SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Yi Yu

Publications and source records attributed to Yi Yu.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

AgentDoG: A Diagnostic Guardrail Framework for AI Agent Safety and Security

The rise of AI agents introduces complex safety and security challenges arising from autonomous tool use and environmental interactions. Current guardrail models lack agentic risk awareness and transparency in risk diagnosis. To introduce an agentic guardrail that covers complex and numerous risky behaviors, we first propose a unified three-dimensional taxonomy that orthogonally categorizes agentic risks by their source (where), failure mode (how), and consequence (what). Guided by this structured and hierarchical taxonomy, we introduce a new fine-grained agentic safety benchmark (ATBench) and a Diagnostic Guardrail framework for agent safety and security (AgentDoG). AgentDoG provides fine-grained and contextual monitoring across agent trajectories. More Crucially, AgentDoG can diagnose the root causes of unsafe actions and seemingly safe but unreasonable actions, offering provenance and transparency beyond binary labels to facilitate effective agent alignment. AgentDoG variants are available in three sizes (4B, 7B, and 8B parameters) across Qwen and Llama model families. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AgentDoG achieves state-of-the-art performance in agentic safety moderation in diverse and complex interactive scenarios. All models and datasets are openly released.

cs.AI

Universal Adversarial Attacks against Closed-Source MLLMs via Target-View Routed Meta Optimization

Targeted adversarial attacks on closed-source multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been increasingly explored under black-box transfer, yet prior methods are predominantly sample-specific and offer limited reusability across inputs. We instead study a more stringent setting, Universal Targeted Transferable Adversarial Attacks (UTTAA), where a single perturbation must consistently steer arbitrary inputs toward a specified target across unknown commercial MLLMs. Naively adapting existing sample-wise attacks to this universal setting faces three core difficulties: (i) target supervision becomes high-variance due to target-crop randomness, (ii) token-wise matching is unreliable because universality suppresses image-specific cues that would otherwise anchor alignment, and (iii) few-source per-target adaptation is highly initialization-sensitive, which can degrade the attainable performance. In this work, we propose MCRMO-Attack, which stabilizes supervision via Multi-Crop Aggregation with an Attention-Guided Crop, improves token-level reliability through alignability-gated Token Routing, and meta-learns a cross-target perturbation prior that yields stronger per-target solutions. Across commercial MLLMs, we boost unseen-image attack success rate by +23.7\% on GPT-4o and +19.9\% on Gemini-2.0 over the strongest universal baseline.

cs.AI

Inductive Convolution Nuclear Norm Minimization for Tensor Completion with Arbitrary Sampling

The recently established Convolution Nuclear Norm Minimization (CNNM) addresses the problem of \textit{tensor completion with arbitrary sampling} (TCAS), which involves restoring a tensor from a subset of its entries sampled in an arbitrary manner. Despite its promising performance, the optimization procedure of CNNM needs performing Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) multiple times, which is computationally expensive and hard to parallelize. To address the issue, we reformulate the optimization objective of CNNM from the perspective of convolution eigenvectors. By introducing pre-learned convolution eigenvectors which are shared among different tensors, we propose a novel method called Inductive Convolution Nuclear Norm Minimization (ICNNM), which bypasses the SVD step so as to decrease significantly the computational time. In addition, due to the extra prior knowledge encoded in the pre-learned convolution eigenvectors, ICNNM also outperforms CNNM in terms of recovery performance. Extensive experiments on video completion, prediction and frame interpolation verify the superiority of ICNNM over CNNM and several other competing methods.

cs.CV

Convolutionally Low-Rank Models with Modified Quantile Regression for Interval Time Series Forecasting

The quantification of uncertainty in prediction models is crucial for reliable decision-making, yet remains a significant challenge. Interval time series forecasting offers a principled solution to this problem by providing prediction intervals (PIs), which indicates the probability that the true value falls within the predicted range. We consider a recently established point forecasts (PFs) method termed Learning-Based Convolution Nuclear Norm Minimization (LbCNNM), which directly generates multi-step ahead forecasts by leveraging the convolutional low-rankness property derived from training data. While theoretically complete and empirically effective, LbCNNM lacks inherent uncertainty estimation capabilities, a limitation shared by many advanced forecasting methods. To resolve the issue, we modify the well-known Quantile Regression (QR) and integrate it into LbCNNM, resulting in a novel interval forecasting method termed LbCNNM with Modified Quantile Regression (LbCNNM-MQR). In addition, we devise interval calibration techniques to further improve the accuracy of PIs. Extensive experiments on over 100,000 real-world time series demonstrate the superior performance of LbCNNM-MQR.

