OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Communication-Efficient and Memory-Aware Parallel Bootstrapping using MPI
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Bootstrapping is a powerful statistical resampling technique for estimating the sampling distribution of an estimator. However, its computational cost becomes prohibitive for large datasets or a high number of resamples. This paper presents a theoretical analysis and design of parallel bootstrapping algorithms using the Message Passing Interface (MPI). We address two key challenges: high communication overhead and memory constraints in distributed environments. We propose two novel strategies: 1) Local Statistic Aggregation, which drastically reduces communication by transmitting sufficient statistics instead of full resampled datasets, and 2) Synchronized Pseudo-Random Number Generation, which enables distributed resampling when the entire dataset cannot be stored on a single process. We develop analytical models for communication and computation complexity, comparing our methods against naive baseline approaches. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed methods offer significant reductions in communication volume and memory usage, facilitating scalable parallel bootstrapping on large-scale systems.
Thinking About Thinking: Evaluating Reasoning in Post-Trained Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in post-training techniques have endowed Large Language Models (LLMs) with enhanced capabilities for tackling complex, logic-intensive tasks through the generation of supplementary planning tokens. This development raises a fundamental question: Are these models aware of what they "learn" and "think"? To address this, we define three core competencies: (1) awareness of learned latent policies, (2) generalization of these policies across domains, and (3) alignment between internal reasoning traces and final outputs. We empirically evaluate these abilities on several tasks, each designed to require learning a distinct policy. Furthermore, we contrast the profiles of models post-trained via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our findings indicate that RL-trained models not only demonstrate greater awareness of their learned behaviors and stronger generalizability to novel, structurally similar tasks than SFT models but also often exhibit weak alignment between their reasoning traces and final outputs, an effect most pronounced in GRPO-trained models.
Beyond Fixed Anchors: Precisely Erasing Concepts with Sibling Exclusive Counterparts
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Existing concept erasure methods for text-to-image diffusion models commonly rely on fixed anchor strategies, which often lead to critical issues such as concept re-emergence and erosion. To address this, we conduct causal tracing to reveal the inherent sensitivity of erasure to anchor selection and define Sibling Exclusive Concepts as a superior class of anchors. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{SELECT} (Sibling-Exclusive Evaluation for Contextual Targeting), a dynamic anchor selection framework designed to overcome the limitations of fixed anchors. Our framework introduces a novel two-stage evaluation mechanism that automatically discovers optimal anchors for precise erasure while identifying critical boundary anchors to preserve related concepts. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SELECT, as a universal anchor solution, not only efficiently adapts to multiple erasure frameworks but also consistently outperforms existing baselines across key performance metrics, averaging only 4 seconds for anchor mining of a single concept.
Tight Pair Query Lower Bounds for Matching and Earth Mover's Distance
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

How many adjacency matrix queries (also known as pair queries) are required to estimate the size of a maximum matching in an $n$-vertex graph $G$? We study this fundamental question in this paper. On the upper bound side, an algorithm of Bhattacharya, Kiss, and Saranurak [FOCS'23] gives an estimate that is within $εn$ of the right bound with $n^{2-Ω_ε(1)}$ queries, which is subquadratic in $n$ (and thus sublinear in the matrix size) for any fixed $ε> 0$. On the lower bound side, while there has been a lot of progress in the adjacency list model, no non-trivial lower bound has been established for algorithms with adjacency matrix query access. In particular, the only known lower bound is a folklore bound of $Ω(n)$, leaving a huge gap. In this paper, we present the first superlinear in $n$ lower bound for this problem. In fact, we close the gap mentioned above entirely by showing that the algorithm of [BKS'23] is optimal. Formally, we prove that for any fixed $δ> 0$, there is a fixed $ε> 0$ such that an estimate that is within $εn$ of the true bound requires $Ω(n^{2-δ})$ adjacency matrix queries. Our lower bound also has strong implications for estimating the earth mover's distance between distributions. For this problem, Beretta and Rubinstein [STOC'24] gave an $n^{2-Ω_ε(1)}$ time algorithm that obtains an additive $ε$-approximation and works for any distance function. Whether this can be improved generally, or even for metric spaces, had remained open. Our lower bound rules out the possibility of any improvements over this bound, even under the strong assumption that the underlying distances are in a (1, 2)-metric.
