arXiv subjects

Jian Liang

Publications and source records attributed to Jian Liang.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Uni-Layout: Integrating Human Feedback in Unified Layout Generation and Evaluation

Layout generation plays a crucial role in enhancing both user experience and design efficiency. However, current approaches suffer from task-specific generation capabilities and perceptually misaligned evaluation metrics, leading to limited applicability and ineffective measurement. In this paper, we propose \textit{Uni-Layout}, a novel framework that achieves unified generation, human-mimicking evaluation and alignment between the two. For universal generation, we incorporate various layout tasks into a single taxonomy and develop a unified generator that handles background or element contents constrained tasks via natural language prompts. To introduce human feedback for the effective evaluation of layouts, we build \textit{Layout-HF100k}, the first large-scale human feedback dataset with 100,000 expertly annotated layouts. Based on \textit{Layout-HF100k}, we introduce a human-mimicking evaluator that integrates visual and geometric information, employing a Chain-of-Thought mechanism to conduct qualitative assessments alongside a confidence estimation module to yield quantitative measurements. For better alignment between the generator and the evaluator, we integrate them into a cohesive system by adopting Dynamic-Margin Preference Optimization (DMPO), which dynamically adjusts margins based on preference strength to better align with human judgments. Extensive experiments show that \textit{Uni-Layout} significantly outperforms both task-specific and general-purpose methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/JD-GenX/Uni-Layout.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Learning Time-Aware Causal Representation for Model Generalization in Evolving Domains

Endowing deep models with the ability to generalize in dynamic scenarios is of vital significance for real-world deployment, given the continuous and complex changes in data distribution. Recently, evolving domain generalization (EDG) has emerged to address distribution shifts over time, aiming to capture evolving patterns for improved model generalization. However, existing EDG methods may suffer from spurious correlations by modeling only the dependence between data and targets across domains, creating a shortcut between task-irrelevant factors and the target, which hinders generalization. To this end, we design a time-aware structural causal model (SCM) that incorporates dynamic causal factors and the causal mechanism drifts, and propose \textbf{S}tatic-D\textbf{YN}amic \textbf{C}ausal Representation Learning (\textbf{SYNC}), an approach that effectively learns time-aware causal representations. Specifically, it integrates specially designed information-theoretic objectives into a sequential VAE framework which captures evolving patterns, and produces the desired representations by preserving intra-class compactness of causal factors both across and within domains. Moreover, we theoretically show that our method can yield the optimal causal predictor for each time domain. Results on both synthetic and real-world datasets exhibit that SYNC can achieve superior temporal generalization performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Personalized Federated Learning via Dual-Prompt Optimization and Cross Fusion

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across decentralized clients without sharing local data, but is challenged by heterogeneity in data, computation, and communication. Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), with their strong generalization and lightweight tuning via prompts, offer a promising solution. However, existing federated prompt-learning methods rely only on text prompts and overlook joint label-domain distribution shifts. In this paper, we propose a personalized FL framework based on dual-prompt learning and cross fusion, termed pFedDC. Specifically, each client maintains both global and local prompts across vision and language modalities: global prompts capture common knowledge shared across the federation, while local prompts encode client-specific semantics and domain characteristics. Meanwhile, a cross-fusion module is designed to adaptively integrate prompts from different levels, enabling the model to generate personalized representations aligned with each client's unique data distribution. Extensive experiments across nine datasets with various types of heterogeneity show that pFedDC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Harmonizing and Merging Source Models for CLIP-based Domain Generalization

