Daily Papers

The Agent and AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) technologies have recently made significant progress. We propose AesopAgent, an Agent-driven Evolutionary System on Story-to-Video Production. AesopAgent is a practical application of agent technology for multimodal content generation. The system integrates multiple generative capabilities within a unified framework, so that individual users can leverage these modules easily. This innovative system would convert user story proposals into scripts, images, and audio, and then integrate these multimodal contents into videos. Additionally, the animating units (e.g., Gen-2 and Sora) could make the videos more infectious. The AesopAgent system could orchestrate task workflow for video generation, ensuring that the generated video is both rich in content and coherent. This system mainly contains two layers, i.e., the Horizontal Layer and the Utility Layer. In the Horizontal Layer, we introduce a novel RAG-based evolutionary system that optimizes the whole video generation workflow and the steps within the workflow. It continuously evolves and iteratively optimizes workflow by accumulating expert experience and professional knowledge, including optimizing the LLM prompts and utilities usage. The Utility Layer provides multiple utilities, leading to consistent image generation that is visually coherent in terms of composition, characters, and style. Meanwhile, it provides audio and special effects, integrating them into expressive and logically arranged videos. Overall, our AesopAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with many previous works in visual storytelling. Our AesopAgent is designed for convenient service for individual users, which is available on the following page: https://aesopai.github.io/.

Deep classifiers are known to be sensitive to data distribution shifts, primarily due to their reliance on spurious correlations in training data. It has been suggested that these classifiers can still find useful features in the network's last layer that hold up under such shifts. In this work, we question the use of last-layer representations for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation and explore the utility of intermediate layers. To this end, we introduce Intermediate Layer Classifiers (ILCs). We discover that intermediate layer representations frequently offer substantially better generalisation than those from the penultimate layer. In many cases, zero-shot OOD generalisation using earlier-layer representations approaches the few-shot performance of retraining on penultimate layer representations. This is confirmed across multiple datasets, architectures, and types of distribution shifts. Our analysis suggests that intermediate layers are less sensitive to distribution shifts compared to the penultimate layer. These findings highlight the importance of understanding how information is distributed across network layers and its role in OOD generalisation, while also pointing to the limits of penultimate layer representation utility. Code is available at https://github.com/oshapio/intermediate-layer-generalization

Recently proposed self-supervised learning approaches have been successful for pre-training speech representation models. The utility of these learned representations has been observed empirically, but not much has been studied about the type or extent of information encoded in the pre-trained representations themselves. Developing such insights can help understand the capabilities and limits of these models and enable the research community to more efficiently develop their usage for downstream applications. In this work, we begin to fill this gap by examining one recent and successful pre-trained model (wav2vec 2.0), via its intermediate representation vectors, using a suite of analysis tools. We use the metrics of canonical correlation, mutual information, and performance on simple downstream tasks with non-parametric probes, in order to (i) query for acoustic and linguistic information content, (ii) characterize the evolution of information across model layers, and (iii) understand how fine-tuning the model for automatic speech recognition (ASR) affects these observations. Our findings motivate modifying the fine-tuning protocol for ASR, which produces improved word error rates in a low-resource setting.

As systems trend toward superintelligence, a natural modeling premise is that agents can self-improve along every facet of their own design. We formalize this with a five-axis decomposition and a decision layer, separating incentives from learning behavior and analyzing axes in isolation. Our central result identifies and introduces a sharp utility--learning tension, the structural conflict in self-modifying systems whereby utility-driven changes that improve immediate or expected performance can also erode the statistical preconditions for reliable learning and generalization. Our findings show that distribution-free guarantees are preserved iff the policy-reachable model family is uniformly capacity-bounded; when capacity can grow without limit, utility-rational self-changes can render learnable tasks unlearnable. Under standard assumptions common in practice, these axes reduce to the same capacity criterion, yielding a single boundary for safe self-modification. Numerical experiments across several axes validate the theory by comparing destructive utility policies against our proposed two-gate policies that preserve learnability.

We consider the training of the first layer of vision models and notice the clear relationship between pixel values and gradient update magnitudes: the gradients arriving at the weights of a first layer are by definition directly proportional to (normalized) input pixel values. Thus, an image with low contrast has a smaller impact on learning than an image with higher contrast, and a very bright or very dark image has a stronger impact on the weights than an image with moderate brightness. In this work, we propose performing gradient descent on the embeddings produced by the first layer of the model. However, switching to discrete inputs with an embedding layer is not a reasonable option for vision models. Thus, we propose the conceptual procedure of (i) a gradient descent step on first layer activations to construct an activation proposal, and (ii) finding the optimal weights of the first layer, i.e., those weights which minimize the squared distance to the activation proposal. We provide a closed form solution of the procedure and adjust it for robust stochastic training while computing everything efficiently. Empirically, we find that TrAct (Training Activations) speeds up training by factors between 1.25x and 4x while requiring only a small computational overhead. We demonstrate the utility of TrAct with different optimizers for a range of different vision models including convolutional and transformer architectures.

