arXiv subjects

Youngjae Yu

Publications and source records attributed to Youngjae Yu.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

DUSK: Do Not Unlearn Shared Knowledge

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, raising concerns about the unauthorized use of copyrighted or sensitive data. Machine unlearning aims to remove such 'forget' data while preserving utility and information from the 'retain' set. However, existing evaluations typically assume that forget and retain sets are fully disjoint, overlooking realistic scenarios where they share overlapping content. For instance, a news article may need to be unlearned, even though the same event, such as an earthquake in Japan, is also described factually on Wikipedia. Effective unlearning should remove the specific phrasing of the news article while preserving publicly supported facts. In this paper, we introduce DUSK, a benchmark designed to evaluate unlearning methods under realistic data overlap. DUSK constructs document sets that describe the same factual content in different styles, with some shared information appearing across all sets and other content remaining unique to each. When one set is designated for unlearning, an ideal method should remove its unique content while preserving shared facts. We define seven evaluation metrics to assess whether unlearning methods can achieve this selective removal. Our evaluation of nine recent unlearning methods reveals a key limitation: while most can remove surface-level text, they often fail to erase deeper, context-specific knowledge without damaging shared content. We release DUSK as a public benchmark to support the development of more precise and reliable unlearning techniques for real-world applications.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Are Any-to-Any Models More Consistent Across Modality Transfers Than Specialists?

Any-to-any generative models aim to enable seamless interpretation and generation across multiple modalities within a unified framework, yet their ability to preserve relationships across modalities remains uncertain. Do unified models truly achieve cross-modal coherence, or is this coherence merely perceived? To explore this, we introduce ACON, a dataset of 1,000 images (500 newly contributed) paired with captions, editing instructions, and Q&A pairs to evaluate cross-modal transfers rigorously. Using three consistency criteria-cyclic consistency, forward equivariance, and conjugated equivariance-our experiments reveal that any-to-any models do not consistently demonstrate greater cross-modal consistency than specialized models in pointwise evaluations such as cyclic consistency. However, equivariance evaluations uncover weak but observable consistency through structured analyses of the intermediate latent space enabled by multiple editing operations. We release our code and data at https://github.com/JiwanChung/ACON.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

VisEscape: A Benchmark for Evaluating Exploration-driven Decision-making in Virtual Escape Rooms

Escape rooms present a unique cognitive challenge that demands exploration-driven planning: with the sole instruction to 'escape the room', players must actively search their environment, collecting information, and finding solutions through repeated trial and error. Motivated by this, we introduce VisEscape, a benchmark of 20 virtual escape rooms specifically designed to evaluate AI models under these challenging conditions, where success depends not only on solving isolated puzzles but also on iteratively constructing and refining spatial-temporal knowledge of a dynamically changing environment. On VisEscape, we observe that even state-of-the-art multi-modal models generally fail to escape the rooms, showing considerable variation in their progress and problem-solving approaches. We find that integrating memory management and reasoning contributes to efficient exploration and enables successive hypothesis formulation and testing, thereby leading to significant improvements in dynamic and exploration-driven environments

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Can Large Language Models be Good Emotional Supporter? Mitigating Preference Bias on Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) is a task aimed at alleviating individuals' emotional distress through daily conversation. Given its inherent complexity and non-intuitive nature, ESConv dataset incorporates support strategies to facilitate the generation of appropriate responses. Recently, despite the remarkable conversational ability of large language models (LLMs), previous studies have suggested that they often struggle with providing useful emotional support. Hence, this work initially analyzes the results of LLMs on ESConv, revealing challenges in selecting the correct strategy and a notable preference for a specific strategy. Motivated by these, we explore the impact of the inherent preference in LLMs on providing emotional support, and consequently, we observe that exhibiting high preference for specific strategies hinders effective emotional support, aggravating its robustness in predicting the appropriate strategy. Moreover, we conduct a methodological study to offer insights into the necessary approaches for LLMs to serve as proficient emotional supporters. Our findings emphasize that (1) low preference for specific strategies hinders the progress of emotional support, (2) external assistance helps reduce preference bias, and (3) existing LLMs alone cannot become good emotional supporters. These insights suggest promising avenues for future research to enhance the emotional intelligence of LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Subtle Risks, Critical Failures: A Framework for Diagnosing Physical Safety of LLMs for Embodied Decision Making

