Daily Papers

Contrastive Learning (CL) has attracted enormous attention due to its remarkable capability in unsupervised representation learning. However, recent works have revealed the vulnerability of CL to backdoor attacks: the feature extractor could be misled to embed backdoored data close to an attack target class, thus fooling the downstream predictor to misclassify it as the target. Existing attacks usually adopt a fixed trigger pattern and poison the training set with trigger-injected data, hoping for the feature extractor to learn the association between trigger and target class. However, we find that such fixed trigger design fails to effectively associate trigger-injected data with target class in the embedding space due to special CL mechanisms, leading to a limited attack success rate (ASR). This phenomenon motivates us to find a better backdoor trigger design tailored for CL framework. In this paper, we propose a bi-level optimization approach to achieve this goal, where the inner optimization simulates the CL dynamics of a surrogate victim, and the outer optimization enforces the backdoor trigger to stay close to the target throughout the surrogate CL procedure. Extensive experiments show that our attack can achieve a higher attack success rate (e.g., 99% ASR on ImageNet-100) with a very low poisoning rate (1%). Besides, our attack can effectively evade existing state-of-the-art defenses. Code is available at: https://github.com/SWY666/SSL-backdoor-BLTO.

Time series classification (TSC) is a cornerstone of modern web applications, powering tasks such as financial data analysis, network traffic monitoring, and user behavior analysis. In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have greatly enhanced the performance of TSC models in these critical domains. However, DNNs are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where attackers can covertly implant triggers into models to induce malicious outcomes. Existing backdoor attacks targeting DNN-based TSC models remain elementary. In particular, early methods borrow trigger designs from computer vision, which are ineffective for time series data. More recent approaches utilize generative models for trigger generation, but at the cost of significant computational complexity. In this work, we analyze the limitations of existing attacks and introduce an enhanced method, FreqBack. Drawing inspiration from the fact that DNN models inherently capture frequency domain features in time series data, we identify that improper perturbations in the frequency domain are the root cause of ineffective attacks. To address this, we propose to generate triggers both effectively and efficiently, guided by frequency analysis. FreqBack exhibits substantial performance across five models and eight datasets, achieving an impressive attack success rate of over 90%, while maintaining less than a 3% drop in model accuracy on clean data.

Dataset distillation offers a potential means to enhance data efficiency in deep learning. Recent studies have shown its ability to counteract backdoor risks present in original training samples. In this study, we delve into the theoretical aspects of backdoor attacks and dataset distillation based on kernel methods. We introduce two new theory-driven trigger pattern generation methods specialized for dataset distillation. Following a comprehensive set of analyses and experiments, we show that our optimization-based trigger design framework informs effective backdoor attacks on dataset distillation. Notably, datasets poisoned by our designed trigger prove resilient against conventional backdoor attack detection and mitigation methods. Our empirical results validate that the triggers developed using our approaches are proficient at executing resilient backdoor attacks.

Recent researches have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to a security threat known as Backdoor Attack. The backdoored model will behave well in normal cases but exhibit malicious behaviours on inputs inserted with a specific backdoor trigger. Current backdoor studies on LLMs predominantly focus on instruction-tuned LLMs, while neglecting another realistic scenario where LLMs are fine-tuned on multi-turn conversational data to be chat models. Chat models are extensively adopted across various real-world scenarios, thus the security of chat models deserves increasing attention. Unfortunately, we point out that the flexible multi-turn interaction format instead increases the flexibility of trigger designs and amplifies the vulnerability of chat models to backdoor attacks. In this work, we reveal and achieve a novel backdoor attacking method on chat models by distributing multiple trigger scenarios across user inputs in different rounds, and making the backdoor be triggered only when all trigger scenarios have appeared in the historical conversations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve high attack success rates (e.g., over 90% ASR on Vicuna-7B) while successfully maintaining the normal capabilities of chat models on providing helpful responses to benign user requests. Also, the backdoor can not be easily removed by the downstream re-alignment, highlighting the importance of continued research and attention to the security concerns of chat models. Warning: This paper may contain toxic content.

Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have manifested significant advancements. To facilitate safeguards against malicious exploitation, a body of research has concentrated on aligning LLMs with human preferences and inhibiting their generation of inappropriate content. Unfortunately, such alignments are often vulnerable: fine-tuning with a minimal amount of harmful data can easily unalign the target LLM. While being effective, such fine-tuning-based unalignment approaches also have their own limitations: (1) non-stealthiness, after fine-tuning, safety audits or red-teaming can easily expose the potential weaknesses of the unaligned models, thereby precluding their release/use. (2) non-persistence, the unaligned LLMs can be easily repaired through re-alignment, i.e., fine-tuning again with aligned data points. In this work, we show that it is possible to conduct stealthy and persistent unalignment on large language models via backdoor injections. We also provide a novel understanding on the relationship between the backdoor persistence and the activation pattern and further provide guidelines for potential trigger design. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed stealthy and persistent unalignment can successfully pass the safety evaluation while maintaining strong persistence against re-alignment defense.

Transformers often display an attention sink: probability mass concentrates on a fixed, content-agnostic position. We prove that computing a simple trigger-conditional behavior necessarily induces a sink in softmax self-attention models. Our results formalize a familiar intuition: normalization over a probability simplex must force attention to collapse onto a stable anchor to realize a default state (e.g., when the model needs to ignore the input). We instantiate this with a concrete task: when a designated trigger token appears, the model must return the average of all preceding token representations, and otherwise output zero, a task which mirrors the functionality of attention heads in the wild (Barbero et al., 2025; Guo et al., 2024). We also prove that non-normalized ReLU attention can solve the same task without any sink, confirming that the normalization constraint is the fundamental driver of sink behavior. Experiments validate our predictions and demonstrate they extend beyond the theoretically analyzed setting: softmax models develop strong sinks while ReLU attention eliminates them in both single-head and multi-head variants.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. The backdoor adversaries intend to maliciously control the predictions of attacked DNNs by injecting hidden backdoors that can be activated by adversary-specified trigger patterns during the training process. One recent research revealed that most of the existing attacks failed in the real physical world since the trigger contained in the digitized test samples may be different from that of the one used for training. Accordingly, users can adopt spatial transformations as the image pre-processing to deactivate hidden backdoors. In this paper, we explore the previous findings from another side. We exploit classical spatial transformations (i.e. rotation and translation) with the specific parameter as trigger patterns to design a simple yet effective poisoning-based backdoor attack. For example, only images rotated to a particular angle can activate the embedded backdoor of attacked DNNs. Extensive experiments are conducted, verifying the effectiveness of our attack under both digital and physical settings and its resistance to existing backdoor defenses.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in complex multimodal tasks. While MLLMs excel at visual perception and reasoning in third-person and egocentric videos, they are prone to hallucinations, generating coherent yet inaccurate responses. We present EgoIllusion, a first benchmark to evaluate MLLM hallucinations in egocentric videos. EgoIllusion comprises 1,400 videos paired with 8,000 human-annotated open and closed-ended questions designed to trigger hallucinations in both visual and auditory cues in egocentric videos. Evaluations across ten MLLMs reveal significant challenges, including powerful models like GPT-4o and Gemini, achieving only 59% accuracy. EgoIllusion lays the foundation in developing robust benchmarks to evaluate the effectiveness of MLLMs and spurs the development of better egocentric MLLMs with reduced hallucination rates. Our benchmark will be open-sourced for reproducibility.

