Singapore

The growing misuse of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has led providers to deploy multiple safeguards—alignment tuning, system prompts, and content moderation.
Yet the real-world robustness of these defenses against adversarial attack remains underexplored. 
We introduce MFA, a framework that systematically uncovers general safety vulnerabilities in leading defense-equipped VLMs, including GPT-4o, Gemini-Pro, and Llama 4.1, etc. Central to MFA is the Attention-Transfer Attack (ATA), which conceals harmful instructions inside a meta task with competing objectives. We offer a theoretical perspective grounded in reward-hacking to explain why such an attack can succeed. To maximize cross-model transfer, we introduce a lightweight transfer-enhancement algorithm combined with a simple repetition strategy that jointly evades both input- and output-level filters—without any model-specific fine-tuning. 
We empirically show that adversarial images optimized for one vision encoder transfer broadly to unseen VLMs, indicating that shared visual representations create a cross-model safety vulnerability.
Combined, our techniques reach a 58.5% overall success rate, consistently outperforming existing methods. 
Notably, on state-of-the-art commercial models, our attack achieves a 52.8% success rate, outperforming the second-best attack by 34%. These findings challenge the perceived robustness of current defensive mechanisms, systematically expose general safety loopholes within defense-equipped VLMs, and offer a practical probe for diagnosing and strengthening the safety of VLMs.

AAAI 2026

Multi-Faceted Attack: Exposing Cross-Model Vulnerabilities in Defense-Equipped Vision-Language Models

reward-hacking

ai safety

alignment

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) encode images into lengthy
sequences of visual tokens, leading to excessive
computational overhead and limited inference efficiency. In
this paper, we study the hierarchical attention pattern in
vision encoders and propose HiPrune, a training-free and
model-agnostic token Pruning framework for VLMs. We
identify that middle layers in the vision encoder attend to
object-centric regions, while deep layers capture global
contextual features. Based on this observation, HiPrune
selects tokens based on the attention score from the middle
and deep layers. Our method requires no retraining and
integrates seamlessly with any ViT-based VLM. Experiments
demonstrate that HiPrune achieves outstanding pruning
performance, maintaining a balance between efficiency and
efficacy.

HiPrune: Training-Free Visual Token Pruning via Hierarchical Attention in Vision-Language Models (Student Abstract)

Autonomous computer-use agents (ACUAs) enable end-to-end
computer operation with human-like capabilities, executing
commands across applications and making independent
decisions. However, their real-world effectiveness and
security remain largely untested. A systematic evaluation
of ACUAs from Anthropic, OpenAI, and open-source projects
categorized them into full-computer-access and
browser-based agents. Findings reveal substantial
limitations, with success rates dropping as low as 28% in
some cases. Additionally, a 100% rate of unauthorized
software installation was observed in certain tasks. The
agents also demonstrated clear susceptibility to prompt
injection attacks. The impact of varied prompting
strategies on performance was also examined. Building on
these weaknesses, development of a specialized agent for
office tasks is proposed. This work bridges agentic AI,
human-computer interaction (HCI), and security to address
the observed limitations of ACUAs, prioritizing both
capability and safety.

Towards Capable and Secure Autonomous Computer-Use Agents (Student Abstract)

Accurately modeling opponent behaviors and integrating
strategy are key challenges for multi-issue automated
negotiation. Existing approaches often isolate preference
learning or trend prediction and lack a unified cognitive
structure with coordinated reasoning. This paper proposes a
BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention)-based opponent modeling and
strategy generation framework. The framework analyzes
opponent responses (Belief), predicts preference weights
and the utility function (Desire), and infers utilities of
future offers (Intention). Building on these predictions,
we design a responsive strategy, enabling gradual
concessions and balanced outcomes. Our main contributions
are: D-MBUE in the Desire module, I-DABI in the Intention
module, and the BDI-Driven Negotiator on top of the
modeling modules. Experiments on 45 standard negotiation
domains and against 13 representative opponents demonstrate
the effectiveness of our BDI framework.

