Focal-SAM: Focal Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Long-Tailed Classification

Real-world datasets often follow a long-tailed distribution, making generalization to tail classes difficult. Recent methods resorted to long-tail variants of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), such as ImbSAM and CC-SAM, to improve generalization by flattening the loss landscape. However, these attempts face a trade-off between computational efficiency and control over the loss landscape. On the one hand, ImbSAM is efficient but offers only coarse control as it excludes head classes from the SAM process. On the other hand, CC-SAM provides fine-grained control through class-dependent perturbations but at the cost of efficiency due to multiple backpropagations. Seeing this dilemma, we introduce Focal-SAM, which assigns different penalties to class-wise sharpness, achieving fine-grained control without extra backpropagations, thus maintaining efficiency. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze Focal-SAM's generalization ability and derive a sharper generalization bound. Extensive experiments on both traditional and foundation models validate the effectiveness of Focal-SAM.

Mitigating Group-Level Fairness Disparities in Federated Visual Language Models

Visual language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal tasks but face challenges in maintaining fairness across demographic groups, particularly when deployed in federated learning (FL) environments. This paper addresses the critical issue of group fairness in federated VLMs by introducing FVL-FP, a novel framework that combines FL with fair prompt tuning techniques. We focus on mitigating demographic biases while preserving model performance through three innovative components: (1) Cross-Layer Demographic Fair Prompting (CDFP), which adjusts potentially biased embeddings through counterfactual regularization; (2) Demographic Subspace Orthogonal Projection (DSOP), which removes demographic bias in image representations by mapping fair prompt text to group subspaces; and (3) Fair-aware Prompt Fusion (FPF), which dynamically balances client contributions based on both performance and fairness metrics. Extensive evaluations across four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach reduces demographic disparity by an average of 45\% compared to standard FL approaches, while maintaining task performance within 6\% of state-of-the-art results. FVL-FP effectively addresses the challenges of non-IID data distributions in federated settings and introduces minimal computational overhead while providing significant fairness benefits. Our work presents a parameter-efficient solution to the critical challenge of ensuring equitable performance across demographic groups in privacy-preserving multimodal systems.

AdaR1: From Long-CoT to Hybrid-CoT via Bi-Level Adaptive Reasoning Optimization

Recently, long-thought reasoning models achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks, but often incur substantial inference overhead, making efficiency a critical concern. Our empirical analysis reveals that the benefit of using Long-CoT varies across problems: while some problems require elaborate reasoning, others show no improvement, or even degraded accuracy. This motivates adaptive reasoning strategies that tailor reasoning depth to the input. However, prior work primarily reduces redundancy within long reasoning paths, limiting exploration of more efficient strategies beyond the Long-CoT paradigm. To address this, we propose a novel two-stage framework for adaptive and efficient reasoning. First, we construct a hybrid reasoning model by merging long and short CoT models to enable diverse reasoning styles. Second, we apply bi-level preference training to guide the model to select suitable reasoning styles (group-level), and prefer concise and correct reasoning within each style group (instance-level). Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly reduces inference costs compared to other baseline approaches, while maintaining performance. Notably, on five mathematical datasets, the average length of reasoning is reduced by more than 50%, highlighting the potential of adaptive strategies to optimize reasoning efficiency in large language models. Our code is coming soon at https://github.com/StarDewXXX/AdaR1

T2VShield: Model-Agnostic Jailbreak Defense for Text-to-Video Models

The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence has made text to video models essential for building future multimodal world simulators. However, these models remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, where specially crafted prompts bypass safety mechanisms and lead to the generation of harmful or unsafe content. Such vulnerabilities undermine the reliability and security of simulation based applications. In this paper, we propose T2VShield, a comprehensive and model agnostic defense framework designed to protect text to video models from jailbreak threats. Our method systematically analyzes the input, model, and output stages to identify the limitations of existing defenses, including semantic ambiguities in prompts, difficulties in detecting malicious content in dynamic video outputs, and inflexible model centric mitigation strategies. T2VShield introduces a prompt rewriting mechanism based on reasoning and multimodal retrieval to sanitize malicious inputs, along with a multi scope detection module that captures local and global inconsistencies across time and modalities. The framework does not require access to internal model parameters and works with both open and closed source systems. Extensive experiments on five platforms show that T2VShield can reduce jailbreak success rates by up to 35 percent compared to strong baselines. We further develop a human centered audiovisual evaluation protocol to assess perceptual safety, emphasizing the importance of visual level defense in enhancing the trustworthiness of next generation multimodal simulators.

