Exploring the Effectiveness and Interpretability of Texts in LLM-based Time Series Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied to time series forecasting tasks, leveraging pre-trained language models as the backbone and incorporating textual data to purportedly enhance the comprehensive capabilities of LLMs for time series. However, are these texts really helpful for interpretation? This study seeks to investigate the actual efficacy and interpretability of such textual incorporations. Through a series of empirical experiments on textual prompts and textual prototypes, our findings reveal that the misalignment between two modalities exists, and the textual information does not significantly improve time series forecasting performance in many cases. Furthermore, visualization analysis indicates that the textual representations learned by existing frameworks lack sufficient interpretability when applied to time series data. We further propose a novel metric named Semantic Matching Index (SMI) to better evaluate the matching degree between time series and texts during our post hoc interpretability investigation. Our analysis reveals the misalignment and limited interpretability of texts in current time-series LLMs, and we hope this study can raise awareness of the interpretability of texts for time series. The code is available at https://github.com/zachysun/TS-Lang-Exp.

Balanced Image Stylization with Style Matching Score

We present Style Matching Score (SMS), a novel optimization method for image stylization with diffusion models. Balancing effective style transfer with content preservation is a long-standing challenge. Unlike existing efforts, our method reframes image stylization as a style distribution matching problem. The target style distribution is estimated from off-the-shelf style-dependent LoRAs via carefully designed score functions. To preserve content information adaptively, we propose Progressive Spectrum Regularization, which operates in the frequency domain to guide stylization progressively from low-frequency layouts to high-frequency details. In addition, we devise a Semantic-Aware Gradient Refinement technique that leverages relevance maps derived from diffusion semantic priors to selectively stylize semantically important regions. The proposed optimization formulation extends stylization from pixel space to parameter space, readily applicable to lightweight feedforward generators for efficient one-step stylization. SMS effectively balances style alignment and content preservation, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches, verified by extensive experiments.

Mastering Continual Reinforcement Learning through Fine-Grained Sparse Network Allocation and Dormant Neuron Exploration

Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) is essential for developing agents that can learn, adapt, and accumulate knowledge over time. However, a fundamental challenge persists as agents must strike a delicate balance between plasticity, which enables rapid skill acquisition, and stability, which ensures long-term knowledge retention while preventing catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we introduce SSDE, a novel structure-based approach that enhances plasticity through a fine-grained allocation strategy with Structured Sparsity and Dormant-guided Exploration. SSDE decomposes the parameter space into forward-transfer (frozen) parameters and task-specific (trainable) parameters. Crucially, these parameters are allocated by an efficient co-allocation scheme under sparse coding, ensuring sufficient trainable capacity for new tasks while promoting efficient forward transfer through frozen parameters. However, structure-based methods often suffer from rigidity due to the accumulation of non-trainable parameters, limiting exploration and adaptability. To address this, we further introduce a sensitivity-guided neuron reactivation mechanism that systematically identifies and resets dormant neurons, which exhibit minimal influence in the sparse policy network during inference. This approach effectively enhance exploration while preserving structural efficiency. Extensive experiments on the CW10-v1 Continual World benchmark demonstrate that SSDE achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching a success rate of 95%, surpassing prior methods significantly in both plasticity and stability trade-offs (code is available at: https://github.com/chengqiArchy/SSDE).

Fast Direct: Query-Efficient Online Black-box Guidance for Diffusion-model Target Generation

