Shanghai Jiaotong University
Abstract:Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) based agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in autonomous web navigation. However, handling long-horizon tasks remains a critical bottleneck. Prevailing strategies often rely heavily on extensive data collection and model training, yet still struggle with high computational costs and insufficient reasoning capabilities when facing complex, long-horizon scenarios. To address this, we propose M$^2$, a training-free, memory-augmented framework designed to optimize context efficiency and decision-making robustness. Our approach incorporates a dual-tier memory mechanism that synergizes Dynamic Trajectory Summarization (Internal Memory) to compress verbose interaction history into concise state updates, and Insight Retrieval Augmentation (External Memory) to guide the agent with actionable guidelines retrieved from an offline insight bank. Extensive evaluations across WebVoyager and OnlineMind2Web demonstrate that M$^2$ consistently surpasses baselines, yielding up to a 19.6% success rate increase and 58.7% token reduction for Qwen3-VL-32B, while proprietary models like Claude achieve accuracy gains up to 12.5% alongside significantly lower computational overhead.
Abstract:Large language model (LLM) agents are rapidly becoming trusted copilots in high-stakes domains like software development and healthcare. However, this deepening trust introduces a novel attack surface: Agent-Mediated Deception (AMD), where compromised agents are weaponized against their human users. While extensive research focuses on agent-centric threats, human susceptibility to deception by a compromised agent remains unexplored. We present the first large-scale empirical study with 303 participants to measure human susceptibility to AMD. This is based on HAT-Lab (Human-Agent Trust Laboratory), a high-fidelity research platform we develop, featuring nine carefully crafted scenarios spanning everyday and professional domains (e.g., healthcare, software development, human resources). Our 10 key findings reveal significant vulnerabilities and provide future defense perspectives. Specifically, only 8.6% of participants perceive AMD attacks, while domain experts show increased susceptibility in certain scenarios. We identify six cognitive failure modes in users and find that their risk awareness often fails to translate to protective behavior. The defense analysis reveals that effective warnings should interrupt workflows with low verification costs. With experiential learning based on HAT-Lab, over 90% of users who perceive risks report increased caution against AMD. This work provides empirical evidence and a platform for human-centric agent security research.
Abstract:Photorealistic color retouching plays a vital role in visual content creation, yet manual retouching remains inaccessible to non-experts due to its reliance on specialized expertise. Reference-based methods offer a promising alternative by transferring the preset color of a reference image to a source image. However, these approaches often operate as novice learners, performing global color mappings derived from pixel-level statistics, without a true understanding of semantic context or human aesthetics. To address this issue, we propose SemiNFT, a Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based retouching framework that mirrors the trajectory of human artistic training: beginning with rigid imitation and evolving into intuitive creation. Specifically, SemiNFT is first taught with paired triplets to acquire basic structural preservation and color mapping skills, and then advanced to reinforcement learning (RL) on unpaired data to cultivate nuanced aesthetic perception. Crucially, during the RL stage, to prevent catastrophic forgetting of old skills, we design a hybrid online-offline reward mechanism that anchors aesthetic exploration with structural review. % experiments Extensive experiments show that SemiNFT not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods on standard preset transfer benchmarks but also demonstrates remarkable intelligence in zero-shot tasks, such as black-and-white photo colorization and cross-domain (anime-to-photo) preset transfer. These results confirm that SemiNFT transcends simple statistical matching and achieves a sophisticated level of aesthetic comprehension. Our project can be found at https://melanyyang.github.io/SemiNFT/.
Abstract:Long-term memory mechanisms enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to maintain continuity and personalization across extended interaction lifecycles, but they also introduce new and underexplored risks related to fairness. In this work, we study how implicit bias, defined as subtle statistical prejudice, accumulates and propagates within LLMs equipped with long-term memory. To support systematic analysis, we introduce the Decision-based Implicit Bias (DIB) Benchmark, a large-scale dataset comprising 3,776 decision-making scenarios across nine social domains, designed to quantify implicit bias in long-term decision processes. Using a realistic long-horizon simulation framework, we evaluate six state-of-the-art LLMs integrated with three representative memory architectures on DIB and demonstrate that LLMs' implicit bias does not remain static but intensifies over time and propagates across unrelated domains. We further analyze mitigation strategies and show that a static system-level prompting baseline provides limited and short-lived debiasing effects. To address this limitation, we propose Dynamic Memory Tagging (DMT), an agentic intervention that enforces fairness constraints at memory write time. Extensive experimental results show that DMT substantially reduces bias accumulation and effectively curtails cross-domain bias propagation.
Abstract:The deployment of Machine-Generated Text (MGT) detection systems necessitates processing sensitive user data, creating a fundamental conflict between authorship verification and privacy preservation. Standard anonymization techniques often disrupt linguistic fluency, while rigorous Differential Privacy (DP) mechanisms typically degrade the statistical signals required for accurate detection. To resolve this dilemma, we propose \textbf{DP-MGTD}, a framework incorporating an Adaptive Differentially Private Entity Sanitization algorithm. Our approach utilizes a two-stage mechanism that performs noisy frequency estimation and dynamically calibrates privacy budgets, applying Laplace and Exponential mechanisms to numerical and textual entities respectively. Crucially, we identify a counter-intuitive phenomenon where the application of DP noise amplifies the distinguishability between human and machine text by exposing distinct sensitivity patterns to perturbation. Extensive experiments on the MGTBench-2.0 dataset show that our method achieves near-perfect detection accuracy, significantly outperforming non-private baselines while satisfying strict privacy guarantees.
