MSR-Align: Policy-Grounded Multimodal Alignment for Safety-Aware Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal reasoning tasks through enhanced chain-of-thought capabilities. However, this advancement also introduces novel safety risks, as these models become increasingly vulnerable to harmful multimodal prompts that can trigger unethical or unsafe behaviors. Existing safety alignment approaches, primarily designed for unimodal language models, fall short in addressing the complex and nuanced threats posed by multimodal inputs. Moreover, current safety datasets lack the fine-grained, policy-grounded reasoning required to robustly align reasoning-capable VLMs. In this work, we introduce {MSR-Align}, a high-quality Multimodal Safety Reasoning dataset tailored to bridge this gap. MSR-Align supports fine-grained, deliberative reasoning over standardized safety policies across both vision and text modalities. Our data generation pipeline emphasizes multimodal diversity, policy-grounded reasoning, and rigorous quality filtering using strong multimodal judges. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning VLMs on MSR-Align substantially improves robustness against both textual and vision-language jailbreak attacks, while preserving or enhancing general reasoning performance. MSR-Align provides a scalable and effective foundation for advancing the safety alignment of reasoning-capable VLMs. Our dataset is made publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Leigest/MSR-Align.

Reinforcement Learning Optimization for Large-Scale Learning: An Efficient and User-Friendly Scaling Library

We introduce ROLL, an efficient, scalable, and user-friendly library designed for Reinforcement Learning Optimization for Large-scale Learning. ROLL caters to three primary user groups: tech pioneers aiming for cost-effective, fault-tolerant large-scale training, developers requiring flexible control over training workflows, and researchers seeking agile experimentation. ROLL is built upon several key modules to serve these user groups effectively. First, a single-controller architecture combined with an abstraction of the parallel worker simplifies the development of the training pipeline. Second, the parallel strategy and data transfer modules enable efficient and scalable training. Third, the rollout scheduler offers fine-grained management of each sample's lifecycle during the rollout stage. Fourth, the environment worker and reward worker support rapid and flexible experimentation with agentic RL algorithms and reward designs. Finally, AutoDeviceMapping allows users to assign resources to different models flexibly across various stages.

Masked Self-distilled Transducer-based Keyword Spotting with Semi-autoregressive Decoding

RNN-T-based keyword spotting (KWS) with autoregressive decoding~(AR) has gained attention due to its streaming architecture and superior performance. However, the simplicity of the prediction network in RNN-T poses an overfitting issue, especially under challenging scenarios, resulting in degraded performance. In this paper, we propose a masked self-distillation (MSD) training strategy that avoids RNN-Ts overly relying on prediction networks to alleviate overfitting. Such training enables masked non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding, which fully masks the RNN-T predictor output during KWS decoding. In addition, we propose a semi-autoregressive (SAR) decoding approach to integrate the advantages of AR and NAR decoding. Our experiments across multiple KWS datasets demonstrate that MSD training effectively alleviates overfitting. The SAR decoding method preserves the superior performance of AR decoding while benefits from the overfitting suppression of NAR decoding, achieving excellent results.

Weight Spectra Induced Efficient Model Adaptation

Large-scale foundation models have demonstrated remarkable versatility across a wide range of downstream tasks. However, fully fine-tuning these models incurs prohibitive computational costs, motivating the development of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods such as LoRA, which introduces low-rank updates to pre-trained weights. Despite their empirical success, the underlying mechanisms by which PEFT modifies model parameters remain underexplored. In this work, we present a systematic investigation into the structural changes of weight matrices during fully fine-tuning. Through singular value decomposition (SVD), we reveal that fine-tuning predominantly amplifies the top singular values while leaving the remainder largely intact, suggesting that task-specific knowledge is injected into a low-dimensional subspace. Furthermore, we find that the dominant singular vectors are reoriented in task-specific directions, whereas the non-dominant subspace remains stable. Building on these insights, we propose a novel method that leverages learnable rescaling of top singular directions, enabling precise modulation of the most influential components without disrupting the global structure. Our approach achieves consistent improvements over strong baselines across multiple tasks, highlighting the efficacy of structurally informed fine-tuning.

Differentiable Solver Search for Fast Diffusion Sampling

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable generation quality but at the cost of numerous function evaluations. Recently, advanced ODE-based solvers have been developed to mitigate the substantial computational demands of reverse-diffusion solving under limited sampling steps. However, these solvers, heavily inspired by Adams-like multistep methods, rely solely on t-related Lagrange interpolation. We show that t-related Lagrange interpolation is suboptimal for diffusion model and reveal a compact search space comprised of time steps and solver coefficients. Building on our analysis, we propose a novel differentiable solver search algorithm to identify more optimal solver. Equipped with the searched solver, rectified-flow models, e.g., SiT-XL/2 and FlowDCN-XL/2, achieve FID scores of 2.40 and 2.35, respectively, on ImageNet256 with only 10 steps. Meanwhile, DDPM model, DiT-XL/2, reaches a FID score of 2.33 with only 10 steps. Notably, our searched solver outperforms traditional solvers by a significant margin. Moreover, our searched solver demonstrates generality across various model architectures, resolutions, and model sizes.

