OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Sim-to-Real Gentle Manipulation of Deformable and Fragile Objects with Stress-Guided Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Robotic manipulation of deformable and fragile objects presents significant challenges, as excessive stress can lead to irreversible damage to the object. While existing solutions rely on accurate object models or specialized sensors and grippers, this adds complexity and often lacks generalization. To address this problem, we present a vision-based reinforcement learning approach that incorporates a stress-penalized reward to discourage damage to the object explicitly. In addition, to bootstrap learning, we incorporate offline demonstrations as well as a designed curriculum progressing from rigid proxies to deformables. We evaluate the proposed method in both simulated and real-world scenarios, showing that the policy learned in simulation can be transferred to the real world in a zero-shot manner, performing tasks such as picking up and pushing tofu. Our results show that the learned policies exhibit a damage-aware, gentle manipulation behavior, demonstrating their effectiveness by decreasing the stress applied to fragile objects by 36.5% while achieving the task goals, compared to vanilla RL policies.
Serve Programs, Not Prompts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Current large language model (LLM) serving systems, primarily designed for text completion, are neither efficient nor adaptable for increasingly complex LLM applications due to their inflexible design. We propose a new LLM serving system architecture that serves programs instead of prompts to address this problem. These programs, called LLM Inference Programs (LIPs), allow users to customize token prediction and KV cache management at runtime and to offload parts of their application logic, such as tool execution, to the server. We describe an example of this architecture through a system named Symphony, which functions as an operating system for LIPs. Symphony exposes LLM model computations via system calls and virtualizes KV cache with a dedicated file system, while ensuring GPU efficiency with a two-level process scheduling scheme. Symphony has the potential to open the door to a more efficient and extensible ecosystem for LLM applications.
Seeing, Signing, and Saying: A Vision-Language Model-Assisted Pipeline for Sign Language Data Acquisition and Curation from Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Most existing sign language translation (SLT) datasets are limited in scale, lack multilingual coverage, and are costly to curate due to their reliance on expert annotation and controlled recording setup. Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities as evaluators and real-time assistants. Despite these advancements, their potential remains untapped in the context of sign language dataset acquisition. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first automated annotation and filtering framework that utilizes VLMs to reduce reliance on manual effort while preserving data quality. Our method is applied to TikTok videos across eight sign languages and to the already curated YouTube-SL-25 dataset in German Sign Language for the purpose of additional evaluation. Our VLM-based pipeline includes a face visibility detection, a sign activity recognition, a text extraction from video content, and a judgment step to validate alignment between video and text, implementing generic filtering, annotation and validation steps. Using the resulting corpus, TikTok-SL-8, we assess the performance of two off-the-shelf SLT models on our filtered dataset for German and American Sign Languages, with the goal of establishing baselines and evaluating the robustness of recent models on automatically extracted, slightly noisy data. Our work enables scalable, weakly supervised pretraining for SLT and facilitates data acquisition from social media.
Depth and Autonomy: A Framework for Evaluating LLM Applications in Social Science Research
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized by researchers across a wide range of domains, and qualitative social science is no exception; however, this adoption faces persistent challenges, including interpretive bias, low reliability, and weak auditability. We introduce a framework that situates LLM usage along two dimensions, interpretive depth and autonomy, thereby offering a straightforward way to classify LLM applications in qualitative research and to derive practical design recommendations. We present the state of the literature with respect to these two dimensions, based on all published social science papers available on Web of Science that use LLMs as a tool and not strictly as the subject of study. Rather than granting models expansive freedom, our approach encourages researchers to decompose tasks into manageable segments, much as they would when delegating work to capable undergraduate research assistants. By maintaining low levels of autonomy and selectively increasing interpretive depth only where warranted and under supervision, one can plausibly reap the benefits of LLMs while preserving transparency and reliability.
More than a Moment: Towards Coherent Sequences of Audio Descriptions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Audio Descriptions (ADs) convey essential on-screen information, allowing visually impaired audiences to follow videos. To be effective, ADs must form a coherent sequence that helps listeners to visualise the unfolding scene, rather than describing isolated moments. However, most automatic methods generate each AD independently, often resulting in repetitive, incoherent descriptions. To address this, we propose a training-free method, CoherentAD, that first generates multiple candidate descriptions for each AD time interval, and then performs auto-regressive selection across the sequence to form a coherent and informative narrative. To evaluate AD sequences holistically, we introduce a sequence-level metric, StoryRecall, which measures how well the predicted ADs convey the ground truth narrative, alongside repetition metrics that capture the redundancy across consecutive AD outputs. Our method produces coherent AD sequences with enhanced narrative understanding, outperforming prior approaches that rely on independent generations.
