OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fusion of Foundation and Vision Transformer Model Features for Dermatoscopic Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Accurate classification of skin lesions from dermatoscopic images is essential for diagnosis and treatment of skin cancer. In this study, we investigate the utility of a dermatology-specific foundation model, PanDerm, in comparison with two Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures (ViT base and Swin Transformer V2 base) for the task of skin lesion classification. Using frozen features extracted from PanDerm, we apply non-linear probing with three different classifiers, namely, multi-layer perceptron (MLP), XGBoost, and TabNet. For the ViT-based models, we perform full fine-tuning to optimize classification performance. Our experiments on the HAM10000 and MSKCC datasets demonstrate that the PanDerm-based MLP model performs comparably to the fine-tuned Swin transformer model, while fusion of PanDerm and Swin Transformer predictions leads to further performance improvements. Future work will explore additional foundation models, fine-tuning strategies, and advanced fusion techniques.
Neuromorphic-based metaheuristics: A new generation of low power, low latency and small footprint optimization algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2025
Year: 2025

Neuromorphic computing (NC) introduces a novel algorithmic paradigm representing a major shift from traditional digital computing of Von Neumann architectures. NC emulates or simulates the neural dynamics of brains in the form of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). Much of the research in NC has concentrated on machine learning applications and neuroscience simulations. This paper investigates the modelling and implementation of optimization algorithms and particularly metaheuristics using the NC paradigm as an alternative to Von Neumann architectures, leading to breakthroughs in solving optimization problems. Neuromorphic-based metaheuristics (Nheuristics) are supposed to be characterized by low power, low latency and small footprint. Since NC systems are fundamentally different from conventional Von Neumann computers, several challenges are posed to the design and implementation of Nheuristics. A guideline based on a classification and critical analysis is conducted on the different families of metaheuristics and optimization problems they address. We also discuss future directions that need to be addressed to expand both the development and application of Nheuristics.
Omni TM-AE: A Scalable and Interpretable Embedding Model Using the Full Tsetlin Machine State Space
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The increasing complexity of large-scale language models has amplified concerns regarding their interpretability and reusability. While traditional embedding models like Word2Vec and GloVe offer scalability, they lack transparency and often behave as black boxes. Conversely, interpretable models such as the Tsetlin Machine (TM) have shown promise in constructing explainable learning systems, though they previously faced limitations in scalability and reusability. In this paper, we introduce Omni Tsetlin Machine AutoEncoder (Omni TM-AE), a novel embedding model that fully exploits the information contained in the TM's state matrix, including literals previously excluded from clause formation. This method enables the construction of reusable, interpretable embeddings through a single training phase. Extensive experiments across semantic similarity, sentiment classification, and document clustering tasks show that Omni TM-AE performs competitively with and often surpasses mainstream embedding models. These results demonstrate that it is possible to balance performance, scalability, and interpretability in modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems without resorting to opaque architectures.
Divide-Fuse-Conquer: Eliciting "Aha Moments" in Multi-Scenario Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have been observed to suddenly exhibit advanced reasoning abilities during reinforcement learning (RL), resembling an ``aha moment'' triggered by simple outcome-based rewards. While RL has proven effective in eliciting such breakthroughs in tasks involving mathematics, coding, and vision, it faces significant challenges in multi-scenario games. The diversity of game rules, interaction modes, and environmental complexities often leads to policies that perform well in one scenario but fail to generalize to others. Simply combining multiple scenarios during training introduces additional challenges, such as training instability and poor performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose Divide-Fuse-Conquer, a framework designed to enhance generalization in multi-scenario RL. This approach starts by heuristically grouping games based on characteristics such as rules and difficulties. Specialized models are then trained for each group to excel at games in the group is what we refer to as the divide step. Next, we fuse model parameters from different groups as a new model, and continue training it for multiple groups, until the scenarios in all groups are conquered. Experiments across 18 TextArena games show that Qwen2.5-32B-Align trained with the Divide-Fuse-Conquer strategy reaches a performance level comparable to Claude3.5, achieving 7 wins and 4 draws. We hope our approach can inspire future research on using reinforcement learning to improve the generalization of LLMs.
From Surveys to Narratives: Rethinking Cultural Value Adaptation in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Adapting cultural values in Large Language Models (LLMs) presents significant challenges, particularly due to biases and limited training data. Prior work primarily aligns LLMs with different cultural values using World Values Survey (WVS) data. However, it remains unclear whether this approach effectively captures cultural nuances or produces distinct cultural representations for various downstream tasks. In this paper, we systematically investigate WVS-based training for cultural value adaptation and find that relying solely on survey data can homogenize cultural norms and interfere with factual knowledge. To investigate these issues, we augment WVS with encyclopedic and scenario-based cultural narratives from Wikipedia and NormAd. While these narratives may have variable effects on downstream tasks, they consistently improve cultural distinctiveness than survey data alone. Our work highlights the inherent complexity of aligning cultural values with the goal of guiding task-specific behavior. We release our code at https://github.com/faridlazuarda/from-surveys-to-narratives.
FREESON: Retriever-Free Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning via Corpus-Traversing MCTS
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multi-step reasoning and calling search engines at appropriate steps. However, existing retrieval-augmented reasoning approaches rely on separate retrieval models, limiting the LRM's role in retrieval to deciding when to retrieve and how to query. This separation not only increases hardware and operational costs but also leads to errors in the retrieval process due to the representation bottleneck, a phenomenon where the retriever's embedding space is not expressive enough to meet the generator's requirements. To address this, we shift our perspective from sequence-to-sequence matching to locating the answer-containing paths within the corpus, and propose a novel framework called FREESON (Retriever-FREE Retrieval-Augmented ReaSONing). This framework enables LRMs to retrieve relevant knowledge on their own by acting as both a generator and retriever. To achieve this, we introduce a variant of the MCTS algorithm specialized for the retrieval task, which we call CT-MCTS (Corpus-Traversing Monte Carlo Tree Search). In this algorithm, LRMs traverse through the corpus toward answer-containing regions. Our results on five open-domain QA benchmarks, including single-hop and multi-hop questions, show that FREESON achieves an average improvement of 14.4% in EM and F1 over four multi-step reasoning models with a separate retriever, and it also performs comparably to the strongest baseline, surpassing it by 3% on PopQA and 2WikiMultihopQA.
AutoMCQ -- Automatically Generate Code Comprehension Questions using GenAI
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Students often do not fully understand the code they have written. This sometimes does not become evident until later in their education, which can mean it is harder to fix their incorrect knowledge or misunderstandings. In addition, being able to fully understand code is increasingly important in a world where students have access to generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, such as GitHub Copilot. One effective solution is to utilise code comprehension questions, where a marker asks questions about a submission to gauge understanding, this can also have the side effect of helping to detect plagiarism. However, this approach is time consuming and can be difficult and/or expensive to scale. This paper introduces AutoMCQ, which uses GenAI for the automatic generation of multiple-choice code comprehension questions. This is integrated with the CodeRunner automated assessment platform.
TAT-VPR: Ternary Adaptive Transformer for Dynamic and Efficient Visual Place Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

