OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
EXION: Exploiting Inter- and Intra-Iteration Output Sparsity for Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2025
Year: 2025

Over the past few years, diffusion models have emerged as novel AI solutions, generating diverse multi-modal outputs from text prompts. Despite their capabilities, they face challenges in computing, such as excessive latency and energy consumption due to their iterative architecture. Although prior works specialized in transformer acceleration can be applied, the iterative nature of diffusion models remains unresolved. In this paper, we present EXION, the first SW-HW co-designed diffusion accelerator that solves the computation challenges by exploiting the unique inter- and intra-iteration output sparsity in diffusion models. To this end, we propose two SW-level optimizations. First, we introduce the FFN-Reuse algorithm that identifies and skips redundant computations in FFN layers across different iterations (inter-iteration sparsity). Second, we use a modified eager prediction method that employs two-step leading-one detection to accurately predict the attention score, skipping unnecessary computations within an iteration (intra-iteration sparsity). We also introduce a novel data compaction mechanism named ConMerge, which can enhance HW utilization by condensing and merging sparse matrices into compact forms. Finally, it has a dedicated HW architecture that supports the above sparsity-inducing algorithms, translating high output sparsity into improved energy efficiency and performance. To verify the feasibility of the EXION, we first demonstrate that it has no impact on accuracy in various types of multi-modal diffusion models. We then instantiate EXION in both server- and edge-level settings and compare its performance against GPUs with similar specifications. Our evaluation shows that EXION achieves dramatic improvements in performance and energy efficiency by 3.2-379.3x and 45.1-3067.6x compared to a server GPU and by 42.6-1090.9x and 196.9-4668.2x compared to an edge GPU.
ExPO: Explainable Phonetic Trait-Oriented Network for Speaker Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

In speaker verification, we use computational method to verify if an utterance matches the identity of an enrolled speaker. This task is similar to the manual task of forensic voice comparison, where linguistic analysis is combined with auditory measurements to compare and evaluate voice samples. Despite much success, we have yet to develop a speaker verification system that offers explainable results comparable to those from manual forensic voice comparison. A novel approach, Explainable Phonetic Trait-Oriented (ExPO) network, is proposed in this paper to introduce the speaker's phonetic trait which describes the speaker's characteristics at the phonetic level, resembling what forensic comparison does. ExPO not only generates utterance-level speaker embeddings but also allows for fine-grained analysis and visualization of phonetic traits, offering an explainable speaker verification process. Furthermore, we investigate phonetic traits from within-speaker and between-speaker variation perspectives to determine which trait is most effective for speaker verification, marking an important step towards explainable speaker verification. Our code is available at https://github.com/mmmmayi/ExPO.
UAV Swarm-enabled Collaborative Post-disaster Communications in Low Altitude Economy via a Two-stage Optimization Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

The low-altitude economy (LAE) plays an indispensable role in cargo transportation, healthcare, infrastructure inspection, and especially post-disaster communication. Specifically, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as one of the core technologies of the LAE, can be deployed to provide communication coverage, facilitate data collection, and relay data for trapped users, thereby significantly enhancing the efficiency of post-disaster response efforts. In this paper, we design an efficient and robust UAV-swarm enabled collaborative self-organizing network to facilitate post-disaster communications. Specifically, a ground device transmits data to UAV swarms, which then use collaborative beamforming (CB) technique to form virtual antenna arrays and relay the data to a remote access point (AP) efficiently. Then, we formulate a rescue-oriented post-disaster transmission rate maximization optimization problem (RPTRMOP). Then, we propose a two-stage optimization approach to address it. In the first stage, the optimal traffic routing and the theoretical upper bound on the transmission rate of the network are derived. In the second stage, we transform the formulated RPTRMOP into a variant named V-RPTRMOP, and a diffusion model-enabled particle swarm optimization (DM-PSO) algorithm is proposed to deal with the V-RPTRMOP. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed two-stage optimization approach in improving the transmission rate of the constructed network, which demonstrates the great potential for post-disaster communications. Moreover, the robustness of the constructed network is also validated via evaluating the impact of two unexpected situations on the system transmission rate.
LLVD: LSTM-based Explicit Motion Modeling in Latent Space for Blind Video Denoising
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Video restoration plays a pivotal role in revitalizing degraded video content by rectifying imperfections caused by various degradations introduced during capturing (sensor noise, motion blur, etc.), saving/sharing (compression, resizing, etc.) and editing. This paper introduces a novel algorithm designed for scenarios where noise is introduced during video capture, aiming to enhance the visual quality of videos by reducing unwanted noise artifacts. We propose the Latent space LSTM Video Denoiser (LLVD), an end-to-end blind denoising model. LLVD uniquely combines spatial and temporal feature extraction, employing Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) within the encoded feature domain. This integration of LSTM layers is crucial for maintaining continuity and minimizing flicker in the restored video. Moreover, processing frames in the encoded feature domain significantly reduces computations, resulting in a very lightweight architecture. LLVD's blind nature makes it versatile for real, in-the-wild denoising scenarios where prior information about noise characteristics is not available. Experiments reveal that LLVD demonstrates excellent performance for both synthetic and captured noise. Specifically, LLVD surpasses the current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) in RAW denoising by 0.3dB, while also achieving a 59\% reduction in computational complexity.
Migician: Revealing the Magic of Free-Form Multi-Image Grounding in Multimodal Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