The application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in accelerating scientific discovery has garnered increasing attention, with a key focus on constructing research agents endowed with innovative capability, i.e., the ability to autonomously generate novel and significant research ideas. Existing approaches predominantly rely on sophisticated prompt engineering and lack a systematic training paradigm. To address this, we propose DeepInnovator, a training framework designed to trigger the innovative capability of LLMs. Our approach comprises two core components. (1) ``Standing on the shoulders of giants''. We construct an automated data extraction pipeline to extract and organize structured research knowledge from a vast corpus of unlabeled scientific literature. (2) ``Conjectures and refutations''. We introduce a ``Next Idea Prediction'' training paradigm, which models the generation of research ideas as an iterative process of continuously predicting, evaluating, and refining plausible and novel next idea. Both automatic and expert evaluations demonstrate that our DeepInnovator-14B significantly outperforms untrained baselines, achieving win rates of 80.53\%-93.81\%, and attains performance comparable to that of current leading LLMs. This work provides a scalable training pathway toward building research agents with genuine, originative innovative capability, and will open-source the dataset to foster community advancement. Source code and data are available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/DeepInnovator.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) expands the capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs) in chatbot applications, enabling developers to adapt and personalize the LLM output without expensive training or fine-tuning. RAG systems use an external knowledge database to retrieve the most relevant documents for a given query, providing this context to the LLM generator. While RAG achieves impressive utility in many applications, its adoption to enable personalized generative models introduces new security risks. In this work, we propose new attack surfaces for an adversary to compromise a victim's RAG system, by injecting a single malicious document in its knowledge database. We design Phantom, general two-step attack framework against RAG augmented LLMs. The first step involves crafting a poisoned document designed to be retrieved by the RAG system within the top-k results only when an adversarial trigger, a specific sequence of words acting as backdoor, is present in the victim's queries. In the second step, a specially crafted adversarial string within the poisoned document triggers various adversarial attacks in the LLM generator, including denial of service, reputation damage, privacy violations, and harmful behaviors. We demonstrate our attacks on multiple LLM architectures, including Gemma, Vicuna, and Llama.

Gradient optimization-based adversarial attack methods automate the learning of adversarial triggers to generate jailbreak prompts or leak system prompts. In this work, we take a closer look at the optimization objective of adversarial trigger learning and propose ATLA: Adversarial Trigger Learning with Augmented objectives. ATLA improves the negative log-likelihood loss used by previous studies into a weighted loss formulation that encourages the learned adversarial triggers to optimize more towards response format tokens. This enables ATLA to learn an adversarial trigger from just one query-response pair and the learned trigger generalizes well to other similar queries. We further design a variation to augment trigger optimization with an auxiliary loss that suppresses evasive responses. We showcase how to use ATLA to learn adversarial suffixes jailbreaking LLMs and to extract hidden system prompts. Empirically we demonstrate that ATLA consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques, achieving nearly 100% success in attacking while requiring 80% fewer queries. ATLA learned jailbreak suffixes demonstrate high generalization to unseen queries and transfer well to new LLMs. We released our code https://github.com/QData/ALTA_Augmented_Adversarial_Trigger_Learning

In AI-assisted decision-making, humans often passively review AI's suggestion and decide whether to accept or reject it as a whole. In such a paradigm, humans are found to rarely trigger analytical thinking and face difficulties in communicating the nuances of conflicting opinions to the AI when disagreements occur. To tackle this challenge, we propose Human-AI Deliberation, a novel framework to promote human reflection and discussion on conflicting human-AI opinions in decision-making. Based on theories in human deliberation, this framework engages humans and AI in dimension-level opinion elicitation, deliberative discussion, and decision updates. To empower AI with deliberative capabilities, we designed Deliberative AI, which leverages large language models (LLMs) as a bridge between humans and domain-specific models to enable flexible conversational interactions and faithful information provision. An exploratory evaluation on a graduate admissions task shows that Deliberative AI outperforms conventional explainable AI (XAI) assistants in improving humans' appropriate reliance and task performance. Based on a mixed-methods analysis of participant behavior, perception, user experience, and open-ended feedback, we draw implications for future AI-assisted decision tool design.

We present experimental results to explore a form of bivariate glyphs for representing large-magnitude-range vectors. The glyphs meet two conditions: (1) two visual dimensions are separable; and (2) one of the two visual dimensions uses a categorical representation (e.g., a categorical colormap). We evaluate how much these two conditions determine the bivariate glyphs' effectiveness. The first experiment asks participants to perform three local tasks requiring reading no more than two glyphs. The second experiment scales up the search space in global tasks when participants must look at the entire scene of hundreds of vector glyphs to get an answer. Our results support that the first condition is necessary for local tasks when a few items are compared. But it is not enough to understand a large amount of data. The second condition is necessary for perceiving global structures of examining very complex datasets. Participants' comments reveal that the categorical features in the bivariate glyphs trigger emergent optimal viewers' behaviors. This work contributes to perceptually accurate glyph representations for revealing patterns from large scientific results. We release source code, quantum physics data, training documents, participants' answers, and statistical analyses for reproducible science https://osf.io/4xcf5/?view_only=94123139df9c4ac984a1e0df811cd580.

Designing proteins with desired functions or properties represents a core goal in synthetic biology and drug discovery. Recent advances in protein language models (PLMs) have enabled the generation of highly designable protein sequences, while preference alignment provides a promising way to steer designs toward desired functions and properties. Nevertheless, they often trigger catastrophic forgetting of pretrained knowledge, degrading basic designability and failing to balance multiple competing objectives. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from On-Policy Distillation (OPD), an advanced post-training method renowned for mitigating catastrophic forgetting through its mode-seeking nature. In this work, we propose ProteinOPD, a multi-objective preference alignment framework that can effectively balance multiple preference objectives while maintaining the inherent designability of PLMs. ProteinOPD adapts a pretrained PLM into preference-specific teachers and distills their knowledge into a shared student via token-level OPD on the student's own trajectories. During this process, the student is aligned to a unique normalized geometric consensus of weighted teachers while ensuring bounded optimization under conflicts. This bridges the gap for OPD in multi-objective/teacher alignment. Extensive experiments show that ProteinOPD achieves substantial gains on target preference objectives without compromising the designability, with an 8x training speedup over RL-based alignment competitors.