Guided diffusion-model generation is a promising direction for customizing the generation process of a pre-trained diffusion-model to address the specific downstream tasks. Existing guided diffusion models either rely on training of the guidance model with pre-collected datasets or require the objective functions to be differentiable. However, for most real-world tasks, the offline datasets are often unavailable, and their objective functions are often not differentiable, such as image generation with human preferences, molecular generation for drug discovery, and material design. Thus, we need an \textbf{online} algorithm capable of collecting data during runtime and supporting a \textbf{black-box} objective function. Moreover, the \textbf{query efficiency} of the algorithm is also critical because the objective evaluation of the query is often expensive in the real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel and simple algorithm, \textbf{Fast Direct}, for query-efficient online black-box target generation. Our Fast Direct builds a pseudo-target on the data manifold to update the noise sequence of the diffusion model with a universal direction, which is promising to perform query-efficient guided generation. Extensive experiments on twelve high-resolution ($\small {1024 \times 1024}$) image target generation tasks and six 3D-molecule target generation tasks show $\textbf{6}\times$ up to $\textbf{10}\times$ query efficiency improvement and $\textbf{11}\times$ up to $\textbf{44}\times$ query efficiency improvement, respectively. Our implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/kimyong95/guide-stable-diffusion/tree/fast-direct

Active Sampling for Node Attribute Completion on Graphs

Node attribute, a type of crucial information for graph analysis, may be partially or completely missing for certain nodes in real world applications. Restoring the missing attributes is expected to benefit downstream graph learning. Few attempts have been made on node attribute completion, but a novel framework called Structure-attribute Transformer (SAT) was recently proposed by using a decoupled scheme to leverage structures and attributes. SAT ignores the differences in contributing to the learning schedule and finding a practical way to model the different importance of nodes with observed attributes is challenging. This paper proposes a novel AcTive Sampling algorithm (ATS) to restore missing node attributes. The representativeness and uncertainty of each node's information are first measured based on graph structure, representation similarity and learning bias. To select nodes as train samples in the next optimization step, a weighting scheme controlled by Beta distribution is then introduced to linearly combine the two properties. Extensive experiments on four public benchmark datasets and two downstream tasks have shown the superiority of ATS in node attribute completion.

MAGIC: Mastering Physical Adversarial Generation in Context through Collaborative LLM Agents

Physical adversarial attacks in driving scenarios can expose critical vulnerabilities in visual perception models. However, developing such attacks remains challenging due to diverse real-world backgrounds and the requirement for maintaining visual naturality. Building upon this challenge, we reformulate physical adversarial attacks as a one-shot patch-generation problem. Our approach generates adversarial patches through a deep generative model that considers the specific scene context, enabling direct physical deployment in matching environments. The primary challenge lies in simultaneously achieving two objectives: generating adversarial patches that effectively mislead object detection systems while determining contextually appropriate placement within the scene. We propose MAGIC (Mastering Physical Adversarial Generation In Context), a novel framework powered by multi-modal LLM agents to address these challenges. MAGIC automatically understands scene context and orchestrates adversarial patch generation through the synergistic interaction of language and vision capabilities. MAGIC orchestrates three specialized LLM agents: The adv-patch generation agent (GAgent) masters the creation of deceptive patches through strategic prompt engineering for text-to-image models. The adv-patch deployment agent (DAgent) ensures contextual coherence by determining optimal placement strategies based on scene understanding. The self-examination agent (EAgent) completes this trilogy by providing critical oversight and iterative refinement of both processes. We validate our method on both digital and physical level, \ie, nuImage and manually captured real scenes, where both statistical and visual results prove that our MAGIC is powerful and effectively for attacking wide-used object detection systems.

SceneTAP: Scene-Coherent Typographic Adversarial Planner against Vision-Language Models in Real-World Environments

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in interpreting visual content. While existing works demonstrate these models' vulnerability to deliberately placed adversarial texts, such texts are often easily identifiable as anomalous. In this paper, we present the first approach to generate scene-coherent typographic adversarial attacks that mislead advanced LVLMs while maintaining visual naturalness through the capability of the LLM-based agent. Our approach addresses three critical questions: what adversarial text to generate, where to place it within the scene, and how to integrate it seamlessly. We propose a training-free, multi-modal LLM-driven scene-coherent typographic adversarial planning (SceneTAP) that employs a three-stage process: scene understanding, adversarial planning, and seamless integration. The SceneTAP utilizes chain-of-thought reasoning to comprehend the scene, formulate effective adversarial text, strategically plan its placement, and provide detailed instructions for natural integration within the image. This is followed by a scene-coherent TextDiffuser that executes the attack using a local diffusion mechanism. We extend our method to real-world scenarios by printing and placing generated patches in physical environments, demonstrating its practical implications. Extensive experiments show that our scene-coherent adversarial text successfully misleads state-of-the-art LVLMs, including ChatGPT-4o, even after capturing new images of physical setups. Our evaluations demonstrate a significant increase in attack success rates while maintaining visual naturalness and contextual appropriateness. This work highlights vulnerabilities in current vision-language models to sophisticated, scene-coherent adversarial attacks and provides insights into potential defense mechanisms.

