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Weiming Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Weiming Zhang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

World Models as Group Actions

Video world models have achieved strong visual realism, but this does not ensure that their dynamics are truly governed by actions. In this work, we argue that action faithfulness should be understood through the compositional structure of actions, which in many embodied settings follows a group structure (e.g., SE(2) for navigation). Based on this insight, we formalize action-conditioned world modeling as realizing a group action on the state space, providing a principled criterion for evaluating dynamics beyond visual quality. To operationalize this framework, we propose a unified approach that enforces identity, inverse, and composition consistency via latent-space regularization with synthesized supervision, avoiding additional data collection. We further introduce two metrics: Group-Action Consistency (GAC) and Group-Action Robustness (GAR), to evaluate structural correctness and rollout stability. Extensive experimental results show that our method consistently improves both GAC and GAR in state-of-the-art video world models without degrading perceptual quality.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

MindCopilot: Towards Formalizing and Evaluating Granular Human-LLM Co-Writing

Recent writing assistants are increasingly shifting from passive, prompt-driven interaction to proactive, suggestion-based completion, which integrates localized continuations into the writing flow and reduces coordination burden. However, existing evaluations simply focus on output quality, failing to capture how users accept, edit, or repair suggestions in real-time interaction, and thus obscuring the true usability of proactive co-writing systems. To address this gap, we adopt a sequential, behavior-centered view of interactive writing and formalize co-writing as a Human-in-the-Loop Markov Decision Process, modeling writing as an interaction shaped by user acceptance and editing decisions. Based on this formulation, we introduce the Co-Writing Fidelity Suite, an interaction-aware metric suite that captures both user-assistant alignment and cognitive editing effort, including Hierarchical Acceptance Rate and Knowledge-aware Editing Distance. We conduct a large-scale simulation study across 16 writing domains, using 1,688 controlled continuation queries sampled from different writing stages. Our analysis reveals systematic effects of interaction structure on acceptance behavior and editing cost. A follow-up user study with 30 participants confirms that these behavioral patterns align with real user experience. Together, our findings demonstrate that interaction-aware evaluation provides insights beyond output-only metrics and informs the design of more effective proactive writing assistants.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2026

Flow of Truth: Proactive Temporal Forensics for Image-to-Video Generation

The rapid rise of image-to-video (I2V) generation enables realistic videos to be created from a single image but also brings new forensic demands. Unlike static images, I2V content evolves over time, requiring forensics to move beyond 2D pixel-level tampering localization toward tracing how pixels flow and transform throughout the video. As frames progress, embedded traces drift and deform, making traditional spatial forensics ineffective. To address this unexplored dimension, we present **Flow of Truth**, the first proactive framework focusing on temporal forensics in I2V generation. A key challenge lies in discovering a forensic signature that can evolve consistently with the generation process, which is inherently a creative transformation rather than a deterministic reconstruction. Despite this intrinsic difficulty, we innovatively redefine video generation as *the motion of pixels through time rather than the synthesis of frames*. Building on this view, we propose a learnable forensic template that follows pixel motion and a template-guided flow module that decouples motion from image content, enabling robust temporal tracing. Experiments show that Flow of Truth generalizes across commercial and open-source I2V models, substantially improving temporal forensics performance.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

GUIGuard-Bench: Toward a General Evaluation for Privacy-Preserving GUI Agents

As GUI agents increasingly rely on screenshots to perceive and operate digital environments, they may inadvertently expose sensitive information such as identities, accounts, locations, and behavioral traces. While existing benchmarks primarily focus on task completion, grounding, or defenses against third-party attacks, current visual privacy datasets remain largely restricted to static natural images, limiting their ability to capture the contextual dependence and task relevance of privacy risks in GUI task trajectories. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{GUIGuard-Bench}, a first-step benchmark for studying privacy-preserving GUI agents in trajectory-based GUI workflows. GUIGuard-Bench contains 241 real GUI-agent trajectories with 4,080 screenshots across Android and PC environments. Each screenshot is annotated at the region level with privacy bounding boxes, semantic privacy categories, risk levels, and whether the private information is necessary for completing the task. Built on these annotations, GUIGuard-Bench supports three complementary evaluations: privacy recognition, offline planning fidelity under protected screenshots, and the utility impact of different protection strategies. Our results show that current models can often detect whether a screenshot contains private information, but they struggle with fine-grained localization, category recognition, risk assessment, and task-necessity judgment. We also find that closed-source models, exemplified by Claude Sonnet 4.6, can maintain largely consistent planner semantics in Android environments after privacy protection is applied. Our results highlight privacy recognition as a critical bottleneck for practical GUI agents. Project: https://futuresis.github.io/GUIGuard-page/

