OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Implicit Deformable Medical Image Registration with Learnable Kernels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Deformable medical image registration is an essential task in computer-assisted interventions. This problem is particularly relevant to oncological treatments, where precise image alignment is necessary for tracking tumor growth, assessing treatment response, and ensuring accurate delivery of therapies. Recent AI methods can outperform traditional techniques in accuracy and speed, yet they often produce unreliable deformations that limit their clinical adoption. In this work, we address this challenge and introduce a novel implicit registration framework that can predict accurate and reliable deformations. Our insight is to reformulate image registration as a signal reconstruction problem: we learn a kernel function that can recover the dense displacement field from sparse keypoint correspondences. We integrate our method in a novel hierarchical architecture, and estimate the displacement field in a coarse-to-fine manner. Our formulation also allows for efficient refinement at test time, permitting clinicians to easily adjust registrations when needed. We validate our method on challenging intra-patient thoracic and abdominal zero-shot registration tasks, using public and internal datasets from the local University Hospital. Our method not only shows competitive accuracy to state-of-the-art approaches, but also bridges the generalization gap between implicit and explicit registration techniques. In particular, our method generates deformations that better preserve anatomical relationships and matches the performance of specialized commercial systems, underscoring its potential for clinical adoption.
Mitigating Data Poisoning Attacks to Local Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

The distributed nature of local differential privacy (LDP) invites data poisoning attacks and poses unforeseen threats to the underlying LDP-supported applications. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive mitigation framework for popular frequency estimation, which contains a suite of novel defenses, including malicious user detection, attack pattern recognition, and damaged utility recovery. In addition to existing attacks, we explore new adaptive adversarial activities for our mitigation design. For detection, we present a new method to precisely identify bogus reports and thus LDP aggregation can be performed over the ``clean'' data. When the attack behavior becomes stealthy and direct filtering out malicious users is difficult, we further propose a detection that can effectively recognize hidden adversarial patterns, thus facilitating the decision-making of service providers. These detection methods require no additional data and attack information and incur minimal computational cost. Our experiment demonstrates their excellent performance and substantial improvement over previous work in various settings. In addition, we conduct an empirical analysis of LDP post-processing for corrupted data recovery and propose a new post-processing method, through which we reveal new insights into protocol recommendations in practice and key design principles for future research.
HENT-SRT: Hierarchical Efficient Neural Transducer with Self-Distillation for Joint Speech Recognition and Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Neural transducers (NT) provide an effective framework for speech streaming, demonstrating strong performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the application of NT to speech translation (ST) remains challenging, as existing approaches struggle with word reordering and performance degradation when jointly modeling ASR and ST, resulting in a gap with attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) models. Existing NT-based ST approaches also suffer from high computational training costs. To address these issues, we propose HENT-SRT (Hierarchical Efficient Neural Transducer for Speech Recognition and Translation), a novel framework that factorizes ASR and translation tasks to better handle reordering. To ensure robust ST while preserving ASR performance, we use self-distillation with CTC consistency regularization. Moreover, we improve computational efficiency by incorporating best practices from ASR transducers, including a down-sampled hierarchical encoder, a stateless predictor, and a pruned transducer loss to reduce training complexity. Finally, we introduce a blank penalty during decoding, reducing deletions and improving translation quality. Our approach is evaluated on three conversational datasets Arabic, Spanish, and Mandarin achieving new state-of-the-art performance among NT models and substantially narrowing the gap with AED-based systems.
Fire360: A Benchmark for Robust Perception and Episodic Memory in Degraded 360-Degree Firefighting Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Modern AI systems struggle most in environments where reliability is critical - scenes with smoke, poor visibility, and structural deformation. Each year, tens of thousands of firefighters are injured on duty, often due to breakdowns in situational perception. We introduce Fire360, a benchmark for evaluating perception and reasoning in safety-critical firefighting scenarios. The dataset includes 228 360-degree videos from professional training sessions under diverse conditions (e.g., low light, thermal distortion), annotated with action segments, object locations, and degradation metadata. Fire360 supports five tasks: Visual Question Answering, Temporal Action Captioning, Object Localization, Safety-Critical Reasoning, and Transformed Object Retrieval (TOR). TOR tests whether models can match pristine exemplars to fire-damaged counterparts in unpaired scenes, evaluating transformation-invariant recognition. While human experts achieve 83.5% on TOR, models like GPT-4o lag significantly, exposing failures in reasoning under degradation. By releasing Fire360 and its evaluation suite, we aim to advance models that not only see, but also remember, reason, and act under uncertainty. The dataset is available at: https://uofi.box.com/v/fire360dataset.
Bregman Centroid Guided Cross-Entropy Method
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The Cross-Entropy Method (CEM) is a widely adopted trajectory optimizer in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), but its unimodal sampling strategy often leads to premature convergence in multimodal landscapes. In this work, we propose Bregman Centroid Guided CEM ($\mathcal{BC}$-EvoCEM), a lightweight enhancement to ensemble CEM that leverages $\textit{Bregman centroids}$ for principled information aggregation and diversity control. $\textbf{$\mathcal{BC}$-EvoCEM}$ computes a performance-weighted Bregman centroid across CEM workers and updates the least contributing ones by sampling within a trust region around the centroid. Leveraging the duality between Bregman divergences and exponential family distributions, we show that $\textbf{$\mathcal{BC}$-EvoCEM}$ integrates seamlessly into standard CEM pipelines with negligible overhead. Empirical results on synthetic benchmarks, a cluttered navigation task, and full MBRL pipelines demonstrate that $\textbf{$\mathcal{BC}$-EvoCEM}$ enhances both convergence and solution quality, providing a simple yet effective upgrade for CEM.
Is PMBOK Guide the Right Fit for AI? Re-evaluating Project Management in the Face of Artificial Intelligence Projects
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