Machine unlearning methods seek to revise pretrained models such that effects of certain training samples can be removed. In addition to effective erasure, low computational cost and general utility retention are also highly desirable. Existing unlearning methods usually involve iterative updates over the model parameters, which incurs a high computational cost. In this work, we propose an efficient method that only requires a one-time gradient computation, with which we modify only a single layer of model parameters. Specifically, we first identify a small number of model layers that lie on the Pareto front of high forget importance and low retain influence as critical layers. Then we search for a suitable step size and take a step along the gradient direction of a single critical layer while keeping other layers frozen. This method is highly modular and can be used to unlearn multiple concepts simultaneously in a controllable manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of this method on various models including CLIP, stable diffusion, and VLMs, surpassing other state-of-the-art methods.

Machine learning-based computer-generated holography (ML-CGH) has advanced rapidly in recent years, yet progress is constrained by the limited availability of high-quality, large-scale hologram datasets. To address this, we present KOREATECH-CGH, a publicly available dataset comprising 6,000 pairs of RGB-D images and complex holograms across resolutions ranging from 256*256 to 2048*2048, with depth ranges extending to the theoretical limits of the angular spectrum method for wide 3D scene coverage. To improve hologram quality at large depth ranges, we introduce amplitude projection, a post-processing technique that replaces amplitude components of hologram wavefields at each depth layer while preserving phase. This approach enhances reconstruction fidelity, achieving 27.01 dB PSNR and 0.87 SSIM, surpassing a recent optimized silhouette-masking layer-based method by 2.03 dB and 0.04 SSIM, respectively. We further validate the utility of KOREATECH-CGH through experiments on hologram generation and super-resolution using state-of-the-art ML models, confirming its applicability for training and evaluating next-generation ML-CGH systems.

Memory layers use a trainable key-value lookup mechanism to add extra parameters to a model without increasing FLOPs. Conceptually, sparsely activated memory layers complement compute-heavy dense feed-forward layers, providing dedicated capacity to store and retrieve information cheaply. This work takes memory layers beyond proof-of-concept, proving their utility at contemporary scale. On downstream tasks, language models augmented with our improved memory layer outperform dense models with more than twice the computation budget, as well as mixture-of-expert models when matched for both compute and parameters. We find gains are especially pronounced for factual tasks. We provide a fully parallelizable memory layer implementation, demonstrating scaling laws with up to 128B memory parameters, pretrained to 1 trillion tokens, comparing to base models with up to 8B parameters.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse applications, including chatbot assistants and code generation, aligning their behavior with safety and ethical standards has become paramount. However, jailbreak attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities to elicit unintended or harmful outputs, threaten LLMs' safety significantly. In this paper, we introduce Layer-AdvPatcher, a novel methodology designed to defend against jailbreak attacks by utilizing an unlearning strategy to patch specific layers within LLMs through self-augmented datasets. Our insight is that certain layer(s), tend to produce affirmative tokens when faced with harmful prompts. By identifying these layers and adversarially exposing them to generate more harmful data, one can understand their inherent and diverse vulnerabilities to attacks. With these exposures, we then "unlearn" these issues, reducing the impact of affirmative tokens and hence minimizing jailbreak risks while keeping the model's responses to safe queries intact. We conduct extensive experiments on two models, four benchmark datasets, and multiple state-of-the-art jailbreak benchmarks to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Results indicate that our framework reduces the harmfulness and attack success rate of jailbreak attacks without compromising utility for benign queries compared to recent defense methods.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable achievements in various domains. However, the untimeliness and cost of knowledge updates coupled with hallucination issues of LLMs have curtailed their applications in knowledge intensive tasks, where retrieval augmented generation (RAG) can be of help. Nevertheless, existing retrieval augmented models typically use similarity as a bridge between queries and documents and follow a retrieve then read procedure. In this work, we argue that similarity is not always the panacea and totally relying on similarity would sometimes degrade the performance of retrieval augmented generation. To this end, we propose MetRag, a Multi layEred Thoughts enhanced Retrieval Augmented Generation framework. To begin with, beyond existing similarity oriented thought, we embrace a small scale utility model that draws supervision from an LLM for utility oriented thought and further come up with a smarter model by comprehensively combining the similarity and utility oriented thoughts. Furthermore, given the fact that the retrieved document set tends to be huge and using them in isolation makes it difficult to capture the commonalities and characteristics among them, we propose to make an LLM as a task adaptive summarizer to endow retrieval augmented generation with compactness-oriented thought. Finally, with multi layered thoughts from the precedent stages, an LLM is called for knowledge augmented generation. Extensive experiments on knowledge-intensive tasks have demonstrated the superiority of MetRag.

