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Chao Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Chao Huang.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources
arXiv2025

Safety Alignment Should Be Made More Than Just A Few Attention Heads

Current safety alignment for large language models(LLMs) continues to present vulnerabilities, given that adversarial prompting can effectively bypass their safety measures.Our investigation shows that these safety mechanisms predominantly depend on a limited subset of attention heads: removing or ablating these heads can severely compromise model safety. To identify and evaluate these safety-critical components, we introduce RDSHA, a targeted ablation method that leverages the model's refusal direction to pinpoint attention heads mostly responsible for safety behaviors. Further analysis shows that existing jailbreak attacks exploit this concentration by selectively bypassing or manipulating these critical attention heads. To address this issue, we propose AHD, a novel training strategy designed to promote the distributed encoding of safety-related behaviors across numerous attention heads. Experimental results demonstrate that AHD successfully distributes safety-related capabilities across more attention heads. Moreover, evaluations under several mainstream jailbreak attacks show that models trained with AHD exhibit considerably stronger safety robustness, while maintaining overall functional utility.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2025

Power-Series Approach to Moment-Matching-Based Model Reduction of MIMO Polynomial Nonlinear Systems

The model reduction problem for high-order multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) polynomial nonlinear systems based on moment matching is addressed. The technique of power-series decomposition is exploited: this decomposes the solution of the nonlinear PDE characterizing the center manifold into the solutions of a series of recursively defined Sylvester equations. This approach allows yielding nonlinear reduced-order models in very much the same way as in the linear case (e.g. analytically). Algorithms are proposed for obtaining the order and the parameters of the reduced-order models with precision of degree $κ$. The approach also provides new insights into the nonlinear moment matching problem: first, a lower bound for the order of the reduced-order model is obtained, which, in the MIMO case, can be strictly less than the number of matched moments; second, it is revealed that the lower bound is affected by the ratio of the number of the input and output channels; third, it is shown that under mild conditions, a nonlinear reduced-order model can always be constructed with either a linear state equation or a linear output equation.

eess.SY↗
arXiv2025

IAD-R1: Reinforcing Consistent Reasoning in Industrial Anomaly Detection

Industrial anomaly detection is a critical component of modern manufacturing, yet the scarcity of defective samples restricts traditional detection methods to scenario-specific applications. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate significant advantages in generalization capabilities, their performance in industrial anomaly detection remains limited. To address this challenge, we propose IAD-R1, a universal post-training framework applicable to VLMs of different architectures and parameter scales, which substantially enhances their anomaly detection capabilities. IAD-R1 employs a two-stage training strategy: the Perception Activation Supervised Fine-Tuning (PA-SFT) stage utilizes a meticulously constructed high-quality Chain-of-Thought dataset (Expert-AD) for training, enhancing anomaly perception capabilities and establishing reasoning-to-answer correlations; the Structured Control Group Relative Policy Optimization (SC-GRPO) stage employs carefully designed reward functions to achieve a capability leap from "Anomaly Perception" to "Anomaly Interpretation". Experimental results demonstrate that IAD-R1 achieves significant improvements across 7 VLMs, the largest improvement was on the DAGM dataset, with average accuracy 43.3% higher than the 0.5B baseline. Notably, the 0.5B parameter model trained with IAD-R1 surpasses commercial models including GPT-4.1 and Claude-Sonnet-4 in zero-shot settings, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of IAD-R1. The dataset, code, and all model weights will be publicly available at https://github.com/Yanhui-Lee/IAD-R1.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Alignment and Safety in Large Language Models: Safety Mechanisms, Training Paradigms, and Emerging Challenges

Due to the remarkable capabilities and growing impact of large language models (LLMs), they have been deeply integrated into many aspects of society. Thus, ensuring their alignment with human values and intentions has emerged as a critical challenge. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of practical alignment techniques, training protocols, and empirical findings in LLM alignment. We analyze the development of alignment methods across diverse paradigms, characterizing the fundamental trade-offs between core alignment objectives. Our analysis shows that while supervised fine-tuning enables basic instruction-following, preference-based methods offer more flexibility for aligning with nuanced human intent. We discuss state-of-the-art techniques, including Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), Constitutional AI, brain-inspired methods, and alignment uncertainty quantification (AUQ), highlighting their approaches to balancing quality and efficiency. We review existing evaluation frameworks and benchmarking datasets, emphasizing limitations such as reward misspecification, distributional robustness, and scalable oversight. We summarize strategies adopted by leading AI labs to illustrate the current state of practice. We conclude by outlining open problems in oversight, value pluralism, robustness, and continuous alignment. This survey aims to inform both researchers and practitioners navigating the evolving landscape of LLM alignment.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2025

Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructions

Digital agents for automating tasks across different platforms by directly manipulating the GUIs are increasingly important. For these agents, grounding from language instructions to target elements remains a significant challenge due to reliance on HTML or AXTree inputs. In this paper, we introduce Aria-UI, a large multimodal model specifically designed for GUI grounding. Aria-UI adopts a pure-vision approach, eschewing reliance on auxiliary inputs. To adapt to heterogeneous planning instructions, we propose a scalable data pipeline that synthesizes diverse and high-quality instruction samples for grounding. To handle dynamic contexts in task performing, Aria-UI incorporates textual and text-image interleaved action histories, enabling robust context-aware reasoning for grounding. Aria-UI sets new state-of-the-art results across offline and online agent benchmarks, outperforming both vision-only and AXTree-reliant baselines. We release all training data and model checkpoints to foster further research at https://ariaui.github.io.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2025

ABench-Physics: Benchmarking Physical Reasoning in LLMs via High-Difficulty and Dynamic Physics Problems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in domains such as mathematics and programming, yet their capabilities in physics remain underexplored and poorly understood. Physics poses unique challenges that demand not only precise computation but also deep conceptual understanding and physical modeling skills. Existing benchmarks often fall short due to limited difficulty, multiple-choice formats, and static evaluation settings that fail to capture physical modeling ability. In this paper, we introduce ABench-Physics, a novel benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate LLMs' physical reasoning and generalization capabilities. ABench-Physics consists of two components: Phy_A, a static set of 400 graduate- or Olympiad-level problems; and Phy_B, a dynamic subset of 100 problems equipped with an automatic variation engine to test model robustness across changing conditions. All questions require precise numerical answers, with strict formatting and tolerance constraints. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art LLMs reveals substantial performance gaps, highlighting persistent limitations in physical reasoning, especially in generalization to dynamic variants. ABench-Physics provides a challenging and diagnostic framework for advancing scientific reasoning in LLMs.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Scaling Value Iteration Networks to 5000 Layers for Extreme Long-Term Planning

The Value Iteration Network (VIN) is an end-to-end differentiable neural network architecture for planning. It exhibits strong generalization to unseen domains by incorporating a differentiable planning module that operates on a latent Markov Decision Process (MDP). However, VINs struggle to scale to long-term and large-scale planning tasks, such as navigating a 100x100 maze -- a task that typically requires thousands of planning steps to solve. We observe that this deficiency is due to two issues: the representation capacity of the latent MDP and the planning module's depth. We address these by augmenting the latent MDP with a dynamic transition kernel, dramatically improving its representational capacity, and, to mitigate the vanishing gradient problem, introduce an "adaptive highway loss" that constructs skip connections to improve gradient flow. We evaluate our method on 2D/3D maze navigation environments, continuous control, and the real-world Lunar rover navigation task. We find that our new method, named Dynamic Transition VIN (DT-VIN), scales to 5000 layers and solves challenging versions of the above tasks. Altogether, we believe that DT-VIN represents a concrete step forward in performing long-term large-scale planning in complex environments.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Dual-Channel Multiplex Graph Neural Networks for Recommendation

Effective recommender systems play a crucial role in accurately capturing user and item attributes that mirror individual preferences. Some existing recommendation techniques have started to shift their focus towards modeling various types of interactive relations between users and items in real-world recommendation scenarios, such as clicks, marking favorites, and purchases on online shopping platforms. Nevertheless, these approaches still grapple with two significant challenges: (1) Insufficient modeling and exploitation of the impact of various behavior patterns formed by multiplex relations between users and items on representation learning, and (2) ignoring the effect of different relations within behavior patterns on the target relation in recommender system scenarios. In this work, we introduce a novel recommendation framework, Dual-Channel Multiplex Graph Neural Network (DCMGNN), which addresses the aforementioned challenges. It incorporates an explicit behavior pattern representation learner to capture the behavior patterns composed of multiplex user-item interactive relations, and includes a relation chain representation learner and a relation chain-aware encoder to discover the impact of various auxiliary relations on the target relation, the dependencies between different relations, and mine the appropriate order of relations in a behavior pattern. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our DCMGNN surpasses various state-of-the-art recommendation methods. It outperforms the best baselines by 10.06% and 12.15% on average across all datasets in terms of Recall@10 and NDCG@10, respectively.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

