OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Reward Engineering for Spatial Epidemic Simulations: A Reinforcement Learning Platform for Individual Behavioral Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We present ContagionRL, a Gymnasium-compatible reinforcement learning platform specifically designed for systematic reward engineering in spatial epidemic simulations. Unlike traditional agent-based models that rely on fixed behavioral rules, our platform enables rigorous evaluation of how reward function design affects learned survival strategies across diverse epidemic scenarios. ContagionRL integrates a spatial SIRS+D epidemiological model with configurable environmental parameters, allowing researchers to stress-test reward functions under varying conditions including limited observability, different movement patterns, and heterogeneous population dynamics. We evaluate five distinct reward designs, ranging from sparse survival bonuses to a novel potential field approach, across multiple RL algorithms (PPO, SAC, A2C). Through systematic ablation studies, we identify that directional guidance and explicit adherence incentives are critical components for robust policy learning. Our comprehensive evaluation across varying infection rates, grid sizes, visibility constraints, and movement patterns reveals that reward function choice dramatically impacts agent behavior and survival outcomes. Agents trained with our potential field reward consistently achieve superior performance, learning maximal adherence to non-pharmaceutical interventions while developing sophisticated spatial avoidance strategies. The platform's modular design enables systematic exploration of reward-behavior relationships, addressing a knowledge gap in models of this type where reward engineering has received limited attention. ContagionRL is an effective platform for studying adaptive behavioral responses in epidemic contexts and highlight the importance of reward design, information structure, and environmental predictability in learning.
Extracting Interaction-Aware Monosemantic Concepts in Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

We present a method for extracting \emph{monosemantic} neurons, defined as latent dimensions that align with coherent and interpretable concepts, from user and item embeddings in recommender systems. Our approach employs a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) to reveal semantic structure within pretrained representations. In contrast to work on language models, monosemanticity in recommendation must preserve the interactions between separate user and item embeddings. To achieve this, we introduce a \emph{prediction aware} training objective that backpropagates through a frozen recommender and aligns the learned latent structure with the model's user-item affinity predictions. The resulting neurons capture properties such as genre, popularity, and temporal trends, and support post hoc control operations including targeted filtering and content promotion without modifying the base model. Our method generalizes across different recommendation models and datasets, providing a practical tool for interpretable and controllable personalization. Code and evaluation resources are available at https://github.com/DeltaLabTLV/Monosemanticity4Rec.
Curvature-Aware Safety Restoration In LLMs Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks often compromises safety alignment, even when using parameter-efficient methods like LoRA. In this work, we uncover a notable property: fine-tuned models preserve the geometric structure of their loss landscapes concerning harmful content, regardless of the fine-tuning method employed. This suggests that safety behaviors are not erased but shifted to less influential regions of the parameter space. Building on this insight, we propose a curvature-aware alignment restoration method that leverages influence functions and second-order optimization to selectively increase loss on harmful inputs while preserving task performance. By navigating the shared geometry between base and fine-tuned models, our method discourages unsafe outputs while preserving task-relevant performance, avoiding full reversion and enabling precise, low-impact updates. Extensive evaluations across multiple model families and adversarial settings show that our approach efficiently reduces harmful responses while maintaining or even improving utility and few-shot learning performance.
IE-Critic-R1: Advancing the Explanatory Measurement of Text-Driven Image Editing for Human Perception Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in text-driven image editing have been significant, yet the task of accurately evaluating these edited images continues to pose a considerable challenge. Different from the assessment of text-driven image generation, text-driven image editing is characterized by simultaneously conditioning on both text and a source image. The edited images often retain an intrinsic connection to the original image, which dynamically change with the semantics of the text. However, previous methods tend to solely focus on text-image alignment or have not well aligned with human perception. In this work, we introduce the Text-driven Image Editing Benchmark suite (IE-Bench) to enhance the assessment of text-driven edited images. IE-Bench includes a database contains diverse source images, various editing prompts and the corresponding edited results from different editing methods, and nearly 4,000 samples with corresponding Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) provided by 15 human subjects. Furthermore, we introduce IE-Critic-R1, which, benefiting from Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), provides more comprehensive and explainable quality assessment for text-driven image editing that aligns with human perception. Extensive experiments demonstrate IE-Critic-R1's superior subjective-alignments on the text-driven image editing task compared with previous metrics. Related data and codes are available to the public.