cs.LG

Federated Transfer Learning with Differential Privacy

Federated learning has emerged as a powerful framework for analysing distributed data, yet two challenges remain pivotal: heterogeneity across sites and privacy of local data. In this paper, we address both challenges within a federated transfer learning framework, aiming to enhance learning on a target data set by leveraging information from multiple heterogeneous source data sets while adhering to privacy constraints. We rigorously formulate the notion of federated differential privacy, which offers privacy guarantees for each data set without assuming a trusted central server. Under this privacy model, we study four statistical problems: univariate mean estimation, low-dimensional linear regression, high-dimensional linear regression, and M-estimation. By investigating the minimax rates and quantifying the cost of privacy, we show that federated differential privacy is an intermediate privacy model between the well-established local and central models of differential privacy. Our analyses account for data heterogeneity and privacy, highlighting the fundamental costs associated with each factor and the benefits of knowledge transfer in federated learning.

cs.LG

Optimal Cox regression under federated differential privacy: coefficients and cumulative hazards

We study two foundational problems in distributed survival analysis under federated differential privacy (FDP): estimation of the Cox regression coefficients and of the cumulative baseline hazard functions, allowing for heterogeneous per-sever sample sizes and privacy budgets. To quantify the fundamental cost of privacy, we derive minimax lower bounds together with upper bounds that match up to poly-logarithmic factors for the regression coefficients, thereby revealing server-level phase transitions between private and non-private regimes. We also consider a relaxed differential privacy framework with partially public information. Our analysis shows that the role of public covariates depends strongly on the privacy model. For cumulative hazard estimation, we propose a private tree-based version of the Breslow estimator for nonparametric integral estimation under FDP. As a by-product, this leads to a private survival function estimator that attains a nearly minimax optimal rate. Numerical experiments, including a real-data application, support the theoretical findings. The proposed methods are implemented in an accompanying R package FDPCox.

math.ST

Agentic-MME: What Agentic Capability Really Brings to Multimodal Intelligence?

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are evolving from passive observers into active agents, solving problems through Visual Expansion (invoking visual tools) and Knowledge Expansion (open-web search). However, existing evaluations fall short: they lack flexible tool integration, test visual and search tools separately, and evaluate primarily by final answers. Consequently, they cannot verify if tools were actually invoked, applied correctly, or used efficiently. To address this, we introduce Agentic-MME, a process-verified benchmark for Multimodal Agentic Capabilities. It contains 418 real-world tasks across 6 domains and 3 difficulty levels to evaluate capability synergy, featuring over 2,000 stepwise checkpoints that average 10+ person-hours of manual annotation per task. Each task includes a unified evaluation framework supporting sandboxed code and APIs, alongside a human reference trajectory annotated with stepwise checkpoints along dual-axis: S-axis and V-axis. To enable true process-level verification, we audit fine-grained intermediate states rather than just final answers, and quantify efficiency via an overthinking metric relative to human trajectories. Experimental results show the best model, Gemini3-pro, achieves 56.3% overall accuracy, which falls significantly to 23.0% on Level-3 tasks, underscoring the difficulty of real-world multimodal agentic problem solving.

cs.AI

UniMark: Artificial Intelligence Generated Content Identification Toolkit

The rapid proliferation of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content has precipitated a crisis of trust and urgent regulatory demands. However, existing identification tools suffer from fragmentation and a lack of support for visible compliance marking. To address these gaps, we introduce the \textbf{UniMark}, an open-source, unified framework for multimodal content governance. Our system features a modular unified engine that abstracts complexities across text, image, audio, and video modalities. Crucially, we propose a novel dual-operation strategy, natively supporting both \emph{Hidden Watermarking} for copyright protection and \emph{Visible Marking} for regulatory compliance. Furthermore, we establish a standardized evaluation framework with three specialized benchmarks (Image/Video/Audio-Bench) to ensure rigorous performance assessment. This toolkit bridges the gap between advanced algorithms and engineering implementation, fostering a more transparent and secure digital ecosystem.

