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Aug 6

Toward Real-world Text Image Forgery Localization: Structured and Interpretable Data Synthesis

Existing Text Image Forgery Localization (T-IFL) methods often suffer from poor generalization due to the limited scale of real-world datasets and the distribution gap caused by synthetic data that fails to capture the complexity of real-world tampering. To tackle this issue, we propose Fourier Series-based Tampering Synthesis (FSTS), a structured and interpretable framework for synthesizing tampered text images. FSTS first collects 16,750 real-world tampering instances from five representative tampering types, using a structured pipeline that records human-performed editing traces via multi-format logs (e.g., video, PSD, and editing logs). By analyzing these collected parameters and identifying recurring behavioral patterns at both individual and population levels, we formulate a hierarchical modeling framework. Specifically, each individual tampering parameter is represented as a compact combination of basis operation-parameter configurations, while the population-level distribution is constructed by aggregating these behaviors. Since this formulation draws inspiration from the Fourier series, it enables an interpretable approximation using basis functions and their learned weights. By sampling from this modeled distribution, FSTS synthesizes diverse and realistic training data that better reflect real-world forgery traces. Extensive experiments across four evaluation protocols demonstrate that models trained with FSTS data achieve significantly improved generalization on real-world datasets. Dataset is available at https://github.com/ZeqinYu/FSTS{Project Page}.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 16, 2025

Getting Better at Working With You: Compiling User Corrections into Runtime Enforcement for Coding Agents

Interactive LLM agents are becoming part of daily work, but they do not reliably become easier to work with over time: a correction remembered in one session may still be violated in the next. We study this gap between preference access and preference compliance. In tasks derived from anonymized real-user friction cases, Mem0 memory still leaves 57.5% of applicable preference checks violated. We introduce Test-time Rule Acquisition and Compiled Enforcement (TRACE), a drop-in skill-layer pipeline for coding-agent runtimes that mines user corrections, rewrites them as atomic rules, and compiles them into runtime checks that must pass before an agent completes future tasks. Unlike runtime checks written ahead of time by developers, TRACE skills come from the user's own chat corrections. We evaluate TRACE with simulated user-in-the-loop experiments on ClawArena coding-agent tasks and MemoryArena-derived memory-intensive tasks. On ClawArena, TRACE reduces held-out preference violation from 100.0% to 37.6% on in-distribution tasks and from 100.0% to 2.0% on out-of-distribution tasks. On MemoryArena-derived tasks, TRACE reduces in-distribution violation from 100.0% to 60.5% while matching or exceeding the strongest memory baseline on task pass. These results suggest that compiling corrections into runtime enforcement can address a repeated-friction failure mode that memory alone does not reliably solve, reducing the need for users to restate the same correction across future sessions. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/TRACE_exp, and the deployable skill is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/tellonce.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 10 3

Forgetting Is Not a Fix: Path Dependence in Sequential Engram Editing

AI Engram (Kwon et al., 2026) formalizes the four engram criteria of neuroscience as a constrained inverse problem in weight space and solves it closed-form: concept-specific memory traces become linear objects that can be extracted once and combined arithmetically. Appendix F states the Compositional Memory States Hypothesis: edited models live on "a commutative manifold where the integration of A and B reaches a consistent equilibrium regardless of the learning sequence." The evidence base is single and paired edits -- in materials terms, single-cycle tests, in which fatigue accumulation is structurally invisible. Whether the hypothesis holds under sequential load is exactly the "temporal dynamics" question the paper defers to future work. We run that test on the authors' own reference implementation, at their reported best edit strength (TOFU alpha=0.6, a choice favoring the linearity hypothesis), with pre-registered predictions, across three model charges (two vendors, two architecture families). Four findings replicate across all three: (1) zero-shot composition and sequential re-calibrated editing diverge by 61-71% of the edit magnitude; (2) cut order is not interchangeable, and the effect scales with concept overlap -- in one charge the order of cutting two Paris landmarks decides whether an uninvolved third concept survives; (3) the survivors' layer-input covariances -- the method's own sufficient statistics, read as strain gauges -- drift monotonically with every further cut, in every surviving concept, in every charge; (4) erased knowledge partially returns under subsequent unrelated cuts. Appendix F's commutative-manifold hypothesis is thereby falsified for sequential editing; the single-edit results of the original paper are untouched. For unlearning-as-compliance: erasure certified today does not certify the artifact after its next edit.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 5

Auto Research with Specialist Agents Develops Effective and Non-Trivial Training Recipes

We study auto research as a closed empirical loop driven by external measurement. Each submitted trial carries a hypothesis, an executable code edit, an evaluator-owned outcome, and feedback that shapes the next proposal. The output is not a generated paper or a single model checkpoint, but an auditable trajectory of proposals, code diffs, experiments, scores, and failure labels. We instantiate this loop with specialist agents that partition recipe surfaces and share measured lineage across trials. The central empirical finding is that lineage feedback lets agents turn evaluator outcomes, including crashes, budget overruns, size failures, and accuracy-gate misses, into later program-level recipe edits rather than one-shot suggestions. Across 1,197 headline-run trials plus 600 Parameter Golf control trials after one-time setup and launch, humans did not choose proposals, edit recipes, override scores, or repair failed trials during the search. In the three headline runs, the same submitted-trial loop reduces Parameter Golf validation bpb by 0.81%, raises NanoChat-D12 CORE by 38.7%, and reduces CIFAR-10 Airbench96 wallclock by 4.59%, with each task measured by its own external evaluator and legality checks. The trace includes a strict architecture-domain audit of 157 headline-run submissions and program rewrites such as a NanoChat attention-kernel path change. Within this scope the loop autonomously writes code, submits experiments, absorbs feedback, applies and combines known techniques inside each environment, and improves public starting recipes.

Modeling Student Learning with 3.8 Million Program Traces

As programmers write code, they often edit and retry multiple times, creating rich "interaction traces" that reveal how they approach coding tasks and provide clues about their level of skill development. For novice programmers in particular, these traces reflect the diverse reasoning processes they employ to code, such as exploratory behavior to understand how a programming concept works, re-strategizing in response to bugs, and personalizing stylistic choices. In this work, we explore what can be learned from training language models on such reasoning traces: not just about code, but about coders, and particularly students learning to program. We introduce a dataset of over 3.8 million programming reasoning traces from users of Pencil Code, a free online educational platform used by students to learn simple programming concepts. Compared to models trained only on final programs or synthetically-generated traces, we find that models trained on real traces are stronger at modeling diverse student behavior. Through both behavioral and probing analyses, we also find that many properties of code traces, such as goal backtracking or number of comments, can be predicted from learned representations of the students who write them. Building on this result, we show that we can help students recover from mistakes by steering code generation models to identify a sequence of edits that will results in more correct code while remaining close to the original student's style. Together, our results suggest that many properties of code are properties of individual students and that training on edit traces can lead to models that are more steerable, more predictive of student behavior while programming, and better at generating programs in their final states. Code and data is available at https://github.com/meghabyte/pencilcode-public

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 14

Can Sensitive Information Be Deleted From LLMs? Objectives for Defending Against Extraction Attacks

Pretrained language models sometimes possess knowledge that we do not wish them to, including memorized personal information and knowledge that could be used to harm people. They can also output toxic or harmful text. To mitigate these safety and informational issues, we propose an attack-and-defense framework for studying the task of deleting sensitive information directly from model weights. We study direct edits to model weights because (1) this approach should guarantee that particular deleted information is never extracted by future prompt attacks, and (2) it should protect against whitebox attacks, which is necessary for making claims about safety/privacy in a setting where publicly available model weights could be used to elicit sensitive information. Our threat model assumes that an attack succeeds if the answer to a sensitive question is located among a set of B generated candidates, based on scenarios where the information would be insecure if the answer is among B candidates. Experimentally, we show that even state-of-the-art model editing methods such as ROME struggle to truly delete factual information from models like GPT-J, as our whitebox and blackbox attacks can recover "deleted" information from an edited model 38% of the time. These attacks leverage two key observations: (1) that traces of deleted information can be found in intermediate model hidden states, and (2) that applying an editing method for one question may not delete information across rephrased versions of the question. Finally, we provide new defense methods that protect against some extraction attacks, but we do not find a single universally effective defense method. Our results suggest that truly deleting sensitive information is a tractable but difficult problem, since even relatively low attack success rates have potentially severe societal implications for real-world deployment of language models.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023 1

R^3: Composed Video Retrieval via Reasoning-Guided Recalling and Re-ranking

The CoVR-R challenge evaluates composed video retrieval, where a system must retrieve a target video from a large gallery given a reference video and a textual edit instruction. This setting is not a standard video-text retrieval problem: the query is defined by both the visual evidence in the source video and the transformation implied by the edit. A strong embedding model can provide scalable candidate recall, but it may under-express target-side consequences such as state changes, action replacement, object preservation, or temporal consistency. A pairwise multimodal reranker can verify such details more directly, but exhaustive reranking over the full gallery is computationally infeasible. We present R^3, a zero-shot composed video retrieval pipeline built around Reasoning-guided Recalling and Reranking. The core idea is to turn the source-edit query into a reasoning-grounded retrieval program rather than treating the edit text as a short caption. First, the model generates a reasoning trace that describes the expected target video after applying the edit. Then the trace is encoded together with the source video as a reasoning-augmented query, and its retrieval score is fused with the base composed query through an agreement-gated residual rule. At last, a re-ranker verifies the recalled candidates with direct source-candidate comparison. Experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in addressing this challenge. Codes are available on https://github.com/Lee-zixu/R-3.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 3

Enhancing Automated Software Traceability by Transfer Learning from Open-World Data

Software requirements traceability is a critical component of the software engineering process, enabling activities such as requirements validation, compliance verification, and safety assurance. However, the cost and effort of manually creating a complete set of trace links across natural language artifacts such as requirements, design, and test-cases can be prohibitively expensive. Researchers have therefore proposed automated link-generation solutions primarily based on information-retrieval (IR) techniques; however, these solutions have failed to deliver the accuracy needed for full adoption in industrial projects. Improvements can be achieved using deep-learning traceability models; however, their efficacy is impeded by the limited size and availability of project-level artifacts and links to serve as training data. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing and evaluating several deep-learning approaches for text-to-text traceability. Our method, named NLTrace, explores three transfer learning strategies that use datasets mined from open world platforms. Through pretraining Language Models (LMs) and leveraging adjacent tracing tasks, we demonstrate that NLTrace can significantly improve the performance of LM based trace models when training links are available. In such scenarios NLTrace outperforms the best performing classical IR method with an 188% improvement in F2 score and 94.01% in Mean Average Precision (MAP). It also outperforms the general LM based trace model by 7% and 23% for F2 and MAP respectively. In addition, NLTrace can adapt to low-resource tracing scenarios where other LM models can not. The knowledge learned from adjacent tasks enables NLTrace to outperform VSM models by 28% F2 on generation challenges when presented with a small number of training examples.

