OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Persistent reachability homology in machine learning applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We explore the recently introduced persistent reachability homology (PRH) of digraph data, i.e. data in the form of directed graphs. In particular, we study the effectiveness of PRH in network classification task in a key neuroscience problem: epilepsy detection. PRH is a variation of the persistent homology of digraphs, more traditionally based on the directed flag complex (DPH). A main advantage of PRH is that it considers the condensations of the digraphs appearing in the persistent filtration and thus is computed from smaller digraphs. We compare the effectiveness of PRH to that of DPH and we show that PRH outperforms DPH in the classification task. We use the Betti curves and their integrals as topological features and implement our pipeline on support vector machine.
Prompt-Based Safety Guidance Is Ineffective for Unlearned Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in text-to-image generative models have raised concerns about their potential to produce harmful content when provided with malicious input text prompts. To address this issue, two main approaches have emerged: (1) fine-tuning the model to unlearn harmful concepts and (2) training-free guidance methods that leverage negative prompts. However, we observe that combining these two orthogonal approaches often leads to marginal or even degraded defense performance. This observation indicates a critical incompatibility between two paradigms, which hinders their combined effectiveness. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a conceptually simple yet experimentally robust method: replacing the negative prompts used in training-free methods with implicit negative embeddings obtained through concept inversion. Our method requires no modification to either approach and can be easily integrated into existing pipelines. We experimentally validate its effectiveness on nudity and violence benchmarks, demonstrating consistent improvements in defense success rate while preserving the core semantics of input prompts.
Conformalized Non-uniform Sampling Strategies for Accelerated Sampling-based Motion Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Sampling-based motion planners (SBMPs) are widely used to compute dynamically feasible robot paths. However, their reliance on uniform sampling often leads to poor efficiency and slow planning in complex environments. We introduce a novel non-uniform sampling strategy that integrates into existing SBMPs by biasing sampling toward `certified' regions. These regions are constructed by (i) generating an initial, possibly infeasible, path using any heuristic path predictor (e.g., A* or vision-language models) and (ii) applying conformal prediction to quantify the predictor's uncertainty. This process yields prediction sets around the initial-guess path that are guaranteed, with user-specified probability, to contain the optimal solution. To our knowledge, this is the first non-uniform sampling approach for SBMPs that provides such probabilistically correct guarantees on the sampling regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method consistently finds feasible paths faster and generalizes better to unseen environments than existing baselines.
Software Defined Vehicle Code Generation: A Few-Shot Prompting Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

The emergence of Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs) marks a paradigm shift in the automotive industry, where software now plays a pivotal role in defining vehicle functionality, enabling rapid innovation of modern vehicles. Developing SDV-specific applications demands advanced tools to streamline code generation and improve development efficiency. In recent years, general-purpose large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated transformative potential across domains. Still, restricted access to proprietary model architectures hinders their adaption to specific tasks like SDV code generation. In this study, we propose using prompts, a common and basic strategy to interact with LLMs and redirect their responses. Using only system prompts with an appropriate and efficient prompt structure designed using advanced prompt engineering techniques, LLMs can be crafted without requiring a training session or access to their base design. This research investigates the extensive experiments on different models by applying various prompting techniques, including bare models, using a benchmark specifically created to evaluate LLMs' performance in generating SDV code. The results reveal that the model with a few-shot prompting strategy outperforms the others in adjusting the LLM answers to match the expected outcomes based on quantitative metrics.
Validating Vision Transformers for Otoscopy: Performance and Data-Leakage Effects
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

This study evaluates the efficacy of vision transformer models, specifically Swin transformers, in enhancing the diagnostic accuracy of ear diseases compared to traditional convolutional neural networks. With a reported 27% misdiagnosis rate among specialist otolaryngologists, improving diagnostic accuracy is crucial. The research utilised a real-world dataset from the Department of Otolaryngology at the Clinical Hospital of the Universidad de Chile, comprising otoscopic videos of ear examinations depicting various middle and external ear conditions. Frames were selected based on the Laplacian and Shannon entropy thresholds, with blank frames removed. Initially, Swin v1 and Swin v2 transformer models achieved accuracies of 100% and 99.1%, respectively, marginally outperforming the ResNet model (99.5%). These results surpassed metrics reported in related studies. However, the evaluation uncovered a critical data leakage issue in the preprocessing step, affecting both this study and related research using the same raw dataset. After mitigating the data leakage, model performance decreased significantly. Corrected accuracies were 83% for both Swin v1 and Swin v2, and 82% for the ResNet model. This finding highlights the importance of rigorous data handling in machine learning studies, especially in medical applications. The findings indicate that while vision transformers show promise, it is essential to find an optimal balance between the benefits of advanced model architectures and those derived from effective data preprocessing. This balance is key to developing a reliable machine learning model for diagnosing ear diseases.
