Multi-view clustering (MVC) has gained widespread recognition as a valuable technique for enhancing clustering performance by harnessing diverse data sources. Nonetheless, current methods mainly concentrate on obtaining consistent information, often ignoring the risk of redundant information across different views. In this study, we propose a novel methodology, called Sufficient Multi-View Clustering (STMVC), which evaluates the multi-view clustering framework through an information-theoretic lens, intending to learn inter-view consistency information while removing redundant information among views. Specifically, we first utilize variational analysis to extract inter-view consistency information, and to further enhance the consistency information and minimize the redundant information between different views, we propose a sufficient representation lower bound. Furthermore, in order to improve the adaptability and generalizability of our proposed approach, we expand the application of STMVC to single-view scenarios and incomplete multi-view scenarios. The STMVC method provides a promising solution to the challenge of multi-view clustering and introduces a fresh perspective for analyzing multi-view data. To validate our model, we conducted a theoretical analysis based on the Bayesian error rate, and experiments on several multi-view datasets and single-view datasets show the outstanding performance of STMVC.

The recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and pre-trained vision models have accelerated the development of vision-language large models (VLLMs), enhancing the interaction between visual and linguistic modalities. Despite their notable success across various domains, VLLMs face challenges in modality alignment, which can lead to issues like hallucinations and unsafe content generation. Current alignment techniques often rely on coarse feedback and external datasets, limiting scalability and performance. In this paper, we propose FiSAO (Fine-Grained Self-Alignment Optimization), a novel self-alignment method that utilizes the model’s own visual encoder as a fine-grained verifier to improve vision-language alignment without the need for additional data. By leveraging token-level feedback from the vision encoder, FiSAO significantly improves vision-language alignment, even surpassing traditional preference tuning methods that require additional data. Through both theoretical analysis and experimental validation, we demonstrate that FiSAO effectively addresses the misalignment problem in VLLMs, marking the first instance of token-level rewards being applied to such models. Our code is avaliable at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FISAO-57F0/}.

Interleaved multimodal comprehension and generation, enabling models to produce and interpret both images and text in arbitrary sequences, have become a pivotal area in multimodal learning. Despite significant advancements, the evaluation of this capability remains insufficient. Existing benchmarks suffer from limitations in data scale, scope, and evaluation depth, while current evaluation metrics are often costly or biased, lacking in reliability for practical applications. To address these challenges, we introduce MMIE, a large-scale knowledge-intensive benchmark for evaluating interleaved multimodal comprehension and generation in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). MMIE comprises 20K meticulously curated multimodal queries, spanning 3 categories, 12 fields, and 102 subfields, including mathematics, coding, physics, literature, health, and arts. It supports both interleaved inputs and outputs, offering a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended question formats to evaluate diverse competencies. Moreover, we propose a reliable automated evaluation metric, leveraging a scoring model fine-tuned with human-annotated data and systematic evaluation criteria, aimed at reducing bias and improving evaluation accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our benchmark and metrics in providing a comprehensive evaluation of interleaved LVLMs. Specifically, we evaluate eight LVLMs, revealing that even the best models show significant room for improvement, with most achieving only moderate results. We believe MMIE will drive further advancements in the development of interleaved LVLMs.

While text-to-image models like GPT-4o-Image and FLUX are rapidly proliferating, they often encounter challenges such as hallucination, bias, and the production of unsafe, low-quality output. To effectively address these issues, it is crucial to align these models with desired behaviors based on feedback from a multimodal judge. Despite their significance, current multimodal judges frequently undergo inadequate evaluation of their capabilities and limitations, potentially leading to misalignment and unsafe fine-tuning outcomes. To address this issue, we introduce MJ-Bench, a novel benchmark which incorporates a comprehensive preference dataset to evaluate multimodal judges in providing feedback for image generation models across six key perspectives: alignment, safety, image quality, bias, composition, and visualization. Specifically, we evaluate a large variety of multimodal judges including smaller-sized CLIP-based scoring models, open-source VLMs, and close-source VLMs on each decomposed subcategory of our preference dataset. Experiments reveal that close-source VLMs generally provide better feedback, with GPT-4o outperforming other judges in average. Compared with open-source VLMs, smaller-sized scoring models can provide better feedback regarding text-image alignment and image quality, while VLMs provide more accurate feedback regarding safety and generation bias due to their stronger reasoning capabilities. Further studies in feedback scale reveal that VLM judges can generally provide more accurate and stable feedback in natural language than numerical scales. Notably, human evaluations on end-to-end and fine-tuned models using separate feedback from these multimodal judges provide similar conclusions, further confirming the effectiveness of MJ-Bench.

