Hard-gated safety checkers often over-refuse and misalign with a vendor’s model spec; prevailing taxonomies also neglect robustness and honesty, yielding safer-on-paper yet less useful systems. This work introduces Guardian-as-an-Advisor (GaaA), a soft-gating pipeline where a guardian predicts a binary risk label plus a concise explanation and prepends this advice to the original query for re-inference, keeping the base model operating under its original spec. To support training and evaluation, GuardSet is constructed—a 208k+ multi-domain dataset unifying harmful and harmless cases with targeted robustness and honesty slices. GuardAdvisor is trained via SFT followed by RL to enforce label–explanation consistency. GuardAdvisor attains competitive detection accuracy while enabling the advisory workflow; when used to augment inputs, responses improve over unaugmented prompts. A latency study shows advisor inference uses below 5% of base-model compute and adds only 2–10% end-to-end overhead under realistic harmful-input rates. Overall, GaaA steers models to comply with the model spec, maintaining safety while reducing over-refusal.

This paper presents BattleAgent, a detailed emulation demonstration system that combines the Large Vision-Language Model (VLM) and Multi-Agent System (MAS). This novel system aims to emulate complex dynamic interactions among multiple agents, as well as between agents and their environments, over a period of time. The emulation showcases the current capabilities of agents, featuring fine-grained multi-modal interactions between agents and landscapes. It develops customizable agent structures to meet specific situational requirements, for example, a variety of battle-related activities like scouting and trench digging. These components collaborate to recreate historical events in a lively and comprehensive manner. This methodology holds the potential to substantially improve visualization of historical events and deepen our understanding of historical events especially from the perspective of decision making. The data and code for this project are accessible at https://github.com/agiresearch/battleagent and the demo is accessible at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I5B3KWiYCSSP1uMiPGNmXlTmild-MzRJ/view?usp=sharing.

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models suchas BERT has become a common practice dom-inating leaderboards across various NLP tasks. Despite its recent success and wide adoption,this process is unstable when there are onlya small number of training samples available. The brittleness of this process is often reflectedby the sensitivity to random seeds. In this pa-per, we propose to tackle this problem basedon the noise stability property of deep nets,which is investigated in recent literature (Aroraet al., 2018; Sanyal et al., 2020). Specifically,we introduce a novel and effective regulariza-tion method to improve fine-tuning on NLPtasks, referred to asLayer-wiseNoiseStabilityRegularization (LNSR). We extend the theo-ries about adding noise to the input and provethat our method gives a stabler regularizationeffect. We provide supportive evidence by ex-perimentally confirming that well-performingmodels show a low sensitivity to noise andfine-tuning with LNSR exhibits clearly bet-ter generalizability and stability. Furthermore,our method also demonstrates advantages overother state-of-the-art algorithms including L2-SP (Li et al., 2018), Mixout (Lee et al., 2020)and SMART (Jiang et al., 20)