OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ORCA: ORchestrating Causal Agent
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2025
Year: 2025

Causal inference is essential for decision-making science while the complexity of the data analysis workflow, ranging from data wrangling to causal analysis, increases substantially as the scale of data grows in complicated business environments. Especially, the execution of the workflow in relational databases by non-experts can result in repetitive bottlenecks which impede timely and responsible business insights. To address this challenge, we propose ORCA (Orchestrating Causal Agent), an LLM agentic system that can automate routine workflows in RDBMS while preserving expert oversight via human-AI interactions. ORCA orchestrates the full data analysis pipeline: interpreting natural language queries, navigating tables from DB servers, generating proper SQL codes, preprocessing data, and configuring modeling processes using causal inference libraries. Domain experts still can control the automation through iterative interactions with ORCA, enabling robust data-driven decision making with less technical expertise in statistical computing. Empirical evaluations on benchmark and synthetic e-commerce datasets demonstrate competitive performance of ORCA in table understanding, query generation, and cause-effect estimation -- achieving over $7\times$ improvement in estimating average treatment compared to GPT-4o mini.
A Knowledge Distillation-empowered Adaptive Federated Reinforcement Learning Framework for Multi-Domain IoT Applications Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) applications across heterogeneous Cloud-Edge-IoT environments presents significant challenges in distributed scheduling optimization. Existing approaches face issues, including fixed neural network architectures that are incompatible with computational heterogeneity, non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) data distributions across IoT scheduling domains, and insufficient cross-domain collaboration mechanisms. This paper proposes KD-AFRL, a Knowledge Distillation-empowered Adaptive Federated Reinforcement Learning framework that addresses multi-domain IoT application scheduling through three core innovations. First, we develop a resource-aware hybrid architecture generation mechanism that creates dual-zone neural networks enabling heterogeneous devices to participate in collaborative learning while maintaining optimal resource utilization. Second, we propose a privacy-preserving environment-clustered federated learning approach that utilizes differential privacy and K-means clustering to address non-IID challenges and facilitate effective collaboration among compatible domains. Third, we introduce an environment-oriented cross-architecture knowledge distillation mechanism that enables efficient knowledge transfer between heterogeneous models through temperature-regulated soft targets. Comprehensive experiments with real Cloud-Edge-IoT infrastructure demonstrate KD-AFRL's effectiveness using diverse IoT applications. Results show significant improvements over the best baseline, with 21% faster convergence and 15.7%, 10.8%, and 13.9% performance gains in completion time, energy consumption, and weighted cost, respectively. Scalability experiments reveal that KD-AFRL achieves 3-5 times better performance retention compared to existing solutions as the number of domains increases.
Think in Games: Learning to Reason in Games via Reinforcement Learning with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks such as mathematics and coding, yet they frequently struggle with simple interactive tasks that young children perform effortlessly. This discrepancy highlights a critical gap between declarative knowledge (knowing about something) and procedural knowledge (knowing how to do something). Although traditional reinforcement learning (RL) agents can acquire procedural knowledge through environmental interaction, they often operate as black boxes and require substantial training data. In contrast, LLMs possess extensive world knowledge and reasoning capabilities, but are unable to effectively convert this static knowledge into dynamic decision-making in interactive settings. To address this challenge, we propose Think in Games (TiG), a novel framework that empowers LLMs to develop procedural understanding through direct interaction with game environments, while retaining their inherent reasoning and explanatory abilities. Specifically, TiG reformulates RL-based decision-making as a language modeling task: LLMs generate language-guided policies, which are refined iteratively through online reinforcement learning based on environmental feedback. Our experimental results show that TiG successfully bridges the gap between declarative and procedural knowledge, achieving competitive performance with dramatically lower data and computational demands compared to conventional RL methods. Moreover, TiG provides step-by-step natural language explanations for its decisions, greatly improving transparency and interpretability in complex interactive tasks.