TraceCoder: A Trace-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Debugging of LLM-Generated Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate code with subtle but critical bugs, especially for complex tasks. Existing automated repair methods typically rely on superficial pass/fail signals, offering limited visibility into program behavior and hindering precise error localization. In addition, without a way to learn from prior failures, repair processes often fall into repetitive and inefficient cycles. To overcome these challenges, we present TraceCoder, a collaborative multi-agent framework that emulates the observe-analyze-repair process of human experts. The framework first instruments the code with diagnostic probes to capture fine-grained runtime traces, enabling deep insight into its internal execution. It then conducts causal analysis on these traces to accurately identify the root cause of the failure. This process is further enhanced by a novel Historical Lesson Learning Mechanism (HLLM), which distills insights from prior failed repair attempts to inform subsequent correction strategies and prevent recurrence of similar mistakes. To ensure stable convergence, a Rollback Mechanism enforces that each repair iteration constitutes a strict improvement toward the correct solution. Comprehensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that TraceCoder achieves up to a 34.43\% relative improvement in Pass@1 accuracy over existing advanced baselines. Ablation studies verify the significance of each system component, with the iterative repair process alone contributing a 65.61\% relative gain in accuracy. Furthermore, TraceCoder significantly outperforms leading iterative methods in terms of both accuracy and cost-efficiency.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 6

TRACE: A Two-Channel Robust Attribution Watermark via Complementary Embeddings for LLM-Agent Trajectories

LLM agents reach users through resellers, who may rebrand a developer's agent or substitute a cheaper model. When provenance is disputed, attribution rests on the trajectory log (the record of tool calls, observations, and executed actions, not the model's reasoning), which the reseller stores and processes to meter usage. A watermark must therefore survive an adversary with full read/write access to the very evidence it is detected from; existing agent watermarks do not, as their attribution is read straight off that log. We present TRACE, to our knowledge the first agent watermark that is distortion-free in its action choices, self-synchronizing under deletion, and unconditionally invariant under rewriting. Deletion desynchronizes a position-derived key and rewriting alters content, so a deletion-robust key must come from content and a rewrite-robust key from position, and no single key serves both. A trajectory, however, has room for two watermarks. TRACE superposes a selection channel that sets which action is chosen, keyed on local content with a distortion-free sampler, so the agent's distribution is provably unchanged and detection resynchronizes after deletions, and a tally channel that sets how many records each decision group holds, keyed on the log's skeleton alone, which no rewriting can touch. We prove this behavioral watermark's signal is bought with decision entropy, each decision paying at least half its entropy and deterministic decisions nothing, and that erasing both channels forces the reseller to corrupt the trajectories it resells. On ToolBench and ALFWorld, TRACE matches the unwatermarked agent's success rate while its selection channel reaches detection scores near z = 100 on long-horizon trajectories, stays detectable under 70% step deletion, and keeps a tally channel exactly unchanged under LLM rewriting of any strength.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 8

AUDIT: Audio Editing by Following Instructions with Latent Diffusion Models

Audio editing is applicable for various purposes, such as adding background sound effects, replacing a musical instrument, and repairing damaged audio. Recently, some diffusion-based methods achieved zero-shot audio editing by using a diffusion and denoising process conditioned on the text description of the output audio. However, these methods still have some problems: 1) they have not been trained on editing tasks and cannot ensure good editing effects; 2) they can erroneously modify audio segments that do not require editing; 3) they need a complete description of the output audio, which is not always available or necessary in practical scenarios. In this work, we propose AUDIT, an instruction-guided audio editing model based on latent diffusion models. Specifically, AUDIT has three main design features: 1) we construct triplet training data (instruction, input audio, output audio) for different audio editing tasks and train a diffusion model using instruction and input (to be edited) audio as conditions and generating output (edited) audio; 2) it can automatically learn to only modify segments that need to be edited by comparing the difference between the input and output audio; 3) it only needs edit instructions instead of full target audio descriptions as text input. AUDIT achieves state-of-the-art results in both objective and subjective metrics for several audio editing tasks (e.g., adding, dropping, replacement, inpainting, super-resolution). Demo samples are available at https://audit-demo.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 3, 2023 1

Trace is the New AutoDiff -- Unlocking Efficient Optimization of Computational Workflows

We study a class of optimization problems motivated by automating the design and update of AI systems like coding assistants, robots, and copilots. We propose an end-to-end optimization framework, Trace, which treats the computational workflow of an AI system as a graph akin to neural networks, based on a generalization of back-propagation. Optimization of computational workflows often involves rich feedback (e.g. console output or user's responses), heterogeneous parameters (e.g. prompts, hyper-parameters, codes), and intricate objectives (beyond maximizing a score). Moreover, its computation graph can change dynamically with the inputs and parameters. We frame a new mathematical setup of iterative optimization, Optimization with Trace Oracle (OPTO), to capture and abstract these properties so as to design optimizers that work across many domains. In OPTO, an optimizer receives an execution trace along with feedback on the computed output and updates parameters iteratively. Trace is the tool to implement OPTO in practice. Trace has a Python interface that efficiently converts a computational workflow into an OPTO instance using a PyTorch-like interface. Using Trace, we develop a general-purpose LLM-based optimizer called OptoPrime that can effectively solve OPTO problems. In empirical studies, we find that OptoPrime is capable of first-order numerical optimization, prompt optimization, hyper-parameter tuning, robot controller design, code debugging, etc., and is often competitive with specialized optimizers for each domain. We believe that Trace, OptoPrime and the OPTO framework will enable the next generation of interactive agents that automatically adapt using various kinds of feedback. Website: https://microsoft.github.io/Trace

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 23, 2024 1

To Add Is Machine, To Delete Is Human: Measuring and Mitigating Deletion Avoidance in LLM Code Editing

Large language models increasingly write and repair production code, yet evidence is mounting that their test-passing patches leave codebases harder to maintain. We identify one concrete source: deletion avoidance, the systematic tendency to retain code that an intended edit requires removing. Across the five leading models on the official SWE-bench Verified leaderboard, deletion recall against the developer patch reaches at most 71.7% even on tasks all five solve, and models reach the right file for over 92% of required deletions but cut the exact line in under 52% of cases. Instead, 29.0% of passing patches wrap the targeted code in a guard or fallback, a pattern we call Guard-and-Go. Such patches pass because the original tests rarely check removal: when we retrofit 34 Verified tasks with tests that fail if the targeted code remains, four frontier models spanning closed and open weights fall from 63.2% to 41.9%. Because real repairs mix removal with addition, we curate CanItDelete, a benchmark of 200 tasks mined from real commits whose entire required edit is deletion. Even with the addition work gone, the best model still fails one task in five, and smaller open models fall to 18.0%. We then ablate GPT-5.6 Sol under four cumulative prompts; success moves little until we supply the exact lines, which nearly eliminate incomplete deletion yet raise success only to 80.5% because the model then deletes beyond the spans or adds code instead. Finally, through a pilot study we show one potential fix: teaching deletion during post-training reduces deletion avoidance and improves broader code-editing performance, suggesting the behavior is undertrained rather than beyond reach.

