OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Spatial Lifting for Dense Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

We present Spatial Lifting (SL), a novel methodology for dense prediction tasks. SL operates by lifting standard inputs, such as 2D images, into a higher-dimensional space and subsequently processing them using networks designed for that higher dimension, such as a 3D U-Net. Counterintuitively, this dimensionality lifting allows us to achieve good performance on benchmark tasks compared to conventional approaches, while reducing inference costs and significantly lowering the number of model parameters. The SL framework produces intrinsically structured outputs along the lifted dimension. This emergent structure facilitates dense supervision during training and enables robust, near-zero-additional-cost prediction quality assessment at test time. We validate our approach across 19 benchmark datasets (13 for semantic segmentation and 6 for depth estimation), demonstrating competitive dense prediction performance while reducing the model parameter count by over 98% (in the U-Net case) and lowering inference costs. Spatial Lifting introduces a new vision modeling paradigm that offers a promising path toward more efficient, accurate, and reliable deep networks for dense prediction tasks in vision.
Towards a Framework for Operationalizing the Specification of Trustworthy AI Requirements
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Growing concerns around the trustworthiness of AI-enabled systems highlight the role of requirements engineering (RE) in addressing emergent, context-dependent properties that are difficult to specify without structured approaches. In this short vision paper, we propose the integration of two complementary approaches: AMDiRE, an artefact-based approach for RE, and PerSpecML, a perspective-based method designed to support the elicitation, analysis, and specification of machine learning (ML)-enabled systems. AMDiRE provides a structured, artefact-centric, process-agnostic methodology and templates that promote consistency and traceability in the results; however, it is primarily oriented toward deterministic systems. PerSpecML, in turn, introduces multi-perspective guidance to uncover concerns arising from the data-driven and non-deterministic behavior of ML-enabled systems. We envision a pathway to operationalize trustworthiness-related requirements, bridging stakeholder-driven concerns and structured artefact models. We conclude by outlining key research directions and open challenges to be discussed with the RE community.
Visual Analytics for Explainable and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Our society increasingly depends on intelligent systems to solve complex problems, ranging from recommender systems suggesting the next movie to watch to AI models assisting in medical diagnoses for hospitalized patients. With the iterative improvement of diagnostic accuracy and efficiency, AI holds significant potential to mitigate medical misdiagnoses by preventing numerous deaths and reducing an economic burden of approximately 450 EUR billion annually. However, a key obstacle to AI adoption lies in the lack of transparency: many automated systems function as "black boxes," providing predictions without revealing the underlying processes. This opacity can hinder experts' ability to trust and rely on AI systems. Visual analytics (VA) provides a compelling solution by combining AI models with interactive visualizations. These specialized charts and graphs empower users to incorporate their domain expertise to refine and improve the models, bridging the gap between AI and human understanding. In this work, we define, categorize, and explore how VA solutions can foster trust across the stages of a typical AI pipeline. We propose a design space for innovative visualizations and present an overview of our previously developed VA dashboards, which support critical tasks within the various pipeline stages, including data processing, feature engineering, hyperparameter tuning, understanding, debugging, refining, and comparing models.
LogLite: Lightweight Plug-and-Play Streaming Log Compression
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2025
Year: 2025

