Shuyu Li
2026
StructBreak: Structural Cognitive Overload-Induced Safety Failures in MLLMs
Yang Luo | Liu Xinran | TianTian Ji | Zhiyi Yin | Lingyun Peng | Shuyu Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yang Luo | Liu Xinran | TianTian Ji | Zhiyi Yin | Lingyun Peng | Shuyu Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at structural reasoning yet suffer from a sharp logical brittleness in structural consistency. We term this phenomenon Structural Cognitive Overload (SCO), a byproduct of the contention between deep reasoning and safety alignment. However, prior work has predominantly targeted typographic and pixel-level perturbations, leaving the study of SCO largely unexplored. To this end, we propose StructBreak, an automated end-to-end framework designed to quantify SCO. By leveraging StructBreak, we uncover a novel higher-order cognitive overload attack paradigm; notably, this attack operates under a practical black-box setting, requiring no internal model access. Consequently, we utilize this framework to establish a comprehensive benchmark spanning ten diverse threat scenarios. Empirical evaluations on six leading MLLMs reveal that SCO readily triggers toxic generation, yielding a 92% average ASR (up to 97% on Gemini 2.5). To elucidate the mechanism of SCO, we further conduct model-level interpretations spanning attention dynamics, latent space topology, and geometric analysis. Our findings reveal that StructBreak acts as a novel structural channel to circumvent safety filters. Furthermore, the limited efficacy of inherent safety mechanisms underscores that current alignment paradigms are insufficient for the era of complex multimodal reasoning.
2025
Generative Music Models’ Alignment with Professional and Amateur Users’ Expectations
Zihao Wang | Jiaxing Yu | Haoxuan Liu | Zehui Zheng | Yuhang Jin | Shuyu Li | Shulei Ji | Kejun Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Zihao Wang | Jiaxing Yu | Haoxuan Liu | Zehui Zheng | Yuhang Jin | Shuyu Li | Shulei Ji | Kejun Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Recent years have witnessed rapid advancements in text-to-music generation using large language models, yielding notable outputs. A critical challenge is understanding users with diverse musical expertise and generating music that meets their expectations, an area that remains underexplored.To address this gap, we introduce the novel task of Professional and Amateur Description-to-Song Generation. This task focuses on aligning generated content with human expressions from varying musical proficiency levels, aiming to produce songs that accurately meet auditory expectations and adhere to musical structural conventions. We utilized the MuChin dataset, which contains annotations from both professionals and amateurs for identical songs, as the source for these distinct description types. We also collected a pre-train dataset of over 1.5 million songs; lyrics were included for some, while for others, lyrics were generated using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models.Furthermore, we propose MuDiT/MuSiT, a single-stage framework designed to enhance human-machine alignment in song generation. This framework employs Chinese MuLan (ChinMu) for cross-modal comprehension between natural language descriptions and auditory musical attributes, thereby aligning generated songs with user-defined outcomes. Concurrently, a DiT/SiT model facilitates end-to-end generation of complete songs audio, encompassing both vocals and instrumentation. We proposed metrics to evaluate semantic and auditory discrepancies between generated content and target music. Experimental results demonstrate that MuDiT/MuSiT outperforms baseline models and exhibits superior alignment with both professional and amateur song descriptions.