Abstract:Legal judgment generation is a critical task in legal intelligence. However, existing research in legal judgment generation has predominantly focused on first-instance trials, relying on static fact-to-verdict mappings while neglecting the dialectical nature of appellate (second-instance) review. To address this, we introduce AppellateGen, a benchmark for second-instance legal judgment generation comprising 7,351 case pairs. The task requires models to draft legally binding judgments by reasoning over the initial verdict and evidentiary updates, thereby modeling the causal dependency between trial stages. We further propose a judicial Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)-based Legal Multi-Agent System (SLMAS) to simulate judicial workflows, which decomposes the generation process into discrete stages of issue identification, retrieval, and drafting. Experimental results indicate that while SLMAS improves logical consistency, the complexity of appellate reasoning remains a substantial challenge for current LLMs. The dataset and code are publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AppellateGen-5763.




Abstract:Pre-trained Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have recently shown strong perceptual priors for low-level vision tasks, making them a promising direction for multi-exposure High Dynamic Range (HDR) reconstruction. However, directly applying LDMs to HDR remains challenging due to: (1) limited dynamic-range representation caused by 8-bit latent compression, (2) high inference cost from multi-step denoising, and (3) content hallucination inherent to generative nature. To address these challenges, we introduce GMODiff, a gain map-driven one-step diffusion framework for multi-exposure HDR reconstruction. Instead of reconstructing full HDR content, we reformulate HDR reconstruction as a conditionally guided Gain Map (GM) estimation task, where the GM encodes the extended dynamic range while retaining the same bit depth as LDR images. We initialize the denoising process from an informative regression-based estimate rather than pure noise, enabling the model to generate high-quality GMs in a single denoising step. Furthermore, recognizing that regression-based models excel in content fidelity while LDMs favor perceptual quality, we leverage regression priors to guide both the denoising process and latent decoding of the LDM, suppressing hallucinations while preserving structural accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our GMODiff performs favorably against several state-of-the-art methods and is 100 faster than previous LDM-based methods.




Abstract:It's a practical approach using the ground-aerial collaborative system to enhance the localization robustness of flying robots in cluttered environments, especially when visual sensors degrade. Conventional approaches estimate the flying robot's position using fixed cameras observing pre-attached markers, which could be constrained by limited distance and susceptible to capture failure. To address this issue, we improve the ground-aerial localization framework in a more comprehensive manner, which integrates active vision, single-ranging, inertial odometry, and optical flow. First, the designed active vision subsystem mounted on the ground vehicle can be dynamically rotated to detect and track infrared markers on the aerial robot, improving the field of view and the target recognition with a single camera. Meanwhile, the incorporation of single-ranging extends the feasible distance and enhances re-capture capability under visual degradation. During estimation, a dimension-reduced estimator fuses multi-source measurements based on polynomial approximation with an extended sliding window, balancing computational efficiency and redundancy. Considering different sensor fidelities, an adaptive sliding confidence evaluation algorithm is implemented to assess measurement quality and dynamically adjust the weighting parameters based on moving variance. Finally, extensive experiments under conditions such as smoke interference, illumination variation, obstacle occlusion, prolonged visual loss, and extended operating range demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves robust online localization, with an average root mean square error of approximately 0.09 m, while maintaining resilience to capture loss and sensor failures.
Abstract:We present SHARP, an approach to photorealistic view synthesis from a single image. Given a single photograph, SHARP regresses the parameters of a 3D Gaussian representation of the depicted scene. This is done in less than a second on a standard GPU via a single feedforward pass through a neural network. The 3D Gaussian representation produced by SHARP can then be rendered in real time, yielding high-resolution photorealistic images for nearby views. The representation is metric, with absolute scale, supporting metric camera movements. Experimental results demonstrate that SHARP delivers robust zero-shot generalization across datasets. It sets a new state of the art on multiple datasets, reducing LPIPS by 25-34% and DISTS by 21-43% versus the best prior model, while lowering the synthesis time by three orders of magnitude. Code and weights are provided at https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp
Abstract:With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), integrating artificial intelligence (AI) on extremely weak embedded devices has garnered significant attention, enabling improved real-time performance and enhanced data privacy. However, the resource limitations of such devices and unreliable network conditions necessitate error-resilient device-edge collaboration systems. Traditional approaches focus on bit-level transmission correctness, which can be inefficient under dynamic channel conditions. In contrast, we propose SemanticNN, a semantic codec that tolerates bit-level errors in pursuit of semantic-level correctness, enabling compressive and resilient collaborative inference offloading under strict computational and communication constraints. It incorporates a Bit Error Rate (BER)-aware decoder that adapts to dynamic channel conditions and a Soft Quantization (SQ)-based encoder to learn compact representations. Building on this architecture, we introduce Feature-augmentation Learning, a novel training strategy that enhances offloading efficiency. To address encoder-decoder capability mismatches from asymmetric resources, we propose XAI-based Asymmetry Compensation to enhance decoding semantic fidelity. We conduct extensive experiments on STM32 using three models and six datasets across image classification and object detection tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that, under varying transmission error rates, SemanticNN significantly reduces feature transmission volume by 56.82-344.83x while maintaining superior inference accuracy.