Underestimated Privacy Risks for Minority Populations in Large Language Model Unlearning

Large Language Models are trained on extensive datasets that often contain sensitive, human-generated information, raising significant concerns about privacy breaches. While certified unlearning approaches offer strong privacy guarantees, they rely on restrictive model assumptions that are not applicable to LLMs. As a result, various unlearning heuristics have been proposed, with the associated privacy risks assessed only empirically. The standard evaluation pipelines typically randomly select data for removal from the training set, apply unlearning techniques, and use membership inference attacks to compare the unlearned models against models retrained without the to-be-unlearned data. However, since every data point is subject to the right to be forgotten, unlearning should be considered in the worst-case scenario from the privacy perspective. Prior work shows that data outliers may exhibit higher memorization effects. Intuitively, they are harder to be unlearn and thus the privacy risk of unlearning them is underestimated in the current evaluation. In this paper, we leverage minority data to identify such a critical flaw in previously widely adopted evaluations. We substantiate this claim through carefully designed experiments, including unlearning canaries related to minority groups, inspired by privacy auditing literature. Using personally identifiable information as a representative minority identifier, we demonstrate that minority groups experience at least 20% more privacy leakage in most cases across six unlearning approaches, three MIAs, three benchmark datasets, and two LLMs of different scales. Given that the right to be forgotten should be upheld for every individual, we advocate for a more rigorous evaluation of LLM unlearning methods. Our minority-aware evaluation framework represents an initial step toward ensuring more equitable assessments of LLM unlearning efficacy.

Multi-modal Iterative and Deep Fusion Frameworks for Enhanced Passive DOA Sensing via a Green Massive H2AD MIMO Receiver

Most existing DOA estimation methods assume ideal source incident angles with minimal noise. Moreover, directly using pre-estimated angles to calculate weighted coefficients can lead to performance loss. Thus, a green multi-modal (MM) fusion DOA framework is proposed to realize a more practical, low-cost and high time-efficiency DOA estimation for a H$^2$AD array. Firstly, two more efficient clustering methods, global maximum cos\_similarity clustering (GMaxCS) and global minimum distance clustering (GMinD), are presented to infer more precise true solutions from the candidate solution sets. Based on this, an iteration weighted fusion (IWF)-based method is introduced to iteratively update weighted fusion coefficients and the clustering center of the true solution classes by using the estimated values. Particularly, the coarse DOA calculated by fully digital (FD) subarray, serves as the initial cluster center. The above process yields two methods called MM-IWF-GMaxCS and MM-IWF-GMinD. To further provide a higher-accuracy DOA estimation, a fusion network (fusionNet) is proposed to aggregate the inferred two-part true angles and thus generates two effective approaches called MM-fusionNet-GMaxCS and MM-fusionNet-GMinD. The simulation outcomes show the proposed four approaches can achieve the ideal DOA performance and the CRLB. Meanwhile, proposed MM-fusionNet-GMaxCS and MM-fusionNet-GMinD exhibit superior DOA performance compared to MM-IWF-GMaxCS and MM-IWF-GMinD, especially in extremely-low SNR range.

SMoA: Improving Multi-agent Large Language Models with Sparse Mixture-of-Agents

While multi-agent systems have been shown to significantly enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various tasks and applications, the dense interaction between scaling agents potentially hampers their efficiency and diversity. To address these challenges, we draw inspiration from the sparse mixture-of-agents (SMoE) and propose a sparse mixture-of-agents (SMoA) framework to improve the efficiency and diversity of multi-agent LLMs. Unlike completely connected structures, SMoA introduces novel Response Selection and Early Stopping mechanisms to sparsify information flows among individual LLM agents, striking a balance between performance and efficiency. Additionally, inspired by the expert diversity principle in SMoE frameworks for workload balance between experts, we assign distinct role descriptions to each LLM agent, fostering diverse and divergent thinking. Extensive experiments on reasoning, alignment, and fairness benchmarks demonstrate that SMoA achieves performance comparable to traditional mixture-of-agents approaches but with significantly lower computational costs. Further analysis reveals that SMoA is more stable, has a greater capacity to scale, and offers considerable potential through hyper-parameter optimization. Code and data will be available at: https://github.com/David-Li0406/SMoA.