Grounded in Reality: Learning and Deploying Proactive LLM from Offline Logs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel as passive responders, but teaching them to be proactive, goal-oriented partners, a critical capability in high-stakes domains, remains a major challenge. Current paradigms either myopically optimize single-turn attributes or rely on brittle, high-cost user simulators, creating a persistent ``reality gap''. To bridge this gap, we introduce \texttt{Learn-to-Ask}, a general, simulator-free framework for learning and deploying proactive dialogue agents \textit{directly from offline expert data}, bypassing the need to model complex user dynamics. Our key insight is to reframe the offline policy learning problem by leveraging the \textbf{observed future} of each expert trajectory. This allows us to infer a dense, turn-by-turn reward signal grounded in the expert's revealed strategy, decomposing the intractable long-horizon problem into a series of supervised learning tasks, and training a policy to output a structured \texttt{(action, state_assessment)} tuple, governing both \textbf{what to ask} and, crucially, \textbf{when to stop}. To ensure reward fidelity, our Automated Grader Calibration pipeline systematically purges noise from the LLM-based reward model with minimal human supervision. Empirically, we demonstrate the efficacy of \texttt{Learn-to-Ask} in a real-world medical dataset, using LLMs of varying sizes up to 32B. Our approach culminates in the successful deployment of LLMs into a live, large-scale online AI service. In rigorous in-house evaluations, our model was launched and achieved performance even superior to human experts, proving our framework's ability to translate offline data into tangible, real-world impact. We hope this work provides a practical and economically viable blueprint for transforming passive LLMs into proactive, goal-oriented LLM applications.
Multi-Objective Search: Algorithms, Applications, and Emerging Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Multi-objective search (MOS) has emerged as a unifying framework for planning and decision-making problems where multiple, often conflicting, criteria must be balanced. While the problem has been studied for decades, recent years have seen renewed interest in the topic across AI applications such as robotics, transportation, and operations research, reflecting the reality that real-world systems rarely optimize a single measure. This paper surveys developments in MOS while highlighting cross-disciplinary opportunities, and outlines open challenges that define the emerging frontier of MOS
Transformers Provably Learn Directed Acyclic Graphs via Kernel-Guided Mutual Information
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Uncovering hidden graph structures underlying real-world data is a critical challenge with broad applications across scientific domains. Recently, transformer-based models leveraging the attention mechanism have demonstrated strong empirical success in capturing complex dependencies within graphs. However, the theoretical understanding of their training dynamics has been limited to tree-like graphs, where each node depends on a single parent. Extending provable guarantees to more general directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) -- which involve multiple parents per node -- remains challenging, primarily due to the difficulty in designing training objectives that enable different attention heads to separately learn multiple different parent relationships. In this work, we address this problem by introducing a novel information-theoretic metric: the kernel-guided mutual information (KG-MI), based on the $f$-divergence. Our objective combines KG-MI with a multi-head attention framework, where each head is associated with a distinct marginal transition kernel to model diverse parent-child dependencies effectively. We prove that, given sequences generated by a $K$-parent DAG, training a single-layer, multi-head transformer via gradient ascent converges to the global optimum in polynomial time. Furthermore, we characterize the attention score patterns at convergence. In addition, when particularizing the $f$-divergence to the KL divergence, the learned attention scores accurately reflect the ground-truth adjacency matrix, thereby provably recovering the underlying graph structure. Experimental results validate our theoretical findings.
A Framework for Bounding Deterministic Risk with PAC-Bayes: Applications to Majority Votes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

PAC-Bayes is a popular and efficient framework for obtaining generalization guarantees in situations involving uncountable hypothesis spaces. Unfortunately, in its classical formulation, it only provides guarantees on the expected risk of a randomly sampled hypothesis. This requires stochastic predictions at test time, making PAC-Bayes unusable in many practical situations where a single deterministic hypothesis must be deployed. We propose a unified framework to extract guarantees holding for a single hypothesis from stochastic PAC-Bayesian guarantees. We present a general oracle bound and derive from it a numerical bound and a specialization to majority vote. We empirically show that our approach consistently outperforms popular baselines (by up to a factor of 2) when it comes to generalization bounds on deterministic classifiers.