This paper critically evaluates the applicability of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) Guide framework to Artificial Intelligence (AI) software projects, highlighting key limitations and proposing tailored adaptations. Unlike traditional projects, AI initiatives rely heavily on complex data, iterative experimentation, and specialized expertise while navigating significant ethical considerations. Our analysis identifies gaps in the PMBOK Guide, including its limited focus on data management, insufficient support for iterative development, and lack of guidance on ethical and multidisciplinary challenges. To address these deficiencies, we recommend integrating data lifecycle management, adopting iterative and AI project management frameworks, and embedding ethical considerations within project planning and execution. Additionally, we explore alternative approaches that better align with AI's dynamic and exploratory nature. We aim to enhance project management practices for AI software projects by bridging these gaps.
Analyzing Contact Patterns in Public Transportation Systems for Opportunistic Communication Services
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

Vehicle mobility has a significant impact on wireless communication between vehicles (buses) in Public Transportation Systems (PTS). Nevertheless, the transportation literature does not provide satisfactory models for bus movements because they are influenced by a variety of factors (itineraries, timetables, etc.). Custom-made mobility models that take these issues into account require a great deal of effort and may render simulations unfeasible. This article considers a tool (EMMS) that automatically inserts PTS information into a mobility simulator in order to undertake a complete statistical analysis of vehicular density, trip duration, and vehicle-to-vehicle interaction. In light of opportunistic communication services, this analysis is of the utmost importance.
VLCD: Vision-Language Contrastive Distillation for Accurate and Efficient Automatic Placenta Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Pathological examination of the placenta is an effective method for detecting and mitigating health risks associated with childbirth. Recent advancements in AI have enabled the use of photographs of the placenta and pathology reports for detecting and classifying signs of childbirth-related pathologies. However, existing automated methods are computationally extensive, which limits their deployability. We propose two modifications to vision-language contrastive learning (VLC) frameworks to enhance their accuracy and efficiency: (1) text-anchored vision-language contrastive knowledge distillation (VLCD)-a new knowledge distillation strategy for medical VLC pretraining, and (2) unsupervised predistillation using a large natural images dataset for improved initialization. Our approach distills efficient neural networks that match or surpass the teacher model in performance while achieving model compression and acceleration. Our results showcase the value of unsupervised predistillation in improving the performance and robustness of our approach, specifically for lower-quality images. VLCD serves as an effective way to improve the efficiency and deployability of medical VLC approaches, making AI-based healthcare solutions more accessible, especially in resource-constrained environments.
What Makes LLMs Effective Sequential Recommenders? A Study on Preference Intensity and Temporal Context
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

Sequential recommendation systems aspire to profile users by interpreting their interaction histories, echoing how humans make decisions by weighing experience, relative preference strength, and situational relevance. Yet, existing large language model (LLM)-based recommenders often fall short of mimicking the flexible, context-aware decision strategies humans exhibit, neglecting the structured, dynamic, and context-aware mechanisms fundamental to human behaviors. To bridge this gap, we propose RecPO, a preference optimization framework that models structured feedback and contextual delay to emulate human-like prioritization in sequential recommendation. RecPO exploits adaptive reward margins based on inferred preference hierarchies and temporal signals, enabling the model to favor immediately relevant items and to distinguish between varying degrees of preference and aversion. Extensive experiments across five real-world datasets demonstrate that RecPO not only yields performance gains over state-of-the-art baselines, but also mirrors key characteristics of human decision-making: favoring timely satisfaction, maintaining coherent preferences, and exercising discernment under shifting contexts.
Composable Building Blocks for Controllable and Transparent Interactive AI Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

