OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning to See Through a Baby's Eyes: Early Visual Diets Enable Robust Visual Intelligence in Humans and Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Newborns perceive the world with low-acuity, color-degraded, and temporally continuous vision, which gradually sharpens as infants develop. To explore the ecological advantages of such staged "visual diets", we train self-supervised learning (SSL) models on object-centric videos under constraints that simulate infant vision: grayscale-to-color (C), blur-to-sharp (A), and preserved temporal continuity (T)-collectively termed CATDiet. For evaluation, we establish a comprehensive benchmark across ten datasets, covering clean and corrupted image recognition, texture-shape cue conflict tests, silhouette recognition, depth-order classification, and the visual cliff paradigm. All CATDiet variants demonstrate enhanced robustness in object recognition, despite being trained solely on object-centric videos. Remarkably, models also exhibit biologically aligned developmental patterns, including neural plasticity changes mirroring synaptic density in macaque V1 and behaviors resembling infants' visual cliff responses. Building on these insights, CombDiet initializes SSL with CATDiet before standard training while preserving temporal continuity. Trained on object-centric or head-mounted infant videos, CombDiet outperforms standard SSL on both in-domain and out-of-domain object recognition and depth perception. Together, these results suggest that the developmental progression of early infant visual experience offers a powerful reverse-engineering framework for understanding the emergence of robust visual intelligence in machines. All code, data, and models will be publicly released.
Hyperion: Hierarchical Scheduling for Parallel LLM Acceleration in Multi-tier Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

LLMs are increasingly executed in edge where limited GPU memory and heterogeneous computation jointly constrain deployment which motivates model partitioning and request scheduling. In this setting, minimizing latency requires addressing the tight coupling between model placement and request scheduling across heterogeneous nodes, as suboptimal decisions in one domain can negate benefits in the other. In this paper, we propose Hyperion, a hierarchical two-stage framework that jointly optimizes partitioning and scheduling for pipelined LLM inference. Hyperion minimizes latency by balancing resources across tiers without requiring model retraining or incurring significant runtime overhead. Leveraging the timescale difference between partitioning and request arrivals, Stage 1 performs offline, inter-tier partitioning via a Hyperion Split with Dynamic Programming (HypSplit-DP) procedure to produce balanced stage times under tier capacity and memory constraints; to adapt to time-varying load, Stage 2 performs online, intra-tier scheduling with a lightweight Hyperion Scheduling for Real-Time (HypSched-RT) that maps each request to the best available node using real-time estimates of queue length and effective capacity. Experiments with Phi-3-medium demonstrate that Hyperion reduces latency by up to 52.1% (vs. GPipe) and 31.2% (vs. HEFT). Furthermore, Hyperion exhibits superior scalability for long-sequence generation, maintaining 44.5% lower latency and higher GPU utilization.
Notes on Kernel Methods in Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

These notes provide a self-contained introduction to kernel methods and their geometric foundations in machine learning. Starting from the construction of Hilbert spaces, we develop the theory of positive definite kernels, reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS), and Hilbert-Schmidt operators, emphasizing their role in statistical estimation and representation of probability measures. Classical concepts such as covariance, regression, and information measures are revisited through the lens of Hilbert space geometry. We also introduce kernel density estimation, kernel embeddings of distributions, and the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). The exposition is designed to serve as a foundation for more advanced topics, including Gaussian processes, kernel Bayesian inference, and functional analytic approaches to modern machine learning.
Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Risk Semantic Distillaion from VLM
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The autonomous driving (AD) system has exhibited remarkable performance in complex driving scenarios. However, generalization is still a key limitation for the current system, which refers to the ability to handle unseen scenarios or unfamiliar sensor configurations.Related works have explored the use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to address few-shot or zero-shot tasks. While promising, these methods introduce a new challenge: the emergence of a hybrid AD system, where two distinct systems are used to plan a trajectory, leading to potential inconsistencies. Alternative research directions have explored Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks that generate control actions from VLM directly. However, these end-to-end solutions demonstrate prohibitive computational demands. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Risk Semantic Distillation (RSD), a novel framework that leverages VLMs to enhance the training of End-to-End (E2E) AD backbones. By providing risk attention for key objects, RSD addresses the issue of generalization. Specifically, we introduce RiskHead, a plug-in module that distills causal risk estimates from Vision-Language Models into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features, yielding interpretable risk-attention maps.This approach allows BEV features to learn richer and more nuanced risk attention representations, which directly enhance the model's ability to handle spatial boundaries and risky objects.By focusing on risk attention, RSD aligns better with human-like driving behavior, which is essential to navigate in complex and dynamic environments. Our experiments on the Bench2Drive benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of RSD in managing complex and unpredictable driving conditions. Due to the enhanced BEV representations enabled by RSD, we observed a significant improvement in both perception and planning capabilities.
Full-Atom Peptide Design via Riemannian-Euclidean Bayesian Flow Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Diffusion and flow matching models have recently emerged as promising approaches for peptide binder design. Despite their progress, these models still face two major challenges. First, categorical sampling of discrete residue types collapses their continuous parameters into onehot assignments, while continuous variables (e.g., atom positions) evolve smoothly throughout the generation process. This mismatch disrupts the update dynamics and results in suboptimal performance. Second, current models assume unimodal distributions for side-chain torsion angles, which conflicts with the inherently multimodal nature of side chain rotameric states and limits prediction accuracy. To address these limitations, we introduce PepBFN, the first Bayesian flow network for full atom peptide design that directly models parameter distributions in fully continuous space. Specifically, PepBFN models discrete residue types by learning their continuous parameter distributions, enabling joint and smooth Bayesian updates with other continuous structural parameters. It further employs a novel Gaussian mixture based Bayesian flow to capture the multimodal side chain rotameric states and a Matrix Fisher based Riemannian flow to directly model residue orientations on the $\mathrm{SO}(3)$ manifold. Together, these parameter distributions are progressively refined via Bayesian updates, yielding smooth and coherent peptide generation. Experiments on side chain packing, reverse folding, and binder design tasks demonstrate the strong potential of PepBFN in computational peptide design.
Neural Networks-Enabled Channel Reconstruction for Fluid Antenna Systems: A Data-Driven Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

