Jitao Sang

Guohai Xu, Jiayi Liu, Ming Yan et al.

With the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs), there is a growing concern that they may pose risks or have negative social impacts. Therefore, evaluation of human values alignment is becoming increasingly important. Previous work mainly focuses on assessing the performance of LLMs on certain knowledge and reasoning abilities, while neglecting the alignment to human values, especially in a Chinese context. In this paper, we present CValues, the first Chinese human values evaluation benchmark to measure the alignment ability of LLMs in terms of both safety and responsibility criteria. As a result, we have manually collected adversarial safety prompts across 10 scenarios and induced responsibility prompts from 8 domains by professional experts. To provide a comprehensive values evaluation of Chinese LLMs, we not only conduct human evaluation for reliable comparison, but also construct multi-choice prompts for automatic evaluation. Our findings suggest that while most Chinese LLMs perform well in terms of safety, there is considerable room for improvement in terms of responsibility. Moreover, both the automatic and human evaluation are important for assessing the human values alignment in different aspects. The benchmark and code is available on ModelScope and Github.

Junyang Wang, Yuanhong Xu, Juhua Hu et al. · uw

Fine-tuning a visual pre-trained model can leverage the semantic information from large-scale pre-training data and mitigate the over-fitting problem on downstream vision tasks with limited training examples. While the problem of catastrophic forgetting in pre-trained backbone has been extensively studied for fine-tuning, its potential bias from the corresponding pre-training task and data, attracts less attention. In this work, we investigate this problem by demonstrating that the obtained classifier after fine-tuning will be close to that induced by the pre-trained model. To reduce the bias in the classifier effectively, we introduce a reference distribution obtained from a fixed text classifier, which can help regularize the learned vision classifier. The proposed method, Text Supervised fine-tuning (TeS), is evaluated with diverse pre-trained vision models including ResNet and ViT, and text encoders including BERT and CLIP, on 11 downstream tasks. The consistent improvement with a clear margin over distinct scenarios confirms the effectiveness of our proposal. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/idstcv/TeS}.

Jiaming Zhang, Qi Yi, Jitao Sang

While vision-language pre-training model (VLP) has shown revolutionary improvements on various vision-language (V+L) tasks, the studies regarding its adversarial robustness remain largely unexplored. This paper studied the adversarial attack on popular VLP models and V+L tasks. First, we analyzed the performance of adversarial attacks under different settings. By examining the influence of different perturbed objects and attack targets, we concluded some key observations as guidance on both designing strong multimodal adversarial attack and constructing robust VLP models. Second, we proposed a novel multimodal attack method on the VLP models called Collaborative Multimodal Adversarial Attack (Co-Attack), which collectively carries out the attacks on the image modality and the text modality. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method achieves improved attack performances on different V+L downstream tasks and VLP models. The analysis observations and novel attack method hopefully provide new understanding into the adversarial robustness of VLP models, so as to contribute their safe and reliable deployment in more real-world scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/adversarial-for-goodness/Co-Attack.

Junyang Wang, Yuhang Wang, Guohai Xu et al.

Despite making significant progress in multi-modal tasks, current Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) encounter the significant challenge of hallucinations, which may lead to harmful consequences. Therefore, evaluating MLLMs' hallucinations is becoming increasingly important in model improvement and practical application deployment. Previous works are limited in high evaluation costs (e.g., relying on humans or advanced LLMs) and insufficient evaluation dimensions (e.g., types of tasks and hallucinations). In this paper, we propose an LLM-free multi-dimensional benchmark AMBER, which can be used to evaluate both generative task and discriminative task including existence, attribute and relation hallucination. Based on AMBER, we design a low-cost and efficient evaluation pipeline. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation and detailed analysis of mainstream MLLMs including GPT-4V(ision), and also give guideline suggestions for mitigating hallucinations. The data and code of AMBER are available at https://github.com/junyangwang0410/AMBER.

Jiaming Zhang, Xingjun Ma, Qi Yi et al.

There is a growing interest in developing unlearnable examples (UEs) against visual privacy leaks on the Internet. UEs are training samples added with invisible but unlearnable noise, which have been found can prevent unauthorized training of machine learning models. UEs typically are generated via a bilevel optimization framework with a surrogate model to remove (minimize) errors from the original samples, and then applied to protect the data against unknown target models. However, existing UE generation methods all rely on an ideal assumption called label-consistency, where the hackers and protectors are assumed to hold the same label for a given sample. In this work, we propose and promote a more practical label-agnostic setting, where the hackers may exploit the protected data quite differently from the protectors. E.g., a m-class unlearnable dataset held by the protector may be exploited by the hacker as a n-class dataset. Existing UE generation methods are rendered ineffective in this challenging setting. To tackle this challenge, we present a novel technique called Unlearnable Clusters (UCs) to generate label-agnostic unlearnable examples with cluster-wise perturbations. Furthermore, we propose to leverage VisionandLanguage Pre-trained Models (VLPMs) like CLIP as the surrogate model to improve the transferability of the crafted UCs to diverse domains. We empirically verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach under a variety of settings with different datasets, target models, and even commercial platforms Microsoft Azure and Baidu PaddlePaddle. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/jiamingzhang94/Unlearnable-Clusters}.

Junyang Wang, Ming Yan, Yi Zhang et al.

With the development of Vision-Language Pre-training Models (VLPMs) represented by CLIP and ALIGN, significant breakthroughs have been achieved for association-based visual tasks such as image classification and image-text retrieval by the zero-shot capability of CLIP without fine-tuning. However, CLIP is hard to apply to generation-based tasks. This is due to the lack of decoder architecture and pre-training tasks for generation. Although previous works have created generation capacity for CLIP through additional language models, a modality gap between the CLIP representations of different modalities and the inability of CLIP to model the offset of this gap, which fails the concept to transfer across modalities. To solve the problem, we try to map images/videos to the language modality and generate captions from the language modality. In this paper, we propose the K-nearest-neighbor Cross-modality Mapping (Knight), a zero-shot method from association to generation. With text-only unsupervised training, Knight achieves State-of-the-Art performance in zero-shot methods for image captioning and video captioning. Our code is available at https://github.com/junyangwang0410/Knight.

Jiaming Zhang, Xingjun Ma, Xin Wang et al.