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for decision making in embodied agents, yet existing safety evaluations often rely on coarse success rates and domain-specific setups, making it difficult to diagnose why and where these models fail. This obscures our understanding of embodied safety and limits the selective deployment of LLMs in high-risk physical environments. We introduce SAFEL, the framework for systematically evaluating the physical safety of LLMs in embodied decision making. SAFEL assesses two key competencies: (1) rejecting unsafe commands via the Command Refusal Test, and (2) generating safe and executable plans via the Plan Safety Test. Critically, the latter is decomposed into functional modules, goal interpretation, transition modeling, action sequencing, enabling fine-grained diagnosis of safety failures. To support this framework, we introduce EMBODYGUARD, a PDDL-grounded benchmark containing 942 LLM-generated scenarios covering both overtly malicious and contextually hazardous instructions. Evaluation across 13 state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that while models often reject clearly unsafe commands, they struggle to anticipate and mitigate subtle, situational risks. Our results highlight critical limitations in current LLMs and provide a foundation for more targeted, modular improvements in safe embodied reasoning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

When AI Co-Scientists Fail: SPOT-a Benchmark for Automated Verification of Scientific Research

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have fueled the vision of automated scientific discovery, often called AI Co-Scientists. To date, prior work casts these systems as generative co-authors responsible for crafting hypotheses, synthesizing code, or drafting manuscripts. In this work, we explore a complementary application: using LLMs as verifiers to automate the \textbf{academic verification of scientific manuscripts}. To that end, we introduce SPOT, a dataset of 83 published papers paired with 91 errors significant enough to prompt errata or retraction, cross-validated with actual authors and human annotators. Evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs on SPOT, we find that none surpasses 21.1\% recall or 6.1\% precision (o3 achieves the best scores, with all others near zero). Furthermore, confidence estimates are uniformly low, and across eight independent runs, models rarely rediscover the same errors, undermining their reliability. Finally, qualitative analysis with domain experts reveals that even the strongest models make mistakes resembling student-level misconceptions derived from misunderstandings. These findings highlight the substantial gap between current LLM capabilities and the requirements for dependable AI-assisted academic verification.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

DEEPTalk: Dynamic Emotion Embedding for Probabilistic Speech-Driven 3D Face Animation

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has garnered lots of attention thanks to its broad range of applications. Despite recent advancements in achieving realistic lip motion, current methods fail to capture the nuanced emotional undertones conveyed through speech and produce monotonous facial motion. These limitations result in blunt and repetitive facial animations, reducing user engagement and hindering their applicability. To address these challenges, we introduce DEEPTalk, a novel approach that generates diverse and emotionally rich 3D facial expressions directly from speech inputs. To achieve this, we first train DEE (Dynamic Emotion Embedding), which employs probabilistic contrastive learning to forge a joint emotion embedding space for both speech and facial motion. This probabilistic framework captures the uncertainty in interpreting emotions from speech and facial motion, enabling the derivation of emotion vectors from its multifaceted space. Moreover, to generate dynamic facial motion, we design TH-VQVAE (Temporally Hierarchical VQ-VAE) as an expressive and robust motion prior overcoming limitations of VAEs and VQ-VAEs. Utilizing these strong priors, we develop DEEPTalk, a talking head generator that non-autoregressively predicts codebook indices to create dynamic facial motion, incorporating a novel emotion consistency loss. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in creating diverse, emotionally expressive talking faces that maintain accurate lip-sync. Our project page is available at https://whwjdqls.github.io/deeptalk\_website/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Do LLMs Have Distinct and Consistent Personality? TRAIT: Personality Testset designed for LLMs with Psychometrics

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their adaptation in various domains as conversational agents. We wonder: can personality tests be applied to these agents to analyze their behavior, similar to humans? We introduce TRAIT, a new benchmark consisting of 8K multi-choice questions designed to assess the personality of LLMs. TRAIT is built on two psychometrically validated small human questionnaires, Big Five Inventory (BFI) and Short Dark Triad (SD-3), enhanced with the ATOMIC-10X knowledge graph to a variety of real-world scenarios. TRAIT also outperforms existing personality tests for LLMs in terms of reliability and validity, achieving the highest scores across four key metrics: Content Validity, Internal Validity, Refusal Rate, and Reliability. Using TRAIT, we reveal two notable insights into personalities of LLMs: 1) LLMs exhibit distinct and consistent personality, which is highly influenced by their training data (e.g., data used for alignment tuning), and 2) current prompting techniques have limited effectiveness in eliciting certain traits, such as high psychopathy or low conscientiousness, suggesting the need for further research in this direction.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

EgoSpeak: Learning When to Speak for Egocentric Conversational Agents in the Wild

