LASA: Language-Agnostic Semantic Alignment at the Semantic Bottleneck for LLM Safety

Large language models (LLMs) often demonstrate strong safety performance in high-resource languages, yet exhibit severe vulnerabilities when queried in low-resource languages. We attribute this gap to a mismatch between language-agnostic semantic understanding ability and language-dominant safety alignment biased toward high-resource languages. Consistent with this hypothesis, we empirically identify the semantic bottleneck in LLMs, an intermediate layer in which the geometry of model representations is governed primarily by shared semantic content rather than language identity. Building on this observation, we propose Language-Agnostic Semantic Alignment (LASA), which anchors safety alignment directly in semantic bottlenecks. Experiments show that LASA substantially improves safety across all languages: average attack success rate (ASR) drops from 24.7% to 2.8% on LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct and remains around 3-4% across Qwen2.5 and Qwen3 Instruct models (7B-32B). Together, our analysis and method offer a representation-level perspective on LLM safety, suggesting that safety alignment requires anchoring safety understanding not in surface text, but in the model's language-agnostic semantic space.

SMSP: A Plug-and-Play Strategy of Multi-Scale Perception for MLLMs to Perceive Visual Illusions

Recent works have shown that Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are highly vulnerable to hidden-pattern visual illusions, where the hidden content is imperceptible to models but obvious to humans. This deficiency highlights a perceptual misalignment between current MLLMs and humans, and also introduces potential safety concerns. To systematically investigate this failure, we introduce IlluChar, a comprehensive and challenging illusion dataset, and uncover a key underlying mechanism for the models' failure: high-frequency attention bias, where the models are easily distracted by high-frequency background textures in illusion images, causing them to overlook hidden patterns. To address the issue, we propose the Strategy of Multi-Scale Perception (SMSP), a plug-and-play framework that aligns with human visual perceptual strategies. By suppressing distracting high-frequency backgrounds, SMSP generates images closer to human perception. Our experiments demonstrate that SMSP significantly improves the performance of all evaluated MLLMs on illusion images, for instance, increasing the accuracy of Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct from 13.0% to 84.0%. Our work provides novel insights into MLLMs' visual perception, and offers a practical and robust solution to enhance it. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Tujz2023/SMSP.

ToolTok: Tool Tokenization for Efficient and Generalizable GUI Agents

Existing GUI agent models relying on coordinate-based one-step visual grounding struggle with generalizing to varying input resolutions and aspect ratios. Alternatives introduce coordinate-free strategies yet suffer from learning under severe data scarcity. To address the limitations, we propose ToolTok, a novel paradigm of multi-step pathfinding for GUI agents, where operations are modeled as a sequence of progressive tool usage. Specifically, we devise tools aligned with human interaction habits and represent each tool using learnable token embeddings. To enable efficient embedding learning under limited supervision, ToolTok introduces a semantic anchoring mechanism that grounds each tool with semantically related concepts as natural inductive bias. To further enable a pre-trained large language model to progressively acquire tool semantics, we construct an easy-to-hard curriculum consisting of three tasks: token definition question-answering, pure text-guided tool selection, and simplified visual pathfinding. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that ToolTok achieves superior performance among models of comparable scale (4B) and remains competitive with a substantially larger model (235B). Notably, these results are obtained using less than 1% of the training data required by other post-training approaches. In addition, ToolTok demonstrates strong generalization across unseen scenarios. Our training & inference code is open-source at https://github.com/ZephinueCode/ToolTok.