OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Prevalence and Impacts of Image-Based Sexual Abuse Victimization: A Multinational Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) refers to the nonconsensual creating, taking, or sharing of intimate images, including threats to share intimate images. Despite the significant harms of IBSA, there is limited data on its prevalence and how it affects different identity or demographic groups. This study examines prevalence of, impacts from, and responses to IBSA via a survey with over 16,000 adults in 10 countries. More than 1 in 5 (22.6%) respondents reported an experience of IBSA. Victimization rates were higher among LGBTQ+ and younger respondents. Although victimized at similar rates, women reported greater harms and negative impacts from IBSA than men. Nearly a third (30.9%) of victim-survivors did not report or disclose their experience to anyone. We provide large-scale, granular, baseline data on prevalence in a diverse set of countries to aid in the development of effective interventions that address the experiences and intersectional identities of victim-survivors.
Wanda++: Pruning Large Language Models via Regional Gradients
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) pruning seeks to remove unimportant weights for inference speedup with minimal accuracy impact. However, existing methods often suffer from accuracy degradation without full-model sparsity-aware fine-tuning. This paper presents Wanda++, a novel pruning framework that outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by utilizing decoder-block-level \textbf{regional} gradients. Specifically, Wanda++ improves the pruning score with regional gradients for the first time and proposes an efficient regional optimization method to minimize pruning-induced output discrepancies between the dense and sparse decoder output. Notably, Wanda++ improves perplexity by up to 32\% over Wanda in the language modeling task and generalizes effectively to downstream tasks. Moreover, despite updating weights with regional optimization, Wanda++ remains orthogonal to sparsity-aware fine-tuning, further reducing perplexity with LoRA in great extend. Our approach is lightweight, pruning a 7B LLaMA model in under 10 minutes on a single H100 GPU.
HieroLM: Egyptian Hieroglyph Recovery with Next Word Prediction Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Egyptian hieroglyphs are found on numerous ancient Egyptian artifacts, but it is common that they are blurry or even missing due to erosion. Existing efforts to restore blurry hieroglyphs adopt computer vision techniques such as CNNs and model hieroglyph recovery as an image classification task, which suffers from two major limitations: (i) They cannot handle severely damaged or completely missing hieroglyphs. (ii) They make predictions based on a single hieroglyph without considering contextual and grammatical information. This paper proposes a novel approach to model hieroglyph recovery as a next word prediction task and use language models to address it. We compare the performance of different SOTA language models and choose LSTM as the architecture of our HieroLM due to the strong local affinity of semantics in Egyptian hieroglyph texts. Experiments show that HieroLM achieves over 44% accuracy and maintains notable performance on multi-shot predictions and scarce data, which makes it a pragmatic tool to assist scholars in inferring missing hieroglyphs. It can also complement CV-based models to significantly reduce perplexity in recognizing blurry hieroglyphs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Rick-Cai/HieroLM/.
Dynamic Indexing Through Learned Indices with Worst-case Guarantees
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2025
Year: 2025

Indexing data is a fundamental problem in computer science. Recently, various papers apply machine learning to this problem. For a fixed integer $\varepsilon$, a \emph{learned index} is a function $h : \mathcal{U} \rightarrow [0, n]$ where $\forall q \in \mathcal{U}$, $h(q) \in [\text{rank}(q) - \varepsilon, \text{rank}(q) + \varepsilon]$. These works use machine learning to compute $h$. Then, they store $S$ in a sorted array $A$ and access $A[\lfloor h(q) \rfloor]$ to answer queries in $O(k + \varepsilon + \log |h|)$ time. Here, $k$ denotes the output size and $|h|$ the complexity of $h$. Ferragina and Vinciguerra (VLDB 2020) observe that creating a learned index is a geometric problem. They define the PGM index by restricting $h$ to a piecewise linear function and show a linear-time algorithm to compute a PGM index of approximate minimum complexity. Since indexing queries are decomposable, the PGM index may be made dynamic through the logarithmic method. When allowing deletions, range query times deteriorate to worst-case $O(N + \sum\limits_i^{\lceil \log n \rceil } (\varepsilon + \log |h_i|))$ time (where $N$ is the largest size of $S$ seen so far). This paper offers a combination of theoretical insights and experiments as we apply techniques from computational geometry to dynamically maintain an approximately minimum-complexity learned index $h : \mathcal{U} \rightarrow [0, n]$ with $O(\log^2 n)$ update time. We also prove that if we restrict $h$ to lie in a specific subclass of piecewise-linear functions, then we can combine $h$ and hash maps to support queries in $O(k + \varepsilon + \log |h|)$ time (at the cost of increasing $|h|$). We implement our algorithm and compare it to the existing implementation. Our empirical analysis shows that our solution supports more efficient range queries in the special case where the update sequence contains many deletions.
