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Tat-Seng Chua

Publications and source records attributed to Tat-Seng Chua.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Targeted Interpretable Safety Neuron Enhancement for Multilingual Vision-Language Large Models

With the widespread deployment of vision-language large models (VLLMs), their safety alignment faces dual challenges across languages and modalities. Existing methods model multilingual and multimodal safety separately, overlooking coupled risks between low-resource-language instructions and visual contexts, which hinders the detection of cross-lingual and cross-modal harmful intent and the formation of robust safety boundaries. To address this, we propose a neuron-level interpretable safety alignment framework that identifies safety neurons and performs neuron-targeted safety tuning to jointly mitigate multilingual and multimodal risks. Specifically, we compare FFN representations elicited by harmful requests and benign inputs to identify neuron activation strengths associated with safety refusals. Next, we jointly model neuron activations and corresponding down-projection columns to derive neuron-level saliency, separating general multilingual and multimodal neurons from safety neurons responsible for model defense. Finally, neuron-targeted gradient masking restricts parameter updates to the safety subspace spanned by the identified neurons, enabling precise and interpretable safety enhancement. Extensive experiments show that our method enhances multilingual and multimodal safety by tuning only a few safety neurons, while preserving general capabilities.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

One Anchor for All: Unified Multilingual and Multimodal Safety Alignment for LVLMs

As large vision-language models (LVLMs) are deployed globally, the combination of multilingual instructions and visual information makes malicious attacks more covert and sophisticated than ever before. However, existing methods isolate language and modality defenses, which, coupled with the scarcity of safety data and high fine-tuning costs, makes it difficult for models to defend against compound attacks. To address this severe challenge, we propose a neuron-level cross-dimensional safety alignment framework driven by modality- and language-shared safety neurons (MLS-Neurons). First, we identify monolingual and unimodal safety neurons by comparing responses to harmful and benign samples, quantifying functional saliency through activation strength and downstream impact. Then, by intersecting these unimodal neurons within each language, we extract modality-shared safety neurons (MS-Neurons) responsive to both visual and textual risks, bridging the safety representation gap between modalities. Furthermore, using English as a semantic anchor, we intersect MS-Neurons across languages to identify modality- and language-shared safety neurons (MLS-Neurons), serving as key defenses against compound attacks. Finally, we update only this minimal subset of shared neurons (~0.03% of parameters), transferring English-only safety supervision to multilingual and multimodal scenarios. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across diverse multilingual and multimodal safety benchmarks while preserving general utility.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Action Imitation: Learning a Decision-Aware User Simulator for Online Advertising

Recent advances in LLM-based user simulation have shown promise for offline evaluation of recommendation and advertising systems. However, existing simulators typically infer user preferences from single-domain interaction histories and are primarily optimized to reproduce observable actions such as clicks. Consequently, they capture only a partial view of user preferences, while action-only prediction easily induces model shortcuts and limits both the fidelity and diagnostic value of simulation. To address these challenges, we propose DASH, a decision-aware user simulator that jointly generates thinking traces and predicts behavioral actions from heterogeneous cross-domain histories. DASH first introduces a Context Engineering stage that folds heterogeneous cross-domain histories into decision-relevant context, together with prompt optimization for effective reasoning over the folded context. To train a user simulator, DASH distills thinking trajectories from strong LLMs as SFT data, and further tailors a rubric-based reward model that evaluates thinking traces along form, content, and logic for RL training. Combined with the action reward, these signals jointly improve action prediction and thinking quality. Extensive experiments on real-world Tencent advertising data spanning five heterogeneous content domains demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, fidelity, and diagnostic value of DASH.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide

AI-assisted research is crossing a threshold: fully automated systems can now generate research papers for as little as $15, while long-horizon agents can execute experiments, draft manuscripts, and simulate critique with minimal human input. Yet this productivity frontier exposes a deeper integrity problem: under scientific pressure, even frontier LLMs still fabricate results, miss hidden errors, and fail to judge novelty reliably. Studying developments through April 2026, we present an end-to-end analysis of AI across the complete research lifecycle, organized into four epistemological phases: Creation (idea generation, literature review, coding & experiments, tables & figures), Writing (paper writing), Validation (peer review, rebuttal & revision), and Dissemination (posters, slides, videos, social media, project pages, and interactive agents). We identify a sharp, stage-dependent boundary between reliable assistance and unreliable autonomy: AI excels at structured, retrieval-grounded, and tool-mediated tasks, but remains fragile for genuinely novel ideas, research-level experiments, and scientific judgment. Generated ideas often degrade after implementation, research code lags far behind pattern-matching benchmarks, and end-to-end autonomous systems have not yet consistently reached major-venue acceptance standards. We further show that greater automation can obscure rather than eliminate failure modes, making human-governed collaboration the most credible deployment paradigm. Finally, we provide a structured taxonomy, benchmark suite, and tool inventory, cross-stage design principles, and a practitioner-oriented playbook, with resources maintained at our project page.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Autonomous Information Seeking: A Roadmap for Agentic Recommender Systems

The rapid integration of large language model-based agents into recommender systems has driven a shift from static, ranking-based pipelines toward autonomous and interactive systems that can reason, plan, and act. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of this emerging landscape by introducing a unified taxonomy grounded in the level of autonomy and three core paradigms of agentic recommender systems: agent-assisted recommendation, agent-as-recommender, and agent-as-user-simulator. The autonomy framework organizes existing methods along increasing capabilities in proactivity, context awareness, interaction flexibility, and adaptivity. Building on this framework, the survey analyzes how each paradigm adopts different agentic architectures and how agents enhance key components such as profiles, memory, tool use, workflows, and optimization mechanisms. We further examine evaluation methodologies for agentic recommendation, covering automated metrics, LLM-based judging, and simulation-based assessment, and discuss their limitations in capturing reasoning quality, user experience, and system behavior. Beyond existing evaluation protocols, we further discuss unresolved issues in evaluating agentic recommender systems, including trajectory-level assessment, agent contribution analysis, and calibration of user simulation. Lastly, the survey outlines open challenges in lifelong user modeling, contextual abstraction, multimodal alignment, controllability, trustworthiness, privacy, scalability, and efficiency. Together, these analyses establish a unified foundation for understanding the current progress of agentic recommender systems and highlight promising opportunities for developing more autonomous, reliable, and human-aligned recommendation agents.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Decodable Is Not Grounded: A Vision-Ablation Arbiter for VLM Spatial Reasoning

The standard way to read latent knowledge out of a model, a linear probe confirmed by a steering recovery, can systematically overstate what a vision-language model (VLM) actually grounds in the image. We show this on spatial reasoning, where the error is invisible to both probing and steering yet exposed by a one-line causal control: replacing the image with a gray blank. Probes decode the within-axis answer at 73--97% across axes, and a training-free projection lifts a near-chance axis from 59% to 79%, exactly the signature of unlocking latent knowledge. The blank-image arbiter refutes it, revealing three grounding regimes that probing conflates: an axis can be grounded (vision-dependent, correct), a prior (vision-independent, with its decode and its apparent recovery a directional default rather than perception), or, surprisingly, inverted: decodable, causally controllable, but deployed with the wrong sign, so the model scores below chance and the error requires looking. The taxonomy holds across the studied VLMs: in fourteen models spanning six language-model families and 2B--27B, horizontal is grounded, vertical is a prior, and depth is inverted, with the inversion emerging at scale within families. The decode-versus-deploy inversion replicates on seven of eight models across five families, and the minimal edit that re-deploys it varies with geometry: a training-free rotation matches a trained edit on the cleanest model, while distributed inversions need a trained low-rank edit, tracing a per-model correction-complexity spectrum. The cheap, self-calibrating arbiter cleanly separates grounded perception, inverted perception, and prior substitution; we argue it should be a default control for latent-knowledge and steering claims in VLMs.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