Towards a Training Free Approach for 3D Scene Editing

Text driven diffusion models have shown remarkable capabilities in editing images. However, when editing 3D scenes, existing works mostly rely on training a NeRF for 3D editing. Recent NeRF editing methods leverages edit operations by deploying 2D diffusion models and project these edits into 3D space. They require strong positional priors alongside text prompt to identify the edit location. These methods are operational on small 3D scenes and are more generalized to particular scene. They require training for each specific edit and cannot be exploited in real-time edits. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method, FreeEdit, to make edits in training free manner using mesh representations as a substitute for NeRF. Training-free methods are now a possibility because of the advances in foundation model's space. We leverage these models to bring a training-free alternative and introduce solutions for insertion, replacement and deletion. We consider insertion, replacement and deletion as basic blocks for performing intricate edits with certain combinations of these operations. Given a text prompt and a 3D scene, our model is capable of identifying what object should be inserted/replaced or deleted and location where edit should be performed. We also introduce a novel algorithm as part of FreeEdit to find the optimal location on grounding object for placement. We evaluate our model by comparing it with baseline models on a wide range of scenes using quantitative and qualitative metrics and showcase the merits of our method with respect to others.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

Does Localization Inform Editing? Surprising Differences in Causality-Based Localization vs. Knowledge Editing in Language Models

Language models learn a great quantity of factual information during pretraining, and recent work localizes this information to specific model weights like mid-layer MLP weights. In this paper, we find that we can change how a fact is stored in a model by editing weights that are in a different location than where existing methods suggest that the fact is stored. This is surprising because we would expect that localizing facts to specific model parameters would tell us where to manipulate knowledge in models, and this assumption has motivated past work on model editing methods. Specifically, we show that localization conclusions from representation denoising (also known as Causal Tracing) do not provide any insight into which model MLP layer would be best to edit in order to override an existing stored fact with a new one. This finding raises questions about how past work relies on Causal Tracing to select which model layers to edit. Next, we consider several variants of the editing problem, including erasing and amplifying facts. For one of our editing problems, editing performance does relate to localization results from representation denoising, but we find that which layer we edit is a far better predictor of performance. Our results suggest, counterintuitively, that better mechanistic understanding of how pretrained language models work may not always translate to insights about how to best change their behavior. Our code is available at https://github.com/google/belief-localization

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 10, 2023

Generating the Traces You Need: A Conditional Generative Model for Process Mining Data

In recent years, trace generation has emerged as a significant challenge within the Process Mining community. Deep Learning (DL) models have demonstrated accuracy in reproducing the features of the selected processes. However, current DL generative models are limited in their ability to adapt the learned distributions to generate data samples based on specific conditions or attributes. This limitation is particularly significant because the ability to control the type of generated data can be beneficial in various contexts, enabling a focus on specific behaviours, exploration of infrequent patterns, or simulation of alternative 'what-if' scenarios. In this work, we address this challenge by introducing a conditional model for process data generation based on a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE). Conditional models offer control over the generation process by tuning input conditional variables, enabling more targeted and controlled data generation. Unlike other domains, CVAE for process mining faces specific challenges due to the multiperspective nature of the data and the need to adhere to control-flow rules while ensuring data variability. Specifically, we focus on generating process executions conditioned on control flow and temporal features of the trace, allowing us to produce traces for specific, identified sub-processes. The generated traces are then evaluated using common metrics for generative model assessment, along with additional metrics to evaluate the quality of the conditional generation

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 4, 2024

TRACE: Capability-Targeted Agentic Training

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in agentic environments must exercise multiple capabilities across different task instances, where a capability is performing one or more actions in a trajectory that are necessary for successfully solving a subset of tasks in the environment. Many existing approaches either rely on synthetic training data that is not targeted to the model's actual capability deficits in the target environment or train directly on the target environment, where the model needs to implicitly learn the capabilities across tasks. We introduce TRACE (Turning Recurrent Agent failures into Capability-targeted training Environments), an end-to-end system for environment-specific agent self-improvement. TRACE contrasts successful and failed trajectories to automatically identify lacking capabilities, synthesizes a targeted training environment for each that rewards whether the capability was exercised, and trains a LoRA adapter via RL on each synthetic environment, routing to the relevant adapter at inference. Empirically, TRACE generalizes across different environments, improving over the base agent by +14.1 points on τ^2-bench (customer service) and +7 perfect scores on ToolSandbox (tool use), outperforming the strongest baseline by +7.4 points and +4 perfect scores, respectively. Given the same number of rollouts, TRACE scales more efficiently than baselines, outperforming GRPO and GEPA by +9.2 and +7.4 points on τ^2-bench.

What Do Evolutionary Coding Agents Evolve?

Recent work pairs LLMs with evolutionary search to iteratively generate, modify, and select code using task-specific feedback. These systems have produced strong results in mathematical discovery and algorithm design, yet a fundamental question remains: what do they actually evolve? Progress is typically summarized by the best score a run reaches under a task-specific evaluator, but that score can reflect several different mechanisms: new algorithmic structure, re-tuning an existing strategy, recombining ideas already in the model's internal knowledge, or overfitting to the evaluator. Distinguishing these mechanisms requires inspecting the search process itself, not only its final outcome. We introduce EvoTrace, a dataset of evolutionary coding traces spanning four evolutionary frameworks, reasoning and non-reasoning models, and 16 tasks across mathematics and algorithm design. To analyze these traces, we develop EvoReplay, a replay-based methodology that reconstructs the local search states behind high-scoring solutions and tests controlled interventions, including adjusting constants, removing program components and substituting models or prompting contexts. We annotate every code edit in EvoTrace with one of nine recurring edit types using an LLM-as-judge pipeline validated against blind human re-annotation. Across EvoTrace, most score gains come from a small subset of these edit types. We further find a deterministic cycling pattern: about 30% of code lines added during search are byte-identical re-introductions of previously-deleted lines, present throughout nearly every run. These results show that benchmark gains in evolutionary coding agents can arise from qualitatively different mechanisms, only some of which correspond to new algorithmic structure. EvoTrace enables more diagnostic evaluation of evolutionary coding agents beyond final benchmark scores.

  • 7 authors
·
May 18

SkCoder: A Sketch-based Approach for Automatic Code Generation

Recently, deep learning techniques have shown great success in automatic code generation. Inspired by the code reuse, some researchers propose copy-based approaches that can copy the content from similar code snippets to obtain better performance. Practically, human developers recognize the content in the similar code that is relevant to their needs, which can be viewed as a code sketch. The sketch is further edited to the desired code. However, existing copy-based approaches ignore the code sketches and tend to repeat the similar code without necessary modifications, which leads to generating wrong results. In this paper, we propose a sketch-based code generation approach named SkCoder to mimic developers' code reuse behavior. Given a natural language requirement, SkCoder retrieves a similar code snippet, extracts relevant parts as a code sketch, and edits the sketch into the desired code. Our motivations are that the extracted sketch provides a well-formed pattern for telling models "how to write". The post-editing further adds requirement-specific details to the sketch and outputs the complete code. We conduct experiments on two public datasets and a new dataset collected by this work. We compare our approach to 20 baselines using 5 widely used metrics. Experimental results show that (1) SkCoder can generate more correct programs, and outperforms the state-of-the-art - CodeT5-base by 30.30%, 35.39%, and 29.62% on three datasets. (2) Our approach is effective to multiple code generation models and improves them by up to 120.1% in Pass@1. (3) We investigate three plausible code sketches and discuss the importance of sketches. (4) We manually evaluate the generated code and prove the superiority of our SkCoder in three aspects.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 13, 2023

Traceability Transformed: Generating more Accurate Links with Pre-Trained BERT Models

Software traceability establishes and leverages associations between diverse development artifacts. Researchers have proposed the use of deep learning trace models to link natural language artifacts, such as requirements and issue descriptions, to source code; however, their effectiveness has been restricted by availability of labeled data and efficiency at runtime. In this study, we propose a novel framework called Trace BERT (T-BERT) to generate trace links between source code and natural language artifacts. To address data sparsity, we leverage a three-step training strategy to enable trace models to transfer knowledge from a closely related Software Engineering challenge, which has a rich dataset, to produce trace links with much higher accuracy than has previously been achieved. We then apply the T-BERT framework to recover links between issues and commits in Open Source Projects. We comparatively evaluated accuracy and efficiency of three BERT architectures. Results show that a Single-BERT architecture generated the most accurate links, while a Siamese-BERT architecture produced comparable results with significantly less execution time. Furthermore, by learning and transferring knowledge, all three models in the framework outperform classical IR trace models. On the three evaluated real-word OSS projects, the best T-BERT stably outperformed the VSM model with average improvements of 60.31% measured using Mean Average Precision (MAP). RNN severely underperformed on these projects due to insufficient training data, while T-BERT overcame this problem by using pretrained language models and transfer learning.

TRACEALIGN -- Tracing the Drift: Attributing Alignment Failures to Training-Time Belief Sources in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuned to align with human values often exhibit alignment drift, producing unsafe or policy-violating completions when exposed to adversarial prompts, decoding perturbations, or paraphrased jailbreaks. While prior work has behaviorally characterized alignment failure, little is known about the training-time belief sources underlying these failures. We introduce TraceAlign, a unified framework for tracing unsafe completions back to their root causes in the model's training corpus. Central to our approach is the Belief Conflict Index (BCI), which quantifies semantic inconsistency between generated spans and aligned policies, based on retrieved training documents using suffix-array matching. We propose three complementary interventions: (i) TraceShield, an inference-time safety filter that refuses completions with high-BCI spans, (ii) Contrastive Belief Deconfliction Loss, a contrastive fine-tuning objective penalizing high-BCI continuations during DPO, and (iii) Prov-Decode, a provenance-aware decoding strategy that vetoes beam expansions predicted to yield high-BCI spans. Together, these defenses reduce alignment drift by up to 85% on our curated Alignment Drift Benchmark (ADB) while preserving utility on standard tasks, with delta less than 0.2 and improved refusal quality. We further derive a theoretical upper bound on drift likelihood via suffix-array span statistics, linking memorization frequency and length to adversarial reactivation risk. TraceAlign thus provides the first scalable, traceable, and grounded toolkit for understanding and mitigating alignment failures at source. To encourage further exploration and development, we open-source our implementation at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/tracealign-2DA7

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025 2

The Realignment Problem: When Right becomes Wrong in LLMs

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values is central to their safe deployment, yet current practice produces static, brittle, and costly-to-maintain models that fail to keep pace with evolving norms and policies. This misalignment, which we term the Alignment-Reality Gap, poses a growing challenge for reliable long-term use. Existing remedies are inadequate: large-scale re-annotation is economically prohibitive, and standard unlearning methods act as blunt instruments that erode utility rather than enable precise policy updates. We introduce TRACE (Triage and Re-align by Alignment Conflict Evaluation), a framework for principled unlearning that reconceives re-alignment as a programmatic policy application problem. TRACE programmatically triages existing preference data against a new policy, identifies high-impact conflicts via a alignment impact score, and applies a hybrid optimization that cleanly inverts, discards, or preserves preferences while safeguarding model performance. Empirical results show that TRACE achieves robust re-alignment across diverse model families (Qwen2.5-7B, Gemma-2-9B, Llama-3.1-8B). On both synthetic benchmarks and the PKU-SafeRLHF dataset under complex policy shift, TRACE enforces new principles without degrading general capabilities. Our work establishes a scalable, dynamic, and cost-effective paradigm for maintaining LLM alignment, providing a foundation for sustainable and responsible AI deployment.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 3, 2025

