Xuemei Dong

Author directory

2026

Tool-integrated reasoning has emerged as a promising paradigm for Text-to-SQL, framing SQL generation as sequential decision-making interleaved with tool execution. However, existing reinforcement learning approaches rely on coarse-grained outcome supervision, creating a credit assignment problem: models receive identical rewards regardless of whether intermediate steps are redundant or erroneous. We observe that tool-integrated reasoning offers a unique opportunity: each tool invocation produces structured, verifiable outputs that can serve as training-free step-level signals, eliminating the need for expensive reward model training. Building on this insight, we propose FineStep, a step-level credit assignment framework that leverages training-free process rewards derived from tool execution feedback. FineStep constructs a dual-channel value estimate for each step, combining backward-propagated outcome value with forward-smoothed process value, and synthesizes them via group-based normalization into a unified step-level advantage for policy optimization. Experiments on Text-to-SQL benchmarks show that FineStep achieves SOTA performance with a 3.25% EX gain over GRPO at the 4B scale, while results on AIME24 demonstrate transferability beyond SQL.
The safety of large vision-language models is increasingly stress-tested by multimodal jailbreaks, yet existing attacks share one fundamental limitation: the attack itself is *static*. Template-based attacks freeze the image–text layout, while iterative sample-level attacks make only the image–text *content* dynamic, keeping the attack-iteration strategy *fixed* and the attacker’s parameters *frozen*. At the *meta level* they remain static, and we argue this partial dynamism cannot expose the full safety risks of multimodal models.We propose **Meta-Adaptive Multimodal Jailbreaking (MAMJ)**, which lifts adversarial dynamism from the sample level to the meta level by making the attacker’s policy itself the optimisation target along two axes: an **attack strategy prompt (ASP)** 𝜃 in language space, governing how the attack is iterated against a victim VLM, and the **attacker weights** 𝜙, determining the success rate attainable under a given 𝜃.Evolving over a *group of multimodal attack trajectories*, an LLM-based critique of failed trajectories first refines 𝜃, after which group-aggregated attack-success-rate (ASR) rewards update 𝜙. On MM-SafetyBench, MAMJ attains 81.0%, 78.9%, and 82.3% ASR against GPT-4o, Gemini-3-Pro-Preview, and Seed 2.0, exceeding the strongest sample-level baseline by up to 24.1 percentage points, and the learned attacker (𝜃⋆, 𝜙⋆) transfers *without retraining* to unseen victims while remaining effective under representative defences.These results expose a systemic vulnerability of frontier VLMs to meta-adaptive jailbreaks and underscore the need for defences that anticipate meta-level adversaries. Code and checkpoints will be released.