54 accepted papers
Robotic navigation in complex environments remains a critical research challenge. Traditional navigation focuses on optimal trajectory generation within free space, struggling in environments lacking viable paths to the goal, such as disaster zones or cluttered warehouses. To address this gap, we pr…
Artificial and biological systems may evolve similar computational solutions despite fundamental differences in architecture and learning mechanisms—a form of convergent evolution. We provide large-scale evidence for this phenomenon through comprehensive analysis of alignment between human brain act…
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising direction for energy-efficient and brain-inspired computing, yet their vulnerability to adversarial perturbations remains poorly understood. In this work, we revisit the adversarial robustness of SNNs through the lens of temporal ensembling, treating
The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical for their safe and effective deployment across diverse user populations. However, existing benchmarks often neglect cultural and demographic diversity, leading to limited understanding of how value alignment generalizes glob
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models such as OpenVLA, Octo, and π0 have shown strong generalization by leveraging large-scale demonstrations, yet their performance is still fundamentally constrained by the quality and coverage of supervised data. Reinforcement learning (RL) therefore provides a promi…
Ensuring Large Language Model (LLM) safety remains challenging due to the absence of universal standards and reliable content validators, making it difficult to obtain effective training signals. We discover that aligned models already possess robust internal safety beliefs: they consistently produc…
In recent years, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have achieved remarkable progress, with Spiking Transformers emerging as a promising architecture for energy-efficient sequence modeling. However, existing Spiking Transformers still lack a principled mechanism for effective temporal fusion, limiting t…
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) utilize spike-based activations to mimic the brain's energy-efficient information processing. However, the binary and discontinuous nature of spike activations causes vanishing gradients, making adversarial robustness evaluation via gradient descent unreliable. While i
Foundation models (FMs) provide societal benefits but also amplify risks. Governments, companies, and researchers have proposed regulatory frameworks, acceptable use policies, and safety benchmarks in response. However, existing public benchmarks often define safety categories based on previous lite…
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, security and safety evaluation are crucial. While current red teaming approaches have made strides in assessing LLM vulnerabilities, they often rely heavily on human input and lack comprehensive coverage of emerging attack vectors. This pa…
The emergence and growing popularity of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significant potential to enhance various aspects of daily life, from improving communication to facilitating learning and problem-solving. Mobile phones, as essential daily companions, represent the most effective…
The hierarchical architecture has become a mainstream design paradigm for Vision Transformers (ViTs), with Patch Merging serving as the pivotal component that transforms a columnar architecture into a hierarchical one. Drawing inspiration from the brain's ability to integrate global and local inform
Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS) capture event data with high temporal resolution and low power consumption, presenting a more efficient solution for visual processing in dynamic and real-time scenarios compared to conventional video capture methods. Event data augmentation serves as an essential method…
As large language models (LLMs) become integral to various applications, ensuring both their safety and utility is paramount. Jailbreak attacks, which manipulate LLMs into generating harmful content, pose significant challenges to this balance. Existing defenses, such as prompt engineering and safet…
The evolution of the human brain has led to the development of complex synaptic plasticity, enabling dynamic adaptation to a constantly evolving world. This progress inspires our exploration into a new paradigm for Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs): a Plasticity-Driven Learning Framework (PDLF). This p…
Semantic retrieval is crucial for modern applications yet remains underexplored in current research. Existing datasets are limited to single languages, single images, or singular retrieval conditions, often failing to fully exploit the expressive capacity of visual information as evidenced by maint…
Multimodal foundation models (MMFMs) play a crucial role in various applications, including autonomous driving, healthcare, and virtual assistants. However, several studies have revealed vulnerabilities in these models, such as generating unsafe content by text-to-image models. Existing benchmarks o…
Anti-backdoor learning, aiming to train clean models directly from poisoned datasets, serves as an important defense method for backdoor attack. However, existing methods usually fail to recover backdoored samples to their original, correct labels and suffer from poor generalization to large pre-tra…