RegionE: Adaptive Region-Aware Generation for Efficient Image Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Recently, instruction-based image editing (IIE) has received widespread attention. In practice, IIE often modifies only specific regions of an image, while the remaining areas largely remain unchanged. Although these two types of regions differ significantly in generation difficulty and computational redundancy, existing IIE models do not account for this distinction, instead applying a uniform generation process across the entire image. This motivates us to propose RegionE, an adaptive, region-aware generation framework that accelerates IIE tasks without additional training. Specifically, the RegionE framework consists of three main components: 1) Adaptive Region Partition. We observed that the trajectory of unedited regions is straight, allowing for multi-step denoised predictions to be inferred in a single step. Therefore, in the early denoising stages, we partition the image into edited and unedited regions based on the difference between the final estimated result and the reference image. 2) Region-Aware Generation. After distinguishing the regions, we replace multi-step denoising with one-step prediction for unedited areas. For edited regions, the trajectory is curved, requiring local iterative denoising. To improve the efficiency and quality of local iterative generation, we propose the Region-Instruction KV Cache, which reduces computational cost while incorporating global information. 3) Adaptive Velocity Decay Cache. Observing that adjacent timesteps in edited regions exhibit strong velocity similarity, we further propose an adaptive velocity decay cache to accelerate the local denoising process. We applied RegionE to state-of-the-art IIE base models, including Step1X-Edit, FLUX.1 Kontext, and Qwen-Image-Edit. RegionE achieved acceleration factors of 2.57, 2.41, and 2.06. Evaluations by GPT-4o confirmed that semantic and perceptual fidelity were well preserved.
Navigation in a Three-Dimensional Urban Flow using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly populating urban areas for delivery and surveillance purposes. In this work, we develop an optimal navigation strategy based on Deep Reinforcement Learning. The environment is represented by a three-dimensional high-fidelity simulation of an urban flow, characterized by turbulence and recirculation zones. The algorithm presented here is a flow-aware Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) combined with a Gated Transformer eXtra Large (GTrXL) architecture, giving the agent richer information about the turbulent flow field in which it navigates. The results are compared with a PPO+GTrXL without the secondary prediction tasks, a PPO combined with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) cells and a traditional navigation algorithm. The obtained results show a significant increase in the success rate (SR) and a lower crash rate (CR) compared to a PPO+LSTM, PPO+GTrXL and the classical Zermelo's navigation algorithm, paving the way to a completely reimagined UAV landscape in complex urban environments.
One Join Order Does Not Fit All: Reducing Intermediate Results with Per-Split Query Plans
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2025
Year: 2025

Minimizing intermediate results is critical for efficient multi-join query processing. Although the seminal Yannakakis algorithm offers strong guarantees for acyclic queries, cyclic queries remain an open challenge. In this paper, we propose SplitJoin, a framework that introduces split as a first-class query operator. By partitioning input tables into heavy and light parts, SplitJoin allows different data partitions to use distinct query plans, with the goal of reducing intermediate sizes using existing binary join engines. We systematically explore the design space for split-based optimizations, including threshold selection, split strategies, and join ordering after splits. Implemented as a front-end to DuckDB and Umbra, SplitJoin achieves substantial improvements: on DuckDB, SplitJoin completes 43 social network queries (vs. 29 natively), achieving 2.1x faster runtime and 7.9x smaller intermediates on average (up to 13.6x and 74x, respectively); on Umbra, it completes 45 queries (vs. 35), achieving 1.3x speedups and 1.2x smaller intermediates on average (up to 6.1x and 2.1x, respectively).
Fourier Neural Operators for Two-Phase, 2D Mold-Filling Problems Related to Metal Casting
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2025
Year: 2025

We formulate mold filling in metal casting as a 2D neural operator learning problem that maps geometry and boundary data on an unstructured mesh to time resolved flow quantities, replacing expensive transient CFD. In the proposed method, a graph based encoder aggregates local neighborhood information on the input mesh and encodes geometry and boundary data, a Fourier spectral core operates on a regular latent grid to capture global interactions across the domain, and a graph based decoder projects the latent fields to a target mesh. The model is trained to jointly predict velocity components, pressure, and liquid volume fraction over a fixed rollout horizon and generalizes across different ingate locations and process settings. On held out geometries and inlet conditions, it reproduces large scale advection and the fluid-air interface evolution with localized errors near steep gradients. The mean relative L2 error is about 5% across all fields, and inference is two to three orders of magnitude faster than conventional CFD, enabling design in the loop exploration. Ablation studies show monotonic accuracy degradation under stronger spatial subsampling of input vertices and a smoother decline under temporal subsampling. Halving the training set yields only a small increase in error. These results establish neural operators as accurate and data efficient surrogates for 2D mold filling and enable rapid optimization of gating systems in casting workflows.
