OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An explainable Recursive Feature Elimination to detect Advanced Persistent Threats using Random Forest classifier
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) play a vital role in modern cybersecurity frameworks by providing a primary defense mechanism against sophisticated threat actors. In this paper, we propose an explainable intrusion detection framework that integrates Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) with Random Forest (RF) to enhance detection of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). By using CICIDS2017 dataset, the approach begins with comprehensive data preprocessing and narrows down the most significant features via RFE. A Random Forest (RF) model was trained on the refined feature set, with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) used to interpret the contribution of each selected feature. Our experiment demonstrates that the explainable RF-RFE achieved a detection accuracy of 99.9%, reducing false positive and computational cost in comparison to traditional classifiers. The findings underscore the effectiveness of integrating explainable AI and feature selection to develop a robust, transparent, and deployable IDS solution.
Why Open Small AI Models Matter for Interactive Art
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

This position paper argues for the importance of open small AI models in creative independence for interactive art practices. Deployable locally, these models offer artists vital control over infrastructure and code, unlike dominant large, closed-source corporate systems. Such centralized platforms function as opaque black boxes, imposing severe limitations on interactive artworks, including restrictive content filters, preservation issues, and technical challenges such as increased latency and limited interfaces. In contrast, small AI models empower creators with more autonomy, control, and sustainability for these artistic processes. They enable the ability to use a model as long as they want, create their own custom model, either by making code changes to integrate new interfaces, or via new datasets by re-training or fine-tuning the model. This fosters technological self-determination, offering greater ownership and reducing reliance on corporate AI ill-suited for interactive art's demands. Critically, this approach empowers the artist and supports long-term preservation and exhibition of artworks with AI components. This paper explores the practical applications and implications of using open small AI models in interactive art, contrasting them with closed-source alternatives.
MoFa: A Unified Performance Modeling Framework for LLM Pretraining
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

The exponential growth in LLM scales, with parameters soaring from billions to trillions, has necessitated distributed pretraining across large clusters comprising thousands to tens of thousands of devices. While hybrid parallelization strategies enable such pretraining, the vast combinatorial strategy space introduces significant optimization challenges. Traditional manual tuning methods incur prohibitive trial-and-error costs, and existing performance modeling approaches exhibit critical limitations: they fail to comprehensively account for prevalent optimization features and ignore the substantial overhead imposed by essential fault tolerance mechanisms like checkpoint recovery in long-duration pretraining. To address these gaps, we propose MoFa, a novel pretraining performance modeling framework that unifies multi-dimensional optimization features and fault tolerance. MoFa incorporates an enhanced cost model to accurately capture the effects of key optimizations and integrates a fault tolerance model based on historical cluster reliability data. Besides, a MoFa-based tuning system is developed to explore optimal pretraining performance and potential bottlenecks in various scenarios. Extensive modeling evaluations demonstrate that MoFa can achieve high prediction accuracy across various scenarios. In addition, through comprehensive tuning experiments, our framework systematically reveals the key factors influencing pretraining performance under different configurations, which provides solid a priori guidance for LLM pretraining system design and deployment.
Hardness of Dynamic Tree Edit Distance and Friends
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2025
Year: 2025

String Edit Distance is a more-than-classical problem whose behavior in the dynamic setting, where the strings are updated over time, is well studied. A single-character substitution, insertion, or deletion can be processed in time $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n w)$ when operation costs are positive integers bounded by $w$ [Charalampopoulos, Kociumaka, Mozes, CPM 2020][Gorbachev, Kociumaka, STOC 2025]. If the weights are further uniform (insertions and deletions have equal cost), also an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n \sqrt{n})$-update time algorithm exists [Charalampopoulos, Kociumaka, Mozes, CPM 2020]. This is a substantial improvement over the static $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ algorithm when $w \ll n$ or when we are dealing with uniform weights. In contrast, for inherently related problems such as Tree Edit Distance, Dyck Edit Distance, and RNA Folding, it has remained unknown whether it is possible to devise dynamic algorithms with an advantage over the static algorithm. In this paper, we resolve this question by showing that (weighted) Tree Edit Distance, Dyck Edit Distance, and RNA Folding admit no dynamic speedup: under well-known fine-grained assumptions we show that the best possible algorithm recomputes the solution from scratch after each update. Furthermore, we prove a quadratic per-update lower bound for unweighted Tree Edit Distance under the $k$-Clique Conjecture. This provides the first separation between dynamic unweighted String Edit Distance and unweighted Tree Edit Distance, problems whose relative difficulty in the static setting is still open.
