of citation diffusion and predicting citation accumulation bins for quantitative conformity modeling. Orthogonal constraints ensure distinct modeling of each perspective, preserving the contribution value. To gauge generalization across publication times and replicate the realistic dynamic context, we partition data based on specific time points and retain all samples without strict filtering. Extensive experiments on three datasets validate DPPDCC's superiority over baselines for papers published previously, freshly, and immediately, with further analyses confirming its robustness. Our codes and supplementary materials can be found at https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/DPPDCC.

Wei Lu, Rachel K. Luu, Markus J. Buehler

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain applications in fields such as materials science and engineering depends on the development of fine-tuning strategies that adapt models for specialized, technical capabilities. In this work, we explore the effects of Continued Pretraining (CPT), Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and various preference-based optimization approaches, including Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Odds Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO), on fine-tuned LLM performance. Our analysis shows how these strategies influence model outcomes and reveals that the merging of multiple fine-tuned models can lead to the emergence of capabilities that surpass the individual contributions of the parent models. We find that model merging leads to new functionalities that neither parent model could achieve alone, leading to improved performance in domain-specific assessments. Experiments with different model architectures are presented, including Llama 3.1 8B and Mistral 7B models, where similar behaviors are observed. Exploring whether the results hold also for much smaller models, we use a tiny LLM with 1.7 billion parameters and show that very small LLMs do not necessarily feature emergent capabilities under model merging, suggesting that model scaling may be a key component. In open-ended yet consistent chat conversations between a human and AI models, our assessment reveals detailed insights into how different model variants perform and show that the smallest model achieves a high intelligence score across key criteria including reasoning depth, creativity, clarity, and quantitative precision. Other experiments include the development of image generation prompts based on disparate biological material design concepts, to create new microstructures, architectural concepts, and urban design based on biological materials-inspired construction principles.

Peiyuan Zhang, Guangtao Zeng, Tianduo Wang et al.

We present TinyLlama, a compact 1.1B language model pretrained on around 1 trillion tokens for approximately 3 epochs. Building on the architecture and tokenizer of Llama 2, TinyLlama leverages various advances contributed by the open-source community (e.g., FlashAttention and Lit-GPT), achieving better computational efficiency. Despite its relatively small size, TinyLlama demonstrates remarkable performance in a series of downstream tasks. It significantly outperforms existing open-source language models with comparable sizes. Our model checkpoints and code are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/jzhang38/TinyLlama.

Zi-Yang Bo, Wei Lu, Hongruixuan Chen et al.

Shadows are a prevalent problem in remote sensing imagery (RSI), degrading visual quality and severely limiting the performance of downstream tasks like object detection and semantic segmentation. Most prior works treat shadow detection and removal as separate, cascaded tasks, which can lead to cumbersome process and error accumulation. Furthermore, many deep learning methods rely on paired shadow and non-shadow images for training, which are often unavailable in practice. To address these challenges, we propose Shadow-Aware and Removal Unified (SARU) Framework , a cohesive two-stage framework. First, its dual-branch detection module (DBCSF-Net) fuses multi-color space and semantic features to generate high-fidelity shadow masks, effectively distinguishing shadows from dark objects. Then, leveraging these masks, a novel, training-free physical algorithm (N$^2$SGSR) restores illumination by transferring properties from adjacent non-shadow regions within the single input image. To facilitate rigorous evaluation and foster future work, we also introduce two new benchmark datasets: the RSI Shadow Detection (RSISD) dataset and the Single-image Shadow Removal Benchmark (SiSRB). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SARU achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the public AISD dataset and our newly introduced benchmarks. By holistically integrating shadow detection and removal to mitigate error propagation and eliminating the dependency on paired training data, SARU establishes a robust, practical framework for real-world RSI analysis. The source code and datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/AeroVILab-AHU/SARU-Framework.

Zechen Liang, Yuan-Gen Wang, Wei Lu et al.

Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) has advanced classification tasks by inputting both labeled and unlabeled data to train a model jointly. However, existing SSL methods only consider the unlabeled data whose predictions are beyond a fixed threshold (e.g., 0.95), ignoring the valuable information from those less than 0.95. We argue that these discarded data have a large proportion and are usually of hard samples, thereby benefiting the model training. This paper proposes an Adaptive Dual-Threshold method for Semi-Supervised Learning (ADT-SSL). Except for the fixed threshold, ADT extracts another class-adaptive threshold from the labeled data to take full advantage of the unlabeled data whose predictions are less than 0.95 but more than the extracted one. Accordingly, we engage CE and $L_2$ loss functions to learn from these two types of unlabeled data, respectively. For highly similar unlabeled data, we further design a novel similar loss to make the prediction of the model consistency. Extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark datasets, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN. Experimental results show that the proposed ADT-SSL achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy.

Keith G. Mills, Fred X. Han, Jialin Zhang et al.

