OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
VSI: Visual Subtitle Integration for Keyframe Selection to enhance Long Video Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in vision-language tasks, yet their processing of long videos is constrained by input context length and high computational costs. Sparse frame sampling thus becomes a necessary preprocessing step, with sampled frame quality directly impacting downstream performance. Existing keyframe search algorithms achieve a balance between efficiency and sampled frame quality but heavily rely on the visual modality alone. This makes them difficult to adapt to text-related tasks and often leads to retrieval results deviating from core semantic content. To address this, we propose the VISUAL-SUBTITLE INTEGRATION (VSI), a multimodal keyframe retrieval framework. It employs a dual-branch collaborative retrieval approach combining Video Search and Subtitle Match to fuse complementary visual and textual information for precise localization. Experiments on LongVideoBench and VideoMME demonstrate that VSI achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in keyframe retrieval while delivering breakthrough performance in text-related tasks and exhibiting strong generalization across other tasks.
Sparsity-Driven Plasticity in Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Plasticity loss, a diminishing capacity to adapt as training progresses, is a critical challenge in deep reinforcement learning. We examine this issue in multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL), where higher representational flexibility is crucial for managing diverse and potentially conflicting task demands. We systematically explore how sparsification methods, particularly Gradual Magnitude Pruning (GMP) and Sparse Evolutionary Training (SET), enhance plasticity and consequently improve performance in MTRL agents. We evaluate these approaches across distinct MTRL architectures (shared backbone, Mixture of Experts, Mixture of Orthogonal Experts) on standardized MTRL benchmarks, comparing against dense baselines, and a comprehensive range of alternative plasticity-inducing or regularization methods. Our results demonstrate that both GMP and SET effectively mitigate key indicators of plasticity degradation, such as neuron dormancy and representational collapse. These plasticity improvements often correlate with enhanced multi-task performance, with sparse agents frequently outperforming dense counterparts and achieving competitive results against explicit plasticity interventions. Our findings offer insights into the interplay between plasticity, network sparsity, and MTRL designs, highlighting dynamic sparsification as a robust but context-sensitive tool for developing more adaptable MTRL systems.
Maestro-EVC: Controllable Emotional Voice Conversion Guided by References and Explicit Prosody
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

Emotional voice conversion (EVC) aims to modify the emotional style of speech while preserving its linguistic content. In practical EVC, controllability, the ability to independently control speaker identity and emotional style using distinct references, is crucial. However, existing methods often struggle to fully disentangle these attributes and lack the ability to model fine-grained emotional expressions such as temporal dynamics. We propose Maestro-EVC, a controllable EVC framework that enables independent control of content, speaker identity, and emotion by effectively disentangling each attribute from separate references. We further introduce a temporal emotion representation and an explicit prosody modeling with prosody augmentation to robustly capture and transfer the temporal dynamics of the target emotion, even under prosody-mismatched conditions. Experimental results confirm that Maestro-EVC achieves high-quality, controllable, and emotionally expressive speech synthesis.
MultiRef: Controllable Image Generation with Multiple Visual References
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Visual designers naturally draw inspiration from multiple visual references, combining diverse elements and aesthetic principles to create artwork. However, current image generative frameworks predominantly rely on single-source inputs -- either text prompts or individual reference images. In this paper, we focus on the task of controllable image generation using multiple visual references. We introduce MultiRef-bench, a rigorous evaluation framework comprising 990 synthetic and 1,000 real-world samples that require incorporating visual content from multiple reference images. The synthetic samples are synthetically generated through our data engine RefBlend, with 10 reference types and 33 reference combinations. Based on RefBlend, we further construct a dataset MultiRef containing 38k high-quality images to facilitate further research. Our experiments across three interleaved image-text models (i.e., OmniGen, ACE, and Show-o) and six agentic frameworks (e.g., ChatDiT and LLM + SD) reveal that even state-of-the-art systems struggle with multi-reference conditioning, with the best model OmniGen achieving only 66.6% in synthetic samples and 79.0% in real-world cases on average compared to the golden answer. These findings provide valuable directions for developing more flexible and human-like creative tools that can effectively integrate multiple sources of visual inspiration. The dataset is publicly available at: https://multiref.github.io/.