Lit Silicon: A Case Where Thermal Imbalance Couples Concurrent Execution in Multiple GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

GPU systems are increasingly powering modern datacenters at scale. Despite being highly performant, GPU systems suffer from performance variation at the node and cluster levels. Such performance variation significantly impacts both high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads, such as cutting-edge large language models (LLMs). We analyze the performance of a single-node multi-GPU system running LLM training, and observe that the kernel-level performance variation is highly correlated with concurrent computation communication (C3), a technique to overlap computation and communication across GPUs for performance gains. We then take a further step to reason that thermally induced straggling coupling with C3 impacts performance variation, coined as the Lit Silicon effect. Lit Silicon describes that in a multi-GPU node, thermal imbalance across GPUs introduces node-level straggler GPUs, which in turn slow down the leader GPUs. Lit Silicon leads to node-level performance variation and inefficiency, impacting the entire datacenter from the bottom up. We propose analytical performance and power models for Lit Silicon, to understand the potential system-level gains. We further design simple detection and mitigation techniques to effectively address the Lit Silicon problem, and evaluate three different power management solutions, including power optimization under GPU thermal design power, performance optimization under node-level GPU power capping, and performance optimization under node-level CPU power sloshing. We conduct experiments on two workloads on two AMD InstinctTM MI300X GPU systems under two LLM training frameworks, and observe up to 6% performance and 4% power improvements, potentially saving hundreds of millions of dollars in datacenters. Our solution is almost free lunch and can be effortlessly adopted in datacenters as a new node-level power management layer.
Quantitative and Qualitative Comparison of Generative Models for Subject-Specific Gaze Synthesis: Diffusion vs GAN
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in deep learning demonstrate the ability to generate synthetic gaze data. However, most approaches have primarily focused on generating data from random noise distributions or global, predefined latent embeddings, whereas individualized gaze sequence generation has been less explored. To address this gap, we revisit two recent approaches based on diffusion and generative adversarial networks (GANs) and introduce modifications that make both models explicitly subject-aware while improving accuracy and effectiveness. For the diffusion-based approach, we utilize compact user embeddings that emphasize per-subject traits. Moreover, for the GAN-based approach, we propose a subject-specific synthesis module that conditioned the generator to retain better idiosyncratic gaze information. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive assessment of these modified approaches utilizing standard eye-tracking signal quality metrics, including spatial accuracy and precision. This work helps define synthetic signal quality, realism, and subject specificity, thereby contributing to the potential development of gaze-based applications.
Incremental Generation is Necessary and Sufficient for Universality in Flow-Based Modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Incremental flow-based denoising models have reshaped generative modelling, but their empirical advantage still lacks a rigorous approximation-theoretic foundation. We show that incremental generation is necessary and sufficient for universal flow-based generation on the largest natural class of self-maps of $[0,1]^d$ compatible with denoising pipelines, namely the orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of $[0,1]^d$. All our guarantees are uniform on the underlying maps and hence imply approximation both samplewise and in distribution. Using a new topological-dynamical argument, we first prove an impossibility theorem: the class of all single-step autonomous flows, independently of the architecture, width, depth, or Lipschitz activation of the underlying neural network, is meagre and therefore not universal in the space of orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of $[0,1]^d$. By exploiting algebraic properties of autonomous flows, we conversely show that every orientation-preserving Lipschitz homeomorphism on $[0,1]^d$ can be approximated at rate $O(n^{-1/d})$ by a composition of at most $K_d$ such flows, where $K_d$ depends only on the dimension. Under additional smoothness assumptions, the approximation rate can be made dimension-free, and $K_d$ can be chosen uniformly over the class being approximated. Finally, by linearly lifting the domain into one higher dimension, we obtain structured universal approximation results for continuous functions and for probability measures on $[0,1]^d$, the latter realized as pushforwards of empirical measures with vanishing $1$-Wasserstein error.
Harnessing Bounded-Support Evolution Strategies for Policy Refinement
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Improving competent robot policies with on-policy RL is often hampered by noisy, low-signal gradients. We revisit Evolution Strategies (ES) as a policy-gradient proxy and localize exploration with bounded, antithetic triangular perturbations, suitable for policy refinement. We propose Triangular-Distribution ES (TD-ES) which pairs bounded triangular noise with a centered-rank finite-difference estimator to deliver stable, parallelizable, gradient-free updates. In a two-stage pipeline - PPO pretraining followed by TD-ES refinement - this preserves early sample efficiency while enabling robust late-stage gains. Across a suite of robotic manipulation tasks, TD-ES raises success rates by 26.5% relative to PPO and greatly reduces variance, offering a simple, compute-light path to reliable refinement.