CoEdIT: Text Editing by Task-Specific Instruction Tuning

Text editing or revision is an essential function of the human writing process. Understanding the capabilities of LLMs for making high-quality revisions and collaborating with human writers is a critical step toward building effective writing assistants. With the prior success of LLMs and instruction tuning, we leverage instruction-tuned LLMs for text revision to improve the quality of user-generated text and improve the efficiency of the process. We introduce CoEdIT, a state-of-the-art text editing model for writing assistance. CoEdIT takes instructions from the user specifying the attributes of the desired text, such as "Make the sentence simpler" or "Write it in a more neutral style," and outputs the edited text. We present a large language model fine-tuned on a diverse collection of task-specific instructions for text editing (a total of 82K instructions). Our model (1) achieves state-of-the-art performance on various text editing benchmarks, (2) is competitive with publicly available largest-sized LLMs trained on instructions while being sim60x smaller, (3) is capable of generalizing to unseen edit instructions, and (4) exhibits compositional comprehension abilities to generalize to instructions containing different combinations of edit actions. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis, we show that writers prefer the edits suggested by CoEdIT, relative to other state-of-the-art text editing models. Our code and dataset are publicly available.

  • 4 authors
·
May 16, 2023 4

SketchAssist: A Practical Assistant for Semantic Edits and Precise Local Redrawing

Sketch editing is central to digital illustration, yet existing image editing systems struggle to preserve the sparse, style-sensitive structure of line art while supporting both high-level semantic changes and precise local redrawing. We present SketchAssist, an interactive sketch drawing assistant that accelerates creation by unifying instruction-guided global edits with line-guided region redrawing, while keeping unrelated regions and overall composition intact. To enable this assistant at scale, we introduce a controllable data generation pipeline that (i) constructs attribute-addition sequences from attribute-free base sketches, (ii) forms multi-step edit chains via cross-sequence sampling, and (iii) expands stylistic coverage with a style-preserving attribute-removal model applied to diverse sketches. Building on this data, SketchAssist employs a unified sketch editing framework with minimal changes to DiT-based editors. We repurpose the RGB channels to encode the inputs, enabling seamless switching between instruction-guided edits and line-guided redrawing within a single input interface. To further specialize behavior across modes, we integrate a task-guided mixture-of-experts into LoRA layers, routing by text and visual cues to improve semantic controllability, structural fidelity, and style preservation. Extensive experiments show state-of-the-art results on both tasks, with superior instruction adherence and style/structure preservation compared to recent baselines. Together, our dataset and SketchAssist provide a practical, controllable assistant for sketch creation and revision.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 16, 2025

TRACE: Business Rule-Grounded Reasoning Curriculum for Knowledge-Preserving Parametric Tool Retrieval in Enterprise LLMs

Parametric retrieval enables LLMs to retrieve tools implicitly by assigning each API a unique virtual token and training the model to generate it via constrained beam search. Toolsense shows that this regime has two critical drawbacks: it destroys parametric tool knowledge during training, and its beam-search decoding is too slow for real-time deployment. We introduce TRACE (Tool Retrieval via Augmented Chain-of-thought and Enterprise rules), a two-stage curriculum that resolves this dissociation. Stage 1 reuses the multi-format memorization SFT from ToolSense to seed tool knowledge with LoRA. Stage 2 is our core contribution: the model is trained to emit a thinking trace before producing a JSON list of tool tokens, using two data sources -- RRB pairs from ToolSense and queries synthesized to target business rules curated by domain experts -- both augmented with reasoning traces. This training objective preserves Stage 1 MCQ and QA probing accuracy while enabling single-beam greedy decoding at production latency. Evaluated on a combined enterprise catalog of 8,300+ tools across two enterprise product lines, TRACE training for Stage 2 not only preserves but improves tool understanding: MCQ accuracy gains +3.2 pp and QA probing gains +9 pp over Stage 1. On retrieval, TRACE achieves ~86% recall on Domain A and ~60% on Domain B -- compared to embedding baseline performance of ~27% & ~52% -- both with single-beam greedy decoding, making it directly deployable at production latency.

SAP SAP
·
Jun 21 2

A Unified Framework for Model Editing

Model editing is a growing area focused on updating the knowledge embedded within models. Among the various methodologies, ROME and MEMIT stand out as leading "locate-and-edit" model editing techniques. While MEMIT enables batched editing of memories, ROME is limited to changing one fact at a time. This paper introduces a unifying framework that brings ROME and MEMIT under a single conceptual umbrella, optimizing for the same goal, which we call the "preservation-memorization" objective. This objective aims to preserve the representations of certain selected vectors while memorizing the representations of new factual information. Specifically, ROME optimizes this objective using an equality constraint, whereas MEMIT employs a more flexible least-square constraint. In addition to making batched edits, MEMIT also edits the model at multiple layers. We disentangle the distribution of edits to multiple layers from the optimization objective of MEMIT and show that these edit-distribution algorithms should be considered separate entities worthy of their own line of research. Finally, we present EMMET - an Equality-constrained Mass Model Editing algorithm for Transformers, a new batched memory-editing algorithm. With EMMET, we present a closed form solution for the equality-constrained version of the preservation-memorization objective. We show that EMMET is able to perform batched-edits on par with MEMIT up to a batch-size of 256 and discuss the challenges in stabilizing EMMET. By articulating the "locate-and-edit" model editing algorithms under a simple conceptual framework of "preservation-memorization", we aim to bridge the gap between intuition and mathematics and hope to simplify the journey for future researchers in model editing.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 21, 2024

SuperEdit: Rectifying and Facilitating Supervision for Instruction-Based Image Editing

Due to the challenges of manually collecting accurate editing data, existing datasets are typically constructed using various automated methods, leading to noisy supervision signals caused by the mismatch between editing instructions and original-edited image pairs. Recent efforts attempt to improve editing models through generating higher-quality edited images, pre-training on recognition tasks, or introducing vision-language models (VLMs) but fail to resolve this fundamental issue. In this paper, we offer a novel solution by constructing more effective editing instructions for given image pairs. This includes rectifying the editing instructions to better align with the original-edited image pairs and using contrastive editing instructions to further enhance their effectiveness. Specifically, we find that editing models exhibit specific generation attributes at different inference steps, independent of the text. Based on these prior attributes, we define a unified guide for VLMs to rectify editing instructions. However, there are some challenging editing scenarios that cannot be resolved solely with rectified instructions. To this end, we further construct contrastive supervision signals with positive and negative instructions and introduce them into the model training using triplet loss, thereby further facilitating supervision effectiveness. Our method does not require the VLM modules or pre-training tasks used in previous work, offering a more direct and efficient way to provide better supervision signals, and providing a novel, simple, and effective solution for instruction-based image editing. Results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches. Compared with previous SOTA SmartEdit, we achieve 9.19% improvements on the Real-Edit benchmark with 30x less training data and 13x smaller model size.

  • 7 authors
·
May 5, 2025 1

MonetGPT: Solving Puzzles Enhances MLLMs' Image Retouching Skills

Retouching is an essential task in post-manipulation of raw photographs. Generative editing, guided by text or strokes, provides a new tool accessible to users but can easily change the identity of the original objects in unacceptable and unpredictable ways. In contrast, although traditional procedural edits, as commonly supported by photoediting tools (e.g., Gimp, Lightroom), are conservative, they are still preferred by professionals. Unfortunately, professional quality retouching involves many individual procedural editing operations that is challenging to plan for most novices. In this paper, we ask if a multimodal large language model (MLLM) can be taught to critique raw photographs, suggest suitable remedies, and finally realize them with a given set of pre-authored procedural image operations. We demonstrate that MLLMs can be first made aware of the underlying image processing operations, by training them to solve specially designed visual puzzles. Subsequently, such an operation-aware MLLM can both plan and propose edit sequences. To facilitate training, given a set of expert-edited photos, we synthesize a reasoning dataset by procedurally manipulating the expert edits and then grounding a pretrained LLM on the visual adjustments, to synthesize reasoning for finetuning. The proposed retouching operations are, by construction, understandable by the users, preserve object details and resolution, and can be optionally overridden. We evaluate our setup on a variety of test examples and show advantages, in terms of explainability and identity preservation, over existing generative and other procedural alternatives. Code, data, models, and supplementary results can be found via our project website at https://monetgpt.github.io.