Continual Pre-training of MoEs: How robust is your router?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Sparsely-activated Mixture of Experts (MoE) transformers are promising architectures for foundation models. Compared to dense transformers that require the same amount of floating-point operations (FLOPs) per forward pass, MoEs benefit from improved sample efficiency at training time and achieve much stronger performance. Many closed-source and open-source frontier language models have thus adopted an MoE architecture. Naturally, practitioners will want to extend the capabilities of these models with large amounts of newly collected data without completely re-training them. Prior work has shown that a simple combination of replay, learning rate re-warming, and re-decaying can enable the continual pre-training (CPT) of dense decoder-only transformers with minimal performance degradation compared to full re-training. In the case of decoder-only MoE transformers, however, it is unclear how the routing algorithm will impact continual pre-training performance: 1) do the MoE transformer's routers exacerbate forgetting relative to a dense model?; 2) do the routers maintain a balanced load on previous distributions after CPT?; 3) are the same strategies applied to dense models sufficient to continually pre-train MoE LLMs? In what follows, we conduct a large-scale study training a 500M parameter dense transformer and four 500M-active/2B-total parameter MoE transformers. Each model is trained for 600B tokens. Our results establish a surprising robustness to distribution shifts for MoEs using both Sinkhorn-Balanced and Z-and-Aux-loss-balanced routing algorithms, even in MoEs continually pre-trained without replay. Moreover, we show that MoE LLMs maintain their sample efficiency (relative to a FLOP-matched dense model) during CPT and that they can match the performance of a fully re-trained MoE at a fraction of the cost.
Dynamic-KGQA: A Scalable Framework for Generating Adaptive Question Answering Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

As question answering (QA) systems advance alongside the rapid evolution of foundation models, the need for robust, adaptable, and large-scale evaluation benchmarks becomes increasingly critical. Traditional QA benchmarks are often static and publicly available, making them susceptible to data contamination and memorization by large language models (LLMs). Consequently, static benchmarks may overestimate model generalization and hinder a reliable assessment of real-world performance. In this work, we introduce Dynamic-KGQA, a scalable framework for generating adaptive QA datasets from knowledge graphs (KGs), designed to mitigate memorization risks while maintaining statistical consistency across iterations. Unlike fixed benchmarks, Dynamic-KGQA generates a new dataset variant on every run while preserving the underlying distribution, enabling fair and reproducible evaluations. Furthermore, our framework provides fine-grained control over dataset characteristics, supporting domain-specific and topic-focused QA dataset generation. Additionally, Dynamic-KGQA produces compact, semantically coherent subgraphs that facilitate both training and evaluation of KGQA models, enhancing their ability to leverage structured knowledge effectively. To align with existing evaluation protocols, we also provide static large-scale train/test/validation splits, ensuring comparability with prior methods. By introducing a dynamic, customizable benchmarking paradigm, Dynamic-KGQA enables a more rigorous and adaptable evaluation of QA systems.
Quasi-linear time decoding of RS and AG codes for burst errors up to the Singleton bound
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

Despite of tremendous research on decoding Reed-Solomon (RS) and algebraic geometry (AG) codes under the random and adversary substitution error models, few studies have explored these codes under the burst substitution error model. Burst errors are prevalent in many communication channels, such as wireless networks, magnetic recording systems, and flash memory. Compared to random and adversarial errors, burst errors often allow for the design of more efficient decoding algorithms. However, achieving both an optimal decoding radius and quasi-linear time complexity for burst error correction remains a significant challenge. The goal of this paper is to design (both list and probabilistic unique) decoding algorithms for RS and AG codes that achieve the Singleton bound for decoding radius while maintaining quasi-linear time complexity. Our idea is to build a one-to-one correspondence between AG codes (including RS codes) and interleaved RS codes with shorter code lengths (or even constant lengths). By decoding the interleaved RS codes with burst errors, we derive efficient decoding algorithms for RS and AG codes. For decoding interleaved RS codes with shorter code lengths, we can employ either the naive methods or existing algorithms. This one-to-one correspondence is constructed using the generalized fast Fourier transform (G-FFT) proposed by Li and Xing (SODA 2024). The G-FFT generalizes the divide-and-conquer technique from polynomials to algebraic function fields. More precisely speaking, assume that our AG code is defined over a function field $E$ which has a sequence of subfields $\mathbb{F}_q(x)=E_r\subseteq E_{r-1}\subseteq \cdots\subset E_1\subseteq E_0=E$ such that $E_{i-1}/E_i$ are Galois extensions for $1\le i\le r$. Then the AG code based on $E$ can be transformed into an interleaved RS code over the rational function field $\mathbb{F}_q(x)$.