With the rapid advancement of multimodal learning, pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated remarkable capacities in bridging the gap between visual and language modalities. However, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, particularly in the image modality, presenting considerable security risks. This paper introduces Adversarial Prompt Tuning (AdvPT), a novel technique to enhance the adversarial robustness of image encoders in VLMs. AdvPT innovatively leverages learnable text prompts and aligns them with adversarial image embeddings, to address the vulnerabilities inherent in VLMs without the need for extensive parameter training or modification of the model architecture. We demonstrate that AdvPT improves resistance against white-box and black-box adversarial attacks and exhibits a synergistic effect when combined with existing image-processing-based defense techniques, further boosting defensive capabilities. Comprehensive experimental analyses provide insights into adversarial prompt tuning, a novel paradigm devoted to improving resistance to adversarial images through textual input modifications, paving the way for future robust multimodal learning research. These findings open up new possibilities for enhancing the security of VLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiamingzhang94/Adversarial-Prompt-Tuning.

Junyang Wang, Yiyang Zhou, Guohai Xu et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently achieved remarkable success. However, LVLMs are still plagued by the hallucination problem, which limits the practicality in many scenarios. Hallucination refers to the information of LVLMs' responses that does not exist in the visual input, which poses potential risks of substantial consequences. There has been limited work studying hallucination evaluation in LVLMs. In this paper, we propose Hallucination Evaluation based on Large Language Models (HaELM), an LLM-based hallucination evaluation framework. HaELM achieves an approximate 95% performance comparable to ChatGPT and has additional advantages including low cost, reproducibility, privacy preservation and local deployment. Leveraging the HaELM, we evaluate the hallucination in current LVLMs. Furthermore, we analyze the factors contributing to hallucination in LVLMs and offer helpful suggestions to mitigate the hallucination problem. Our training data and human annotation hallucination data will be made public soon.

Yaogong Feng, Xiaowen Huang, Pengbo Yang et al.

Synthesizing pseudo samples is currently the most effective way to solve the Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) problem. Most models achieve competitive performance but still suffer from two problems: (1) Feature confounding, the overall representations confound task-correlated and task-independent features, and existing models disentangle them in a generative way, but they are unreasonable to synthesize reliable pseudo samples with limited samples; (2) Distribution uncertainty, that massive data is needed when existing models synthesize samples from the uncertain distribution, which causes poor performance in limited samples of seen classes. In this paper, we propose a non-generative model to address these problems correspondingly in two modules: (1) Task-correlated feature disentanglement, to exclude the task-correlated features from task-independent ones by adversarial learning of domain adaption towards reasonable synthesis; (2) Controllable pseudo sample synthesis, to synthesize edge-pseudo and center-pseudo samples with certain characteristics towards more diversity generated and intuitive transfer. In addation, to describe the new scene that is the limit seen class samples in the training process, we further formulate a new ZSL task named the 'Few-shot Seen class and Zero-shot Unseen class learning' (FSZU). Extensive experiments on four benchmarks verify that the proposed method is competitive in the GZSL and the FSZU tasks.

Yi Zhang, Junyang Wang, Jitao Sang

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in numerous cross-modal tasks. Since they are optimized to capture the statistical properties of intra- and inter-modality, there remains risk to learn social biases presented in the data as well. In this work, we (1) introduce a counterfactual-based bias measurement \emph{CounterBias} to quantify the social bias in VLP models by comparing the [MASK]ed prediction probabilities of factual and counterfactual samples; (2) construct a novel VL-Bias dataset including 24K image-text pairs for measuring gender bias in VLP models, from which we observed that significant gender bias is prevalent in VLP models; and (3) propose a VLP debiasing method \emph{FairVLP} to minimize the difference in the [MASK]ed prediction probabilities between factual and counterfactual image-text pairs for VLP debiasing. Although CounterBias and FairVLP focus on social bias, they are generalizable to serve as tools and provide new insights to probe and regularize more knowledge in VLP models.

Junyang Wang, Yi Zhang, Jitao Sang

The Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models like CLIP have gained popularity in recent years. However, many works found that the social biases hidden in CLIP easily manifest in downstream tasks, especially in image retrieval, which can have harmful effects on human society. In this work, we propose FairCLIP to eliminate the social bias in CLIP-based image retrieval without damaging the retrieval performance achieving the compatibility between the debiasing effect and the retrieval performance. FairCLIP is divided into two steps: Attribute Prototype Learning (APL) and Representation Neutralization (RN). In the first step, we extract the concepts needed for debiasing in CLIP. We use the query with learnable word vector prefixes as the extraction structure. In the second step, we first divide the attributes into target and bias attributes. By analysis, we find that both attributes have an impact on the bias. Therefore, we try to eliminate the bias by using Re-Representation Matrix (RRM) to achieve the neutralization of the representation. We compare the debiasing effect and retrieval performance with other methods, and experiments demonstrate that FairCLIP can achieve the best compatibility. Although FairCLIP is used to eliminate bias in image retrieval, it achieves the neutralization of the representation which is common to all CLIP downstream tasks. This means that FairCLIP can be applied as a general debiasing method for other fairness issues related to CLIP.

Zhiyu Lin, Yifei Gao, Jitao Sang

CNNs exhibit many behaviors different from humans, one of which is the capability of employing high-frequency components. This paper discusses the frequency bias phenomenon in image classification tasks: the high-frequency components are actually much less exploited than the low- and mid-frequency components. We first investigate the frequency bias phenomenon by presenting two observations on feature discrimination and learning priority. Furthermore, we hypothesize that (i) the spectral density, (ii) class consistency directly affect the frequency bias. Specifically, our investigations verify that the spectral density of datasets mainly affects the learning priority, while the class consistency mainly affects the feature discrimination.

Yanxu Zhu, Jinlin Xiao, Yuhang Wang et al.

Recent studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to being misled by false premise questions (FPQs), leading to errors in factual knowledge, know as factuality hallucination. Existing benchmarks that assess this vulnerability primarily rely on manual construction, resulting in limited scale and lack of scalability. In this work, we introduce an automated, scalable pipeline to create FPQs based on knowledge graphs (KGs). The first step is modifying true triplets extracted from KGs to create false premises. Subsequently, utilizing the state-of-the-art capabilities of GPTs, we generate semantically rich FPQs. Based on the proposed method, we present a comprehensive benchmark, the Knowledge Graph-based False Premise Questions (KG-FPQ), which contains approximately 178k FPQs across three knowledge domains, at six levels of confusability, and in two task formats. Using KG-FPQ, we conduct extensive evaluations on several representative LLMs and provide valuable insights. The KG-FPQ dataset and code are available at~https://github.com/yanxuzhu/KG-FPQ.

