Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract:As large language models (LLMs) become more capable and widely used, ensuring the safety of their outputs is increasingly critical. Existing guardrail models, though useful in static evaluation settings, face two major limitations in real-world applications: (1) they typically output only binary "safe/unsafe" labels, which can be interpreted inconsistently across diverse safety policies, rendering them incapable of accommodating varying safety tolerances across domains; and (2) they require complete model outputs before performing safety checks, making them fundamentally incompatible with streaming LLM inference, thereby preventing timely intervention during generation and increasing exposure to harmful partial outputs. To address these challenges, we present Qwen3Guard, a series of multilingual safety guardrail models with two specialized variants: Generative Qwen3Guard, which casts safety classification as an instruction-following task to enable fine-grained tri-class judgments (safe, controversial, unsafe); and Stream Qwen3Guard, which introduces a token-level classification head for real-time safety monitoring during incremental text generation. Both variants are available in three sizes (0.6B, 4B, and 8B parameters) and support up to 119 languages and dialects, providing comprehensive, scalable, and low-latency safety moderation for global LLM deployments. Evaluated across English, Chinese, and multilingual benchmarks, Qwen3Guard achieves state-of-the-art performance in both prompt and response safety classification. All models are released under the Apache 2.0 license for public use.
Abstract:Recommender systems frequently encounter data sparsity issues, particularly when addressing cold-start scenarios involving new users or items. Multi-source cross-domain recommendation (CDR) addresses these challenges by transferring valuable knowledge from multiple source domains to enhance recommendations in a target domain. However, existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based CDR methods typically rely on a single-agent framework, leading to negative transfer issues caused by inconsistent domain contributions and inherent distributional discrepancies among source domains. To overcome these limitations, MARCO, a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning-based Cross-Domain recommendation framework, is proposed. It leverages cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, where each agent is dedicated to estimating the contribution from an individual source domain, effectively managing credit assignment and mitigating negative transfer. In addition, an entropy-based action diversity penalty is introduced to enhance policy expressiveness and stabilize training by encouraging diverse agents' joint actions. Extensive experiments across four benchmark datasets demonstrate MARCO's superior performance over state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its robustness and strong generalization capabilities. The code is at https://github.com/xiewilliams/MARCO.
Abstract:We propose a posterior sampling algorithm for the problem of estimating multiple independent source signals from their noisy superposition. The proposed algorithm is a combination of Gibbs sampling method and plug-and-play (PnP) diffusion priors. Unlike most existing diffusion-model-based approaches for signal separation, our method allows source priors to be learned separately and flexibly combined without retraining. Moreover, under the assumption of perfect diffusion model training, the proposed method provably produces samples from the posterior distribution. Experiments on the task of heartbeat extraction from mixtures with synthetic motion artifacts demonstrate the superior performance of our method over existing approaches.
Abstract:Significant progress has been made in spatial intelligence, spanning both spatial reconstruction and world exploration. However, the scalability and real-world fidelity of current models remain severely constrained by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality training data. While several datasets provide camera pose information, they are typically limited in scale, diversity, and annotation richness, particularly for real-world dynamic scenes with ground-truth camera motion. To this end, we collect \textbf{SpatialVID}, a dataset consists of a large corpus of in-the-wild videos with diverse scenes, camera movements and dense 3D annotations such as per-frame camera poses, depth, and motion instructions. Specifically, we collect more than 21,000 hours of raw video, and process them into 2.7 million clips through a hierarchical filtering pipeline, totaling 7,089 hours of dynamic content. A subsequent annotation pipeline enriches these clips with detailed spatial and semantic information, including camera poses, depth maps, dynamic masks, structured captions, and serialized motion instructions. Analysis of SpatialVID's data statistics reveals a richness and diversity that directly foster improved model generalization and performance, establishing it as a key asset for the video and 3D vision research community.
Abstract:Electromagnetic (EM) imaging is an important tool for non-invasive sensing with low-cost and portable devices. One emerging application is EM stroke imaging, which enables early diagnosis and continuous monitoring of brain strokes. Quantitative imaging is achieved by solving an inverse scattering problem (ISP) that reconstructs permittivity and conductivity maps from measurements. In general, the reconstruction accuracy is limited by its inherent nonlinearity and ill-posedness. Existing methods, including learning-free and learning-based approaches, fail to either incorporate complicated prior distributions or provide theoretical guarantees, posing difficulties in balancing interpretability, distortion error, and reliability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a posterior sampling method based on latent diffusion for quantitative EM brain imaging, adapted from a generative plug-and-play (PnP) posterior sampling framework. Our approach allows to flexibly integrate prior knowledge into physics-based inversion without requiring paired measurement-label datasets. We first learn the prior distribution of targets from an unlabeled dataset, and then incorporate the learned prior into posterior sampling. In particular, we train a latent diffusion model on permittivity and conductivity maps to capture their prior distribution. Then, given measurements and the forward model describing EM wave physics, we perform posterior sampling by alternating between two samplers that respectively enforce the likelihood and prior distributions. Finally, reliable reconstruction is obtained through minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimation based on the samples. Experimental results on brain imaging demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in reconstruction accuracy and structural similarity while maintaining high measurement fidelity.
