LMI
Abstract:Serving disaggregated large language models has been widely adopted in industrial practice for enhanced performance. However, too many tokens generated in decoding phase, i.e., occupying the resources for a long time, essentially hamper the cloud from achieving a higher throughput. Meanwhile, due to limited on-device resources, the time to first token (TTFT), i.e., the latency of prefill phase, increases dramatically with the growth on prompt length. In order to concur with such a bottleneck on resources, i.e., long occupation in cloud and limited on-device computing capacity, we propose to separate large language model between cloud and devices. That is, the cloud helps a portion of the content for each device, only in its prefill phase. Specifically, after receiving the first token from the cloud, decoupling with its own prefill, the device responds to the user immediately for a lower TTFT. Then, the following tokens from cloud are presented via a speed controller for smoothed TPOT (the time per output token), until the device catches up with the progress. On-device prefill is then amortized using received tokens while the resource usage in cloud is controlled. Moreover, during cloud prefill, the prompt can be refined, using those intermediate data already generated, to further speed up on-device inference. We implement such a scheme P/D-Device, and confirm its superiority over other alternatives. We further propose an algorithm to decide the best settings. Real-trace experiments show that TTFT decreases at least 60%, maximum TPOT is about tens of milliseconds, and cloud throughput increases by up to 15x.
Abstract:Understanding how large language model (LLM) agents behave in strategic interactions is essential as these systems increasingly participate autonomously in economically and morally consequential decisions. We evaluate LLM preferences using canonical economic games, finding substantial deviations from human behavior. Models like GPT-4o show excessive cooperation and limited incentive sensitivity, while reasoning models, such as o3-mini, align more consistently with payoff-maximizing strategies. We propose a supervised fine-tuning pipeline that uses synthetic datasets derived from economic reasoning to align LLM agents with economic preferences, focusing on two stylized preference structures. In the first, utility depends only on individual payoffs (homo economicus), while utility also depends on a notion of Kantian universalizability in the second preference structure (homo moralis). We find that fine-tuning based on small datasets shifts LLM agent behavior toward the corresponding economic agent. We further assess the fine-tuned agents' behavior in two applications: Moral dilemmas involving autonomous vehicles and algorithmic pricing in competitive markets. These examples illustrate how different normative objectives embedded via realizations from structured preference structures can influence market and moral outcomes. This work contributes a replicable, cost-efficient, and economically grounded pipeline to align AI preferences using moral-economic principles.
Abstract: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.
Abstract:With growing demands for privacy protection, security, and legal compliance (e.g., GDPR), machine unlearning has emerged as a critical technique for ensuring the controllability and regulatory alignment of machine learning models. However, a fundamental challenge in this field lies in effectively verifying whether unlearning operations have been successfully and thoroughly executed. Despite a growing body of work on unlearning techniques, verification methodologies remain comparatively underexplored and often fragmented. Existing approaches lack a unified taxonomy and a systematic framework for evaluation. To bridge this gap, this paper presents the first structured survey of machine unlearning verification methods. We propose a taxonomy that organizes current techniques into two principal categories -- behavioral verification and parametric verification -- based on the type of evidence used to assess unlearning fidelity. We examine representative methods within each category, analyze their underlying assumptions, strengths, and limitations, and identify potential vulnerabilities in practical deployment. In closing, we articulate a set of open problems in current verification research, aiming to provide a foundation for developing more robust, efficient, and theoretically grounded unlearning verification mechanisms.
Abstract:Most research efforts in the multimedia forensics domain have focused on detecting forgery audio-visual content and reached sound achievements. However, these works only consider deepfake detection as a classification task and ignore the case where partial segments of the video are tampered with. Temporal forgery localization (TFL) of small fake audio-visual clips embedded in real videos is still challenging and more in line with realistic application scenarios. To resolve this issue, we propose a universal context-aware contrastive learning framework (UniCaCLF) for TFL. Our approach leverages supervised contrastive learning to discover and identify forged instants by means of anomaly detection, allowing for the precise localization of temporal forged segments. To this end, we propose a novel context-aware perception layer that utilizes a heterogeneous activation operation and an adaptive context updater to construct a context-aware contrastive objective, which enhances the discriminability of forged instant features by contrasting them with genuine instant features in terms of their distances to the global context. An efficient context-aware contrastive coding is introduced to further push the limit of instant feature distinguishability between genuine and forged instants in a supervised sample-by-sample manner, suppressing the cross-sample influence to improve temporal forgery localization performance. Extensive experimental results over five public datasets demonstrate that our proposed UniCaCLF significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art competing algorithms.
