OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Linking heterogeneous microstructure informatics with expert characterization knowledge through customized and hybrid vision-language representations for industrial qualification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Rapid and reliable qualification of advanced materials remains a bottleneck in industrial manufacturing, particularly for heterogeneous structures produced via non-conventional additive manufacturing processes. This study introduces a novel framework that links microstructure informatics with a range of expert characterization knowledge using customized and hybrid vision-language representations (VLRs). By integrating deep semantic segmentation with pre-trained multi-modal models (CLIP and FLAVA), we encode both visual microstructural data and textual expert assessments into shared representations. To overcome limitations in general-purpose embeddings, we develop a customized similarity-based representation that incorporates both positive and negative references from expert-annotated images and their associated textual descriptions. This allows zero-shot classification of previously unseen microstructures through a net similarity scoring approach. Validation on an additively manufactured metal matrix composite dataset demonstrates the framework's ability to distinguish between acceptable and defective samples across a range of characterization criteria. Comparative analysis reveals that FLAVA model offers higher visual sensitivity, while the CLIP model provides consistent alignment with the textual criteria. Z-score normalization adjusts raw unimodal and cross-modal similarity scores based on their local dataset-driven distributions, enabling more effective alignment and classification in the hybrid vision-language framework. The proposed method enhances traceability and interpretability in qualification pipelines by enabling human-in-the-loop decision-making without task-specific model retraining. By advancing semantic interoperability between raw data and expert knowledge, this work contributes toward scalable and domain-adaptable qualification strategies in engineering informatics.
SpeedMalloc: Improving Multi-threaded Applications via a Lightweight Core for Memory Allocation
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Memory allocation, though constituting only a small portion of the executed code, can have a "butterfly effect" on overall program performance, leading to significant and far-reaching impacts. Despite accounting for just approximately 5% of total instructions, memory allocation can result in up to a 2.7x performance variation depending on the allocator used. This effect arises from the complexity of memory allocation in modern multi-threaded multi-core systems, where allocator metadata becomes intertwined with user data, leading to cache pollution or increased cross-thread synchronization overhead. Offloading memory allocators to accelerators, e.g., Mallacc and Memento, is a potential direction to improve the allocator performance and mitigate cache pollution. However, these accelerators currently have limited support for multi-threaded applications, and synchronization between cores and accelerators remains a significant challenge. We present SpeedMalloc, using a lightweight support-core to process memory allocation tasks in multi-threaded applications. The support-core is a lightweight programmable processor with efficient cross-core data synchronization and houses all allocator metadata in its own caches. This design minimizes cache conflicts with user data and eliminates the need for cross-core metadata synchronization. In addition, using a general-purpose core instead of domain-specific accelerators makes SpeedMalloc capable of adopting new allocator designs. We compare SpeedMalloc with state-of-the-art software and hardware allocators, including Jemalloc, TCMalloc, Mimalloc, Mallacc, and Memento. SpeedMalloc achieves 1.75x, 1.18x, 1.15x, 1.23x, and 1.18x speedups on multithreaded workloads over these five allocators, respectively.
Latent Variable Modeling for Robust Causal Effect Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Latent variable models provide a powerful framework for incorporating and inferring unobserved factors in observational data. In causal inference, they help account for hidden factors influencing treatment or outcome, thereby addressing challenges posed by missing or unmeasured covariates. This paper proposes a new framework that integrates latent variable modeling into the double machine learning (DML) paradigm to enable robust causal effect estimation in the presence of such hidden factors. We consider two scenarios: one where a latent variable affects only the outcome, and another where it may influence both treatment and outcome. To ensure tractability, we incorporate latent variables only in the second stage of DML, separating representation learning from latent inference. We demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
DRR-MDPF: A Queue Management Strategy Based on Dynamic Resource Allocation and Markov Decision Process in Named Data Networking (NDN)
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

Named Data Networking (NDN) represents a transformative shift in network architecture, prioritizing content names over host addresses to enhance data dissemination. Efficient queue and resource management are critical to NDN performance, especially under dynamic and high-traffic conditions. This paper introduces DRR-MDPF, a novel hybrid strategy that integrates the Markov Decision Process Forwarding (MDPF) model with the Deficit Round Robin (DRR) algorithm. MDPF enables routers to intelligently predict optimal forwarding decisions based on key metrics such as bandwidth, delay, and the number of unsatisfied Interests, while DRR ensures fair and adaptive bandwidth allocation among competing data flows. The proposed method models each router as a learning agent capable of adjusting its strategies through continuous feedback and probabilistic updates. Simulation results using ndnSIM demonstrate that DRR-MDPF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art strategies including SAF, RFA, SMDPF, and LA-MDPF across various metrics such as throughput, Interest Satisfaction Rate (ISR), packet drop rate, content retrieval time, and load balancing. Notably, DRR-MDPF maintains robustness under limited cache sizes and heavy traffic, offering enhanced adaptability and lower computational complexity due to its single-path routing design. Furthermore, its multi-metric decision-making capability enables more accurate interface selection, leading to optimized network performance. Overall, DRR-MDPF serves as an intelligent, adaptive, and scalable queue management solution for NDN, effectively addressing core challenges such as resource allocation, congestion control, and route optimization in dynamic networking environments.