  • 3 authors
·
May 9, 2025 2

DreamOmni: Unified Image Generation and Editing

Currently, the success of large language models (LLMs) illustrates that a unified multitasking approach can significantly enhance model usability, streamline deployment, and foster synergistic benefits across different tasks. However, in computer vision, while text-to-image (T2I) models have significantly improved generation quality through scaling up, their framework design did not initially consider how to unify with downstream tasks, such as various types of editing. To address this, we introduce DreamOmni, a unified model for image generation and editing. We begin by analyzing existing frameworks and the requirements of downstream tasks, proposing a unified framework that integrates both T2I models and various editing tasks. Furthermore, another key challenge is the efficient creation of high-quality editing data, particularly for instruction-based and drag-based editing. To this end, we develop a synthetic data pipeline using sticker-like elements to synthesize accurate, high-quality datasets efficiently, which enables editing data scaling up for unified model training. For training, DreamOmni jointly trains T2I generation and downstream tasks. T2I training enhances the model's understanding of specific concepts and improves generation quality, while editing training helps the model grasp the nuances of the editing task. This collaboration significantly boosts editing performance. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of DreamOmni. The code and model will be released.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 22, 2024

Instruction-based Time Series Editing

In time series editing, we aim to modify some properties of a given time series without altering others. For example, when analyzing a hospital patient's blood pressure, we may add a sudden early drop and observe how it impacts their future while preserving other conditions. Existing diffusion-based editors rely on rigid, predefined attribute vectors as conditions and produce all-or-nothing edits through sampling. This attribute- and sampling-based approach limits flexibility in condition format and lacks customizable control over editing strength. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Instruction-based Time Series Editing, where users specify intended edits using natural language. This allows users to express a wider range of edits in a more accessible format. We then introduce InstructTime, the first instruction-based time series editor. InstructTime takes in time series and instructions, embeds them into a shared multi-modal representation space, then decodes their embeddings to generate edited time series. By learning a structured multi-modal representation space, we can easily interpolate between embeddings to achieve varying degrees of edit. To handle local and global edits together, we propose multi-resolution encoders. In our experiments, we use synthetic and real datasets and find that InstructTime is a state-of-the-art time series editor: InstructTime achieves high-quality edits with controllable strength, can generalize to unseen instructions, and can be easily adapted to unseen conditions through few-shot learning.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 2, 2025

Sketch3DVE: Sketch-based 3D-Aware Scene Video Editing

Recent video editing methods achieve attractive results in style transfer or appearance modification. However, editing the structural content of 3D scenes in videos remains challenging, particularly when dealing with significant viewpoint changes, such as large camera rotations or zooms. Key challenges include generating novel view content that remains consistent with the original video, preserving unedited regions, and translating sparse 2D inputs into realistic 3D video outputs. To address these issues, we propose Sketch3DVE, a sketch-based 3D-aware video editing method to enable detailed local manipulation of videos with significant viewpoint changes. To solve the challenge posed by sparse inputs, we employ image editing methods to generate edited results for the first frame, which are then propagated to the remaining frames of the video. We utilize sketching as an interaction tool for precise geometry control, while other mask-based image editing methods are also supported. To handle viewpoint changes, we perform a detailed analysis and manipulation of the 3D information in the video. Specifically, we utilize a dense stereo method to estimate a point cloud and the camera parameters of the input video. We then propose a point cloud editing approach that uses depth maps to represent the 3D geometry of newly edited components, aligning them effectively with the original 3D scene. To seamlessly merge the newly edited content with the original video while preserving the features of unedited regions, we introduce a 3D-aware mask propagation strategy and employ a video diffusion model to produce realistic edited videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of Sketch3DVE in video editing. Homepage and code: http://http://geometrylearning.com/Sketch3DVE/

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025 2

ContextFlow: Training-Free Video Object Editing via Adaptive Context Enrichment

Training-free video object editing aims to achieve precise object-level manipulation, including object insertion, swapping, and deletion. However, it faces significant challenges in maintaining fidelity and temporal consistency. Existing methods, often designed for U-Net architectures, suffer from two primary limitations: inaccurate inversion due to first-order solvers, and contextual conflicts caused by crude "hard" feature replacement. These issues are more challenging in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs), where the unsuitability of prior layer-selection heuristics makes effective guidance challenging. To address these limitations, we introduce ContextFlow, a novel training-free framework for DiT-based video object editing. In detail, we first employ a high-order Rectified Flow solver to establish a robust editing foundation. The core of our framework is Adaptive Context Enrichment (for specifying what to edit), a mechanism that addresses contextual conflicts. Instead of replacing features, it enriches the self-attention context by concatenating Key-Value pairs from parallel reconstruction and editing paths, empowering the model to dynamically fuse information. Additionally, to determine where to apply this enrichment (for specifying where to edit), we propose a systematic, data-driven analysis to identify task-specific vital layers. Based on a novel Guidance Responsiveness Metric, our method pinpoints the most influential DiT blocks for different tasks (e.g., insertion, swapping), enabling targeted and highly effective guidance. Extensive experiments show that ContextFlow significantly outperforms existing training-free methods and even surpasses several state-of-the-art training-based approaches, delivering temporally coherent, high-fidelity results.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 22, 2025 2

SketchEdit: Mask-Free Local Image Manipulation with Partial Sketches

Sketch-based image manipulation is an interactive image editing task to modify an image based on input sketches from users. Existing methods typically formulate this task as a conditional inpainting problem, which requires users to draw an extra mask indicating the region to modify in addition to sketches. The masked regions are regarded as holes and filled by an inpainting model conditioned on the sketch. With this formulation, paired training data can be easily obtained by randomly creating masks and extracting edges or contours. Although this setup simplifies data preparation and model design, it complicates user interaction and discards useful information in masked regions. To this end, we investigate a new paradigm of sketch-based image manipulation: mask-free local image manipulation, which only requires sketch inputs from users and utilizes the entire original image. Given an image and sketch, our model automatically predicts the target modification region and encodes it into a structure agnostic style vector. A generator then synthesizes the new image content based on the style vector and sketch. The manipulated image is finally produced by blending the generator output into the modification region of the original image. Our model can be trained in a self-supervised fashion by learning the reconstruction of an image region from the style vector and sketch. The proposed method offers simpler and more intuitive user workflows for sketch-based image manipulation and provides better results than previous approaches. More results, code and interactive demo will be available at https://zengxianyu.github.io/sketchedit.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 29, 2021

Beyond Hard Writes and Rigid Preservation: Soft Recursive Least-Squares for Lifelong LLM Editing

Model editing updates a pre-trained LLM with new facts or rules without re-training, while preserving unrelated behavior. In real deployment, edits arrive as long streams, and existing editors often face a plasticity-stability dilemma: locate-then-edit "hard writes" can accumulate interference over time, while null-space-style "hard preservation" preserves only what is explicitly constrained, so past edits can be overwritten and unconstrained behaviors may deviate, degrading general capabilities in the many-edits regime. We propose RLSEdit, a recursive least-squares editor for long sequential editing. RLSEdit formulates editing as an online quadratic optimization with soft constraints, minimizing a cumulative key-value fitting objective with two regularizers that control for both deviation from the pre-trained weights and from a designated anchor mapping. The resulting update admits an efficient online recursion via the Woodbury identity, with per-edit cost independent of history length and scaling only with the current edit size. We further provide deviation bounds and an asymptotic characterization of the adherence-preservation trade-off in the many-edits regime. Experiments on multiple model families demonstrate stable scaling to 10K edits, outperforming strong baselines in both edit success and holistic stability -- crucially retaining early edits, and preserving general capabilities on GLUE and held-out reasoning/code benchmarks.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 22

An Efficient and Adaptive Next Edit Suggestion Framework with Zero Human Instructions in IDEs

Code editing, including modifying, refactoring, and maintaining existing code, is the most frequent task in software development and has garnered significant attention from AI-powered tools. However, existing solutions that translate explicit natural language instructions into code edits face critical limitations, such as heavy reliance on human instruction input and high latency, which hinder their effective integration into a developer's workflow. We observe that developers' habitual behaviors and coding objectives are often reflected in their historical editing patterns, making this data key to addressing existing limitations. To leverage these insights, we propose NES (Next Edit Suggestion), an LLM-driven code editing framework that delivers an instruction-free and low-latency experience. Built on a dual-model architecture and trained with our high-quality SFT and DAPO datasets, NES enhances productivity by understanding developer intent while optimizing inference to minimize latency. NES is a scalable, industry-ready solution with a continuous Tab key interaction workflow, seamlessly adopted by a FinTech company with over 20,000 developers. Evaluations on real-world datasets show NES achieves 75.6% and 81.6% accuracy in two tasks of predicting next edit locations, alongside 91.36% ES and 27.7% EMR for intent-aligned edits, outperforming SOTA models. Our open-sourced SFT and DAPO datasets have been demonstrated to enhance the performance of open-source CodeLLMs. The demonstration of NES is available at https://youtu.be/yGoyYOe6fbY.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025

Next Edit Prediction: Learning to Predict Code Edits from Context and Interaction History

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to the widespread adoption of AI-powered coding assistants integrated into a development environment. On one hand, low-latency code completion offers completion suggestions but is fundamentally constrained to the cursor's current position. On the other hand, chat-based editing can perform complex modifications, yet forces developers to stop their work, describe the intent in natural language, which causes a context-switch away from the code. This creates a suboptimal user experience, as neither paradigm proactively predicts the developer's next edit in a sequence of related edits. To bridge this gap and provide the seamless code edit suggestion, we introduce the task of Next Edit Prediction, a novel task designed to infer developer intent from recent interaction history to predict both the location and content of the subsequent edit. Specifically, we curate a high-quality supervised fine-tuning dataset and an evaluation benchmark for the Next Edit Prediction task. Then, we conduct supervised fine-tuning on a series of models and performed a comprehensive evaluation of both the fine-tuned models and other baseline models, yielding several novel findings. This work lays the foundation for a new interaction paradigm that proactively collaborate with developers by anticipating their following action, rather than merely reacting to explicit instructions.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 13, 2025

Complex-Edit: CoT-Like Instruction Generation for Complexity-Controllable Image Editing Benchmark

