OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Simple and Optimal Algorithms for Heavy Hitters and Frequency Moments in Distributed Models
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

We consider the problems of distributed heavy hitters and frequency moments in both the coordinator model and the distributed tracking model (also known as the distributed functional monitoring model). We present simple and optimal (up to logarithmic factors) algorithms for $\ell_p$ heavy hitters and $F_p$ estimation ($p \geq 2$) in these distributed models. For $\ell_p$ heavy hitters in the coordinator model, our algorithm requires only one round and uses $\tilde{O}(k^{p-1}/\eps^p)$ bits of communication. For $p > 2$, this is the first near-optimal result. By combining our algorithm with the standard recursive sketching technique, we obtain a near-optimal two-round algorithm for $F_p$ in the coordinator model, matching a significant result from recent work by Esfandiari et al.\ (STOC 2024). Our algorithm and analysis are much simpler and have better costs with respect to logarithmic factors. Furthermore, our technique provides a one-round algorithm for $F_p$, which is a significant improvement over a result of Woodruff and Zhang (STOC 2012). Thanks to the simplicity of our heavy hitter algorithms, we manage to adapt them to the distributed tracking model with only a $\polylog(n)$ increase in communication. For $\ell_p$ heavy hitters, our algorithm has a communication cost of $\tilde{O}(k^{p-1}/\eps^p)$, representing the first near-optimal algorithm for all $p \geq 2$. By applying the recursive sketching technique, we also provide the first near-optimal algorithm for $F_p$ in the distributed tracking model, with a communication cost of $\tilde{O}(k^{p-1}/\eps^2)$ for all $p \geq 2$. Even for $F_2$, our result improves upon the bounds established by Cormode, Muthukrishnan, and Yi (SODA 2008) and Woodruff and Zhang (STOC 2012), nearly matching the existing lower bound for the first time.
Swarm Intelligence Optimization of Multi-RIS Aided MmWave Beamspace MIMO
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

We investigate the performance of a multiple reconfigurable intelligence surface (RIS)-aided millimeter wave (mmWave) beamspace multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with multiple users (UEs). We focus on a challenging scenario in which the direct links between the base station (BS) and all UEs are blocked, and communication is facilitated only via RISs. The maximum ratio transmission (MRT) is utilized for data precoding, while a low-complexity algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is designed to jointly perform beam selection, power allocation, and RIS profile configuration. The proposed optimization approach demonstrates positive trade-offs between the complexity (in terms of running time) and the achievable sum rate. In addition, our results demonstrate that due to the sparsity of beamspace channels, increasing the number of unit cells (UCs) at RISs can lead to higher achievable rates than activating a larger number of beams at the MIMO BS.
RA-Touch: Retrieval-Augmented Touch Understanding with Enriched Visual Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Visuo-tactile perception aims to understand an object's tactile properties, such as texture, softness, and rigidity. However, the field remains underexplored because collecting tactile data is costly and labor-intensive. We observe that visually distinct objects can exhibit similar surface textures or material properties. For example, a leather sofa and a leather jacket have different appearances but share similar tactile properties. This implies that tactile understanding can be guided by material cues in visual data, even without direct tactile supervision. In this paper, we introduce RA-Touch, a retrieval-augmented framework that improves visuo-tactile perception by leveraging visual data enriched with tactile semantics. We carefully recaption a large-scale visual dataset with tactile-focused descriptions, enabling the model to access tactile semantics typically absent from conventional visual datasets. A key challenge remains in effectively utilizing these tactile-aware external descriptions. RA-Touch addresses this by retrieving visual-textual representations aligned with tactile inputs and integrating them to focus on relevant textural and material properties. By outperforming prior methods on the TVL benchmark, our method demonstrates the potential of retrieval-based visual reuse for tactile understanding. Code is available at https://aim-skku.github.io/RA-Touch
Heterogeneous Memory Pool Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2025
Year: 2025