Beyond Safe Answers: A Benchmark for Evaluating True Risk Awareness in Large Reasoning Models

Despite the remarkable proficiency of \textit{Large Reasoning Models} (LRMs) in handling complex reasoning tasks, their reliability in safety-critical scenarios remains uncertain. Existing evaluations primarily assess response-level safety, neglecting a critical issue we identify as \textbf{\textit{Superficial Safety Alignment} (SSA)} -- a phenomenon where models produce superficially safe outputs while internal reasoning processes fail to genuinely detect and mitigate underlying risks, resulting in inconsistent safety behaviors across multiple sampling attempts. To systematically investigate SSA, we introduce \textbf{Beyond Safe Answers (BSA)} bench, a novel benchmark comprising 2,000 challenging instances organized into three distinct SSA scenario types and spanning nine risk categories, each meticulously annotated with risk rationales. Evaluations of 19 state-of-the-art LRMs demonstrate the difficulty of this benchmark, with top-performing models achieving only 38.0\% accuracy in correctly identifying risk rationales. We further explore the efficacy of safety rules, specialized fine-tuning on safety reasoning data, and diverse decoding strategies in mitigating SSA. Our work provides a comprehensive assessment tool for evaluating and improving safety reasoning fidelity in LRMs, advancing the development of genuinely risk-aware and reliably safe AI systems.

USB: A Comprehensive and Unified Safety Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models

Despite their remarkable achievements and widespread adoption, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have revealed significant security vulnerabilities, highlighting the urgent need for robust safety evaluation benchmarks. Existing MLLM safety benchmarks, however, fall short in terms of data quality and coverge, and modal risk combinations, resulting in inflated and contradictory evaluation results, which hinders the discovery and governance of security concerns. Besides, we argue that vulnerabilities to harmful queries and oversensitivity to harmless ones should be considered simultaneously in MLLMs safety evaluation, whereas these were previously considered separately. In this paper, to address these shortcomings, we introduce Unified Safety Benchmarks (USB), which is one of the most comprehensive evaluation benchmarks in MLLM safety. Our benchmark features high-quality queries, extensive risk categories, comprehensive modal combinations, and encompasses both vulnerability and oversensitivity evaluations. From the perspective of two key dimensions: risk categories and modality combinations, we demonstrate that the available benchmarks -- even the union of the vast majority of them -- are far from being truly comprehensive. To bridge this gap, we design a sophisticated data synthesis pipeline that generates extensive, high-quality complementary data addressing previously unexplored aspects. By combining open-source datasets with our synthetic data, our benchmark provides 4 distinct modality combinations for each of the 61 risk sub-categories, covering both English and Chinese across both vulnerability and oversensitivity dimensions.

LeTS: Learning to Think-and-Search via Process-and-Outcome Reward Hybridization

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning with the emergence of reasoning models like OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1. Recent research focuses on integrating reasoning capabilities into the realm of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) via outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, while the correctness of intermediate think-and-search steps is usually neglected. To address this issue, we design a process-level reward module to mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation. Grounded on this, we propose Learning to Think-and-Search (LeTS), a novel framework that hybridizes stepwise process reward and outcome-based reward to current RL methods for RAG. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generalization and inference efficiency of LeTS across various RAG benchmarks. In addition, these results reveal the potential of process- and outcome-level reward hybridization in boosting LLMs' reasoning ability via RL under other scenarios. The code will be released soon.

EVADE: Multimodal Benchmark for Evasive Content Detection in E-Commerce Applications

E-commerce platforms increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to detect illicit or misleading product content. However, these models remain vulnerable to evasive content: inputs (text or images) that superficially comply with platform policies while covertly conveying prohibited claims. Unlike traditional adversarial attacks that induce overt failures, evasive content exploits ambiguity and context, making it far harder to detect. Existing robustness benchmarks provide little guidance for this demanding, real-world challenge. We introduce EVADE, the first expert-curated, Chinese, multimodal benchmark specifically designed to evaluate foundation models on evasive content detection in e-commerce. The dataset contains 2,833 annotated text samples and 13,961 images spanning six demanding product categories, including body shaping, height growth, and health supplements. Two complementary tasks assess distinct capabilities: Single-Violation, which probes fine-grained reasoning under short prompts, and All-in-One, which tests long-context reasoning by merging overlapping policy rules into unified instructions. Notably, the All-in-One setting significantly narrows the performance gap between partial and full-match accuracy, suggesting that clearer rule definitions improve alignment between human and model judgment. We benchmark 26 mainstream LLMs and VLMs and observe substantial performance gaps: even state-of-the-art models frequently misclassify evasive samples. By releasing EVADE and strong baselines, we provide the first rigorous standard for evaluating evasive-content detection, expose fundamental limitations in current multimodal reasoning, and lay the groundwork for safer and more transparent content moderation systems in e-commerce. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/koenshen/EVADE-Bench.

NAN: A Training-Free Solution to Coefficient Estimation in Model Merging

Model merging offers a training-free alternative to multi-task learning by combining independently fine-tuned models into a unified one without access to raw data. However, existing approaches often rely on heuristics to determine the merging coefficients, limiting their scalability and generality. In this work, we revisit model merging through the lens of least-squares optimization and show that the optimal merging weights should scale with the amount of task-specific information encoded in each model. Based on this insight, we propose NAN, a simple yet effective method that estimates model merging coefficients via the inverse of parameter norm. NAN is training-free, plug-and-play, and applicable to a wide range of merging strategies. Extensive experiments on show that NAN consistently improves performance of baseline methods.