Recent advances in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have showcased strong reasoning abilities across multiple modalities, achieving significant breakthroughs in various real-world applications. Despite this great success, the safety guardrail of LVLMs may not cover the unforeseen domains introduced by the visual modality. Existing studies primarily focus on eliciting LVLMs to generate harmful responses via carefully crafted image-based jailbreaks designed to bypass alignment defenses. In this study, we reveal that a safe image can be exploited to achieve the same jailbreak consequence when combined with additional safe images and prompts. This stems from two fundamental properties of LVLMs: universal reasoning capabilities and safety snowball effect. Building on these insights, we propose Safety Snowball Agent (SSA), a novel agent-based framework leveraging agents' autonomous and tool-using abilities to jailbreak LVLMs. SSA operates through two principal stages: (1) initial response generation, where tools generate or retrieve jailbreak images based on potential harmful intents, and (2) harmful snowballing, where refined subsequent prompts induce progressively harmful outputs. Our experiments demonstrate that SSA can use nearly any image to induce LVLMs to produce unsafe content, achieving high success jailbreaking rates against the latest LVLMs. Unlike prior works that exploit alignment flaws, SSA leverages the inherent properties of LVLMs, presenting a profound challenge for enforcing safety in generative multimodal systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to exhibit vulnerabilities despite deliberate safety alignment efforts, posing significant risks to users and society. To safeguard against the risk of policy-violating content, system-level moderation via external guard models—designed to monitor LLM inputs and outputs and block potentially harmful content—has emerged as a prevalent mitigation strategy. Existing approaches of training guard models rely heavily on extensive human curated datasets and struggle with out-of-distribution threats, such as emerging harmful categories or jailbreak attacks. To address these limitations, we propose RSafe, an adaptive reasoning-based safeguard that conducts guided safety reasoning to provide robust protection within the scope of specified safety policies. RSafe operates in two stages: (1) guided reasoning, where it analyzes safety risks of input content through policy-guided step-by-step reasoning, and (2) reinforced alignment, where rule-based RL optimizes its reasoning paths to align with accurate safety prediction. This two-stage training paradigm enables RSafe to internalize safety principles to generalize safety protection capability over unseen or adversarial safety violation scenarios. During inference, RSafe accepts user-specified safety policies to provide enhanced safeguards tailored to specific safety requirements. Experiments demonstrate that RSafe matches state-of-the-art guard models using limited amount of public data in both prompt- and response-level harmfulness detection, while achieving superior out-of-distribution generalization on both emerging harmful category and jailbreak attacks. Furthermore, RSafe provides human-readable explanations for its safety judgments for better interpretability. RSafe offers a robust, adaptive, and interpretable solution for LLM safety moderation, advancing the development of reliable safeguards in dynamic real-world environments. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RSafe-996D.

In recent years, incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC), which studies the challenging multi-view clustering problem on missing views, has received growing research interests. Previous IMVC methods suffer from the following issues: (1) the inaccurate imputation for missing data, which leads to suboptimal clustering performance, and (2) most existing IMVC models merely consider the explicit presence of graph structure in data, ignoring the fact that latent graphs of different views also provide valuable information for the clustering task. To overcome such challenges, we present a novel method, termed Adaptive feature imputation with latent graph for incomplete multi-view clustering (AGDIMC). Specifically, it captures the embbedded features of each view by incorporating the view-specific deep encoders. Then, we construct partial latent graphs on complete data, which can consolidate the intrinsic relationships within each view while preserving the topological information. With the aim of estimating the missing sample based on the available information, we utilize an adaptive imputation layer to impute the embedded feature of missing data by using cross-view soft cluster assignments and global cluster centroids. As the imputation progresses, the portion of complete data increases, contributing to enhancing the discriminative information contained in global pseudo-labels. Meanwhile, to alleviate the negative impact caused by inferior impute samples and the discrepancy of cluster structures, we further design an adaptive imputation strategy based on the global pseudo-label and the local cluster assignment. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over existing approaches.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in understanding visual information with human languages. However, LVLMs still suffer from object hallucination, which is the problem of generating descriptions that include objects that do not actually exist in the images. This can negatively impact many vision-language tasks, such as visual summarization and reasoning. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet powerful algorithm, LVLM Hallucination Revisor (LURE), to post-hoc rectify object hallucination in LVLMs by reconstructing less hallucinatory descriptions. LURE is grounded in a rigorous statistical analysis of the key factors underlying object hallucination, including co-occurrence (the frequent appearance of certain objects alongside others in images), uncertainty (objects with higher uncertainty during LVLM decoding), and object position (hallucination often appears in the later part of the generated text). LURE can also be seamlessly integrated with any LVLMs. We evaluate LURE on six open-source LVLMs and found it outperforms the previous best approach in both general object hallucination evaluation metrics, GPT, and human evaluations.

