OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Enhanced Textual Feature Extraction for Visual Question Answering: A Simple Convolutional Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Visual Question Answering (VQA) has emerged as a highly engaging field in recent years, with increasing research focused on enhancing VQA accuracy through advanced models such as Transformers. Despite this growing interest, limited work has examined the comparative effectiveness of textual encoders in VQA, particularly considering model complexity and computational efficiency. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive comparison between complex textual models that leverage long-range dependencies and simpler models focusing on local textual features within a well-established VQA framework. Our findings reveal that employing complex textual encoders is not always the optimal approach for the VQA-v2 dataset. Motivated by this insight, we propose ConvGRU, a model that incorporates convolutional layers to improve text feature representation without substantially increasing model complexity. Tested on the VQA-v2 dataset, ConvGRU demonstrates a modest yet consistent improvement over baselines for question types such as Number and Count, which highlights the potential of lightweight architectures for VQA tasks, especially when computational resources are limited.
Discovering robust biomarkers of psychiatric disorders from resting-state functional MRI via graph neural networks: A systematic review
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Graph neural networks (GNN) have emerged as a popular tool for modelling functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets. Many recent studies have reported significant improvements in disorder classification performance via more sophisticated GNN designs and highlighted salient features that could be potential biomarkers of the disorder. However, existing methods of evaluating their robustness are often limited to cross-referencing with existing literature, which is a subjective and inconsistent process. In this review, we provide an overview of how GNN and model explainability techniques (specifically, feature attributors) have been applied to fMRI datasets for disorder prediction tasks, with an emphasis on evaluating the robustness of potential biomarkers produced for psychiatric disorders. Then, 65 studies using GNNs that reported potential fMRI biomarkers for psychiatric disorders (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, major depressive disorder, schizophrenia) published before 9 October 2024 were identified from 2 online databases (Scopus, PubMed). We found that while most studies have performant models, salient features highlighted in these studies (as determined by feature attribution scores) vary greatly across studies on the same disorder. Reproducibility of biomarkers is only limited to a small subset at the level of regions and few transdiagnostic biomarkers were identified. To address these issues, we suggest establishing new standards that are based on objective evaluation metrics to determine the robustness of these potential biomarkers. We further highlight gaps in the existing literature and put together a prediction-attribution-evaluation framework that could set the foundations for future research on discovering robust biomarkers of psychiatric disorders via GNNs.
Modeling Caption Diversity in Contrastive Vision-Language Pretraining
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

There are a thousand ways to caption an image. Contrastive Language Pretraining (CLIP) on the other hand, works by mapping an image and its caption to a single vector -- limiting how well CLIP-like models can represent the diverse ways to describe an image. In this work, we introduce Llip, Latent Language Image Pretraining, which models the diversity of captions that could match an image. Llip's vision encoder outputs a set of visual features that are mixed into a final representation by conditioning on information derived from the text. We show that Llip outperforms non-contextualized baselines like CLIP and SigLIP on a variety of tasks even with large-scale encoders. Llip improves zero-shot classification by an average of 2.9% zero-shot classification benchmarks with a ViT-G/14 encoder. Specifically, Llip attains a zero-shot top-1 accuracy of 83.5% on ImageNet outperforming a similarly sized CLIP by 1.4%. We also demonstrate improvement on zero-shot retrieval on MS-COCO by 6.0%. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the components introduced by the method and demonstrate that Llip leads to richer visual representations.
A cornering strategy for synchronizing a DFA
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2025
Year: 2025

This paper considers the existence of short synchronizing words in deterministic finite automata (DFAs). We define two general strategies for generating synchronizing words, and we show that each of these strategies can be applied if and only if a DFA is synchronizable. Furthermore, we show that if a synchronizable DFA is well-structured, then our strategies generate short synchronizing words. The first of our strategies, called the cornering strategy, takes advantage of states in a DFA with properties similar to those of a polytope vertex. The second of our strategies, similar to the cornering strategy and called the $f$-ordered strategy, takes advantage of a partial order defined on the states of a DFA. We apply our cornering strategy to the class of difference DFAs, whose states form subsets of $\mathbb R^d$ and whose input symbols correspond to translation vectors between states. We show that difference DFAs share many similarities with aperiodic DFAs, and in particular, a difference DFA $M$ has a synchronizing word if and only if it has a universally reachable state. Using the cornering strategy, we also show that under certain conditions, such an $n$-state DFA $M$ has a synchronizing word of length at most $(n-1)^2$ and thereby satisfies Černý's conjecture. Using the $f$-ordered strategy, we also show that a synchronizable DFA whose states have a certain partial order that is preserved by a set of short words also has a short synchronizing word, and we consider several consequences of this result. Finally, we consider how the cornering strategy can be applied to the problem of synchronizing the product of two DFAs $M_1, M_2$ that share a common alphabet, and we show that the product $M_1 \times M_2$ often has a synchronizing word that is subquadratic in the number of states of $M_1 \times M_2$.
