OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
UMind-VL: A Generalist Ultrasound Vision-Language Model for Unified Grounded Perception and Comprehensive Interpretation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Despite significant strides in medical foundation models, the ultrasound domain lacks a comprehensive solution capable of bridging low-level Ultrasound Grounded Perception (e.g., segmentation, localization) and high-level Ultrasound Comprehensive Interpretation (e.g., diagnosis, reasoning). To bridge this gap, we propose UMind-VL, a unified foundation model designed to synergize pixel-level structural understanding with complex clinical reasoning. We first introduce UMind-DS, a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising 1.2 million ultrasound image-text pairs across 16 anatomical regions, enriching standard data with pixel-level annotations and clinician-validated rationales. Architecturally, UMind-VL incorporates a lightweight Dynamic Convolutional Mask Decoder that generates masks via dynamic kernels conditioned on LLM outputs. This design, combined with task-specific tokens, unifies segmentation, detection, geometric measurement, and diagnosis tasks within a single framework. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that UMind-VL significantly outperforms existing generalist multimodal models and achieves performance on par with, or superior to, state-of-the-art specialist models across segmentation, detection, keypoint localization, and diagnostic reasoning benchmarks, while maintaining strong generalization ability. We demonstrate the capability of UMind-VL in Figure 1.
The Hidden Cost of Approximation in Online Mirror Descent
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Online mirror descent (OMD) is a fundamental algorithmic paradigm that underlies many algorithms in optimization, machine learning and sequential decision-making. The OMD iterates are defined as solutions to optimization subproblems which, oftentimes, can be solved only approximately, leading to an inexact version of the algorithm. Nonetheless, existing OMD analyses typically assume an idealized error free setting, thereby limiting our understanding of performance guarantees that should be expected in practice. In this work we initiate a systematic study into inexact OMD, and uncover an intricate relation between regularizer smoothness and robustness to approximation errors. When the regularizer is uniformly smooth, we establish a tight bound on the excess regret due to errors. Then, for barrier regularizers over the simplex and its subsets, we identify a sharp separation: negative entropy requires exponentially small errors to avoid linear regret, whereas log-barrier and Tsallis regularizers remain robust even when the errors are only polynomial. Finally, we show that when the losses are stochastic and the domain is the simplex, negative entropy regains robustness-but this property does not extend to all subsets, where exponentially small errors are again necessary to avoid suboptimal regret.
Match-and-Fuse: Consistent Generation from Unstructured Image Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

We present Match-and-Fuse - a zero-shot, training-free method for consistent controlled generation of unstructured image sets - collections that share a common visual element, yet differ in viewpoint, time of capture, and surrounding content. Unlike existing methods that operate on individual images or densely sampled videos, our framework performs set-to-set generation: given a source set and user prompts, it produces a new set that preserves cross-image consistency of shared content. Our key idea is to model the task as a graph, where each node corresponds to an image and each edge triggers a joint generation of image pairs. This formulation consolidates all pairwise generations into a unified framework, enforcing their local consistency while ensuring global coherence across the entire set. This is achieved by fusing internal features across image pairs, guided by dense input correspondences, without requiring masks or manual supervision. It also allows us to leverage an emergent prior in text-to-image models that encourages coherent generation when multiple views share a single canvas. Match-and-Fuse achieves state-of-the-art consistency and visual quality, and unlocks new capabilities for content creation from image collections.
When AI Bends Metal: AI-Assisted Optimization of Design Parameters in Sheet Metal Forming
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Numerical simulations have revolutionized the industrial design process by reducing prototyping costs, design iterations, and enabling product engineers to explore the design space more efficiently. However, the growing scale of simulations demands substantial expert knowledge, computational resources, and time. A key challenge is identifying input parameters that yield optimal results, as iterative simulations are costly and can have a large environmental impact. This paper presents an AI-assisted workflow that reduces expert involvement in parameter optimization through the use of Bayesian optimization. Furthermore, we present an active learning variant of the approach, assisting the expert if desired. A deep learning model provides an initial parameter estimate, from which the optimization cycle iteratively refines the design until a termination condition (e.g., energy budget or iteration limit) is met. We demonstrate our approach, based on a sheet metal forming process, and show how it enables us to accelerate the exploration of the design space while reducing the need for expert involvement.
Enhancing the Security of Rollup Sequencers using Decentrally Attested TEEs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