Synthetic Data Reveals Generalization Gaps in Correlated Multiple Instance Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Multiple instance learning (MIL) is often used in medical imaging to classify high-resolution 2D images by processing patches or classify 3D volumes by processing slices. However, conventional MIL approaches treat instances separately, ignoring contextual relationships such as the appearance of nearby patches or slices that can be essential in real applications. We design a synthetic classification task where accounting for adjacent instance features is crucial for accurate prediction. We demonstrate the limitations of off-the-shelf MIL approaches by quantifying their performance compared to the optimal Bayes estimator for this task, which is available in closed-form. We empirically show that newer correlated MIL methods still do not achieve the best possible performance when trained with ten thousand training samples, each containing many instances.
Magentic Marketplace: An Open-Source Environment for Studying Agentic Markets
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2025
Year: 2025

As LLM agents advance, they are increasingly mediating economic decisions, ranging from product discovery to transactions, on behalf of users. Such applications promise benefits but also raise many questions about agent accountability and value for users. Addressing these questions requires understanding how agents behave in realistic market conditions. However, previous research has largely evaluated agents in constrained settings, such as single-task marketplaces (e.g., negotiation) or structured two-agent interactions. Real-world markets are fundamentally different: they require agents to handle diverse economic activities and coordinate within large, dynamic ecosystems where multiple agents with opaque behaviors may engage in open-ended dialogues. To bridge this gap, we investigate two-sided agentic marketplaces where Assistant agents represent consumers and Service agents represent competing businesses. To study these interactions safely, we develop Magentic-Marketplace -- a simulated environment where Assistants and Services can operate. This environment enables us to study key market dynamics: the utility agents achieve, behavioral biases, vulnerability to manipulation, and how search mechanisms shape market outcomes. Our experiments show that frontier models can approach optimal welfare -- but only under ideal search conditions. Performance degrades sharply with scale, and all models exhibit severe first-proposal bias, creating 10-30x advantages for response speed over quality. These findings reveal how behaviors emerge across market conditions, informing the design of fair and efficient agentic marketplaces.
BlackboxNLP-2025 MIB Shared Task: Improving Circuit Faithfulness via Better Edge Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

One of the main challenges in mechanistic interpretability is circuit discovery, determining which parts of a model perform a given task. We build on the Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark (MIB) and propose three key improvements to circuit discovery. First, we use bootstrapping to identify edges with consistent attribution scores. Second, we introduce a simple ratio-based selection strategy to prioritize strong positive-scoring edges, balancing performance and faithfulness. Third, we replace the standard greedy selection with an integer linear programming formulation. Our methods yield more faithful circuits and outperform prior approaches across multiple MIB tasks and models. Our code is available at: https://github.com/technion-cs-nlp/MIB-Shared-Task.
SHA-256 Infused Embedding-Driven Generative Modeling of High-Energy Molecules in Low-Data Regimes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

High-energy materials (HEMs) are critical for propulsion and defense domains, yet their discovery remains constrained by experimental data and restricted access to testing facilities. This work presents a novel approach toward high-energy molecules by combining Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for molecular generation and Attentive Graph Neural Networks (GNN) for property predictions. We propose a transformative embedding space construction strategy that integrates fixed SHA-256 embeddings with partially trainable representations. Unlike conventional regularization techniques, this changes the representational basis itself, reshaping the molecular input space before learning begins. Without recourse to pretraining, the generator achieves 67.5% validity and 37.5% novelty. The generated library exhibits a mean Tanimoto coefficient of 0.214 relative to training set signifying the ability of framework to generate a diverse chemical space. We identified 37 new super explosives higher than 9 km/s predicted detonation velocity.
Beyond Long Context: When Semantics Matter More than Tokens
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Electronic Health Records (EHR) store clinical documentation as base64 encoded attachments in FHIR DocumentReference resources, which makes semantic question answering difficult. Traditional vector database methods often miss nuanced clinical relationships. The Clinical Entity Augmented Retrieval (CLEAR) method, introduced by Lopez et al. 2025, uses entity aware retrieval and achieved improved performance with an F1 score of 0.90 versus 0.86 for embedding based retrieval, while using over 70 percent fewer tokens. We developed a Clinical Notes QA Evaluation Platform to validate CLEAR against zero shot large context inference and traditional chunk based retrieval augmented generation. The platform was tested on 12 clinical notes ranging from 10,000 to 65,000 tokens representing realistic EHR content. CLEAR achieved a 58.3 percent win rate, an average semantic similarity of 0.878, and used 78 percent fewer tokens than wide context processing. The largest performance gains occurred on long notes, with a 75 percent win rate for documents exceeding 65,000 tokens. These findings confirm that entity aware retrieval improves both efficiency and accuracy in clinical natural language processing. The evaluation framework provides a reusable and transparent benchmark for assessing clinical question answering systems where semantic precision and computational efficiency are critical.