Tianyang Wang

Benji Peng, Keyu Chen, Qian Niu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence by advancing natural language understanding and generation, enabling applications across fields beyond healthcare, software engineering, and conversational systems. Despite these advancements in the past few years, LLMs have shown considerable vulnerabilities, particularly to prompt injection and jailbreaking attacks. This review analyzes the state of research on these vulnerabilities and presents available defense strategies. We roughly categorize attack approaches into prompt-based, model-based, multimodal, and multilingual, covering techniques such as adversarial prompting, backdoor injections, and cross-modality exploits. We also review various defense mechanisms, including prompt filtering, transformation, alignment techniques, multi-agent defenses, and self-regulation, evaluating their strengths and shortcomings. We also discuss key metrics and benchmarks used to assess LLM safety and robustness, noting challenges like the quantification of attack success in interactive contexts and biases in existing datasets. Identifying current research gaps, we suggest future directions for resilient alignment strategies, advanced defenses against evolving attacks, automation of jailbreak detection, and consideration of ethical and societal impacts. This review emphasizes the need for continued research and cooperation within the AI community to enhance LLM security and ensure their safe deployment.

Xi Xiao, Yunbei Zhang, Lin Zhao et al.

In computer vision, Visual Prompting (VP) and Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) have recently emerged as lightweight and effective alternatives to full fine-tuning for adapting large-scale vision models within the ``pretrain-then-finetune'' paradigm. However, despite rapid progress, their conceptual boundaries remain blurred, as VP and VPT are frequently used interchangeably in current research, reflecting a lack of systematic distinction between these techniques and their respective applications. In this survey, we revisit the designs of VP and VPT from first principles, and conceptualize them within a unified framework termed Prompt-based Adaptation (PA). We provide a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods into learnable, generative, and non-learnable prompts, and further organizes them by injection granularity -- pixel-level and token-level. Beyond the core methodologies, we examine PA's integrations across diverse domains, including medical imaging, 3D point clouds, and vision-language tasks, as well as its role in test-time adaptation and trustworthy AI. We also summarize current benchmarks and identify key challenges and future directions. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first comprehensive survey dedicated to PA's methodologies and applications in light of their distinct characteristics. Our survey aims to provide a clear roadmap for researchers and practitioners in all area to understand and explore the evolving landscape of PA-related research.

Tianyang Wang, Ming Liu, Benji Peng et al.

Clinical trials are an indispensable part of the drug development process, bridging the gap between basic research and clinical application. During the development of new drugs, clinical trials are used not only to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the drug but also to explore its dosage, treatment regimens, and potential side effects. This review discusses the various stages of clinical trials, including Phase I (safety assessment), Phase II (preliminary efficacy evaluation), Phase III (large-scale validation), and Phase IV (post-marketing surveillance), highlighting the characteristics of each phase and their interrelationships. Additionally, the paper addresses the major challenges encountered in clinical trials, such as ethical issues, subject recruitment difficulties, diversity and representativeness concerns, and proposes strategies for overcoming these challenges. With the advancement of technology, innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and digitalization are gradually transforming clinical trial design and implementation, improving trial efficiency and data quality. The article also looks forward to the future of clinical trials, particularly the impact of emerging therapies such as gene therapy and immunotherapy on trial design, as well as the importance of regulatory reforms and global collaboration. In conclusion, the core role of clinical trials in drug development will continue to drive the progress of innovative drug development and clinical treatment.

Tianyang Wang, Jun Huan, Bo Li

Deep learning models learn to fit training data while they are highly expected to generalize well to testing data. Most works aim at finding such models by creatively designing architectures and fine-tuning parameters. To adapt to particular tasks, hand-crafted information such as image prior has also been incorporated into end-to-end learning. However, very little progress has been made on investigating how an individual training sample will influence the generalization ability of a model. In other words, to achieve high generalization accuracy, do we really need all the samples in a training dataset? In this paper, we demonstrate that deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks may not favor all training samples, and generalization accuracy can be further improved by dropping those unfavorable samples. Specifically, the influence of removing a training sample is quantifiable, and we propose a Two-Round Training approach, aiming to achieve higher generalization accuracy. We locate unfavorable samples after the first round of training, and then retrain the model from scratch with the reduced training dataset in the second round. Since our approach is essentially different from fine-tuning or further training, the computational cost should not be a concern. Our extensive experimental results indicate that, with identical settings, the proposed approach can boost performance of the well-known networks on both high-level computer vision problems such as image classification, and low-level vision problems such as image denoising.