OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Alignment Quality Index (AQI) : Beyond Refusals: AQI as an Intrinsic Alignment Diagnostic via Latent Geometry, Cluster Divergence, and Layer wise Pooled Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Alignment is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity. As large language models (LLMs) enter high-stakes domains like education, healthcare, governance, and law, their behavior must reliably reflect human-aligned values and safety constraints. Yet current evaluations rely heavily on behavioral proxies such as refusal rates, G-Eval scores, and toxicity classifiers, all of which have critical blind spots. Aligned models are often vulnerable to jailbreaking, stochasticity of generation, and alignment faking. To address this issue, we introduce the Alignment Quality Index (AQI). This novel geometric and prompt-invariant metric empirically assesses LLM alignment by analyzing the separation of safe and unsafe activations in latent space. By combining measures such as the Davies-Bouldin Score (DBS), Dunn Index (DI), Xie-Beni Index (XBI), and Calinski-Harabasz Index (CHI) across various formulations, AQI captures clustering quality to detect hidden misalignments and jailbreak risks, even when outputs appear compliant. AQI also serves as an early warning signal for alignment faking, offering a robust, decoding invariant tool for behavior agnostic safety auditing. Additionally, we propose the LITMUS dataset to facilitate robust evaluation under these challenging conditions. Empirical tests on LITMUS across different models trained under DPO, GRPO, and RLHF conditions demonstrate AQI's correlation with external judges and ability to reveal vulnerabilities missed by refusal metrics. We make our implementation publicly available to foster future research in this area.
A Systematic Review of User-Centred Evaluation of Explainable AI in Healthcare
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Despite promising developments in Explainable Artificial Intelligence, the practical value of XAI methods remains under-explored and insufficiently validated in real-world settings. Robust and context-aware evaluation is essential, not only to produce understandable explanations but also to ensure their trustworthiness and usability for intended users, but tends to be overlooked because of no clear guidelines on how to design an evaluation with users. This study addresses this gap with two main goals: (1) to develop a framework of well-defined, atomic properties that characterise the user experience of XAI in healthcare; and (2) to provide clear, context-sensitive guidelines for defining evaluation strategies based on system characteristics. We conducted a systematic review of 82 user studies, sourced from five databases, all situated within healthcare settings and focused on evaluating AI-generated explanations. The analysis was guided by a predefined coding scheme informed by an existing evaluation framework, complemented by inductive codes developed iteratively. The review yields three key contributions: (1) a synthesis of current evaluation practices, highlighting a growing focus on human-centred approaches in healthcare XAI; (2) insights into the interrelations among explanation properties; and (3) an updated framework and a set of actionable guidelines to support interdisciplinary teams in designing and implementing effective evaluation strategies for XAI systems tailored to specific application contexts.
Sequence Modeling for Time-Optimal Quadrotor Trajectory Optimization with Sampling-based Robustness Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Time-optimal trajectories drive quadrotors to their dynamic limits, but computing such trajectories involves solving non-convex problems via iterative nonlinear optimization, making them prohibitively costly for real-time applications. In this work, we investigate learning-based models that imitate a model-based time-optimal trajectory planner to accelerate trajectory generation. Given a dataset of collision-free geometric paths, we show that modeling architectures can effectively learn the patterns underlying time-optimal trajectories. We introduce a quantitative framework to analyze local analytic properties of the learned models, and link them to the Backward Reachable Tube of the geometric tracking controller. To enhance robustness, we propose a data augmentation scheme that applies random perturbations to the input paths. Compared to classical planners, our method achieves substantial speedups, and we validate its real-time feasibility on a hardware quadrotor platform. Experiments demonstrate that the learned models generalize to previously unseen path lengths. The code for our approach can be found here: https://github.com/maokat12/lbTOPPQuad
Beyond the Plane: A 3D Representation of Human Personal Space for Socially-Aware Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

The increasing presence of robots in human environments requires them to exhibit socially appropriate behavior, adhering to social norms. A critical aspect in this context is the concept of personal space, a psychological boundary around an individual that influences their comfort based on proximity. This concept extends to human-robot interaction, where robots must respect personal space to avoid causing discomfort. While much research has focused on modeling personal space in two dimensions, almost none have considered the vertical dimension. In this work, we propose a novel three-dimensional personal space model that integrates both height (introducing a discomfort function along the Z-axis) and horizontal proximity (via a classic XY-plane formulation) to quantify discomfort. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to compute discomfort in 3D space at any robot component's position, considering the person's configuration and height.
