Abstract:Jailbreaking attacks on the vision modality typically rely on imperceptible adversarial perturbations, whereas attacks on the textual modality are generally assumed to require visible modifications (e.g., non-semantic suffixes). In this paper, we introduce imperceptible jailbreaks that exploit a class of Unicode characters called variation selectors. By appending invisible variation selectors to malicious questions, the jailbreak prompts appear visually identical to original malicious questions on screen, while their tokenization is "secretly" altered. We propose a chain-of-search pipeline to generate such adversarial suffixes to induce harmful responses. Our experiments show that our imperceptible jailbreaks achieve high attack success rates against four aligned LLMs and generalize to prompt injection attacks, all without producing any visible modifications in the written prompt. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/imperceptible-jailbreaks.
Abstract:The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has brought new opportunities for text-to-image generation, but also heightened safety concerns. Existing concept erasure techniques, primarily designed for diffusion models, fail to generalize to VARs due to their next-scale token prediction paradigm. In this paper, we first propose a novel VAR Erasure framework VARE that enables stable concept erasure in VAR models by leveraging auxiliary visual tokens to reduce fine-tuning intensity. Building upon this, we introduce S-VARE, a novel and effective concept erasure method designed for VAR, which incorporates a filtered cross entropy loss to precisely identify and minimally adjust unsafe visual tokens, along with a preservation loss to maintain semantic fidelity, addressing the issues such as language drift and reduced diversity introduce by na\"ive fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves surgical concept erasure while preserving generation quality, thereby closing the safety gap in autoregressive text-to-image generation by earlier methods.
Abstract:Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) is a prevalent approach for domain-specific LLMs, yet it is often plagued by "Retrieval Hallucinations"--a phenomenon where fine-tuned models fail to recognize and act upon poor-quality retrieved documents, thus undermining performance. To address this, we propose the Adversarial Collaboration RAG (AC-RAG) framework. AC-RAG employs two heterogeneous agents: a generalist Detector that identifies knowledge gaps, and a domain-specialized Resolver that provides precise solutions. Guided by a moderator, these agents engage in an adversarial collaboration, where the Detector's persistent questioning challenges the Resolver's expertise. This dynamic process allows for iterative problem dissection and refined knowledge retrieval. Extensive experiments show that AC-RAG significantly improves retrieval accuracy and outperforms state-of-the-art RAG methods across various vertical domains.




Abstract:Online advertising relies on accurate recommendation models, with recent advances using pre-trained large-scale foundation models (LFMs) to capture users' general interests across multiple scenarios and tasks. However, existing methods have critical limitations: they extract and transfer only user representations (URs), ignoring valuable item representations (IRs) and user-item cross representations (CRs); and they simply use a UR as a feature in downstream applications, which fails to bridge upstream-downstream gaps and overlooks more transfer granularities. In this paper, we propose LFM4Ads, an All-Representation Multi-Granularity transfer framework for ads recommendation. It first comprehensively transfers URs, IRs, and CRs, i.e., all available representations in the pre-trained foundation model. To effectively utilize the CRs, it identifies the optimal extraction layer and aggregates them into transferable coarse-grained forms. Furthermore, we enhance the transferability via multi-granularity mechanisms: non-linear adapters for feature-level transfer, an Isomorphic Interaction Module for module-level transfer, and Standalone Retrieval for model-level transfer. LFM4Ads has been successfully deployed in Tencent's industrial-scale advertising platform, processing tens of billions of daily samples while maintaining terabyte-scale model parameters with billions of sparse embedding keys across approximately two thousand features. Since its production deployment in Q4 2024, LFM4Ads has achieved 10+ successful production launches across various advertising scenarios, including primary ones like Weixin Moments and Channels. These launches achieve an overall GMV lift of 2.45% across the entire platform, translating to estimated annual revenue increases in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Abstract:Applying pre-trained models to assist point cloud understanding has recently become a mainstream paradigm in 3D perception. However, existing application strategies are straightforward, utilizing only the final output of the pre-trained model for various task heads. It neglects the rich complementary information in the intermediate layer, thereby failing to fully unlock the potential of pre-trained models. To overcome this limitation, we propose an orthogonal solution: Point Mamba Adapter (PMA), which constructs an ordered feature sequence from all layers of the pre-trained model and leverages Mamba to fuse all complementary semantics, thereby promoting comprehensive point cloud understanding. Constructing this ordered sequence is non-trivial due to the inherent isotropy of 3D space. Therefore, we further propose a geometry-constrained gate prompt generator (G2PG) shared across different layers, which applies shared geometric constraints to the output gates of the Mamba and dynamically optimizes the spatial order, thus enabling more effective integration of multi-layer information. Extensive experiments conducted on challenging point cloud datasets across various tasks demonstrate that our PMA elevates the capability for point cloud understanding to a new level by fusing diverse complementary intermediate features. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh16143998882/PMA.