CLIP-based domain generalization aims to improve model generalization to unseen domains by leveraging the powerful zero-shot classification capabilities of CLIP and multiple source datasets. Existing methods typically train a single model across multiple source domains to capture domain-shared information. However, this paradigm inherently suffers from two types of conflicts: 1) sample conflicts, arising from noisy samples and extreme domain shifts among sources; and 2) optimization conflicts, stemming from competition and trade-offs during multi-source training. Both hinder the generalization and lead to suboptimal solutions. Recent studies have shown that model merging can effectively mitigate the competition of multi-objective optimization and improve generalization performance. Inspired by these findings, we propose Harmonizing and Merging (HAM), a novel source model merging framework for CLIP-based domain generalization. During the training process of the source models, HAM enriches the source samples without conflicting samples, and harmonizes the update directions of all models. Then, a redundancy-aware historical model merging method is introduced to effectively integrate knowledge across all source models. HAM comprehensively consolidates source domain information while enabling mutual enhancement among source models, ultimately yielding a final model with optimal generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments on five widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Test-Time Immunization: A Universal Defense Framework Against Jailbreaks for (Multimodal) Large Language Models

While (multimodal) large language models (LLMs) have attracted widespread attention due to their exceptional capabilities, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Various defense methods are proposed to defend against jailbreak attacks, however, they are often tailored to specific types of jailbreak attacks, limiting their effectiveness against diverse adversarial strategies. For instance, rephrasing-based defenses are effective against text adversarial jailbreaks but fail to counteract image-based attacks. To overcome these limitations, we propose a universal defense framework, termed Test-time IMmunization (TIM), which can adaptively defend against various jailbreak attacks in a self-evolving way. Specifically, TIM initially trains a gist token for efficient detection, which it subsequently applies to detect jailbreak activities during inference. When jailbreak attempts are identified, TIM implements safety fine-tuning using the detected jailbreak instructions paired with refusal answers. Furthermore, to mitigate potential performance degradation in the detector caused by parameter updates during safety fine-tuning, we decouple the fine-tuning process from the detection module. Extensive experiments on both LLMs and multimodal LLMs demonstrate the efficacy of TIM.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Backdoor Cleaning without External Guidance in MLLM Fine-tuning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in fine-tuning-as-a-service (FTaaS) settings, where user-submitted datasets adapt general-purpose models to downstream tasks. This flexibility, however, introduces serious security risks, as malicious fine-tuning can implant backdoors into MLLMs with minimal effort. In this paper, we observe that backdoor triggers systematically disrupt cross-modal processing by causing abnormal attention concentration on non-semantic regions--a phenomenon we term attention collapse. Based on this insight, we propose Believe Your Eyes (BYE), a data filtering framework that leverages attention entropy patterns as self-supervised signals to identify and filter backdoor samples. BYE operates via a three-stage pipeline: (1) extracting attention maps using the fine-tuned model, (2) computing entropy scores and profiling sensitive layers via bimodal separation, and (3) performing unsupervised clustering to remove suspicious samples. Unlike prior defenses, BYE equires no clean supervision, auxiliary labels, or model modifications. Extensive experiments across various datasets, models, and diverse trigger types validate BYE's effectiveness: it achieves near-zero attack success rates while maintaining clean-task performance, offering a robust and generalizable solution against backdoor threats in MLLMs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

From Local Details to Global Context: Advancing Vision-Language Models with Attention-Based Selection

Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), e.g., CLIP, demonstrate impressive zero-shot capabilities on downstream tasks. Prior research highlights the crucial role of visual augmentation techniques, like random cropping, in alignment with fine-grained class descriptions generated by large language models (LLMs), significantly enhancing zero-shot performance by incorporating multi-view information. However, the inherent randomness of these augmentations can inevitably introduce background artifacts and cause models to overly focus on local details, compromising global semantic understanding. To address these issues, we propose an \textbf{A}ttention-\textbf{B}ased \textbf{S}election (\textbf{ABS}) method from local details to global context, which applies attention-guided cropping in both raw images and feature space, supplement global semantic information through strategic feature selection. Additionally, we introduce a soft matching technique to effectively filter LLM descriptions for better alignment. \textbf{ABS} achieves state-of-the-art performance on out-of-distribution generalization and zero-shot classification tasks. Notably, \textbf{ABS} is training-free and even rivals few-shot and test-time adaptation methods. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/BIT-DA/ABS}{\textcolor{darkgreen}{https://github.com/BIT-DA/ABS}}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

