Why Safeguarded Ships Run Aground? Aligned Large Language Models' Safety Mechanisms Tend to Be Anchored in The Template Region

The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) remains vulnerable, as their initial behavior can be easily jailbroken by even relatively simple attacks. Since infilling a fixed template between the input instruction and initial model output is a common practice for existing LLMs, we hypothesize that this template is a key factor behind their vulnerabilities: LLMs' safety-related decision-making overly relies on the aggregated information from the template region, which largely influences these models' safety behavior. We refer to this issue as template-anchored safety alignment. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments and verify that template-anchored safety alignment is widespread across various aligned LLMs. Our mechanistic analyses demonstrate how it leads to models' susceptibility when encountering inference-time jailbreak attacks. Furthermore, we show that detaching safety mechanisms from the template region is promising in mitigating vulnerabilities to jailbreak attacks. We encourage future research to develop more robust safety alignment techniques that reduce reliance on the template region.

Training Turn-by-Turn Verifiers for Dialogue Tutoring Agents: The Curious Case of LLMs as Your Coding Tutors

Intelligent tutoring agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly explored to deliver personalized guidance in areas such as language learning and science education. However, their capabilities in guiding users to solve complex real-world tasks remain underexplored. To address this limitation, in this work, we focus on coding tutoring, a challenging problem that requires tutors to proactively guide students toward completing predefined coding tasks. We propose a novel agent workflow, Trace-and-Verify (TRAVER), which combines knowledge tracing to estimate a student's knowledge state and turn-by-turn verification to ensure effective guidance toward task completion. We introduce DICT, an automatic evaluation protocol that assesses tutor agents holistically using controlled student simulation and code generation tests. Extensive experiments reveal the challenges of coding tutoring and demonstrate that TRAVER achieves a significantly higher success rate. Although we use code tutoring as an example in this paper, our results and findings can be extended beyond coding, providing valuable insights into advancing tutoring agents for a variety of tasks.

KABB: Knowledge-Aware Bayesian Bandits for Dynamic Expert Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems

As scaling large language models faces prohibitive costs, multi-agent systems emerge as a promising alternative, though challenged by static knowledge assumptions and coordination inefficiencies. We introduces Knowledge-Aware Bayesian Bandits (KABB), a novel framework that enhances multi-agent system coordination through semantic understanding and dynamic adaptation. The framework features three key innovations: a three-dimensional knowledge distance model for deep semantic understanding, a dual-adaptation mechanism for continuous expert optimization, and a knowledge-aware Thompson Sampling strategy for efficient expert selection. Extensive evaluation demonstrates KABB achieves an optimal cost-performance balance, maintaining high performance while keeping computational demands relatively low in multi-agent coordination.

EventEgo3D++: 3D Human Motion Capture from a Head-Mounted Event Camera

Monocular egocentric 3D human motion capture remains a significant challenge, particularly under conditions of low lighting and fast movements, which are common in head-mounted device applications. Existing methods that rely on RGB cameras often fail under these conditions. To address these limitations, we introduce EventEgo3D++, the first approach that leverages a monocular event camera with a fisheye lens for 3D human motion capture. Event cameras excel in high-speed scenarios and varying illumination due to their high temporal resolution, providing reliable cues for accurate 3D human motion capture. EventEgo3D++ leverages the LNES representation of event streams to enable precise 3D reconstructions. We have also developed a mobile head-mounted device (HMD) prototype equipped with an event camera, capturing a comprehensive dataset that includes real event observations from both controlled studio environments and in-the-wild settings, in addition to a synthetic dataset. Additionally, to provide a more holistic dataset, we include allocentric RGB streams that offer different perspectives of the HMD wearer, along with their corresponding SMPL body model. Our experiments demonstrate that EventEgo3D++ achieves superior 3D accuracy and robustness compared to existing solutions, even in challenging conditions. Moreover, our method supports real-time 3D pose updates at a rate of 140Hz. This work is an extension of the EventEgo3D approach (CVPR 2024) and further advances the state of the art in egocentric 3D human motion capture. For more details, visit the project page at https://eventego3d.mpi-inf.mpg.de.

Molecular Odor Prediction Based on Multi-Feature Graph Attention Networks

Olfactory perception plays a critical role in both human and organismal interactions, yet understanding of its underlying mechanisms and influencing factors remain insufficient. Molecular structures influence odor perception through intricate biochemical interactions, and accurately quantifying structure-odor relationships presents significant challenges. The Quantitative Structure-Odor Relationship (QSOR) task, which involves predicting the associations between molecular structures and their corresponding odors, seeks to address these challenges. To this end, we propose a method for QSOR, utilizing Graph Attention Networks to model molecular structures and capture both local and global features. Unlike conventional QSOR approaches reliant on predefined descriptors, our method leverages diverse molecular feature extraction techniques to automatically learn comprehensive representations. This integration enhances the model's capacity to handle complex molecular information, improves prediction accuracy. Our approach demonstrates clear advantages in QSOR prediction tasks, offering valuable insights into the application of deep learning in cheminformatics.