We present GALA, a framework that takes as input a single-layer clothed 3D human mesh and decomposes it into complete multi-layered 3D assets. The outputs can then be combined with other assets to create novel clothed human avatars with any pose. Existing reconstruction approaches often treat clothed humans as a single-layer of geometry and overlook the inherent compositionality of humans with hairstyles, clothing, and accessories, thereby limiting the utility of the meshes for downstream applications. Decomposing a single-layer mesh into separate layers is a challenging task because it requires the synthesis of plausible geometry and texture for the severely occluded regions. Moreover, even with successful decomposition, meshes are not normalized in terms of poses and body shapes, failing coherent composition with novel identities and poses. To address these challenges, we propose to leverage the general knowledge of a pretrained 2D diffusion model as geometry and appearance prior for humans and other assets. We first separate the input mesh using the 3D surface segmentation extracted from multi-view 2D segmentations. Then we synthesize the missing geometry of different layers in both posed and canonical spaces using a novel pose-guided Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss. Once we complete inpainting high-fidelity 3D geometry, we also apply the same SDS loss to its texture to obtain the complete appearance including the initially occluded regions. Through a series of decomposition steps, we obtain multiple layers of 3D assets in a shared canonical space normalized in terms of poses and human shapes, hence supporting effortless composition to novel identities and reanimation with novel poses. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for decomposition, canonicalization, and composition tasks compared to existing solutions.

Deep Generative Models (DGMs) have been shown to be powerful tools for generating tabular data, as they have been increasingly able to capture the complex distributions that characterize them. However, to generate realistic synthetic data, it is often not enough to have a good approximation of their distribution, as it also requires compliance with constraints that encode essential background knowledge on the problem at hand. In this paper, we address this limitation and show how DGMs for tabular data can be transformed into Constrained Deep Generative Models (C-DGMs), whose generated samples are guaranteed to be compliant with the given constraints. This is achieved by automatically parsing the constraints and transforming them into a Constraint Layer (CL) seamlessly integrated with the DGM. Our extensive experimental analysis with various DGMs and tasks reveals that standard DGMs often violate constraints, some exceeding 95% non-compliance, while their corresponding C-DGMs are never non-compliant. Then, we quantitatively demonstrate that, at training time, C-DGMs are able to exploit the background knowledge expressed by the constraints to outperform their standard counterparts with up to 6.5% improvement in utility and detection. Further, we show how our CL does not necessarily need to be integrated at training time, as it can be also used as a guardrail at inference time, still producing some improvements in the overall performance of the models. Finally, we show that our CL does not hinder the sample generation time of the models.

Plasticity, the ability of a neural network to quickly change its predictions in response to new information, is essential for the adaptability and robustness of deep reinforcement learning systems. Deep neural networks are known to lose plasticity over the course of training even in relatively simple learning problems, but the mechanisms driving this phenomenon are still poorly understood. This paper conducts a systematic empirical analysis into plasticity loss, with the goal of understanding the phenomenon mechanistically in order to guide the future development of targeted solutions. We find that loss of plasticity is deeply connected to changes in the curvature of the loss landscape, but that it typically occurs in the absence of saturated units or divergent gradient norms. Based on this insight, we identify a number of parameterization and optimization design choices which enable networks to better preserve plasticity over the course of training. We validate the utility of these findings in larger-scale learning problems by applying the best-performing intervention, layer normalization, to a deep RL agent trained on the Arcade Learning Environment.

The enormous demand for seafood products has led to exploitation of marine resources and near-extinction of some species. In particular, overfishing is one the main issues in sustainable marine development. In alignment with the protection of marine resources and sustainable fishing, this study proposes to advance fish classification techniques that support identifying protected fish species using state-of-the-art machine learning. We use a custom modification of the MobileNet model to design a lightweight classifier called M-MobileNet that is capable of running on limited hardware. As part of the study, we compiled a labeled dataset of 37,462 images of fish found in the waters of the Indonesian archipelago. The proposed model is trained on the dataset to classify images of the captured fish into their species and give recommendations on whether they are consumable or not. Our modified MobileNet model uses only 50\% of the top layer parameters with about 42% GTX 860M utility and achieves up to 97% accuracy in fish classification and determining its consumability. Given the limited computing capacity available on many fishing vessels, the proposed model provides a practical solution to on-site fish classification. In addition, synchronized implementation of the proposed model on multiple vessels can supply valuable information about the movement and location of different species of fish.

