OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Lost in Space: Finding the Right Tokens for Structured Output
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

General-purpose language models are trained to produce varied natural language outputs, but for some tasks, like annotation or classification, we need more specific output formats. LLM systems increasingly support structured output, which enforces formats by sampling tokens according to a grammar -- but also unpredictably reduces downstream performance. Are there systematic differences between grammars that appear semantically (and often visually) similar to humans? To answer this, we test four popular model families with five varying output formats on four common NLP benchmarks. We find all models perform most accurately when guided to use formats respecting convention, such as letters for multiple choice and real numbers for numerical prediction. Performance also improves by 5%-10% when guiding models to return tokens incorporating leading whitespace, with smaller models benefiting the most. We find leading whitespace helps models avoid structural deficiencies in subword token representations. We finally present best practices for researchers using language models as zero-shot classifiers with structured output.
EigenShield: Causal Subspace Filtering via Random Matrix Theory for Adversarially Robust Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) inherit adversarial vulnerabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), which are further exacerbated by their multimodal nature. Existing defenses, including adversarial training, input transformations, and heuristic detection, are computationally expensive, architecture-dependent, and fragile against adaptive attacks. We introduce EigenShield, an inference-time defense leveraging Random Matrix Theory to quantify adversarial disruptions in high-dimensional VLM representations. Unlike prior methods that rely on empirical heuristics, EigenShield employs the spiked covariance model to detect structured spectral deviations. Using a Robustness-based Nonconformity Score (RbNS) and quantile-based thresholding, it separates causal eigenvectors, which encode semantic information, from correlational eigenvectors that are susceptible to adversarial artifacts. By projecting embeddings onto the causal subspace, EigenShield filters adversarial noise without modifying model parameters or requiring adversarial training. This architecture-independent, attack-agnostic approach significantly reduces the attack success rate, establishing spectral analysis as a principled alternative to conventional defenses. Our results demonstrate that EigenShield consistently outperforms all existing defenses, including adversarial training, UNIGUARD, and CIDER.
Contextualizing Search Queries In-Context Learning for Conversational Rewriting with LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Conversational query rewriting is crucial for effective conversational search, yet traditional supervised methods require substantial labeled data, which is scarce in low-resource settings. This paper introduces Prompt-Guided In-Context Learning, a novel approach that leverages the in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for few-shot conversational query rewriting. Our method employs carefully designed prompts, incorporating task descriptions, input/output format specifications, and a small set of illustrative examples, to guide pre-trained LLMs to generate context-independent queries without explicit fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, TREC and Taskmaster-1, demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines, including supervised models and contrastive co-training methods, across various evaluation metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE-L, Success Rate, and MRR. Ablation studies confirm the importance of in-context examples, and human evaluations further validate the superior fluency, relevance, and context utilization of our generated rewrites. The results highlight the potential of prompt-guided in-context learning as an efficient and effective paradigm for low-resource conversational query rewriting, reducing the reliance on extensive labeled data and complex training procedures.
Towards Physics-Guided Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Traditional foundation models are pre-trained on broad datasets to reduce the training resources (e.g., time, energy, labeled samples) needed for fine-tuning a wide range of downstream tasks. However, traditional foundation models struggle with out-of-distribution prediction and can produce outputs that are unrealistic and physically infeasible. We propose the notation of physics-guided foundation models (PGFM), that is, foundation models integrated with broad or general domain (e.g., scientific) physical knowledge applicable to a wide range of downstream tasks.
Fundamental Survey on Neuromorphic Based Audio Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

Audio classification is paramount in a variety of applications including surveillance, healthcare monitoring, and environmental analysis. Traditional methods frequently depend on intricate signal processing algorithms and manually crafted features, which may fall short in fully capturing the complexities of audio patterns. Neuromorphic computing, inspired by the architecture and functioning of the human brain, presents a promising alternative for audio classification tasks. This survey provides an exhaustive examination of the current state-of-the-art in neuromorphic-based audio classification. It delves into the crucial components of neuromorphic systems, such as Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), memristors, and neuromorphic hardware platforms, highlighting their advantages in audio classification. Furthermore, the survey explores various methodologies and strategies employed in neuromorphic audio classification, including event-based processing, spike-based learning, and bio-inspired feature extraction. It examines how these approaches address the limitations of traditional audio classification methods, particularly in terms of energy efficiency, real-time processing, and robustness to environmental noise. Additionally, the paper conducts a comparative analysis of different neuromorphic audio classification models and benchmarks, evaluating their performance metrics, computational efficiency, and scalability. By providing a comprehensive guide for researchers, engineers and practitioners, this survey aims to stimulate further innovation and advancements in the evolving field of neuromorphic audio classification.