The recent advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has significantly improved their fine-grained perception of single images and general comprehension across multiple images. However, existing MLLMs still face challenges in achieving precise grounding in complex multi-image scenarios. To address this, we first explore a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) framework that integrates single-image grounding with multi-image comprehension. While partially effective, it remains unstable and struggles to capture abstract visual information due to its non-end-to-end nature. Therefore, we introduce Migician, the first multi-image grounding model capable of performing free-form and accurate grounding across multiple images. To support this, we present the MGrounding-630k dataset, which comprises data for several multi-image grounding tasks derived from existing datasets, along with newly generated free-form grounding instruction-following data. Furthermore, we propose MIG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating multi-image grounding capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves significantly superior multi-image grounding capabilities, outperforming the best existing MLLMs by 24.94% and even surpassing much larger 70B models. Our code, model, dataset, and benchmark are fully open-sourced at https://migician-vg.github.io/.
Path Planning for Multi-Copter UAV Formation Employing a Generalized Particle Swarm Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

The paper investigates the problem of path planning techniques for multi-copter uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) cooperation in a formation shape to examine surrounding surfaces. We first describe the problem as a joint objective cost for planning a path of the formation centroid working in a complicated space. The path planning algorithm, named the generalized particle swarm optimization algorithm, is then presented to construct an optimal, flyable path while avoiding obstacles and ensuring the flying mission requirements. A path-development scheme is then incorporated to generate a relevant path for each drone to maintain its position in the formation configuration. Simulation, comparison, and experiments have been conducted to verify the proposed approach. Results show the feasibility of the proposed path-planning algorithm with GEPSO.
Multi-layer RIS on Edge: Communication, Computation and Wireless Power Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) and its integration into various applications highlight the need for advanced communication, computation, and energy transfer techniques. However, the traditional hardware-based evolution of communication systems faces challenges due to excessive power consumption and prohibitive hardware cost. With the rapid advancement of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), a new approach by parallel stacking a series of RIS, i.e., multi-layer RIS, has been proposed. Benefiting from the characteristics of scalability, passivity, low cost, and enhanced computation capability, multi-layer RIS is a promising technology for future massive IoT scenarios. Thus, this article proposes a multi-layer RIS-based universal paradigm at the network edge, enabling three functions, i.e., multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication, computation, and wireless power transfer (WPT). Starting by picturing the possible applications of multi-layer RIS, we explore the potential signal transmission links, energy transmission links, and computation processes in IoT scenarios, showing its ability to handle on-edge IoT tasks and associated green challenges. Then, these three key functions are analyzed respectively in detail, showing the advantages of the proposed scheme, compared with the traditional hardware-based scheme. To facilitate the implementation of this new paradigm into reality, we list the dominant future research directions at last, such as inter-layer channel modeling, resource allocation and scheduling, channel estimation, and edge training. It is anticipated that multi-layer RIS will contribute to more energy-efficient wireless networks in the future by introducing a revolutionary paradigm shift to an all-wave-based approach.
IndoNLP 2025: Shared Task on Real-Time Reverse Transliteration for Romanized Indo-Aryan languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

