When Languages Disagree: Self-Evolving Multilingual LLM Judges

Multilingual LLM-as-a-judge is widely used to evaluate model outputs across languages, but suffers from cross-lingual inconsistency (Fu and Liu, 2025). Existing methods typically treat this inconsistency as noise and mitigate it through voting or aggregation. In this work, we instead show that multilingual inconsistency can provide complementary evaluation signals. Our oracle analysis finds that sampling judgments across languages yields a higher performance upper bound than single-language judging, indicating that different languages potentially include complementary judgments. Motivated by this finding, we propose SEMJ, a self-evolving multilingual judge that leverages cross-lingual inconsistency for iterative refinement. SEMJ constructs multilingual variants of each input, collects independent judgments and rationales, and feeds inconsistent outputs back for self-reflection and re-evaluation. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that SEMJ consistently outperforms voting and reflection baselines in both accuracy and cross-lingual consistency. Further analysis shows that inconsistency triggers useful re-evaluation, which improves judgment quality.

Safety Paradox: How Enhanced Safety Awareness Leaves LLMs Vulnerable to Posterior Attack

Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content. In this work, we reveal that this advanced safety awareness inadvertently introduces a fatal vulnerability. We introduce Posterior Attack, a single-query jailbreak that bypasses guardrails by prompting the model to generate the exact harmful response its internal classifier would normally flag as unsafe. Through extensive empirical evaluation across 30 open-source LLMs (up to 35B parameters in size) and frontier models (e.g., GPT-5, Claude 4.6), we observe a striking phenomenon: models with superior safety-judgment capabilities are disproportionately more susceptible to this exploitation. To explain this, we formalize the Safety Paradox, analytically showing that monotonic improvements in safety alignment naturally amplify posterior vulnerability. Finally, we establish a causal link via reinforcement learning interventions, exemplifying that artificially degrading a model's safety judgment immunizes it against the attack, whereas enhancing judgment exacerbates the vulnerability. Our findings highlight potential flaws in current alignment paradigms, indicating that defense mechanisms may require further structural refinement.

Multilingual Fine-Tuning via Localized Gradient Conflict Resolution

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has established cross-lingual versatility as a defining feature of modern systems. However, fine-tuning these models frequently induces negative interference across languages. To address this, we reformulate multilingual fine-tuning as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem. Specifically, we introduce Bucket-Level MOO, a scalable distributed framework that applies gradient-based MOO algorithms locally on parameter buckets. This enables conflict-aware updates without the prohibitive communication overhead of reconstructing full gradient vectors. Theoretically, we prove this localized resolution natively enforces Refined Pareto Stationarity, a strictly tighter necessary condition for Pareto optimality. Empirically, Bucket-Level MOO mitigates interference by driving LLMs to construct distinct language-specific dimensions, improving representational separability. Extensive experiments across four base LLMs demonstrate that our method significantly improves both seen and unseen multilingual performance over standard fine-tuning paradigms.

Training Prompt Matters: State-Adaptive Optimization for Robust Fine-Tuning

While prompt engineering is instrumental in maximizing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference, the role of prompts during training remains critically underexplored. Prevailing fine-tuning paradigms typically treat training prompts as mere surface forms, assuming that semantically equivalent instructions yield identical learning outcomes. However, we reveal that this equivalence is deceptive: while paraphrased prompts often lead to comparable in-task performance, they induce drastically different cross-task impacts regarding catastrophic forgetting and generalization. Crucially, these impacts are positively correlated across tasks, indicating the existence of superior prompts that consistently yield better performance. Furthermore, we discover that these superior prompts can be robustly identified by task loss prior to learning. Leveraging these insights, we introduce State-Adaptive Prompt Optimization (SAPO), a lightweight yet effective training strategy that shifts task formulation from a static input to a dynamic, state-adaptive variable. Comprehensive experiments on diverse benchmarks confirm its effectiveness, which significantly mitigates forgetting while improving generalization, achieving substantial performance gains over state-of-the-art methods. These results provide insights into how training prompts shape learning dynamics and offer a practical recipe for robust fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/Eric8932/SAPO.