TAT-VPR is a ternary-quantized transformer that brings dynamic accuracy-efficiency trade-offs to visual SLAM loop-closure. By fusing ternary weights with a learned activation-sparsity gate, the model can control computation by up to 40% at run-time without degrading performance (Recall@1). The proposed two-stage distillation pipeline preserves descriptor quality, letting it run on micro-UAV and embedded SLAM stacks while matching state-of-the-art localization accuracy.
MMLU-Reason: Benchmarking Multi-Task Multi-modal Language Understanding and Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled unified processing of language, vision, and structured inputs, opening the door to complex tasks such as logical deduction, spatial reasoning, and scientific analysis. Despite their promise, the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, particularly those augmented with intermediate thinking traces (MLLMs-T), remain poorly understood and lack standardized evaluation benchmarks. Existing work focuses primarily on perception or final answer correctness, offering limited insight into how models reason or fail across modalities. To address this gap, we introduce the MMLU-Reason, a new benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate multi-modal reasoning with explicit thinking. The MMLU-Reason comprises 1) a high-difficulty dataset of 1,083 questions spanning six diverse reasoning types with symbolic depth and multi-hop demands and 2) a modular Reasoning Trace Evaluation Pipeline (RTEP) for assessing reasoning quality beyond accuracy through metrics like relevance, consistency, and structured error annotations. Empirical results show that MLLMs-T overall outperform non-thinking counterparts, but even top models like Claude-3.7-Sonnet and Gemini-2.5 Pro suffer from reasoning pathologies such as inconsistency and overthinking. This benchmark reveals persistent gaps between accuracy and reasoning quality and provides an actionable evaluation pipeline for future model development. Overall, the MMLU-Reason offers a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and improving the next generation of multi-modal reasoning systems.
Conf-GNNRec: Quantifying and Calibrating the Prediction Confidence for GNN-based Recommendation Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