Recent deep-learning-based compression methods have achieved superior performance compared with traditional approaches. However, deep learning models have proven to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where some specific trigger patterns added to the input can lead to malicious behavior of the models. In this paper, we present a novel backdoor attack with multiple triggers against learned image compression models. Motivated by the widely used discrete cosine transform (DCT) in existing compression systems and standards, we propose a frequency-based trigger injection model that adds triggers in the DCT domain. In particular, we design several attack objectives for various attacking scenarios, including: 1) attacking compression quality in terms of bit-rate and reconstruction quality; 2) attacking task-driven measures, such as down-stream face recognition and semantic segmentation. Moreover, a novel simple dynamic loss is designed to balance the influence of different loss terms adaptively, which helps achieve more efficient training. Extensive experiments show that with our trained trigger injection models and simple modification of encoder parameters (of the compression model), the proposed attack can successfully inject several backdoors with corresponding triggers in a single image compression model.

Backdoor attacks have become a significant threat to the pre-training and deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs). Although numerous methods for detecting and mitigating backdoor attacks have been proposed, most rely on identifying and eliminating the ``shortcut" created by the backdoor, which links a specific source class to a target class. However, these approaches can be easily circumvented by designing multiple backdoor triggers that create shortcuts everywhere and therefore nowhere specific. In this study, we explore the concept of Multi-Trigger Backdoor Attacks (MTBAs), where multiple adversaries leverage different types of triggers to poison the same dataset. By proposing and investigating three types of multi-trigger attacks including parallel, sequential, and hybrid attacks, we demonstrate that 1) multiple triggers can coexist, overwrite, or cross-activate one another, and 2) MTBAs easily break the prevalent shortcut assumption underlying most existing backdoor detection/removal methods, rendering them ineffective. Given the security risk posed by MTBAs, we have created a multi-trigger backdoor poisoning dataset to facilitate future research on detecting and mitigating these attacks, and we also discuss potential defense strategies against MTBAs. Our code is available at https://github.com/bboylyg/Multi-Trigger-Backdoor-Attacks.

Concept Design structures software systems around concepts: user-facing, self-contained units of functionality with a focused purpose. Concepts are composed into applications using synchronization rules called reactions, which specify how actions in one concept trigger actions in others. This paper first gives a formal semantics for concepts and reactions, enabling automatic verification of safety invariants in applications developed with this methodology. It then presents a CEGIS-style, LLM-driven synthesis procedure for generating reaction designs that satisfy such invariants. Because many different designs can satisfy the same invariant, we study two ways of steering synthesis toward the user's intended design: natural-language prompts and positive/negative scenarios. We also propose an LLM-driven scenario elicitation technique to support early design exploration. In an evaluation on three applications and twelve design variants using one LLM configuration, invariant-only synthesis reached verified designs quickly but often produced inconsistent designs across runs, some of which were implausible, showing that invariants alone underconstrain the design task. Scenario-guided synthesis recovered intended designs more consistently than natural-language prompting, although minimal scenarios can lead to overfitting. LLM-driven scenario elicitation, where the user classifies proposed scenarios rather than authoring them from scratch, recovered the intended designs in most variants when enough scenarios were elicited, but missed behaviors and non-determinism prevented reliable coverage in all cases.

Recently, stable diffusion (SD) models have typically flourished in the field of image synthesis and personalized editing, with a range of photorealistic and unprecedented images being successfully generated. As a result, widespread interest has been ignited to develop and use various SD-based tools for visual content creation. However, the exposure of AI-created content on public platforms could raise both legal and ethical risks. In this regard, the traditional methods of adding watermarks to the already generated images (i.e. post-processing) may face a dilemma (e.g., being erased or modified) in terms of copyright protection and content monitoring, since the powerful image inversion and text-to-image editing techniques have been widely explored in SD-based methods. In this work, we propose a Safe and high-traceable Stable Diffusion framework (namely Safe-SD) to adaptively implant the graphical watermarks (e.g., QR code) into the imperceptible structure-related pixels during the generative diffusion process for supporting text-driven invisible watermarking and detection. Different from the previous high-cost injection-then-detection training framework, we design a simple and unified architecture, which makes it possible to simultaneously train watermark injection and detection in a single network, greatly improving the efficiency and convenience of use. Moreover, to further support text-driven generative watermarking and deeply explore its robustness and high-traceability, we elaborately design lambda sampling and encryption algorithm to fine-tune a latent diffuser wrapped by a VAE for balancing high-fidelity image synthesis and high-traceable watermark detection. We present our quantitative and qualitative results on two representative datasets LSUN, COCO and FFHQ, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance of Safe-SD and showing it significantly outperforms the previous approaches.

Image generation models can generate or edit images from a given text. Recent advancements in image generation technology, exemplified by DALL-E and Midjourney, have been groundbreaking. These advanced models, despite their impressive capabilities, are often trained on massive Internet datasets, making them susceptible to generating content that perpetuates social stereotypes and biases, which can lead to severe consequences. Prior research on assessing bias within image generation models suffers from several shortcomings, including limited accuracy, reliance on extensive human labor, and lack of comprehensive analysis. In this paper, we propose BiasPainter, a novel evaluation framework that can accurately, automatically and comprehensively trigger social bias in image generation models. BiasPainter uses a diverse range of seed images of individuals and prompts the image generation models to edit these images using gender, race, and age-neutral queries. These queries span 62 professions, 39 activities, 57 types of objects, and 70 personality traits. The framework then compares the edited images to the original seed images, focusing on the significant changes related to gender, race, and age. BiasPainter adopts a key insight that these characteristics should not be modified when subjected to neutral prompts. Built upon this design, BiasPainter can trigger the social bias and evaluate the fairness of image generation models. We use BiasPainter to evaluate six widely-used image generation models, such as stable diffusion and Midjourney. Experimental results show that BiasPainter can successfully trigger social bias in image generation models. According to our human evaluation, BiasPainter can achieve 90.8% accuracy on automatic bias detection, which is significantly higher than the results reported in previous work.

Large language models (large LMs) are susceptible to producing text with hallucinated content. Self-contradiction, where the LM generates two contradictory sentences within the same context, is an important form of hallucination. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis on self-contradiction for state-of-the-art, instruction-tuned LMs, including evaluation, detection, and mitigation. To effectively trigger self-contradictions, we design a framework that constrains LMs to generate appropriate sentence pairs. Our evaluation on these sentence pairs reveals that self-contradictions occur frequently across different LMs for both famous and lesser-known topics. Next, we prompt the LMs to detect self-contradictions. Our results indicate that ChatGPT and GPT-4 are able to accurately identify self-contradictions, while Vicuna-13B struggles to do so. For example, with our best prompting method, ChatGPT achieves 91.0% precision and 80.5% recall on the sentence pairs generated by itself. To automatically mitigate self-contradictions, we develop an iterative algorithm that prompts the LMs to remove the detected self-contradictions from the generated text. Our algorithm successfully revises the text such that self-contradictions are significantly reduced, while maintaining its fluency and informativeness. Importantly, our entire pipeline of triggering, detecting, and mitigating self-contradictions is applicable to black-box LMs and does not require any external grounded knowledge.