We present a lightweight tool for the analysis and tuning of application data placement in systems with heterogeneous memory pools. The tool allows non-intrusively identifying, analyzing, and controlling the placement of individual allocations of the application. We use the tool to analyze a set of benchmarks running on the Intel Sapphire Rapids platform with both HBM and DDR memory. The paper also contains an analysis of the performance of both memory subsystems in terms of read/write bandwidth and latency. The key part of the analysis is to focus on performance if both subsystems are used together. We show that only about 60% to 75% of the data must be placed in HBM memory to achieve 90% of the potential performance of the platform on those benchmarks.
Scaling Law for Quantization-Aware Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) demand substantial computational and memory resources, creating deployment challenges. Quantization-aware training (QAT) addresses these challenges by reducing model precision while maintaining performance. However, the scaling behavior of QAT, especially at 4-bit precision (W4A4), is not well understood. Existing QAT scaling laws often ignore key factors such as the number of training tokens and quantization granularity, which limits their applicability. This paper proposes a unified scaling law for QAT that models quantization error as a function of model size, training data volume, and quantization group size. Through 268 QAT experiments, we show that quantization error decreases as model size increases, but rises with more training tokens and coarser quantization granularity. To identify the sources of W4A4 quantization error, we decompose it into weight and activation components. Both components follow the overall trend of W4A4 quantization error, but with different sensitivities. Specifically, weight quantization error increases more rapidly with more training tokens. Further analysis shows that the activation quantization error in the FC2 layer, caused by outliers, is the primary bottleneck of W4A4 QAT quantization error. By applying mixed-precision quantization to address this bottleneck, we demonstrate that weight and activation quantization errors can converge to similar levels. Additionally, with more training data, weight quantization error eventually exceeds activation quantization error, suggesting that reducing weight quantization error is also important in such scenarios. These findings offer key insights for improving QAT research and development.
HausaNLP: Current Status, Challenges and Future Directions for Hausa Natural Language Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Hausa Natural Language Processing (NLP) has gained increasing attention in recent years, yet remains understudied as a low-resource language despite having over 120 million first-language (L1) and 80 million second-language (L2) speakers worldwide. While significant advances have been made in high-resource languages, Hausa NLP faces persistent challenges, including limited open-source datasets and inadequate model representation. This paper presents an overview of the current state of Hausa NLP, systematically examining existing resources, research contributions, and gaps across fundamental NLP tasks: text classification, machine translation, named entity recognition, speech recognition, and question answering. We introduce HausaNLP (https://catalog.hausanlp.org), a curated catalog that aggregates datasets, tools, and research works to enhance accessibility and drive further development. Furthermore, we discuss challenges in integrating Hausa into large language models (LLMs), addressing issues of suboptimal tokenization and dialectal variation. Finally, we propose strategic research directions emphasizing dataset expansion, improved language modeling approaches, and strengthened community collaboration to advance Hausa NLP. Our work provides both a foundation for accelerating Hausa NLP progress and valuable insights for broader multilingual NLP research.
Towards eliciting latent knowledge from LLMs with mechanistic interpretability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

As language models become more powerful and sophisticated, it is crucial that they remain trustworthy and reliable. There is concerning preliminary evidence that models may attempt to deceive or keep secrets from their operators. To explore the ability of current techniques to elicit such hidden knowledge, we train a Taboo model: a language model that describes a specific secret word without explicitly stating it. Importantly, the secret word is not presented to the model in its training data or prompt. We then investigate methods to uncover this secret. First, we evaluate non-interpretability (black-box) approaches. Subsequently, we develop largely automated strategies based on mechanistic interpretability techniques, including logit lens and sparse autoencoders. Evaluation shows that both approaches are effective in eliciting the secret word in our proof-of-concept setting. Our findings highlight the promise of these approaches for eliciting hidden knowledge and suggest several promising avenues for future work, including testing and refining these methods on more complex model organisms. This work aims to be a step towards addressing the crucial problem of eliciting secret knowledge from language models, thereby contributing to their safe and reliable deployment.
Vision-Language Modeling Meets Remote Sensing: Models, Datasets and Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Vision-language modeling (VLM) aims to bridge the information gap between images and natural language. Under the new paradigm of first pre-training on massive image-text pairs and then fine-tuning on task-specific data, VLM in the remote sensing domain has made significant progress. The resulting models benefit from the absorption of extensive general knowledge and demonstrate strong performance across a variety of remote sensing data analysis tasks. Moreover, they are capable of interacting with users in a conversational manner. In this paper, we aim to provide the remote sensing community with a timely and comprehensive review of the developments in VLM using the two-stage paradigm. Specifically, we first cover a taxonomy of VLM in remote sensing: contrastive learning, visual instruction tuning, and text-conditioned image generation. For each category, we detail the commonly used network architecture and pre-training objectives. Second, we conduct a thorough review of existing works, examining foundation models and task-specific adaptation methods in contrastive-based VLM, architectural upgrades, training strategies and model capabilities in instruction-based VLM, as well as generative foundation models with their representative downstream applications. Third, we summarize datasets used for VLM pre-training, fine-tuning, and evaluation, with an analysis of their construction methodologies (including image sources and caption generation) and key properties, such as scale and task adaptability. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions: cross-modal representation alignment, vague requirement comprehension, explanation-driven model reliability, continually scalable model capabilities, and large-scale datasets featuring richer modalities and greater challenges.
Human and Machine as Seen at the Co-Creation Age: A Co-Word Analysis in Human Machine Co-creation (2014-2024)
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