The paper overviews the shared task on Real-Time Reverse Transliteration for Romanized Indo-Aryan languages. It focuses on the reverse transliteration of low-resourced languages in the Indo-Aryan family to their native scripts. Typing Romanized Indo-Aryan languages using ad-hoc transliterals and achieving accurate native scripts are complex and often inaccurate processes with the current keyboard systems. This task aims to introduce and evaluate a real-time reverse transliterator that converts Romanized Indo-Aryan languages to their native scripts, improving the typing experience for users. Out of 11 registered teams, four teams participated in the final evaluation phase with transliteration models for Sinhala, Hindi and Malayalam. These proposed solutions not only solve the issue of ad-hoc transliteration but also empower low-resource language usability in the digital arena.
Fine-tuning is Not Fine: Mitigating Backdoor Attacks in GNNs with Limited Clean Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable performance through their message-passing mechanism. However, recent studies have highlighted the vulnerability of GNNs to backdoor attacks, which can lead the model to misclassify graphs with attached triggers as the target class. The effectiveness of recent promising defense techniques, such as fine-tuning or distillation, is heavily contingent on having comprehensive knowledge of the sufficient training dataset. Empirical studies have shown that fine-tuning methods require a clean dataset of 20% to reduce attack accuracy to below 25%, while distillation methods require a clean dataset of 15%. However, obtaining such a large amount of clean data is commonly impractical. In this paper, we propose a practical backdoor mitigation framework, denoted as GRAPHNAD, which can capture high-quality intermediate-layer representations in GNNs to enhance the distillation process with limited clean data. To achieve this, we address the following key questions: How to identify the appropriate attention representations in graphs for distillation? How to enhance distillation with limited data? By adopting the graph attention transfer method, GRAPHNAD can effectively align the intermediate-layer attention representations of the backdoored model with that of the teacher model, forcing the backdoor neurons to transform into benign ones. Besides, we extract the relation maps from intermediate-layer transformation and enforce the relation maps of the backdoored model to be consistent with that of the teacher model, thereby ensuring model accuracy while further reducing the influence of backdoors. Extensive experimental results show that by fine-tuning a teacher model with only 3% of the clean data, GRAPHNAD can reduce the attack success rate to below 5%.
Text-to-Edit: Controllable End-to-End Video Ad Creation via Multimodal LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The exponential growth of short-video content has ignited a surge in the necessity for efficient, automated solutions to video editing, with challenges arising from the need to understand videos and tailor the editing according to user requirements. Addressing this need, we propose an innovative end-to-end foundational framework, ultimately actualizing precise control over the final video content editing. Leveraging the flexibility and generalizability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we defined clear input-output mappings for efficient video creation. To bolster the model's capability in processing and comprehending video content, we introduce a strategic combination of a denser frame rate and a slow-fast processing technique, significantly enhancing the extraction and understanding of both temporal and spatial video information. Furthermore, we introduce a text-to-edit mechanism that allows users to achieve desired video outcomes through textual input, thereby enhancing the quality and controllability of the edited videos. Through comprehensive experimentation, our method has not only showcased significant effectiveness within advertising datasets, but also yields universally applicable conclusions on public datasets.
Beyond Flat Text: Dual Self-inherited Guidance for Visual Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

In real-world images, slanted or curved texts, especially those on cans, banners, or badges, appear as frequently, if not more so, than flat texts due to artistic design or layout constraints. While high-quality visual text generation has become available with the advanced generative capabilities of diffusion models, these models often produce distorted text and inharmonious text background when given slanted or curved text layouts due to training data limitation. In this paper, we introduce a new training-free framework, STGen, which accurately generates visual texts in challenging scenarios (\eg, slanted or curved text layouts) while harmonizing them with the text background. Our framework decomposes the visual text generation process into two branches: (i) \textbf{Semantic Rectification Branch}, which leverages the ability in generating flat but accurate visual texts of the model to guide the generation of challenging scenarios. The generated latent of flat text is abundant in accurate semantic information related both to the text itself and its background. By incorporating this, we rectify the semantic information of the texts and harmonize the integration of the text with its background in complex layouts. (ii) \textbf{Structure Injection Branch}, which reinforces the visual text structure during inference. We incorporate the latent information of the glyph image, rich in glyph structure, as a new condition to further strengthen the text structure. To enhance image harmony, we also apply an effective combination method to merge the priors, providing a solid foundation for generation. Extensive experiments across a variety of visual text layouts demonstrate that our framework achieves superior accuracy and outstanding quality.
From Balance to Breach: Cyber Threats to Battery Energy Storage Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Battery energy storage systems are an important part of modern power systems as a solution to maintain grid balance. However, such systems are often remotely managed using cloud-based control systems. This exposes them to cyberattacks that could result in catastrophic consequences for the electrical grid and the connected infrastructure. This paper takes a step towards advancing understanding of these systems and investigates the effects of cyberattacks targeting them. We propose a reference model for an electrical grid cloud-controlled load-balancing system connected to remote battery energy storage systems. The reference model is evaluated from a cybersecurity perspective by implementing and simulating various cyberattacks. The results reveal the system's attack surface and demonstrate the impact of cyberattacks that can criticaly threaten the security and stability of the electrical grid.
Soft regression trees: a model variant and a decomposition training algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Decision trees are widely used for classification and regression tasks in a variety of application fields due to their interpretability and good accuracy. During the past decade, growing attention has been devoted to globally optimized decision trees with deterministic or soft splitting rules at branch nodes, which are trained by optimizing the error function over all the tree parameters. In this work, we propose a new variant of soft multivariate regression trees (SRTs) where, for every input vector, the prediction is defined as the linear regression associated to a single leaf node, namely, the leaf node obtained by routing the input vector from the root along the branches with higher probability. SRTs exhibit the conditional computational property, i.e., each prediction depends on a small number of nodes (parameters), and our nonlinear optimization formulation for training them is amenable to decomposition. After showing a universal approximation result for SRTs, we present a decomposition training algorithm including a clustering-based initialization procedure and a heuristic for reassigning the input vectors along the tree. Under mild assumptions, we establish asymptotic convergence guarantees. Experiments on 15 wellknown datasets indicate that our SRTs and decomposition algorithm yield higher accuracy and robustness compared with traditional soft regression trees trained using the nonlinear optimization formulation of Blanquero et al., and a significant reduction in training times as well as a slightly better average accuracy compared with the mixed-integer optimization approach of Bertsimas and Dunn. We also report a comparison with the Random Forest ensemble method.
Universal-2-TF: Robust All-Neural Text Formatting for ASR
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