CARE: Competence-Aware Reward Shaping for Adaptive Reasoning Length in Video-MLLMs

In multimodal video reasoning, reinforcement learning-based methods typically rely on simplistic and inflexible reasoning-length control strategies that fail to adapt to the model's evolving competence. This mismatch may suppress necessary exploration at early stages, while encouraging redundant reasoning and inefficient decoding once the model becomes more competent. In this paper, we propose CARE, a competence-aware reward shaping framework for adaptive reasoning length optimization in multimodal reasoning. Specifically, CARE maintains a smoothed competence estimate via an exponential moving average of pass rates, and uses it to route training into progressive stages that shift the reward preference from exploration-oriented long-form reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning. To avoid conflating verbosity with intrinsic task complexity, CARE further normalizes reasoning effort with batch-level statistics, and introduces a posterior amplifier to strengthen reward signals for unexpectedly strong performance on historically difficult samples. The proposed mechanism is seamlessly integrated into the GRPO training pipeline and incurs no additional inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple video reasoning and general video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that CARE consistently improves reasoning accuracy, stabilizes reinforcement learning, and significantly enhances token efficiency. Moreover, CARE exhibits a characteristic inverted-U trajectory of reasoning length during training, and yields shorter yet more informative reasoning traces at convergence, indicating effective adaptive allocation of reasoning budget. We provide the source code for our proposed CARE framework and experiments at https://github.com/1Pansy/Video-CARE.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

HumanScale: Egocentric Human Video Can Outperform Real-Robot Data for Embodied Pretraining

Embodied foundation models are expected to benefit from data scaling like large language models, but face a much tighter data bottleneck. Teleoperated real-robot trajectories remain the dominant pretraining source due to their precise action supervision and embodiment alignment, yet their scalability is limited by high collection cost, acquisition difficulty, and low behavioral and environmental diversity. These limitations have sparked interest in egocentric human video as a scalable, substantially lower-cost, and more diverse alternative for embodied model pretraining. However, its effectiveness compared to teleoperated real-robot data remains underexplored. To address this question, we conduct a systematic study comparing egocentric human video and teleoperated real-robot trajectories as pretraining data sources for embodied foundation models, under fixed post-training and validation protocols. Surprisingly, we find that egocentric data, when processed through a carefully designed filtering and labeling pipeline, is not merely a viable substitute for model pretraining but can lead to superior performance. With the same amount of pretraining data, models pretrained on egocentric data achieve a 24% lower validation loss on real-robot action prediction, as well as 52.5% and 90% higher success rates on in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-robot task execution, respectively. This finding verifies a scalable paradigm for embodied foundation models: pretrain on egocentric human video to learn diverse world representations, then adapt with a small amount of labeled real-robot data for action-space alignment. We hope this study encourages broader exploration of egocentric data and offers guidance for data quality assessment before costly robot data collection.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Enhancing Decision-Making with Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Fictitious Play

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated great potential in solving tasks with execution complexity, by distributing subtasks across cooperative agents. However, this divide-and-conquer paradigm falls short on decision-making tasks that are also prevalent in the real world. These tasks require simultaneous reasoning from the stances of all involved stakeholders whose decisions are mutually dependent and thus cannot be solved in isolation. We characterize this challenge as stance entanglement, a form of decision complexity distinct from execution complexity. To address it, we propose Multi-Agent Fictitious Play (MAFP), a novel MAS paradigm that represents stakeholder stances as agents and formulates decision-making as an equilibrium-seeking process. Built on the game-theoretic principle of fictitious play, MAFP iteratively updates each agent's decision by best responding to the empirical mixture of other agents' past decisions. This enables agents to expose and address one another's weaknesses, progressively improving decision quality and robustness. We evaluate MAFP on challenging decision-making tasks that test the capability of deciding strategies for competitive scenarios prior to acting. MAFP outperforms both single-round and multi-round baselines on two complementary metrics, tournament strength and robustness, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing stance entanglement.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Reasoning as Intersection: Consensus-Frame Alignment for Visual Focus in Video-MLLMs