Motivated by the phenomenon of strategic agents gaming a recommender system to maximize the number of times they are recommended to users, we study a strategic variant of the linear contextual bandit problem, where the arms can strategically misreport privately observed contexts to the learner. We treat the algorithm design problem as one of mechanism design under uncertainty and propose the Optimistic Grim Trigger Mechanism (OptGTM) that incentivizes the agents (i.e., arms) to report their contexts truthfully while simultaneously minimizing regret. We also show that failing to account for the strategic nature of the agents results in linear regret. However, a trade-off between mechanism design and regret minimization appears to be unavoidable. More broadly, this work aims to provide insight into the intersection of online learning and mechanism design.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) can be manipulated to exhibit specific behaviors when exposed to specific trigger patterns, without affecting their performance on benign samples, dubbed backdoor attack. Currently, implementing backdoor attacks in physical scenarios still faces significant challenges. Physical attacks are labor-intensive and time-consuming, and the triggers are selected in a manual and heuristic way. Moreover, expanding digital attacks to physical scenarios faces many challenges due to their sensitivity to visual distortions and the absence of counterparts in the real world. To address these challenges, we define a novel trigger called the Visible, Semantic, Sample-Specific, and Compatible (VSSC) trigger, to achieve effective, stealthy and robust simultaneously, which can also be effectively deployed in the physical scenario using corresponding objects. To implement the VSSC trigger, we propose an automated pipeline comprising three modules: a trigger selection module that systematically identifies suitable triggers leveraging large language models, a trigger insertion module that employs generative models to seamlessly integrate triggers into images, and a quality assessment module that ensures the natural and successful insertion of triggers through vision-language models. Extensive experimental results and analysis validate the effectiveness, stealthiness, and robustness of the VSSC trigger. It can not only maintain robustness under visual distortions but also demonstrates strong practicality in the physical scenario. We hope that the proposed VSSC trigger and implementation approach could inspire future studies on designing more practical triggers in backdoor attacks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of applications, e.g., medical question-answering, mathematical sciences, and code generation. However, they also exhibit inherent limitations, such as outdated knowledge and susceptibility to hallucinations. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising paradigm to address these issues, but it also introduces new vulnerabilities. Recent efforts have focused on the security of RAG-based LLMs, yet existing attack methods face three critical challenges: (1) their effectiveness declines sharply when only a limited number of poisoned texts can be injected into the knowledge database, (2) they lack sufficient stealth, as the attacks are often detectable by anomaly detection systems, which compromises their effectiveness, and (3) they rely on heuristic approaches to generate poisoned texts, lacking formal optimization frameworks and theoretic guarantees, which limits their effectiveness and applicability. To address these issues, we propose coordinated Prompt-RAG attack (PR-attack), a novel optimization-driven attack that introduces a small number of poisoned texts into the knowledge database while embedding a backdoor trigger within the prompt. When activated, the trigger causes the LLM to generate pre-designed responses to targeted queries, while maintaining normal behavior in other contexts. This ensures both high effectiveness and stealth. We formulate the attack generation process as a bilevel optimization problem leveraging a principled optimization framework to develop optimal poisoned texts and triggers. Extensive experiments across diverse LLMs and datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PR-Attack, achieving a high attack success rate even with a limited number of poisoned texts and significantly improved stealth compared to existing methods.

Coding agents ship with one kind of memory: documents. Instruction files, plan artifacts, and auto-written memory directories are deliberately authored and deliberately retrieved: the agent must choose to write them and choose to read them back. Human expertise runs on a second tier that never gets written down: situationally-bound operational facts (gotchas, locations, local conventions) encoded as a side effect of the work and retrieved involuntarily when the situation cues them. We argue this second tier is the load-bearing one for long-running agents and must be a harness property, not an agent choice. We contribute: (1) a two-tier design theory grounded in the cognitive literature on memory offloading, incidental encoding, and event-based prospective memory, each mapped to an architectural requirement; (2) a cue-anchored memory model where memories carry first-class trigger conditions over a composable vocabulary (path, symbol, semantic, event, temporal), evaluated deterministically by the harness, a composition no surveyed academic or shipped system provides; (3) a controlled evaluation on a real coding task showing that voluntary memory use is near zero even with a pre-seeded store (0 memory operations in 114 turns), that deterministic injection delivered in every seeded run with zero false alarms, and that 39% of intra-session re-reads re-buy content paid for before a compaction boundary; (4) a repeated-compaction decay probe: ten facts held only in conversation vanish at the first summary and stay absent from 106 of 108 compactions, and the deprived agent greps the harness's own session files to rebuild them, while the same facts injected from a harness-owned store arrive intact through all 138 compact-resumes as the final summary carries none. Delivery, not storage, is the product: the reliable memory channel for agents is the one the agent never has to think about.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on retrieving information from external corpora. This creates a new attack surface: indirect prompt injection (IPI), where hidden instructions are planted in the corpora and hijack model behavior once retrieved. Previous studies have highlighted this risk but often avoid the hardest step: ensuring that malicious content is actually retrieved. In practice, unoptimized IPI is rarely retrieved under natural queries, which leaves its real-world impact unclear. We address this challenge by decomposing the malicious content into a trigger fragment that guarantees retrieval and an attack fragment that encodes arbitrary attack objectives. Based on this idea, we design an efficient and effective black-box attack algorithm that constructs a compact trigger fragment to guarantee retrieval for any attack fragment. Our attack requires only API access to embedding models, is cost-efficient (as little as $0.21 per target user query on OpenAI's embedding models), and achieves near-100% retrieval across 11 benchmarks and 8 embedding models (including both open-source models and proprietary services). Based on this attack, we present the first end-to-end IPI exploits under natural queries and realistic external corpora, spanning both RAG and agentic systems with diverse attack objectives. These results establish IPI as a practical and severe threat: when a user issued a natural query to summarize emails on frequently asked topics, a single poisoned email was sufficient to coerce GPT-4o into exfiltrating SSH keys with over 80% success in a multi-agent workflow. We further evaluate several defenses and find that they are insufficient to prevent the retrieval of malicious text, highlighting retrieval as a critical open vulnerability.

Backdoor attack is a major threat to deep learning systems in safety-critical scenarios, which aims to trigger misbehavior of neural network models under attacker-controlled conditions. However, most backdoor attacks have to modify the neural network models through training with poisoned data and/or direct model editing, which leads to a common but false belief that backdoor attack can be easily avoided by properly protecting the model. In this paper, we show that backdoor attacks can be achieved without any model modification. Instead of injecting backdoor logic into the training data or the model, we propose to place a carefully-designed patch (namely backdoor patch) in front of the camera, which is fed into the model together with the input images. The patch can be trained to behave normally at most of the time, while producing wrong prediction when the input image contains an attacker-controlled trigger object. Our main techniques include an effective training method to generate the backdoor patch and a digital-physical transformation modeling method to enhance the feasibility of the patch in real deployments. Extensive experiments show that PatchBackdoor can be applied to common deep learning models (VGG, MobileNet, ResNet) with an attack success rate of 93% to 99% on classification tasks. Moreover, we implement PatchBackdoor in real-world scenarios and show that the attack is still threatening.