Junyang Wang, Yi Zhang, Ming Yan et al.

CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) has shown remarkable zero-shot transfer capabilities in cross-modal correlation tasks such as visual classification and image retrieval. However, its performance in cross-modal generation tasks like zero-shot image captioning remains unsatisfied. In this work, we discuss that directly employing CLIP for zero-shot image captioning relies more on the textual modality in context and largely ignores the visual information, which we call \emph{contextual language prior}. To address this, we propose Cross-modal Language Models (CLMs) to facilitate unsupervised cross-modal learning. We further propose Anchor Augment to guide the generative model's attention to the fine-grained information in the representation of CLIP. Experiments on MS COCO and Flickr 30K validate the promising performance of proposed approach in both captioning quality and computational efficiency.

Yi Zhang, Jitao Sang, Junyang Wang et al.

Machine learning models often learn to make predictions that rely on sensitive social attributes like gender and race, which poses significant fairness risks, especially in societal applications, such as hiring, banking, and criminal justice. Existing work tackles this issue by minimizing the employed information about social attributes in models for debiasing. However, the high correlation between target task and these social attributes makes learning on the target task incompatible with debiasing. Given that model bias arises due to the learning of bias features (\emph{i.e}., gender) that help target task optimization, we explore the following research question: \emph{Can we leverage shortcut features to replace the role of bias feature in target task optimization for debiasing?} To this end, we propose \emph{Shortcut Debiasing}, to first transfer the target task's learning of bias attributes from bias features to shortcut features, and then employ causal intervention to eliminate shortcut features during inference. The key idea of \emph{Shortcut Debiasing} is to design controllable shortcut features to on one hand replace bias features in contributing to the target task during the training stage, and on the other hand be easily removed by intervention during the inference stage. This guarantees the learning of the target task does not hinder the elimination of bias features. We apply \emph{Shortcut Debiasing} to several benchmark datasets, and achieve significant improvements over the state-of-the-art debiasing methods in both accuracy and fairness.

Yifei Gao, Zhiyu Lin, Yunfan Yang et al.

Adversarial example detection is known to be an effective adversarial defense method. Black-box attack, which is a more realistic threat and has led to various black-box adversarial training-based defense methods, however, does not attract considerable attention in adversarial example detection. In this paper, we fill this gap by positioning the problem of black-box adversarial example detection (BAD). Data analysis under the introduced BAD settings demonstrates (1) the incapability of existing detectors in addressing the black-box scenario and (2) the potential of exploring BAD solutions from a data perspective. To tackle the BAD problem, we propose a data reconstruction-based adversarial example detection method. Specifically, we use variational auto-encoder (VAE) to capture both pixel and frequency representations of normal examples. Then we use reconstruction error to detect adversarial examples. Compared with existing detection methods, the proposed method achieves substantially better detection performance in BAD, which helps promote the deployment of adversarial example detection-based defense solutions in real-world models.

Shangxi Wu, Qiuyang He, Jian Yu et al.

With the swift advancement of deep learning, state-of-the-art algorithms have been utilized in various social situations. Nonetheless, some algorithms have been discovered to exhibit biases and provide unequal results. The current debiasing methods face challenges such as poor utilization of data or intricate training requirements. In this work, we found that the backdoor attack can construct an artificial bias similar to the model bias derived in standard training. Considering the strong adjustability of backdoor triggers, we are motivated to mitigate the model bias by carefully designing reverse artificial bias created from backdoor attack. Based on this, we propose a backdoor debiasing framework based on knowledge distillation, which effectively reduces the model bias from original data and minimizes security risks from the backdoor attack. The proposed solution is validated on both image and structured datasets, showing promising results. This work advances the understanding of backdoor attacks and highlights its potential for beneficial applications. The code for the study can be found at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DwB-BC07/}.

Junyang Wang, Haiyang Xu, Jiabo Ye et al.

Mobile device agent based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) is becoming a popular application. In this paper, we introduce Mobile-Agent, an autonomous multi-modal mobile device agent. Mobile-Agent first leverages visual perception tools to accurately identify and locate both the visual and textual elements within the app's front-end interface. Based on the perceived vision context, it then autonomously plans and decomposes the complex operation task, and navigates the mobile Apps through operations step by step. Different from previous solutions that rely on XML files of Apps or mobile system metadata, Mobile-Agent allows for greater adaptability across diverse mobile operating environments in a vision-centric way, thereby eliminating the necessity for system-specific customizations. To assess the performance of Mobile-Agent, we introduced Mobile-Eval, a benchmark for evaluating mobile device operations. Based on Mobile-Eval, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation of Mobile-Agent. The experimental results indicate that Mobile-Agent achieved remarkable accuracy and completion rates. Even with challenging instructions, such as multi-app operations, Mobile-Agent can still complete the requirements. Code and model will be open-sourced at https://github.com/X-PLUG/MobileAgent.

Yinpeng Dong, Peng Chen, Senyou Deng et al.

The security of artificial intelligence (AI) is an important research area towards safe, reliable, and trustworthy AI systems. To accelerate the research on AI security, the Artificial Intelligence Security Competition (AISC) was organized by the Zhongguancun Laboratory, China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, and RealAI as part of the Zhongguancun International Frontier Technology Innovation Competition (https://www.zgc-aisc.com/en). The competition consists of three tracks, including Deepfake Security Competition, Autonomous Driving Security Competition, and Face Recognition Security Competition. This report will introduce the competition rules of these three tracks and the solutions of top-ranking teams in each track.

Yi Zhang, Jitao Sang, Junyang Wang

Deep learning models often learn to make predictions that rely on sensitive social attributes like gender and race, which poses significant fairness risks, especially in societal applications, e.g., hiring, banking, and criminal justice. Existing work tackles this issue by minimizing information about social attributes in models for debiasing. However, the high correlation between target task and social attributes makes bias mitigation incompatible with target task accuracy. Recalling that model bias arises because the learning of features in regard to bias attributes (i.e., bias features) helps target task optimization, we explore the following research question: \emph{Can we leverage proxy features to replace the role of bias feature in target task optimization for debiasing?} To this end, we propose \emph{Proxy Debiasing}, to first transfer the target task's learning of bias information from bias features to artificial proxy features, and then employ causal intervention to eliminate proxy features in inference. The key idea of \emph{Proxy Debiasing} is to design controllable proxy features to on one hand replace bias features in contributing to target task during the training stage, and on the other hand easily to be removed by intervention during the inference stage. This guarantees the elimination of bias features without affecting the target information, thus addressing the fairness-accuracy paradox in previous debiasing solutions. We apply \emph{Proxy Debiasing} to several benchmark datasets, and achieve significant improvements over the state-of-the-art debiasing methods in both of accuracy and fairness.

