OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards a Science of Causal Interpretability in Deep Learning for Software Engineering
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

This dissertation addresses achieving causal interpretability in Deep Learning for Software Engineering (DL4SE). While Neural Code Models (NCMs) show strong performance in automating software tasks, their lack of transparency in causal relationships between inputs and outputs limits full understanding of their capabilities. To build trust in NCMs, researchers and practitioners must explain code predictions. Associational interpretability, which identifies correlations, is often insufficient for tasks requiring intervention and change analysis. To address this, the dissertation introduces DoCode, a novel post hoc interpretability method for NCMs. DoCode uses causal inference to provide programming language-oriented explanations of model predictions. It follows a four-step pipeline: modeling causal problems using Structural Causal Models (SCMs), identifying the causal estimand, estimating effects with metrics like Average Treatment Effect (ATE), and refuting effect estimates. Its framework is extensible, with an example that reduces spurious correlations by grounding explanations in programming language properties. A case study on deep code generation across interpretability scenarios and various deep learning architectures demonstrates DoCode's benefits. Results show NCMs' sensitivity to code syntax changes and their ability to learn certain programming concepts while minimizing confounding bias. The dissertation also examines associational interpretability as a foundation, analyzing software information's causal nature using tools like COMET and TraceXplainer for traceability. It highlights the need to identify code confounders and offers practical guidelines for applying causal interpretability to NCMs, contributing to more trustworthy AI in software engineering.
Lawful but Awful: Evolving Legislative Responses to Address Online Misinformation, Disinformation, and Mal-Information in the Age of Generative AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

"Fake news" is an old problem. In recent years, however, increasing usage of social media as a source of information, the spread of unverified medical advice during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the rise of generative artificial intelligence have seen a rush of legislative proposals seeking to minimize or mitigate the impact of false information spread online. Drawing on a novel dataset of statutes and other instruments, this article analyses changing perceptions about the potential harms caused by misinformation, disinformation, and "mal-information". The turn to legislation began in countries that were less free, in terms of civil liberties, and poorer, as measured by GDP per capita. Internet penetration does not seem to have been a driving factor. The focus of such laws is most frequently on national security broadly construed, though 2020 saw a spike in laws addressing public health. Unsurprisingly, governments with fewer legal constraints on government action have generally adopted more robust positions in dealing with false information. Despite early reservations, however, growth in such laws is now steepest in Western states. Though there are diverse views on the appropriate response to false information online, the need for legislation of some kind appears now to be global. The question is no longer whether to regulate "lawful but awful" speech online, but how.
Can Large Language Models Understand Internet Buzzwords Through User-Generated Content
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

The massive user-generated content (UGC) available in Chinese social media is giving rise to the possibility of studying internet buzzwords. In this paper, we study if large language models (LLMs) can generate accurate definitions for these buzzwords based on UGC as examples. Our work serves a threefold contribution. First, we introduce CHEER, the first dataset of Chinese internet buzzwords, each annotated with a definition and relevant UGC. Second, we propose a novel method, called RESS, to effectively steer the comprehending process of LLMs to produce more accurate buzzword definitions, mirroring the skills of human language learning. Third, with CHEER, we benchmark the strengths and weaknesses of various off-the-shelf definition generation methods and our RESS. Our benchmark demonstrates the effectiveness of RESS while revealing crucial shared challenges: over-reliance on prior exposure, underdeveloped inferential abilities, and difficulty identifying high-quality UGC to facilitate comprehension. We believe our work lays the groundwork for future advancements in LLM-based definition generation. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/SCUNLP/Buzzword.
Agentic Feature Augmentation: Unifying Selection and Generation with Teaming, Planning, and Memories
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

