OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
VisFocus: Prompt-Guided Vision Encoders for OCR-Free Dense Document Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

In recent years, notable advancements have been made in the domain of visual document understanding, with the prevailing architecture comprising a cascade of vision and language models. The text component can either be extracted explicitly with the use of external OCR models in OCR-based approaches, or alternatively, the vision model can be endowed with reading capabilities in OCR-free approaches. Typically, the queries to the model are input exclusively to the language component, necessitating the visual features to encompass the entire document. In this paper, we present VisFocus, an OCR-free method designed to better exploit the vision encoder's capacity by coupling it directly with the language prompt. To do so, we replace the down-sampling layers with layers that receive the input prompt and allow highlighting relevant parts of the document, while disregarding others. We pair the architecture enhancements with a novel pre-training task, using language masking on a snippet of the document text fed to the visual encoder in place of the prompt, to empower the model with focusing capabilities. Consequently, VisFocus learns to allocate its attention to text patches pertinent to the provided prompt. Our experiments demonstrate that this prompt-guided visual encoding approach significantly improves performance, achieving state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks.
Continuous reasoning for adaptive container image distribution in the cloud-edge continuum
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Cloud-edge computing requires applications to operate across diverse infrastructures, often triggered by cyber-physical events. Containers offer a lightweight deployment option but pulling images from central repositories can cause delays. This article presents a novel declarative approach and open-source prototype for replicating container images across the cloud-edge continuum. Considering resource availability, network QoS, and storage costs, we leverage logic programming to (i) determine optimal initial placements via Answer Set Programming (ASP) and (ii) adapt placements using Prolog-based continuous reasoning. We evaluate our solution through simulations, showcasing how combining ASP and Prolog continuous reasoning can balance cost optimisation and prompt decision-making in placement adaptation at increasing infrastructure sizes.
Is That Rain? Understanding Effects on Visual Odometry Performance for Autonomous UAVs and Efficient DNN-based Rain Classification at the Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

The development of safe and reliable autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles relies on the ability of the system to recognise and adapt to changes in the local environment based on sensor inputs. State-of-the-art local tracking and trajectory planning are typically performed using camera sensor input to the flight control algorithm, but the extent to which environmental disturbances like rain affect the performance of these systems is largely unknown. In this paper, we first describe the development of an open dataset comprising ~335k images to examine these effects for seven different classes of precipitation conditions and show that a worst-case average tracking error of 1.5 m is possible for a state-of-the-art visual odometry system (VINS-Fusion). We then use the dataset to train a set of deep neural network models suited to mobile and constrained deployment scenarios to determine the extent to which it may be possible to efficiently and accurately classify these `rainy' conditions. The most lightweight of these models (MobileNetV3 small) can achieve an accuracy of 90% with a memory footprint of just 1.28 MB and a frame rate of 93 FPS, which is suitable for deployment in resource-constrained and latency-sensitive systems. We demonstrate a classification latency in the order of milliseconds using typical flight computer hardware. Accordingly, such a model can feed into the disturbance estimation component of an autonomous flight controller. In addition, data from unmanned aerial vehicles with the ability to accurately determine environmental conditions in real time may contribute to developing more granular timely localised weather forecasting.
The Dual Imperative: Innovation and Regulation in the AI Era
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

This article addresses the societal costs associated with the lack of regulation in Artificial Intelligence and proposes a framework combining innovation and regulation. Over fifty years of AI research, catalyzed by declining computing costs and the proliferation of data, have propelled AI into the mainstream, promising significant economic benefits. Yet, this rapid adoption underscores risks, from bias amplification and labor disruptions to existential threats posed by autonomous systems. The discourse is polarized between accelerationists, advocating for unfettered technological advancement, and doomers, calling for a slowdown to prevent dystopian outcomes. This piece advocates for a middle path that leverages technical innovation and smart regulation to maximize the benefits of AI while minimizing its risks, offering a pragmatic approach to the responsible progress of AI technology. Technical invention beyond the most capable foundation models is needed to contain catastrophic risks. Regulation is required to create incentives for this research while addressing current issues.
