OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
VLA-R: Vision-Language Action Retrieval toward Open-World End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Exploring open-world situations in an end-to-end manner is a promising yet challenging task due to the need for strong generalization capabilities. In particular, end-to-end autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments often encounters conditions that were unfamiliar during training. In this work, we present Vision-Language Action Retrieval (VLA-R), an open-world end-to-end autonomous driving (OW-E2EAD) framework that integrates open-world perception with a novel vision-action retrieval paradigm. We leverage a frozen vision-language model for open-world detection and segmentation to obtain multi-scale, prompt-guided, and interpretable perception features without domain-specific tuning. A Q-Former bottleneck aggregates fine-grained visual representations with language-aligned visual features, bridging perception and action domains. To learn transferable driving behaviors, we introduce a vision-action contrastive learning scheme that aligns vision-language and action embeddings for effective open-world reasoning and action retrieval. Our experiments on a real-world robotic platform demonstrate strong generalization and exploratory performance in unstructured, unseen environments, even with limited data. Demo videos are provided in the supplementary material.
Towards Rotation-only Imaging Geometry: Rotation Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Structure from Motion (SfM) is a critical task in computer vision, aiming to recover the 3D scene structure and camera motion from a sequence of 2D images. The recent pose-only imaging geometry decouples 3D coordinates from camera poses and demonstrates significantly better SfM performance through pose adjustment. Continuing the pose-only perspective, this paper explores the critical relationship between the scene structures, rotation and translation. Notably, the translation can be expressed in terms of rotation, allowing us to condense the imaging geometry representation onto the rotation manifold. A rotation-only optimization framework based on reprojection error is proposed for both two-view and multi-view scenarios. The experiment results demonstrate superior accuracy and robustness performance over the current state-of-the-art rotation estimation methods, even comparable to multiple bundle adjustment iteration results. Hopefully, this work contributes to even more accurate, efficient and reliable 3D visual computing.
Political Advertising on Facebook During the 2022 Australian Federal Election: A Social Identity Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

The spread of targeted advertising on social media platforms has revolutionized political marketing strategies. Monitoring these digital campaigns is essential for maintaining transparency and accountability in democratic processes. Leveraging Meta's Ad Library, we analyze political advertising on Facebook and Instagram during the 2022 Australian federal election campaign. We investigate temporal, demographic, and geographical patterns in the advertising strategies of major Australian political actors to establish an empirical evidence base, and interpret these findings through the lens of Social Identity Theory (SIT). Our findings not only reveal significant disparities in spending and reach among parties, but also in persuasion strategies being deployed in targeted online campaigns. We observe a marked increase in advertising activity as the election approached, peaking just before the mandated media blackout period. Demographic analysis shows distinct targeting strategies, with parties focusing more on younger demographics and exhibiting gender-based differences in ad impressions. Regional distribution of ads largely mirrored population densities, with some parties employing more targeted approaches in specific states. Moreover, we found that parties emphasized different themes aligned with their ideologies-major parties focused on party names and opponents, while smaller parties emphasized issue-specific messages. Drawing on SIT, we interpret these findings within Australia's compulsory voting context, suggesting that parties employed distinct persuasion strategies. With turnout guaranteed, major parties focused on reinforcing partisan identities to prevent voter defection, while smaller parties cultivated issue-based identities to capture the support of disaffected voters who are obligated to participate.
Detecting LLM-Assisted Academic Dishonesty using Keystroke Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

The rapid adoption of generative AI tools has intensified the challenge of maintaining academic integrity. Conventional plagiarism detectors, which rely on text-matching or text-intrinsic features, often fail to identify submissions that have been AI-assisted or paraphrased. To address this limitation, we introduce keystroke-dynamics-based detectors that analyze how, rather than what, a person writes to distinguish genuine from assisted writing. Building on our earlier study, which collected keystroke data from 40 participants and trained a modified TypeNet model to detect assisted text, we expanded the dataset by adding 90 new participants and introducing a paraphrasing-based plagiarism-detection mode. We then benchmarked two additional gradient-boosting classifiers, LightGBM and CatBoost, alongside TypeNet, and compared their performance with DetectGPT, LLaMA 3.3 70B Instruct, and the results of 44 human evaluators. To further assess and improve robustness, we proposed a deception-based threat model simulating forged keystrokes and applied adversarial training as a countermeasure. Results show that the machine learning models achieve F1 scores above 97% in structured settings, while TypeNet performs best in detecting paraphrasing, with an F1 score of 86.9%. In contrast, text-only detectors and human evaluators perform near-chance, demonstrating that keystroke dynamics provide a strong behavioral signal for identifying AI-assisted plagiarism and support the use of multimodal behavioral features for reliable academic integrity assessment.