Log data is a vital resource for capturing system events and states. With the increasing complexity and widespread adoption ofmodern software systems and IoT devices, the daily volume of log generation has surged to tens of petabytes, leading to significant collection and storage costs. To address this challenge, lossless log compression has emerged as an effective solution, enabling substantial resource savings without compromising log information. In this paper, we first conduct a characterization study on extensive public log datasets and identify four key observations. Building on these insights, we propose LogLite, a lightweight, plug-and-play, streaming lossless compression algorithm designed to handle both TEXT and JSON logs throughout their life cycle. LogLite requires no predefined rules or pre-training and is inherently adaptable to evolving log structures. Our evaluation shows that, compared to state-of-the-art baselines, LogLite achieves Pareto optimality in most scenarios, delivering an average improvement of up to 67.8% in compression ratio and up to 2.7 $\times$ in compression speed.
Extracting Important Tokens in E-Commerce Queries with a Tag Interaction-Aware Transformer Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The major task of any e-commerce search engine is to retrieve the most relevant inventory items, which best match the user intent reflected in a query. This task is non-trivial due to many reasons, including ambiguous queries, misaligned vocabulary between buyers, and sellers, over- or under-constrained queries by the presence of too many or too few tokens. To address these challenges, query reformulation is used, which modifies a user query through token dropping, replacement or expansion, with the objective to bridge semantic gap between query tokens and users' search intent. Early methods of query reformulation mostly used statistical measures derived from token co-occurrence frequencies from selective user sessions having clicks or purchases. In recent years, supervised deep learning approaches, specifically transformer-based neural language models, or sequence-to-sequence models are being used for query reformulation task. However, these models do not utilize the semantic tags of a query token, which are significant for capturing user intent of an e-commerce query. In this work, we pose query reformulation as a token classification task, and solve this task by designing a dependency-aware transformer-based language model, TagBERT, which makes use of semantic tags of a token for learning superior query phrase embedding. Experiments on large, real-life e-commerce datasets show that TagBERT exhibits superior performance than plethora of competing models, including BERT, eBERT, and Sequence-to-Sequence transformer model for important token classification task.
Devanagari Handwritten Character Recognition using Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Handwritten character recognition is getting popular among researchers because of its possible applications in facilitating technological search engines, social media, recommender systems, etc. The Devanagari script is one of the oldest language scripts in India that does not have proper digitization tools. With the advancement of computing and technology, the task of this research is to extract handwritten Hindi characters from an image of Devanagari script with an automated approach to save time and obsolete data. In this paper, we present a technique to recognize handwritten Devanagari characters using two deep convolutional neural network layers. This work employs a methodology that is useful to enhance the recognition rate and configures a convolutional neural network for effective Devanagari handwritten text recognition (DHTR). This approach uses the Devanagari handwritten character dataset (DHCD), an open dataset with 36 classes of Devanagari characters. Each of these classes has 1700 images for training and testing purposes. This approach obtains promising results in terms of accuracy by achieving 96.36% accuracy in testing and 99.55% in training time.
Energy Efficiency in AI for 5G and Beyond: A DeepRx Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

This study addresses the challenge of balancing energy efficiency with performance in AI/ML models, focusing on DeepRX, a deep learning receiver based on a fully convolutional ResNet architecture. We evaluate the energy consumption of DeepRX, considering factors including FLOPs/Watt and FLOPs/clock, and find consistency between estimated and actual energy usage, influenced by memory access patterns. The research extends to comparing energy dynamics during training and inference phases. A key contribution is the application of knowledge distillation (KD) to train a compact DeepRX student model that emulates the performance of the teacher model but with reduced energy consumption. We experiment with different student model sizes, optimal teacher sizes, and KD hyperparameters. Performance is measured by comparing the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance versus Signal-to-Interference & Noise Ratio (SINR) values of the distilled model and a model trained from scratch. The distilled models demonstrate a lower error floor across SINR levels, highlighting the effectiveness of KD in achieving energy-efficient AI solutions.
Consensus, Inconsistency, Emergence: what's paraconsistency got to do with it?
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

The consensus problem, briefly stated, consists of having processes in an asynchronous distributed system agree on a value. It is widely known that the consensus problem does not have a deterministic solution that ensures both termination and consistency, if there is at least one faulty process in the system. This result, known as the FLP impossibility theorem, led to several generalizations and developments in theoretical distributed computing. This paper argues that the FLP impossibility theorem holds even under a generalized definition of computation through oracles. Furthermore, using a theoretical machinery from complex systems, this paper also posits that inconsistency may be an emergent feature of consensus over distributed systems by examining how a system transitions phases. Under the same complex systems framework, this paper examines paraconsistent logics, arguing that while inconsistency is not an emergent feature for these logics, triviality may be. Lastly, some attention is given to the possibility of developing consensus algorithms capable of paraconsistent reasoning.
Evaluating Fake Music Detection Performance Under Audio Augmentations
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

With the rapid advancement of generative audio models, distinguishing between human-composed and generated music is becoming increasingly challenging. As a response, models for detecting fake music have been proposed. In this work, we explore the robustness of such systems under audio augmentations. To evaluate model generalization, we constructed a dataset consisting of both real and synthetic music generated using several systems. We then apply a range of audio transformations and analyze how they affect classification accuracy. We test the performance of a recent state-of-the-art musical deepfake detection model in the presence of audio augmentations. The performance of the model decreases significantly even with the introduction of light augmentations.
Solving the compute crisis with physics-based ASICs
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2025
Year: 2025