We introduce Complex-Edit, a comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate instruction-based image editing models across instructions of varying complexity. To develop this benchmark, we harness GPT-4o to automatically collect a diverse set of editing instructions at scale. Our approach follows a well-structured ``Chain-of-Edit'' pipeline: we first generate individual atomic editing tasks independently and then integrate them to form cohesive, complex instructions. Additionally, we introduce a suite of metrics to assess various aspects of editing performance, along with a VLM-based auto-evaluation pipeline that supports large-scale assessments. Our benchmark yields several notable insights: 1) Open-source models significantly underperform relative to proprietary, closed-source models, with the performance gap widening as instruction complexity increases; 2) Increased instructional complexity primarily impairs the models' ability to retain key elements from the input images and to preserve the overall aesthetic quality; 3) Decomposing a complex instruction into a sequence of atomic steps, executed in a step-by-step manner, substantially degrades performance across multiple metrics; 4) A straightforward Best-of-N selection strategy improves results for both direct editing and the step-by-step sequential approach; and 5) We observe a ``curse of synthetic data'': when synthetic data is involved in model training, the edited images from such models tend to appear increasingly synthetic as the complexity of the editing instructions rises -- a phenomenon that intriguingly also manifests in the latest GPT-4o outputs.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 17, 2025 2

Efficient and Scalable Provenance Tracking for LLM-Generated Code Snippets

Large language models (LLMs) for code completion and generation are increasingly used in software development, yet they may reproduce training examples verbatim and without authorship attribution, raising legal and ethical concerns around plagiarism and license compliance. Classical fingerprint-based plagiarism detectors based on fingerprinting, such as Winnowing, remain highly effective, yet the inspection requires comparing fragments of code to the entire training set, and their linear-time search makes them impractical for the billion-scale corpora used to train modern code LLMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce SOURCETRACKER, a 300M-parameter encoder tailored for code retrieval, together with a hybrid two-stage provenance-tracking pipeline HYBRIDSOURCETRACKER (HST). HST first narrows down a small set of candidate snippets via vector search, then re-ranks those candidates using Winnowing on exact fingerprints. We train and evaluate our system on a 10M-snippet subset of the THESTACKV2 dataset, with both verbatim and adapted snippets that emulate realistic identifier renaming. On an in vitro 100k-snippet search space with adapted queries, our hybrid approach reaches a mean reciprocal rank on par with Winnowing for 30-token fragments. Then, starting from windows >= 60 tokens, it consistently over-performs by up to 5.4% while preserving logarithmic-time query complexity. In a complementary evaluation using an LLM-based judge, we find that many retrieved snippets not labeled as ground truth are still highly similar to the expected sources, particularly with longer context windows, and thus remain useful for end users. Overall, our results demonstrate that integrating vector search with fingerprinting enables scalable, high-precision provenance tracking for code produced by LLMs.

  • 5 authors
·
May 26 2

CodeTracer: Towards Traceable Agent States

Code agents are advancing rapidly, but debugging them is becoming increasingly difficult. As frameworks orchestrate parallel tool calls and multi-stage workflows over complex tasks, making the agent's state transitions and error propagation hard to observe. In these runs, an early misstep can trap the agent in unproductive loops or even cascade into fundamental errors, forming hidden error chains that make it hard to tell when the agent goes off track and why. Existing agent tracing analyses either focus on simple interaction or rely on small-scale manual inspection, which limits their scalability and usefulness for real coding workflows. We present CodeTracer, a tracing architecture that parses heterogeneous run artifacts through evolving extractors, reconstructs the full state transition history as a hierarchical trace tree with persistent memory, and performs failure onset localization to pinpoint the failure origin and its downstream chain. To enable systematic evaluation, we construct CodeTraceBench from a large collection of executed trajectories generated by four widely used code agent frameworks on diverse code tasks (e.g., bug fixing, refactoring, and terminal interaction), with supervision at both the stage and step levels for failure localization. Experiments show that CodeTracer substantially outperforms direct prompting and lightweight baselines, and that replaying its diagnostic signals consistently recovers originally failed runs under matched budgets. Our code and data are publicly available.

NJU-LINK NJU-LINK Lab
·
Apr 12 2

Vision-guided and Mask-enhanced Adaptive Denoising for Prompt-based Image Editing

Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable progress in synthesizing high-quality images from text prompts, which boosts researches on prompt-based image editing that edits a source image according to a target prompt. Despite their advances, existing methods still encounter three key issues: 1) limited capacity of the text prompt in guiding target image generation, 2) insufficient mining of word-to-patch and patch-to-patch relationships for grounding editing areas, and 3) unified editing strength for all regions during each denoising step. To address these issues, we present a Vision-guided and Mask-enhanced Adaptive Editing (ViMAEdit) method with three key novel designs. First, we propose to leverage image embeddings as explicit guidance to enhance the conventional textual prompt-based denoising process, where a CLIP-based target image embedding estimation strategy is introduced. Second, we devise a self-attention-guided iterative editing area grounding strategy, which iteratively exploits patch-to-patch relationships conveyed by self-attention maps to refine those word-to-patch relationships contained in cross-attention maps. Last, we present a spatially adaptive variance-guided sampling, which highlights sampling variances for critical image regions to promote the editing capability. Experimental results demonstrate the superior editing capacity of ViMAEdit over all existing methods.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 14, 2024

UniTune: Text-Driven Image Editing by Fine Tuning a Diffusion Model on a Single Image

Text-driven image generation methods have shown impressive results recently, allowing casual users to generate high quality images by providing textual descriptions. However, similar capabilities for editing existing images are still out of reach. Text-driven image editing methods usually need edit masks, struggle with edits that require significant visual changes and cannot easily keep specific details of the edited portion. In this paper we make the observation that image-generation models can be converted to image-editing models simply by fine-tuning them on a single image. We also show that initializing the stochastic sampler with a noised version of the base image before the sampling and interpolating relevant details from the base image after sampling further increase the quality of the edit operation. Combining these observations, we propose UniTune, a novel image editing method. UniTune gets as input an arbitrary image and a textual edit description, and carries out the edit while maintaining high fidelity to the input image. UniTune does not require additional inputs, like masks or sketches, and can perform multiple edits on the same image without retraining. We test our method using the Imagen model in a range of different use cases. We demonstrate that it is broadly applicable and can perform a surprisingly wide range of expressive editing operations, including those requiring significant visual changes that were previously impossible.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 17, 2022

From Exploration to Mastery: Enabling LLMs to Master Tools via Self-Driven Interactions

Tool learning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact with external environments by invoking tools, serving as an effective strategy to mitigate the limitations inherent in their pre-training data. In this process, tool documentation plays a crucial role by providing usage instructions for LLMs, thereby facilitating effective tool utilization. This paper concentrates on the critical challenge of bridging the comprehension gap between LLMs and external tools due to the inadequacies and inaccuracies inherent in existing human-centric tool documentation. We propose a novel framework, DRAFT, aimed at Dynamically Refining tool documentation through the Analysis of Feedback and Trails emanating from LLMs' interactions with external tools. This methodology pivots on an innovative trial-and-error approach, consisting of three distinct learning phases: experience gathering, learning from experience, and documentation rewriting, to iteratively enhance the tool documentation. This process is further optimized by implementing a diversity-promoting exploration strategy to ensure explorative diversity and a tool-adaptive termination mechanism to prevent overfitting while enhancing efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that DRAFT's iterative, feedback-based refinement significantly ameliorates documentation quality, fostering a deeper comprehension and more effective utilization of tools by LLMs. Notably, our analysis reveals that the tool documentation refined via our approach demonstrates robust cross-model generalization capabilities.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 10, 2024

Sibyl-AutoResearch: Autonomous Research Needs Self-Evolving Trial-and-Error Harnesses, Not Paper Generators

Autonomous research systems increasingly make the scientific workflow executable: agents can propose ideas, run code, inspect results, and draft papers. But executable workflows do not by themselves produce research judgment. We analyze where current systems lose trial experience: weak evidence becomes prose, pilot signals become broad claims, memory remains textual, and recurring process failures do not change later behavior. We introduce Sibyl-AutoResearch, a self-evolving AutoResearch framework built around Scientific Trial-and-Error Harnesses. A harness lets agents run bounded trials, preserve positive and negative outcomes, and route lessons into later planning, validation, claim scope, scheduling, critique, writing, and harness repair. We formalize this through two auditable conversion units: trial-to-behavior conversion, which links trial signals to later research actions, and trial-to-harness-behavior conversion, which links recurring process failures to system updates. We implement the framework in SIBYL, a file-backed autonomous research system that exposes the state, roles, memory, gates, and artifact traces needed to inspect these conversion paths. A retrospective audit identifies eight high-confidence conversion events, with a median latency of one iteration and a maximum latency of three iterations. A recovered-failure registry further shows how five naturally occurring failure classes, including duplicate results, stale numbers, and unsupported statistics, were blocked, downgraded, or routed into later repair. These traces do not establish a comparative performance claim; they show that the proposed conversion units are recoverable from realistic autonomous-research workspaces. The SIBYL framework and system are available at https://github.com/Sibyl-Research-Team/AutoResearch-SibylSystem.

