OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
LocaGen: Sub-Sample Time-Delay Learning for Beam Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

The goal of LocaGen is to improve the localization performance of audio signals in the 2-D beam localization problem. LocaGen reduces sampling quantization errors through machine learning models trained on realistic synthetic data generated by a simulation. The system increases the accuracy of both direction-of-arrival (DOA) and precise location estimation of an audio beam from an array of three microphones. We demonstrate LocaGen's efficacy on a low-powered embedded system with an increased localization accuracy with a minimal increase in real-time resource usage. LocaGen was demonstrated to reduce DOA error by approximately 67% even with a microphone array of only 10 kHz in audio processing.
Artificial Intelligence-Driven Network-on-Chip Design Space Exploration: Neural Network Architectures for Design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Network-on-Chip (NoC) design requires exploring a high-dimensional configuration space to satisfy stringent throughput requirements and latency constraints. Traditional design space exploration techniques are often slow and struggle to handle complex, non-linear parameter interactions. This work presents a machine learning-driven framework that automates NoC design space exploration using BookSim simulations and reverse neural network models. Specifically, we compare three architectures - a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP),a Conditional Diffusion Model, and a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) to predict optimal NoC parameters given target performance metrics. Our pipeline generates over 150,000 simulation data points across varied mesh topologies. The Conditional Diffusion Model achieved the highest predictive accuracy, attaining a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.463 on unseen data. Furthermore, the proposed framework reduces design exploration time by several orders of magnitude, making it a practical solution for rapid and scalable NoC co-design.
Graph Contrastive Learning via Spectral Graph Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Given augmented views of each input graph, contrastive learning methods (e.g., InfoNCE) optimize pairwise alignment of graph embeddings across views while providing no mechanism to control the global structure of the view specific graph-of-graphs built from these embeddings. We introduce SpecMatch-CL, a novel loss function that aligns the view specific graph-of-graphs by minimizing the difference between their normalized Laplacians. Theoretically, we show that under certain assumptions, the difference between normalized Laplacians provides an upper bound not only for the difference between the ideal Perfect Alignment contrastive loss and the current loss, but also for the Uniformly loss. Empirically, SpecMatch-CL establishes new state of the art on eight TU benchmarks under unsupervised learning and semi-supervised learning at low label rates, and yields consistent gains in transfer learning on PPI-306K and ZINC 2M datasets.
Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Ethical Cybersecurity in Uganda: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Threat Detection in Resource-Constrained Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Uganda's rapid digital transformation, supported by national strategies such as Vision 2040 and the Digital Transformation Roadmap, has expanded reliance on networked services while simultaneously increasing exposure to sophisticated cyber threats. In resource-constrained settings, commonly deployed rule-based intrusion detection systems lack the adaptability and ethical safeguards needed to address evolving attack patterns, leading to undetected breaches and excessive blocking of legitimate traffic. This study proposes an Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AAI) framework that integrates reinforcement learning, an explicit ethical governance layer, and human oversight to deliver adaptive and trustworthy cybersecurity. A CPU-optimized simulation environment was developed using a five-node network topology that mirrors key elements of Uganda's critical digital infrastructure and generates both benign and malicious traffic, including phishing, ransomware, and distributed denial-of-service attacks. A Q-learning agent, operating within clearly defined ethical constraints and subject to human auditability, was trained and evaluated against a traditional rule-based baseline. The AAI framework achieved a 100 percent detection rate, zero false positives, and full ethical compliance, compared with 70 percent detection and 15 percent false positives for the baseline system. These results demonstrate that agentic, ethically governed reinforcement learning can substantially improve cybersecurity effectiveness and fairness in CPU-only, resource-constrained environments, offering a practical pathway for operationalizing responsible AI in Uganda's national cybersecurity strategy.
Can AI autonomously build, operate, and use the entire data stack?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Enterprise data management is a monumental task. It spans data architecture and systems, integration, quality, governance, and continuous improvement. While AI assistants can help specific persona, such as data engineers and stewards, to navigate and configure the data stack, they fall far short of full automation. However, as AI becomes increasingly capable of tackling tasks that have previously resisted automation due to inherent complexities, we believe there is an imminent opportunity to target fully autonomous data estates. Currently, AI is used in different parts of the data stack, but in this paper, we argue for a paradigm shift from the use of AI in independent data component operations towards a more holistic and autonomous handling of the entire data lifecycle. Towards that end, we explore how each stage of the modern data stack can be autonomously managed by intelligent agents to build self-sufficient systems that can be used not only by human end-users, but also by AI itself. We begin by describing the mounting forces and opportunities that demand this paradigm shift, examine how agents can streamline the data lifecycle, and highlight open questions and areas where additional research is needed. We hope this work will inspire lively debate, stimulate further research, motivate collaborative approaches, and facilitate a more autonomous future for data systems.
