OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Minimizing Tardy Processing Time on a Single Machine in Near-Linear Time
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

In this work we revisit the elementary scheduling problem $1||\sum p_j U_j$. The goal is to select, among $n$ jobs with processing times and due dates, a subset of jobs with maximum total processing time that can be scheduled in sequence without violating their due dates. This problem is NP-hard, but a classical algorithm by Lawler and Moore from the 60s solves this problem in pseudo-polynomial time $O(nP)$, where $P$ is the total processing time of all jobs. With the aim to develop best-possible pseudo-polynomial-time algorithms, a recent wave of results has improved Lawler and Moore's algorithm for $1||\sum p_j U_j$: First to time $\tilde O(P^{7/4})$ [Bringmann, Fischer, Hermelin, Shabtay, Wellnitz; ICALP'20], then to time $\tilde O(P^{5/3})$ [Klein, Polak, Rohwedder; SODA'23], and finally to time $\tilde O(P^{7/5})$ [Schieber, Sitaraman; WADS'23]. It remained an exciting open question whether these works can be improved further. In this work we develop an algorithm in near-linear time $\tilde O(P)$ for the $1||\sum p_j U_j$ problem. This running time not only significantly improves upon the previous results, but also matches conditional lower bounds based on the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis or the Set Cover Hypothesis and is therefore likely optimal (up to subpolynomial factors). Our new algorithm also extends to the case of $m$ machines in time $\tilde O(P^m)$. In contrast to the previous improvements, we take a different, more direct approach inspired by the recent reductions from Modular Subset Sum to dynamic string problems. We thereby arrive at a satisfyingly simple algorithm.
Backdoor Attacks on Dense Retrieval via Public and Unintentional Triggers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Dense retrieval systems have been widely used in various NLP applications. However, their vulnerabilities to potential attacks have been underexplored. This paper investigates a novel attack scenario where the attackers aim to mislead the retrieval system into retrieving the attacker-specified contents. Those contents, injected into the retrieval corpus by attackers, can include harmful text like hate speech or spam. Unlike prior methods that rely on model weights and generate conspicuous, unnatural outputs, we propose a covert backdoor attack triggered by grammar errors. Our approach ensures that the attacked models can function normally for standard queries while covertly triggering the retrieval of the attacker's contents in response to minor linguistic mistakes. Specifically, dense retrievers are trained with contrastive loss and hard negative sampling. Surprisingly, our findings demonstrate that contrastive loss is notably sensitive to grammatical errors, and hard negative sampling can exacerbate susceptibility to backdoor attacks. Our proposed method achieves a high attack success rate with a minimal corpus poisoning rate of only 0.048\%, while preserving normal retrieval performance. This indicates that the method has negligible impact on user experience for error-free queries. Furthermore, evaluations across three real-world defense strategies reveal that the malicious passages embedded within the corpus remain highly resistant to detection and filtering, underscoring the robustness and subtlety of the proposed attack \footnote{Codes of this work are available at https://github.com/ruyue0001/Backdoor_DPR.}.
MlingConf: A Comprehensive Study of Multilingual Confidence Estimation on Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

The tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate hallucinations raises concerns regarding their reliability. Therefore, confidence estimations indicating the extent of trustworthiness of the generations become essential. However, current LLM confidence estimations in languages other than English remain underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a comprehensive investigation of Multilingual Confidence estimation (MlingConf) on LLMs, focusing on both language-agnostic (LA) and language-specific (LS) tasks to explore the performance and language dominance effects of multilingual confidence estimations on different tasks. The benchmark comprises four meticulously checked and human-evaluated high-quality multilingual datasets for LA tasks and one for the LS task tailored to specific social, cultural, and geographical contexts of a language. Our experiments reveal that on LA tasks English exhibits notable linguistic dominance in confidence estimations than other languages, while on LS tasks, using question-related language to prompt LLMs demonstrates better linguistic dominance in multilingual confidence estimations. The phenomena inspire a simple yet effective native-tone prompting strategy by employing language-specific prompts for LS tasks, effectively improving LLMs' reliability and accuracy in LS scenarios.
NeuralDiffuser: Neuroscience-inspired Diffusion Guidance for fMRI Visual Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2025
Year: 2025

