OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Reinforcement Learning for Accelerated Aerodynamic Shape Optimisation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) based adaptive optimization algorithm for aerodynamic shape optimization focused on dimensionality reduction. The form in which RL is applied here is that of a surrogate-based, actor-critic policy evaluation MCMC approach allowing for temporal 'freezing' of some of the parameters to be optimized. The goals are to minimize computational effort, and to use the observed optimization results for interpretation of the discovered extrema in terms of their role in achieving the desired flow-field. By a sequence of local optimized parameter changes around intermediate CFD simulations acting as ground truth, it is possible to speed up the global optimization if (a) the local neighbourhoods of the parameters in which the changed parameters must reside are sufficiently large to compete with the grid-sized steps and its large number of simulations, and (b) the estimates of the rewards and costs on these neighbourhoods necessary for a good step-wise parameter adaption are sufficiently accurate. We give an example of a simple fluid-dynamical problem on which the method allows interpretation in the sense of a feature importance scoring.
Causal Mechanism Estimation in Multi-Sensor Systems Across Multiple Domains
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

To gain deeper insights into a complex sensor system through the lens of causality, we present common and individual causal mechanism estimation (CICME), a novel three-step approach to inferring causal mechanisms from heterogeneous data collected across multiple domains. By leveraging the principle of Causal Transfer Learning (CTL), CICME is able to reliably detect domain-invariant causal mechanisms when provided with sufficient samples. The identified common causal mechanisms are further used to guide the estimation of the remaining causal mechanisms in each domain individually. The performance of CICME is evaluated on linear Gaussian models under scenarios inspired from a manufacturing process. Building upon existing continuous optimization-based causal discovery methods, we show that CICME leverages the benefits of applying causal discovery on the pooled data and repeatedly on data from individual domains, and it even outperforms both baseline methods under certain scenarios.
CHAMP: A Configurable, Hot-Swappable Edge Architecture for Adaptive Biometric Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

What if you could piece together your own custom biometrics and AI analysis system, a bit like LEGO blocks? We aim to bring that technology to field operators in the field who require flexible, high-performance edge AI system that can be adapted on a moment's notice. This paper introduces CHAMP (Configurable Hot-swappable Architecture for Machine Perception), a modular edge computing platform that allows operators to dynamically swap in specialized AI "capability cartridges" for tasks like face recognition, object tracking, and document analysis. CHAMP leverages low-power FPGA-based accelerators on a high-throughput bus, orchestrated by a custom operating system (VDiSK) to enable plug-and-play AI pipelines and cryptographically secured biometric datasets. In this paper we describe the CHAMP design, including its modular scaling with multiple accelerators and the VDiSK operating system for runtime reconfiguration, along with its cryptographic capabilities to keep data stored on modules safe and private. Experiments demonstrate near-linear throughput scaling from 1 to 5 neural compute accelerators, highlighting both the performance gains and saturation limits of the USB3-based bus. Finally, we discuss applications of CHAMP in field biometrics, surveillance, and disaster response, and outline future improvements in bus protocols, cartridge capabilities, and system software.
Lumina-mGPT 2.0: Stand-Alone AutoRegressive Image Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

We present Lumina-mGPT 2.0, a stand-alone, decoder-only autoregressive model that revisits and revitalizes the autoregressive paradigm for high-quality image generation and beyond. Unlike existing approaches that rely on pretrained components or hybrid architectures, Lumina-mGPT 2.0 is trained entirely from scratch, enabling unrestricted architectural design and licensing freedom. It achieves generation quality on par with state-of-the-art diffusion models such as DALL-E 3 and SANA, while preserving the inherent flexibility and compositionality of autoregressive modeling. Our unified tokenization scheme allows the model to seamlessly handle a wide spectrum of tasks-including subject-driven generation, image editing, controllable synthesis, and dense prediction-within a single generative framework. To further boost usability, we incorporate efficient decoding strategies like inference-time scaling and speculative Jacobi sampling to improve quality and speed, respectively. Extensive evaluations on standard text-to-image benchmarks (e.g., GenEval, DPG) demonstrate that Lumina-mGPT 2.0 not only matches but in some cases surpasses diffusion-based models. Moreover, we confirm its multi-task capabilities on the Graph200K benchmark, with the native Lumina-mGPT 2.0 performing exceptionally well. These results position Lumina-mGPT 2.0 as a strong, flexible foundation model for unified multimodal generation. We have released our training details, code, and models at https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/Lumina-mGPT-2.0.
Speaker Disentanglement of Speech Pre-trained Model Based on Interpretability
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