Dynamics-Compliant Trajectory Diffusion for Super-Nominal Payload Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Nominal payload ratings for articulated robots are typically derived from worst-case configurations, resulting in uniform payload constraints across the entire workspace. This conservative approach severely underutilizes the robot's inherent capabilities -- our analysis demonstrates that manipulators can safely handle payloads well above nominal capacity across broad regions of their workspace while staying within joint angle, velocity, acceleration, and torque limits. To address this gap between assumed and actual capability, we propose a novel trajectory generation approach using denoising diffusion models that explicitly incorporates payload constraints into the planning process. Unlike traditional sampling-based methods that rely on inefficient trial-and-error, optimization-based methods that are prohibitively slow, or kinodynamic planners that struggle with problem dimensionality, our approach generates dynamically feasible joint-space trajectories in constant time that can be directly executed on physical hardware without post-processing. Experimental validation on a 7 DoF Franka Emika Panda robot demonstrates that up to 67.6% of the workspace remains accessible even with payloads exceeding 3 times the nominal capacity. This expanded operational envelope highlights the importance of a more nuanced consideration of payload dynamics in motion planning algorithms.
Risks and Compliance with the EU's Core Cyber Security Legislation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

The European Union (EU) has long favored a risk-based approach to regulation. Such an approach is also used in recent cyber security legislation enacted in the EU. Risks are also inherently related to compliance with the new legislation. Objective: The paper investigates how risks are framed in the EU's five core cyber security legislative acts, whether the framings indicate convergence or divergence between the acts and their risk concepts, and what qualifying words and terms are used when describing the legal notions of risks. Method : The paper's methodology is based on qualitative legal interpretation and taxonomy-building. Results: The five acts have an encompassing coverage of different cyber security risks, including but not limited to risks related to technical, organizational, and human security as well as those not originating from man-made actions. Both technical aspects and assets are used to frame the legal risk notions in many of the legislative acts. A threat-centric viewpoint is also present in one of the acts. Notable gaps are related to acceptable risks, non-probabilistic risks, and residual risks. Conclusion: The EU's new cyber security legislation has significantly extended the risk-based approach to regulations. At the same time, complexity and compliance burden have increased. With this point in mind, the paper concludes with a few practical takeaways about means to deal with compliance and research it.
PMODE: Theoretically Grounded and Modular Mixture Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce PMODE (Partitioned Mixture Of Density Estimators), a general and modular framework for mixture modeling with both parametric and nonparametric components. PMODE builds mixtures by partitioning the data and fitting separate estimators to each subset. It attains near-optimal rates for this estimator class and remains valid even when the mixture components come from different distribution families. As an application, we develop MV-PMODE, which scales a previously theoretical approach to high-dimensional density estimation to settings with thousands of dimensions. Despite its simplicity, it performs competitively against deep baselines on CIFAR-10 anomaly detection.
An Empirical Study of Vulnerable Package Dependencies in LLM Repositories
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have developed rapidly in recent years, revolutionizing various fields. Despite their widespread success, LLMs heavily rely on external code dependencies from package management systems, creating a complex and interconnected LLM dependency supply chain. Vulnerabilities in dependencies can expose LLMs to security risks. While existing research predominantly focuses on model-level security threats, vulnerabilities within the LLM dependency supply chain have been overlooked. To fill this gap, we conducted an empirical analysis of 52 open-source LLMs, examining their third-party dependencies and associated vulnerabilities. We then explored activities within the LLM repositories to understand how maintainers manage third-party vulnerabilities in practice. Finally, we compared third-party dependency vulnerabilities in the LLM ecosystem to those in the Python ecosystem. Our results show that half of the vulnerabilities in the LLM ecosystem remain undisclosed for more than 56.2 months, significantly longer than those in the Python ecosystem. Additionally, 75.8% of LLMs include vulnerable dependencies in their configuration files. This study advances the understanding of LLM supply chain risks, provides insights for practitioners, and highlights potential directions for improving the security of the LLM supply chain.
Scale-GS: Efficient Scalable Gaussian Splatting via Redundancy-filtering Training on Streaming Content
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity real-time rendering, a key requirement for immersive applications. However, the extension of 3DGS to dynamic scenes remains limitations on the substantial data volume of dense Gaussians and the prolonged training time required for each frame. This paper presents \M, a scalable Gaussian Splatting framework designed for efficient training in streaming tasks. Specifically, Gaussian spheres are hierarchically organized by scale within an anchor-based structure. Coarser-level Gaussians represent the low-resolution structure of the scene, while finer-level Gaussians, responsible for detailed high-fidelity rendering, are selectively activated by the coarser-level Gaussians. To further reduce computational overhead, we introduce a hybrid deformation and spawning strategy that models motion of inter-frame through Gaussian deformation and triggers Gaussian spawning to characterize wide-range motion. Additionally, a bidirectional adaptive masking mechanism enhances training efficiency by removing static regions and prioritizing informative viewpoints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \M~ achieves superior visual quality while significantly reducing training time compared to state-of-the-art methods.