This paper introduces an all-neural text formatting (TF) model designed for commercial automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, encompassing punctuation restoration (PR), truecasing, and inverse text normalization (ITN). Unlike traditional rule-based or hybrid approaches, this method leverages a two-stage neural architecture comprising a multi-objective token classifier and a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model. This design minimizes computational costs and reduces hallucinations while ensuring flexibility and robustness across diverse linguistic entities and text domains. Developed as part of the Universal-2 ASR system, the proposed method demonstrates superior performance in TF accuracy, computational efficiency, and perceptual quality, as validated through comprehensive evaluations using both objective and subjective methods. This work underscores the importance of holistic TF models in enhancing ASR usability in practical settings.
Model Inversion in Split Learning for Personalized LLMs: New Insights from Information Bottleneck Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent, showcasing the impressive capabilities of models like GPT-4. This trend has also catalyzed extensive research on deploying LLMs on mobile devices. Feasible approaches for such edge-cloud deployment include using split learning. However, previous research has largely overlooked the privacy leakage associated with intermediate representations transmitted from devices to servers. This work is the first to identify model inversion attacks in the split learning framework for LLMs, emphasizing the necessity of secure defense. For the first time, we introduce mutual information entropy to understand the information propagation of Transformer-based LLMs and assess privacy attack performance for LLM blocks. To address the issue of representations being sparser and containing less information than embeddings, we propose a two-stage attack system in which the first part projects representations into the embedding space, and the second part uses a generative model to recover text from these embeddings. This design breaks down the complexity and achieves attack scores of 38%-75% in various scenarios, with an over 60% improvement over the SOTA. This work comprehensively highlights the potential privacy risks during the deployment of personalized LLMs on the edge side.
A Brain Age Residual Biomarker (BARB): Leveraging MRI-Based Models to Detect Latent Health Conditions in U.S. Veterans
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Age prediction using brain imaging, such as MRIs, has achieved promising results, with several studies identifying the model's residual as a potential biomarker for chronic disease states. In this study, we developed a brain age predictive model using a dataset of 1,220 U.S. veterans (18--80 years) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on two-dimensional slices of axial T2-weighted fast spin-echo and T2-weighted fluid attenuated inversion recovery MRI images. The model, incorporating a degree-3 polynomial ensemble, achieved an $R^{2}$ of 0.816 on the testing set. Images were acquired at the level of the anterior commissure and the frontal horns of the lateral ventricles. Residual analysis was performed to assess its potential as a biomarker for five ICD-coded conditions: hypertension (HTN), diabetes mellitus (DM), mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), illicit substance abuse/dependence (SAD), and alcohol abuse/dependence (AAD). Residuals grouped by the number of ICD-coded conditions demonstrated different trends that were statistically significant ($p = 0.002$), suggesting a relationship between disease states and predicted brain age. This association was particularly pronounced in patients over 49 years, where negative residuals (indicating advanced brain aging) correlated with the presence of multiple ICD codes. These findings support the potential of residuals as biomarkers for detecting latent health conditions.