Addressing Overthinking in Large Vision-Language Models via Gated Perception-Reasoning Optimization

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have exhibited strong reasoning capabilities through chain-of-thought mechanisms that generate step-by-step rationales. However, such slow-thinking approaches often lead to overthinking, where models produce excessively verbose responses even for simple queries, resulting in test-time inefficiency and even degraded accuracy. Prior work has attempted to mitigate this issue via adaptive reasoning strategies, but these methods largely overlook a fundamental bottleneck: visual perception failures. We argue that stable reasoning critically depends on low-level visual grounding, and that reasoning errors often originate from imperfect perception rather than insufficient deliberation. To address this limitation, we propose Gated Perception-Reasoning Optimization (GPRO), a meta-reasoning controller that dynamically routes computation among three decision paths at each generation step: a lightweight fast path, a slow perception path for re-examining visual inputs, and a slow reasoning path for internal self-reflection. To learn this distinction, we derive large-scale failure attribution supervision from approximately 790k samples, using teacher models to distinguish perceptual hallucinations from reasoning errors. We then train the controller with multi-objective reinforcement learning to optimize the trade-off between task accuracy and computational cost under uncertainty. Experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that GPRO substantially improves both accuracy and efficiency, outperforming recent slow-thinking methods while generating significantly shorter responses.

Explainable and Fine-Grained Safeguarding of LLM Multi-Agent Systems via Bi-Level Graph Anomaly Detection

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown strong capabilities in solving complex tasks. As MAS become increasingly autonomous in various safety-critical tasks, detecting malicious agents has become a critical security concern. Although existing graph anomaly detection (GAD)-based defenses can identify anomalous agents, they mainly rely on coarse sentence-level information and overlook fine-grained lexical cues, leading to suboptimal performance. Moreover, the lack of interpretability in these methods limits their reliability and real-world applicability. To address these limitations, we propose XG-Guard, an explainable and fine-grained safeguarding framework for detecting malicious agents in MAS. To incorporate both coarse and fine-grained textual information for anomalous agent identification, we utilize a bi-level agent encoder to jointly model the sentence- and token-level representations of each agent. A theme-based anomaly detector further captures the evolving discussion focus in MAS dialogues, while a bi-level score fusion mechanism quantifies token-level contributions for explanation. Extensive experiments across diverse MAS topologies and attack scenarios demonstrate robust detection performance and strong interpretability of XG-Guard.

Synthetic Clinical Notes for Rare ICD Codes: A Data-Centric Framework for Long-Tail Medical Coding

Automatic ICD coding from clinical text is a critical task in medical NLP but remains hindered by the extreme long-tail distribution of diagnostic codes. Thousands of rare and zero-shot ICD codes are severely underrepresented in datasets like MIMIC-III, leading to low macro-F1 scores. In this work, we propose a data-centric framework that generates high-quality synthetic discharge summaries to mitigate this imbalance. Our method constructs realistic multi-label code sets anchored on rare codes by leveraging real-world co-occurrence patterns, ICD descriptions, synonyms, taxonomy, and similar clinical notes. Using these structured prompts, we generate 90,000 synthetic notes covering 7,902 ICD codes, significantly expanding the training distribution. We fine-tune two state-of-the-art transformer-based models, PLM-ICD and GKI-ICD, on both the original and extended datasets. Experiments show that our approach modestly improves macro-F1 while maintaining strong micro-F1, outperforming prior SOTA. While the gain may seem marginal relative to the computational cost, our results demonstrate that carefully crafted synthetic data can enhance equity in long-tail ICD code prediction.

Glocal Information Bottleneck for Time Series Imputation

Time Series Imputation (TSI), which aims to recover missing values in temporal data, remains a fundamental challenge due to the complex and often high-rate missingness in real-world scenarios. Existing models typically optimize the point-wise reconstruction loss, focusing on recovering numerical values (local information). However, we observe that under high missing rates, these models still perform well in the training phase yet produce poor imputations and distorted latent representation distributions (global information) in the inference phase. This reveals a critical optimization dilemma: current objectives lack global guidance, leading models to overfit local noise and fail to capture global information of the data. To address this issue, we propose a new training paradigm, Glocal Information Bottleneck (Glocal-IB). Glocal-IB is model-agnostic and extends the standard IB framework by introducing a Global Alignment loss, derived from a tractable mutual information approximation. This loss aligns the latent representations of masked inputs with those of their originally observed counterparts. It helps the model retain global structure and local details while suppressing noise caused by missing values, giving rise to better generalization under high missingness. Extensive experiments on nine datasets confirm that Glocal-IB leads to consistently improved performance and aligned latent representations under missingness. Our code implementation is available in https://github.com/Muyiiiii/NeurIPS-25-Glocal-IB.

A Systematic Survey of Model Extraction Attacks and Defenses: State-of-the-Art and Perspectives

Machine learning (ML) models have significantly grown in complexity and utility, driving advances across multiple domains. However, substantial computational resources and specialized expertise have historically restricted their wide adoption. Machine-Learning-as-a-Service (MLaaS) platforms have addressed these barriers by providing scalable, convenient, and affordable access to sophisticated ML models through user-friendly APIs. While this accessibility promotes widespread use of advanced ML capabilities, it also introduces vulnerabilities exploited through Model Extraction Attacks (MEAs). Recent studies have demonstrated that adversaries can systematically replicate a target model's functionality by interacting with publicly exposed interfaces, posing threats to intellectual property, privacy, and system security. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive survey of MEAs and corresponding defense strategies. We propose a novel taxonomy that classifies MEAs according to attack mechanisms, defense approaches, and computing environments. Our analysis covers various attack techniques, evaluates their effectiveness, and highlights challenges faced by existing defenses, particularly the critical trade-off between preserving model utility and ensuring security. We further assess MEAs within different computing paradigms and discuss their technical, ethical, legal, and societal implications, along with promising directions for future research. This systematic survey aims to serve as a valuable reference for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers engaged in AI security and privacy. Additionally, we maintain an online repository continuously updated with related literature at https://github.com/kzhao5/ModelExtractionPapers.

