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Solution to the 10th ABAW Expression Recognition Challenge: A Robust Multimodal Framework with Safe Cross-Attention and Modality Dropout

arXiv:2603.08034v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotion recognition in real-world environments is hindered by partial occlusions, missing modalities, and severe class imbalance. To address these issues, particularly for the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Expression challenge, we propose a multimodal framework that dynamically fuses visual and audio representations. Our approach uses a dual-branch Transformer architecture featuring a safe cross-attention mechanism and a modality dropout strategy. This design allows the network to rely on audio-based predictions when visual cues are absent. To mitigate the long-tail distribution of the Aff-Wild2 dataset, we apply focal loss optimization, combined with a sliding-window soft voting strategy to capture dynamic emotional transitions and reduce frame-level classification jitter. Experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively handles missing modalities and complex spatiotemporal dependencies, achieving an accuracy of 60.79% and an F1-score of 0.5029 on the Aff-Wild2 validation set.

DropVLA: An Action-Level Backdoor Attack on Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2510.10932v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map multimodal perception and language instructions to executable robot actions, making them particularly vulnerable to behavioral backdoor manipulation: a hidden trigger introduced during training can induce unintended physical actions while nominal task performance remains intact. Prior work on VLA backdoors primarily studies untargeted attacks or task-level hijacking, leaving fine-grained control over individual actions largely unexplored. In this work, we present DropVLA, an action-level backdoor attack that forces a reusable action primitive (e.g., open_gripper) to execute at attacker-chosen decision points under a realistic pipeline-black-box setting with limited data-poisoning access, using a window-consistent relabeling scheme for chunked fine-tuning. On OpenVLA-7B evaluated with LIBERO, vision-only poisoning achieves 98.67%-99.83% attack success rate (ASR) with only 0.31% poisoned episodes while preserving 98.50%-99.17% clean-task retention, and successfully triggers the targeted action within 25 control steps at 500 Hz (0.05 s). Text-only triggers are unstable at low poisoning budgets, and combining text with vision provides no consistent ASR improvement over vision-only attacks. The backdoor remains robust to moderate trigger variations and transfers across evaluation suites (96.27%, 99.09%), whereas text-only largely fails (0.72%). We further validate physical-world feasibility on a 7-DoF Franka arm with pi0-fast, demonstrating non-trivial attack efficacy under camera-relative motion that induces image-plane trigger drift. These results reveal that VLA models can be covertly steered at the granularity of safety-critical actions with minimal poisoning and without observable degradation of nominal performance.

DeepInnovator: Triggering the Innovative Capabilities of LLMs

arXiv:2602.18920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in accelerating scientific discovery has garnered increasing attention, with a key focus on constructing research agents endowed with innovative capability, i.e., the ability to autonomously generate novel and significant research ideas. Existing approaches predominantly rely on sophisticated prompt engineering and lack a systematic training paradigm. To address this, we propose DeepInnovator, a training framework designed to trigger the innovative capability of LLMs. Our approach comprises two core components. (1) ``Standing on the shoulders of giants''. We construct an automated data extraction pipeline to extract and organize structured research knowledge from a vast corpus of unlabeled scientific literature. (2) ``Conjectures and refutations''. We introduce a ``Next Idea Prediction'' training paradigm, which models the generation of research ideas as an iterative process of continuously predicting, evaluating, and refining plausible and novel next idea. Both automatic and expert evaluations demonstrate that our DeepInnovator-14B significantly outperforms untrained baselines, achieving win rates of 80.53\%-93.81\%, and attains performance comparable to that of current leading LLMs. This work provides a scalable training pathway toward building research agents with genuine, originative innovative capability, and will open-source the dataset to foster community advancement. Source code and data are available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/DeepInnovator.
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