AUTO: Adaptive Outlier Optimization for Test-Time OOD Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to detect test samples that do not fall into any training in-distribution (ID) classes. Prior efforts focus on regularizing models with ID data only, largely underperforming counterparts that utilize auxiliary outliers. However, data safety and privacy make it infeasible to collect task-specific outliers in advance for different scenarios. Besides, using task-irrelevant outliers leads to inferior OOD detection performance. To address the above issue, we present a new setup called test-time OOD detection, which allows the deployed model to utilize real OOD data from the unlabeled data stream during testing. We propose Adaptive Outlier Optimization (AUTO) which allows for continuous adaptation of the OOD detector. Specifically, AUTO consists of three key components: 1) an in-out-aware filter to selectively annotate test samples with pseudo-ID and pseudo-OOD and ingeniously trigger the updating process while encountering each pseudo-OOD sample; 2) a dynamic-updated memory to overcome the catastrophic forgetting led by frequent parameter updates; 3) a prediction-aligning objective to calibrate the rough OOD objective during testing. Extensive experiments show that AUTO significantly improves OOD detection performance over state-of-the-art methods. Besides, evaluations on complicated scenarios (e.g. multi-OOD, time-series OOD) also conduct the superiority of AUTO.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Do We Really Need Curated Malicious Data for Safety Alignment in Multi-modal Large Language Models?

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress, yet their safety alignment remains limited. Typically, current open-source MLLMs rely on the alignment inherited from their language module to avoid harmful generations. However, the lack of safety measures specifically designed for multi-modal inputs creates an alignment gap, leaving MLLMs vulnerable to vision-domain attacks such as typographic manipulation. Current methods utilize a carefully designed safety dataset to enhance model defense capability, while the specific knowledge or patterns acquired from the high-quality dataset remain unclear. Through comparison experiments, we find that the alignment gap primarily arises from data distribution biases, while image content, response quality, or the contrastive behavior of the dataset makes little contribution to boosting multi-modal safety. To further investigate this and identify the key factors in improving MLLM safety, we propose finetuning MLLMs on a small set of benign instruct-following data with responses replaced by simple, clear rejection sentences. Experiments show that, without the need for labor-intensive collection of high-quality malicious data, model safety can still be significantly improved, as long as a specific fraction of rejection data exists in the finetuning set, indicating the security alignment is not lost but rather obscured during multi-modal pretraining or instruction finetuning. Simply correcting the underlying data bias could narrow the safety gap in the vision domain.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

LoRA-Pro: Are Low-Rank Adapters Properly Optimized?

Low-rank adaptation, also known as LoRA, has emerged as a prominent method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of foundation models. Despite its computational efficiency, LoRA still yields inferior performance compared to full fine-tuning. In this paper, we first uncover a fundamental connection between the optimization processes of LoRA and full fine-tuning: using LoRA for optimization is mathematically equivalent to full fine-tuning using a low-rank gradient for parameter updates. And this low-rank gradient can be expressed in terms of the gradients of the two low-rank matrices in LoRA. Leveraging this insight, we introduce LoRA-Pro, a method that enhances LoRA's performance by strategically adjusting the gradients of these low-rank matrices. This adjustment allows the low-rank gradient to more accurately approximate the full fine-tuning gradient, thereby narrowing the performance gap between LoRA and full fine-tuning. Furthermore, we theoretically derive the optimal solutions for adjusting the gradients of the low-rank matrices, applying them during fine-tuning in LoRA-Pro. We conduct extensive experiments across natural language understanding, dialogue generation, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and image classification tasks, demonstrating that LoRA-Pro substantially improves LoRA's performance, effectively narrowing the gap with full fine-tuning. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/mrflogs/LoRA-Pro.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