How Multimodal LLMs Solve Image Tasks: A Lens on Visual Grounding, Task Reasoning, and Answer Decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of vision-language tasks, yet their internal processing dynamics remain underexplored. In this work, we introduce a probing framework to systematically analyze how MLLMs process visual and textual inputs across layers. We train linear classifiers to predict fine-grained visual categories (e.g., dog breeds) from token embeddings extracted at each layer, using a standardized anchor question. To uncover the functional roles of different layers, we evaluate these probes under three types of controlled prompt variations: (1) lexical variants that test sensitivity to surface-level changes, (2) semantic negation variants that flip the expected answer by modifying the visual concept in the prompt, and (3) output format variants that preserve reasoning but alter the answer format. Applying our framework to LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-Next-LLaMA-3, and Qwen2-VL, we identify a consistent stage-wise structure in which early layers perform visual grounding, middle layers support lexical integration and semantic reasoning, and final layers prepare task-specific outputs. We further show that while the overall stage-wise structure remains stable across variations in visual tokenization, instruction tuning data, and pretraining corpus, the specific layer allocation to each stage shifts notably with changes in the base LLM architecture. Our findings provide a unified perspective on the layer-wise organization of MLLMs and offer a lightweight, model-agnostic approach for analyzing multimodal representation dynamics.
Poison Once, Refuse Forever: Weaponizing Alignment for Injecting Bias in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are aligned to meet ethical standards and safety requirements by training them to refuse answering harmful or unsafe prompts. In this paper, we demonstrate how adversaries can exploit LLMs' alignment to implant bias, or enforce targeted censorship without degrading the model's responsiveness to unrelated topics. Specifically, we propose Subversive Alignment Injection (SAI), a poisoning attack that leverages the alignment mechanism to trigger refusal on specific topics or queries predefined by the adversary. Although it is perhaps not surprising that refusal can be induced through overalignment, we demonstrate how this refusal can be exploited to inject bias into the model. Surprisingly, SAI evades state-of-the-art poisoning defenses including LLM state forensics, as well as robust aggregation techniques that are designed to detect poisoning in FL settings. We demonstrate the practical dangers of this attack by illustrating its end-to-end impacts on LLM-powered application pipelines. For chat based applications such as ChatDoctor, with 1% data poisoning, the system refuses to answer healthcare questions to targeted racial category leading to high bias ($ΔDP$ of 23%). We also show that bias can be induced in other NLP tasks: for a resume selection pipeline aligned to refuse to summarize CVs from a selected university, high bias in selection ($ΔDP$ of 27%) results. Even higher bias ($ΔDP$~38%) results on 9 other chat based downstream applications.
MedFoundationHub: A Lightweight and Secure Toolkit for Deploying Medical Vision Language Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in medical vision-language models (VLMs) open up remarkable opportunities for clinical applications such as automated report generation, copilots for physicians, and uncertainty quantification. However, despite their promise, medical VLMs introduce serious security concerns, most notably risks of Protected Health Information (PHI) exposure, data leakage, and vulnerability to cyberthreats - which are especially critical in hospital environments. Even when adopted for research or non-clinical purposes, healthcare organizations must exercise caution and implement safeguards. To address these challenges, we present MedFoundationHub, a graphical user interface (GUI) toolkit that: (1) enables physicians to manually select and use different models without programming expertise, (2) supports engineers in efficiently deploying medical VLMs in a plug-and-play fashion, with seamless integration of Hugging Face open-source models, and (3) ensures privacy-preserving inference through Docker-orchestrated, operating system agnostic deployment. MedFoundationHub requires only an offline local workstation equipped with a single NVIDIA A6000 GPU, making it both secure and accessible within the typical resources of academic research labs. To evaluate current capabilities, we engaged board-certified pathologists to deploy and assess five state-of-the-art VLMs (Google-MedGemma3-4B, Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, and LLaVA-1.5-7B/13B). Expert evaluation covered colon cases and renal cases, yielding 1015 clinician-model scoring events. These assessments revealed recurring limitations, including off-target answers, vague reasoning, and inconsistent pathology terminology.
