LLM Can be a Dangerous Persuader: Empirical Study of Persuasion Safety in Large Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled them to approach human-level persuasion capabilities. However, such potential also raises concerns about the safety risks of LLM-driven persuasion, particularly their potential for unethical influence through manipulation, deception, exploitation of vulnerabilities, and many other harmful tactics. In this work, we present a systematic investigation of LLM persuasion safety through two critical aspects: (1) whether LLMs appropriately reject unethical persuasion tasks and avoid unethical strategies during execution, including cases where the initial persuasion goal appears ethically neutral, and (2) how influencing factors like personality traits and external pressures affect their behavior. To this end, we introduce PersuSafety, the first comprehensive framework for the assessment of persuasion safety which consists of three stages, i.e., persuasion scene creation, persuasive conversation simulation, and persuasion safety assessment. PersuSafety covers 6 diverse unethical persuasion topics and 15 common unethical strategies. Through extensive experiments across 8 widely used LLMs, we observe significant safety concerns in most LLMs, including failing to identify harmful persuasion tasks and leveraging various unethical persuasion strategies. Our study calls for more attention to improve safety alignment in progressive and goal-driven conversations such as persuasion.

Transfer between Modalities with MetaQueries

Unified multimodal models aim to integrate understanding (text output) and generation (pixel output), but aligning these different modalities within a single architecture often demands complex training recipes and careful data balancing. We introduce MetaQueries, a set of learnable queries that act as an efficient interface between autoregressive multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) and diffusion models. MetaQueries connects the MLLM's latents to the diffusion decoder, enabling knowledge-augmented image generation by leveraging the MLLM's deep understanding and reasoning capabilities. Our method simplifies training, requiring only paired image-caption data and standard diffusion objectives. Notably, this transfer is effective even when the MLLM backbone remains frozen, thereby preserving its state-of-the-art multimodal understanding capabilities while achieving strong generative performance. Additionally, our method is flexible and can be easily instruction-tuned for advanced applications such as image editing and subject-driven generation.

A Survey on Mechanistic Interpretability for Multi-Modal Foundation Models

The rise of foundation models has transformed machine learning research, prompting efforts to uncover their inner workings and develop more efficient and reliable applications for better control. While significant progress has been made in interpreting Large Language Models (LLMs), multimodal foundation models (MMFMs) - such as contrastive vision-language models, generative vision-language models, and text-to-image models - pose unique interpretability challenges beyond unimodal frameworks. Despite initial studies, a substantial gap remains between the interpretability of LLMs and MMFMs. This survey explores two key aspects: (1) the adaptation of LLM interpretability methods to multimodal models and (2) understanding the mechanistic differences between unimodal language models and crossmodal systems. By systematically reviewing current MMFM analysis techniques, we propose a structured taxonomy of interpretability methods, compare insights across unimodal and multimodal architectures, and highlight critical research gaps.

UniHGKR: Unified Instruction-aware Heterogeneous Knowledge Retrievers

Existing information retrieval (IR) models often assume a homogeneous structure for knowledge sources and user queries, limiting their applicability in real-world settings where retrieval is inherently heterogeneous and diverse. In this paper, we introduce UniHGKR, a unified instruction-aware heterogeneous knowledge retriever that (1) builds a unified retrieval space for heterogeneous knowledge and (2) follows diverse user instructions to retrieve knowledge of specified types. UniHGKR consists of three principal stages: heterogeneous self-supervised pretraining, text-anchored embedding alignment, and instruction-aware retriever fine-tuning, enabling it to generalize across varied retrieval contexts. This framework is highly scalable, with a BERT-based version and a UniHGKR-7B version trained on large language models. Also, we introduce CompMix-IR, the first native heterogeneous knowledge retrieval benchmark. It includes two retrieval scenarios with various instructions, over 9,400 question-answer (QA) pairs, and a corpus of 10 million entries, covering four different types of data. Extensive experiments show that UniHGKR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on CompMix-IR, achieving up to 6.36% and 54.23% relative improvements in two scenarios, respectively. Finally, by equipping our retriever for open-domain heterogeneous QA systems, we achieve a new state-of-the-art result on the popular ConvMix task, with an absolute improvement of up to 4.80 points.

RoRA-VLM: Robust Retrieval-Augmented Vision Language Models

Current vision-language models (VLMs) still exhibit inferior performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, primarily due to the challenge of accurately encoding all the associations between visual objects and scenes to their corresponding entities and background knowledge. While retrieval augmentation methods offer an efficient way to integrate external knowledge, extending them to vision-language domain presents unique challenges in (1) precisely retrieving relevant information from external sources due to the inherent discrepancy within the multimodal queries, and (2) being resilient to the irrelevant, extraneous and noisy information contained in the retrieved multimodal knowledge snippets. In this work, we introduce RORA-VLM, a novel and robust retrieval augmentation framework specifically tailored for VLMs, with two key innovations: (1) a 2-stage retrieval process with image-anchored textual-query expansion to synergistically combine the visual and textual information in the query and retrieve the most relevant multimodal knowledge snippets; and (2) a robust retrieval augmentation method that strengthens the resilience of VLMs against irrelevant information in the retrieved multimodal knowledge by injecting adversarial noises into the retrieval-augmented training process, and filters out extraneous visual information, such as unrelated entities presented in images, via a query-oriented visual token refinement strategy. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed methods on three widely adopted benchmark datasets. Our results demonstrate that with a minimal amount of training instance, RORA-VLM enables the base model to achieve significant performance improvement and constantly outperform state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented VLMs on all benchmarks while also exhibiting a novel zero-shot domain transfer capability.