Rare Disease Differential Diagnosis with Large Language Models at Scale: From Abdominal Actinomycosis to Wilson's Disease
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in disease diagnosis. However, their effectiveness in identifying rarer diseases, which are inherently more challenging to diagnose, remains an open question. Rare disease performance is critical with the increasing use of LLMs in healthcare settings. This is especially true if a primary care physician needs to make a rarer prognosis from only a patient conversation so that they can take the appropriate next step. To that end, several clinical decision support systems are designed to support providers in rare disease identification. Yet their utility is limited due to their lack of knowledge of common disorders and difficulty of use. In this paper, we propose RareScale to combine the knowledge LLMs with expert systems. We use jointly use an expert system and LLM to simulate rare disease chats. This data is used to train a rare disease candidate predictor model. Candidates from this smaller model are then used as additional inputs to black-box LLM to make the final differential diagnosis. Thus, RareScale allows for a balance between rare and common diagnoses. We present results on over 575 rare diseases, beginning with Abdominal Actinomycosis and ending with Wilson's Disease. Our approach significantly improves the baseline performance of black-box LLMs by over 17% in Top-5 accuracy. We also find that our candidate generation performance is high (e.g. 88.8% on gpt-4o generated chats).
Optimizing Singular Spectrum for Large Language Model Compression
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet prohibitive parameter complexity often hinders their deployment. Existing singular value decomposition (SVD) based compression methods simply deem singular values as importance scores of decomposed components. However, this importance ordered by singular values does not necessarily correlate with the performance of a downstream task. In this work, we introduce SoCo (Singular spectrum optimization for large language model Compression), a novel compression framework that learns to rescale the decomposed components of SVD in a data-driven manner. Concretely, we employ a learnable diagonal matrix to assign importance scores for singular spectrum and develop a three-stage training process that progressively refines these scores from initial coarse compression to fine-grained sparsification-thereby striking an effective balance between aggressive model compression and performance preservation. Thanks to the learnable singular spectrum, SoCo adaptively prunes components according to the sparsified importance scores, rather than relying on the fixed order of singular values. More importantly, the remaining components with amplified importance scores can compensate for the loss of the pruned ones. Experimental evaluations across multiple LLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that SoCo surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in model compression.
A Study on Interaction Complexity and Time
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Testing Web User Interfaces (UIs) requires considerable time and effort and resources, most notably participants for user testing. Additionally, the tests results may demand adjustments on the UI, taking further resources and testing. Early tests can make this process less costly with the help of low fidelity prototypes, but it is difficult to conduct user tests on them, and recruiting participants is still necessary. To tackle this issue, there are tools that can predict UI aspects like interaction time, as the well-known KLM model. Another aspect that can be predicted is complexity, and this was achieved by the Big I notation, which can be applied to early UX concepts like lo-fi wireframes. Big I assists developers in estimating the interaction complexity, specified as a function of user steps, which are composed of abstracted user actions. Interaction complexity is expressed in mathematical terms, making the comparison of interaction complexities for various UX concepts easy. However, big I is not able to predict execution time for user actions, which would be very helpful for early assessment of lo-fi prototypes. To address this shortcoming, in this paper we present a study in which we took measurements from real users (n=100) completing tasks in a fictitious website, in order to derive average times per interaction step. Using these results, we were able to study the relationship between interaction complexity and time and ultimately complement big I predictions with time estimates.
