OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Retrieval Augmented Generation for Topic Modeling in Organizational Research: An Introduction with Empirical Demonstration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Analyzing textual data is the cornerstone of qualitative research. While traditional methods such as grounded theory and content analysis are widely used, they are labor-intensive and time-consuming. Topic modeling offers an automated complement. Yet, existing approaches, including LLM-based topic modeling, still struggle with issues such as high data preprocessing requirements, interpretability, and reliability. This paper introduces Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Agentic RAG) as a method for topic modeling with LLMs. It integrates three key components: (1) retrieval, enabling automatized access to external data beyond an LLM's pre-trained knowledge; (2) generation, leveraging LLM capabilities for text synthesis; and (3) agent-driven learning, iteratively refining retrieval and query formulation processes. To empirically validate Agentic RAG for topic modeling, we reanalyze a Twitter/X dataset, previously examined by Mu et al. (2024a). Our findings demonstrate that the approach is more efficient, interpretable and at the same time achieves higher reliability and validity in comparison to the standard machine learning approach but also in comparison to LLM prompting for topic modeling. These results highlight Agentic RAG's ability to generate semantically relevant and reproducible topics, positioning it as a robust, scalable, and transparent alternative for AI-driven qualitative research in leadership, managerial, and organizational research.
On the Impact of Intra-node Communication in the Performance of Supercomputer and Data Center Interconnection Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2025
Year: 2025

In the last decade, specific-purpose computing and storage devices, such as GPUs, TPUs, or high-speed storage, have been incorporated into server nodes of Supercomputers and Data centers. The development of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) enabled a much more compact form factor for these devices, thus allowing the interconnection of several of them within a server node, typically using an intra-node interconnection network (e.g., PCIe, NVLink, or Infinity Fabric). These networks allow scaling up the number of specific computing and storage devices per node. Furthermore, the inter-node networks communicate thousands of these devices placed in different server nodes in a Supercomputer or Data Center. Unfortunately, the intra- and inter-node networks may become the system's bottleneck due to the increasing communication demand among accelerators of applications such as generative AI. Although current intra-node network designs alleviate this bottleneck by increasing the bandwidth of the intra-node network, we show in this paper that such a high bandwidth for intra-node communication may hinder the inter-node communication performance when traffic from outside the node arrives at the intra-node devices, resulting in interference with intra-node traffic. To analyze the impact of this interference, we have studied the communication operations of realistic traffic patterns exploiting intra-node communication. We have developed a generic intra- and inter-node simulation model based on OMNeT++ and modeled the mentioned communication operations. We have also performed extensive simulation experiments that confirm that increasing the intra-node network bandwidth and the number of computing devices per node (i.e., accelerators) is counterproductive to the inter-node communication performance.
TeleRAG: Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation Inference with Lookahead Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends large language models (LLMs) with external data sources to enhance factual correctness and domain coverage. Modern RAG pipelines rely on large datastores, creating a significant system challenge: achieving high throughput and low latency is difficult, especially when GPU memory is limited. To address these challenges, we propose TeleRAG, an efficient inference system that reduces latency and improves throughput with minimal GPU memory requirements. The core innovation of TeleRAG is lookahead retrieval, a prefetching mechanism that predicts required data and transfers them from CPU to GPU in parallel with LLM generation. In addition, TeleRAG adopts a prefetching scheduler and a cache-aware scheduler to support efficient multi-GPU inference with minimal overhead. Evaluations show TeleRAG achieves up to a 1.53x average end-to-end latency reduction (single-query) and 1.83x higher average throughput (batched), as well as good scalability in throughput. This confirms the practical utility of TeleRAG for faster and more memory-efficient deployments of RAG applications.
UoR-NCL at SemEval-2025 Task 1: Using Generative LLMs and CLIP Models for Multilingual Multimodal Idiomaticity Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