This paper explores the evolving landscape of human-machine co-creation, focusing on its development in the context of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) from 2014 to 2024. We employ co-word analysis to identify emerging trends, central themes, and the intellectual trajectory of this field. The study highlights the shift from viewing machines as mere tools to recognizing them as collaborative partners in creative processes. By understanding these dynamics, we aim to provide insights into the implications of this paradigm shift for creativity, innovation, and societal impact, ultimately fostering a more inclusive and effective approach to human-machine interaction in various domains.
Is Your Prompt Safe? Investigating Prompt Injection Attacks Against Open-Source LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Recent studies demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to different prompt-based attacks, generating harmful content or sensitive information. Both closed-source and open-source LLMs are underinvestigated for these attacks. This paper studies effective prompt injection attacks against the $\mathbf{14}$ most popular open-source LLMs on five attack benchmarks. Current metrics only consider successful attacks, whereas our proposed Attack Success Probability (ASP) also captures uncertainty in the model's response, reflecting ambiguity in attack feasibility. By comprehensively analyzing the effectiveness of prompt injection attacks, we propose a simple and effective hypnotism attack; results show that this attack causes aligned language models, including Stablelm2, Mistral, Openchat, and Vicuna, to generate objectionable behaviors, achieving around $90$% ASP. They also indicate that our ignore prefix attacks can break all $\mathbf{14}$ open-source LLMs, achieving over $60$% ASP on a multi-categorical dataset. We find that moderately well-known LLMs exhibit higher vulnerability to prompt injection attacks, highlighting the need to raise public awareness and prioritize efficient mitigation strategies.
When Bias Backfires: The Modulatory Role of Counterfactual Explanations on the Adoption of Algorithmic Bias in XAI-Supported Human Decision-Making
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Although the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into everyday tasks improves efficiency and objectivity, it also risks transmitting bias to human decision-making. In this study, we conducted a controlled experiment that simulated hiring decisions to examine how biased AI recommendations - augmented with or without counterfactual explanations - influence human judgment over time. Participants, acting as hiring managers, completed 60 decision trials divided into a baseline phase without AI, followed by a phase with biased (X)AI recommendations (favoring either male or female candidates), and a final post-interaction phase without AI. Our results indicate that the participants followed the AI recommendations 70% of the time when the qualifications of the given candidates were comparable. Yet, only a fraction of participants detected the gender bias (8 out of 294). Crucially, exposure to biased AI altered participants' inherent preferences: in the post-interaction phase, participants' independent decisions aligned with the bias when no counterfactual explanations were provided before, but reversed the bias when explanations were given. Reported trust did not differ significantly across conditions. Confidence varied throughout the study phases after exposure to male-biased AI, indicating nuanced effects of AI bias on decision certainty. Our findings point to the importance of calibrating XAI to avoid unintended behavioral shifts in order to safeguard equitable decision-making and prevent the adoption of algorithmic bias.
Algorithmic Hiring and Diversity: Reducing Human-Algorithm Similarity for Better Outcomes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Algorithmic tools are increasingly used in hiring to improve fairness and diversity, often by enforcing constraints such as gender-balanced candidate shortlists. However, we show theoretically and empirically that enforcing equal representation at the shortlist stage does not necessarily translate into more diverse final hires, even when there is no gender bias in the hiring stage. We identify a crucial factor influencing this outcome: the correlation between the algorithm's screening criteria and the human hiring manager's evaluation criteria -- higher correlation leads to lower diversity in final hires. Using a large-scale empirical analysis of nearly 800,000 job applications across multiple technology firms, we find that enforcing equal shortlists yields limited improvements in hire diversity when the algorithmic screening closely mirrors the hiring manager's preferences. We propose a complementary algorithmic approach designed explicitly to diversify shortlists by selecting candidates likely to be overlooked by managers, yet still competitive according to their evaluation criteria. Empirical simulations show that this approach significantly enhances gender diversity in final hires without substantially compromising hire quality. These findings highlight the importance of algorithmic design choices in achieving organizational diversity goals and provide actionable guidance for practitioners implementing fairness-oriented hiring algorithms.
MUG-Eval: A Proxy Evaluation Framework for Multilingual Generation Capabilities in Any Language
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Evaluating text generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is challenging, particularly for low-resource languages where methods for direct assessment are scarce. We propose MUG-Eval, a novel framework that evaluates LLMs' multilingual generation capabilities by transforming existing benchmarks into conversational tasks and measuring the LLMs' accuracies on those tasks. We specifically designed these conversational tasks to require effective communication in the target language. Then, we simply use task success rate as a proxy for successful conversation generation. Our approach offers two key advantages: it is independent of language-specific NLP tools or annotated datasets, which are limited for most languages, and it does not rely on LLMs-as-judges, whose evaluation quality degrades outside a few high-resource languages. We evaluate 8 LLMs across 30 languages spanning high, mid, and low-resource categories, and we find that MUG-Eval correlates strongly with established benchmarks ($r$ > 0.75) while enabling standardized comparisons across languages and models. Our framework provides a robust and resource-efficient solution for evaluating multilingual generation that can be extended to thousands of languages.
Explaining Neural Networks with Reasons
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We propose a new interpretability method for neural networks, which is based on a novel mathematico-philosophical theory of reasons. Our method computes a vector for each neuron, called its reasons vector. We then can compute how strongly this reasons vector speaks for various propositions, e.g., the proposition that the input image depicts digit 2 or that the input prompt has a negative sentiment. This yields an interpretation of neurons, and groups thereof, that combines a logical and a Bayesian perspective, and accounts for polysemanticity (i.e., that a single neuron can figure in multiple concepts). We show, both theoretically and empirically, that this method is: (1) grounded in a philosophically established notion of explanation, (2) uniform, i.e., applies to the common neural network architectures and modalities, (3) scalable, since computing reason vectors only involves forward-passes in the neural network, (4) faithful, i.e., intervening on a neuron based on its reason vector leads to expected changes in model output, (5) correct in that the model's reasons structure matches that of the data source, (6) trainable, i.e., neural networks can be trained to improve their reason strengths, (7) useful, i.e., it delivers on the needs for interpretability by increasing, e.g., robustness and fairness.
From Templates to Natural Language: Generalization Challenges in Instruction-Tuned LLMs for Spatial Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on a variety of tasks; however, generalizing from synthetic to human-authored instructions in grounded environments remains a challenge for them. In this work, we study generalization challenges in spatial grounding tasks where models interpret and translate instructions for building object arrangements on a $2.5$D grid. We fine-tune LLMs using only synthetic instructions and evaluate their performance on a benchmark dataset containing both synthetic and human-written instructions. Our results reveal that while models generalize well on simple tasks, their performance degrades significantly on more complex tasks. We present a detailed error analysis of the gaps in instruction generalization.
SkyMemory: A LEO Edge Cache for Transformer Inference Optimization and Scale Out
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