Fluid antenna systems (FASs) offer substantial spatial diversity by exploiting the electromagnetic port correlation within compact array spaces, thereby generating favorable small-scale fading conditions with beneficial channel gain envelope fluctuations. This unique capability opens new opportunities for a wide range of communication applications and emerging technologies. However, accurate channel state information (CSI) must be acquired before a fluid antenna can be effectively utilized. Although several efforts have been made toward channel reconstruction in FASs, a generally applicable solution to both model-based or model-free scenario with both high precision and efficient computational flow remains lacking. In this work, we propose a data-driven channel reconstruction approach enabled by neural networks. The proposed framework not only achieves significantly enhanced reconstruction accuracy but also requires substantially lower computational complexity compared with existing model-free methods. Numerical results further demonstrate the rapid convergence and robust reconstruction capability of the proposed scheme, outperforming current state-of-the-art techniques.
Compression with Privacy-Preserving Random Access
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

It is shown that an i.i.d. binary source sequence $X_1, \ldots, X_n$ can be losslessly compressed at any rate above entropy such that the individual decoding of any $X_i$ reveals \emph{no} information about the other bits $\{X_j : j \neq i\}$.
LLM-Assisted Thematic Analysis: Opportunities, Limitations, and Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

[Context] Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to assist qualitative research in Software Engineering (SE), yet the methodological implications of this usage remain underexplored. Their integration into interpretive processes such as thematic analysis raises fundamental questions about rigor, transparency, and researcher agency. [Objective] This study investigates how experienced SE researchers conceptualize the opportunities, risks, and methodological implications of integrating LLMs into thematic analysis. [Method] A reflective workshop with 25 ISERN researchers guided participants through structured discussions of LLM-assisted open coding, theme generation, and theme reviewing, using color-coded canvases to document perceived opportunities, limitations, and recommendations. [Results] Participants recognized potential efficiency and scalability gains, but highlighted risks related to bias, contextual loss, reproducibility, and the rapid evolution of LLMs. They also emphasized the need for prompting literacy and continuous human oversight. [Conclusion] Findings portray LLMs as tools that can support, but not substitute, interpretive analysis. The study contributes to ongoing community reflections on how LLMs can responsibly enhance qualitative research in SE.
MissHDD: Hybrid Deterministic Diffusion for Hetrogeneous Incomplete Data Imputation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Incomplete data are common in real-world tabular applications, where numerical, categorical, and discrete attributes coexist within a single dataset. This heterogeneous structure presents significant challenges for existing diffusion-based imputation models, which typically assume a homogeneous feature space and rely on stochastic denoising trajectories. Such assumptions make it difficult to maintain conditional consistency, and they often lead to information collapse for categorical variables or instability when numerical variables require deterministic updates. These limitations indicate that a single diffusion process is insufficient for mixed-type tabular imputation. We propose a hybrid deterministic diffusion framework that separates heterogeneous features into two complementary generative channels. A continuous DDIM-based channel provides efficient and stable deterministic denoising for numerical variables, while a discrete latent-path diffusion channel, inspired by loopholing-based discrete diffusion, models categorical and discrete features without leaving their valid sample manifolds. The two channels are trained under a unified conditional imputation objective, enabling coherent reconstruction of mixed-type incomplete data. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that the proposed framework achieves higher imputation accuracy, more stable sampling trajectories, and improved robustness across MCAR, MAR, and MNAR settings compared with existing diffusion-based and classical methods. These results demonstrate the importance of structure-aware diffusion processes for advancing deep learning approaches to incomplete tabular data.
Evaluating the Impact of Packet Scheduling and Congestion Control Algorithms on MPTCP Performance over Heterogeneous Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

