OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Hearing to Translate: The Effectiveness of Speech Modality Integration into LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

As Large Language Models (LLMs) expand beyond text, integrating speech as a native modality has given rise to SpeechLLMs, which aim to translate spoken language directly, thereby bypassing traditional transcription-based pipelines. Whether this integration improves speech-to-text translation quality over established cascaded architectures, however, remains an open question. We present Hearing to Translate, the first comprehensive test suite rigorously benchmarking 5 state-of-the-art SpeechLLMs against 16 strong direct and cascade systems that couple leading speech foundation models (SFM), with multilingual LLMs. Our analysis spans 16 benchmarks, 13 language pairs, and 9 challenging conditions, including disfluent, noisy, and long-form speech. Across this extensive evaluation, we find that cascaded systems remain the most reliable overall, while current SpeechLLMs only match cascades in selected settings and SFMs lag behind both, highlighting that integrating an LLM, either within the model or in a pipeline, is essential for high-quality speech translation.
Quantitative Verification of Fairness in Tree Ensembles
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

This work focuses on quantitative verification of fairness in tree ensembles. Unlike traditional verification approaches that merely return a single counterexample when the fairness is violated, quantitative verification estimates the ratio of all counterexamples and characterizes the regions where they occur, which is important information for diagnosing and mitigating bias. To date, quantitative verification has been explored almost exclusively for deep neural networks (DNNs). Representative methods, such as DeepGemini and FairQuant, all build on the core idea of Counterexample-Guided Abstraction Refinement, a generic framework that could be adapted to other model classes. We extended the framework into a model-agnostic form, but discovered two limitations: (i) it can provide only lower bounds, and (ii) its performance scales poorly. Exploiting the discrete structure of tree ensembles, our work proposes an efficient quantification technique that delivers any-time upper and lower bounds. Experiments on five widely used datasets demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency. When applied to fairness testing, our quantification method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art testing techniques.
Hypernetworks That Evolve Themselves
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2025
Year: 2025