Abstract:Low-dose computed tomography (CT) denoising is crucial for reduced radiation exposure while ensuring diagnostically acceptable image quality. Despite significant advancements driven by deep learning (DL) in recent years, existing DL-based methods, typically trained on a specific dose level and anatomical region, struggle to handle diverse noise characteristics and anatomical heterogeneity during varied scanning conditions, limiting their generalizability and robustness in clinical scenarios. In this paper, we propose FoundDiff, a foundational diffusion model for unified and generalizable LDCT denoising across various dose levels and anatomical regions. FoundDiff employs a two-stage strategy: (i) dose-anatomy perception and (ii) adaptive denoising. First, we develop a dose- and anatomy-aware contrastive language image pre-training model (DA-CLIP) to achieve robust dose and anatomy perception by leveraging specialized contrastive learning strategies to learn continuous representations that quantify ordinal dose variations and identify salient anatomical regions. Second, we design a dose- and anatomy-aware diffusion model (DA-Diff) to perform adaptive and generalizable denoising by synergistically integrating the learned dose and anatomy embeddings from DACLIP into diffusion process via a novel dose and anatomy conditional block (DACB) based on Mamba. Extensive experiments on two public LDCT datasets encompassing eight dose levels and three anatomical regions demonstrate superior denoising performance of FoundDiff over existing state-of-the-art methods and the remarkable generalization to unseen dose levels. The codes and models are available at https://github.com/hao1635/FoundDiff.
Abstract:Vision Transformer (ViT) has prevailed in computer vision tasks due to its strong long-range dependency modelling ability. However, its large model size with high computational cost and weak local feature modeling ability hinder its application in real scenarios. To balance computation efficiency and performance, we propose SAEViT (Sparse-Attention-Efficient-ViT), a lightweight ViT based model with convolution blocks, in this paper to achieve efficient downstream vision tasks. Specifically, SAEViT introduces a Sparsely Aggregated Attention (SAA) module that performs adaptive sparse sampling based on image redundancy and recovers the feature map via deconvolution operation, which significantly reduces the computational complexity of attention operations. In addition, a Channel-Interactive Feed-Forward Network (CIFFN) layer is developed to enhance inter-channel information exchange through feature decomposition and redistribution, mitigating redundancy in traditional feed-forward networks (FNN). Finally, a hierarchical pyramid structure with embedded depth-wise separable convolutional blocks (DWSConv) is devised to further strengthen convolutional features. Extensive experiments on mainstream datasets show that SAEViT achieves Top-1 accuracies of 76.3\% and 79.6\% on the ImageNet-1K classification task with only 0.8 GFLOPs and 1.3 GFLOPs, respectively, demonstrating a lightweight solution for various fundamental vision tasks.
Abstract:We present MM-Food-100K, a public 100,000-sample multimodal food intelligence dataset with verifiable provenance. It is a curated approximately 10% open subset of an original 1.2 million, quality-accepted corpus of food images annotated for a wide range of information (such as dish name, region of creation). The corpus was collected over six weeks from over 87,000 contributors using the Codatta contribution model, which combines community sourcing with configurable AI-assisted quality checks; each submission is linked to a wallet address in a secure off-chain ledger for traceability, with a full on-chain protocol on the roadmap. We describe the schema, pipeline, and QA, and validate utility by fine-tuning large vision-language models (ChatGPT 5, ChatGPT OSS, Qwen-Max) on image-based nutrition prediction. Fine-tuning yields consistent gains over out-of-box baselines across standard metrics; we report results primarily on the MM-Food-100K subset. We release MM-Food-100K for publicly free access and retain approximately 90% for potential commercial access with revenue sharing to contributors.
Abstract:Subject-to-video generation has witnessed substantial progress in recent years. However, existing models still face significant challenges in faithfully following textual instructions. This limitation, commonly known as the copy-paste problem, arises from the widely used in-pair training paradigm. This approach inherently entangles subject identity with background and contextual attributes by sampling reference images from the same scene as the target video. To address this issue, we introduce \textbf{Phantom-Data, the first general-purpose cross-pair subject-to-video consistency dataset}, containing approximately one million identity-consistent pairs across diverse categories. Our dataset is constructed via a three-stage pipeline: (1) a general and input-aligned subject detection module, (2) large-scale cross-context subject retrieval from more than 53 million videos and 3 billion images, and (3) prior-guided identity verification to ensure visual consistency under contextual variation. Comprehensive experiments show that training with Phantom-Data significantly improves prompt alignment and visual quality while preserving identity consistency on par with in-pair baselines.
Abstract:Image inpainting is the task of reconstructing missing or damaged parts of an image in a way that seamlessly blends with the surrounding content. With the advent of advanced generative models, especially diffusion models and generative adversarial networks, inpainting has achieved remarkable improvements in visual quality and coherence. However, achieving seamless continuity remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose two novel methods to address discrepancy issues in diffusion-based inpainting models. First, we introduce a modified Variational Autoencoder that corrects color imbalances, ensuring that the final inpainted results are free of color mismatches. Second, we propose a two-step training strategy that improves the blending of generated and existing image content during the diffusion process. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our methods effectively reduce discontinuity and produce high-quality inpainting results that are coherent and visually appealing.