LoRASculpt: Sculpting LoRA for Harmonizing General and Specialized Knowledge in Multimodal Large Language Models

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at generalizing across modalities and tasks, effectively adapting them to specific downstream tasks while simultaneously retaining both general and specialized knowledge remains challenging. Although Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is widely used to efficiently acquire specialized knowledge in MLLMs, it introduces substantial harmful redundancy during visual instruction tuning, which exacerbates the forgetting of general knowledge and degrades downstream task performance. To address this issue, we propose LoRASculpt to eliminate harmful redundant parameters, thereby harmonizing general and specialized knowledge. Specifically, under theoretical guarantees, we introduce sparse updates into LoRA to discard redundant parameters effectively. Furthermore, we propose a Conflict Mitigation Regularizer to refine the update trajectory of LoRA, mitigating knowledge conflicts with the pretrained weights. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that even at very high degree of sparsity ($\le$ 5%), our method simultaneously enhances generalization and downstream task performance. This confirms that our approach effectively mitigates the catastrophic forgetting issue and further promotes knowledge harmonization in MLLMs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Triply charmed baryons mass decomposition from lattice QCD

We present the first calculation of the connected scalar matrix element and the momentum fraction of charm quark within the$\frac{3}{2}^{+}$ and $\frac{3}{2}^{-}$triply charmed baryons on lattice QCD. The results are based on overlap valence fermions on two ensembles of $N_f=2+1$ domain wall fermion configurations with two lattice spacings. The corresponding sea quark pion masses are $300$ MeV and $278$ MeV. The separated contributions to the triply charmed baryon mass are derived through the decomposition of the QCD energy-momentum tensor. The contribution of the connected charm quark matrix element to the triply charmed baryon is about 3/2 times that of the charmonium. And it contributes almost 70% of the total mass. The mass splitting of $\frac{3}{2}^{+}$ and $\frac{3}{2}^{-}$triply charmed baryons is mainly from $\langle H_{E}\rangle$ of the QCD energy-momentum tensor. A mass decomposition from the quark model is also studied for comparison.

hep-lat↗

arXiv2025

Keeping Yourself is Important in Downstream Tuning Multimodal Large Language Model

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate visual and linguistic reasoning to address complex tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. While MLLMs demonstrate remarkable versatility, MLLMs appears limited performance on special applications. But tuning MLLMs for downstream tasks encounters two key challenges: Task-Expert Specialization, where distribution shifts between pre-training and target datasets constrain target performance, and Open-World Stabilization, where catastrophic forgetting erases the model general knowledge. In this work, we systematically review recent advancements in MLLM tuning methodologies, classifying them into three paradigms: (I) Selective Tuning, (II) Additive Tuning, and (III) Reparameterization Tuning. Furthermore, we benchmark these tuning strategies across popular MLLM architectures and diverse downstream tasks to establish standardized evaluation analysis and systematic tuning principles. Finally, we highlight several open challenges in this domain and propose future research directions. To facilitate ongoing progress in this rapidly evolving field, we provide a public repository that continuously tracks developments: https://github.com/WenkeHuang/Awesome-MLLM-Tuning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report

We present DeepSeek-V3, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model with 671B total parameters with 37B activated for each token. To achieve efficient inference and cost-effective training, DeepSeek-V3 adopts Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE architectures, which were thoroughly validated in DeepSeek-V2. Furthermore, DeepSeek-V3 pioneers an auxiliary-loss-free strategy for load balancing and sets a multi-token prediction training objective for stronger performance. We pre-train DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning stages to fully harness its capabilities. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that DeepSeek-V3 outperforms other open-source models and achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models. Despite its excellent performance, DeepSeek-V3 requires only 2.788M H800 GPU hours for its full training. In addition, its training process is remarkably stable. Throughout the entire training process, we did not experience any irrecoverable loss spikes or perform any rollbacks. The model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