Perceiving, Reasoning, Adapting: A Dual-Layer Framework for VLM-Guided Precision Robotic Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable potential in robotic manipulation, yet challenges persist in executing complex fine manipulation tasks with high speed and precision. While excelling at high-level planning, existing VLM methods struggle to guide robots through precise sequences of fine motor actions. To address this limitation, we introduce a progressive VLM planning algorithm that empowers robots to perform fast, precise, and error-correctable fine manipulation. Our method decomposes complex tasks into sub-actions and maintains three key data structures: task memory structure, 2D topology graphs, and 3D spatial networks, achieving high-precision spatial-semantic fusion. These three components collectively accumulate and store critical information throughout task execution, providing rich context for our task-oriented VLM interaction mechanism. This enables VLMs to dynamically adjust guidance based on real-time feedback, generating precise action plans and facilitating step-wise error correction. Experimental validation on complex assembly tasks demonstrates that our algorithm effectively guides robots to rapidly and precisely accomplish fine manipulation in challenging scenarios, significantly advancing robot intelligence for precision tasks.
Partial Distribution Alignment via Adaptive Optimal Transport
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

To remedy the drawbacks of full-mass or fixed-mass constraints in classical optimal transport, we propose adaptive optimal transport which is distinctive from the classical optimal transport in its ability of adaptive-mass preserving. It aims to answer the mathematical problem of how to transport the probability mass adaptively between probability distributions, which is a fundamental topic in various areas of artificial intelligence. Adaptive optimal transport is able to transfer mass adaptively in the light of the intrinsic structure of the problem itself. The theoretical results shed light on the adaptive mechanism of mass transportation. Furthermore, we instantiate the adaptive optimal transport in machine learning application to align source and target distributions partially and adaptively by respecting the ubiquity of noises, outliers, and distribution shifts in the data. The experiment results on the domain adaptation benchmarks show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Visual Cues of Gender and Race are Associated with Stereotyping in Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Current research on bias in Vision Language Models (VLMs) has important limitations: it is focused exclusively on trait associations while ignoring other forms of stereotyping, it examines specific contexts where biases are expected to appear, and it conceptualizes social categories like race and gender as binary, ignoring the multifaceted nature of these identities. Using standardized facial images that vary in prototypicality, we test four VLMs for both trait associations and homogeneity bias in open-ended contexts. We find that VLMs consistently generate more uniform stories for women compared to men, with people who are more gender prototypical in appearance being represented more uniformly. By contrast, VLMs represent White Americans more uniformly than Black Americans. Unlike with gender prototypicality, race prototypicality was not related to stronger uniformity. In terms of trait associations, we find limited evidence of stereotyping-Black Americans were consistently linked with basketball across all models, while other racial associations (i.e., art, healthcare, appearance) varied by specific VLM. These findings demonstrate that VLM stereotyping manifests in ways that go beyond simple group membership, suggesting that conventional bias mitigation strategies may be insufficient to address VLM stereotyping and that homogeneity bias persists even when trait associations are less apparent in model outputs.
SMILENet: Unleashing Extra-Large Capacity Image Steganography via a Synergistic Mosaic InvertibLE Hiding Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Existing image steganography methods face fundamental limitations in hiding capacity (typically $1\sim7$ images) due to severe information interference and uncoordinated capacity-distortion trade-off. We propose SMILENet, a novel synergistic framework that achieves 25 image hiding through three key innovations: (i) A synergistic network architecture coordinates reversible and non-reversible operations to efficiently exploit information redundancy in both secret and cover images. The reversible Invertible Cover-Driven Mosaic (ICDM) module and Invertible Mosaic Secret Embedding (IMSE) module establish cover-guided mosaic transformations and representation embedding with mathematically guaranteed invertibility for distortion-free embedding. The non-reversible Secret Information Selection (SIS) module and Secret Detail Enhancement (SDE) module implement learnable feature modulation for critical information selection and enhancement. (ii) A unified training strategy that coordinates complementary modules to achieve 3.0x higher capacity than existing methods with superior visual quality. (iii) Last but not least, we introduce a new metric to model Capacity-Distortion Trade-off for evaluating the image steganography algorithms that jointly considers hiding capacity and distortion, and provides a unified evaluation approach for accessing results with different number of secret image. Extensive experiments on DIV2K, Paris StreetView and ImageNet1K show that SMILENet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of hiding capacity, recovery quality as well as security against steganalysis methods.
