OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Evaluating improvements on using Large Language Models (LLMs) for property extraction in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG)
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

Current research highlights the great potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for constructing Scholarly Knowledge Graphs (SKGs). One particularly complex step in this process is relation extraction, aimed at identifying suitable properties to describe the content of research. This study builds directly on previous research of three Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) team members who assessed the readiness of LLMs such as GPT-3.5, Llama 2, and Mistral for property extraction in scientific literature. Given the moderate performance observed, the previous work concluded that fine-tuning is needed to improve these models' alignment with scientific tasks and their emulation of human expertise. Expanding on this prior experiment, this study evaluates the impact of advanced prompt engineering techniques and demonstrates that these techniques can highly significantly enhance the results. Additionally, this study extends the property extraction process to include property matching to existing ORKG properties, which are retrieved via the API. The evaluation reveals that results generated through advanced prompt engineering achieve a higher proportion of matches with ORKG properties, further emphasizing the enhanced alignment achieved. Moreover, this lays the groundwork for addressing challenges such as the inconsistency of ORKG properties, an issue highlighted in prior studies. By assigning unique URIs and using standardized terminology, this work increases the consistency of the properties, fulfilling a crucial aspect of Linked Data and FAIR principles - core commitments of ORKG. This, in turn, significantly enhances the applicability of ORKG content for subsequent tasks such as comparisons of research publications. Finally, the study concludes with recommendations for future improvements in the overall property extraction process.
Analyzing Privacy Dynamics within Groups using Gamified Auctions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Online shared content, such as group pictures, often contains information about multiple users. Developing technical solutions to manage the privacy of such "co-owned" content is challenging because each co-owner may have different preferences. Recent technical approaches advocate group-decision mechanisms, including auctions, to decide as how best to resolve these differences. However, it is not clear if users would participate in such mechanisms and if they do, whether they would act altruistically. Understanding the privacy dynamics is crucial to develop effective mechanisms for privacy-respecting collaborative systems. Accordingly, this work develops RESOLVE, a privacy auction game to understand the sharing behavior of users in groups. Our results of users' playing the game show that i) the users' understanding of individual vs. group privacy differs significantly; ii) often users fight for their preferences even at the cost of others' privacy; and iii) at times users collaborate to fight for the privacy of others.
ReReLRP -- Remembering and Recognizing Tasks with LRP
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Deep neural networks have revolutionized numerous research fields and applications. Despite their widespread success, a fundamental limitation known as catastrophic forgetting remains, where models fail to retain their ability to perform previously learned tasks after being trained on new ones. This limitation is particularly acute in certain continual learning scenarios, where models must integrate the knowledge from new domains with their existing capabilities. Traditional approaches to mitigate this problem typically rely on memory replay mechanisms, storing either original data samples, prototypes, or activation patterns. Although effective, these methods often introduce significant computational overhead, raise privacy concerns, and require the use of dedicated architectures. In this work we present ReReLRP (Remembering and Recognizing with LRP), a novel solution that leverages Layerwise Relevance Propagation (LRP) to preserve information across tasks. Our contribution provides increased privacy of existing replay-free methods while additionally offering built-in explainability, flexibility of model architecture and deployment, and a new mechanism to increase memory storage efficiency. We validate our approach on a wide variety of datasets, demonstrating results comparable with a well-known replay-based method in selected scenarios.
Tackling the Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning Loss Directly
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim at instantly producing a behavior for an RL task in a given environment, from a description of the reward function. These methods are usually tested by evaluating their average performance on a series of downstream tasks. Yet they cannot be trained directly for that objective, unless the distribution of downstream tasks is known. Existing approaches either use other learning criteria [BBQ+ 18, TRO23, TO21, HDB+ 19], or explicitly set a prior on downstream tasks, such as reward functions given by a random neural network [FPAL24]. Here we prove that the zero-shot RL loss can be optimized directly, for a range of non-informative priors such as white noise rewards, temporally smooth rewards, ``scattered'' sparse rewards, or a combination of those. Thus, it is possible to learn the optimal zero-shot features algorithmically, for a wide mixture of priors. Surprisingly, the white noise prior leads to an objective almost identical to the one in VISR [HDB+19], via a different approach. This shows that some seemingly arbitrary choices in VISR, such as Von Mises--Fisher distributions, do maximize downstream performance. This also suggests more efficient ways to tackle the VISR objective. Finally, we discuss some consequences and limitations of the zero-shot RL objective, such as its tendency to produce narrow optimal features if only using Gaussian dense reward priors.
FaceSwapGuard: Safeguarding Facial Privacy from DeepFake Threats through Identity Obfuscation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