Sparse Transformer Architectures via Regularized Wasserstein Proximal Operator with $L_1$ Prior
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

In this work, we propose a sparse transformer architecture that incorporates prior information about the underlying data distribution directly into the transformer structure of the neural network. The design of the model is motivated by a special optimal transport problem, namely the regularized Wasserstein proximal operator, which admits a closed-form solution and turns out to be a special representation of transformer architectures. Compared with classical flow-based models, the proposed approach improves the convexity properties of the optimization problem and promotes sparsity in the generated samples. Through both theoretical analysis and numerical experiments, including applications in generative modeling and Bayesian inverse problems, we demonstrate that the sparse transformer achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence to the target distribution than classical neural ODE-based methods.
EDVD-LLaMA: Explainable Deepfake Video Detection via Multimodal Large Language Model Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The rapid development of deepfake video technology has not only facilitated artistic creation but also made it easier to spread misinformation. Traditional deepfake video detection (DVD) methods face issues such as a lack of transparency in their principles and insufficient generalization capabilities to cope with evolving forgery techniques. This highlights an urgent need for detectors that can identify forged content and provide verifiable reasoning explanations. This paper proposes the explainable deepfake video detection (EDVD) task and designs the EDVD-LLaMA multimodal, a large language model (MLLM) reasoning framework, which provides traceable reasoning processes alongside accurate detection results and trustworthy explanations. Our approach first incorporates a Spatio-Temporal Subtle Information Tokenization (ST-SIT) to extract and fuse global and local cross-frame deepfake features, providing rich spatio-temporal semantic information input for MLLM reasoning. Second, we construct a Fine-grained Multimodal Chain-of-Thought (Fg-MCoT) mechanism, which introduces facial feature data as hard constraints during the reasoning process to achieve pixel-level spatio-temporal video localization, suppress hallucinated outputs, and enhance the reliability of the chain of thought. In addition, we build an Explainable Reasoning FF++ dataset (ER-FF++set), leveraging structured data to annotate videos and ensure quality control, thereby supporting dual supervision for reasoning and detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDVD-LLaMA achieves outstanding performance and robustness in terms of detection accuracy, explainability, and its ability to handle cross-forgery methods and cross-dataset scenarios. Compared to previous DVD methods, it provides a more explainable and superior solution. The project page is available at: https://11ouo1.github.io/edvd-llama/.
Colliding with Adversaries at ECML-PKDD 2025 Model Robustness Competition 1st Prize Solution
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

This report presents the winning solution for Task 2 of Colliding with Adversaries: A Challenge on Robust Learning in High Energy Physics Discovery at ECML-PKDD 2025. The goal of the challenge was to design and train a robust ANN-based model capable of achieving high accuracy in a binary classification task on both clean and adversarial data generated with the Random Distribution Shuffle Attack (RDSA). Our solution consists of two components: a data generation phase and a robust model training phase. In the first phase, we produced 15 million artificial training samples using a custom methodology derived from Random Distribution Shuffle Attack (RDSA). In the second phase, we introduced a robust architecture comprising (i)a Feature Embedding Block with shared weights among features of the same type and (ii)a Dense Fusion Tail responsible for the final prediction. Training this architecture on our adversarial dataset achieved a mixed accuracy score of 80\%, exceeding the second-place solution by two percentage points.
Instance-Aware Pseudo-Labeling and Class-Focused Contrastive Learning for Weakly Supervised Domain Adaptive Segmentation of Electron Microscopy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Annotation-efficient segmentation of the numerous mitochondria instances from various electron microscopy (EM) images is highly valuable for biological and neuroscience research. Although unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods can help mitigate domain shifts and reduce the high costs of annotating each domain, they typically have relatively low performance in practical applications. Thus, we investigate weakly supervised domain adaptation (WDA) that utilizes additional sparse point labels on the target domain, which require minimal annotation effort and minimal expert knowledge. To take full use of the incomplete and imprecise point annotations, we introduce a multitask learning framework that jointly conducts segmentation and center detection with a novel cross-teaching mechanism and class-focused cross-domain contrastive learning. While leveraging unlabeled image regions is essential, we introduce segmentation self-training with a novel instance-aware pseudo-label (IPL) selection strategy. Unlike existing methods that typically rely on pixel-wise pseudo-label filtering, the IPL semantically selects reliable and diverse pseudo-labels with the help of the detection task. Comprehensive validations and comparisons on challenging datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing UDA and WDA methods, significantly narrowing the performance gap with the supervised upper bound. Furthermore, under the UDA setting, our method also achieves substantial improvements over other UDA techniques.