Recommender systems based on graph neural networks perform well in tasks such as rating and ranking. However, in real-world recommendation scenarios, noise such as user misuse and malicious advertisement gradually accumulates through the message propagation mechanism. Even if existing studies mitigate their effects by reducing the noise propagation weights, the severe sparsity of the recommender system still leads to the low-weighted noisy neighbors being mistaken as meaningful information, and the prediction result obtained based on the polluted nodes is not entirely trustworthy. Therefore, it is crucial to measure the confidence of the prediction results in this highly noisy framework. Furthermore, our evaluation of the existing representative GNN-based recommendation shows that it suffers from overconfidence. Based on the above considerations, we propose a new method to quantify and calibrate the prediction confidence of GNN-based recommendations (Conf-GNNRec). Specifically, we propose a rating calibration method that dynamically adjusts excessive ratings to mitigate overconfidence based on user personalization. We also design a confidence loss function to reduce the overconfidence of negative samples and effectively improve recommendation performance. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate the validity of Conf-GNNRec in prediction confidence and recommendation performance.
Computing Exact Shapley Values in Polynomial Time for Product-Kernel Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Kernel methods are widely used in machine learning due to their flexibility and expressiveness. However, their black-box nature poses significant challenges to interpretability, limiting their adoption in high-stakes applications. Shapley value-based feature attribution techniques, such as SHAP and kernel method-specific adaptation like RKHS-SHAP, offer a promising path toward explainability. Yet, computing exact Shapley values is generally intractable, leading existing methods to rely on approximations and thereby incur unavoidable error. In this work, we introduce PKeX-Shapley, a novel algorithm that utilizes the multiplicative structure of product kernels to enable the exact computation of Shapley values in polynomial time. The core of our approach is a new value function, the functional baseline value function, specifically designed for product-kernel models. This value function removes the influence of a feature subset by setting its functional component to the least informative state. Crucially, it allows a recursive thus efficient computation of Shapley values in polynomial time. As an important additional contribution, we show that our framework extends beyond predictive modeling to statistical inference. In particular, it generalizes to popular kernel-based discrepancy measures such as the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) and the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), thereby providing new tools for interpretable statistical inference.
Are the Hidden States Hiding Something? Testing the Limits of Factuality-Encoding Capabilities in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Factual hallucinations are a major challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). They undermine reliability and user trust by generating inaccurate or fabricated content. Recent studies suggest that when generating false statements, the internal states of LLMs encode information about truthfulness. However, these studies often rely on synthetic datasets that lack realism, which limits generalization when evaluating the factual accuracy of text generated by the model itself. In this paper, we challenge the findings of previous work by investigating truthfulness encoding capabilities, leading to the generation of a more realistic and challenging dataset. Specifically, we extend previous work by introducing: (1) a strategy for sampling plausible true-false factoid sentences from tabular data and (2) a procedure for generating realistic, LLM-dependent true-false datasets from Question Answering collections. Our analysis of two open-source LLMs reveals that while the findings from previous studies are partially validated, generalization to LLM-generated datasets remains challenging. This study lays the groundwork for future research on factuality in LLMs and offers practical guidelines for more effective evaluation.
From Local Patterns to Global Understanding: Cross-Stock Trend Integration for Enhanced Predictive Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2025
Year: 2025

Stock price prediction is a critical area of financial forecasting, traditionally approached by training models using the historical price data of individual stocks. While these models effectively capture single-stock patterns, they fail to leverage potential correlations among stock trends, which could improve predictive performance. Current single-stock learning methods are thus limited in their ability to provide a broader understanding of price dynamics across multiple stocks. To address this, we propose a novel method that merges local patterns into a global understanding through cross-stock pattern integration. Our strategy is inspired by Federated Learning (FL), a paradigm designed for decentralized model training. FL enables collaborative learning across distributed datasets without sharing raw data, facilitating the aggregation of global insights while preserving data privacy. In our adaptation, we train models on individual stock data and iteratively merge them to create a unified global model. This global model is subsequently fine-tuned on specific stock data to retain local relevance. The proposed strategy enables parallel training of individual stock models, facilitating efficient utilization of computational resources and reducing overall training time. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed method, demonstrating that it outperforms benchmark models and enhances the predictive capabilities of state-of-the-art approaches. Our results highlight the efficacy of Cross-Stock Trend Integration (CSTI) in advancing stock price prediction, offering a robust alternative to traditional single-stock learning methodologies.
Bridging the Dynamic Perception Gap: Training-Free Draft Chain-of-Thought for Dynamic Multimodal Spatial Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

