Abstract:Adversarial patches have emerged as a popular privacy-preserving approach for resisting AI-driven surveillance systems. However, their conspicuous appearance makes them difficult to deploy in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a thermally activated adversarial wearable designed to ensure adaptability and effectiveness in complex real-world environments. The system integrates thermochromic dyes with flexible heating units to induce visually dynamic adversarial patterns on clothing surfaces. In its default state, the clothing appears as an ordinary black T-shirt. Upon heating via an embedded thermal unit, hidden adversarial patterns on the fabric are activated, allowing the wearer to effectively evade detection across both visible and infrared modalities. Physical experiments demonstrate that the adversarial wearable achieves rapid texture activation within 50 seconds and maintains an adversarial success rate above 80\% across diverse real-world surveillance environments. This work demonstrates a new pathway toward physically grounded, user-controllable anti-AI systems, highlighting the growing importance of proactive adversarial techniques for privacy protection in the age of ubiquitous AI surveillance.
Abstract:Robust object detection for challenging scenarios increasingly relies on event cameras, yet existing Event-RGB datasets remain constrained by sparse coverage of extreme conditions and low spatial resolution (<= 640 x 480), which prevents comprehensive evaluation of detectors under challenging scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose PEOD, the first large-scale, pixel-aligned and high-resolution (1280 x 720) Event-RGB dataset for object detection under challenge conditions. PEOD contains 130+ spatiotemporal-aligned sequences and 340k manual bounding boxes, with 57% of data captured under low-light, overexposure, and high-speed motion. Furthermore, we benchmark 14 methods across three input configurations (Event-based, RGB-based, and Event-RGB fusion) on PEOD. On the full test set and normal subset, fusion-based models achieve the excellent performance. However, in illumination challenge subset, the top event-based model outperforms all fusion models, while fusion models still outperform their RGB-based counterparts, indicating limits of existing fusion methods when the frame modality is severely degraded. PEOD establishes a realistic, high-quality benchmark for multimodal perception and facilitates future research.
Abstract:Adversarial Training (AT) has been shown to significantly enhance adversarial robustness via a min-max optimization approach. However, its effectiveness in video recognition tasks is hampered by two main challenges. First, fast adversarial training for video models remains largely unexplored, which severely impedes its practical applications. Specifically, most video adversarial training methods are computationally costly, with long training times and high expenses. Second, existing methods struggle with the trade-off between clean accuracy and adversarial robustness. To address these challenges, we introduce Video Fast Adversarial Training with Weak-to-Strong consistency (VFAT-WS), the first fast adversarial training method for video data. Specifically, VFAT-WS incorporates the following key designs: First, it integrates a straightforward yet effective temporal frequency augmentation (TF-AUG), and its spatial-temporal enhanced form STF-AUG, along with a single-step PGD attack to boost training efficiency and robustness. Second, it devises a weak-to-strong spatial-temporal consistency regularization, which seamlessly integrates the simpler TF-AUG and the more complex STF-AUG. Leveraging the consistency regularization, it steers the learning process from simple to complex augmentations. Both of them work together to achieve a better trade-off between clean accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments on UCF-101 and HMDB-51 with both CNN and Transformer-based models demonstrate that VFAT-WS achieves great improvements in adversarial robustness and corruption robustness, while accelerating training by nearly 490%.
Abstract:Cell type annotation is critical for understanding cellular heterogeneity. Based on single-cell RNA-seq data and deep learning models, good progress has been made in annotating a fixed number of cell types within a specific tissue. However, universal cell annotation, which can generalize across tissues, discover novel cell types, and extend to novel cell types, remains less explored. To fill this gap, this paper proposes scAgent, a universal cell annotation framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs). scAgent can identify cell types and discover novel cell types in diverse tissues; furthermore, it is data efficient to learn novel cell types. Experimental studies in 160 cell types and 35 tissues demonstrate the superior performance of scAgent in general cell-type annotation, novel cell discovery, and extensibility to novel cell type.




Abstract:Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various tasks, yet their robustness to real-world illumination variations remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{I}llumination \textbf{T}ransformation \textbf{A}ttack (\textbf{ITA}), the first framework to systematically assess VLMs' robustness against illumination changes. However, there still exist two key challenges: (1) how to model global illumination with fine-grained control to achieve diverse lighting conditions and (2) how to ensure adversarial effectiveness while maintaining naturalness. To address the first challenge, we innovatively decompose global illumination into multiple parameterized point light sources based on the illumination rendering equation. This design enables us to model more diverse lighting variations that previous methods could not capture. Then, by integrating these parameterized lighting variations with physics-based lighting reconstruction techniques, we could precisely render such light interactions in the original scenes, finally meeting the goal of fine-grained lighting control. For the second challenge, by controlling illumination through the lighting reconstrution model's latent space rather than direct pixel manipulation, we inherently preserve physical lighting priors. Furthermore, to prevent potential reconstruction artifacts, we design additional perceptual constraints for maintaining visual consistency with original images and diversity constraints for avoiding light source convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ITA could significantly reduce the performance of advanced VLMs, e.g., LLaVA-1.6, while possessing competitive naturalness, exposing VLMS' critical illuminiation vulnerabilities.




Abstract:This paper introduces the Global Challenge for Safe and Secure Large Language Models (LLMs), a pioneering initiative organized by AI Singapore (AISG) and the CyberSG R&D Programme Office (CRPO) to foster the development of advanced defense mechanisms against automated jailbreaking attacks. With the increasing integration of LLMs in critical sectors such as healthcare, finance, and public administration, ensuring these models are resilient to adversarial attacks is vital for preventing misuse and upholding ethical standards. This competition focused on two distinct tracks designed to evaluate and enhance the robustness of LLM security frameworks. Track 1 tasked participants with developing automated methods to probe LLM vulnerabilities by eliciting undesirable responses, effectively testing the limits of existing safety protocols within LLMs. Participants were challenged to devise techniques that could bypass content safeguards across a diverse array of scenarios, from offensive language to misinformation and illegal activities. Through this process, Track 1 aimed to deepen the understanding of LLM vulnerabilities and provide insights for creating more resilient models.




Abstract:Large language models have drawn significant attention to the challenge of safe alignment, especially regarding jailbreak attacks that circumvent security measures to produce harmful content. To address the limitations of existing methods like GCG, which perform well in single-model attacks but lack transferability, we propose several enhancements, including a scenario induction template, optimized suffix selection, and the integration of re-suffix attack mechanism to reduce inconsistent outputs. Our approach has shown superior performance in extensive experiments across various benchmarks, achieving nearly 100% success rates in both attack execution and transferability. Notably, our method has won the online first place in the AISG-hosted Global Challenge for Safe and Secure LLMs.




Abstract:Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models like CLIP have achieved remarkable success in computer vision and particularly demonstrated superior robustness to distribution shifts of 2D images. However, their robustness under 3D viewpoint variations is still limited, which can hinder the development for real-world applications. This paper successfully addresses this concern while keeping VLPs' original performance by breaking through two primary obstacles: 1) the scarcity of training data and 2) the suboptimal fine-tuning paradigms. To combat data scarcity, we build the Multi-View Caption (MVCap) dataset -- a comprehensive collection of over four million multi-view image-text pairs across more than 100K objects, providing more potential for VLP models to develop generalizable viewpoint-invariant representations. To address the limitations of existing paradigms in performance trade-offs and training efficiency, we design a novel fine-tuning framework named Omniview-Tuning (OVT). Specifically, OVT introduces a Cross-Viewpoint Alignment objective through a minimax-like optimization strategy, which effectively aligns representations of identical objects from diverse viewpoints without causing overfitting. Additionally, OVT fine-tunes VLP models in a parameter-efficient manner, leading to minimal computational cost. Extensive experiments on various VLP models with different architectures validate that OVT significantly improves the models' resilience to viewpoint shifts and keeps the original performance, establishing a pioneering standard for boosting the viewpoint invariance of VLP models.
Abstract:This paper proposes a meshless deep learning algorithm, enriched physics-informed neural networks (EPINNs), to solve dynamic Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) equations with strong coupling and nonlinear characteristics. The EPINNs takes the traditional physics-informed neural networks as the foundation framework, and adds the adaptive loss weight to balance the loss functions, which automatically assigns the weights of losses by updating the parameters in each iteration based on the maximum likelihood estimate. The resampling strategy is employed in the EPINNs to accelerate the convergence of loss function. Meanwhile, the GPU parallel computing technique is adopted to accelerate the solving process. Four examples are provided to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method. Numerical results indicate that the new method has better applicability than traditional numerical methods in solving such coupled nonlinear systems. More importantly, the EPINNs is more accurate, stable, and fast than the traditional physics-informed neural networks. This work provides a simple and high-performance numerical tool for addressing PNPs with arbitrary boundary shapes and boundary conditions.




Abstract:The emergence of artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) has raised concerns about the authenticity of multimedia content in various fields. However, existing research for forgery content detection has focused mainly on binary classification tasks of complete videos, which has limited applicability in industrial settings. To address this gap, we propose UMMAFormer, a novel universal transformer framework for temporal forgery localization (TFL) that predicts forgery segments with multimodal adaptation. Our approach introduces a Temporal Feature Abnormal Attention (TFAA) module based on temporal feature reconstruction to enhance the detection of temporal differences. We also design a Parallel Cross-Attention Feature Pyramid Network (PCA-FPN) to optimize the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) for subtle feature enhancement. To evaluate the proposed method, we contribute a novel Temporal Video Inpainting Localization (TVIL) dataset specifically tailored for video inpainting scenes. Our experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets, including Lav-DF, TVIL, and Psynd, significantly outperforming previous methods. The code and data are available at https://github.com/ymhzyj/UMMAFormer/.