Evaluating aligned large language models' (LLMs) ability to recognize and reject unsafe user requests is crucial for safe, policy-compliant deployments. Existing evaluation efforts, however, face three limitations that we address with **SORRY-Bench**, our proposed benchmark. **First**, existing meth…
Spiking Transformers have recently emerged as promising architectures for combining the efficiency of spiking neural networks with the representational power of self-attention. However, the lack of standardized implementations, evaluation pipelines, and consistent design choices has hindered fair co…
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) hold promise for energy-efficient, biologically inspired computing. We identify substantial information loss during spike transmission, linked to temporal dependencies in traditional Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons--a key factor potentially limiting SNN performa…
Human beings often experience stress, which can significantly influence their performance. This study explores whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit stress responses similar to those of humans and whether their performance fluctuates under different stress-inducing prompts. To investigate thi…
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are rich in spatio-temporal dynamics and are suitable for processing event-based neuromorphic data. However, event-based datasets are usually less annotated than static datasets. This small data scale makes SNNs prone to overfitting and limits their performance. In or…
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been widely praised for their high energy efficiency and immense potential. However comprehensive research that critically contrasts and correlates SNNs with quantized Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) remains scant often leading to skewed comparisons lacking fair…
Safety backdoor attacks in large language models (LLMs) enable harmful behaviors to be stealthily triggered while evading detection during normal interactions. The high dimensionality of the trigger search space and the diverse range of potential malicious behaviors in LLMs make this a critical open…
Soft pneumatic actuators often struggle to achieve both a high degree of freedom and high bending stiffness simultaneously. In this letter, we present a bionic soft pneumatic actuator inspired by the intricate musculature of the elephant trunk, which employs a dual actuation mode of transverse-longi
To address issues of group-level fairness in machine learning, it is natural to adjust model parameters based on specific fairness objectives over a sensitive-attributed validation set. Such an adjustment procedure can be cast within a meta-learning framework. However, naive integration of fairness…
Optimizing large language models (LLMs) for downstream use cases often involves the customization of pre-trained LLMs through further fine-tuning. Meta's open-source release of Llama models and OpenAI's APIs for fine-tuning GPT-3.5 Turbo on customized datasets accelerate this trend. But, what are th…
Most traditional AI safety research views models as machines and centers on algorithm-focused attacks developed by security experts. As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly common and competent, non-expert users can also impose risks during daily interactions. Observing this, we shift th…
Class-incremental object detection (CIOD) is a real-world desired capability, requiring an object detector to continuously adapt to new tasks without forgetting learned ones, with the main challenge being catastrophic forgetting. Many methods based on distillation and replay have been proposed to al…
Image matching and object detection are two fundamental and challenging tasks, while many related applications consider them two individual tasks (i.e. task-individual). In this paper, a collaborative framework called MatchDet (i.e. task-collaborative) is proposed for image matching and object detec…
Decoding non-invasive brain recordings is pivotal for advancing our understanding of human cognition but faces challenges due to individual differences and complex neural signal representations. Traditional methods often require customized models and extensive trials, lacking interpretability in vis…
Independent evaluation and red teaming are critical for identifying the risks posed by generative AI systems. However, the terms of service and enforcement strategies used by prominent AI companies to deter model misuse have disincentives on good faith safety evaluations. This causes some researcher…
With the rapidly increasing capabilities and adoption of code agents for AI-assisted coding and software development, safety and security concerns, such as generating or executing malicious code, have become significant barriers to the real-world deployment of these agents. To provide comprehensive…
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities across various tasks in different domains. However, the emergence of biases and the potential for generating harmful content in LLMs, particularly under malicious inputs, pose significant challenges. Current m…
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), as the third generation of neural networks, have gained prominence for their biological plausibility and computational efficiency, especially in processing diverse datasets. The integration of attention mechanisms, inspired by advancements in neural network architectu…
