OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
WITNESS: A lightweight and practical approach to fine-grained predictive mutation testing
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Existing fine-grained predictive mutation testing studies predominantly rely on deep learning, which faces two critical limitations in practice: (1) Exorbitant computational costs. The deep learning models adopted in these studies demand significant computational resources for training and inference acceleration. This introduces high costs and undermines the cost-reduction goal of predictive mutation testing. (2) Constrained applicability. Although modern mutation testing tools generate mutants both inside and outside methods, current fine-grained predictive mutation testing approaches handle only inside-method mutants. As a result, they cannot predict outside-method mutants, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. We propose WITNESS, a new fine-grained predictive mutation testing approach. WITNESS adopts a twofold design: (1) With collected features from both inside-method and outside-method mutants, WITNESS is suitable for all generated mutants. (2) Instead of using computationally expensive deep learning, WITNESS employs lightweight classical machine learning models for training and prediction. This makes it more cost-effective and enabling straightforward explanations of the decision-making processes behind the adopted models. Evaluations on Defects4J projects show that WITNESS consistently achieves state-of-the-art predictive performance across different scenarios. Additionally, WITNESS significantly enhances the efficiency of kill matrix prediction. Post-hoc analysis reveals that features incorporating information from before and after the mutation are the most important among those used in WITNESS. Test case prioritization based on the predicted kill matrix shows that WITNESS delivers results much closer to those obtained by using the actual kill matrix, outperforming baseline approaches.
CURE: Cultural Understanding and Reasoning Evaluation - A Framework for "Thick" Culture Alignment Evaluation in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in culturally diverse environments, yet existing evaluations of cultural competence remain limited. Existing methods focus on de-contextualized correctness or forced-choice judgments, overlooking the need for cultural understanding and reasoning required for appropriate responses. To address this gap, we introduce a set of benchmarks that, instead of directly probing abstract norms or isolated statements, present models with realistic situational contexts that require culturally grounded reasoning. In addition to the standard Exact Match metric, we introduce four complementary metrics (Coverage, Specificity, Connotation, and Coherence) to capture different dimensions of model's response quality. Empirical analysis across frontier models reveals that thin evaluation systematically overestimates cultural competence and produces unstable assessments with high variance. In contrast, thick evaluation exposes differences in reasoning depth, reduces variance, and provides more stable, interpretable signals of cultural understanding.
Enhancing Road Safety Through Multi-Camera Image Segmentation with Post-Encroachment Time Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Traffic safety analysis at signalized intersections is vital for reducing vehicle and pedestrian collisions, yet traditional crash-based studies are limited by data sparsity and latency. This paper presents a novel multi-camera computer vision framework for real-time safety assessment through Post-Encroachment Time (PET) computation, demonstrated at the intersection of H Street and Broadway in Chula Vista, California. Four synchronized cameras provide continuous visual coverage, with each frame processed on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier devices using YOLOv11 segmentation for vehicle detection. Detected vehicle polygons are transformed into a unified bird's-eye map using homography matrices, enabling alignment across overlapping camera views. A novel pixel-level PET algorithm measures vehicle position without reliance on fixed cells, allowing fine-grained hazard visualization via dynamic heatmaps, accurate to 3.3 sq-cm. Timestamped vehicle and PET data is stored in an SQL database for long-term monitoring. Results over various time intervals demonstrate the framework's ability to identify high-risk regions with sub-second precision and real-time throughput on edge devices, producing data for an 800 x 800 pixel logarithmic heatmap at an average of 2.68 FPS. This study validates the feasibility of decentralized vision-based PET analysis for intelligent transportation systems, offering a replicable methodology for high-resolution, real-time, and scalable intersection safety evaluation.
Calibrated Multimodal Representation Learning with Missing Modalities
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Multimodal representation learning harmonizes distinct modalities by aligning them into a unified latent space. Recent research generalizes traditional cross-modal alignment to produce enhanced multimodal synergy but requires all modalities to be present for a common instance, making it challenging to utilize prevalent datasets with missing modalities. We provide theoretical insights into this issue from an anchor shift perspective. Observed modalities are aligned with a local anchor that deviates from the optimal one when all modalities are present, resulting in an inevitable shift. To address this, we propose CalMRL for multimodal representation learning to calibrate incomplete alignments caused by missing modalities. Specifically, CalMRL leverages the priors and the inherent connections among modalities to model the imputation for the missing ones at the representation level. To resolve the optimization dilemma, we employ a bi-step learning method with the closed-form solution of the posterior distribution of shared latents. We validate its mitigation of anchor shift and convergence with theoretical guidance. By equipping the calibrated alignment with the existing advanced method, we offer new flexibility to absorb data with missing modalities, which is originally unattainable. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analyses demonstrate the superiority of CalMRL. Our code, model checkpoints, and evaluation raw data will be publicly available.