ExpertFlow: Optimized Expert Activation and Token Allocation for Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Inference

Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, while outperforming dense Large Language Models (LLMs) in terms of performance, face significant deployment challenges during inference due to their high memory demands. Existing offloading techniques, which involve swapping activated and idle experts between the GPU and CPU, often suffer from rigid expert caching mechanisms. These mechanisms fail to adapt to dynamic routing, leading to inefficient cache utilization, or incur prohibitive costs for prediction training. To tackle these inference-specific challenges, we introduce ExpertFlow, a comprehensive system specifically designed to enhance inference efficiency by accommodating flexible routing and enabling efficient expert scheduling between CPU and GPU. This reduces overhead and boosts system performance. Central to our approach is a predictive routing path-based offloading mechanism that utilizes a lightweight predictor to accurately forecast routing paths before computation begins. This proactive strategy allows for real-time error correction in expert caching, significantly increasing cache hit ratios and reducing the frequency of expert transfers, thereby minimizing I/O overhead. Additionally, we implement a dynamic token scheduling strategy that optimizes MoE inference by rearranging input tokens across different batches. This method not only reduces the number of activated experts per batch but also improves computational efficiency. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that ExpertFlow achieves up to 93.72\% GPU memory savings and enhances inference speed by 2 to 10 times compared to baseline methods, highlighting its effectiveness and utility as a robust solution for resource-constrained inference scenarios.

Sharpness-Aware Black-Box Optimization

Black-box optimization algorithms have been widely used in various machine learning problems, including reinforcement learning and prompt fine-tuning. However, directly optimizing the training loss value, as commonly done in existing black-box optimization methods, could lead to suboptimal model quality and generalization performance. To address those problems in black-box optimization, we propose a novel Sharpness-Aware Black-box Optimization (SABO) algorithm, which applies a sharpness-aware minimization strategy to improve the model generalization. Specifically, the proposed SABO method first reparameterizes the objective function by its expectation over a Gaussian distribution. Then it iteratively updates the parameterized distribution by approximated stochastic gradients of the maximum objective value within a small neighborhood around the current solution in the Gaussian distribution space. Theoretically, we prove the convergence rate and generalization bound of the proposed SABO algorithm. Empirically, extensive experiments on the black-box prompt fine-tuning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SABO method in improving model generalization performance.

Self-Assessed Generation: Trustworthy Label Generation for Optical Flow and Stereo Matching in Real-world

A significant challenge facing current optical flow and stereo methods is the difficulty in generalizing them well to the real world. This is mainly due to the high costs required to produce datasets, and the limitations of existing self-supervised methods on fuzzy results and complex model training problems. To address the above challenges, we propose a unified self-supervised generalization framework for optical flow and stereo tasks: Self-Assessed Generation (SAG). Unlike previous self-supervised methods, SAG is data-driven, using advanced reconstruction techniques to construct a reconstruction field from RGB images and generate datasets based on it. Afterward, we quantified the confidence level of the generated results from multiple perspectives, such as reconstruction field distribution, geometric consistency, and structural similarity, to eliminate inevitable defects in the generation process. We also designed a 3D flight foreground automatic rendering pipeline in SAG to encourage the network to learn occlusion and motion foreground. Experimentally, because SAG does not involve changes to methods or loss functions, it can directly self-supervised train the state-of-the-art deep networks, greatly improving the generalization performance of self-supervised methods on current mainstream optical flow and stereo-matching datasets. Compared to previous training modes, SAG is more generalized, cost-effective, and accurate.