The prevalence of violence in daily life poses significant threats to individuals' physical and mental well-being. Using surveillance cameras in public spaces has proven effective in proactively deterring and preventing such incidents. However, concerns regarding privacy invasion have emerged due to…
Children possess the ability to learn multiple cognitive tasks sequentially, which is a major challenge toward the long-term goal of artificial general intelligence. Existing continual learning frameworks are usually applicable to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and lack the exploration on more brain-in…
Traditionally, data valuation is posed as a problem of equitably splitting the validation performance of a learning algorithm among the training data. As a result, the calculated data values depend on many design choices of the underlying learning algorithm. However, this dependence is undesirable f…
Data-free knowledge distillation (KD) helps transfer knowledge from a pre-trained model (known as the teacher model) to a smaller model (known as the student model) without access to the original training data used for training the teacher model. However, the security of the synthetic or out-of-dist…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of certifying neural network robustness against universal perturbations (UPs), which have been widely used in universal adversarial attacks and backdoor attacks. Existing robustness certification methods aim to provide robustness guarantees for each sample w…
Image generation techniques have been gaining increasing attention recently, but concerns have been raised about the potential misuse and intellectual property (IP) infringement associated with image generation models. It is, therefore, necessary to analyze the origin of images by inferring if a spe…
We propose a minimax formulation for removing backdoors from a given poisoned model based on a small set of clean data. This formulation encompasses much of prior work on backdoor removal. We propose the Implicit Backdoor Adversarial Unlearning (I-BAU) algorithm to solve the minimax. Unlike previous…
Previous works have validated that text generation APIs can be stolen through imitation attacks, causing IP violations. In order to protect the IP of text generation APIs, recent work has introduced a watermarking algorithm and utilized the null-hypothesis test as a post-hoc ownership verification o…
Spiking neural network (SNN), as a brain-inspired energy-efficient neural network, has attracted the interest of researchers. While the training of spiking neural networks is still an open problem. One effective way is to map the weight of trained ANN to SNN to achieve high reasoning ability. Howeve…
3D object detection from point clouds data has become an indispensable part in autonomous driving. Previous works for processing point clouds lie in either projection or voxelization. However, projection-based methods suffer from information loss while voxelization-based methods bring huge computati…
Accurate 3D object detection from point clouds has become a crucial component in autonomous driving. However, the volumetric representations and the projection methods in previous works fail to establish the relationships between the local point sets. In this paper, we propose Sparse Voxel-Graph Att…
"Few-Shot Learning (FSL) alleviates the data shortage challenge via embedding discriminative target-aware features among plenty seen (base) and few unseen (novel) labeled samples. Most feature embedding modules in recent FSL methods are specially designed for corresponding learning tasks (e.g., clas…
Watermarking has become the tendency in protecting the intellectual property of DNN models. Recent works, from the adversary's perspective, attempted to subvert watermarking mechanisms by designing watermark removal attacks. However, these attacks mainly adopted sophisticated fine-tuning techniques,…
Extremely noisy low light enhancement suffers from high-level noise, loss of texture detail, and color degradation. When recovering color or illumination for images taken in a dark environment, the challenge for networks is how to balance the enhancement for noise and texture details for a good visu…
Backdoor attacks have been considered a severe security threat to deep learning. Such attacks can make models perform abnormally on inputs with predefined triggers and still retain state-of-the-art performance on clean data. While backdoor attacks have been thoroughly investigated in the image domai…
Gait recognition plays a vital role in human identification since gait is a unique biometric feature that can be perceived at a distance. Although existing gait recognition methods can learn gait features from gait sequences in different ways, the performance of gait recognition suffers from insuffi…
Deep neural network based methods have made a significant breakthrough in salient object detection. However, they are typically limited to input images with low resolutions (400x400 pixels or less). Little effort has been made to train neural networks to directly handle salient object segmentation i…
In this paper, a visual saliency detection model based on tensor sparse reconstruction for images is proposed. This algorithm measures saliency value of image regions by the reconstruction residual and performs better on color images than current sparse models. Current sparse models treat a color im…