FaceInsight: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Face Perception

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in understanding general visual content. However, these general-domain MLLMs perform poorly in face perception tasks, often producing inaccurate or misleading responses to face-specific queries. To address this gap, we propose FaceInsight, the versatile face perception MLLM that provides fine-grained facial information. Our approach introduces visual-textual alignment of facial knowledge to model both uncertain dependencies and deterministic relationships among facial information, mitigating the limitations of language-driven reasoning. Additionally, we incorporate face segmentation maps as an auxiliary perceptual modality, enriching the visual input with localized structural cues to enhance semantic understanding. Comprehensive experiments and analyses across three face perception tasks demonstrate that FaceInsight consistently outperforms nine compared MLLMs under both training-free and fine-tuned settings.

Towards Realistic Low-Light Image Enhancement via ISP Driven Data Modeling

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently become the leading method for low-light image enhancement (LLIE). However, despite significant progress, their outputs may still exhibit issues such as amplified noise, incorrect white balance, or unnatural enhancements when deployed in real world applications. A key challenge is the lack of diverse, large scale training data that captures the complexities of low-light conditions and imaging pipelines. In this paper, we propose a novel image signal processing (ISP) driven data synthesis pipeline that addresses these challenges by generating unlimited paired training data. Specifically, our pipeline begins with easily collected high-quality normal-light images, which are first unprocessed into the RAW format using a reverse ISP. We then synthesize low-light degradations directly in the RAW domain. The resulting data is subsequently processed through a series of ISP stages, including white balance adjustment, color space conversion, tone mapping, and gamma correction, with controlled variations introduced at each stage. This broadens the degradation space and enhances the diversity of the training data, enabling the generated data to capture a wide range of degradations and the complexities inherent in the ISP pipeline. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our synthetic pipeline, we conduct extensive experiments using a vanilla UNet model consisting solely of convolutional layers, group normalization, GeLU activation, and convolutional block attention modules (CBAMs). Extensive testing across multiple datasets reveals that the vanilla UNet model trained with our data synthesis pipeline delivers high fidelity, visually appealing enhancement results, surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Generalized Semantic Contrastive Learning via Embedding Side Information for Few-Shot Object Detection

The objective of few-shot object detection (FSOD) is to detect novel objects with few training samples. The core challenge of this task is how to construct a generalized feature space for novel categories with limited data on the basis of the base category space, which could adapt the learned detection model to unknown scenarios. However, limited by insufficient samples for novel categories, two issues still exist: (1) the features of the novel category are easily implicitly represented by the features of the base category, leading to inseparable classifier boundaries, (2) novel categories with fewer data are not enough to fully represent the distribution, where the model fine-tuning is prone to overfitting. To address these issues, we introduce the side information to alleviate the negative influences derived from the feature space and sample viewpoints and formulate a novel generalized feature representation learning method for FSOD. Specifically, we first utilize embedding side information to construct a knowledge matrix to quantify the semantic relationship between the base and novel categories. Then, to strengthen the discrimination between semantically similar categories, we further develop contextual semantic supervised contrastive learning which embeds side information. Furthermore, to prevent overfitting problems caused by sparse samples, a side-information guided region-aware masked module is introduced to augment the diversity of samples, which finds and abandons biased information that discriminates between similar categories via counterfactual explanation, and refines the discriminative representation space further. Extensive experiments using ResNet and ViT backbones on PASCAL VOC, MS COCO, LVIS V1, FSOD-1K, and FSVOD-500 benchmarks demonstrate that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving the ability of FSOD in most shots/splits.