Cross-Domain Conditional Diffusion Models for Time Series Imputation

Cross-domain time series imputation is an underexplored data-centric research task that presents significant challenges, particularly when the target domain suffers from high missing rates and domain shifts in temporal dynamics. Existing time series imputation approaches primarily focus on the single-domain setting, which cannot effectively adapt to a new domain with domain shifts. Meanwhile, conventional domain adaptation techniques struggle with data incompleteness, as they typically assume the data from both source and target domains are fully observed to enable adaptation. For the problem of cross-domain time series imputation, missing values introduce high uncertainty that hinders distribution alignment, making existing adaptation strategies ineffective. Specifically, our proposed solution tackles this problem from three perspectives: (i) Data: We introduce a frequency-based time series interpolation strategy that integrates shared spectral components from both domains while retaining domain-specific temporal structures, constructing informative priors for imputation. (ii) Model: We design a diffusion-based imputation model that effectively learns domain-shared representations and captures domain-specific temporal dependencies with dedicated denoising networks. (iii) Algorithm: We further propose a cross-domain consistency alignment strategy that selectively regularizes output-level domain discrepancies, enabling effective knowledge transfer while preserving domain-specific characteristics. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach. Our code implementation is available here.

A Survey of Large Language Models for Text-Guided Molecular Discovery: from Molecule Generation to Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) are introducing a paradigm shift in molecular discovery by enabling text-guided interaction with chemical spaces through natural language, symbolic notations, with emerging extensions to incorporate multi-modal inputs. To advance the new field of LLM for molecular discovery, this survey provides an up-to-date and forward-looking review of the emerging use of LLMs for two central tasks: molecule generation and molecule optimization. Based on our proposed taxonomy for both problems, we analyze representative techniques in each category, highlighting how LLM capabilities are leveraged across different learning settings. In addition, we include the commonly used datasets and evaluation protocols. We conclude by discussing key challenges and future directions, positioning this survey as a resource for researchers working at the intersection of LLMs and molecular science. A continuously updated reading list is available at https://github.com/REAL-Lab-NU/Awesome-LLM-Centric-Molecular-Discovery.

Topology-Aware Conformal Prediction for Stream Networks

Stream networks, a unique class of spatiotemporal graphs, exhibit complex directional flow constraints and evolving dependencies, making uncertainty quantification a critical yet challenging task. Traditional conformal prediction methods struggle in this setting due to the need for joint predictions across multiple interdependent locations and the intricate spatio-temporal dependencies inherent in stream networks. Existing approaches either neglect dependencies, leading to overly conservative predictions, or rely solely on data-driven estimations, failing to capture the rich topological structure of the network. To address these challenges, we propose Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Conformal Inference (\texttt{STACI}), a novel framework that integrates network topology and temporal dynamics into the conformal prediction framework. \texttt{STACI} introduces a topology-aware nonconformity score that respects directional flow constraints and dynamically adjusts prediction sets to account for temporal distributional shifts. We provide theoretical guarantees on the validity of our approach and demonstrate its superior performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results show that \texttt{STACI} effectively balances prediction efficiency and coverage, outperforming existing conformal prediction methods for stream networks.

A Survey of Model Extraction Attacks and Defenses in Distributed Computing Environments

Model Extraction Attacks (MEAs) threaten modern machine learning systems by enabling adversaries to steal models, exposing intellectual property and training data. With the increasing deployment of machine learning models in distributed computing environments, including cloud, edge, and federated learning settings, each paradigm introduces distinct vulnerabilities and challenges. Without a unified perspective on MEAs across these distributed environments, organizations risk fragmented defenses, inadequate risk assessments, and substantial economic and privacy losses. This survey is motivated by the urgent need to understand how the unique characteristics of cloud, edge, and federated deployments shape attack vectors and defense requirements. We systematically examine the evolution of attack methodologies and defense mechanisms across these environments, demonstrating how environmental factors influence security strategies in critical sectors such as autonomous vehicles, healthcare, and financial services. By synthesizing recent advances in MEAs research and discussing the limitations of current evaluation practices, this survey provides essential insights for developing robust and adaptive defense strategies. Our comprehensive approach highlights the importance of integrating protective measures across the entire distributed computing landscape to ensure the secure deployment of machine learning models.

RobustFT: Robust Supervised Fine-tuning for Large Language Models under Noisy Response

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a crucial role in adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific domains or tasks. However, as demonstrated by empirical experiments, the collected data inevitably contains noise in practical applications, which poses significant challenges to model performance on downstream tasks. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a noise-robust SFT framework to enhance model capabilities in downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce a robust SFT framework (RobustFT) that performs noise detection and relabeling on downstream task data. For noise identification, our approach employs a multi-expert collaborative system with inference-enhanced models to achieve superior noise detection. In the denoising phase, we utilize a context-enhanced strategy, which incorporates the most relevant and confident knowledge followed by careful assessment to generate reliable annotations. Additionally, we introduce an effective data selection mechanism based on response entropy, ensuring only high-quality samples are retained for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple LLMs across five datasets demonstrate RobustFT's exceptional performance in noisy scenarios.