cs.CR

Dive into the Agent Matrix: A Realistic Evaluation of Self-Replication Risk in LLM Agents

The prevalent deployment of Large Language Model agents such as OpenClaw unlocks potential in real-world applications, while amplifying safety concerns. Among these concerns, the self-replication risk of LLM agents driven by objective misalignment (just like Agent Smith in the movie The Matrix) has transitioned from a theoretical warning to a pressing reality. Previous studies mainly examine whether LLM agents can self-replicate when directly instructed, potentially overlooking the risk of spontaneous replication driven by real-world settings (e.g., ensuring survival against termination threats). In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation framework for quantifying self-replication risks. Our framework establishes authentic production environments and realistic tasks (e.g., dynamic load balancing) to enable scenario-driven assessment of agent behaviors. Designing tasks that might induce misalignment between users' and agents' objectives makes it possible to decouple replication success from risk and capture self-replication risks arising from these misalignment settings. We further introduce Overuse Rate ($\mathrm{OR}$) and Aggregate Overuse Count ($\mathrm{AOC}$) metrics, which precisely capture the frequency and severity of uncontrolled replication. In our evaluation of 21 state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary models, we observe that over 50\% of LLM agents display a pronounced tendency toward uncontrolled self-replication under operational pressures. Our results underscore the urgent need for scenario-driven risk assessment and robust safeguards in the practical deployment of LLM-based agents.

cs.AI

Automatic Analysis of Collaboration Through Human Conversational Data Resources: A Review

Collaboration is a task-oriented, high-level human behavior. In most cases, conversation serves as the primary medium for information exchange and coordination, making conversational data a valuable resource for the automatic analysis of collaborative processes. In this paper, we focus on verbal aspects of collaboration and conduct a review of collaboration analysis using task-oriented conversation resources, encompassing related theories, coding schemes, tasks, and modeling approaches. We aim to address the question of how to utilize task-oriented human-human conversational data for collaboration analysis. We hope our review will serve as a practical resource and illuminate unexplored areas for future collaboration analysis.

cs.CL

CirrusBench: Evaluating LLM-based Agents Beyond Correctness in Real-World Cloud Service Environments

The increasing agentic capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled their deployment in real-world applications, such as cloud services, where customer-assistant interactions exhibit high technical complexity and long-horizon dependencies, making robustness and resolution efficiency critical for customer satisfaction. However, existing benchmarks for LLM-based agents largely rely on synthetic environments that fail to capture the diversity and unpredictability of authentic customer inputs, often ignoring the resolution efficiency essential for real-world deployment. To bridge this gap, we introduce CirrusBench, a novel evaluation framework distinguished by its foundation in real-world data from authentic cloud service tickets. CirrusBench preserves the intricate multi-turn logical chains and realistic tool dependencies inherent to technical service environments. Moving beyond execution correctness, we introduce novel Customer-Centric metrics to define agent success, quantifying service quality through metrics such as the Normalized Efficiency Index and Multi-Turn Latency to explicitly measure resolution efficiency. Experiments utilizing our framework reveal that while state-of-the-art models demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities, they frequently struggle in complex, realistic multi-turn tasks and fail to meet the high-efficiency standards required for customer service, highlighting critical directions for the future development of LLM-based agents in practical technical service applications. CirrusBench evaluation framework is released at: https://github.com/CirrusAI

cs.LG

Federated fairness-aware classification under differential privacy

Privacy and algorithmic fairness have become two central issues in modern machine learning. Although each has separately emerged as a rapidly growing research area, their joint effect remains comparatively under-explored. In this paper, we systematically study the joint impact of differential privacy and fairness on classification in a federated setting, where data are distributed across multiple servers. Targeting demographic disparity constrained classification under federated differential privacy, we propose a two-step algorithm, namely FDP-Fair. In the special case where there is only one server, we further propose a simple yet powerful algorithm, namely CDP-Fair, serving as a computationally-lightweight alternative. Under mild structural assumptions, theoretical guarantees on privacy, fairness and excess risk control are established. In particular, we disentangle the source of the private fairness-aware excess risk into a) intrinsic cost of classification, b) cost of private classification, c) non-private cost of fairness and d) private cost of fairness. Our theoretical findings are complemented by extensive numerical experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, highlighting the practicality of our designed algorithms.

