Han Wang, Jingyuan Bao, Juntao Wu, Saiao Zhou, Yuman Nie
Event cameras, spiking cochleas and similar sensors emit asynchronous events, yet most learning systems first bin them into frames or packets, so the output depends on how the stream was sliced. Networks whose state is updated exactly at every event and evolves in closed form between events are invariant to this slicing. We ask what more makes the output (i) independent of the processing order of simultaneous events and (ii) continuous in the time stamps, even when two events cross in time, while (iii) staying sensitive to temporal order. For arbitrary nonlinear event models we prove that (i) and (ii) are each equivalent to pairwise commutation of the event updates, and that once updates commute, all order dependence comes from their non-commutation with the inter-event dynamics and vanishes linearly in the time lag. This identifies a class of time-mediated non-commutative (TM) models and yields a resolution-robustness bound for any model. We construct the minimal TM layer, a learnable, provably Lipschitz generalization of the Hassenstein-Reichardt correlator; prove that no single additive layer can uniformly represent ordered pair interactions, whereas a three-dimensional TM state can; show that each TM layer adds two levels of temporal nesting versus one for additive layers; and give a single-layer higher-order construction (TM-k) and a stacking rule preserving all three properties. We instantiate these results as the Clock-Free Event (CFE) layer, linear in the number of events, give a topology-free variant for temporal point processes with closed-form likelihoods, and specify a preregistered clock-robustness protocol with a physical-time threat model for spike-retiming attacks. In preliminary development-set experiments, the TM state beats an otherwise identical additive state by 3.5-9.1 points on DVS128 Gesture and by 24.5 and 30.6 points on SHD and Speech Commands.
Science agents increasingly package domain expertise as reusable skills that plan analyses, select tools, and execute workflows. This modularity creates a confidentiality risk: the interactions that deliver a skill's capability can also reveal the skill itself. We build an extensible benchmark of 40 protected skills across eight open- and closed-source science-agent platforms, comparing direct, fixed-strategy, and bandit-guided iterative probing under reference-based and reference-free evaluation. Leakage is pervasive: all eight platforms (100%) leak at least one protected skill, and four reach 100% attack success under a single direct request. To stress-test platforms that resist simple probing, we propose SEEK (Skill Extraction with Evolving Knowledge), a black-box, self-evolving red-teaming agent that consolidates response-derived evidence in persistent memory and evolves reusable attack skills, using only user-visible responses. On 12 skills from SpatialAgent and Biomni, SEEK achieves 100% attack success while reducing the mean first-success round by 31.8% and 38.2% relative to bandit-guided probing. Against a confidentiality policy that blocks all three benchmark protocols, SEEK still extracts one of six protected skills. These findings show that current science agents do not reliably protect their skills and that defenses must be evaluated against adaptive, multi-turn attackers.
Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have largely been driven by aligning visual encoders with pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs). While effective, the geometric nature of this alignment remains under-explored. Existing methods often assume a symmetric interaction between visual and textual modalities, implying that both spaces adapt to each other. In this paper, we challenge this assumption and propose the “Text Space as Anchor” hypothesis. We argue that the semantic space of LLMs is rigid, anisotropic, and dominant; thus, effective cross-modal alignment may be an asymmetric projection of visual features onto this pre-existing text manifold without distorting it. We identify a potential issue in current parameter-efficient tuning paradigms where task-specific visual adjustments inadvertently disrupt the projector’s geometry, leading to “catastrophic forgetting” of the alignment mechanism itself. To address this, we introduce Anchor-Preserving Projection (APP), a novel method that regularizes the projector to maintain the geometric structure of the text embedding space via spectral filtering. Extensive experiments on 8 diverse cross-modal tasks and 3 pure language benchmarks demonstrate that APP preserves the LLM’s inherent linguistic capabilities (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) and reduces object hallucination significantly better than standard fine-tuning methods. We release our code.
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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
Tao Wu, Jingyuan Chen Zhejiang University, Wang Lin, Jian Zhan, Mengze Li The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Fangzhou Jin, Min Zhang East China Normal University, Kun Kuang Zhejiang University 等 9 位作者
Distractors—incorrect yet plausible answer choices in multiple-choice questions (MCQs)—are vital in educational assessments, as they help identify student misconceptions by presenting potential reasoning errors. Current distractor generation methods typically produce shared distractors for all students, ignoring the individual variations in reasoning, which limits their diagnostic effectiveness. To tackle this challenge, we introduce the task of Personalized Distractor Generation, which tailors distractors to each student’s specific cognitive flaws, inferred from their past question-answering (QA) history. While promising, this task is particularly demanding due to the limited number of QA records available for each student, which are insufficient for training, as well as the absence of their underlying reasoning process. To overcome this, we propose a novel, training-free two-stage framework. In the first stage, Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is used to reconstruct the student’s reasoning process from past errors, creating a student-specific misconception prototype. In the second stage, this prototype guides the simulation of the student’s reasoning on new questions, generating personalized distractors that resonate with their individual misconceptions. Our experiments, conducted on 1,361 students across 6 subjects, demonstrate that this approach outperforms existing methods in generating plausible, personalized distractors, and also effectively adapts to group-level settings, highlighting its robustness and versatility.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表