Sparse Variable Projection in Robotic Perception: Exploiting Separable Structure for Efficient Nonlinear Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Robotic perception often requires solving large nonlinear least-squares (NLS) problems. While sparsity has been well-exploited to scale solvers, a complementary and underexploited structure is \emph{separability} -- where some variables (e.g., visual landmarks) appear linearly in the residuals and, for any estimate of the remaining variables (e.g., poses), have a closed-form solution. Variable projection (VarPro) methods are a family of techniques that exploit this structure by analytically eliminating the linear variables and presenting a reduced problem in the remaining variables that has favorable properties. However, VarPro has seen limited use in robotic perception; a major challenge arises from gauge symmetries (e.g., cost invariance to global shifts and rotations), which are common in perception and induce specific computational challenges in standard VarPro approaches. We present a VarPro scheme designed for problems with gauge symmetries that jointly exploits separability and sparsity. Our method can be applied as a one-time preprocessing step to construct a \emph{matrix-free Schur complement operator}. This operator allows efficient evaluation of costs, gradients, and Hessian-vector products of the reduced problem and readily integrates with standard iterative NLS solvers. We provide precise conditions under which our method applies, and describe extensions when these conditions are only partially met. Across synthetic and real benchmarks in SLAM, SNL, and SfM, our approach achieves up to \textbf{2$\times$--35$\times$ faster runtimes} than state-of-the-art methods while maintaining accuracy. We release an open-source C++ implementation and all datasets from our experiments.
SSplain: Sparse and Smooth Explainer for Retinopathy of Prematurity Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Neural networks are frequently used in medical diagnosis. However, due to their black-box nature, model explainers are used to help clinicians understand better and trust model outputs. This paper introduces an explainer method for classifying Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) from fundus images. Previous methods fail to generate explanations that preserve input image structures such as smoothness and sparsity. We introduce Sparse and Smooth Explainer (SSplain), a method that generates pixel-wise explanations while preserving image structures by enforcing smoothness and sparsity. This results in realistic explanations to enhance the understanding of the given black-box model. To achieve this goal, we define an optimization problem with combinatorial constraints and solve it using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Experimental results show that SSplain outperforms commonly used explainers in terms of both post-hoc accuracy and smoothness analyses. Additionally, SSplain identifies features that are consistent with domain-understandable features that clinicians consider as discriminative factors for ROP. We also show SSplain's generalization by applying it to additional publicly available datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/neu-spiral/SSplain.
Lost in Translation, Found in Embeddings: Sign Language Translation and Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Our aim is to develop a unified model for sign language understanding, that performs sign language translation (SLT) and sign-subtitle alignment (SSA). Together, these two tasks enable the conversion of continuous signing videos into spoken language text and also the temporal alignment of signing with subtitles -- both essential for practical communication, large-scale corpus construction, and educational applications. To achieve this, our approach is built upon three components: (i) a lightweight visual backbone that captures manual and non-manual cues from human keypoints and lip-region images while preserving signer privacy; (ii) a Sliding Perceiver mapping network that aggregates consecutive visual features into word-level embeddings to bridge the vision-text gap; and (iii) a multi-task scalable training strategy that jointly optimises SLT and SSA, reinforcing both linguistic and temporal alignment. To promote cross-linguistic generalisation, we pretrain our model on large-scale sign-text corpora covering British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) from the BOBSL and YouTube-SL-25 datasets. With this multilingual pretraining and strong model design, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the challenging BOBSL (BSL) dataset for both SLT and SSA. Our model also demonstrates robust zero-shot generalisation and finetuned SLT performance on How2Sign (ASL), highlighting the potential of scalable translation across different sign languages.