We expand the scope of cache memory to include LEO constellations, which are highly distributed systems with thousands of satellites connected with free-space optics inter-satellite links (ISL) always only one hop from any point on earth. We show how to increase the number of cache hits and improve the speed of inference for the important use case of LLMs. These benefits apply not only to LLMs, both terrestrially hosted and on satellites, but also generalize to any cache distributed over multiple locations that needs to be accessed in a timely manner. We show the benefit of our key value cache (KVC) protocol in simulations and present a proof-of-concept implementation of the protocol for KVCs on a testbed comprising 5 Intel NUC Linux mini PCs hosting a 19x5 constellation, with an NVIDIA Jetson Nano 8GB GPU hosting the LLM.
Semantically-driven Deep Reinforcement Learning for Inspection Path Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

This paper introduces a novel semantics-aware inspection planning policy derived through deep reinforcement learning. Reflecting the fact that within autonomous informative path planning missions in unknown environments, it is often only a sparse set of objects of interest that need to be inspected, the method contributes an end-to-end policy that simultaneously performs semantic object visual inspection combined with collision-free navigation. Assuming access only to the instantaneous depth map, the associated segmentation image, the ego-centric local occupancy, and the history of past positions in the robot's neighborhood, the method demonstrates robust generalizability and successful crossing of the sim2real gap. Beyond simulations and extensive comparison studies, the approach is verified in experimental evaluations onboard a flying robot deployed in novel environments with previously unseen semantics and overall geometric configurations.