ASMR: Augmenting Life Scenario using Large Generative Models for Robotic Action Reflection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

When designing robots to assist in everyday human activities, it is crucial to enhance user requests with visual cues from their surroundings for improved intent understanding. This process is defined as a multimodal classification task. However, gathering a large-scale dataset encompassing both visual and linguistic elements for model training is challenging and time-consuming. To address this issue, our paper introduces a novel framework focusing on data augmentation in robotic assistance scenarios, encompassing both dialogues and related environmental imagery. This approach involves leveraging a sophisticated large language model to simulate potential conversations and environmental contexts, followed by the use of a stable diffusion model to create images depicting these environments. The additionally generated data serves to refine the latest multimodal models, enabling them to more accurately determine appropriate actions in response to user interactions with the limited target data. Our experimental results, based on a dataset collected from real-world scenarios, demonstrate that our methodology significantly enhances the robot's action selection capabilities, achieving the state-of-the-art performance.
Toward Explainable Offline RL: Analyzing Representations in Intrinsically Motivated Decision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Elastic Decision Transformers (EDTs) have proved to be particularly successful in offline reinforcement learning, offering a flexible framework that unifies sequence modeling with decision-making under uncertainty. Recent research has shown that incorporating intrinsic motivation mechanisms into EDTs improves performance across exploration tasks, yet the representational mechanisms underlying these improvements remain unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a systematic post-hoc explainability framework to analyze how intrinsic motivation shapes learned embeddings in EDTs. Through statistical analysis of embedding properties (including covariance structure, vector magnitudes, and orthogonality), we reveal that different intrinsic motivation variants create fundamentally different representational structures. Our analysis demonstrates environment-specific correlation patterns between embedding metrics and performance that explain why intrinsic motivation improves policy learning. These findings show that intrinsic motivation operates beyond simple exploration bonuses, acting as a representational prior that shapes embedding geometry in biologically plausible ways, creating environment-specific organizational structures that facilitate better decision-making.
Careful synchronisation and the diameter of transformation semigroups with few generators
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2025
Year: 2025

A word is called carefully synchronising for a partial deterministic finite semi-automaton if it maps all states to the same state. Equivalently, it is a composition of partial transformations equal to a constant total transformation. There is a sequence of several papers providing stronger and stronger lower bounds on the length of shortest carefully synchronising words for $n$-state partial DFAs over small alphabets. It resulted in the lower bounds of $Ω(\frac{2^{n/3}}{n\sqrt{n}})$ and $Ω(\frac{4^{n/5}}{n})$ for alphabets of two and three letters respectively, obtained by de Bondt, Don, and Zantema. Using a significantly simpler construction, we improve these lower bounds to $2^{(n - 4)/3}$ and $4^{(n - 4)/5}$ respectively. We then consider a tightly related question of the diameter of a partial DFA, which is the smallest $\ell \ge 0$ such that words of length at most $\ell$ express all the transformations induced by words in this DFA. We show that an alphabet of large enough constant size already asymptotically matches the upper bound on the diameter for arbitrary alphabet size, extending the construction of Panteleev that requires an alphabet of size exponential in the number of states. We then discuss an application to the diameter of finite semigroups of nonnegative matrices, and some open problems.
Membership Inference Attacks as Privacy Tools: Reliability, Disparity and Ensemble
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) pose a significant threat to the privacy of machine learning models and are widely used as tools for privacy assessment, auditing, and machine unlearning. While prior MIA research has primarily focused on performance metrics such as AUC, accuracy, and TPR@low FPR - either by developing new methods to enhance these metrics or using them to evaluate privacy solutions - we found that it overlooks the disparities among different attacks. These disparities, both between distinct attack methods and between multiple instantiations of the same method, have crucial implications for the reliability and completeness of MIAs as privacy evaluation tools. In this paper, we systematically investigate these disparities through a novel framework based on coverage and stability analysis. Extensive experiments reveal significant disparities in MIAs, their potential causes, and their broader implications for privacy evaluation. To address these challenges, we propose an ensemble framework with three distinct strategies to harness the strengths of state-of-the-art MIAs while accounting for their disparities. This framework not only enables the construction of more powerful attacks but also provides a more robust and comprehensive methodology for privacy evaluation.