Enhanced DOA Estimation via Hybrid Massive MIMO Receive Array with Switches-based Sparse Architecture

Hybrid massive arrays have been widely used in direction of arrival (DOA) estimation for it can provide larger aperture with lower hardware complexity. However, as the signals received by a hybrid array are compressed by the phase shifter network or the switch network, the degree of freedom (DOF) or spatial resolution of hybrid array is lower than fully-digital (FD) array with same number of antennas. Therefore, we develop a novel sparse hybrid array called switches-based sparse hybrid array (SW-SHA) which by combining nested array and switches-based hybrid array to achieve a huge improvement on DOF over traditional hybrid arrays. Simulations of the spatial spectrums verify that SW-SHA can accurately solve the problem of DOA estimation with the number of signal sources much larger than the number of RF chains. Finally, to further improve the accuracy of DOA estimation for SW-SHA, MMV-SW-SHA is proposed by transforming the single-snapshot co-array signal into MMV form. The simulation results also show that MMV-SW-SHA has better performance than SW-SHA when signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low.

Global Public Sentiment on Decentralized Finance: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Geo-tagged Tweets from 150 Countries

In the digital era, blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have transformed financial and decentralized systems. However, existing research often neglects the spatiotemporal variations in public sentiment toward these technologies, limiting macro-level insights into their global impact. This study leverages Twitter data to explore public attention and sentiment across 150 countries, analyzing over 150 million geotagged tweets from 2012 to 2022. Sentiment scores were derived using a BERT-based multilingual sentiment model trained on 7.4 billion tweets. The analysis integrates global cryptocurrency regulations and economic indicators from the World Development Indicators database. Results reveal significant global sentiment variations influenced by economic factors, with more developed nations engaging more in discussions, while less developed countries show higher sentiment levels. Geographically weighted regression indicates that GDP-tweet engagement correlation intensifies following Bitcoin price surges. Topic modeling shows that countries within similar economic clusters share discussion trends, while different clusters focus on distinct topics. This study highlights global disparities in sentiment toward decentralized finance, shaped by economic and regional factors, with implications for poverty alleviation, cryptocurrency crime, and sustainable development. The dataset and code are publicly available on GitHub.

Oracle Bone Script Similiar Character Screening Approach Based on Simsiam Contrastive Learning and Supervised Learning

This project proposes a new method that uses fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to integrate ResNet-50 self-supervised and RepVGG supervised learning. The source image dataset HWOBC oracle is taken as input, the target image is selected, and finally the most similar image is output in turn without any manual intervention. The same feature encoding method is not used for images of different modalities. Before the model training, the image data is preprocessed, and the image is enhanced by random rotation processing, self-square graph equalization theory algorithm, and gamma transform, which effectively enhances the key feature learning. Finally, the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method is used to combine the results of supervised training and unsupervised training, which can better solve the "most similar" problem that is difficult to quantify. At present, there are many unknown oracle-bone inscriptions waiting for us to crack. Contacting with the glyphs can provide new ideas for cracking.