Escalating artificial intelligence (AI) demands expose a critical "compute crisis" characterized by unsustainable energy consumption, prohibitive training costs, and the approaching limits of conventional CMOS scaling. Physics-based Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) present a transformative paradigm by directly harnessing intrinsic physical dynamics for computation rather than expending resources to enforce idealized digital abstractions. By relaxing the constraints needed for traditional ASICs, like enforced statelessness, unidirectionality, determinism, and synchronization, these devices aim to operate as exact realizations of physical processes, offering substantial gains in energy efficiency and computational throughput. This approach enables novel co-design strategies, aligning algorithmic requirements with the inherent computational primitives of physical systems. Physics-based ASICs could accelerate critical AI applications like diffusion models, sampling, optimization, and neural network inference as well as traditional computational workloads like scientific simulation of materials and molecules. Ultimately, this vision points towards a future of heterogeneous, highly-specialized computing platforms capable of overcoming current scaling bottlenecks and unlocking new frontiers in computational power and efficiency.
From BERT to Qwen: Hate Detection across architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Online platforms struggle to curb hate speech without over-censoring legitimate discourse. Early bidirectional transformer encoders made big strides, but the arrival of ultra-large autoregressive LLMs promises deeper context-awareness. Whether this extra scale actually improves practical hate-speech detection on real-world text remains unverified. Our study puts this question to the test by benchmarking both model families, classic encoders and next-generation LLMs, on curated corpora of online interactions for hate-speech detection (Hate or No Hate).
An Empirical Evaluation of AI-Powered Non-Player Characters' Perceived Realism and Performance in Virtual Reality Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have significantly enhanced the realism and interactivity of non-player characters (NPCs) in virtual reality (VR), creating more engaging and believable user experiences. This paper evaluates AI-driven NPCs within a VR interrogation simulator, focusing on their perceived realism, usability, and system performance. The simulator features two AI-powered NPCs, a suspect, and a partner, using GPT-4 Turbo to engage participants in a scenario to determine the suspect's guilt or innocence. A user study with 18 participants assessed the system using the System Usability Scale (SUS), Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ), and a Virtual Agent Believability Questionnaire, alongside latency measurements for speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), OpenAI GPT-4 Turbo, and overall (cycle) latency. Results showed an average cycle latency of 7 seconds, influenced by the increasing conversational context. Believability scored 6.67 out of 10, with high ratings in behavior, social relationships, and intelligence but moderate scores in emotion and personality. The system achieved a SUS score of 79.44, indicating good usability. These findings demonstrate the potential of large language models to improve NPC realism and interaction in VR while highlighting challenges in reducing system latency and enhancing emotional depth. This research contributes to the development of more sophisticated AI-driven NPCs, revealing the need for performance optimization to achieve increasingly immersive virtual experiences.
VIP-Sim: A User-Centered Approach to Vision Impairment Simulation for Accessible Design
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

People with vision impairments (VIPs) often rely on their remaining vision when interacting with user interfaces. Simulating visual impairments is an effective tool for designers, fostering awareness of the challenges faced by VIPs. While previous research has introduced various vision impairment simulators, none have yet been developed with the direct involvement of VIPs or thoroughly evaluated from their perspective. To address this gap, we developed VIP-Sim. This symptom-based vision simulator was created through a participatory design process tailored explicitly for this purpose, involving N=7 VIPs. 21 symptoms, like field loss or light sensitivity, can be overlaid on desktop design tools. Most participants felt VIP-Sim could replicate their symptoms. VIP-Sim was received positively, but concerns about exclusion in design and comprehensiveness of the simulation remain, mainly whether it represents the experiences of other VIPs.
The Target Polish: A New Approach to Outlier-Resistant Non-Negative Matrix Factorization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