Positive Characteristic Sets for Relational Pattern Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2025
Year: 2025

In the context of learning formal languages, data about an unknown target language L is given in terms of a set of (word,label) pairs, where a binary label indicates whether or not the given word belongs to L. A (polynomial-size) characteristic set for L, with respect to a reference class L of languages, is a set of such pairs that satisfies certain conditions allowing a learning algorithm to (efficiently) identify L within L. In this paper, we introduce the notion of positive characteristic set, referring to characteristic sets of only positive examples. These are of importance in the context of learning from positive examples only. We study this notion for classes of relational pattern languages, which are of relevance to various applications in string processing.
BudgetLeak: Membership Inference Attacks on RAG Systems via the Generation Budget Side Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models by integrating external knowledge, but reliance on proprietary or sensitive corpora poses various data risks, including privacy leakage and unauthorized data usage. Membership inference attacks (MIAs) are a common technique to assess such risks, yet existing approaches underperform in RAG due to black-box constraints and the absence of strong membership signals. In this paper, we identify a previously unexplored side channel in RAG systems: the generation budget, which controls the maximum number of tokens allowed in a generated response. Varying this budget reveals observable behavioral patterns between member and non-member queries, as members gain quality more rapidly with larger budgets. Building on this insight, we propose BudgetLeak, a novel membership inference attack that probes responses under different budgets and analyzes metric evolution via sequence modeling or clustering. Extensive experiments across four datasets, three LLM generators, and two retrievers demonstrate that BudgetLeak consistently outperforms existing baselines, while maintaining high efficiency and practical viability. Our findings reveal a previously overlooked data risk in RAG systems and highlight the need for new defenses.
FedSDA: Federated Stain Distribution Alignment for Non-IID Histopathological Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Federated learning (FL) has shown success in collaboratively training a model among decentralized data resources without directly sharing privacy-sensitive training data. Despite recent advances, non-IID (non-independent and identically distributed) data poses an inevitable challenge that hinders the use of FL. In this work, we address the issue of non-IID histopathological images with feature distribution shifts from an intuitive perspective that has only received limited attention. Specifically, we address this issue from the perspective of data distribution by solely adjusting the data distributions of all clients. Building on the success of diffusion models in fitting data distributions and leveraging stain separation to extract the pivotal features that are closely related to the non-IID properties of histopathological images, we propose a Federated Stain Distribution Alignment (FedSDA) method. FedSDA aligns the stain distribution of each client with a target distribution in an FL framework to mitigate distribution shifts among clients. Furthermore, considering that training diffusion models on raw data in FL has been shown to be susceptible to privacy leakage risks, we circumvent this problem while still effectively achieving alignment. Extensive experimental results show that FedSDA is not only effective in improving baselines that focus on mitigating disparities across clients' model updates but also outperforms baselines that address the non-IID data issues from the perspective of data distribution. We show that FedSDA provides valuable and practical insights for the computational pathology community.
BackWeak: Backdooring Knowledge Distillation Simply with Weak Triggers and Fine-tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is essential for compressing large models, yet relying on pre-trained "teacher" models downloaded from third-party repositories introduces serious security risks -- most notably backdoor attacks. Existing KD backdoor methods are typically complex and computationally intensive: they employ surrogate student models and simulated distillation to guarantee transferability, and they construct triggers in a way similar to universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs), which being not stealthy in magnitude, inherently exhibit strong adversarial behavior. This work questions whether such complexity is necessary and constructs stealthy "weak" triggers -- imperceptible perturbations that have negligible adversarial effect. We propose BackWeak, a simple, surrogate-free attack paradigm. BackWeak shows that a powerful backdoor can be implanted by simply fine-tuning a benign teacher with a weak trigger using a very small learning rate. We demonstrate that this delicate fine-tuning is sufficient to embed a backdoor that reliably transfers to diverse student architectures during a victim's standard distillation process, yielding high attack success rates. Extensive empirical evaluations on multiple datasets, model architectures, and KD methods show that BackWeak is efficient, simpler, and often more stealthy than previous elaborate approaches. This work calls on researchers studying KD backdoor attacks to pay particular attention to the trigger's stealthiness and its potential adversarial characteristics.
