Xue Yang


2026

Federated learning (FL) addresses privacy and data-silo issues in the training of large language models (LLMs). Most prior work focuses on improving the efficiency of federated learning for LLMs (FedLLM). However, security in open federated environments, particularly defenses against malicious clients, remains underexplored. To investigate the security of FedLLM, we conduct a preliminary study to analyze potential attack surfaces and defensive characteristics from the perspective of LoRA updates. We find two key properties of FedLLM: 1) LLMs are vulnerable to attacks from malicious clients in FL, and 2) LoRA updates exhibit distinct behavioral patterns that can be effectively distinguished by lightweight classifiers. Based on these properties, we propose Safe-FedLLM, a probe-based defense framework for FedLLM, which constructs defenses across three levels: Step-Level, Client-Level, and Shadow-Level. The core concept of Safe-FedLLM is to perform probe-based discrimination on each client’s local LoRA updates, treating them as high-dimensional behavioral features and using a lightweight classifier to determine whether they are malicious. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Safe-FedLLM effectively improves FedLLM’s robustness against malicious clients while maintaining competitive performance on benign data. Notably, our method effectively suppresses the impact of malicious data without significantly affecting training speed, and remains effective even under high malicious client ratios.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are gaining increasing attention. Due to the heterogeneity of their input features, they face significant challenges in terms of jailbreak defenses. Current defense methods rely on costly fine-tuning or inefficient post-hoc interventions, limiting their ability to address novel attacks and involving performance trade-offs. To address the above issues, we explore the endogenous safety capabilities within MLLMs and quantify their intrinsic ability to discern harmfulness at both encoding and decoding stages. We observe that 1) MLLMs can distinguish the harmful and harmless inputs during decoding process, 2) Image-based attacks are more stealthy. Based on these insights, we introduce SafeSteer, a decoding-level defense mechanism for MLLMs. Specifically, it employs a lightweight discriminator, based on the MLLM’s own discriminative ability, to iteratively steer the decoding process toward safety. A safety alignment vector is also integrated to handle complex multimodal threats. Experiments on multiple MLLMs demonstrate that our proposed method can improve safety performance by up to 33.40% without fine-tuning.
The "reversal curse" refers to the phenomenon where large language models (LLMs) exhibit predominantly unidirectional behavior when processing logically bidirectional relationships. Prior work attributed this to autoregressive training—predicting the next token inherently favors left-to-right information flow over genuine bidirectional knowledge associations. However, we observe that Diffusion LLMs (DLLMs), despite being trained bidirectionally, also suffer from the reversal curse. To investigate the root causes, we conduct systematic experiments on DLLMs and identify three key reasons: 1) entity fragmentation during training, 2) data asymmetry, and 3) missing entity relations. Motivated by the analysis of these reasons, we propose Diffusion Entity-Relation Modeling (DiffER), which addresses the reversal curse through entity-aware training and balanced data construction. Specifically, DiffER introduces whole-entity masking, which mitigates entity fragmentation by predicting complete entities in a single step. DiffER further employs distribution-symmetric and relation-enhanced data construction strategies to alleviate data asymmetry and missing relations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffER effectively alleviates the reversal curse in Diffusion LLMs, offering new perspectives for future research. The code is available at https://github.com/CQU-MM-Intelligent-Lab/DiffER.
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have emerged as a powerful advancement in multi-step reasoning tasks, offering enhanced transparency and logical consistency through explicit chains of thought (CoT). However, these models introduce novel safety and reliability risks, such as CoT-hijacking and prompt-induced inefficiencies, which are not fully captured by existing evaluation methods. To address this gap, we propose Rt-LRM, a unified benchmark designed to assess the trustworthiness of LRMs. Rt-LRM evaluates three core dimensions: truthfulness, safety and efficiency. Beyond metric-based evaluation, we further introduce the training paradigm as a key analytical perspective to investigate the systematic impact of different training strategies on model trustworthiness. We achieve this by designing a curated suite of 30 reasoning tasks from an observational standpoint. We conduct extensive experiments on 26 models and identify several valuable insights into the trustworthiness of LRMs. For example, LRMs generally face trustworthiness challenges and tend to be more fragile than Large Language Models (LLMs) when encountering reasoning-induced risks. These findings uncover previously underexplored vulnerabilities and highlight the need for more targeted evaluations. In addition, we release a scalable toolbox for standardized trustworthiness research to support future advancements in this important field.
With the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs), understanding their personality representation mechanisms has become critical. As a novel paradigm in Personality Editing, most existing methods employ neuron-editing to locate and modify LLM neurons, requiring changes to numerous neurons and leading to significant performance degradation. This raises a fundamental question: Are all modified neurons directly related to personality representation? In this work, we investigate and quantify this specificity through assessments of general capability impact and representation-level patterns. We find that: 1) Current methods can change personalities but reduce overall performance. 2) Neurons are multifunctional, connecting personality traits and general knowledge. 3) Opposing personality traits demonstrate distinctly mutually exclusive representation patterns. Motivated by these findings, we propose DPN-LE (Dual Personality Neuron Localization and Editing), which identifies personality-specific neurons by contrasting MLP activations between high-trait and low-trait samples. DPN-LE constructs layer-wise steering vectors and applies dual-criterion filtering based on Cohen’s d effect size and activation magnitude to isolate mutually exclusive neuron subsets. Sparse linear intervention on these neurons enables precise personality control at inference time. Using only 1,000 contrastive sample pairs per trait, DPN-LE intervenes on 0.5% of neurons while achieving competitive personality control and substantially better capability preservation across reasoning tasks. Experiments on LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach.

2025

We introduce **ComfyUI-Copilot**, a large language model-powered plugin designed to enhance the usability and efficiency of ComfyUI, an open-source platform for AI-driven art creation. Despite its flexibility and user-friendly interface, ComfyUI can present challenges to newcomers, including limited documentation, model misconfigurations, and the complexity of workflow design. ComfyUI-Copilot addresses these challenges by offering intelligent node and model recommendations, along with automated one-click workflow construction. At its core, the system employs a hierarchical multi-agent framework comprising a central assistant agent for task delegation and specialized worker agents for different usages, supported by our curated ComfyUI knowledge bases to streamline debugging and deployment. We validate the effectiveness of ComfyUI-Copilot through both offline quantitative evaluations and online user feedback, showing that it accurately recommends nodes and accelerates workflow development. Additionally, use cases illustrate that ComfyUI-Copilot lowers entry barriers for beginners and enhances workflow efficiency for experienced users. The ComfyUI-Copilot installation package and a demo video are available at https://github.com/AIDC-AI/ComfyUI-Copilot.
Automating planning with LLMs presents transformative opportunities for traditional industries, yet remains underexplored. In commercial construction, the complexity of automated scheduling often requires manual intervention to ensure precision. We propose CONSTRUCTA, a novel framework leveraging LLMs to optimize construction schedules in complex projects like semiconductor fabrication. CONSTRUCTA addresses key challenges by: (1) integrating construction-specific knowledge through static RAG; (2) employing context-sampling techniques inspired by architectural expertise to provide relevant input; and (3) deploying Construction DPO to align schedules with expert preferences using RLHF. Experiments on proprietary data demonstrate performance improvements of +42.3% in missing value prediction, +79.1% in dependency analysis, and +28.9% in automated planning compared to baseline methods, showcasing its potential to revolutionize construction workflows and inspire domain-specific LLM advancements.
Conditional image generation has gained significant attention for its ability to personalize content. However, the field faces challenges in developing task-agnostic, reliable, and explainable evaluation metrics. This paper introduces CIGEval, a unified agentic framework for comprehensive evaluation of conditional image generation tasks. CIGEval utilizes large multimodal models (LMMs) as its core, integrating a multi-functional toolbox and establishing a fine-grained evaluation framework. Additionally, we synthesize evaluation trajectories for fine-tuning, empowering smaller LMMs to autonomously select appropriate tools and conduct nuanced analyses based on tool outputs. Experiments across seven prominent conditional image generation tasks demonstrate that CIGEval (GPT-4o version) achieves a high correlation of 0.4625 with human assessments, closely matching the inter-annotator correlation of 0.47. Notably, when implemented with 7B open-source LMMs using only 2.3K training trajectories, CIGEval surpasses the previous GPT-4o-based state-of-the-art method. These findings indicate that CIGEval holds great potential for automating evaluation of image generation tasks while maintaining human-level reliability.