OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Communication- and Computation-Efficient Distributed Submodular Optimization in Robot Mesh Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

We provide a communication- and computation-efficient method for distributed submodular optimization in robot mesh networks. Submodularity is a property of diminishing returns that arises in active information gathering such as mapping, surveillance, and target tracking. Our method, Resource-Aware distributed Greedy (RAG), introduces a new distributed optimization paradigm that enables scalable and near-optimal action coordination. To this end, RAG requires each robot to make decisions based only on information received from and about their neighbors. In contrast, the current paradigms allow the relay of information about all robots across the network. As a result, RAG's decision-time scales linearly with the network size, while state-of-the-art near-optimal submodular optimization algorithms scale cubically. We also characterize how the designed mesh-network topology affects RAG's approximation performance. Our analysis implies that sparser networks favor scalability without proportionally compromising approximation performance: while RAG's decision time scales linearly with network size, the gain in approximation performance scales sublinearly. We demonstrate RAG's performance in simulated scenarios of area detection with up to 45 robots, simulating realistic robot-to-robot (r2r) communication speeds such as the 0.25 Mbps speed of the Digi XBee 3 Zigbee 3.0. In the simulations, RAG enables real-time planning, up to three orders of magnitude faster than competitive near-optimal algorithms, while also achieving superior mean coverage performance. To enable the simulations, we extend the high-fidelity and photo-realistic simulator AirSim by integrating a scalable collaborative autonomy pipeline to tens of robots and simulating r2r communication delays. Our code is available at https://github.com/UM-iRaL/Resource-Aware-Coordination-AirSim.
Multibeam Satellite Communications with Massive MIMO: Asymptotic Performance Analysis and Design Insights
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

To achieve high performance without substantial overheads associated with channel state information (CSI) of ground users, we consider a fixed-beam precoding approach, where a satellite forms multiple fixed-beams without relying on CSI, then select a suitable user set for each beam. Upon this precoding method, we put forth a satellite equipped with massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), by which inter-beam interference is efficiently mitigated by narrowing corresponding beam width. By modeling the ground users' locations via a Poisson point process, we rigorously analyze the achievable performance of the presented multibeam satellite system. In particular, we investigate the asymptotic scaling laws that reveal the interplay between the user density, the number of beams, and the number of antennas. Our analysis offers critical design insights for the multibeam satellite with massive MIMO: i) If the user density scales in power with the number of antennas, the considered precoding can achieve a linear fraction of the optimal rate in the asymptotic regime. ii) A certain additional scaling factor for the user density is needed as the number of beams increases to maintain the asymptotic optimality.
Investigating shocking events in the Ethereum stablecoin ecosystem through temporal multilayer graph structure
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2025
Year: 2025