CannyEdit: Selective Canny Control and Dual-Prompt Guidance for Training-Free Image Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models have enabled training-free regional image editing by leveraging the generative priors of foundation models. However, existing methods struggle to balance text adherence in edited regions, context fidelity in unedited areas, and seamless integration of edits. We introduce CannyEdit, a novel training-free framework that addresses this trilemma through two key innovations. First, Selective Canny Control applies structural guidance from a Canny ControlNet only to the unedited regions, preserving the original image's details while allowing for precise, text-driven changes in the specified editable area. Second, Dual-Prompt Guidance utilizes both a local prompt for the specific edit and a global prompt for overall scene coherence. Through this synergistic approach, these components enable controllable local editing for object addition, replacement, and removal, achieving a superior trade-off among text adherence, context fidelity, and editing seamlessness compared to current region-based methods. Beyond this, CannyEdit offers exceptional flexibility: it operates effectively with rough masks or even single-point hints in addition tasks. Furthermore, the framework can seamlessly integrate with vision-language models in a training-free manner for complex instruction-based editing that requires planning and reasoning. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate CannyEdit's strong performance against leading instruction-based editors in complex object addition scenarios.
Generalized Samorodnitsky noisy function inequalities, with applications to error-correcting codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

An inequality by Samorodnitsky states that if $f : \mathbb{F}_2^n \to \mathbb{R}$ is a nonnegative boolean function, and $S \subseteq [n]$ is chosen by randomly including each coordinate with probability a certain $λ= λ(q,ρ) < 1$, then \begin{equation} \log \|T_ρf\|_q \leq \mathbb{E}_{S} \log \|\mathbb{E}(f|S)\|_q\;. \end{equation} Samorodnitsky's inequality has several applications to the theory of error-correcting codes. Perhaps most notably, it can be used to show that \emph{any} binary linear code (with minimum distance $ω(\log n)$) that has vanishing decoding error probability on the BEC$(λ)$ (binary erasure channel) also has vanishing decoding error on \emph{all} memoryless symmetric channels with capacity above some $C = C(λ)$. Samorodnitsky determined the optimal $λ= λ(q,ρ)$ for his inequality in the case that $q \geq 2$ is an integer. In this work, we generalize the inequality to $f : Ω^n \to \mathbb{R}$ under any product probability distribution $μ^{\otimes n}$ on $Ω^n$; moreover, we determine the optimal value of $λ= λ(q,μ,ρ)$ for any real $q \in [2,\infty]$, $ρ\in [0,1]$, and distribution~$μ$. As one consequence, we obtain the aforementioned coding theory result for linear codes over \emph{any} finite alphabet.
Convergence Sans Synchronization
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

We currently see a steady rise in the usage and size of multiprocessor systems, and so the community is evermore interested in developing fast parallel processing algorithms. However, most algorithms require a synchronization mechanism, which is costly in terms of computational resources and time. If an algorithm can be executed in asynchrony, then it can use all the available computation power, and the nodes can execute without being scheduled or locked. However, to show that an algorithm guarantees convergence in asynchrony, we need to generate the entire global state transition graph and check for the absence of cycles. This takes time exponential in the size of the global state space. In this dissertation, we present a theory that explains the necessary and sufficient properties of a multiprocessor algorithm that guarantees convergence even without synchronization. We develop algorithms for various problems that do not require synchronization. Additionally, we show for several existing algorithms that they can be executed without any synchronization mechanism. A significant theoretical benefit of our work is in proving that an algorithm can converge even in asynchrony. Our theory implies that we can make such conclusions about an algorithm, by only showing that the local state transition graph of a computing node forms a partial order, rather than generating the entire global state space and determining the absence of cycles in it. Thus, the complexity of rendering such proofs, formal or social, is phenomenally reduced. Experiments show a significant reduction in time taken to converge, when we compare the execution time of algorithms in the literature versus the algorithms that we design. We get similar results when we run an algorithm, that guarantees convergence in asynchrony, under a scheduler versus in asynchrony.
Large Language Models Do Not Simulate Human Psychology
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs),such as ChatGPT, are increasingly used in research, ranging from simple writing assistance to complex data annotation tasks. Recently, some research has suggested that LLMs may even be able to simulate human psychology and can, hence, replace human participants in psychological studies. We caution against this approach. We provide conceptual arguments against the hypothesis that LLMs simulate human psychology. We then present empiric evidence illustrating our arguments by demonstrating that slight changes to wording that correspond to large changes in meaning lead to notable discrepancies between LLMs' and human responses, even for the recent CENTAUR model that was specifically fine-tuned on psychological responses. Additionally, different LLMs show very different responses to novel items, further illustrating their lack of reliability. We conclude that LLMs do not simulate human psychology and recommend that psychological researchers should treat LLMs as useful but fundamentally unreliable tools that need to be validated against human responses for every new application.