Predicting when to initiate speech in real-world environments remains a fundamental challenge for conversational agents. We introduce EgoSpeak, a novel framework for real-time speech initiation prediction in egocentric streaming video. By modeling the conversation from the speaker's first-person viewpoint, EgoSpeak is tailored for human-like interactions in which a conversational agent must continuously observe its environment and dynamically decide when to talk. Our approach bridges the gap between simplified experimental setups and complex natural conversations by integrating four key capabilities: (1) first-person perspective, (2) RGB processing, (3) online processing, and (4) untrimmed video processing. We also present YT-Conversation, a diverse collection of in-the-wild conversational videos from YouTube, as a resource for large-scale pretraining. Experiments on EasyCom and Ego4D demonstrate that EgoSpeak outperforms random and silence-based baselines in real time. Our results also highlight the importance of multimodal input and context length in effectively deciding when to speak.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

$C^2$: Scalable Auto-Feedback for LLM-based Chart Generation

Generating high-quality charts with Large Language Models (LLMs) presents significant challenges due to limited data and the high cost of scaling through human curation. $\langle \text{instruction}, \text{data}, \text{code} \rangle$ triplets are scarce and expensive to manually curate as their creation demands technical expertise. To address this scalability challenge, we introduce a reference-free automatic feedback generator, which eliminates the need for costly human intervention. Our novel framework, C$^2$, consists of (1) an automatic feedback provider (ChartAF) and (2) a diverse, reference-free dataset (ChartUIE-8K). The results are compelling: in our first experiment, 74% of respondents strongly preferred, and 10% preferred, the results after feedback. The second post-feedback experiment demonstrates that ChartAF outperform nine baselines. Moreover, ChartUIE-8K significantly improves data diversity by increasing queries, datasets, and chart types by 5982%, 1936%, and 91%, respectively, over benchmarks. Finally, a study of LLM users revealed that 94% of participants preferred ChartUIE-8K's queries, with 93% deeming them aligned with real-world use cases. Core contributions are available as open-source at chartsquared.github.io, with ample qualitative examples.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

MASS: Overcoming Language Bias in Image-Text Matching

Pretrained visual-language models have made significant advancements in multimodal tasks, including image-text retrieval. However, a major challenge in image-text matching lies in language bias, where models predominantly rely on language priors and neglect to adequately consider the visual content. We thus present Multimodal ASsociation Score (MASS), a framework that reduces the reliance on language priors for better visual accuracy in image-text matching problems. It can be seamlessly incorporated into existing visual-language models without necessitating additional training. Our experiments have shown that MASS effectively lessens language bias without losing an understanding of linguistic compositionality. Overall, MASS offers a promising solution for enhancing image-text matching performance in visual-language models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SEAL: Entangled White-box Watermarks on Low-Rank Adaptation

Recently, LoRA and its variants have become the de facto strategy for training and sharing task-specific versions of large pretrained models, thanks to their efficiency and simplicity. However, the issue of copyright protection for LoRA weights, especially through watermark-based techniques, remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose SEAL (SEcure wAtermarking on LoRA weights), the universal whitebox watermarking for LoRA. SEAL embeds a secret, non-trainable matrix between trainable LoRA weights, serving as a passport to claim ownership. SEAL then entangles the passport with the LoRA weights through training, without extra loss for entanglement, and distributes the finetuned weights after hiding the passport. When applying SEAL, we observed no performance degradation across commonsense reasoning, textual/visual instruction tuning, and text-to-image synthesis tasks. We demonstrate that SEAL is robust against a variety of known attacks: removal, obfuscation, and ambiguity attacks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

ISR-DPO: Aligning Large Multimodal Models for Videos by Iterative Self-Retrospective DPO

Iterative self-improvement, a concept extending beyond personal growth, has found powerful applications in machine learning, particularly in transforming weak models into strong ones. While recent advances in natural language processing have shown its efficacy through iterative preference optimization, applying this approach to Video Large Multi-modal Models (VLMMs) remains challenging due to modality misalignment. VLMMs struggle with this misalignment during iterative preference modeling, as the self-judge model often prioritizes linguistic knowledge over visual information. Additionally, iterative preference optimization can lead to visually hallucinated verbose responses due to length bias within the self-rewarding cycle. To address these issues, we propose Iterative Self-Retrospective Direct Preference Optimization (ISR-DPO), a method that uses self-retrospection to enhance preference modeling. This approach enhances the self-judge's focus on informative video regions, resulting in more visually grounded preferences. In extensive empirical evaluations across diverse video question answering benchmarks, the ISR-DPO significantly outperforms the state of the art. We are committed to open-sourcing our code, models, and datasets to encourage further investigation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Towards Visual Text Design Transfer Across Languages