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Beyond the Edge of Function: Unraveling the Patterns of Type Recovery in Binary Code

Type recovery is a crucial step in binary code analysis, holding significant importance for reverse engineering and various security applications. Existing works typically simply target type identifiers within binary code and achieve type recovery by analyzing variable characteristics within functions. However, we find that the types in real-world binary programs are more complex and often follow specific distribution patterns. In this paper, to gain a profound understanding of the variable type recovery problem in binary code, we first conduct a comprehensive empirical study. We utilize the TYDA dataset, which includes 163,643 binary programs across four architectures and four compiler optimization options, fully reflecting the complexity and diversity of real-world programs. We carefully study the unique patterns that characterize types and variables in binary code, and also investigate the impact of compiler optimizations on them, yielding many valuable insights. Based on our empirical findings, we propose ByteTR, a framework for recovering variable types in binary code. We decouple the target type set to address the issue of unbalanced type distribution and perform static program analysis to tackle the impact of compiler optimizations on variable storage. In light of the ubiquity of variable propagation across functions observed in our study, ByteTR conducts inter-procedural analysis to trace variable propagation and employs a gated graph neural network to capture long-range data flow dependencies for variable type recovery. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of ByteTR. The results demonstrate that ByteTR leads state-of-the-art works in both effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover, in real CTF challenge case, the pseudo code optimized by ByteTR significantly improves readability, surpassing leading tools IDA and Ghidra.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

VertMark: A Unified Training-Free Robust Watermarking Framework for Vertical Domain Pre-trained Language Models

With the application of vertical domain pre-trained language models (VPLMs) in specialized fields such as medical, finance, and law, model parameters and inference capabilities have become important digital assets. Achieving traceable copyright verification for VPLMs has become an urgent challenge. Existing copyright verification methods primarily rely on embedding backdoor watermarks into models. However, most of these methods require additional training, suffer from inefficient watermark embedding, and lack scalable designs for multiple vertical domains. To address these limitations, we propose VertMark, the first unified training-free and robust watermarking framework for copyright verification across multiple vertical domain VPLMs. The framework embeds ownership-encoded watermarks by establishing a hidden semantic equivalence between low-frequency trigger tokens and high-frequency domain-relevant words via a training-free parameter replacement strategy. Experiments demonstrate that VertMark can achieve efficient watermark embedding and reliable watermark verification for both text understanding and text generation downstream tasks in the medical, financial, and legal domains, with negligible impact on model performance. Moreover, VertMark exhibits strong robustness against various attacks (e.g., pruning and quantization), highlighting its practical value and providing strong protection for the copyright security of VPLMs.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

ACPO: Anchor-Constrained Perceptual Optimization for Diffusion Models with No-Reference Quality Guidance

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image generation, yet their training is predominantly driven by full-reference objectives that enforce pixel-wise similarity to ground-truth images.Such supervision, while effective for fidelity, may insufficient in terms of subjective visual perception quality and text-image semantic consistency. In this work, we investigate the problem of incorporating no-reference perceptual quality into diffusion training. A key challenge is that directly optimizing perceptual signals, such as those provided by no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) models, introduces a mismatch with the original diffusion objective, leading to training instability and distributional drift during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose an anchor-constrained optimization framework that enables stable perceptual adaptation. Specifically, we leverage a learned NR-IQA model as a perceptual guidance signal, while introducing an anchor-based regularization that enforces consistency with the base diffusion model in terms of noise prediction. This design effectively balances perceptual quality improvement and generative fidelity, allowing controlled adaptation toward perceptually favorable outputs without compromising the original generative behavior. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently enhances perceptual quality while preserving generation diversity and training stability, highlighting the effectiveness of anchor-constrained perceptual optimization for diffusion models.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

ColorBrowserAgent: Complex Long-Horizon Browser Agent with Adaptive Knowledge Evolution