Reinforcement learning has improved the reasoning ability of large language models, but applying outcome-only rewards to video multimodal large language models (Video-MLLMs) provides limited guidance on which visual evidence should support the answer. Inspired by multisensory integration, where consistent cues can enhance the salience and reliability of perceptual estimates, we introduce Consensus Frame GRPO (CF-GRPO), a temporal-annotation-free process-level reward framework for evidence-aware video reasoning. CF-GRPO constructs a consensus frame prior from intrinsic video cues, including temporal coverage, scene-transition cues, and query-conditioned visual relevance. It then computes a model-side frame-use score from visual and response representations and optimizes their agreement through the Consensus Frame Reward (CFR). With salience-aware sparse aggregation and distribution sharpening, CFR provides a high-contrast reward signal without requiring human temporal annotations. Experiments show that VideoCFR achieves competitive performance across complex video reasoning benchmarks and improves several metrics over representative Video-MLLM and RL baselines, while the consensus prior provides an interpretable view of the evidence frames emphasized during training. The implementation is available at https://github.com/1Pansy/VideoCFR.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

An Extensive Benchmark for Single-round and Multi-round Instruction-based Image Editing

In recent years, there have been notable advancements in the area of instruction-based image editing (IIE), which focuses on the automatic alteration of input images using a model. Nevertheless, assessing the effectiveness of these editing models poses a considerable challenge due to the intricate nature of instructions and the wide variety of edits. To tackle this problem, one urgent task in this domain is the development of a robust evaluation framework that can precisely gauge the quality of editing outcomes and offer valuable benchmarks to guide future improvements. To address this challenge, we present a comprehensive evaluation benchmark named I2EBench2.0, designed for single-round and multi-round assessment of IIE models. I2EBench2.0 has four key features: 1) Evaluation Across Single and Multi-rounds: I2EBench2.0 simultaneously evaluates both single-round and multi-round instruction-based edits, assessing the precision and consistency of the edits. 2) Extensive Evaluation Criteria: I2EBench2.0 encompasses a broad range of criteria, evaluating both high-level and low-level aspects of each IIE model. Specifically, it incorporates 16 dimensions for single-round evaluations and 7 for multi-round evaluations. 3) Alignment with Human Judgment: To ensure our benchmark aligns with human evaluation, we conducted a comprehensive user study for each criterion. 4) Research-driven Insights: By analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of current IIE models across all 16 single-round and 7 multi-round dimensions, we provide critical insights aimed at directing future research in this area. We tested eight recently developed IIE models using I2EBench2.0 and derived academic insights through meticulous comparison and analysis. The related code, dataset, and images generated by all IIE models are available on GitHub: https://github.com/cocoshe/I2EBench.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

A Robust Point Cloud Analysis Framework Inspired By Primary Visual Cortex

Despite significant advancements in point cloud analysis, reducing energy consumption and improving robustness remain understudied, largely due to the inherent limitations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the primary visual cortex and propose a Dendritic-Connected Continuous-Coupled Neural Network (DC-CCNN), a novel Brain-Inspired Neural Network (BINN) architecture for point cloud analysis. By combining discrete and continuous encoding, our design replaces traditional Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) with more efficient and robust BINNs. Building upon this framework, we further propose an extended model, DC-CCNN++, to improve robustness under complex corruption conditions. Specifically, we introduce a Neuro-Inspired Robust Modulation-and-Readout Module (NRMR) to enhance feature stability and decision robustness through global-context gain modulation and dual-code evidence integration. We also design a Cortically Inspired Progressive Variability Training (CPVT) strategy, which progressively exposes the model to structured environmental variability while preserving stable clean-sample anchors during training. Experimental results show that DC-CCNN++ improves the performance of brain-inspired networks on point cloud analysis while maintaining performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. Compared with the original DC-CCNN, it achieves stronger results on both classification and part segmentation, and exhibits enhanced robustness against sparsity, occlusion, Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and spatial transformations. With its efficiency, robustness, and biologically grounded design, DC-CCNN++ provides a promising alternative to traditional deep learning methods for point cloud analysis. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DC-CCNNpp-44E3.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

