OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
TD-MPC-Opt: Distilling Model-Based Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We present a novel approach to knowledge transfer in model-based reinforcement learning, addressing the critical challenge of deploying large world models in resource-constrained environments. Our method efficiently distills a high-capacity multi-task agent (317M parameters) into a compact model (1M parameters) on the MT30 benchmark, significantly improving performance across diverse tasks. Our distilled model achieves a state-of-the-art normalized score of 28.45, surpassing the original 1M parameter model score of 18.93. This improvement demonstrates the ability of our distillation technique to capture and consolidate complex multi-task knowledge. We further optimize the distilled model through FP16 post-training quantization, reducing its size by $\sim$50\%. Our approach addresses practical deployment limitations and offers insights into knowledge representation in large world models, paving the way for more efficient and accessible multi-task reinforcement learning systems in robotics and other resource-constrained applications. Code available at https://github.com/dmytro-kuzmenko/td-mpc-opt.
Out-of-Distribution Detection Methods Answer the Wrong Questions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

To detect distribution shifts and improve model safety, many out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods rely on the predictive uncertainty or features of supervised models trained on in-distribution data. In this paper, we critically re-examine this popular family of OOD detection procedures, and we argue that these methods are fundamentally answering the wrong questions for OOD detection. There is no simple fix to this misalignment, since a classifier trained only on in-distribution classes cannot be expected to identify OOD points; for instance, a cat-dog classifier may confidently misclassify an airplane if it contains features that distinguish cats from dogs, despite generally appearing nothing alike. We find that uncertainty-based methods incorrectly conflate high uncertainty with being OOD, while feature-based methods incorrectly conflate far feature-space distance with being OOD. We show how these pathologies manifest as irreducible errors in OOD detection and identify common settings where these methods are ineffective. Additionally, interventions to improve OOD detection such as feature-logit hybrid methods, scaling of model and data size, epistemic uncertainty representation, and outlier exposure also fail to address this fundamental misalignment in objectives. We additionally consider unsupervised density estimation and generative models for OOD detection, which we show have their own fundamental limitations.
Bridging UI Design and chatbot Interactions: Applying Form-Based Principles to Conversational Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Domain specific chatbot applications often involve multi step interactions, such as refining search filters, selecting multiple items, or performing comparisons. Traditional graphical user interfaces (GUIs) handle these workflows by providing explicit "Submit" (commit data) and "Reset" (discard data) actions, allowing back-end systems to track user intent unambiguously. In contrast, conversational agents rely on subtle language cues, which can lead to confusion and incomplete context management. This paper proposes modeling these GUI inspired metaphors acknowledgment (submit like) and context switching (reset-like) as explicit tasks within large language model (LLM) prompts. By capturing user acknowledgment, reset actions, and chain of thought (CoT) reasoning as structured session data, we preserve clarity, reduce user confusion, and align domain-specific chatbot interactions with back-end logic. We demonstrate our approach in hotel booking and customer management scenarios, highlighting improvements in multi-turn task coherence, user satisfaction, and efficiency.
IC-Custom: Diverse Image Customization via In-Context Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Image customization, a crucial technique for industrial media production, aims to generate content that is consistent with reference images. However, current approaches conventionally separate image customization into position-aware and position-free customization paradigms and lack a universal framework for diverse customization, limiting their applications across various scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose IC-Custom, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates position-aware and position-free image customization through in-context learning. IC-Custom concatenates reference images with target images to a polyptych, leveraging DiT's multi-modal attention mechanism for fine-grained token-level interactions. We propose the In-context Multi-Modal Attention (ICMA) mechanism, which employs learnable task-oriented register tokens and boundary-aware positional embeddings to enable the model to effectively handle diverse tasks and distinguish between inputs in polyptych configurations. To address the data gap, we curated a 12K identity-consistent dataset with 8K real-world and 4K high-quality synthetic samples, avoiding the overly glossy, oversaturated look typical of synthetic data. IC-Custom supports various industrial applications, including try-on, image insertion, and creative IP customization. Extensive evaluations on our proposed ProductBench and the publicly available DreamBench demonstrate that IC-Custom significantly outperforms community workflows, closed-source models, and state-of-the-art open-source approaches. IC-Custom achieves about 73\% higher human preference across identity consistency, harmony, and text alignment metrics, while training only 0.4\% of the original model parameters. Project page: https://liyaowei-stu.github.io/project/IC_Custom
Adaptability of ASR Models on Low-Resource Language: A Comparative Study of Whisper and Wav2Vec-BERT on Bangla
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

In recent years, neural models trained on large multilingual text and speech datasets have shown great potential for supporting low-resource languages. This study investigates the performances of two state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models, OpenAI's Whisper (Small & Large-V2) and Facebook's Wav2Vec-BERT on Bangla, a low-resource language. We have conducted experiments using two publicly available datasets: Mozilla Common Voice-17 and OpenSLR to evaluate model performances. Through systematic fine-tuning and hyperparameter optimization, including learning rate, epochs, and model checkpoint selection, we have compared the models based on Word Error Rate (WER), Character Error Rate (CER), Training Time, and Computational Efficiency. The Wav2Vec-BERT model outperformed Whisper across all key evaluation metrics, demonstrated superior performance while requiring fewer computational resources, and offered valuable insights to develop robust speech recognition systems in low-resource linguistic settings.