This paper introduces the "Target Polish," a robust and computationally efficient framework for Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). Although conventional weighted NMF approaches are resistant to outliers, they converge slowly due to the use of multiplicative updates to minimize the objective criterion. In contrast, the Target Polish approach remains compatible with the Fast-HALS algorithm, which is renowned for its speed, by adaptively "polishing" the data with a weighted median-based transformation. This innovation provides outlier resistance while maintaining the highly efficient additive update structure of Fast-HALS. Empirical evaluations using image datasets corrupted with structured (block) and unstructured (salt) noise demonstrate that the Target Polish approach matches or exceeds the accuracy of state-of-the-art robust NMF methods while reducing computational time by an order of magnitude in the studied scenarios.
The Power of Certainty: How Confident Models Lead to Better Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Deep learning models have been proposed for automatic polyp detection and precise segmentation of polyps during colonoscopy procedures. Although these state-of-the-art models achieve high performance, they often require a large number of parameters. Their complexity can make them prone to overfitting, particularly when trained on biased datasets, and can result in poor generalization across diverse datasets. Knowledge distillation and self-distillation are proposed as promising strategies to mitigate the limitations of large, over-parameterized models. These approaches, however, are resource-intensive, often requiring multiple models and significant memory during training. We propose a confidence-based self-distillation approach that outperforms state-of-the-art models by utilizing only previous iteration data storage during training, without requiring extra computation or memory usage during testing. Our approach calculates the loss between the previous and current iterations within a batch using a dynamic confidence coefficient. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct comprehensive experiments on the task of polyp segmentation. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models and generalizes well across datasets collected from multiple clinical centers. The code will be released to the public once the paper is accepted.
Reasoning or Memorization? Unreliable Results of Reinforcement Learning Due to Data Contamination
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Reasoning in large language models has long been a central research focus, and recent studies employing reinforcement learning (RL) have introduced diverse methods that yield substantial performance gains with minimal or even no external supervision. Surprisingly, some studies even suggest that random or incorrect reward signals can enhance performance. However, these breakthroughs are predominantly observed for the mathematically strong Qwen2.5 series on benchmarks such as MATH-500, AMC, and AIME, and seldom transfer to models like Llama, which warrants a more in-depth investigation. In this work, our empirical analysis reveals that pre-training on massive web-scale corpora leaves Qwen2.5 susceptible to data contamination in widely used benchmarks. Consequently, conclusions derived from contaminated benchmarks on Qwen2.5 series may be unreliable. To obtain trustworthy evaluation results, we introduce a generator that creates fully clean arithmetic problems of arbitrary length and difficulty, dubbed RandomCalculation. Using this leakage-free dataset, we show that only accurate reward signals yield steady improvements that surpass the base model's performance boundary in mathematical reasoning, whereas random or incorrect rewards do not. Moreover, we conduct more fine-grained analyses to elucidate the factors underlying the different performance observed on the MATH-500 and RandomCalculation benchmarks. Consequently, we recommend that future studies evaluate models on uncontaminated benchmarks and, when feasible, test various model series to ensure trustworthy conclusions about RL and related methods.
WildFX: A DAW-Powered Pipeline for In-the-Wild Audio FX Graph Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

Despite rapid progress in end-to-end AI music generation, AI-driven modeling of professional Digital Signal Processing (DSP) workflows remains challenging. In particular, while there is growing interest in neural black-box modeling of audio effect graphs (e.g. reverb, compression, equalization), AI-based approaches struggle to replicate the nuanced signal flow and parameter interactions used in professional workflows. Existing differentiable plugin approaches often diverge from real-world tools, exhibiting inferior performance relative to simplified neural controllers under equivalent computational constraints. We introduce WildFX, a pipeline containerized with Docker for generating multi-track audio mixing datasets with rich effect graphs, powered by a professional Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) backend. WildFX supports seamless integration of cross-platform commercial plugins or any plugins in the wild, in VST/VST3/LV2/CLAP formats, enabling structural complexity (e.g., sidechains, crossovers) and achieving efficient parallelized processing. A minimalist metadata interface simplifies project/plugin configuration. Experiments demonstrate the pipeline's validity through blind estimation of mixing graphs, plugin/gain parameters, and its ability to bridge AI research with practical DSP demands. The code is available on: https://github.com/IsaacYQH/WildFX.
On the Performance of Differentially Private Optimization with Heavy-Tail Class Imbalance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

In this work, we analyze the optimization behaviour of common private learning optimization algorithms under heavy-tail class imbalanced distribution. We show that, in a stylized model, optimizing with Gradient Descent with differential privacy (DP-GD) suffers when learning low-frequency classes, whereas optimization algorithms that estimate second-order information do not. In particular, DP-AdamBC that removes the DP bias from estimating loss curvature is a crucial component to avoid the ill-condition caused by heavy-tail class imbalance, and empirically fits the data better with $\approx8\%$ and $\approx5\%$ increase in training accuracy when learning the least frequent classes on both controlled experiments and real data respectively.