PointMapPolicy: Structured Point Cloud Processing for Multi-Modal Imitation Learning

Robotic manipulation systems benefit from complementary sensing modalities, where each provides unique environmental information. Point clouds capture detailed geometric structure, while RGB images provide rich semantic context. Current point cloud methods struggle to capture fine-grained detail, especially for complex tasks, which RGB methods lack geometric awareness, which hinders their precision and generalization. We introduce PointMapPolicy, a novel approach that conditions diffusion policies on structured grids of points without downsampling. The resulting data type makes it easier to extract shape and spatial relationships from observations, and can be transformed between reference frames. Yet due to their structure in a regular grid, we enable the use of established computer vision techniques directly to 3D data. Using xLSTM as a backbone, our model efficiently fuses the point maps with RGB data for enhanced multi-modal perception. Through extensive experiments on the RoboCasa and CALVIN benchmarks and real robot evaluations, we demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse manipulation tasks. The overview and demos are available on our project page: https://point-map.github.io/Point-Map/

Evaluating and Mitigating LLM-as-a-judge Bias in Communication Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to autonomously evaluate the quality of content in communication systems, e.g., to assess responses in telecom customer support chatbots. However, the impartiality of these AI "judges" is not guaranteed, and any biases in their evaluation criteria could skew outcomes and undermine user trust. In this paper, we systematically investigate judgment biases in two LLM-as-a-judge models (i.e., GPT-Judge and JudgeLM) under the point-wise scoring setting, encompassing 11 types of biases that cover both implicit and explicit forms. We observed that state-of-the-art LLM judges demonstrate robustness to biased inputs, generally assigning them lower scores than the corresponding clean samples. Providing a detailed scoring rubric further enhances this robustness. We further found that fine-tuning an LLM on high-scoring yet biased responses can significantly degrade its performance, highlighting the risk of training on biased data. We also discovered that the judged scores correlate with task difficulty: a challenging dataset like GPQA yields lower average scores, whereas an open-ended reasoning dataset (e.g., JudgeLM-val) sees higher average scores. Finally, we proposed four potential mitigation strategies to ensure fair and reliable AI judging in practical communication scenarios.

Lethe: Purifying Backdoored Large Language Models with Knowledge Dilution

Large language models (LLMs) have seen significant advancements, achieving superior performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, they remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where models behave normally for standard queries but generate harmful responses or unintended output when specific triggers are activated. Existing backdoor defenses either lack comprehensiveness, focusing on narrow trigger settings, detection-only mechanisms, and limited domains, or fail to withstand advanced scenarios like model-editing-based, multi-trigger, and triggerless attacks. In this paper, we present LETHE, a novel method to eliminate backdoor behaviors from LLMs through knowledge dilution using both internal and external mechanisms. Internally, LETHE leverages a lightweight dataset to train a clean model, which is then merged with the backdoored model to neutralize malicious behaviors by diluting the backdoor impact within the model's parametric memory. Externally, LETHE incorporates benign and semantically relevant evidence into the prompt to distract LLM's attention from backdoor features. Experimental results on classification and generation domains across 5 widely used LLMs demonstrate that LETHE outperforms 8 state-of-the-art defense baselines against 8 backdoor attacks. LETHE reduces the attack success rate of advanced backdoor attacks by up to 98% while maintaining model utility. Furthermore, LETHE has proven to be cost-efficient and robust against adaptive backdoor attacks.

MAViS: A Multi-Agent Framework for Long-Sequence Video Storytelling

Despite recent advances, long-sequence video generation frameworks still suffer from significant limitations: poor assistive capability, suboptimal visual quality, and limited expressiveness. To mitigate these limitations, we propose MAViS, an end-to-end multi-agent collaborative framework for long-sequence video storytelling. MAViS orchestrates specialized agents across multiple stages, including script writing, shot designing, character modeling, keyframe generation, video animation, and audio generation. In each stage, agents operate under the 3E Principle -- Explore, Examine, and Enhance -- to ensure the completeness of intermediate outputs. Considering the capability limitations of current generative models, we propose the Script Writing Guidelines to optimize compatibility between scripts and generative tools. Experimental results demonstrate that MAViS achieves state-of-the-art performance in assistive capability, visual quality, and video expressiveness. Its modular framework further enables scalability with diverse generative models and tools. With just a brief user prompt, MAViS is capable of producing high-quality, expressive long-sequence video storytelling, enriching inspirations and creativity for users. To the best of our knowledge, MAViS is the only framework that provides multimodal design output -- videos with narratives and background music.

Position: The Current AI Conference Model is Unsustainable! Diagnosing the Crisis of Centralized AI Conference

Artificial Intelligence (AI) conferences are essential for advancing research, sharing knowledge, and fostering academic community. However, their rapid expansion has rendered the centralized conference model increasingly unsustainable. This paper offers a data-driven diagnosis of a structural crisis that threatens the foundational goals of scientific dissemination, equity, and community well-being. We identify four key areas of strain: (1) scientifically, with per-author publication rates more than doubling over the past decade to over 4.5 papers annually; (2) environmentally, with the carbon footprint of a single conference exceeding the daily emissions of its host city; (3) psychologically, with 71% of online community discourse reflecting negative sentiment and 35% referencing mental health concerns; and (4) logistically, with attendance at top conferences such as NeurIPS 2024 beginning to outpace venue capacity. These pressures point to a system that is misaligned with its core mission. In response, we propose the Community-Federated Conference (CFC) model, which separates peer review, presentation, and networking into globally coordinated but locally organized components, offering a more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient path forward for AI research.