ARCHE: A Novel Task to Evaluate LLMs on Latent Reasoning Chain Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in scientific domains. While they can produce reasoning-like content via methods such as chain-of-thought prompting, these outputs are typically unstructured and informal, obscuring whether models truly understand the fundamental reasoning paradigms that underpin scientific inference. To address this, we introduce a novel task named Latent Reasoning Chain Extraction (ARCHE), in which models must decompose complex reasoning arguments into combinations of standard reasoning paradigms in the form of a Reasoning Logic Tree (RLT). In RLT, all reasoning steps are explicitly categorized as one of three variants of Peirce's fundamental inference modes: deduction, induction, or abduction. To facilitate this task, we release ARCHE Bench, a new benchmark derived from 70 Nature Communications articles, including more than 1,900 references and 38,000 viewpoints. We propose two logic-aware evaluation metrics: Entity Coverage (EC) for content completeness and Reasoning Edge Accuracy (REA) for step-by-step logical validity. Evaluations on 10 leading LLMs on ARCHE Bench reveal that models exhibit a trade-off between REA and EC, and none are yet able to extract a complete and standard reasoning chain. These findings highlight a substantial gap between the abilities of current reasoning models and the rigor required for scientific argumentation.
Mitigating Length Bias in RLHF through a Causal Lens
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, RLHF-trained reward models often exhibit length bias -- a systematic tendency to favor longer responses by conflating verbosity with quality. We propose a causal framework for analyzing and mitigating length bias in RLHF reward modeling. Central to our approach is a counterfactual data augmentation method that generates response pairs designed to isolate content quality from verbosity. These counterfactual examples are then used to train the reward model, enabling it to assess responses based on content quality independently of verbosity. Specifically, we construct (1) length-divergent pairs with similar content and (2) content-divergent pairs of similar length. Empirical evaluations show that our method reduces length bias in reward assignment and leads to more concise, content-focused outputs from the policy model. These findings demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively reduces length bias and improves the robustness and content sensitivity of reward modeling in RLHF pipelines.
Rank-Aware Agglomeration of Foundation Models for Immunohistochemistry Image Cell Counting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Accurate cell counting in immunohistochemistry (IHC) images is critical for quantifying protein expression and aiding cancer diagnosis. However, the task remains challenging due to the chromogen overlap, variable biomarker staining, and diverse cellular morphologies. Regression-based counting methods offer advantages over detection-based ones in handling overlapped cells, yet rarely support end-to-end multi-class counting. Moreover, the potential of foundation models remains largely underexplored in this paradigm. To address these limitations, we propose a rank-aware agglomeration framework that selectively distills knowledge from multiple strong foundation models, leveraging their complementary representations to handle IHC heterogeneity and obtain a compact yet effective student model, CountIHC. Unlike prior task-agnostic agglomeration strategies that either treat all teachers equally or rely on feature similarity, we design a Rank-Aware Teacher Selecting (RATS) strategy that models global-to-local patch rankings to assess each teacher's inherent counting capacity and enable sample-wise teacher selection. For multi-class cell counting, we introduce a fine-tuning stage that reformulates the task as vision-language alignment. Discrete semantic anchors derived from structured text prompts encode both category and quantity information, guiding the regression of class-specific density maps and improving counting for overlapping cells. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CountIHC surpasses state-of-the-art methods across 12 IHC biomarkers and 5 tissue types, while exhibiting high agreement with pathologists' assessments. Its effectiveness on H&E-stained data further confirms the scalability of the proposed method.
Open-World Test-Time Adaptation with Hierarchical Feature Aggregation and Attention Affine
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Test-time adaptation (TTA) refers to adjusting the model during the testing phase to cope with changes in sample distribution and enhance the model's adaptability to new environments. In real-world scenarios, models often encounter samples from unseen (out-of-distribution, OOD) categories. Misclassifying these as known (in-distribution, ID) classes not only degrades predictive accuracy but can also impair the adaptation process, leading to further errors on subsequent ID samples. Many existing TTA methods suffer substantial performance drops under such conditions. To address this challenge, we propose a Hierarchical Ladder Network that extracts OOD features from class tokens aggregated across all Transformer layers. OOD detection performance is enhanced by combining the original model prediction with the output of the Hierarchical Ladder Network (HLN) via weighted probability fusion. To improve robustness under domain shift, we further introduce an Attention Affine Network (AAN) that adaptively refines the self-attention mechanism conditioned on the token information to better adapt to domain drift, thereby improving the classification performance of the model on datasets with domain shift. Additionally, a weighted entropy mechanism is employed to dynamically suppress the influence of low-confidence samples during adaptation. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our method significantly improves the performance on the most widely used classification datasets.