With the advancement of vision-language models, web automation has made significant progress. However, deploying autonomous agents in real-world settings remains challenging, primarily due to site heterogeneity, where generalist models lack domain-specific priors for diverse interfaces, and long-horizon instability, characterized by the accumulation of decision drift over extended interactions. To address these challenges, we introduce ColorBrowserAgent (Complex Long-Horizon Browser Agent), a knowledge-evolving agent for robust web automation. Our approach addresses these challenges through two synergistic mechanisms: human-in-the-loop knowledge adaptation that transforms sparse human feedback into reusable domain knowledge, and knowledge-aligned progressive summarization that stabilizes long interactions through memory compression. Extensive experiments on WebArena, WebChoreArena and industrial deployment show that ColorBrowserAgent consistently outperforms strong baselines. It achieves a state-of-the-art success rate of 71.2% on WebArena and maintains 47.4% performance under zero-shot transfer setting on WebChoreArena. In commercial deployment, it improves user satisfaction by 19.3% relatively, verifying its robustness in real-world scenarios.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2026

OptiMVMap: Offline Vectorized Map Construction via Optimal Multi-vehicle Perspectives

Offline vectorized maps constitute critical infrastructure for high-precision autonomous driving and mapping services. Existing approaches rely predominantly on single ego-vehicle trajectories, which fundamentally suffer from viewpoint insufficiency: while memory-based methods extend observation time by aggregating ego-trajectory frames, they lack the spatial diversity needed to reveal occluded regions. Incorporating views from surrounding vehicles offers complementary perspectives, yet naive fusion introduces three key challenges: computational cost from large candidate pools, redundancy from near-collinear viewpoints, and noise from pose errors and occlusion artifacts. We present OptiMVMap, which reformulates multi-vehicle mapping as a select-then-fuse problem to address these challenges systematically. An Optimal Vehicle Selection (OVS) module strategically identifies a compact subset of helpers that maximally reduce ego-centric uncertainty in occluded regions, addressing computation and redundancy challenges. Cross-Vehicle Attention (CVA) and Semantic-aware Noise Filter (SNF) then perform pose-tolerant alignment and artifact suppression before BEV-level fusion, addressing the noise challenge. This targeted pipeline yields more complete and topologically faithful maps with substantially fewer views than indiscriminate aggregation. On nuScenes and Argoverse2, OptiMVMap improves MapTRv2 by +10.5 mAP and +9.3 mAP, respectively, and surpasses memory-augmented baselines MVMap and HRMapNet by +6.2 mAP and +3.8 mAP on nuScenes. These results demonstrate that uncertainty-guided selection of helper vehicles is essential for efficient and accurate multi-vehicle vectorized mapping. The code is released at https://github.com/DanZeDong/OptiMVMap.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Into the Gray Zone: Domain Contexts Can Blur LLM Safety Boundaries

A central goal of LLM alignment is to balance helpfulness with harmlessness, yet these objectives conflict when the same knowledge serves both legitimate and malicious purposes. This tension is amplified by context-sensitive alignment: we observe that domain-specific contexts (e.g., chemistry) selectively relax defenses for domain-relevant harmful knowledge, while safety-research contexts (e.g., jailbreak studies) trigger broader relaxation spanning all harm categories. To systematically exploit this vulnerability, we propose Jargon, a framework combining safety-research contexts with multi-turn adversarial interactions that achieves attack success rates exceeding 93% across seven frontier models, including GPT-5.2, Claude-4.5, and Gemini-3, substantially outperforming existing methods. Activation space analysis reveals that Jargon queries occupy an intermediate region between benign and harmful inputs, a gray zone where refusal decisions become unreliable. To mitigate this vulnerability, we design a policy-guided safeguard that steers models toward helpful yet harmless responses, and internalize this capability through alignment fine-tuning, reducing attack success rates while preserving helpfulness.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

From Boundaries to Semantics: Prompt-Guided Multi-Task Learning for Petrographic Thin-section Segmentation

Grain-edge segmentation (GES) and lithology semantic segmentation (LSS) are two pivotal tasks for quantifying rock fabric and composition. However, these two tasks are often treated separately, and the segmentation quality is implausible albeit expensive, time-consuming, and expert-annotated datasets have been used. Recently, foundation models, especially the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have demonstrated impressive robustness for boundary alignment. However, directly adapting SAM to joint GES and LSS is nontrivial due to 1) severe domain gap induced by extinction-dependent color variations and ultra-fine grain boundaries, and 2) lacking novel modules for joint learning on multi-angle petrographic image stacks. In this paper, we propose Petro-SAM, a novel two-stage, multi-task framework that can achieve high-quality joint GES and LSS on petrographic images. Specifically, based on SAM, we introduce a Merge Block to integrate seven polarized views, effectively solving the extinction issue. Moreover, we introduce multi-scale feature fusion and color-entropy priors to refine the detection.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