  • 6 authors
·
May 20

Editing on the Generative Manifold: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of General Diffusion-Based Image Editing Trade-offs

Diffusion-based editing has rapidly evolved from curated inpainting tools into general-purpose editors spanning text-guided instruction following, mask-localized edits, drag-based geometric manipulation, exemplar transfer, and training-free composition systems. Despite strong empirical progress, the field lacks a unified treatment of core desiderata that govern practical usability: controllability (how precisely and continuously the user can specify an edit), faithfulness to user intent (semantic alignment to instructions), semantic consistency (preservation of identity and non-target content), locality (containment of changes), and perceptual quality (artifact suppression and detail retention). This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of general diffusion-based image editing, connecting diverse paradigms through a common view of editing as guided transport on a learned image manifold. We first formalize editing as an operator induced by a conditional reverse-time generative process and define task-agnostic metrics capturing instruction adherence, region preservation, semantic consistency, and stability under repeated edits. We then develop theory describing edit dynamics under (i) noise-injection and denoising transport, (ii) inversion-and-edit pipelines and the propagation of inversion errors, and (iii) locality constraints implemented via masked guidance or hard constraints. Under mild Lipschitz assumptions on the learned score or flow field, we derive bounds connecting guidance strength and inversion error to measurable deviations in non-target regions, and we characterize accumulation effects under iterative multi-turn editing. Empirically, we benchmark representative paradigms.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 30

FreeEdit: Mask-free Reference-based Image Editing with Multi-modal Instruction

Introducing user-specified visual concepts in image editing is highly practical as these concepts convey the user's intent more precisely than text-based descriptions. We propose FreeEdit, a novel approach for achieving such reference-based image editing, which can accurately reproduce the visual concept from the reference image based on user-friendly language instructions. Our approach leverages the multi-modal instruction encoder to encode language instructions to guide the editing process. This implicit way of locating the editing area eliminates the need for manual editing masks. To enhance the reconstruction of reference details, we introduce the Decoupled Residual ReferAttention (DRRA) module. This module is designed to integrate fine-grained reference features extracted by a detail extractor into the image editing process in a residual way without interfering with the original self-attention. Given that existing datasets are unsuitable for reference-based image editing tasks, particularly due to the difficulty in constructing image triplets that include a reference image, we curate a high-quality dataset, FreeBench, using a newly developed twice-repainting scheme. FreeBench comprises the images before and after editing, detailed editing instructions, as well as a reference image that maintains the identity of the edited object, encompassing tasks such as object addition, replacement, and deletion. By conducting phased training on FreeBench followed by quality tuning, FreeEdit achieves high-quality zero-shot editing through convenient language instructions. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of FreeEdit across multiple task types, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods. The code will be available at: https://freeedit.github.io/.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

Agentic Synthesis against Counterexample-Supplemented Sketches

Coding agents can fix a failing example without preserving the domain rule that made it fail, so later generations can repeat the same plausible mistake. We present agentic synthesis against counterexample-supplemented sketches, a repository-native method for systems whose governing policy is discovered during implementation. A human starts with a partial, code-shaped sketch, and a coding agent generates the first implementation. When a concrete failure exposes missing or mistaken policy, an operator explicitly approves the corrected behavior and rule. The agent then revises the sketch and repairs or regenerates code and prompt surfaces for that one counterexample. The full archive preserves provenance; a selected regression set gates each revision before the next candidate is revealed; and periodic clean regeneration tests whether the evolved sketch, rather than prompt history or accumulated examples, carries the learned policy. We demonstrate the method with CatSynth, a synthetic browser application and captured coding-agent experiment. In one open-world run with GPT-5.4-mini, 8 of 14 frozen candidate cases became counterexamples. The rebuild controls inherited that promotion schedule, and all three paths passed the 8 accepted cases. Rebuilding from the evolved sketch passed 19 of 21 withheld cases, compared with 15 of 21 when rebuilding from the initial sketch and replaying all accepted examples. Retaining code across counterexamples required 9 Developer calls and 719 lines of cumulative artifact churn, versus 15 calls and 2,394 lines for replay-all, and passed 18 of 21 withheld cases. These results provide inspectable evidence that the evolved sketch carried reviewed policy and that retaining code reduced rework in this run; with one model and one reveal order, they do not establish general superiority or correctness beyond the encoded checks.

  • 2 authors
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Jul 16

An Empirical Study of Proactive Coding Assistants in Real-World Software Development

Large language model (LLM)-based coding assistants have made substantial progress, yet most systems remain reactive, requiring developers to explicitly formulate their needs. Proactive coding assistants aim to infer latent developer intent from integrated development environment (IDE) interactions and repository context, thereby reducing interaction overhead and supporting more seamless assistance. However, research in this direction is limited by the scarcity of large-scale real-world developer behavior data. Existing studies therefore often rely on LLM-simulated IDE traces, whose fidelity to real development behavior remains unclear. In this paper, we investigate this simulation-to-reality gap through a large-scale empirical study. We collect real IDE interaction traces from 1{,}246 experienced industry developers over three consecutive days using a custom Visual Studio Code extension, and construct paired LLM-simulated traces for controlled comparison. Our analysis shows that simulated traces differ substantially from real traces in behavioral diversity, temporal structure, and exploratory patterns. Based on the collected data, we introduce ProCodeBench, a real-world benchmark for proactive intent prediction. Experiments with representative LLMs, retrieval-augmented methods, and agentic baselines show that current approaches remain far from reliable under real IDE traces, suggesting that simulation-based evaluation can overestimate real-world performance. Finally, our training study shows that simulated data cannot replace real data, but can complement it when used before real-world fine-tuning. These findings highlight the importance of real developer behavior data for evaluating and training proactive coding assistants.

  • 4 authors
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May 6

Evoflux: Inference-Time Evolution of Executable Tool Workflows for Compact Agents

Compact language models (LMs) reduce cost, latency, and deployment risk for tool agents. Yet MCP-style tool use requires more than isolated function calling: an agent must discover tools from live catalogs, satisfy schemas, preserve dependencies across intermediate outputs, and ground final responses in executed evidence. Small planners often generate plausible workflow graphs that fail under tool resolution, parameter validation, dependency tracking, or execution. We argue that this failure mode is poorly handled by small-corpus distillation. A few hundred teacher traces can teach workflow format, but rarely cover the recovery behavior needed to repair failed plans over changing tool catalogs. We introduce Evoflux, an inference-time evolutionary search method that treats compact tool use as the repair of executable tool workflows. It evolves typed workflow graphs through structured edits, execution feedback, adaptive intensity, meta-guided redesign, and diversity pruning. On held-out MCP-Bench tasks spanning live MCP servers and 250 tools, Evoflux raises execution feasibility from roughly 3% to 17-24% across small planners. In contrast, SFT and SFT+DPO on the same search-mined data match, underperform, or collapse below zero-shot performance; ReAct reaches higher peaks, but with higher variance and token cost. These results show that execution-grounded search is more reliable under scarce teacher-trace budgets.

Answer Presence Drives RAG Rewriting Gains

Retrieval-augmented QA pipelines often route retrieved passages through an LLM rewriter before a smaller reader, lifting F1 by tens of points on multi-hop benchmarks; this gain is typically credited to improved evidence quality. We ask whether that lift is causally driven by the gold answer string appearing in the rewritten context rather than by curation per se, using a controlled intervention audit. For each rewritten context we re-run the reader after one of four controlled edits to the compile output: removing the gold answer span, replacing a length-matched random non-answer span (placebo), or injecting the gold into rewrites where it was absent (at the prefix or at a midpoint sentence boundary). Across twelve completed (cell, baseline) intervention runs spanning three reader families (Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen3.5-35B, GLM-4.7), two datasets (HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA), and three compiler arrangements (MA-only, MB-only, MA+verify), removing the gold answer drops reader F1 by 28 to 64 points beyond the length-matched placebo on paired answer-in-compile strata, and prepending the gold into rewrites that lacked it raises F1 by +0.7 to +9.7 points in 10 of 12 (cell, baseline) combinations. A companion five-sentinel audit shows the conventional single-[MASK] probe is itself sentinel-fragile: on 2Wiki it reports a +4.12~F1 ``non-leakage residual'' that flips to -3.33 to -7.81~F1 under four alternative sentinels and fails an equivalence test for three of those four (1/4~pass). We do not propose a new rewriter or mitigation; we release the intervention runner and the sentinel panel so that other rewriter-gain claims can be tested against the same standard.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 3 2

TRACE: Temporal Grounding Video LLM via Causal Event Modeling

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) is a crucial capability for video understanding models and plays a vital role in downstream tasks such as video browsing and editing. To effectively handle various tasks simultaneously and enable zero-shot prediction, there is a growing trend in employing video LLMs for VTG tasks. However, current video LLM-based methods rely exclusively on natural language generation, lacking the ability to model the clear structure inherent in videos, which restricts their effectiveness in tackling VTG tasks. To address this issue, this paper first formally introduces causal event modeling framework, which represents videos as sequences of events, and predict the current event using previous events, video inputs, and textural instructions. Each event consists of three components: timestamps, salient scores, and textual captions. We then propose a novel task-interleaved video LLM called TRACE to effectively implement the causal event modeling framework in practice. The TRACE processes visual frames, timestamps, salient scores, and text as distinct tasks, employing various encoders and decoding heads for each. Task tokens are arranged in an interleaved sequence according to the causal event modeling framework's formulation. Extensive experiments on various VTG tasks and datasets demonstrate the superior performance of TRACE compared to state-of-the-art video LLMs. Our model and code are available at https://github.com/gyxxyg/TRACE.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 3

TRACE: Task-Adaptive Reasoning and Representation Learning for Universal Multimodal Retrieval

Universal Multimodal Retrieval requires unified embedding models capable of interpreting diverse user intents, ranging from simple keywords to complex compositional instructions. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) possess strong reasoning capabilities, prevailing adaptations confine them to static encoders, underutilizing their generative potential. This encoder-only paradigm struggles with complex intents that demand logical deduction rather than superficial pattern matching. To address this, we introduce TRACE (Task-adaptive Reasoning And Compressing Embeddings). TRACE unifies generative reasoning with discriminative representation learning. It first generates a structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to explicitly reason about the query, and subsequently compresses this reasoning trace into a compact embedding via a dedicated token. To train this framework, we construct M-BEIR-CoT, a large-scale dataset featuring a difficulty-aware routing strategy. Experiments on the M-BEIR benchmark establish TRACE as the new state-of-the-art. Crucially, TRACE demonstrates a learned implicit routing behavior. It autonomously activates reasoning for complex queries while bypassing it for simpler ones, achieving an optimal balance between retrieval accuracy and inference throughput. Furthermore, by internalizing the deductive process, TRACE exhibits remarkable zero-shot transferability to unseen domains and novel constraints.