In the dynamic landscape of the Web, we are witnessing the emergence of the Web3 paradigm, which dictates that platforms should rely on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies to sustain themselves and their profitability. Cryptocurrencies are characterised by high market volatility and susceptibility to substantial crashes, issues that require temporal analysis methodologies able to tackle the high temporal resolution, heterogeneity and scale of blockchain data. While existing research attempts to analyse crash events, fundamental questions persist regarding the optimal time scale for analysis, differentiation between long-term and short-term trends, and the identification and characterisation of shock events within these decentralised systems. This paper addresses these issues by examining cryptocurrencies traded on the Ethereum blockchain, with a spotlight on the crash of the stablecoin TerraUSD and the currency LUNA designed to stabilise it. Utilising complex network analysis and a multi-layer temporal graph allows the study of the correlations between the layers representing the currencies and system evolution across diverse time scales. The investigation sheds light on the strong interconnections among stablecoins pre-crash and the significant post-crash transformations. We identify anomalous signals before, during, and after the collapse, emphasising their impact on graph structure metrics and user movement across layers. This paper pioneers temporal, cross-chain graph analysis to explore a cryptocurrency collapse. It emphasises the importance of temporal analysis for studies on web-derived data and how graph-based analysis can enhance traditional econometric results. Overall, this research carries implications beyond its field, for example for regulatory agencies aiming to safeguard users from shocks and monitor investment risks for citizens and clients.
XEQ Scale for Evaluating XAI Experience Quality
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to improve the transparency of autonomous decision-making through explanations. Recent literature has emphasised users' need for holistic "multi-shot" explanations and personalised engagement with XAI systems. We refer to this user-centred interaction as an XAI Experience. Despite advances in creating XAI experiences, evaluating them in a user-centred manner has remained challenging. In response, we developed the XAI Experience Quality (XEQ) Scale. XEQ quantifies the quality of experiences across four dimensions: learning, utility, fulfilment and engagement. These contributions extend the state-of-the-art of XAI evaluation, moving beyond the one-dimensional metrics frequently developed to assess single-shot explanations. This paper presents the XEQ scale development and validation process, including content validation with XAI experts, and discriminant and construct validation through a large-scale pilot study. Our pilot study results offer strong evidence that establishes the XEQ Scale as a comprehensive framework for evaluating user-centred XAI experiences.
Correlations Are Ruining Your Gradient Descent
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Herein the topics of (natural) gradient descent, data decorrelation, and approximate methods for backpropagation are brought into a common discussion. Natural gradient descent illuminates how gradient vectors, pointing at directions of steepest descent, can be improved by considering the local curvature of loss landscapes. We extend this perspective and show that to fully solve the problem illuminated by natural gradients in neural networks, one must recognise that correlations in the data at any linear transformation, including node responses at every layer of a neural network, cause a non-orthonormal relationship between the model's parameters. To solve this requires a method for decorrelating inputs at each individual layer of a neural network. We describe a range of methods which have been proposed for decorrelation and whitening of node output, and expand on these to provide a novel method specifically useful for distributed computing and computational neuroscience. Implementing decorrelation within multi-layer neural networks, we can show that not only is training via backpropagation sped up significantly but also existing approximations of backpropagation, which have failed catastrophically in the past, benefit significantly in their accuracy and convergence speed. This has the potential to provide a route forward for approximate gradient descent methods which have previously been discarded, training approaches for analogue and neuromorphic hardware, and potentially insights as to the efficacy and utility of decorrelation processes in the brain.
Graph traversals associated with iterative methods for solving systems of linear equations
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2025
Year: 2025

To solve many problems on graphs, graph traversals are used, the usual variants of which are the depth-first search and the breadth-first search. Implementing a graph traversal we consequently reach all vertices of the graph that belong to a connected component. The breadth-first search is the usual choice when constructing efficient algorithms for finding connected components of a graph. Methods of simple iteration for solving systems of linear equations with modified graph adjacency matrices and with the properly specified right-hand side can be considered as graph traversal algorithms. These traversal algorithms, generally speaking, turn out to be non-equivalent neither to the depth-first search nor the breadth-first search. The example of such a traversal algorithm is the one associated with the Gauss-Seidel method. For an arbitrary connected graph, to visit all its vertices, the algorithm requires not more iterations than that is required for BFS. For a large number of instances of the problem, fewer iterations will be required.
Enhancing Cyber Security Through Predictive Analytics: Real-Time Threat Detection and Response
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

This study evaluates the application of predictive analytics for real-time cyber-attack detection and response, focusing on how statistical and machine learning methods can improve decision-making in Security Operations Centers (SOCs). Using a curated network-traffic dataset of 2,000 records, we analyzed key features such as attack type, packet length, anomaly scores, protocol usage, and geo-location patterns to assess their predictive value. Findings indicate that attack type has a measurable influence on response actions, while basic header metrics alone lack the precision needed for accurate classification. These results highlight the importance of incorporating richer contextual features - such as user behavior, asset criticality, and temporal patterns - into predictive models. By integrating such features into operational pipelines, organizations can improve early threat detection, reduce false positives, and optimize resource allocation. This research contributes actionable insights for advancing proactive, data-driven cyber defense strategies and outlines directions for future implementation in live SOC environments.
SLIP: Securing LLMs IP Using Weights Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have recently seen widespread adoption in both academia and industry. As these models grow, they become valuable intellectual property (IP), reflecting substantial investments by their owners. The high cost of cloud-based deployment has spurred interest in running models on edge devices, but this risks exposing parameters to theft and unauthorized use. Existing approaches to protect model IP on the edge trade off practicality, accuracy, or deployment requirements. We introduce SLIP, a hybrid inference algorithm designed to protect edge-deployed models from theft. SLIP is, to our knowledge, the first hybrid protocol that is both practical for real-world applications and provably secure, while incurring zero accuracy degradation and minimal latency overhead. It partitions the model across two computing resources: one secure but expensive, and one cost-effective but vulnerable. Using matrix decomposition, the secure resource retains the most sensitive portion of the model's IP while performing only a small fraction of the computation; the vulnerable resource executes the remainder. The protocol includes security guarantees that prevent attackers from using the partition to infer the protected information. Finally, we present experimental results that demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our method, positioning it as a compelling solution for protecting LLMs.
When Heterophily Meets Heterogeneity: Challenges and a New Large-Scale Graph Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Graph mining has become crucial in fields such as social science, finance, and cybersecurity. Many large-scale real-world networks exhibit both heterogeneity, where multiple node and edge types exist in the graph, and heterophily, where connected nodes may have dissimilar labels and attributes. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on either heterophilic homogeneous graphs or homophilic heterogeneous graphs, leaving a significant gap in understanding how models perform on graphs with both heterogeneity and heterophily. To bridge this gap, we introduce H2GB, a large-scale node-classification graph benchmark that brings together the complexities of both the heterophily and heterogeneity properties of real-world graphs. H2GB encompasses 9 real-world datasets spanning 5 diverse domains, 28 baseline models, and a unified benchmarking library with a standardized data loader, evaluator, unified modeling framework, and an extensible framework for reproducibility. We establish a standardized workflow supporting both model selection and development, enabling researchers to easily benchmark graph learning methods. Extensive experiments across 28 baselines reveal that current methods struggle with heterophilic and heterogeneous graphs, underscoring the need for improved approaches. Finally, we present a new variant of the model, H2G-former, developed following our standardized workflow, that excels at this challenging benchmark. Both the benchmark and the framework are publicly available at Github and PyPI, with documentation hosted at https://junhongmit.github.io/H2GB.
Panza: Design and Analysis of a Fully-Local Personalized Text Writing Assistant
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

