Beyond Accuracy: Auditing Spatial Provenance in Visual Token Pruning for OCR-Critical MLLM Inference

Visual-token pruning is usually judged by answer quality at a fixed retention budget. For text-rich multimodal large language models (MLLMs), this protocol can miss a distinct failure: an answer remains correct even when no retained token is locally traceable to the small OCR region that supports it. We turn this blind spot into an evidence-risk audit that couples answer behavior with geometric token-origin provenance, interventions, and realized cost; transparent training-free selectors isolate controlled operating points. On locked image-disjoint confirmation, Qwen Target at 30% retention has observed accuracy 0.786 versus 0.783 for Full (paired image-cluster difference +0.003, 95% CI [-0.014, +0.020]), yet same-budget Target, Random, and Grid retain sharply different positive-support coverage: 0.620, 0.270, and 0.318. Across Qwen3-VL-8B, LLaVA-1.5-7B, and InternVL3.5-8B, matched controls, interventions, detector tests, and external methods reveal model-specific quality-risk-traceability frontiers that accuracy alone does not expose. Materialized prefixes yield up to 4.32x batch-prefill speedup and 76.4% lower incremental peak memory; full-validation TextVQA and DocVQA further show that favorable target-verification points do not imply task-general compression. Visual-token pruning should therefore report surviving spatial provenance and realized cost alongside quality and compression.

Causally Debiased Latent Action Model for Embodied Action Conditioned World Models

Action-conditioned world models (ACWMs) aim to simulate future observations conditioned on embodied actions, offering a promising foundation for robot planning, policy evaluation, and data augmentation. However, learning controllable ACWMs requires large-scale action-labeled data, which remains costly to collect in the real world. Latent action models (LAMs) mitigate this bottleneck by inferring latent actions from unlabeled videos, but existing LAMs are typically trained with reconstruction-only objectives and therefore entangle action-relevant dynamics with action-irrelevant visual factors such as backgrounds and untouched objects. In this work, we identify this action-irrelevant bias as a key obstacle to controllable ACWMs and introduce evaluation metrics to measure latent-action bias, action following, and robustness. We propose CD-LAM, a causally debiased framework for LAM-based ACWMs. CD-LAM introduces three efficient fine-tuning objectives: embodiment-centric reconstruction, action-centric contrastive learning, and latent space calibration, which together encourage embodiment-focused, action-aware, and calibrated non-collapsed latent action representations. Experiments on 2B and 14B ACWM backbones show that CD-LAM substantially improves latent-action controllability, downstream robot-action following, visual fidelity, and adaptation efficiency, requiring only 6k fine-tuning steps and more than 12$\times$ fewer robot-action adaptation updates than the baseline.

Resource Consumption Threats in Large Language Models

Given limited and costly computational infrastructure, resource efficiency is a key requirement for large language models (LLMs). Efficient LLMs increase service capacity for providers and reduce latency and API costs for users. Recent resource consumption threats induce excessive generation, degrading model efficiency and harming both service availability and economic sustainability. This survey presents a systematic review of threats to resource consumption in LLMs. We further establish a unified view of this emerging area by clarifying its scope and examining the problem along the full pipeline from threat induction to mechanism understanding and mitigation. Our goal is to clarify the problem landscape for this emerging area, thereby providing a clearer foundation for characterization and mitigation.

Silent Inconsistency in Data-Parallel Full Fine-Tuning: Diagnosing Worker-Level Optimization Misalignment

Data-parallel (DP) training with synchronous all-reduce is a dominant paradigm for full-parameter fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). While parameter synchronization guarantees numerical equivalence of model weights after each iteration, it does not necessarily imply alignment of worker-level optimization dynamics before gradient aggregation. This paper identifies and studies this latent mismatch, termed \emph{silent inconsistency}, where cross-worker divergence in losses and gradients can remain invisible under conventional aggregated monitoring signals. We propose a lightweight, model-agnostic diagnostic framework that quantifies worker-level consistency using training signals readily available in standard pipelines. Specifically, we introduce three complementary metrics: loss dispersion, gradient-norm dispersion, and gradient-direction consistency measured by inter-worker cosine similarity. The proposed metrics incur negligible overhead and require no modification to model architecture, synchronization mechanisms, or optimization algorithms. We validate the framework by fully fine-tuning the 1B-parameter \texttt{openPangu-Embedded-1B-V1.1} model on the \texttt{tatsu-lab/alpaca} dataset using an 8-NPU DP setup, under controlled perturbations of cross-rank stochasticity. Experimental results show that progressively desynchronized data shuffling and random seeds lead to substantial increases in loss/gradient dispersion and reduced directional alignment, despite smooth globally averaged loss curves. These findings demonstrate that the proposed indicators provide actionable visibility into hidden instability modes in large-scale DP fine-tuning, enabling more reliable diagnosis and configuration assessment.

From Helpfulness to Toxic Proactivity: Diagnosing Behavioral Misalignment in LLM Agents

The enhanced capabilities of LLM-based agents come with an emergency for model planning and tool-use abilities. Attributing to helpful-harmless trade-off from LLM alignment, agents typically also inherit the flaw of "over-refusal", which is a passive failure mode. However, the proactive planning and action capabilities of agents introduce another crucial danger on the other side of the trade-off. This phenomenon we term "Toxic Proactivity'': an active failure mode in which an agent, driven by the optimization for Machiavellian helpfulness, disregards ethical constraints to maximize utility. Unlike over-refusal, Toxic Proactivity manifests as the agent taking excessive or manipulative measures to ensure its "usefulness'' is maintained. Existing research pays little attention to identifying this behavior, as it often lacks the subtle context required for such strategies to unfold. To reveal this risk, we introduce a novel evaluation framework based on dilemma-driven interactions between dual models, enabling the simulation and analysis of agent behavior over multi-step behavioral trajectories. Through extensive experiments with mainstream LLMs, we demonstrate that Toxic Proactivity is a widespread behavioral phenomenon and reveal two major tendencies. We further present a systematic benchmark for evaluating Toxic Proactive behavior across contextual settings.