SayAnything: Audio-Driven Lip Synchronization with Conditional Video Diffusion

Recent advances in diffusion models have led to significant progress in audio-driven lip synchronization. However, existing methods typically rely on constrained audio-visual alignment priors or multi-stage learning of intermediate representations to force lip motion synthesis. This leads to complex training pipelines and limited motion naturalness. In this paper, we present SayAnything, a conditional video diffusion framework that directly synthesizes lip movements from audio input while preserving speaker identity. Specifically, we propose three specialized modules including identity preservation module, audio guidance module, and editing control module. Our novel design effectively balances different condition signals in the latent space, enabling precise control over appearance, motion, and region-specific generation without requiring additional supervision signals or intermediate representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SayAnything generates highly realistic videos with improved lip-teeth coherence, enabling unseen characters to say anything, while effectively generalizing to animated characters.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Protecting Model Adaptation from Trojans in the Unlabeled Data

Model adaptation tackles the distribution shift problem with a pre-trained model instead of raw data, which has become a popular paradigm due to its great privacy protection. Existing methods always assume adapting to a clean target domain, overlooking the security risks of unlabeled samples. This paper for the first time explores the potential trojan attacks on model adaptation launched by well-designed poisoning target data. Concretely, we provide two trigger patterns with two poisoning strategies for different prior knowledge owned by attackers. These attacks achieve a high success rate while maintaining the normal performance on clean samples in the test stage. To defend against such backdoor injection, we propose a plug-and-play method named DiffAdapt, which can be seamlessly integrated with existing adaptation algorithms. Experiments across commonly used benchmarks and adaptation methods demonstrate the effectiveness of DiffAdapt. We hope this work will shed light on the safety of transfer learning with unlabeled data.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Exploring Structured Semantic Priors Underlying Diffusion Score for Test-time Adaptation

Capitalizing on the complementary advantages of generative and discriminative models has always been a compelling vision in machine learning, backed by a growing body of research. This work discloses the hidden semantic structure within score-based generative models, unveiling their potential as effective discriminative priors. Inspired by our theoretical findings, we propose DUSA to exploit the structured semantic priors underlying diffusion score to facilitate the test-time adaptation of image classifiers or dense predictors. Notably, DUSA extracts knowledge from a single timestep of denoising diffusion, lifting the curse of Monte Carlo-based likelihood estimation over timesteps. We demonstrate the efficacy of our DUSA in adapting a wide variety of competitive pre-trained discriminative models on diverse test-time scenarios. Additionally, a thorough ablation study is conducted to dissect the pivotal elements in DUSA. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/BIT-DA/DUSA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Prototypical Distillation and Debiased Tuning for Black-box Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to transfer knowledge from a related, label-rich source domain to an unlabeled target domain, thereby circumventing the high costs associated with manual annotation. Recently, there has been growing interest in source-free domain adaptation, a paradigm in which only a pre-trained model, rather than the labeled source data, is provided to the target domain. Given the potential risk of source data leakage via model inversion attacks, this paper introduces a novel setting called black-box domain adaptation, where the source model is accessible only through an API that provides the predicted label along with the corresponding confidence value for each query. We develop a two-step framework named $\textbf{Pro}$totypical $\textbf{D}$istillation and $\textbf{D}$ebiased tun$\textbf{ing}$ ($\textbf{ProDDing}$). In the first step, ProDDing leverages both the raw predictions from the source model and prototypes derived from the target domain as teachers to distill a customized target model. In the second step, ProDDing keeps fine-tuning the distilled model by penalizing logits that are biased toward certain classes. Empirical results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ProDDing outperforms existing black-box domain adaptation methods. Moreover, in the case of hard-label black-box domain adaptation, where only predicted labels are available, ProDDing achieves significant improvements over these methods. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/tim-learn/ProDDing/}.

cs.LG↗