SyncBreaker:Stage-Aware Multimodal Adversarial Attacks on Audio-Driven Talking Head Generation

Diffusion-based audio-driven talking-head generation enables realistic portrait animation, but also introduces risks of misuse, such as fraud and misinformation. Existing protection methods are largely limited to a single modality, and neither image-only nor audio-only attacks can effectively suppress speech-driven facial dynamics. To address this gap, we propose SyncBreaker, a stage-aware multimodal protection framework that jointly perturbs portrait and audio inputs under modality-specific perceptual constraints. Our key contributions are twofold. First, for the image stream, we introduce nullifying supervision with Multi-Interval Sampling (MIS) across diffusion stages to steer the generation toward the static reference portrait by aggregating guidance from multiple denoising intervals. Second, for the audio stream, we propose Cross-Attention Fooling (CAF), which suppresses interval-specific audio-conditioned cross-attention responses. Both streams are optimized independently and combined at inference time to enable flexible deployment. We evaluate SyncBreaker in a white-box proactive protection setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SyncBreaker more effectively degrades lip synchronization and facial dynamics than strong single-modality baselines, while preserving input perceptual quality and remaining robust under purification. Code: https://github.com/kitty384/SyncBreaker.

Dialogue based Interactive Explanations for Safety Decisions in Human Robot Collaboration

As robots increasingly operate in shared, safety critical environments, acting safely is no longer sufficient robots must also make their safety decisions intelligible to human collaborators. In human robot collaboration (HRC), behaviours such as stopping or switching modes are often triggered by internal safety constraints that remain opaque to nearby workers. We present a dialogue based framework for interactive explanation of safety decisions in HRC. The approach tightly couples explanation with constraint based safety evaluation, grounding dialogue in the same state and constraint representations that govern behaviour selection. Explanations are derived directly from the recorded decision trace, enabling users to pose causal ("Why?"), contrastive ("Why not?"), and counterfactual ("What if?") queries about safety interventions. Counterfactual reasoning is evaluated in a bounded manner under fixed, certified safety parameters, ensuring that interactive exploration does not relax operational guarantees. We instantiate the framework in a construction robotics scenario and provide a structured operational trace illustrating how constraint aware dialogue clarifies safety interventions and supports coordinated task recovery. By treating explanation as an operational interface to safety control, this work advances a design perspective for interactive, safety aware autonomy in HRC.

Planning to Explore: Curiosity-Driven Planning for LLM Test Generation

The use of LLMs for code generation has naturally extended to code testing and evaluation. As codebases grow in size and complexity, so does the need for automated test generation. Current approaches for LLM-based test generation rely on strategies that maximize immediate coverage gain, a greedy approach that plateaus on code where reaching deep branches requires setup steps that individually yield zero new coverage. Drawing on principles of Bayesian exploration, we treat the program's branch structure as an unknown environment, and an evolving coverage map as a proxy probabilistic posterior representing what the LLM has discovered so far. Our method, CovQValue, feeds the coverage map back to the LLM, generates diverse candidate plans in parallel, and selects the most informative plan by LLM-estimated Q-values, seeking actions that balance immediate branch discovery with future reachability. Our method outperforms greedy selection on TestGenEval Lite, achieving 51-77% higher branch coverage across three popular LLMs and winning on 77-84% of targets. In addition, we build a benchmark for iterative test generation, RepoExploreBench, where they achieve 40-74%. These results show the potential of curiosity-driven planning methods for LLM-based exploration, enabling more effective discovery of program behavior through sequential interaction

Towards Domain-Generalized Open-Vocabulary Object Detection: A Progressive Domain-invariant Cross-modal Alignment Method