Scaling Agentic Capabilities via Grounded Interaction Synthesis

General agentic intelligence hinges on the ability to interact with diverse real-world tools to complete complex tasks, a capability fundamentally tied to the quality of interaction data. To bypass the prohibitive costs of human annotation, prevailing paradigms depend entirely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to scale the synthesis of agentic environments and tasks. However, such unconstrained generation often degenerates into biased random sampling of LLMs' internal priors, failing to capture the diversity and difficulty of real-world domains or construct high-fidelity, long-horizon tasks. In this work, we introduce Grounded Agentic Interaction Synthesis (GAIS), a framework that automates the scalable construction of diverse environments and complex tasks via a two-phase grounding mechanism. Specifically, we construct protocol-anchored environments derived from real-world Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to ensure functional diversity and difficulty. Subsequently, we employ structure-guided planning to navigate these environments, actively enforcing logical dependencies and adversarial policies to generate complex tasks. Experiments on BFCL, $τ^2$-Bench, and ACEBench demonstrate that GAIS-synthesized data significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, enabling base models to match or even surpass their official instruction-tuned counterparts. Furthermore, GAIS exhibits superior data efficiency and scalability, achieving exceptional capabilities with significantly less data while maintaining continuous growth where baselines stagnate. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Eric8932/GAIS.

DiscourseFlip: An Oblique Discourse-Level Opinion Manipulation Attack against Black-box Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are widely deployed and increasingly influential, but their reliance on external corpora exposes new security risks from poisoned retrieval content. Existing RAG attacks are largely focusing on individual queries or narrow topic-local query sets, which limits their practical reach and offers limited camouflage in real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce discourse-level opinion manipulation, a new threat model in which coordinated influence across a semantic query network induces opinion shifts over a holistic, multi-topic query space. We formalize this threat in a black-box setting and propose DiscourseFlip, an agentic, graph-guided attack that dynamically allocates a limited poisoning budget to maximize discourse-level opinion deviation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiscourseFlip consistently induces targeted opinion shifts across the contextualized query network and significantly outperforms existing baselines in terms of coverage and effectiveness. User studies further confirm that DiscourseFlip is effective while remaining well camouflaged from user detection. Moreover, systematic analyses show that existing mitigation strategies are ineffective against discourse-level manipulation, underscoring the urgent need for more robust and adaptive defenses to address discourse-level vulnerabilities.

Pre-VLA: Preemptive Runtime Verification for Reliable Vision-Language-Action and World-Model Rollouts

While large vision-language-action (VLA) models and generative world models (WM) have advanced long-horizon embodied intelligence, their practical deployment remains challenged by uncertainty in learning-based action generation. Low-quality actions may cause physical failures during execution or lead to misleading world-model rollouts with redundant rendering costs. To address this issue, we propose Pre-VLA, a unified runtime verification architecture that performs preemptive action validity assessment before physical execution or world-model imagination. Pre-VLA leverages an efficient multimodal backbone with modality-aware pooling and a lightweight dual-branch head to predict both safety confidence and critic-derived advantage scores for candidate action chunks. To handle severe class imbalance and unstable boundary decisions, we train Pre-VLA with a multi-task objective combining Focal classification, advantage regression, and soft-threshold calibration. During deployment, a dual-mode preemptive resampling scheduler filters low-quality actions and triggers adaptive resampling under a limited computation budget. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark show that Pre-VLA improves the average closed-loop success rate across four suites from 30.79\% to 37.62\% over RynnVLA-002, reduces task execution steps, achieves 183.9 ms average forward verification time per action chunk, and mitigates error accumulation in world-model rollouts.

What Limits Vision-and-Language Navigation ?