The availability of powerful open-source large language models (LLMs) opens exciting use-cases, such as using personal data to fine-tune these models to imitate a user's unique writing style. Two key requirements for such assistants are personalization - in the sense that the assistant should recognizably reflect the user's own writing style - and privacy - users may justifiably be wary of uploading extremely personal data, such as their email archive, to a third-party service. In this paper, we present a new design and evaluation for such an automated assistant, for the specific use case of email generation, which we call Panza. Panza's personalization features are based on a combination of fine-tuning using a variant of the Reverse Instructions technique together with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). We demonstrate that this combination allows us to fine-tune an LLM to reflect a user's writing style using limited data, while executing on extremely limited resources, e.g. on a free Google Colab instance. Our key methodological contribution is the first detailed study of evaluation metrics for this personalized writing task, and of how different choices of system components--the use of RAG and of different fine-tuning approaches-impact the system's performance. Additionally, we demonstrate that very little data - under 100 email samples - are sufficient to create models that convincingly imitate humans. This finding showcases a previously-unknown attack vector in language models - that access to a small number of writing samples can allow a bad actor to cheaply create generative models that imitate a target's writing style. We are releasing the full Panza code as well as three new email datasets licensed for research use at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/PanzaMail.
Backdoor Graph Condensation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Graph condensation has recently emerged as a prevalent technique to improve the training efficiency for graph neural networks (GNNs). It condenses a large graph into a small one such that a GNN trained on this small synthetic graph can achieve comparable performance to a GNN trained on the large graph. However, while existing graph condensation studies mainly focus on the best trade-off between graph size and the GNNs' performance (model utility), they overlook the security issues of graph condensation. To bridge this gap, we first explore backdoor attack against the GNNs trained on the condensed graphs. We introduce an effective backdoor attack against graph condensation, termed BGC. This attack aims to (1) preserve the condensed graph quality despite trigger injection, and (2) ensure trigger efficacy through the condensation process, achieving a high attack success rate. Specifically, BGC consistently updates triggers during condensation and targets representative nodes for poisoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack. BGC achieves a high attack success rate (close to 1.0) and good model utility in all cases. Furthermore, the results against multiple defense methods demonstrate BGC's resilience under their defenses. Finally, we analyze the key hyperparameters that influence the attack performance. Our code is available at: https://github.com/JiahaoWuGit/BGC.
Show, Don't Tell: Evaluating Large Language Models Beyond Textual Understanding with ChildPlay
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

