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Ranjie Duan

21 accepted papers

2026

Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Dynamic Reward Scaling for LLM Alignment

ICLR 2026poster

Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based--train a reward model on preference pairs and optimize with reinforcement learning (RL)--or reward-free--directly fine-tune on ranked outputs. Recent research show that well-tuned reward…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MESA: Improving MoE Safety Alignment via Decentralized Expertise

ICML 2026poster

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as a popular paradigm for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling greater capacity with reduced computational cost by dynamically routing inputs to the most relevant experts based on learned patterns. However, this also introduces a critical…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Obscure but Effective: Classical Chinese Jailbreak Prompt Optimization via Bio-Inspired Search

ICLR 2026poster

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used, their security risks have drawn increasing attention. Existing research reveals that LLMs are highly susceptible to jailbreak attacks, with effectiveness varying across language contexts. This paper investigates the role of classical Chinese in…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Phantom: Physical Object Interactions as Dynamic Triggers for NMS-Exploited Backdoors

CVPR 2026

Backdoor attacks pose potential threats to object detection models, highlighting the importance of studying their security. However, existing backdoor attacks mainly rely on trigger-specific intrinsic features, which limits their practicality in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a nove

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Position: Preparing for AI Systems That Deceive Developers

ICML 2026poster

AI systems may exhibit deceptive behaviors that mislead developers about their capabilities, propensities, or actions. Such deception can take distinct forms across the development lifecycle: training subversion, evaluation gaming, and control evasion. We argue that the AI community should prioritiz…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Pruning as a Cooperative Game: Surrogate-Assisted Layer Contribution Estimation for Large Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance across various tasks, their deployment in real-world scenarios is still constrained by high computational demands. Layer-wise pruning, a commonly employed strategy to mitigate inference costs, can partially address this challenge.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Towards Safe Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models via Corrective Intervention

ICLR 2026poster

Although Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have progressed in solving complex problems, their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning often contains harmful content that can persist even when the final responses appear safe. We show that this issue still remains in existing methods which overlook the unique si…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Vulcan: Crafting Compact Class-Specific Vision Transformers For Edge Intelligence

ICLR 2026poster

Large Vision Transformers (ViTs) must often be compressed before they can be deployed on resource-constrained edge devices. However, many edge devices require only part of the *all-classes* knowledge of a pre-trained ViT in their corresponding application scenarios. This is overlooked by existing c…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

DREAM: Disentangling Risks to Enhance Safety Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models

NAACL 2025long

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) pose unique safety challenges due to their integration of visual and textual data, thereby introducing new dimensions of potential attacks and complex risk combinations. In this paper, we begin with a detailed analysis aimed at disentangling risks through ste…

2025

Heuristic-Induced Multimodal Risk Distribution Jailbreak Attack for Multimodal Large Language Models

ICCV 2025poster

With the rapid advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), concerns regarding their security have increasingly captured the attention of both academia and industry. Although MLLMs are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, designing effective jailbreak attacks poses unique challenges, especia…

2025

Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models via Shuffle Inconsistency

ICCV 2025poster

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance and have been put into practical use in commercial applications, but they still have potential safety mechanism vulnerabilities. Jailbreak attacks are red teaming methods that aim to bypass safety mechanisms and discover M…

2025

PBI-Attack: Prior-Guided Bimodal Interactive Black-Box Jailbreak Attack for Toxicity Maximization

EMNLP 2025

Understanding the vulnerabilities of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) to jailbreak attacks is essential for their responsible real-world deployment. Most previous work requires access to model gradients, or is based on human knowledge (prompt engineering) to complete jailbreak, and they hardly c

2025

STAIR: Improving Safety Alignment with Introspective Reasoning

ICML 2025oral

Ensuring the safety and harmlessness of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become equally critical as their performance in applications. However, existing safety alignment methods typically suffer from safety-performance trade-offs and susceptibility to jailbreak attacks, primarily due to their relian…

2025

SeCon-RAG: A Two-Stage Semantic Filtering and Conflict-Free Framework for Trustworthy RAG

NeurIPS 2025poster

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems enhance large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge but are vulnerable to corpus poisoning and contamination attacks, which can compromise output integrity. Existing defenses often apply aggressive filtering, leading to unnecessary loss of valuab…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Improving Adversarial Robust Fairness via Anti-Bias Soft Label Distillation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Adversarial Training (AT) has been widely proved to be an effective method to improve the adversarial robustness against adversarial examples for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). As a variant of AT, Adversarial Robustness Distillation (ARD) has demonstrated its superior performance in improving the robu…

2023

Inequality phenomenon in $l_{\infty}$-adversarial training, and its unrealized threats

ICLR 2023top-25%

The appearance of adversarial examples raises attention from both academia and industry. Along with the attack-defense arms race, adversarial training is the most effective against adversarial examples. However, we find inequality phenomena occur during the $l_{\infty}$-adversarial training, that fe…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2022

Enhance the Visual Representation via Discrete Adversarial Training

NeurIPS 2022accept

Adversarial Training (AT), which is commonly accepted as one of the most effective approaches defending against adversarial examples, can largely harm the standard performance, thus has limited usefulness on industrial-scale production and applications. Surprisingly, this phenomenon is totally oppos…

2021

AdvDrop: Adversarial Attack to DNNs by Dropping Information

ICCV 2021poster

Human can easily recognize visual objects with lost information: even losing most details with only contour reserved, e.g. cartoon. However, in terms of visual perception of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), the ability for recognizing abstract objects (visual objects with lost information) is still a ch…

Cited by 125PDFcodeScholar
2021

Adversarial Laser Beam: Effective Physical-World Attack to DNNs in a Blink

CVPR 2021poster

Though it is well known that the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) degrades under certain light conditions, there exists no study on the threats of light beams emitted from some physical source as adversarial attacker on DNNs in a real-world scenario. In this work, we show by simply using a…

Cited by 173PDFcodeScholar
2020

Adversarial Camouflage: Hiding Physical-World Attacks With Natural Styles

CVPR 2020poster

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. Existing works have mostly focused on either digital adversarial examples created via small and imperceptible perturbations, or physical-world adversarial examples created with large and less realistic distortions that a…

Cited by 282PDFcodeScholar