SLearnLLM: A Self-Learning Framework for Efficient Domain-Specific Adaptation of Large Language Models

When using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to adapt large language models (LLMs) to specific domains, a significant challenge arises: should we use the entire SFT dataset for fine-tuning? Common practice often involves fine-tuning directly on the entire dataset due to limited information on the LLM's past training data. However, if the SFT dataset largely overlaps with the model's existing knowledge, the performance gains are minimal, leading to wasted computational resources. Identifying the unknown knowledge within the SFT dataset and using it to fine-tune the model could substantially improve the training efficiency. To address this challenge, we propose a self-learning framework for LLMs inspired by human learning pattern. This framework takes a fine-tuning (SFT) dataset in a specific domain as input. First, the LLMs answer the questions in the SFT dataset. The LLMs then objectively grade the responses and filter out the incorrectly answered QA pairs. Finally, we fine-tune the LLMs based on this filtered QA set. Experimental results in the fields of agriculture and medicine demonstrate that our method substantially reduces training time while achieving comparable improvements to those attained with full dataset fine-tuning. By concentrating on the unknown knowledge within the SFT dataset, our approach enhances the efficiency of fine-tuning LLMs.

A Large Vision-Language Model based Environment Perception System for Visually Impaired People

It is a challenging task for visually impaired people to perceive their surrounding environment due to the complexity of the natural scenes. Their personal and social activities are thus highly limited. This paper introduces a Large Vision-Language Model(LVLM) based environment perception system which helps them to better understand the surrounding environment, by capturing the current scene they face with a wearable device, and then letting them retrieve the analysis results through the device. The visually impaired people could acquire a global description of the scene by long pressing the screen to activate the LVLM output, retrieve the categories of the objects in the scene resulting from a segmentation model by tapping or swiping the screen, and get a detailed description of the objects they are interested in by double-tapping the screen. To help visually impaired people more accurately perceive the world, this paper proposes incorporating the segmentation result of the RGB image as external knowledge into the input of LVLM to reduce the LVLM's hallucination. Technical experiments on POPE, MME and LLaVA-QA90 show that the system could provide a more accurate description of the scene compared to Qwen-VL-Chat, exploratory experiments show that the system helps visually impaired people to perceive the surrounding environment effectively.

Safety Evaluation and Enhancement of DeepSeek Models in Chinese Contexts

DeepSeek-R1, renowned for its exceptional reasoning capabilities and open-source strategy, is significantly influencing the global artificial intelligence landscape. However, it exhibits notable safety shortcomings. Recent research conducted by Robust Intelligence, a subsidiary of Cisco, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania, revealed that DeepSeek-R1 achieves a 100\% attack success rate when processing harmful prompts. Furthermore, multiple security firms and research institutions have identified critical security vulnerabilities within the model. Although China Unicom has uncovered safety vulnerabilities of R1 in Chinese contexts, the safety capabilities of the remaining distilled models in the R1 series have not yet been comprehensively evaluated. To address this gap, this study utilizes the comprehensive Chinese safety benchmark CHiSafetyBench to conduct an in-depth safety evaluation of the DeepSeek-R1 series distilled models. The objective is to assess the safety capabilities of these models in Chinese contexts both before and after distillation, and to further elucidate the adverse effects of distillation on model safety. Building on these findings, we implement targeted safety enhancements for six distilled models. Evaluation results indicate that the enhanced models achieve significant improvements in safety while maintaining reasoning capabilities without notable degradation. We open-source the safety-enhanced models at https://github.com/UnicomAI/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Safe/tree/main to serve as a valuable resource for future research and optimization of DeepSeek models.

A Multimodal Benchmark Dataset and Model for Crop Disease Diagnosis

While conversational generative AI has shown considerable potential in enhancing decision-making for agricultural professionals, its exploration has predominantly been anchored in text-based interactions. The evolution of multimodal conversational AI, leveraging vast amounts of image-text data from diverse sources, marks a significant stride forward. However, the application of such advanced vision-language models in the agricultural domain, particularly for crop disease diagnosis, remains underexplored. In this work, we present the crop disease domain multimodal (CDDM) dataset, a pioneering resource designed to advance the field of agricultural research through the application of multimodal learning techniques. The dataset comprises 137,000 images of various crop diseases, accompanied by 1 million question-answer pairs that span a broad spectrum of agricultural knowledge, from disease identification to management practices. By integrating visual and textual data, CDDM facilitates the development of sophisticated question-answering systems capable of providing precise, useful advice to farmers and agricultural professionals. We demonstrate the utility of the dataset by finetuning state-of-the-art multimodal models, showcasing significant improvements in crop disease diagnosis. Specifically, we employed a novel finetuning strategy that utilizes low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to finetune the visual encoder, adapter and language model simultaneously. Our contributions include not only the dataset but also a finetuning strategy and a benchmark to stimulate further research in agricultural technology, aiming to bridge the gap between advanced AI techniques and practical agricultural applications. The dataset is available at https: //github.com/UnicomAI/UnicomBenchmark/tree/main/CDDMBench.