Yuhang Wang, Yanxu Zhu, Chao Kong et al.

As the scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has dramatically enhanced their capabilities, there has been a growing focus on the alignment problem to ensure their responsible and ethical use. While existing alignment efforts predominantly concentrate on universal values such as the HHH principle, the aspect of culture, which is inherently pluralistic and diverse, has not received adequate attention. This work introduces a new benchmark, CDEval, aimed at evaluating the cultural dimensions of LLMs. CDEval is constructed by incorporating both GPT-4's automated generation and human verification, covering six cultural dimensions across seven domains. Our comprehensive experiments provide intriguing insights into the culture of mainstream LLMs, highlighting both consistencies and variations across different dimensions and domains. The findings underscore the importance of integrating cultural considerations in LLM development, particularly for applications in diverse cultural settings. Through CDEval, we aim to broaden the horizon of LLM alignment research by including cultural dimensions, thus providing a more holistic framework for the future development and evaluation of LLMs. This benchmark serves as a valuable resource for cultural studies in LLMs, paving the way for more culturally aware and sensitive models.

Yuxiang Zhang, Shangxi Wu, Yuqi Yang et al.

The technical report introduces O1-CODER, an attempt to replicate OpenAI's o1 model with a focus on coding tasks. It integrates reinforcement learning (RL) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to enhance the model's System-2 thinking capabilities. The framework includes training a Test Case Generator (TCG) for standardized code testing, using MCTS to generate code data with reasoning processes, and iteratively fine-tuning the policy model to initially produce pseudocode and then generate the full code. The report also addresses the opportunities and challenges in deploying o1-like models in real-world applications, suggesting transitioning to the System-2 paradigm and highlighting the imperative for world model construction. Updated model progress and experimental results will be reported in subsequent versions. All source code, curated datasets, as well as the derived models are disclosed at https://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/O1-CODER .

Yuhang Wang, Yuxiang Zhang, Dongyuan Lu et al.

Many news comment mining studies are based on the assumption that comment is explicitly linked to the corresponding news. In this paper, we observed that users' comments are also heavily influenced by their individual characteristics embodied by the interaction history. Therefore, we position to understand news comment behavior by considering both the dispositional factors from news interaction history, and the situational factors from corresponding news. A three-part encoder-decoder framework is proposed to model the generative process of news comment. The resultant dispositional and situational attribution contributes to understanding user focus and opinions, which are validated in applications of reader-aware news summarization and news aspect-opinion forecasting.

Jitao Sang, Yuhang Wang, Jing Zhang et al.

This paper presents a follow-up study to OpenAI's recent superalignment work on Weak-to-Strong Generalization (W2SG). Superalignment focuses on ensuring that high-level AI systems remain consistent with human values and intentions when dealing with complex, high-risk tasks. The W2SG framework has opened new possibilities for empirical research in this evolving field. Our study simulates two phases of superalignment under the W2SG framework: the development of general superhuman models and the progression towards superintelligence. In the first phase, based on human supervision, the quality of weak supervision is enhanced through a combination of scalable oversight and ensemble learning, reducing the capability gap between weak teachers and strong students. In the second phase, an automatic alignment evaluator is employed as the weak supervisor. By recursively updating this auto aligner, the capabilities of the weak teacher models are synchronously enhanced, achieving weak-to-strong supervision over stronger student models.We also provide an initial validation of the proposed approach for the first phase. Using the SciQ task as example, we explore ensemble learning for weak teacher models through bagging and boosting. Scalable oversight is explored through two auxiliary settings: human-AI interaction and AI-AI debate. Additionally, the paper discusses the impact of improved weak supervision on enhancing weak-to-strong generalization based on in-context learning. Experiment code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/W2SG.

Yuxiang Zhang, Yuqi Yang, Jiangming Shu et al.

OpenAI's recent introduction of Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) showcases the potential of reasoning foundation model and offers a new paradigm for fine-tuning beyond simple pattern imitation. This technical report presents \emph{OpenRFT}, our attempt to fine-tune generalist reasoning models for domain-specific tasks under the same settings as RFT. OpenRFT addresses two key challenges of lacking reasoning step data and the limited quantity of training samples, by leveraging the domain-specific samples in three ways: question augmentation, synthesizing reasoning-process data, and few-shot ICL. The evaluation is conducted on SciKnowEval, where OpenRFT achieves notable performance gains with only $100$ domain-specific samples for each task. More experimental results will be updated continuously in later versions. Source codes, datasets, and models are disclosed at: https://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/OpenRFT

Yahan Tu, Rui Hu, Jitao Sang

Hallucination poses a persistent challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing benchmarks for evaluating hallucinations are generally static, which may overlook the potential risk of data contamination. To address this issue, we propose ODE, an open-set, dynamic protocol designed to evaluate object hallucinations in MLLMs at both the existence and attribute levels. ODE employs a graph-based structure to represent real-world object concepts, their attributes, and the distributional associations between them. This structure facilitates the extraction of concept combinations based on diverse distributional criteria, generating varied samples for structured queries that evaluate hallucinations in both generative and discriminative tasks. Through the generation of new samples, dynamic concept combinations, and varied distribution frequencies, ODE mitigates the risk of data contamination and broadens the scope of evaluation. This protocol is applicable to both general and specialized scenarios, including those with limited data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocol, revealing that MLLMs exhibit higher hallucination rates when evaluated with ODE-generated samples, which indicates potential data contamination. Furthermore, these generated samples aid in analyzing hallucination patterns and fine-tuning models, offering an effective approach to mitigating hallucinations in MLLMs.