BoRA: Towards More Expressive Low-Rank Adaptation with Block Diversity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method widely used in large language models (LLMs). It approximates the update of a pretrained weight matrix $W\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ by the product of two low-rank matrices, $BA$, where $A \in\mathbb{R}^{r\times n}$ and $B\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times r} (r\ll\min\{m,n\})$. Increasing the dimension $r$ can raise the rank of LoRA weights (i.e., $BA$), which typically improves fine-tuning performance but also significantly increases the number of trainable parameters. In this paper, we propose Block Diversified Low-Rank Adaptation (BoRA), which improves the rank of LoRA weights with a small number of additional parameters. Specifically, BoRA treats the product $BA$ as a block matrix multiplication, where $A$ and $B$ are partitioned into $b$ blocks along the columns and rows, respectively (i.e., $A=[A_1,\dots,A_b]$ and $B=[B_1,\dots,B_b]^\top$). Consequently, the product $BA$ becomes the concatenation of the block products $B_iA_j$ for $i,j\in[b]$. To enhance the diversity of different block products, BoRA introduces a unique diagonal matrix $Σ_{i,j} \in \mathbb{R}^{r\times r}$ for each block multiplication, resulting in $B_i Σ_{i,j} A_j$. By leveraging these block-wise diagonal matrices, BoRA increases the rank of LoRA weights by a factor of $b$ while only requiring $b^2r$ additional parameters. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and models demonstrate the superiority of BoRA, and ablation studies further validate its scalability.
THz/RF Multi-Hop Routing Throughput: Performance, Optimization, and Application
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

Terahertz (THz) communication offers a promising solution for high-throughput wireless systems. However, the severe path loss of THz signals raises concerns about its effectiveness compared to radio frequency (RF) communication. In this article, we establish the first stochastic geometry (SG)-based analytical framework for routing in THz systems. We develop a stepwise optimization approach to maximize throughput, including power allocation, relay selection, and number of hops design. Analytical expressions for throughput and coverage probability are derived under the SG framework, enabling low complexity and scalable performance evaluation. Numerical results show that the proposed stepwise-optimal routing strategies not only outperform existing SG-based methods but also approach the ideal upper bound. Moreover, we compare the throughput and coverage performance of THz and RF routing and demonstrate the applications of the proposed analytical framework and routing strategies in system parameter design and unmanned aerial vehicle networks.
SSD Offloading for LLM Mixture-of-Experts Weights Considered Harmful in Energy Efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) applying Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scale to trillions of parameters but require vast memory, motivating a line of research to offload expert weights from fast-but-small DRAM (HBM) to denser Flash SSDs. While SSDs provide cost-effective capacity, their read energy per bit is substantially higher than that of DRAM. This paper quantitatively analyzes the energy implications of offloading MoE expert weights to SSDs during the critical decode stage of LLM inference. Our analysis, comparing SSD, CPU memory (DDR), and HBM storage scenarios for models like DeepSeek-R1, reveals that offloading MoE weights to current SSDs drastically increases per-token-generation energy consumption (e.g., by up to ~12x compared to the HBM baseline), dominating the total inference energy budget. Although techniques like prefetching effectively hide access latency, they cannot mitigate this fundamental energy penalty. We further explore future technological scaling, finding that the inherent sparsity of MoE models could potentially make SSDs energy-viable if Flash read energy improves significantly, roughly by an order of magnitude.
S2-UniSeg: Fast Universal Agglomerative Pooling for Scalable Segment Anything without Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Recent self-supervised image segmentation models have achieved promising performance on semantic segmentation and class-agnostic instance segmentation. However, their pretraining schedule is multi-stage, requiring a time-consuming pseudo-masks generation process between each training epoch. This time-consuming offline process not only makes it difficult to scale with training dataset size, but also leads to sub-optimal solutions due to its discontinuous optimization routine. To solve these, we first present a novel pseudo-mask algorithm, Fast Universal Agglomerative Pooling (UniAP). Each layer of UniAP can identify groups of similar nodes in parallel, allowing to generate both semantic-level and instance-level and multi-granular pseudo-masks within ens of milliseconds for one image. Based on the fast UniAP, we propose the Scalable Self-Supervised Universal Segmentation (S2-UniSeg), which employs a student and a momentum teacher for continuous pretraining. A novel segmentation-oriented pretext task, Query-wise Self-Distillation (QuerySD), is proposed to pretrain S2-UniSeg to learn the local-to-global correspondences. Under the same setting, S2-UniSeg outperforms the SOTA UnSAM model, achieving notable improvements of AP+6.9 on COCO, AR+11.1 on UVO, PixelAcc+4.5 on COCOStuff-27, RQ+8.0 on Cityscapes. After scaling up to a larger 2M-image subset of SA-1B, S2-UniSeg further achieves performance gains on all four benchmarks. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/bio-mlhui/S2-UniSeg
Consensus-based Decentralized Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Random Access Network Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

With wireless devices increasingly forming a unified smart network for seamless, user-friendly operations, random access (RA) medium access control (MAC) design is considered a key solution for handling unpredictable data traffic from multiple terminals. However, it remains challenging to design an effective RA-based MAC protocol to minimize collisions and ensure transmission fairness across the devices. While existing multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approaches with centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) have been proposed to optimize RA performance, their reliance on centralized training and the significant overhead required for information collection can make real-world applications unrealistic. In this work, we adopt a fully decentralized MARL architecture, where policy learning does not rely on centralized tasks but leverages consensus-based information exchanges across devices. We design our MARL algorithm over an actor-critic (AC) network and propose exchanging only local rewards to minimize communication overhead. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical proof of global convergence for our approach. Numerical experiments show that our proposed MARL algorithm can significantly improve RA network performance compared to other baselines.