As a widely-used and practical tool, feature engineering transforms raw data into discriminative features to advance AI model performance. However, existing methods usually apply feature selection and generation separately, failing to strive a balance between reducing redundancy and adding meaningful dimensions. To fill this gap, we propose an agentic feature augmentation concept, where the unification of feature generation and selection is modeled as agentic teaming and planning. Specifically, we develop a Multi-Agent System with Long and Short-Term Memory (MAGS), comprising a selector agent to eliminate redundant features, a generator agent to produce informative new dimensions, and a router agent that strategically coordinates their actions. We leverage in-context learning with short-term memory for immediate feedback refinement and long-term memory for globally optimal guidance. Additionally, we employ offline Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) reinforcement fine-tuning to train the router agent for effective decision-making to navigate a vast discrete feature space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this unified agentic framework consistently achieves superior task performance by intelligently orchestrating feature selection and generation.
Robust Multi-Modal Forecasting: Integrating Static and Dynamic Features
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Time series forecasting plays a crucial role in various applications, particularly in healthcare, where accurate predictions of future health trajectories can significantly impact clinical decision-making. Ensuring transparency and explainability of the models responsible for these tasks is essential for their adoption in critical settings. Recent work has explored a top-down approach to bi-level transparency, focusing on understanding trends and properties of predicted time series using static features. In this work, we extend this framework by incorporating exogenous time series features alongside static features in a structured manner, while maintaining cohesive interpretation. Our approach leverages the insights of trajectory comprehension to introduce an encoding mechanism for exogenous time series, where they are decomposed into meaningful trends and properties, enabling the extraction of interpretable patterns. Through experiments on several synthetic datasets, we demonstrate that our approach remains predictive while preserving interpretability and robustness. This work represents a step towards developing robust, and generalized time series forecasting models. The code is available at https://github.com/jeremy-qin/TIMEVIEW
Leveraging Large Language Models for Command Injection Vulnerability Analysis in Python: An Empirical Study on Popular Open-Source Projects
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Command injection vulnerabilities are a significant security threat in dynamic languages like Python, particularly in widely used open-source projects where security issues can have extensive impact. With the proven effectiveness of Large Language Models(LLMs) in code-related tasks, such as testing, researchers have explored their potential for vulnerabilities analysis. This study evaluates the potential of large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, as an alternative approach for automated testing for vulnerability detection. In particular, LLMs have demonstrated advanced contextual understanding and adaptability, making them promising candidates for identifying nuanced security vulnerabilities within code. To evaluate this potential, we applied LLM-based analysis to six high-profile GitHub projects-Django, Flask, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, PyTorch, and Langchain-each with over 50,000 stars and extensive adoption across software development and academic research. Our analysis assesses both the strengths and limitations of LLMs in detecting command injection vulnerabilities, evaluating factors such as detection accuracy, efficiency, and practical integration into development workflows. In addition, we provide a comparative analysis of different LLM tools to identify those most suitable for security applications. Our findings offer guidance for developers and security researchers on leveraging LLMs as innovative and automated approaches to enhance software security.
Nek Minit: Harnessing Pragmatic Metacognitive Prompting for Explainable Sarcasm Detection of Australian and Indian English
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Sarcasm is a challenge to sentiment analysis because of the incongruity between stated and implied sentiment. The challenge is exacerbated when the implication may be relevant to a specific country or geographical region. Pragmatic metacognitive prompting (PMP) is a cognition-inspired technique that has been used for pragmatic reasoning. In this paper, we harness PMP for explainable sarcasm detection for Australian and Indian English, alongside a benchmark dataset for standard English. We manually add sarcasm explanations to an existing sarcasm-labeled dataset for Australian and Indian English called BESSTIE, and compare the performance for explainable sarcasm detection for them with FLUTE, a standard English dataset containing sarcasm explanations. Our approach utilising PMP when evaluated on two open-weight LLMs (GEMMA and LLAMA) achieves statistically significant performance improvement across all tasks and datasets when compared with four alternative prompting strategies. We also find that alternative techniques such as agentic prompting mitigate context-related failures by enabling external knowledge retrieval. The focused contribution of our work is utilising PMP in generating sarcasm explanations for varieties of English.
Maximum Degree-Based Quasi-Clique Search via an Iterative Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2025
Year: 2025