CapsuleFS A Multi-credential DataCapsule Filesystem
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

CapsuleFS (CFS) is the first filesystem to integrate multi-credential functionality within a POSIX-compliant framework, utilizing DataCapsule as the storage provider. This innovative system is established based on the Global Data Plane in the area of edge computing. Our comprehensive design and implementation of CFS successfully fulfill the objective of providing a multi-credential Common Access API. The architecture of CFS is methodically segmented into three integral components: Firstly, the DataCapsule server, tasked with the storage, dissemination, and replication of DataCapsules on the edge. Secondly, the middleware, a crucial element running in a Trusted Execution Environment responsible for the enforcement and management of write permissions and requests. Finally, the client component, which manifests as a POSIX-compliant filesystem, is adaptable and operational across many architectures. Experimental evaluations of CFS reveal that, while its read and write performances are comparatively modest, it upholds a high degree of functional correctness. This attribute distinctly positions CFS as a viable candidate for application in real-world software development scenarios. The paper also delineates potential future enhancements, aimed at augmenting the practicality of CFS in the landscape of software development.
Unveiling Latent Knowledge in Chemistry Language Models through Sparse Autoencoders
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Since the advent of machine learning, interpretability has remained a persistent challenge, becoming increasingly urgent as generative models support high-stakes applications in drug and material discovery. Recent advances in large language model (LLM) architectures have yielded chemistry language models (CLMs) with impressive capabilities in molecular property prediction and molecular generation. However, how these models internally represent chemical knowledge remains poorly understood. In this work, we extend sparse autoencoder techniques to uncover and examine interpretable features within CLMs. Applying our methodology to the Foundation Models for Materials (FM4M) SMI-TED chemistry foundation model, we extract semantically meaningful latent features and analyse their activation patterns across diverse molecular datasets. Our findings reveal that these models encode a rich landscape of chemical concepts. We identify correlations between specific latent features and distinct domains of chemical knowledge, including structural motifs, physicochemical properties, and pharmacological drug classes. Our approach provides a generalisable framework for uncovering latent knowledge in chemistry-focused AI systems. This work has implications for both foundational understanding and practical deployment; with the potential to accelerate computational chemistry research.
Complexity of One-Dimensional ReLU DNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We study the expressivity of one-dimensional (1D) ReLU deep neural networks through the lens of their linear regions. For randomly initialized, fully connected 1D ReLU networks (He scaling with nonzero bias) in the infinite-width limit, we prove that the expected number of linear regions grows as $\sum_{i = 1}^L n_i + \mathop{o}\left(\sum_{i = 1}^L{n_i}\right) + 1$, where $n_\ell$ denotes the number of neurons in the $\ell$-th hidden layer. We also propose a function-adaptive notion of sparsity that compares the expected regions used by the network to the minimal number needed to approximate a target within a fixed tolerance.
Robust Agents in Open-Ended Worlds
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The growing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) in various applications underscores the need for agents that can successfully navigate and adapt to an ever-changing, open-ended world. A key challenge is ensuring these AI agents are robust, excelling not only in familiar settings observed during training but also effectively generalising to previously unseen and varied scenarios. In this thesis, we harness methodologies from open-endedness and multi-agent learning to train and evaluate robust AI agents capable of generalising to novel environments, out-of-distribution inputs, and interactions with other co-player agents. We begin by introducing MiniHack, a sandbox framework for creating diverse environments through procedural content generation. Based on the game of NetHack, MiniHack enables the construction of new tasks for reinforcement learning (RL) agents with a focus on generalisation. We then present Maestro, a novel approach for generating adversarial curricula that progressively enhance the robustness and generality of RL agents in two-player zero-sum games. We further probe robustness in multi-agent domains, utilising quality-diversity methods to systematically identify vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art, pre-trained RL policies within the complex video game football domain, characterised by intertwined cooperative and competitive dynamics. Finally, we extend our exploration of robustness to the domain of LLMs. Here, our focus is on diagnosing and enhancing the robustness of LLMs against adversarial prompts, employing evolutionary search to generate a diverse range of effective inputs that aim to elicit undesirable outputs from an LLM. This work collectively paves the way for future advancements in AI robustness, enabling the development of agents that not only adapt to an ever-evolving world but also thrive in the face of unforeseen challenges and interactions.