SemEval-2025 Task 1 focuses on ranking images based on their alignment with a given nominal compound that may carry idiomatic meaning in both English and Brazilian Portuguese. To address this challenge, this work uses generative large language models (LLMs) and multilingual CLIP models to enhance idiomatic compound representations. LLMs generate idiomatic meanings for potentially idiomatic compounds, enriching their semantic interpretation. These meanings are then encoded using multilingual CLIP models, serving as representations for image ranking. Contrastive learning and data augmentation techniques are applied to fine-tune these embeddings for improved performance. Experimental results show that multimodal representations extracted through this method outperformed those based solely on the original nominal compounds. The fine-tuning approach shows promising outcomes but is less effective than using embeddings without fine-tuning. The source code used in this paper is available at https://github.com/tongwu17/SemEval-2025-Task1-UoR-NCL.
Soften the Mask: Adaptive Temporal Soft Mask for Efficient Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition (DFER) facilitates the understanding of psychological intentions through non-verbal communication. Existing methods struggle to manage irrelevant information, such as background noise and redundant semantics, which impacts both efficiency and effectiveness. In this work, we propose a novel supervised temporal soft masked autoencoder network for DFER, namely AdaTosk, which integrates a parallel supervised classification branch with the self-supervised reconstruction branch. The self-supervised reconstruction branch applies random binary hard mask to generate diverse training samples, encouraging meaningful feature representations in visible tokens. Meanwhile the classification branch employs an adaptive temporal soft mask to flexibly mask visible tokens based on their temporal significance. Its two key components, respectively of, class-agnostic and class-semantic soft masks, serve to enhance critical expression moments and reduce semantic redundancy over time. Extensive experiments conducted on widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that our AdaTosk remarkably reduces computational costs compared with current state-of-the-art methods while still maintaining competitive performance.
PersuasiveToM: A Benchmark for Evaluating Machine Theory of Mind in Persuasive Dialogues
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

The ability to understand and predict the mental states of oneself and others, known as the Theory of Mind (ToM), is crucial for effective social scenarios. Although recent studies have evaluated ToM in Large Language Models (LLMs), existing benchmarks focus on simplified settings (e.g., Sally-Anne-style tasks) and overlook the complexity of real-world social interactions. To mitigate this gap, we propose PersuasiveToM, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ToM abilities of LLMs in persuasive dialogues. Our framework contains two core tasks: ToM Reasoning, which tests tracking of evolving desires, beliefs, and intentions; and ToM Application, which assesses the use of inferred mental states to predict and evaluate persuasion strategies. Experiments across eight leading LLMs reveal that while models excel on multiple questions, they struggle with the tasks that need tracking the dynamics and shifts of mental states and understanding the mental states in the whole dialogue comprehensively. Our aim with PersuasiveToM is to allow an effective evaluation of the ToM reasoning ability of LLMs with more focus on complex psychological activities. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yu-Fangxu/PersuasiveToM.
Nano Drone-based Indoor Crime Scene Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Technologies such as robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Computer Vision (CV) can be applied to crime scene analysis (CSA) to help protect lives, facilitate justice, and deter crime, but an overview of the tasks that can be automated has been lacking. Here we follow a speculative prototyping approach: First, the STAIR tool is used to rapidly review the literature and identify tasks that seem to have not received much attention, like accessing crime scenes through a window, mapping/gathering evidence, and analyzing blood smears. Secondly, we present a prototype of a small drone that implements these three tasks with 75%, 85%, and 80% performance, to perform a minimal analysis of an indoor crime scene. Lessons learned are reported, toward guiding next work.
Measuring and identifying factors of individuals' trust in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) can engage in human-looking conversational exchanges. Although conversations can elicit trust between users and LLMs, scarce empirical research has examined trust formation in human-LLM contexts, beyond LLMs' trustworthiness or human trust in AI in general. Here, we introduce the Trust-In-LLMs Index (TILLMI) as a new framework to measure individuals' trust in LLMs, extending McAllister's cognitive and affective trust dimensions to LLM-human interactions. We developed TILLMI as a psychometric scale, prototyped with a novel protocol we called LLM-simulated validity. The LLM-based scale was then validated in a sample of 1,000 US respondents. Exploratory Factor Analysis identified a two-factor structure. Two items were then removed due to redundancy, yielding a final 6-item scale with a 2-factor structure. Confirmatory Factor Analysis on a separate subsample showed strong model fit ($CFI = .995$, $TLI = .991$, $RMSEA = .046$, $p_{X^2} > .05$). Convergent validity analysis revealed that trust in LLMs correlated positively with openness to experience, extraversion, and cognitive flexibility, but negatively with neuroticism. Based on these findings, we interpreted TILLMI's factors as "closeness with LLMs" (affective dimension) and "reliance on LLMs" (cognitive dimension). Younger males exhibited higher closeness with- and reliance on LLMs compared to older women. Individuals with no direct experience with LLMs exhibited lower levels of trust compared to LLMs' users. These findings offer a novel empirical foundation for measuring trust in AI-driven verbal communication, informing responsible design, and fostering balanced human-AI collaboration.
Flora: Efficient Cloud Resource Selection for Big Data Processing via Job Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Distributed dataflow systems like Spark and Flink enable data-parallel processing of large datasets on clusters of cloud resources. Yet, selecting appropriate computational resources for dataflow jobs is often challenging. For efficient execution, individual resource allocations, such as memory and CPU cores, must meet the specific resource demands of the job. Meanwhile, the choices of cloud configurations are often plentiful, especially in public clouds, and the current cost of the available resource options can fluctuate. Addressing this challenge, we present Flora, a low-overhead approach to cost-optimizing cloud cluster configurations for big data processing. Flora lets users categorize jobs according to their data access patterns and derives suitable cluster resource configurations from executions of test jobs of the same category, considering current resource costs. In our evaluation on a new dataset comprising 180 Spark job executions on Google Cloud, Flora's cluster resource selections exhibit an average deviation below 6% from the most cost-optimal solution, with a maximum deviation below 24%.
Robust Deterministic Policy Gradient for Disturbance Attenuation and Its Application to Quadrotor Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