BDI-based Opponent Modeling and Strategy Generation for Multi-Issue Negotiation (Student Abstract)

Rip currents cause over 100 drowning deaths and more than 30,000 rescues annually in the United States, posing a severe threat to beach safety worldwide. However, most existing detection methods are reactive, identifying rip currents only after they form, leaving limited time for intervention. We propose RipAlert, a future-frame-aware framework that forecasts near-future coastal dynamics and proactively identifies rip current risks. We design a region-sensitive optical flow prediction method with a novel entropy-based object detector to capture early-stage reverse-flow anomalies. Unlike static-image approaches, RipAlert leverages temporal motion patterns to detect rip currents up to 5 seconds before they visibly form. To support real-world deployment, we design a lightweight mobile application and release a curated dataset with over 2,000 annotated images. Experiments on the RipVIS benchmark show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. The system has been deployed at high-risk beaches in China, issuing successful early warnings over real-world events. Our work advances AI-driven coastal safety and contributes to SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being) and SDG 13 (Climate Action).

RipAlert: A Future-Frame-Aware Framework for Rip Current Forecasting and Early Alerting

Dynamic Text-Attributed Graphs (DyTAGs) are a novel graph paradigm that captures evolving temporal events (edges) alongside rich textual attributes. Existing studies can be broadly categorized into TGNN-driven and LLM-driven approaches, both of which encode textual attributes and temporal structures for DyTAG representation. We observe that DyTAGs inherently comprise three distinct modalities: temporal, textual, and structural, often exhibiting completely disjoint distributions. However, the first two modalities are largely overlooked by existing studies, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose MoMent, a multi-modal network that explicitly models, integrates, and aligns each modality to learn node representations for link prediction. Given the disjoint nature of the original modality distributions, we first construct modality-specific features and encode them using individual encoders to capture correlations across temporal patterns, semantic context, and local structures. Each encoder generates modality-specific tokens, which are then fused into comprehensive node representations with a theoretical guarantee. To avoid disjoint subspaces of these heterogeneous modalities, we propose a dual-domain alignment loss that first aligns their distributions globally and then fine-tunes coherence at the instance level. This enhances coherent representations from temporal, textual, and structural views. Extensive experiments across seven datasets show that MoMent achieves up to 17.28% accuracy improvement and up to 31x speed-up against eight baselines.

Unlocking Multi-Modal Potentials for Link Prediction on Dynamic Text-Attributed Graphs

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising energy-efficient alternative to artificial neural networks, due to their event-driven spiking computation. 
However, some foundation SNN backbones (including Spikformer and SEW ResNet) suffer from non-spike computations (integer-float multiplications) caused by the structure of their residual connections. These non-spike computations increase SNNs' power consumption and make them unsuitable for deployment on mainstream neuromorphic hardware. 
In this paper, we analyze the spike-driven behavior of the residual connection methods in SNNs. We then present Spikingformer, a novel spiking transformer backbone that merges the MS Residual connection with Self-Attention in a biologically plausible way to address the non-spike computation challenge in Spikformer while maintaining global modeling capabilities.
We evaluate Spikingformer across 13 datasets spanning large static images, neuromorphic data, and natural language tasks, and demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of Spikingformer, setting a vital benchmark for spiking neural networks.
In addition, with the spike-driven features and global modeling capabilities, Spikingformer is expected to become a more efficient general-purpose SNN backbone towards energy-efficient artificial intelligence.

Spikingformer: A Key Foundation Model for Spiking Neural Networks

Infrared video has been of great interest in visual tasks under challenging environments, but often suffers from severe atmospheric turbulence and compression degradation. Existing video super-resolution (VSR) methods either neglect the inherent modality gap between infrared and visible images or fail to restore turbulence-induced distortions. Directly cascading turbulence mitigation (TM) algorithms with VSR methods leads to error propagation and accumulation due to the decoupled modeling of degradation between turbulence and resolution. We introduce \textbf{HATIR}, a \textbf{H}eat-\textbf{A}ware Diffusion for \textbf{T}urbulent \textbf{I}nfra\textbf{R}ed Video Super-Resolution, which injects heat-aware deformation priors into the diffusion sampling path to jointly model the inverse process of turbulent degradation and structural detail loss. Specifically, HATIR constructs a Phasor-Guided Flow Estimator, rooted in the physical principle that thermally active regions exhibit consistent phasor responses over time, enabling reliable turbulence-aware flow to guide the reverse diffusion process. To ensure the fidelity of structural recovery under nonuniform distortions, a Turbulence-Aware Decoder is proposed to selectively suppress unstable temporal cues and enhance edge-aware feature aggregation via turbulence gating and structure-aware attention. We built FILR-IVSR, the first dataset for turbulent infrared VSR, comprising paired LR-HR sequences from a FILR T1050sc camera (\(1024 \times 768\)) spanning 645 diverse scenes with varying camera and object motion conditions. This encourages future research in infrared VSR.