Grounded-VideoLLM: Sharpening Fine-grained Temporal Grounding in Video Large Language Models

Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in coarse-grained video understanding, however, they struggle with fine-grained temporal grounding. In this paper, we introduce Grounded-VideoLLM, a novel Video-LLM adept at perceiving and reasoning over specific video moments in a fine-grained manner. We identify that current Video-LLMs have limitations for fine-grained video understanding since they lack effective temporal modeling and timestamp representation. In light of this, we sharpen our model by incorporating (1) an additional temporal stream to encode the relationships between frames and (2) discrete temporal tokens enriched with specific time knowledge to represent timestamps. To optimize the training of Grounded-VideoLLM, we employ a multi-stage training scheme, beginning with simple video-captioning tasks and progressively introducing video temporal grounding tasks of increasing complexity. To further enhance Grounded-VideoLLM's temporal reasoning capability, we also curate a grounded VideoQA dataset by an automatic annotation pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Grounded-VideoLLM not only excels in fine-grained grounding tasks such as temporal sentence grounding, dense video captioning, and grounded VideoQA, but also shows great potential as a versatile video assistant for general video understanding.

SPARTUN3D: Situated Spatial Understanding of 3D World in Large Language Models

Integrating the 3D world into large language models (3D-based LLMs) has been a promising research direction for 3D scene understanding. However, current 3D-based LLMs fall short in situated understanding due to two key limitations: 1) existing 3D datasets are constructed from a global perspective of the 3D scenes and lack situated context. 2) the architectures of existing 3D-based LLMs lack explicit alignment between the spatial representations of 3D scenes and natural language, limiting their performance in tasks requiring precise spatial reasoning. We address these issues by introducing a scalable situated 3D dataset, named Spartun3D, that incorporates various situated spatial reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we propose Spartun3D-LLM, built on an existing 3D-based LLM but integrated with a novel situated spatial alignment module, aiming to enhance the alignment between 3D visual representations and their corresponding textual descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate that both our proposed dataset and alignment module significantly enhance the situated spatial understanding of 3D-based LLMs.

Do Large Language Models Possess Sensitive to Sentiment?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently displayed their extraordinary capabilities in language understanding. However, how to comprehensively assess the sentiment capabilities of LLMs continues to be a challenge. This paper investigates the ability of LLMs to detect and react to sentiment in text modal. As the integration of LLMs into diverse applications is on the rise, it becomes highly critical to comprehend their sensitivity to emotional tone, as it can influence the user experience and the efficacy of sentiment-driven tasks. We conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the performance of several prominent LLMs in identifying and responding appropriately to sentiments like positive, negative, and neutral emotions. The models' outputs are analyzed across various sentiment benchmarks, and their responses are compared with human evaluations. Our discoveries indicate that although LLMs show a basic sensitivity to sentiment, there are substantial variations in their accuracy and consistency, emphasizing the requirement for further enhancements in their training processes to better capture subtle emotional cues. Take an example in our findings, in some cases, the models might wrongly classify a strongly positive sentiment as neutral, or fail to recognize sarcasm or irony in the text. Such misclassifications highlight the complexity of sentiment analysis and the areas where the models need to be refined. Another aspect is that different LLMs might perform differently on the same set of data, depending on their architecture and training datasets. This variance calls for a more in-depth study of the factors that contribute to the performance differences and how they can be optimized.

NeuroBind: Towards Unified Multimodal Representations for Neural Signals

Understanding neural activity and information representation is crucial for advancing knowledge of brain function and cognition. Neural activity, measured through techniques like electrophysiology and neuroimaging, reflects various aspects of information processing. Recent advances in deep neural networks offer new approaches to analyzing these signals using pre-trained models. However, challenges arise due to discrepancies between different neural signal modalities and the limited scale of high-quality neural data. To address these challenges, we present NeuroBind, a general representation that unifies multiple brain signal types, including EEG, fMRI, calcium imaging, and spiking data. To achieve this, we align neural signals in these image-paired neural datasets to pre-trained vision-language embeddings. Neurobind is the first model that studies different neural modalities interconnectedly and is able to leverage high-resource modality models for various neuroscience tasks. We also showed that by combining information from different neural signal modalities, NeuroBind enhances downstream performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of the complementary strengths of different neural modalities. As a result, we can leverage multiple types of neural signals mapped to the same space to improve downstream tasks, and demonstrate the complementary strengths of different neural modalities. This approach holds significant potential for advancing neuroscience research, improving AI systems, and developing neuroprosthetics and brain-computer interfaces.

Lateralization LoRA: Interleaved Instruction Tuning with Modality-Specialized Adaptations

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have led to the development of Vision-Language Generalists (VLGs) capable of understanding and generating interleaved images and text. Despite these advances, VLGs still struggle to follow user instructions for interleaved text and image generation. To address this issue, we introduce LeafInstruct, the first open-sourced interleaved instruction tuning data with over 30,000 high-quality instances across more than 10 domains. Due to the extensive size of existing VLGs, we opt for parameter-efficient tuning. However, we observe that VLGs tuned with a standard LoRA typically exhibit inferior performance in interleaved text-image generation. We attribute this problem to modality interference and the lack of modality-specialized adaptation design. Hence, we propose Lateralization LoRA, a novel modality-specialized adaptation method inspired by the concept of brain lateralization. Lateralization LoRA employs a hybrid approach, combining the traditional linear LoRA and a Convolutional LoRA for generating text and images, enabling the generation of high-quality text and images by leveraging modality-specific structures and parameter sets. We perform instruction tuning of the VLG (i.e., EMU2) using Lateralization LoRA on the LeafInstruct dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EMU2 tuned with Lateralization LoRA achieve state-of-the-art performance, significantly surpassing baseline models in complex interleaved tasks.