DeepFakes pose a significant threat to our society. One representative DeepFake application is face-swapping, which replaces the identity in a facial image with that of a victim. Although existing methods partially mitigate these risks by degrading the quality of swapped images, they often fail to disrupt the identity transformation effectively. To fill this gap, we propose FaceSwapGuard (FSG), a novel black-box defense mechanism against deepfake face-swapping threats. Specifically, FSG introduces imperceptible perturbations to a user's facial image, disrupting the features extracted by identity encoders. When shared online, these perturbed images mislead face-swapping techniques, causing them to generate facial images with identities significantly different from the original user. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FSG against multiple face-swapping techniques, reducing the face match rate from 90\% (without defense) to below 10\%. Both qualitative and quantitative studies further confirm its ability to confuse human perception, highlighting its practical utility. Additionally, we investigate key factors that may influence FSG and evaluate its robustness against various adaptive adversaries.
Sensing With Communication Signals: From Information Theory to Signal Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

The Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) paradigm is anticipated to be a cornerstone of the upcoming 6G networks. In order to optimize the use of wireless resources, 6G ISAC systems need to harness the communication data payload signals, which are inherently random, for both sensing and communication (S&C) purposes. This tutorial paper provides a comprehensive technical overview of the fundamental theory and signal processing methodologies for ISAC transmission with random communication signals. We begin by introducing the deterministic-random tradeoff (DRT) between S&C from an information-theoretic perspective, emphasizing the need for specialized signal processing techniques tailored to random ISAC signals. Building on this foundation, we review the core signal models and processing pipelines for communication-centric ISAC systems, and analyze the average squared auto-correlation function (ACF) of random ISAC signals, which serves as a fundamental performance metric for multi-target ranging tasks. Drawing insights from these theoretical results, we outline the design principles for the three key components of communication-centric ISAC systems: modulation schemes, constellation design, and pulse shaping filters. The goal is to either enhance sensing performance without compromising communication efficiency or to establish a scalable tradeoff between the two. We then extend our analysis from a single-antenna ISAC system to its multi-antenna counterpart, discussing recent advancements in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) precoding techniques specifically designed for random ISAC signals. We conclude by highlighting several open challenges and future research directions in the field of sensing with communication signals.
Improved Offline Contextual Bandits with Second-Order Bounds: Betting and Freezing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We consider off-policy selection and learning in contextual bandits, where the learner aims to select or train a reward-maximizing policy using data collected by a fixed behavior policy. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we propose a novel off-policy selection method that leverages a new betting-based confidence bound applied to an inverse propensity weight sequence. Our theoretical analysis reveals that this method achieves a significantly improved, variance-adaptive guarantee over prior work. Second, we propose a novel and generic condition on the optimization objective for off-policy learning that strikes a different balance between bias and variance. One special case, which we call freezing, tends to induce low variance, which is preferred in small-data regimes. Our analysis shows that it matches the best existing guarantees. In our empirical study, our selection method outperforms existing methods, and freezing exhibits improved performance in small-sample regimes.
The Vendiscope: An Algorithmic Microscope For Data Collections
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The evolution of microscopy, beginning with its invention in the late 16th century, has continuously enhanced our ability to explore and understand the microscopic world, enabling increasingly detailed observations of structures and phenomena. In parallel, the rise of data-driven science has underscored the need for sophisticated methods to explore and understand the composition of complex data collections. This paper introduces the Vendiscope, the first algorithmic microscope designed to extend traditional microscopy to computational analysis. The Vendiscope leverages the Vendi scores -- a family of differentiable diversity metrics rooted in ecology and quantum mechanics -- and assigns weights to data points based on their contribution to the overall diversity of the collection. These weights enable high-resolution data analysis at scale. We demonstrate this across biology, materials science, and machine learning (ML). We analyzed the $250$ million protein sequences in the protein universe, discovering that over $200$ million are near-duplicates and that AlphaFold fails on proteins with Gene Ontology (GO) functions that contribute most to diversity. Applying the Vendiscope to the Materials Project database led to similar findings: more than $85\%$ of the crystals with formation energy data are near-duplicates and ML models perform poorly on materials that enhance diversity. Additionally, the Vendiscope can be used to study phenomena such as memorization in generative models. We used the Vendiscope to identify memorized training samples from $13$ different generative models and found that the best-performing ones often memorize the training samples that contribute least to diversity. Our findings demonstrate that the Vendiscope can serve as a powerful tool for data-driven science.
Towards End-to-End Application Slicing in Multi-access Edge Computing systems: Architecture Discussion and Proof-of-Concept
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

