Bridging the Gap: Unpacking the Hidden Challenges in Knowledge Distillation for Online Ranking Systems

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a powerful approach for compressing a large model into a smaller, more efficient model, particularly beneficial for latency-sensitive applications like recommender systems. However, current KD research predominantly focuses on Computer Vision (CV) and NLP tasks, overlooking unique data characteristics and challenges inherent to recommender systems. This paper addresses these overlooked challenges, specifically: (1) mitigating data distribution shifts between teacher and student models, (2) efficiently identifying optimal teacher configurations within time and budgetary constraints, and (3) enabling computationally efficient and rapid sharing of teacher labels to support multiple students. We present a robust KD system developed and rigorously evaluated on multiple large-scale personalized video recommendation systems within Google. Our live experiment results demonstrate significant improvements in student model performance while ensuring consistent and reliable generation of high quality teacher labels from a continuous data stream of data.

Automatic Dataset Construction (ADC): Sample Collection, Data Curation, and Beyond

Large-scale data collection is essential for developing personalized training data, mitigating the shortage of training data, and fine-tuning specialized models. However, creating high-quality datasets quickly and accurately remains a challenge due to annotation errors, the substantial time and costs associated with human labor. To address these issues, we propose Automatic Dataset Construction (ADC), an innovative methodology that automates dataset creation with negligible cost and high efficiency. Taking the image classification task as a starting point, ADC leverages LLMs for the detailed class design and code generation to collect relevant samples via search engines, significantly reducing the need for manual annotation and speeding up the data generation process. Despite these advantages, ADC also encounters real-world challenges such as label errors (label noise) and imbalanced data distributions (label bias). We provide open-source software that incorporates existing methods for label error detection, robust learning under noisy and biased data, ensuring a higher-quality training data and more robust model training procedure. Furthermore, we design three benchmark datasets focused on label noise detection, label noise learning, and class-imbalanced learning. These datasets are vital because there are few existing datasets specifically for label noise detection, despite its importance. Finally, we evaluate the performance of existing popular methods on these datasets, thereby facilitating further research in the field.

Efficient Detection of Toxic Prompts in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini have significantly advanced natural language processing, enabling various applications such as chatbots and automated content generation. However, these models can be exploited by malicious individuals who craft toxic prompts to elicit harmful or unethical responses. These individuals often employ jailbreaking techniques to bypass safety mechanisms, highlighting the need for robust toxic prompt detection methods. Existing detection techniques, both blackbox and whitebox, face challenges related to the diversity of toxic prompts, scalability, and computational efficiency. In response, we propose ToxicDetector, a lightweight greybox method designed to efficiently detect toxic prompts in LLMs. ToxicDetector leverages LLMs to create toxic concept prompts, uses embedding vectors to form feature vectors, and employs a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifier for prompt classification. Our evaluation on various versions of the LLama models, Gemma-2, and multiple datasets demonstrates that ToxicDetector achieves a high accuracy of 96.39\% and a low false positive rate of 2.00\%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, ToxicDetector's processing time of 0.0780 seconds per prompt makes it highly suitable for real-time applications. ToxicDetector achieves high accuracy, efficiency, and scalability, making it a practical method for toxic prompt detection in LLMs.

EAGLE: Elevating Geometric Reasoning through LLM-empowered Visual Instruction Tuning