MM-SeR: Multimodal Self-Refinement for Lightweight Image Captioning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Systems such as video chatbots and navigation robots often depend on streaming image captioning to interpret visual inputs. Existing approaches typically employ large multimodal language models (MLLMs) for this purpose, but their substantial computational cost hinders practical application. This limitation motivates our development of a lightweight captioning model. Our investigation begins by replacing the large-scale language component in MLLMs with a compact 125M-parameter model. Surprisingly, this compact model, despite a 93x reduction in size, achieves comparable performance to MLLMs, suggesting that factual image captioning does not significantly require the complex reasoning abilities of LLMs. Despite this promising result, our lightweight model still lacks reliability. To address this, we draw inspiration from the human visual process: perceiving a global and coarse understanding of the scene before attending to finer details. Accordingly, we propose a multimodal self-refinement framework that guides the model to utilize features from salient regions, identified by referencing the previous coarse caption, and to produce a refined description. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model in both single-sentence and detailed captioning, extending even to long-range video QA tasks.
Morae: Proactively Pausing UI Agents for User Choices
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

User interface (UI) agents promise to make inaccessible or complex UIs easier to access for blind and low-vision (BLV) users. However, current UI agents typically perform tasks end-to-end without involving users in critical choices or making them aware of important contextual information, thus reducing user agency. For example, in our field study, a BLV participant asked to buy the cheapest available sparkling water, and the agent automatically chose one from several equally priced options, without mentioning alternative products with different flavors or better ratings. To address this problem, we introduce Morae, a UI agent that automatically identifies decision points during task execution and pauses so that users can make choices. Morae uses large multimodal models to interpret user queries alongside UI code and screenshots, and prompt users for clarification when there is a choice to be made. In a study over real-world web tasks with BLV participants, Morae helped users complete more tasks and select options that better matched their preferences, as compared to baseline agents, including OpenAI Operator. More broadly, this work exemplifies a mixed-initiative approach in which users benefit from the automation of UI agents while being able to express their preferences.
SoK: Exposing the Generation and Detection Gaps in LLM-Generated Phishing Through Examination of Generation Methods, Content Characteristics, and Countermeasures
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Phishing campaigns involve adversaries masquerading as trusted vendors trying to trigger user behavior that enables them to exfiltrate private data. While URLs are an important part of phishing campaigns, communicative elements like text and images are central in triggering the required user behavior. Further, due to advances in phishing detection, attackers react by scaling campaigns to larger numbers and diversifying and personalizing content. In addition to established mechanisms, such as template-based generation, large language models (LLMs) can be used for phishing content generation, enabling attacks to scale in minutes, challenging existing phishing detection paradigms through personalized content, stealthy explicit phishing keywords, and dynamic adaptation to diverse attack scenarios. Countering these dynamically changing attack campaigns requires a comprehensive understanding of the complex LLM-related threat landscape. Existing studies are fragmented and focus on specific areas. In this work, we provide the first holistic examination of LLM-generated phishing content. First, to trace the exploitation pathways of LLMs for phishing content generation, we adopt a modular taxonomy documenting nine stages by which adversaries breach LLM safety guardrails. We then characterize how LLM-generated phishing manifests as threats, revealing that it evades detectors while emphasizing human cognitive manipulation. Third, by taxonomizing defense techniques aligned with generation methods, we expose a critical asymmetry that offensive mechanisms adapt dynamically to attack scenarios, whereas defensive strategies remain static and reactive. Finally, based on a thorough analysis of the existing literature, we highlight insights and gaps and suggest a roadmap for understanding and countering LLM-driven phishing at scale.
Interpolation for Converse PDL
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2025
Year: 2025

Converse PDL is the extension of propositional dynamic logic with a converse operation on programs. Our main result states that Converse PDL enjoys the (local) Craig Interpolation Property, with respect to both atomic programs and propositional variables. As a corollary we establish the Beth Definability Property for the logic. Our interpolation proof is based on an adaptation of Maehara's proof-theoretic method. For this purpose we introduce a sound and complete cyclic sequent system for this logic. This calculus features an analytic cut rule and uses a focus mechanism for recognising successful cycles.