Unified Lexical Representation for Interpretable Visual-Language Alignment

Visual-Language Alignment (VLA) has gained a lot of attention since CLIP's groundbreaking work. Although CLIP performs well, the typical direct latent feature alignment lacks clarity in its representation and similarity scores. On the other hand, lexical representation, a vector whose element represents the similarity between the sample and a word from the vocabulary, is a natural sparse representation and interpretable, providing exact matches for individual words. However, lexical representations is difficult to learn due to no ground-truth supervision and false-discovery issues, and thus requires complex design to train effectively. In this paper, we introduce LexVLA, a more interpretable VLA framework by learning a unified lexical representation for both modalities without complex design. We use DINOv2 as our visual model for its local-inclined features and Llama 2, a generative language model, to leverage its in-context lexical prediction ability. To avoid the false discovery, we propose an overuse penalty to refrain the lexical representation from falsely frequently activating meaningless words. We demonstrate that these two pre-trained uni-modal models can be well-aligned by fine-tuning on modest multi-modal dataset and avoid intricate training configurations. On cross-modal retrieval benchmarks, LexVLA, trained on the CC-12M multi-modal dataset, outperforms baselines fine-tuned on larger datasets (e.g., YFCC15M) and those trained from scratch on even bigger datasets (e.g., 1.1B data, including CC-12M). We conduct extensive experiments to analyze LexVLA.

"Glue pizza and eat rocks" -- Exploiting Vulnerabilities in Retrieval-Augmented Generative Models

Retrieval-Augmented Generative (RAG) models enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge bases, improving their performance in applications like fact-checking and information searching. In this paper, we demonstrate a security threat where adversaries can exploit the openness of these knowledge bases by injecting deceptive content into the retrieval database, intentionally changing the model's behavior. This threat is critical as it mirrors real-world usage scenarios where RAG systems interact with publicly accessible knowledge bases, such as web scrapings and user-contributed data pools. To be more realistic, we target a realistic setting where the adversary has no knowledge of users' queries, knowledge base data, and the LLM parameters. We demonstrate that it is possible to exploit the model successfully through crafted content uploads with access to the retriever. Our findings emphasize an urgent need for security measures in the design and deployment of RAG systems to prevent potential manipulation and ensure the integrity of machine-generated content.

KnobTree: Intelligent Database Parameter Configuration via Explainable Reinforcement Learning

Databases are fundamental to contemporary information systems, yet traditional rule-based configuration methods struggle to manage the complexity of real-world applications with hundreds of tunable parameters. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL), which combines perception and decision-making, presents a potential solution for intelligent database configuration tuning. However, due to black-box property of RL-based method, the generated database tuning strategies still face the urgent problem of lack explainability. Besides, the redundant parameters in large scale database always make the strategy learning become unstable. This paper proposes KnobTree, an interpertable framework designed for the optimization of database parameter configuration. In this framework, an interpertable database tuning algorithm based on RL-based differentatial tree is proposed, which building a transparent tree-based model to generate explainable database tuning strategies. To address the problem of large-scale parameters, We also introduce a explainable method for parameter importance assessment, by utilizing Shapley Values to identify parameters that have significant impacts on database performance. Experiments conducted on MySQL and Gbase8s databases have verified exceptional transparency and interpretability of the KnobTree model. The good property makes generated strategies can offer practical guidance to algorithm designers and database administrators. Moreover, our approach also slightly outperforms the existing RL-based tuning algorithms in aspects such as throughput, latency, and processing time.

Towards Event-oriented Long Video Understanding

With the rapid development of video Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), numerous benchmarks have been proposed to assess their video understanding capability. However, due to the lack of rich events in the videos, these datasets may suffer from the short-cut bias that the answers can be deduced from a few frames, without the need to watch the entire video. To address this issue, we introduce Event-Bench, an event-oriented long video understanding benchmark built on existing datasets and human annotations. Event-Bench includes six event-related tasks and 2,190 test instances to comprehensively evaluate video event understanding ability. Additionally, we propose Video Instruction Merging~(VIM), a cost-effective method that enhances video MLLMs using merged, event-intensive video instructions, addressing the scarcity of human-annotated, event-intensive data. Extensive experiments show that the best-performing model, GPT-4o, achieves an overall accuracy of 53.33, significantly outperforming the best open-source model by 41.42%. Leveraging an effective instruction synthesis method and an adaptive model architecture, VIM surpasses both state-of-the-art open-source models and GPT-4V on the Event-Bench. All code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Event-Bench.