How can neural networks evolve themselves without relying on external optimizers? We propose Self-Referential Graph HyperNetworks, systems where the very machinery of variation and inheritance is embedded within the network. By uniting hypernetworks, stochastic parameter generation, and graph-based representations, Self-Referential GHNs mutate and evaluate themselves while adapting mutation rates as selectable traits. Through new reinforcement learning benchmarks with environmental shifts (CartPoleSwitch, LunarLander-Switch), Self-Referential GHNs show swift, reliable adaptation and emergent population dynamics. In the locomotion benchmark Ant-v5, they evolve coherent gaits, showing promising fine-tuning capabilities by autonomously decreasing variation in the population to concentrate around promising solutions. Our findings support the idea that evolvability itself can emerge from neural self-reference. Self-Referential GHNs reflect a step toward synthetic systems that more closely mirror biological evolution, offering tools for autonomous, open-ended learning agents.
NDRL: Cotton Irrigation and Nitrogen Application with Nested Dual-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Effective irrigation and nitrogen fertilization have a significant impact on crop yield. However, existing research faces two limitations: (1) the high complexity of optimizing water-nitrogen combinations during crop growth and poor yield optimization results; and (2) the difficulty in quantifying mild stress signals and the delayed feedback, which results in less precise dynamic regulation of water and nitrogen and lower resource utilization efficiency. To address these issues, we propose a Nested Dual-Agent Reinforcement Learning (NDRL) method. The parent agent in NDRL identifies promising macroscopic irrigation and fertilization actions based on projected cumulative yield benefits, reducing ineffective explorationwhile maintaining alignment between objectives and yield. The child agent's reward function incorporates quantified Water Stress Factor (WSF) and Nitrogen Stress Factor (NSF), and uses a mixed probability distribution to dynamically optimize daily strategies, thereby enhancing both yield and resource efficiency. We used field experiment data from 2023 and 2024 to calibrate and validate the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) to simulate real-world conditions and interact with NDRL. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to the best baseline, the simulated yield increased by 4.7% in both 2023 and 2024, the irrigation water productivity increased by 5.6% and 5.1% respectively, and the nitrogen partial factor productivity increased by 6.3% and 1.0% respectively. Our method advances the development of cotton irrigation and nitrogen fertilization, providing new ideas for addressing the complexity and precision issues in agricultural resource management and for sustainable agricultural development.
Multi-Fidelity Delayed Acceptance: hierarchical MCMC sampling for Bayesian inverse problems combining multiple solvers through deep neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Inverse uncertainty quantification (UQ) tasks such as parameter estimation are computationally demanding whenever dealing with physics-based models, and typically require repeated evaluations of complex numerical solvers. When partial differential equations are involved, full-order models such as those based on the Finite Element Method can make traditional sampling approaches like Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) computationally infeasible. Although data-driven surrogate models may help reduce evaluation costs, their utility is often limited by the expense of generating high-fidelity data. In contrast, low-fidelity data can be produced more efficiently, although relying on them alone may degrade the accuracy of the inverse UQ solution. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-Fidelity Delayed Acceptance scheme for Bayesian inverse problems. Extending the Multi-Level Delayed Acceptance framework, the method introduces multi-fidelity neural networks that combine the predictions of solvers of varying fidelity, with high fidelity evaluations restricted to an offline training stage. During the online phase, likelihood evaluations are obtained by evaluating the coarse solvers and passing their outputs to the trained neural networks, thereby avoiding additional high-fidelity simulations. This construction allows heterogeneous coarse solvers to be incorporated consistently within the hierarchy, providing greater flexibility than standard Multi-Level Delayed Acceptance. The proposed approach improves the approximation accuracy of the low fidelity solvers, leading to longer sub-chain lengths, better mixing, and accelerated posterior inference. The effectiveness of the strategy is demonstrated on two benchmark inverse problems involving (i) steady isotropic groundwater flow, (ii) an unsteady reaction-diffusion system, for which substantial computational savings are obtained.
Emergent Bias and Fairness in Multi-Agent Decision Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Multi-agent systems have demonstrated the ability to improve performance on a variety of predictive tasks by leveraging collaborative decision making. However, the lack of effective evaluation methodologies has made it difficult to estimate the risk of bias, making deployment of such systems unsafe in high stakes domains such as consumer finance, where biased decisions can translate directly into regulatory breaches and financial loss. To address this challenge, we need to develop fairness evaluation methodologies for multi-agent predictive systems and measure the fairness characteristics of these systems in the financial tabular domain. Examining fairness metrics using large-scale simulations across diverse multi-agent configurations, with varying communication and collaboration mechanisms, we reveal patterns of emergent bias in financial decision-making that cannot be traced to individual agent components, indicating that multi-agent systems may exhibit genuinely collective behaviors. Our findings highlight that fairness risks in financial multi-agent systems represent a significant component of model risk, with tangible impacts on tasks such as credit scoring and income estimation. We advocate that multi-agent decision systems must be evaluated as holistic entities rather than through reductionist analyses of their constituent components.
OpenAlex: Features, advantages and limitations of an open database for retrieving and analysing scholarly outputs
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2025
Year: 2025