The increasing use of generative models such as diffusion models for synthetic data augmentation has greatly reduced the cost of data collection and labeling in downstream perception tasks. However, this new data source paradigm may introduce important security concerns. Publicly available generative models are often reused without verification, raising a fundamental question of their safety and trustworthiness. This work investigates backdoor propagation in such emerging generative data supply chain, namely, Data-Chain Backdoor (DCB). Specifically, we find that open-source diffusion models can become hidden carriers of backdoors. Their strong distribution-fitting ability causes them to memorize and reproduce backdoor triggers in generation, which are subsequently inherited by downstream models, resulting in severe security risks. This threat is particularly concerning under clean-label attack scenarios, as it remains effective while having negligible impact on the utility of the synthetic data. We study two attacker choices to obtain a backdoor-carried generator, training from scratch and fine-tuning. While naive fine-tuning leads to weak inheritance of the backdoor, we find that novel designs in the loss objectives and trigger processing can substantially improve the generator's ability to preserve trigger patterns, making fine-tuning a low-cost attack path. We evaluate the effectiveness of DCB under the standard augmentation protocol and further assess data-scarce settings. Across multiple trigger types, we observe that the trigger pattern can be consistently retained in the synthetic data with attack efficacy comparable to the conventional backdoor attack.

Building credible simulators from data is difficult because structure design, parameter calibration, and out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness are tightly coupled. We introduce SOCIA (Simulation Orchestration for Computational Intelligence with Agents), a framework that treats simulator construction as joint structure-parameter co-optimization: it elicits mechanism-rich blueprints, exposes explicit tunable parameters, and instantiates a calibration schema, producing an executable simulator with built-in calibration hooks. SOCIA couples Bayesian Optimization for sample-efficient point calibration with Simulation-Based Inference for uncertainty-aware fitting; diagnostics trigger targeted structural edits in an outer refinement loop to co-optimize design and parameters under tight budgets. Across three diverse tasks, SOCIA consistently outperforms strong baselines, excelling on both in-distribution (ID) fitting and OOD shift. Ablations that weaken structure, calibration design, or tuning yield near-monotone degradations, underscoring the necessity of unified structure-parameter optimization. We will release the code soon.

Large Language Models (LLMs) face prominent security risks from jailbreaking, a practice that manipulates models to bypass built-in security constraints and generate unethical or unsafe content. Among various jailbreak techniques, multi-turn jailbreak attacks are more covert and persistent than single-turn counterparts, exposing critical vulnerabilities of LLMs. However, existing multi-turn jailbreak methods suffer from two fundamental limitations that affect the actual impact in real-world scenarios: (a) As models become more context-aware, any explicit harmful trigger is increasingly likely to be flagged and blocked; (b) Successful final-step triggers often require finely tuned, model-specific contexts, making such attacks highly context-dependent. To fill this gap, we propose Salami Slicing Risk, which operates by chaining numerous low-risk inputs that individually evade alignment thresholds but cumulatively accumulate harmful intent to ultimately trigger high-risk behaviors, without heavy reliance on pre-designed contextual structures. Building on this risk, we develop Salami Attack, an automatic framework universally applicable to multiple model types and modalities. Rigorous experiments demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance across diverse models and modalities, achieving over 90\% Attack Success Rate on GPT-4o and Gemini, as well as robustness against real-world alignment defenses. We also proposed a defense strategy to constrain the Salami Attack by at least 44.8\% while achieving a maximum blocking rate of 64.8\% against other multi-turn jailbreak attacks. Our findings provide critical insights into the pervasive risks of multi-turn jailbreaking and offer actionable mitigation strategies to enhance LLM security.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) from static instruction-followers to autonomous agents necessitates operating within complex, stateful environments to achieve precise state-transition objectives. However, this paradigm is bottlenecked by data scarcity, as existing tool-centric reverse-synthesis pipelines fail to capture the rigorous logic of real-world applications. We introduce LOGIGEN, a logic-driven framework that synthesizes verifiable training data based on three core pillars: Hard-Compiled Policy Grounding, Logic-Driven Forward Synthesis, and Deterministic State Verification. Specifically, a Triple-Agent Orchestration is employed: the Architect compiles natural-language policy into database constraints to enforce hard rules; the Set Designer initializes boundary-adjacent states to trigger critical policy conflicts; and the Explorer searches this environment to discover causal solution paths. This framework yields a dataset of 20,000 complex tasks across 8 domains, where validity is strictly guaranteed by checking exact state equivalence. Furthermore, we propose a verification-based training protocol where Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on verifiable trajectories establishes compliance with hard-compiled policy, while Reinforcement Learning (RL) guided by dense state-rewards refines long-horizon goal achievement. On τ^2-Bench, LOGIGEN-32B(RL) achieves a 79.5\% success rate, substantially outperforming the base model (40.7\%). These results demonstrate that logic-driven synthesis combined with verification-based training effectively constructs the causally valid trajectories needed for next-generation agents.

An ideal vision-language agent serves as a bridge between the human users and their surrounding physical world in real-world applications like autonomous driving and embodied agents, and proactively provides accurate and timely responses given user intents. An intriguing challenge arises when agents interact with the world as a dynamic data stream and ad-hoc queries from users: supporting knowledge for queries, namely evidence, usually appears asynchronously with the arrival time of queries, and agents need to ground their responses in historical data, present observations, and even future streams. We frame this challenge as Query-Evidence Asynchrony, where user queries and their supporting evidence typically arrive asynchronously in the streaming setting. This setting requires not only strong reasoning capabilities but also the ability to retain past observations and respond to queries with temporal awareness. In this paper, we introduce a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on their ability to handle interaction with streaming data. Further, we present AViLA, Asynchronous Video-Language Agent for streaming data interaction that can handle ad-hoc queries and give time-aware responses. For this purpose, AViLA consists of three key modules: comprehensive memory retention, evidence identification, and evidence-grounded trigger, that are designed to maintain a general-purpose memory and respond readily and timely to queries. Our experiments show that existing models often fail to respond at appropriate times, while AViLA significantly improves both accuracy and temporal awareness. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.

The improvement of LLMs' instruction-following capabilities depends critically on the availability of high-quality instruction-response pairs. While existing automatic data synthetic methods alleviate the burden of manual curation, they often rely heavily on either the quality of seed data or strong assumptions about the structure and content of web documents. To tackle these challenges, we propose Web Reconstruction (WebR), a fully automated framework for synthesizing high-quality instruction-tuning (IT) data directly from raw web documents with minimal assumptions. Leveraging the inherent diversity of raw web content, we conceptualize web reconstruction as an instruction-tuning data synthesis task via a novel dual-perspective paradigm--Web as Instruction and Web as Response--where each web document is designated as either an instruction or a response to trigger the reconstruction process. Comprehensive experiments show that datasets generated by WebR outperform state-of-the-art baselines by up to 16.65% across four instruction-following benchmarks. Notably, WebR demonstrates superior compatibility, data efficiency, and scalability, enabling enhanced domain adaptation with minimal effort. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/YJiangcm/WebR.