Discrete Curvature Graph Information Bottleneck

Graph neural networks(GNNs) have been demonstrated to depend on whether the node effective information is sufficiently passing. Discrete curvature (Ricci curvature) is used to study graph connectivity and information propagation efficiency with a geometric perspective, and has been raised in recent years to explore the efficient message-passing structure of GNNs. However, most empirical studies are based on directly observed graph structures or heuristic topological assumptions and lack in-depth exploration of underlying optimal information transport structures for downstream tasks. We suggest that graph curvature optimization is more in-depth and essential than directly rewiring or learning for graph structure with richer message-passing characterization and better information transport interpretability. From both graph geometry and information theory perspectives, we propose the novel Discrete Curvature Graph Information Bottleneck (CurvGIB) framework to optimize the information transport structure and learn better node representations simultaneously. CurvGIB advances the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) principle for Ricci curvature optimization to learn the optimal information transport pattern for specific downstream tasks. The learned Ricci curvature is used to refine the optimal transport structure of the graph, and the node representation is fully and efficiently learned. Moreover, for the computational complexity of Ricci curvature differentiation, we combine Ricci flow and VIB to deduce a curvature optimization approximation to form a tractable IB objective function. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness and interpretability of CurvGIB.

MR-COGraphs: Communication-efficient Multi-Robot Open-vocabulary Mapping System via 3D Scene Graphs

Collaborative perception in unknown environments is crucial for multi-robot systems. With the emergence of foundation models, robots can now not only perceive geometric information but also achieve open-vocabulary scene understanding. However, existing map representations that support open-vocabulary queries often involve large data volumes, which becomes a bottleneck for multi-robot transmission in communication-limited environments. To address this challenge, we develop a method to construct a graph-structured 3D representation called COGraph, where nodes represent objects with semantic features and edges capture their spatial relationships. Before transmission, a data-driven feature encoder is applied to compress the feature dimensions of the COGraph. Upon receiving COGraphs from other robots, the semantic features of each node are recovered using a decoder. We also propose a feature-based approach for place recognition and translation estimation, enabling the merging of local COGraphs into a unified global map. We validate our framework using simulation environments built on Isaac Sim and real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that, compared to transmitting semantic point clouds and 512-dimensional COGraphs, our framework can reduce the data volume by two orders of magnitude, without compromising mapping and query performance. For more details, please visit our website at https://github.com/efc-robot/MR-COGraphs.

InstantRestore: Single-Step Personalized Face Restoration with Shared-Image Attention

Face image restoration aims to enhance degraded facial images while addressing challenges such as diverse degradation types, real-time processing demands, and, most crucially, the preservation of identity-specific features. Existing methods often struggle with slow processing times and suboptimal restoration, especially under severe degradation, failing to accurately reconstruct finer-level identity details. To address these issues, we introduce InstantRestore, a novel framework that leverages a single-step image diffusion model and an attention-sharing mechanism for fast and personalized face restoration. Additionally, InstantRestore incorporates a novel landmark attention loss, aligning key facial landmarks to refine the attention maps, enhancing identity preservation. At inference time, given a degraded input and a small (~4) set of reference images, InstantRestore performs a single forward pass through the network to achieve near real-time performance. Unlike prior approaches that rely on full diffusion processes or per-identity model tuning, InstantRestore offers a scalable solution suitable for large-scale applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InstantRestore outperforms existing methods in quality and speed, making it an appealing choice for identity-preserving face restoration.

Learning Locally, Revising Globally: Global Reviser for Federated Learning with Noisy Labels

The success of most federated learning (FL) methods heavily depends on label quality, which is often inaccessible in real-world scenarios, such as medicine, leading to the federated label-noise (F-LN) problem. In this study, we observe that the global model of FL memorizes the noisy labels slowly. Based on the observations, we propose a novel approach dubbed Global Reviser for Federated Learning with Noisy Labels (FedGR) to enhance the label-noise robustness of FL. In brief, FedGR employs three novel modules to achieve noisy label sniffing and refining, local knowledge revising, and local model regularization. Specifically, the global model is adopted to infer local data proxies for global sample selection and refine incorrect labels. To maximize the utilization of local knowledge, we leverage the global model to revise the local exponential moving average (EMA) model of each client and distill it into the clients' models. Additionally, we introduce a global-to-local representation regularization to mitigate the overfitting of noisy labels. Extensive experiments on three F-LNL benchmarks against seven baseline methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FedGR.

RAGDiffusion: Faithful Cloth Generation via External Knowledge Assimilation

Standard clothing asset generation involves creating forward-facing flat-lay garment images displayed on a clear background by extracting clothing information from diverse real-world contexts, which presents significant challenges due to highly standardized sampling distributions and precise structural requirements in the generated images. Existing models have limited spatial perception and often exhibit structural hallucinations in this high-specification generative task. To address this issue, we propose a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, termed RAGDiffusion, to enhance structure determinacy and mitigate hallucinations by assimilating external knowledge from LLM and databases. RAGDiffusion consists of two core processes: (1) Retrieval-based structure aggregation, which employs contrastive learning and a Structure Locally Linear Embedding (SLLE) to derive global structure and spatial landmarks, providing both soft and hard guidance to counteract structural ambiguities; and (2) Omni-level faithful garment generation, which introduces a three-level alignment that ensures fidelity in structural, pattern, and decoding components within the diffusing. Extensive experiments on challenging real-world datasets demonstrate that RAGDiffusion synthesizes structurally and detail-faithful clothing assets with significant performance improvements, representing a pioneering effort in high-specification faithful generation with RAG to confront intrinsic hallucinations and enhance fidelity.