OpenAlex is an open bibliographic database that has been proposed as an alternative to commercial platforms in a context defined by the aim of transforming science evaluation systems into more transparent sources based on open data. This paper analyses its features, information sources, entities, advantages and limitations. The results reveal numerous records lacking abstracts, affiliations and references; deficiencies in identifying document types and languages; and issues with authority control and versioning. Although OpenAlex has been adopted in important initiatives and has yielded results comparable to those obtained with commercial databases, gaps in its metadata and a lack of consistency point to a need for intensive data cleaning, suggesting it should be used with caution. The study concludes by identifying three lines of action to improve data quality: increasing publishers' commitment to completing metadata in primary sources; creating coordination structures to channel the contributions of institutional users; and endowing the project with sufficient human resources and reliable procedures to address internal quality control tasks and user support requests.
E-SDS: Environment-aware See it, Do it, Sorted - Automated Environment-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Humanoid Locomotion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Vision-language models (VLMs) show promise in automating reward design in humanoid locomotion, which could eliminate the need for tedious manual engineering. However, current VLM-based methods are essentially "blind", as they lack the environmental perception required to navigate complex terrain. We present E-SDS (Environment-aware See it, Do it, Sorted), a framework that closes this perception gap. E-SDS integrates VLMs with real-time terrain sensor analysis to automatically generate reward functions that facilitate training of robust perceptive locomotion policies, grounded by example videos. Evaluated on a Unitree G1 humanoid across four distinct terrains (simple, gaps, obstacles, stairs), E-SDS uniquely enabled successful stair descent, while policies trained with manually-designed rewards or a non-perceptive automated baseline were unable to complete the task. In all terrains, E-SDS also reduced velocity tracking error by 51.9-82.6%. Our framework reduces the human effort of reward design from days to less than two hours while simultaneously producing more robust and capable locomotion policies.
Prime and Reach: Synthesising Body Motion for Gaze-Primed Object Reach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Human motion generation is a challenging task that aims to create realistic motion imitating natural human behaviour. We focus on the well-studied behaviour of priming an object/location for pick up or put down -- that is, the spotting of an object/location from a distance, known as gaze priming, followed by the motion of approaching and reaching the target location. To that end, we curate, for the first time, 23.7K gaze-primed human motion sequences for reaching target object locations from five publicly available datasets, i.e., HD-EPIC, MoGaze, HOT3D, ADT, and GIMO. We pre-train a text-conditioned diffusion-based motion generation model, then fine-tune it conditioned on goal pose or location, on our curated sequences. Importantly, we evaluate the ability of the generated motion to imitate natural human movement through several metrics, including the 'Reach Success' and a newly introduced 'Prime Success' metric. On the largest dataset, HD-EPIC, our model achieves 60% prime success and 89% reach success when conditioned on the goal object location.
SNOW: Spatio-Temporal Scene Understanding with World Knowledge for Open-World Embodied Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Autonomous robotic systems require spatio-temporal understanding of dynamic environments to ensure reliable navigation and interaction. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide open-world semantic priors, they lack grounding in 3D geometry and temporal dynamics. Conversely, geometric perception captures structure and motion but remains semantically sparse. We propose SNOW (Scene Understanding with Open-World Knowledge), a training-free and backbone-agnostic framework for unified 4D scene understanding that integrates VLM-derived semantics with point cloud geometry and temporal consistency. SNOW processes synchronized RGB images and 3D point clouds, using HDBSCAN clustering to generate object-level proposals that guide SAM2-based segmentation. Each segmented region is encoded through our proposed Spatio-Temporal Tokenized Patch Encoding (STEP), producing multimodal tokens that capture localized semantic, geometric, and temporal attributes. These tokens are incrementally integrated into a 4D Scene Graph (4DSG), which serves as 4D prior for downstream reasoning. A lightweight SLAM backend anchors all STEP tokens spatially in the environment, providing the global reference alignment, and ensuring unambiguous spatial grounding across time. The resulting 4DSG forms a queryable, unified world model through which VLMs can directly interpret spatial scene structure and temporal dynamics. Experiments on a diverse set of benchmarks demonstrate that SNOW enables precise 4D scene understanding and spatially grounded inference, thereby setting new state-of-the-art performance in several settings, highlighting the importance of structured 4D priors for embodied reasoning and autonomous robotics.
Investigating the Effect of Encumbrance on Gaze- and Touch-based Target Acquisition on Handheld Mobile Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