Network slicing is one of the most critical 5G pillars. It allows for sharing a 5G infrastructure among different tenants leading to improved service customisation and increased operators' revenues. Concurrently, introducing the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) into 5G to support time-critical applications raises the need to integrate this distributed computing infrastructure to the 5G network slicing framework. Indeed, end-to-end latency guarantees require the end-to-end management of slice resources. For this purpose, after discussing the main gaps in the state-of-the-art with regards to such an objective, we propose a novel slicing architecture that enables the management and orchestration of slice segments that span over all the domains of an end-to-end application service, including the MEC. We also show how this general management architecture can be instantiated into a multi-tenant MEC infrastructure. A preliminary implementation of the proposed architecture focusing on the MEC domain is also provided, together with performance tests to validate the feasibility and efficacy of our design approach.
Accelerated co-design of robots through morphological pretraining
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

The co-design of robot morphology and neural control typically requires using reinforcement learning to approximate a unique control policy gradient for each body plan, demanding massive amounts of training data to measure the performance of each design. Here we show that a universal, morphology-agnostic controller can be rapidly and directly obtained by gradient-based optimization through differentiable simulation. This process of morphological pretraining allows the designer to explore non-differentiable changes to a robot's physical layout (e.g. adding, removing and recombining discrete body parts) and immediately determine which revisions are beneficial and which are deleterious using the pretrained model. We term this process "zero-shot evolution" and compare it with the simultaneous co-optimization of a universal controller alongside an evolving design population. We find the latter results in diversity collapse, a previously unknown pathology whereby the population -- and thus the controller's training data -- converges to similar designs that are easier to steer with a shared universal controller. We show that zero-shot evolution with a pretrained controller quickly yields a diversity of highly performant designs, and by fine-tuning the pretrained controller on the current population throughout evolution, diversity is not only preserved but significantly increased as superior performance is achieved.
Broadcast Channel Cooperative Gain: An Operational Interpretation of Partial Information Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

Partial information decomposition has recently found applications in biological signal processing and machine learning. Despite its impacts, the decomposition was introduced through an informal and heuristic route, and its exact operational meaning is unclear. In this work, we fill this gap by connecting partial information decomposition to the capacity of the broadcast channel, which has been well-studied in the information theory literature. We show that the synergistic information in the decomposition can be rigorously interpreted as the cooperative gain, or a lower bound of this gain, on the corresponding broadcast channel. This interpretation can help practitioners to better explain and expand the applications of the partial information decomposition technique.
Developing Conversational Speech Systems for Robots to Detect Speech Biomarkers of Cognition in People Living with Dementia
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

This study presents the development and testing of a conversational speech system designed for robots to detect speech biomarkers indicative of cognitive impairments in people living with dementia (PLwD). The system integrates a backend Python WebSocket server and a central core module with a large language model (LLM) fine-tuned for dementia to process user input and generate robotic conversation responses in real-time in less than 1.5 seconds. The frontend user interface, a Progressive Web App (PWA), displays information and biomarker score graphs on a smartphone in real-time to human users (PLwD, caregivers, clinicians). Six speech biomarkers based on the existing literature - Altered Grammar, Pragmatic Impairments, Anomia, Disrupted Turn-Taking, Slurred Pronunciation, and Prosody Changes - were developed for the robot conversation system using two datasets, one that included conversations of PLwD with a human clinician (DementiaBank dataset) and one that included conversations of PLwD with a robot (Indiana dataset). We also created a composite speech biomarker that combined all six individual biomarkers into a single score. The speech system's performance was first evaluated on the DementiaBank dataset showing moderate correlation with MMSE scores, with the composite biomarker score outperforming individual biomarkers. Analysis of the Indiana dataset revealed higher and more variable biomarker scores, suggesting potential differences due to study populations (e.g. severity of dementia) and the conversational scenario (human-robot conversations are different from human-human). The findings underscore the need for further research on the impact of conversational scenarios on speech biomarkers and the potential clinical applications of robotic speech systems.
PCGRLLM: Large Language Model-Driven Reward Design for Procedural Content Generation Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Reward design plays a pivotal role in the training of game AIs, requiring substantial domain-specific knowledge and human effort. In recent years, several studies have explored reward generation for training game agents and controlling robots using large language models (LLMs). In the content generation literature, there has been early work on generating reward functions for reinforcement learning agent generators. This work introduces PCGRLLM, an extended architecture based on earlier work, which employs a feedback mechanism and several reasoning-based prompt engineering techniques. We evaluate the proposed method on a story-to-reward generation task in a two-dimensional environment using two state-of-the-art LLMs, demonstrating the generalizability of our approach. Our experiments provide insightful evaluations that demonstrate the capabilities of LLMs essential for content generation tasks. The results highlight significant performance improvements of 415% and 40% respectively, depending on the zero-shot capabilities of the language model. Our work demonstrates the potential to reduce human dependency in game AI development, while supporting and enhancing creative processes.
An Open-Source Web-Based Tool for Evaluating Open-Source Large Language Models Leveraging Information Retrieval from Custom Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

