OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Training-Free Framework for Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation and Recognition with EfficientNet and CLIP
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

This paper presents a novel training-free framework for open-vocabulary image segmentation and object recognition (OVSR), which leverages EfficientNetB0, a convolutional neural network, for unsupervised segmentation and CLIP, a vision-language model, for open-vocabulary object recognition. The proposed framework adopts a two stage pipeline: unsupervised image segmentation followed by segment-level recognition via vision-language alignment. In the first stage, pixel-wise features extracted from EfficientNetB0 are decomposed using singular value decomposition to obtain latent representations, which are then clustered using hierarchical clustering to segment semantically meaningful regions. The number of clusters is adaptively determined by the distribution of singular values. In the second stage, the segmented regions are localized and encoded into image embeddings using the Vision Transformer backbone of CLIP. Text embeddings are precomputed using CLIP's text encoder from category-specific prompts, including a generic something else prompt to support open set recognition. The image and text embeddings are concatenated and projected into a shared latent feature space via SVD to enhance cross-modal alignment. Recognition is performed by computing the softmax over the similarities between the projected image and text embeddings. The proposed method is evaluated on standard benchmarks, including COCO, ADE20K, and PASCAL VOC, achieving state-of-the-art performance in terms of Hungarian mIoU, precision, recall, and F1-score. These results demonstrate the effectiveness, flexibility, and generalizability of the proposed framework.
To Use or to Refuse? Re-Centering Student Agency with Generative AI in Engineering Design Education
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

This pilot study traces students' reflections on the use of AI in a 13-week foundational design course enrolling over 500 first-year engineering and architecture students at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. The course was an AI-enhanced design course, with several interventions to equip students with AI based design skills. Students were required to reflect on whether the technology was used as a tool (instrumental assistant), a teammate (collaborative partner), or neither (deliberate non-use). By foregrounding this three-way lens, students learned to use AI for innovation rather than just automation and to reflect on agency, ethics, and context rather than on prompt crafting alone. Evidence stems from coursework artefacts: thirteen structured reflection spreadsheets and eight illustrated briefs submitted, combined with notes of teachers and researchers. Qualitative coding of these materials reveals shared practices brought about through the inclusion of Gen-AI, including accelerated prototyping, rapid skill acquisition, iterative prompt refinement, purposeful "switch-offs" during user research, and emergent routines for recognizing hallucinations. Unexpectedly, students not only harnessed Gen-AI for speed but (enabled by the tool-teammate-neither triage) also learned to reject its outputs, invent their own hallucination fire-drills, and divert the reclaimed hours into deeper user research, thereby transforming efficiency into innovation. The implications of the approach we explore shows that: we can transform AI uptake into an assessable design habit; that rewarding selective non-use cultivates hallucination-aware workflows; and, practically, that a coordinated bundle of tool access, reflection, role tagging, and public recognition through competition awards allows AI based innovation in education to scale without compromising accountability.
Learning Noise-Resilient and Transferable Graph-Text Alignment via Dynamic Quality Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Pre-training Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is central to web-scale applications such as search, recommendation, and knowledge discovery. However, existing CLIP-style graph-text aligners face two key limitations: they assume strict one-to-one correspondences between nodes and texts, overlooking the inherent many-to-many relations in real-world graphs; and they rely on static alignment objectives that cannot adapt to varying data quality, making them brittle under noisy supervision. Together, these limitations expose a core dilemma: embracing expressive many-to-many alignment amplifies noise, while reverting to strict one-to-one strategies sacrifices semantic diversity and fails to handle inherently mismatched pairs. To address these challenges, we propose ADAligner, a dynamic, quality-aware graph-text alignment framework that dynamically adjusts between expressive many-to-many and conservative one-to-one objectives according to supervision quality. ADAligner estimates batch-level alignment reliability in real time and adapts its optimization accordingly, promoting soft, subgraph-level many-to-many alignment when supervision is clean, while emphasizing reliable one-to-one alignment by dynamically filtering low-confidence pairs under noise. Theoretically, we prove that this dynamic mechanism forms a stable negative feedback process, ensuring convergence and robustness. Comprehensive experiments on nine diverse TAG datasets demonstrate that ADAligner consistently outperforms prior graph-text aligners on zero-/few-shot node classification, link prediction and cross-modal retrieval tasks. It maintains strong robustness under noisy supervision and accelerates pre-training by approximately 2 to 3 times compared to multimodal baselines, establishing a scalable and reliable foundation for graph-text representation learning in real-world web environments.
A Probabilistic Computing Approach to the Closest Vector Problem for Lattice-Based Factoring
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