Assessing a Single Student's Concentration on Learning Platforms: A Machine Learning-Enhanced EEG-Based Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

This study introduces a specialized pipeline designed to classify the concentration state of an individual student during online learning sessions by training a custom-tailored machine learning model. Detailed protocols for acquiring and preprocessing EEG data are outlined, along with the extraction of fifty statistical features from five EEG signal bands: alpha, beta, theta, delta, and gamma. Following feature extraction, a thorough feature selection process was conducted to optimize the data inputs for a personalized analysis. The study also explores the benefits of hyperparameter fine-tuning to enhance the classification accuracy of the student's concentration state. EEG signals were captured from the student using a Muse headband (Gen 2), equipped with five electrodes (TP9, AF7, AF8, TP10, and a reference electrode NZ), during engagement with educational content on computer-based e-learning platforms. Employing a random forest model customized to the student's data, we achieved remarkable classification performance, with test accuracies of 97.6% in the computer-based learning setting and 98% in the virtual reality setting. These results underscore the effectiveness of our approach in delivering personalized insights into student concentration during online educational activities.
DAM-Seg: Anatomically accurate cardiac segmentation using Dense Associative Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Deep learning-based cardiac segmentation has seen significant advancements over the years. Many studies have tackled the challenge of anatomically incorrect segmentation predictions by introducing auxiliary modules. These modules either post-process segmentation outputs or enforce consistency between specific points to ensure anatomical correctness. However, such approaches often increase network complexity, require separate training for these modules, and may lack robustness in scenarios with poor visibility. To address these limitations, we propose a novel transformer-based architecture that leverages dense associative networks to learn and retain specific patterns inherent to cardiac inputs. Unlike traditional methods, our approach restricts the network to memorize a limited set of patterns. During forward propagation, a weighted sum of these patterns is used to enforce anatomical correctness in the output. Since these patterns are input-independent, the model demonstrates enhanced robustness, even in cases with poor visibility. The proposed pipeline was evaluated on two publicly available datasets, CAMUS and CardiacNet. Experimental results indicate that our model consistently outperforms baseline approaches across all metrics, highlighting its effectiveness and reliability for cardiac segmentation tasks.
TransMamba: Fast Universal Architecture Adaption from Transformers to Mamba
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Transformer-based architectures have become the backbone of both uni-modal and multi-modal foundation models, largely due to their scalability via attention mechanisms, resulting in a rich ecosystem of publicly available pre-trained models such as LLaVA, CLIP, and DeiT, etc. In parallel, emerging sub-quadratic architectures like Mamba offer promising efficiency gains by enabling global context modeling with linear complexity. However, training these architectures from scratch remains resource-intensive (e.g., in terms of data and time). Motivated by this challenge, we explore a cross-architecture knowledge transfer paradigm, termed TransMamba, that facilitates the reuse of Transformer pre-trained knowledge. We propose a two-stage framework to accelerate the training of Mamba-based models, ensuring their effectiveness across both uni-modal and multi-modal tasks. The first stage leverages pre-trained Transformer models to initialize critical components of the Mamba architecture. To bridge architectural and dimensional gaps, we develop a selective weight subcloning strategy and a layered initialization scheme that prioritizes the early $n$ layers. Building on this initialization, the second stage introduces an adaptive multi-directional knowledge distillation method. This mechanism employs layer-wise adaptive scaling factors to align Mamba representations with their Transformer counterparts, while accommodating the scanning order variations inherent to multi-modal Mamba architectures. Despite operating with a reduced training dataset and a more compact model architecture, TransMamba consistently outperforms baseline approaches across diverse mamba-based backbones (e.g., PlainMamba, Vmamba, ViM and VideoMamba) and downstream tasks (e.g., image classification, visual question answering, text-video retrieval and multimodal reasoning). All code and implementation details will be released.
SPAARC: Spatial Proximity and Association based prefetching for Augmented Reality in edge Cache
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2025
Year: 2025

Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) applications face performance challenges due to their high computational demands and need for low-latency responses. Traditional approaches like on-device storage or reactive data fetching from the cloud often result in limited AR experiences or unacceptable lag. Edge caching, which caches AR objects closer to the user, provides a promising solution. However, existing edge caching approaches do not consider AR-specific features such as AR object sizes, user interactions, and physical location. This paper investigates how to further optimize edge caching by employing AR-aware prefetching techniques. We present SPAARC, a Spatial Proximity and Association-based Prefetching policy specifically designed for MAR Caches. SPAARC intelligently prioritizes the caching of virtual objects based on their association with other similar objects and the user's proximity to them. It also considers the recency of associations and uses a lazy fetching strategy to efficiently manage edge resources and maximize Quality of Experience (QoE). Through extensive evaluation using both synthetic and real-world workloads, we demonstrate that SPAARC significantly improves cache hit rates compared to standard caching algorithms, achieving gains ranging from 3% to 40% while reducing the need for on-demand data retrieval from the cloud. Further, we present an adaptive tuning algorithm that automatically tunes SPAARC parameters to achieve optimal performance. Our findings demonstrate the potential of SPAARC to substantially enhance the user experience in MAR applications by ensuring the timely availability of virtual objects.