While chains-of-thought (CoT) have advanced complex reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), existing methods remain confined to text or static visual domains, often faltering in dynamic spatial reasoning tasks. To bridge this gap, we present GRASSLAND, a novel maze navigation benchmark designed to evaluate dynamic spatial reasoning. Our experiments show that augmenting textual reasoning chains with dynamic visual drafts, overlaid on input images, significantly outperforms conventional approaches, offering new insights into spatial reasoning in evolving environments. To generalize this capability, we propose D2R (Dynamic Draft-Augmented Reasoning), a training-free framework that seamlessly integrates textual CoT with corresponding visual drafts into MLLMs. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that D2R consistently enhances performance across diverse tasks, establishing a robust baseline for dynamic spatial reasoning without requiring model fine-tuning. Project is open at https://github.com/Cratileo/D2R.
From Generic Empathy to Personalized Emotional Support: A Self-Evolution Framework for User Preference Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Effective emotional support hinges on understanding users' emotions and needs to provide meaningful comfort during multi-turn interactions. Large Language Models (LLMs) show great potential for expressing empathy; however, they often deliver generic and one-size-fits-all responses that fail to address users' specific needs. To tackle this issue, we propose a self-evolution framework designed to help LLMs improve their responses to better align with users' implicit preferences concerning user profiles (personalities), emotional states, and specific situations. Our framework consists of two distinct phases: \textit{(1)} \textit{Emotional Support Experience Acquisition}, where LLMs are fine-tuned on limited emotional support conversation data to provide basic support, and \textit{(2)} \textit{Self-Improvement for Personalized Emotional Support}, where LLMs leverage self-reflection and self-refinement to generate personalized responses. Through iterative direct preference optimization between the pre- and post-refined responses, our model generates responses that reflect a better understanding of the user's implicit preferences. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the model's performance in emotional support, reducing unhelpful responses and minimizing discrepancies between user preferences and model outputs.
Energy Consumption Framework and Analysis of Post-Quantum Key-Generation on Embedded Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

The emergence of quantum computing and Shor's algorithm necessitates an imminent shift from current public key cryptography techniques to post-quantum robust techniques. NIST has responded by standardising Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms, with ML-KEM (FIPS-203) slated to replace ECDH (Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman) for key exchange. A key practical concern for PQC adoption is energy consumption. This paper introduces a new framework for measuring the PQC energy consumption on a Raspberry Pi when performing key generation. The framework uses both available traditional methods and the newly standardised ML-KEM algorithm via the commonly utilised OpenSSL library.
Can reasoning models comprehend mathematical problems in Chinese ancient texts? An empirical study based on data from Suanjing Shishu
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

This study addresses the challenges in intelligent processing of Chinese ancient mathematical classics by constructing Guji_MATH, a benchmark for evaluating classical texts based on Suanjing Shishu. It systematically assesses the mathematical problem-solving capabilities of mainstream reasoning models under the unique linguistic constraints of classical Chinese. Through machine-assisted annotation and manual verification, 538 mathematical problems were extracted from 8 canonical texts, forming a structured dataset centered on the "Question-Answer-Solution" framework, supplemented by problem types and difficulty levels. Dual evaluation modes--closed-book (autonomous problem-solving) and open-book (reproducing classical solution methods)--were designed to evaluate the performance of six reasoning models on ancient Chinese mathematical problems. Results indicate that reasoning models can partially comprehend and solve these problems, yet their overall performance remains inferior to benchmarks on modern mathematical tasks. Enhancing models' classical Chinese comprehension and cultural knowledge should be prioritized for optimization. This study provides methodological support for mining mathematical knowledge from ancient texts and disseminating traditional culture, while offering new perspectives for evaluating cross-linguistic and cross-cultural capabilities of reasoning models.