Compensating Distribution Drifts in Class-incremental Learning of Pre-trained Vision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances have shown that sequential fine-tuning (SeqFT) of pre-trained vision transformers (ViTs), followed by classifier refinement using approximate distributions of class features, can be an effective strategy for class-incremental learning (CIL). However, this approach is susceptible to distribution drift, caused by the sequential optimization of shared backbone parameters. This results in a mismatch between the distributions of the previously learned classes and that of the updater model, ultimately degrading the effectiveness of classifier performance over time. To address this issue, we introduce a latent space transition operator and propose Sequential Learning with Drift Compensation (SLDC). SLDC aims to align feature distributions across tasks to mitigate the impact of drift. First, we present a linear variant of SLDC, which learns a linear operator by solving a regularized least-squares problem that maps features before and after fine-tuning. Next, we extend this with a weakly nonlinear SLDC variant, which assumes that the ideal transition operator lies between purely linear and fully nonlinear transformations. This is implemented using learnable, weakly nonlinear mappings that balance flexibility and generalization. To further reduce representation drift, we apply knowledge distillation (KD) in both algorithmic variants. Extensive experiments on standard CIL benchmarks demonstrate that SLDC significantly improves the performance of SeqFT. Notably, by combining KD to address representation drift with SLDC to compensate distribution drift, SeqFT achieves performance comparable to joint training across all evaluated datasets. Code: https://github.com/raoxuan98-hash/sldc.git.
A Study on Enhancing the Generalization Ability of Visuomotor Policies via Data Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

The generalization ability of visuomotor policy is crucial, as a good policy should be deployable across diverse scenarios. Some methods can collect large amounts of trajectory augmentation data to train more generalizable imitation learning policies, aimed at handling the random placement of objects on the scene's horizontal plane. However, the data generated by these methods still lack diversity, which limits the generalization ability of the trained policy. To address this, we investigate the performance of policies trained by existing methods across different scene layout factors via automate the data generation for those factors that significantly impact generalization. We have created a more extensively randomized dataset that can be efficiently and automatically generated with only a small amount of human demonstration. The dataset covers five types of manipulators and two types of grippers, incorporating extensive randomization factors such as camera pose, lighting conditions, tabletop texture, and table height across six manipulation tasks. We found that all of these factors influence the generalization ability of the policy. Applying any form of randomization enhances policy generalization, with diverse trajectories particularly effective in bridging visual gap. Notably, we investigated on low-cost manipulator the effect of the scene randomization proposed in this work on enhancing the generalization capability of visuomotor policies for zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.
Leveraging Large Language Models for Identifying Knowledge Components
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Knowledge Components (KCs) are foundational to adaptive learning systems, but their manual identification by domain experts is a significant bottleneck. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue for automating this process, prior research has been limited to small datasets and has been shown to produce superfluous, redundant KC labels. This study addresses these limitations by first scaling a "simulated textbook" LLM prompting strategy (using GPT-4o-mini) to a larger dataset of 646 multiple-choice questions. We found that this initial automated approach performed significantly worse than an expert-designed KC model (RMSE 0.4285 vs. 0.4206) and generated an excessive number of KCs (569 vs. 101). To address the issue of redundancy, we proposed and evaluated a novel method for merging semantically similar KC labels based on their cosine similarity. This merging strategy significantly improved the model's performance; a model using a cosine similarity threshold of 0.8 achieved the best result, reducing the KC count to 428 and improving the RMSE to 0.4259. This demonstrates that while scaled LLM generation alone is insufficient, combining it with a semantic merging technique offers a viable path toward automating and refining KC identification.
EEGAgent: A Unified Framework for Automated EEG Analysis Using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Scalable and generalizable analysis of brain activity is essential for advancing both clinical diagnostics and cognitive research. Electroencephalography (EEG), a non-invasive modality with high temporal resolution, has been widely used for brain states analysis. However, most existing EEG models are usually tailored for individual specific tasks, limiting their utility in realistic scenarios where EEG analysis often involves multi-task and continuous reasoning. In this work, we introduce EEGAgent, a general-purpose framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to schedule and plan multiple tools to automatically complete EEG-related tasks. EEGAgent is capable of performing the key functions: EEG basic information perception, spatiotemporal EEG exploration, EEG event detection, interaction with users, and EEG report generation. To realize these capabilities, we design a toolbox composed of different tools for EEG preprocessing, feature extraction, event detection, etc. These capabilities were evaluated on public datasets, and our EEGAgent can support flexible and interpretable EEG analysis, highlighting its potential for real-world clinical applications.