  • 6 authors
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Mar 3

RIPPLECOT: Amplifying Ripple Effect of Knowledge Editing in Language Models via Chain-of-Thought In-Context Learning

The ripple effect poses a significant challenge in knowledge editing for large language models. Namely, when a single fact is edited, the model struggles to accurately update the related facts in a sequence, which is evaluated by multi-hop questions linked to a chain of related facts. Recent strategies have moved away from traditional parameter updates to more flexible, less computation-intensive methods, proven to be more effective in addressing the ripple effect. In-context learning (ICL) editing uses a simple demonstration `Imagine that + new fact` to guide LLMs, but struggles with complex multi-hop questions as the new fact alone fails to specify the chain of facts involved in such scenarios. Besides, memory-based editing maintains additional storage for all edits and related facts, requiring continuous updates to stay effective. As a result of these design limitations, the challenge remains, with the highest accuracy being only 33.8% on the MQuAKE-cf benchmarks for Vicuna-7B. To address this, we propose RippleCOT, a novel ICL editing approach integrating Chain-of-Thought (COT) reasoning. RippleCOT structures demonstrations as `newfact, question, thought, answer`, incorporating a thought component to identify and decompose the multi-hop logic within questions. This approach effectively guides the model through complex multi-hop questions with chains of related facts. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that RippleCOT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on the ripple effect, achieving accuracy gains ranging from 7.8% to 87.1%.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024

dots.tts.edit: Precisely Controlled Speech Editing with a Continuous Autoregressive Model

Speech editing for content creation requires precise control over both what an edit should do and where it should apply. Free-form natural language provides a flexible interface for expressing edit requests, but its ambiguity may leave the intended operation, parameters, or target region underspecified. We study a precise and explicit interface for speech editing: a transcript-grounded structural edit instruction with XML-style tags explicitly specifies typed operations and localizes them to transcript spans or boundaries. This semantic timeline avoids explicit timestamp alignment and provides an externally inspectable contract for compositional edits. We instantiate the interface in dots.tts.edit, an editor adapted from the continuous autoregressive dots.tts foundation model. Four representative speech-creation controls cover lexical content, affective expression, pitch and speaking-rate delivery, and temporal phrasing through text, emotion, prosody, and pause editing. Task-specific data pipelines construct operation- and scope-controlled pairs while retaining source-derived context outside each target region. We further introduce doteBench, a bilingual evaluation suite that measures precise instruction following, local preservation, and audio quality across the four controls and their composition. Experiments show leading overall instruction following and local preservation across its five editing categories, while audio quality remains comparable to existing open-source systems. Across three Seed-TTS-Eval shards, the model shows negligible differences from the base model in zero-shot TTS recognition error rate and speaker similarity. The code and model will be released soon.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 1

DreamOmni3: Scribble-based Editing and Generation

Recently unified generation and editing models have achieved remarkable success with their impressive performance. These models rely mainly on text prompts for instruction-based editing and generation, but language often fails to capture users intended edit locations and fine-grained visual details. To this end, we propose two tasks: scribble-based editing and generation, that enables more flexible creation on graphical user interface (GUI) combining user textual, images, and freehand sketches. We introduce DreamOmni3, tackling two challenges: data creation and framework design. Our data synthesis pipeline includes two parts: scribble-based editing and generation. For scribble-based editing, we define four tasks: scribble and instruction-based editing, scribble and multimodal instruction-based editing, image fusion, and doodle editing. Based on DreamOmni2 dataset, we extract editable regions and overlay hand-drawn boxes, circles, doodles or cropped image to construct training data. For scribble-based generation, we define three tasks: scribble and instruction-based generation, scribble and multimodal instruction-based generation, and doodle generation, following similar data creation pipelines. For the framework, instead of using binary masks, which struggle with complex edits involving multiple scribbles, images, and instructions, we propose a joint input scheme that feeds both the original and scribbled source images into the model, using different colors to distinguish regions and simplify processing. By applying the same index and position encodings to both images, the model can precisely localize scribbled regions while maintaining accurate editing. Finally, we establish comprehensive benchmarks for these tasks to promote further research. Experimental results demonstrate that DreamOmni3 achieves outstanding performance, and models and code will be publicly released.

ByteDance ByteDance
·
Dec 27, 2025 4

Improving Editability in Image Generation with Layer-wise Memory

Most real-world image editing tasks require multiple sequential edits to achieve desired results. Current editing approaches, primarily designed for single-object modifications, struggle with sequential editing: especially with maintaining previous edits along with adapting new objects naturally into the existing content. These limitations significantly hinder complex editing scenarios where multiple objects need to be modified while preserving their contextual relationships. We address this fundamental challenge through two key proposals: enabling rough mask inputs that preserve existing content while naturally integrating new elements and supporting consistent editing across multiple modifications. Our framework achieves this through layer-wise memory, which stores latent representations and prompt embeddings from previous edits. We propose Background Consistency Guidance that leverages memorized latents to maintain scene coherence and Multi-Query Disentanglement in cross-attention that ensures natural adaptation to existing content. To evaluate our method, we present a new benchmark dataset incorporating semantic alignment metrics and interactive editing scenarios. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate superior performance in iterative image editing tasks with minimal user effort, requiring only rough masks while maintaining high-quality results throughout multiple editing steps.

  • 3 authors
·
May 2, 2025 1

TRACE: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Continual Learning in Large Language Models

Aligned large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in task-solving, following instructions, and ensuring safety. However, the continual learning aspect of these aligned LLMs has been largely overlooked. Existing continual learning benchmarks lack sufficient challenge for leading aligned LLMs, owing to both their simplicity and the models' potential exposure during instruction tuning. In this paper, we introduce TRACE, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate continual learning in LLMs. TRACE consists of 8 distinct datasets spanning challenging tasks including domain-specific tasks, multilingual capabilities, code generation, and mathematical reasoning. All datasets are standardized into a unified format, allowing for effortless automatic evaluation of LLMs. Our experiments show that after training on TRACE, aligned LLMs exhibit significant declines in both general ability and instruction-following capabilities. For example, the accuracy of llama2-chat 13B on gsm8k dataset declined precipitously from 28.8\% to 2\% after training on our datasets. This highlights the challenge of finding a suitable tradeoff between achieving performance on specific tasks while preserving the original prowess of LLMs. Empirical findings suggest that tasks inherently equipped with reasoning paths contribute significantly to preserving certain capabilities of LLMs against potential declines. Motivated by this, we introduce the Reasoning-augmented Continual Learning (RCL) approach. RCL integrates task-specific cues with meta-rationales, effectively reducing catastrophic forgetting in LLMs while expediting convergence on novel tasks.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 10, 2023

EditVal: Benchmarking Diffusion Based Text-Guided Image Editing Methods

A plethora of text-guided image editing methods have recently been developed by leveraging the impressive capabilities of large-scale diffusion-based generative models such as Imagen and Stable Diffusion. A standardized evaluation protocol, however, does not exist to compare methods across different types of fine-grained edits. To address this gap, we introduce EditVal, a standardized benchmark for quantitatively evaluating text-guided image editing methods. EditVal consists of a curated dataset of images, a set of editable attributes for each image drawn from 13 possible edit types, and an automated evaluation pipeline that uses pre-trained vision-language models to assess the fidelity of generated images for each edit type. We use EditVal to benchmark 8 cutting-edge diffusion-based editing methods including SINE, Imagic and Instruct-Pix2Pix. We complement this with a large-scale human study where we show that EditVall's automated evaluation pipeline is strongly correlated with human-preferences for the edit types we considered. From both the human study and automated evaluation, we find that: (i) Instruct-Pix2Pix, Null-Text and SINE are the top-performing methods averaged across different edit types, however {\it only} Instruct-Pix2Pix and Null-Text are able to preserve original image properties; (ii) Most of the editing methods fail at edits involving spatial operations (e.g., changing the position of an object). (iii) There is no `winner' method which ranks the best individually across a range of different edit types. We hope that our benchmark can pave the way to developing more reliable text-guided image editing tools in the future. We will publicly release EditVal, and all associated code and human-study templates to support these research directions in https://deep-ml-research.github.io/editval/.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 3, 2023

From Accidents to Insights: Leveraging Multimodal Data for Scenario-Driven ADS Testing

The rapid advancements in Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) have necessitated robust software testing to ensure safety and reliability. However, automating the generation of scalable and concrete test scenarios remains a significant challenge. Current scenario-based test case generation methods often face limitations, such as unrealistic scenes and inaccurate vehicle trajectories. These challenges largely result from the loss of map information during data extraction and the lack of an effective verification mechanism to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). This paper introduces TRACE, a scenario-based ADS Test case Generation framework for Critical Scenarios. By leveraging multimodal data to extract challenging scenarios from real-world car crash reports, TRACE constructs numerous critical test cases with less data, significantly enhancing ADS bug detection efficiency. Using in-context learning, chain-of-thought prompting, and self-validation approaches, we use LLMs to extract environmental and road network information from crash reports. For vehicle trajectory planning, data containing map information and vehicle coordinates serves as a knowledge base to build a ChatGPT-based LLM with path-planning capabilities, which we named TrackMate. Based on 50 existing crash reports, our approach successfully tested three ADS models across two simulation platforms, MetaDrive and BeamNG. Of the 290 constructed test scenarios, 127 are identified as critical, as they resulted in vehicle collisions. Additionally, user feedback reveals that TRACE demonstrates superior scenario reconstruction accuracy, with 77.5% of the scenarios being rated as 'mostly or 'totally' consistent, compared to only 27% for the most related SOTA, LCTGen.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 4, 2025