This paper presents a robust reinforcement learning algorithm called robust deterministic policy gradient (RDPG), which reformulates the H-infinity control problem as a two-player zero-sum dynamic game between a user and an adversary. The method combines deterministic policy gradients with deep reinforcement learning to train a robust policy that attenuates disturbances efficiently. A practical variant, robust deep deterministic policy gradient (RDDPG), integrates twin-delayed updates for stability and sample efficiency. Experiments on an unmanned aerial vehicle demonstrate superior robustness and tracking accuracy under severe disturbance conditions.
Enhancing deep neural networks through complex-valued representations and Kuramoto synchronization dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Neural synchrony is hypothesized to play a crucial role in how the brain organizes visual scenes into structured representations, enabling the robust encoding of multiple objects within a scene. However, current deep learning models often struggle with object binding, limiting their ability to represent multiple objects effectively. Inspired by neuroscience, we investigate whether synchrony-based mechanisms can enhance object encoding in artificial models trained for visual categorization. Specifically, we combine complex-valued representations with Kuramoto dynamics to promote phase alignment, facilitating the grouping of features belonging to the same object. We evaluate two architectures employing synchrony: a feedforward model and a recurrent model with feedback connections to refine phase synchronization using top-down information. Both models outperform their real-valued counterparts and complex-valued models without Kuramoto synchronization on tasks involving multi-object images, such as overlapping handwritten digits, noisy inputs, and out-of-distribution transformations. Our findings highlight the potential of synchrony-driven mechanisms to enhance deep learning models, improving their performance, robustness, and generalization in complex visual categorization tasks.
Resource Allocation and Sharing in URLLC for IoT Applications using Shareability Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

The current development trend of wireless communications aims at coping with the very stringent reliability and latency requirements posed by several emerging Internet of Things (IoT) application scenarios. Since the problem of realizing Ultra Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) is becoming more and more important, it has attracted the attention of researchers, and new efficient resource allocation algorithms are necessary. In this paper, we consider a challenging scenario where the available spectrum might be fragmented across non-adjacent portions of the band, and channels are differently affected by interference coming from surrounding networks. Furthermore, Channel State Information (CSI) is assumed to be unavailable, thus requiring an allocation of resources based only on topology information and channel statistics. To address this challenge in a dense smart factory scenario where devices periodically transmit their data to a common receiver, we present a novel resource allocation methodology based on a graph-theoretical approach originally designed to allocate mobility resources in on-demand, shared transportation. The proposed methodology is compared with two benchmark allocation strategies, showing its ability of increasing spectral efficiency of as much as 50% with respect to the best performing benchmark. Contrary to what happens in many resource allocation settings, this increase in spectrum efficiency does not come at the expense of fairness, which is also increased as compared to benchmark algorithms.
PASemiQA: Plan-Assisted Agent for Question Answering on Semi-Structured Data with Text and Relational Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in answering questions across various domains, but they often encounter hallucination issues on questions that require professional and up-to-date knowledge. To address this limitation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have been proposed, which retrieve relevant information from external sources to inform their responses. However, existing RAG methods typically focus on a single type of external data, such as vectorized text database or knowledge graphs, and cannot well handle real-world questions on semi-structured data containing both text and relational information. To bridge this gap, we introduce PASemiQA, a novel approach that jointly leverages text and relational information in semi-structured data to answer questions. PASemiQA first generates a plan to identify relevant text and relational information to answer the question in semi-structured data, and then uses an LLM agent to traverse the semi-structured data and extract necessary information. Our empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of PASemiQA across different semi-structured datasets from various domains, showcasing its potential to improve the accuracy and reliability of question answering systems on semi-structured data.
Large Language Model-Based Benchmarking Experiment Settings for Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2025
Year: 2025

