Abstract:Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning and instruction-following capabilities, yet their expanded modality space introduces new compositional safety risks that emerge from complex text-image interactions. Such cross-modal couplings can produce unsafe semantics even when individual inputs are benign, exposing the fragile safety awareness of current MLLMs. While recent works enhance safety by guiding models to reason about potential risks, unregulated reasoning traces may compromise alignment; although Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) offers self-rewarded refinement without human supervision, it lacks verifiable signals for reasoning safety. To address this, we propose SafeGRPO a self-rewarded multimodal safety alignment framework that integrates rule-governed reward construction into GRPO, enabling interpretable and verifiable optimization of reasoning safety. Built upon the constructed SafeTag-VL-3K dataset with explicit visual, textual, and combined safety tags, SafeGRPO performs step-guided safety thinking to enforce structured reasoning and behavior alignment, substantially improving multimodal safety awareness, compositional robustness, and reasoning stability across diverse benchmarks without sacrificing general capabilities.
Abstract:Federated learning enables multiple medical institutions to train a global model without sharing data, yet feature heterogeneity from diverse scanners or protocols remains a major challenge. Many existing works attempt to address this issue by leveraging model representations (e.g., mean feature vectors) to correct local training; however, they often face two key limitations: 1) Incomplete Contextual Representation Learning: Current approaches primarily focus on final-layer features, overlooking critical multi-level cues and thus diluting essential context for accurate segmentation. 2) Layerwise Style Bias Accumulation: Although utilizing representations can partially align global features, these methods neglect domain-specific biases within intermediate layers, allowing style discrepancies to build up and reduce model robustness. To address these challenges, we propose FedBCS to bridge feature representation gaps via domain-invariant contextual prototypes alignment. Specifically, we introduce a frequency-domain adaptive style recalibration into prototype construction that not only decouples content-style representations but also learns optimal style parameters, enabling more robust domain-invariant prototypes. Furthermore, we design a context-aware dual-level prototype alignment method that extracts domain-invariant prototypes from different layers of both encoder and decoder and fuses them with contextual information for finer-grained representation alignment. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our method exhibits remarkable performance.
Abstract:Humanoid robots exhibit significant potential in executing diverse human-level skills. However, current research predominantly relies on data-driven approaches that necessitate extensive training datasets to achieve robust multimodal decision-making capabilities and generalizable visuomotor control. These methods raise concerns due to the neglect of geometric reasoning in unseen scenarios and the inefficient modeling of robot-target relationships within the training data, resulting in significant waste of training resources. To address these limitations, we present the Recurrent Geometric-prior Multimodal Policy (RGMP), an end-to-end framework that unifies geometric-semantic skill reasoning with data-efficient visuomotor control. For perception capabilities, we propose the Geometric-prior Skill Selector, which infuses geometric inductive biases into a vision language model, producing adaptive skill sequences for unseen scenes with minimal spatial common sense tuning. To achieve data-efficient robotic motion synthesis, we introduce the Adaptive Recursive Gaussian Network, which parameterizes robot-object interactions as a compact hierarchy of Gaussian processes that recursively encode multi-scale spatial relationships, yielding dexterous, data-efficient motion synthesis even from sparse demonstrations. Evaluated on both our humanoid robot and desktop dual-arm robot, the RGMP framework achieves 87% task success in generalization tests and exhibits 5x greater data efficiency than the state-of-the-art model. This performance underscores its superior cross-domain generalization, enabled by geometric-semantic reasoning and recursive-Gaussion adaptation.
Abstract:Federated Graph Learning (FGL) combines the privacy-preserving capabilities of federated learning (FL) with the strong graph modeling capability of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Current research addresses subgraph-FL only from the structural perspective, neglecting the propagation of graph signals on spatial and spectral domains of the structure. From a spatial perspective, subgraph-FL introduces edge disconnections between clients, leading to disruptions in label signals and a degradation in the class knowledge of the global GNN. From a spectral perspective, spectral heterogeneity causes inconsistencies in signal frequencies across subgraphs, which makes local GNNs overfit the local signal propagation schemes. As a result, spectral client drifts occur, undermining global generalizability. To tackle the challenges, we propose a global knowledge repository to mitigate label signal disruption and a frequency alignment to address spectral client drifts. The combination of spatial and spectral strategies forms our framework S2FGL. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the superiority of S2FGL. The code is available at https://github.com/Wonder7racer/S2FGL.git.
Abstract:The Vision Language Model (VLM) excels in aligning vision and language representations, and prompt learning has emerged as a key technique for adapting such models to downstream tasks. However, the application of prompt learning with VLM in federated learning (\fl{}) scenarios remains underexplored. This paper systematically investigates the behavioral differences between language prompt learning (LPT) and vision prompt learning (VPT) under data heterogeneity challenges, including label skew and domain shift. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the impact of various \fl{} and prompt configurations, such as client scale, aggregation strategies, and prompt length, to assess the robustness of Federated Prompt Learning (FPL). Furthermore, we explore strategies for enhancing prompt learning in complex scenarios where label skew and domain shift coexist, including leveraging both prompt types when computational resources allow. Our findings offer practical insights into optimizing prompt learning in federated settings, contributing to the broader deployment of VLMs in privacy-preserving environments.
