Fanci Meng, Kun Wang, Guibin Zhang, Xinlei Yu, Jiaming Zhang, Ming Li, Yang Wang
Recent advances in test-time optimization have shown that the multimodal reasoning performance of large multimodal language models (MLLMs) can be improved during inference without modifying backbone model parameters. However, existing approaches primarily operate at the prompt or output level, leaving the latent reasoning process largely uncontrolled and insufficient to prevent error accumulation during autoregressive generation. To address this limitation, we propose LatentWeave, a test-time framework that treats multimodal reasoning as a controllable latent trajectory. LatentWeave performs structured Latent Weaving, progressively refining intermediate hidden states segment-wise to correct emerging deviations, and further introduces Reasoning Anchors via lightweight WEAVE tokens to stabilize reasoning structure and guide answer-oriented generation. These mechanisms are designed to enable fine-grained, step-aware intervention in the latent reasoning process while keeping the main MLLM backbone parameters fixed. Extensive experiments across diverse multimodal reasoning benchmarks report improvements over the evaluated baselines; the contribution of latent optimization, anchor training, and additional test-time computation is analyzed separately in the ablation and efficiency studies. Our code is available at https://github.com/jins7/LatentWeave.
Jiaming Zhang, Fuyao Zhang, Pengjun Xie, Wei Yang Bryan Lim
Deep neural networks are known to rely on non-robust features that align poorly with human perception. Prior work has largely framed these features as opportunistic shortcuts that help standard models on clean data. We show instead that non-robust cues can be antagonistic: they can act as Natural Jammers that actively mislead standard models on clean, unmodified images. Using disagreement between a standard model and robust models as an analysis lens, we identify a Jammed Set on which robust models outperform standard models. We provide causal evidence for Spectral-spatial Locking: jamming arises only when high-frequency components are precisely aligned with specific spatial structures. Disrupting this lock through spectral filtering or small geometric shifts can restore correct predictions. Crucially, we uncover a Substitution Paradox: while individual jammers are fragile to geometric shifts, the aggregate prevalence of jamming remains approximately stable and is redistributed rather than eliminated under such transformations. Our results reframe natural non-robustness as a failure field over the empirical model-data geometry: one that redistributes rather than disappears under small transformations.
Wenlong Deng, Qi Zeng Facebook, Jiaming Zhang, Minghui Chen Columbia University, Zixin Ding, Christos Thrampoulidis University of British Columbia, Boying Gong Facebook, Xiaoxiao Li University of British Columbia
Data valuation is essential for enhancing the transparency and accountability of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing methods typically rely on gradient computations, making them computationally prohibitive for billion-parameter models and precluding batch parallelization. In this work, we introduce For-Value, a forward-only data valuation framework that enables efficient batch-scalable value estimation while maintaining effectiveness. Leveraging the expressive power of pretrained LLMs/VLMs, we theoretically demonstrate that data valuation can be captured by the alignment between the final hidden representations and prediction errors at the last layer. In light of this insight, For-Value computes data value using a simple closed-form expression with a single forward pass, eliminating the need for costly backpropagation and enabling efficient batch calculating at scale. Extensive experiments show that For-Value matches or outperforms gradient-based baselines in detecting influential data and mislabeled data, while achieving significant efficiency improvements.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表