While the increased integration of AI technologies into interactive systems enables them to solve an equally increasing number of tasks, the black box problem of AI models continues to spread throughout the interactive system as a whole. Explainable AI (XAI) techniques can make AI models more accessible by employing post-hoc methods or transitioning to inherently interpretable models. While this makes individual AI models clearer, the overarching system architecture remains opaque. To this end, we propose an approach to represent interactive systems as sequences of structural building blocks, such as AI models and control mechanisms grounded in the literature. These can then be explained through accompanying visual building blocks, such as XAI techniques. The flow and APIs of the structural building blocks form an explicit overview of the system. This serves as a communication basis for both humans and automated agents like LLMs, aligning human and machine interpretability of AI models. We discuss a selection of building blocks and concretize our flow-based approach in an architecture and accompanying prototype interactive system.
Why Gradients Rapidly Increase Near the End of Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

During long-duration Large Language Model (LLM) training runs the gradient norm increases rapidly near the end of training. In this short note, we show that this increase is due to an unintended interaction between weight decay, normalization layers, and the learning rate schedule. We propose a simple correction that fixes this behavior while also resulting in lower loss values throughout training.
Entity Image and Mixed-Modal Image Retrieval Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Despite advances in multimodal learning, challenging benchmarks for mixed-modal image retrieval that combines visual and textual information are lacking. This paper introduces a novel benchmark to rigorously evaluate image retrieval that demands deep cross-modal contextual understanding. We present two new datasets: the Entity Image Dataset (EI), providing canonical images for Wikipedia entities, and the Mixed-Modal Image Retrieval Dataset (MMIR), derived from the WIT dataset. The MMIR benchmark features two challenging query types requiring models to ground textual descriptions in the context of provided visual entities: single entity-image queries (one entity image with descriptive text) and multi-entity-image queries (multiple entity images with relational text). We empirically validate the benchmark's utility as both a training corpus and an evaluation set for mixed-modal retrieval. The quality of both datasets is further affirmed through crowd-sourced human annotations. The datasets are accessible through the GitHub page: https://github.com/google-research-datasets/wit-retrieval.
Finite State Dimension and The Davenport Erdős Theorem
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

A 1952 result of Davenport and Erdős states that if $p$ is an integer-valued polynomial, then the real number $0.p(1)p(2)p(3)\dots$ is Borel normal in base ten. A later result of Nakai and Shiokawa extends this result to polynomials with arbitrary real coefficients and all bases $b\geq 2$. It is well-known that finite-state dimension, a finite-state effectivization of the classical Hausdorff dimension, characterizes the Borel normal sequences as precisely those sequences of finite-state dimension 1. For an infinite set of natural numbers, and a base $b\geq 2$, the base $b$ Copeland-Erdős sequence of $A$, $CE_b(A)$, is the infinite sequence obtained by concatenating the base $b$ expressions of the numbers in $A$ in increasing order. In this work we investigate the possible relationships between the finite-state dimensions of $CE_b(A)$ and $CE_b(p(A))$ where $p$ is a polynomial. We show that, if the polynomial is permitted to have arbitrary real coefficients, then for any $s,s^\prime$ in the unit interval, there is a set $A$ of natural numbers and a linear polynomial $p$ so that the finite-state dimensions of $CE_b(A)$ and $CE_b(p(A))$ are $s$ and $s^\prime$ respectively. We also demonstrate that linear polynomials with rational coefficients do not change the finite-state dimension of any Copeland-Erdős sequence, but there exist polynomials with rational coefficients of every larger integer degree that change the finite-state dimension of some sequence. To prove our main results, we develop techniques involving taking concatenated prefixes of a sequence as well as inserting a density zero set of strings into a sequence that may be of independent interest.
PandasBench: A Benchmark for the Pandas API
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2025
Year: 2025