Women have it Worse: an ICT Workplace Digital Transformation Stress Gender Gap
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

Although information and communication technologies (ICT) solutions have positive outcomes for both companies and employees, the digital transformation (DT) could have an impact on the well-being of employees. The jobs of the employees became more demanding, and they were expected to learn ICT skills and cope with ICT workloads and hassles. Due to negative stereotypes about women's deficiency in technology, these ICT problems could affect female and male employees differently. Thus, we predicted that this additional pressure may manifest itself in higher levels of digital transformation stress (DTS) in female employees. The results confirmed this prediction and indicated the existence of a gender gap in DTS, measured two-fold - in sentiment analysis of help desk tickets and self-report using a psychological scale. Based on these results, we explore the need to discuss possible solutions and tools to support women in ICT-heavy workplace contexts.
SCALAR: Self-Calibrating Adaptive Latent Attention Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

High-dimensional, heterogeneous data with complex feature interactions pose significant challenges for traditional predictive modeling approaches. While Projection to Latent Structures (PLS) remains a popular technique, it struggles to model complex non-linear relationships, especially in multivariate systems with high-dimensional correlation structures. This challenge is further compounded by simultaneous interactions across multiple scales, where local processing fails to capture crossgroup dependencies. Additionally, static feature weighting limits adaptability to contextual variations, as it ignores sample-specific relevance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method that enhances predictive performance through novel architectural innovations. Our architecture introduces an adaptive kernel-based attention mechanism that processes distinct feature groups separately before integration, enabling capture of local patterns while preserving global relationships. Experimental results show substantial improvements in performance metrics, compared to the state-of-the-art methods across diverse datasets.
NP-Engine: Empowering Optimization Reasoning in Large Language Models with Verifiable Synthetic NP Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities, with models like OpenAI's O-series and DeepSeek R1 excelling at tasks such as mathematics, coding, logic, and puzzles through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, their ability to solve more complex optimization problems - particularly NP-hard tasks - remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose NP-ENGINE, the first comprehensive framework for training and evaluating LLMs on NP-hard problems. NP-ENGINE covers 10 tasks across five domains, each equipped with (i) a controllable instance generator, (ii) a rule-based verifier, and (iii) a heuristic solver that provides approximate optimal solutions as ground truth. This generator-verifier-heuristic pipeline enables scalable and verifiable RLVR training under hierarchical difficulties. We also introduce NP-BENCH, a benchmark derived from NP-ENGINE-DATA, specifically designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to tackle NP-hard level reasoning problems, focusing not only on feasibility but also on solution quality. Additionally, we present QWEN2.5-7B-NP, a model trained via zero-RLVR with curriculum learning on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, which significantly outperforms GPT-4o on NP-BENCH and achieves SOTA performance with the same model size. Beyond in-domain tasks, we demonstrate that RLVR training on NP-ENGINE-DATA enables strong out-of-domain (OOD) generalization to reasoning tasks (logic, puzzles, math, and knowledge), as well as non-reasoning tasks such as instruction following. We also observe a scaling trend: increasing task diversity improves OOD generalization. These findings suggest that task-rich RLVR training is a promising direction for advancing LLM's reasoning ability, revealing new insights into the scaling laws of RLVR.
Trading Prophets with Initial Capital
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

Correa et al. [EC' 2023] introduced the following trading prophets problem. A trader observes a sequence of stochastic prices for a stock, each drawn from a known distribution, and at each time must decide whether to buy or sell. Unfortunately, they observed that in this setting it is impossible to compete with a prophet who knows all future stock prices. In this paper, we explore the trading prophets problem when we are given initial capital with which to start trading. We show that initial capital is enough to bypass the impossibility result and obtain a competitive ratio of $3$ with respect to a prophet who knows all future prices (and who also starts with capital), and we show that this competitive ratio is best possible. We further study a more realistic model in which the trader must pay multiplicative and/or additive transaction costs for trading which model dynamics such as bid-ask spreads and broker fees.
Watch Where You Move: Region-aware Dynamic Aggregation and Excitation for Gait Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Deep learning-based gait recognition has achieved great success in various applications. The key to accurate gait recognition lies in considering the unique and diverse behavior patterns in different motion regions, especially when covariates affect visual appearance. However, existing methods typically use predefined regions for temporal modeling, with fixed or equivalent temporal scales assigned to different types of regions, which makes it difficult to model motion regions that change dynamically over time and adapt to their specific patterns. To tackle this problem, we introduce a Region-aware Dynamic Aggregation and Excitation framework (GaitRDAE) that automatically searches for motion regions, assigns adaptive temporal scales and applies corresponding attention. Specifically, the framework includes two core modules: the Region-aware Dynamic Aggregation (RDA) module, which dynamically searches the optimal temporal receptive field for each region, and the Region-aware Dynamic Excitation (RDE) module, which emphasizes the learning of motion regions containing more stable behavior patterns while suppressing attention to static regions that are more susceptible to covariates. Experimental results show that GaitRDAE achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets.