Self-supervised speech models learn representations that capture both content and speaker information. Yet this entanglement creates problems: content tasks suffer from speaker bias, and privacy concerns arise when speaker identity leaks through supposedly anonymized representations. We present two contributions to address these challenges. First, we develop InterpTRQE-SptME (Timbre Residual Quantitative Evaluation Benchmark of Speech pre-training Models Encoding via Interpretability), a benchmark that directly measures residual speaker information in content embeddings using SHAP-based interpretability analysis. Unlike existing indirect metrics, our approach quantifies the exact proportion of speaker information remaining after disentanglement. Second, we propose InterpTF-SptME, which uses these interpretability insights to filter speaker information from embeddings. Testing on VCTK with seven models including HuBERT, WavLM, and ContentVec, we find that SHAP Noise filtering reduces speaker residuals from 18.05% to nearly zero while maintaining recognition accuracy (CTC loss increase under 1%). The method is model-agnostic and requires no retraining.
Federated Learning for Large-Scale Cloud Robotic Manipulation: Opportunities and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm, where the collaborative training of a model involves dynamic participation of devices to achieve broad objectives. In contrast, classical machine learning (ML) typically requires data to be located on-premises for training, whereas FL leverages numerous user devices to train a shared global model without the need to share private data. Current robotic manipulation tasks are constrained by the individual capabilities and speed of robots due to limited low-latency computing resources. Consequently, the concept of cloud robotics has emerged, allowing robotic applications to harness the flexibility and reliability of computing resources, effectively alleviating their computational demands across the cloud-edge continuum. Undoubtedly, within this distributed computing context, as exemplified in cloud robotic manipulation scenarios, FL offers manifold advantages while also presenting several challenges and opportunities. In this paper, we present fundamental concepts of FL and their connection to cloud robotic manipulation. Additionally, we envision the opportunities and challenges associated with realizing efficient and reliable cloud robotic manipulation at scale through FL, where researchers adopt to design and verify FL models in either centralized or decentralized settings.
PowerTrip: Exploiting Federated Heterogeneous Datacenter Power for Distributed ML Training
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

The exponential growth of large-scale AI models has led to computational and power demands that can exceed the capacity of a single data center. This is due to the limited power supplied by regional grids that leads to limited regional computational power. Consequently, distributing training workloads across geographically distributed sites has become essential. However, this approach introduces a significant challenge in the form of communication overhead, creating a fundamental trade-off between the performance gains from accessing greater aggregate power and the performance losses from increased network latency. Although prior work has focused on reducing communication volume or using heuristics for distribution, these methods assume constant homogeneous power supplies and ignore the challenge of heterogeneous power availability between sites. To address the challenge of training large models in power-constrained, geo-distributed environments, we introduce PowerTrip, a system that dynamically selects a subset of sites during runtime to optimize the power-communication trade-off. Specifically, PowerTrip selects sites based on a power-to-cost heuristic, prioritizing those with high power availability and low network latency. PowerTrip employs a dynamic greedy approach and uses the marginal gain in training efficiency, i.e., accuracy improvement per unit of time, to optimize for the number of sites where the performance penalty from network overhead negates the benefit of adding more computational power. Our evaluation, which uses real-world Google power traces to model realistic power capacity constraints, demonstrates that PowerTrip can reduce time-to-accuracy by up to 50% compared to existing baseline policies.
One Whisper to Grade Them All
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

We present an efficient end-to-end approach for holistic Automatic Speaking Assessment (ASA) of multi-part second-language tests, developed for the 2025 Speak & Improve Challenge. Our system's main novelty is the ability to process all four spoken responses with a single Whisper-small encoder, combine all information via a lightweight aggregator, and predict the final score. This architecture removes the need for transcription and per-part models, cuts inference time, and makes ASA practical for large-scale Computer-Assisted Language Learning systems. Our system achieved a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.384, outperforming the text-based baseline (0.44) while using at most 168M parameters (about 70% of Whisper-small). Furthermore, we propose a data sampling strategy, allowing the model to train on only 44.8% of the speakers in the corpus and still reach 0.383 RMSE, demonstrating improved performance on imbalanced classes and strong data efficiency.
Automated Brake Onset Detection in Naturalistic Driving Data
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Response timing measures play a crucial role in the assessment of automated driving systems (ADS) in collision avoidance scenarios, including but not limited to establishing human benchmarks and comparing ADS to human driver response performance. For example, measuring the response time (of a human driver or ADS) to a conflict requires the determination of a stimulus onset and a response onset. In existing studies, response onset relies on manual annotation or vehicle control signals such as accelerator and brake pedal movements. These methods are not applicable when analyzing large scale data where vehicle control signals are not available. This holds in particular for the rapidly expanding sets of ADS log data where the behavior of surrounding road users is observed via onboard sensors. To advance evaluation techniques for ADS and enable measuring response timing when vehicle control signals are not available, we developed a simple and efficient algorithm, based on a piecewise linear acceleration model, to automatically estimate brake onset that can be applied to any type of driving data that includes vehicle longitudinal time series data. We also proposed a manual annotation method to identify brake onset and used it as ground truth for validation. R^2 was used as a confidence metric to measure the accuracy of the algorithm, and its classification performance was analyzed using naturalistic collision avoidance data of both ADS and humans, where our method was validated against human manual annotation. Although our algorithm is subject to certain limitations, it is efficient, generalizable, applicable to any road user and scenario types, and is highly configurable.
Deep Learning-based Position-domain Channel Extrapolation for Cell-Free Massive MIMO
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