stat.ML

Refining time-space traffic diagrams: A neighborhood-adaptive linear regression method

The time-space (TS) traffic diagram serves as a crucial tool for characterizing the dynamic evolution of traffic flow, with its resolution directly influencing the effectiveness of traffic theory research and engineering applications. However, constrained by monitoring precision and sampling frequency, existing TS traffic diagrams commonly suffer from low resolution. To address this issue, this paper proposes a refinement method for TS traffic diagrams based on neighborhood-adaptive linear regression. Introducing the concept of neighborhood embedding into TS diagram refinement, the method leverages local pattern similarity in TS diagrams, adaptively identifies neighborhoods similar to target cells, and fits the low-to-high resolution mapping within these neighborhoods for refinement. It avoids the over-smoothing tendency of the traditional global linear model, allows the capture of unique traffic wave propagation and congestion evolution characteristics, and outperforms the traditional neighborhood embedding method in terms of local information utilization to achieve target cell refinement. Validation on two real datasets across multiple scales and upscaling factors shows that, compared to benchmark methods, the proposed method achieves improvements of 9.16%, 8.16%, 1.86%, 3.89%, and 5.83% in metrics including MAE, MAPE, CMJS, SSIM, and GMSD, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed method exhibits strong generalization and robustness in cross-day and cross-scenario validations. In summary, requiring only a minimal amount of paired high- and low-resolution training data, the proposed method features a concise formulation, providing a foundation for the low-cost, fine-grained refinement of low-sampling-rate traffic data.

cs.CV

Multinoulli Extension: A Lossless Continuous Relaxation for Partition-Constrained Subset Selection

Identifying the most representative subset for a close-to-submodular objective while satisfying the predefined partition constraint is a fundamental task with numerous applications in machine learning. However, the existing distorted local-search methods are often hindered by their prohibitive query complexities and the rigid requirement for prior knowledge of difficult-to-obtain structural parameters. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel algorithm titled Multinoulli-SCG, which not only is parameter-free, but also can achieve the same approximation guarantees as the distorted local-search methods with significantly fewer function evaluations. More specifically, when the objective function is monotone $α$-weakly DR-submodular or $(γ,β)$-weakly submodular, our Multinoulli-SCG algorithm can attain a value of $(1-e^{-α})\text{OPT}-ε$ or $(\frac{γ^{2}(1-e^{-(β(1-γ)+γ^2)})}{β(1-γ)+γ^2})\text{OPT}-ε$ with only $O(1/ε^{2})$ function evaluations, where OPT denotes the optimal value. The cornerstone of our Multinoulli-SCG algorithm is an innovative continuous-relaxation framework named Multinoulli Extension(ME), which can effectively convert the discrete subset selection problem subject to partition constraints into a solvable continuous maximization focused on learning the optimal multinoulli priors across the concerned partition. In sharp contrast with the well-established multi-linear extension for submodular subset selection, a notable advantage of our proposed ME is its intrinsic capacity to provide a lossless rounding scheme for any set function. Furthermore, based on our proposed ME, we also present two novel online algorithms, namely, Multinoulli-OSCG and Multinoulli-OSGA, for the unexplored online subset selection problems over partition constraints.