Reconstructing visual stimuli from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging fMRI enables fine-grained retrieval of brain activity. However, the accurate reconstruction of diverse details, including structure, background, texture, color, and more, remains challenging. The stable diffusion models inevitably result in the variability of reconstructed images, even under identical conditions. To address this challenge, we first uncover the neuroscientific perspective of diffusion methods, which primarily involve top-down creation using pre-trained knowledge from extensive image datasets, but tend to lack detail-driven bottom-up perception, leading to a loss of faithful details. In this paper, we propose NeuralDiffuser, which incorporates primary visual feature guidance to provide detailed cues in the form of gradients. This extension of the bottom-up process for diffusion models achieves both semantic coherence and detail fidelity when reconstructing visual stimuli. Furthermore, we have developed a novel guidance strategy for reconstruction tasks that ensures the consistency of repeated outputs with original images rather than with various outputs. Extensive experimental results on the Natural Senses Dataset (NSD) qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the advancement of NeuralDiffuser by comparing it against baseline and state-of-the-art methods horizontally, as well as conducting longitudinal ablation studies.
The Delusional Hedge Algorithm as a Model of Human Learning from Diverse Opinions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Whereas cognitive models of learning often assume direct experience with both the features of an event and with a true label or outcome, much of everyday learning arises from hearing the opinions of others, without direct access to either the experience or the ground truth outcome. We consider how people can learn which opinions to trust in such scenarios by extending the hedge algorithm: a classic solution for learning from diverse information sources. We first introduce a semi-supervised variant we call the delusional hedge capable of learning from both supervised and unsupervised experiences. In two experiments, we examine the alignment between human judgments and predictions from the standard hedge, the delusional hedge, and a heuristic baseline model. Results indicate that humans effectively incorporate both labeled and unlabeled information in a manner consistent with the delusional hedge algorithm -- suggesting that human learners not only gauge the accuracy of information sources but also their consistency with other reliable sources. The findings advance our understanding of human learning from diverse opinions, with implications for the development of algorithms that better capture how people learn to weigh conflicting information sources.
Can Large Language Models Detect Misinformation in Scientific News Reporting?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Scientific facts are often spun in the popular press with the intent to influence public opinion and action, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Automatic detection of misinformation in the scientific domain is challenging because of the distinct styles of writing in these two media types and is still in its nascence. Most research on the validity of scientific reporting treats this problem as a claim verification challenge. In doing so, significant expert human effort is required to generate appropriate claims. Our solution bypasses this step and addresses a more real-world scenario where such explicit, labeled claims may not be available. The central research question of this paper is whether it is possible to use large language models (LLMs) to detect misinformation in scientific reporting. To this end, we first present a new labeled dataset SciNews, containing 2.4k scientific news stories drawn from trusted and untrustworthy sources, paired with related abstracts from the CORD-19 database. Our dataset includes both human-written and LLM-generated news articles, making it more comprehensive in terms of capturing the growing trend of using LLMs to generate popular press articles. Then, we identify dimensions of scientific validity in science news articles and explore how this can be integrated into the automated detection of scientific misinformation. We propose several baseline architectures using LLMs to automatically detect false representations of scientific findings in the popular press. For each of these architectures, we use several prompt engineering strategies including zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting. We also test these architectures and prompting strategies on GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama2-7B, Llama2-13B.
A Landmark-Aware Visual Navigation Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Map representations learned by expert demonstrations have shown promising research value. However, the field of visual navigation still faces challenges due to the lack of real-world human-navigation datasets that can support efficient, supervised, representation learning of environments. We present a Landmark-Aware Visual Navigation (LAVN) dataset to allow for supervised learning of human-centric exploration policies and map building. We collect RGBD observation and human point-click pairs as a human annotator explores virtual and real-world environments with the goal of full coverage exploration of the space. The human annotators also provide distinct landmark examples along each trajectory, which we intuit will simplify the task of map or graph building and localization. These human point-clicks serve as direct supervision for waypoint prediction when learning to explore in environments. Our dataset covers a wide spectrum of scenes, including rooms in indoor environments, as well as walkways outdoors. We release our dataset with detailed documentation at https://huggingface.co/datasets/visnavdataset/lavn (DOI: 10.57967/hf/2386) and a plan for long-term preservation.
COMPASS: Computational Mapping of Patient-Therapist Alliance Strategies with Language Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