A Dual Perspective on Decision-Focused Learning: Scalable Training via Dual-Guided Surrogates
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Many real-world decisions are made under uncertainty by solving optimization problems using predicted quantities. This predict-then-optimize paradigm has motivated decision-focused learning, which trains models with awareness of how the optimizer uses predictions, improving the performance of downstream decisions. Despite its promise, scaling is challenging: state-of-the-art methods either differentiate through a solver or rely on task-specific surrogates, both of which require frequent and expensive calls to an optimizer, often a combinatorial one. In this paper, we leverage dual variables from the downstream problem to shape learning and introduce Dual-Guided Loss (DGL), a simple, scalable objective that preserves decision alignment while reducing solver dependence. We construct DGL specifically for combinatorial selection problems with natural one-of-many constraints, such as matching, knapsack, and shortest path. Our approach (a) decouples optimization from gradient updates by solving the downstream problem only periodically; (b) between refreshes, trains on dual-adjusted targets using simple differentiable surrogate losses; and (c) as refreshes become less frequent, drives training cost toward standard supervised learning while retaining strong decision alignment. We prove that DGL has asymptotically diminishing decision regret, analyze runtime complexity, and show on two problem classes that DGL matches or exceeds state-of-the-art DFL methods while using far fewer solver calls and substantially less training time. Code is available at https://github.com/paularodr/Dual-Guided-Learning.
MERaLiON-SER: Robust Speech Emotion Recognition Model for English and SEA Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

We present MERaLiON-SER, a robust speech emotion recognition model designed for English and Southeast Asian languages. The model is trained using a hybrid objective combining weighted categorical cross-entropy and Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) losses for joint discrete and dimensional emotion modelling. This dual approach enables the model to capture both the distinct categories of emotion (like happy or angry) and the fine-grained, such as arousal (intensity), valence (positivity/negativity), and dominance (sense of control), leading to a more comprehensive and robust representation of human affect. Extensive evaluations across multilingual Singaporean languages (English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil ) and other public benchmarks show that MERaLiON-SER consistently surpasses both open-source speech encoders and large Audio-LLMs. These results underscore the importance of specialised speech-only models for accurate paralinguistic understanding and cross-lingual generalisation. Furthermore, the proposed framework provides a foundation for integrating emotion-aware perception into future agentic audio systems, enabling more empathetic and contextually adaptive multimodal reasoning.
DeepForgeSeal: Latent Space-Driven Semi-Fragile Watermarking for Deepfake Detection Using Multi-Agent Adversarial Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Rapid advances in generative AI have led to increasingly realistic deepfakes, posing growing challenges for law enforcement and public trust. Existing passive deepfake detectors struggle to keep pace, largely due to their dependence on specific forgery artifacts, which limits their ability to generalize to new deepfake types. Proactive deepfake detection using watermarks has emerged to address the challenge of identifying high-quality synthetic media. However, these methods often struggle to balance robustness against benign distortions with sensitivity to malicious tampering. This paper introduces a novel deep learning framework that harnesses high-dimensional latent space representations and the Multi-Agent Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (MAARL) paradigm to develop a robust and adaptive watermarking approach. Specifically, we develop a learnable watermark embedder that operates in the latent space, capturing high-level image semantics, while offering precise control over message encoding and extraction. The MAARL paradigm empowers the learnable watermarking agent to pursue an optimal balance between robustness and fragility by interacting with a dynamic curriculum of benign and malicious image manipulations simulated by an adversarial attacker agent. Comprehensive evaluations on the CelebA and CelebA-HQ benchmarks reveal that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving improvements of over 4.5% on CelebA and more than 5.3% on CelebA-HQ under challenging manipulation scenarios.