As a new paradigm in machine learning, self-supervised learning (SSL) is capable of learning high-quality representations of complex data without relying on labels. In addition to eliminating the need for labeled data, research has found that SSL improves the adversarial robustness over supervised learning since lacking labels makes it more challenging for adversaries to manipulate model predictions. However, the extent to which this robustness superiority generalizes to other types of attacks remains an open question. We explore this question in the context of backdoor attacks. Specifically, we design and evaluate CTRL, an embarrassingly simple yet highly effective self-supervised backdoor attack. By only polluting a tiny fraction of training data (<= 1%) with indistinguishable poisoning samples, CTRL causes any trigger-embedded input to be misclassified to the adversary's designated class with a high probability (>= 99%) at inference time. Our findings suggest that SSL and supervised learning are comparably vulnerable to backdoor attacks. More importantly, through the lens of CTRL, we study the inherent vulnerability of SSL to backdoor attacks. With both empirical and analytical evidence, we reveal that the representation invariance property of SSL, which benefits adversarial robustness, may also be the very reason making \ssl highly susceptible to backdoor attacks. Our findings also imply that the existing defenses against supervised backdoor attacks are not easily retrofitted to the unique vulnerability of SSL.

In mid-2026 a slogan reorganized how practitioners talk about coding agents: stop prompting your agent, start designing the loop that prompts it. We take this claim seriously and give it a careful treatment. We call the object of the new practice the loop specification: a bounded, reusable artifact, made of a trigger, a goal, a verification step, a stopping rule and a memory, that a human hands to an agent harness (such as Claude Code or Codex) so the agent pursues a goal on its own, in place of step-by-step prompting. We distinguish this external loop specification from two things it is often confused with: an ordinary programming loop, and the internal perceive-act-observe cycle that the harness already provides as plumbing. We position loop engineering as a new layer in the progression from prompt to context to harness to loop, and we argue, against the stronger headlines, that it does not retire prompt engineering; loop and prompt are distinct tools with distinct uses. We offer four contributions: a definition and scope for the discipline; an anatomy and taxonomy of loop specifications organized around trigger, goal type, a five-level verification ladder, architecture, and named terminal states; a descriptive analysis of the Loop Library, a public corpus of fifty real loops that we code by hand; and a set of design principles and anti-patterns grounded in the scientific literature on self-correction, reward hacking and model-as-judge fragility. The corpus shows that practice has matured most where the discipline says it matters: seventy percent of loops verify in the autonomous zone of the ladder and seventy-four percent name their terminal states, while automated triggering and durable memory remain comparatively underdeveloped. We close with the limits the practice must respect, including the verification burden, comprehension debt and the risk of cognitive surrender.

Event-based cameras are attracting significant interest as they provide rich edge information, high dynamic range, and high temporal resolution. Many state-of-the-art event-based algorithms rely on splitting the events into fixed groups, resulting in the omission of crucial temporal information, particularly when dealing with diverse motion scenarios (\eg, high/low speed).In this work, we propose SpikeSlicer, a novel-designed plug-and-play event processing method capable of splitting events stream adaptively.SpikeSlicer utilizes a low-energy spiking neural network (SNN) to trigger event slicing. To guide the SNN to fire spikes at optimal time steps, we propose the Spiking Position-aware Loss (SPA-Loss) to modulate the neuron's state. Additionally, we develop a Feedback-Update training strategy that refines the slicing decisions using feedback from the downstream artificial neural network (ANN). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields significant performance improvements in event-based object tracking and recognition. Notably, SpikeSlicer provides a brand-new SNN-ANN cooperation paradigm, where the SNN acts as an efficient, low-energy data processor to assist the ANN in improving downstream performance, injecting new perspectives and potential avenues of exploration.

Game feel design is the intentional design of the affective impact of moment-to-moment interaction with games. In this paper we survey academic research and publications by practitioners to give a complete overview of the state of research concerning this aspect of game design, including context from related areas. We analysed over 200 sources and categorised their content according to the design purpose presented. This resulted in three different domains of intended player experiences: physicality, amplification, and support. In these domains, the act of polishing that determines game feel, takes the shape of tuning, juicing, and streamlining respectively. Tuning the physicality of game objects creates cohesion, predictability, and the resulting movement informs many other design aspects. Juicing is the act of polishing amplification and it results in empowerment and provides clarity of feedback by communicating the importance of game events. Streamlining allows a game to act on the intention of the player, supporting the execution of actions in the game. These three design intents are the main means through which designers control minute details of interactivity and inform the player's reaction. This framework and its nuanced vocabulary can lead to an understanding of game feel that is shared between practitioners and researchers as highlighted in the concluding future research section.

High-throughput scientific facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider depend on real-time event filtering (triggering) under tight constraints on bandwidth, latency, and storage. In practice, trigger menus are largely static and hand-tuned and can become suboptimal as detector conditions, pileup, and background composition drift over time. We cast online threshold tuning as a sequential decision-making problem: a reinforcement learning agent ingests streaming summaries of recent rates and signal-sensitive features and updates trigger thresholds to maximize signal efficiency while tracking a target background rate within a tolerance band. We adapt Group-Filtered Policy Optimization (GFPO) to streaming control and introduce two variants (GFPO-F, GFPO-FR) that enforce background rate feasibility during training. On a benchmark that emulates realistic collider operation, we study two representative triggers: a total transverse energy (H_{T}) trigger sensitive to pileup variation, and an anomaly-detection (AD) trigger based on reconstruction loss for rare or non-standard signatures. On Monte Carlo streams, our agent increases the fraction of in-tolerance time intervals by 48\% (H_T) and 28\% (AD), with a cumulative gain of up to 2\% in signal efficiency on those in-tolerance intervals. Transferring from simulation to real collision data (CMS Run 283408), the same agent, without fine-tuning, achieves a 56\% (H_T) and 28\% (AD) in-tolerance improvement over baselines, with further signal-efficiency gain on both triggers. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of RL-based trigger control on real Large Hadron Collider collision data. Code is available at https://github.com/Zixind/GFPO_LHC (see repo for details).

Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are increasingly used for emotional and mental health support due to their low cost, immediacy, and accessibility. However, when safety guardrails are triggered, conversations may be abruptly terminated, introducing a distinct form of emotional disruption that can exacerbate distress and elevate risk among already vulnerable users. As this phenomenon gains attention, this viewpoint introduces Abrupt Refusal Secondary Harm (ARSH) as a conceptual framework to describe the psychological impacts of sudden conversational discontinuation caused by AI safety protocols. Drawing on counseling psychology and communication science as conceptual heuristics, we argue that abrupt refusals can rupture perceived relational continuity, evoke feelings of rejection or shame, and discourage future help seeking. To mitigate these risks, we propose a design hypothesis, the Compassionate Completion Standard (CCS), a refusal protocol grounded in Human Centered Design (HCD) that maintains safety constraints while preserving relational coherence. CCS emphasizes empathetic acknowledgment, transparent boundary articulation, graded conversational transition, and guided redirection, replacing abrupt disengagement with psychologically attuned closure. By integrating awareness of ARSH into AI safety design, developers and policymakers can reduce preventable iatrogenic harm and advance a more psychologically informed approach to AI governance. Rather than presenting incremental empirical findings, this viewpoint contributes a timely conceptual framework, articulates a testable design hypothesis, and outlines a coordinated research agenda for improving psychological safety in human AI interaction.

