TaskCraft: Automated Generation of Agentic Tasks

Agentic tasks, which require multi-step problem solving with autonomy, tool use, and adaptive reasoning, are becoming increasingly central to the advancement of NLP and AI. However, existing instruction data lacks tool interaction, and current agentic benchmarks rely on costly human annotation, limiting their scalability. We introduce \textsc{TaskCraft}, an automated workflow for generating difficulty-scalable, multi-tool, and verifiable agentic tasks with execution trajectories. TaskCraft expands atomic tasks using depth-based and width-based extensions to create structurally and hierarchically complex challenges. Empirical results show that these tasks improve prompt optimization in the generation workflow and enhance supervised fine-tuning of agentic foundation models. We present a large-scale synthetic dataset of approximately 36,000 tasks with varying difficulty to support future research on agent tuning and evaluation.

Rethinking Contrastive Learning in Graph Anomaly Detection: A Clean-View Perspective

Graph anomaly detection aims to identify unusual patterns in graph-based data, with wide applications in fields such as web security and financial fraud detection. Existing methods typically rely on contrastive learning, assuming that a lower similarity between a node and its local subgraph indicates abnormality. However, these approaches overlook a crucial limitation: the presence of interfering edges invalidates this assumption, since it introduces disruptive noise that compromises the contrastive learning process. Consequently, this limitation impairs the ability to effectively learn meaningful representations of normal patterns, leading to suboptimal detection performance. To address this issue, we propose a Clean-View Enhanced Graph Anomaly Detection framework (CVGAD), which includes a multi-scale anomaly awareness module to identify key sources of interference in the contrastive learning process. Moreover, to mitigate bias from the one-step edge removal process, we introduce a novel progressive purification module. This module incrementally refines the graph by iteratively identifying and removing interfering edges, thereby enhancing model performance. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach.

DenSe-AdViT: A novel Vision Transformer for Dense SAR Object Detection

Vision Transformer (ViT) has achieved remarkable results in object detection for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, owing to its exceptional ability to extract global features. However, it struggles with the extraction of multi-scale local features, leading to limited performance in detecting small targets, especially when they are densely arranged. Therefore, we propose Density-Sensitive Vision Transformer with Adaptive Tokens (DenSe-AdViT) for dense SAR target detection. We design a Density-Aware Module (DAM) as a preliminary component that generates a density tensor based on target distribution. It is guided by a meticulously crafted objective metric, enabling precise and effective capture of the spatial distribution and density of objects. To integrate the multi-scale information enhanced by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with the global features derived from the Transformer, Density-Enhanced Fusion Module (DEFM) is proposed. It effectively refines attention toward target-survival regions with the assist of density mask and the multiple sources features. Notably, our DenSe-AdViT achieves 79.8% mAP on the RSDD dataset and 92.5% on the SIVED dataset, both of which feature a large number of densely distributed vehicle targets.

Face De-identification: State-of-the-art Methods and Comparative Studies

The widespread use of image acquisition technologies, along with advances in facial recognition, has raised serious privacy concerns. Face de-identification usually refers to the process of concealing or replacing personal identifiers, which is regarded as an effective means to protect the privacy of facial images. A significant number of methods for face de-identification have been proposed in recent years. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art face de-identification methods, categorized into three levels: pixel-level, representation-level, and semantic-level techniques. We systematically evaluate these methods based on two key criteria, the effectiveness of privacy protection and preservation of image utility, highlighting their advantages and limitations. Our analysis includes qualitative and quantitative comparisons of the main algorithms, demonstrating that deep learning-based approaches, particularly those using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models, have achieved significant advancements in balancing privacy and utility. Experimental results reveal that while recent methods demonstrate strong privacy protection, trade-offs remain in visual fidelity and computational complexity. This survey not only summarizes the current landscape but also identifies key challenges and future research directions in face de-identification.