RecGPT: A Foundation Model for Sequential Recommendation

This work addresses a fundamental barrier in recommender systems: the inability to generalize across domains without extensive retraining. Traditional ID-based approaches fail entirely in cold-start and cross-domain scenarios where new users or items lack sufficient interaction history. Inspired by foundation models' cross-domain success, we develop a foundation model for sequential recommendation that achieves genuine zero-shot generalization capabilities. Our approach fundamentally departs from existing ID-based methods by deriving item representations exclusively from textual features. This enables immediate embedding of any new item without model retraining. We introduce unified item tokenization with Finite Scalar Quantization that transforms heterogeneous textual descriptions into standardized discrete tokens. This eliminates domain barriers that plague existing systems. Additionally, the framework features hybrid bidirectional-causal attention that captures both intra-item token coherence and inter-item sequential dependencies. An efficient catalog-aware beam search decoder enables real-time token-to-item mapping. Unlike conventional approaches confined to their training domains, RecGPT naturally bridges diverse recommendation contexts through its domain-invariant tokenization mechanism. Comprehensive evaluations across six datasets and industrial scenarios demonstrate consistent performance advantages.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

Directly Forecasting Belief for Reinforcement Learning with Delays

Reinforcement learning (RL) with delays is challenging as sensory perceptions lag behind the actual events: the RL agent needs to estimate the real state of its environment based on past observations. State-of-the-art (SOTA) methods typically employ recursive, step-by-step forecasting of states. This can cause the accumulation of compounding errors. To tackle this problem, our novel belief estimation method, named Directly Forecasting Belief Transformer (DFBT), directly forecasts states from observations without incrementally estimating intermediate states step-by-step. We theoretically demonstrate that DFBT greatly reduces compounding errors of existing recursively forecasting methods, yielding stronger performance guarantees. In experiments with D4RL offline datasets, DFBT reduces compounding errors with remarkable prediction accuracy. DFBT's capability to forecast state sequences also facilitates multi-step bootstrapping, thus greatly improving learning efficiency. On the MuJoCo benchmark, our DFBT-based method substantially outperforms SOTA baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/QingyuanWuNothing/DFBT.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

SepLLM: Accelerate Large Language Models by Compressing One Segment into One Separator

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional performance across a spectrum of natural language processing tasks. However, their substantial sizes pose considerable challenges, particularly in computational demands and inference speed, due to their quadratic complexity. In this work, we have identified a key pattern: certain seemingly meaningless separator tokens (i.e., punctuations) contribute disproportionately to attention scores compared to semantically meaningful tokens. This observation suggests that information of the segments between these separator tokens can be effectively condensed into the separator tokens themselves without significant information loss. Guided by this insight, we introduce SepLLM, a plug-and-play framework that accelerates inference by compressing these segments and eliminating redundant tokens. Additionally, we implement efficient kernels for training acceleration. Experimental results across training-free, training-from-scratch, and post-training settings demonstrate SepLLM's effectiveness. Notably, using the Llama-3-8B backbone, SepLLM achieves over 50% reduction in KV cache on the GSM8K-CoT benchmark while maintaining comparable performance. Furthermore, in streaming settings, SepLLM effectively processes sequences of up to 4 million tokens or more while maintaining consistent language modeling capabilities.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

RecLM: Recommendation Instruction Tuning

Modern recommender systems aim to deeply understand users' complex preferences through their past interactions. While deep collaborative filtering approaches using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at capturing user-item relationships, their effectiveness is limited when handling sparse data or zero-shot scenarios, primarily due to constraints in ID-based embedding functions. To address these challenges, we propose a model-agnostic recommendation instruction-tuning paradigm that seamlessly integrates large language models with collaborative filtering. Our proposed $\underline{Rec}$ommendation $\underline{L}$anguage $\underline{M}$odel (RecLM) enhances the capture of user preference diversity through a carefully designed reinforcement learning reward function that facilitates self-augmentation of language models. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate significant advantages of our approach across various settings, and its plug-and-play compatibility with state-of-the-art recommender systems results in notable performance enhancements. The implementation of our RecLM framework is publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/RecLM.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

FreSca: Scaling in Frequency Space Enhances Diffusion Models

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) have achieved remarkable success in a variety of image tasks, yet achieving fine-grained, disentangled control over global structures versus fine details remains challenging. This paper explores frequency-based control within latent diffusion models. We first systematically analyze frequency characteristics across pixel space, VAE latent space, and internal LDM representations. This reveals that the "noise difference" term, derived from classifier-free guidance at each step t, is a uniquely effective and semantically rich target for manipulation. Building on this insight, we introduce FreSca, a novel and plug-and-play framework that decomposes noise difference into low- and high-frequency components and applies independent scaling factors to them via spatial or energy-based cutoffs. Essentially, FreSca operates without any model retraining or architectural change, offering model- and task-agnostic control. We demonstrate its versatility and effectiveness in improving generation quality and structural emphasis on multiple architectures (e.g., SD3, SDXL) and across applications including image generation, editing, depth estimation, and video synthesis, thereby unlocking a new dimension of expressive control within LDMs.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

