Yongxiang Liu

Shuzhou Sun, Li Liu, Yongxiang Liu et al.

Bias in Foundation Models (FMs) - trained on vast datasets spanning societal and historical knowledge - poses significant challenges for fairness and equity across fields such as healthcare, education, and finance. These biases, rooted in the overrepresentation of stereotypes and societal inequalities in training data, exacerbate real-world discrimination, reinforce harmful stereotypes, and erode trust in AI systems. To address this, we introduce Trident Probe Testing (TriProTesting), a systematic testing method that detects explicit and implicit biases using semantically designed probes. Here we show that FMs, including CLIP, ALIGN, BridgeTower, and OWLv2, demonstrate pervasive biases across single and mixed social attributes (gender, race, age, and occupation). Notably, we uncover mixed biases when social attributes are combined, such as gender x race, gender x age, and gender x occupation, revealing deeper layers of discrimination. We further propose Adaptive Logit Adjustment (AdaLogAdjustment), a post-processing technique that dynamically redistributes probability power to mitigate these biases effectively, achieving significant improvements in fairness without retraining models. These findings highlight the urgent need for ethical AI practices and interdisciplinary solutions to address biases not only at the model level but also in societal structures. Our work provides a scalable and interpretable solution that advances fairness in AI systems while offering practical insights for future research on fair AI technologies.

Chen Chen, Kangcheng Bin, Ting Hu et al.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)-based object detection with visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) images facilitates robust around-the-clock detection, driven by advancements in deep learning techniques and the availability of high-quality dataset. However, the existing dataset struggles to fully capture real-world complexity for limited imaging conditions. To this end, we introduce a high-diversity dataset ATR-UMOD covering varying scenarios, spanning altitudes from 80m to 300m, angles from 0° to 75°, and all-day, all-year time variations in rich weather and illumination conditions. Moreover, each RGB-IR image pair is annotated with 6 condition attributes, offering valuable high-level contextual information. To meet the challenge raised by such diverse conditions, we propose a novel prompt-guided condition-aware dynamic fusion (PCDF) to adaptively reassign multimodal contributions by leveraging annotated condition cues. By encoding imaging conditions as text prompts, PCDF effectively models the relationship between conditions and multimodal contributions through a task-specific soft-gating transformation. A prompt-guided condition-decoupling module further ensures the availability in practice without condition annotations. Experiments on ATR-UMOD dataset reveal the effectiveness of PCDF.

Yongxiang Liu, Bowen Peng, Li Liu et al.

Transferable Targeted Attacks (TTAs), which aim to deceive black-box models into predicting specific erroneous labels, face significant challenges due to severe overfitting to surrogate models. Although modifying image features to generate robust semantic patterns of the target class is a promising approach, existing methods heavily rely on large-scale additional data. This dependence undermines the fair evaluation of TTA threats, potentially leading to a false sense of security or unnecessary overreactions. In this paper, we introduce two blind measures, surrogate self-alignment and self-transferability, to analyze the effectiveness and correlations of basic transformations, to enhance data-free attacks under strict black-box constraints. Our findings challenge conventional assumptions: (1) Attacking simple scaling transformations uniquely enhances targeted transferability, outperforming other basic transformations and rivaling leading complex methods; (2) Geometric and color transformations exhibit high internal redundancy despite weak inter-category correlations. These insights drive the design and tuning of S4ST (Strong, Self-transferable, faSt, Simple Scale Transformation), which integrates dimensionally consistent scaling, complementary low-redundancy transformations, and block-wise operations. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet-Compatible dataset demonstrate that S4ST achieves a 77.7% average targeted success rate (tSuc), surpassing existing transformations (+17.2% over H-Aug with only 26% computational time) and SOTA TTA solutions (+6.2% over SASD-WS with 1.2M samples for post-training). Notably, it attains 69.6% and 55.3% average tSuc against three commercial APIs and vision-language models, respectively. This work establishes a new SOTA for TTAs, highlights their potential threats, and calls for a reevaluation of the data dependency in achieving targeted transferability.