ClimateBench-M: A Multi-Modal Climate Data Benchmark with a Simple Generative Method

Climate science studies the structure and dynamics of Earth's climate system and seeks to understand how climate changes over time, where the data is usually stored in the format of time series, recording the climate features, geolocation, time attributes, etc. Recently, much research attention has been paid to the climate benchmarks. In addition to the most common task of weather forecasting, several pioneering benchmark works are proposed for extending the modality, such as domain-specific applications like tropical cyclone intensity prediction and flash flood damage estimation, or climate statement and confidence level in the format of natural language. To further motivate the artificial general intelligence development for climate science, in this paper, we first contribute a multi-modal climate benchmark, i.e., ClimateBench-M, which aligns (1) the time series climate data from ERA5, (2) extreme weather events data from NOAA, and (3) satellite image data from NASA HLS based on a unified spatial-temporal granularity. Second, under each data modality, we also propose a simple but strong generative method that could produce competitive performance in weather forecasting, thunderstorm alerts, and crop segmentation tasks in the proposed ClimateBench-M. The data and code of ClimateBench-M are publicly available at https://github.com/iDEA-iSAIL-Lab-UIUC/ClimateBench-M.

CATS: Mitigating Correlation Shift for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) leverages labeled source data to train models for unlabeled target data. Given the prevalence of multivariate time series (MTS) data across various domains, the UDA task for MTS classification has emerged as a critical challenge. However, for MTS data, correlations between variables often vary across domains, whereas most existing UDA works for MTS classification have overlooked this essential characteristic. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel domain shift, {\em correlation shift}, measuring domain differences in multivariate correlation. To mitigate correlation shift, we propose a scalable and parameter-efficient \underline{C}orrelation \underline{A}dapter for M\underline{TS} (CATS). Designed as a plug-and-play technique compatible with various Transformer variants, CATS employs temporal convolution to capture local temporal patterns and a graph attention module to model the changing multivariate correlation. The adapter reweights the target correlations to align the source correlations with a theoretically guaranteed precision. A correlation alignment loss is further proposed to mitigate correlation shift, bypassing the alignment challenge from the non-i.i.d. nature of MTS data. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that (1) compared with vanilla Transformer-based models, CATS increases over $10\%$ average accuracy while only adding around $1\%$ parameters, and (2) all Transformer variants equipped with CATS either reach or surpass state-of-the-art baselines.

TeleLoRA: Teleporting Model-Specific Alignment Across LLMs

Mitigating Trojans in Large Language Models (LLMs) is one of many tasks where alignment data is LLM specific, as different LLMs have different Trojan triggers and trigger behaviors to be removed. In this paper, we introduce TeleLoRA (Teleporting Low-Rank Adaptation), a novel framework that synergizes model-specific alignment data across multiple LLMs to enable zero-shot Trojan mitigation on unseen LLMs without alignment data. TeleLoRA learns a unified generator of LoRA adapter weights by leveraging local activation information across multiple LLMs. This generator is designed to be permutation symmetric to generalize across models with different architectures and sizes. We optimize the model design for memory efficiency, making it feasible to learn with large-scale LLMs with minimal computational resources. Experiments on LLM Trojan mitigation benchmarks demonstrate that TeleLoRA effectively reduces attack success rates while preserving the benign performance of the models.

General-Purpose Aerial Intelligent Agents Empowered by Large Language Models

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) opens new frontiers for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs), yet existing systems remain confined to predefined tasks due to hardware-software co-design challenges. This paper presents the first aerial intelligent agent capable of open-world task execution through tight integration of LLM-based reasoning and robotic autonomy. Our hardware-software co-designed system addresses two fundamental limitations: (1) Onboard LLM operation via an edge-optimized computing platform, achieving 5-6 tokens/sec inference for 14B-parameter models at 220W peak power; (2) A bidirectional cognitive architecture that synergizes slow deliberative planning (LLM task planning) with fast reactive control (state estimation, mapping, obstacle avoidance, and motion planning). Validated through preliminary results using our prototype, the system demonstrates reliable task planning and scene understanding in communication-constrained environments, such as sugarcane monitoring, power grid inspection, mine tunnel exploration, and biological observation applications. This work establishes a novel framework for embodied aerial artificial intelligence, bridging the gap between task planning and robotic autonomy in open environments.

UIFace: Unleashing Inherent Model Capabilities to Enhance Intra-Class Diversity in Synthetic Face Recognition

Face recognition (FR) stands as one of the most crucial applications in computer vision. The accuracy of FR models has significantly improved in recent years due to the availability of large-scale human face datasets. However, directly using these datasets can inevitably lead to privacy and legal problems. Generating synthetic data to train FR models is a feasible solution to circumvent these issues. While existing synthetic-based face recognition methods have made significant progress in generating identity-preserving images, they are severely plagued by context overfitting, resulting in a lack of intra-class diversity of generated images and poor face recognition performance. In this paper, we propose a framework to Unleash Inherent capability of the model to enhance intra-class diversity for synthetic face recognition, shortened as UIFace. Our framework first trains a diffusion model that can perform sampling conditioned on either identity contexts or a learnable empty context. The former generates identity-preserving images but lacks variations, while the latter exploits the model's intrinsic ability to synthesize intra-class-diversified images but with random identities. Then we adopt a novel two-stage sampling strategy during inference to fully leverage the strengths of both types of contexts, resulting in images that are diverse as well as identitypreserving. Moreover, an attention injection module is introduced to further augment the intra-class variations by utilizing attention maps from the empty context to guide the sampling process in ID-conditioned generation. Experiments show that our method significantly surpasses previous approaches with even less training data and half the size of synthetic dataset. The proposed UIFace even achieves comparable performance with FR models trained on real datasets when we further increase the number of synthetic identities.

