In the era of social media, the proliferation of fake news has created an urgent need for more effective detection methods, particularly for multimodal content. The task of identifying fake news is highly challenging, as it requires broad background knowledge and understanding across various domains. Existing detection methods primarily rely on neural networks to learn latent feature representations, resulting in black-box classifications with limited real-world understanding. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for fake news detection. Our method introduces adversarial reasoning through debates from opposing perspectives. By harnessing the powerful capabilities of MLLMs in text generation and cross-modal reasoning, we guide these models to engage in multimodal debates, generating adversarial arguments based on contradictory evidence from both sides of the issue. We then utilize these arguments to learn reasonable thinking patterns, enabling better multimodal fusion and fine-tuning. This process effectively positions our model as a debate referee for adversarial inference. Extensive experiments conducted on four fake news detection datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Unified vision large language models (VLLMs) have recently achieved impressive advancements in both multimodal understanding and generation, powering applications such as visual question answering and text-guided image synthesis. However, progress in unified VLLMs remains constrained by the lack of datasets that fully exploit the synergistic potential between these two core abilities. Existing datasets typically address understanding and generation in isolation, thereby limiting the performance of unified VLLMs. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce a novel dataset construction framework, UnifiedVisual, and present UnifiedVisual-240K, a high-quality dataset meticulously designed to facilitate mutual enhancement between multimodal understanding and generation. UnifiedVisual-240K seamlessly integrates diverse visual and textual inputs and outputs, enabling comprehensive cross-modal reasoning and precise text-to-image alignment. Our dataset encompasses a wide spectrum of tasks and data sources, ensuring rich diversity and addressing key shortcomings of prior resources. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained on UnifiedVisual-240K consistently achieve strong performance across a wide range of tasks. Notably, these models exhibit significant mutual reinforcement between multimodal understanding and generation, further validating the effectiveness of our framework and dataset. We believe UnifiedVisual represents a new growth point for advancing unified VLLMs and unlocking their full potential.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have gained significant attention due to their impressive ability to integrate vision and language modalities. Recent advancements in MLLMs have primarily focused on improving performance through high-quality datasets, novel architectures, and optimized training strategies. However, in this paper, we identify a previously overlooked issue, language prior conflict, a mismatch between the inherent language priors of large language models (LLMs) and the language priors in training datasets. This conflict leads to suboptimal vision-language alignment, as MLLMs are prone to adapting to the language style of training samples. To address this issue, we propose a novel training method called Decoupled Proxy Alignment (DPA). DPA introduces two key innovations: (1) the use of a proxy LLM during pretraining to decouple the vision-language alignment process from language prior interference, and (2) dynamic loss adjustment based on visual relevance to strengthen optimization signals for visually relevant tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DPA significantly mitigates the language prior conflict, achieving superior alignment performance across diverse datasets, model families, and scales. Our method not only improves the effectiveness of MLLM training but also shows exceptional generalization capabilities, making it a robust approach for vision-language alignment.

As large language models (LLMs) rapidly evolve, they are increasingly being customized through fine-tuning to suit the specific needs of various applications. A critical aspect of this advancement is the alignment process, which ensures that these models perform tasks in ways that align with human values and expectations. Current alignment methods, such as direct preference optimization (DPO) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), focus primarily on alignment during training phase. However, these methods often involve complex and resource-intensive training processes, posing significant challenge for their implementation. Therefore, we propose InferAligner, a simple yet effective method for harmlessness alignment during inference phase. InferAligner decouples harmlessness from helpfulness. During the training phase, it focuses solely on enhancing the target model’s capabilities on downstream tasks. In the inference phase, it utilizes safety steering vectors extracted from the aligned model to guide the target model towards harmlessness alignment. Experimental results show that our method can be very effectively applied to domain-specific models in finance, medicine, and mathematics, as well as to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) such as LLaVA. It significantly diminishes the attack success rate (ASR) of both harmful instructions and jailbreak instructions, while maintaining almost unchanged performance in downstream tasks.

Through reading the documentation in the context, tool-using language models can dynamically extend their capability using external tools. The cost is that we have to input lengthy documentation every time the model needs to use the tool, occupying the input window as well as slowing down the decoding process.Given the progress in general-purpose compression, soft context compression is a suitable approach to alleviate the problem. However, when compressing tool documentation, existing methods suffer from the weaknesses of key information loss (specifically, tool/parameter name errors) and difficulty in adjusting the length of compressed sequences based on documentation lengths.To address these problems, we propose two strategies for compressing tool documentation into concise and precise summary sequences for tool-using language models. 1) Selective compression strategy mitigates key information loss by deliberately retaining key information as raw text tokens. 2) Block compression strategy involves dividing tool documentation into short chunks and then employing a fixed-length compression model to achieve variable-length compression. This strategy facilitates the flexible adjustment of the compression ratio.Results on API-Bank and APIBench show that our approach reaches a performance comparable to the upper-bound baseline under up to 16x compression ratio.

Prompting method is regarded as one of the crucial progress for few-shot nature language processing. Recent research on prompting moves from discrete tokens based “hard prompts” to continuous “soft prompts”, which employ learnable vectors as pseudo prompt tokens and achieve better performance. Though showing promising prospects, these soft-prompting methods are observed to rely heavily on good initialization to take effect. Unfortunately, obtaining a perfect initialization for soft prompts requires understanding of inner language models working and elaborate design, which is no easy task and has to restart from scratch for each new task. To remedy this, we propose a generalized soft prompting method called MetaPrompting, which adopts the well-recognized model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm to automatically find better prompt initialization that facilitates fast adaptation to new prompting tasks. Extensive experiments show MetaPrompting tackles soft prompt initialization problem and brings significant improvement on three different datasets (over 7 points improvement in accuracy for 1-shot setting), achieving new state-of-the-art performance.