The therapeutic working alliance is a critical predictor of psychotherapy success. Traditionally, working alliance assessment relies on questionnaires completed by both therapists and patients. In this paper, we present COMPASS, a novel framework to directly infer the therapeutic working alliance from the natural language used in psychotherapy sessions. Our approach leverages advanced large language models (LLMs) to analyze session transcripts and map them to distributed representations. These representations capture the semantic similarities between the dialogues and psychometric instruments, such as the Working Alliance Inventory. Analyzing a dataset of over 950 sessions spanning diverse psychiatric conditions -- including anxiety (N=498), depression (N=377), schizophrenia (N=71), and suicidal tendencies (N=12) -- collected between 1970 and 2012, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in providing fine-grained mapping of patient-therapist alignment trajectories, offering interpretable insights for clinical practice, and identifying emerging patterns related to the condition being treated. By employing various deep learning-based topic modeling techniques in combination with prompting generative language models, we analyze the topical characteristics of different psychiatric conditions and how these topics evolve during each turn of the conversation. This integrated framework enhances the understanding of therapeutic interactions, enables timely feedback for therapists on the quality of therapeutic relationships, and provides clear, actionable insights to improve the effectiveness of psychotherapy.
Mochi: Fast \& Exact Collision Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2025
Year: 2025

Collision Detection (CD) has several applications across the domains such as robotics, visual graphics, and fluid mechanics. Finding exact collisions between the objects in the scene is quite computationally intensive. To quickly filter the object pairs that do not result in a collision, bounding boxes are built on the objects, indexed using a Bounding Volume Hierarchy(BVH), and tested for intersection before performing the expensive object-object intersection tests. In state-of-the-art CD libraries, accelerators such as GPUs are used to accelerate BVH traversal by building specialized data structures. The recent addition of ray tracing architecture to GPU hardware is designed to do the same but in the context of implementing a Ray Tracing algorithm to render a graphical scene in real-time. We present Mochi, a fast and exact collision detection engine that accelerates both the broad and narrow phases by taking advantage of the capabilities of Ray Tracing cores. We introduce multiple new reductions to perform generic CD to support three types of objects for CD: simple spherical particles, objects describable by mathematical equations, and complex objects composed of a triangle mesh. By implementing our reductions, Mochi achieves several orders of magnitude speedups on synthetic datasets and 5x-28x speedups on real-world triangle mesh datasets. We further evaluate our reductions thoroughly and provide several architectural insights on the ray tracing cores that are otherwise unknown due to their proprietorship.
Stable Neural Stochastic Differential Equations in Analyzing Irregular Time Series Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Irregular sampling intervals and missing values in real-world time series data present challenges for conventional methods that assume consistent intervals and complete data. Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs) offer an alternative approach, utilizing neural networks combined with ODE solvers to learn continuous latent representations through parameterized vector fields. Neural Stochastic Differential Equations (Neural SDEs) extend Neural ODEs by incorporating a diffusion term, although this addition is not trivial, particularly when addressing irregular intervals and missing values. Consequently, careful design of drift and diffusion functions is crucial for maintaining stability and enhancing performance, while incautious choices can result in adverse properties such as the absence of strong solutions, stochastic destabilization, or unstable Euler discretizations, significantly affecting Neural SDEs' performance. In this study, we propose three stable classes of Neural SDEs: Langevin-type SDE, Linear Noise SDE, and Geometric SDE. Then, we rigorously demonstrate their robustness in maintaining excellent performance under distribution shift, while effectively preventing overfitting. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets for interpolation, forecasting, and classification tasks, and analyze the robustness of our methods with 30 public datasets under different missing rates. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in handling real-world irregular time series data.
Interpretation of Inaccessible Sets in Martin-Löf Type Theory with One Mahlo Universe
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2025
Year: 2025

Rathjen proved that Aczel's constructive set theory $\mathbf{CZF}$ extended with inaccessible sets of all transfinite orders can be interpreted in Martin-Löf type theory $\mathbf{MLTT}$ extended with Setzer's Mahlo universe and another universe above it. In this paper we show that this interpretation can be carried out bottom-up without the universe above the Mahlo universe, provided we add an accessibility predicate instead. If we work in Martin-Löf type theory with extensional identity types the accessibility predicate can be defined in terms of $\mathrm{W}$-types. The main part of our interpretation has been formalised in the proof assistant Agda.
Grasp, See, and Place: Efficient Unknown Object Rearrangement with Policy Structure Prior
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