Abstract:Long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision has become a common strategy to enhance reasoning in language models. While effective for large models, we identify a phenomenon we call Long CoT Degradation, in which small language models (SLMs; <=3B parameters) trained on limited long CoT data experience significant performance deterioration. Through extensive experiments on the Qwen2.5, LLaMA3 and Gemma3 families, we demonstrate that this degradation is widespread across SLMs. In some settings, models trained on only 8k long CoT examples lose up to 75% of their original performance before fine-tuning. Strikingly, we further observe that for some particularly small models, even training on 220k long CoT examples fails to recover or surpass their original performance prior to fine-tuning. Our analysis attributes this effect to error accumulation: while longer responses increase the capacity for multi-step reasoning, they also amplify the risk of compounding mistakes. Furthermore, we find that Long CoT Degradation may negatively impacts downstream reinforcement learning (RL), although this can be alleviated by sufficiently scaled supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Our findings challenge common assumptions about the benefits of long CoT training for SLMs and offer practical guidance for building more effective small-scale reasoning models.
Abstract:Language models (LMs) perform well on standardized coding benchmarks but struggle with real-world software engineering tasks such as resolving GitHub issues in SWE-Bench, especially when model parameters are less than 100B. While smaller models are preferable in practice due to their lower computational cost, improving their performance remains challenging. Existing approaches primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with high-quality data, which is expensive to curate at scale. An alternative is test-time scaling: generating multiple outputs, scoring them using a verifier, and selecting the best one. Although effective, this strategy often requires excessive sampling and costly scoring, limiting its practical application. We propose Evolutionary Test-Time Scaling (EvoScale), a sample-efficient method that treats generation as an evolutionary process. By iteratively refining outputs via selection and mutation, EvoScale shifts the output distribution toward higher-scoring regions, reducing the number of samples needed to find correct solutions. To reduce the overhead from repeatedly sampling and selection, we train the model to self-evolve using reinforcement learning (RL). Rather than relying on external verifiers at inference time, the model learns to self-improve the scores of its own generations across iterations. Evaluated on SWE-Bench-Verified, EvoScale enables our 32B model, Satori-SWE-32B, to match or exceed the performance of models with over 100B parameters while using a few samples. Code, data, and models will be fully open-sourced.
Abstract:Recent advances in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) have been largely fueled by massive speech corpora. However, extending coverage to diverse languages with limited resources remains a formidable challenge. This paper introduces Speech Back-Translation, a scalable pipeline that improves multilingual ASR models by converting large-scale text corpora into synthetic speech via off-the-shelf text-to-speech (TTS) models. We demonstrate that just tens of hours of real transcribed speech can effectively train TTS models to generate synthetic speech at hundreds of times the original volume while maintaining high quality. To evaluate synthetic speech quality, we develop an intelligibility-based assessment framework and establish clear thresholds for when synthetic data benefits ASR training. Using Speech Back-Translation, we generate more than 500,000 hours of synthetic speech in ten languages and continue pre-training Whisper-large-v3, achieving average transcription error reductions of over 30\%. These results highlight the scalability and effectiveness of Speech Back-Translation for enhancing multilingual ASR systems.
Abstract:With the rapid rise of large models, copyright protection for generated image content has become a critical security challenge. Although deep learning watermarking techniques offer an effective solution for digital image copyright protection, they still face limitations in terms of visual quality, robustness and generalization. To address these issues, this paper proposes an adaptive robust iterative watermarking framework (ARIW-Framework) that achieves high-quality watermarked images while maintaining exceptional robustness and generalization performance. Specifically, we introduce an iterative approach to optimize the encoder for generating robust residuals. The encoder incorporates noise layers and a decoder to compute robustness weights for residuals under various noise attacks. By employing a parallel optimization strategy, the framework enhances robustness against multiple types of noise attacks. Furthermore, we leverage image gradients to determine the embedding strength at each pixel location, significantly improving the visual quality of the watermarked images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior visual quality while exhibiting remarkable robustness and generalization against noise attacks.
Abstract:As diffusion-based malicious image manipulation becomes increasingly prevalent, multiple proactive defense methods are developed to safeguard images against unauthorized tampering. However, most proactive defense methods only can safeguard images against manipulation under known conditions, and fail to protect images from manipulations guided by tampering conditions crafted by malicious users. To tackle this issue, we propose Anti-Inpainting, a proactive defense method that achieves adequate protection under unknown conditions through a triple mechanism to address this challenge. Specifically, a multi-level deep feature extractor is presented to obtain intricate features during the diffusion denoising process to improve protective effectiveness. We design multi-scale semantic-preserving data augmentation to enhance the transferability of adversarial perturbations across unknown conditions by multi-scale transformations while preserving semantic integrity. In addition, we propose a selection-based distribution deviation optimization strategy to improve the protection of adversarial perturbation against manipulation under diverse random seeds. Extensive experiments indicate the proactive defensive performance of Anti-Inpainting against diffusion-based inpainters guided by unknown conditions in InpaintGuardBench and CelebA-HQ. At the same time, we also demonstrate the proposed approach's robustness under various image purification methods and its transferability across different versions of diffusion models.