We present a novel benchmark and associated evaluation metrics for assessing the performance of text anonymization methods. Text anonymization, defined as the task of editing a text document to prevent the disclosure of personal information, currently suffers from a shortage of privacy-oriented annotated text resources, making it difficult to properly evaluate the level of privacy protection offered by various anonymization methods. This paper presents TAB (Text Anonymization Benchmark), a new, open-source annotated corpus developed to address this shortage. The corpus comprises 1,268 English-language court cases from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) enriched with comprehensive annotations about the personal information appearing in each document, including their semantic category, identifier type, confidential attributes, and co-reference relations. Compared to previous work, the TAB corpus is designed to go beyond traditional de-identification (which is limited to the detection of predefined semantic categories), and explicitly marks which text spans ought to be masked in order to conceal the identity of the person to be protected. Along with presenting the corpus and its annotation layers, we also propose a set of evaluation metrics that are specifically tailored towards measuring the performance of text anonymization, both in terms of privacy protection and utility preservation. We illustrate the use of the benchmark and the proposed metrics by assessing the empirical performance of several baseline text anonymization models. The full corpus along with its privacy-oriented annotation guidelines, evaluation scripts and baseline models are available on: https://github.com/NorskRegnesentral/text-anonymisation-benchmark

We introduce a new approach to systematically map features discovered by sparse autoencoder across consecutive layers of large language models, extending earlier work that examined inter-layer feature links. By using a data-free cosine similarity technique, we trace how specific features persist, transform, or first appear at each stage. This method yields granular flow graphs of feature evolution, enabling fine-grained interpretability and mechanistic insights into model computations. Crucially, we demonstrate how these cross-layer feature maps facilitate direct steering of model behavior by amplifying or suppressing chosen features, achieving targeted thematic control in text generation. Together, our findings highlight the utility of a causal, cross-layer interpretability framework that not only clarifies how features develop through forward passes but also provides new means for transparent manipulation of large language models.

Transformer encoders are widely deployed in large-scale web services for natural language understanding tasks such as text classification, semantic retrieval, and content ranking. However, their high inference latency and memory consumption pose significant challenges for real-time serving and scalability. These limitations stem largely from architectural redundancy, particularly in the attention module. The inherent parameter redundancy of the attention mechanism, coupled with the fact that its attention heads operate with a degree of independence, makes it particularly amenable to structured model compression. In this paper, we propose SHRP (Specialized Head Routing and Pruning), a novel structured pruning framework that automatically identifies and removes redundant attention heads while preserving most of the model's accuracy and compatibility. SHRP introduces Expert Attention, a modular design that treats each attention head as an independent expert, followed by a lightweight shared expander feed-forward network that refines their outputs. The framework employs a unified Top-1 usage-driven mechanism to jointly perform dynamic routing during training and deterministic pruning at deployment. Experimental results on the GLUE benchmark using a BERT-base encoder show that SHRP achieves 93% of the original model accuracy while reducing parameters by 48 percent. Under an extreme compression scenario where 11/12 of the layers are pruned, the model still maintains 84% accuracy and delivers a 4.2x throughput gain while reducing computation to as low as 11.5 percent of the original FLOPs, demonstrating its practical utility for large-scale and latency-sensitive web deployments.