Too Good to be Bad: On the Failure of LLMs to Role-Play Villains
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with creative generation, including the simulation of fictional characters. However, their ability to portray non-prosocial, antagonistic personas remains largely unexamined. We hypothesize that the safety alignment of modern LLMs creates a fundamental conflict with the task of authentically role-playing morally ambiguous or villainous characters. To investigate this, we introduce the Moral RolePlay benchmark, a new dataset featuring a four-level moral alignment scale and a balanced test set for rigorous evaluation. We task state-of-the-art LLMs with role-playing characters from moral paragons to pure villains. Our large-scale evaluation reveals a consistent, monotonic decline in role-playing fidelity as character morality decreases. We find that models struggle most with traits directly antithetical to safety principles, such as ``Deceitful'' and ``Manipulative'', often substituting nuanced malevolence with superficial aggression. Furthermore, we demonstrate that general chatbot proficiency is a poor predictor of villain role-playing ability, with highly safety-aligned models performing particularly poorly. Our work provides the first systematic evidence of this critical limitation, highlighting a key tension between model safety and creative fidelity. Our benchmark and findings pave the way for developing more nuanced, context-aware alignment methods.
Scientific judgment drifts over time in AI ideation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Scientific discovery begins with ideas, yet evaluating early-stage research concepts is a subtle and subjective human judgment. As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with generating scientific hypotheses, most systems assume that scientists' evaluations form a fixed gold standard, and that scientists' judgments do not change. Here we challenge this assumption. In a two-wave study with 7,182 ratings from 57 active researchers across six scientific departments, each participant repeatedly evaluated a constant "control" research idea alongside AI-generated ideas. We show that scientists' ratings of the very same idea systematically drift over time: overall quality scores increased by 0.61 points on a 0-10 scale (P = 0.005), and test-retest reliability was only moderate across core dimensions of scientific value, revealing systematic temporal drift in perceived idea quality. Yet the internal structure of judgment remained stable, such as the relative importance placed on originality, feasibility, clarity. We then aligned an LLM-based ideation system to first-wave human ratings and used it to select new ideas. Although alignment improved agreement with Wave-1 evaluations, its apparent gains disappeared once drift in human standards was accounted for. Thus, tuning to a fixed human snapshot produced improvements that were transient rather than persistent. These findings reveal that human evaluation of scientific ideas is not static but a dynamic process with stable priorities and requires shifting calibration. Treating one-time human ratings as immutable ground truth risks overstating progress in AI-assisted ideation and obscuring the challenge of co-evolving with changing expert standards. Drift-aware evaluation protocols and longitudinal benchmarks may therefore be essential for building AI systems that reliably augment, rather than overfit to, human scientific judgment.
iFlyBot-VLM Technical Report
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce iFlyBot-VLM, a general-purpose Vision-Language Model (VLM) used to improve the domain of Embodied Intelligence. The central objective of iFlyBot-VLM is to bridge the cross-modal semantic gap between high-dimensional environmental perception and low-level robotic motion control. To this end, the model abstracts complex visual and spatial information into a body-agnostic and transferable Operational Language, thereby enabling seamless perception-action closed-loop coordination across diverse robotic platforms. The architecture of iFlyBot-VLM is systematically designed to realize four key functional capabilities essential for embodied intelligence: 1) Spatial Understanding and Metric Reasoning; 2) Interactive Target Grounding; 3) Action Abstraction and Control Parameter Generation; 4) Task Planning and Skill Sequencing. We envision iFlyBot-VLM as a scalable and generalizable foundation model for embodied AI, facilitating the progression from specialized task-oriented systems toward generalist, cognitively capable agents. We conducted evaluations on 10 current mainstream embodied intelligence-related VLM benchmark datasets, such as Blink and Where2Place, and achieved optimal performance while preserving the model's general capabilities. We will publicly release both the training data and model weights to foster further research and development in the field of Embodied Intelligence.
Scaling Up ROC-Optimizing Support Vector Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The ROC-SVM, originally proposed by Rakotomamonjy, directly maximizes the area under the ROC curve (AUC) and has become an attractive alternative of the conventional binary classification under the presence of class imbalance. However, its practical use is limited by high computational cost, as training involves evaluating all $O(n^2)$. To overcome this limitation, we develop a scalable variant of the ROC-SVM that leverages incomplete U-statistics, thereby substantially reducing computational complexity. We further extend the framework to nonlinear classification through a low-rank kernel approximation, enabling efficient training in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Theoretical analysis establishes an error bound that justifies the proposed approximation, and empirical results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves comparable AUC performance to the original ROC-SVM with drastically reduced training time.