Jiaqi Wang, Yifei Gao, Jitao Sang

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multimodal task reasoning. However, they often generate responses that appear plausible yet do not accurately reflect the visual content, a phenomenon known as hallucination. Recent approaches have introduced training-free methods to mitigate hallucinations by adjusting the decoding strategy during the inference stage, typically attributing hallucinations to the language model itself. Our analysis, however, reveals that distortions in the visual encoding process significantly affect the model's reasoning capabilities. Specifically, earlier visual layers may retain key features but gradually distort as the information propagates toward the output layer. Building on these insights, we propose a novel hallucination-mitigation method from the visual encoding perspective: \textbf{V}isu\textbf{a}l \textbf{L}ayer Fus\textbf{i}on Contrastive \textbf{D}ecoding (\textbf{VaLiD}). This method utilizes uncertainty to guide the visual layer selection, correcting distortions in the visual encoding process and thereby enhancing the reliability of the generated content. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of VaLiD in mitigating hallucinations across various benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance when compared to baseline methods. Codes are available at \href{https://github.com/RicardoLuL/VaLiD_LVLMs_hallucinations}{Github}.

Shangxi Wu, Jitao Sang

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in the field of code generation. However, as more and more users rely on these models for software development, the security risks associated with code generation models have become increasingly significant. Studies have shown that traditional deep learning robustness issues also negatively impact the field of code generation. In this paper, we first present the game-theoretic model that focuses on security issues in code generation scenarios. This framework outlines possible scenarios and patterns where attackers could spread malicious code models to create security threats. We also pointed out for the first time that the attackers can use backdoor attacks to dynamically adjust the timing of malicious code injection, which will release varying degrees of malicious code depending on the skill level of the user. Through extensive experiments on leading code generation models, we validate our proposed game-theoretic model and highlight the significant threats that these new attack scenarios pose to the safe use of code models.

Zekun Liu, Xiaowen Huang, Jitao Sang

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in natural language processing tasks. However, in the field of recommendation systems, due to the structural differences between user behavior data and natural language, LLMs struggle to effectively model the associations between user preferences and items. Although prompt-based methods can generate recommendation results, their inadequate understanding of recommendation tasks leads to constrained performance. To address this gap, in this work, we construct a sufficient instruction tuning dataset, ITDR, which encompasses 7 subtasks across two core root tasks--user-item interaction and user-item understanding. The dataset integrates data from 13 public recommendation datasets and is built using manually crafted standardized templates, comprising approximately 200,000 instances. Experimental results demonstrate that ITDR significantly enhances the performance of mainstream open-source LLMs such as GLM-4, Qwen2.5, Qwen2.5-Instruct and LLaMA-3.2 on recommendation tasks. Furthermore, we analyze the correlations between tasks and explore the impact of task descriptions and data scale on instruction tuning effectiveness. Finally, we perform comparative experiments against closed-source LLMs with substantial parameters. Our tuning dataset ITDR and the fine-tuned large recommendation models can be accessed at https://github.com/hellolzk/ITDR.

Junyang Wang, Haiyang Xu, Haitao Jia et al.

Mobile device operation tasks are increasingly becoming a popular multi-modal AI application scenario. Current Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), constrained by their training data, lack the capability to function effectively as operation assistants. Instead, MLLM-based agents, which enhance capabilities through tool invocation, are gradually being applied to this scenario. However, the two major navigation challenges in mobile device operation tasks, task progress navigation and focus content navigation, are significantly complicated under the single-agent architecture of existing work. This is due to the overly long token sequences and the interleaved text-image data format, which limit performance. To address these navigation challenges effectively, we propose Mobile-Agent-v2, a multi-agent architecture for mobile device operation assistance. The architecture comprises three agents: planning agent, decision agent, and reflection agent. The planning agent generates task progress, making the navigation of history operations more efficient. To retain focus content, we design a memory unit that updates with task progress. Additionally, to correct erroneous operations, the reflection agent observes the outcomes of each operation and handles any mistakes accordingly. Experimental results indicate that Mobile-Agent-v2 achieves over a 30% improvement in task completion compared to the single-agent architecture of Mobile-Agent. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/X-PLUG/MobileAgent.

Rui Hu, Yahan Tu, Jitao Sang

Neural networks often learn spurious correlations when exposed to biased training data, leading to poor performance on out-of-distribution data. A biased dataset can be divided, according to biased features, into bias-aligned samples (i.e., with biased features) and bias-conflicting samples (i.e., without biased features). Recent debiasing works typically assume that no bias label is available during the training phase, as obtaining such information is challenging and labor-intensive. Following this unsupervised assumption, existing methods usually train two models: a biased model specialized to learn biased features and a target model that uses information from the biased model for debiasing. This paper first presents experimental analyses revealing that the existing biased models overfit to bias-conflicting samples in the training data, which negatively impacts the debiasing performance of the target models. To address this issue, we propose a straightforward and effective method called Echoes, which trains a biased model and a target model with a different strategy. We construct an "echo chamber" environment by reducing the weights of samples which are misclassified by the biased model, to ensure the biased model fully learns the biased features without overfitting to the bias-conflicting samples. The biased model then assigns lower weights on the bias-conflicting samples. Subsequently, we use the inverse of the sample weights of the biased model for training the target model. Experiments show that our approach achieves superior debiasing results compared to the existing baselines on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/isruihu/Echoes.

Jiaming Zhang, Jitao Sang, Qi Yi et al.

ImageNet pre-training has enabled state-of-the-art results on many tasks. In spite of its recognized contribution to generalization, we observed in this study that ImageNet pre-training also transfers adversarial non-robustness from pre-trained model into fine-tuned model in the downstream classification tasks. We first conducted experiments on various datasets and network backbones to uncover the adversarial non-robustness in fine-tuned model. Further analysis was conducted on examining the learned knowledge of fine-tuned model and standard model, and revealed that the reason leading to the non-robustness is the non-robust features transferred from ImageNet pre-trained model. Finally, we analyzed the preference for feature learning of the pre-trained model, explored the factors influencing robustness, and introduced a simple robust ImageNet pre-training solution. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/jiamingzhang94/ImageNet-Pretraining-transfers-non-robustness}.