Memory and computation remain core bottlenecks in long-horizon LLM inference due to the quadratic cost of self-attention and the ever-growing key-value (KV) cache. Existing strategies for memory-bounded inference, such as quantization, offloading, or heuristic KV eviction, either incur high orchestration costs or rely on unreliable attention-based proxies of importance. We propose TRIM-KV, a novel approach that learns each token's intrinsic importance at creation time via a lightweight retention gate. Each gate predicts a scalar retention score that decays over time, reflecting the long-term utility of the token for a specific layer and head. Tokens with low scores are evicted when the memory budget is exceeded, ensuring that the cache always contains the most critical tokens. TRIM-KV is trained efficiently through distillation from a frozen LLM combined with a capacity loss, requiring only gate fine-tuning and adding negligible inference overhead. Across mathematical reasoning (GSM8K, MATH-500, AIME24), procedural generation (LongProc), conversational long-memory benchmarks (LongMemEval), and long-context understanding (LongBench and SCBench), TRIM-KV consistently outperforms strong eviction and learnable retrieval baselines, especially in low-memory regimes. Remarkably, it even surpasses full-cache models in some settings, showing that selective retention can serve as a form of regularization, suppressing noise from uninformative tokens. Qualitative analyses further reveal that learned retention scores align with human intuition, naturally recovering heuristics such as sink tokens, sliding windows, and gist compression without explicit design. Beyond efficiency, retention scores provide insights into layer- and head-specific roles, suggesting a new path toward LLM interpretability.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have advanced the scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) by activating only a sparse subset of parameters per input, enabling state-of-the-art performance with reduced computational cost. As these models are increasingly deployed in critical domains, understanding and strengthening their alignment mechanisms is essential to prevent harmful outputs. However, existing LLM safety research has focused almost exclusively on dense architectures, leaving the unique safety properties of MoEs largely unexamined. The modular, sparsely-activated design of MoEs suggests that safety mechanisms may operate differently than in dense models, raising questions about their robustness. In this paper, we present GateBreaker, the first training-free, lightweight, and architecture-agnostic attack framework that compromises the safety alignment of modern MoE LLMs at inference time. GateBreaker operates in three stages: (i) gate-level profiling, which identifies safety experts disproportionately routed on harmful inputs, (ii) expert-level localization, which localizes the safety structure within safety experts, and (iii) targeted safety removal, which disables the identified safety structure to compromise the safety alignment. Our study shows that MoE safety concentrates within a small subset of neurons coordinated by sparse routing. Selective disabling of these neurons, approximately 3% of neurons in the targeted expert layers, significantly increases the averaged attack success rate (ASR) from 7.4% to 64.9% against the eight latest aligned MoE LLMs with limited utility degradation. These safety neurons transfer across models within the same family, raising ASR from 17.9% to 67.7% with one-shot transfer attack. Furthermore, GateBreaker generalizes to five MoE vision language models (VLMs) with 60.9% ASR on unsafe image inputs.

The black-box nature of deep neural networks (DNN) has brought to attention the issues of transparency and fairness. Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL or DRL), which uses DNN to learn its policy, value functions etc, is thus also subject to similar concerns. This paper proposes a way to circumvent the issues through the bottom-up design of neural networks with detailed interpretability, where each neuron or layer has its own meaning and utility that corresponds to humanly understandable concept. The framework introduced in this paper is called the Self Reward Design (SRD), inspired by the Inverse Reward Design, and this interpretable design can (1) solve the problem by pure design (although imperfectly) and (2) be optimized like a standard DNN. With deliberate human designs, we show that some RL problems such as lavaland and MuJoCo can be solved using a model constructed with standard NN components with few parameters. Furthermore, with our fish sale auction example, we demonstrate how SRD is used to address situations that will not make sense if black-box models are used, where humanly-understandable semantic-based decision is required.

Tool-using agents that act in the world need to be both useful and safe. Well-calibrated model confidences can be used to weigh the risk versus reward of potential actions, but prior work shows that many models are poorly calibrated. Inspired by interpretability literature exploring the internals of models, we propose a novel class of model-internal confidence estimators (MICE) to better assess confidence when calling tools. MICE first decodes from each intermediate layer of the language model using logitLens and then computes similarity scores between each layer's generation and the final output. These features are fed into a learned probabilistic classifier to assess confidence in the decoded output. On the simulated trial and error (STE) tool-calling dataset using Llama3 models, we find that MICE beats or matches the baselines on smoothed expected calibration error. Using MICE confidences to determine whether to call a tool significantly improves over strong baselines on a new metric, expected tool-calling utility. Further experiments show that MICE is sample-efficient, can generalize zero-shot to unseen APIs, and results in higher tool-calling utility in scenarios with varying risk levels. Our code is open source, available at https://github.com/microsoft/mice_for_cats.

With the advent of deep learning, neural network-based recommendation models have emerged as an important tool for tackling personalization and recommendation tasks. These networks differ significantly from other deep learning networks due to their need to handle categorical features and are not well studied or understood. In this paper, we develop a state-of-the-art deep learning recommendation model (DLRM) and provide its implementation in both PyTorch and Caffe2 frameworks. In addition, we design a specialized parallelization scheme utilizing model parallelism on the embedding tables to mitigate memory constraints while exploiting data parallelism to scale-out compute from the fully-connected layers. We compare DLRM against existing recommendation models and characterize its performance on the Big Basin AI platform, demonstrating its usefulness as a benchmark for future algorithmic experimentation and system co-design.