Cohesive subgraph mining is a fundamental problem in graph theory with numerous real-world applications, such as social network analysis and protein-protein interaction modeling. Among various cohesive subgraphs, the $γ$-quasi-clique is widely studied for its flexibility in requiring each vertex to connect to at least a $γ$ proportion of other vertices in the subgraph. However, solving the maximum $γ$-quasi-clique problem is NP-hard and further complicated by the lack of the hereditary property, which makes designing efficient pruning strategies challenging. Existing algorithms, such as DDA and FastQC, either struggle with scalability or exhibit significant performance declines for small values of $γ$. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, IterQC, which reformulates the maximum $γ$-quasi-clique problem as a series of $k$-plex problems that possess the hereditary property. IterQC introduces a non-trivial iterative framework and incorporates two key optimization techniques: (1) the pseudo lower bound (pseudo LB) technique, which leverages information across iterations to improve the efficiency of branch-and-bound searches, and (2) the preprocessing technique that reduces problem size and unnecessary iterations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IterQC achieves up to four orders of magnitude speedup and solves significantly more graph instances compared to state-of-the-art algorithms DDA and FastQC.
Lossless Token Merging Even Without Fine-Tuning in Vision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Although Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become the standard architecture in computer vision, their massive sizes lead to significant computational overhead. Token compression techniques have attracted considerable attention to address this issue, but they often suffer from severe information loss, requiring extensive additional training to achieve practical performance. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Token Merging (ATM), a novel method that ensures lossless token merging, eliminating the need for fine-tuning while maintaining competitive performance. ATM adaptively reduces tokens across layers and batches by carefully adjusting layer-specific similarity thresholds, thereby preventing the undesirable merging of less similar tokens with respect to each layer. Furthermore, ATM introduces a novel token matching technique that considers not only similarity but also merging sizes, particularly for the final layers, to minimize the information loss incurred from each merging operation. We empirically validate our method across a wide range of pretrained models, demonstrating that ATM not only outperforms all existing training-free methods but also surpasses most training-intensive approaches, even without additional training. Remarkably, training-free ATM achieves over a 30% reduction in FLOPs for the DeiT-T and DeiT-S models without any drop in their original accuracy.
Building LOD Representation for 3D Urban Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2025
Year: 2025

The advances in 3D reconstruction technology, such as photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning, have made it easier to reconstruct accurate and detailed 3D models for urban scenes. Nevertheless, these reconstructed models often contain a large number of geometry primitives, making interactive manipulation and rendering challenging, especially on resource-constrained devices like virtual reality platforms. Therefore, the generation of appropriate levels-of-detail (LOD) representations for these models is crucial. Additionally, automatically reconstructed 3D models tend to suffer from noise and lack semantic information. Dealing with these issues and creating LOD representations that are robust against noise while capturing the semantic meaning present significant challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to address these challenges. We begin by analysing the properties of planar primitives detected from the input and group these primitives into multiple level sets by forming meaningful 3D structures. These level sets form the nodes of our innovative LOD-Tree. By selecting nodes at appropriate depths within the LOD-Tree, different LOD representations can be generated. Experimental results on real and complex urban scenes demonstrate the merits of our approach in generating clean, accurate, and semantically meaningful LOD representations.
Leveraging Foundation Models for Multimodal Graph-Based Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Foundation models have ushered in a new era for multimodal video understanding by enabling the extraction of rich spatiotemporal and semantic representations. In this work, we introduce a novel graph-based framework that integrates a vision-language foundation, leveraging VideoMAE for dynamic visual encoding and BERT for contextual textual embedding, to address the challenge of recognizing fine-grained bimanual manipulation actions. Departing from conventional static graph architectures, our approach constructs an adaptive multimodal graph where nodes represent frames, objects, and textual annotations, and edges encode spatial, temporal, and semantic relationships. These graph structures evolve dynamically based on learned interactions, allowing for flexible and context-aware reasoning. A task-specific attention mechanism within a Graph Attention Network further enhances this reasoning by modulating edge importance based on action semantics. Through extensive evaluations on diverse benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, underscoring the strength of combining foundation models with dynamic graph-based reasoning for robust and generalizable action recognition.
Flashback: Memory-Driven Zero-shot, Real-time Video Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) automatically identifies anomalous events from video, mitigating the need for human operators in large-scale surveillance deployments. However, two fundamental obstacles hinder real-world adoption: domain dependency and real-time constraints -- requiring near-instantaneous processing of incoming video. To this end, we propose Flashback, a zero-shot and real-time video anomaly detection paradigm. Inspired by the human cognitive mechanism of instantly judging anomalies and reasoning in current scenes based on past experience, Flashback operates in two stages: Recall and Respond. In the offline recall stage, an off-the-shelf LLM builds a pseudo-scene memory of both normal and anomalous captions without any reliance on real anomaly data. In the online respond stage, incoming video segments are embedded and matched against this memory via similarity search. By eliminating all LLM calls at inference time, Flashback delivers real-time VAD even on a consumer-grade GPU. On two large datasets from real-world surveillance scenarios, UCF-Crime and XD-Violence, we achieve 87.3 AUC (+7.0 pp) and 75.1 AP (+13.1 pp), respectively, outperforming prior zero-shot VAD methods by large margins.
DUSK: Do Not Unlearn Shared Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, raising concerns about the unauthorized use of copyrighted or sensitive data. Machine unlearning aims to remove such 'forget' data while preserving utility and information from the 'retain' set. However, existing evaluations typically assume that forget and retain sets are fully disjoint, overlooking realistic scenarios where they share overlapping content. For instance, a news article may need to be unlearned, even though the same event, such as an earthquake in Japan, is also described factually on Wikipedia. Effective unlearning should remove the specific phrasing of the news article while preserving publicly supported facts. In this paper, we introduce DUSK, a benchmark designed to evaluate unlearning methods under realistic data overlap. DUSK constructs document sets that describe the same factual content in different styles, with some shared information appearing across all sets and other content remaining unique to each. When one set is designated for unlearning, an ideal method should remove its unique content while preserving shared facts. We define seven evaluation metrics to assess whether unlearning methods can achieve this selective removal. Our evaluation of nine recent unlearning methods reveals a key limitation: while most can remove surface-level text, they often fail to erase deeper, context-specific knowledge without damaging shared content. We release DUSK as a public benchmark to support the development of more precise and reliable unlearning techniques for real-world applications.
DC-Scene: Data-Centric Learning for 3D Scene Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