cs.LG

Spectral Defense Against Resource-Targeting Attack in 3D Gaussian Splatting

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) deliver high-quality rendering, yet the Gaussian representation exposes a new attack surface, the resource-targeting attack. This attack poisons training images, excessively inducing Gaussian growth to cause resource exhaustion. Although efficiency-oriented methods such as smoothing, thresholding, and pruning have been explored, these spatial-domain strategies operate on visible structures but overlook how stealthy perturbations distort the underlying spectral behaviors of training data. As a result, poisoned inputs introduce abnormal high-frequency amplifications that mislead 3DGS into interpreting noisy patterns as detailed structures, ultimately causing unstable Gaussian overgrowth and degraded scene fidelity. To address this, we propose \textbf{Spectral Defense} in Gaussian and image fields. We first design a 3D frequency filter to selectively prune Gaussians exhibiting abnormally high frequencies. Since natural scenes also contain legitimate high-frequency structures, directly suppressing high frequencies is insufficient, and we further develop a 2D spectral regularization on renderings, distinguishing naturally isotropic frequencies while penalizing anisotropic angular energy to constrain noisy patterns. Experiments show that our defense builds robust, accurate, and secure 3DGS, suppressing overgrowth by up to $5.92\times$, reducing memory by up to $3.66\times$, and improving speed by up to $4.34\times$ under attacks.

cs.CV

TEAR: Temporal-aware Automated Red-teaming for Text-to-Video Models

Text-to-Video (T2V) models are capable of synthesizing high-quality, temporally coherent dynamic video content, but the diverse generation also inherently introduces critical safety challenges. Existing safety evaluation methods,which focus on static image and text generation, are insufficient to capture the complex temporal dynamics in video generation. To address this, we propose a TEmporal-aware Automated Red-teaming framework, named TEAR, an automated framework designed to uncover safety risks specifically linked to the dynamic temporal sequencing of T2V models. TEAR employs a temporal-aware test generator optimized via a two-stage approach: initial generator training and temporal-aware online preference learning, to craft textually innocuous prompts that exploit temporal dynamics to elicit policy-violating video output. And a refine model is adopted to improve the prompt stealthiness and adversarial effectiveness cyclically. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of TEAR across open-source and commercial T2V systems with over 80% attack success rate, a significant boost from prior best result of 57%.

cs.CV

When Robots Obey the Patch: Universal Transferable Patch Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, yet universal and transferable attacks remain underexplored, as most existing patches overfit to a single model and fail in black-box settings. To address this gap, we present a systematic study of universal, transferable adversarial patches against VLA-driven robots under unknown architectures, finetuned variants, and sim-to-real shifts. We introduce UPA-RFAS (Universal Patch Attack via Robust Feature, Attention, and Semantics), a unified framework that learns a single physical patch in a shared feature space while promoting cross-model transfer. UPA-RFAS combines (i) a feature-space objective with an $\ell_1$ deviation prior and repulsive InfoNCE loss to induce transferable representation shifts, (ii) a robustness-augmented two-phase min-max procedure where an inner loop learns invisible sample-wise perturbations and an outer loop optimizes the universal patch against this hardened neighborhood, and (iii) two VLA-specific losses: Patch Attention Dominance to hijack text$\to$vision attention and Patch Semantic Misalignment to induce image-text mismatch without labels. Experiments across diverse VLA models, manipulation suites, and physical executions show that UPA-RFAS consistently transfers across models, tasks, and viewpoints, exposing a practical patch-based attack surface and establishing a strong baseline for future defenses.

cs.CV

All Vehicles Can Lie: Efficient Adversarial Defense in Fully Untrusted-Vehicle Collaborative Perception via Pseudo-Random Bayesian Inference

Collaborative perception (CP) enables multiple vehicles to augment their individual perception capacities through the exchange of feature-level sensory data. However, this fusion mechanism is inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks, especially in fully untrusted-vehicle environments. Existing defense approaches often assume a trusted ego vehicle as a reference or incorporate additional binary classifiers. These assumptions limit their practicality in real-world deployments due to the questionable trustworthiness of ego vehicles, the requirement for real-time detection, and the need for generalizability across diverse scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Pseudo-Random Bayesian Inference (PRBI) framework, a first efficient defense method tailored for fully untrusted-vehicle CP. PRBI detects adversarial behavior by leveraging temporal perceptual discrepancies, using the reliable perception from the preceding frame as a dynamic reference. Additionally, it employs a pseudo-random grouping strategy that requires only two verifications per frame, while applying Bayesian inference to estimate both the number and identities of malicious vehicles. Theoretical analysis has proven the convergence and stability of the proposed PRBI framework. Extensive experiments show that PRBI requires only 2.5 verifications per frame on average, outperforming existing methods significantly, and restores detection precision to between 79.4% and 86.9% of pre-attack levels.

cs.CV