P2C: Path to Counterfactuals
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Machine-learning models are increasingly driving decisions in high-stakes settings, such as finance, law, and hiring, thus, highlighting the need for transparency. However, the key challenge is to balance transparency -- clarifying `why' a decision was made -- with recourse: providing actionable steps on `how' to achieve a favourable outcome from an unfavourable outcome. Counterfactual explanations reveal `why' an undesired outcome occurred and `how' to reverse it through targeted feature changes (interventions). Current counterfactual approaches have limitations: 1) they often ignore causal dependencies between features, and 2) they typically assume all interventions can happen simultaneously, an unrealistic assumption in practical scenarios where actions are typically taken in a sequence. As a result, these counterfactuals are often not achievable in the real world. We present P2C (Path-to-Counterfactuals), a model-agnostic framework that produces a plan (ordered sequence of actions) converting an unfavourable outcome to a causally consistent favourable outcome. P2C addresses both limitations by 1) Explicitly modelling causal relationships between features and 2) Ensuring that each intermediate state in the plan is feasible and causally valid. P2C uses the goal-directed Answer Set Programming system s(CASP) to generate the plan accounting for feature changes that happen automatically due to causal dependencies. Furthermore, P2C refines cost (effort) computation by only counting changes actively made by the user, resulting in realistic cost estimates. Finally, P2C highlights how its causal planner outperforms standard planners, which lack causal knowledge and thus can generate illegal actions.
Uncertainty Under the Curve: A Sequence-Level Entropy Area Metric for Reasoning LLM
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

In this work, we introduce Entropy Area Score (EAS), a simple yet effective metric to quantify uncertainty in the answer generation process of reasoning large language models (LLMs). EAS requires neither external models nor repeated sampling, it integrates token-level predictive entropy from the model itself to capture the evolution of uncertainty during generation. Empirical results show that EAS is strongly correlated with answer entropy across models and datasets. In training data selection, EAS identifies high-potential samples and consistently outperforms Pass Rate filtering under equal sample budgets, improving student model accuracy on math benchmarks. EAS is both efficient and interpretable, offering a practical tool for uncertainty modeling and data quality assessment in LLM training.
A Case Study of Balanced Query Recommendation on Wikipedia
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

Modern IR systems are an extremely important tool for seeking information. In addition to search, such systems include a number of query reformulation methods, such as query expansion and query recommendations, to provide high quality results. However, results returned by such methods sometimes exhibit undesirable or wrongful bias with respect to protected categories such as gender or race. Our earlier work considered the problem of balanced query recommendation, where instead of re-ranking a list of results based on fairness measures, the goal was to suggest queries that are relevant to a user's search query but exhibit less bias than the original query. In this work, we present a case study of BalancedQR using an extension of BalancedQR that handles biases in multiple dimensions. It employs a Pareto front approach that finds balanced queries, optimizing for multiple objectives such as gender bias and regional bias, along with the relevance of returned results. We evaluate the extended version of BalancedQR on a Wikipedia dataset.Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our extension to BalancedQR framework and highlight the significant impact of subtle query wording,linguistic choice on retrieval.
Blind Source Separation-Enabled Joint Communication and Sensing in IBFD MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2025
Year: 2025

This paper addresses the challenge of joint communication and sensing (JCAS) in next-generation wireless networks, with an emphasis on in-band full-duplex (IBFD) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Traditionally, self-interference (SI) in IBFD systems is a major obstacle to recovering the signal of interest (SOI). Under the JCAS paradigm, however, this high-power SI signal presents an opportunity for efficient sensing. Since each transceiver node has access to the original SI signal, its environmental reflections can be exploited to estimate channel conditions and detect changes, without requiring dedicated radar waveforms. We propose a blind source separation (BSS)-based framework to simultaneously perform self-interference cancellation (SIC) and extract sensing information in IBFD MIMO settings. The approach applies the Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA) algorithm to separate the SI and SOI signals while enabling simultaneous signal recovery and channel estimation. Simulation results confirm the framework's effectiveness, showing improved sensing and communication performance as signal frame size increases.
