Department of Nuclear Engineering, Texas A&M University
Abstract:Data mixing strategy is essential for large language model (LLM) training. Empirical evidence shows that inappropriate strategies can significantly reduce generalization. Although recent methods have improved empirical performance, several fundamental questions remain open: what constitutes a domain, whether human and model perceptions of domains are aligned, and how domain weighting influences generalization. We address these questions by establishing formal connections between gradient dynamics and domain distributions, offering a theoretical framework that clarifies the role of domains in training dynamics. Building on this analysis, we introduce DoGraph, a reweighting framework that formulates data scheduling as a graph-constrained optimization problem. Extensive experiments on GPT-2 models of varying scales demonstrate that DoGraph consistently achieves competitive performance.
Abstract:The deployment of large language models (LLMs) raises significant ethical and safety concerns. While LLM alignment techniques are adopted to improve model safety and trustworthiness, adversaries can exploit these techniques to undermine safety for malicious purposes, resulting in \emph{misalignment}. Misaligned LLMs may be published on open platforms to magnify harm. To address this, additional safety alignment, referred to as \emph{realignment}, is necessary before deploying untrusted third-party LLMs. This study explores the efficacy of fine-tuning methods in terms of misalignment, realignment, and the effects of their interplay. By evaluating four Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and two Preference Fine-Tuning (PFT) methods across four popular safety-aligned LLMs, we reveal a mechanism asymmetry between attack and defense. While Odds Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO) is most effective for misalignment, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) excels in realignment, albeit at the expense of model utility. Additionally, we identify model-specific resistance, residual effects of multi-round adversarial dynamics, and other noteworthy findings. These findings highlight the need for robust safeguards and customized safety alignment strategies to mitigate potential risks in the deployment of LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhangrui4041/The-Art-of-Mis-alignment.
Abstract:In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the surge of visual tokens significantly increases the inference time and computational overhead, making them impractical for real-time or resource-constrained applications. Visual token pruning is a promising strategy for reducing the cost of MLLM inference by removing redundant visual tokens. Existing research usually assumes that all attention heads contribute equally to the visual interpretation. However, our study reveals that different heads may capture distinct visual semantics and inherently play distinct roles in visual processing. In light of this observation, we propose HAWK, a head importance-aware visual token pruning method that perceives the varying importance of attention heads in visual tasks to maximize the retention of crucial tokens. By leveraging head importance weights and text-guided attention to assess visual token significance, HAWK effectively retains task-relevant visual tokens while removing redundant ones. The proposed HAWK is entirely training-free and can be seamlessly applied to various MLLMs. Extensive experiments on multiple mainstream vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that HAWK achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. When applied to Qwen2.5-VL, HAWK retains 96.0% of the original accuracy after pruning 80.2% of the visual tokens. Additionally, it reduces end-to-end latency to 74.4% of the original and further decreases GPU memory usage across the tested models. The code is available at https://github.com/peppery77/HAWK.git.
Abstract:Real-time supervisory control of advanced reactors requires accurate forecasting of plant-wide thermal-hydraulic states, including locations where physical sensors are unavailable. Meeting this need calls for surrogate models that combine predictive fidelity, millisecond-scale inference, and robustness to partial observability. In this work, we present a physics-informed message-passing Graph Neural Network coupled with a Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (GNN-ODE) to addresses all three requirements simultaneously. We represent the whole system as a directed sensor graph whose edges encode hydraulic connectivity through flow/heat transfer-aware message passing, and we advance the latent dynamics in continuous time via a controlled Neural ODE. A topology-guided missing-node initializer reconstructs uninstrumented states at rollout start; prediction then proceeds fully autoregressively. The GNN-ODE surrogate achieves satisfactory results for the system dynamics prediction. On held-out simulation transients, the surrogate achieves an average MAE of 0.91 K at 60 s and 2.18 K at 300 s for uninstrumented nodes, with $R^2$ up to 0.995 for missing-node state reconstruction. Inference runs at approximately 105 times faster than simulated time on a single GPU, enabling 64-member ensemble rollouts for uncertainty quantification. To assess sim-to-real transfer, we adapt the pretrained surrogate to experimental facility data using layerwise discriminative fine-tuning with only 30 training sequences. The learned flow-dependent heat-transfer scaling recovers a Reynolds-number exponent consistent with established correlations, indicating constitutive learning beyond trajectory fitting. The model tracks a steep power change transient and produces accurate trajectories at uninstrumented locations.
Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved remarkable success in robotic manipulation. However, their robustness to linguistic nuances remains a critical, under-explored safety concern, posing a significant safety risk to real-world deployment. Red teaming, or identifying environmental scenarios that elicit catastrophic behaviors, is an important step in ensuring the safe deployment of embodied AI agents. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach in automated red teaming that aims to uncover these vulnerabilities. However, standard RL-based adversaries often suffer from severe mode collapse due to their reward-maximizing nature, which tends to converge to a narrow set of trivial or repetitive failure patterns, failing to reveal the comprehensive landscape of meaningful risks. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel \textbf{D}iversity-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{E}mbodied \textbf{R}ed \textbf{T}eaming (\textbf{DAERT}) framework, to expose the vulnerabilities of VLAs against linguistic variations. Our design is based on evaluating a uniform policy, which is able to generate a diverse set of challenging instructions while ensuring its attack effectiveness, measured by execution failures in a physical simulator. We conduct extensive experiments across different robotic benchmarks against two state-of-the-art VLAs, including $π_0$ and OpenVLA. Our method consistently discovers a wider range of more effective adversarial instructions that reduce the average task success rate from 93.33\% to 5.85\%, demonstrating a scalable approach to stress-testing VLA agents and exposing critical safety blind spots before real-world deployment.
Abstract:Ultrasound perception typically requires multiple scan views through probe movement to reduce diagnostic ambiguity, mitigate acoustic occlusions, and improve anatomical coverage. However, not all probe views are equally informative. Exhaustively acquiring a large number of views can introduce substantial redundancy, increase scanning and processing costs. To address this, we define an active view exploration task for ultrasound and propose SonoSelect, an ultrasound-specific method that adaptively guides probe movement based on current observations. Specifically, we cast ultrasound active view exploration as a sequential decision-making problem. Each new 2D ultrasound view is fused into a 3D spatial memory of the observed anatomy, which guides the next probe position. On top of this formulation, we propose an ultrasound-specific objective that favors probe movements with greater organ coverage, lower reconstruction uncertainty, and less redundant scanning. Experiments on the ultrasound simulator show that SonoSelect achieves promising multi-view organ classification accuracy using only 2 out of N views. Furthermore, for a more difficult kidney cyst detection task, it reaches 54.56% kidney coverage and 35.13% cyst coverage, with short trajectories consistently centered on the target cyst.
Abstract:We introduce JoyAI-LLM Flash, an efficient Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model designed to redefine the trade-off between strong performance and token efficiency in the sub-50B parameter regime. JoyAI-LLM Flash is pretrained on a massive corpus of 20 trillion tokens and further optimized through a rigorous post-training pipeline, including supervised fine-tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) across diverse environments. To improve token efficiency, JoyAI-LLM Flash strategically balances \emph{thinking} and \emph{non-thinking} cognitive modes and introduces FiberPO, a novel RL algorithm inspired by fibration theory that decomposes trust-region maintenance into global and local components, providing unified multi-scale stability control for LLM policy optimization. To enhance architectural sparsity, the model comprises 48B total parameters while activating only 2.7B parameters per forward pass, achieving a substantially higher sparsity ratio than contemporary industry leading models of comparable scale. To further improve inference throughput, we adopt a joint training-inference co-design that incorporates dense Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) and Quantization-Aware Training (QAT). We release the checkpoints for both JoyAI-LLM-48B-A3B Base and its post-trained variants on Hugging Face to support the open-source community.