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) has achieved remarkable success in generalizing to novel categories. However, this success often rests on the implicit assumption of domain stationarity. In this work, we provide a principled revisit of the OVOD paradigm, uncovering a fundamental vulnerability: the fragile coupling between visual manifolds and textual embeddings when distribution shifts occur. We first systematically formalize Domain-Generalized Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (DG-OVOD). Through empirical analysis, we demonstrate that visual shifts do not merely add noise; they cause a collapse of the latent cross-modal space where novel category visual signals detach from their semantic anchors. Motivated by these insights, we propose Progressive Domain-invariant Cross-modal Alignment (PICA). PICA departs from uniform training by introducing a multi-level ambiguity and signal strength curriculum. It builds adaptive pseudo-word prototypes, refined via sample confidence and visual consistency, to enforce invariant cross-domain modality alignment. Our findings suggest that OVOD's robustness to domain shifts is intrinsically linked to the stability of the latent cross-modal alignment space. Our work provides both a challenging benchmark and a new perspective on building truly generalizable open-vocabulary systems that extend beyond static laboratory conditions.

A Step Toward Federated Pretraining of Multimodal Large Language Models

The rapid evolution of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is bottlenecked by the saturation of high-quality public data, while vast amounts of diverse multimodal data remain inaccessible in privacy-sensitive silos. Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising solution to unlock these distributed resources, but existing research focuses predominantly on fine-tuning, leaving the foundational pre-training phase largely unexplored. In this paper, we formally introduce the Federated MLLM Alignment (Fed-MA) task, a lightweight pre-training paradigm that freezes the vision encoder and LLM while collaboratively training the cross-modal projector. We identify two critical challenges in this setting: (i) parameter interference in aggregating local projectors; and (ii) gradient oscillations in one-pass collaborative SGD. To address these challenges, we propose Fed-CMP, a pioneering framework for federated MLLM pre-training. Fed-CMP employs Canonical Reliability-Aware Aggregation, which constructs a canonical space to decompose client projectors into a shared alignment basis and client-specific coefficients, then performs reliability-weighted fusion to suppress parameter interference. Furthermore, Fed-CMP introduces Orthogonality-Preserved Momentum, which applies momentum to the shared alignment basis via orthogonal projection, accumulating historical optimization directions while preserving geometric structure. We construct four federated pre-training scenarios based on public datasets, and extensive experiments validate that Fed-CMP significantly outperforms existing baselines.

KUKAloha: A General, Low-Cost, and Shared-Control based Teleoperation Framework for Construction Robot Arm

This paper presents KUKAloha, a general, low-cost, and shared-control teleoperation framework designed for construction robot arms. The proposed system employs a leader-follower paradigm in which a lightweight leading arm enables intuitive human guidance for coarse robot motion, while an autonomous perception module based on AprilTag detection performs precise alignment and grasp execution. By explicitly decoupling human control from fine manipulation, KUKAloha improves safety and repeatability when operating large-scale manipulators. We implement the framework on a KUKA robot arm and conduct a usability study with representative construction manipulation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that KUKAloha reduces operator workload, improves task completion efficiency, and provides a practical solution for scalable demonstration collection and shared human-robot control in construction environments.

SafeCRS: Personalized Safety Alignment for LLM-Based Conversational Recommender Systems

Current LLM-based conversational recommender systems (CRS) primarily optimize recommendation accuracy and user satisfaction. We identify an underexplored vulnerability in which recommendation outputs may negatively impact users by violating personalized safety constraints, when individualized safety sensitivities -- such as trauma triggers, self-harm history, or phobias -- are implicitly inferred from the conversation but not respected during recommendation. We formalize this challenge as personalized CRS safety and introduce SafeRec, a new benchmark dataset designed to systematically evaluate safety risks in LLM-based CRS under user-specific constraints. To further address this problem, we propose SafeCRS, a safety-aware training framework that integrates Safe Supervised Fine-Tuning (Safe-SFT) with Safe Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization (Safe-GDPO) to jointly optimize recommendation quality and personalized safety alignment. Extensive experiments on SafeRec demonstrate that SafeCRS reduces safety violation rates by up to 96.5% relative to the strongest recommendation-quality baseline while maintaining competitive recommendation quality. Warning: This paper contains potentially harmful and offensive content.