Priors Matter: Addressing Misspecification in Bayesian Deep Q-Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Uncertainty quantification in reinforcement learning can greatly improve exploration and robustness. Approximate Bayesian approaches have recently been popularized to quantify uncertainty in model-free algorithms. However, so far the focus has been on improving the accuracy of the posterior approximation, instead of studying the accuracy of the prior and likelihood assumptions underlying the posterior. In this work, we demonstrate that there is a cold posterior effect in Bayesian deep Q-learning, where contrary to theory, performance increases when reducing the temperature of the posterior. To identify and overcome likely causes, we challenge common assumptions made on the likelihood and priors in Bayesian model-free algorithms. We empirically study prior distributions and show through statistical tests that the common Gaussian likelihood assumption is frequently violated. We argue that developing more suitable likelihoods and priors should be a key focus in future Bayesian reinforcement learning research and we offer simple, implementable solutions for better priors in deep Q-learning that lead to more performant Bayesian algorithms.
Failure Prediction Is a Better Performance Proxy for Early-Exit Networks Than Calibration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Early-exit models accelerate inference by attaching internal classifiers to intermediate layers of the network, allowing computation to halt once a prediction meets a predefined exit criterion. Most early-exit methods rely on confidence-based exit strategies, which has motivated prior work to calibrate intermediate classifiers in pursuit of improved performance-efficiency trade-offs. In this paper, we argue that calibration metrics can be misleading indicators of multi-exit model performance. Specifically, we present empirical evidence showing that miscalibrated networks can outperform calibrated ones. As an alternative, we propose using failure prediction as a more informative proxy for early-exit model performance. Unlike calibration, failure prediction captures changes in sample rankings and correlates strongly with efficiency gains, offering a more reliable framework for designing and evaluating early-exit models.
Accept or Deny? Evaluating LLM Fairness and Performance in Loan Approval across Table-to-Text Serialization Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in high-stakes decision-making tasks, such as loan approvals. While their applications expand across domains, LLMs struggle to process tabular data, ensuring fairness and delivering reliable predictions. In this work, we assess the performance and fairness of LLMs on serialized loan approval datasets from three geographically distinct regions: Ghana, Germany, and the United States. Our evaluation focuses on the model's zero-shot and in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. Our results reveal that the choice of serialization (Serialization refers to the process of converting tabular data into text formats suitable for processing by LLMs.) format significantly affects both performance and fairness in LLMs, with certain formats such as GReat and LIFT yielding higher F1 scores but exacerbating fairness disparities. Notably, while ICL improved model performance by 4.9-59.6% relative to zero-shot baselines, its effect on fairness varied considerably across datasets. Our work underscores the importance of effective tabular data representation methods and fairness-aware models to improve the reliability of LLMs in financial decision-making.
Maybe you don't need a U-Net: convolutional feature upsampling for materials micrograph segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Feature foundation models - usually vision transformers - offer rich semantic descriptors of images, useful for downstream tasks such as (interactive) segmentation and object detection. For computational efficiency these descriptors are often patch-based, and so struggle to represent the fine features often present in micrographs; they also struggle with the large image sizes present in materials and biological image analysis. In this work, we train a convolutional neural network to upsample low-resolution (i.e, large patch size) foundation model features with reference to the input image. We apply this upsampler network (without any further training) to efficiently featurise and then segment a variety of microscopy images, including plant cells, a lithium-ion battery cathode and organic crystals. The richness of these upsampled features admits separation of hard to segment phases, like hairline cracks. We demonstrate that interactive segmentation with these deep features produces high-quality segmentations far faster and with far fewer labels than training or finetuning a more traditional convolutional network.
What Data is Really Necessary? A Feasibility Study of Inference Data Minimization for Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Data minimization is a legal principle requiring personal data processing to be limited to what is necessary for a specified purpose. Operationalizing this principle for recommender systems, which rely on extensive personal data, remains a significant challenge. This paper conducts a feasibility study on minimizing implicit feedback inference data for such systems. We propose a novel problem formulation, analyze various minimization techniques, and investigate key factors influencing their effectiveness. We demonstrate that substantial inference data reduction is technically feasible without significant performance loss. However, its practicality is critically determined by two factors: the technical setting (e.g., performance targets, choice of model) and user characteristics (e.g., history size, preference complexity). Thus, while we establish its technical feasibility, we conclude that data minimization remains practically challenging and its dependence on the technical and user context makes a universal standard for data `necessity' difficult to implement.