END: Early Noise Dropping for Efficient and Effective Context Denoising

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, they are often distracted by irrelevant or noisy context in input sequences that degrades output quality. This problem affects both long- and short-context scenarios, such as retrieval-augmented generation, table question-answering, and in-context learning. We reveal that LLMs can implicitly identify whether input sequences contain useful information at early layers, prior to token generation. Leveraging this insight, we introduce Early Noise Dropping (\textsc{END}), a novel approach to mitigate this issue without requiring fine-tuning the LLMs. \textsc{END} segments input sequences into chunks and employs a linear prober on the early layers of LLMs to differentiate between informative and noisy chunks. By discarding noisy chunks early in the process, \textsc{END} preserves critical information, reduces distraction, and lowers computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textsc{END} significantly improves both performance and efficiency across different LLMs on multiple evaluation datasets. Furthermore, by investigating LLMs' implicit understanding to the input with the prober, this work also deepens understanding of how LLMs do reasoning with contexts internally.

Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training

Due to the scarcity of agent-oriented pre-training data, LLM-based autonomous agents typically rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning, which often fails to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. We introduce Hephaestus-Forge, the first large-scale pre-training corpus designed to enhance the fundamental capabilities of LLM agents in API function calling, intrinsic reasoning and planning, and adapting to environmental feedback. Hephaestus-Forge comprises 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs, including both tool documentation to introduce knowledge of API functions and function calling trajectories to strengthen intrinsic reasoning. To explore effective training protocols, we investigate scaling laws to identify the optimal recipe in data mixing ratios. By continual pre-training on Hephaestus-Forge, Hephaestus outperforms small- to medium-scale open-source LLMs and rivals commercial LLMs on three agent benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our pre-training corpus in enhancing fundamental agentic capabilities and generalization of LLMs to new tasks or environments.

GVMGen: A General Video-to-Music Generation Model with Hierarchical Attentions

Composing music for video is essential yet challenging, leading to a growing interest in automating music generation for video applications. Existing approaches often struggle to achieve robust music-video correspondence and generative diversity, primarily due to inadequate feature alignment methods and insufficient datasets. In this study, we present General Video-to-Music Generation model (GVMGen), designed for generating high-related music to the video input. Our model employs hierarchical attentions to extract and align video features with music in both spatial and temporal dimensions, ensuring the preservation of pertinent features while minimizing redundancy. Remarkably, our method is versatile, capable of generating multi-style music from different video inputs, even in zero-shot scenarios. We also propose an evaluation model along with two novel objective metrics for assessing video-music alignment. Additionally, we have compiled a large-scale dataset comprising diverse types of video-music pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that GVMGen surpasses previous models in terms of music-video correspondence, generative diversity, and application universality.

Personalized Dynamic Music Emotion Recognition with Dual-Scale Attention-Based Meta-Learning

Dynamic Music Emotion Recognition (DMER) aims to predict the emotion of different moments in music, playing a crucial role in music information retrieval. The existing DMER methods struggle to capture long-term dependencies when dealing with sequence data, which limits their performance. Furthermore, these methods often overlook the influence of individual differences on emotion perception, even though everyone has their own personalized emotional perception in the real world. Motivated by these issues, we explore more effective sequence processing methods and introduce the Personalized DMER (PDMER) problem, which requires models to predict emotions that align with personalized perception. Specifically, we propose a Dual-Scale Attention-Based Meta-Learning (DSAML) method. This method fuses features from a dual-scale feature extractor and captures both short and long-term dependencies using a dual-scale attention transformer, improving the performance in traditional DMER. To achieve PDMER, we design a novel task construction strategy that divides tasks by annotators. Samples in a task are annotated by the same annotator, ensuring consistent perception. Leveraging this strategy alongside meta-learning, DSAML can predict personalized perception of emotions with just one personalized annotation sample. Our objective and subjective experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance in both traditional DMER and PDMER.

GraphicsDreamer: Image to 3D Generation with Physical Consistency

Recently, the surge of efficient and automated 3D AI-generated content (AIGC) methods has increasingly illuminated the path of transforming human imagination into complex 3D structures. However, the automated generation of 3D content is still significantly lags in industrial application. This gap exists because 3D modeling demands high-quality assets with sharp geometry, exquisite topology, and physically based rendering (PBR), among other criteria. To narrow the disparity between generated results and artists' expectations, we introduce GraphicsDreamer, a method for creating highly usable 3D meshes from single images. To better capture the geometry and material details, we integrate the PBR lighting equation into our cross-domain diffusion model, concurrently predicting multi-view color, normal, depth images, and PBR materials. In the geometry fusion stage, we continue to enforce the PBR constraints, ensuring that the generated 3D objects possess reliable texture details, supporting realistic relighting. Furthermore, our method incorporates topology optimization and fast UV unwrapping capabilities, allowing the 3D products to be seamlessly imported into graphics engines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model can produce high quality 3D assets in a reasonable time cost compared to previous methods.