"I understand why I got this grade": Automatic Short Answer Grading with Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate student assessment in education. Among different types of assessments, summative assessments play a crucial role in evaluating a student's understanding level of a course. Such examinations often involve short-answer questions. However, grading these responses and providing meaningful feedback manually at scale is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. Feedback is particularly important, as it helps students recognize their strengths and areas for improvement. Despite the importance of this task, there is a significant lack of publicly available datasets that support automatic short-answer grading with feedback generation. To address this gap, we introduce Engineering Short Answer Feedback (EngSAF), a dataset designed for automatic short-answer grading with feedback. The dataset covers a diverse range of subjects, questions, and answer patterns from multiple engineering domains and contains ~5.8k data points. We incorporate feedback into our dataset by leveraging the generative capabilities of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) using our Label-Aware Synthetic Feedback Generation (LASFG) strategy. This paper underscores the importance of enhanced feedback in practical educational settings, outlines dataset annotation and feedback generation processes, conducts a thorough EngSAF analysis, and provides different LLMs-based zero-shot and finetuned baselines for future comparison. The best-performing model (Mistral-7B) achieves an overall accuracy of 75.4% and 58.7% on unseen answers and unseen question test sets, respectively. Additionally, we demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our ASAG system through its deployment in a real-world end-semester exam at a reputed institute.
The 2024 Foundation Model Transparency Index
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Foundation models are increasingly consequential yet extremely opaque. To characterize the status quo, the Foundation Model Transparency Index (FMTI) was launched in October 2023 to measure the transparency of leading foundation model developers. FMTI 2023 assessed 10 major foundation model developers (e.g. OpenAI, Google) on 100 transparency indicators (e.g. does the developer disclose the wages it pays for data labor?). At the time, developers publicly disclosed very limited information with the average score being 37 out of 100. To understand how the status quo has changed, we conduct a follow-up study after 6 months: we score 14 developers against the same 100 indicators. While in FMTI 2023 we searched for publicly available information, in FMTI 2024 developers submit reports on the 100 transparency indicators, potentially including information that was not previously public. We find that developers now score 58 out of 100 on average, a 21 point improvement over FMTI 2023. Much of this increase is driven by developers disclosing information during the FMTI 2024 process: on average, developers disclosed information related to 16.6 indicators that was not previously public. We observe regions of sustained (i.e. across 2023 and 2024) and systemic (i.e. across most or all developers) opacity such as on copyright status, data access, data labor, and downstream impact. We publish transparency reports for each developer that consolidate information disclosures: these reports are based on the information disclosed to us via developers. Our findings demonstrate that transparency can be improved in this nascent ecosystem, the Foundation Model Transparency Index likely contributes to these improvements, and policymakers should consider interventions in areas where transparency has not improved.
Beyond the Veil of Similarity: Quantifying Semantic Continuity in Explainable AI
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce a novel metric for measuring semantic continuity in Explainable AI methods and machine learning models. We posit that for models to be truly interpretable and trustworthy, similar inputs should yield similar explanations, reflecting a consistent semantic understanding. By leveraging XAI techniques, we assess semantic continuity in the task of image recognition. We conduct experiments to observe how incremental changes in input affect the explanations provided by different XAI methods. Through this approach, we aim to evaluate the models' capability to generalize and abstract semantic concepts accurately and to evaluate different XAI methods in correctly capturing the model behaviour. This paper contributes to the broader discourse on AI interpretability by proposing a quantitative measure for semantic continuity for XAI methods, offering insights into the models' and explainers' internal reasoning processes, and promoting more reliable and transparent AI systems.
Cheddar: A Swift Fully Homomorphic Encryption Library Designed for GPU Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) frees cloud computing from privacy concerns by enabling secure computation on encrypted data. However, its substantial computational and memory overhead results in significantly slower performance compared to unencrypted processing. To mitigate this overhead, we present Cheddar, a high-performance FHE library for GPUs, achieving substantial speedups over previous GPU implementations. We systematically enable 32-bit FHE execution, leveraging the 32-bit integer datapath within GPUs. We optimize GPU kernels using efficient low-level primitives and algorithms tailored to specific GPU architectures. Further, we alleviate the memory bandwidth burden by adjusting common FHE operational sequences and extensively applying kernel fusion. Cheddar delivers performance improvements of 2.18--4.45$\times$ for representative FHE workloads compared to state-of-the-art GPU implementations.