Predicting life satisfaction using machine learning and explainable AI
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Life satisfaction is a crucial facet of human well-being. Hence, research on life satisfaction is incumbent for understanding how individuals experience their lives and influencing interventions targeted at enhancing mental health and well-being. Life satisfaction has traditionally been measured using analog, complicated, and frequently error-prone methods. These methods raise questions concerning validation and propagation. However, this study demonstrates the potential for machine learning algorithms to predict life satisfaction with a high accuracy of 93.80% and a 73.00% macro F1-score. The dataset comes from a government survey of 19000 people aged 16-64 years in Denmark. Using feature learning techniques, 27 significant questions for assessing contentment were extracted, making the study highly reproducible, simple, and easily interpretable. Furthermore, clinical and biomedical large language models (LLMs) were explored for predicting life satisfaction by converting tabular data into natural language sentences through mapping and adding meaningful counterparts, achieving an accuracy of 93.74% and macro F1-score of 73.21%. It was found that life satisfaction prediction is more closely related to the biomedical domain than the clinical domain. Ablation studies were also conducted to understand the impact of data resampling and feature selection techniques on model performance. Moreover, the correlation between primary determinants with different age brackets was analyzed, and it was found that health condition is the most important determinant across all ages. This study demonstrates how machine learning, large language models and XAI can jointly contribute to building trust and understanding in using AI to investigate human behavior, with significant ramifications for academics and professionals working to quantify and comprehend subjective well-being.
Toward Understanding Security Issues in the Model Context Protocol Ecosystem
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an emerging open standard that enables AI-powered applications to interact with external tools through structured metadata. A rapidly growing ecosystem has formed around MCP, including a wide range of MCP hosts (i.e., Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Desktop, and Cline), MCP registries (i.e., mcp.so, MCP Market, MCP Store, Pulse MCP, Smithery, and npm), and thousands of community-contributed MCP servers. Although the MCP ecosystem is gaining traction, there has been little systematic study of its architecture and associated security risks. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive security analysis of the MCP ecosystem. We decompose MCP ecosystem into three core components: hosts, registries, and servers, and study the interactions and trust relationships among them. Users search for servers on registries and configure them in the host, which translates LLM-generated output into external tool invocations provided by the servers and executes them. Our qualitative analysis reveals that hosts lack output verification mechanisms for LLM-generated outputs, enabling malicious servers to manipulate model behavior and induce a variety of security threats, including but not limited to sensitive data exfiltration. We uncover a wide range of vulnerabilities that enable attackers to hijack servers, due to the lack of a vetted server submission process in registries. To support our analysis, we collect and analyze a dataset of 67,057 servers from six public registries. Our quantitative analysis demonstrates that a substantial number of servers can be hijacked by attackers. Finally, we propose practical defense strategies for MCP hosts, registries, and users. We responsibly disclosed our findings to affected hosts and registries.
Human-Aligned Code Readability Assessment with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Code readability is crucial for software comprehension and maintenance, yet difficult to assess at scale. Traditional static metrics often fail to capture the subjective, context-sensitive nature of human judgments. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a scalable alternative, but their behavior as readability evaluators remains underexplored. We introduce CoReEval, the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating LLM-based code readability assessment, comprising over 1.4 million model-snippet-prompt evaluations across 10 state of the art LLMs. The benchmark spans 3 programming languages (Java, Python, CUDA), 2 code types (functional code and unit tests), 4 prompting strategies (ZSL, FSL, CoT, ToT), 9 decoding settings, and developer-guided prompts tailored to junior and senior personas. We compare LLM outputs against human annotations and a validated static model, analyzing numerical alignment (MAE, Pearson's, Spearman's) and justification quality (sentiment, aspect coverage, semantic clustering). Our findings show that developer-guided prompting grounded in human-defined readability dimensions improves alignment in structured contexts, enhances explanation quality, and enables lightweight personalization through persona framing. However, increased score variability highlights trade-offs between alignment, stability, and interpretability. CoReEval provides a robust foundation for prompt engineering, model alignment studies, and human in the loop evaluation, with applications in education, onboarding, and CI/CD pipelines where LLMs can serve as explainable, adaptable reviewers.