Arctic Long Sequence Training: Scalable And Efficient Training For Multi-Million Token Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Long sequences are critical for applications like RAG, long document summarization, multi-modality, etc., and modern LLMs, like Llama 4 Scout, support max sequence length of up to 10 million tokens. However, outside of enterprise labs, long sequence training is challenging for the AI community with limited system support in the open-source space. Out-of-box, even on a modern NVIDIA H100 80GB GPU cluster, training Llama 8B model with sequence over 32K runs out of memory on a basic Hugging Face (HF) model due to two reasons: i) LLM training workloads are not optimized to fully leverage a single GPU memory, ii) existing solutions for leveraging multiple GPU memory are not easily available to HF models, making long sequence training inaccessible. We address this with Arctic Long Sequence Training (ALST). It offers a combination of attention-agnostic single GPU and multi-GPU memory optimizations, that enables it to support out-of-box training of multi-million sequence length for a wide variety of HF models. ALST supports training Meta's Llama 8B model with 500K sequence length on a single H100 GPU, 3.7M on a single 8xH100 GPU node, and over 15M on a 4 node cluster, an increase of over 400x compared to the 32K baseline for the latter. ALST is fully compatible with HF models and open-sourced via Deepspeed https://www.deepspeed.ai/tutorials/ulysses-alst-sequence-pallellism/ and Arctic Training https://github.com/snowflakedb/ArcticTraining/blob/main/projects/sequence-parallelism/README.md.
GRaD-Nav++: Vision-Language Model Enabled Visual Drone Navigation with Gaussian Radiance Fields and Differentiable Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Autonomous drones capable of interpreting and executing high-level language instructions in unstructured environments remain a long-standing goal. Yet existing approaches are constrained by their dependence on hand-crafted skills, extensive parameter tuning, or computationally intensive models unsuitable for onboard use. We introduce GRaD-Nav++, a lightweight Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework that runs fully onboard and follows natural-language commands in real time. Our policy is trained in a photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) simulator via Differentiable Reinforcement Learning (DiffRL), enabling efficient learning of low-level control from visual and linguistic inputs. At its core is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) action head, which adaptively routes computation to improve generalization while mitigating forgetting. In multi-task generalization experiments, GRaD-Nav++ achieves a success rate of 83% on trained tasks and 75% on unseen tasks in simulation. When deployed on real hardware, it attains 67% success on trained tasks and 50% on unseen ones. In multi-environment adaptation experiments, GRaD-Nav++ achieves an average success rate of 81% across diverse simulated environments and 67% across varied real-world settings. These results establish a new benchmark for fully onboard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) flight and demonstrate that compact, efficient models can enable reliable, language-guided navigation without relying on external infrastructure.
Sketched Sum-Product Networks for Joins
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2025
Year: 2025

Sketches have shown high accuracy in multi-way join cardinality estimation, a critical problem in cost-based query optimization. Accurately estimating the cardinality of a join operation -- analogous to its computational cost -- allows the optimization of query execution costs in relational database systems. However, although sketches have shown high efficacy in query optimization, they are typically constructed specifically for predefined selections in queries that are assumed to be given a priori, hindering their applicability to new queries. As a more general solution, we propose for Sum-Product Networks to dynamically approximate sketches on-the-fly. Sum-Product Networks can decompose and model multivariate distributions, such as relations, as linear combinations of multiple univariate distributions. By representing these univariate distributions as sketches, Sum-Product Networks can combine them element-wise to efficiently approximate the sketch of any query selection. These approximate sketches can then be applied to join cardinality estimation. In particular, we implement the Fast-AGMS and Bound Sketch methods, which have successfully been used in prior work, despite their costly construction. By accurately approximating them instead, our work provides a practical alternative to apply these sketches to query optimization.
Load Balancing Mixture of Experts with Similarity Preserving Routers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models offer a scalable and efficient architecture for training large neural networks by activating only a subset of parameters ("experts") for each input. A learned router computes a distribution over these experts, and assigns input tokens to a small subset. However, without auxiliary balancing mechanisms, routers often converge to using only a few experts, severely limiting model capacity and degrading performance. Most current load balancing mechanisms encourage a distribution over experts that resembles a roughly uniform distribution of experts per token. During training, this can result in inconsistent routing behavior, resulting in the model spending its capacity to learn redundant knowledge. We address this by introducing a novel load balancing loss that preserves token-wise relational structure, encouraging consistent expert choices for similar inputs during training. Our experimental results show that applying our loss to the router results in 36% faster convergence and lower redundancy compared to a popular load balancing loss.
An Interdisciplinary Review of Commonsense Reasoning and Intent Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

This review explores recent advances in commonsense reasoning and intent detection, two key challenges in natural language understanding. We analyze 28 papers from ACL, EMNLP, and CHI (2020-2025), organizing them by methodology and application. Commonsense reasoning is reviewed across zero-shot learning, cultural adaptation, structured evaluation, and interactive contexts. Intent detection is examined through open-set models, generative formulations, clustering, and human-centered systems. By bridging insights from NLP and HCI, we highlight emerging trends toward more adaptive, multilingual, and context-aware models, and identify key gaps in grounding, generalization, and benchmark design.