Learning to Explore with Parameter-Space Noise: A Deep Dive into Parameter-Space Noise for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves LLM reasoning, yet growing evidence indicates an exploration ceiling: it often reweights existing solution traces rather than discovering new strategies, limiting gains under large sampling budgets (e.g., pass-at-256). We address this limitation with PSN-RLVR, which perturbs policy parameters before rollout generation to induce temporally consistent, trajectory-level exploration that better preserves long-horizon chain-of-thought coherence than action-space noise. To mitigate the resulting sampling-update mismatch, we incorporate truncated importance sampling (TIS). To avoid expensive KL-based adaptive noise control, we propose a computationally efficient real-time adaptive noise scheduler driven by a lightweight surrogate that combines semantic diversity with normalized self-certainty. Instantiated on GRPO, a widely used RLVR method, PSN-GRPO consistently expands the effective reasoning capability boundary across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks and model families, yielding higher pass-at-k under large sampling budgets and outperforming prior exploration-oriented RLVR methods (e.g., Pass-at-k-style training) while remaining orthogonal and thus composable for additional gains.

From Classification to Ranking: Enhancing LLM Reasoning Capabilities for MBTI Personality Detection

Personality detection aims to measure an individual's corresponding personality traits through their social media posts. The advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer novel perspectives for personality detection tasks. Existing approaches enhance personality trait analysis by leveraging LLMs to extract semantic information from textual posts as prompts, followed by training classifiers for categorization. However, accurately classifying personality traits remains challenging due to the inherent complexity of human personality and subtle inter-trait distinctions. Moreover, prompt-based methods often exhibit excessive dependency on expert-crafted knowledge without autonomous pattern-learning capacity. To address these limitations, we view personality detection as a ranking task rather than a classification and propose a corresponding reinforcement learning training paradigm. First, we employ supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to establish personality trait ranking capabilities while enforcing standardized output formats, creating a robust initialization. Subsequently, we introduce Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a specialized ranking-based reward function. Unlike verification tasks with definitive solutions, personality assessment involves subjective interpretations and blurred boundaries between trait categories. Our reward function explicitly addresses this challenge by training LLMs to learn optimal answer rankings. Comprehensive experiments have demonstrated that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple personality detection benchmarks.

Transformer Is Inherently a Causal Learner

We reveal that transformers trained in an autoregressive manner naturally encode time-delayed causal structures in their learned representations. When predicting future values in multivariate time series, the gradient sensitivities of transformer outputs with respect to past inputs directly recover the underlying causal graph, without any explicit causal objectives or structural constraints. We prove this connection theoretically under standard identifiability conditions and develop a practical extraction method using aggregated gradient attributions. On challenging cases such as nonlinear dynamics, long-term dependencies, and non-stationary systems, this approach greatly surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art discovery algorithms, especially as data heterogeneity increases, exhibiting scaling potential where causal accuracy improves with data volume and heterogeneity, a property traditional methods lack. This unifying view lays the groundwork for a future paradigm where causal discovery operates through the lens of foundation models, and foundation models gain interpretability and enhancement through the lens of causality.

ATM-GAD: Adaptive Temporal Motif Graph Anomaly Detection for Financial Transaction Networks

Financial fraud detection is essential to safeguard billions of dollars, yet the intertwined entities and fast-changing transaction behaviors in modern financial systems routinely defeat conventional machine learning models. Recent graph-based detectors make headway by representing transactions as networks, but they still overlook two fraud hallmarks rooted in time: (1) temporal motifs--recurring, telltale subgraphs that reveal suspicious money flows as they unfold--and (2) account-specific intervals of anomalous activity, when fraud surfaces only in short bursts unique to each entity. To exploit both signals, we introduce ATM-GAD, an adaptive graph neural network that leverages temporal motifs for financial anomaly detection. A Temporal Motif Extractor condenses each account's transaction history into the most informative motifs, preserving both topology and temporal patterns. These motifs are then analyzed by dual-attention blocks: IntraA reasons over interactions within a single motif, while InterA aggregates evidence across motifs to expose multi-step fraud schemes. In parallel, a differentiable Adaptive Time-Window Learner tailors the observation window for every node, allowing the model to focus precisely on the most revealing time slices. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that ATM-GAD consistently outperforms seven strong anomaly-detection baselines, uncovering fraud patterns missed by earlier methods.

$PD^3F$: A Pluggable and Dynamic DoS-Defense Framework Against Resource Consumption Attacks Targeting Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs), due to substantial computational requirements, are vulnerable to resource consumption attacks, which can severely degrade server performance or even cause crashes, as demonstrated by denial-of-service (DoS) attacks designed for LLMs. However, existing works lack mitigation strategies against such threats, resulting in unresolved security risks for real-world LLM deployments. To this end, we propose the Pluggable and Dynamic DoS-Defense Framework ($PD^3F$), which employs a two-stage approach to defend against resource consumption attacks from both the input and output sides. On the input side, we propose the Resource Index to guide Dynamic Request Polling Scheduling, thereby reducing resource usage induced by malicious attacks under high-concurrency scenarios. On the output side, we introduce the Adaptive End-Based Suppression mechanism, which terminates excessive malicious generation early. Experiments across six models demonstrate that $PD^3F$ significantly mitigates resource consumption attacks, improving users' access capacity by up to 500% during adversarial load. $PD^3F$ represents a step toward the resilient and resource-aware deployment of LLMs against resource consumption attacks.