WISER: Wider Search, Deeper Thinking, and Adaptive Fusion for Training-Free Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval

Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve target images given a multimodal query (comprising a reference image and a modification text), without training on annotated triplets. Existing methods typically convert the multimodal query into a single modality-either as an edited caption for Text-to-Image retrieval (T2I) or as an edited image for Image-to-Image retrieval (I2I). However, each paradigm has inherent limitations: T2I often loses fine-grained visual details, while I2I struggles with complex semantic modifications. To effectively leverage their complementary strengths under diverse query intents, we propose WISER, a training-free framework that unifies T2I and I2I via a "retrieve-verify-refine" pipeline, explicitly modeling intent awareness and uncertainty awareness. Specifically, WISER first performs Wider Search by generating both edited captions and images for parallel retrieval to broaden the candidate pool. Then, it conducts Adaptive Fusion with a verifier to assess retrieval confidence, triggering refinement for uncertain retrievals, and dynamically fusing the dual-path for reliable ones. For uncertain retrievals, WISER generates refinement suggestions through structured self-reflection to guide the next retrieval round toward Deeper Thinking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WISER significantly outperforms previous methods across multiple benchmarks, achieving relative improvements of 45% on CIRCO (mAP@5) and 57% on CIRR (Recall@1) over existing training-free methods. Notably, it even surpasses many training-dependent methods, highlighting its superiority and generalization under diverse scenarios. Code will be released at https://github.com/Physicsmile/WISER.

Tele-Omni: a Unified Multimodal Framework for Video Generation and Editing

Recent advances in diffusion-based video generation have substantially improved visual fidelity and temporal coherence. However, most existing approaches remain task-specific and rely primarily on textual instructions, limiting their ability to handle multimodal inputs, contextual references, and diverse video generation and editing scenarios within a unified framework. Moreover, many video editing methods depend on carefully engineered pipelines tailored to individual operations, which hinders scalability and composability. In this paper, we propose Tele-Omni, a unified multimodal framework for video generation and editing that follows multimodal instructions, including text, images, and reference videos, within a single model. Tele-Omni leverages pretrained multimodal large language models to parse heterogeneous instructions and infer structured generation or editing intents, while diffusion-based generators perform high-quality video synthesis conditioned on these structured signals. To enable joint training across heterogeneous video tasks, we introduce a task-aware data processing pipeline that unifies multimodal inputs into a structured instruction format while preserving task-specific constraints. Tele-Omni supports a wide range of video-centric tasks, including text-to-video generation, image-to-video generation, first-last-frame video generation, in-context video generation, and in-context video editing. By decoupling instruction parsing from video synthesis and combining it with task-aware data design, Tele-Omni achieves flexible multimodal control while maintaining strong temporal coherence and visual consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that Tele-Omni achieves competitive performance across multiple tasks.

Toward Cognitive Supersensing in Multimodal Large Language Model

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in open-vocabulary perceptual tasks, yet their ability to solve complex cognitive problems remains limited, especially when visual details are abstract and require visual memory. Current approaches primarily scale Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in the text space, even when language alone is insufficient for clear and structured reasoning, and largely neglect visual reasoning mechanisms analogous to the human visuospatial sketchpad and visual imagery. To mitigate this deficiency, we introduce Cognitive Supersensing, a novel training paradigm that endows MLLMs with human-like visual imagery capabilities by integrating a Latent Visual Imagery Prediction (LVIP) head that jointly learns sequences of visual cognitive latent embeddings and aligns them with the answer, thereby forming vision-based internal reasoning chains. We further introduce a reinforcement learning stage that optimizes text reasoning paths based on this grounded visual latent. To evaluate the cognitive capabilities of MLLMs, we present CogSense-Bench, a comprehensive visual question answering (VQA) benchmark assessing five cognitive dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MLLMs trained with Cognitive Supersensing significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines on CogSense-Bench and exhibit superior generalization on out-of-domain mathematics and science VQA benchmarks, suggesting that internal visual imagery is potentially key to bridging the gap between perceptual recognition and cognitive understanding. We will open-source the CogSense-Bench and our model weights.