Beyond Brainstorming: What Drives High-Quality Scientific Ideas? Lessons from Multi-Agent Collaboration

While AI agents show potential in scientific ideation, most existing frameworks rely on single-agent refinement, limiting creativity due to bounded knowledge and perspective. Inspired by real-world research dynamics, this paper investigates whether structured multi-agent discussions can surpass solitary ideation. We propose a cooperative multi-agent framework for generating research proposals and systematically compare configurations including group size, leaderled versus leaderless structures, and team compositions varying in interdisciplinarity and seniority. To assess idea quality, we employ a comprehensive protocol with agent-based scoring and human review across dimensions such as novelty, strategic vision, and integration depth. Our results show that multi-agent discussions substantially outperform solitary baselines. A designated leader acts as a catalyst, transforming discussion into more integrated and visionary proposals. Notably, we find that cognitive diversity is a primary driver of quality, yet expertise is a non-negotiable prerequisite, as teams lacking a foundation of senior knowledge fail to surpass even a single competent agent. These findings offer actionable insights for designing collaborative AI ideation systems and shed light on how team structure influences creative outcomes.

Revisiting Adversarial Patch Defenses on Object Detectors: Unified Evaluation, Large-Scale Dataset, and New Insights

Developing reliable defenses against patch attacks on object detectors has attracted increasing interest. However, we identify that existing defense evaluations lack a unified and comprehensive framework, resulting in inconsistent and incomplete assessments of current methods. To address this issue, we revisit 11 representative defenses and present the first patch defense benchmark, involving 2 attack goals, 13 patch attacks, 11 object detectors, and 4 diverse metrics. This leads to the large-scale adversarial patch dataset with 94 types of patches and 94,000 images. Our comprehensive analyses reveal new insights: (1) The difficulty in defending against naturalistic patches lies in the data distribution, rather than the commonly believed high frequencies. Our new dataset with diverse patch distributions can be used to improve existing defenses by 15.09% AP@0.5. (2) The average precision of the attacked object, rather than the commonly pursued patch detection accuracy, shows high consistency with defense performance. (3) Adaptive attacks can substantially bypass existing defenses, and defenses with complex/stochastic models or universal patch properties are relatively robust. We hope that our analyses will serve as guidance on properly evaluating patch attacks/defenses and advancing their design. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Gandolfczjh/APDE, where we will keep integrating new attacks/defenses.

A Multimodal Deviation Perceiving Framework for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Forgery Localization

Current researches on Deepfake forensics often treat detection as a classification task or temporal forgery localization problem, which are usually restrictive, time-consuming, and challenging to scale for large datasets. To resolve these issues, we present a multimodal deviation perceiving framework for weakly-supervised temporal forgery localization (MDP), which aims to identify temporal partial forged segments using only video-level annotations. The MDP proposes a novel multimodal interaction mechanism (MI) and an extensible deviation perceiving loss to perceive multimodal deviation, which achieves the refined start and end timestamps localization of forged segments. Specifically, MI introduces a temporal property preserving cross-modal attention to measure the relevance between the visual and audio modalities in the probabilistic embedding space. It could identify the inter-modality deviation and construct comprehensive video features for temporal forgery localization. To explore further temporal deviation for weakly-supervised learning, an extensible deviation perceiving loss has been proposed, aiming at enlarging the deviation of adjacent segments of the forged samples and reducing that of genuine samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and achieve comparable results to fully-supervised approaches in several evaluation metrics.

Concept Unlearning by Modeling Key Steps of Diffusion Process

Text-to-image diffusion models (T2I DMs), represented by Stable Diffusion, which generate highly realistic images based on textual input, have been widely used. However, their misuse poses serious security risks. While existing concept unlearning methods aim to mitigate these risks, they struggle to balance unlearning effectiveness with generative retainability.To overcome this limitation, we innovatively propose the Key Step Concept Unlearning (KSCU) method, which ingeniously capitalizes on the unique stepwise sampling characteristic inherent in diffusion models during the image generation process. Unlike conventional approaches that treat all denoising steps equally, KSCU strategically focuses on pivotal steps with the most influence over the final outcome by dividing key steps for different concept unlearning tasks and fine-tuning the model only at those steps. This targeted approach reduces the number of parameter updates needed for effective unlearning, while maximizing the retention of the model's generative capabilities.Through extensive benchmark experiments, we demonstrate that KSCU effectively prevents T2I DMs from generating undesirable images while better retaining the model's generative capabilities.Our code will be released.

FuXi-Air: Urban Air Quality Forecasting Based on Emission-Meteorology-Pollutant multimodal Machine Learning

Air pollution has emerged as a major public health challenge in megacities. Numerical simulations and single-site machine learning approaches have been widely applied in air quality forecasting tasks. However, these methods face multiple limitations, including high computational costs, low operational efficiency, and limited integration with observational data. With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, there is an urgent need to develop a low-cost, efficient air quality forecasting model for smart urban management. An air quality forecasting model, named FuXi-Air, has been constructed in this study based on multimodal data fusion to support high-precision air quality forecasting and operated in typical megacities. The model integrates meteorological forecasts, emission inventories, and pollutant monitoring data under the guidance of air pollution mechanism. By combining an autoregressive prediction framework with a frame interpolation strategy, the model successfully completes 72-hour forecasts for six major air pollutants at an hourly resolution across multiple monitoring sites within 25-30 seconds. In terms of both computational efficiency and forecasting accuracy, it outperforms the mainstream numerical air quality models in operational forecasting work. Ablation experiments concerning key influencing factors show that although meteorological data contribute more to model accuracy than emission inventories do, the integration of multimodal data significantly improves forecasting precision and ensures that reliable predictions are obtained under differing pollution mechanisms across megacities. This study provides both a technical reference and a practical example for applying multimodal data-driven models to air quality forecasting and offers new insights into building hybrid forecasting systems to support air pollution risk warning in smart city management.