Exploring AI in Steganography and Steganalysis: Trends, Clusters, and Sustainable Development Potential
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Steganography and steganalysis are strongly related subjects of information security. Over the past decade, many powerful and efficient artificial intelligence (AI) - driven techniques have been designed and presented during research into steganography as well as steganalysis. This study presents a scientometric analysis of AI-driven steganography-based data hiding techniques using a thematic modelling approach. A total of 654 articles within the time span of 2017 to 2023 have been considered. Experimental evaluation of the study reveals that 69% of published articles are from Asian countries. The China is on top (TP:312), followed by India (TP-114). The study mainly identifies seven thematic clusters: steganographic image data hiding, deep image steganalysis, neural watermark robustness, linguistic steganography models, speech steganalysis algorithms, covert communication networks, and video steganography techniques. The proposed study also assesses the scope of AI-steganography under the purview of sustainable development goals (SDGs) to present the interdisciplinary reciprocity between them. It has been observed that only 18 of the 654 articles are aligned with one of the SDGs, which shows that limited studies conducted in alignment with SDG goals. SDG9 which is Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure is leading among 18 SDGs mapped articles. To the top of our insight, this study is the unique one to present a scientometric study on AI-driven steganography-based data hiding techniques. In the context of descriptive statistics, the study breaks down the underlying causes of observed trends, including the influence of DL developments, trends in East Asia and maturity of foundational methods. The work also stresses upon the critical gaps in societal alignment, particularly the SDGs, ultimately working on unveiling the field's global impact on AI security challenges.
UniABG: Unified Adversarial View Bridging and Graph Correspondence for Unsupervised Cross-View Geo-Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) matches query images ($\textit{e.g.}$, drone) to geographically corresponding opposite-view imagery ($\textit{e.g.}$, satellite). While supervised methods achieve strong performance, their reliance on extensive pairwise annotations limits scalability. Unsupervised alternatives avoid annotation costs but suffer from noisy pseudo-labels due to intrinsic cross-view domain gaps. To address these limitations, we propose $\textit{UniABG}$, a novel dual-stage unsupervised cross-view geo-localization framework integrating adversarial view bridging with graph-based correspondence calibration. Our approach first employs View-Aware Adversarial Bridging (VAAB) to model view-invariant features and enhance pseudo-label robustness. Subsequently, Heterogeneous Graph Filtering Calibration (HGFC) refines cross-view associations by constructing dual inter-view structure graphs, achieving reliable view correspondence. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art unsupervised performance, showing that UniABG improves Satellite $\rightarrow$ Drone AP by +10.63\% on University-1652 and +16.73\% on SUES-200, even surpassing supervised baselines. The source code is available at https://github.com/chenqi142/UniABG
GenIE - Simulator-Driven Iterative Data Exploration for Scientific Discovery
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2025
Year: 2025

Physics-based simulators play a critical role in scientific discovery and risk assessment, enabling what-if analyses for events like wildfires and hurricanes. Today, databases treat these simulators as external pre-processing steps. Analysts must manually run a simulation, export the results, and load them into a database before analysis can begin. This linear workflow is inefficient, incurs high latency, and hinders interactive exploration, especially when the analysis itself dictates the need for new or refined simulation data. We envision a new database paradigm, entitled GenIE, that seamlessly integrates multiple simulators into databases to enable dynamic orchestration of simulation workflows. By making the database "simulation-aware," GenIE can dynamically invoke simulators with appropriate parameters based on the user's query and analytical needs. This tight integration allows GenIE to avoid generating data irrelevant to the analysis, reuse previously generated data, and support iterative, incremental analysis where results are progressively refined at interactive speeds. We present our vision for GenIE, designed as an extension to PostgreSQL, and demonstrate its potential benefits through comprehensive use cases: wildfire smoke dispersion analysis using WRF-SFIRE and HYSPLIT, and hurricane hazard assessment integrating wind, surge, and flood models. Our preliminary experiments show how GenIE can transform these slow, static analyses into interactive explorations by intelligently managing the trade-off between simulation accuracy and runtime across multiple integrated simulators. We conclude by highlighting the challenges and opportunities ahead in realizing the full vision of GenIE as a cornerstone for next-generation scientific data analysis.