PanoSAM2: Lightweight Distortion- and Memory-aware Adaptions of SAM2 for 360 Video Object Segmentation

360 video object segmentation (360VOS) aims to predict temporally-consistent masks in 360 videos, offering full-scene coverage, benefiting applications, such as VR/AR and embodied AI. Learning 360VOS model is nontrivial due to the lack of high-quality labeled dataset. Recently, Segment Anything Models (SAMs), especially SAM2 -- with its design of memory module -- shows strong, promptable VOS capability. However, directly using SAM2 for 360VOS yields implausible results as 360 videos suffer from the projection distortion, semantic inconsistency of left-right sides, and sparse object mask information in SAM2's memory. To this end, we propose PanoSAM2, a novel 360VOS framework based on our lightweight distortion- and memory-aware adaptation strategies of SAM2 to achieve reliable 360VOS while retaining SAM2's user-friendly prompting design. Concretely, to tackle the projection distortion and semantic inconsistency issues, we propose a Pano-Aware Decoder with seam-consistent receptive fields and iterative distortion refinement to maintain continuity across the 0/360 degree boundary. Meanwhile, a Distortion-Guided Mask Loss is introduced to weight pixels by distortion magnitude, stressing stretched regions and boundaries. To address the object sparsity issue, we propose a Long-Short Memory Module to maintain a compact long-term object pointer to re-instantiate and align short-term memories, thereby enhancing temporal coherence. Extensive experiments show that PanoSAM2 yields substantial gains over SAM2: +5.6 on 360VOTS and +6.7 on PanoVOS, showing the effectiveness of our method.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Can LLMs Deobfuscate Binary Code? A Systematic Analysis of Large Language Models into Pseudocode Deobfuscation

Deobfuscating binary code remains a fundamental challenge in reverse engineering, as obfuscation is widely used to hinder analysis and conceal program logic. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in recovering semantics from obfuscated binaries, a systematic evaluation of their effectiveness is still lacking. In this work, we present BinDeObfBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for assessing LLM-based binary deobfuscation across diverse transformations spanning pre-compilation, compile-time, and post-compilation stages. Our evaluation shows that deobfuscation performance depends more on reasoning capability and domain expertise than on model scale, and that task-specific supervised fine-tuning consistently outperforms broad domain pre-training. Reasoning models can maintain robustness under severe obfuscation, generalize across different instruction set architectures (ISAs) and optimization levels. In-context learning benefits standard models but yields limited gains for reasoning models. Overall, our study highlights the importance of task-specific fine-tuning and reasoning-driven strategies, and positions BinDeObfBench as a basis for future work in binary deobfuscation.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineering

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly built less by changing model weights than by reorganizing the runtime around them. Capabilities that earlier systems expected the model to recover internally are now externalized into memory stores, reusable skills, interaction protocols, and the surrounding harness that makes these modules reliable in practice. This paper reviews that shift through the lens of externalization. Drawing on the idea of cognitive artifacts, we argue that agent infrastructure matters not merely because it adds auxiliary components, but because it transforms hard cognitive burdens into forms that the model can solve more reliably. Under this view, memory externalizes state across time, skills externalize procedural expertise, protocols externalize interaction structure, and harness engineering serves as the unification layer that coordinates them into governed execution. We trace a historical progression from weights to context to harness, analyze memory, skills, and protocols as three distinct but coupled forms of externalization, and examine how they interact inside a larger agent system. We further discuss the trade-off between parametric and externalized capability, identify emerging directions such as self-evolving harnesses and shared agent infrastructure, and discuss open challenges in evaluation, governance, and the long-term co-evolution of models and external infrastructure. The result is a systems-level framework for explaining why practical agent progress increasingly depends not only on stronger models, but on better external cognitive infrastructure.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

VLMShield: Efficient and Robust Defense of Vision-Language Models against Malicious Prompts

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) face significant safety vulnerabilities from malicious prompt attacks due to weakened alignment during visual integration. Existing defenses suffer from efficiency and robustness. To address these challenges, we first propose the Multimodal Aggregated Feature Extraction (MAFE) framework that enables CLIP to handle long text and fuse multimodal information into unified representations. Through empirical analysis of MAFE-extracted features, we discover distinct distributional patterns between benign and malicious prompts. Building upon this finding, we develop VLMShield, a lightweight safety detector that efficiently identifies multimodal malicious attacks as a plug-and-play solution. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance across multiple dimensions, including robustness, efficiency, and utility. Through our work, we hope to pave the way for more secure multimodal AI deployment. Code is available at [this https URL](https://github.com/pgqihere/VLMShield).