The growing scalability demand of public Blockchains led to the rise of Layer-2 solutions, such as Rollups. Rollups improve transaction throughput by processing operations off-chain and posting the results on-chain. A critical component in Rollups is the Sequencer, responsible for receiving, ordering and batching transactions before they are submitted to the Layer-1 blockchain. While essential, the centralized nature of the Sequencer makes it vulnerable to attacks, such as censorship, transaction manipulation and tampering. To enhance its security, there are solutions in the literature that shield the Sequencer inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). However, the attestation of TEEs introduces additional centralization, which is in contrast with the core Blockchain principle. In this paper, we propose a TEE-secured Sequencer equipped with a decentralized attestation mechanism. We outline the design and implementation of our solution, covering the system architecture, TEE integration, and the decentralization of the attestation process. Additionally, we present an experimental evaluation conducted on a realistic Rollup testnet. Our results show that this approach strengthens Sequencer integrity without sacrificing compatibility or deployability in existing Layer-2 architectures.
Unexplored flaws in multiple-choice VQA evaluations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in handling image-text inputs. A common way to assess this ability is through multiple-choice Visual Question Answering (VQA). Earlier works have already revealed that these benchmarks are sensitive to answer choice order, a limitation that can be mitigated through careful design. Yet, we highlight additional, unexplored biases in prompt formatting that question the reliability of current MLLM evaluations. Specifically, we identify three key variation factors in prompt formatting and analyze their impact through a large-scale study involving $\mathbf{\text{seven}}$ MLLMs and $\mathbf{\text{five}}$ VQA datasets, spanning $\mathbf{48}$ distinct $\mathbf{\text{prompt format variations}}$. Our findings reveal that multiple-choice VQA is highly sensitive to minor prompt format changes, even when these changes are semantically neutral. We further demonstrate that these biases persist independently of known order biases or the MLLM's confidence in the correct answer. Finally, we demonstrate that existing bias mitigation strategies fail to address these newly identified biases.
Common $p$-Belief with Plausibility Measures: Extended Abstract
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2025
Year: 2025

Aumann's famous Agreeing to Disagree Theorem states that if a group of agents share a common prior, update their beliefs by Bayesian conditioning based on private information, and have common knowledge of their posterior beliefs regarding some event, these posteriors must be identical. There is an elegant generalization of this theorem by Monderer and Samet, later refined by Neeman: if a group of agents share a common prior, update their beliefs using Bayesian conditioning on private information, and have common p-belief of their posteriors, these posteriors must be close (i.e., they cannot differ by more than 1 - p). Here, common p-belief generalizes the concept of common knowledge to probabilistic beliefs: agents commonly p-believe an event E if everyone believes E to at least degree p, everyone believes to at least degree p that everyone believes E to at least degree p, and so on. This paper further extends the Monderer-Samet-Neeman Agreement Theorem from classical probability measures to plausibility measures -- a very general framework introduced by Halpern that unifies many formal models of belief. To facilitate this extension, we provide a new proof of the Monderer-Samet-Neeman theorem in the classical setting. Building upon both the original proof and our new proof, we offer two different generalizations of the theorem to plausibility-based structures. We then apply these generalized results to several non-classical belief models, including conditional probability structures and lexicographic probability structures. Moreover, we show that whenever our generalized theorems do not apply, the Monderer-Samet-Neeman Agreement Theorem fails. These findings suggest that our results successfully identify the minimal conditions required for a belief model to satisfy the Monderer-Samet-Neeman Agreement Theorem.
Mapping Clinical Doubt: Locating Linguistic Uncertainty in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in clinical settings, where sensitivity to linguistic uncertainty can influence diagnostic interpretation and decision-making. Yet little is known about where such epistemic cues are internally represented within these models. Distinct from uncertainty quantification, which measures output confidence, this work examines input-side representational sensitivity to linguistic uncertainty in medical text. We curate a contrastive dataset of clinical statements varying in epistemic modality (e.g., 'is consistent with' vs. 'may be consistent with') and propose Model Sensitivity to Uncertainty (MSU), a layerwise probing metric that quantifies activation-level shifts induced by uncertainty cues. Our results show that LLMs exhibit structured, depth-dependent sensitivity to clinical uncertainty, suggesting that epistemic information is progressively encoded in deeper layers. These findings reveal how linguistic uncertainty is internally represented in LLMs, offering insight into their interpretability and epistemic reliability.
Improving Stochastic Action-Constrained Reinforcement Learning via Truncated Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