ZeroSep: Separate Anything in Audio with Zero Training

Audio source separation is fundamental for machines to understand complex acoustic environments and underpins numerous audio applications. Current supervised deep learning approaches, while powerful, are limited by the need for extensive, task-specific labeled data and struggle to generalize to the immense variability and open-set nature of real-world acoustic scenes. Inspired by the success of generative foundation models, we investigate whether pre-trained text-guided audio diffusion models can overcome these limitations. We make a surprising discovery: zero-shot source separation can be achieved purely through a pre-trained text-guided audio diffusion model under the right configuration. Our method, named ZeroSep, works by inverting the mixed audio into the diffusion model's latent space and then using text conditioning to guide the denoising process to recover individual sources. Without any task-specific training or fine-tuning, ZeroSep repurposes the generative diffusion model for a discriminative separation task and inherently supports open-set scenarios through its rich textual priors. ZeroSep is compatible with a variety of pre-trained text-guided audio diffusion backbones and delivers strong separation performance on multiple separation benchmarks, surpassing even supervised methods.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2025

Pre-training for Recommendation Unlearning

Modern recommender systems powered by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at modeling complex user-item interactions, yet increasingly face scenarios requiring selective forgetting of training data. Beyond user requests to remove specific interactions due to privacy concerns or preference changes, regulatory frameworks mandate recommender systems' ability to eliminate the influence of certain user data from models. This recommendation unlearning challenge presents unique difficulties as removing connections within interaction graphs creates ripple effects throughout the model, potentially impacting recommendations for numerous users. Traditional approaches suffer from significant drawbacks: fragmentation methods damage graph structure and diminish performance, while influence function techniques make assumptions that may not hold in complex GNNs, particularly with self-supervised or random architectures. To address these limitations, we propose a novel model-agnostic pre-training paradigm UnlearnRec that prepares systems for efficient unlearning operations. Our Influence Encoder takes unlearning requests together with existing model parameters and directly produces updated parameters of unlearned model with little fine-tuning, avoiding complete retraining while preserving model performance characteristics. Extensive evaluation on public benchmarks demonstrates that our method delivers exceptional unlearning effectiveness while providing more than 10x speedup compared to retraining approaches. We release our method implementation at: https://github.com/HKUDS/UnlearnRec.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

Vad-R1: Towards Video Anomaly Reasoning via Perception-to-Cognition Chain-of-Thought

Recent advancements in reasoning capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate its effectiveness in tackling complex visual tasks. However, existing MLLM-based Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) methods remain limited to shallow anomaly descriptions without deep reasoning. In this paper, we propose a new task named Video Anomaly Reasoning (VAR), which aims to enable deep analysis and understanding of anomalies in the video by requiring MLLMs to think explicitly before answering. To this end, we propose Vad-R1, an end-to-end MLLM-based framework for VAR. Specifically, we design a Perception-to-Cognition Chain-of-Thought (P2C-CoT) that simulates the human process of recognizing anomalies, guiding the MLLM to reason anomaly step-by-step. Based on the structured P2C-CoT, we construct Vad-Reasoning, a dedicated dataset for VAR. Furthermore, we propose an improved reinforcement learning algorithm AVA-GRPO, which explicitly incentivizes the anomaly reasoning capability of MLLMs through a self-verification mechanism with limited annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that Vad-R1 achieves superior performance, outperforming both open-source and proprietary models on VAD and VAR tasks. Codes and datasets will be released at https://github.com/wbfwonderful/Vad-R1.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

AI-Researcher: Autonomous Scientific Innovation

The powerful reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematics and coding, combined with their ability to automate complex tasks through agentic frameworks, present unprecedented opportunities for accelerating scientific innovation. In this paper, we introduce AI-Researcher, a fully autonomous research system that transforms how AI-driven scientific discovery is conducted and evaluated. Our framework seamlessly orchestrates the complete research pipeline--from literature review and hypothesis generation to algorithm implementation and publication-ready manuscript preparation--with minimal human intervention. To rigorously assess autonomous research capabilities, we develop Scientist-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising state-of-the-art papers across diverse AI research domains, featuring both guided innovation and open-ended exploration tasks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that AI-Researcher achieves remarkable implementation success rates and produces research papers that approach human-level quality. This work establishes new foundations for autonomous scientific innovation that can complement human researchers by systematically exploring solution spaces beyond cognitive limitations.

cs.AI↗