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

SWIFT: Sliding Window Reconstruction for Few-Shot Training-Free Generated Video Attribution

Recent advancements in video generation technologies have been significant, resulting in their widespread application across multiple domains. However, concerns have been mounting over the potential misuse of generated content. Tracing the origin of generated videos has become crucial to mitigate potential misuse and identify responsible parties. Existing video attribution methods require additional operations or the training of source attribution models, which may degrade video quality or necessitate large amounts of training samples. To address these challenges, we define for the first time the "few-shot training-free generated video attribution" task and propose SWIFT, which is tightly integrated with the temporal characteristics of the video. By leveraging the "Pixel Frames(many) to Latent Frame(one)" temporal mapping within each video chunk, SWIFT applies a fixed-length sliding window to perform two distinct reconstructions: normal and corrupted. The variation in the losses between two reconstructions is then used as an attribution signal. We conducted an extensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art (SOTA) video generation models. Experimental results show that SWIFT achieves over 90% average attribution accuracy with merely 20 video samples across all models and even enables zero-shot attribution for HunyuanVideo, EasyAnimate, and Wan2.2. Our source code is available at https://github.com/wangchao0708/SWIFT.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

InferDPT: Privacy-Preserving Inference for Closed-box Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have greatly simplified text generation tasks. However, they have also raised concerns about privacy risks such as data leakage and unauthorized data collection. Existing solutions for privacy-preserving inference face practical challenges related to computation time and communication costs. In this paper, we propose InferDPT, the first practical framework for the privacy-preserving Inference of black-box LLMs, implementing Differential Privacy in Text generation. InferDPT comprises two key modules: the "perturbation module" utilizes the exponential mechanism to generate a perturbed prompt, facilitating privacy-preserving inference with black-box LLMs, and the "extraction module", inspired by knowledge distillation and retrieval-augmented generation, extracts coherent and consistent text from the perturbed generation result, ensuring successful text generation completion. To address privacy concerns related to previous exponential mechanisms' susceptibility to embedding revision attacks, we introduce RANTEXT, a novel differential privacy mechanism integrated into the perturbation module of InferDPT, which introduces the concept of "RANdom adjacency" for TEXT perturbation within the prompt. Experimental results across three datasets demonstrate that the text generation quality of InferDPT is comparable to that of non-private GPT-4, and RANTEXT surpasses existing state-of-the-art mechanisms, namely, SANTEXT+ and CUSTEXT+ in the trade-off between privacy and utility. Even with an privacy parameter epsilon value of 6.0, RANTEXT achieves an average privacy protection rate exceeding 90% against embedding revision attacks, which is 0.58 times higher than that of SANTEXT+ and 3.35 times higher than that of CUSTEXT+.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Reference-Free Omnidirectional Stereo Matching via Multi-View Consistency Maximization

Reliable omnidirectional depth estimation from multi-fisheye stereo matching is pivotal to many applications, such as embodied robotics. Existing approaches either rely on spherical sweeping with heuristic fusion strategies to build the cost columns or perform reference-centric stereo matching based on rectified views. However, these methods fail to explicitly exploit geometric relationships between multiple views, rendering them less capable of capturing the global dependencies, visibility, or scale changes. In this paper, we shift to a new perspective and propose a novel reference-free framework, dubbed FreeOmniMVS, via multi-view consistency maximization. The highlight of FreeOmniMVS is that it can aggregate pair-wise correlations into a robust, visibility-aware, and global consensus. As such, it is tolerant to occlusions, partial overlaps, and varying baselines. Specifically, to achieve global coherence, we introduce a novel View-pair Correlation Transformer (VCT) that explicitly models pairwise correlation volumes across all camera view pairs, allowing us to drop unreliable pairs caused by occlusion or out-of-focus observations. To realize scalable and visibility-aware consensus, we propose a lightweight attention mechanism that adaptively fuses the correlation vectors, eliminating the need for a designated reference view and allowing all cameras to contribute equally to the stereo matching process. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method for globally consistent, visibility-aware, and scale-aware omnidirectional depth estimation.

cs.CV↗