In reinforcement learning (RL), it is often advantageous to consider additional constraints on the action space to ensure safety or action relevance. Existing work on such action-constrained RL faces challenges regarding effective policy updates, computational efficiency, and predictable runtime. Recent work proposes to use truncated normal distributions for stochastic policy gradient methods. However, the computation of key characteristics, such as the entropy, log-probability, and their gradients, becomes intractable under complex constraints. Hence, prior work approximates these using the non-truncated distributions, which severely degrades performance. We argue that accurate estimation of these characteristics is crucial in the action-constrained RL setting, and propose efficient numerical approximations for them. We also provide an efficient sampling strategy for truncated policy distributions and validate our approach on three benchmark environments, which demonstrate significant performance improvements when using accurate estimations.
Exposing Vulnerabilities in RL: A Novel Stealthy Backdoor Attack through Reward Poisoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, enabling autonomous systems to learn and adapt to dynamic environments by optimizing a reward function. However, this reliance on reward signals creates a significant security vulnerability. In this paper, we study a stealthy backdoor attack that manipulates an agent's policy by poisoning its reward signals. The effectiveness of this attack highlights a critical threat to the integrity of deployed RL systems and calls for urgent defenses against training-time manipulation. We evaluate the attack across classic control and MuJoCo environments. The backdoored agent remains highly stealthy in Hopper and Walker2D, with minimal performance drops of only 2.18 % and 4.59 % under non-triggered scenarios, while achieving strong attack efficacy with up to 82.31% and 71.27% declines under trigger conditions.
MATCH: Engineering Transparent and Controllable Conversational XAI Systems through Composable Building Blocks
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

While the increased integration of AI technologies into interactive systems enables them to solve an increasing number of tasks, the black-box problem of AI models continues to spread throughout the interactive system as a whole. Explainable AI (XAI) techniques can make AI models more accessible by employing post-hoc methods or transitioning to inherently interpretable models. While this makes individual AI models clearer, the overarching system architecture remains opaque. This challenge not only pertains to standard XAI techniques but also to human examination and conversational XAI approaches that need access to model internals to interpret them correctly and completely. To this end, we propose conceptually representing such interactive systems as sequences of structural building blocks. These include the AI models themselves, as well as control mechanisms grounded in literature. The structural building blocks can then be explained through complementary explanatory building blocks, such as established XAI techniques like LIME and SHAP. The flow and APIs of the structural building blocks form an unambiguous overview of the underlying system, serving as a communication basis for both human and automated agents, thus aligning human and machine interpretability of the embedded AI models. In this paper, we present our flow-based approach and a selection of building blocks as MATCH: a framework for engineering Multi-Agent Transparent and Controllable Human-centered systems. This research contributes to the field of (conversational) XAI by facilitating the integration of interpretability into existing interactive systems.
Semantic-Aware Caching for Efficient Image Generation in Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

Text-to-image generation employing diffusion models has attained significant popularity due to its capability to produce high-quality images that adhere to textual prompts. However, the integration of diffusion models faces critical challenges into resource-constrained mobile and edge environments because it requires multiple denoising steps from the original random noise. A practical way to speed up denoising is to initialize the process with a noised reference image that is similar to the target, since both images share similar layouts, structures, and details, allowing for fewer denoising steps. Based on this idea, we present CacheGenius, a hybrid image generation system in edge computing that accelerates generation by combining text-toimage and image-to-image workflows. It generates images from user text prompts using cached reference images. CacheGenius introduces a semantic-aware classified storage scheme and a request-scheduling algorithm that ensures semantic alignment between references and targets. To ensure sustained performance, it employs a cache maintenance policy that proactively evicts obsolete entries via correlation analysis. Evaluated in a distributed edge computing system, CacheGenius reduces generation latency by 41% and computational costs by 48% relative to baselines, while maintaining competitive evaluation metrics.
FastFHE: Packing-Scalable and Depthwise-Separable CNN Inference Over FHE
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

