Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) may memorize sensitive or copyrighted content, raising significant privacy and legal concerns. While machine unlearning has emerged as a potential remedy, prevailing paradigms rely on user-provided forget sets, making unlearning requests difficult to audit and exposing systems to secondary leakage and malicious abuse. We propose MAGE, a Memory-grAph Guided Erasure framework for user-minimized, corpus-free unlearning. Given only a lightweight user anchor that identifies a target entity, MAGE probes the target LLM to recover target-related memorization, organizes it into a weighted local memory graph, and synthesizes scoped supervision for unlearning. MAGE is model-agnostic, can be plugged into standard unlearning methods, and requires no access to the original training corpus. Experiments on two benchmarks, TOFU and RWKU, demonstrate that MAGE's self-generated supervision achieves effective unlearning performance comparable to supervision generated with external reference, while preserving overall utility. These results support a practical and auditable unlearning workflow driven by minimal anchors rather than user-supplied forget corpora.
Abstract:Recent Text-to-Image (T2I) models based on rectified-flow transformers (e.g., SD3, FLUX) achieve high generative fidelity but remain vulnerable to unsafe semantics, especially when triggered by multi-token interactions. Existing mitigation methods largely rely on fine-tuning or attention modulation for concept unlearning; however, their expensive computational overhead and design tailored to U-Net-based denoisers hinder direct adaptation to transformer-based diffusion models (e.g., MMDiT). In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the attention mechanism in MMDiT and find that unsafe semantics concentrate within interpretable, low-dimensional subspaces at head level, where a finite set of safety-critical heads is responsible for unsafe feature extraction. We further observe that perturbing the Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) applied to the query and key vectors can effectively modify some specific concepts in the generated images. Motivated by these insights, we propose SafeRoPE, a lightweight and fine-grained safe generation framework for MMDiT. Specifically, SafeRoPE first constructs head-wise unsafe subspaces by decomposing unsafe embeddings within safety-critical heads, and computes a Latent Risk Score (LRS) for each input vector via projection onto these subspaces. We then introduce head-wise RoPE perturbations that can suppress unsafe semantics without degrading benign content or image quality. SafeRoPE combines both head-wise LRS and RoPE perturbations to perform risk-specific head-wise rotation on query and key vector embeddings, enabling precise suppression of unsafe outputs while maintaining generation fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SafeRoPE achieves SOTA performance in balancing effective harmful content mitigation and utility preservation for safe generation of MMDiT. Codes are available at https://github.com/deng12yx/SafeRoPE.
Abstract:Deep neural networks have recently achieved notable progress in 3D point cloud recognition, yet their vulnerability to adversarial perturbations poses critical security challenges in practical deployments. Conventional defense mechanisms struggle to address the evolving landscape of multifaceted attack patterns. Through systematic analysis of existing defenses, we identify that their unsatisfactory performance primarily originates from an entangled feature space, where adversarial attacks can be performed easily. To this end, we present 3D-ANC, a novel approach that capitalizes on the Neural Collapse (NC) mechanism to orchestrate discriminative feature learning. In particular, NC depicts where last-layer features and classifier weights jointly evolve into a simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) arrangement, establishing maximally separable class prototypes. However, leveraging this advantage in 3D recognition confronts two substantial challenges: (1) prevalent class imbalance in point cloud datasets, and (2) complex geometric similarities between object categories. To tackle these obstacles, our solution combines an ETF-aligned classification module with an adaptive training framework consisting of representation-balanced learning (RBL) and dynamic feature direction loss (FDL). 3D-ANC seamlessly empowers existing models to develop disentangled feature spaces despite the complexity in 3D data distribution. Comprehensive evaluations state that 3D-ANC significantly improves the robustness of models with various structures on two datasets. For instance, DGCNN's classification accuracy is elevated from 27.2% to 80.9% on ModelNet40 -- a 53.7% absolute gain that surpasses leading baselines by 34.0%.
Abstract:Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in reasoning-intensive tasks, but they remain vulnerable to harmful content generation, particularly in the mid-to-late steps of their reasoning processes. Existing defense mechanisms, however, rely on costly fine-tuning and additional expert knowledge, which restricts their scalability. In this work, we propose ReasoningGuard, an inference-time safeguard for LRMs, which injects timely safety aha moments to steer harmless while helpful reasoning processes. Leveraging the model's internal attention behavior, our approach accurately identifies critical points in the reasoning path, and triggers spontaneous, safety-oriented reflection. To safeguard both the subsequent reasoning steps and the final answers, we further implement a scaling sampling strategy during the decoding phase, selecting the optimal reasoning path. Inducing minimal extra inference cost, ReasoningGuard effectively mitigates three types of jailbreak attacks, including the latest ones targeting the reasoning process of LRMs. Our approach outperforms seven existing safeguards, achieving state-of-the-art safety defenses while effectively avoiding the common exaggerated safety issues.
Abstract:Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have emerged as a revolutionary approach to automating human-machine interactions, capable of autonomously operating personal devices (e.g., mobile phones) or applications within the device to perform complex real-world tasks in a human-like manner. However, their close integration with personal devices raises significant security concerns, with many threats, including backdoor attacks, remaining largely unexplored. This work reveals that the visual grounding of GUI agent-mapping textual plans to GUI elements-can introduce vulnerabilities, enabling new types of backdoor attacks. With backdoor attack targeting visual grounding, the agent's behavior can be compromised even when given correct task-solving plans. To validate this vulnerability, we propose VisualTrap, a method that can hijack the grounding by misleading the agent to locate textual plans to trigger locations instead of the intended targets. VisualTrap uses the common method of injecting poisoned data for attacks, and does so during the pre-training of visual grounding to ensure practical feasibility of attacking. Empirical results show that VisualTrap can effectively hijack visual grounding with as little as 5% poisoned data and highly stealthy visual triggers (invisible to the human eye); and the attack can be generalized to downstream tasks, even after clean fine-tuning. Moreover, the injected trigger can remain effective across different GUI environments, e.g., being trained on mobile/web and generalizing to desktop environments. These findings underscore the urgent need for further research on backdoor attack risks in GUI agents.