Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled the creation of deceptively real images, posing significant security risks when misused. In this study, we empirically show that different timesteps of DDIM inversion reveal varying subtle distinctions between synthetic and real images that are extractable for detection, taking the forms of such as Fourier power spectrum high-frequency discrepancies and inter-pixel variance distributions. Based on these observations, we propose a novel detection method named ESIDE that directly utilizes features of intermediately noised images by training an ensemble on multiple noised timesteps, circumventing the overtime of conventional reconstruction-based strategies. To enhance human comprehension, we introduce a metric-grounded explanation refinement module to identify and explain AI-generated flaws. Additionally, we present the benchmarks GenHard and GenExplain, offering detection samples of greater difficulty and high-quality rationales for fake images. Extensive experiments show that ESIDE achieves state-of-the-art performance with 98.91% and 95.89% detection accuracy on regular and challenging samples respectively, and demonstrates generalizability and robustness.

Zisu Huang, Muzhao Tian, Xiaohua Wang, Jingwen Xu, Zhengkang Guo, Qi Qian, Kaitao Song, Jiakang Yuan, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhenghua Wang, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, Xuanjing Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications necessitates resource-efficient computing paradigms that can unify heterogeneous sensing modalities. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) meet this need with their event-driven and energy-efficient processing nature. However, deploying SNNs on mobile and embedded platforms is hindered by strict and fluctuating memory budgets. While prior work explores lightweight model design and system-level memory management, these methods either sacrifice accuracy or incur high runtime overhead due to timestep-dependent dynamics. To tackle these challenges, we propose a memory-adaptive framework MASI that enables efficient on-device SNN inference by combining (1) a fine-grained memory-adaptive layer slicing strategy, (2) a timestep-agnostic scheduler that maximizes memory utilization with minimal fragmentation, and (3) a timestep-aware early-exit mechanism that reduces redundant calculations. Evaluated on diverse workloads and edge devices, MASI can dynamically adapt to runtime memory availability, approximately reducing memory usage by 20.67% and inference latency by 58.53% on average with negligible accuracy loss compared to other feasible on-device implementations under memory constraints.

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) enhance recommendation quality by engaging users in multi-turn dialogues, capturing nuanced preferences through natural language interactions. However, these systems often face the false negative issue, where items that a user might like are incorrectly labeled as negative during training, leading to suboptimal recommendations. Expanding the label set through data augmentation presents an intuitive solution but faces the challenge of balancing two key aspects: ensuring semantic relevance and preserving the collaborative information inherent in CRS datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel data augmentation framework that first leverages an LLM-based semantic retriever to identify diverse and semantically relevant items, which are then filtered by a relevance scorer to remove noisy candidates. Building on this, we introduce a two-stage training strategy balancing semantic relevance and collaborative information. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets and user simulators demonstrate significant and consistent performance improvements across various recommenders, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in advancing CRS performance.

The recent surge in jailbreaking attacks has revealed significant vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) when exposed to malicious inputs. While various defense strategies have been proposed to mitigate these threats, there has been limited research into the underlying mechanisms that make LLMs vulnerable to such attacks. In this study, we suggest that the self-safeguarding capability of LLMs is linked to specific activity patterns within their representation space. Although these patterns have little impact on the semantic content of the generated text, they play a crucial role in shaping LLM behavior under jailbreaking attacks. Our findings demonstrate that these patterns can be detected with just a few pairs of contrastive queries. Extensive experimentation shows that the robustness of LLMs against jailbreaking can be manipulated by weakening or strengthening these patterns. Further visual analysis provides additional evidence for our conclusions, providing new insights into the jailbreaking phenomenon. These findings highlight the importance of addressing the potential misuse of open-source LLMs within the community.

Backpropagation is the foundational algorithm for training neural networks and a key driver of deep learning’s success. However, its biological plausibility has been challenged due to three primary limitations: weight symmetry, reliance on global error signals, and the dual-phase nature of training, as highlighted by the existing literature. Although various alternative learning approaches have been proposed to address these issues, most either fail to satisfy all three criteria simultaneously or yield suboptimal results. Inspired by the dynamics and plasticity of pyramidal neurons, we propose Dendritic Localized Learning (DLL), a novel learning algorithm designed to overcome these challenges. Extensive empirical experiments demonstrate that DLL satisfies all three criteria of biological plausibility while achieving state-of-the-art performance among algorithms that meet these requirements. Furthermore, DLL exhibits strong generalization across a range of architectures, including MLPs, CNNs, and RNNs. These results, benchmarked against existing biologically plausible learning algorithms, offer valuable empirical insights for future research. We hope this study can inspire the development of new biologically plausible algorithms for training multilayer networks and advancing progress in both neuroscience and machine learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lvchangze/Dendritic-Localized-Learning.