SoK: Advances and Open Problems in Web Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Web tracking is a pervasive and opaque practice that enables personalized advertising, retargeting, and conversion tracking. Over time, it has evolved into a sophisticated and invasive ecosystem, employing increasingly complex techniques to monitor and profile users across the web. The research community has a long track record of analyzing new web tracking techniques, designing and evaluating the effectiveness of countermeasures, and assessing compliance with privacy regulations. Despite a substantial body of work on web tracking, the literature remains fragmented across distinctly scoped studies, making it difficult to identify overarching trends, connect new but related techniques, and identify research gaps in the field. Today, web tracking is undergoing a once-in-a-generation transformation, driven by fundamental shifts in the advertising industry, the adoption of anti-tracking countermeasures by browsers, and the growing enforcement of emerging privacy regulations. This Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) aims to consolidate and synthesize this wide-ranging research, offering a comprehensive overview of the technical mechanisms, countermeasures, and regulations that shape the modern and rapidly evolving web tracking landscape. This SoK also highlights open challenges and outlines directions for future research, aiming to serve as a unified reference and introductory material for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers alike.
An Exact and Efficient Sampler for Dynamic Discrete Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

Sampling from a dynamic discrete distribution involves sampling from a dynamic set of weighted elements, where elements can be added or removed at any stage of the sampling process. Although efficient for static sets, the Alias method becomes impractical in dynamic settings due to the need to reconstruct the sampler after each update, which incurs a computational cost proportional to the size of the distribution, making it unsuitable for applications requiring frequent insertions, deletions, or weight adjustments. To address this limitation, different approaches have been studied, such as the Forest of Trees method and the BUcket Sampling (BUS) method. However, all previous methods suffered from numerical issues which can bias the sampling process. In this paper, we describe EBUS (Exact BUcket Sampling), the first exact algorithm with $O(1)$ sampling and update cost. The sampler can be updated by base-$b$ numbers with bounded precision and exponent, and sample the distribution of its elements exactly and efficiently. We provide also a state of the art implementation of the method using IEEE 64-bit floating point numbers which we empirically show to be more efficient than several implementations of previous inexact methods.
Déjà Vu: Efficient Video-Language Query Engine with Learning-based Inter-Frame Computation Reuse
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Recently, Video-Language Models (VideoLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, offering significant potential for flexible and powerful video query systems. These models typically rely on Vision Transformers (ViTs), which process video frames individually to extract visual embeddings. However, generating embeddings for large-scale videos requires ViT inferencing across numerous frames, posing a major hurdle to real-world deployment and necessitating solutions for integration into scalable video data management systems. This paper introduces Déjà Vu, a video-language query engine that accelerates ViT-based VideoLMs by reusing computations across consecutive frames. At its core is ReuseViT, a modified ViT model specifically designed for VideoLM tasks, which learns to detect inter-frame reuse opportunities, striking an effective balance between accuracy and reuse. Although ReuseViT significantly reduces computation, these savings do not directly translate into performance gains on GPUs. To overcome this, Déjà Vu integrates memory-compute joint compaction techniques that convert the FLOP savings into tangible performance gains. Evaluations on three VideoLM tasks show that Déjà Vu accelerates embedding generation by up to a 2.64x within a 2% error bound, dramatically enhancing the practicality of VideoLMs for large-scale video analytics.
Evaluating Loss Functions for Graph Neural Networks: Towards Pretraining and Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) became useful for learning on non-Euclidean data. However, their best performance depends on choosing the right model architecture and the training objective, also called the loss function. Researchers have studied these parts separately, but a large-scale evaluation has not looked at how GNN models and many loss functions work together across different tasks. To fix this, we ran a thorough study - it included seven well-known GNN architectures. We also used a large group of 30 single plus mixed loss functions. The study looked at both inductive and transductive settings. Our evaluation spanned three distinct real-world datasets, assessing performance in both inductive and transductive settings using 21 comprehensive evaluation metrics. From these extensive results (detailed in supplementary information 1 \& 2), we meticulously analyzed the top ten model-loss combinations for each metric based on their average rank. Our findings reveal that, especially for the inductive case: 1) Hybrid loss functions generally yield superior and more robust performance compared to single loss functions, indicating the benefit of multi-objective optimization. 2) The GIN architecture always showed the highest-level average performance, especially with Cross-Entropy loss. 3) Although some combinations had overall lower average ranks, models such as GAT, particularly with certain hybrid losses, demonstrated incredible specialized strengths, maximizing the most top-1 results among the individual metrics, emphasizing subtle strengths for particular task demands. 4) On the other hand, the MPNN architecture typically lagged behind the scenarios it was tested against.