Gameplay Filters: Robust Zero-Shot Safety through Adversarial Imagination
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Despite the impressive recent advances in learning-based robot control, ensuring robustness to out-of-distribution conditions remains an open challenge. Safety filters can, in principle, keep arbitrary control policies from incurring catastrophic failures by overriding unsafe actions, but existing solutions for complex (e.g., legged) robot dynamics do not span the full motion envelope and instead rely on local, reduced-order models. These filters tend to overly restrict agility and can still fail when perturbed away from nominal conditions. This paper presents the gameplay filter, a new class of predictive safety filter that continually plays out hypothetical matches between its simulation-trained safety strategy and a virtual adversary co-trained to invoke worst-case events and sim-to-real error, and precludes actions that would cause failures down the line. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of the approach with a first-of-its-kind full-order safety filter for (36-D) quadrupedal dynamics. Physical experiments on two different quadruped platforms demonstrate the superior zero-shot effectiveness of the gameplay filter under large perturbations such as tugging and unmodeled terrain. Experiment videos and open-source software are available online: https://saferobotics.org/research/gameplay-filter
Artificial intelligence for context-aware visual change detection in software test automation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Automated software testing is integral to the software development process, streamlining workflows and ensuring product reliability. Visual testing, particularly for user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) validation, plays a vital role in maintaining software quality. However, conventional techniques such as pixel-wise comparison and region-based visual change detection often fail to capture contextual similarities, subtle variations, and spatial relationships between UI elements. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based approach for context-aware visual change detection in software test automation. Our method leverages a machine learning model (YOLOv5) to detect UI controls from software screenshots and constructs a graph that models their contextual and spatial relationships. This graph structure is then used to identify correspondences between UI elements across software versions and to detect meaningful changes. The proposed method incorporates a recursive similarity computation that combines structural, visual, and textual cues, offering a robust and holistic model of UI changes. We evaluate our approach on a curated dataset of real-world software screenshots and demonstrate that it reliably detects both simple and complex UI changes. Our method significantly outperforms pixel-wise and region-based baselines, especially in scenarios requiring contextual understanding. We also discuss current limitations related to dataset diversity, baseline complexity, and model generalization, and outline planned future improvements. Overall, our work advances the state of the art in visual change detection and provides a practical solution for enhancing the reliability and maintainability of evolving software interfaces.
Wake Vision: A Tailored Dataset and Benchmark Suite for TinyML Computer Vision Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Tiny machine learning (TinyML) for low-power devices lacks systematic methodologies for creating large, high-quality datasets suitable for production-grade systems. We present a novel automated pipeline for generating binary classification datasets that addresses this critical gap through several algorithmic innovations: intelligent multi-source label fusion, confidence-aware filtering, automated label correction, and systematic fine-grained benchmark generation. Crucially, automation is not merely convenient but necessary to cope with TinyML's diverse applications. TinyML requires bespoke datasets tailored to specific deployment constraints and use cases, making manual approaches prohibitively expensive and impractical for widespread adoption. Using our pipeline, we create Wake Vision, a large-scale binary classification dataset of almost 6 million images that demonstrates our methodology through person detection--the canonical vision task for TinyML. Wake Vision achieves up to a 6.6% accuracy improvement over existing datasets via a carefully designed two-stage training strategy and provides 100x more images. We demonstrate our broad applicability for automated large-scale TinyML dataset generation across two additional target categories, and show our label error rates are substantially lower than prior work. Our comprehensive fine-grained benchmark suite evaluates model robustness across five critical dimensions, revealing failure modes masked by aggregate metrics. To ensure continuous improvement, we establish ongoing community engagement through competitions hosted by the Edge AI Foundation. All datasets, benchmarks, and code are available under CC-BY 4.0 license, providing a systematic foundation for advancing TinyML research.