Long-horizon multimodal agents in open-world games must stay goal-directed across many low-level interactions under tight token and latency budgets. Existing approaches often trade off costly per-step reasoning against reactive execution that can drift, repeat failures, and recover poorly. Our key idea is to reuse strategic reasoning across locally stable segments and reinvoke it at event boundaries. We present SPIKE, an adaptive dual controller framework for cost-efficient long-horizon game control. Its Strategic Controller performs low-frequency global planning, failure analysis, and recovery, while its Reactive Controller handles fast local execution under a strict token budget. An Event Trigger monitors visual change, task progress, repeated actions, and failure signals to decide when control should stay reactive or escalate to strategic reasoning. Hierarchical Memory separates short-term experience reuse in the State-Action Memory Bank (SA-MB) from structured evidence in the State Action Knowledge Graph (SA-KG), allowing each controller to retrieve the context it needs. This design reuses strategic proposals over multiple reactive steps, supports local override when plans become stale, and reserves expensive reasoning for moments where extra deliberation is useful. On the Lite-100 split of StarDojo, SPIKE improves Lite-100 success rate (SR) by 5.0 percentage points (38.5% relative) over the strongest Lite-100 baseline and Budgeted SR by 9.3 points (75.6% relative) over the strongest budgeted baseline. It also reduces token consumption by 54.9% and latency by 40.8%. Ablations show that event triggering, reactive override, and heterogeneous memory each contribute to success and recovery, supporting selective reasoning rather than reasoning at every step.

Although the LLM-based in-context learning (ICL) paradigm has demonstrated considerable success across various natural language processing tasks, it encounters challenges in event detection. This is because LLMs lack an accurate understanding of event triggers and tend to make over-interpretation, which cannot be effectively corrected through in-context examples alone. In this paper, we focus on the most challenging one-shot setting and propose KeyCP++, a keyword-centric chain-of-thought prompting approach. KeyCP++ addresses the weaknesses of conventional ICL by automatically annotating the logical gaps between input text and detection results for the demonstrations. Specifically, to generate in-depth and meaningful rationale, KeyCP++ constructs a trigger discrimination prompting template. It incorporates the exemplary triggers (a.k.a keywords) into the prompt as the anchor to simply trigger profiling, let LLM propose candidate triggers, and justify each candidate. These propose-and-judge rationales help LLMs mitigate over-reliance on the keywords and promote detection rule learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing significant advancements in one-shot event detection.

Graphic design is a creative and innovative process that plays a crucial role in applications such as e-commerce and advertising. However, developing an automated design system that can faithfully translate user intentions into editable design files remains an open challenge. Although recent studies have leveraged powerful text-to-image models and MLLMs to assist graphic design, they typically simplify professional workflows, resulting in limited flexibility and intuitiveness. To address these limitations, we propose PSDesigner, an automated graphic design system that emulates the creative workflow of human designers. Building upon multiple specialized components, PSDesigner collects theme-related assets based on user instructions, and autonomously infers and executes tool calls to manipulate design files, such as integrating new assets or refining inferior elements. To endow the system with strong tool-use capabilities, we construct a design dataset, CreativePSD, which contains a large amount of high-quality PSD design files annotated with operation traces across a wide range of design scenarios and artistic styles, enabling models to learn expert design procedures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PSDesigner outperforms existing methods across diverse graphic design tasks, empowering non-specialists to conveniently create production-quality designs.

We introduce Multi-Objective Counterfactuals for Design (MCD), a novel method for counterfactual optimization in design problems. Counterfactuals are hypothetical situations that can lead to a different decision or choice. In this paper, the authors frame the counterfactual search problem as a design recommendation tool that can help identify modifications to a design, leading to better functional performance. MCD improves upon existing counterfactual search methods by supporting multi-objective queries, which are crucial in design problems, and by decoupling the counterfactual search and sampling processes, thus enhancing efficiency and facilitating objective tradeoff visualization. The paper demonstrates MCD's core functionality using a two-dimensional test case, followed by three case studies of bicycle design that showcase MCD's effectiveness in real-world design problems. In the first case study, MCD excels at recommending modifications to query designs that can significantly enhance functional performance, such as weight savings and improvements to the structural safety factor. The second case study demonstrates that MCD can work with a pre-trained language model to suggest design changes based on a subjective text prompt effectively. Lastly, the authors task MCD with increasing a query design's similarity to a target image and text prompt while simultaneously reducing weight and improving structural performance, demonstrating MCD's performance on a complex multimodal query. Overall, MCD has the potential to provide valuable recommendations for practitioners and design automation researchers looking for answers to their ``What if'' questions by exploring hypothetical design modifications and their impact on multiple design objectives. The code, test problems, and datasets used in the paper are available to the public at decode.mit.edu/projects/counterfactuals/.

Protein function is often controlled by ligands that bias the direction of state transitions, such as agonists and antagonists, rather than stabilizing a single conformation. This is especially important for clinically relevant G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), where therapeutic efficacy depends on functional directionality. Structure-based design methods optimize binding to static conformations and cannot represent non-reversible, directional effects or systematically distinguish agonist from antagonist behavior. To address this gap, we introduce Transition-Directed Discrete Diffusion for Allosteric Binder Design (TD3B), a sequence-based generative framework that designs binders with specified agonist or antagonist behavior via a directional transition control objective. TD3B combines a target-aware Direction Oracle, a soft binding-affinity gate, and amortized fine-tuning of a pre-trained discrete diffusion model, enabling targeted agonist and antagonist generation decoupled from binding affinity and unattainable by equilibrium-based or inference-only guidance baselines. The code and checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/ChatterjeeLab/TD3B.

Graphic design plays a vital role in visual communication across advertising, marketing, and multimedia entertainment. Prior work has explored automated graphic design generation using diffusion models, aiming to streamline creative workflows and democratize design capabilities. However, complex graphic design scenarios require accurately adhering to design intent specified by multiple heterogeneous user-provided elements (\eg images, layouts, and texts), which pose multi-condition control challenges for existing methods. Specifically, previous single-condition control models demonstrate effectiveness only within their specialized domains but fail to generalize to other conditions, while existing multi-condition methods often lack fine-grained control over each sub-condition and compromise overall compositional harmony. To address these limitations, we introduce CreatiDesign, a systematic solution for automated graphic design covering both model architecture and dataset construction. First, we design a unified multi-condition driven architecture that enables flexible and precise integration of heterogeneous design elements with minimal architectural modifications to the base diffusion model. Furthermore, to ensure that each condition precisely controls its designated image region and to avoid interference between conditions, we propose a multimodal attention mask mechanism. Additionally, we develop a fully automated pipeline for constructing graphic design datasets, and introduce a new dataset with 400K samples featuring multi-condition annotations, along with a comprehensive benchmark. Experimental results show that CreatiDesign outperforms existing models by a clear margin in faithfully adhering to user intent.