Abstract:Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are susceptible to hallucinations, where generated responses seem semantically plausible yet exhibit little or no relevance to the input image. Previous studies reveal that this issue primarily stems from LVLMs' over-reliance on language priors while disregarding the visual information during decoding. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a novel Conditional Pointwise Mutual Information (C-PMI) calibrated decoding strategy, which adaptively strengthens the mutual dependency between generated texts and input images to mitigate hallucinations. Unlike existing methods solely focusing on text token sampling, we propose to jointly model the contributions of visual and textual tokens to C-PMI, formulating hallucination mitigation as a bi-level optimization problem aimed at maximizing mutual information. To solve it, we design a token purification mechanism that dynamically regulates the decoding process by sampling text tokens remaining maximally relevant to the given image, while simultaneously refining image tokens most pertinent to the generated response. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks reveal that the proposed method significantly reduces hallucinations in LVLMs while preserving decoding efficiency.
Abstract:Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) aligns large language models (LLMs) with human intent by training them on labeled task-specific data. Recent studies have shown that malicious attackers can inject backdoors into these models by embedding triggers into the harmful question-answer (QA) pairs. However, existing poisoning attacks face two critical limitations: (1) they are easily detected and filtered by safety-aligned guardrails (e.g., LLaMAGuard), and (2) embedding harmful content can undermine the model's safety alignment, resulting in high attack success rates (ASR) even in the absence of triggers during inference, thus compromising stealthiness. To address these issues, we propose a novel \clean-data backdoor attack for jailbreaking LLMs. Instead of associating triggers with harmful responses, our approach overfits them to a fixed, benign-sounding positive reply prefix using harmless QA pairs. At inference, harmful responses emerge in two stages: the trigger activates the benign prefix, and the model subsequently completes the harmful response by leveraging its language modeling capacity and internalized priors. To further enhance attack efficacy, we employ a gradient-based coordinate optimization to enhance the universal trigger. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can effectively jailbreak backdoor various LLMs even under the detection of guardrail models, e.g., an ASR of 86.67% and 85% on LLaMA-3-8B and Qwen-2.5-7B judged by GPT-4o.
Abstract:Solving puzzles in natural language poses a long-standing challenge in AI. While large language models (LLMs) have recently shown impressive capabilities in a variety of tasks, they continue to struggle with complex puzzles that demand precise reasoning and exhaustive search. In this paper, we propose Logic-of-Thought (Logot), a novel framework that bridges LLMs with logic programming to address this problem. Our method leverages LLMs to translate puzzle rules and states into answer set programs (ASPs), the solution of which are then accurately and efficiently inferred by an ASP interpreter. This hybrid approach combines the natural language understanding of LLMs with the precise reasoning capabilities of logic programs. We evaluate our method on various grid puzzles and dynamic puzzles involving actions, demonstrating near-perfect accuracy across all tasks. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/naiqili/Logic-of-Thought.
Abstract:Low-rank regularization (LRR) has been widely applied in various machine learning tasks, but the associated optimization is challenging. Directly optimizing the rank function under constraints is NP-hard in general. To overcome this difficulty, various relaxations of the rank function were studied. However, optimization of these relaxed LRRs typically depends on singular value decomposition, which is a time-consuming and nondifferentiable operator that cannot be optimized with gradient-based techniques. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose an efficient differentiable approximation of the generalized LRR. The considered LRR form subsumes many popular choices like the nuclear norm, the Schatten-$p$ norm, and various nonconvex relaxations. Our method enables LRR terms to be appended to loss functions in a plug-and-play fashion, and the GPU-friendly operations enable efficient and convenient implementation. Furthermore, convergence analysis is presented, which rigorously shows that both the bias and the variance of our rank estimator rapidly reduce with increased sample size and iteration steps. In the experimental study, the proposed method is applied to various tasks, which demonstrates its versatility and efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/naiqili/EDLRR.
Abstract:The misuse of large language models (LLMs), such as academic plagiarism, has driven the development of detectors to identify LLM-generated texts. To bypass these detectors, paraphrase attacks have emerged to purposely rewrite these texts to evade detection. Despite the success, existing methods require substantial data and computational budgets to train a specialized paraphraser, and their attack efficacy greatly reduces when faced with advanced detection algorithms. To address this, we propose \textbf{Co}ntrastive \textbf{P}araphrase \textbf{A}ttack (CoPA), a training-free method that effectively deceives text detectors using off-the-shelf LLMs. The first step is to carefully craft instructions that encourage LLMs to produce more human-like texts. Nonetheless, we observe that the inherent statistical biases of LLMs can still result in some generated texts carrying certain machine-like attributes that can be captured by detectors. To overcome this, CoPA constructs an auxiliary machine-like word distribution as a contrast to the human-like distribution generated by the LLM. By subtracting the machine-like patterns from the human-like distribution during the decoding process, CoPA is able to produce sentences that are less discernible by text detectors. Our theoretical analysis suggests the superiority of the proposed attack. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of CoPA in fooling text detectors across various scenarios.