Robust Decentralized Learning with Local Updates and Gradient Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

As distributed learning applications such as Federated Learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Edge Computing grow, it is critical to address the shortcomings of such technologies from a theoretical perspective. As an abstraction, we consider decentralized learning over a network of communicating clients or nodes and tackle two major challenges: data heterogeneity and adversarial robustness. We propose a decentralized minimax optimization method that employs two important modules: local updates and gradient tracking. Minimax optimization is the key tool to enable adversarial training for ensuring robustness. Having local updates is essential in Federated Learning (FL) applications to mitigate the communication bottleneck, and utilizing gradient tracking is essential to proving convergence in the case of data heterogeneity. We analyze the performance of the proposed algorithm, Dec-FedTrack, in the case of nonconvex-strongly concave minimax optimization, and prove that it converges a stationary point. We also conduct numerical experiments to support our theoretical findings.
Enhancing person re-identification via Uncertainty Feature Fusion Method and Auto-weighted Measure Combination
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Person re-identification (Re-ID) is a challenging task that involves identifying the same person across different camera views in surveillance systems. Current methods usually rely on features from single-camera views, which can be limiting when dealing with multiple cameras and challenges such as changing viewpoints and occlusions. In this paper, a new approach is introduced that enhances the capability of ReID models through the Uncertain Feature Fusion Method (UFFM) and Auto-weighted Measure Combination (AMC). UFFM generates multi-view features using features extracted independently from multiple images to mitigate view bias. However, relying only on similarity based on multi-view features is limited because these features ignore the details represented in single-view features. Therefore, we propose the AMC method to generate a more robust similarity measure by combining various measures. Our method significantly improves Rank@1 accuracy and Mean Average Precision (mAP) when evaluated on person re-identification datasets. Combined with the BoT Baseline on challenging datasets, we achieve impressive results, with a 7.9% improvement in Rank@1 and a 12.1% improvement in mAP on the MSMT17 dataset. On the Occluded-DukeMTMC dataset, our method increases Rank@1 by 22.0% and mAP by 18.4%. Code is available: https://github.com/chequanghuy/Enhancing-Person-Re-Identification-via-UFFM-and-AMC
The Effectiveness of LLMs as Annotators: A Comparative Overview and Empirical Analysis of Direct Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful support tools across various natural language tasks and a range of application domains. Recent studies focus on exploring their capabilities for data annotation. This paper provides a comparative overview of twelve studies investigating the potential of LLMs in labelling data. While the models demonstrate promising cost and time-saving benefits, there exist considerable limitations, such as representativeness, bias, sensitivity to prompt variations and English language preference. Leveraging insights from these studies, our empirical analysis further examines the alignment between human and GPT-generated opinion distributions across four subjective datasets. In contrast to the studies examining representation, our methodology directly obtains the opinion distribution from GPT. Our analysis thereby supports the minority of studies that are considering diverse perspectives when evaluating data annotation tasks and highlights the need for further research in this direction.
Graph is all you need? Lightweight data-agnostic neural architecture search without training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Neural architecture search (NAS) enables the automatic design of neural network models. However, training the candidates generated by the search algorithm for performance evaluation incurs considerable computational overhead. Our method, dubbed nasgraph, remarkably reduces the computational costs by converting neural architectures to graphs and using the average degree, a graph measure, as the proxy in lieu of the evaluation metric. Our training-free NAS method is data-agnostic and light-weight. It can find the best architecture among 200 randomly sampled architectures from NAS-Bench201 in 217 CPU seconds. Besides, our method is able to achieve competitive performance on various datasets including NASBench-101, NASBench-201, and NDS search spaces. We also demonstrate that nasgraph generalizes to more challenging tasks on Micro TransNAS-Bench-101.
Uncertainty for Active Learning on Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Uncertainty Sampling is an Active Learning strategy that aims to improve the data efficiency of machine learning models by iteratively acquiring labels of data points with the highest uncertainty. While it has proven effective for independent data its applicability to graphs remains under-explored. We propose the first extensive study of Uncertainty Sampling for node classification: (1) We benchmark Uncertainty Sampling beyond predictive uncertainty and highlight a significant performance gap to other Active Learning strategies. (2) We develop ground-truth Bayesian uncertainty estimates in terms of the data generating process and prove their effectiveness in guiding Uncertainty Sampling toward optimal queries. We confirm our results on synthetic data and design an approximate approach that consistently outperforms other uncertainty estimators on real datasets. (3) Based on this analysis, we relate pitfalls in modeling uncertainty to existing methods. Our analysis enables and informs the development of principled uncertainty estimation on graphs.