Vec2Summ: Text Summarization via Probabilistic Sentence Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

We propose Vec2Summ, a novel method for abstractive summarization that frames the task as semantic compression. Vec2Summ represents a document collection using a single mean vector in the semantic embedding space, capturing the central meaning of the corpus. To reconstruct fluent summaries, we perform embedding inversion -- decoding this mean vector into natural language using a generative language model. To improve reconstruction quality and capture some degree of topical variability, we introduce stochasticity by sampling from a Gaussian distribution centered on the mean. This approach is loosely analogous to bagging in ensemble learning, where controlled randomness encourages more robust and varied outputs. Vec2Summ addresses key limitations of LLM-based summarization methods. It avoids context-length constraints, enables interpretable and controllable generation via semantic parameters, and scales efficiently with corpus size -- requiring only $O(d + d^2)$ parameters. Empirical results show that Vec2Summ produces coherent summaries for topically focused, order-invariant corpora, with performance comparable to direct LLM summarization in terms of thematic coverage and efficiency, albeit with less fine-grained detail. These results underscore Vec2Summ's potential in settings where scalability, semantic control, and corpus-level abstraction are prioritized.
Large Language Model Evaluated Stand-alone Attention-Assisted Graph Neural Network with Spatial and Structural Information Interaction for Precise Endoscopic Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Accurate endoscopic image segmentation on the polyps is critical for early colorectal cancer detection. However, this task remains challenging due to low contrast with surrounding mucosa, specular highlights, and indistinct boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose FOCUS-Med, which stands for Fusion of spatial and structural graph with attentional context-aware polyp segmentation in endoscopic medical imaging. FOCUS-Med integrates a Dual Graph Convolutional Network (Dual-GCN) module to capture contextual spatial and topological structural dependencies. This graph-based representation enables the model to better distinguish polyps from background tissues by leveraging topological cues and spatial connectivity, which are often obscured in raw image intensities. It enhances the model's ability to preserve boundaries and delineate complex shapes typical of polyps. In addition, a location-fused stand-alone self-attention is employed to strengthen global context integration. To bridge the semantic gap between encoder-decoder layers, we incorporate a trainable weighted fast normalized fusion strategy for efficient multi-scale aggregation. Notably, we are the first to introduce the use of a Large Language Model (LLM) to provide detailed qualitative evaluations of segmentation quality. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that FOCUS-Med achieves state-of-the-art performance across five key metrics, underscoring its effectiveness and clinical potential for AI-assisted colonoscopy.
A Stage-Aware Mixture of Experts Framework for Neurodegenerative Disease Progression Modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The long-term progression of neurodegenerative diseases is commonly conceptualized as a spatiotemporal diffusion process that consists of a graph diffusion process across the structural brain connectome and a localized reaction process within brain regions. However, modeling this progression remains challenging due to 1) the scarcity of longitudinal data obtained through irregular and infrequent subject visits and 2) the complex interplay of pathological mechanisms across brain regions and disease stages, where traditional models assume fixed mechanisms throughout disease progression. To address these limitations, we propose a novel stage-aware Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework that explicitly models how different contributing mechanisms dominate at different disease stages through time-dependent expert weighting.Data-wise, we utilize an iterative dual optimization method to properly estimate the temporal position of individual observations, constructing a co hort-level progression trajectory from irregular snapshots. Model-wise, we enhance the spatial component with an inhomogeneous graph neural diffusion model (IGND) that allows diffusivity to vary based on node states and time, providing more flexible representations of brain networks. We also introduce a localized neural reaction module to capture complex dynamics beyond standard processes.The resulting IGND-MoE model dynamically integrates these components across temporal states, offering a principled way to understand how stage-specific pathological mechanisms contribute to progression. The stage-wise weights yield novel clinical insights that align with literature, suggesting that graph-related processes are more influential at early stages, while other unknown physical processes become dominant later on.