3D scene understanding plays a fundamental role in vision applications such as robotics, autonomous driving, and augmented reality. However, advancing learning-based 3D scene understanding remains challenging due to two key limitations: (1) the large scale and complexity of 3D scenes lead to higher computational costs and slower training compared to 2D counterparts; and (2) high-quality annotated 3D datasets are significantly scarcer than those available for 2D vision. These challenges underscore the need for more efficient learning paradigms. In this work, we propose DC-Scene, a data-centric framework tailored for 3D scene understanding, which emphasizes enhancing data quality and training efficiency. Specifically, we introduce a CLIP-driven dual-indicator quality (DIQ) filter, combining vision-language alignment scores with caption-loss perplexity, along with a curriculum scheduler that progressively expands the training pool from the top 25% to 75% of scene-caption pairs. This strategy filters out noisy samples and significantly reduces dependence on large-scale labeled 3D data. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D demonstrate that DC-Scene achieves state-of-the-art performance (86.1 CIDEr with the top-75% subset vs. 85.4 with the full dataset) while reducing training cost by approximately two-thirds, confirming that a compact set of high-quality samples can outperform exhaustive training. Code will be available at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/DC-Scene.
Margin-aware Fuzzy Rough Feature Selection: Bridging Uncertainty Characterization and Pattern Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Fuzzy rough feature selection (FRFS) is an effective means of addressing the curse of dimensionality in high-dimensional data. By removing redundant and irrelevant features, FRFS helps mitigate classifier overfitting, enhance generalization performance, and lessen computational overhead. However, most existing FRFS algorithms primarily focus on reducing uncertainty in pattern classification, neglecting that lower uncertainty does not necessarily result in improved classification performance, despite it commonly being regarded as a key indicator of feature selection effectiveness in the FRFS literature. To bridge uncertainty characterization and pattern classification, we propose a Margin-aware Fuzzy Rough Feature Selection (MAFRFS) framework that considers both the compactness and separation of label classes. MAFRFS effectively reduces uncertainty in pattern classification tasks, while guiding the feature selection towards more separable and discriminative label class structures. Extensive experiments on 15 public datasets demonstrate that MAFRFS is highly scalable and more effective than FRFS. The algorithms developed using MAFRFS outperform six state-of-the-art feature selection algorithms.
Loss-Guided Auxiliary Agents for Overcoming Mode Collapse in GFlowNets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Although Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are designed to capture multiple modes of a reward function, they often suffer from mode collapse in practice, getting trapped in early-discovered modes and requiring prolonged training to find diverse solutions. Existing exploration techniques often rely on heuristic novelty signals. We propose Loss-Guided GFlowNets (LGGFN), a novel approach where an auxiliary GFlowNet's exploration is \textbf{directly driven by the main GFlowNet's training loss}. By prioritizing trajectories where the main model exhibits \textbf{high loss}, LGGFN focuses sampling on poorly understood regions of the state space. This targeted exploration significantly accelerates the discovery of diverse, high-reward samples. Empirically, across \textbf{diverse benchmarks} including grid environments, structured sequence generation, Bayesian structure learning, and biological sequence design, LGGFN consistently \textbf{outperforms} baselines in exploration efficiency and sample diversity. For instance, on a challenging sequence generation task, it discovered over 40 times more unique valid modes while simultaneously reducing the exploration error metric by approximately 99\%.