Intelligent Collaborative Optimization for Rubber Tyre Film Production Based on Multi-path Differentiated Clipping Proximal Policy Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

The advent of smart manufacturing is addressing the limitations of traditional centralized scheduling and inflexible production line configurations in the rubber tyre industry, especially in terms of coping with dynamic production demands. Contemporary tyre manufacturing systems form complex networks of tightly coupled subsystems pronounced nonlinear interactions and emergent dynamics. This complexity renders the effective coordination of multiple subsystems, posing an essential yet formidable task. For high-dimensional, multi-objective optimization problems in this domain, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning algorithm: Multi-path Differentiated Clipping Proximal Policy Optimization (MPD-PPO). This algorithm employs a multi-branch policy architecture with differentiated gradient clipping constraints to ensure stable and efficient high-dimensional policy updates. Validated through experiments on width and thickness control in rubber tyre film production, MPD-PPO demonstrates substantial improvements in both tuning accuracy and operational efficiency. The framework successfully tackles key challenges, including high dimensionality, multi-objective trade-offs, and dynamic adaptation, thus delivering enhanced performance and production stability for real-time industrial deployment in tyre manufacturing.
MovSemCL: Movement-Semantics Contrastive Learning for Trajectory Similarity (Extension)
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Trajectory similarity computation is fundamental functionality that is used for, e.g., clustering, prediction, and anomaly detection. However, existing learning-based methods exhibit three key limitations: (1) insufficient modeling of trajectory semantics and hierarchy, lacking both movement dynamics extraction and multi-scale structural representation; (2) high computational costs due to point-wise encoding; and (3) use of physically implausible augmentations that distort trajectory semantics. To address these issues, we propose MovSemCL, a movement-semantics contrastive learning framework for trajectory similarity computation. MovSemCL first transforms raw GPS trajectories into movement-semantics features and then segments them into patches. Next, MovSemCL employs intra- and inter-patch attentions to encode local as well as global trajectory patterns, enabling efficient hierarchical representation and reducing computational costs. Moreover, MovSemCL includes a curvature-guided augmentation strategy that preserves informative segments (e.g., turns and intersections) and masks redundant ones, generating physically plausible augmented views. Experiments on real-world datasets show that MovSemCL is capable of outperforming state-of-the-art methods, achieving mean ranks close to the ideal value of 1 at similarity search tasks and improvements by up to 20.3% at heuristic approximation, while reducing inference latency by up to 43.4%.
MF-Speech: Achieving Fine-Grained and Compositional Control in Speech Generation via Factor Disentanglement
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

Generating expressive and controllable human speech is one of the core goals of generative artificial intelligence, but its progress has long been constrained by two fundamental challenges: the deep entanglement of speech factors and the coarse granularity of existing control mechanisms. To overcome these challenges, we have proposed a novel framework called MF-Speech, which consists of two core components: MF-SpeechEncoder and MF-SpeechGenerator. MF-SpeechEncoder acts as a factor purifier, adopting a multi-objective optimization strategy to decompose the original speech signal into highly pure and independent representations of content, timbre, and emotion. Subsequently, MF-SpeechGenerator functions as a conductor, achieving precise, composable and fine-grained control over these factors through dynamic fusion and Hierarchical Style Adaptive Normalization (HSAN). Experiments demonstrate that in the highly challenging multi-factor compositional speech generation task, MF-Speech significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, achieving a lower word error rate (WER=4.67%), superior style control (SECS=0.5685, Corr=0.68), and the highest subjective evaluation scores(nMOS=3.96, sMOS_emotion=3.86, sMOS_style=3.78). Furthermore, the learned discrete factors exhibit strong transferability, demonstrating their significant potential as a general-purpose speech representation.
From Scaling to Structured Expressivity: Rethinking Transformers for CTR Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

Despite massive investments in scale, deep models for click-through rate (CTR) prediction often exhibit rapidly diminishing returns - a stark contrast to the smooth, predictable gains seen in large language models. We identify the root cause as a structural misalignment: Transformers assume sequential compositionality, while CTR data demand combinatorial reasoning over high-cardinality semantic fields. Unstructured attention spreads capacity indiscriminately, amplifying noise under extreme sparsity and breaking scalable learning. To restore alignment, we introduce the Field-Aware Transformer (FAT), which embeds field-based interaction priors into attention through decomposed content alignment and cross-field modulation. This design ensures model complexity scales with the number of fields F, not the total vocabulary size n >> F, leading to tighter generalization and, critically, observed power-law scaling in AUC as model width increases. We present the first formal scaling law for CTR models, grounded in Rademacher complexity, that explains and predicts this behavior. On large-scale benchmarks, FAT improves AUC by up to +0.51% over state-of-the-art methods. Deployed online, it delivers +2.33% CTR and +0.66% RPM. Our work establishes that effective scaling in recommendation arises not from size, but from structured expressivity-architectural coherence with data semantics.