To reduce channel acquisition overhead, spatial, time, and frequency-domain channel extrapolation techniques have been widely studied. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based Position-domain Channel Extrapolation framework (named PCEnet) for cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The user's position, which contains significant channel characteristic information, can greatly enhance the efficiency of channel acquisition. In cell-free massive MIMO, while the propagation environments between different base stations and a specific user vary and their respective channels are uncorrelated, the user's position remains constant and unique across all channels. Building on this, the proposed PCEnet framework leverages the position as a bridge between channels to establish a mapping between the characteristics of different channels, thereby using one acquired channel to assist in the estimation and feedback of others. Specifically, this approach first utilizes neural networks (NNs) to infer the user's position from the obtained channel. {The estimated position, shared among BSs through a central processing unit (CPU)}, is then fed into an NN to design pilot symbols and concatenated with the feedback information to the channel reconstruction NN to reconstruct other channels, thereby significantly enhancing channel acquisition performance. Additionally, we propose a simplified strategy where only the estimated position is used in the reconstruction process without modifying the pilot design, thereby reducing latency. Furthermore, we introduce a position label-free approach that infers the relative user position instead of the absolute position, eliminating the need for ground truth position labels during the localization NN training. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed PCEnet framework reduces pilot and feedback overheads by up to 50%.
Failure Prediction in Conversational Recommendation Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

In a Conversational Image Recommendation task, users can provide natural language feedback on a recommended image item, which leads to an improved recommendation in the next turn. While typical instantiations of this task assume that the user's target item will (eventually) be returned, this might often not be true, for example, the item the user seeks is not within the item catalogue. Failing to return a user's desired item can lead to user frustration, as the user needs to interact with the system for an increased number of turns. To mitigate this issue, in this paper, we introduce the task of Supervised Conversational Performance Prediction, inspired by Query Performance Prediction (QPP) for predicting effectiveness in response to a search engine query. In this regard, we propose predictors for conversational performance that detect conversation failures using multi-turn semantic information contained in the embedded representations of retrieved image items. Specifically, our AutoEncoder-based predictor learns a compressed representation of top-retrieved items of the train turns and uses the classification labels to predict the evaluation turn. Our evaluation scenario addressed two recommendation scenarios, by differentiating between system failure, where the system is unable to find the target, and catalogue failure, where the target does not exist in the item catalogue. In our experiments using the Shoes and FashionIQ Dresses datasets, we measure the accuracy of predictors for both system and catalogue failures. Our results demonstrate the promise of our proposed predictors for predicting system failures (existing evaluation scenario), while we detect a considerable decrease in predictive performance in the case of catalogue failure prediction (when inducing a missing item scenario) compared to system failures.
SIFOTL: A Principled, Statistically-Informed Fidelity-Optimization Method for Tabular Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Identifying the factors driving data shifts in tabular datasets is a significant challenge for analysis and decision support systems, especially those focusing on healthcare. Privacy rules restrict data access, and noise from complex processes hinders analysis. To address this challenge, we propose SIFOTL (Statistically-Informed Fidelity-Optimization Method for Tabular Learning) that (i) extracts privacy-compliant data summary statistics, (ii) employs twin XGBoost models to disentangle intervention signals from noise with assistance from LLMs, and (iii) merges XGBoost outputs via a Pareto-weighted decision tree to identify interpretable segments responsible for the shift. Unlike existing analyses which may ignore noise or require full data access for LLM-based analysis, SIFOTL addresses both challenges using only privacy-safe summary statistics. Demonstrating its real-world efficacy, for a MEPS panel dataset mimicking a new Medicare drug subsidy, SIFOTL achieves an F1 score of 0.85, substantially outperforming BigQuery Contribution Analysis (F1=0.46) and statistical tests (F1=0.20) in identifying the segment receiving the subsidy. Furthermore, across 18 diverse EHR datasets generated based on Synthea ABM, SIFOTL sustains F1 scores of 0.86-0.96 without noise and >= 0.75 even with injected observational noise, whereas baseline average F1 scores range from 0.19-0.67 under the same tests. SIFOTL, therefore, provides an interpretable, privacy-conscious workflow that is empirically robust to observational noise.
$k$-Approval Veto: A Spectrum of Voting Rules Balancing Metric Distortion and Minority Protection
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2025
Year: 2025