Modern mobile and stationary devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces aiming to provide wireless and wireline connectivity either in a local LAN or the Internet. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol has been developed on top of legacy TCP to allow the simultaneous use of multiple network paths in the communication route between two end-systems. Although the combination of multiple paths is beneficial in case of links with similar network characteristics, MPTCP performance is challenged as heterogeneity among the used paths increases. This work provides an overview of the MPTCP protocol operation, analyzes the state-of-art packet scheduling and congestion control algorithms available in literature, and examines the impact of the various algorithm combinations on MPTCP performance, by conducting an extensive experimental evaluation under diverse path-heterogeneity conditions.
Explaining Digital Pathology Models via Clustering Activations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

We present a clustering-based explainability technique for digital pathology models based on convolutional neural networks. Unlike commonly used methods based on saliency maps, such as occlusion, GradCAM, or relevance propagation, which highlight regions that contribute the most to the prediction for a single slide, our method shows the global behaviour of the model under consideration, while also providing more fine-grained information. The result clusters can be visualised not only to understand the model, but also to increase confidence in its operation, leading to faster adoption in clinical practice. We also evaluate the performance of our technique on an existing model for detecting prostate cancer, demonstrating its usefulness.
Masked IRL: LLM-Guided Reward Disambiguation from Demonstrations and Language
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Robots can adapt to user preferences by learning reward functions from demonstrations, but with limited data, reward models often overfit to spurious correlations and fail to generalize. This happens because demonstrations show robots how to do a task but not what matters for that task, causing the model to focus on irrelevant state details. Natural language can more directly specify what the robot should focus on, and, in principle, disambiguate between many reward functions consistent with the demonstrations. However, existing language-conditioned reward learning methods typically treat instructions as simple conditioning signals, without fully exploiting their potential to resolve ambiguity. Moreover, real instructions are often ambiguous themselves, so naive conditioning is unreliable. Our key insight is that these two input types carry complementary information: demonstrations show how to act, while language specifies what is important. We propose Masked Inverse Reinforcement Learning (Masked IRL), a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to combine the strengths of both input types. Masked IRL infers state-relevance masks from language instructions and enforces invariance to irrelevant state components. When instructions are ambiguous, it uses LLM reasoning to clarify them in the context of the demonstrations. In simulation and on a real robot, Masked IRL outperforms prior language-conditioned IRL methods by up to 15% while using up to 4.7 times less data, demonstrating improved sample-efficiency, generalization, and robustness to ambiguous language. Project page: https://MIT-CLEAR-Lab.github.io/Masked-IRL and Code: https://github.com/MIT-CLEAR-Lab/Masked-IRL
Task Addition and Weight Disentanglement in Closed-Vocabulary Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Task arithmetic has recently emerged as a promising method for editing pre-trained \textit{open-vocabulary} models, offering a cost-effective alternative to standard multi-task fine-tuning. However, despite the abundance of \textit{closed-vocabulary} models that are not pre-trained with language supervision, applying task arithmetic to these models remains unexplored. In this paper, we deploy and study task addition in closed-vocabulary image classification models. We consider different pre-training schemes and find that \textit{weight disentanglement} -- the property enabling task arithmetic -- is a general consequence of pre-training, as it appears in different pre-trained closed-vocabulary models. In fact, we find that pre-trained closed-vocabulary vision transformers can also be edited with task arithmetic, achieving high task addition performance and enabling the efficient deployment of multi-task models. Finally, we demonstrate that simple linear probing is a competitive baseline to task addition. Overall, our findings expand the applicability of task arithmetic to a broader class of pre-trained models and open the way for more efficient use of pre-trained models in diverse settings.
Scalable Enforcement of Fine Grained Access Control Policies in Relational Database Management Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2025
Year: 2025