Lixi Zhu, Xiaowen Huang, Jitao Sang

Conversational Recommender System (CRS) interacts with users through natural language to understand their preferences and provide personalized recommendations in real-time. CRS has demonstrated significant potential, prompting researchers to address the development of more realistic and reliable user simulators as a key focus. Recently, the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted a lot of attention in various fields. Simultaneously, efforts are underway to construct user simulators based on LLMs. While these works showcase innovation, they also come with certain limitations that require attention. In this work, we aim to analyze the limitations of using LLMs in constructing user simulators for CRS, to guide future research. To achieve this goal, we conduct analytical validation on the notable work, iEvaLM. Through multiple experiments on two widely-used datasets in the field of conversational recommendation, we highlight several issues with the current evaluation methods for user simulators based on LLMs: (1) Data leakage, which occurs in conversational history and the user simulator's replies, results in inflated evaluation results. (2) The success of CRS recommendations depends more on the availability and quality of conversational history than on the responses from user simulators. (3) Controlling the output of the user simulator through a single prompt template proves challenging. To overcome these limitations, we propose SimpleUserSim, employing a straightforward strategy to guide the topic toward the target items. Our study validates the ability of CRS models to utilize the interaction information, significantly improving the recommendation results.

Lixi Zhu, Xiaowen Huang, Jitao Sang

Conversational Recommender System (CRS) leverages real-time feedback from users to dynamically model their preferences, thereby enhancing the system's ability to provide personalized recommendations and improving the overall user experience. CRS has demonstrated significant promise, prompting researchers to concentrate their efforts on developing user simulators that are both more realistic and trustworthy. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked the onset of a new epoch in computational capabilities, exhibiting human-level intelligence in various tasks. Research efforts have been made to utilize LLMs for building user simulators to evaluate the performance of CRS. Although these efforts showcase innovation, they are accompanied by certain limitations. In this work, we introduce a Controllable, Scalable, and Human-Involved (CSHI) simulator framework that manages the behavior of user simulators across various stages via a plugin manager. CSHI customizes the simulation of user behavior and interactions to provide a more lifelike and convincing user interaction experience. Through experiments and case studies in two conversational recommendation scenarios, we show that our framework can adapt to a variety of conversational recommendation settings and effectively simulate users' personalized preferences. Consequently, our simulator is able to generate feedback that closely mirrors that of real users. This facilitates a reliable assessment of existing CRS studies and promotes the creation of high-quality conversational recommendation datasets.

Yifei Gao, Jiaqi Wang, Zhiyu Lin et al.

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence Generated Contents (AIGCs) is advancing towards higher quality. The growing interactions with AIGCs present a new challenge to the data-driven AI community: While AI-generated contents have played a crucial role in a wide range of AI models, the potential hidden risks they introduce have not been thoroughly examined. Beyond human-oriented forgery detection, AI-generated content poses potential issues for AI models originally designed to process natural data. In this study, we underscore the exacerbated hallucination phenomena in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) caused by AI-synthetic images. Remarkably, our findings shed light on a consistent AIGC \textbf{hallucination bias}: the object hallucinations induced by synthetic images are characterized by a greater quantity and a more uniform position distribution, even these synthetic images do not manifest unrealistic or additional relevant visual features compared to natural images. Moreover, our investigations on Q-former and Linear projector reveal that synthetic images may present token deviations after visual projection, thereby amplifying the hallucination bias.

Junyang Wang, Haiyang Xu, Xi Zhang et al.

The exponential rise in mobile device usage necessitates streamlined automation for effective task management, yet many AI frameworks fall short due to inadequate operational expertise. While manually written knowledge can bridge this gap, it is often burdensome and inefficient. We introduce Mobile-Agent-V, an innovative framework that utilizes video as a guiding tool to effortlessly and efficiently inject operational knowledge into mobile automation processes. By deriving knowledge directly from video content, Mobile-Agent-V eliminates manual intervention, significantly reducing the effort and time required for knowledge acquisition. To rigorously evaluate this approach, we propose Mobile-Knowledge, a benchmark tailored to assess the impact of external knowledge on mobile agent performance. Our experimental findings demonstrate that Mobile-Agent-V enhances performance by 36% compared to existing methods, underscoring its effortless and efficient advantages in mobile automation.

Rui Hu, Delai Qiu, Shuyu Wei et al.

Omnimodal Large Language Models (OLLMs) have shown significant progress in integrating vision and text, but still struggle with integrating vision and audio, often exhibiting suboptimal performance when processing audio queries compared to text queries. This disparity is primarily due to insufficient alignment between vision and audio modalities during training, leading to inadequate attention to visual information when using audio queries. To mitigate this issue, we propose a Self-Knowledge Distillation (Self-KD) training method where the vision-text component of the OLLM serves as the teacher and the vision-audio component as the student. This enables the model to process audio in a manner analogous to its text processing. Our experimental results demonstrate that Self-KD is an effective method for enhancing the vision-audio capabilities of OLLMs by learning from the vision-text components, which subsequently improves the interaction between audio and images and results in improved performance on multimodal tasks.

Junyang Wang, Haiyang Xu, Xi Zhang et al.

The exponential rise in mobile device usage necessitates streamlined automation for effective task management, yet many AI frameworks fall short due to inadequate operational expertise. While manually written knowledge can bridge this gap, it is often burdensome and inefficient. We introduce Mobile-Agent-V, an innovative framework that utilizes video as a guiding tool to effortlessly and efficiently inject operational knowledge into mobile automation processes. By deriving knowledge directly from video content, Mobile-Agent-V eliminates manual intervention, significantly reducing the effort and time required for knowledge acquisition. To rigorously evaluate this approach, we propose Mobile-Knowledge, a benchmark tailored to assess the impact of external knowledge on mobile agent performance. Our experimental findings demonstrate that Mobile-Agent-V enhances performance by 36% compared to existing methods, underscoring its effortless and efficient advantages in mobile automation.

Yunfan Yang, Chaoquan Jiang, Zhiyu Lin et al.

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have exhibited remarkable performance across various downstream tasks by aligning text and images in a unified embedding space. However, due to the imbalanced distribution of pre-trained datasets, CLIP suffers from the bias problem in real-world applications. Existing debiasing methods struggle to obtain sufficient image samples for minority groups and incur high costs for group labeling. To address the limitations, we propose a Text-Only Debiasing framework called TOD, leveraging a text-as-image training paradigm to mitigate visual biases. Specifically, this approach repurposes the text encoder to function as an image encoder, thereby eliminating the need for image data. Simultaneously, it utilizes a large language model (LLM) to generate a balanced text dataset, which is then used for prompt tuning. However, we observed that the model overfits to the text modality because label names, serving as supervision signals, appear explicitly in the texts. To address this issue, we further introduce a Multi-Target Prediction (MTP) task that motivates the model to focus on complex contexts and distinguish between target and biased information. Extensive experiments on the Waterbirds and CelebA datasets show that our method significantly improves group robustness, achieving state-of-the-art results among image-free methods and even competitive performance compared to image-supervised methods. Furthermore, the proposed method can be adapted to challenging scenarios with multiple or unknown bias attributes, demonstrating its strong generalization and robustness.