CI-VID: A Coherent Interleaved Text-Video Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Text-to-video (T2V) generation has recently attracted considerable attention, resulting in the development of numerous high-quality datasets that have propelled progress in this area. However, existing public datasets are primarily composed of isolated text-video (T-V) pairs and thus fail to support the modeling of coherent multi-clip video sequences. To address this limitation, we introduce CI-VID, a dataset that moves beyond isolated text-to-video (T2V) generation toward text-and-video-to-video (TV2V) generation, enabling models to produce coherent, multi-scene video sequences. CI-VID contains over 340,000 samples, each featuring a coherent sequence of video clips with text captions that capture both the individual content of each clip and the transitions between them, enabling visually and textually grounded generation. To further validate the effectiveness of CI-VID, we design a comprehensive, multi-dimensional benchmark incorporating human evaluation, VLM-based assessment, and similarity-based metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained on CI-VID exhibit significant improvements in both accuracy and content consistency when generating video sequences. This facilitates the creation of story-driven content with smooth visual transitions and strong temporal coherence, underscoring the quality and practical utility of the CI-VID dataset We release the CI-VID dataset and the accompanying code for data construction and evaluation at: https://github.com/ymju-BAAI/CI-VID
Multiple Watchman Routes in Staircase Polygons
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2025
Year: 2025

We consider the watchman route problem for multiple watchmen in staircase polygons, which are rectilinear $x$- and $y$-monotone polygons. For two watchmen, we propose an algorithm to find an optimal solution that takes quadratic time, improving on the cubic time of a trivial solution. For $m \geq 3$ watchmen, we explain where this approach fails, and present an approximation algorithm for the min-max criterion with only an additive error.
How Well Does GPT-4o Understand Vision? Evaluating Multimodal Foundation Models on Standard Computer Vision Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Multimodal foundation models, such as GPT-4o, have recently made remarkable progress, but it is not clear where exactly these models stand in terms of understanding vision. In this paper, we benchmark the performance of popular multimodal foundation models (GPT-4o, o4-mini, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen2-VL, Llama 3.2) on standard computer vision tasks (semantic segmentation, object detection, image classification, depth and surface normal prediction) using established datasets (e.g., COCO, ImageNet and its variants, etc). The main challenges to performing this are: 1) most models are trained to output text and cannot natively express versatile domains, such as segments or 3D geometry, and 2) many leading models are proprietary and accessible only at an API level, i.e., there is no weight access to adapt them. We address these challenges by translating standard vision tasks into equivalent text-promptable and API-compatible tasks via prompt chaining to create a standardized benchmarking framework. We observe that 1) the models are not close to the state-of-the-art specialist models at any task. However, 2) they are respectable generalists; this is remarkable as they are presumably trained on primarily image-text-based tasks. 3) They perform semantic tasks notably better than geometric ones. 4) While the prompt-chaining techniques affect performance, better models exhibit less sensitivity to prompt variations. 5) GPT-4o performs the best among non-reasoning models, securing the top position in 4 out of 6 tasks, 6) reasoning models, e.g. o3, show improvements in geometric tasks, and 7) a preliminary analysis of models with native image generation, like the latest GPT-4o, shows they exhibit quirks like hallucinations and spatial misalignments.
Dynamic Strategy Adaptation in Multi-Agent Environments with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning abilities across mathematical, strategic, and linguistic tasks, yet little is known about how well they reason in dynamic, real-time, multi-agent scenarios, such as collaborative environments in which agents continuously adapt to each other's behavior, as in cooperative gameplay settings. In this paper, we bridge this gap by combining LLM-driven agents with strategic reasoning and real-time adaptation in cooperative, multi-agent environments grounded in game-theoretic principles such as belief consistency and Nash equilibrium. The proposed framework applies broadly to dynamic scenarios in which agents coordinate, communicate, and make decisions in response to continuously changing conditions. We provide real-time strategy refinement and adaptive feedback mechanisms that enable agents to dynamically adjust policies based on immediate contextual interactions, in contrast to previous efforts that evaluate LLM capabilities in static or turn-based settings. Empirical results show that our method achieves up to a 26\% improvement in return over PPO baselines in high-noise environments, while maintaining real-time latency under 1.05 milliseconds. Our approach improves collaboration efficiency, task completion rates, and flexibility, illustrating that game-theoretic guidance integrated with real-time feedback enhances LLM performance, ultimately fostering more resilient and flexible strategic multi-agent systems.