R1-Zero's "Aha Moment" in Visual Reasoning on a 2B Non-SFT Model
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Recently DeepSeek R1 demonstrated how reinforcement learning with simple rule-based incentives can enable autonomous development of complex reasoning in large language models, characterized by the "aha moment", in which the model manifest self-reflection and increased response length during training. However, attempts to extend this success to multimodal reasoning often failed to reproduce these key characteristics. In this report, we present the first successful replication of these emergent characteristics for multimodal reasoning on only a non-SFT 2B model. Starting with Qwen2-VL-2B and applying reinforcement learning directly on the SAT dataset, our model achieves 59.47% accuracy on CVBench, outperforming the base model by approximately ~30% and exceeding both SFT setting by ~2%. In addition, we share our failed attempts and insights in attempting to achieve R1-like reasoning using RL with instruct models. aiming to shed light on the challenges involved. Our key observations include: (1) applying RL on instruct model often results in trivial reasoning trajectories, and (2) naive length reward are ineffective in eliciting reasoning capabilities. The project code is available at https://github.com/turningpoint-ai/VisualThinker-R1-Zero
Partially Supervised Unpaired Multi-Modal Learning for Label-Efficient Medical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Unpaired Multi-Modal Learning (UMML) which leverages unpaired multi-modal data to boost model performance on each individual modality has attracted a lot of research interests in medical image analysis. However, existing UMML methods require multi-modal datasets to be fully labeled, which incurs tremendous annotation cost. In this paper, we investigate the use of partially labeled data for label-efficient unpaired multi-modal learning, which can reduce the annotation cost by up to one half. We term the new learning paradigm as Partially Supervised Unpaired Multi-Modal Learning (PSUMML) and propose a novel Decomposed partial class adaptation with snapshot Ensembled Self-Training (DEST) framework for it. Specifically, our framework consists of a compact segmentation network with modality specific normalization layers for learning with partially labeled unpaired multi-modal data. The key challenge in PSUMML lies in the complex partial class distribution discrepancy due to partial class annotation, which hinders effective knowledge transfer across modalities. We theoretically analyze this phenomenon with a decomposition theorem and propose a decomposed partial class adaptation technique to precisely align the partially labeled classes across modalities to reduce the distribution discrepancy. We further propose a snapshot ensembled self-training technique to leverage the valuable snapshot models during training to assign pseudo-labels to partially labeled pixels for self-training to boost model performance. We perform extensive experiments under different scenarios of PSUMML for two medical image segmentation tasks, namely cardiac substructure segmentation and abdominal multi-organ segmentation. Our framework outperforms existing methods significantly.
Deep Muscle EMG construction using A Physics-Integrated Deep Learning approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Electromyography (EMG)--based computational musculoskeletal modeling is a non-invasive method for studying musculotendon function, human movement, and neuromuscular control, providing estimates of internal variables like muscle forces and joint torques. However, EMG signals from deeper muscles are often challenging to measure by placing the surface EMG electrodes and unfeasible to measure directly using invasive methods. The restriction to the access of EMG data from deeper muscles poses a considerable obstacle to the broad adoption of EMG-driven modeling techniques. A strategic alternative is to use an estimation algorithm to approximate the missing EMG signals from deeper muscle. A similar strategy is used in physics-informed deep learning, where the features of physical systems are learned without labeled data. In this work, we propose a hybrid deep learning algorithm, namely the neural musculoskeletal model (NMM), that integrates physics-informed and data-driven deep learning to approximate the EMG signals from the deeper muscles. While data-driven modeling is used to predict the missing EMG signals, physics-based modeling engraves the subject-specific information into the predictions. Experimental verifications on five test subjects are carried out to investigate the performance of the proposed hybrid framework. The proposed NMM is validated against the joint torque computed from 'OpenSim' software. The predicted deep EMG signals are also compared against the state-of-the-art muscle synergy extrapolation (MSE) approach, where the proposed NMM completely outperforms the existing MSE framework by a significant margin.
Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS: A Robust Decision-Making Framework for Robotic Manipulation in High Uncertainty Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has emerged as a powerful tool for decision-making in robotics, enabling efficient exploration of large search spaces. However, traditional MCTS methods struggle in environments characterized by high uncertainty and noisy data due to their reliance on final-step reward evaluation. The lack of intermediate feedback during search often results in suboptimal decision-making and computational inefficiencies. This paper introduces Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS, a novel framework that enhances MCTS by incorporating intermediate reward shaping. The core of our approach is the Rewarding Center, which refines search trajectories by dynamically assigning partial rewards using rule-based validation, heuristic guidance, and neural estimation. By integrating these mechanisms, our method enables real-time optimization of search paths, mitigating the effects of error propagation. We evaluate Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS in robotic manipulation tasks under high uncertainty, demonstrating consistent improvements in decision accuracy. Compared to baseline methods, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and Vanilla ReST-MCTS, our framework achieves a 2-4% accuracy improvement while maintaining computational feasibility. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of intermediate feedback in search refinement, particularly in pruning incorrect decision paths early. Furthermore, robustness tests show that our method retains high performance across varying levels of uncertainty.