Abstract:Infrared and visible video fusion combines the object saliency from infrared images with the texture details from visible images to produce semantically rich fusion results. However, most existing methods are designed for static image fusion and cannot effectively handle frame-to-frame motion in videos. Current video fusion methods improve temporal consistency by introducing interactions across frames, but they often require high computational cost. To mitigate these challenges, we propose MAVFusion, an end-to-end video fusion framework featuring a motion-aware sparse interaction mechanism that enhances efficiency while maintaining superior fusion quality. Specifically, we leverage optical flow to identify dynamic regions in multi-modal sequences, adaptively allocating computationally intensive cross-modal attention to these sparse areas to capture salient transitions and facilitate inter-modal information exchange. For static background regions, a lightweight weak interaction module is employed to maintain structural and appearance integrity. By decoupling the processing of dynamic and static regions, MAVFusion simultaneously preserves temporal consistency and fine-grained details while significantly accelerating inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAVFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple infrared and visible video benchmarks, achieving a speed of 14.16\,FPS at $640 \times 480$ resolution. The source code will be available at https://github.com/ixilai/MAVFusion.
Abstract:3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has enabled efficient 3D scene reconstruction from everyday images with real-time, high-fidelity rendering, greatly advancing VR/AR applications. Fisheye cameras, with their wider field of view (FOV), promise high-quality reconstructions from fewer inputs and have recently attracted much attention. However, since 3DGS relies on rasterization, most subsequent works involving fisheye camera inputs first undistort images before training, which introduces two problems: 1) Black borders at image edges cause information loss and negate the fisheye's large FOV advantage; 2) Undistortion's stretch-and-interpolate resampling spreads each pixel's value over a larger area, diluting detail density -- causes 3DGS overfitting these low-frequency zones, producing blur and floating artifacts. In this work, we integrate fisheye camera model into the original 3DGS framework, enabling native fisheye image input for training without preprocessing. Despite correct modeling, we observed that the reconstructed scenes still exhibit floaters at image edges: Distortion increases toward the periphery, and 3DGS's original per-iteration random-selecting-view optimization ignores the cross-view correlations of a Gaussian, leading to extreme shapes (e.g., oversized or elongated) that degrade reconstruction quality. To address this, we introduce a feature-overlap-driven cross-view joint optimization strategy that establishes consistent geometric and photometric constraints across views-a technique equally applicable to existing pinhole-camera-based pipelines. Our DirectFisheye-GS matches or surpasses state-of-the-art performance on public datasets.
Abstract:Smartphone GUI agents execute tasks by operating directly on app interfaces, offering a path to broad capability without deep system integration. However, real-world smartphone use is highly personalized: users adopt diverse workflows and preferences, challenging agents to deliver customized assistance rather than generic solutions. Existing GUI agent benchmarks cannot adequately capture this personalization dimension due to sparse user-specific data and the lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics. To address this gap, we present PSPA-Bench, the benchmark dedicated to evaluating personalization in smartphone GUI agents. PSPA-Bench comprises over 12,855 personalized instructions aligned with real-world user behaviors across 10 representative daily-use scenarios and 22 mobile apps, and introduces a structure-aware process evaluation method that measures agents' personalized capabilities at a fine-grained level. Through PSPA-Bench, we benchmark 11 state-of-the-art GUI agents. Results reveal that current methods perform poorly under personalized settings, with even the strongest agent achieving limited success. Our analysis further highlights three directions for advancing personalized GUI agents: (1) reasoning-oriented models consistently outperform general LLMs, (2) perception remains a simple yet critical capability, and (3) reflection and long-term memory mechanisms are key to improving adaptation. Together, these findings establish PSPA-Bench as a foundation for systematic study and future progress in personalized GUI agents.