Multi-Scale Cross-Fusion and Edge-Supervision Network for Image Splicing Localization

Image Splicing Localization (ISL) is a fundamental yet challenging task in digital forensics. Although current approaches have achieved promising performance, the edge information is insufficiently exploited, resulting in poor integrality and high false alarms. To tackle this problem, we propose a multi-scale cross-fusion and edge-supervision network for ISL. Specifically, our framework consists of three key steps: multi-scale features cross-fusion, edge mask prediction and edge-supervision localization. Firstly, we input the RGB image and its noise image into a segmentation network to learn multi-scale features, which are then aggregated via a cross-scale fusion followed by a cross-domain fusion to enhance feature representation. Secondly, we design an edge mask prediction module to effectively mine the reliable boundary artifacts. Finally, the cross-fused features and the reliable edge mask information are seamlessly integrated via an attention mechanism to incrementally supervise and facilitate model training. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art schemes.

Learning on Less: Constraining Pre-trained Model Learning for Generalizable Diffusion-Generated Image Detection

Diffusion Models enable realistic image generation, raising the risk of misinformation and eroding public trust. Currently, detecting images generated by unseen diffusion models remains challenging due to the limited generalization capabilities of existing methods. To address this issue, we rethink the effectiveness of pre-trained models trained on large-scale, real-world images. Our findings indicate that: 1) Pre-trained models can cluster the features of real images effectively. 2) Models with pre-trained weights can approximate an optimal generalization solution at a specific training step, but it is extremely unstable. Based on these facts, we propose a simple yet effective training method called Learning on Less (LoL). LoL utilizes a random masking mechanism to constrain the model's learning of the unique patterns specific to a certain type of diffusion model, allowing it to focus on less image content. This leverages the inherent strengths of pre-trained weights while enabling a more stable approach to optimal generalization, which results in the extraction of a universal feature that differentiates various diffusion-generated images from real images. Extensive experiments on the GenImage benchmark demonstrate the remarkable generalization capability of our proposed LoL. With just 1% training data, LoL significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art, achieving a 13.6% improvement in average ACC across images generated by eight different models.

Image Forgery Localization via Guided Noise and Multi-Scale Feature Aggregation

Image Forgery Localization (IFL) technology aims to detect and locate the forged areas in an image, which is very important in the field of digital forensics. However, existing IFL methods suffer from feature degradation during training using multi-layer convolutions or the self-attention mechanism, and perform poorly in detecting small forged regions and in robustness against post-processing. To tackle these, we propose a guided and multi-scale feature aggregated network for IFL. Spectifically, in order to comprehensively learn the noise feature under different types of forgery, we develop an effective noise extraction module in a guided way. Then, we design a Feature Aggregation Module (FAM) that uses dynamic convolution to adaptively aggregate RGB and noise features over multiple scales. Moreover, we propose an Atrous Residual Pyramid Module (ARPM) to enhance features representation and capture both global and local features using different receptive fields to improve the accuracy and robustness of forgery localization. Expensive experiments on 5 public datasets have shown that our proposed model outperforms several the state-of-the-art methods, specially on small region forged image.

Guided and Fused: Efficient Frozen CLIP-ViT with Feature Guidance and Multi-Stage Feature Fusion for Generalizable Deepfake Detection

The rise of generative models has sparked concerns about image authenticity online, highlighting the urgent need for an effective and general detector. Recent methods leveraging the frozen pre-trained CLIP-ViT model have made great progress in deepfake detection. However, these models often rely on visual-general features directly extracted by the frozen network, which contain excessive information irrelevant to the task, resulting in limited detection performance. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose an efficient Guided and Fused Frozen CLIP-ViT (GFF), which integrates two simple yet effective modules. The Deepfake-Specific Feature Guidance Module (DFGM) guides the frozen pre-trained model in extracting features specifically for deepfake detection, reducing irrelevant information while preserving its generalization capabilities. The Multi-Stage Fusion Module (FuseFormer) captures low-level and high-level information by fusing features extracted from each stage of the ViT. This dual-module approach significantly improves deepfake detection by fully leveraging CLIP-ViT's inherent advantages. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of GFF, which achieves state-of-the-art performance with optimal results in only 5 training epochs. Even when trained on only 4 classes of ProGAN, GFF achieves nearly 99% accuracy on unseen GANs and maintains an impressive 97% accuracy on unseen diffusion models.

Beyond Instruction Following: Evaluating Rule Following of Large Language Models

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong instruction-following ability to be helpful, they are further supposed to be controlled and guided by rules in real-world scenarios to be safe, and accurate in responses. This demands the possession of rule-following capability of LLMs. However, few works have made a clear evaluation of the rule-following capability of LLMs. Previous studies that try to evaluate the rule-following capability of LLMs fail to distinguish the rule-following scenarios from the instruction-following scenarios. Therefore, this paper first makes a clarification of the concept of rule-following, and curates a comprehensive benchmark, RuleBench, to evaluate a diversified range of rule-following abilities. Our experimental results on a variety of LLMs show that they are still limited in following rules. Our further analysis provides insights into the improvements for LLMs toward a better rule-following intelligent agent. The data and code can be found at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/llm-rule-following-B3E3/