We focus on the task of unknown object rearrangement, where a robot is supposed to re-configure the objects into a desired goal configuration specified by an RGB-D image. Recent works explore unknown object rearrangement systems by incorporating learning-based perception modules. However, they are sensitive to perception error, and pay less attention to task-level performance. In this paper, we aim to develop an effective system for unknown object rearrangement amidst perception noise. We theoretically reveal that the noisy perception impacts grasp and place in a decoupled way, and show such a decoupled structure is valuable to improve task optimality. We propose GSP, a dual-loop system with the decoupled structure as prior. For the inner loop, we learn a see policy for self-confident in-hand object matching. For the outer loop, we learn a grasp policy aware of object matching and grasp capability guided by task-level rewards. We leverage the foundation model CLIP for object matching, policy learning and self-termination. A series of experiments indicate that GSP can conduct unknown object rearrangement with higher completion rates and fewer steps.
Evaluating the Performance of ChatGPT for Spam Email Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Email continues to be a pivotal and extensively utilized communication medium within professional and commercial domains. Nonetheless, the prevalence of spam emails poses a significant challenge for users, disrupting their daily routines and diminishing productivity. Consequently, accurately identifying and filtering spam based on content has become crucial for cybersecurity. Recent advancements in natural language processing, particularly with large language models like ChatGPT, have shown remarkable performance in tasks such as question answering and text generation. However, its potential in spam identification remains underexplored. To fill in the gap, this study attempts to evaluate ChatGPT's capabilities for spam identification in both English and Chinese email datasets. We employ ChatGPT for spam email detection using in-context learning, which requires a prompt instruction with (or without) a few demonstrations. We also investigate how the number of demonstrations in the prompt affects the performance of ChatGPT. For comparison, we also implement five popular benchmark methods, including naive Bayes, support vector machines (SVM), logistic regression (LR), feedforward dense neural networks (DNN), and BERT classifiers. Through extensive experiments, the performance of ChatGPT is significantly worse than deep supervised learning methods in the large English dataset, while it presents superior performance on the low-resourced Chinese dataset. This study provides insights into the potential and limitations of ChatGPT for spam identification, highlighting its potential as a viable solution for resource-constrained language domains.
Certifying Knowledge Comprehension in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical systems where they provide answers based on in-context information derived from knowledge bases. As LLMs are increasingly envisioned as superhuman agents, their proficiency in knowledge comprehension-extracting relevant information and reasoning over it to answer questions, a key facet of human intelligence-becomes crucial. However, existing evaluations of LLMs on knowledge comprehension are typically conducted on small test sets, but these datasets represent only a tiny fraction of the vast number of possible queries. Simple empirical evaluations on these limited test sets raises concerns about the reliability and generalizability of the results. In this work, we introduce the first specification and certification framework for knowledge comprehension in LLMs, providing formal probabilistic guarantees for reliability. Instead of a fixed dataset, we design novel specifications that mathematically represent prohibitively large probability distributions of knowledge comprehension prompts with natural noise, using knowledge graphs. From these specifications, we generate quantitative certificates that offer high-confidence, tight bounds on the probability that a given LLM correctly answers any question drawn from the specification distribution. We apply our framework to certify SOTA LLMs in two domains: precision medicine and general question-answering. Our results reveal previously unrecognized vulnerabilities in SOTA LLMs due to natural noise in the prompts. Additionally, we establish performance hierarchies with formal guarantees among the SOTA LLMs, particularly in the context of precision medicine question-answering.
Controlling Deformable Objects with Non-negligible Dynamics: a Shape-Regulation Approach to End-Point Positioning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made considerable strides toward general modeling and control, despite soft robots and deformable objects being very similar from a mechanical standpoint. In this work, we leverage these recent results to develop a control-oriented, fully dynamic framework of slender deformable objects grasped at one end by a robotic manipulator. We introduce a dynamic model of this system using functional strain parameterizations and describe the manipulation challenge as a regulation control problem. This enables us to define a fully model-based control architecture, for which we can prove analytically closed-loop stability and provide sufficient conditions for steady state convergence to the desired state. The nature of this work is intended to be markedly experimental. We provide an extensive experimental validation of the proposed ideas, tasking a robot arm with controlling the distal end of six different cables, in a given planar position and orientation in space.