The closest vector problem (CVP) is a fundamental optimization problem in lattice-based cryptography and its conjectured hardness underpins the security of lattice-based cryptosystems. Furthermore, Schnorr's lattice-based factoring algorithm reduces integer factoring (the foundation of current cryptosystems, including RSA) to the CVP. Recent work has investigated the inclusion of a heuristic CVP approximation `refinement' step in the lattice-based factoring algorithm, using quantum variational algorithms to perform the heuristic optimization. This coincides with the emergence of probabilistic computing as a hardware accelerator for randomized algorithms including tasks in combinatorial optimization. In this work we investigate the application of probabilistic computing to the heuristic optimization task of CVP approximation refinement in lattice-based factoring. We present the design of a probabilistic computing algorithm for this task, a discussion of `prime lattice' parameters, and experimental results showing the efficacy of probabilistic computing for solving the CVP as well as its efficacy as a subroutine for lattice-based factoring. The main results found that (a) this approach is capable of finding the maximal available CVP approximation refinement in time linear in problem size and (b) probabilistic computing used in conjunction with the lattice parameters presented can find the composite prime factors of a semiprime number using up to 100x fewer lattice instances than similar quantum and classical methods.
Neural Variational Dropout Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Learning to infer the conditional posterior model is a key step for robust meta-learning. This paper presents a new Bayesian meta-learning approach called Neural Variational Dropout Processes (NVDPs). NVDPs model the conditional posterior distribution based on a task-specific dropout; a low-rank product of Bernoulli experts meta-model is utilized for a memory-efficient mapping of dropout rates from a few observed contexts. It allows for a quick reconfiguration of a globally learned and shared neural network for new tasks in multi-task few-shot learning. In addition, NVDPs utilize a novel prior conditioned on the whole task data to optimize the conditional \textit{dropout} posterior in the amortized variational inference. Surprisingly, this enables the robust approximation of task-specific dropout rates that can deal with a wide range of functional ambiguities and uncertainties. We compared the proposed method with other meta-learning approaches in the few-shot learning tasks such as 1D stochastic regression, image inpainting, and classification. The results show the excellent performance of NVDPs.
Transmitter Identification via Volterra Series Based Radio Frequency Fingerprint
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