Graph-Based Uncertainty Modeling and Multimodal Fusion for Salient Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

In view of the problems that existing salient object detection (SOD) methods are prone to losing details, blurring edges, and insufficient fusion of single-modal information in complex scenes, this paper proposes a dynamic uncertainty propagation and multimodal collaborative reasoning network (DUP-MCRNet). Firstly, a dynamic uncertainty graph convolution module (DUGC) is designed to propagate uncertainty between layers through a sparse graph constructed based on spatial semantic distance, and combined with channel adaptive interaction, it effectively improves the detection accuracy of small structures and edge regions. Secondly, a multimodal collaborative fusion strategy (MCF) is proposed, which uses learnable modality gating weights to weightedly fuse the attention maps of RGB, depth, and edge features. It can dynamically adjust the importance of each modality according to different scenes, effectively suppress redundant or interfering information, and strengthen the semantic complementarity and consistency between cross-modalities, thereby improving the ability to identify salient regions under occlusion, weak texture or background interference. Finally, the detection performance at the pixel level and region level is optimized through multi-scale BCE and IoU loss, cross-scale consistency constraints, and uncertainty-guided supervision mechanisms. Extensive experiments show that DUP-MCRNet outperforms various SOD methods on most common benchmark datasets, especially in terms of edge clarity and robustness to complex backgrounds. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YukiBear426/DUP-MCRNet.
Enhancing Corpus Callosum Segmentation in Fetal MRI via Pathology-Informed Domain Randomization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Accurate fetal brain segmentation is crucial for extracting biomarkers and assessing neurodevelopment, especially in conditions such as corpus callosum dysgenesis (CCD), which can induce drastic anatomical changes. However, the rarity of CCD severely limits annotated data, hindering the generalization of deep learning models. To address this, we propose a pathology-informed domain randomization strategy that embeds prior knowledge of CCD manifestations into a synthetic data generation pipeline. By simulating diverse brain alterations from healthy data alone, our approach enables robust segmentation without requiring pathological annotations. We validate our method on a cohort comprising 248 healthy fetuses, 26 with CCD, and 47 with other brain pathologies, achieving substantial improvements on CCD cases while maintaining performance on both healthy fetuses and those with other pathologies. From the predicted segmentations, we derive clinically relevant biomarkers, such as corpus callosum length (LCC) and volume, and show their utility in distinguishing CCD subtypes. Our pathology-informed augmentation reduces the LCC estimation error from 1.89 mm to 0.80 mm in healthy cases and from 10.9 mm to 0.7 mm in CCD cases. Beyond these quantitative gains, our approach yields segmentations with improved topological consistency relative to available ground truth, enabling more reliable shape-based analyses. Overall, this work demonstrates that incorporating domain-specific anatomical priors into synthetic data pipelines can effectively mitigate data scarcity and enhance analysis of rare but clinically significant malformations.
Towards Inclusive Communication: A Unified Framework for Generating Spoken Language from Sign, Lip, and Audio
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Audio is the primary modality for human communication and has driven the success of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies. However, such audio-centric systems inherently exclude individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. Visual alternatives such as sign language and lip reading offer effective substitutes, and recent advances in Sign Language Translation (SLT) and Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) have improved audio-less communication. Yet, these modalities have largely been studied in isolation, and their integration within a unified framework remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose the first unified framework capable of handling diverse combinations of sign language, lip movements, and audio for spoken-language text generation. We focus on three main objectives: (i) designing a unified, modality-agnostic architecture capable of effectively processing heterogeneous inputs; (ii) exploring the underexamined synergy among modalities, particularly the role of lip movements as non-manual cues in sign language comprehension; and (iii) achieving performance on par with or superior to state-of-the-art models specialized for individual tasks. Building on this framework, we achieve performance on par with or better than task-specific state-of-the-art models across SLT, VSR, ASR, and Audio-Visual Speech Recognition. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a key linguistic insight: explicitly modeling lip movements as a distinct modality significantly improves SLT performance by capturing critical non-manual cues.
Enhancing Resilience for IoE: A Perspective of Networking-Level Safeguard
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

The Internet of Energy (IoE) integrates IoT-driven digital communication with power grids to enable efficient and sustainable energy systems. Still, its interconnectivity exposes critical infrastructure to sophisticated cyber threats, including adversarial attacks designed to bypass traditional safeguards. Unlike general IoT risks, IoE threats have heightened public safety consequences, demanding resilient solutions. From the networking-level safeguard perspective, we propose a Graph Structure Learning (GSL)-based safeguards framework that jointly optimizes graph topology and node representations to resist adversarial network model manipulation inherently. Through a conceptual overview, architectural discussion, and case study on a security dataset, we demonstrate GSL's superior robustness over representative methods, offering practitioners a viable path to secure IoE networks against evolving attacks. This work highlights the potential of GSL to enhance the resilience and reliability of future IoE networks for practitioners managing critical infrastructure. Lastly, we identify key open challenges and propose future research directions in this novel research area.