Autonomous Concept Drift Threshold Determination
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Existing drift detection methods focus on designing sensitive test statistics. They treat the detection threshold as a fixed hyperparameter, set once to balance false alarms and late detections, and applied uniformly across all datasets and over time. However, maintaining model performance is the key objective from the perspective of machine learning, and we observe that model performance is highly sensitive to this threshold. This observation inspires us to investigate whether a dynamic threshold could be provably better. In this paper, we prove that a threshold that adapts over time can outperform any single fixed threshold. The main idea of the proof is that a dynamic strategy, constructed by combining the best threshold from each individual data segment, is guaranteed to outperform any single threshold that apply to all segments. Based on the theorem, we propose a Dynamic Threshold Determination algorithm. It enhances existing drift detection frameworks with a novel comparison phase to inform how the threshold should be adjusted. Extensive experiments on a wide range of synthetic and real-world datasets, including both image and tabular data, validate that our approach substantially enhances the performance of state-of-the-art drift detectors.
Optimizing CPU Cache Utilization in Cloud VMs with Accurate Cache Abstraction
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

This paper shows that cache-based optimizations are often ineffective in cloud virtual machines (VMs) due to limited visibility into and control over provisioned caches. In public clouds, CPU caches can be partitioned or shared among VMs, but a VM is unaware of cache provisioning details. Moreover, a VM cannot influence cache usage via page placement policies, as memory-to-cache mappings are hidden. The paper proposes a novel solution, CacheX, which probes accurate and fine-grained cache abstraction within VMs using eviction sets without requiring hardware or hypervisor support, and showcases the utility of the probed information with two new techniques: LLC contention-aware task scheduling and virtual color-aware page cache management. Our evaluation of CacheX's implementation in x86 Linux kernel demonstrates that it can effectively improve cache utilization for various workloads in public cloud VMs.
MultiTab: A Scalable Foundation for Multitask Learning on Tabular Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Tabular data is the most abundant data type in the world, powering systems in finance, healthcare, e-commerce, and beyond. As tabular datasets grow and span multiple related targets, there is an increasing need to exploit shared task information for improved multitask generalization. Multitask learning (MTL) has emerged as a powerful way to improve generalization and efficiency, yet most existing work focuses narrowly on large-scale recommendation systems, leaving its potential in broader tabular domains largely underexplored. Also, existing MTL approaches for tabular data predominantly rely on multi-layer perceptron-based backbones, which struggle to capture complex feature interactions and often fail to scale when data is abundant, a limitation that transformer architectures have overcome in other domains. Motivated by this, we introduce MultiTab-Net, the first multitask transformer architecture specifically designed for large tabular data. MultiTab-Net employs a novel multitask masked-attention mechanism that dynamically models feature-feature dependencies while mitigating task competition. Through extensive experiments, we show that MultiTab-Net consistently achieves higher multitask gain than existing MTL architectures and single-task transformers across diverse domains including large-scale recommendation data, census-like socioeconomic data, and physics datasets, spanning a wide range of task counts, task types, and feature modalities. In addition, we contribute MultiTab-Bench, a generalized multitask synthetic dataset generator that enables systematic evaluation of multitask dynamics by tuning task count, task correlations, and relative task complexity. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Armanfard-Lab/MultiTab.
Towards Robust Multimodal Learning in the Open World
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The rapid evolution of machine learning has propelled neural networks to unprecedented success across diverse domains. In particular, multimodal learning has emerged as a transformative paradigm, leveraging complementary information from heterogeneous data streams (e.g., text, vision, audio) to advance contextual reasoning and intelligent decision-making. Despite these advancements, current neural network-based models often fall short in open-world environments characterized by inherent unpredictability, where unpredictable environmental composition dynamics, incomplete modality inputs, and spurious distributions relations critically undermine system reliability. While humans naturally adapt to such dynamic, ambiguous scenarios, artificial intelligence systems exhibit stark limitations in robustness, particularly when processing multimodal signals under real-world complexity. This study investigates the fundamental challenge of multimodal learning robustness in open-world settings, aiming to bridge the gap between controlled experimental performance and practical deployment requirements.