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a cornerstone of embodied intelligence. However, current agents often suffer from significant performance degradation when transitioning from simulation to real-world deployment, primarily due to perceptual instability (e.g., lighting variations and motion blur) and under-specified instructions. While existing methods attempt to bridge this gap by scaling up model size and training data, we argue that the bottleneck lies in the lack of robust spatial grounding and cross-domain priors. In this paper, we propose StereoNav, a robust Vision-Language-Action framework designed to enhance real-world navigation consistency. To address the inherent gap between synthetic training and physical execution, we introduce Target-Location Priors as a persistent bridge. These priors provide stable visual guidance that remains invariant across domains, effectively grounding the agent even when instructions are vague. Furthermore, to mitigate visual disturbances like motion blur and illumination shifts, StereoNav leverages stereo vision to construct a unified representation of semantics and geometry, enabling precise action prediction through enhanced depth awareness. Extensive experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE demonstrate that StereoNav achieves state-of-the-art egocentric RGB performance, with SR and SPL scores of 81.1% and 68.3%, and 67.5% and 52.0%, respectively, while using significantly fewer parameters and less training data than prior scaling-based approaches. More importantly, real-world robotic deployments confirm that StereoNav substantially improves navigation reliability in complex, unstructured environments. Project page: https://yunheng-wang.github.io/stereonav-public.github.io.

SARU: A Shadow-Aware and Removal Unified Framework for Remote Sensing Images with New Benchmarks

Shadows are a prevalent problem in remote sensing imagery (RSI), degrading visual quality and severely limiting the performance of downstream tasks like object detection and semantic segmentation. Most prior works treat shadow detection and removal as separate, cascaded tasks, which can lead to cumbersome process and error accumulation. Furthermore, many deep learning methods rely on paired shadow and non-shadow images for training, which are often unavailable in practice. To address these challenges, we propose Shadow-Aware and Removal Unified (SARU) Framework , a cohesive two-stage framework. First, its dual-branch detection module (DBCSF-Net) fuses multi-color space and semantic features to generate high-fidelity shadow masks, effectively distinguishing shadows from dark objects. Then, leveraging these masks, a novel, training-free physical algorithm (N$^2$SGSR) restores illumination by transferring properties from adjacent non-shadow regions within the single input image. To facilitate rigorous evaluation and foster future work, we also introduce two new benchmark datasets: the RSI Shadow Detection (RSISD) dataset and the Single-image Shadow Removal Benchmark (SiSRB). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SARU achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the public AISD dataset and our newly introduced benchmarks. By holistically integrating shadow detection and removal to mitigate error propagation and eliminating the dependency on paired training data, SARU establishes a robust, practical framework for real-world RSI analysis. The source code and datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/AeroVILab-AHU/SARU-Framework.

Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models for Short Term Electricity Price Forecasting in Australia's National Electricity Market

Short term electricity price forecast is essential in competitive power markets, yet electricity price series exhibit high volatility, irregularity, and non-stationarity. This phenomenon is pronounced in the South Australian region of the National Electricity Market, where high renewable penetration drives price volatility and frequent negative price intervals, while structural changes such as the transition to five-minute settlement further complicate forecast. To address these challenges, this study develops a unified benchmark framework. Under identical data preprocessing, feature engineering with lag features, rolling statistics, cyclic temporal encodings, and so on, and an 85% to 15% chronological train test split, six algorithms are systematically compared, including AWMLSTM, CatBoost, GBRT, LSTM, LightGBM, and SVR. The results show that for price prediction, tree-based models, especially GBRT with an R squared value of 0.88, generally outperform LSTM and SVR. However, all models achieve a mean absolute percentage error above 90%, and more than 65% of GBRT predictions have relative errors above 10%, which highlights the inherent difficulty of price forecast. For demand prediction, all models perform substantially better than in price prediction. AWMLSTM and GBRT achieve an R2 value of 0.96 with mean absolute percentage error below 32%, and GBRT has 74.37% of samples within 5% error, while LSTM and SVR perform less accurately in both tasks. Future improvements should focus on hybrid models such as tree plus transformers, data augmentation for extreme events, and error correction to better capture price spikes.