Agonistic Image Generation: Unsettling the Hegemony of Intention
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Current image generation paradigms prioritize actualizing user intention - "see what you intend" - but often neglect the sociopolitical dimensions of this process. However, it is increasingly evident that image generation is political, contributing to broader social struggles over visual meaning. This sociopolitical aspect was highlighted by the March 2024 Gemini controversy, where Gemini faced criticism for inappropriately injecting demographic diversity into user prompts. Although the developers sought to redress image generation's sociopolitical dimension by introducing diversity "corrections," their opaque imposition of a standard for "diversity" ultimately proved counterproductive. In this paper, we present an alternative approach: an image generation interface designed to embrace open negotiation along the sociopolitical dimensions of image creation. Grounded in the principles of agonistic pluralism (from the Greek agon, meaning struggle), our interface actively engages users with competing visual interpretations of their prompts. Through a lab study with 29 participants, we evaluate our agonistic interface on its ability to facilitate reflection - engagement with other perspectives and challenging dominant assumptions - a core principle that underpins agonistic contestation. We compare it to three existing paradigms: a standard interface, a Gemini-style interface that produces "diverse" images, and an intention-centric interface suggesting prompt refinements. Our findings demonstrate that the agonistic interface enhances reflection across multiple measures, but also that reflection depends on users perceiving the interface as both appropriate and empowering; introducing diversity without grounding it in relevant political contexts was perceived as inauthentic. Our results suggest that diversity and user intention should not be treated as opposing values to be balanced.
Steganographic Embeddings as an Effective Data Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Image Steganography is a cryptographic technique that embeds secret information into an image, ensuring the hidden data remains undetectable to the human eye while preserving the image's original visual integrity. Least Significant Bit (LSB) Steganography achieves this by replacing the k least significant bits of an image with the k most significant bits of a secret image, maintaining the appearance of the original image while simultaneously encoding the essential elements of the hidden data. In this work, we shift away from conventional applications of steganography in deep learning and explore its potential from a new angle. We present experimental results on CIFAR-10 showing that LSB Steganography, when used as a data augmentation strategy for downstream computer vision tasks such as image classification, can significantly improve the training efficiency of deep neural networks. It can also act as an implicit, uniformly discretized piecewise linear approximation of color augmentations such as (brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation), without introducing additional training overhead through a new joint image training regime that disregards the need for tuning sensitive augmentation hyperparameters.
A Training-free LLM-based Approach to General Chinese Character Error Correction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Chinese spelling correction (CSC) is a crucial task that aims to correct character errors in Chinese text. While conventional CSC focuses on character substitution errors caused by mistyping, two other common types of character errors, missing and redundant characters, have received less attention. These errors are often excluded from CSC datasets during the annotation process or ignored during evaluation, even when they have been annotated. This issue limits the practicality of the CSC task. To address this issue, we introduce the task of General Chinese Character Error Correction (C2EC), which focuses on all three types of character errors. We construct a high-quality C2EC benchmark by combining and manually verifying data from CCTC and Lemon datasets. We extend the training-free prompt-free CSC method to C2EC by using Levenshtein distance for handling length changes and leveraging an additional prompt-based large language model (LLM) to improve performance. Experiments show that our method enables a 14B-parameter LLM to be on par with models nearly 50 times larger on both conventional CSC and C2EC tasks, without any fine-tuning.
FlexPie: Accelerate Distributed Inference on Edge Devices with Flexible Combinatorial Optimization[Technical Report]
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

The rapid advancement of deep learning has catalyzed the development of novel IoT applications, which often deploy pre-trained deep neural network (DNN) models across multiple edge devices for collaborative inference.