When we manually design an evolutionary optimization algorithm, we implicitly or explicitly assume a set of target optimization problems. In the case of automated algorithm design, target optimization problems are usually explicitly shown. Recently, the use of large language models (LLMs) for the design of evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) algorithms have been examined in some studies. In those studies, target multi-objective problems are not always explicitly shown. It is well known in the EMO community that the performance evaluation results of EMO algorithms depend on not only test problems but also many other factors such as performance indicators, reference point, termination condition, and population size. Thus, it is likely that the designed EMO algorithms by LLMs depends on those factors. In this paper, we try to examine the implicit assumption about the performance comparison of EMO algorithms in LLMs. For this purpose, we ask LLMs to design a benchmarking experiment of EMO algorithms. Our experiments show that LLMs often suggest classical benchmark settings: Performance examination of NSGA-II, MOEA/D and NSGA-III on ZDT, DTLZ and WFG by HV and IGD under the standard parameter specifications.
Predicting clinical outcomes from patient care pathways represented with temporal knowledge graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Background: With the increasing availability of healthcare data, predictive modeling finds many applications in the biomedical domain, such as the evaluation of the level of risk for various conditions, which in turn can guide clinical decision making. However, it is unclear how knowledge graph data representations and their embedding, which are competitive in some settings, could be of interest in biomedical predictive modeling. Method: We simulated synthetic but realistic data of patients with intracranial aneurysm and experimented on the task of predicting their clinical outcome. We compared the performance of various classification approaches on tabular data versus a graph-based representation of the same data. Next, we investigated how the adopted schema for representing first individual data and second temporal data impacts predictive performances. Results: Our study illustrates that in our case, a graph representation and Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) embeddings reach the best performance for a predictive task from observational data. We emphasize the importance of the adopted schema and of the consideration of literal values in the representation of individual data. Our study also moderates the relative impact of various time encoding on GCN performance.
Same accuracy, twice as fast: continuous training surpasses retraining from scratch
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Continual learning aims to enable models to adapt to new datasets without losing performance on previously learned data, often assuming that prior data is no longer available. However, in many practical scenarios, both old and new data are accessible. In such cases, good performance on both datasets is typically achieved by abandoning the model trained on the previous data and re-training a new model from scratch on both datasets. This training from scratch is computationally expensive. In contrast, methods that leverage the previously trained model and old data are worthy of investigation, as they could significantly reduce computational costs. Our evaluation framework quantifies the computational savings of such methods while maintaining or exceeding the performance of training from scratch. We identify key optimization aspects -- initialization, regularization, data selection, and hyper-parameters -- that can each contribute to reducing computational costs. For each aspect, we propose effective first-step methods that already yield substantial computational savings. By combining these methods, we achieve up to 2.7x reductions in computation time across various computer vision tasks, highlighting the potential for further advancements in this area.
A Review on Generative AI For Text-To-Image and Image-To-Image Generation and Implications To Scientific Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

This review surveys the state-of-the-art in text-to-image and image-to-image generation within the scope of generative AI. We provide a comparative analysis of three prominent architectures: Variational Autoencoders, Generative Adversarial Networks and Diffusion Models. For each, we elucidate core concepts, architectural innovations, and practical strengths and limitations, particularly for scientific image understanding. Finally, we discuss critical open challenges and potential future research directions in this rapidly evolving field.
Autonomous Curriculum Design via Relative Entropy Based Task Modifications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Curriculum learning is a training method in which an agent is first trained on a curriculum of relatively simple tasks related to a target task in an effort to shorten the time required to train on the target task. Autonomous curriculum design involves the design of such curriculum with no reliance on human knowledge and/or expertise. Finding an efficient and effective way of autonomously designing curricula remains an open problem. We propose a novel approach for automatically designing curricula by leveraging the learner's uncertainty to select curricula tasks. Our approach measures the uncertainty in the learner's policy using relative entropy, and guides the agent to states of high uncertainty to facilitate learning. Our algorithm supports the generation of autonomous curricula in a self-assessed manner by leveraging the learner's past and current policies but it also allows the use of teacher guided design in an instructive setting. We provide theoretical guarantees for the convergence of our algorithm using two time-scale optimization processes. Results show that our algorithm outperforms randomly generated curriculum, and learning directly on the target task as well as the curriculum-learning criteria existing in literature. We also present two additional heuristic distance measures that could be combined with our relative-entropy approach for further performance improvements.