The Pandas API has been central to the success of pandas and its alternatives. Despite its importance, there is no benchmark for it, and we argue that we cannot repurpose existing benchmarks (from other domains) for the Pandas API. In this paper, we introduce requirements that are necessary for a Pandas API enchmark, and present the first benchmark that fulfills them: PandasBench. We argue that it should evaluate the real-world coverage of a technique. Yet, real-world coverage is not sufficient for a useful benchmark, and so we also: cleaned it from irrelevant code, adapted it for benchmark usage, and introduced input scaling. We claim that uniform scaling used in other benchmarks (e.g., TPC-H) is too coarse-grained for PandasBench, and use a non-uniform scaling scheme. PandasBench is the largest Pandas API benchmark to date, with 102 notebooks and 3,721 cells. We used PandasBench to evaluate Modin, Dask, Koalas, and Dias. This is the largest-scale evaluation of all these techniques to date. Prior works report significant speedups using constrained benchmarks, but we show that on a larger benchmark with real-world code, the most notebooks that got a speedup were 8/102 (~8%) for Modin, and 0 for both Koalas and Dask. Dias showed speedups in up to 55 notebooks (~54%), but it rewrites code incorrectly in certain cases, which had not been observed in prior work. Second, we identified many failures: Modin runs only 72/102 (~70%) notebooks, Dask 4 (~4%), Koalas 10 (~10%), and Dias 97 (95%).
Auto-Labeling Data for Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Great labels make great models. However, traditional labeling approaches for tasks like object detection have substantial costs at scale. Furthermore, alternatives to fully-supervised object detection either lose functionality or require larger models with prohibitive computational costs for inference at scale. To that end, this paper addresses the problem of training standard object detection models without any ground truth labels. Instead, we configure previously-trained vision-language foundation models to generate application-specific pseudo "ground truth" labels. These auto-generated labels directly integrate with existing model training frameworks, and we subsequently train lightweight detection models that are computationally efficient. In this way, we avoid the costs of traditional labeling, leverage the knowledge of vision-language models, and keep the efficiency of lightweight models for practical application. We perform exhaustive experiments across multiple labeling configurations, downstream inference models, and datasets to establish best practices and set an extensive auto-labeling benchmark. From our results, we find that our approach is a viable alternative to standard labeling in that it maintains competitive performance on multiple datasets and substantially reduces labeling time and costs.
Dynamic real-time multi-UAV cooperative mission planning method under multiple constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

As UAV popularity soars, so does the mission planning associated with it. The classical approaches suffer from the triple problems of decoupled of task assignment and path planning, poor real-time performance and limited adaptability. Aiming at these challenges, this paper proposes a dynamic real-time multi-UAV collaborative mission planning algorithm based on Dubins paths under a distributed formation structure. Dubins path with multiple advantages bridges the gap between task assignment and path planning, leading to a coupled solution for mission planning. Then, a series of acceleration techniques, task clustering preprocessing, highly efficient distance cost functions, low-complexity and less iterative task allocation strategies, are employed to guarantee the real-time performance of the algorithms. To cope with different emergencies and their simultaneous extremes, real-time planning of emerging tasks and mission replanning due to the reduction of available UAVs are appropriately handled. Finally, the developed algorithm is comprehensively exemplified and studied through simulations, highlighting that the proposed method only sacrifices 9.57% of the path length, while achieving a speed improvement of 4-5 orders of magnitude over the simulated annealing method, with a single mission planning of about 0.0003s.
SFBD Flow: A Continuous-Optimization Framework for Training Diffusion Models with Noisy Samples
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Diffusion models achieve strong generative performance but often rely on large datasets that may include sensitive content. This challenge is compounded by the models' tendency to memorize training data, raising privacy concerns. SFBD (Lu et al., 2025) addresses this by training on corrupted data and using limited clean samples to capture local structure and improve convergence. However, its iterative denoising and fine-tuning loop requires manual coordination, making it burdensome to implement. We reinterpret SFBD as an alternating projection algorithm and introduce a continuous variant, SFBD flow, that removes the need for alternating steps. We further show its connection to consistency constraint-based methods, and demonstrate that its practical instantiation, Online SFBD, consistently outperforms strong baselines across benchmarks.
AnswerCarefully: A Dataset for Improving the Safety of Japanese LLM Output
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper we present AnswerCarefully, a dataset for promoting the safety and appropriateness of Japanese LLM outputs. The dataset consists of 1,800 pairs of questions and reference answers, where the questions require special attention in answering. It covers a wide range of risk categories established in prior English-language datasets, but the data samples are original in that they are manually created to reflect the socio-cultural context of LLM usage in Japan. We show that using this dataset for instruction to fine-tune a Japanese LLM led to improved output safety without compromising the utility of general responses. We also report the results of a safety evaluation of 12 Japanese LLMs using this dataset as a benchmark. Finally, we describe the latest update on the dataset which provides English translations and annotations of the questions, aimed at facilitating the derivation of similar datasets in different languages and regions.