Predicting neural architecture performance is a challenging task and is crucial to neural architecture design and search. Existing approaches either rely on neural performance predictors which are limited to modeling architectures in a predefined design space involving specific sets of operators and connection rules, and cannot generalize to unseen architectures, or resort to zero-cost proxies which are not always accurate. In this paper, we propose GENNAPE, a Generalized Neural Architecture Performance Estimator, which is pretrained on open neural architecture benchmarks, and aims to generalize to completely unseen architectures through combined innovations in network representation, contrastive pretraining, and fuzzy clustering-based predictor ensemble. Specifically, GENNAPE represents a given neural network as a Computation Graph (CG) of atomic operations which can model an arbitrary architecture. It first learns a graph encoder via Contrastive Learning to encourage network separation by topological features, and then trains multiple predictor heads, which are soft-aggregated according to the fuzzy membership of a neural network. Experiments show that GENNAPE pretrained on NAS-Bench-101 can achieve superior transferability to 5 different public neural network benchmarks, including NAS-Bench-201, NAS-Bench-301, MobileNet and ResNet families under no or minimum fine-tuning. We further introduce 3 challenging newly labelled neural network benchmarks: HiAML, Inception and Two-Path, which can concentrate in narrow accuracy ranges. Extensive experiments show that GENNAPE can correctly discern high-performance architectures in these families. Finally, when paired with a search algorithm, GENNAPE can find architectures that improve accuracy while reducing FLOPs on three families.

Zhuo Chen, Jiawei Liu, Haotan Liu et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is applied to solve hallucination problems and real-time constraints of large language models, but it also induces vulnerabilities against retrieval corruption attacks. Existing research mainly explores the unreliability of RAG in white-box and closed-domain QA tasks. In this paper, we aim to reveal the vulnerabilities of Retrieval-Enhanced Generative (RAG) models when faced with black-box attacks for opinion manipulation. We explore the impact of such attacks on user cognition and decision-making, providing new insight to enhance the reliability and security of RAG models. We manipulate the ranking results of the retrieval model in RAG with instruction and use these results as data to train a surrogate model. By employing adversarial retrieval attack methods to the surrogate model, black-box transfer attacks on RAG are further realized. Experiments conducted on opinion datasets across multiple topics show that the proposed attack strategy can significantly alter the opinion polarity of the content generated by RAG. This demonstrates the model's vulnerability and, more importantly, reveals the potential negative impact on user cognition and decision-making, making it easier to mislead users into accepting incorrect or biased information.

Fred X. Han, Keith G. Mills, Fabian Chudak et al.

Understanding and modelling the performance of neural architectures is key to Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Performance predictors have seen widespread use in low-cost NAS and achieve high ranking correlations between predicted and ground truth performance in several NAS benchmarks. However, existing predictors are often designed based on network encodings specific to a predefined search space and are therefore not generalizable to other search spaces or new architecture families. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose neural predictor for NAS that can transfer across search spaces, by representing any given candidate Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with a Computation Graph (CG) that consists of primitive operators. We further combine our CG network representation with Contrastive Learning (CL) and propose a graph representation learning procedure that leverages the structural information of unlabeled architectures from multiple families to train CG embeddings for our performance predictor. Experimental results on NAS-Bench-101, 201 and 301 demonstrate the efficacy of our scheme as we achieve strong positive Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient (SRCC) on every search space, outperforming several Zero-Cost Proxies, including Synflow and Jacov, which are also generalizable predictors across search spaces. Moreover, when using our proposed general-purpose predictor in an evolutionary neural architecture search algorithm, we can find high-performance architectures on NAS-Bench-101 and find a MobileNetV3 architecture that attains 79.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet.

Keith G. Mills, Di Niu, Mohammad Salameh et al.

Evaluating neural network performance is critical to deep neural network design but a costly procedure. Neural predictors provide an efficient solution by treating architectures as samples and learning to estimate their performance on a given task. However, existing predictors are task-dependent, predominantly estimating neural network performance on image classification benchmarks. They are also search-space dependent; each predictor is designed to make predictions for a specific architecture search space with predefined topologies and set of operations. In this paper, we propose a novel All-in-One Predictor (AIO-P), which aims to pretrain neural predictors on architecture examples from multiple, separate computer vision (CV) task domains and multiple architecture spaces, and then transfer to unseen downstream CV tasks or neural architectures. We describe our proposed techniques for general graph representation, efficient predictor pretraining and knowledge infusion techniques, as well as methods to transfer to downstream tasks/spaces. Extensive experimental results show that AIO-P can achieve Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Spearman's Rank Correlation (SRCC) below 1% and above 0.5, respectively, on a breadth of target downstream CV tasks with or without fine-tuning, outperforming a number of baselines. Moreover, AIO-P can directly transfer to new architectures not seen during training, accurately rank them and serve as an effective performance estimator when paired with an algorithm designed to preserve performance while reducing FLOPs.

Xiang Shi, Jiawei Liu, Yinpeng Liu et al.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown the potential to improve relevance and provide direct answers in web searches. However, challenges arise in validating the reliability of generated results and the credibility of contributing sources, due to the limitations of traditional information retrieval algorithms and the LLM hallucination problem. Aiming to create a "PageRank" for the LLM era, we strive to transform LLM into a relevant, responsible, and trustworthy searcher. We propose a novel generative retrieval framework leveraging the knowledge of LLMs to foster a direct link between queries and online sources. This framework consists of three core modules: Generator, Validator, and Optimizer, each focusing on generating trustworthy online sources, verifying source reliability, and refining unreliable sources, respectively. Extensive experiments and evaluations highlight our method's superior relevance, responsibility, and trustfulness against various SOTA methods.