New Tools for Smoothed Analysis: Least Singular Value Bounds for Random Matrices with Dependent Entries
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

We develop new techniques for proving lower bounds on the least singular value of random matrices with limited randomness. The matrices we consider have entries that are given by polynomials of a few underlying base random variables. This setting captures a core technical challenge for obtaining smoothed analysis guarantees in many algorithmic settings. Least singular value bounds often involve showing strong anti-concentration inequalities that are intricate and much less understood compared to concentration (or large deviation) bounds. First, we introduce a general technique involving a hierarchical $ε$-nets to prove least singular value bounds. Our second tool is a new statement about least singular values to reason about higher-order lifts of smoothed matrices, and the action of linear operators on them. Apart from getting simpler proofs of existing smoothed analysis results, we use these tools to now handle more general families of random matrices. This allows us to produce smoothed analysis guarantees in several previously open settings. These include new smoothed analysis guarantees for power sum decompositions, subspace clustering and certifying robust entanglement of subspaces, where prior work could only establish least singular value bounds for fully random instances or only show non-robust genericity guarantees.
Empirical Studies of Parameter Efficient Methods for Large Language Models of Code and Knowledge Transfer to R
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods are proposed as an alternative fine-tuning approach for Large Language Models (LLM) to minimize high training costs. While prior research demonstrates the effectiveness of PEFT methods in knowledge transfer using smaller language models, their application to larger LLMs, particularly in low-resource and unseen programming languages such as R, remains under-explored. In this work, we evaluate PEFT methods, LoRA, Compacter, and IA^3 on LLMs for code summarization and generation, with a particular emphasis on knowledge transfer to R as an unseen under-explored target language. Our experiments reveal that LoRA consistently outperforms Compacter and IA^3 in all settings, while Compacter offers significant resource efficiency with minimal performance trade-offs. Additionally, we find that the number of trainable parameters has a greater influence on the functional accuracy of the generated code than PEFT architecture. Our study can direct future research in developing code intelligent tasks for unseen languages including R, as well as the choice of PEFT methods for knowledge transfer, especially when balancing the computational cost and performance.
RULSurv: A probabilistic survival-based method for early censoring-aware prediction of remaining useful life in ball bearings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of ball bearings is an active area of research, where novel machine learning techniques are continuously being applied to predict degradation trends and anticipate failures before they occur. However, few studies have explicitly addressed the challenge of handling censored data, where information about a specific event (\eg mechanical failure) is incomplete or only partially observed. To address this issue, we introduce a novel and flexible method for early fault detection using Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and RUL estimation using survival analysis that naturally supports censored data. We demonstrate our approach in the XJTU-SY dataset using a 5-fold cross-validation strategy across three different operating conditions. When predicting the time to failure for bearings under the highest load (C1, 12.0 kN and 2100 RPM) with 25% random censoring, our approach achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 14.7 minutes (95% CI = 13.6-15.8) using a linear CoxPH model, and an MAE of 12.6 minutes (95% CI = 11.8-13.4) using a nonlinear Random Survival Forests model, compared to an MAE of 18.5 minutes (95% CI = 17.4-19.6) using a linear LASSO model that does not support censoring. Moreover, our approach achieves a mean cumulative relative accuracy (CRA) of 0.7586 over 5 bearings under the highest load, which improves over several state-of-the-art baselines. Our work highlights the importance of considering censored data as part of the model design when building predictive models for early fault detection and RUL estimation.
Non-linear Welfare-Aware Strategic Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

This paper studies algorithmic decision-making in the presence of strategic individual behaviors, where an ML model is used to make decisions about human agents and the latter can adapt their behavior strategically to improve their future data. Existing results on strategic learning have largely focused on the linear setting where agents with linear labeling functions best respond to a (noisy) linear decision policy. Instead, this work focuses on general non-linear settings where agents respond to the decision policy with only "local information" of the policy. Moreover, we simultaneously consider the objectives of maximizing decision-maker welfare (model prediction accuracy), social welfare (agent improvement caused by strategic behaviors), and agent welfare (the extent that ML underestimates the agents). We first generalize the agent best response model in previous works to the non-linear setting, then reveal the compatibility of welfare objectives. We show the three welfare can attain the optimum simultaneously only under restrictive conditions which are challenging to achieve in non-linear settings. The theoretical results imply that existing works solely maximizing the welfare of a subset of parties inevitably diminish the welfare of the others. We thus claim the necessity of balancing the welfare of each party in non-linear settings and propose an irreducible optimization algorithm suitable for general strategic learning. Experiments on synthetic and real data validate the proposed algorithm.