Visual text design plays a critical role in conveying themes, emotions, and atmospheres in multimodal formats such as film posters and album covers. Translating these visual and textual elements across languages extends the concept of translation beyond mere text, requiring the adaptation of aesthetic and stylistic features. To address this, we introduce a novel task of Multimodal Style Translation (MuST-Bench), a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of visual text generation models to perform translation across different writing systems while preserving design intent. Our initial experiments on MuST-Bench reveal that existing visual text generation models struggle with the proposed task due to the inadequacy of textual descriptions in conveying visual design. In response, we introduce SIGIL, a framework for multimodal style translation that eliminates the need for style descriptions. SIGIL enhances image generation models through three innovations: glyph latent for multilingual settings, pretrained VAEs for stable style guidance, and an OCR model with reinforcement learning feedback for optimizing readable character generation. SIGIL outperforms existing baselines by achieving superior style consistency and legibility while maintaining visual fidelity, setting itself apart from traditional description-based approaches. We release MuST-Bench publicly for broader use and exploration https://huggingface.co/datasets/yejinc/MuST-Bench.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Selective Vision is the Challenge for Visual Reasoning: A Benchmark for Visual Argument Understanding

Visual arguments, often used in advertising or social causes, rely on images to persuade viewers to do or believe something. Understanding these arguments requires selective vision: only specific visual stimuli within an image are relevant to the argument, and relevance can only be understood within the context of a broader argumentative structure. While visual arguments are readily appreciated by human audiences, we ask: are today's AI capable of similar understanding? We present VisArgs, a dataset of 1,611 images annotated with 5,112 visual premises (with regions), 5,574 commonsense premises, and reasoning trees connecting them into structured arguments. We propose three tasks for evaluating visual argument understanding: premise localization, premise identification, and conclusion deduction. Experiments show that 1) machines struggle to capture visual cues: GPT-4-O achieved 78.5% accuracy, while humans reached 98.0%. Models also performed 19.5% worse when distinguishing between irrelevant objects within the image compared to external objects. 2) Providing relevant visual premises improved model performance significantly.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Can visual language models resolve textual ambiguity with visual cues? Let visual puns tell you!

Humans possess multimodal literacy, allowing them to actively integrate information from various modalities to form reasoning. Faced with challenges like lexical ambiguity in text, we supplement this with other modalities, such as thumbnail images or textbook illustrations. Is it possible for machines to achieve a similar multimodal understanding capability? In response, we present Understanding Pun with Image Explanations (UNPIE), a novel benchmark designed to assess the impact of multimodal inputs in resolving lexical ambiguities. Puns serve as the ideal subject for this evaluation due to their intrinsic ambiguity. Our dataset includes 1,000 puns, each accompanied by an image that explains both meanings. We pose three multimodal challenges with the annotations to assess different aspects of multimodal literacy; Pun Grounding, Disambiguation, and Reconstruction. The results indicate that various Socratic Models and Visual-Language Models improve over the text-only models when given visual context, particularly as the complexity of the tasks increases.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Cactus: Towards Psychological Counseling Conversations using Cognitive Behavioral Theory

Recently, the demand for psychological counseling has significantly increased as more individuals express concerns about their mental health. This surge has accelerated efforts to improve the accessibility of counseling by using large language models (LLMs) as counselors. To ensure client privacy, training open-source LLMs faces a key challenge: the absence of realistic counseling datasets. To address this, we introduce Cactus, a multi-turn dialogue dataset that emulates real-life interactions using the goal-oriented and structured approach of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). We create a diverse and realistic dataset by designing clients with varied, specific personas, and having counselors systematically apply CBT techniques in their interactions. To assess the quality of our data, we benchmark against established psychological criteria used to evaluate real counseling sessions, ensuring alignment with expert evaluations. Experimental results demonstrate that Camel, a model trained with Cactus, outperforms other models in counseling skills, highlighting its effectiveness and potential as a counseling agent. We make our data, model, and code publicly available.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

ActionSwitch: Class-agnostic Detection of Simultaneous Actions in Streaming Videos

Online Temporal Action Localization (On-TAL) is a critical task that aims to instantaneously identify action instances in untrimmed streaming videos as soon as an action concludes -- a major leap from frame-based Online Action Detection (OAD). Yet, the challenge of detecting overlapping actions is often overlooked even though it is a common scenario in streaming videos. Current methods that can address concurrent actions depend heavily on class information, limiting their flexibility. This paper introduces ActionSwitch, the first class-agnostic On-TAL framework capable of detecting overlapping actions. By obviating the reliance on class information, ActionSwitch provides wider applicability to various situations, including overlapping actions of the same class or scenarios where class information is unavailable. This approach is complemented by the proposed "conservativeness loss", which directly embeds a conservative decision-making principle into the loss function for On-TAL. Our ActionSwitch achieves state-of-the-art performance in complex datasets, including Epic-Kitchens 100 targeting the challenging egocentric view and FineAction consisting of fine-grained actions.

cs.CV↗