Multi-modal Large Language Models have recently experienced rapid developments and excel in various multi-modal tasks. However, they still struggle with mathematical geometric problem solving, which requires exceptional visual perception proficiency. Existing MLLMs mostly optimize the LLM backbone to acquire geometric reasoning capabilities, while rarely emphasizing improvements in visual comprehension. In this paper, we first investigate the visual perception performance of MLLMs when facing geometric diagrams. Our findings reveal that current MLLMs severely suffer from inaccurate geometric perception and hallucinations. To address these limitations, we propose EAGLE, a novel two-stage end-to-end visual enhancement MLLM framework designed to ElevAte Geometric reasoning through LLM-Empowered visual instruction tuning. Specifically, in the preliminary stage, we feed geometric image-caption pairs into our MLLM that contains a fully fine-tuning CLIP ViT and a frozen LLM, aiming to endow our model with basic geometric knowledge. In the subsequent advanced stage, we incorporate LoRA modules into the vision encoder and unfreeze the LLM backbone. This enables the model to leverage the inherent CoT rationales within question-answer pairs, guiding the MLLM to focus on nuanced visual cues and enhancing its overall perceptual capacity. Moreover, we optimize the cross-modal projector in both stages to foster adaptive visual-linguistic alignments. After the two-stage visual enhancement, we develop the geometry expert model EAGLE-7B. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. For example, on the GeoQA benchmark, EAGLE-7B not only surpasses the exemplary G-LLaVA 7B model by 2.9%, but also marginally outperforms the larger G-LLaVA 13B model. On the MathVista benchmark, EAGLE-7B achieves remarkable 3.8% improvements compared with the proprietary model GPT-4V.

Perception-guided Jailbreak against Text-to-Image Models

In recent years, Text-to-Image (T2I) models have garnered significant attention due to their remarkable advancements. However, security concerns have emerged due to their potential to generate inappropriate or Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) images. In this paper, inspired by the observation that texts with different semantics can lead to similar human perceptions, we propose an LLM-driven perception-guided jailbreak method, termed PGJ. It is a black-box jailbreak method that requires no specific T2I model (model-free) and generates highly natural attack prompts. Specifically, we propose identifying a safe phrase that is similar in human perception yet inconsistent in text semantics with the target unsafe word and using it as a substitution. The experiments conducted on six open-source models and commercial online services with thousands of prompts have verified the effectiveness of PGJ.

Privacy-preserving Universal Adversarial Defense for Black-box Models

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly used in critical applications such as identity authentication and autonomous driving, where robustness against adversarial attacks is crucial. These attacks can exploit minor perturbations to cause significant prediction errors, making it essential to enhance the resilience of DNNs. Traditional defense methods often rely on access to detailed model information, which raises privacy concerns, as model owners may be reluctant to share such data. In contrast, existing black-box defense methods fail to offer a universal defense against various types of adversarial attacks. To address these challenges, we introduce DUCD, a universal black-box defense method that does not require access to the target model's parameters or architecture. Our approach involves distilling the target model by querying it with data, creating a white-box surrogate while preserving data privacy. We further enhance this surrogate model using a certified defense based on randomized smoothing and optimized noise selection, enabling robust defense against a broad range of adversarial attacks. Comparative evaluations between the certified defenses of the surrogate and target models demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Experiments on multiple image classification datasets show that DUCD not only outperforms existing black-box defenses but also matches the accuracy of white-box defenses, all while enhancing data privacy and reducing the success rate of membership inference attacks.

Combo: Co-speech holistic 3D human motion generation and efficient customizable adaptation in harmony

In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Combo, for harmonious co-speech holistic 3D human motion generation and efficient customizable adaption. In particular, we identify that one fundamental challenge as the multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) nature of the generative model of interest. More concretely, on the input end, the model typically consumes both speech signals and character guidance (e.g., identity and emotion), which not only poses challenge on learning capacity but also hinders further adaptation to varying guidance; on the output end, holistic human motions mainly consist of facial expressions and body movements, which are inherently correlated but non-trivial to coordinate in current data-driven generation process. In response to the above challenge, we propose tailored designs to both ends. For the former, we propose to pre-train on data regarding a fixed identity with neutral emotion, and defer the incorporation of customizable conditions (identity and emotion) to fine-tuning stage, which is boosted by our novel X-Adapter for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. For the latter, we propose a simple yet effective transformer design, DU-Trans, which first divides into two branches to learn individual features of face expression and body movements, and then unites those to learn a joint bi-directional distribution and directly predicts combined coefficients. Evaluated on BEAT2 and SHOW datasets, Combo is highly effective in generating high-quality motions but also efficient in transferring identity and emotion. Project website: \href{https://xc-csc101.github.io/combo/}{Combo}.