Most edge-cloud collaboration frameworks rely on the substantial computational and storage capabilities of cloud-based artificial neural networks (ANNs). However, this reliance results in significant communication overhead between edge devices and the cloud, as well as high computational energy consumption, especially when applied to resource-constrained edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose ECC-SNN, a novel edge-cloud collaboration framework that incorporates energy-efficient spiking neural networks (SNNs) to offload more computational workload from the cloud to the edge, thereby improving cost-effectiveness and reducing reliance on the cloud. ECC-SNN employs a joint training approach that integrates ANN and SNN models, enabling edge devices to leverage knowledge from cloud models for enhanced performance while reducing energy consumption and processing latency. Furthermore, ECC-SNN features an on-device incremental learning algorithm that enables edge models to continuously adapt to dynamic environments, reducing the communication overhead and resource consumption associated with frequent cloud update requests. Extensive experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that ECC-SNN improves accuracy by 4.15%, reduces average energy consumption by 79.4%, and lowers average processing latency by 39.1%.

On-device sequential recommendation (SR) systems are designed to make local inferences using real-time features, thereby alleviating the communication burden on server-based recommenders when handling concurrent requests from millions of users. However, the resource constraints of edge devices, including limited memory and computational capacity, pose significant challenges to deploying efficient SR models. Inspired by the energy-efficient and sparse computing properties of deep Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), we propose a cost-effective on-device SR model named SSR, which encodes dense embedding representations into sparse spike-wise representations and integrates novel spiking filter modules to extract temporal patterns and critical features from item sequences, optimizing computational and memory efficiency without sacrificing recommendation accuracy. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of SSR. Compared to other SR baselines, SSR achieves comparable recommendation performance while reducing energy consumption by an average of 59.43%. In addition, SSR significantly lowers memory usage, making it particularly well-suited for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are bio-inspired networks that mimic how neurons in the brain communicate through discrete spikes, which have great potential in various tasks due to their energy efficiency and temporal processing capabilities. SNNs with self-attention mechanisms (spiking Transformers) have recently shown great advancements in various tasks, and inspired by traditional Transformers, several studies have demonstrated that spiking absolute positional encoding can help capture sequential relationships for input data, enhancing the capabilities of spiking Transformers for tasks such as sequential modeling and image classification. However, how to incorporate relative positional information into SNNs remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce several strategies to approximate relative positional encoding (RPE) in spiking Transformers while preserving the binary nature of spikes. Firstly, we formally prove that encoding relative distances with Gray Code ensures that the binary representations of positional indices maintain a constant Hamming distance whenever their decimal values differ by a power of two, and we propose **Gray-PE** based on this property. In addition, we propose another RPE method called **Log-PE**, which combines the logarithmic form of the relative distance matrix directly into the spiking attention map. Furthermore, we extend our RPE methods to a two-dimensional form, making them suitable for processing image patches. We evaluate our RPE methods on various tasks, including time series forecasting, text classification, and patch-based image classification, and the experimental results demonstrate a satisfying performance gain by incorporating our RPE methods across many architectures. Our results provide fresh perspectives on designing spiking Transformers to advance their sequential modeling capability, thereby expanding their applicability across various domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/SeqSNN.

Wenhao Liu, Xiaohua Wang, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Zhu JianHao, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Xiaohua Wang, Tianlong Li, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Zhu JianHao, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Xiaohua Wang, Zhenghua Wang, Xuan Gao, Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhibo Xu, Tianyuan Shi, Zhengyuan Wang, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Ruicheng Yin, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), inspired by the spiking behavior of biological neurons, provide a unique pathway for capturing the intricacies of temporal data. However, applying SNNs to time-series forecasting is challenging due to difficulties in effective temporal alignment, complexities in encoding processes, and the absence of standardized guidelines for model selection. In this paper, we propose a framework for SNNs in time-series forecasting tasks, leveraging the efficiency of spiking neurons in processing temporal information. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed SNN-based approaches achieve comparable or superior results to traditional time-series forecasting methods on diverse benchmarks with much less energy consumption. Furthermore, we conduct detailed analysis experiments to assess the SNN’s capacity to capture temporal dependencies within time-series data, offering valuable insights into its nuanced strengths and effectiveness in modeling the intricate dynamics of temporal data. Our study contributes to the expanding field of SNNs and offers a promising alternative for time-series forecasting tasks, presenting a pathway for the development of more biologically inspired and temporally aware forecasting models. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/SeqSNN.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) represent a promising approach to developing artificial neural networks that are both energy-efficient and biologically plausible. However, applying SNNs to sequential tasks, such as text classification and time-series forecasting, has been hindered by the challenge of creating an effective and hardware-friendly spike-form positional encoding (PE) strategy. Drawing inspiration from the central pattern generators (CPGs) in the human brain, which produce rhythmic patterned outputs without requiring rhythmic inputs, we propose a novel PE technique for SNNs, termed CPG-PE. We demonstrate that the commonly used sinusoidal PE is mathematically a specific solution to the membrane potential dynamics of a particular CPG. Moreover, extensive experiments across various domains, including time-series forecasting, natural language processing, and image classification, show that SNNs with CPG-PE outperform their conventional counterparts. Additionally, we perform analysis experiments to elucidate the mechanism through which SNNs encode positional information and to explore the function of CPGs in the human brain. This investigation may offer valuable insights into the fundamental principles of neural computation.