VK-Det: Visual Knowledge Guided Prototype Learning for Open-Vocabulary Aerial Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

To identify objects beyond predefined categories, open-vocabulary aerial object detection (OVAD) leverages the zero-shot capabilities of visual-language models (VLMs) to generalize from base to novel categories. Existing approaches typically utilize self-learning mechanisms with weak text supervision to generate region-level pseudo-labels to align detectors with VLMs semantic spaces. However, text dependence induces semantic bias, restricting open-vocabulary expansion to text-specified concepts. We propose $\textbf{VK-Det}$, a $\textbf{V}$isual $\textbf{K}$nowledge-guided open-vocabulary object $\textbf{Det}$ection framework $\textit{without}$ extra supervision. First, we discover and leverage vision encoder's inherent informative region perception to attain fine-grained localization and adaptive distillation. Second, we introduce a novel prototype-aware pseudo-labeling strategy. It models inter-class decision boundaries through feature clustering and maps detection regions to latent categories via prototype matching. This enhances attention to novel objects while compensating for missing supervision. Extensive experiments show state-of-the-art performance, achieving 30.1 $\mathrm{mAP}^{N}$ on DIOR and 23.3 $\mathrm{mAP}^{N}$ on DOTA, outperforming even extra supervised methods.
Diffusion-based Surrogate Model for Time-varying Underwater Acoustic Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

Accurate modeling of time-varying underwater acoustic channels is essential for the design, evaluation, and deployment of reliable underwater communication systems. Conventional physics models require detailed environmental knowledge, while stochastic replay methods are constrained by the limited diversity of measured channels and often fail to generalize to unseen scenarios, reducing their practical applicability. To address these challenges, we propose StableUASim, a pre-trained conditional latent diffusion surrogate model that captures the stochastic dynamics of underwater acoustic communication channels. Leveraging generative modeling, StableUASim produces diverse and statistically realistic channel realizations, while supporting conditional generation from specific measurement samples. Pre-training enables rapid adaptation to new environments using minimal additional data, and the autoencoder latent representation facilitates efficient channel analysis and compression. Experimental results demonstrate that StableUASim accurately reproduces key channel characteristics and communication performance, providing a scalable, data-efficient, and physically consistent surrogate model for both system design and machine learning-driven underwater applications.
Less Is More: An Explainable AI Framework for Lightweight Malaria Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Background and Objective: Deep learning models have high computational needs and lack interpretability but are often the first choice for medical image classification tasks. This study addresses whether complex neural networks are essential for the simple binary classification task of malaria. We introduce the Extracted Morphological Feature Engineered (EMFE) pipeline, a transparent, reproducible, and low compute machine learning approach tailored explicitly for simple cell morphology, designed to achieve deep learning performance levels on a simple CPU only setup with the practical aim of real world deployment. Methods: The study used the NIH Malaria Cell Images dataset, with two features extracted from each cell image: the number of non background pixels and the number of holes within the cell. Logistic Regression and Random Forest were compared against ResNet18, DenseNet121, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNet across accuracy, model size, and CPU inference time. An ensemble model was created by combining Logistic Regression and Random Forests to achieve higher accuracy while retaining efficiency. Results: The single variable Logistic Regression model achieved a test accuracy of 94.80 percent with a file size of 1.2 kB and negligible inference latency (2.3 ms). The two stage ensemble improved accuracy to 97.15 percent. In contrast, the deep learning methods require 13.6 MB to 44.7 MB of storage and show significantly higher inference times (68 ms). Conclusion: This study shows that a compact feature engineering approach can produce clinically meaningful classification performance while offering gains in transparency, reproducibility, speed, and deployment feasibility. The proposed pipeline demonstrates that simple interpretable features paired with lightweight models can serve as a practical diagnostic solution for environments with limited computational resources.
Continually Evolving Skill Knowledge in Vision Language Action Model
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Developing general robot intelligence in open environments requires continual skill learning. Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage massive pretraining data to support diverse manipulation tasks, but they still depend heavily on task-specific fine-tuning, revealing a lack of continual learning capability. Existing continual learning methods are also resource-intensive to scale to VLA models. We propose Stellar VLA, a knowledge-driven continual learning framework with two variants: T-Stellar, modeling task-centric knowledge space, and TS-Stellar, capturing hierarchical task-skill structure. Stellar VLA enables self-supervised knowledge evolution through joint learning of task latent representation and the knowledge space, reducing annotation needs. Knowledge-guided expert routing provide task specialization without extra network parameters, lowering training overhead. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world tasks show over 50 percentage average improvement in final success rates relative to baselines. TS-Stellar further excels in complex action inference, and in-depth analyses verify effective knowledge retention and discovery. Our code will be released soon.