We developed a benchmark set to assess the generalization of state-of-the-art large language models on problems beyond linguistic tasks and evaluate it on a systematic progression of GPT models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini). Using simple games like Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect Four, Battleship, and a Shape Recognition Game, all encoded in ASCII, we test strategic capabilities and spatial reasoning, core abilities any artificial intelligence would need to master for solving problems in chemistry. To probe generalization, we introduce two new games for spatial logic: LEGO Connect Language (LCL) and Guess-the-SMILES (GtS), a operationally simple chemistry benchmark. Our results show that GPT models provide meaningful responses for several tasks but, generally, perform poorly. A systematic performance progression with increased model capabilities (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o) is only observed for 4 out of the 7 benchmark tasks. All models consistently struggle with Battleship, LCL, and GtS. This suggests that while GPT models can emulate conversational proficiency and basic rule comprehension, they have limited generalization with respect to strategy and spatial reasoning. Particularly poor performance is observed for interpreting molecular graphs when encoded in ASCII. The results provided by our open-source benchmark suite (\href{https://github.com/BlueVelvetSackOfGoldPotatoes/child-play}{\texttt{ChildPlay} GitHub Repository}) caution against claims of emergent intelligence in GPT models, which appear more specialized than general.
Deep deterministic policy gradient with symmetric data augmentation for lateral attitude tracking control of a fixed-wing aircraft
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The symmetry of dynamical systems can be exploited for state-transition prediction and to facilitate control policy optimization. This paper leverages system symmetry to develop sample-efficient offline reinforcement learning (RL) approaches. Under the symmetry assumption for a Markov Decision Process (MDP), a symmetric data augmentation method is proposed. The augmented samples are integrated into the dataset of Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) to enhance its coverage rate of the state-action space. Furthermore, sample utilization efficiency is improved by introducing a second critic trained on the augmented samples, resulting in a dual-critic structure. The aircraft's model is verified to be symmetric, and flight control simulations demonstrate accelerated policy convergence when augmented samples are employed.
Latent Linear Quadratic Regulator for Robotic Control Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Model predictive control (MPC) has played a more crucial role in various robotic control tasks, but its high computational requirements are concerning, especially for nonlinear dynamical models. This paper presents a $\textbf{la}$tent $\textbf{l}$inear $\textbf{q}$uadratic $\textbf{r}$egulator (LaLQR) that maps the state space into a latent space, on which the dynamical model is linear and the cost function is quadratic, allowing the efficient application of LQR. We jointly learn this alternative system by imitating the original MPC. Experiments show LaLQR's superior efficiency and generalization compared to other baselines.
Exact Label Recovery in Euclidean Random Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we propose a family of label recovery problems on weighted Euclidean random graphs. The vertices of a graph are embedded in $\mathbb{R}^d$ according to a Poisson point process, and are assigned to a discrete community label. Our goal is to infer the vertex labels, given edge weights whose distributions depend on the vertex labels as well as their geometric positions. Our general model provides a geometric extension of popular graph and matrix problems, including submatrix localization and $\mathbb{Z}_2$-synchronization, and includes the Geometric Stochastic Block Model (proposed by Sankararaman and Baccelli) as a special case. We study the fundamental limits of exact recovery of the vertex labels. Under a mild distinctness of distributions assumption, we determine the information-theoretic threshold for exact label recovery, in terms of a Chernoff-Hellinger divergence criterion. Impossibility of recovery below the threshold is proven by a unified analysis using a Cramér lower bound. Achievability above the threshold is proven via an efficient two-phase algorithm, where the first phase computes an almost-exact labeling through a local propagation scheme, while the second phase refines the labels. The information-theoretic threshold is dictated by the performance of the so-called genie estimator, which decodes the label of a single vertex given all the other labels. This shows that our proposed models exhibit the local-to-global amplification phenomenon.
TexSenseGAN: A User-Guided System for Optimizing Texture-Related Vibrotactile Feedback Using Generative Adversarial Network
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Vibration rendering is essential for creating realistic tactile experiences in human-virtual object interactions, such as in video game controllers and VR devices. By dynamically adjusting vibration parameters based on user actions, these systems can convey spatial features and contribute to texture representation. However, generating arbitrary vibrations to replicate real-world material textures is challenging due to the large parameter space. This study proposes a human-in-the-loop vibration generation model based on user preferences. To enable users to easily control the generation of vibration samples with large parameter spaces, we introduced an optimization model based on Differential Subspace Search (DSS) and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). With DSS, users can employ a one-dimensional slider to easily modify the high-dimensional latent space to ensure that the GAN can generate desired vibrations. We trained the generative model using an open dataset of tactile vibration data and selected five types of vibrations as target samples for the generation experiment. Extensive user experiments were conducted using the generated and real samples. The results indicated that our system could generate distinguishable samples that matched the target characteristics. Moreover, we established a correlation between subjects' ability to distinguish real samples and their ability to distinguish generated samples.