The deep learning (DL) has been penetrating daily life in many domains, how to keep the DL model inference secure and sample privacy in an encrypted environment has become an urgent and increasingly important issue for various security-critical applications. To date, several approaches have been proposed based on the Residue Number System variant of the Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (RNS-CKKS) scheme. However, they all suffer from high latency, which severely limits the applications in real-world tasks. Currently, the research on encrypted inference in deep CNNs confronts three main bottlenecks: i) the time and storage costs of convolution calculation; ii) the time overhead of huge bootstrapping operations; and iii) the consumption of circuit multiplication depth. Towards these three challenges, we in this paper propose an efficient and effective mechanism FastFHE to accelerate the model inference while simultaneously retaining high inference accuracy over fully homomorphic encryption. Concretely, our work elaborates four unique novelties. First, we propose a new scalable ciphertext data-packing scheme to save the time and storage consumptions. Second, we work out a depthwise-separable convolution fashion to degrade the computation load of convolution calculation. Third, we figure out a BN dot-product fusion matrix to merge the ciphertext convolutional layer with the batch-normalization layer without incurring extra multiplicative depth. Last but not least, we adopt the low-degree Legendre polynomial to approximate the nonlinear smooth activation function SiLU under the guarantee of tiny accuracy error before and after encrypted inference. Finally, we execute multi-facet experiments to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Performant Synchronization in Geo-Distributed Databases
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2025
Year: 2025

The deployment of databases across geographically distributed regions has become increasingly critical for ensuring data reliability and scalability. Recent studies indicate that distributed databases exhibit significantly higher latency than single-node databases, primarily due to consensus protocols maintaining data consistency across multiple nodes. We argue that synchronization cost constitutes the primary bottleneck for distributed databases, which is particularly pronounced in wide-area networks (WAN). Fortunately, we identify opportunities to optimize synchronization costs in real production environments: (1) network clustering phenomena, (2) triangle inequality violations in transmission, and (3) redundant data transfers. Based on these observations, we propose GeoCoCo, a synchronization acceleration framework for cross-region distributed databases. First, GeoCoCo presents a group rescheduling strategy that adapts to real-time network conditions to maximize WAN transmission efficiency. Second, GeoCoCo introduces a task-preserving data filtering method that reduces data volume transmitted over the WAN. Finally, GeoCoCo develops a consistency-guaranteed transmission framework integrating grouping and pruning. Extensive evaluations in both trace-driven simulations and real-world deployments demonstrate that GeoCoCo reduces synchronization cost-primarily by lowering WAN bandwidth usage-by up to 40.3%, and increases system throughput by up to 14.1% in GeoGauss.
Beyond Real versus Fake Towards Intent-Aware Video Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The rapid advancement of generative models has led to increasingly realistic deepfake videos, posing significant societal and security risks. While existing detection methods focus on distinguishing real from fake videos, such approaches fail to address a fundamental question: What is the intent behind a manipulated video? Towards addressing this question, we introduce IntentHQ: a new benchmark for human-centered intent analysis, shifting the paradigm from authenticity verification to contextual understanding of videos. IntentHQ consists of 5168 videos that have been meticulously collected and annotated with 23 fine-grained intent-categories, including "Financial fraud", "Indirect marketing", "Political propaganda", as well as "Fear mongering". We perform intent recognition with supervised and self-supervised multi-modality models that integrate spatio-temporal video features, audio processing, and text analysis to infer underlying motivations and goals behind videos. Our proposed model is streamlined to differentiate between a wide range of intent-categories.
An Efficient Embedding Based Ad Retrieval with GPU-Powered Feature Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

In large-scale advertising recommendation systems, retrieval serves as a critical component, aiming to efficiently select a subset of candidate ads relevant to user behaviors from a massive ad inventory for subsequent ranking and recommendation. The Embedding-Based Retrieval (EBR) methods modeled by the dual-tower network are widely used in the industry to maintain both retrieval efficiency and accuracy. However, the dual-tower model has significant limitations: the embeddings of users and ads interact only at the final inner product computation, resulting in insufficient feature interaction capabilities. Although DNN-based models with both user and ad as input features, allowing for early-stage interaction between these features, are introduced in the ranking stage to mitigate this issue, they are computationally infeasible for the retrieval stage. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes an efficient GPU-based feature interaction for the dual-tower network to significantly improve retrieval accuracy while substantially reducing computational costs. Specifically, we introduce a novel compressed inverted list designed for GPU acceleration, enabling efficient feature interaction computation at scale. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework in the industry to successfully implement Wide and Deep in a retrieval system. We apply this model to the real-world business scenarios in Tencent Advertising, and experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in offline evaluation and has been successfully deployed to Tencent's advertising recommendation system, delivering significant online performance gains. This improvement not only validates the effectiveness of the proposed method, but also provides new practical guidance for optimizing large-scale ad retrieval systems.