A Unified Multi-Dynamics Framework for Perception-Oriented Modeling in Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Tendon-driven continuum robots offer intrinsically safe and contact-rich interactions owing to their kinematic redundancy and structural compliance. However, their perception often depends on external sensors, which increase hardware complexity and limit scalability. This work introduces a unified multi-dynamics modeling framework for tendon-driven continuum robotic systems, exemplified by a spiral-inspired robot named Spirob. The framework integrates motor electrical dynamics, motor-winch dynamics, and continuum robot dynamics into a coherent system model. Within this framework, motor signals such as current and angular displacement are modeled to expose the electromechanical signatures of external interactions, enabling perception grounded in intrinsic dynamics. The model captures and validates key physical behaviors of the real system, including actuation hysteresis and self-contact at motion limits. Building on this foundation, the framework is applied to environmental interaction: first for passive contact detection, verified experimentally against simulation data; then for active contact sensing, where control and perception strategies from simulation are successfully applied to the real robot; and finally for object size estimation, where a policy learned in simulation is directly deployed on hardware. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework provides a physically grounded way to interpret interaction signatures from intrinsic motor signals in tendon-driven continuum robots.
Versatile Recompression-Aware Perceptual Image Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Perceptual image super-resolution (SR) methods restore degraded images and produce sharp outputs. In practice, those outputs are usually recompressed for storage and transmission. Ignoring recompression is suboptimal as the downstream codec might add additional artifacts to restored images. However, jointly optimizing SR and recompression is challenging, as the codecs are not differentiable and vary in configuration. In this paper, we present Versatile Recompression-Aware Perceptual Super-Resolution (VRPSR), which makes existing perceptual SR aware of versatile compression. First, we formulate compression as conditional text-to-image generation and utilize a pre-trained diffusion model to build a generalizable codec simulator. Next, we propose a set of training techniques tailored for perceptual SR, including optimizing the simulator using perceptual targets and adopting slightly compressed images as the training target. Empirically, our VRPSR saves more than 10\% bitrate based on Real-ESRGAN and S3Diff under H.264/H.265/H.266 compression. Besides, our VRPSR facilitates joint optimization of the SR and post-processing model after recompression.
Average Secrecy Capacity Maximization of Rotatable Antenna-Assisted Secure Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

A rotatable antenna, which is able to dynamically adjust its deflection angle, is promising to achieve better physical layer security performance for wireless communications. In this paper, considering practical scenarios with non-real-time rotatable antenna adjustment, we investigate the average secrecy rate maximization problem of a rotatable antenna-assisted secure communication system. We theoretically prove that the objective function of the average secrecy rate maximization problem is quasi-concave with respect to an adjustment factor of the rotatable antenna. Under this condition, the optimal solution can be found by the bisection search. Furthermore, we derive the closed-form optimal deflection angle for the secrecy capacity maximization problem, considering the existence of only line-of-sight components of wireless channels. This solution serves as a near optimal solution to the average secrecy rate maximization problem. Based on the closed-form near optimal solution, we obtain the system secrecy outage probability at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). It is shown through simulation results that the near optimal solution achieves almost the same average secrecy capacity as the optimal solution. It is also found that at high SNR, the theoretical secrecy outage probabilities match the simulation ones.
ASTRA: Agentic Steerability and Risk Assessment Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Securing AI agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) represents one of the most critical challenges in AI security today. Unlike traditional software, AI agents leverage LLMs as their "brain" to autonomously perform actions via connected tools. This capability introduces significant risks that go far beyond those of harmful text presented in a chatbot that was the main application of LLMs. A compromised AI agent can deliberately abuse powerful tools to perform malicious actions, in many cases irreversible, and limited solely by the guardrails on the tools themselves and the LLM ability to enforce them. This paper presents ASTRA, a first-of-its-kind framework designed to evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs in supporting the creation of secure agents that enforce custom guardrails defined at the system-prompt level (e.g., "Do not send an email out of the company domain," or "Never extend the robotic arm in more than 2 meters"). Our holistic framework simulates 10 diverse autonomous agents varying between a coding assistant and a delivery drone equipped with 37 unique tools. We test these agents against a suite of novel attacks developed specifically for agentic threats, inspired by the OWASP Top 10 but adapted to challenge the ability of the LLM for policy enforcement during multi-turn planning and execution of strict tool activation. By evaluating 13 open-source, tool-calling LLMs, we uncovered surprising and significant differences in their ability to remain secure and keep operating within their boundaries. The purpose of this work is to provide the community with a robust and unified methodology to build and validate better LLMs, ultimately pushing for more secure and reliable agentic AI systems.
