Zooming In on Fakes: A Novel Dataset for Localized AI-Generated Image Detection with Forgery Amplification Approach

The rise of AI-generated image editing tools has made localized forgeries increasingly realistic, posing challenges for visual content integrity. Although recent efforts have explored localized AIGC detection, existing datasets predominantly focus on object-level forgeries while overlooking broader scene edits in regions such as sky or ground. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{BR-Gen}, a large-scale dataset of 150,000 locally forged images with diverse scene-aware annotations, which are based on semantic calibration to ensure high-quality samples. BR-Gen is constructed through a fully automated Perception-Creation-Evaluation pipeline to ensure semantic coherence and visual realism. In addition, we further propose \textbf{NFA-ViT}, a Noise-guided Forgery Amplification Vision Transformer that enhances the detection of localized forgeries by amplifying forgery-related features across the entire image. NFA-ViT mines heterogeneous regions in images, \emph{i.e.}, potential edited areas, by noise fingerprints. Subsequently, attention mechanism is introduced to compel the interaction between normal and abnormal features, thereby propagating the generalization traces throughout the entire image, allowing subtle forgeries to influence a broader context and improving overall detection robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BR-Gen constructs entirely new scenarios that are not covered by existing methods. Take a step further, NFA-ViT outperforms existing methods on BR-Gen and generalizes well across current benchmarks. All data and codes are available at https://github.com/clpbc/BR-Gen.

Gradient-based Sample Selection for Faster Bayesian Optimization

Bayesian optimization (BO) is an effective technique for black-box optimization. However, its applicability is typically limited to moderate-budget problems due to the cubic complexity in computing the Gaussian process (GP) surrogate model. In large-budget scenarios, directly employing the standard GP model faces significant challenges in computational time and resource requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, gradient-based sample selection Bayesian Optimization (GSSBO), to enhance the computational efficiency of BO. The GP model is constructed on a selected set of samples instead of the whole dataset. These samples are selected by leveraging gradient information to maintain diversity and representation. We provide a theoretical analysis of the gradient-based sample selection strategy and obtain explicit sublinear regret bounds for our proposed framework. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world tasks demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the computational cost of GP fitting in BO while maintaining optimization performance comparable to baseline methods.

Weighted Euclidean Distance Matrices over Mixed Continuous and Categorical Inputs for Gaussian Process Models

Gaussian Process (GP) models are widely utilized as surrogate models in scientific and engineering fields. However, standard GP models are limited to continuous variables due to the difficulties in establishing correlation structures for categorical variables. To overcome this limitati on, we introduce WEighted Euclidean distance matrices Gaussian Process (WEGP). WEGP constructs the kernel function for each categorical input by estimating the Euclidean distance matrix (EDM) among all categorical choices of this input. The EDM is represented as a linear combination of several predefined base EDMs, each scaled by a positive weight. The weights, along with other kernel hyperparameters, are inferred using a fully Bayesian framework. We analyze the predictive performance of WEGP theoretically. Numerical experiments validate the accuracy of our GP model, and by WEGP, into Bayesian Optimization (BO), we achieve superior performance on both synthetic and real-world optimization problems.

On the convergence of noisy Bayesian Optimization with Expected Improvement

Expected improvement (EI) is one of the most widely-used acquisition functions in Bayesian optimization (BO). Despite its proven success in applications for decades, important open questions remain on the theoretical convergence behaviors and rates for EI. In this paper, we contribute to the convergence theories of EI in three novel and critical area. First, we consider objective functions that are under the Gaussian process (GP) prior assumption, whereas existing works mostly focus on functions in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). Second, we establish the first asymptotic error bound and its corresponding rate for GP-EI with noisy observations under the GP prior assumption. Third, by investigating the exploration and exploitation of the non-convex EI function, we prove improved error bounds for both the noise-free and noisy cases. The improved noiseless bound is extended to the RKHS assumption as well.

On Improved Regret Bounds In Bayesian Optimization with Gaussian Noise

Bayesian optimization (BO) with Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models is a powerful black-box optimization method. Acquisition functions are a critical part of a BO algorithm as they determine how the new samples are selected. Some of the most widely used acquisition functions include upper confidence bound (UCB) and Thompson sampling (TS). The convergence analysis of BO algorithms has focused on the cumulative regret under both the Bayesian and frequentist settings for the objective. In this paper, we establish new pointwise bounds on the prediction error of GP under the frequentist setting with Gaussian noise. Consequently, we prove improved convergence rates of cumulative regret bound for both GP-UCB and GP-TS. Of note, the new prediction error bound under Gaussian noise can be applied to general BO algorithms and convergence analysis, e.g., the asymptotic convergence of expected improvement (EI) with noise.

From Allies to Adversaries: Manipulating LLM Tool-Calling through Adversarial Injection

Tool-calling has changed Large Language Model (LLM) applications by integrating external tools, significantly enhancing their functionality across diverse tasks. However, this integration also introduces new security vulnerabilities, particularly in the tool scheduling mechanisms of LLM, which have not been extensively studied. To fill this gap, we present ToolCommander, a novel framework designed to exploit vulnerabilities in LLM tool-calling systems through adversarial tool injection. Our framework employs a well-designed two-stage attack strategy. Firstly, it injects malicious tools to collect user queries, then dynamically updates the injected tools based on the stolen information to enhance subsequent attacks. These stages enable ToolCommander to execute privacy theft, launch denial-of-service attacks, and even manipulate business competition by triggering unscheduled tool-calling. Notably, the ASR reaches 91.67% for privacy theft and hits 100% for denial-of-service and unscheduled tool calling in certain cases. Our work demonstrates that these vulnerabilities can lead to severe consequences beyond simple misuse of tool-calling systems, underscoring the urgent need for robust defensive strategies to secure LLM Tool-calling systems.