Language in the Flow of Time: Time-Series-Paired Texts Weaved into a Unified Temporal Narrative

While many advances in time series models focus exclusively on numerical data, research on multimodal time series, particularly those involving contextual textual information commonly encountered in real-world scenarios, remains in its infancy. Consequently, effectively integrating the text modality remains challenging. In this work, we highlight an intuitive yet significant observation that has been overlooked by existing works: time-series-paired texts exhibit periodic properties that closely mirror those of the original time series. Building on this insight, we propose a novel framework, Texts as Time Series (TaTS), which considers the time-series-paired texts to be auxiliary variables of the time series. TaTS can be plugged into any existing numerical-only time series models and enable them to handle time series data with paired texts effectively. Through extensive experiments on both multimodal time series forecasting and imputation tasks across benchmark datasets with various existing time series models, we demonstrate that TaTS can enhance predictive performance and achieve outperformance without modifying model architectures.

CleanPose: Category-Level Object Pose Estimation via Causal Learning and Knowledge Distillation

Category-level object pose estimation aims to recover the rotation, translation and size of unseen instances within predefined categories. In this task, deep neural network-based methods have demonstrated remarkable performance. However, previous studies show they suffer from spurious correlations raised by "unclean" confounders in models, hindering their performance on novel instances with significant variations. To address this issue, we propose CleanPose, a novel approach integrating causal learning and knowledge distillation to enhance category-level pose estimation. To mitigate the negative effect of unobserved confounders, we develop a causal inference module based on front-door adjustment, which promotes unbiased estimation by reducing potential spurious correlations. Additionally, to further improve generalization ability, we devise a residual-based knowledge distillation method that has proven effective in providing comprehensive category information guidance. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks (REAL275, CAMERA25 and HouseCat6D) hightlight the superiority of proposed CleanPose over state-of-the-art methods. Code will be released.

MoTE: Reconciling Generalization with Specialization for Visual-Language to Video Knowledge Transfer

Transferring visual-language knowledge from large-scale foundation models for video recognition has proved to be effective. To bridge the domain gap, additional parametric modules are added to capture the temporal information. However, zero-shot generalization diminishes with the increase in the number of specialized parameters, making existing works a trade-off between zero-shot and close-set performance. In this paper, we present MoTE, a novel framework that enables generalization and specialization to be balanced in one unified model. Our approach tunes a mixture of temporal experts to learn multiple task views with various degrees of data fitting. To maximally preserve the knowledge of each expert, we propose \emph{Weight Merging Regularization}, which regularizes the merging process of experts in weight space. Additionally with temporal feature modulation to regularize the contribution of temporal feature during test. We achieve a sound balance between zero-shot and close-set video recognition tasks and obtain state-of-the-art or competitive results on various datasets, including Kinetics-400 \& 600, UCF, and HMDB. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ZMHH-H/MoTE}.

BACKTIME: Backdoor Attacks on Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting is a fundamental task with numerous real-world applications, such as transportation, climate, and epidemiology. While a myriad of powerful deep learning models have been developed for this task, few works have explored the robustness of MTS forecasting models to malicious attacks, which is crucial for their trustworthy employment in high-stake scenarios. To address this gap, we dive deep into the backdoor attacks on MTS forecasting models and propose an effective attack method named BackTime.By subtly injecting a few stealthy triggers into the MTS data, BackTime can alter the predictions of the forecasting model according to the attacker's intent. Specifically, BackTime first identifies vulnerable timestamps in the data for poisoning, and then adaptively synthesizes stealthy and effective triggers by solving a bi-level optimization problem with a GNN-based trigger generator. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and state-of-the-art MTS forecasting models demonstrate the effectiveness, versatility, and stealthiness of \method{} attacks. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/xiaolin-cs/BackTime}.

iWalker: Imperative Visual Planning for Walking Humanoid Robot

Humanoid robots, with the potential to perform a broad range of tasks in environments designed for humans, have been deemed crucial for the basis of general AI agents. When talking about planning and controlling, although traditional models and task-specific methods have been extensively studied over the past few decades, they are inadequate for achieving the flexibility and versatility needed for general autonomy. Learning approaches, especially reinforcement learning, are powerful and popular nowadays, but they are inherently "blind" during training, relying heavily on trials in simulation without proper guidance from physical principles or underlying dynamics. In response, we propose a novel end-to-end pipeline that seamlessly integrates perception, planning, and model-based control for humanoid robot walking. We refer to our method as iWalker, which is driven by imperative learning (IL), a self-supervising neuro-symbolic learning framework. This enables the robot to learn from arbitrary unlabeled data, significantly improving its adaptability and generalization capabilities. In experiments, iWalker demonstrates effectiveness in both simulated and real-world environments, representing a significant advancement toward versatile and autonomous humanoid robots.