Yuqi Yang, Xiaowen Huang, Jitao Sang

Large language models (LLMs), renowned for their impressive capabilities in various tasks, have significantly advanced artificial intelligence. Yet, these advancements have raised growing concerns about privacy and security implications. To address these issues and explain the risks inherent in these models, we have devised a three-tiered progressive framework tailored for evaluating privacy in language systems. This framework consists of progressively complex and in-depth privacy test tasks at each tier. Our primary objective is to comprehensively evaluate the sensitivity of large language models to private information, examining how effectively they discern, manage, and safeguard sensitive data in diverse scenarios. This systematic evaluation helps us understand the degree to which these models comply with privacy protection guidelines and the effectiveness of their inherent safeguards against privacy breaches. Our observations indicate that existing Chinese large language models universally show privacy protection shortcomings. It seems that at the moment this widespread issue is unavoidable and may pose corresponding privacy risks in applications based on these models.

Boyuan Chen, Sitong Fang, Jiaming Ji et al.

As intelligence increases, so does its shadow. AI deception, in which systems induce false beliefs to secure self-beneficial outcomes, has evolved from a speculative concern to an empirically demonstrated risk across language models, AI agents, and emerging frontier systems. This project provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the AI deception field, covering its core concepts, methodologies, genesis, and potential mitigations. First, we identify a formal definition of AI deception, grounded in signaling theory from studies of animal deception. We then review existing empirical studies and associated risks, highlighting deception as a sociotechnical safety challenge. We organize the landscape of AI deception research as a deception cycle, consisting of two key components: deception emergence and deception treatment. Deception emergence reveals the mechanisms underlying AI deception: systems with sufficient capability and incentive potential inevitably engage in deceptive behaviors when triggered by external conditions. Deception treatment, in turn, focuses on detecting and addressing such behaviors. On deception emergence, we analyze incentive foundations across three hierarchical levels and identify three essential capability preconditions required for deception. We further examine contextual triggers, including supervision gaps, distributional shifts, and environmental pressures. On deception treatment, we conclude detection methods covering benchmarks and evaluation protocols in static and interactive settings. Building on the three core factors of deception emergence, we outline potential mitigation strategies and propose auditing approaches that integrate technical, community, and governance efforts to address sociotechnical challenges and future AI risks. To support ongoing work in this area, we release a living resource at www.deceptionsurvey.com.

Yuhang Wang, Yanxu Zhu, Dongyuan Lu et al.

Reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, ensuring their safety against adversarial jailbreak prompts remains a critical challenge. Due to the covert and deceptive nature of such prompts, they can often evade built-in safety mechanisms and lead to the generation of harmful content. This underscores the need for an adaptive safety alignment approach that enables models to autonomously reinforce their defenses in response to adversarial inputs. This paper introduces the Synthesized Guideline-based Adaptive Safety Alignment (SGASA) framework, which internalizes model-generated safety guidelines to strengthen models' ability to enhance robustness against harmful adversarial prompts while minimizing unnecessary refusals of benign requests. SGASA consists of two key stages: Data Pre-synthesis, which generates safety guidelines and augmented prompts; and Alignment Fine-tuning, which leverages Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to embed these guidelines into the model. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that SGASA significantly improves model safety, validating its adaptive and scalable effectiveness.

Yuxiang Zhang, Jiangming Shu, Ye Ma et al.

Large Language Models face challenges in long-horizon agentic tasks as their constrained memory is easily overwhelmed by distracting or irrelevant context. Existing working memory methods typically rely on external, heuristic mechanisms that are decoupled from the agent's core policy. In this work, we reframe working memory management as a learnable, intrinsic capability. We propose a novel framework, Memory-as-Action, where an agent actively manages its working memory by executing explicit editing operations as part of a unified policy. This formulation allows an agent, trained via reinforcement learning, to balance memory curation against long-term task objectives under given resource constraints. However, such memory editing actions break the standard assumption of a continuously growing prefix in LLM interactions, leading to what we call trajectory fractures. These non-prefix changes disrupt the causal continuity required by standard policy gradient methods, making those methods inapplicable. To address this, we propose a new algorithm, Dynamic Context Policy Optimization, which enables stable end-to-end reinforcement learning by segmenting trajectories at memory action points and applying trajectory-level advantages to the resulting action segments. Our results demonstrate that jointly optimizing for task reasoning and memory management in an end-to-end fashion not only reduces overall computational consumption but also improves task performance, driven by adaptive context curation strategies tailored to the model's intrinsic capabilities.

Haitao Jia, Ming He, Zimo Yin et al.

Mobile GUI agents exhibit substantial potential to facilitate and automate the execution of user tasks on mobile phones. However, exist mobile GUI agents predominantly privilege autonomous operation and neglect the necessity of active user engagement during task execution. This omission undermines their adaptability to information dilemmas including ambiguous, dynamically evolving, and conflicting task scenarios, leading to execution outcomes that deviate from genuine user requirements and preferences. To address these shortcomings, we propose ReInAgent, a context-aware multi-agent framework that leverages dynamic information management to enable human-in-the-loop mobile task navigation. ReInAgent integrates three specialized agents around a shared memory module: an information-managing agent for slot-based information management and proactive interaction with the user, a decision-making agent for conflict-aware planning, and a reflecting agent for task reflection and information consistency validation. Through continuous contextual information analysis and sustained user-agent collaboration, ReInAgent overcomes the limitation of existing approaches that rely on clear and static task assumptions. Consequently, it enables more adaptive and reliable mobile task navigation in complex, real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ReInAgent effectively resolves information dilemmas and produces outcomes that are more closely aligned with genuine user preferences. Notably, on complex tasks involving information dilemmas, ReInAgent achieves a 25% higher success rate than Mobile-Agent-v2.

Gehui Chen, Guan'an Wang, Xiaowen Huang et al.