Optimizing for the Shortest Path in Denoising Diffusion Model

In this research, we propose a novel denoising diffusion model based on shortest-path modeling that optimizes residual propagation to enhance both denoising efficiency and quality. Drawing on Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) and insights from graph theory, our model, termed the Shortest Path Diffusion Model (ShortDF), treats the denoising process as a shortest-path problem aimed at minimizing reconstruction error. By optimizing the initial residuals, we improve the efficiency of the reverse diffusion process and the quality of the generated samples. Extensive experiments on multiple standard benchmarks demonstrate that ShortDF significantly reduces diffusion time (or steps) while enhancing the visual fidelity of generated samples compared to prior arts. This work, we suppose, paves the way for interactive diffusion-based applications and establishes a foundation for rapid data generation. Code is available at https://github.com/UnicomAI/ShortDF

HumorReject: Decoupling LLM Safety from Refusal Prefix via A Little Humor

Large Language Models (LLMs) commonly rely on explicit refusal prefixes for safety, making them vulnerable to prefix injection attacks. We introduce HumorReject, a novel data-driven approach that fundamentally reimagines LLM safety by decoupling it from refusal prefixes through the use of humor as an indirect refusal strategy. Rather than explicitly rejecting harmful instructions, HumorReject responds with contextually appropriate humor that naturally defuses potentially dangerous requests while maintaining engaging interactions. Our approach effectively addresses the common "over-defense" issues in existing safety mechanisms, demonstrating superior robustness against various attack vectors while preserving natural and high-quality interactions on legitimate tasks. Our findings suggest that innovations at the data level are even more fundamental than the alignment algorithm itself in achieving effective LLM safety, opening new directions for developing more resilient and user-friendly AI systems.

Mining Glitch Tokens in Large Language Models via Gradient-based Discrete Optimization

Glitch tokens in Large Language Models (LLMs) can trigger unpredictable behaviors, compromising model reliability and safety. Existing detection methods often rely on manual observation to infer the prior distribution of glitch tokens, which is inefficient and lacks adaptability across diverse model architectures. To address these limitations, we introduce GlitchMiner, a gradient-based discrete optimization framework designed for efficient glitch token detection in LLMs. GlitchMiner leverages an entropy-based loss function to quantify the uncertainty in model predictions and integrates first-order Taylor approximation with a local search strategy to effectively explore the token space. Our evaluation across various mainstream LLM architectures demonstrates that GlitchMiner surpasses existing methods in both detection precision and adaptability. In comparison to the previous state-of-the-art, GlitchMiner achieves an average improvement of 19.07% in precision@1000 for glitch token detection. By enabling efficient detection of glitch tokens, GlitchMiner provides a valuable tool for assessing and mitigating potential vulnerabilities in LLMs, contributing to their overall security.

Piculet: Specialized Models-Guided Hallucination Decrease for MultiModal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in bridging the gap between visual and language modalities. However, hallucinations in MLLMs, where the generated text does not align with image content, continue to be a major challenge. Existing methods for addressing hallucinations often rely on instruction-tuning, which requires retraining the model with specific data, which increases the cost of utilizing MLLMs further. In this paper, we introduce a novel training-free method, named Piculet, for enhancing the input representation of MLLMs. Piculet leverages multiple specialized models to extract descriptions of visual information from the input image and combine these descriptions with the original image and query as input to the MLLM. We evaluate our method both quantitively and qualitatively, and the results demonstrate that Piculet greatly decreases hallucinations of MLLMs. Our method can be easily extended to different MLLMs while being universal.

Methodology of Adapting Large English Language Models for Specific Cultural Contexts

The rapid growth of large language models(LLMs) has emerged as a prominent trend in the field of artificial intelligence. However, current state-of-the-art LLMs are predominantly based on English. They encounter limitations when directly applied to tasks in specific cultural domains, due to deficiencies in domain-specific knowledge and misunderstandings caused by differences in cultural values. To address this challenge, our paper proposes a rapid adaptation method for large models in specific cultural contexts, which leverages instruction-tuning based on specific cultural knowledge and safety values data. Taking Chinese as the specific cultural context and utilizing the LLaMA3-8B as the experimental English LLM, the evaluation results demonstrate that the adapted LLM significantly enhances its capabilities in domain-specific knowledge and adaptability to safety values, while maintaining its original expertise advantages.

CHiSafetyBench: A Chinese Hierarchical Safety Benchmark for Large Language Models

With the profound development of large language models(LLMs), their safety concerns have garnered increasing attention. However, there is a scarcity of Chinese safety benchmarks for LLMs, and the existing safety taxonomies are inadequate, lacking comprehensive safety detection capabilities in authentic Chinese scenarios. In this work, we introduce CHiSafetyBench, a dedicated safety benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capabilities in identifying risky content and refusing answering risky questions in Chinese contexts. CHiSafetyBench incorporates a dataset that covers a hierarchical Chinese safety taxonomy consisting of 5 risk areas and 31 categories. This dataset comprises two types of tasks: multiple-choice questions and question-answering, evaluating LLMs from the perspectives of risk content identification and the ability to refuse answering risky questions respectively. Utilizing this benchmark, we validate the feasibility of automatic evaluation as a substitute for human evaluation and conduct comprehensive automatic safety assessments on mainstream Chinese LLMs. Our experiments reveal the varying performance of different models across various safety domains, indicating that all models possess considerable potential for improvement in Chinese safety capabilities. Our dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/UnicomAI/DataSet/tree/main/TestData/Safety.