CFALR: Collaborative Filtering-Augmented Large Language Model for Personalized Fashion Outfit Recommendation

Personalized outfit recommendation poses a significant challenge in e-commerce and social media platforms, requiring systems that balance user preferences with aesthetic compatibility. Collaborative filtering (CF) provides a traditional solution for this, but it struggles with data-sparse scenarios and complex user-item-outfit relationships. Meanwhile, existing template-based approaches are constrained by rigid pre-designed structures. To bridge these research gaps, we introduce CFALR (Collaborative Filtering-Augmented Large Language Model for Recommendation), a novel framework that synergizes collaborative filtering with large language models for personalized outfit recommendation. Specifically, CFALR describes user-outfit interactions in natural language and leverages LLMs to capture fashion semantics while employing CF-enhanced embeddings to bridge the semantic space and the collaborative interaction spaces. Our technical contributions include: (1) the first LLM-based architecture specifically designed for personalized outfit recommendation, (2) a CF-augmented generative mechanism that efficiently navigates the extensive combination space of outfit items, and (3) trainable projection layers that optimally integrate relational and content features. Experiments on Polyvore and IQON benchmarks demonstrate CFALR's superior performance over both traditional CF-based and LLM-based methods in personalized fill-in-the-blank and personalized outfit generation tasks.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

MODF-SIR: A Multi-agent Omni-modal Distilled Framework for Social Intelligence Reasoning

We propose a multi-agent collaborative framework built upon a lightweight Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), specifically designed for social intelligence reasoning. A key feature of our approach is that both the training and inference phases are augmented via knowledge distillation. Within this architecture, multi-modal data pertinent to social intelligence is precisely localized. Furthermore, relevant long-tail events are identified, extracted, and rendered as formatted, explicit text. This formatting strategy prevents critical long-tail information from being overshadowed by head events and environmental noise during the tokenization process. Specifically, we integrate Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) across the entire reasoning pipeline, encompassing the extraction and representation of long-tail events, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, and self-reflection. This TTA mechanism is also distillation-enhanced, utilizing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the foundation model exclusively for instance-level reasoning. Extensive evaluations against various open-source and proprietary AI models across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. With around 30% of training data from IntentTrain, we achieve state-of-the-art results. Codes are available at https://github.com/eeee-sys/MODF-SIR, demo is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Harry-1234/MODF-SIR, LoRA is available at https://huggingface.co/Harry-1234/MODF-SIR and the dataset for training router is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Harry-1234/IntentRouterTrain.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Reasoning over Semantic IDs Enhances Generative Recommendation

Recent advances in generative recommendation have leveraged pretrained LLMs by formulating sequential recommendation as autoregressive generation over a unified token space comprising language tokens and itemic identifiers, where each item is represented by a compact sequence of discrete tokens, namely Semantic IDs (SIDs). This SID-based formulation enables efficient decoding over large-scale item corpora and provides a natural interface for LLM-based recommenders to leverage rich world knowledge. Meanwhile, breakthroughs in LLM reasoning motivate reasoning-enhanced recommendation, yet effective reasoning over SIDs remains underexplored and challenging. Itemic tokens are not natively meaningful to LLMs; moreover, recommendation-oriented SID reasoning is hard to evaluate, making high-quality supervision scarce. To address these challenges, we propose SIDReasoner, a two-stage framework that elicits reasoning over SIDs by strengthening SID--language alignment to unlock transferable LLM reasoning, rather than relying on large amounts of recommendation-specific reasoning traces. Concretely, SIDReasoner first enhances SID-language alignment via multi-task training on an enriched SID-centered corpus synthesized by a stronger teacher model, grounding itemic tokens in diverse semantic and behavioral contexts. Building on this enhanced alignment, SIDReasoner further improves recommendation reasoning through outcome-driven reinforced optimization, which guides the model toward effective reasoning trajectories without requiring explicit reasoning annotations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our reasoning-augmented SID-based generative recommendation. Beyond accuracy, the results highlight the broader potential of large reasoning models for generative recommendation, including improved interpretability and cross-domain generalization.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

GIFT: Games as Informal Training for Generalizable LLMs

Recent LLMs excel at formal tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation, but still struggle with broader abilities such as planning, creativity, and social intelligence. Inspired by human learning, where formal instruction and informal experience jointly shape intelligence, we introduce informal learning into LLM training and use games as annotation-free, feedback-driven environments. To cover diverse abilities including abstract reasoning, planning, creativity, and social interaction, we combine formal math tasks with three representative game tasks, including Matrix Games, TicTacToe, and Who's the Spy. However, directly mixing these tasks under a unified RL objective can blur task-specific learning signals and provides no explicit guidance for coordinating task-gradient directions. To combat these, we propose Coordinated Subtask Training (CST), which replaces a single mixed update with sequential subtask-specific updates, separating heterogeneous RL signals while implicitly promoting coordination among subtasks. Experiments on ability-oriented benchmarks show that game-based informal learning improves generalization beyond formal training alone, while CST further enhances multi-task RL by preserving in-domain subtask performance and improving broader general abilities. Code and data are publicly available.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Controllable Value Alignment in Large Language Models through Neuron-Level Editing

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values has become increasingly important as their influence on human behavior and decision-making expands. However, existing steering-based alignment methods suffer from limited controllability: steering a target value often unintentionally activates other, non-target values. To characterize this limitation, we introduce value leakage, a diagnostic notion that captures the unintended activation of non-target values during value steering, along with a normalized leakage metric grounded in Schwartz's value theory. In light of this analysis, we propose NeVA, a neuron-level editing framework for controllable value alignment in LLMs. NeVA identifies sparse, value-relevant neurons and performs inference-time activation editing, enabling fine-grained control without parameter updates or retraining. Experiments show that NeVA achieves stronger target value alignment while incurring smaller performance degradation on general capability. Moreover, NeVA significantly reduces the average leakage, with residual effects largely confined to semantically related value classes. Overall, NeVA offers a more controllable and interpretable mechanism for value alignment.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Turing Patterns for Multimedia: Reaction-Diffusion Multi-Modal Fusion for Language-Guided Video Moment Retrieval

Video-language models are pivotal for tasks such as moment retrieval and highlight detection, yet they often struggle to capture the dynamic, non-linear interactions between temporal video sequences and textual semantics. Existing approaches, relying on static cross-attention or prompt-tuning mechanisms, fail to adaptively model the evolving relationships between modalities, leading to suboptimal alignment and limited generalization. Inspired by systems biology, we propose \textbf{Reaction-Diffusion Multimodal Fusion (RDMF)}, a novel framework that reimagines video-language alignment as a reaction-diffusion (RD) process, drawing on the principles of pattern formation introduced by Alan Turing. In RDMF, video features diffuse across time to capture temporal context, while text-video interactions are modeled as non-linear reactions that amplify relevant features and suppress noise, forming emergent patterns akin to biological systems. Leveraging the Gray-Scott RD model, we design a computationally efficient fusion module that integrates video and text representations, supported by rigorous mathematical analysis of stability and convergence using Turing instability criteria. Our framework is theoretically grounded, employing advanced mathematical tools to ensure stable pattern formation, and is practically viable, incorporating standard components like pretrained encoders and DETR-style heads for moment retrieval and saliency prediction. RDMF represents a pioneering interdisciplinary approach, bridging systems biology and multimedia research to address the limitations of conventional multimodal fusion. Preliminary experiments demonstrate its potential to outperform existing methods in identifying salient video moments, offering a new paradigm for video-language tasks.

cs.CV↗