The potential of using gaze as an input modality in the mobile context is growing. While users often encumber themselves by carrying objects and using mobile devices while walking, the impact of encumbrance on gaze input performance remains unexplored. To investigate this, we conducted a user study (N=24) to evaluate the effect of encumbrance on the performance of 1) Gaze using Dwell time (with/without visual feedback), 2) GazeTouch (with/without visual feedback), and 3) One- or two-hand touch input. While Touch generally performed better, Gaze, especially with feedback, showed a consistent performance regardless of whether participants were encumbered or unencumbered. Participants' preferences for input modalities varied with encumbrance: they preferred Gaze when encumbered, and touch when unencumbered. Our findings enhance understanding of the effect of encumbrance on gaze input and contribute towards selecting appropriate input modalities in future mobile user interfaces to account for situational impairments.
Efficient CPU-GPU Collaborative Inference for MoE-based LLMs on Memory-Limited Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results across various tasks, yet their high computational demands pose deployment challenges, especially on consumer-grade hardware. Mixture of Experts (MoE) models provide an efficient solution through selective activation of parameter subsets, which reduces computation requirements. Despite this efficiency, state-of-the-art MoE models still require substantial memory beyond typical consumer GPU capacities. Traditional offloading methods that transfer model weights between CPU and GPU introduce latency, limiting inference performance. This paper presents a novel CPU-GPU collaborative inference framework that incorporates an expert caching mechanism on the GPU to reduce data transfer requirements and enable faster inference through cache hits. Computations are offloaded to CPU for efficient cache miss handling, which benefits from CPU multithreading optimizations. The evaluations of our framework demonstrate performance improvements and highlight the potential of CPU-GPU collaboration to maximize hardware utilization for single-request inference scenarios on consumer-grade systems. The implementation of our framework is available at https://github.com/elsa-lab/MoE-CPU-GPU-Collaborative-Inference.
Guiding Perception-Reasoning Closer to Human in Blind Image Quality Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Humans assess image quality through a perception-reasoning cascade, integrating sensory cues with implicit reasoning to form self-consistent judgments. In this work, we investigate how a model can acquire both human-like and self-consistent reasoning capability for blind image quality assessment (BIQA). We first collect human evaluation data that capture several aspects of human perception-reasoning pipeline. Then, we adopt reinforcement learning, using human annotations as reward signals to guide the model toward human-like perception and reasoning. To enable the model to internalize self-consistent reasoning capability, we design a reward that drives the model to infer the image quality purely from self-generated descriptions. Empirically, our approach achieves score prediction performance comparable to state-of-the-art BIQA systems under general metrics, including Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients. In addition to the rating score, we assess human-model alignment using ROUGE-1 to measure the similarity between model-generated and human perception-reasoning chains. On over 1,000 human-annotated samples, our model reaches a ROUGE-1 score of 0.512 (cf. 0.443 for baseline), indicating substantial coverage of human explanations and marking a step toward human-like interpretable reasoning in BIQA.
YOLO11-4K: An Efficient Architecture for Real-Time Small Object Detection in 4K Panoramic Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The processing of omnidirectional 360-degree images poses significant challenges for object detection due to inherent spatial distortions, wide fields of view, and ultra-high-resolution inputs. Conventional detectors such as YOLO are optimised for standard image sizes (for example, 640x640 pixels) and often struggle with the computational demands of 4K or higher-resolution imagery typical of 360-degree vision. To address these limitations, we introduce YOLO11-4K, an efficient real-time detection framework tailored for 4K panoramic images. The architecture incorporates a novel multi-scale detection head with a P2 layer to improve sensitivity to small objects often missed at coarser scales, and a GhostConv-based backbone to reduce computational complexity without sacrificing representational power. To enable evaluation, we manually annotated the CVIP360 dataset, generating 6,876 frame-level bounding boxes and producing a publicly available, detection-ready benchmark for 4K panoramic scenes. YOLO11-4K achieves 0.95 mAP at 0.50 IoU with 28.3 milliseconds inference per frame, representing a 75 percent latency reduction compared to YOLO11 (112.3 milliseconds), while also improving accuracy (mAP at 0.50 of 0.95 versus 0.908). This balance of efficiency and precision enables robust object detection in expansive 360-degree environments, making the framework suitable for real-world high-resolution panoramic applications. While this work focuses on 4K omnidirectional images, the approach is broadly applicable to high-resolution detection tasks in autonomous navigation, surveillance, and augmented reality.
Pseudo-Cepstrum: Pitch Modification for Mel-Based Neural Vocoders
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2025
Year: 2025

This paper introduces a cepstrum-based pitch modification method that can be applied to any mel-spectrogram representation. As a result, this method is compatible with any mel-based vocoder without requiring any additional training or changes to the model. This is achieved by directly modifying the cepstrum feature space in order to shift the harmonic structure to the desired target. The spectrogram magnitude is computed via the pseudo-inverse mel transform, then converted to the cepstrum by applying DCT. In this domain, the cepstral peak is shifted without having to estimate its position and the modified mel is recomputed by applying IDCT and mel-filterbank. These pitch-shifted mel-spectrogram features can be converted to speech with any compatible vocoder. The proposed method is validated experimentally with objective and subjective metrics on various state-of-the-art neural vocoders as well as in comparison with traditional pitch modification methods.
N3D-VLM: Native 3D Grounding Enables Accurate Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

While current multimodal models can answer questions based on 2D images, they lack intrinsic 3D object perception, limiting their ability to comprehend spatial relationships and depth cues in 3D scenes. In this work, we propose N3D-VLM, a novel unified framework that seamlessly integrates native 3D object perception with 3D-aware visual reasoning, enabling both precise 3D grounding and interpretable spatial understanding. Unlike conventional end-to-end models that directly predict answers from RGB/RGB-D inputs, our approach equips the model with native 3D object perception capabilities, enabling it to directly localize objects in 3D space based on textual descriptions. Building upon accurate 3D object localization, the model further performs explicit reasoning in 3D, achieving more interpretable and structured spatial understanding. To support robust training for these capabilities, we develop a scalable data construction pipeline that leverages depth estimation to lift large-scale 2D annotations into 3D space, significantly increasing the diversity and coverage for 3D object grounding data, yielding over six times larger than the largest existing single-image 3D detection dataset. Moreover, the pipeline generates spatial question-answering datasets that target chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in 3D, facilitating joint training for both 3D object localization and 3D spatial reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that our unified framework not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3D grounding tasks, but also consistently surpasses existing methods in 3D spatial reasoning in vision-language model.