The growing number of wireless devices increases the need for secure network access. Radio Frequency Fingerprinting (RFF), a physical-layer authentication method, offers a promising solution as it requires no cryptography and resists spoofing. However, existing RFF approaches often lack a unified theory and effective feature extraction. Many methods use handcrafted signal features or direct neural network classification, leading to limited generalization and interpretability. In this work, we model the transmitter as a black box and analyze its impact on transmitted signals. By treating the deviation from an ideal signal as hardware-induced distortion, we represent the received signal using a Volterra series, using its kernels to capture linear and nonlinear hardware traits. To manage the high dimensionality of these kernels, we approximate them via wavelet decomposition and estimate coefficients through least-squares fitting. The resulting wavelet coefficients provide compact yet informative hardware representations, which are classified using a complex-valued neural network. Experiments on a public LoRa dataset show state-of-the-art performance, with over 98% accuracy in static channels and above 90% under multipath and Doppler effects. The proposed approach improves both interpretability and generalization across varying channel conditions.
PCP-GAN: Property-Constrained Pore-scale image reconstruction via conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Obtaining truly representative pore-scale images that match bulk formation properties remains a fundamental challenge in subsurface characterization, as natural spatial heterogeneity causes extracted sub-images to deviate significantly from core-measured values. This challenge is compounded by data scarcity, where physical samples are only available at sparse well locations. This study presents a multi-conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) framework that generates representative pore-scale images with precisely controlled properties, addressing both the representativeness challenge and data availability constraints. The framework was trained on thin section samples from four depths (1879.50-1943.50 m) of a carbonate formation, simultaneously conditioning on porosity values and depth parameters within a single unified model. This approach captures both universal pore network principles and depth-specific geological characteristics, from grainstone fabrics with interparticle-intercrystalline porosity to crystalline textures with anhydrite inclusions. The model achieved exceptional porosity control (R^2=0.95) across all formations with mean absolute errors of 0.0099-0.0197. Morphological validation confirmed preservation of critical pore network characteristics including average pore radius, specific surface area, and tortuosity, with statistical differences remaining within acceptable geological tolerances. Most significantly, generated images demonstrated superior representativeness with dual-constraint errors of 1.9-11.3% compared to 36.4-578% for randomly extracted real sub-images. This capability provides transformative tools for subsurface characterization, particularly valuable for carbon storage, geothermal energy, and groundwater management applications where knowing the representative morphology of the pore space is critical for implementing digital rock physics.
Cross-Chain Sealed-Bid Auctions Using Confidential Compute Blockchains
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Sealed-bid auctions ensure fair competition and efficient allocation but are often deployed on centralized infrastructure, enabling opaque manipulation. Public blockchains eliminate central control, yet their inherent transparency conflicts with the confidentiality required for sealed bidding. Prior attempts struggle to reconcile privacy, verifiability, and scalability without relying on trusted intermediaries, multi-round protocols, or expensive cryptography. We present a sealed-bid auction protocol that executes sensitive bidding logic on a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)-backed confidential compute blockchain while retaining settlement and enforcement on a public chain. Bidders commit funds to enclave-generated escrow addresses, ensuring confidentiality and binding commitments. After the deadline, any party can trigger resolution: the confidential blockchain determines the winner through verifiable off-chain computation and issues signed settlement transactions for execution on the public chain. Our design provides security, privacy, and scalability without trusted third parties or protocol modifications. We implement it on SUAVE with Ethereum settlement, evaluate its scalability and trust assumptions, and demonstrate deployment with minimal integration on existing infrastructure
Using Non-Expert Data to Robustify Imitation Learning via Offline Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Imitation learning has proven effective for training robots to perform complex tasks from expert human demonstrations. However, it remains limited by its reliance on high-quality, task-specific data, restricting adaptability to the diverse range of real-world object configurations and scenarios. In contrast, non-expert data -- such as play data, suboptimal demonstrations, partial task completions, or rollouts from suboptimal policies -- can offer broader coverage and lower collection costs. However, conventional imitation learning approaches fail to utilize this data effectively. To address these challenges, we posit that with right design decisions, offline reinforcement learning can be used as a tool to harness non-expert data to enhance the performance of imitation learning policies. We show that while standard offline RL approaches can be ineffective at actually leveraging non-expert data under the sparse data coverage settings typically encountered in the real world, simple algorithmic modifications can allow for the utilization of this data, without significant additional assumptions. Our approach shows that broadening the support of the policy distribution can allow imitation algorithms augmented by offline RL to solve tasks robustly, showing considerably enhanced recovery and generalization behavior. In manipulation tasks, these innovations significantly increase the range of initial conditions where learned policies are successful when non-expert data is incorporated. Moreover, we show that these methods are able to leverage all collected data, including partial or suboptimal demonstrations, to bolster task-directed policy performance. This underscores the importance of algorithmic techniques for using non-expert data for robust policy learning in robotics. Website: https://uwrobotlearning.github.io/RISE-offline/
CARES: Context-Aware Resolution Selector for VLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Large vision-language models (VLMs) commonly process images at native or high resolution to remain effective across tasks. This inflates visual tokens ofter to 97-99% of total tokens, resulting in high compute and latency, even when low-resolution images would suffice. We introduce \emph{CARES}-a \textbf{C}ontext-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{R}esolution \textbf{S}elector, a lightweight preprocessing module that, given an image-query pair, predicts the \emph{minimal} sufficient input resolution. CARES uses a compact VLM (350M) to extract features and predict when a target pretrained VLM's response converges to its peak ability to answer correctly. Though trained as a discrete classifier over a set of optional resolutions, CARES interpolates continuous resolutions at inference for fine-grained control. Across five multimodal benchmarks spanning documents and natural images, as well as diverse target VLMs, CARES preserves task performance while reducing compute by up to 80%.
Which Evaluation for Which Model? A Taxonomy for Speech Model Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Speech foundation models have recently achieved remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, their evaluation remains disjointed across tasks and model types. Different models excel at distinct aspects of speech processing and thus require different evaluation protocols. This paper proposes a unified taxonomy that addresses the question: Which evaluation is appropriate for which model? The taxonomy defines three orthogonal axes: the evaluation aspect being measured, the model capabilities required to attempt the task, and the task or protocol requirements needed to perform it. We classify a broad set of existing evaluations and benchmarks along these axes, spanning areas such as representation learning, speech generation, and interactive dialogue. By mapping each evaluation to the capabilities a model exposes (e.g., speech generation, real-time processing) and to its methodological demands (e.g., fine-tuning data, human judgment), the taxonomy provides a principled framework for aligning models with suitable evaluation methods. It also reveals systematic gaps, such as limited coverage of prosody, interaction, or reasoning, that highlight priorities for future benchmark design. Overall, this work offers a conceptual foundation and practical guide for selecting, interpreting, and extending evaluations of speech models.
A Matter of Time: Revealing the Structure of Time in Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have gained popularity for their generalizable and expressive multimodal representations. By leveraging large-scale training data with diverse textual metadata, VLMs acquire open-vocabulary capabilities, solving tasks beyond their training scope. This paper investigates the temporal awareness of VLMs, assessing their ability to position visual content in time. We introduce TIME10k, a benchmark dataset of over 10,000 images with temporal ground truth, and evaluate the time-awareness of 37 VLMs by a novel methodology. Our investigation reveals that temporal information is structured along a low-dimensional, non-linear manifold in the VLM embedding space. Based on this insight, we propose methods to derive an explicit ``timeline'' representation from the embedding space. These representations model time and its chronological progression and thereby facilitate temporal reasoning tasks. Our timeline approaches achieve competitive to superior accuracy compared to a prompt-based baseline while being computationally efficient. All code and data are available at https://tekayanidham.github.io/timeline-page/.
HAD: Hierarchical Asymmetric Distillation to Bridge Spatio-Temporal Gaps in Event-Based Object Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