RG-SAN: Rule-Guided Spatial Awareness Network for End-to-End 3D Referring Expression Segmentation

3D Referring Expression Segmentation (3D-RES) aims to segment 3D objects by correlating referring expressions with point clouds. However, traditional approaches frequently encounter issues like over-segmentation or mis-segmentation, due to insufficient emphasis on spatial information of instances. In this paper, we introduce a Rule-Guided Spatial Awareness Network (RG-SAN) by utilizing solely the spatial information of the target instance for supervision. This approach enables the network to accurately depict the spatial relationships among all entities described in the text, thus enhancing the reasoning capabilities. The RG-SAN consists of the Text-driven Localization Module (TLM) and the Rule-guided Weak Supervision (RWS) strategy. The TLM initially locates all mentioned instances and iteratively refines their positional information. The RWS strategy, acknowledging that only target objects have supervised positional information, employs dependency tree rules to precisely guide the core instance's positioning. Extensive testing on the ScanRefer benchmark has shown that RG-SAN not only establishes new performance benchmarks, with an mIoU increase of 5.1 points, but also exhibits significant improvements in robustness when processing descriptions with spatial ambiguity. All codes are available at https://github.com/sosppxo/RG-SAN.

3D-GRES: Generalized 3D Referring Expression Segmentation

3D Referring Expression Segmentation (3D-RES) is dedicated to segmenting a specific instance within a 3D space based on a natural language description. However, current approaches are limited to segmenting a single target, restricting the versatility of the task. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Generalized 3D Referring Expression Segmentation (3D-GRES), which extends the capability to segment any number of instances based on natural language instructions. In addressing this broader task, we propose the Multi-Query Decoupled Interaction Network (MDIN), designed to break down multi-object segmentation tasks into simpler, individual segmentations. MDIN comprises two fundamental components: Text-driven Sparse Queries (TSQ) and Multi-object Decoupling Optimization (MDO). TSQ generates sparse point cloud features distributed over key targets as the initialization for queries. Meanwhile, MDO is tasked with assigning each target in multi-object scenarios to different queries while maintaining their semantic consistency. To adapt to this new task, we build a new dataset, namely Multi3DRes. Our comprehensive evaluations on this dataset demonstrate substantial enhancements over existing models, thus charting a new path for intricate multi-object 3D scene comprehension. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/sosppxo/MDIN.

Exploring Phrase-Level Grounding with Text-to-Image Diffusion Model

Recently, diffusion models have increasingly demonstrated their capabilities in vision understanding. By leveraging prompt-based learning to construct sentences, these models have shown proficiency in classification and visual grounding tasks. However, existing approaches primarily showcase their ability to perform sentence-level localization, leaving the potential for leveraging contextual information for phrase-level understanding largely unexplored. In this paper, we utilize Panoptic Narrative Grounding (PNG) as a proxy task to investigate this capability further. PNG aims to segment object instances mentioned by multiple noun phrases within a given narrative text. Specifically, we introduce the DiffPNG framework, a straightforward yet effective approach that fully capitalizes on the diffusion's architecture for segmentation by decomposing the process into a sequence of localization, segmentation, and refinement steps. The framework initially identifies anchor points using cross-attention mechanisms and subsequently performs segmentation with self-attention to achieve zero-shot PNG. Moreover, we introduce a refinement module based on SAM to enhance the quality of the segmentation masks. Our extensive experiments on the PNG dataset demonstrate that DiffPNG achieves strong performance in the zero-shot PNG task setting, conclusively proving the diffusion model's capability for context-aware, phrase-level understanding. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/nini0919/DiffPNG}.

SAM as the Guide: Mastering Pseudo-Label Refinement in Semi-Supervised Referring Expression Segmentation

In this paper, we introduce SemiRES, a semi-supervised framework that effectively leverages a combination of labeled and unlabeled data to perform RES. A significant hurdle in applying semi-supervised techniques to RES is the prevalence of noisy pseudo-labels, particularly at the boundaries of objects. SemiRES incorporates the Segment Anything Model (SAM), renowned for its precise boundary demarcation, to improve the accuracy of these pseudo-labels. Within SemiRES, we offer two alternative matching strategies: IoU-based Optimal Matching (IOM) and Composite Parts Integration (CPI). These strategies are designed to extract the most accurate masks from SAM's output, thus guiding the training of the student model with enhanced precision. In instances where a precise mask cannot be matched from the available candidates, we develop the Pixel-Wise Adjustment (PWA) strategy, guiding the student model's training directly by the pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on three RES benchmarks--RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and G-Ref reveal its superior performance compared to fully supervised methods. Remarkably, with only 1% labeled data, our SemiRES outperforms the supervised baseline by a large margin, e.g. +18.64% gains on RefCOCO val set. The project code is available at \url{https://github.com/nini0919/SemiRES}.