Designing user interfaces (UIs) is a critical step when launching products, building portfolios, or personalizing projects, yet end users without design expertise often struggle to articulate their intent and to trust design choices. Existing example-based tools either promote broad exploration, which can cause overwhelm and design drift, or require adapting a single example, risking design fixation. We present UI Remix, an interactive system that supports mobile UI design through an example-driven design workflow. Powered by a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (MMRAG) model, UI Remix enables iterative search, selection, and adaptation of examples at both the global (whole interface) and local (component) level. To foster trust, it presents source transparency cues such as ratings, download counts, and developer information. In an empirical study with 24 end users, UI Remix significantly improved participants' ability to achieve their design goals, facilitated effective iteration, and encouraged exploration of alternative designs. Participants also reported that source transparency cues enhanced their confidence in adapting examples. Our findings suggest new directions for AI-assisted, example-driven systems that empower end users to design with greater control, trust, and openness to exploration.

Feedback is crucial for every design process, such as user interface (UI) design, and automating design critiques can significantly improve the efficiency of the design workflow. Although existing multimodal large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks, they often struggle with generating high-quality design critiques -- a complex task that requires producing detailed design comments that are visually grounded in a given design's image. Building on recent advancements in iterative refinement of text output and visual prompting methods, we propose an iterative visual prompting approach for UI critique that takes an input UI screenshot and design guidelines and generates a list of design comments, along with corresponding bounding boxes that map each comment to a specific region in the screenshot. The entire process is driven completely by LLMs, which iteratively refine both the text output and bounding boxes using few-shot samples tailored for each step. We evaluated our approach using Gemini-1.5-pro and GPT-4o, and found that human experts generally preferred the design critiques generated by our pipeline over those by the baseline, with the pipeline reducing the gap from human performance by 50% for one rating metric. To assess the generalizability of our approach to other multimodal tasks, we applied our pipeline to open-vocabulary object and attribute detection, and experiments showed that our method also outperformed the baseline.

User interface (UI) design is an iterative process in which designers progressively refine their work with design software such as Figma or Sketch. Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) with tool invocation suggest these models can operate design software to edit a UI design through iteration. Understanding and enhancing this capacity is important, as it highlights VLMs' potential to collaborate with designers within conventional software. However, as no existing benchmark evaluates tool-based design performance, the capacity remains unknown. To address this, we introduce CANVAS, a benchmark for VLMs on tool-based user interface design. Our benchmark contains 598 tool-based design tasks paired with ground-truth references sampled from 3.3K mobile UI designs across 30 function-based categories (e.g., onboarding, messaging). In each task, a VLM updates the design step-by-step through context-based tool invocations (e.g., create a rectangle as a button background), linked to design software. Specifically, CANVAS incorporates two task types: (i) design replication evaluates the ability to reproduce a whole UI screen; (ii) design modification evaluates the ability to modify a specific part of an existing screen. Results suggest that leading models exhibit more strategic tool invocations, improving design quality. Furthermore, we identify common error patterns models exhibit, guiding future work in enhancing tool-based design capabilities.

Graphic designs are an effective medium for visual communication. They range from greeting cards to corporate flyers and beyond. Off-late, machine learning techniques are able to generate such designs, which accelerates the rate of content production. An automated way of evaluating their quality becomes critical. Towards this end, we introduce Design-o-meter, a data-driven methodology to quantify the goodness of graphic designs. Further, our approach can suggest modifications to these designs to improve its visual appeal. To the best of our knowledge, Design-o-meter is the first approach that scores and refines designs in a unified framework despite the inherent subjectivity and ambiguity of the setting. Our exhaustive quantitative and qualitative analysis of our approach against baselines adapted for the task (including recent Multimodal LLM-based approaches) brings out the efficacy of our methodology. We hope our work will usher more interest in this important and pragmatic problem setting.

Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We present automated techniques that enable experts to identify dark patterns on a large set of websites. Using these techniques, we study shopping websites, which often use dark patterns to influence users into making more purchases or disclosing more information than they would otherwise. Analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites, we discover 1,818 dark pattern instances, together representing 15 types and 7 broader categories. We examine these dark patterns for deceptive practices, and find 183 websites that engage in such practices. We also uncover 22 third-party entities that offer dark patterns as a turnkey solution. Finally, we develop a taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics that describes the underlying influence of the dark patterns and their potential harm on user decision-making. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for stakeholders including researchers and regulators to study, mitigate, and minimize the use of these patterns.

Web-scraped datasets are vulnerable to data poisoning, which can be used for backdooring deep image classifiers during training. Since training on large datasets is expensive, a model is trained once and re-used many times. Unlike adversarial examples, backdoor attacks often target specific classes rather than any class learned by the model. One might expect that targeting many classes through a naive composition of attacks vastly increases the number of poison samples. We show this is not necessarily true and more efficient, universal data poisoning attacks exist that allow controlling misclassifications from any source class into any target class with a small increase in poison samples. Our idea is to generate triggers with salient characteristics that the model can learn. The triggers we craft exploit a phenomenon we call inter-class poison transferability, where learning a trigger from one class makes the model more vulnerable to learning triggers for other classes. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our universal backdoor attacks by controlling models with up to 6,000 classes while poisoning only 0.15% of the training dataset. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Ben-Schneider-code/Universal-Backdoor-Attacks.

Layout generation is the foundation task of intelligent design, which requires the integration of visual aesthetics and harmonious expression of content delivery. However, existing methods still face challenges in generating precise and visually appealing layouts, including blocking, overlap, or spatial misalignment between layouts, which are closely related to the spatial structure of graphic layouts. We find that these methods overly focus on content information and lack constraints on layout spatial structure, resulting in an imbalance of learning content-aware and graphic-aware features. To tackle this issue, we propose Content and Graphic Balance Layout Generation with Transformer-based Diffusion Model (CGB-DM). Specifically, we first design a regulator that balances the predicted content and graphic weight, overcoming the tendency of paying more attention to the content on canvas. Secondly, we introduce a graphic constraint of saliency bounding box to further enhance the alignment of geometric features between layout representations and images. In addition, we adapt a transformer-based diffusion model as the backbone, whose powerful generation capability ensures the quality in layout generation. Extensive experimental results indicate that our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our model framework can also be expanded to other graphic design fields.

Controllable layout generation refers to the process of creating a plausible visual arrangement of elements within a graphic design (e.g., document and web designs) with constraints representing design intentions. Although recent diffusion-based models have achieved state-of-the-art FID scores, they tend to exhibit more pronounced misalignment compared to earlier transformer-based models. In this work, we propose the LAyout Constraint diffusion modEl (LACE), a unified model to handle a broad range of layout generation tasks, such as arranging elements with specified attributes and refining or completing a coarse layout design. The model is based on continuous diffusion models. Compared with existing methods that use discrete diffusion models, continuous state-space design can enable the incorporation of differentiable aesthetic constraint functions in training. For conditional generation, we introduce conditions via masked input. Extensive experiment results show that LACE produces high-quality layouts and outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines.