Text-Phase Synergy Network with Dual Priors for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Retrieval

This paper studies unsupervised cross-domain image retrieval (UCDIR), which aims to retrieve images of the same category across different domains without relying on labeled data. Existing methods typically utilize pseudo-labels, derived from clustering algorithms, as supervisory signals for intra-domain representation learning and cross-domain feature alignment. However, these discrete pseudo-labels often fail to provide accurate and comprehensive semantic guidance. Moreover, the alignment process frequently overlooks the entanglement between domain-specific and semantic information, leading to semantic degradation in the learned representations and ultimately impairing retrieval performance. This paper addresses the limitations by proposing a Text-Phase Synergy Network with Dual Priors(TPSNet). Specifically, we first employ CLIP to generate a set of class-specific prompts per domain, termed as domain prompt, serving as a text prior that offers more precise semantic supervision. In parallel, we further introduce a phase prior, represented by domain-invariant phase features, which is integrated into the original image representations to bridge the domain distribution gaps while preserving semantic integrity. Leveraging the synergy of these dual priors, TPSNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on UCDIR benchmarks.

SRasP: Self-Reorientation Adversarial Style Perturbation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL) aims to transfer knowledge from a seen source domain to unseen target domains, serving as a key benchmark for evaluating the robustness and transferability of models. Existing style-based perturbation methods mitigate domain shift but often suffer from gradient instability and convergence to sharp minima.To address these limitations, we propose a novel crop-global style perturbation network, termed Self-Reorientation Adversarial \underline{S}tyle \underline{P}erturbation (SRasP). Specifically, SRasP leverages global semantic guidance to identify incoherent crops, followed by reorienting and aggregating the style gradients of these crops with the global style gradients within one image. Furthermore, we propose a novel multi-objective optimization function to maximize visual discrepancy while enforcing semantic consistency among global, crop, and adversarial features. Applying the stabilized perturbations during training encourages convergence toward flatter and more transferable solutions, improving generalization to unseen domains. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple CD-FSL benchmarks, demonstrating consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

Diffusion Probe: Generated Image Result Prediction Using CNN Probes

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models lack an efficient mechanism for early quality assessment, leading to costly trial-and-error in multi-generation scenarios such as prompt iteration, agent-based generation, and flow-grpo. We reveal a strong correlation between early diffusion cross-attention distributions and final image quality. Based on this finding, we introduce Diffusion Probe, a framework that leverages internal cross-attention maps as predictive signals. We design a lightweight predictor that maps statistical properties of early-stage cross-attention extracted from initial denoising steps to the final image's overall quality. This enables accurate forecasting of image quality across diverse evaluation metrics long before full synthesis is complete. We validate Diffusion Probe across a wide range of settings. On multiple T2I models, across early denoising windows, resolutions, and quality metrics, it achieves strong correlation (PCC > 0.7) and high classification performance (AUC-ROC > 0.9). Its reliability translates into practical gains. By enabling early quality-aware decisions in workflows such as prompt optimization, seed selection, and accelerated RL training, the probe supports more targeted sampling and avoids computation on low-potential generations. This reduces computational overhead while improving final output quality.Diffusion Probe is model-agnostic, efficient, and broadly applicable, offering a practical solution for improving T2I generation efficiency through early quality prediction.

TC-Padé: Trajectory-Consistent Padé Approximation for Diffusion Acceleration

Despite achieving state-of-the-art generation quality, diffusion models are hindered by the substantial computational burden of their iterative sampling process. While feature caching techniques achieve effective acceleration at higher step counts (e.g., 50 steps), they exhibit critical limitations in the practical low-step regime of 20-30 steps. As the interval between steps increases, polynomial-based extrapolators like TaylorSeer suffer from error accumulation and trajectory drift. Meanwhile, conventional caching strategies often overlook the distinct dynamical properties of different denoising phases. To address these challenges, we propose Trajectory-Consistent Padé approximation, a feature prediction framework grounded in Padé approximation. By modeling feature evolution through rational functions, our approach captures asymptotic and transitional behaviors more accurately than Taylor-based methods. To enable stable and trajectory-consistent sampling under reduced step counts, TC-Padé incorporates (1) adaptive coefficient modulation that leverages historical cached residuals to detect subtle trajectory transitions, and (2) step-aware prediction strategies tailored to the distinct dynamics of early, mid, and late sampling stages. Extensive experiments on DiT-XL/2, FLUX.1-dev, and Wan2.1 across both image and video generation demonstrate the effectiveness of TC-Padé. For instance, TC-Padé achieves 2.88x acceleration on FLUX.1-dev and 1.72x on Wan2.1 while maintaining high quality across FID, CLIP, Aesthetic, and VBench-2.0 metrics, substantially outperforming existing feature caching methods.

How Controllable Are Large Language Models? A Unified Evaluation across Behavioral Granularities

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive domains, yet their unpredictable behaviors, ranging from misaligned intent to inconsistent personality, pose significant risks. We introduce SteerEval, a hierarchical benchmark for evaluating LLM controllability across three domains: language features, sentiment, and personality. Each domain is structured into three specification levels: L1 (what to express), L2 (how to express), and L3 (how to instantiate), connecting high-level behavioral intent to concrete textual output. Using SteerEval, we systematically evaluate contemporary steering methods, revealing that control often degrades at finer-grained levels. Our benchmark offers a principled and interpretable framework for safe and controllable LLM behavior, serving as a foundation for future research.

Why Steering Works: Toward a Unified View of Language Model Parameter Dynamics

Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs), including local weight fine-tuning, LoRA-based adaptation, and activation-based interventions, are often studied in isolation, obscuring their connections and making comparison difficult. In this work, we present a unified view that frames these interventions as dynamic weight updates induced by a control signal, placing them within a single conceptual framework. Building on this view, we propose a unified preference-utility analysis that separates control effects into preference, defined as the tendency toward a target concept, and utility, defined as coherent and task-valid generation, and measures both on a shared log-odds scale using polarity-paired contrastive examples. Across methods, we observe a consistent trade-off between preference and utility: stronger control increases preference while predictably reducing utility. We further explain this behavior through an activation manifold perspective, in which control shifts representations along target-concept directions to enhance preference, while utility declines primarily when interventions push representations off the model's valid-generation manifold. Finally, we introduce a new steering approach SPLIT guided by this analysis that improves preference while better preserving utility. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit/blob/main/examples/SPLIT.md.

A Causal Perspective for Enhancing Jailbreak Attack and Defense

Uncovering the mechanisms behind "jailbreaks" in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for enhancing their safety and reliability, yet these mechanisms remain poorly understood. Existing studies predominantly analyze jailbreak prompts by probing latent representations, often overlooking the causal relationships between interpretable prompt features and jailbreak occurrences. In this work, we propose Causal Analyst, a framework that integrates LLMs into data-driven causal discovery to identify the direct causes of jailbreaks and leverage them for both attack and defense. We introduce a comprehensive dataset comprising 35k jailbreak attempts across seven LLMs, systematically constructed from 100 attack templates and 50 harmful queries, annotated with 37 meticulously designed human-readable prompt features. By jointly training LLM-based prompt encoding and GNN-based causal graph learning, we reconstruct causal pathways linking prompt features to jailbreak responses. Our analysis reveals that specific features, such as "Positive Character" and "Number of Task Steps", act as direct causal drivers of jailbreaks. We demonstrate the practical utility of these insights through two applications: (1) a Jailbreaking Enhancer that targets identified causal features to significantly boost attack success rates on public benchmarks, and (2) a Guardrail Advisor that utilizes the learned causal graph to extract true malicious intent from obfuscated queries. Extensive experiments, including baseline comparisons and causal structure validation, confirm the robustness of our causal analysis and its superiority over non-causal approaches. Our results suggest that analyzing jailbreak features from a causal perspective is an effective and interpretable approach for improving LLM reliability. Our code is available at https://github.com/Master-PLC/Causal-Analyst.

AgentDoG: A Diagnostic Guardrail Framework for AI Agent Safety and Security

The rise of AI agents introduces complex safety and security challenges arising from autonomous tool use and environmental interactions. Current guardrail models lack agentic risk awareness and transparency in risk diagnosis. To introduce an agentic guardrail that covers complex and numerous risky behaviors, we first propose a unified three-dimensional taxonomy that orthogonally categorizes agentic risks by their source (where), failure mode (how), and consequence (what). Guided by this structured and hierarchical taxonomy, we introduce a new fine-grained agentic safety benchmark (ATBench) and a Diagnostic Guardrail framework for agent safety and security (AgentDoG). AgentDoG provides fine-grained and contextual monitoring across agent trajectories. More Crucially, AgentDoG can diagnose the root causes of unsafe actions and seemingly safe but unreasonable actions, offering provenance and transparency beyond binary labels to facilitate effective agent alignment. AgentDoG variants are available in three sizes (4B, 7B, and 8B parameters) across Qwen and Llama model families. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AgentDoG achieves state-of-the-art performance in agentic safety moderation in diverse and complex interactive scenarios. All models and datasets are openly released.

YuFeng-XGuard: A Reasoning-Centric, Interpretable, and Flexible Guardrail Model for Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, safety guardrails are required to go beyond coarse-grained filtering and support fine-grained, interpretable, and adaptable risk assessment. However, existing solutions often rely on rapid classification schemes or post-hoc rules, resulting in limited transparency, inflexible policies, or prohibitive inference costs. To this end, we present YuFeng-XGuard, a reasoning-centric guardrail model family designed to perform multi-dimensional risk perception for LLM interactions. Instead of producing opaque binary judgments, YuFeng-XGuard generates structured risk predictions, including explicit risk categories and configurable confidence scores, accompanied by natural language explanations that expose the underlying reasoning process. This formulation enables safety decisions that are both actionable and interpretable. To balance decision latency and explanatory depth, we adopt a tiered inference paradigm that performs an initial risk decision based on the first decoded token, while preserving ondemand explanatory reasoning when required. In addition, we introduce a dynamic policy mechanism that decouples risk perception from policy enforcement, allowing safety policies to be adjusted without model retraining. Extensive experiments on a diverse set of public safety benchmarks demonstrate that YuFeng-XGuard achieves stateof-the-art performance while maintaining strong efficiency-efficacy trade-offs. We release YuFeng-XGuard as an open model family, including both a full-capacity variant and a lightweight version, to support a wide range of deployment scenarios.

A Safety Report on GPT-5.2, Gemini 3 Pro, Qwen3-VL, Grok 4.1 Fast, Nano Banana Pro, and Seedream 4.5

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has driven major gains in reasoning, perception, and generation across language and vision, yet whether these advances translate into comparable improvements in safety remains unclear, partly due to fragmented evaluations that focus on isolated modalities or threat models. In this report, we present an integrated safety evaluation of six frontier models--GPT-5.2, Gemini 3 Pro, Qwen3-VL, Grok 4.1 Fast, Nano Banana Pro, and Seedream 4.5--assessing each across language, vision-language, and image generation using a unified protocol that combines benchmark, adversarial, multilingual, and compliance evaluations. By aggregating results into safety leaderboards and model profiles, we reveal a highly uneven safety landscape: while GPT-5.2 demonstrates consistently strong and balanced performance, other models exhibit clear trade-offs across benchmark safety, adversarial robustness, multilingual generalization, and regulatory compliance. Despite strong results under standard benchmarks, all models remain highly vulnerable under adversarial testing, with worst-case safety rates dropping below 6%. Text-to-image models show slightly stronger alignment in regulated visual risk categories, yet remain fragile when faced with adversarial or semantically ambiguous prompts. Overall, these findings highlight that safety in frontier models is inherently multidimensional--shaped by modality, language, and evaluation design--underscoring the need for standardized, holistic safety assessments to better reflect real-world risk and guide responsible deployment.