AIRES: Accelerating Out-of-Core GCNs via Algorithm-System Co-Design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are fundamental in various scientific applications, ranging from biomedical protein-protein interactions (PPI) to large-scale recommendation systems. An essential component for modeling graph structures in GCNs is sparse general matrix-matrix multiplication (SpGEMM). As the size of graph data continues to scale up, SpGEMMs are often conducted in an out-of-core fashion due to limited GPU memory space in resource-constrained systems. Albeit recent efforts that aim to alleviate the memory constraints of out-of-core SpGEMM through either GPU feature caching, hybrid CPU-GPU memory layout, or performing the computation in sparse format, current systems suffer from both high I/O latency and GPU under-utilization issues. In this paper, we first identify the problems of existing systems, where sparse format data alignment and memory allocation are the main performance bottlenecks, and propose AIRES, a novel algorithm-system co-design solution to accelerate out-of-core SpGEMM computation for GCNs. Specifically, from the algorithm angle, AIRES proposes to alleviate the data alignment issues on the block level for matrices in sparse formats and develops a tiling algorithm to facilitate row block-wise alignment. On the system level, AIRES employs a three-phase dynamic scheduling that features a dual-way data transfer strategy utilizing a tiered memory system: integrating GPU memory, GPU Direct Storage (GDS), and host memory to reduce I/O latency and improve throughput. Evaluations show that AIRES significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 1.8x lower latency in real-world graph processing benchmarks.
AI-Empowered Channel Generation for IoV Semantic Communications in Dynamic Conditions
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) transforms the transportation ecosystem promising pervasive connectivity and data-driven approaches. Deep learning and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) have the potential to significantly enhance the operation of applications within IoV by facilitating efficient decision-making and predictive capabilities, including intelligent navigation, vehicle safety monitoring, accident prevention, and intelligent traffic management. Nevertheless, efficiently transmitting and processing the massive volumes of data generated by the IoV in real-time remains a significant challenge, particularly in dynamic and unpredictable wireless channel conditions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a semantic communication framework based on channel perception to improve the accuracy and efficiency of data transmission. The semantic communication model extracts and compresses the information to be transmitted. In addition, the wireless channel is estimated by using a generative diffusion model, which is employed to predict the dynamic channel states, thereby improving the quality of IoV service. In dynamic scenarios, however, the channel estimation performance may be degraded when substantially new scenarios take place, which will adversely affect user experience. To mitigate this limitation, we employ a large model to fine-tune the channel generation model to enhance its adaptability for varying scenarios. The performance and reliability of the proposed framework are evaluated on the two public datasets.
New algorithms for girth and cycle detection
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

Let $G=(V,E)$ be an unweighted undirected graph with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges. Let $g$ be the girth of $G$, that is, the length of a shortest cycle in $G$. We present a randomized algorithm with a running time of $\tilde{O}\big(\ell \cdot n^{1 + \frac{1}{\ell - \varepsilon}}\big)$ that returns a cycle of length at most $ 2\ell \left\lceil \frac{g}{2} \right\rceil - 2 \left\lfloor \varepsilon \left\lceil \frac{g}{2} \right\rceil \right\rfloor, $ where $\ell \geq 2$ is an integer and $\varepsilon \in [0,1]$, for every graph with $g = polylog(n)$. Our algorithm generalizes an algorithm of Kadria \etal{} [SODA'22] that computes a cycle of length at most $4\left\lceil \frac{g}{2} \right\rceil - 2\left\lfloor \varepsilon \left\lceil \frac{g}{2} \right\rceil \right\rfloor $ in $\tilde{O}\big(n^{1 + \frac{1}{2 - \varepsilon}}\big)$ time. Kadria \etal{} presented also an algorithm that finds a cycle of length at most $ 2\ell \left\lceil \frac{g}{2} \right\rceil $ in $\tilde{O}\big(n^{1 + \frac{1}{\ell}}\big)$ time, where $\ell$ must be an integer. Our algorithm generalizes this algorithm, as well, by replacing the integer parameter $\ell$ in the running time exponent with a real-valued parameter $\ell - \varepsilon$, thereby offering greater flexibility in parameter selection and enabling a broader spectrum of combinations between running times and cycle lengths. We also show that for sparse graphs a better tradeoff is possible, by presenting an $\tilde{O}(\ell\cdot m^{1+1/(\ell-\varepsilon)})$ time randomized algorithm that returns a cycle of length at most $2\ell(\lfloor \frac{g-1}{2}\rfloor) - 2(\lfloor \varepsilon \lfloor \frac{g-1}{2}\rfloor \rfloor+1)$, where $\ell\geq 3$ is an integer and $\varepsilon\in [0,1)$, for every graph with $g=polylog(n)$. To obtain our algorithms we develop several techniques and introduce a formal definition of hybrid cycle detection algorithms. [...]