Unlocking the Black Box: A Five-Dimensional Framework for Evaluating Explainable AI in Credit Risk
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The financial industry faces a significant challenge modeling and risk portfolios: balancing the predictability of advanced machine learning models, neural network models, and explainability required by regulatory entities (such as Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). This paper intends to fill the gap in the application between these "black box" models and explainability frameworks, such as LIME and SHAP. Authors elaborate on the application of these frameworks on different models and demonstrates the more complex models with better prediction powers could be applied and reach the same level of the explainability, using SHAP and LIME. Beyond the comparison and discussion of performances, this paper proposes a novel five dimensional framework evaluating Inherent Interpretability, Global Explanations, Local Explanations, Consistency, and Complexity to offer a nuanced method for assessing and comparing model explainability beyond simple accuracy metrics. This research demonstrates the feasibility of employing sophisticated, high performing ML models in regulated financial environments by utilizing modern explainability techniques and provides a structured approach to evaluate the crucial trade offs between model performance and interpretability.
Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Refining Textual Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

In this work, we identify an inherent bias in prevailing LVLM architectures toward the language modality, largely resulting from the common practice of simply appending visual embeddings to the input text sequence. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method that refines textual embeddings by integrating average-pooled visual features. Our approach demonstrably improves visual grounding and significantly reduces hallucinations on established benchmarks. While average pooling offers a straightforward, robust, and efficient means of incorporating visual information, we believe that more sophisticated fusion methods could further enhance visual grounding and cross-modal alignment. Given that the primary focus of this work is to highlight the modality imbalance and its impact on hallucinations -- and to show that refining textual embeddings with visual information mitigates this issue -- we leave exploration of advanced fusion strategies for future work.
8bit-GPT: Exploring Human-AI Interaction on Obsolete Macintosh Operating Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

The proliferation of assistive chatbots offering efficient, personalized communication has driven widespread over-reliance on them for decision-making, information-seeking and everyday tasks. This dependence was found to have adverse consequences on information retention as well as lead to superficial emotional attachment. As such, this work introduces 8bit-GPT; a language model simulated on a legacy Macintosh Operating System, to evoke reflection on the nature of Human-AI interaction and the consequences of anthropomorphic rhetoric. Drawing on reflective design principles such as slow-technology and counterfunctionality, this work aims to foreground the presence of chatbots as a tool by defamiliarizing the interface and prioritizing inefficient interaction, creating a friction between the familiar and not.
Accelerating HDC-CNN Hybrid Models Using Custom Instructions on RISC-V GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Machine learning based on neural networks has advanced rapidly, but the high energy consumption required for training and inference remains a major challenge. Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) offers a lightweight, brain-inspired alternative that enables high parallelism but often suffers from lower accuracy on complex visual tasks. To overcome this, hybrid accelerators combining HDC and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been proposed, though their adoption is limited by poor generalizability and programmability. The rise of open-source RISC-V architectures has created new opportunities for domain-specific GPU design. Unlike traditional proprietary GPUs, emerging RISC-V-based GPUs provide flexible, programmable platforms suitable for custom computation models such as HDC. In this study, we design and implement custom GPU instructions optimized for HDC operations, enabling efficient processing for hybrid HDC-CNN workloads. Experimental results using four types of custom HDC instructions show a performance improvement of up to 56.2 times in microbenchmark tests, demonstrating the potential of RISC-V GPUs for energy-efficient, high-performance computing.
No Pose Estimation? No Problem: Pose-Agnostic and Instance-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for Monocular Depth Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Monocular depth estimation (MDE), inferring pixel-level depths in single RGB images from a monocular camera, plays a crucial and pivotal role in a variety of AI applications demanding a three-dimensional (3D) topographical scene. In the real-world scenarios, MDE models often need to be deployed in environments with different conditions from those for training. Test-time (domain) adaptation (TTA) is one of the compelling and practical approaches to address the issue. Although there have been notable advancements in TTA for MDE, particularly in a self-supervised manner, existing methods are still ineffective and problematic when applied to diverse and dynamic environments. To break through this challenge, we propose a novel and high-performing TTA framework for MDE, named PITTA. Our approach incorporates two key innovative strategies: (i) pose-agnostic TTA paradigm for MDE and (ii) instance-aware image masking. Specifically, PITTA enables highly effective TTA on a pretrained MDE network in a pose-agnostic manner without resorting to any camera pose information. Besides, our instance-aware masking strategy extracts instance-wise masks for dynamic objects (e.g., vehicles, pedestrians, etc.) from a segmentation mask produced by a pretrained panoptic segmentation network, by removing static objects including background components. To further boost performance, we also present a simple yet effective edge extraction methodology for the input image (i.e., a single monocular image) and depth map. Extensive experimental evaluations on DrivingStereo and Waymo datasets with varying environmental conditions demonstrate that our proposed framework, PITTA, surpasses the existing state-of-the-art techniques with remarkable performance improvements in MDE during TTA.