Analyzing and Bridging the Gap between Maximizing Total Reward and Discounted Reward in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the practical objective due to its stability. This can lead to a misalignment of objectives. To better understand the problem, we theoretically analyze the performance gap between the policy maximizes the total return and the policy maximizes the discounted return. Our analysis reveals that increasing the discount factor can be ineffective at eliminating this gap when environment contains cyclic states,a frequent scenario. To address this issue, we propose two alternative approaches to align the objectives. The first approach achieves alignment by modifying the terminal state value, treating it as a tunable hyper-parameter with its suitable range defined through theoretical analysis. The second approach focuses on calibrating the reward data in trajectories, enabling alignment in practical Deep RL applications using off-policy algorithms. This method enhances robustness to the discount factor and improve performance when the trajectory length is large. Our proposed methods demonstrate that adjusting reward data can achieve alignment, providing an insight that can be leveraged to design new optimization objectives to fundamentally enhance the performance of RL algorithms.
CiteFusion: An Ensemble Framework for Citation Intent Classification Harnessing Dual-Model Binary Couples and SHAP Analyses
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Understanding the motivations underlying scholarly citations is essential to evaluate research impact and promote transparent scholarly communication. This study introduces CiteFusion, an ensemble framework designed to address the multi-class Citation Intent Classification task on two benchmark datasets: SciCite and ACL-ARC. The framework employs a one-vs-all decomposition of the multi-class task into class-specific binary subtasks, leveraging complementary pairs of SciBERT and XLNet models, independently tuned, for each citation intent. The outputs of these base models are aggregated through a feedforward neural network meta-classifier to reconstruct the original classification task. To enhance interpretability, SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) is employed to analyze token-level contributions, and interactions among base models, providing transparency into the classification dynamics of CiteFusion, and insights about the kind of misclassifications of the ensemble. In addition, this work investigates the semantic role of structural context by incorporating section titles, as framing devices, into input sentences, assessing their positive impact on classification accuracy. CiteFusion ultimately demonstrates robust performance in imbalanced and data-scarce scenarios: experimental results show that CiteFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance, with Macro-F1 scores of 89.60% on SciCite, and 76.24% on ACL-ARC. Furthermore, to ensure interoperability and reusability, citation intents from both datasets schemas are mapped to Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO) object properties, highlighting some overlaps. Finally, we describe and release a web-based application that classifies citation intents leveraging the CiteFusion models developed on SciCite.
Dual-arm Motion Generation for Repositioning Care based on Deep Predictive Learning with Somatosensory Attention Mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Caregiving is a vital role for domestic robots, especially the repositioning care has immense societal value, critically improving the health and quality of life of individuals with limited mobility. However, repositioning task is a challenging area of research, as it requires robots to adapt their motions while interacting flexibly with patients. The task involves several key challenges: (1) applying appropriate force to specific target areas; (2) performing multiple actions seamlessly, each requiring different force application policies; and (3) motion adaptation under uncertain positional conditions. To address these, we propose a deep neural network (DNN)-based architecture utilizing proprioceptive and visual attention mechanisms, along with impedance control to regulate the robot's movements. Using the dual-arm humanoid robot Dry-AIREC, the proposed model successfully generated motions to insert the robot's hand between the bed and a mannequin's back without applying excessive force, and it supported the transition from a supine to a lifted-up position. The project page is here: https://sites.google.com/view/caregiving-robot-airec/repositioning
Baba Is AI: Break the Rules to Beat the Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Humans solve problems by following existing rules and procedures, and also by leaps of creativity to redefine those rules and objectives. To probe these abilities, we developed a new benchmark based on the game Baba Is You where an agent manipulates both objects in the environment and rules, represented by movable tiles with words written on them, to reach a specified goal and win the game. We test three state-of-the-art multi-modal large language models (OpenAI GPT-4o, Google Gemini-1.5-Pro and Gemini-1.5-Flash) and find that they fail dramatically when generalization requires that the rules of the game must be manipulated and combined.