PromptMoE: Generalizable Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection via Visually-Guided Prompt Mixtures
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) aims to identify and localize anomalous regions in images of unseen object classes. While recent methods based on vision-language models like CLIP show promise, their performance is constrained by existing prompt engineering strategies. Current approaches, whether relying on single fixed, learnable, or dense dynamic prompts, suffer from a representational bottleneck and are prone to overfitting on auxiliary data, failing to generalize to the complexity and diversity of unseen anomalies. To overcome these limitations, we propose $\mathtt{PromptMoE}$. Our core insight is that robust ZSAD requires a compositional approach to prompt learning. Instead of learning monolithic prompts, $\mathtt{PromptMoE}$ learns a pool of expert prompts, which serve as a basis set of composable semantic primitives, and a visually-guided Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism to dynamically combine them for each instance. Our framework materializes this concept through a Visually-Guided Mixture of Prompt (VGMoP) that employs an image-gated sparse MoE to aggregate diverse normal and abnormal expert state prompts, generating semantically rich textual representations with strong generalization. Extensive experiments across 15 datasets in industrial and medical domains demonstrate the effectiveness and state-of-the-art performance of $\mathtt{PromptMoE}$.
MVS-TTA: Test-Time Adaptation for Multi-View Stereo via Meta-Auxiliary Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Recent learning-based multi-view stereo (MVS) methods are data-driven and have achieved remarkable progress due to large-scale training data and advanced architectures. However, their generalization remains sub-optimal due to fixed model parameters trained on limited training data distributions. In contrast, optimization-based methods enable scene-specific adaptation but lack scalability and require costly per-scene optimization. In this paper, we propose MVS-TTA, an efficient test-time adaptation (TTA) framework that enhances the adaptability of learning-based MVS methods by bridging these two paradigms. Specifically, MVS-TTA employs a self-supervised, cross-view consistency loss as an auxiliary task to guide inference-time adaptation. We introduce a meta-auxiliary learning strategy to train the model to benefit from auxiliary-task-based updates explicitly. Our framework is model-agnostic and can be applied to a wide range of MVS methods with minimal architectural changes. Extensive experiments on standard datasets (DTU, BlendedMVS) and a challenging cross-dataset generalization setting demonstrate that MVS-TTA consistently improves performance, even when applied to state-of-the-art MVS models. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to integrate optimization-based test-time adaptation into learning-based MVS using meta-learning. The code will be available at https://github.com/mart87987-svg/MVS-TTA.
SFHand: A Streaming Framework for Language-guided 3D Hand Forecasting and Embodied Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Real-time 3D hand forecasting is a critical component for fluid human-computer interaction in applications like AR and assistive robotics. However, existing methods are ill-suited for these scenarios, as they typically require offline access to accumulated video sequences and cannot incorporate language guidance that conveys task intent. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SFHand, the first streaming framework for language-guided 3D hand forecasting. SFHand autoregressively predicts a comprehensive set of future 3D hand states, including hand type, 2D bounding box, 3D pose, and trajectory, from a continuous stream of video and language instructions. Our framework combines a streaming autoregressive architecture with an ROI-enhanced memory layer, capturing temporal context while focusing on salient hand-centric regions. To enable this research, we also introduce EgoHaFL, the first large-scale dataset featuring synchronized 3D hand poses and language instructions. We demonstrate that SFHand achieves new state-of-the-art results in 3D hand forecasting, outperforming prior work by a significant margin of up to 35.8%. Furthermore, we show the practical utility of our learned representations by transferring them to downstream embodied manipulation tasks, improving task success rates by up to 13.4% on multiple benchmarks. Dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ut-vision/EgoHaFL, project page: https://github.com/ut-vision/SFHand.