Adaptive Matched Filtering for Sensing With Communication Signals in Cluttered Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

This paper investigates the performance of the adaptive matched filtering (AMF) in cluttered environments, particularly when operating with superimposed signals. Since the instantaneous signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio (SCNR) is a random variable dependent on the data payload, using it directly as a design objective poses severe practical challenges, such as prohibitive computational burdens and signaling overhead. To address this, we propose shifting the optimization objective from an instantaneous to a statistical metric, which focuses on maximizing the average SCNR over all possible payloads. Due to its analytical intractability, we leverage tools from random matrix theory (RMT) to derive an asymptotic approximation for the average SCNR, which remains accurate even in moderate-dimensional regimes. A key finding from our theoretical analysis is that, for a fixed modulation basis, the PSK achieves a superior average SCNR compared to QAM and the pure Gaussian constellation. Furthermore, for any given constellation, the OFDM achieves a higher average SCNR than SC and AFDM. Then, we propose two pilot design schemes to enhance system performance: a Data-Payload-Dependent (DPD) scheme and a Data-Payload-Independent (DPI) scheme. The DPD approach maximizes the instantaneous SCNR for each transmission. Conversely, the DPI scheme optimizes the average SCNR, offering a flexible trade-off between sensing performance and implementation complexity. Then, we develop two dedicated optimization algorithms for DPD and DPI schemes. In particular, for the DPD problem, we employ fractional optimization and the KKT conditions to derive a closed-form solution. For the DPI problem, we adopt a manifold optimization approach to handle the inherent rank-one constraint efficiently. Simulation results validate the accuracy of our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Framing Climate Change on YouTube: North-South Divides in Narratives and Public Engagement
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2025
Year: 2025

Climate change debates have gained increasing visibility on social media, with YouTube emerging as one of the most influential platforms for political communication. Reaching billions of users worldwide, it functions both as a news outlet and as a space for public discourse. While existing studies of climate discourse on YouTube often adopt a global perspective, this study examines the platform through the lens of the Global North-South divide. We analyse a dataset of 758 climate-related videos and their comment sections, applying topic modelling and sentiment analysis to identify recurring discursive patterns. Through these patterns, we recognise parallels with respect to debates in international climate negotiations. The findings reveal notable differences. Videos from the Global North and Global South reflect real-world divides, with the North emphasising the need for policies to curb carbon emissions, while the South highlights developmental priorities. A key area of convergence between the regions lies in the shared recognition of the importance of emissions reduction and international agreements. Audience responses, however, diverge more sharply: comment sections under Global North videos are dominated by criticism, conspiracy, and climate fatigue, whereas those under Global South videos are generally more supportive, constructive, and knowledge-oriented. Overall, the study demonstrates how YouTube reflects and reshapes global climate politics, while also revealing the gap between curated narratives and public sentiment. Bridging these divides may contribute to more inclusive and cooperative approaches to climate action.
Embodied Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Manipulation Planning with Embodied World Model
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

World models have emerged as a pivotal component in robot manipulation planning, enabling agents to predict future environmental states and reason about the consequences of actions before execution. While video-generation models are increasingly adopted, they often lack rigorous physical grounding, leading to hallucinations and a failure to maintain consistency in long-horizon physical constraints. To address these limitations, we propose Embodied Tree of Thoughts (EToT), a novel Real2Sim2Real planning framework that leverages a physics-based interactive digital twin as an embodied world model. EToT formulates manipulation planning as a tree search expanded through two synergistic mechanisms: (1) Priori Branching, which generates diverse candidate execution paths based on semantic and spatial analysis; and (2) Reflective Branching, which utilizes VLMs to diagnose execution failures within the simulator and iteratively refine the planning tree with corrective actions. By grounding high-level reasoning in a physics simulator, our framework ensures that generated plans adhere to rigid-body dynamics and collision constraints. We validate EToT on a suite of short- and long-horizon manipulation tasks, where it consistently outperforms baselines by effectively predicting physical dynamics and adapting to potential failures. Website at https://embodied-tree-of-thoughts.github.io .
New VVC profiles targeting Feature Coding for Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Modern video codecs have been extensively optimized to preserve perceptual quality, leveraging models of the human visual system. However, in split inference systems-where intermediate features from neural network are transmitted instead of pixel data-these assumptions no longer apply. Intermediate features are abstract, sparse, and task-specific, making perceptual fidelity irrelevant. In this paper, we investigate the use of Versatile Video Coding (VVC) for compressing such features under the MPEG-AI Feature Coding for Machines (FCM) standard. We perform a tool-level analysis to understand the impact of individual coding components on compression efficiency and downstream vision task accuracy. Based on these insights, we propose three lightweight essential VVC profiles-Fast, Faster, and Fastest. The Fast profile provides 2.96% BD-Rate gain while reducing encoding time by 21.8%. Faster achieves a 1.85% BD-Rate gain with a 51.5% speedup. Fastest reduces encoding time by 95.6% with only a 1.71% loss in BD-Rate.