Image-Based Geolocation Using Large Vision-Language Models

Geolocation is now a vital aspect of modern life, offering numerous benefits but also presenting serious privacy concerns. The advent of large vision-language models (LVLMs) with advanced image-processing capabilities introduces new risks, as these models can inadvertently reveal sensitive geolocation information. This paper presents the first in-depth study analyzing the challenges posed by traditional deep learning and LVLM-based geolocation methods. Our findings reveal that LVLMs can accurately determine geolocations from images, even without explicit geographic training. To address these challenges, we introduce \tool{}, an innovative framework that significantly enhances image-based geolocation accuracy. \tool{} employs a systematic chain-of-thought (CoT) approach, mimicking human geoguessing strategies by carefully analyzing visual and contextual cues such as vehicle types, architectural styles, natural landscapes, and cultural elements. Extensive testing on a dataset of 50,000 ground-truth data points shows that \tool{} outperforms both traditional models and human benchmarks in accuracy. It achieves an impressive average score of 4550.5 in the GeoGuessr game, with an 85.37\% win rate, and delivers highly precise geolocation predictions, with the closest distances as accurate as 0.3 km. Furthermore, our study highlights issues related to dataset integrity, leading to the creation of a more robust dataset and a refined framework that leverages LVLMs' cognitive capabilities to improve geolocation precision. These findings underscore \tool{}'s superior ability to interpret complex visual data, the urgent need to address emerging security vulnerabilities posed by LVLMs, and the importance of responsible AI development to ensure user privacy protection.

Visual-Friendly Concept Protection via Selective Adversarial Perturbations

Personalized concept generation by tuning diffusion models with a few images raises potential legal and ethical concerns regarding privacy and intellectual property rights. Researchers attempt to prevent malicious personalization using adversarial perturbations. However, previous efforts have mainly focused on the effectiveness of protection while neglecting the visibility of perturbations. They utilize global adversarial perturbations, which introduce noticeable alterations to original images and significantly degrade visual quality. In this work, we propose the Visual-Friendly Concept Protection (VCPro) framework, which prioritizes the protection of key concepts chosen by the image owner through adversarial perturbations with lower perceptibility. To ensure these perturbations are as inconspicuous as possible, we introduce a relaxed optimization objective to identify the least perceptible yet effective adversarial perturbations, solved using the Lagrangian multiplier method. Qualitative and quantitative experiments validate that VCPro achieves a better trade-off between the visibility of perturbations and protection effectiveness, effectively prioritizing the protection of target concepts in images with less perceptible perturbations.

See What LLMs Cannot Answer: A Self-Challenge Framework for Uncovering LLM Weaknesses

The impressive performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) has consistently surpassed numerous human-designed benchmarks, presenting new challenges in assessing the shortcomings of LLMs. Designing tasks and finding LLMs' limitations are becoming increasingly important. In this paper, we investigate the question of whether an LLM can discover its own limitations from the errors it makes. To this end, we propose a Self-Challenge evaluation framework with human-in-the-loop. Starting from seed instances that GPT-4 fails to answer, we prompt GPT-4 to summarize error patterns that can be used to generate new instances and incorporate human feedback on them to refine these patterns for generating more challenging data, iteratively. We end up with 8 diverse patterns, such as text manipulation and questions with assumptions. We then build a benchmark, SC-G4, consisting of 1,835 instances generated by GPT-4 using these patterns, with human-annotated gold responses. The SC-G4 serves as a challenging benchmark that allows for a detailed assessment of LLMs' abilities. Our results show that only 44.96\% of instances in SC-G4 can be answered correctly by GPT-4. Interestingly, our pilot study indicates that these error patterns also challenge other LLMs, such as Claude-3 and Llama-3, and cannot be fully resolved through fine-tuning. Our work takes the first step to demonstrate that LLMs can autonomously identify their inherent flaws and provide insights for future dynamic and automatic evaluation.