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Chengzhi Mao

28 accepted papers

2026

Differences That Matter: Auditing Models for Capability Gap Discovery and Rectification

CVPR 2026

Conventional evaluation methods for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) lack interpretability and are often insufficient to fully disclose significant capability gaps across models. To address this, we introduce AuditDM, an automated framework that actively discovers and rectifies MLLM failure modes by auditing

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Language-Instructed Vision Embeddings for Controllable and Generalizable Perception

ICLR 2026poster

Vision foundation models are typically trained as static feature extractors, forcing the burden of task adaptation onto large downstream models. We propose a different paradigm: instead of solely feeding visual features into language, we use language itself to dynamically guide the vision encoder. O…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Aligned but Blind: Alignment Increases Implicit Bias by Reducing Awareness of Race

ACL 2025long

Although value-aligned language models (LMs) appear unbiased in explicit bias evaluations, they often exhibit stereotypes in implicit word association tasks, raising concerns about their fair usage. We investigate the mechanisms behind this discrepancy and find that alignment surprisingly amplifies…

2025

Diversity Helps Jailbreak Large Language Models

NAACL 2025long

We have uncovered a powerful jailbreak technique that leverages large language models’ ability to diverge from prior context, enabling them to bypass safety constraints and generate harmful outputs. By simply instructing the LLM to deviate and obfuscate previous attacks, our method dramatically outp…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

EditLord: Learning Code Transformation Rules for Code Editing

ICML 2025poster

Code editing is a foundational task in software development, where its effectiveness depends on whether it introduces desired code property changes without changing the original code's intended functionality. Existing approaches often formulate code editing as an implicit end-to-end task, omitting…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

I Can Hear You: Selective Robust Training for Deepfake Audio Detection

ICLR 2025poster

Recent advances in AI-generated voices have intensified the challenge of detecting deepfake audio, posing risks for scams and the spread of disinformation. To tackle this issue, we establish the largest public voice dataset to date, named DeepFakeVox-HQ, comprising 1.3 million samples, including 270…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

LARGO: Latent Adversarial Reflection through Gradient Optimization for Jailbreaking LLMs

NeurIPS 2025poster

Efficient red-teaming method to uncover vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial. While recent attacks often use LLMs as optimizers, the discrete language space make gradient-based methods struggle. We introduce LARGO (Latent Adversarial Reflection through Gradient Optimization), a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Learning to Rewrite: Generalized LLM-Generated Text Detection

ACL 2025long

Detecting text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial, yet current detectors often struggle to generalize in open-world settings. We introduce Learning2Rewrite, a novel framework to detect LLM-generated text with exceptional generalization to unseen domains. Capitalized on the finding…

2025

Video Diffusion Models Excel at Tracking Similar-Looking Objects Without Supervision

NeurIPS 2025poster

Distinguishing visually similar objects by their motion remains a critical challenge in computer vision. Although supervised trackers show promise, contemporary self-supervised trackers struggle when visual cues become ambiguous, limiting their scalability and generalization without extensive labele…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

INViTE: INterpret and Control Vision-Language Models with Text Explanations

ICLR 2024poster

Large-scale pre-trained vision foundation models, such as CLIP, have become de facto backbones for various vision tasks. However, due to their black-box nature, understanding the underlying rules behind these models’ predictions and controlling model behaviors have remained open challenges. We prese…

2024

ImageNet-D: Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness on Diffusion Synthetic Object

CVPR 2024highlight

We establish rigorous benchmarks for visual perception robustness. Synthetic images such as ImageNet-C ImageNet-9 and Stylized ImageNet provide specific type of evaluation over synthetic corruptions backgrounds and textures yet those robustness benchmarks are restricted in specified variations and h…

2024

SelfIE: Self-Interpretation of Large Language Model Embeddings

ICML 2024poster

How do large language models (LLMs) obtain their answers? The ability to explain and control an LLM’s reasoning process is key for reliability, transparency, and future model developments. We propose SelfIE (Self-Interpretation of Embeddings), a framework that enables LLMs to interpret their own emb…

2023

Doubly Right Object Recognition: A Why Prompt for Visual Rationales

CVPR 2023poster

Many visual recognition models are evaluated only on their classification accuracy, a metric for which they obtain strong performance. In this paper, we investigate whether computer vision models can also provide correct rationales for their predictions. We propose a "doubly right" object recognitio…

2023

Robust Perception through Equivariance

ICML 2023poster

Deep networks for computer vision are not reliable when they encounter adversarial examples. In this paper, we introduce a framework that uses the dense intrinsic constraints in natural images to robustify inference. By introducing constraints at inference time, we can shift the burden of robustness…

2023

Understanding Zero-shot Adversarial Robustness for Large-Scale Models

ICLR 2023poster

Pretrained large-scale vision-language models like CLIP have exhibited strong generalization over unseen tasks. Yet imperceptible adversarial perturbations can significantly reduce CLIP's performance on new tasks. In this work, we identify and explore the problem of adapting large-scale models for z…

2023

What You Can Reconstruct From a Shadow

CVPR 2023poster

3D reconstruction is a fundamental problem in computer vision, and the task is especially challenging when the object to reconstruct is partially or fully occluded. We introduce a method that uses the shadows cast by an unobserved object in order to infer the possible 3D volumes under occlusion. We…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2022

Causal Transportability for Visual Recognition

CVPR 2022poster

Visual representations underlie object recognition tasks, but they often contain both robust and non-robust features. Our main observation is that image classifiers may perform poorly on out-of-distribution samples because spurious correlations between non-robust features and labels can be changed i…

Cited by 45PDFcodeScholar
2022

Discrete Representations Strengthen Vision Transformer Robustness

ICLR 2022poster

Vision Transformer (ViT) is emerging as the state-of-the-art architecture for image recognition. While recent studies suggest that ViTs are more robust than their convolutional counterparts, our experiments find that ViTs are overly reliant on local features (\eg, nuisances and texture) and fail to…

Cited by 54SourcePDFScholar
2021

Adversarial Attacks Are Reversible With Natural Supervision

ICCV 2021poster

We find that images contain intrinsic structure that enables the reversal of many adversarial attacks. Attack vectors cause not only image classifiers to fail, but also collaterally disrupt incidental structure in the image. We demonstrate that modifying the attacked image to restore the natural str…

Cited by 68PDFcodeScholar
2021

Generative Interventions for Causal Learning

CVPR 2021poster

We introduce a framework for learning robust visual representations that generalize to new viewpoints, backgrounds, and scene contexts. Discriminative models often learn naturally occurring spurious correlations, which cause them to fail on images outside of the training distribution. In this paper,…

Cited by 67PDFcodeScholar
2020

Multitask Learning Strengthens Adversarial Robustness

ECCV 2020poster

Although deep networks achieve strong accuracy on a range of computer vision benchmarks, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where imperceptible input perturbations fool the network. We present both theoretical and empirical analyses that connect the adversarial robustness of a model to t…

2019

Metric Learning for Adversarial Robustness

NeurIPS 2019poster

Deep networks are well-known to be fragile to adversarial attacks. We conduct an empirical analysis of deep representations under the state-of-the-art attack method called PGD, and find that the attack causes the internal representation to shift closer to the ``false'' class. Motivated by this obser…