Xu Zhang

Xu Zhang, Hao Li, Zhichao Lu

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong reasoning and perception capabilities but are increasingly vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. While existing work focuses on explicit attacks, where malicious content resides in a single modality, recent studies reveal implicit attacks, in which benign text and image inputs jointly express unsafe intent. Such joint-modal threats are difficult to detect and remain underexplored, largely due to the scarcity of high-quality implicit data. We propose ImpForge, an automated red-teaming pipeline that leverages reinforcement learning with tailored reward modules to generate diverse implicit samples across 14 domains. Building on this dataset, we further develop CrossGuard, an intent-aware safeguard providing robust and comprehensive defense against both explicit and implicit threats. Extensive experiments across safe and unsafe benchmarks, implicit and explicit attacks, and multiple out-of-domain settings demonstrate that CrossGuard significantly outperforms existing defenses, including advanced MLLMs and guardrails, achieving stronger security while maintaining high utility. This offers a balanced and practical solution for enhancing MLLM robustness against real-world multimodal threats.

Yudong Liu, Xu Zhang, Shilin He et al.

Logs provide first-hand information for engineers to diagnose failures in large-scale online service systems. Log parsing, which transforms semi-structured raw log messages into structured data, is a prerequisite of automated log analysis such as log-based anomaly detection and diagnosis. Almost all existing log parsers follow the general idea of extracting the common part as templates and the dynamic part as parameters. However, these log parsing methods, often neglect the semantic meaning of log messages. Furthermore, high diversity among various log sources also poses an obstacle in the generalization of log parsing across different systems. In this paper, we propose UniParser to capture the common logging behaviours from heterogeneous log data. UniParser utilizes a Token Encoder module and a Context Encoder module to learn the patterns from the log token and its neighbouring context. A Context Similarity module is specially designed to model the commonalities of learned patterns. We have performed extensive experiments on 16 public log datasets and our results show that UniParser outperperforms state-of-the-art log parsers by a large margin.

Yi Zhen, Hang Chen, Xu Zhang et al.

To investigate whether and to what extent central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC) depicted on color fundus photographs can be assessed using deep learning technology. We collected a total of 2,504 fundus images acquired on different subjects. We verified the CSC status of these images using their corresponding optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. A total of 1,329 images depicted CSC. These images were preprocessed and normalized. This resulting dataset was randomly split into three parts in the ratio of 8:1:1 respectively for training, validation, and testing purposes. We used the deep learning architecture termed InceptionV3 to train the classifier. We performed nonparametric receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses to assess the capability of the developed algorithm to identify CSC. The Kappa coefficient between the two raters was 0.48 (p < 0.001), while the Kappa coefficients between the computer and the two raters were 0.59 (p < 0.001) and 0.33 (p < 0.05).Our experiments showed that the computer algorithm based on deep learning can assess CSC depicted on color fundus photographs in a relatively reliable and consistent way.

Mehmet Efe Tiryaki, Xu Zhang, Quang-Cuong Pham

Building and Construction have recently become an exciting application ground for robotics. In particular, rapid progress in materials formulation and in robotics technology has made robotic 3D Printing of concrete a promising technique for in-situ construction. Yet, scalability remains an important hurdle to widespread adoption: the printing systems (gantry- based or arm-based) are often much larger than the structure to be printed, hence cumbersome. Recently, a mobile printing system - a manipulator mounted on a mobile base - was proposed to alleviate this issue: such a system, by moving its base, can potentially print a structure larger than itself. However, the proposed system could only print while being stationary, imposing thereby a limit on the size of structures that can be printed in a single take. Here, we develop a system that implements the printing-while-moving paradigm, which enables printing single-piece structures of arbitrary sizes with a single robot. This development requires solving motion planning, localization, and motion control problems that are specific to mobile 3D Printing. We report our framework to address those problems, and demonstrate, for the first time, a printing-while-moving experiment, wherein a 210 cm x 45 cm x 10 cm concrete structure is printed by a robot arm that has a reach of 87 cm.

Xu Zhang, Felix Xinnan Yu, Shih-Fu Chang et al.

Domain adaptation aims at training a classifier in one dataset and applying it to a related but not identical dataset. One successfully used framework of domain adaptation is to learn a transformation to match both the distribution of the features (marginal distribution), and the distribution of the labels given features (conditional distribution). In this paper, we propose a new domain adaptation framework named Deep Transfer Network (DTN), where the highly flexible deep neural networks are used to implement such a distribution matching process. This is achieved by two types of layers in DTN: the shared feature extraction layers which learn a shared feature subspace in which the marginal distributions of the source and the target samples are drawn close, and the discrimination layers which match conditional distributions by classifier transduction. We also show that DTN has a computation complexity linear to the number of training samples, making it suitable to large-scale problems. By combining the best paradigms in both worlds (deep neural networks in recognition, and matching marginal and conditional distributions in domain adaptation), we demonstrate by extensive experiments that DTN improves significantly over former methods in both execution time and classification accuracy.