Daily TMLR digest for Dec 23, 2025
TMLR
Accepted papers
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Title: Multimodal Cultural Safety: Evaluation Framework and Alignment Strategies
Authors: Haoyi Qiu, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Ruichen Zheng, Jiao Sun, Nanyun Peng
Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in globally distributed applications, such as tourism assistants, yet their ability to produce culturally appropriate responses remains underexplored. Existing multimodal safety benchmarks primarily focus on physical safety and overlook violations rooted in cultural norms, which can result in symbolic harm. For example, suggesting clocks as gifts for a baby’s birthday in China may invoke associations with death, leading to user discomfort and undermining trust. To address this gap, we introduce CROSS, a benchmark designed to assess the cultural safety reasoning capabilities of LVLMs. CROSS includes 1,284 multilingual visually grounded queries from 16 countries, three everyday domains (i.e., shopping, meal planning, and outdoor activities), and 14 languages, where cultural norm violations emerge only when images are interpreted in context. We propose CROSS-Eval, an intercultural theory-based framework that measures four key dimensions: cultural awareness, norm education, compliance, and helpfulness. Using this framework, we evaluate 21 leading LVLMs, including mixture-of-experts models (e.g., Llama-4-Maverick) and reasoning models (e.g., o1 and Gemini-2.5-Pro). Results reveal significant cultural safety gaps: the best-performing model achieves only 61.79% in awareness and 37.73% in compliance. While some open-source models achieve performance better or comparable to GPT-4o, they still fall notably short of proprietary models. Our results further show that increasing reasoning capacity improves cultural alignment but does not fully resolve the issue. To improve model performance, we develop two enhancement strategies: supervised fine-tuning with culturally grounded, open-ended data and preference tuning with contrastive response pairs that highlight safe versus unsafe behaviors. These methods substantially improve GPT-4o’s cultural awareness (+60.14%) and compliance (+55.2%), while preserving general multimodal capabilities with minimal performance reduction on general multimodal understanding benchmarks. This work establishes a framework for evaluating and improving cultural safety in vision-language systems across diverse global contexts.
URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=mkFBmxgnRh
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Title: Inherently Robust Control through Maximum-Entropy Learning-Based Rollout
Authors: Felix Bok, Atanas Mirchev, Baris Kayalibay, Ole Jonas Wenzel, Patrick van der Smagt, Justin Bayer
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning has recently proven extremely successful in the context of robot control. One of the major reasons is massively parallel simulation in conjunction with controlling for the so-called ``sim to real'' gap: training on a distribution of environments, which is assumed to contain the real one, is sufficient for finding neural policies that successfully transfer from computer simulations to real robots. Often, this is accompanied by a layer of system identification during deployment to close the gap further. Still, the efficacy of these approaches hinges on reasonable simulation capabilities with an adequately rich task distribution containing the real environment. This work aims to provide a complementary solution in cases where the aforementioned criteria may prove challenging to satisfy. We combine two approaches, $\textit{maximum-entropy reinforcement learning}$ (MaxEntRL) and $\textit{rollout}$, into an inherently robust control method called $\textbf{Maximum-Entropy Learning-Based Rollout (MELRO)}$. Both promise increased robustness and adaptability on their own. While MaxEntRL has been shown to be an adversarially-robust approach in disguise, rollout greatly improves over parametric models through an implicit Newton step on a model of the environment. We find that our approach works excellently in the vast majority of cases on both the Real World Reinforcement Learning (RWRL) benchmark and on our own environment perturbations of the popular DeepMind Control (DMC) suite, which move beyond simple parametric noise. We also show its success in ``sim to real'' transfer with the Franka Panda robot arm.
URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=Ho4XUDn21D
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Title: Let Your Light Shine: Foreground Portrait Matting via Deep Flash Priors
Authors: Tianyi Xiang, Yangyang Xu, Qingxuan Hu, Chenyi Zi, Nanxuan Zhao, Junle Wang, Shengfeng He
Abstract: In this paper, we delve into a new perspective to solve image matting by revealing the foreground with flash priors. Previous Background Matting frameworks require a clean background as input, and although demonstrated powerfully, they are not practical to handle real-world scenarios with dynamic camera or background movement. We introduce the flash/no-flash image pair to portray the foreground object while eliminating the influence of dynamic background. The rationale behind this is that the foreground object is closer to the camera and thus received more light than the background. We propose a cascaded end-to-end network to integrate flash prior knowledge into the alpha matte estimation process. Particularly, a transformer-based Foreground Correlation Module is presented to connect foregrounds exposed in different lightings, which can effectively filter out the perturbation from the dynamic background and also robust to foreground motion. The initial prediction is concatenated with a Boundary Matting Network to polish the details of previous predictions. To supplement the training and evaluation of our flash/no-flash framework, we construct the first flash/no-flash portrait image matting dataset with 3,025 well-annotated alpha mattes. Experimental evaluations show that our proposed model significantly outperforms existing trimap-free matting methods on scenes with dynamic backgrounds. Moreover, we detailedly discuss and analyze the effects of different prior knowledge on static and dynamic backgrounds. In contrast to the restricted scenarios of Background Matting, we demonstrate a flexible and reliable solution in real-world cases with the camera or background movements.
URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=vxUiVJp2eM
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New submissions
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Title: Private Sketches for Linear Regression
Abstract: Linear regression is frequently applied in a variety of domains, some of which might contain sensitive information. This necessitates that the application of these methods does not reveal private information. Differentially private (DP) linear regression methods, developed for this purpose, compute private estimates of the solution. These techniques typically involve computing a noisy version of the solution vector. Instead, we propose releasing private sketches of the datasets, which can then be used to compute an approximate solution to the regression problem. This is motivated by the \emph{sketch-and-solve} paradigm, where the regression problem is solved on a smaller sketch of the dataset instead of on the original problem space. The solution obtained on the sketch can also be shown to have good approximation guarantees to the original problem. Various sketching methods have been developed for improving the computational efficiency of linear regression problems under this paradigm. We adopt this paradigm for the purpose of releasing private sketches of the data. We construct differentially private sketches for the problems of least squares regression, as well as least absolute deviations regression. We show that the privacy constraints lead to sketched versions of regularized regression. We compute the bounds on the regularization parameter required for guaranteeing privacy. The availability of these private sketches facilitates the application of commonly available solvers for regression, without the risk of privacy leakage.
URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=2R0INa6R6h
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Title: Flex-Act: Why Learn when you can Pick?
Abstract: Learning activation functions has emerged as a promising direction in deep learning, allowing networks to adapt activation mechanisms to task-specific demands. In this work, we introduce a novel framework that employs the Gumbel-Softmax trick to enable discrete yet differentiable selection among a predefined set of activation functions during training. Our method dynamically learns the optimal activation function independently of the input, thereby enhancing both predictive accuracy and architectural flexibility. Experiments on synthetic datasets show that our model consistently selects the most suitable activation function, underscoring its effectiveness. These results connect theoretical advances with practical utility, paving the way for more adaptive and modular neural architectures in complex learning scenarios.
URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=HQGis83pM2
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Title: Multi-Marginal Schrödinger Bridge Matching
Abstract: Understanding the continuous evolution of populations from discrete temporal snapshots is a critical research challenge, particularly in fields like developmental biology and systems medicine where longitudinal tracking of individual entities is often impossible. Such trajectory inference is vital for unraveling the mechanisms of dynamic processes. While Schrödinger Bridge (SB) offer a potent framework, their traditional application to pairwise time points can be insufficient for systems defined by multiple intermediate snapshots. This paper introduces Multi-Marginal Schrödinger Bridge Matching (MSBM), a novel algorithm specifically designed for the multi-marginal SB problem. MSBM extends iterative Markovian fitting (IMF) to effectively handle multiple marginal constraints. This technique ensures robust enforcement of all intermediate marginals while preserving the continuity of the learned global dynamics across the entire trajectory. Empirical validations on synthetic data and real-world single-cell RNA sequencing datasets demonstrate the competitive or superior performance of MSBM in capturing complex trajectories and respecting intermediate distributions, all with notable computational efficiency.
URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=AbOuxBMTog
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