OPFormer: Object Pose Estimation leveraging foundation model with geometric encoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

We introduce a unified, end-to-end framework that seamlessly integrates object detection and pose estimation with a versatile onboarding process. Our pipeline begins with an onboarding stage that generates object representations from either traditional 3D CAD models or, in their absence, by rapidly reconstructing a high-fidelity neural representation (NeRF) from multi-view images. Given a test image, our system first employs the CNOS detector to localize target objects. For each detection, our novel pose estimation module, OPFormer, infers the precise 6D pose. The core of OPFormer is a transformer-based architecture that leverages a foundation model for robust feature extraction. It uniquely learns a comprehensive object representation by jointly encoding multiple template views and enriches these features with explicit 3D geometric priors using Normalized Object Coordinate Space (NOCS). A decoder then establishes robust 2D-3D correspondences to determine the final pose. Evaluated on the challenging BOP benchmarks, our integrated system demonstrates a strong balance between accuracy and efficiency, showcasing its practical applicability in both model-based and model-free scenarios.
SynapticCore-X: A Modular Neural Processing Architecture for Low-Cost FPGA Acceleration
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2025
Year: 2025

This paper presents SynapticCore-X, a modular and resource-efficient neural processing architecture optimized for deployment on low-cost FPGA platforms. The design integrates a lightweight RV32IMC RISC-V control core with a configurable neural compute tile that supports fused matrix, activation, and data-movement operations. Unlike existing FPGA accelerators that rely on heavyweight IP blocks, SynapticCore-X provides a fully open-source SystemVerilog microarchitecture with tunable parallelism, scratchpad memory depth, and DMA burst behavior, enabling rapid exploration of hardware-software co-design trade-offs. We document an automated, reproducible Vivado build pipeline that achieves timing closure at 100 MHz on the Zynq-7020 while consuming only 6.1% LUTs, 32.5% DSPs, and 21.4% BRAMs. Hardware validation on PYNQ-Z2 confirms correct register-level execution, deterministic control-path behavior, and cycle-accurate performance for matrix and convolution kernels. SynapticCore-X demonstrates that energy-efficient NPU-like acceleration can be prototyped on commodity educational FPGAs, lowering the entry barrier for academic and open-hardware research in neural microarchitectures.
EcoFlight: Finding Low-Energy Paths Through Obstacles for Autonomous Sensing Drones
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Obstacle avoidance path planning for uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, is rarely addressed in most flight path planning schemes, despite obstacles being a realistic condition. Obstacle avoidance can also be energy-intensive, making it a critical factor in efficient point-to-point drone flights. To address these gaps, we propose EcoFlight, an energy-efficient pathfinding algorithm that determines the lowest-energy route in 3D space with obstacles. The algorithm models energy consumption based on the drone propulsion system and flight dynamics. We conduct extensive evaluations, comparing EcoFlight with direct-flight and shortest-distance schemes. The simulation results across various obstacle densities show that EcoFlight consistently finds paths with lower energy consumption than comparable algorithms, particularly in high-density environments. We also demonstrate that a suitable flying speed can further enhance energy savings.
Denoising Vision Transformer Autoencoder with Spectral Self-Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) typically encode images into a compact latent space, reducing computational cost but introducing an optimization dilemma: a higher-dimensional latent space improves reconstruction fidelity but often hampers generative performance. Recent methods attempt to address this dilemma by regularizing high-dimensional latent spaces using external vision foundation models (VFMs). However, it remains unclear how high-dimensional VAE latents affect the optimization of generative models. To our knowledge, our analysis is the first to reveal that redundant high-frequency components in high-dimensional latent spaces hinder the training convergence of diffusion models and, consequently, degrade generation quality. To alleviate this problem, we propose a spectral self-regularization strategy to suppress redundant high-frequency noise while simultaneously preserving reconstruction quality. The resulting Denoising-VAE, a ViT-based autoencoder that does not rely on VFMs, produces cleaner, lower-noise latents, leading to improved generative quality and faster optimization convergence. We further introduce a spectral alignment strategy to facilitate the optimization of Denoising-VAE-based generative models. Our complete method enables diffusion models to converge approximately 2$\times$ faster than with SD-VAE, while achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality (rFID = 0.28, PSNR = 27.26) and competitive generation performance (gFID = 1.82) on the ImageNet 256$\times$256 benchmark.