Exploring the Evidence-Based SE Beliefs of Generative AI Tools
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

Background: Recent innovations in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have transformed how programmers develop and maintain software. The advanced capabilities of generative AI tools in supporting development tasks have led to a rise in their adoption within software engineering (SE) workflows. However, little is known about how AI tools perceive evidence-based practices supported by empirical SE research. Aim: To this end, we explore the "beliefs" of generative AI tools increasingly used to support software development in practice. Method: We conduct a preliminary evaluation conceptually replicating prior work to investigate 17 evidence-based claims across five generative AI tools. Results: Our findings demonstrate generative AI tools have ambiguous beliefs regarding research claims and lack credible evidence to support responses. Conclusions: Based on our results, we provide implications for practitioners integrating generative AI-based systems into development contexts and shed light on future research directions to enhance the reliability and trustworthiness of generative AI -- aiming to increase awareness and adoption of evidence-based SE research findings in practice.
Continual Distillation Learning: Knowledge Distillation in Prompt-based Continual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce the problem of continual distillation learning (CDL) in order to use knowledge distillation (KD) to improve prompt-based continual learning (CL) models. The CDL problem is valuable to study since the use of a larger vision transformer (ViT) leads to better performance in prompt-based continual learning. The distillation of knowledge from a large ViT to a small ViT improves the inference efficiency for prompt-based CL models. We empirically found that existing KD methods such as logit distillation and feature distillation cannot effectively improve the student model in the CDL setup. To address this issue, we introduce a novel method named Knowledge Distillation based on Prompts (KDP), in which globally accessible prompts specifically designed for knowledge distillation are inserted into the frozen ViT backbone of the student model. We demonstrate that our KDP method effectively enhances the distillation performance in comparison to existing KD methods in the CDL setup.
Unmasking Social Bots: How Confident Are We?
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2025
Year: 2025

Social bots remain a major vector for spreading disinformation on social media and a menace to the public. Despite the progress made in developing multiple sophisticated social bot detection algorithms and tools, bot detection remains a challenging, unsolved problem that is fraught with uncertainty due to the heterogeneity of bot behaviors, training data, and detection algorithms. Detection models often disagree on whether to label the same account as bot or human-controlled. However, they do not provide any measure of uncertainty to indicate how much we should trust their results. We propose to address both bot detection and the quantification of uncertainty at the account level - a novel feature of this research. This dual focus is crucial as it allows us to leverage additional information related to the quantified uncertainty of each prediction, thereby enhancing decision-making and improving the reliability of bot classifications. Specifically, our approach facilitates targeted interventions for bots when predictions are made with high confidence and suggests caution (e.g., gathering more data) when predictions are uncertain.
Dual adversarial and contrastive network for single-source domain generalization in fault diagnosis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Domain generalization achieves fault diagnosis on unseen modes. In process industrial systems, fault samples are limited, and it is quite common that the available fault data are from a single mode. Extracting domain-invariant features from single-mode data for unseen mode fault diagnosis poses challenges. Existing methods utilize a generator module to simulate samples of unseen modes. However, multi-mode samples contain complex spatiotemporal information, which brings significant difficulties to accurate sample generation. To solve this problem, this paper proposed a dual adversarial and contrastive network (DACN) for single-source domain generalization in fault diagnosis. The main idea of DACN is to generate diverse sample features and extract domain-invariant feature representations. An adversarial pseudo-sample feature generation strategy is developed to create fake unseen mode sample features with sufficient semantic information and diversity, leveraging adversarial learning between the feature transformer and domain-invariant feature extractor. An enhanced domain-invariant feature extraction strategy is designed to capture common feature representations across multi-modes, utilizing contrastive learning and adversarial learning between the domain-invariant feature extractor and the discriminator. Experiments on the Tennessee Eastman process and continuous stirred-tank reactor demonstrate that DACN achieves high classification accuracy on unseen modes while maintaining a small model size.
People use fast, goal-directed simulation to reason about novel games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2025
Year: 2025

People can evaluate features of problems and their potential solutions well before we can effectively solve them. When considering a game we have never played, for instance, we might infer whether it is likely to be challenging, fair, or fun simply from hearing the game rules, prior to deciding whether to invest time in learning the game or trying to play it well. Many studies of game play have focused on optimality and expertise, characterizing how people and computational models play based on moderate to extensive search and after playing a game dozens (if not thousands or millions) of times. Here, we study how people reason about a range of simple but novel Connect-N style board games. We ask people to judge how fair and how fun the games are from very little experience: just thinking about the game for a minute or so, before they have ever actually played with anyone else, and we propose a resource-limited model that captures their judgments using only a small number of partial game simulations and almost no look-ahead search.