Pedagogically-Inspired Data Synthesis for Language Model Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation from Large Language Models (LLMs) to smaller models has emerged as a critical technique for deploying efficient AI systems. However, current methods for distillation via synthetic data lack pedagogical awareness, treating knowledge transfer as a one-off data synthesis and training task rather than a systematic learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel pedagogically-inspired framework for LLM knowledge distillation that draws from fundamental educational principles. Our approach introduces a three-stage pipeline -- Knowledge Identifier, Organizer, and Adapter (IOA) -- that systematically identifies knowledge deficiencies in student models, organizes knowledge delivery through progressive curricula, and adapts representations to match the cognitive capacity of student models. We integrate Bloom's Mastery Learning Principles and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development to create a dynamic distillation process where student models approach teacher model's performance on prerequisite knowledge before advancing, and new knowledge is introduced with controlled, gradual difficulty increments. Extensive experiments using LLaMA-3.1/3.2 and Qwen2.5 as student models demonstrate that IOA achieves significant improvements over baseline distillation methods, with student models retaining 94.7% of teacher performance on DollyEval while using less than 1/10th of the parameters. Our framework particularly excels in complex reasoning tasks, showing 19.2% improvement on MATH and 22.3% on HumanEval compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

RealHD: A High-Quality Dataset for Robust Detection of State-of-the-Art AI-Generated Images

The rapid advancement of generative AI has raised concerns about the authenticity of digital images, as highly realistic fake images can now be generated at low cost, potentially increasing societal risks. In response, several datasets have been established to train detection models aimed at distinguishing AI-generated images from real ones. However, existing datasets suffer from limited generalization, low image quality, overly simple prompts, and insufficient image diversity. To address these limitations, we propose a high-quality, large-scale dataset comprising over 730,000 images across multiple categories, including both real and AI-generated images. The generated images are synthesized via state-of-the-art methods, including text-to-image generation (guided by over 10,000 carefully designed prompts), image inpainting, image refinement, and face swapping. Each generated image is annotated with its generation method and category. Inpainting images further include binary masks to indicate inpainted regions, providing rich metadata for analysis. Compared to existing datasets, detection models trained on our dataset demonstrate superior generalization capabilities. Our dataset not only serves as a strong benchmark for evaluating detection methods but also contributes to advancing the robustness of AI-generated image detection techniques. Building upon this, we propose a lightweight detection method based on image noise entropy, which transforms the original image into an entropy tensor of Non-Local Means (NLM) noise before classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained on our dataset achieve strong generalization, and our method delivers competitive performance, establishing a solid baseline for future research. The dataset and source code are publicly available at https://real-hd.github.io.

Search-R2: Enhancing Search-Integrated Reasoning via Actor-Refiner Collaboration

Search-integrated reasoning enables language agents to transcend static parametric knowledge by actively querying external sources. However, training these agents via reinforcement learning is hindered by the multi-scale credit assignment problem: existing methods typically rely on sparse, trajectory-level rewards that fail to distinguish between high-quality reasoning and fortuitous guesses, leading to redundant or misleading search behaviors. To address this, we propose Search-R2, a novel Actor-Refiner collaboration framework that enhances reasoning through targeted intervention, with both components jointly optimized during training. Our approach decomposes the generation process into an Actor, which produces initial reasoning trajectories, and a Meta-Refiner, which selectively diagnoses and repairs flawed steps via a 'cut-and-regenerate' mechanism. To provide fine-grained supervision, we introduce a hybrid reward design that couples outcome correctness with a dense process reward quantifying the information density of retrieved evidence. Theoretically, we formalize the Actor-Refiner interaction as a smoothed mixture policy, proving that selective correction yields strict performance gains over strong baselines. Extensive experiments across various general and multi-hop QA datasets demonstrate that Search-R2 consistently outperforms strong RAG and RL-based baselines across model scales, achieving superior reasoning accuracy with minimal overhead.

On Temperature-Constrained Non-Deterministic Machine Translation: Potential and Evaluation

In recent years, the non-deterministic properties of language models have garnered considerable attention and have shown a significant influence on real-world applications. However, such properties remain under-explored in machine translation (MT), a complex, non-deterministic NLP task. In this study, we systematically evaluate modern MT systems and identify temperature-constrained Non-Deterministic MT (ND-MT) as a distinct phenomenon. Additionally, we demonstrate that ND-MT exhibits significant potential in addressing the multi-modality issue that has long challenged MT research and provides higher-quality candidates than Deterministic MT (D-MT) under temperature constraints. However, ND-MT introduces new challenges in evaluating system performance. Specifically, the evaluation framework designed for D-MT fails to yield consistent evaluation results when applied to ND-MT. We further investigate this emerging challenge by evaluating five state-of-the-art ND-MT systems across three open datasets using both lexical-based and semantic-based metrics at varying sampling sizes. The results reveal a Buckets effect across these systems: the lowest-quality candidate generated by ND-MT consistently determines the overall system ranking across different sampling sizes for all reasonable metrics. Furthermore, we propose the ExpectoSample strategy to automatically assess the reliability of evaluation metrics for selecting robust ND-MT.

Revisiting Judge Decoding from First Principles via Training-Free Distributional Divergence

Judge Decoding accelerates LLM inference by relaxing the strict verification of Speculative Decoding, yet it typically relies on expensive and noisy supervision. In this work, we revisit this paradigm from first principles, revealing that the ``criticality'' scores learned via costly supervision are intrinsically encoded in the draft-target distributional divergence. We theoretically prove a structural correspondence between learned linear judges and Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, demonstrating they rely on the same underlying logit primitives. Guided by this, we propose a simple, training-free verification mechanism based on KL divergence. Extensive experiments across reasoning and coding benchmarks show that our method matches or outperforms complex trained judges (e.g., AutoJudge), offering superior robustness to domain shifts and eliminating the supervision bottleneck entirely.