HATIR: Heat-Aware Diffusion for Turbulent Infrared Video Super-Resolution

Pan-sharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by integrating a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image with its corresponding low-resolution multispectral (MS) image. To achieve effective fusion, it is crucial to fully exploit the complementary information between the two modalities. Traditional CNN-based methods typically rely on channel-wise concatenation with fixed convolutional operators, which limits their adaptability to diverse spatial and spectral variations. While cross-attention mechanisms enable global interactions, they are computationally inefficient and may dilute fine-grained correspondences, making it difficult to capture complex semantic relationships. Recent advances in the Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) architecture have demonstrated impressive success in image generation and editing tasks. Unlike cross-attention, MMDiT employs in-context conditioning to facilitate more direct and efficient cross-modal information exchange. In this paper, we propose MMMamba, a cross-modal in-context fusion framework for pan-sharpening, with the flexibility to support image super-resolution in a zero-shot manner. Built upon the Mamba architecture, our design ensures linear computational complexity while maintaining strong cross-modal interaction capacity. Furthermore, we introduce a novel multimodal interleaved (MI) scanning mechanism that facilitates effective information exchange between the PAN and MS modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques across multiple tasks and benchmarks.

MMMamba: A Versatile Cross-Modal in Context Fusion Framework for Pan-Sharpening and Zero-Shot Image Enhancement

The rapid proliferation of Generative AI (GenAI) into diverse, high-stakes domains necessitates robust and reproducible evaluation methods. However, practitioners often resort to ad-hoc, non-standardized scripts, as common metrics are often unsuitable for specialized, structured outputs (e.g., automated plans, time-series) or holistic comparison across modalities (e.g., text, audio, and image). This fragmentation hinders comparability and slows AI system development. To address this challenge, we present GAICo (Generative AI Comparator): a deployed, open-source Python library that streamlines and standardizes GenAI output comparison. GAICo provides a unified, extensible framework supporting a comprehensive suite of reference-based metrics for unstructured text, specialized structured data formats, and multimedia (images, audio). Its architecture features a high-level API for rapid, end-to-end analysis, from multi-model comparison to visualization and reporting, alongside direct metric access for granular control. We demonstrate GAICo's utility through a detailed case study evaluating and debugging complex, multi-modal AI Travel Assistant pipelines. GAICo empowers AI researchers and developers to efficiently assess system performance, make evaluation reproducible, improve development velocity, and ultimately build more trustworthy AI systems, aligning with the goal of moving faster and safer in AI deployment. **Since its release on PyPI in Jun 2025, the tool has been downloaded over 13K times, across versions, by Aug 2025, demonstrating growing community interest.**

GAICo: A Deployed and Extensible Framework for Evaluating Diverse and Multimodal Generative AI Outputs

Stable models of logic programs have been studied and characterized in relation with other formalisms by many researchers. As already argued in previous papers, such characterizations are interesting for diverse reasons, including theoretical investigations and the possibility of leading to new algorithms for computing stable models of logic programs. At the theoretical level, complexity and expressiveness comparisons have brought about fundamental insights. Beyond that, practical implementations of the developed reductions enable the use of existing solvers for other logical formalisms to compute stable models. In this paper, we first provide a simple characterization of stable models that can be viewed as a proof-theoretic counterpart of the standard model-theoretic definition. We further show how it can be naturally encoded in difference logic. Such an encoding, compared to the existing reductions to classical logics, does not require Boolean variables. Then, we implement our novel translation to a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) formula. We finally compare our approach, employing the SMT solver yices, to the translation-based ASP solver lp2diff and to clingo on domains from the “Basic Decision” track of the 2017 Answer Set Programming competition. The results show that our approach is competitive to and often better than lp2diff, and that it can also be faster than clingo on non-tight domains.

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