arXiv subjects

Liyi Cai

Publications and source records attributed to Liyi Cai.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

DAVSP: Safety Alignment for Large Vision-Language Models via Deep Aligned Visual Safety Prompt

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved impressive progress across various applications but remain vulnerable to malicious queries that exploit the visual modality. Existing alignment approaches typically fail to resist malicious queries while preserving utility on benign ones effectively. To address these challenges, we propose Deep Aligned Visual Safety Prompt (DAVSP), which is built upon two key innovations. First, we introduce the Visual Safety Prompt, which appends a trainable padding region around the input image. It preserves visual features and expands the optimization space. Second, we propose Deep Alignment, a novel approach to train the visual safety prompt through supervision in the model's activation space. It enhances the inherent ability of LVLMs to perceive malicious queries, achieving deeper alignment than prior works. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks on two representative LVLMs demonstrate that DAVSP effectively resists malicious queries while preserving benign input utility. Furthermore, DAVSP exhibits great cross-model generation ability. Ablation studies further reveal that both the Visual Safety Prompt and Deep Alignment are essential components, jointly contributing to its overall effectiveness. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhangyitonggg/DAVSP.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

AI-Driven Self-Evolving Software: A Promising Path Toward Software Automation

Software automation has long been a central goal of software engineering, striving for software development that proceeds without human intervention. Recent efforts have leveraged Artificial Intelligence (AI) to advance software automation with notable progress. However, current AI functions primarily as assistants to human developers, leaving software development still dependent on explicit human intervention. This raises a fundamental question: Can AI move beyond its role as an assistant to become a core component of software, thereby enabling genuine software automation? To investigate this vision, we introduce AI-Driven Self-Evolving Software, a new form of software that evolves continuously through direct interaction with users. We demonstrate the feasibility of this idea with a lightweight prototype built on a multi-agent architecture that autonomously interprets user requirements, generates and validates code, and integrates new functionalities. Case studies across multiple representative scenarios show that the prototype can reliably construct and reuse functionality, providing early evidence that such software systems can scale to more sophisticated applications and pave the way toward truly automated software development. We make code and cases in this work publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/live-software.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Environmental Injection Attacks against GUI Agents in Realistic Dynamic Environments

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents are increasingly deployed to interact with online web services, yet their exposure to open-world content renders them vulnerable to Environmental Injection Attacks (EIAs). In these attacks, an attacker can inject crafted triggers into website to manipulate the behavior of GUI agents used by other users. In this paper, we find that most existing EIA studies fall short of realism. In particular, they fail to capture the dynamic nature of real-world web content, often assuming that a trigger's on-screen position and surrounding visual context remain largely consistent between training and testing. To better reflect practice, we introduce a realistic dynamic-environment threat model in which the attacker is a regular user and the trigger is embedded within a dynamically changing environment. Under this threat model, existing approaches largely fail, suggesting that their effectiveness in exposing GUI agent vulnerabilities has been substantially overestimated. To expose the hidden vulnerabilities of existing GUI agents effectively, we propose Chameleon, an attack framework with two key novelties designed for dynamic environments. (1) To synthesize more realistic training data, we introduce LLM-Driven Environment Simulation, which automatically generates diverse, high-fidelity webpage simulations that mimic the variability of real-world dynamic environments. (2) To optimize the trigger more effectively, we introduce Attention Black Hole, which converts attention weights into explicit supervisory signals. This mechanism encourages the agent to remain insensitive to irrelevant surrounding content, thereby improving robustness in dynamic environments. We evaluate Chameleon on six realistic websites and four representative LVLM-powered GUI agents, where it significantly outperforms existing methods.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Autoregression: An Empirical Study of Diffusion Large Language Models for Code Generation

LLMs have become the mainstream approaches to code generation. Existing LLMs mainly employ autoregressive generation, i.e. generating code token-by-token from left to right. However, the underlying autoregressive generation has two limitations in code generation. First, autoregressive LLMs only generate a token at each step, showing low efficiency in practice. Second, programming is a non-sequential process involving back-and-forth editing, while autoregressive LLMs only employ the left-to-right generation order. These two intrinsic limitations hinder the further development of LLMs in code generation. Recently, diffusion LLMs have emerged as a promising alternative. Diffusion LLMs address the above limitations with two advances, including multi-token prediction (i.e. generating multiple tokens at each step) and flexible generation order (i.e. flexibly determining which positions to generate tokens). However, there is no systematic study exploring diffusion LLMs in code generation. To bridge the knowledge gap, we present the first empirical study of diffusion LLMs for code generation. Our study involves 9 representative diffusion LLMs and conduct experiments on 4 widely used benchmarks. Based on the results, we summarize the following findings. (1) Existing diffusion LLMs are competitive with autoregressive LLMs with similar sizes. (2) Diffusion LLMs have a stronger length extrapolation ability than autoregressive LLMs and perform better in long code understanding. (3) We explore factors impacting the effectiveness and efficiency of diffusion LLMs, and provide practical guidance. (4) We discuss several promising further directions to improve diffusion LLMs on code generation. We open-source all source code, data, and results to facilitate the following research. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhangyitonggg/dllm4code.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

A Few-Shot Metric Learning Method with Dual-Channel Attention for Cross-Modal Same-Neuron Identification

In neuroscience research, achieving single-neuron matching across different imaging modalities is critical for understanding the relationship between neuronal structure and function. However, modality gaps and limited annotations present significant challenges. We propose a few-shot metric learning method with a dual-channel attention mechanism and a pretrained vision transformer to enable robust cross-modal neuron identification. The local and global channels extract soma morphology and fiber context, respectively, and a gating mechanism fuses their outputs. To enhance the model's fine-grained discrimination capability, we introduce a hard sample mining strategy based on the MultiSimilarityMiner algorithm, along with the Circle Loss function. Experiments on two-photon and fMOST datasets demonstrate superior Top-K accuracy and recall compared to existing methods. Ablation studies and t-SNE visualizations validate the effectiveness of each module. The method also achieves a favorable trade-off between accuracy and training efficiency under different fine-tuning strategies. These results suggest that the proposed approach offers a promising technical solution for accurate single-cell level matching and multimodal neuroimaging integration.

cs.CV↗