Recent Video-to-Audio (V2A) generation relies on extracting semantic and temporal features from video to condition generative models. Training these models from scratch is resource intensive. Consequently, leveraging foundation models (FMs) has gained traction due to their cross-modal knowledge transfer and generalization capabilities. One prior work has explored fine-tuning a lightweight mapper network to connect a pre-trained visual encoder with a text-to-audio generation model for V2A. Inspired by this, we introduce the Multiple Foundation Model Mapper (MFM-Mapper). Compared to the previous mapper approach, MFM-Mapper benefits from richer semantic and temporal information by fusing features from dual visual encoders. Furthermore, by replacing a linear mapper with GPT-2, MFM-Mapper improves feature alignment, drawing parallels between cross-modal features mapping and autoregressive translation tasks. Our MFM-Mapper exhibits remarkable training efficiency. It achieves better performance in semantic and temporal consistency with fewer training consuming, requiring only 16\% of the training scale compared to previous mapper-based work, yet achieves competitive performance with models trained on a much larger scale.

Jiaming Zhang, Xin Wang, Xingjun Ma et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding relationships between visual and textual data through joint embedding spaces. Despite their effectiveness, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, particularly in the image modality, posing significant security concerns. Building upon our previous work on Adversarial Prompt Tuning (AdvPT), which introduced learnable text prompts to enhance adversarial robustness in VLMs without extensive parameter training, we present a significant extension by introducing the Neural Augmentor framework for Multi-modal Adversarial Prompt Tuning (NAP-Tuning).Our key innovations include: (1) extending AdvPT from text-only to multi-modal prompting across both text and visual modalities, (2) expanding from single-layer to multi-layer prompt architectures, and (3) proposing a novel architecture-level redesign through our Neural Augmentor approach, which implements feature purification to directly address the distortions introduced by adversarial attacks in feature space. Our NAP-Tuning approach incorporates token refiners that learn to reconstruct purified features through residual connections, allowing for modality-specific and layer-specific feature correction.Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that NAP-Tuning significantly outperforms existing methods across various datasets and attack types. Notably, our approach shows significant improvements over the strongest baselines under the challenging AutoAttack benchmark, outperforming them by 33.5% on ViT-B16 and 33.0% on ViT-B32 architectures while maintaining competitive clean accuracy.

Guanhua Zheng, Jitao Sang, Changsheng Xu

Attributions aim to identify input pixels that are relevant to the decision-making process. A popular approach involves using modified backpropagation (BP) rules to reverse decisions, which improves interpretability compared to the original gradients. However, these methods lack a solid theoretical foundation and exhibit perplexing behaviors, such as reduced sensitivity to parameter randomization, raising concerns about their reliability and highlighting the need for theoretical justification. In this work, we present a unified theoretical framework for methods like GBP, RectGrad, LRP, and DTD, demonstrating that they achieve input alignment by combining the weights of activated neurons. This alignment improves the visualization quality and reduces sensitivity to weight randomization. Our contributions include: (1) Providing a unified explanation for multiple behaviors, rather than focusing on just one. (2) Accurately predicting novel behaviors. (3) Offering insights into decision-making processes, including layer-wise information changes and the relationship between attributions and model decisions.

Chaoquan Jiang, Yunfan Yang, Rui Hu et al.

Prompt tuning of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP, has demonstrated the ability to rapidly adapt to various downstream tasks. However, recent studies indicate that tuned VLMs may suffer from the problem of spurious correlations, where the model relies on spurious features (e.g. background and gender) in the data. This may lead to the model having worse robustness in out-of-distribution data. Standard methods for eliminating spurious correlation typically require us to know the spurious attribute labels of each sample, which is hard in the real world. In this work, we explore improving the group robustness of prompt tuning in VLMs without relying on manual annotation of spurious features. We notice the zero - shot image recognition ability of VLMs and use this ability to identify spurious features, thus avoiding the cost of manual annotation. By leveraging pseudo-spurious attribute annotations, we further propose a method to automatically adjust the training weights of different groups. Extensive experiments show that our approach efficiently improves the worst-group accuracy on CelebA, Waterbirds, and MetaShift datasets, achieving the best robustness gap between the worst-group accuracy and the overall accuracy.

Zhengrui Xu, Guan'an Wang, Xiaowen Huang et al.

The denoising model has been proven a powerful generative model but has little exploration of discriminative tasks. Representation learning is important in discriminative tasks, which is defined as "learning representations (or features) of the data that make it easier to extract useful information when building classifiers or other predictors". In this paper, we propose a novel Denoising Model for Representation Learning (DenoiseRep) to improve feature discrimination with joint feature extraction and denoising. DenoiseRep views each embedding layer in a backbone as a denoising layer, processing the cascaded embedding layers as if we are recursively denoise features step-by-step. This unifies the frameworks of feature extraction and denoising, where the former progressively embeds features from low-level to high-level, and the latter recursively denoises features step-by-step. After that, DenoiseRep fuses the parameters of feature extraction and denoising layers, and theoretically demonstrates its equivalence before and after the fusion, thus making feature denoising computation-free. DenoiseRep is a label-free algorithm that incrementally improves features but also complementary to the label if available. Experimental results on various discriminative vision tasks, including re-identification (Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, MSMT17, CUHK-03, vehicleID), image classification (ImageNet, UB200, Oxford-Pet, Flowers), object detection (COCO), image segmentation (ADE20K) show stability and impressive improvements. We also validate its effectiveness on the CNN (ResNet) and Transformer (ViT, Swin, Vmamda) architectures.

Chaoquan Jiang, Jinqiang Wang, Rui Hu et al.

Vision models with high overall accuracy often exhibit systematic errors in specific scenarios, posing potential serious safety concerns. Diagnosing bugs of vision models is gaining increased attention, however traditional diagnostic approaches require annotation efforts (eg rich metadata accompanying each samples of CelebA). To address this issue,We propose a language-assisted diagnostic method that uses texts instead of images to diagnose bugs in vision models based on multi-modal models (eg CLIP). Our approach connects the embedding space of CLIP with the buggy vision model to be diagnosed; meanwhile, utilizing a shared classifier and the cross-modal transferability of embedding space from CLIP, the text-branch of CLIP become a proxy model to find bugs in the buggy model. The proxy model can classify texts paired with images. During the diagnosis, a Large Language Model (LLM) is employed to obtain task-relevant corpora, and this corpora is used to extract keywords. Descriptions constructed with templates containing these keywords serve as input text to probe errors in the proxy model. Finally, we validate the ability to diagnose existing visual models using language on the Waterbirds and CelebA datasets, we can identify bugs comprehensible to human experts, uncovering not only known bugs but also previously unknown ones.