Evaluating the Promise and Pitfalls of LLMs in Hiring Decisions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The use of large language models (LLMs) in hiring promises to streamline candidate screening, but it also raises serious concerns regarding accuracy and algorithmic bias where sufficient safeguards are not in place. In this work, we benchmark several state-of-the-art foundational LLMs - including models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Deepseek, and compare them with our proprietary domain-specific hiring model (Match Score) for job candidate matching. We evaluate each model's predictive accuracy (ROC AUC, Precision-Recall AUC, F1-score) and fairness (impact ratio of cut-off analysis across declared gender, race, and intersectional subgroups). Our experiments on a dataset of roughly 10,000 real-world recent candidate-job pairs show that Match Score outperforms the general-purpose LLMs on accuracy (ROC AUC 0.85 vs 0.77) and achieves significantly more equitable outcomes across demographic groups. Notably, Match Score attains a minimum race-wise impact ratio of 0.957 (near-parity), versus 0.809 or lower for the best LLMs, (0.906 vs 0.773 for the intersectionals, respectively). We discuss why pretraining biases may cause LLMs with insufficient safeguards to propagate societal biases in hiring scenarios, whereas a bespoke supervised model can more effectively mitigate these biases. Our findings highlight the importance of domain-specific modeling and bias auditing when deploying AI in high-stakes domains such as hiring, and caution against relying on off-the-shelf LLMs for such tasks without extensive fairness safeguards. Furthermore, we show with empirical evidence that there shouldn't be a dichotomy between choosing accuracy and fairness in hiring: a well-designed algorithm can achieve both accuracy in hiring and fairness in outcomes.
Energy-Based Transformers are Scalable Learners and Thinkers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Inference-time computation techniques, analogous to human System 2 Thinking, have recently become popular for improving model performances. However, most existing approaches suffer from several limitations: they are modality-specific (e.g., working only in text), problem-specific (e.g., verifiable domains like math and coding), or require additional supervision/training on top of unsupervised pretraining (e.g., verifiers or verifiable rewards). In this paper, we ask the question "Is it possible to generalize these System 2 Thinking approaches, and develop models that learn to think solely from unsupervised learning?" Interestingly, we find the answer is yes, by learning to explicitly verify the compatibility between inputs and candidate-predictions, and then re-framing prediction problems as optimization with respect to this verifier. Specifically, we train Energy-Based Transformers (EBTs) -- a new class of Energy-Based Models (EBMs) -- to assign an energy value to every input and candidate-prediction pair, enabling predictions through gradient descent-based energy minimization until convergence. Across both discrete (text) and continuous (visual) modalities, we find EBTs scale faster than the dominant Transformer++ approach during training, achieving an up to 35% higher scaling rate with respect to data, batch size, parameters, FLOPs, and depth. During inference, EBTs improve performance with System 2 Thinking by 29% more than the Transformer++ on language tasks, and EBTs outperform Diffusion Transformers on image denoising while using fewer forward passes. Further, we find that EBTs achieve better results than existing models on most downstream tasks given the same or worse pretraining performance, suggesting that EBTs generalize better than existing approaches. Consequently, EBTs are a promising new paradigm for scaling both the learning and thinking capabilities of models.
A Multimodal Approach Combining Biometrics and Self-Report Instruments for Monitoring Stress in Programming: Methodological Insights
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

The study of well-being, stress and other human factors has traditionally relied on self-report instruments to assess key variables. However, concerns about potential biases in these instruments, even when thoroughly validated and standardised, have driven growing interest in alternatives in combining these measures with more objective methods, such as physiological measures. We aimed to (i) compare psychometric stress measures and biometric indicators and (ii) identify stress-related patterns in biometric data during software engineering tasks. We conducted an experiment where participants completed a pre-survey, then programmed two tasks wearing biometric sensors, answered brief post-surveys for each, and finally went through a short exit interview. Our results showed diverse outcomes; we found no stress in the psychometric instruments. Participants in the interviews reported a mix of feeling no stress and experiencing time pressure. Finally, the biometrics showed a significant difference only in EDA phasic peaks. We conclude that our chosen way of inducing stress by imposing a stricter time limit was insufficient. We offer methodological insights for future studies working with stress, biometrics, and psychometric instruments.