RGB cameras excel at capturing rich texture details with high spatial resolution, whereas event cameras offer exceptional temporal resolution and a high dynamic range (HDR). Leveraging their complementary strengths can substantially enhance object tracking under challenging conditions, such as high-speed motion, HDR environments, and dynamic background interference. However, a significant spatio-temporal asymmetry exists between these two modalities due to their fundamentally different imaging mechanisms, hindering effective multi-modal integration. To address this issue, we propose {Hierarchical Asymmetric Distillation} (HAD), a multi-modal knowledge distillation framework that explicitly models and mitigates spatio-temporal asymmetries. Specifically, HAD proposes a hierarchical alignment strategy that minimizes information loss while maintaining the student network's computational efficiency and parameter compactness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HAD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness and necessity of each designed component. The code will be released soon.
gem5 Co-Pilot: AI Assistant Agent for Architectural Design Space Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2025
Year: 2025

Generative AI is increasing the productivity of software and hardware development across many application domains. In this work, we utilize the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to develop a co-pilot agent for assisting gem5 users with automating design space exploration. Computer architecture design space exploration is complex and time-consuming, given that numerous parameter settings and simulation statistics must be analyzed before improving the current design. The emergence of LLMs has significantly accelerated the analysis of long-text data as well as smart decision making, two key functions in a successful design space exploration task. In this project, we first build gem5 Co-Pilot, an AI agent assistant for gem5, which comes with a webpage-GUI for smooth user interaction, agent automation, and result summarization. We also implemented a language for design space exploration, as well as a Design Space Database (DSDB). With DSDB, gem5 Co-Pilot effectively implements a Retrieval Augmented Generation system for gem5 design space exploration. We experiment on cost-constraint optimization with four cost ranges and compare our results with two baseline models. Results show that gem5 Co-Pilot can quickly identify optimal parameters for specific design constraints based on performance and cost, with limited user interaction.
Matrix-Free Least Squares Solvers: Values, Gradients, and What to Do With Them
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

This paper argues that the method of least squares has significant unfulfilled potential in modern machine learning, far beyond merely being a tool for fitting linear models. To release its potential, we derive custom gradients that transform the solver into a differentiable operator, like a neural network layer, enabling many diverse applications. Empirically, we demonstrate: (i) scalability by enforcing weight sparsity on a 50 million parameter model; (ii) imposing conservativeness constraints in score-based generative models; and (iii) hyperparameter tuning of Gaussian processes based on predictive performance. By doing this, our work represents the next iteration in developing differentiable linear-algebra tools and making them widely accessible to machine learning practitioners.
Style Attack Disguise: When Fonts Become a Camouflage for Adversarial Intent
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

With social media growth, users employ stylistic fonts and font-like emoji to express individuality, creating visually appealing text that remains human-readable. However, these fonts introduce hidden vulnerabilities in NLP models: while humans easily read stylistic text, models process these characters as distinct tokens, causing interference. We identify this human-model perception gap and propose a style-based attack, Style Attack Disguise (SAD). We design two sizes: light for query efficiency and strong for superior attack performance. Experiments on sentiment classification and machine translation across traditional models, LLMs, and commercial services demonstrate SAD's strong attack performance. We also show SAD's potential threats to multimodal tasks including text-to-image and text-to-speech generation.