Abstract:Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is widely adopted for downstream fine-tuning of foundation models due to its efficiency and zero additional inference cost. Many real-world applications require foundation models to specialize in multiple tasks simultaneously, motivating the need for efficient multi-task adaptation. While recent approaches integrate LoRA with mixture-of-experts (MoE) to address this, the use of routers prevents parameter mergeability, which increases inference overhead and hinders unified multi-task adaptation, thereby limiting deployment practicality. In this work, we propose ThanoRA, a Task Heterogeneity-Aware Multi-Task Low-Rank Adaptation framework that enables multi-task adaptation while preserving the inference efficiency of LoRA. ThanoRA jointly models task heterogeneity and mitigates subspace interference throughout training. Specifically, motivated by inherent differences in complexity and heterogeneity across tasks, ThanoRA constructs task-specific LoRA subspaces at initialization, enabling fine-grained knowledge injection aligned with task heterogeneity. Furthermore, to prevent task interference and subspace collapse during multi-task training, ThanoRA introduces a subspace-preserving regularization that maintains the independence of task-specific representations. With the synergy of both components, ThanoRA enables efficient and unified multi-task adaptation. Extensive experiments across multimodal and text-only benchmarks under varying multi-task mixtures demonstrate that ThanoRA consistently achieves robust and superior performance over strong baselines without introducing additional inference overhead. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/LiangJian24/ThanoRA.
Abstract:Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in fine-tuning-as-a-service (FTaaS) settings, where user-submitted datasets adapt general-purpose models to downstream tasks. This flexibility, however, introduces serious security risks, as malicious fine-tuning can implant backdoors into MLLMs with minimal effort. In this paper, we observe that backdoor triggers systematically disrupt cross-modal processing by causing abnormal attention concentration on non-semantic regions--a phenomenon we term attention collapse. Based on this insight, we propose Believe Your Eyes (BYE), a data filtering framework that leverages attention entropy patterns as self-supervised signals to identify and filter backdoor samples. BYE operates via a three-stage pipeline: (1) extracting attention maps using the fine-tuned model, (2) computing entropy scores and profiling sensitive layers via bimodal separation, and (3) performing unsupervised clustering to remove suspicious samples. Unlike prior defenses, BYE equires no clean supervision, auxiliary labels, or model modifications. Extensive experiments across various datasets, models, and diverse trigger types validate BYE's effectiveness: it achieves near-zero attack success rates while maintaining clean-task performance, offering a robust and generalizable solution against backdoor threats in MLLMs.
Abstract:Recent Large Reasoning Models significantly improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models by learning to reason, exhibiting the promising performance in solving complex tasks. LRMs solve tasks that require complex reasoning by explicitly generating reasoning trajectories together with answers. Nevertheless, judging the quality of such an output answer is not easy because only considering the correctness of the answer is not enough and the soundness of the reasoning trajectory part matters as well. Logically, if the soundness of the reasoning part is poor, even if the answer is correct, the confidence of the derived answer should be low. Existing methods did consider jointly assessing the overall output answer by taking into account the reasoning part, however, their capability is still not satisfactory as the causal relationship of the reasoning to the concluded answer cannot properly reflected. In this paper, inspired by classical mechanics, we present a novel approach towards establishing a CoT-Kinetics energy equation. Specifically, our CoT-Kinetics energy equation formulates the token state transformation process, which is regulated by LRM internal transformer layers, as like a particle kinetics dynamics governed in a mechanical field. Our CoT-Kinetics energy assigns a scalar score to evaluate specifically the soundness of the reasoning phase, telling how confident the derived answer could be given the evaluated reasoning. As such, the LRM's overall output quality can be accurately measured, rather than a coarse judgment (e.g., correct or incorrect) anymore.
Abstract:The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has illuminated a promising pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence for both academic and industrial communities, owing to their unprecedented performance across various applications. As LLMs continue to gain prominence in both research and commercial domains, their security and safety implications have become a growing concern, not only for researchers and corporations but also for every nation. Currently, existing surveys on LLM safety primarily focus on specific stages of the LLM lifecycle, e.g., deployment phase or fine-tuning phase, lacking a comprehensive understanding of the entire "lifechain" of LLMs. To address this gap, this paper introduces, for the first time, the concept of "full-stack" safety to systematically consider safety issues throughout the entire process of LLM training, deployment, and eventual commercialization. Compared to the off-the-shelf LLM safety surveys, our work demonstrates several distinctive advantages: (I) Comprehensive Perspective. We define the complete LLM lifecycle as encompassing data preparation, pre-training, post-training, deployment and final commercialization. To our knowledge, this represents the first safety survey to encompass the entire lifecycle of LLMs. (II) Extensive Literature Support. Our research is grounded in an exhaustive review of over 800+ papers, ensuring comprehensive coverage and systematic organization of security issues within a more holistic understanding. (III) Unique Insights. Through systematic literature analysis, we have developed reliable roadmaps and perspectives for each chapter. Our work identifies promising research directions, including safety in data generation, alignment techniques, model editing, and LLM-based agent systems. These insights provide valuable guidance for researchers pursuing future work in this field.
Abstract:Data-free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) is a method that constructs pseudo-samples using a generator without real data, and transfers knowledge from a teacher model to a student by enforcing the student to overcome dimensional differences and learn to mimic the teacher's outputs on these pseudo-samples. In recent years, various studies in the vision domain have made notable advancements in this area. However, the varying topological structures and non-grid nature of graph data render the methods from the vision domain ineffective. Building upon prior research into differentiable methods for graph neural networks, we propose a fast and high-quality data-free knowledge distillation approach in this paper. Without compromising distillation quality, the proposed graph-free KD method (ACGKD) significantly reduces the spatial complexity of pseudo-graphs by leveraging the Binary Concrete distribution to model the graph structure and introducing a spatial complexity tuning parameter. This approach enables efficient gradient computation for the graph structure, thereby accelerating the overall distillation process. Additionally, ACGKD eliminates the dimensional ambiguity between the student and teacher models by increasing the student's dimensions and reusing the teacher's classifier. Moreover, it equips graph knowledge distillation with a CL-based strategy to ensure the student learns graph structures progressively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACGKD achieves state-of-the-art performance in distilling knowledge from GNNs without training data.