Beyond Progress Measures: Theoretical Insights into the Mechanism of Grokking

Grokking, referring to the abrupt improvement in test accuracy after extended overfitting, offers valuable insights into the mechanisms of model generalization. Existing researches based on progress measures imply that grokking relies on understanding the optimization dynamics when the loss function is dominated solely by the weight decay term. However, we find that this optimization merely leads to token uniformity, which is not a sufficient condition for grokking. In this work, we investigate the grokking mechanism underlying the Transformer in the task of prime number operations. Based on theoretical analysis and experimental validation, we present the following insights: (i) The weight decay term encourages uniformity across all tokens in the embedding space when it is minimized. (ii) The occurrence of grokking is jointly determined by the uniformity of the embedding space and the distribution of the training dataset. Building on these insights, we provide a unified perspective for understanding various previously proposed progress measures and introduce a novel, concise, and effective progress measure that could trace the changes in test loss more accurately. Finally, to demonstrate the versatility of our theoretical framework, we design a dedicated dataset to validate our theory on ResNet-18, successfully showcasing the occurrence of grokking.

Less is More: Efficient Black-box Attribution via Minimal Interpretable Subset Selection

To develop a trustworthy AI system, which aim to identify the input regions that most influence the models decisions. The primary task of existing attribution methods lies in efficiently and accurately identifying the relationships among input-prediction interactions. Particularly when the input data is discrete, such as images, analyzing the relationship between inputs and outputs poses a significant challenge due to the combinatorial explosion. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient black-box attribution mechanism, LiMA (Less input is More faithful for Attribution), which reformulates the attribution of important regions as an optimization problem for submodular subset selection. First, to accurately assess interactions, we design a submodular function that quantifies subset importance and effectively captures their impact on decision outcomes. Then, efficiently ranking input sub-regions by their importance for attribution, we improve optimization efficiency through a novel bidirectional greedy search algorithm. LiMA identifies both the most and least important samples while ensuring an optimal attribution boundary that minimizes errors. Extensive experiments on eight foundation models demonstrate that our method provides faithful interpretations with fewer regions and exhibits strong generalization, shows an average improvement of 36.3% in Insertion and 39.6% in Deletion. Our method also outperforms the naive greedy search in attribution efficiency, being 1.6 times faster. Furthermore, when explaining the reasons behind model prediction errors, the average highest confidence achieved by our method is, on average, 86.1% higher than that of state-of-the-art attribution algorithms. The code is available at https://github.com/RuoyuChen10/LIMA.

On the Mistaken Assumption of Interchangeable Deep Reinforcement Learning Implementations

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a paradigm of artificial intelligence where an agent uses a neural network to learn which actions to take in a given environment. DRL has recently gained traction from being able to solve complex environments like driving simulators, 3D robotic control, and multiplayer-online-battle-arena video games. Numerous implementations of the state-of-the-art algorithms responsible for training these agents, like the Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithms, currently exist. However, studies make the mistake of assuming implementations of the same algorithm to be consistent and thus, interchangeable. In this paper, through a differential testing lens, we present the results of studying the extent of implementation inconsistencies, their effect on the implementations' performance, as well as their impact on the conclusions of prior studies under the assumption of interchangeable implementations. The outcomes of our differential tests showed significant discrepancies between the tested algorithm implementations, indicating that they are not interchangeable. In particular, out of the five PPO implementations tested on 56 games, three implementations achieved superhuman performance for 50% of their total trials while the other two implementations only achieved superhuman performance for less than 15% of their total trials. As part of a meticulous manual analysis of the implementations' source code, we analyzed implementation discrepancies and determined that code-level inconsistencies primarily caused these discrepancies. Lastly, we replicated a study and showed that this assumption of implementation interchangeability was sufficient to flip experiment outcomes. Therefore, this calls for a shift in how implementations are being used.