Deep Deterministic Nonlinear ICA via Total Correlation Minimization with Matrix-Based Entropy Functional

Blind source separation, particularly through independent component analysis (ICA), is widely utilized across various signal processing domains for disentangling underlying components from observed mixed signals, owing to its fully data-driven nature that minimizes reliance on prior assumptions. However, conventional ICA methods rely on an assumption of linear mixing, limiting their ability to capture complex nonlinear relationships and to maintain robustness in noisy environments. In this work, we present deep deterministic nonlinear independent component analysis (DDICA), a novel deep neural network-based framework designed to address these limitations. DDICA leverages a matrix-based entropy function to directly optimize the independence criterion via stochastic gradient descent, bypassing the need for variational approximations or adversarial schemes. This results in a streamlined training process and improved resilience to noise. We validated the effectiveness and generalizability of DDICA across a range of applications, including simulated signal mixtures, hyperspectral image unmixing, modeling of primary visual receptive fields, and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that DDICA effectively separates independent components with high accuracy across a range of applications. These findings suggest that DDICA offers a robust and versatile solution for blind source separation in diverse signal processing tasks.

Improving the Convergence Rate of Ray Search Optimization for Query-Efficient Hard-Label Attacks

In hard-label black-box adversarial attacks, where only the top-1 predicted label is accessible, the prohibitive query complexity poses a major obstacle to practical deployment. In this paper, we focus on optimizing a representative class of attacks that search for the optimal ray direction yielding the minimum $\ell_2$-norm perturbation required to move a benign image into the adversarial region. Inspired by Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient (NAG), we propose a momentum-based algorithm, ARS-OPT, which proactively estimates the gradient with respect to a future ray direction inferred from accumulated momentum. We provide a theoretical analysis of its convergence behavior, showing that ARS-OPT enables more accurate directional updates and achieves faster, more stable optimization. To further accelerate convergence, we incorporate surrogate-model priors into ARS-OPT's gradient estimation, resulting in PARS-OPT with enhanced performance. The superiority of our approach is supported by theoretical guarantees under standard assumptions. Extensive experiments on ImageNet and CIFAR-10 demonstrate that our method surpasses 13 state-of-the-art approaches in query efficiency.

Enhancing Interpretability for Vision Models via Shapley Value Optimization

Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance across various domains, yet their decision-making processes remain opaque. Although many explanation methods are dedicated to bringing the obscurity of DNNs to light, they exhibit significant limitations: post-hoc explanation methods often struggle to faithfully reflect model behaviors, while self-explaining neural networks sacrifice performance and compatibility due to their specialized architectural designs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel self-explaining framework that integrates Shapley value estimation as an auxiliary task during training, which achieves two key advancements: 1) a fair allocation of the model prediction scores to image patches, ensuring explanations inherently align with the model's decision logic, and 2) enhanced interpretability with minor structural modifications, preserving model performance and compatibility. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art interpretability.

T2I-Based Physical-World Appearance Attack against Traffic Sign Recognition Systems in Autonomous Driving

Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) systems play a critical role in Autonomous Driving (AD) systems, enabling real-time detection of road signs, such as STOP and speed limit signs. While these systems are increasingly integrated into commercial vehicles, recent research has exposed their vulnerability to physical-world adversarial appearance attacks. In such attacks, carefully crafted visual patterns are misinterpreted by TSR models as legitimate traffic signs, while remaining inconspicuous or benign to human observers. However, existing adversarial appearance attacks suffer from notable limitations. Pixel-level perturbation-based methods often lack stealthiness and tend to overfit to specific surrogate models, resulting in poor transferability to real-world TSR systems. On the other hand, text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model-based approaches demonstrate limited effectiveness and poor generalization to out-of-distribution sign types. In this paper, we present DiffSign, a novel T2I-based appearance attack framework designed to generate physically robust, highly effective, transferable, practical, and stealthy appearance attacks against TSR systems. To overcome the limitations of prior approaches, we propose a carefully designed attack pipeline that integrates CLIP-based loss and masked prompts to improve attack focus and controllability. We also propose two novel style customization methods to guide visual appearance and improve out-of-domain traffic sign attack generalization and attack stealthiness. We conduct extensive evaluations of DiffSign under varied real-world conditions, including different distances, angles, light conditions, and sign categories. Our method achieves an average physical-world attack success rate of 83.3%, leveraging DiffSign's high effectiveness in attack transferability.

Have We Really Understood Collaborative Information? An Empirical Investigation

Collaborative information serves as the cornerstone of recommender systems which typically focus on capturing it from user-item interactions to deliver personalized services. However, current understanding of this crucial resource remains limited. Specifically, a quantitative definition of collaborative information is missing, its manifestation within user-item interactions remains unclear, and its impact on recommendation performance is largely unknown. To bridge this gap, this work conducts a systematic investigation of collaborative information. We begin by clarifying collaborative information in terms of item co-occurrence patterns, identifying its main characteristics, and presenting a quantitative definition. We then estimate the distribution of collaborative information from several aspects, shedding light on how collaborative information is structured in practice. Furthermore, we evaluate the impact of collaborative information on the performance of various recommendation algorithms. Finally, we highlight challenges in effectively capturing collaborative information and outlook promising directions for future research. By establishing an empirical framework, we uncover many insightful observations that advance our understanding of collaborative information and offer valuable guidelines for developing more effective recommender systems.