In our work, we present the first-of-its-kind open-source web-based tool which is able to demonstrate the impacts of a user's speech act during discourse with conversational agents, which leverages open-source large language models. With this software resource, it is possible for researchers and experts to evaluate the performance of various dialogues, visualize the user's communicative intents, and utilise uploaded specific documents for the chat agent to use for its information retrieval to respond to the user query. The context gathered by these models is obtained from a set of linguistic features extracted, which forms the context embeddings of the models. Regardless of these models showing good context understanding based on these features, there still remains a gap in including deeper pragmatic features to improve the model's comprehension of the query, hence the efforts to develop this web resource, which is able to extract and then inject this overlooked feature in the encoder-decoder pipeline of the conversational agent. To demonstrate the effect and impact of the resource, we carried out an experiment which evaluated the system using 2 knowledge files for information retrieval, with two user queries each, across 5 open-source large language models using 10 standard metrics. Our results showed that larger open-source models, demonstrated an improved alignment when the user speech act was included with their query. The smaller models in contrast showed an increased perplexity and mixed performance, which explicitly indicated struggles in processing queries that explicitly included speech acts. The results from the analysis using the developed web resource highlight the potential of speech acts towards enhancing conversational depths while underscoring the need for model-specific optimizations to address increased computational costs and response times.
A recurrent vision transformer shows signatures of primate visual attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Attention is fundamental to both biological and artificial intelligence, yet research on animal attention and AI self attention remains largely disconnected. We propose a Recurrent Vision Transformer (Recurrent ViT) that integrates self-attention with recurrent memory, allowing both current inputs and stored information to guide attention allocation. Trained solely via sparse reward feedback on a spatially cued orientation change detection task, a paradigm used in primate studies, our model exhibits primate like signatures of attention, including improved accuracy and faster responses for cued stimuli that scale with cue validity. Analysis of self-attention maps reveals dynamic spatial prioritization with reactivation prior to expected changes, and targeted perturbations produce performance shifts similar to those observed in primate frontal eye fields and superior colliculus. These findings demonstrate that incorporating recurrent feedback into self attention can capture key aspects of primate visual attention.
Skillful Nowcasting of Convective Clouds With a Cascade Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Accurate nowcasting of convective clouds from satellite imagery is essential for mitigating the impacts of meteorological disasters, especially in developing countries and remote regions with limited ground-based observations. Recent advances in deep learning have shown promise in video prediction; however, existing models frequently produce blurry results and exhibit reduced accuracy when forecasting physical fields. Here, we introduce SATcast, a diffusion model that leverages a cascade architecture and multimodal inputs for nowcasting cloud fields in satellite imagery. SATcast incorporates physical fields predicted by FuXi, a deep-learning weather model, alongside past satellite observations as conditional inputs to generate high-quality future cloud fields. Through comprehensive evaluation, SATcast outperforms conventional methods on multiple metrics, demonstrating its superior accuracy and robustness. Ablation studies underscore the importance of its multimodal design and the cascade architecture in achieving reliable predictions. Notably, SATcast maintains predictive skill for up to 24 hours, underscoring its potential for operational nowcasting applications.