In the context of single-winner ranked-choice elections between $m$ candidates, we explore the tradeoff between two competing goals in every democratic system: the majority principle (maximizing the social welfare) and the minority principle (safeguarding minority groups from overly bad outcomes).To measure the social welfare, we use the well-established framework of metric distortion subject to various objectives: utilitarian (i.e., total cost), $α$-percentile (e.g., median cost for $α= 1/2$), and egalitarian (i.e., max cost). To measure the protection of minorities, we introduce the $\ell$-mutual minority criterion, which requires that if a sufficiently large (parametrized by $\ell$) coalition $T$ of voters ranks all candidates in $S$ lower than all other candidates, then none of the candidates in $S$ should win. The highest $\ell$ for which the criterion is satisfied provides a well-defined measure of mutual minority protection (ranging from 1 to $m$). Our main contribution is the analysis of a recently proposed class of voting rules called $k$-Approval Veto, offering a comprehensive range of trade-offs between the two principles. This class spans between Plurality Veto (for $k=1$) - a simple voting rule achieving optimal metric distortion - and Vote By Veto (for $k=m$) which picks a candidate from the proportional veto core. We show that $k$-Approval Veto has minority protection at least $k$, and thus, it accommodates any desired level of minority protection. However, this comes at the price of lower social welfare. For the utilitarian objective, the metric distortion increases linearly in $k$. For the $α$-percentile objective, the metric distortion is the optimal value of 5 for $α\ge k/(k+1)$ and unbounded for $α< k/(k+1)$. For the egalitarian objective, the metric distortion is the optimal value of 3 for all values of $k$.
Dual Charging for Half-Integral TSP
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

We show that the max entropy algorithm is a randomized 1.49776 approximation for half-integral TSP, improving upon the previous known bound of 1.49993 from Karlin et al. This also improves upon the best-known approximation for half-integral TSP due to Gupta et al. Our improvement results from using the dual, instead of the primal, to analyze the expected cost of the matching. We believe this method of analysis could lead to a simpler proof that max entropy is a better-than-3/2 approximation in the general case. We also give a 1.4671 approximation for half integral LP solutions with no proper minimum cuts and an even number of vertices, improving upon the bound of Haddadan and Newman of 1.476. We then extend the analysis to the case when there are an odd number of vertices $n$ at the cost of an additional $O(1/n)$ factor.
GRR-CoCa: Leveraging LLM Mechanisms in Multimodal Model Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

State-of-the-art (SOTA) image and text generation models are multimodal models that have many similarities to large language models (LLMs). Despite achieving strong performances, leading foundational multimodal model architectures frequently lag behind the architectural sophistication of contemporary LLMs. We propose GRR-CoCa, an improved SOTA Contrastive Captioner (CoCa) model that incorporates Gaussian error gated linear units, root mean squared normalization, and rotary positional embedding into the textual decoders and the vision transformer (ViT) encoder. Each architectural modification has been shown to improve model performance in LLMs, but has yet to be adopted in CoCa. We benchmarked GRR-CoCa against Baseline CoCa, a model with the same modified textual decoders but with CoCa's original ViT encoder. We used standard pretraining and fine-tuning workflows to benchmark the models on contrastive and generative tasks. Our GRR-CoCa significantly outperformed Baseline CoCa on the pretraining dataset and three diverse fine-tuning datasets. Pretraining improvements were 27.25% in contrastive loss, 3.71% in perplexity, and 7.15% in CoCa loss. The average fine-tuning improvements were 13.66% in contrastive loss, 5.18% in perplexity, and 5.55% in CoCa loss. We show that GRR-CoCa's modified architecture improves performance and generalization across vision-language domains.