Multi-view clustering is an important machine learning task for multi-media data, encompassing various domains such as images, videos, and texts. Moreover, with the growing abundance of graph data, the significance of multi-view graph clustering (MVGC) has become evident. Most existing methods focus on graph neural networks (GNNs) to extract information from both graph structure and feature data to learn distinguishable node representations. However, traditional GNNs are designed with the assumption of homophilous graphs, making them unsuitable for widely prevalent heterophilous graphs. Several techniques have been introduced to enhance GNNs for heterophilous graphs. While these methods partially mitigate the heterophilous graph issue, they often neglect the advantages of traditional GNNs, such as their simplicity, interpretability, and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view graph clustering method based on dual-optimized adaptive graph reconstruction, named DOAGC. It mainly aims to reconstruct the graph structure adapted to traditional GNNs to deal with heterophilous graph issues while maintaining the advantages of traditional GNNs. Specifically, we first develop an adaptive graph reconstruction mechanism that accounts for node correlation and original structural information. To further optimize the reconstruction graph, we design a dual optimization strategy and demonstrate the feasibility of our optimization strategy through mutual information theory. Numerous experiments demonstrate that DOAGC effectively mitigates the heterophilous graph problem.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made substantial progress by integrating pre-trained large language models (LLMs) and vision models through instruction tuning. Despite these advancements, LVLMs often exhibit the hallucination phenomenon, where generated text responses appear linguistically plausible but contradict the input image, indicating a misalignment between image and text pairs. This misalignment arises because the model tends to prioritize textual information over visual input, even when both the language model and visual representations are of high quality. Existing methods leverage additional models or human annotations to curate preference data and enhance modality alignment through preference optimization. These approaches are resource-intensive and may not effectively reflect the target LVLM's preferences, making the curated preferences easily distinguishable. Our work addresses these challenges by proposing the Calibrated Self-Rewarding (CSR) approach, which enables the model to self-improve by iteratively generating candidate responses, evaluating the reward for each response, and curating preference data for fine-tuning. In the reward modeling, we employ a step-wise strategy and incorporate visual constraints into the self-rewarding process to place greater emphasis on visual input. Empirical results demonstrate that CSR significantly enhances performance and reduces hallucinations across twelve benchmarks and tasks, achieving substantial improvements over existing methods by 7.62\%. Our empirical results are further supported by rigorous theoretical analysis, under mild assumptions, verifying the effectiveness of introducing visual constraints into the self-rewarding paradigm. Additionally, CSR shows compatibility with different vision-language models and the ability to incrementally improve performance through iterative fine-tuning.

Deep multi-view subspace clustering (DMVSC) has recently attracted increasing attention due to its promising performance. However, existing DMVSC methods still have two issues: (1) they mainly focus on using autoencoders to nonlinearly embed the data, while the embedding may be suboptimal for clustering because the clustering objective is rarely considered in autoencoders, and (2) existing methods typically have a quadratic or even cubic complexity, which makes it challenging to deal with large-scale data. To address these issues, in this paper we propose a novel deep multi-view subspace clustering method with anchor graph (DMCAG). To be specific, DMCAG firstly learns the embedded features for each view independently, which are used to obtain the subspace representations. To significantly reduce the complexity, we construct an anchor graph with small size for each view. Then, spectral clustering is performed on an integrated anchor graph to obtain pseudo-labels. To overcome the negative impact caused by suboptimal embedded features, we use pseudo-labels to refine the embedding process to make it more suitable for the clustering task. Pseudo-labels and embedded features are updated alternately. Furthermore, we design a strategy to keep the consistency of the labels based on contrastive learning to enhance the clustering performance. Empirical studies on real-world datasets show that our method achieves superior clustering performance over other state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-view clustering (MVC) is a popular technique for improving clustering performance using various data sources. However, existing methods primarily focus on acquiring consistent information while often neglecting the issue of redundancy across multiple views. This study presents a new approach called Sufficient Multi-View Clustering (SUMVC) that examines the multi-view clustering framework from an information-theoretic standpoint. Our proposed method consists of two parts. Firstly, we develop a simple and reliable multi-view clustering method SCMVC (simple consistent multi-view clustering) that employs variational analysis to generate consistent information. Secondly, we propose a sufficient representation lower bound to enhance consistent information and minimise unnecessary information among views. The proposed SUMVC method offers a promising solution to the problem of multi-view clustering and provides a new perspective for analyzing multi-view data. To verify the effectiveness of our model, we conducted a theoretical analysis based on the Bayes Error Rate, and experiments on multiple multi-view datasets demonstrate the superior performance of SUMVC.