The proliferation of smart technologies and evolving privacy regulations such as the GDPR and CPRA has increased the need to manage fine-grained access control (FGAC) policies in database management systems (DBMSs). Existing approaches to enforcing FGAC policies do not scale to thousands of policies, leading to degraded query performance and reduced system effectiveness. We present Sieve, a middleware for relational DBMSs that combines query rewriting and caching to optimize FGAC policy enforcement. Sieve rewrites a query with guarded expressions that group and filter policies and can efficiently use indexes in the DBMS. It also integrates a caching mechanism with an effective replacement strategy and a refresh mechanism to adapt to dynamic workloads. Experiments on two DBMSs with real and synthetic datasets show that Sieve scales to large datasets and policy corpora, maintaining low query latency and system load and improving policy evaluation performance by between 2x and 10x on workloads with 200 to 1,200 policies. The caching extension further improves query performance by between 6 and 22 percent under dynamic workloads, especially with larger cache sizes. These results highlight Sieve's applicability for real-time access control in smart environments and its support for efficient, scalable management of user preferences and privacy policies.
Adapformer: Adaptive Channel Management for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

In multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF), accurately modeling the intricate dependencies among multiple variables remains a significant challenge due to the inherent limitations of traditional approaches. Most existing models adopt either \textbf{channel-independent} (CI) or \textbf{channel-dependent} (CD) strategies, each presenting distinct drawbacks. CI methods fail to leverage the potential insights from inter-channel interactions, resulting in models that may not fully exploit the underlying statistical dependencies present in the data. Conversely, CD approaches often incorporate too much extraneous information, risking model overfitting and predictive inefficiency. To address these issues, we introduce the Adaptive Forecasting Transformer (\textbf{Adapformer}), an advanced Transformer-based framework that merges the benefits of CI and CD methodologies through effective channel management. The core of Adapformer lies in its dual-stage encoder-decoder architecture, which includes the \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{C}hannel \textbf{E}nhancer (\textbf{ACE}) for enriching embedding processes and the \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{C}hannel \textbf{F}orecaster (\textbf{ACF}) for refining the predictions. ACE enhances token representations by selectively incorporating essential dependencies, while ACF streamlines the decoding process by focusing on the most relevant covariates, substantially reducing noise and redundancy. Our rigorous testing on diverse datasets shows that Adapformer achieves superior performance over existing models, enhancing both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency, thus making it state-of-the-art in MTSF.
Graded strength of comparative illusions is explained by Bayesian inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Like visual processing, language processing is susceptible to illusions in which people systematically misperceive stimuli. In one such case--the comparative illusion (CI), e.g., More students have been to Russia than I have--comprehenders tend to judge the sentence as acceptable despite its underlying nonsensical comparison. Prior research has argued that this phenomenon can be explained as Bayesian inference over a noisy channel: the posterior probability of an interpretation of a sentence is proportional to both the prior probability of that interpretation and the likelihood of corruption into the observed (CI) sentence. Initial behavioral work has supported this claim by evaluating a narrow set of alternative interpretations of CI sentences and showing that comprehenders favor interpretations that are more likely to have been corrupted into the illusory sentence. In this study, we replicate and go substantially beyond this earlier work by directly predicting the strength of illusion with a quantitative model of the posterior probability of plausible interpretations, which we derive through a novel synthesis of statistical language models with human behavioral data. Our model explains not only the fine gradations in the strength of CI effects, but also a previously unexplained effect caused by pronominal vs. full noun phrase than-clause subjects. These findings support a noisy-channel theory of sentence comprehension by demonstrating that the theory makes novel predictions about the comparative illusion that bear out empirically. This outcome joins related evidence of noisy channel processing in both illusory and non-illusory contexts to support noisy channel inference as a unified computational-level theory of diverse language processing phenomena.
SkillGen: Learning Domain Skills for In-Context Sequential Decision Making
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to sequential decision-making through in-context learning (ICL), yet their effectiveness is highly sensitive to prompt quality. Effective prompts should meet three principles: focus on decision-critical information, provide step-level granularity, and minimize reliance on expert annotations through label efficiency. However, existing ICL methods often fail to satisfy all three criteria simultaneously. Motivated by these challenges, we introduce SkillGen, a skill-based ICL framework for structured sequential reasoning. It constructs an action-centric, domain-level graph from sampled trajectories, identifies high-utility actions via temporal-difference credit assignment, and retrieves step-wise skills to generate fine-grained, context-aware prompts. We further present a theoretical analysis showing that focusing on high-utility segments supports task identifiability and informs more effective ICL prompt design. Experiments on ALFWorld, BabyAI, and ScienceWorld, using both open-source and proprietary LLMs, show that SkillGen achieves consistent gains, improving progress rate by 5.9%-16.5% on average across models.