Equivalence Checking of ML GPU Kernels
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2025
Year: 2025

With the rapid progress of deep learning and large language models (LLMs), companies now spend enormous sums executing GPU kernels. These kernels have, therefore, become prime targets for aggressive optimization. Recent efforts increasingly leverage LLMs to generate GPU kernels, but make no formal guarantees about the generated kernels. We present the first equivalence checker for GPU kernels and use it to formally verify the correctness of machine learning (ML) kernels optimized by hand, by LLMs, and by compilers. We show that our equivalence checker is sound and, for a well-defined class of GPU kernels which includes the programs of interest, complete. Our implementation, VOLTA, can verify ML computations such as convolutions, matrix multiplications, and various attention mechanisms.
Appreciate the View: A Task-Aware Evaluation Framework for Novel View Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The goal of Novel View Synthesis (NVS) is to generate realistic images of a given content from unseen viewpoints. But how can we trust that a generated image truly reflects the intended transformation? Evaluating its reliability remains a major challenge. While recent generative models, particularly diffusion-based approaches, have significantly improved NVS quality, existing evaluation metrics struggle to assess whether a generated image is both realistic and faithful to the source view and intended viewpoint transformation. Standard metrics, such as pixel-wise similarity and distribution-based measures, often mis-rank incorrect results as they fail to capture the nuanced relationship between the source image, viewpoint change, and generated output. We propose a task-aware evaluation framework that leverages features from a strong NVS foundation model, Zero123, combined with a lightweight tuning step to enhance discrimination. Using these features, we introduce two complementary evaluation metrics: a reference-based score, $D_{\text{PRISM}}$, and a reference-free score, $\text{MMD}_{\text{PRISM}}$. Both reliably identify incorrect generations and rank models in agreement with human preference studies, addressing a fundamental gap in NVS evaluation. Our framework provides a principled and practical approach to assessing synthesis quality, paving the way for more reliable progress in novel view synthesis. To further support this goal, we apply our reference-free metric to six NVS methods across three benchmarks: Toys4K, Google Scanned Objects (GSO), and OmniObject3D, where $\text{MMD}_{\text{PRISM}}$ produces a clear and stable ranking, with lower scores consistently indicating stronger models.
X-VMamba: Explainable Vision Mamba
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

State Space Models (SSMs), particularly the Mamba architecture, have recently emerged as powerful alternatives to Transformers for sequence modeling, offering linear computational complexity while achieving competitive performance. Yet, despite their effectiveness, understanding how these Vision SSMs process spatial information remains challenging due to the lack of transparent, attention-like mechanisms. To address this gap, we introduce a controllability-based interpretability framework that quantifies how different parts of the input sequence (tokens or patches) influence the internal state dynamics of SSMs. We propose two complementary formulations: a Jacobian-based method applicable to any SSM architecture that measures influence through the full chain of state propagation, and a Gramian-based approach for diagonal SSMs that achieves superior speed through closed-form analytical solutions. Both methods operate in a single forward pass with linear complexity, requiring no architectural modifications or hyperparameter tuning. We validate our framework through experiments on three diverse medical imaging modalities, demonstrating that SSMs naturally implement hierarchical feature refinement from diffuse low-level textures in early layers to focused, clinically meaningful patterns in deeper layers. Our analysis reveals domain-specific controllability signatures aligned with diagnostic criteria, progressive spatial selectivity across the network hierarchy, and the substantial influence of scanning strategies on attention patterns. Beyond medical imaging, we articulate applications spanning computer vision, natural language processing, and cross-domain tasks. Our framework establishes controllability analysis as a unified, foundational interpretability paradigm for SSMs across all domains. Code and analysis tools will be made available upon publication
ProxyPrints: From Database Breach to Spoof, A Plug-and-Play Defense for Biometric Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Fingerprint recognition systems are widely deployed for authentication and forensic applications, but the security of stored fingerprint data remains a critical vulnerability. While many systems avoid storing raw fingerprint images in favor of minutiae-based templates, recent research shows that these templates can be reverse-engineered to reconstruct realistic fingerprint images, enabling physical spoofing attacks that compromise user identities with no means of remediation. We present ProxyPrints, the first practical defense that brings cancellable biometrics to existing fingerprint recognition systems without requiring modifications to proprietary matching software. ProxyPrints acts as a transparent middleware layer between the fingerprint scanner and the matching algorithm, transforming each scanned fingerprint into a consistent, unlinkable alias. This transformation allows biometric identities to be revoked and replaced in the event of a breach, without affecting authentication accuracy. Additionally, ProxyPrints provides organizations with breach detection capabilities by enabling the identification of out-of-band spoofing attempts involving compromised aliases. We evaluate ProxyPrints on standard benchmark datasets and commercial fingerprint recognition systems, demonstrating that it preserves matching performance while offering strong security and revocability. Our open-source implementation includes tools for alias generation and deployment in real-world pipelines, making ProxyPrints a drop-in, scalable solution for fingerprint data protection.